A neurotic Alice in Wonderland

Photo by Meghan Hessler on Unsplash

Dear Lori –

"There, that will teach you to remember me.

There, that will teach you – oh, I hope – charity."

Let's talk about Chapters nineteen & twenty. The rhythm and rhyming of the two lines you quoted in your last letter, to which I've added line breaks above, reminds me of a Lewis Carroll poem or the verse on a Victorian Christmas card. It's a strange note to strike in the midst of what is, implicitly and explicitly, as you say, a rape scene. Miss MacIntosh violently subdues and subjugates a struggling Vera, who has committed the trespass of uncovering her nursemaid's secrets.

I like the Carroll comparison. Vera easily fits the role of a neurotic Alice, processing her trauma while making her way through a surreal midwestern landscape and her mother's opium-induced Wonderland. (Though, I think Young would probably hate the comparison. Have you noticed how particular she was of whom she claimed as her literary influences? Lawrence Sterne, Gogol, Coleridge, Browning, Elizabeth not Robert, and Emerson get the nod. Joyce, Woolf, and Eliot – adamant no).

I've been reading and listening to all the interviews I can find where Young discusses Miss MacIntosh, My Darling. The 2003 interview published on the Dalkey Archives website from The Review of Contemporary Fiction is terrific. In it, Young reveals Vera is NOT the central character/ protagonist of the novel; Miss MacIntosh is (which, I suppose, shouldn't surprise me considering the title. But then, I'd argue, the "My" is misleading). By Vera's merciless gaze, Miss MacIntosh, a woman who clothes herself in perceived practicality and pragmatism, is ruthlessly stripped of her illusions, along with her femininity, wig, and breast. She strikes out, physically and psychologically, over the loss of her sense of self. Then, in a scene I found more disturbing than the violence that preceded it, she cajoles Vera that what has taken place is just a dream. It never happened.

Is Young defining a hierarchy of illusions/delusions by which her characters navigate the world? Vera's mother's grand and elaborate – even bohemian – fantasies are catered to and protected. But Miss MacIntosh's homespun framing of what is proper and what is not, perhaps because fear and adherence to society's strictures constrain it, is called into question. Miss MacIntosh's aspirations are, if we are to read into what Young has written, those of the petit bourgeoisie. Miss MacIntosh is preparing Vera to be a wife and mother while warning her to fear would-be rapists hiding in the shrubbery. She wishes her to conform.

(I've just finished Speak/Stop by Noémi Lefebvre, so the petit bourgeoisie and French class distinctions related to culture are very much on my mind. And, since we're on French texts – I'm also reminded of the English translation of Simone de Beauvoir's story, published in 2020 – Inseparable. It is a fictional account of de Beauvoir's childhood friendship with Zaza Lacoine. Zaza died at age twenty-one after her mother separated her from de Beauvoir to prepare Zaza for her role as a Catholic wife and mother. De Beauvoir blames Zaza’s death on the social constraints to which she was forced to conform. Her loss would eventually help shape De Beauvoir’s feminist philosophy).

In a 1965 NYPR interview, Young told Duncan MacDonald that Miss MacIntosh, My Darling is both a psychological and poetic novel. Young explains how her book deals with loss, memory, and broken human relationships – ideas she's been exploring since childhood. She describes the sea-blackened house as a kind of museum, housing the consciousness of the opium lady and the searchlight of reality illuminating the unconscious.

If we are honest, we all see ourselves as something other than who (and what) we really are.

With charity, I hope,

Tara