Understanding Alice Adams

Bryant Mangum

Description

An illuminating study of an award-winning writer who captured the complex challenges twentieth-century women faced in their struggle for independence

In Understanding Alice Adams, Bryant Mangum examines the thematic intricacies and astute social commentary of Adams's eleven novels and five short story collections. Throughout her career Adams was known for creating and re-creating the "Alice Adams woman," who is bright, honest, attractive, thoughtful—and sometimes a bit offbeat. As Mangum notes, Adams's central characters—her heroes—are most often women struggling toward self-sufficiency and independence as they strive to fulfill their responsibilities, including child rearing and other societal commitments.

After an overview of Adams's life (1926-1999), Mangum groups the novels and stories by the decades in which they were published, since shifts in the thematic arc of Adams's fiction break conveniently along those lines. He explains how Adams used the novel as an extended workshop for her short fiction. Her novels cover wide swaths of the American experience, and from these sweeping narratives she distilled her sharp, lyrical, vibrant short stories, which earned her twenty-three O. Henry Awards—including six first-place recognitions and a lifetime achievement award—an honor shared with only Joyce Carol Oates, John Updike, and Alice Munro.

In this study Mangum explores how Adams treats love, family, work, friendship, and nostalgia. He identifies hope as a thread that links all her main characters, despite how accurately she had anticipated the complexities and challenges that accompanied increased freedom for women in the later twentieth century.

Sujets

• Women Authors
• Literary Criticism
• Otra mujer
• Carol Sklenicka
• The Other Hand
• Carolyn See
• Venable
• In Parenthesis
• Gentlewoman
• Alice Adams (writer)
• Minor Characters
• Another Woman
• Daisy Duke
• Mrs.
• E. M. Forster
• Alice Adams (novel)
• Jane Austen
• Susannah
• Alison Lurie
• Alice Munro
• Edward Morgan Forster
• Cynthia Ozick

Informations

• Publié par: University of South Carolina Press
• Date de parution: 07 février 2019
• Nombre de lectures: 1
• EAN13: 9781611179347
• Langue: English

Extrait

UNDERSTANDING ALICE ADAMS
UNDERSTANDING CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN LITERATURE
Matthew J. Bruccoli, Founding Editor
Linda Wagner-Martin, Series Editor
UNDERSTANDING
ALICE ADAMS
Bryant Mangum

The University of South Carolina Press
2019 University of South Carolina
Published by the University of South Carolina Press Columbia, South Carolina 29208
www.sc.edu/uscpress
28 27 26 25 24 23 22 21 20 19 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data can be found at http://catalog.loc.gov/ .
ISBN 978-1-61117-933-0 (cloth)
ISBN 978-1-61117-934-7 (ebook)
Front cover photograph: Harry Fong, used with permission
CONTENTS
Series Editor s Preface
Acknowledgments
Chapter 1 Understanding Alice Adams
Chapter 2 The Early Novels: Careless Love, Families and Survivors , and Listening to Billie
Chapter 3 Early Stories: Beautiful Girl
Chapter 4 1980s Novels: Rich Rewards, Superior Women , and Second Chances
Chapter 5 1980s Stories: To See You Again, Return Trips , and After You ve Gone
Chapter 6 1990s Novels: Caroline s Daughters, Almost Perfect, A Southern Exposure , and Medicine Men
Chapter 7 1990s Stories: The Last Lovely City
Chapter 8 Posthumous: After the War
Notes
Bibliography
Index
SERIES EDITOR S PREFACE
The Understanding Contemporary American Literature series was founded by the estimable Matthew J. Bruccoli (1931-2008), who envisioned these volumes as guides or companions for students as well as good nonacademic readers, a legacy that will continue as new volumes are developed to fill in gaps among the nearly one hundred series volumes published to date and to embrace a host of new writers only now making their marks on our literature.
As Professor Bruccoli explained in his preface to the volumes he edited, because much influential contemporary literature makes special demands, the word understanding in the titles was chosen deliberately. Many willing readers lack an adequate understanding of how contemporary literature works; that is, of what the author is attempting to express and the means by which it is conveyed. Aimed at fostering this understanding of good literature and good writers, the criticism and analysis in the series provide instruction in how to read certain contemporary writers-explicating their material, language, structures, themes, and perspectives-and facilitate a more profitable experience of the works under discussion.
In the twenty-first century Professor Bruccoli s prescience gives us an avenue to publish expert critiques of significant contemporary American writing. The series continues to map the literary landscape and to provide both instruction and enjoyment. Future volumes will seek to introduce new voices alongside canonized favorites, to chronicle the changing literature of our times, and to remain, as Professor Bruccoli conceived, contemporary in the best sense of the word.
Linda Wagner-Martin, Series Editor
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This book originated in conversations I had with Linda Wagner-Martin. I am grateful to her for her continuing encouragement, her support, and her friendship. I also wish to thank Jim Denton and Linda Haines Fogle of the University of South Carolina Press, who offered valuable advice from the moment I began my work on this project. Bill Adams, Suzanne Axland, and Patricia Callahan have gracefully responded to my many queries, and I am most appreciative of their help.
I am deeply indebted to Alice Adams s biographer and my dear friend, Carol Sklenicka, who has been beyond generous in sharing her knowledge, her resources, her time, and her wisdom with me. Alice Adams s son, Peter Linenthal, has been helpful in countless ways, and I am grateful to him for his help and friendship.
David Latan , chair of the English Department at Virginia Commonwealth University, has given me encouragement and all the support I dared ask for during the writing of this book, and I thank him. Montse Fuentes, dean of the College of Humanities and Sciences at Virginia Commonwealth University has generously provided assistance when it was needed most, and I am very appreciative of her support. I have also received valuable help from these friends and colleagues: Gretchen Comba, Thom Didato, Kate Drowne, Maurice Duke, A ne Norris, Margret Vopel, and James L. W. West III.
My deep thanks go to my research assistants for their work far beyond the call of duty: Christie Maurer located early serial publications of Adams s stories; Chelsea Gillenwater devoted untold hours to finding, copying, and cataloguing hundreds of reviews of Adams s books; Emily Block went behind me on each draft with a sharp editorial eye and improved the manuscript every time she touched it; Annie Persons has gone through every page, offering suggestions that I invariably followed, and she also prepared the index. Finally I want to express appreciation to my children, Skip, Wrenn, and Charlotte, who have provided inspiration at every turn.
CHAPTER 1
Understanding Alice Adams
I was always serious [about writing]-came from a literary, no that s wrong, a bookish town, Chapel Hill. Being a writer was the best possible thing. Writers were our folk heroes. So I was always serious about being a writer, or to put it negatively, nothing else occurred to me to be.
Alice Adams, Interview with Kay Bonetti (1987)
Alice Boyd Adams (1926-1999) knew from an early age that she would devote her life to writing, though as a very young girl she had planned to become a poet rather than a fiction writer. Between the ages of nine and thirteen she collected dozens of her poems, many of them vividly imagistic nature poems, in a notebook that she labeled on its cover The Poems of Alice Adams by Alice Adams. 1 By the time she finished her degree at Radcliffe, which she attended from 1943 through 1946, she had begun to devote her energies to writing short stories and sending them out to magazines. Then, in 1966, The New American Library published her first novel, Careless Love .
In the 1970s Adams published two novels, Families and Survivors (1974) and Listening to Billie (1978), and one short story collection, Beautiful Girl (1979), through Alfred A. Knopf, which would remain her publisher throughout her entire career. The 1980s were extraordinarily productive years during which Adams published three novels- Rich Rewards (1980), Superior Women (1984), and Second Chances (1988)-and three collections of short stories- To See You Again (1982), Return Trips (1985), and After You ve Gone (1989). The 1990s saw the publication of four novels- Caroline s Daughters (1991), Almost Perfect (1993), A Southern Exposure (1995), and Medicine Men (1991)-and one collection of stories, The Last Lovely City (1999). Her final novel, After the War (2000), was published the year after her death.
Adams remained reluctant throughout her career to speak in interviews about general meanings or thematic patterns in her work-or about personal philosophical insights that found expression in her fiction. However, in an interview with Kay Bonetti conducted three years after the publication of her most successful novel, Superior Women (1984), Adams provided a guiding principle for those new to her fiction. The interviewer made the following general observation about Adams s work and finally posed a question: It seems to me that one of your major subject matters is the potential of destructiveness and simultaneously the potential of personal growth through love relationships. That seems to be where you think the core of things exists. Can you explain why that is your subject matter? Adams gave this response: Not really. I think most of us are chosen by our subject matters. I don t mean to sound mystic or silly about this, but stories come upon one. I don t go around groping for stories. They appear in my mind, so the reasons for those choices are so deep that they have to do with my entire unconscious. 2 With this answer Adams provided both a guide and a challenge for readers approaching the body of her eleven novels and five collections of stories, and she did so without telling readers what themes they should expect to find in her works. Her response suggests three approaches to her work: one is biographical; a second is historical or cultural; and the third is analytical, as it explores the ways in which Adams s thoughts and ideas-conscious and unconscious-reveal themselves in her writing, sometimes reinforcing familiar social and cultural patterns and as often celebrating mystery and wonder.
In her suggestion that, like most writers, she was chosen by her subject matters, Adams invites readers to consider that the subject matters that chose her included experiences that came to her by chance. The most obvious of these are those experiences that were hers by virtue of her having been born into a family, place, and time that she did not choose, at least for much of her childhood, adolescence, and early adulthood. There were then the later experiences that came to her in adulthood, many of them again through chance rather than choice, by virtue of the zeitgeist of her time-1960s, 70s, 80s, and 90s, those decades of her publishing career. Clearly some events that she wrote about come from details in her life. She drew extensively on her early years in Chapel Hill, North Carolina-her family, her early friendships, the house of her childhood-for material for her fiction. Later her settings often include San Francisco, where she lived from 1949 until her death, and Mexico, which she visited virtually every year of her life from the late 1960s forward and about which she published a travel companion, Mexico: Some Travels and Some Travelers There (1990). As she points out in interv