Grief

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From Summer Sisters (1998)

  She and Gus have been talking about moving to the island full time if only they can figure out a way to support themselves doing what they want. Daniel is still single, still waiting for the perfect woman to show up. Abby has asked him to please turn off his cellular phone during the dedication. Phoebe sent regrets. She’d be out of the country. Dorset can’t make it either, but promises to think of them from her home in Mendocino, where she moved following Grandmother’s death, just shy of her ninety-ninth birthday. Abby starts off by reading from Shelley. Wren, who is so shy she makes Sharkey seem gregarious, surprises all of them by singing the Beatles’ “Yesterday,” in a clear, beautiful soprano. Sharkey loses it halfway through the song. Lamb embraces him, his own face streaked with tears, the two men comforting one another. Didn’t she know how much she was loved? Didn’t she care? Vix wonders if somewhere in Tuscany a handsome man who also loved her is grieving. Or was he another of Caitlin’s fantasies? Vix planned on reading the essay she’d written for her college application—Caitlin Somers, the Most Influential Person in My Life —but realizes at the last minute she can’t, so Gus reads it for her while Vix holds their baby, Nate, who tries to shove the turquoise beads Vix wears around her neck into his mouth. Maizie, who is five, skips up and down in a floral pinafore, scattering rose petals into the wind. She says she remembers Caitlin but Vix doesn’t think that’s possible. What she remembers are the stories Vix has told her, the stories Maizie calls Caitlin Summers , and the albums of photos she and Vix pore over whenever she visits. Caitlin is just a fantasy figure to Maizie, someone to dream about, someone from another time and place. She doesn’t really understand what they’re doing here, except that it’s some kind of party, a party for Caitlin, her birth mother. Vix doesn’t understand either. She’s tried to make sense of it but she can’t. No one can explain what happened that day. There was no storm in the area. Winds were moderate. They found her boat two days later, drifting, but there was no sign of trouble. There isn’t any evidence she was lost at sea, except for the little boat and her plan to go sailing. There’s no way Vix or anyone else will ever know the truth. The truth is with Caitlin, wherever she is. Sometimes Vix hears Caitlin reminding her, No matter how many guys come and go we’ll always be together . She hears her infectious laugh or that seductive voice, whispering, I’ll always love you. Promise you’ll always love me? Two days later Vix rides her bike out to the wildflower meadow by herself. She kneels at the stone, which they have all been careful to call commemorative rather than memorial . She runs her fingers over the engraved letters.

• From Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990)

  According to Kristeva, the act of giving birth does not successfully reestablish that continuous relation prior to individuation because the infant invariably suffers the prohibition on incest and is separated off as a discrete identity. In the case of the mother’s separation from the girl-child, the result is melancholy for both, for the separation is never fully completed. As opposed to grief or mourning, in which separation is recognized and the libido attached to the original object is successfully displaced onto a new substitute object, melancholy designates a failure to grieve in which the loss is simply internalized and, in that sense, refused. Instead of a negative attachment to the body, the maternal body is internalized as a negation, so that the girl’s identity becomes itself a kind of loss, a characteristic privation or lack. The alleged psychosis of homosexuality, then, consists in its thorough break with the paternal law and with the grounding of the female “ego,” tenuous though it may be, in the melancholic response to separation from the maternal body. Hence, according to Kristeva, female homosexuality is the emergence of psychosis into culture: The homosexual-maternal facet is a whirl of words, a complete absence of meaning and seeing; it is feeling, displacement, rhythm, sound, flashes, and fantasied clinging to the maternal body as a screen against the plunge … for woman, a paradise lost but seemingly close at hand.10 For women, however, this homosexuality is manifest in poetic language which becomes, in fact, the only form of the semiotic, besides childbirth, which can be sustained within the terms of the Symbolic. For Kristeva, then, overt homosexuality cannot be a culturally sustainable activity, for it would constitute a breaking of the incest taboo in an unmediated way. And yet why is this the case? Kristeva accepts the assumption that culture is equivalent to the Symbolic, that the Symbolic is fully subsumed under the “Law of the Father,” and that the only modes of nonpsychotic activity are those which participate in the Symbolic to some extent. Her strategic task, then, is neither to replace the Symbolic with the semiotic nor to establish the semiotic as a rival cultural possibility, but rather to validate those experiences within the Symbolic that permit a manifestation of the borders which divide the Symbolic from the semiotic. Just as birth is understood to be a cathexis of instinctual drives for the purposes of a social teleology, so poetic production is conceived as the site in which the split between instinct and representation exists in culturally communicable form: The speaker reaches this limit, this requisite of sociality, only by virtue of a particular, discursive practice called “art.” A woman also attains it (and in our society, especially) through the strange form of split symbolization (threshold of language and instinctual drive, of the “symbolic” and the “semiotic”) of which the act of giving birth consists.11

• From The Canterbury Tales (2009)

  It revealed horrors. The letter stated that Constance had been delivered of a fiend, an unnatural monster bred out of the devil. No one in the castle could endure the sight or sound or smell of it. It was agreed by all that its mother was a witch, sent to the castle by means of spells and sorcery. No one would go near her. The king’s grief, on reading this letter, was overwhelming. But he said nothing. He kept his sorrow secret, and wrote to the governor of the castle. ‘Let the providence of Christ be my guide. I am now converted to His cause, and must abide His will. Oh Lord, I will obey your commands in everything. Do with me as you wish.’ Then he added, to the governor, ‘Keep this child safe, whether it be foul or fair. And safeguard my wife, too, until I return. Christ will grant me another child, fair and wholesome, when He deems it right.’ Weeping, he sealed and dispatched this letter to the messenger. There was nothing else to be done. Yet how false a messenger! You are a drunken sot. Your breath is foul, and your limbs are weak. You falter on your legs. You betray every secret entrusted to you. You have lost your mind. You chatter like a parrot. Your face is distorted and awry. Wherever there is a drunk, there is also a loud mouth. You can be sure of it. Oh Donegild, evil queen mother, I have no words to describe the malice of your wickedness. I give you over to your companion, the foul fiend. Let him record your treachery. I defy you, unnatural creature - no, you are yourself a fiend. Wherever your body wanders, your spirit dwells in hell. So the messenger left the presence of the king and returned to the court of Donegild. She was delighted to see him again, and offered him all the hospitality she could possibly provide. He drank himself close to bursting. Then he passed out, and spent the night snorting and farting like a swine in its sty. In the meantime, of course, Donegild had stolen the letter from the king and forged one in its place. ‘The king,’ she wrote, ‘commands the governor, on pain of death, to make sure that Constance is banished from the realm of Northumberland. She may remain only for three days. After that time, she must be gone. ‘Place her in the same ship in which she arrived here. She must take her infant son and all her possessions. Then push the ship out to sea. And forbid her ever to return.’ Oh Constance, well may your spirit tremble. Well may your dreams be sorrowful. Donegild intends to strike at you.

• From Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990)

  antimetaphorical precisely because it maintains the loss as radically unnameable; in other words, incorporation is not only a failure to name or avow the loss, but erodes the conditions of metaphorical signification itself. As in the Lacanian perspective, for Abraham and Torok the repudiation of the maternal body is the condition of signification within the Symbolic. They argue further that this primary repression founds the possibility of individuation and of significant speech, where speech is necessarily metaphorical, in the sense that the referent, the object of desire, is a perpetual displacement. In effect, the loss of the maternal body as an object of love is understood to establish the empty space out of which words originate. But the refusal of this loss—melancholy—results in the failure to displace into words; indeed, the place of the maternal body is established in the body, “encrypted,” to use their term, and given permanent residence there as a dead and deadening part of the body or one inhabited or possessed by phantasms of various kinds. When we consider gender identity as a melancholic structure, it makes sense to choose “incorporation” as the manner by which that identification is accomplished. Indeed, according to the scheme above, gender identity would be established through a refusal of loss that encrypts itself in the body and that determines, in effect, the living versus the dead body. As an antimetaphorical activity, incorporation literalizes the loss on or in the body and so appears as the facticity of the body, the means by which the body comes to bear “sex” as its literal truth. The localization and/or prohibition of pleasures and desires in given “erotogenic” zones is precisely the kind of gender-differentiating melancholy that suffuses the body’s surface. The loss of the pleasurable object is resolved through the incorporation of that very pleasure with the result that pleasure is both determined and prohibited through the compulsory effects of the gender-differentiating law. The incest taboo is, of course, more inclusive than the taboo against homosexuality, but in the case of the heterosexual incest taboo through which heterosexual identity is established, the loss is borne as grief. In the case of the prohibition against homosexual incest through which heterosexual identity is established, however, the loss is sustained through a melancholic structure. The loss of the heterosexual object, argues Freud, results in the displacement of that object, but not the heterosexual aim; on the other hand, the loss of the homosexual object requires the loss of the aim and the object. In other words, the object is not only lost, but the desire fully denied, such that “I never lost that person and I never loved that person, indeed never felt that kind of love at all.” The melancholic preservation of that love is all the more securely safeguarded through the totalizing trajectory of the denial.

• From Summer Sisters (1998)

  No, she thought, shaking her head. That would be too personal. That would have to wait until they were together again. Vix helped her father dispose of Nathan’s clothes, his toys, the contraption for his bath, his wheelchair. When she said she would like to keep Nathan’s books for herself—Green Eggs and Ham, Stuart Little, The Great Brain —her father broke down and sobbed, the only time she’d ever seen him cry. She tried to console him but he bolted, unable to share his feelings. If Lewis or Lanie were sad about Nathan’s death they didn’t say. They went on with their lives as if nothing had happened. Vix sometimes thought they were relieved. What kind of family were they? she wondered. What kind of family isn’t able to comfort one another? When Caitlin returned from the Vineyard she hand-delivered a sympathy card from Bru, stiff, formal, with some bullshit message that began In your time of need ... It was signed, I’m sorry. Bru. She sent an equally formal card, thanking him for his expression of sympathy and signed it Victoria. At Christmas he sent a card showing a snowy Vineyard scene. Hoping to see you next summer. Bru. She sent him a card showing a Santa Fe scene. Hoping to see you, too. Victoria. The Countess asked Tawny to accompany her on a trip to Europe. Tawny went and stayed away almost three months. When she returned she had very little interest in anything or anyone. Lanie was running wild and Lewis was sullen at home, when he was home, which wasn’t often. Caitlin decided men were too much trouble. “I’m applying to Wellesley,” she told Vix at school. “I think I’ll do better without men around to distract me. Besides, I’m thinking of becoming a lesbian ... to make a statement. Are you interested?” “This is a joke, right?” “It’s whatever you want it to be.” Vix laughed uneasily.

• From The Glass Castle: A Memoir (2005)

  But after listening to the prosecutor’s version of events, the judge shook her head grimly: “Bail is denied.” In the hallway, Lori and Dad got into a loud argument over who was responsible for pushing Maureen over the edge. Lori blamed Dad for creating a sick environment, while Dad maintained that Maureen had faulty wiring. Mom chimed in that all the junk food Maureen ate had led to a chemical imbalance, and Brian started yelling at them all to shut the hell up or he’d arrest them. I just stood there looking from one distorted face to another, listening to this babble of enraged squabbling as the members of the Walls family gave vent to all their years of hurt and anger, each unloading his or her own accumulated grievances and blaming the others for allowing the most fragile one of us to break into pieces. The judge sent Maureen to an upstate hospital. She was released after a year and immediately bought a one-way bus ticket to California. I told Brian that we had to stop her. She didn’t know a single person in California. How would she survive? But Brian thought it was the smartest thing she could do for herself. He said she needed to get as far away from Mom and Dad, and probably the rest of us, as possible. I decided Brian was right. But I also hoped that Maureen had chosen California because she thought that was her true home, the place where she really belonged, where it was always warm and you could dance in the rain, pick grapes right off the vines, and sleep outside at night under the stars. Maureen did not want any of us to see her off. I rose just after first light the morning she was scheduled to leave. It was an early departure, and I wanted to be awake and thinking about her at the moment her bus pulled out, so I could say farewell in my mind. I went to the window and looked out at the cold, wet sky. I wondered if she was thinking of us and if she was going to miss us. I’d always had mixed feelings about bringing her to New York, but I’d agreed to let her come. Once she arrived, I’d been too busy taking care of myself to look after her. “I’m sorry, Maureen,” I said when the time came, “sorry for everything.” AFTER THAT, I HARDLY ever saw Mom or Dad. Neither did Brian. He had gotten married and bought a run-down Victorian house on Long Island that he restored, and he and his wife had a child, a little girl. They were his family now. Lori, who was still living in her apartment near the Port Authority, was more in touch with Mom and Dad, but she, too, had gone her own way. We hadn’t gotten together since Maureen’s arraignment.

• From Summer Sisters (1998)

  desperation? She was the last one to see her. Surely she could have done something. She dissolves into tears. She cries the way she did when she left Caitlin the morning after her seventeenth birthday. She cries the way she did driving back from Santa Fe with Bru, great gut-wrenching sobs, until there’s nothing left. Finally, she lies beside the stone and sleeps. When she awakens she’s thirsty. Her breasts are full, her nipples are beginning to leak. She has to get back for Nate’s feeding. She reaches into her bag and pulls out a pure white beach stone. She places it atop Caitlin’s stone. “The next time I see you I get to ask the questions,” she tells her. Then she laughs. She laughs thinking of Caitlin listening to her, blathering about friendship and love. Sometimes Vix thinks when the Big Four-O comes along she’ll get an envelope from some exotic place and inside will be an airline ticket and a note—Come celebrate with me. Gus will say, “Go ... don’t worry about the kids.” So she’ll go. Caitlin will meet her at the airport, her hair flying in the wind. After they hug Vix will hold Caitlin at arm’s length for a minute. God, Caitlin, she’ll say, You look so ... grownup. And Caitlin will laugh and answer, It’s about time, don’t you think? To Mary Weaver my “summer sister” WITH MANY THANKS to Randy Blume, Larry Blume, Amanda Cooper, and their friends for talking with me about music and memories during long, leisurely Vineyard dinners on the porch. Special thanks to Kate Schaum, dedicated early reader, and to Gloria DeAngelis, Kaethe Fine, and Robin Standefer. Also, to my Harvard connections, Nicky Weinstock, Ted Rose, and Seng Dao Yang (my unofficial guide to Weld South). JUDY BLUME’S BOOKS FOR ADULT READERS Wifey Smart Women Summer Sisters FOR YOUNG ADULTS Tiger Eyes Forever ... Letters to Judy: What Kids Wish They Could Tell You Places I Never Meant to Be (editor) FOR YOUNGER READERS, THE “FUDGE” BOOKS Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing Otherwise Known as Sheila the Great Superfudge Fudge-a-mania Double Fudge FOR MIDDLE GRADE READERS Iggie’s House Blubber Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret. Then Again, Maybe I Won’t It’s Not the End of the World Starring Sally J. Freedman as Herself Deenie Just as Long as We’re Together Here’s to You, Rachel Robinson PICTURE BOOKS The One in the Middle Is the Green Kangaroo The Pain and the Great One Freckle Juice THE “PAIN & THE GREAT ONE” SERIES Soupy Saturdays with the Pain & the Great One Cool Zone with the Pain & the Great One Going, Going, Gone! with the Pain & the Great One Friend or Fiend? with the Pain & the Great One

• From The Glass Castle: A Memoir (2005)

  Something in all of us broke that day, and afterward, we no longer had the spirit for family gatherings. About a year after Maureen took off for California, I got a call at work from Dad. He said he needed to get together to discuss something important. “Can’t we do it over the phone?” “I need to see you in person, honey.” Dad asked me to come down to the Lower East Side that evening. “And if it’s not too much trouble,” he added, “could you stop on your way and pick up a bottle of vodka?” “Oh, so that’s what this is about.” “No, no, honey. I do need to talk to you. But I would appreciate some vodka. Nothing fancy, just the cheapest rotgut they have. A pint would be fine. A fifth would be great.” I was annoyed by Dad’s sly request for vodka—tossing it out at the end of the conversation as if it were an afterthought, when I figured it was probably the purpose of the call. That afternoon I called Mom, who still never drank anything stronger than tea, and asked if I should indulge Dad. “Your father is who he is,” Mom said. “It’s a little late in the game to try to reform him now. Humor the man.” • • • That night I stopped in a liquor store and bought a half gallon of the cheapest rotgut on the shelf, just as Dad had requested, then took a taxi down to the Lower East Side. I climbed the dark staircase and pushed open the unlocked door. Mom and Dad were lying in their bed under a pile of thin blankets. I got the impression they’d been there all day. Mom squealed when she saw me, and Dad started apologizing for the mess, saying if Mom would let him clear out some of her crap, they might at least be able to swing a cat in here, which got Mom accusing Dad of being a bum. “Good to see you,” I said as I kissed them. “It’s been a while.” Mom and Dad struggled up into sitting positions. I saw Dad eyeing the brown paper bag, and I passed it to him. “A magnum,” Dad said, his voice choked with gratitude as he eased the big bottle from the bag. He unscrewed the cap and took a long, deep pull. “Thank you, my darling,” he said. “You are so good to your old man.” Mom wore a heavy cable-knit sweater. The skin of her hands was deeply cracked, and her hair was tangled, but her face had a healthy pink glow, and her eyes were clear and bright. Beside her, Dad looked gaunt. His hair, still coal black except for touches of gray at his temples, was combed back, but his cheeks were sunken, and he had a thin beard. He’d always been clean-shaven, even during those days on the streets. “Why are you growing a beard, Dad?” I asked.

• From The Glass Castle: A Memoir (2005)

  She had picked out all the hymns and prayers, chosen her favorite funeral home, ordered a lavender lace nightgown from JCPenney that she wanted to be buried in, and selected a two-toned lavender casket with shiny chrome handles from the mortician’s catalog. Erma’s death brought out Mom’s pious side. While we were waiting for the preacher, she took out her rosary and prayed for Erma’s soul, which she feared was in jeopardy since, as she saw it, Erma had committed suicide. She also tried to make us kiss Erma’s corpse. We flat out refused, but Mom went up in front of the mourners, genuflected with a grand sweep, and then kissed Erma’s cheek so vigorously that you could hear the puckering sound throughout the chapel. I was sitting next to Dad. It was the first time in my life I’d ever seen him wearing a necktie, which he always called a noose. His face was tight and closed, but I could tell he was distraught. More distraught than I’d ever seen him, which surprised me, because Erma had seemed to have some sort of an evil hold over Dad, and I thought he’d be relieved to be free of it. As we walked home, Mom asked us kids if we had anything nice to say about Erma now that she had passed. We took a couple of steps in silence, then Lori said, “Ding-dong, the witch is dead.” Brian and I started snickering. Dad wheeled around and gave Lori such a cold, angry look that I thought he might wallop her. “She was my mother, for God’s sake,” he said. He glared at us. “You kids. You make me ashamed. Do you hear me? Ashamed!” He turned down the street to Junior’s bar. We all watched him go. “You’re ashamed of us ?” Lori called after him. Dad just kept walking. • • • Four days later, when Dad still hadn’t come home, Mom sent me to go find him. “Why do I always have to get Dad?” I asked. “Because he likes you the best,” she said. “And he’ll come home if you tell him to.” The first step in tracking down Dad was going next door to the Freemans, who let us use their phone if we paid a dime, and calling Grandpa to ask if Dad was there. Grandpa said he had no idea where Dad was. “When y’all gonna get your own telephone?” Mr. Freeman asked after I hung up. “Mom disapproves of telephones,” I said as I placed the dime on his coffee table. “She thinks they’re an impersonal means of communication.” My first stop, as always, was Junior’s. It was the fanciest bar in Welch, with a picture window, a grill that served hamburgers and french fries, and a pinball machine. “Hey!” one of the regulars called out when I walked in. “It’s Rex’s little girl. How ya doin’, sweetheart?” “I’m fine, thank you.

• From Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990)

  The rendition of Lacan that understands the prediscursive as an impossibility promises a critique that conceptualizes the Law as prohibitive and generative at once. That the language of physiology or disposition does not appear here is welcome news, but binary restrictions nevertheless still operate to frame and formulate sexuality and delimit in advance the forms of its resistance to the “real.” In marking off the very domain of what is subject to repression, exclusion operates prior to repression—that is, in the delimitation of the Law and its objects of subordination. Although one can argue that for Lacan repression creates the repressed through the prohibitive and paternal law, that argument does not account for the pervasive nostalgia for the lost fullness of jouissance in his work. Indeed, the loss could not be understood as loss unless the very irrecoverability of that pleasure did not designate a past that is barred from the present through the prohibitive law. That we cannot know that past from the position of the founded subject is not to say that that past does not reemerge within that subject’s speech as fêlure, discontinuity, metonymic slippage. As the truer noumenal reality existed for Kant, the prejuridical past of jouissance is unknowable from within spoken language; that does not mean, however, that this past has no reality. The very inaccessibility of the past, indicated by metonymic slippage in contemporary speech, confirms that original fullness as the ultimate reality. The further question emerges: What plausibility can be given to an account of the Symbolic that requires a conformity to the Law that proves impossible to perform and that makes no room for the flexibility of the Law itself, its cultural reformulation in more plastic forms? The injunction to become sexed in the ways prescribed by the Symbolic always leads to failure and, in some cases, to the exposure of the phantasmatic nature of sexual identity itself. The Symbolic’s claim to be cultural intelligibility in its present and hegemonic form effectively consolidates the power of those phantasms as well as the various dramas of identificatory failures. The alternative is not to suggest that identification should become a viable accomplishment. But there does seem to be a romanticization or, indeed, a religious idealization of “failure,” humility and limitation before the Law, which makes the Lacanian narrative ideologically suspect. The dialectic between a juridical imperative that cannot be fulfilled and an inevitable failure “before the law” recalls the tortured relationship between the God of the Old Testament and those humiliated servants who offer their obedience without reward. That sexuality now embodies this religious impulse in the form of the demand for love (considered to be an “absolute” demand) that is distinct from both need and desire (a kind of ecstatic transcendence that eclipses sexuality altogether) lends further credibility to the Symbolic as that which operates for human subjects as the inaccessible but all-determining deity.

• From Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990)

  At the beginning of the narrative, s/he offers two one-sentence paragraphs “parallel” to one another which suggest a melancholic incorporation of the lost father, a postponement of the anger of abandonment through the structural instatement of that negativity into h/er identity and desire. Before s/he tells us that s/he h/erself was abandoned by h/er mother quickly and without advance notice, s/he tells us that for reasons unstated s/he spent a few years in a house for abandoned and orphaned children. S/he refers to the “poor creatures, deprived from their cradle of a mother’s love.” In the next sentence s/he refers to this institution as a “refuge [asile] of suffering and affliction,” and in the following sentence refers to h/er father “whom a sudden death tore away … from the tender affection of my mother” (4). Although h/er own abandonment is twice deflected here through the pity for others who are suddenly rendered motherless, s/he establishes an identification through that deflection, one that later reappears as the joint plight of father and daughter cut off from the maternal caress. The deflections of desire are semantically compounded, as it were, as Herculine proceeds to fall in love with “mother” after “mother” and then falls in love with various mothers’ “daughters,” which scandalizes all manner of mother. Indeed, s/he vacillates between being the object of everyone’s adoration and excitement and an object of scorn and abandonment, the split consequence of a melancholic structure left to feed on itself without intervention. If melancholy involves self-recrimination, as Freud argues, and if that recrimination is a kind of negative narcissism (attending to the self, even if only in the mode of berating that self), then Herculine can be understood to be constantly falling into the opposition between negative and positive narcissism, at once avowing h/erself as the most abandoned and neglected creature on earth but also as the one who casts a spell of enchantment on everyone who comes near h/er, indeed, one who is better for all women than any “man” (107).

• From The Canterbury Tales (2009)

  There was a fox, tipped with black from head to toe, who was a very model of slyness and iniquity. He had dwelled in a forest, near the old woman’s cottage, for three years. The previous night, as high fortune had dictated, the fox burst through the hedge that protected the yard where Chanticleer and his wives were accustomed to take the air. He lay concealed in a bed of cabbages until the following morning, ready to seize the proud cock at the first opportunity. That is what assassins do, when they are waiting for their prey. They hide, and they plot. Oh false murderer, lying among the cabbages! You are no better than Judas Iscariot. You are worse than Genylon, who betrayed brave Roland. You false traitor. You are another Synon, who caused the wooden horse to be brought into Troy. Oh Chanticleer you will curse the morning when you flew down from your perch. You were forewarned in your dreams that this day would be hurtful to you, but you spread your wings none the less. Well, as some wise clerks say, what will be will be. God has made it so. There is much debate and argument on the point, among the schoolmen. Thousands of them have disputed on the claims of free will and necessity. I really don’t have the wit to solve the conundrum. Augustine has tried. Boethius has tried. Thomas Bradwardyn has tried. Remember him? There are those who believe that all is predestined and prejudged in the fathomless mind of God. But there are others who distinguish between providence and destiny. It is not necessary that things happen because they have been ordained but, rather, things that do happen have indeed been ordained. It is too much for me. I am telling a tale of a cock and a fox. That is all. I am relating the sad story of a bird that was persuaded by his wife to ignore his dream and to strut around the farmyard. The advice of women is often fatal. It was a woman’s advice that led to all our woe. I am talking about Eve, who advised Adam out of Paradise. He had been happy there. If I have offended anyone among you, dear pilgrims, take it in good spirit. I am only joking. Consult the authors who know about such things. Read what they have written about women. In any case these are the words of the cock. They are not mine. I mean no harm to any female.

• From Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990)

  The conflation of desire with the real—that is, the belief that it is parts of the body, the “literal” penis, the “literal” vagina, which cause pleasure and desire—is precisely the kind of literalizing fantasy characteristic of the syndrome of melancholic heterosexuality. The disavowed homosexuality at the base of melancholic heterosexuality reemerges as the self-evident anatomical facticity of sex, where “sex” designates the blurred unity of anatomy, “natural identity,” and “natural desire.” The loss is denied and incorporated, and the genealogy of that transmutation fully forgotten and repressed. The sexed surface of the body thus emerges as the necessary sign of a natural(ized) identity and desire. The loss of homosexuality is refused and the love sustained or encrypted in the parts of the body itself, literalized in the ostensible anatomical facticity of sex. Here we see the general strategy of literalization as a form of forgetfulness, which, in the case of a literalized sexual anatomy, “forgets” the imaginary and, with it, an imaginable homosexuality. In the case of the melancholic heterosexual male, he never loved another man, he is a man, and he can seek recourse to the empirical facts that will prove it. But the literalization of anatomy not only proves nothing, but is a literalizing restriction of pleasure in the very organ that is championed as the sign of masculine identity. The love for the father is stored in the penis, safeguarded through an impervious denial, and the desire which now centers on that penis has that continual denial as its structure and its task. Indeed, the woman-as-object must be the sign that he not only never felt homosexual desire, but never felt the grief over its loss. Indeed, the woman-as-sign must effectively displace and conceal that preheterosexual history in favor of one that consecrates a seamless heterosexuality.

• From The Canterbury Tales (2009)

  So she begged him to take up his sword and slay her softly. Then once more she fainted away. With sorrowful heart Virginius picked up his sword and cut off her head with one stroke. Then, according to the story, he picked it up by the hair and took it to the courtoom. There he laid it on the judge’s table. When Appius saw it, he ordered Virginius to be hanged immediately. But a thousand people gathered, in sorrow and pity for the knight. All of them knew, or suspected, that the judge had twisted and broken the law. They had noted the false demeanour of the churl Claudius, who had brought the charges. In any case, Appius was a notorious lecher. No one trusted him. So they marched against him, charged him, and threw him into prison; he killed himself in his cell. Claudius was sentenced to death by hanging, from the nearest tree, but Virginius pleaded his case so well that the churl was instead sent into exile. That is pity for you. Otherwise the villain would have died. All the other guilty parties were taken and executed immediately. This is how sin is repaid. We must all take heed. No one knows the course of God’s will. No one knows how, or where, He will strike. The worm of conscience may be nourished by a wicked life, and then bite. However secret, however well hidden, vice will get its reward. The simple man and the scholar have this in common: they do not know the time or the nature of their departure from this life. So be warned. Give up sin, before sin gives up you. Heere endeth the Phisiciens Tale The Pardoner’s Prologue Heere folweth the Prologe of the Pardoners Tale Our Host began to swear as if he had gone crazy. ‘My God!’ he shouted. ‘By the blood and body of Christ that judge was wicked! And so was the churl! They deserved to die, as do all false judges and plaintiffs. And the beautiful girl was murdered by her own father. Her beauty came at too high a price, that’s for sure. I know one thing. I will say it over and over again. The so-called gifts of Fortune, and of Nature, can be fatal. Her beauty led her to the slaughter. It is a most sorrowful story. We are the darlings of Fortune and Nature, as I said just now, at our peril. They cause more harm than good.

• From The Glass Castle: A Memoir (2005)

  We couldn’t afford wood any more than we could afford coal, and Dad wasn’t around to chop and split any, which meant it was up to us kids to gather dead branches and logs from the forest. Finding good, dry wood was a challenge. We trekked along the mountainside, looking for pieces that weren’t waterlogged or rotten, shaking the snow off branches. But we went through the wood awfully quickly, and while a coal fire burns hot, a wood fire doesn’t throw off much heat. We all huddled around the potbellied stove, wrapped in blankets, holding out our hands toward the weak, smoky heat. Mom said we should be thankful because we had it better than pioneers, who didn’t have modern conveniences like window glass and cast-iron stoves. One day we got a roaring fire going, but even then we could still see our breath, and there was ice on both sides of the windows. Brian and I decided we needed to make the fire even bigger and went out to collect more wood. On the way back, Brian stopped and looked at our house. “There’s no snow on our roof,” he said. He was right. It had completely melted. “Every other house has snow on its roof,” he said. He was right about that, too. “This house doesn’t have a lick of insulation,” Brian told Mom when we got back inside. “All the heat’s going right through the roof.” “We may not have insulation,” Mom said as we all gathered around the stove, “but we have each other.” It got so cold in the house that icicles hung from the kitchen ceiling, the water in the sink turned into a solid block of ice, and the dirty dishes were stuck there as if they’d been cemented in place. Even the pan of water that we kept in the living room to wash up in usually had a layer of ice on it. We walked around the house wearing our coats and wrapped in blankets. We wore our coats to bed, too. There was no stove in the bedroom, and no matter how many blankets I piled on top of myself, I still felt cold. I lay awake at night, rubbing my feet with my hands, trying to warm them. We fought over who got to sleep with the dogs—Tinkle, the Jack Russell terrier, and Pippin, a curly-haired mutt who had wandered down through the woods one day—because they kept us warm. They usually ended up in a heap with Mom, because she had the bigger body, and they were cold, too. Brian had bought an iguana at G. C. Murphy, the five-and-dime on McDowell Street, because it reminded him of the desert. He named the lizard Iggy and slept with it against his chest to keep it warm, but it froze to death one night. We had to leave the faucet under the house dripping or the water froze in the pipe.

• From The Glass Castle: A Memoir (2005)

  When I got to the hospital, he was in a bed in the emergency room, his eyes closed. Mom and Lori were standing next to him. “It’s just the machines keeping him alive at his point,” Mom said. I knew Dad would have hated that, spending his final moments in a hospital hooked up to machines. He’d have wanted to be out in the wild somewhere. He always said that when he died, we should put him on a mountaintop and let the buzzards and coyotes tear his body apart. I had this crazy urge to scoop him up in my arms and charge through the doors—to check out Rex Walls–style one last time. Instead, I took his hand. It was warm and heavy. An hour later, they turned the machines off. • • • In the months that followed, I found myself always wanting to be somewhere other than where I was. If I was at work, I’d wish I were at home. If I was in the apartment, I couldn’t wait to get out of it. If a taxi I had hailed was stuck in traffic for over a minute, I got out and walked. I felt best when I was on the move, going someplace rather than being there. I took up ice-skating. I rose early in the morning and made my way through the quiet, dawn-lit streets to the rink, where I laced up my skates so tightly my feet throbbed. I welcomed the numbing cold and even the jolt of my falls on the hard, wet ice. The fast-paced, repetitive maneuvers distracted me, and sometimes I went back at night to skate again, returning home only when it was late and I was exhausted. It took me a while to realize that just being on the move wasn’t enough; that I needed to reconsider everything. • • • A year after Dad died, I left Eric. He was a good man, but not the right one for me. And Park Avenue was not where I belonged. I took a small apartment on the West Side. It had neither a doorman nor a fireplace, but there were large windows that flooded the rooms with light, and parquet floors and a small foyer, just like that first apartment Lori and I had found in the Bronx. It felt right. I went ice-skating less often, and when my skates were stolen, I never replaced them. My compulsion to be always on the move began to fade. But I liked to go for long walks at night. I often walked west toward the river. The city lights obscured the stars, but on clear nights, I could see Venus on the horizon, up over the dark water, glowing steadily. V [image "Images" file=Image00012.jpg] THANKSGIVING I WAS STANDING ON the platform with my second husband, John. A whistle sounded in the distance, red lights flashed, and a bell clanged as the gates were lowered across the roadway.

• From Birthday Girl (2018)

  Pike no dice nada, pero puedo verlo mirándome. Soy una presa fácil. Me alejé de mi ex y mis padres, pero nunca les di su merecido. Nunca luché. Solo corrí. Además de mi hermana, Cole es todo lo que tengo, y permito esta mierda porque era más que solo un novio para mí. ―¿Puedo hacerte una pregunta? ―dice Pike. Lo miro, y mi corazón se salta un latido al ver que sus ojos se ciernen sobre mí. El reflejo del agua los hace parecer azul. ―¿Cómo se conocieron Cole y tú? ―pregunta. Y a pesar de mi irritación, sonrío un poco. Mis ojos van a la cicatriz en mi pulgar. ―Cuando tenía dieciséis, trabajaba en un auto lavado ―le digo―. No había otras chicas trabajando allí, pero fue todo lo que pude encontrar, así que lo hice con un equipo lleno de chicos. Siento el calor de su cuerpo junto a mí, mido el subir y bajar de su pecho, y me encuentro emparejándolo. —Tuve mucha mierda ―continúo, recordando los comentarios sarcásticos cada vez que me inclinaba o me recargaba en un auto―. Los adolescentes pueden ser... ―Sí ―termina Pike por mí concordando, sin humor en su voz. Intercambiamos una sonrisa. Él también solía ser un adolescente, después de todo, supongo. ―Había un chico llamado Nick que siempre alejaba a la gente de mí ―continúo, recordando―. Era amable conmigo y me hablaba. No me miraba, ni actuaba inmaduro. Froto mi dedo sobre la cicatriz ausentemente. ―Un día me invitó a salir, y trajo a Cole. ―Miro a Pike, la rabia de antes de repente se ha ido―. Nos volvimos amigos, nos divertíamos mucho, y creo que me volví más cercana a ellos de lo que había sido con alguien. Excepto mi hermana, claro. Asiente, luciendo como si estuviera pensando. Y entonces pregunta: ―¿Y tú y Cole comenzaron a salir? ¿Cómo tomó eso Nick? Vuelvo a mirar a la piscina, respirando profundo. ―Nunca lo supo ―digo en voz baja. Pike permanece en silencio, la tensión en el aire ahora es espesa. Dije que él nunca lo supo. No que no lo sabe. Aclaro mi garganta. ―Una noche, hace un par de años, antes que Cole y yo estuviéramos juntos ―le digo―. Él y Nick salieron. Cole bebió demasiado y se desmayó. Nick consiguió un aventón con alguien más. Me arden los ojos por las lágrimas que intento contener, y mi boca está tan seca. —El conductor perdió el control de su camioneta, dio vueltas, y todos los chicos en la parte de atrás se cayeron. ―Oh, Dios mío ―dice en voz baja, dejando caer su cabeza. Termino: ―Nick quedó atrapado debajo de la camioneta. Murió un par de días después. Aprieto mis puños para intentar no llorar. Él era la única persona que conocí que murió. No fue como el abandono de mi madre. Nick no quería irse. Él vivía por los videos juegos, y su cabello siempre estaba colgando fuera de sus gafas, y extraño todas sus peculiaridades.

• From Summer Sisters (1998)

  Caitlin’s face, in her eyes. “What?” she asked. Caitlin said, “It’s Nathan.” “No,” Vix said. “Vix ... I’m so sorry. He died this morning.” Vix screamed. “No ... please God, not Nathan!” Caitlin grabbed her, kept her from keeling over. Then Abby was pushing a glass of something in her face. Vix knocked it out of her hand. “They didn’t even tell me he was sick!” “It happened too fast,” Abby said. “I have to go home.” Vix broke away. “I have to see him.” “We’ve already booked a flight, kiddo.” Lamb had his arm around her shoulders and was holding her tight. Caitlin slid into the back seat of the Volvo next to Vix. “I’m coming with you.” Vix shook her head. “I know how much he meant to you,” Caitlin said, reaching for her hand. “Please, Vix ... let me be your friend.” She never had the chance to say goodbye to Nathan, never had the chance to keep her promise. Instead, she slipped the Disney World brochure into his coffin, along with Orlando and a letter telling him she loved him, apologizing for thinking only of herself that summer, for being too much in love. When she asked her family why no one had called to tell her he was sick, Lanie answered, “He wasn’t that sick. It was just a summer cold. Two days later he had pneumonia. We didn’t know he was going to ... die.”

• From Summer Sisters (1998)

  haggard, ten years older than Vix. Vix wished they could take out the old Barbies and play on the floor. This time she’d let Lanie use Barbie’s Dream House. Jimmy didn’t show up for dinner, not that Lanie expected him to. He was probably at his brother’s house getting stoned, she said. At the end of the day, when Lanie got into her truck with the children and the Christmas toys, she hit on Vix for money. “I work my ass off shoveling manure while he sits around getting high. My life sucks.” Vix felt like telling Lanie she was working her ass off, too, making every penny count, but Jesus, she was a student at Harvard and Lanie was existing on food stamps so she ran back into the house and dug fifty dollars out of her wallet. “Thanks,” Lanie said, pocketing the money. “Your guy is gorgeous. Marry him while you can.” Vix was surprised. “I wouldn’t have expected you to recommend marriage.” “Yeah, well ... I didn’t exactly plan on winding up like this.” “Get out of it then,” Vix said. “Get your life together. You could move in with Dad, go back to school. You can’t just give up.” Lanie’s mouth hardened. “You come back here once in three years and think you can fix everything just like that? You don’t know shit about any of us. Tawny’s gone for good, not that Dad will admit it. He’s got some cow at work, not that he’ll admit that either. You think she’s going to put up with me and these two?” The kids were asleep, the baby in a car seat, Amber slumped against him, breathing heavily. Didn’t Lanie know it was illegal to drive with an unprotected child? “Are those bullet holes?” Vix asked, eyeing the damage to the door of the truck. “Just some jerk at the trailer park shooting up everything in sight,” Lanie told her, turning on the ignition. “Nothing personal.” Vix drove to the cemetery with her father. It was the first time she’d visited Nathan’s grave since she’d left for college. She stopped at Kaune’s to buy a poinsettia in a plastic pot and when they got there, she set it in front of the simple marker. Nathan William Leonard 1970–1982 Rest in Peace Then she asked her father for some time alone. He nodded and walked away. She kneeled at the foot of the grave.

• From Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990)

  The melancholic refuses the loss of the object, and internalization becomes a strategy of magically resuscitating the lost object, not only because the loss is painful, but because the ambivalence felt toward the object requires that the object be retained until differences are settled. In this early essay, Freud understands grief to be the withdrawal of libidinal cathexis from the object and the successful transferral of that cathexis onto a fresh object. In The Ego and the Id, however, Freud revises this distinction between mourning and melancholia and suggests that the identification process associated with melancholia may be “the sole condition under which the id can give up its objects” (19). In other words, the identification with lost loves characteristic of melancholia becomes the precondition for the work of mourning. The two processes, originally conceived as oppositional, are now understood as integrally related aspects of the grieving process.35 In his later view, Freud remarks that the internalization of loss is compensatory: “When the ego assumes the features of the object, it is forcing itself, so to speak, upon the id’s loss by saying: ‘Look, you can love me too—I am so like the object’ ” (20). Strictly speaking, the giving up of the object is not a negation of the cathexis, but its internalization and, hence, preservation. What precisely is the topology of the psyche in which the ego and its lost loves reside in perpetual habitation? Clearly, Freud conceptualizes the ego in the perpetual company of the ego ideal which acts as a moral agency of various kinds. The internalized losses of the ego are reestablished as part of this agency of moral scrutiny, the internalization of anger and blame originally felt for the object in its external mode. In the act of internalization, that anger and blame, inevitably heightened by the loss itself, are turned inward and sustained; the ego changes place with the internalized object, thereby investing this internalized externality with moral agency and power. Thus, the ego forfeits its anger and efficacy to the ego ideal which turns against the very ego by which it is sustained; in other words, the ego constructs a way to turn against itself. Indeed, Freud warns of the hypermoral possibilities of this ego ideal, which, taken to its extreme, can motivate suicide.36 The construction of the interior ego ideal involves the internalization of gender identities as well. Freud remarks that the ego ideal is a solution to the Oedipal complex and is thus instrumental in the successful consolidation of masculinity and femininity: The super-ego is, however, not simply a residue of the earliest object-choices of the id: it also represents an energetic reaction-formation against these choices. Its relation to the ego is not exhausted by the precept: “You ought to be like this (like your father.)” It also comprises the prohibition: “You may not be like this (like your father)—that is, you may not do all that he does; some things are his prerogative.” (24)