Month: May 2024

Posted in Reading, Writing

The Poetry of “There is Always Light” and the Prose of “What Came to Me”

Posted on by janemlucas

When an author follows a collection of personal essays, or columns, with one of autobiographical poetry, or vice versa, she leads readers of both volumes to consider how she depicts some of the same people and themes in a different genre. Such was the case with Arlene Neal’s book of poems There is Always Light (2023), the follow-up to her first book, What Came to Me (2020), a collection of her weekly columns from The News-Topic.

The poem “God help me not to hate” echoes the column “New Shoes and Self Esteem,” in which a thoughtless classmate observes that the writer’s loafers are “not Bass Weejuns” (48). The girl who speaks those words could easily be one of the girls who “wear / pink pearl nail polish and wear / pleated skirts and new shoes” (lines 4-6). But those girls in the Sunday school class are not the antagonists of the poem; rather, it’s the Sunday school teacher, herself, who treats the speaker of the poem as an object of scorn. The speaker—what we call the narrator of a poem—does not actually speak. She refrains from answering the teacher’s questions, sitting, in her words, “on both hands / so she [the teacher] won’t see my black nails / and fingers stained yellow / from working in tobacco” (lines 7-10).

That girl who hides her tobacco-stained fingers is the girl on the bus in “New Shoes . . . ,” but the silent speaker of the poem is not the adult retrospective narrator of the column. At the end of the poem, she still sits in Sunday school, while the girl who was humiliated on the bus has grown up “to understand the value of [her] personhood” (48). Yet even though the speaker in the poem lacks the adult perspective of the writer of “New Shoes . . . ,” she gains insight—not from the lesson that the teacher attempts to impart but from her own epiphany: her recognition of the teacher’s hypocrisy.

Just as “God teach me not to hate” recollects “New Shoes and Self Esteem,” “A Baseball Poem,” “End of the Season,” and “World Series 1966” all recall the column “The Longest Game and Life Lessons.” The baseball-playing father and daughter of the column figure in all three poems, but it isn’t the bat and ball of “The Longest Game,” the first half of the column’s title, but instead the “Life Lessons” of the latter half of the title that resonate in the trilogy. At the end of the third poem, the speaker notes, “I really / cannot remember what the movie / was about, or who won that game” (38-40). She doesn’t remember because the events unfolding on the TV screen that her father watches intermittently and the action on the drive-in movie screen that her date aggressively prevents her from watching are not what she has carried with her from that night—and subsequently brought to the poem.

In a sense, the destination of none of the three baseball poems is the ballpark: the first leads us to post-traumatic stress disorder; the second, to the twilight of childhood; the third, to unwanted sexual advances. As the writer notes in “A Baseball Poem,” “To write baseball poems / is really the yearning to see” (lines 1-2). The products of Arlene Neal’s “yearning to see” shine through the lines of her poems and the sentences of her columns. This reader hopes—as do others, I’m sure—that more volumes of her poetry and columns will follow.

Works Cited

Neal, Arlene. There is Always Light. Redhawk Publications, 2023.

—. What Came to Me. Third Lung Press, 2020.

Posted in Reading, Theatre

Through a Glass Darkly: “Girl at Mirror” and Grover’s Corners

Posted on by janemlucas
Rockwell, Norman. “Girl at Mirror.” The Saturday Evening Post. 6 March 1954.

Seven years ago, when my students at Lenoir-Rhyne University were studying Thorton Wilder’s Our Town, I wrote this essay as a model for their own analyses. Before we opened tonight, I gave copies of it to my castmates and the production team. In the letter that accompanied the essay, I noted, “When I wrote ‘Through a Glass Darkly: Girl at Mirror and Grover’s Corners,’ I was an adjunct professor writing about Mrs. Webb, among other characters, with no inkling that seven years later I’d find myself playing Professor Willard and Mrs. Webb. As George says, ‘What do you know!'”

Through a Glass Darkly: Girl at Mirror and Grover’s Corners

In Norman Rockwell’s painting Girl at Mirror, the face that viewers see is the girl’s reflection—not her face itself, but the one she sees in the glass. What does she see in herself, and what do the painting’s observers see, as we witness this private moment? Does her lace-trimmed petticoat evoke in her, or in us, thoughts of the wedding gown that she may wear one day? For Rockwell’s detractors—and for those who consider him a guilty pleasure—Girl at the Mirror and his other covers for The Saturday Evening Post present a sentimentalized depiction of American life, the same picket-fenced cliché that many who find fault with Our Town perceive as the prevailing image of the play. As theatre scholar Donald Margulies writes in his foreword to Our Town, many people who dislike it have “dismissed [it] as a corny relic of Americana and relegated Thornton Wilder to the kitsch bin along with Norman Rockwell and Frank Capra” (xi). Yet a close look at Our Town and Girl at Mirror reveals portraits of American life that are far from idyllic.

As she gazes pensively in the mirror, the girl in Rockwell’s painting might be asking herself the same question that Emily Webb asks her mother: “[A]m I pretty?” (31). Though Mrs. Webb tries to reassure her daughter, Emily seeks an answer that her mother’s words fail to provide.

Both Emily and the subject of Girl at Mirror occupy that awkward space between childhood and adulthood—a notion that Rockwell emphasizes with the composition of his painting, placing the girl between her childhood toy, the doll that she has cast aside, and her new grown-up object of interest, movie star Jane Russell, who gazes up at her from the page of a magazine. Will I ever be beautiful and desirable, the way you are? the girl might be asking of Russell. Or, as Emily asks her mother: “Am I pretty enough . . . to get anybody . . . to get people interested in me? (32). Though Mrs. Webb answers Emily, she doesn’t provide the answer that her daughter seeks. Telling Emily, instead, that she has “a nice pretty young face” (31) and that she’s “pretty enough for all normal purposes” (32), she avoids the subject of adult desire that underlies Emily’s questions.

Though the audience feels the frustration in Emily’s voice as she says, “Oh, Mama, you’re no help at all” (32), only later in the play do we feel the full weight of those words when Mrs. Webb confesses in the wedding scene that she has never talked to Emily about sex: “It’s cruel, I know, but I couldn’t bring myself to say anything” (76). Mrs. Webb’s monologue turns the scene of her daughter’s wedding into a reminder of the vulnerability and pain that will come as a consequence. That same darkness at the edge of a seemingly quaint picture appears in Girl at Mirror. Consider the doll, just beyond the mirror—and the viewer’s focus—innocently cast aside, perhaps, but backed up to the edge of the mirror’s frame. To the adult eye, the doll’s posture is one of sexual submissiveness.

Both Wilder’s and Rockwell’s visions are more complex than what many of their critics give them credit for—or more accurately deny them—rendering the trouble that lurks below the surfaces of our daily encounters. And while the sexual innocence of Emily Webb and Rockwell’s Girl at Mirror may seem distant to us, the silence that endangers their innocence pervades our lives. Now as revelations of celebrities’ and politicians’ transgressions saturate our news streams, the silences of Wilder’s characters seem eerily prescient. Can anyone now hear Mrs. Webb say, “I couldn’t bring myself to say anything” (76), without thinking of our own culture of silence—and of Roy Moore and Louis C.K. and Kevin Spacey and Harvey Weinstein—and of all the predators in our own towns, places supposedly so far removed Grover’s Corners?

Meanwhile, back in Our Town, Mrs. Gibbs says of Simon Stimson’s alcoholism that “the only thing the rest of us can do is just not to notice it” (40). And Constable Warren says, “‘Twant much” (104), of a Polish immigrant nearly freezing to death, another way of saying that some lives don’t matter as much as others, a prejudice that we know all too well as no mere relic of the past. Those moments in Our Town not only belie the notion of Grover’s Corners as a saccharine portrait of America but also demonstrate that the play critiques the very parochialism that its detractors denounce as its stock-in-trade.

In his reassessment of Rockwell’s paintings, Richard Halpern observes that “[a] false belief in our own sophistication or knowingness is just another form of innocence” (par. 17). The same innocence may prevent us from seeing Our Town with real clarity, the way that Emily only truly sees her twelfth birthday when she revisits it after death. As she says to the Stage Manager, “I can’t look at everything hard enough” (105). Perhaps in our own innocence, neither can we.

Works Cited

Halpern, Richard. “Manufacturing Innocence,” excerpt from Norman Rockwell: The Underside of Innocence, U. of Chicago P., http://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/N/bo3750655.html, Accessed 16 Nov. 2017.

Margulies, Donald. Foreword. Our Town by Thornton Wilder. 1938. Harper Perennial, 2003, xi-xx.

Rockwell, Norman. “Girl at Mirror.” The Saturday Evening Post, 6 Mar. 1954. Norman Rockwell Museum, 2016, http://www.nrm.org/MT/text/GirlMirror.html, Accessed 16 Nov. 2017.

Wilder, Thornton. Our Town. 1938. Harper Perennial, 2003.