“Home
Is Where You Come From”: The Fiction of Jayne Anne Phillips and the
Journey Within

“The great writers,” West Virginia fiction writer Jayne Anne
Phillips wrote in 1985, “have a journeyer’s wisdom.  They
have been somewhere limitless and come back.  That’s not necessarily what they
are writing about, but you can feel that in the work” (qtd. in Edelstein
107).   When reviewing MotherKind in 2000, Richard Eder
saw the connection between Phillips’ writing and Kerouac’s (11);
indeed, many critics and reviewers have referred to Jayne Anne Phillips over
the years as a “feminized Kerouac.”  However, her plots go beyond the typical
road-trip fare and her characters have a broader range than the angst-ridden
questers of Kerouac’s stories (though she certainly gives us a fair dose
of angry, alienated young seekers).  What Phillips’ fiction presents to
the reader is a variety of profound and thought-provoking ideas, portrayed
within the framework of the journey; and more often than not, even when the
journey is literal, it is one made within the individual character as well.  In
some cases, it is a “trip” layered with guilt and anger, as in the
extraordinary short story “Fast Lanes”; in some, the trip is an
exercise in obsession and delusion that propels a character toward catastrophe
and impedes discovery (“How Mickey Made It”); in others, the
journey involves lost innocence and discovery of a failed and fallen adult
world (Shelter); sometimes the
journey involves the disintegration of values that provide cohesive relationships
(Machine Dreams); finally, the
journey is imbued with mythic significance of spiritual discovery and salvation
as in the moving story MotherKind.

If Phillips’ writing fits into literary
scaffolding of the journey, it reflects her own personal inclinations and
psychic propensities as well.  In a 1984 Publishers Weekly interview, she confessed that writing for her is
a slow, labored endeavor and absolutely necessary for her own well-being and
self-preservation.  Her life has been itself a journey toward
discernment and understanding of forces that propel individuals toward tragedy
or self-revelation.   Yet there is a certain degree of personal
and artistic freedom that her writing has given her.  She says in the 1984 interview: “I
write for my own psychic survival, and that is why I never have considered the
reader.  Nor have I ever written with any kind of
plan because the whole point is to follow the story to its center, not to
impose some point of view” (66).  Indeed, the best writers follow this aesthetic
principle, with the story itself always serving as the center of any creative
work of fiction.  Certainly, profound moral principles and
a discernible plan are apparent in the long view of Phillips’ work, but,
like Emerson’s tacking ship, they
are seen as a straight line only at a distance; and no matter how far abroad
she may sail, all ports eventually lead her back to West Virginia.  In a taped interview with Kate Long for
public radio, Phillips shared her feelings about West Virginia and home:  “I think my work is really rooted
in my childhood, my young adulthood, my family,
my ancestry.  And it’s very much rooted in place. . . . The
sense of hard reality, the edge in my work, I think comes from having grown up
there.”

Jayne Anne Phillips readily admits the interconnectedness
of her rich and unique fiction.  In a 2001 interview with Sarah Robertson,
Phillips said: “I see my work, all of it, as a continuum.  All
the books I have or will write open out into one another” (72).  This
literary continuity began for Phillips in the hills of West Virginia, in Buckhannon, where she was
born on July 19, 1952.  Her mother Martha Jane Thornhill was a
hard-working, industrious woman, ambitious for herself and for her children, a
woman who put herself through school while her children were small and
eventually became a public school educator and administrator.
Phillips’ father, Russell R.
Phillips, owned a cement business, which failed as the children were growing up,
forcing Martha Jane eventually to become the principle breadwinner.  Phillips
was the only daughter, sandwiched between male siblings.  In 1972, when she was twenty, her
parents divorced.

Home Is
Where You Come From

From her earliest memory, Phillips was set on being a
writer.  She recalls listening to the stories of
those around her and yearning to tell her own.  In her hometown of Buckhannon, she
remembers, “everyone knew everyone’s stories, but the stories were
secret.”  Phillips goes on to explain:  “As the writer in my family, I felt that I was the person who was charged
with making sure all these stories and ideas survive, but at the same time
you’re not allowed to tell anyone.  Writing is the telling of secrets. . . .
[which] can transform and unite one moment with another, and bridge the gulf
between time, distance, difference” (qtd.
in Dictionary of Literary Biography 273).  Growing
up in Buckhannon, Phillips always had a knack for language, entertaining her
friends with adolescent narratives in which they played a central part and
learning early the power of storytelling to validate our lives and engender
meaning in mundanity.  In high school, she received
encouragement from English teacher
Irene McKinney, later West Virginia’s
Poet Laureate, and with her own ambitions and a singular lust for living, she
left her hometown at eighteen to attend West Virginia University,
receiving her BA degree in 1974.

During these years she wrote mostly poetry—narrative
poems that would become seeds for later stories.  After graduation, the call to wanderlust
and to see the world beyond West
Virginia prompted a cross-country trip to California, where Phillips
settled for a time in an African American neighborhood in Oakland.  By the next year, she was in Colorado, contributing
to small literary magazines and drawing from the broad range of characters and
types she had encountered on her journey.  In 1976, as she was preparing to enroll
in the writing program at the University
of Iowa, she published
her first volume, Sweethearts, a
collection of one-page prose pieces, which won the notice of the literary world
and the Fels Award in Fiction.  Sweethearts
was recognized by Pushcart, and Phillips was well on her way to the solid
literary reputation she enjoys today.  She received her M.F.A. in
1978 from the University
of Iowa, where she
studied with Frank Conroy.  Phillips’ association with Seymour
Lawrence, publisher of Tillie Olsen, Katherine Anne Porter, and Kurt Vonnegut,
completed her literary apprenticeship, and with the publication of Black Tickets in 1979, she became
recognized as a major new voice in American fiction.

Phillips’ writing has received the plaudits of first-rate
critics and such writers as Tillie Olsen, who called her collection Black Tickets “the unmistakable
work of early genius,” and Nobel-prize winning author Nadine Gordimer,
who called her “the best writer since Eudora Welty.”  Phillips is recipient of the Sue Kaufman
Prize for First Fiction and the Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, two
Pushcart Prizes, the O. Henry Award,
a Bunting Institute Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and two
National Endowment for the Arts fellowships in fiction.  Her work has been translated into twelve
languages, and her stories have been anthologized in American Short Story Masterpieces.

A Matter
of Style: Time, Memory, and Point of View

It is no coincidence that Phillips’ rich and
sensuous prose is the product of her creative beginnings as a poet.  She
has a poet’s eye for detail, but more important, she possesses the
perception and intellectual inclinations of a poet.  Of her narrative technique and the
prominence of plot in her writing, she says: “I’ve always been more
interested in conveying perception itself within a narrative rather than
conveying plot or a series of events.  Plot moves out of voice for me; story is
suggested in part by the rhythm of the language in which a narrative unfolds.  There
are a finite number of stories . . . but
perceptions about those stories are specific and infinite” (Robertson 74).  Nonetheless, her plots are gripping, in
large part because of the power of those “perceptions” and the profundity
of her language.  In a 2002 interview with Kate Rhodes,
she explained: “I work with language in a very specific way, with
language that’s very much anchored in physical detail and in sensual
detail.   There’s a sensory
connection, with the reader, hopefully.  I try to use language in a way that begins
to get at perception itself: the way people think, and the way they experience
things, and the way that memory and dream and thought can all
intermingle” (420).

One gathers a glimpse of Phillips’ literary
aesthetic from a conversation that her character Kate has about literature and
film with her mother in the novel MotherKind.  Kate
is a poet, a daughter, and a new mother, whose terminally ill  mother, Katherine,  leaves her home in West Virginia to go to Boston to stay with her daughter during the
last year of Katherine’s life.  Kate not only has the responsibility of
her mother’s illness but all the attendant woes that come with a blended family and a new marriage.  Katherine says that she wants to be
entertained when she experiences art, that she wants to go to a movie and not
be upset; Kate counters that she doesn’t “want to be entertained;
entertainment was far too demanding, and gave so little in return.”
Phillips writes: “Kate wanted someone to read stories to her, or
speak intensely about a private matter.  She wanted to be fed” (32).
Great art, for Phillips, essentially feeds one an intellectual feast
that remains long after the meal has been consumed, and words provide the
ingredients for that nourishment.  In Why
I Write: Thoughts on the Craft of Fiction, Phillips says:

Words float memory, awaken desire; words do pull
people in, even demanding, haunting words, because language is, finally, a
matter of survival.  Human beings can’t live without
the illusion of meaning, the apprehension of confluence, the endless debate
concerning the fault in the stars or in ourselves.  The writer is just the messenger, the
moving target.  Inside culture, the writer is the
talking self.  (Blythe 191)

Kate
is Phillips’ best articulator about the power of language to create
reality and make meaning of our motley lives.  The narrator states: “Kate
conceives of words as implements of pure energy, washed, infused, shadowed or
illuminated by all they carry in endless combination with one another.  She writes words and works with them for
pay and for succor; she believes words open in the intangible spheres of their
construction, yet stay apart from the world of use, innocent of motive, of
healing or harm” (MotherKind 4).

Phillips rarely presents a story in a
straight-forward linear style, again a testament to her propensity for
portraying perception rather than delineating plot.  She is interested in getting inside the
skin of her characters and allowing them to tell their stories from their
particular viewpoint, whether that point of view is accurate or not.  Technically, of course, there are no
“inaccurate” points of view.
Each character’s narrative is accurate according to his perception,
and there are as many narratives as there are characters.  The moral world in which these
characters operate is complex, where good and evil co-mingle to constitute a
fearful symmetry that is perplexing at best and rarely presents moral insights
that are crystal clear.  Knowledge
and truth are fleeting as well as difficult to discern, and the moral
color-scheme of such a world is, at best, grey.  To unfold her characters’ perceptions
and moral dilemmas, Phillips utilizes stream-of-consciousness narration along
with multiple-focus points of view.
It is obvious that the literary models that she has acknowledged have
exerted their influence on her writing style: the subtlety of a Eudora Welty in
unfolding a story through focus on character, the modernist proclivities of a
William Faulkner or Katherine Anne Porter in stream-of-consciousness narration,
the interconnecting imaginative fictional world of an Edgar Lee Masters, and
one might add, at least in so far as the short stories are concerned, the
southern gothic characterization of a Flannery O’Connor.

In
the online essay “Jayne Anne Phillips Talks about MotherKind,” Phillips explains how she uses language, time,
and memory to unfold narrative.  “I see language,” she says,
“as the means of investigation and time as the organizing principle”
(4).  Her 2000 novel Motherkind, she explains, is written in a “clear, simple,
very accessible language because it
deals with such intricate patterning and universal experience” (birth,
death, familial relationships). In
terms of time sequences; Machine Dreams
(1984) has sections “framed by lapses of time that float the prose.”
Shelter (1994), on the other
hand, occurs in “three days of real time made lapidary and
circular,” while MotherKind
occurs on “two planes at once: the year within the novel is inter-cut
with an on-going past that becomes a kind of eternal present.  Memory
sometimes offers up the past as living, dimension, sensory presence.”
Memory, she continues, “is alive with meaning. . . . This
is not a random universe precisely because we are in it: naming it loving and
fearing it, yearning to understand it, reaching for one another within
it” (4).

Phillips
has a unique and to a degree stylized writing style, certainly one recognizable
to her alone.  Sarah Robertson directly asked her about
her use of italics in her writing, and Phillips explained: “I use italics
differently in various works, but they nearly always signify time shifts, or
language unlimited by time.  They may be phrases or lines spoken in
another time, powerful enough to have remained intact in the mind of the
character recalling them.  They may be the voice of one character
perfectly recalled in the mind of another.  They may be words from a spiritual
realm, or phrases from the oracle into which all lines are spoken” (74).   Phillips goes on to explain her use
of the italic sections in MotherKind,
which “form one narrative which threads throughout the book—the
journey home to and with the mother exists in perpetuity, outside the
boundaries of death” (74).   The time shifts, the interior monologues
of her characters, and most particularly, the extraordinary imagery that
Phillips employs in her writing all attest to the artistry of her richly poetic
prose.

The
Dysfunctional, the Disenfranchised, and the Disenchanted: Black Tickets (1979) and Fast
Lanes (1984)

Aside from the many stories in these two important
collections that provide a preface for the novels, all of the stories reveal an
array of characters on society’s fringe, many  disenfranchised, many in the “fast
lane,” going nowhere.  Phillips’ sympathy for these
individuals is evident, yet there is little sentimentality as their lives
unfold before the reader, like the sad inhabitants of some latter-day Spoon River.  Most
of the characters tell their own stories, each voice unique and authentic; Phillips
has an extraordinary ability both to get under the skin and into the psyche of
her characters.  The best examples are
“Gemcrack” in Black Tickets
and “How Mickey Made It” in Fast
Lanes, two “dramatic monologues,” told in the vivid voice of misfit
personas.  Many of the stories in Black Tickets are mere poetic sketches,
only a paragraph or two—the prose terse and stripped bare of all but
snatches of a character’s consciousness or brief images, but the rhythms of
the language leave a resonating echo in the reader’s mind.  One of
the most memorable of these vignette collections, inspired by the poetry of
Akutagawa, is found in the story “Counting” in Fast Lanes.  “Counting” is a series of
“mini-chapters” or brief vignettes detailing the demise of a
relationship between an aged dancer and her young lover.  The details are so sparse as to be almost
brusque, yet by the end of the story, the reader knows the two characters thoroughly
and sees their tattered lives in full.

Not one, by any means, to be “afraid of
Virginia Woolf,” Phillips’ realism is dazzling to the point of being
almost blinding.  In one of the longer stories in Black Tickets called “Home,”
a daughter returns home to her mother, to heal and begin a new life as she
commences graduate school.  The idea of home in Phillips’
stories is a place where you can go back to but not always a place you will
wish to remain.  “Home” serves as a preface for the novel MotherKind; however, the daughter finds little solace in the
presence of the mother, who is herself wounded, both physically and emotionally.  Often
in Phillips’ stories, generations clash and children find little in their
parents’ disheveled lives to help them adjust to this perplexing world,
as their parents are just as confounded and alienated as they.  Yet
there is a connection between family
members that suffices for salvation.  In another short story preface to Motherkind called
“Souvenir,” a daughter learns of her mother’s terminal
illness and the importance of “settling things” in the messy
business of life and familial relationships.  The story also establishes one of the
important ideas in Phillips’ canon, the concept that mothers and
daughters have a unique bond—with daughters functioning as receptors of
those “secrets” that run through the heart of family matters.  At one point Kate thinks to herself, ”She’d
been on the point of telling her mother everything.
The secrets were a travesty”—and secrets must be shared.
Daughters, like mothers, are the guardians of family
secrets, angels sweeping away “the rotten rain off the clouds”
(188).

One of the most important aspects of these two
collections of stories is that they contain the seeds for Phillips’s
novels.  “1934” in Black Tickets gives us the mother
Jean’s story which unfolds more fully in Machine Dreams.  “Alma” in Fast Lanes portrays the quiet
desperation of the parents of two of the children in Shelter—the short story helping us comprehend the degree of
moral autonomy the children possess at the end of the novel.  Lenny’s and Alma’s mother
Audrey has an affair with Nick Campbell, the father of Lenny’s friend
Delia.  Audrey elicits her younger
daughter Alma’s help to carry out the affair, feigning baton lessons for
the child in nearby Winfield as an excuse to meet Nick.  The affair ends in tragedy as
Nick’s guilt drives him literally off the Winfield
Bridge, and Alma forever tries to comprehend the tragedy
and the bitterness of her parents’ lives.  Both “Blue Moon” and
“Bess” take us into Machine
Dreams territory, with “Bess” exploring the background to
father Mitch’s life and “Blue Moon” exploring an episode in
the teen lives of Mitch’s two children, Danner and Billy—all are prominent
players in the Hampson family saga which the novel portrays.  “Bess,” however, is a key
narrative in the collection, providing a poignant story that grapples with
time, memory, and coming of age, portrayed through a relationship between a
brother and sister.  Two of twelve Hampson
siblings growing up in a sleepy West
Virginia mountain cove, Bess and Warwick have an
unusually close brother-sister relationship that will be echoed in
Danner’s and Billy’s story, two generations of Hampsons later.  The main part of the story takes place
during a summer of awakening—to love, to sexuality, and to death.  The secret, however, that the reader
shares about Mitch’s parentage at the end of the story will shed light on
the tragedy and family dysfunction of Machine
Dreams, for Bess is actually Mitch’s mother rather than the cold, distant,
and disdaining Warwick, thus explaining Mitch’s feelings of inadequacy
and emotional absence from his children.
Indeed, much of the anger,
truculence, and brooding alienation that afflict so many of Phillips’
characters in these two short story collections are preceded by childhood
events that adults awkwardly and carelessly engender, sometimes in the name of
propriety but more often than not by shear adult self-absorbed neglect.

“Let
Your Life Be a Counter Friction to Stop the Machine”: Machine Dreams (1984)

In the story “Blue Moon,” the image of
lost ideals of youth is displayed as a fake “moon” stretched over a
frame and set to drift on wires across the prom dance floor.  Prom
night in this short story provides portents for both the personal tragedies to
come to Billy and Danner Hampson and to their generation who would become
embroiled in the failed political scheme that became the Vietnam War.  The
novel Machine Dreams fleshes out the
tragedy of faded ideals and provides a representative chronology of American
life, from pre-WWII through the dark days of the Vietnam War, as represented by
this West Virginia
family, the Hampsons.  The
narrative is told from multiple points of view—through letters from the
war-front or through the consciousness of four characters: the father Mitch,
the mother Jean, the daughter Danner, and the son Billy.  The book reflects the extraordinary
change in values of the period, the schism in the American family brought on by changing social conditions
including the second wave of feminism of the 1960’s and 70’s and
the sexual revolution exacerbated by the Vietnam War.  The story begins with the rise and fall
of Jean’s parents, Jean’s loss of her first and great love Tom, who
dies as a teen of a heart attack, and her marriage to the older, more settled
Mitch, a WWII veteran.  Their children, Danner and Billy, grow
up in the 1950’s and 1960’s, a time that reflects immense
transition in the American experience.  Thus as the novel portrays the
increasing dysfunction of this American family,
it also portrays a national dysfunction, symbolized in a war that almost tore
the country apart.  Running throughout the novel are the
themes of family and home, the
dreams and hopes that elude us, a capricious Fate which buffets us about
carelessly and often tragically, and the passage of innocence—lost
innocence on an individual level and a larger, nationalistic level.

Looming
large over the novel is the metaphor of the
“machine”—Billy’s love of machines, Mitch’s
trucks at his cement business, the planes and cars that fill Billy’s
dreams—all brassy, shiny, and new, all mindless and sometimes deceptive
in their appeal.  The “machine”
metaphor becomes an emblem for a country that is changing too quickly, moving mindlessly
toward an unjust war, skewed values, and a world that folks like Mitch simply
can’t comprehend with any degree of surety.  One is reminded of Thoreau’s metaphor
of the great machine in “Civil Disobedience,” a mindless,
methodless machine that rolls ever onward, no one bothering to throw a wrench
into a cog to provide the friction to slow or stop the ever turning wheels in
the machine when it goes awry.  When
Mitch’s concrete business fails, Jean takes over more and more of the
responsibilities of the family, eventually divorcing him when the children become
college-age.  Changing sexual mores,
the drug culture that looms over the horizon, the disintegration of the family—all
are the polluting by-products of the machine that will eventually cause
disaster and pull this family apart.
A manifestation of the changing times can be observed in the war letters
in the book.  Mitch’s WWII
letters and Billy’s letters from Vietnam highlight the disparity
between the two eras.  Mitch’s
war letters are hopeful and heroic, while Billy’s are contentious and
often tinged with irony and bitterness.

Throughout the book, time present and time past interplay,
with the image of the machine ever-present.  Toward the end of the story, in a moment
of family truce prior to Billy’s leaving for Vietnam, Billy speaks the
words of a childhood prayer before dinner which brings forth an image from the
past to his mind, an image from childhood, propitious and ominous in its
symbolism: “Billy spoke, words from one of the old prayers, but behind
his closed eyes played a memory of startling clarity: watching the snow plow
with Danner, both of them small, standing in snow to their knees.  The big yellow machine rumbling by,
slow, all-powerful.  Engine roar,
shrill jangling of chains.  The
powdery snow thrown up in fanned continuous spray as the heavy machine press
on” (271).  Just as the
children are lost for a moment in the man-made “storm” created by
the plow, they will be lost in the storm of war and societal dysfunction, which
Phillips vividly portrays in Machine
Dreams.

In the Garden of Good and Evil: Shelter (1994)

While
the seed for Shelter is found in the
short story “Alma,”
the longer work allows Phillips to explore the very nature of good and evil in
a violent “coming of age” story that ultimately is full of hope and
possibility for the human journey.
Phillips has said about her writing Shelter
that she wanted to investigate whether evil truly exists or whether it is
merely a by-product of “damage.”  She confessed to Sarah Robertson:
“I do see ‘evil’ as a statement of horrific damage,
particularly in personal terms: one person acting to damage or dominate
another. . . .   In societal terms, I see evil as a
function of fear” (76).
However, she goes on to add that in the “primal world of Shelter—the power of place, time,
the natural world—functions beyond and predates our distinctions of good
and evil” (76).   The
conclusion of the novel does indeed appear to suggest that the concept of evil
is more complex than such a “damage” theory might explain, for
among the array of “damaged” individuals in the story, some ultimately
succumb to the power of evil and some do not, suggesting another dimension or
Power at work along with our wills.
That Power likewise appears to operate, like Blake’s idea of a
Universal Fearful Symmetry, according to a scheme that is beyond good and
evil.  The irony associated with
“Shelter,” the name of a girls’ summer camp, operates within
this interpretation as well, for this “shelter” is fraught with
sinister danger for all of the children in the story.

The
narrative of Phillips’ second novel takes place during the summer of
1963.  The Cuban Missile Crisis has
just taken place, and communism is the recognized “evil empire”
that threatens the course of human existence—this backdrop to the events
that occur in the bucolic summer girls’ camp highlights Phillips’
suggestion that the darkness often lies within ourselves rather than in some
extraneous, ideological villainy.  For
a few months of woodland paradise, sisters Lenny and Alma Swenson and their
friends Cap Briarley and Delia Campbell are away from their parents and the unhappy
complexity of those adult lives.
The story is told through multiple points of view—through the
perception of several of the girl campers, through their young friend Buddy,
son of the camp cook, and through two dark and damaged characters, Carmody,
Buddy’s perverted, abusive father, and the ultra religious, guilt-ridden Parson.  Both Parson and Carmody are ex-convicts,
Parson having escaped from prison and found his way to the camp in search of
Carmody, whom he has known in prison and whom he has identified as the serpent
incarnate.  Parson finds a job with
a construction crew working near the camp, and the potential for tragedy mounts
with each passing day.

At
Camp Shelter, the children find some relief
from the problems and pain of home life, for Delia’s father, guilt-ridden
and despairing after an adulterous affair with Lenny’s mother, has a few
months earlier driven his car off the Winfield Bridge.  The
children are haunted by painful memories that intrude upon their consciousness—their
inner darkness converging, as it were, during this summer sojourn at Shelter
with the outer darkness represented in the characters of Carmody and Parson.  For
Lenny, the painful image of her mother, discovered by her one night in the
kitchen, in a groping embrace with Delia’s Dad, haunts her; for her
little sister Alma, the image of Nick Campbell’s waxen face in the casket
provides likewise little peace.  The children confide their secrets to
each other during a summer of budding sexuality and gathering storm.

This novel is written on a smaller scale than Machine Dreams, but its moral dimension
is vast.  The individual voices which
Phillips’ presents are authentic for each character and provide a tour de force in storytelling,
different  characters’ perception
of the same event unique to their own particular reality .  The story is also rich with symbolism.  The
Turtle Hole where Lenny and Cap meet to swim and explore their sexuality with
one of the young camp workers Frank is emblematic of the girls’ budding
female sexuality.  The swing bridge across the Mud River
over which the girls must cross as Frank watches from below represents the
demarcation point between the worlds of innocence and experience.  The
stick that the guilt-ridden and sexually obsessed and repressed Parson holds as
he ferrets about the woods is rich with phallic significance.  The
camp director, Mrs. Thompson-Warner,
a bona fide Daughter of the American Revolution, admonished the children in her
lectures on the evils of communism and appears in her singularly and monomaniacal
religious fervor as the other side of the coin to Parson.  However, the true serpent in the garden
is Buddy’s father Carmody, who has returned to taunt and abuse Buddy and Mam,
his mother, whose own religious simplicity and good heart are in stark contrast
to Mrs. Thompson-Warner’s nominalistic  orthodoxy.

The dramatic climax in the story occurs when the incestuous
Carmody absconds with Buddy, taking him to a secret cave where he intends to
keep the boy until he agrees to rob the camp director.  As Buddy and Carmody leave the cave,
they spy Cap, Lenny, Delia, and Alma
at the Turtle Hole, with Lenny already in the water.  Carmody’s lust overcomes his greed,
and he plunges in the water to rape Lenny.  Lenny tries to escape to shore where Parson,
who has been watching the evil doings of Carmody, attempts to pull him off of
Lenny.  When Parson is knocked away by Carmody, Buddy
comes up behind his father to drop a huge rock on the back of his head.  The
children rush to Buddy’s and Lenny’s defense and begin to stone
Carmody, at which point Parson awakens to club the now still and lifeless body
of Carmody—taking a “flat rock from the bottom of the pile”
and lifting it high above his head, Parson “brings it down on the back of
the hooded head but the body never twitches.  Still they can’t know.  Parson
has taken it on” (245).

This violent ending is rife with poignant detail and
religious significance, reminiscent of the best of Flannery
O’Connor’s storytelling.
Parson acts as a shield for the children—Christ-like, he takes on
the burden of their sin and then immediately proceeds to wash that sin
away.  Buddy comes up to him as he
rests from his struggle with Carmody, to point to his blood-splattered
shoulder, and Parson takes the boy’s hand and walks directly into the
river: “[Buddy] folds himself in and sighs raggedly.  Parson stands, holding him, and they
walk in to the water just far enough for Parson to crouch down, immersed to his
chest.  He cradles Buddy in the
water easily, with one arm, and he tilts Buddy’s head back, only
slightly, as though he will rock him, to comfort him” (245).  And thus the boy is “baptized,”
cleansed. The children lead Parson to the cave, where they hide the body, a
place where it is unlikely Carmody’s remains should ever be found and
where they vow to keep silent forever about this day.

Summer camp is over.  Cap and Lenny leave for school in New York, while Buddy
lives peacefully with his Mam, whose gentleness and religious simplicity work
as an anecdote to the poison of his father.  The last vignette of the novel leaves
one with an image of hopefulness, as this horrific story comes quietly to an
end.  Buddy, the wild child of the woods, a
boy abused by a perverted and sinister father, comes across a young rabbit,
damaged and blind in one eye.  “One-eyed,” Buddy says to
himself, “Big enough to be on its own but won’t make first snow,
all the foxes and stoats gluttonous with instinct .
. .
.  He’ll take it to Mam.
She’ll think it’s pretty, she’ll have a bottle to feed
it” (279).

Shelter is particularly interesting with regards to the
religious undertones in the book.  Sarah Robertson asked Phillips about the
religious fundamentalism in the book, and her response echoed Flannery
O’Connor’s use of religious fundamentalism in her fiction.
“I believe religious teachings (doesn’t matter which
religion really) are just as important to the developing psyche as fairy tales
and myths,” posits Phillips.  “Unfortunately organized religion
often politicizes those teaching and uses them to promote a tribal rather than
religious mentality, but the stories themselves at least imply a spiritual
dimension and of course play out communal metaphors of male/female, father/mother
archetypes” (75).   Phillips goes on to say that “religion
is a magical response.  As our illusions of control of environment,
of ourselves, grows, societal religious observance declines.  My
point in Shelter was that religion
invested with power is a source of strength to Mam .
. .”
(75).  Phillips relates these ideas to the
discomfiting character Parson: “Charismatic Christianity provides Parson
with a vocabulary in which to couch his understanding of good, evil, shelter,
protection; it provides him with a self-accepted
frame for his psychic abilities” (75).

Passages
on the Journey: Birth, Death, and MotherKind
(2000)

Chicago
Tribune critic Alan Cheuse has
compared MotherKind to a Mary Cassatt
portrait of a mother and child, “beautifully composed and emotionally
wrenching.”  Cheuse writes, “Even the most commonplace care.
. .
becomes lyrical—but never, never sentimental—in the enlivening
embrace of Phillips’ wonderful prose” (qtd.
in Contemporary Authors Online 7).  The
journey in MotherKind is a journey
through life-passages and a coming to terms with
relationships—relationships between men and women, fathers and daughters,
stepparents and stepchildren, and most particularly, between mothers and
daughters.  As the novel opens, Kate, both an artist
and a “spiritual pilgrim,” as Phillips has called to her, finds
herself at the commencement of two of life’s most poignant passages, both
occurring simultaneously in her case: the birth of her first child and the
death of her mother.  Kate is one of Phillips’ most
interesting “journeyers,” having left the hills of West Virginia for academia and life as a poet and editor
living in Boston.
Throughout her life she has avoided long-term relationships, as have her
brothers, since her mother Katherine and father Waylon have sown the seeds of
caution in their children by the example of their own strained relationship.  When
Kate meets Matt, a physician, his wife’s infidelity has already destroyed
his own marriage, though young sons Sam and Jonah are loathe to accept that fact.  Kate prepares to leave for a sabbatical
to Katmandu, a
spiritual journey that will serve her well and provide her with essential
spiritual resources when she returns to find that her affection for Matt has
turned to love and her mother is terminally ill with cancer.  As Katherine’s
physical health deteriorates, the decision is made for her to leave her West Virginia home and
spend her final days with her daughter.  This need becomes particularly important
for Katherine when she learns that Kate is pregnant with her first grandchild.
“I want to hold this baby,” says Katherine, determined to
stay alive until the birth of Kate’s son Alexander (292).  Though
the pressures of trying to blend a new family,
to deal with the anger of her two stepsons, to tend to her mother’s
illness, and to welcome a new life into the world are difficult and challenging,
Kate handles these events with the grace and wisdom of a woman who has already
progressed far on her journey.

The
narrative in MotherKind is told from
the point of view of an omniscient author, though Kate’s perspective
looms above the rest; for this is after all Kate’s story, a woman’s
story, indeed all women’s stories.
Phillips writes: “For me, consciousness begins with the mother
figure, the figure of the mother and the relationship between the mother and
the infant, and very specifically in my heritage in the writer bearing witness,
the female child who is the confidante of the mother.  She is the one who is told the secrets,
the one who is charged with remembering the secrets.  She’s not really supposed to speak
about them, but she finds herself unable to live with them or truly remember
them unless she speaks about them . . . a sort of metaphor for consciousness
itself” (qdt. in Rhodes 2).  Like Phillips’ other stories, the
narrative eschews a strict linear unfolding; though it delineates a “real”
time action that roughly covers a year, it intersperses the immediate narrative
with memories and flashbacks that clarify the action of that year.

Phillips is unafraid to write of atypical subjects,
including the gritty details of birth, nursing, the slow process of death for
the terminally ill, divorce, and the minefields of blended and extended
families—for this reason, a few critics have rather erroneously and
short-sightedly thought the subject matter narrow.  These details, however, while often
singularly female, nonetheless have universal implications.  After Kate’s son is born, the
narrator muses: “Ravenous, Kate knew, this need to birth babies, to hold
one’s child.  The fact was,
birth dwarfed sex, swept sex before it.
A woman had sex to get this, to be here, to smell the clean smell of her
child tended by her hands, to drink him in, consumed” (117).  One of the most important ideas that
Phillips communicates in this extraordinary story is that the birth of a child,
certainly for a mother, and potentially for a father, releases one from the debilitating
illusion of control in this vast and friendless universe.  Such knowledge is liberating by allowing
one to confront Fate and engenders the kind of flexibility that enables one to persevere
in stressful times, to prevail under duress, but also saddles one with an
understanding of human frailty and limitation.  Kate thinks that “the idea of
control was an illusion.
Gestation progressed, labor progressed, birth progressed”; they
were immovable and unstoppable; however, “once life existed, threats to
life progressed” as well.
Such is the double-edged knowledge of MotherKind (117).

The
novel tackles many of the societal issues that we face today—foremost
among these is the ever-changing dynamics of the family.  Phillips explains: “Family is our
spiritual blueprint.  We’re
born into it and move off from it, into the endless permutations and patterns
we make of those first intimacies—mother, father, siblings, homeplace.  If they’re absent we construct
them.  If they’re damaged we try,
even as children, to fix them.  The
rich, textural, sensual/sexual realm of identity is awash in where we
begin” (“Jayne Anne Phillips Talks . . . “ 3).  However, she goes on to add that our
society is “notoriously anti-family,” except as families are regarded
as consumers.  “We live in a
fast, mobile, scheduled society.  When
families need support, we don’t always have nearby family or available
friends; we no longer experience the most primal, demanding junctures in life
within a community.  Like Kate and
Matt, we hire help or depend on social services for assistance” (3).

The
“support” that Kate finds comes in the form of MotherKind, a postpartum
care agency whose services Katherine has given Kate as a gift, since she would
not have the strength to help her daughter after the baby was born.  The women who serve Kate eventually care
for Katherine also, as the two passages, birth and death, become profoundly
intertwined.  The women of
MotherKind become Kate’s “comrades”; they “watched and
tended; listening, touching, waiting, doing” (286).  Kate finds that she needs their
“distance, their calm,” for these “women knew; they listened
before . . . they had crossed oceans to meet beside this bed. . . . These women
were strong enough to care for the dying, and Kate endeavored to be one of
them” (286).  And indeed Kate
does become one of them.  MotherKind represents for Phillips a continuum, a continuity
that is symbolized in the antique bassinet that Katherine has refurbished for
her daughter.

Throughout Kate’s journey, she is complete
enough in her sense of self to keep something back for her alone, when all the
care-giving is over and when this current passage is finished as well.  This “holding back”
something for oneself, an idea that Kate Chopin posits in The Awakening, is represented in the Millennium Falcon, a Star Wars
spaceship toy that Kate finds on a day that she has taken a few minutes for
herself away from her duties for her new son and her mother.  Shopping, she finds a pram for the
Alexander and the bright and shinny Millennium Falcon.  At first she speculates about giving it
to her stepsons, another weak attempt to buy their favor, but she thinks better
and decides to keep it herself.
“But this toy,” she thinks, “was so untouched,
unscratched, as though no one had ever played with it.  Surely there was a reason someone had
revered it so.  She would keep it
safe, Kate thought, put away somewhere, like an escape vehicle she might fit
into when they were all through with her.
There’s no such thing as a
blended family, one of Kate’s stepfamily manuals intoned, and if there is, it’s the woman who
gets blended” (82).   Kate
understood that even under the best of conditions hers and Matt’s current
domestic adventure would be difficult.
Sam and Jonah, Matt’s two sons, had made clear that they held her
responsible for their father’s leaving their mother, an idea encouraged
by their mother even though she had begun the affair more than a year ago that
had broken up the family.  The
Millennium Falcon represented to Kate a pure and limitless self-boundary
untouched by the hurly-burly of life with its care and tragedy.  The spacemen who inhabited the
Millennium Falcon existed in “an enclosed system, away and a part”
(84).  They were insulated in the
same way that metaphorically her spiritual study in Katmandu had instructed her.  For Kate, it was necessary to throw
herself into the messy business of life at this difficulty point in time, but
there must always be something of herself held back in reserve to suffice for
spiritual peace of mind.

MotherKind is a book about
reconciliation and “putting things right.”  If Phillips’ other novels
delineate the dysfunction of family, this story details the reconciliation
possible in familial relationships.
By the novel’s end both Kate and the reader understand the value
of friendship and loyalty, and they have a greater understanding of the concept
of home.  At one point, Wayland,
Kate’s father, talks to her about home back in West Virginia.  “Everything’s there,”
he says, “houses I built, streets I laid down, Raine’s grave.  You’ll be bringing your mother
back. . . . It’s home, no matter who’s left it.  Your home too.”  Kate responds that her home is in Boston, far away from the dusty roads of West Virginia.  Wayland turns to his daughter, the gulf
of years of silence and misunderstandings fading away as he too has traveled
far on his own journey, and says: “This
is where you live.  Home is where you come from”
(203).  Little does Waylon comprehend
of the broader ramification of those words, for home is ultimately more than any
one place: it is a state of mind, a collection of memories and relationships
that are with one always.

Sylvia Bailey Shurbutt,
Professor of English

August 2005

Works Cited

“An
Interview with Jayne Anne Phillips.” Publishers
Weekly.  225 (8 June 1984):

65-66.

Blythe,
Will, ed.  “Jayne Anne Phillips.”
Why I Write: Thoughts on the Craft
of

Fiction.  New York; Little Brown,
1998.  188-194.

Contemporary Authors Online. The Gale Group, 2001.   Online @

http://galenet.galegroup.com.

Dictionary of Literary Biography: Twenty-First
Century American Novelists.  Vol.

292.  New
York: The Gale Group, 2004.  271-277.

Edelstein,
David.  Esquire.  104 (December
1985): 107-12.

Eder,
Richard.  Los Angeles Times Book Review.  19 April 1987: 3. 11.

Long,
Kate.  In Their Own Country.  West Virginia Public
Radio, 2004.

Phillips,
Jayne Anne.  Black Tickets.  Boston: Faber and Faber,
1993.

________________.  Fast
Lanes.  New York: Vintage Books, 2000.

________________.  Machine
Dreams.  New York: Vintage Books, 1984.

_________________.  MotherKind.  New
York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2000.

_________________.  Shelter.  Boston:
Houghton Mifflin, 1994.

_________________.
“Jane Anne Phillips Talks about MotherKind.”  Online @

http://www.jayneannephillips.com/mother.htm.

Robertson,
Sarah.  EJAC 20 (2): 68-77.

Rhodes,
Kate.  “Interview with Jayne
Anne Phillips.” Women’s
Studies 31

(July/August 2002): 517-520.