LITTLE SELVES
Starting Point and Structural Processes. “You were right,” Miss Lerner says, “about my knowing ‘the prototype of old Margaret.’ And every one of her storied recollections is a real one, told for the most part in her own words. She still insists so stoutly on the reality of the ‘little old man with the high hat,’ the bewitched churn, the fairies’ chairs and tables, that one ends by believing in them, too. So you see the material came ready to my hand. All I had to do was to vivify it, and cast it in the most dramatic form possible.
“Old Margaret is not dead, however. She reads and re-reads ‘Little Selves,’ and says she can smell the peat fire and hear the kettle humming on the hob. It was an old friend of hers who died—of cancer, as the story ran; and Margaret used to spend many an hour talking with her those last days. Their reminiscences, however, were of the time of their young womanhood; they did not meet in the old country.
“All this cherished material had long lain in my mind. Its greatest appeal to me perhaps depended on the fact that I, too, had always been an inveterate ponderer of moments of my extreme childhood. Even at eight or ten, I used to re-live isolated moments of particular interest from my ‘past,’ which even then seemed bathed in a ‘livelier light.’
“The final impulse came one day on hearing Stevenson’s phrase, ‘Nothing matters much that happens to a boy after he is seven.’ At once I saw the whole story. Margaret must die, of course, and dying revisit the scenes of her childhood. That bit of manipulation would heighten and intensify the whole tale. She must be a single woman, too, instead of a wife and the devoted mother of a difficult but promising daughter. She must be considerably older. She must retain her skill with the needle, and her piety. So I simply jotted down half a dozen words to name the several incidents of her dream, then began to write, visualizing the opening scene as I went. It was like transcribing at some one else’s dictation matter already an intimate part of one’s spiritual life. Isn’t that the way one’s best things come? I wrote only one rough draft, then the final copy. Hardly a word was changed. The title, oddly apt, I think, came to me when I wrote the line, ‘She recreated her earlier selves and passed them on, happy in the thought that she was saving them from oblivion.’”
This full description of the constructive process renders almost superfluous either questions or further comment. It should be compared closely with Mary Brecht Pulver’s similar résumé of her “Path of Glory.”
“Little Selves” constitutes a happy cross between the “evoked ghost” story, such as one finds in Kipling’s “They,” and the pictures frankly labeled as memories, in a multitude of stories. For as Margaret says, the earlier selves “is realer” than the children of flesh-and-blood who surround her.
Theme. In what does the merit of the narrative lie,—theme, characterization, or plot? In connection with your own answer observe that Miss Lerner says, “As for plot versus theme, I think theme usually dominates. I have some idea I wish to expound—to illustrate by means of interplay of character and action. Idea, I feel, is really The Thing, rather than mere complication or rapidity of action.”
In how many stories of these collections, do you feel the dominance of the underlying idea? In which, if any, is it lacking? In which do you feel the predominance of idea to such an extent as to swamp the story values?
Plot. Show that the sentence on page 224, “Her voice choked with sudden tears,” is a sort of dramatic climax.
Why is it more artistic to leave the climax of action, the old woman’s death, untold?
Characters. In what sense is the narrative a “character story”? Is a whole life really re-constructed? Is the author’s chief object this re-living?
How is Margaret best visualized for you?
What is Anna’s chief characteristic and what her main place in the plot?
Setting. In what respects is the story a national representative? How do the two larger settings, as indicated, aid each other? Which is thrown into subjection? Why?