What makes Thomas Bailey Aldrich's famous story,
"Marjorie Daw" work is the letter technique. Letters between Delaney and Fleming who broke
his leg tell the story. Thematically,
the story depends on the device that Alfred Hitchcock in the famous movie "Rear
Window". The issue is the
same--when one is immobile and cannot "reality check" a fiction, then
one has no choice but to take the fiction as reality. Moreover, when one is dependent on the
reportage of one person, who is obviously free to create out of the imagination
something unreal, one is caught in the fiction.
This same sort of thing happens today on the Internet.
The first letter is from the doctor: It is a nice irony that Fleming has
twenty-seven volumes of Balzac, mainly to throw at his serving man, a sly joke
about the main use of the novel. Delaney apologizes that he has nothing to
write since he is living out in the country with no one around. He says he wishes he were a novelist so he
could write him a "summer romance," like Turgenev. He then says "Picture to
yourself..." and beings a description of the house across the road, and
puts it in present tense--"a young woman appears on the piazza with some
mysterious Penelope web of embroidery in her hand, or a book. There is a hammock over there--of pineapple
fiber, it looks from here. A hammock is
very becoming when one is eighteen and has golden hair, and dark eyes, and an
emerald-colored illusion dress looped up after the fashion of a Dresden china
shepherdess....But enough of this nonsense..."
Although the description begins generally, it is
enough to catch Flemming and he writes back wanting to know more about the
little girl in the hammock. Tells him he
has "a graphic descriptive touch."
Delaney write back "There is literally nothing here--except the
little girl over the way." He
begins to create a family for her and a name--Marjorie Daw coincidences: He says "how oddly things fall
out!" for just as he describes perhaps meeting her he says he is called
downstairs and her father is there with an invitation. He then describes sitting with her--"It
was like seeing a picture to see Miss Marjorie hovering around the old
soldier...."
He says he tells her about him and she asks
questions about him. "I think I made her like you!" He describes her as a beauty without
affectation and her father a noble character.
Flemming writes back to say:
"You seem to be describing a woman I have known in some previous state
of existence, or dreamed of in this."
He says if he saw a photo of her he would recognize her at once. He says her manner and traits and appearance
are all familiar to him. Delaney says to
say she is not his type, but says if they were on a desert island--"let me
suggest a tropical island, for it costs no more to be picturesque"--he
would be like a sister to her. [Note all the references to story telling]
Delaney says:
"Is this not the oddest thing in the world?" (referring to
Marjorie's interest in Flemming), then says, no the oddest the overall
effect. "The effect which you tell
me was produced on you by my casual mention of an unknown girl swinging in a
hammock is certainly as strange." He writes again, and now the letters are
all from Delaney to Flemming, in which Delaney refers to the letters from
Flemming. Why do Flemming's letter's disappear from the exchange? "Do you mean to say that you are
seriously half in love with a woman whom you have never seen--with a shadow, a
chimera? for what else can Miss Daw be to you?
I do not understand it at all."
(The convention here is that he is a lawyer and not a romantic) He says Fleming and Daw are like ethereal
spirits and he is Caliban (Another clue to the made-up nature of the story--The
Tempest--he is not Caliban, but Prospero, who creates a world. "When you do come to know her, she will
fall far short of your ideal, and you will not care for her in the least."
Later letter, he writes to say Daw loves Jack also,
and comments on the "strangeness of the whole business." He says he has lost the faculty of being
surprised "I accept things as people do in dreams." When Flemming says he wants to write to Daw,
Delaney says: "She knows you only
through me; you are to her an abstraction, a figure in a dream--a dream from
which the faintest shock would awaken her." "Do you not see that, every hour you
remain away, Marjorie's glamour deepens, and your influence over her
increases?" When Flemming talks of coming there, he puts him off and make
sup story about the father wanting her to be with another suitor. The letters become increasing urgent and
short. "Stay where you are. You would only complicate matters." When Flemming says he must see her, the
letters stop and we have the only narrative, which provides the opportunity for
the last letter. Delaney goes to Boston.
The last letter: He is filled with horror and regret
at what he has done. Says he just wanted
to make a little romance to interest him and did it all too well. "There isn't any colonial mansion on the
other side of the road, there isn't any piazza, there isn't any hammock--there
isn't any Marjorie Daw!" Wonderful
ending--A classic story about the power of story to create a sense of
reality. This is a story that moves from
the old romantic story of the supernatural, mystical woman (Diamond Lens and
the Gautier story.
Ostensibly "The Lady or the Tiger" is a
story about justice, that is, the only kind of justice possible in
fiction--poetic justice. The end of the
game played by the semibarbaric king has only two alternatives, and they are
quite purposely the conventional alternative endings of comedy or
tragedy--marriage or death. The fact
that this particular story "ends" before it ends, giving the reader
the freedom to choose a conclusion, is a game on Stockton's part to exploit the
reader's need to "close" a story, to see true justice enacted. Stockton urges readers to close the story not
by choosing what they want to come out of the doors, but rather in the way
readers always achieve closure--by looking back at the plot, the tone, and the
thematic motifs to determine the story's thematic "end."
Since the story makes quite clear that the
semibarbaric nature of the princess consists of her being both lady-like and
tigerish, what readers are really asked to decide is which aspect of the
princess dominates at the end--her lady side or her tiger side. Because the presentation of what goes on the
princess' mind makes quite clear which side that is, the reader is not so free
to choose as it first appears.
The story is most interesting for its focus on the
reader's need for closure. For even
though the story leaves little doubt that the tiger pounces out at the end (for
the princess has more tiger in her personality than lady), most readers feel
somehow tricked or cheated that the author leaves the final choice ostensibly
open. This is a story that constantly refers to the storyteller who is in the
position of being aware of the reader and how he is responding.
"The
Lady or the Tiger" is a story about justice, but about the only kind of
justice possible in art, that is, poetic justice. The end of the game played by the
semibarbaric king, the game of the arena has only two alternatives, and they
are quite purposely the conventional endings of long narrative--depending on
whether they are primarily tragic or comic--that is, marriage or death. The fact that in this particular story, the
story "ends" before it ends, and the reader is explicitly made to
choose an ending is a game on Stockton's part to exploit the reader's need to
"close" a story, to see true justice performed.
The story is our most famous "open" story,
or at least it pretends to be open.
However, the reader is compelled to close it not by choosing arbitrarily
by rather in the way he or she always closes a story, that is, by looking back
at the plot, the tone, the motifs and determining which came out--the lady or
the tiger. For the story makes quite
clear that the semibarbaric nature of the princess consists of her being both
lady like and tigerish. What we really
need to close the story off is to determine which aspect of the princess
dominates--her lady side or tiger side.
The story makes quite clear which side that is. Thus, we close the story in all its openness
by determining the pattern and tone of the story.
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