Rereading Minrose Gwin

Rereading Minrose Gwin's The Queen of Palmyra       Part One

Making an investment in rereading , a senior reader profits from the generosity of time.  He or she can suss out the limits of subjectivity and attend  thoughtfully to details.  There's no guarantee of achieving a more valid interpretation. There just a possibility that significance ---the dividends of signifying ----will be higher.  Unlike struggling younger readers, the seniors can enjoy what comes with antiquity of youth.

In earlier commentary on Minrose Gwin's The Queen of Palmyra in The China Lectures (2014), I compared her achievement with the more commercially successful outcomes of Katheryn Stockett's The Help.  Stockett affirmed the white mythology of the South;  Gwin anatomized it.  In my opinion, it was worth noting "these first novels were written by women from Mississippi," by white females, and that the aesthetic integrity of the texts gave us "an opportunity to make ethical judgments about the forking paths of contemporary American fiction" by connecting  them with "the everyday concerns we bring to our reading of texts" (137-138).  Rereading provides an opportunity to recover what I overlooked, namely Gwin's establishing intertextuality with various discourses on the historical Zenobia, a Middle Eastern ruler of note, whose triumph over Roman occupiers was a Pyrrhic victory .  Gwin shifts aspects of the discourses to ensure her novel ends with a triumph of conscience.

Curiosity led me to discover an undistinguished, obscure bit of British moral fiction, the two volumes of Adelaide O'Keeffe's Zenobia, Queen of Palmyra: A Narrative, Founded on History (London: F.C. and J. Rivington, St. Paul's Church Yard, 1814).  O'Keeffe's narrative maximizes religious sentiment of the kind which no doubt sponsored the flowing of empathetic tears among sexism-bound women readers of the early 19th century.  O'Keeffe knew how to play an audience.  Her third person narrator demanded notice be given to what "was spoken by the oracle of Apollo in Balbe, ' Look to Zenobia, the babe born of Antiochus and Septimia, for her fate and that of Palmyra are one' (Vol. I, 4) and special notice to the fact that Septimia,  Zenobia's mother, "a Hebrew by descent" was "the victim of avaricious parents, who, to secure an illustrious and wealthy alliance, sacrificed her in marriage to paganism and Antiochus"(7).  Sacrifice, to be sure,  is a keyword.

O'Keeffe's narrative provides a backward glance in time on assumptions about the " plight of women ", and as such it's a fine gloss for Jane Austen's fictions of English manners and gendered commerce, especially Mansfield Park (1814), a didactic treatment of the morality around which Austen famously waltzed. Neither O'Keeffe nor Austen seem to have known anything about the oral publications in 1814 of enslaved African women in the so-called New World, the unrecorded narratives in which sacrifice and plight of women was truly dominant.  As a senior reader meditates, he highlights the absence and/or gaps of cognition and narrative knowing in 1814.

 What intrigues me, however, isn't discrepant relations between Austen and O'Keeffe or between them and African women. I am interested more in their work as prototypes for  intersectionality  (the concept proposed by Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw in 1989)as an analytic frame  which occupies  much 21st century feminist fiction.  I am more interested in Gwin's reversal of sense and sensibility  and her rendering of O'Keeffe's and Austen's terms of engagement in a narrative of Southern  white dyfunctionality and the mechanics of white supremacy. It is in Gwin's rendering that intrigues as I seek to align it with C. Liegh McInnis's comments on the Greek concepts of  agape, eros, philia, and storge in an email of April 18, 2019 to selected readers.

 The narrative voice of Florence Irene Forrest rivals the voice of Scout in To Kill a Mockingbird, for it is more lyric, tragic, and subjectively true.  In O'Keeffe's narrative Septimia was without consent "raised to a pinnacle of power, perverted, nay, nurtured in the abominations of idolatry" (womanhood on the pedestal )  and, alas, Zenobia dies at the end of volume two, for her abused heart "sank within her; the springs of life were broken at their sources; the spirit fled!"(310). In Gwin's narrative, Zenobia lives forever in race-specific morality. No tears are necessary.

April 20, 2019

Rereading Minrose Gwin's The Queen of Palmyra       Part Two   

The triumph of conscience at the end of the novel is one shared by Minrose Gwin and those of her readers who have the gumption to allow it to happen, to allow the State of Mississippi 1963 to (re)present itself and versions of love to parade in the nude. In my earlier comments on the novel in The China Lectures, I said little about the sense of an ending, so fascinated was I by how the writer allowed Florence Irene Forrest, by dint of reverse minstrelsy, "the equal opportunity  to be the object of mistreatment" (141).  Therein is a perversity (the poisonous snake in the garden) which is slightly more pronounced  in Southern fiction than in the bulk of American fictions, the snake that apologists for American democracy and global capitalism pretend does not exist.  Gwin does not suffer the trap of apology in her novel.  She constructs it judiciously to expose the fundamental and universal imperfections of seeing and knowing possessed by our minds, the imperfections which tantalize literary theory and literary criticism and overt miseducation.  It would be ideal were more contemporary American novels to take lesson from how Gwin diagrams ordinary life.  Was it shock of recognition that ordained my silence in earlier readings of the novel?  Perhaps.  Did rereading of Part IV, pp. 363-366 [ Eva Greene's italicized narration of how Winburn Lafayette Forrest murdered her with a screwdriver] and of Part V, pp. 369-390 [[the adult Florence's decision to say to her bed-ridden father in a Chalmette, Louisiana nursing home "Daddy, you killed Eva Green.  I saw you do it.  I saw you"(387) and to abandon him there to become "another untagged, unclaimed body in the state morgue"(390) in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and the breaking of the levees]] produce a superior shock of recognition that justice is only an act of language?  Perhaps.  My ears are rested and my eyes are rewarded  for having heard and seen yet again how justice sounds and looks in an extraordinary work of fiction. The antiquity of youth is wonderful.

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.            April 28, 2019