2. Sisterhood, Shame, and Redemption in Cat’s Eye and King Lear

1.2. Marriage, Love, and Sacrifice in Ladder of Years and King Lear.
It seems natural to discuss Anne Tyler’s Ladder of Years in immediate on with A Thousand Acres. In Tyler’s novel the reader is moved into a domestic world similar to that of Smiley’s. Both novels moor the stories in family life and place the female ‘Shakespearean’ protagonists in a complex network of relations, one in which they occupy different positions as sisters and wives and as daughters and mothers. The two novels also outline a similar pattern of development for their respective female protagonists. In depicting ‘the housewife’s departure’, A Thousand Acres appears, to Janis P. Stout, ‘to have exerted a strong pull on Tyler’s imagination during the writing of Ladder of Years’.2 From having figured as objects to serve their fathers’ and husbands’ goals, both protagonists thus move into a public world where they attempt to create their own future; but whereas Ginny’s departure is a definite one, the departure of Tyler’s protagonist is succeeded by a return home.
The previous chapter dealt with the ways in which judgmental reactions to Shakespeare’s ‘bad’ daughters are halted by A Thousand Acres. This chapter examines how Tyler’s novel qualifies censorious reactions to Shakespeare’s ‘good’ but ‘obstinate’ daughter. What brings Shakespeare’s Cordelia and Tyler’s Delia together is a violation of a taboo; but whereas Cordelia breaks a Renaissance taboo by disobeying her father, Tyler’s Cordelia transgresses one of our most persistent cultural taboos by abandoning her children.3 As will be discussed below, both ‘transgressions’ originate in a debt of gratitude that is expected to be returned to a father. This expectation epitomizes a dilemma which defines what this study refers to as the ‘Cordelia complex’ and derives from an examination of a daughter’s conflicting loyalties in a patriarchy. The debt that a daughter owes her father confines her to eternal daughterhood. The father’s complicity in the daughter’s captivity invites the reader to suspend his or her desire to assign guilt to Cordelia Delia for their ‘transgressions’.
Ladder of Years is not alone among Tyler’s novels to suspend the reader’s inclination to assign blame. Most of her novels frustrate readers’ attempts to find the ultimate source of guilt. This may have something to do with the fact that her characters often fail to identify the source of their own emotions, be they feelings of guilt, anger, emptiness, loss, or disillusionment. Ifa character is unable to trace guilt to the appropriate source, it may follow that the reader is too. Instead of encouraging readers to assign guilt, Tyler’s novels encourage them to feel sympathetic towards the sometimes ordinary and sometimes quirky, but almost exclusively appealing charactersthat populate her novels. As Gene H. Bell-Villada points out: there are noreal villains in Tyler’s oeuvre. Readers familiar with Tyler’s fiction will immediately recognize themselves on entering her literary universe. She has, as Judith Caesar points out, ‘long been an unusual voice in American writing’. Her sympathetic characters, the strong sense of place (Baltimore), and the disorganized domestic situations are all part of her unique contribution to American literature. Critics agree that Tyler is an author who almost exclusively addresses the disarray of American family life. Brooke Allen typically argues that Tyler ‘is doggedly determined to celebrate the clutter and mess of domesticlife’.6 Tyler’s characters, however, often try to escape the domestic scene. Many are not in fact at home in their homes or in society, and they give vent to a kind of restless desire to be on the move, one that gives way in the end – if not to resignation, then to endurance and patience,7 but also, I would argue, to a sense of responsibility.
Caren J. Town observes that ‘homes and cities make Tyler’s characters feel frustrated, trapped, and anxious to be on the move; when they do leave, however, they intermittently long to return’.8 For these characters, however, there is more at stake than a yearning to escape and return. In Searching for Caleb (1976), Tyler is, according to Catherine Peters, ‘con-cerned with an existential examination of the nature of freedom’.9 In Earthly Possessions (1977) and Morgan’s Passing (1980), Tyler continues to probe more deeply into such questions, but deals primarily with characters who finally accept the oftentimes unfulfilling disorder of everyday life instead of running away. In Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant (1982), we see the emotional and existential consequences for those who are left behind after a father’s departure towards freedom from familial constraints. The novel features a single ‘angry sort of mother’ of three, whose frustration over her situation is taken out on her children.10 Th e root of Pearl Tull’s emotional dysfunction– and consequently her children’s – is more or less vaguely manifest in the father/husband’s desertion, although, as Alice Hall Petry makes clear, in Tyler’s oeuvre, ‘one individual alone [is rarely] the sole culprit in another person’s difficulties’.
In Tyler’s latest novel to date, Noah’s Compass (2009), we see the emotional and existential effects on a person who tries to disengage himself from relations and possessions. The book focuses on a 61-year-old retired teacher who moves towards a dispossessed and disencumbered existence. His wish to ‘Simplify, simplify!’ 12 captures the Thoreauvian exhortation to attain ‘freedom from other people as well as from things’.13 According to Barbara Harrell Carson:
When Thoreau advises his readers to ‘Simplify, simplify,’ he is only giving philosophical voice to the central ideal of the American hero. Rip Van Winkle’s shucking off the encumbrances of nagging wife and burdensome children; Huck Finn’s opting for the emotional and moral simplicity offered by the Territory; Nick Adams’s and Jake Barnes’s finding their truest selves in simple, ritualistic retreats into the countryside; Yossarian’s jumping out of the impossibly muddled system of Catch-22 to save himself – all express a conviction at the heart of American life and literature (and one repeatedly explored by literary critics): that personal wholeness and authenticityare to be found only through discovery of one’s radical freedom, freedom from other people as well as from things. The goal was, as Thoreau said, to ‘live free and uncommitted’.
According to Carson, Anne Tyler’s fiction offers one place to look for an alternative to the Thoreauvian selfhood.15 In the end, the male teacher’s Thoreauvian inspiration gives way to an understanding that living entails‘ encumbrances’ and responsibilities,16 an acceptance that eventually reconciles him with time and with his life. A similar process of realization prompts Delia Grinstead’s return home. In Tyler’s writing, freedom cannot come through a disencumbered existence, particularly if such an existence leads to the ‘sacrifice’ of the ‘young and true’; in Ladder of Years, the kind off reedom that it is right to seek for is the freedom that is achieved through the liberation of the next generation.
Much like her characters, who often feel uncomfortable inhabiting predetermined roles, Tyler walks her own path, reluctant to let plot elements control her characters or to allow the action of her novels to adhere to any fixed patterns.17 Delia Grin stead seems to be a product of that reluctance, in that she is a character who literally walks her own path by departing from home and family and who characteristically fails to recognize the source of that ‘whim’. Cathleen Schine notes that ‘[i]f the reader is neverquite sure why Delia deserts her life, neither is Delia herself ’.18 However, Ladder of Years moves readers towards the origin of Delia’s departure by directing their attention to a literary debt which is not the one from which Hemingway claimed ‘[a]ll modern American literature comes from’:19 not Hckleberry Finn, but King Lear. Read in relation to King Lear, Ladder of Years reveals that it is Delia’s debt to her father – or, rather, the sudden freedom from that debt – that prompts her departure towards a disencumbered future. The fact that Delia does not recognize her father’s part in her departure is perhaps not surprising: he is represented as a generous and affectionate parent. In addition, the fact that he is gone – when the novel opens, three months have passed since he died – poses a challenge to the reader’s ability to identify him as the source of her present feeling of confinement.
Most critics have explained Delia’s departure as her response to feeling imprisoned by marriage and/or motherhood. Roberta Rubenstein’s response is typical: ‘Tyler exposes and explores a particularly female anxiety about being trapped both at home and in time, remaining stuck in roles, routines, and relationships in which the self has stagnated’.20 Heidi Slettedahl Macpherson observes that ‘[f ]ew writers so faithfully delineatethe position of the mother in contemporary fiction, nor explore thedesire for escape from this role so openly’.21 Delia’s departure evokes severalother female literary heroines who depart from home and family as anecessary step towards freedom. According to Rubenstein, ‘despite Tyler’sown expressed distance from feminism, Ladder of Years follows a patternestablished in earlier feminist fiction: the psychological “awakening” of awoman who has unthinkingly defined herself through conventional femaleroles’.22 It is Delia’s return – which has been perceived both as a feministfailure and as a post-feminist success –23 that separates Ladder of Years fromthe pattern usually found in fiction belonging to the feminist ‘awakening’tradition. As Doris Betts writes about Tyler’s fiction in general: ‘No rebelliousNora goes slamming out of her doll’s house in her conclusions; nowoman is swimming out to where horizon meets sea or going mad fromseeing creatures swarm inside her yellow wallpaper’.
In order to account for elia’s departure, Ladder of Years invites thereader to go beyond Henrik Ibsen, Kate Chopin, and Charlotte PerkinsGilman to a point even further back in time: an age when marriage and allthat came with such an arrangement was not the prime threat to a woman’ssense of freedom – rather the contrary.25 In King Lear, the principal threatwish to live unencumbered by instilling a debt of gratitude in the youngergeneration. If it is such a debt that prompts Delia’s departure in that it tiedher to ‘eternal daughterhood’, it is another debt that prompts her return:the debt to and responsibility towards the third generation. This pattern isnot pursued in the feminist fiction referred to above, nor is it invoked inHuckleberry Finn or in the literature that followed Twain’s novel. Granted,there is no third generation in King Lear; but that is precisely the point: theolder generations’ desire to lead an unburdened existence ends in tragedybecause the generation that is biologically assigned to carry life forwardpays for the old men’s yearning with their lives. Edgar, who did not let hisfather unburden himself twice, is the sole survivor from that generation inthe play.