down town, sleeping late...). Just like a child whose life is devoid of any
sense of responsibility or constraint, his life is thus organized around the
satisfaction of his pleasures (139).

Clearly enough, his perspective is temporally regressive, fueled
by unconscious fantasized feelings of might, just like those of a child
who thinks he is the center of attention and believes his mother holds
herself at his disposal: "He was still a hero to his two young sisters. His
mother would have given him breakfast in bed if he had wanted it" (139).
The experience of the war has not propelled him forward regarding his
affects, but pushed his wishes back toward archaic repressed desires
and probably feelings of guilt, that turn out to be obstacles to sexual
gratification, preventing enjoyment and active participation in social life.
The belief that he could be served by his mother at will testifies to the
return of repressed archaic desires and thus to the failure of the process
of symbolization that should normally put an end to the problematics of
the Oedipus complex phase. On the contrary, Krebs's eroticism is passive:
"He would have liked to have a girl but he did not want to have to spend
a long time getting her" (140). The refusal to go with girls despite some
feelings of sexual attraction just shows how sexual frustration has
triggered in part his neurotic symptoms.

Krebs thinks he can do without the symbolic order (that is, the
order of the signifier) which imposes intersubjectivity and language
as a relational tool and channel for desire. The subject is constantly
confronted with the risk of otherness in social interactions, in the sense
that his desire can be rejected by the other. Krebs is confined in the
Imaginary where everything is prefixed and easy to predict. It is the
girl, in a maternal unconscious position, who is the source of the active
erotic force, while Krebs remains an object satisfied to satisfy the Other,
a position that refers back to the archaic infantile position when the
baby, not yet a speaking subject, considers itself the object of desire of
its mother. Thus, in Krebs's fantasmatic scenario, the active source of
desire is external and structurally maternal: "Now he would have liked a
girl if she had come to him and not wanted to talk. But here at home it
was all too complicated" (141); "complicated": folded together, intricate,
just like the cultural complex.
Helen, Krebs's sister, is also an active seducing force. The manifestation of incestuous desires through the frolicsome allurements of Helen, and through Krebs's equally playful response to it—and it is easy to understand that the sister is a metonymic figure of the maternal—, shows, too, how far Krebs's sexual desire (or libido) is still trapped in the archaic incestuous fantasies of the self-erotic phase, which prevents him from directing his sexual desires toward the beautiful young girls of his town. On the contrary, the whole story's affective field is centered on Krebs's relation with his mother. Home is characterized with the omnipresence of the maternal force and the weakness of the paternal function. Because of this lack of balance, home also comes under the dangerous spell of incest and consequently the unconscious fear of punishment that paralyzes Krebs's desire and prevents him from moving toward sexual otherness.

The father is indeed conspicuous by his absence in the story (and in Hemingway's work generally), only referred to as “he” or “your father,” whereas the mother’s presence is powerfully felt. The dominating maternal Other seems to have absorbed the paternal function though the mother also imposes her authority on its behalf. The absence of the father, whose words are merely conveyed by the mother, emphasizes the maternal domination of the home space, while the power of her normative and injunctive language makes her son feel all the guiltier. In the face of Krebs’s embarrassed and certainly uncomfortable silence, his mother strategically refers to the paternal pole to convince her son to ‘get moving’ (144).

The mother is a conservative woman who speaks in the name of the father, but Krebs knows she is the one pulling the strings of power behind the scenes (141-142). The soldier believed that the experience of the Great War would be enough for him to become a man, which in his mind confusedly means a hero. His war stories are meant to be proofs of his heroic virility. However, they no longer interest anyone, and the heroes’ welcome is in any case over. His mother, who often comes into his room when he is lying down in bed and asks him to talk to her about the war (139), does not listen to him for long, as “her attention always wander[s]” (139).
Helen, Krebs's sister, is also an active seducing force. The manifestation of incestuous desires through the frolicsome allurements of Helen, and through Krebs's equally playful response to it—and it is easy to understand that the sister is a metonymic figure of the maternal—, shows, too, how far Krebs's sexual desire (or libido) is still trapped in the archaic incestuous fantasies of the self-erotic phase, which prevents him from directing his sexual desires toward the beautiful young girls of his town. On the contrary, the whole story's affective field is centered on Krebs's relation with his mother. Home is characterized with the omnipresence of the maternal force and the weakness of the paternal function. Because of this lack of balance, home also comes under the dangerous spell of incest and consequently the unconscious fear of punishment that paralyzes Krebs's desire and prevents him from moving toward sexual otherness.

The father is indeed conspicuous by his absence in the story (and in Hemingway's work generally), only referred to as “he” or “your father,” whereas the mother’s presence is powerfully felt. The dominating maternal Other seems to have absorbed the paternal function though the mother also imposes her authority on its behalf. The absence of the father, whose words are merely conveyed by the mother, emphasizes the maternal domination of the home space, while the power of her normative and injunctive language makes her son feel all the guiltier. In the face of Krebs’s embarrassed and certainly uncomfortable silence, his mother strategically refers to the paternal pole to convince her son to ‘get moving’ (144).

The mother is a conservative woman who speaks in the name of the father, but Krebs knows she is the one pulling the strings of power behind the scenes (141-142). The soldier believed that the experience of the Great War would be enough for him to become a man, which in his mind confusedly means a hero. His war stories are meant to be proofs of his heroic virility. However, they no longer interest anyone, and the heroes’ welcome is in any case over. His mother, who often comes into his room when he is lying down in bed and asks him to talk to her about the war (139), does not listen to him for long, as “her attention always wander[s]” (139).
The narrative voice does not give the reasons behind this paradoxical and highly revealing disinterest, since it is at his mother's request that Krebs starts telling his war stories. One can nevertheless deduce from her attitude a true knowledge of the war from a more reliable source that allows her to see through Krebs, who likes to stage his virility in his "apocryphal" narratives (139). Indeed, she seems to have had her own heroic ideal and truthful narrator in the figure of her own father:

> "I've worried about you so much, Harold [...]. I know the temptations you must have been exposed to. I know how weak men are. I know what your own dear grandfather, my own father, told us about the Civil War and I have prayed for you. I pray for you all day long, Harold."
> 
> Krebs looked at the bacon fat hardening on his plate. (143)

The mother's knowledge, insisted upon through repetition (*I know...*, *I know...*), is coupled with a power derived from paternal filiation. That powerful knowledge both victimizes and infantilizes her son, now deprived of the possibility to develop his own heroic fantasies and to gain her admiration. "Boys" like Harold are not heroes but "weak" creatures and easily tempted sinners worth being prayed for "all day long" for forgiveness. The mother's words are meant to reveal not only Krebs's "lies" about his allegedly heroic deeds but also his guilt (or sins). The reference to the two German girls at the beginning of the story supports the mother's both intuitive and rational knowledge. Moreover, the emphatic expression "'your own dear grandfather, my own father'" suggests the daughter's attachment to and admiration for her father, whose authentic heroic stories are well kept in her memory as a trustworthy testimony on what wars really are. Krebs can therefore only equal the authentic heroic grandfather by inventing heroic stories to take the place of his mother's hero. However, these scenarios are disrupted by internal forces that demand the real thing. He can brilliantly display a certain image and assert himself before the maternal Other, but this Other is far from complacent. Home has become thus a place of confrontation with one's truths as reflected by an uncompromising mother, who does not consider her son man enough to fight in a real war and to assume
The narrative voice does not give the reasons behind this paradoxical and highly revealing disinterest, since it is at his mother's request that Krebs starts telling his war stories. One can nevertheless deduce from her attitude a true knowledge of the war from a more reliable source that allows her to see through Krebs, who likes to stage his virility in his "apocryphal" narratives (139). Indeed, she seems to have had her own heroic ideal and truthful narrator in the figure of her own father:

> "I've worried about you so much, Harold [...]. I know the temptations you must have been exposed to. I know how weak men are. I know what your own dear grandfather, my own father, told us about the Civil War and I have prayed for you. I pray for you all day long, Harold."
> 
> Krebs looked at the bacon fat hardening on his plate. (143)

The mother's knowledge, insisted upon through repetition (*I know...*, *I know...*), is coupled with a power derived from paternal filiation. That powerful knowledge both victimizes and infantilizes her son, now deprived of the possibility to develop his own heroic fantasies and to gain her admiration. "Boys" like Harold are not heroes but "weak" creatures and easily tempted sinners worth being prayed for "all day long" for forgiveness. The mother's words are meant to reveal not only Krebs's "lies" about his allegedly heroic deeds but also his guilt (or sins). The reference to the two German girls at the beginning of the story supports the mother's both intuitive and rational knowledge. Moreover, the emphatic expression "'your own dear grandfather, my own father'" suggests the daughter's attachment to and admiration for her father, whose authentic heroic stories are well kept in her memory as a trustworthy testimony on what wars really are. Krebs can therefore only equal the authentic heroic grandfather by inventing heroic stories to take the place of his mother's hero. However, these scenarios are disrupted by internal forces that demand the real thing. He can brilliantly display a certain image and assert himself before the maternal Other, but this Other is far from complacent. Home has become thus a place of confrontation with one's truths as reflected by an uncompromising mother, who does not consider her son man enough to fight in a real war and to assume
his social responsibilities: finding a good job and getting married like the other "boys," who apparently have no sexual problems and no difficulty in getting a girl suited to their desires.

Krebs's masculinity, comically displayed at the beginning of the story, is to be reimagined or reinvented through fictionalizing his self-representation, which "consist[s] in attributing to himself things other men [have] seen, done or heard of, and stating as facts certain apocryphal incidents familiar to all soldiers" (139). The reader might have noted the suggestive use in this excerpt of the word "men" before "soldiers"; indeed, the real issues at stake have to do with a deficit of virility not of warring valor.

Krebs is a storyteller, an imaginative spirit whose lies are the very proof of his creative talents and the sign of a personality yet under development. However, his imaginative faculties, which his gullible sisters have made admirable, no longer correspond to the true requirements of the subject. Invaded by a feeling of abjection of which he himself is the source and the object, Krebs is the victim of an internal conflict between, on the one hand, the brilliant image he gives of himself and his imaginative mental predispositions that allow him to create it, and, on the other hand, what he is in truth: a non-heroic man according to the standards of a rigorously defined masculinity, here circumscribed in the warlike sphere where he tried to look and maybe even be heroic and manly enough. His true self (the *subject* within) is not satisfied by warfare but by music and reading, and by the intimate interiority of closed places. When he goes down town, it is to fetch a book from the library (139), or to spend "the hottest hours of the day in the cool dark of the pool room" (139), an antithetical image that tacitly opposes the paradigms of the masculine (the heat brings to mind the firearms of the war) and the feminine as a shelter whose watery consistency is suggested by the signifier "pool" buttressed by "cool" and by the overall delicate music of the words. Thus, the activities he carries out, far from reflecting a strictly defined mannish self (as the opening paragraphs of the story suggest ironically), point to a delicate sensitivity.

Krebs's inner space, as mirrored by his home, is therefore dominated by a powerful sense of the feminine, an atmosphere where the mother
his social responsibilities: finding a good job and getting married like the other "boys," who apparently have no sexual problems and no difficulty in getting a girl suited to their desires.

Krebs's masculinity, comically displayed at the beginning of the story, is to be reimagined or reinvented through fictionalizing his self-representation, which "consist[s] in attributing to himself things other men [have] seen, done or heard of, and stating as facts certain apocryphal incidents familiar to all soldiers" (139). The reader might have noted the suggestive use in this excerpt of the word "men" before "soldiers"; indeed, the real issues at stake have to do with a deficit of virility not of warring valor.

Krebs is a storyteller, an imaginative spirit whose lies are the very proof of his creative talents and the sign of a personality yet under development. However, his imaginative faculties, which his gullible sisters have made admirable, no longer correspond to the true requirements of the subject. Invaded by a feeling of abjection of which he himself is the source and the object, Krebs is the victim of an internal conflict between, on the one hand, the brilliant image he gives of himself and his imaginative mental predispositions that allow him to create it, and, on the other hand, what he is in truth: a non-heroic man according to the standards of a rigorously defined masculinity, here circumscribed in the warlike sphere where he tried to look and maybe even be heroic and manly enough. His true self (the *subject* within) is not satisfied by warfare but by music and reading, and by the intimate interiority of closed places. When he goes down town, it is to fetch a book from the library (139), or to spend "the hottest hours of the day in the cool dark of the pool room" (139), an antithetical image that tacitly opposes the paradigms of the masculine (the heat brings to mind the firearms of the war) and the feminine as a shelter whose watery consistency is suggested by the signifier "pool" buttressed by "cool" and by the overall delicate music of the words. Thus, the activities he carries out, far from reflecting a strictly defined mannish self (as the opening paragraphs of the story suggest ironically), point to a delicate sensitivity.

Krebs's inner space, as mirrored by his home, is therefore dominated by a powerful sense of the feminine, an atmosphere where the mother
holds sway. This maternal supremacy is made clear at the end of the story when his mother triumphantly makes her son kneel down in prayer in spite of his reluctance and his belief that he is not in "'His kingdom'" (143). Yet, the confrontation with his mother makes him feel "embarrassed and resentful as always." Even if he does not pray he lets his mother do so for him, while the act of kneeling down per se symbolizes his capitulation to the maternal sovereign. Indeed, after a vain attempt at unfulfilled resistance, he surrenders to his mother by vowing "'[he]'ll try and be a good boy for [her]'" (144), and a good citizen too since he finally makes the promise he will go to Kansas City to look for a job, thus honoring the moral and social expectations of his mother and of the nation at large. This said, does this comic conclusion prove Krebs's conciliation with the social order he has been shunning and despising so far? Actually, to Krebs work has a much different meaning from what is expected by his mother, even if his decision is meant to please her.

For the mother, as a spokesperson of the American way of life, man, work, and home are coextensive and absolutely interdependent; it is a matter of order and loyalty. A man's existence is justified by what he can do to build up and improve his home through hard work and religious devotion. Work is a moral obligation that makes man worthy of the mission entrusted him by God because, as she reminds her son, "'God has some work for everyone to do.'" Therefore, "'there can be no idle hands in His Kingdom'" (143). Man can thus affirm himself as a synthetically apprehended conscience, capable, thanks to the reason it is based on, of regulating a world threatened by the dark forces of jouissance, including unrestricted sexuality and its satanic avatars. The enjoyment recommended to Krebs by his mother (for instance driving his father's car and taking "'some of the nice girls'" for a ride) is none other than that of social production and sexual reproduction, both well marked out and necessarily transitive and finalistic.

Now, for the Hemingway protagonist (fisherman, hunter, writer), work is subjected to the interplay of Eros and Thanatos according to primitive rules that recognize the excesses of the body while symbolizing them by actions involving both matter and spirit, thus channeling the violence of the drives into symbolical cultural forms. It is not the socially
holds sway. This maternal supremacy is made clear at the end of the story when his mother triumphantly makes her son kneel down in prayer in spite of his reluctance and his belief that he is not in "'His kingdom'" (143). Yet, the confrontation with his mother makes him feel "embarrassed and resentful as always." Even if he does not pray he lets his mother do so for him, while the act of kneeling down per se symbolizes his capitulation to the maternal sovereign. Indeed, after a vain attempt at unfulfilled resistance, he surrenders to his mother by vowing "'[he]'ll try and be a good boy for [her]'" (144), and a good citizen too since he finally makes the promise he will go to Kansas City to look for a job, thus honoring the moral and social expectations of his mother and of the nation at large. This said, does this comic conclusion prove Krebs's conciliation with the social order he has been shunning and despising so far? Actually, to Krebs work has a much different meaning from what is expected by his mother, even if his decision is meant to please her.

For the mother, as a spokesperson of the American way of life, man, work, and home are coextensive and absolutely interdependent; it is a matter of order and loyalty. A man's existence is justified by what he can do to build up and improve his home through hard work and religious devotion. Work is a moral obligation that makes man worthy of the mission entrusted him by God because, as she reminds her son, "'God has some work for everyone to do.'" Therefore, "'there can be no idle hands in His Kingdom'" (143). Man can thus affirm himself as a synthetically apprehended conscience, capable, thanks to the reason it is based on, of regulating a world threatened by the dark forces of jouissance, including unrestricted sexuality and its satanic avatars. The enjoyment recommended to Krebs by his mother (for instance driving his father's car and taking "'some of the nice girls'" for a ride) is none other than that of social production and sexual reproduction, both well marked out and necessarily transitive and finalistic.

Now, for the Hemingway protagonist (fisherman, hunter, writer), work is subjected to the interplay of Eros and Thanatos according to primitive rules that recognize the excesses of the body while symbolizing them by actions involving both matter and spirit, thus channeling the violence of the drives into symbolical cultural forms. It is not the socially
defined reason that underlies the protagonist's activities, but the free
play of sexuality and the *letter* (or writing). The play of the letter and
the enjoyment it entails is already suggested by the implicit connection
between Krebs's intention to go to Kansas City and get a job there so
that his mother "would feel all right about it," and the *Kansas City Star*,
his father's paper he enjoys reading while taking breakfast (142). In this
sense, going to Kansas implies a symbolical move toward the father,
whose desire is figured metonymically by the *Kansas City Star*, and by
the pleasure of reading the newspaper every morning, *before* his father, a
habit that points to the structuring issues of the Oedipus complex. This,
too, foreshadows Krebs's professional future which is connected with
writing and, therefore, with the possibility to emancipate himself from
the maternal grip. Albeit slightly distorted, the biographical reference is
barely veiled: Hemingway began his career as a journalist at the *Kansas
City Star*, though he did so *before* going to war as a volunteer.

When Hemingway went back home from Italy, he was already a
celebrity (Baker 84), hailed by newspapers such as *The New York Sun* as
a hero who had "defied the shrapnel of the Central Powers" (Lynn 96). Yet,
this heroic return home from the war was marred by arguments with his
mother, Grace Hall Hemingway, who did not let him enjoy his heroic aura
as long as he wished. Kenneth Lynn writes that "[w]hat was particularly
maddening from Ernest's point of view was that his status hadn't changed
after all. It was as if he had never [...] helped to remove the remains of
dead women from a field in Lombardy, or felt the pain of shell fragments
tearing into his flesh" (101). Thus, the non-complaisant reaction of his
mother frustrated and then enraged him. A few months later Hemingway
started working as a reporter for the *Toronto Weekly Star*, before heading
for Europe where he became the European correspondent for the Canadian
paper until 1924. He then established himself as a professional writer.

The fiction explores, albeit cautiously, the relationship with the
all too present mother and the insufficiently present father during that
period of his life. Hemingway's writing is not a matter of reporting exactly
what happened nor imagining some non-existent world, but of *acting*
upon reality through its symbolization. In "Soldier's Home" Krebs's father,
defined reason that underlies the protagonist's activities, but the free
play of sexuality and the *letter* (or writing). The play of the letter and
the enjoyment it entails is already suggested by the implicit connection
between Krebs's intention to go to Kansas City and get a job there so
that his mother "would feel all right about it," and the *Kansas City Star*,
his father's paper he enjoys reading while taking breakfast (142). In this
sense, going to Kansas implies a symbolical move toward the father,
whose desire is figured metonymically by the *Kansas City Star*, and by
the pleasure of reading the newspaper every morning, *before* his father, a
habit that points to the structuring issues of the Oedipus complex. This,
too, foreshadows Krebs's professional future which is connected with
writing and, therefore, with the possibility to emancipate himself from
the maternal grip. Albeit slightly distorted, the biographical reference is
barely veiled: Hemingway began his career as a journalist at the *Kansas
City Star*, though he did so *before* going to war as a volunteer.

When Hemingway went back home from Italy, he was already a
celebrity (Baker 84), hailed by newspapers such as *The New York Sun* as
a hero who had "defied the shrapnel of the Central Powers" (Lynn 96). Yet,
this heroic return home from the war was marred by arguments with his
mother, Grace Hall Hemingway, who did not let him enjoy his heroic aura
as long as he wished. Kenneth Lynn writes that "[w]hat was particularly
maddening from Ernest's point of view was that his status hadn't changed
after all. It was as if he had never [...] helped to remove the remains of
dead women from a field in Lombardy, or felt the pain of shell fragments
tearing into his flesh" (101). Thus, the non-complaisant reaction of his
mother frustrated and then enraged him. A few months later Hemingway
started working as a reporter for the *Toronto Weekly Star*, before heading
for Europe where he became the European correspondent for the Canadian
paper until 1924. He then established himself as a professional writer.

The fiction explores, albeit cautiously, the relationship with the
all too present mother and the insufficiently present father during that
period of his life. Hemingway's writing is not a matter of reporting exactly
what happened nor imagining some non-existent world, but of *acting*
upon reality through its symbolization. In "Soldier's Home" Krebs's father,
a real estate agent, has a very different job from Hemingway's father,
who was a brilliant obstetrician. The job of Krebs's father (which consists
in selling and buying houses) can be understood as the sublimative
expression of his will to take hold through work of what he has been
dispossessed of, that is, the control of home and its maternal powerful
soul. In this sense, father and son share the same concern and the same
oppressive condition, a commonality that is hinted at by the newspaper
as an object of identification with the father, which belies the explicit
hatred expressed toward him.

So it is not the biographical fact as such that matters here, but
the way writing symbolizes it in the sense of performing it, liberating its
unconscious meaning and channeling the affects that fuel it into meaningful
combinations. While the conclusion of "Soldier's Home" suggests the
obedience to the mother's injunctive wishes and the submission to her
sovereignty, the general frame of the story shows that the rupture with
home and the mother has already taken place. By locating the soldier's
home in Oklahoma, Hemingway has already written, in the sense of acting
out, his ambivalent break with home and family. Oklahoma is a portmanteau
word that combines tellingly Oak and home, thus twisting the notion of
home in two ways. The signifier distorts Oak Park, Hemingway's place
of birth and growth till 1920. But contrary to "Oak Park," which sounds
sweet thanks to the diphthong /əʊk/ in "Oak" and the beautiful image
implied by "Park," Oklahoma associates home to the harsh initial ok, where
the air is constrained by the stop consonant k followed by the liquid l.
Moreover, the signifier sounds especially ambiguous on account of the
final syllable 'ma' which surfaces phonetically in the childish "Mummy"
and of course in "mother." Writing is supposed to rationalize, dramatize,
and symbolize this indestructible knot between home and Mum.

An additional remark can be made here about the evocative and
striking power of writing: Krebs's 'fate' is written in Kansas, which is
not the place of his rebirth as a good citizen, the one whose identity
preexists his own existence and his own existential choices. Hemingway
understood quite early that an authentic writer is an authentic man, one
who first tries to get rid of the alienating forces within, through the rational
analysis of his emotional complex. He writes in *Death in the Afternoon*:
a real estate agent, has a very different job from Hemingway's father,
who was a brilliant obstetrician. The job of Krebs's father (which consists
in selling and buying houses) can be understood as the sublimative
expression of his will to take hold through work of what he has been
dispossessed of, that is, the control of home and its maternal powerful
soul. In this sense, father and son share the same concern and the same
oppressive condition, a commonality that is hinted at by the newspaper
as an object of identification with the father, which belies the explicit
hatred expressed toward him.

So it is not the biographical fact as such that matters here, but
the way writing symbolizes it in the sense of performing it, liberating its
unconscious meaning and channeling the affects that fuel it into meaningful
combinations. While the conclusion of "Soldier's Home" suggests the
obedience to the mother's injunctive wishes and the submission to her
sovereignty, the general frame of the story shows that the rupture with
home and the mother has already taken place. By locating the soldier's
home in Oklahoma, Hemingway has already written, in the sense of acting
out, his ambivalent break with home and family. Oklahoma is a portmanteau
word that combines tellingly Oak and home, thus twisting the notion of
home in two ways. The signifier distorts Oak Park, Hemingway's place
of birth and growth till 1920. But contrary to "Oak Park," which sounds
sweet thanks to the diphthong /əʊk/ in "Oak" and the beautiful image
implied by "Park," Oklahoma associates home to the harsh initial ok, where
the air is constrained by the stop consonant k followed by the liquid l.
Moreover, the signifier sounds especially ambiguous on account of the
final syllable 'ma' which surfaces phonetically in the childish "Mummy"
and of course in "mother." Writing is supposed to rationalize, dramatize,
and symbolize this indestructible knot between home and Mum.

An additional remark can be made here about the evocative and
striking power of writing: Krebs's 'fate' is written in Kansas, which is
not the place of his rebirth as a good citizen, the one whose identity
preexists his own existence and his own existential choices. Hemingway
understood quite early that an authentic writer is an authentic man, one
who first tries to get rid of the alienating forces within, through the rational
analysis of his emotional complex. He writes in *Death in the Afternoon*:
I was trying to write then and I found the greatest difficulty, aside
from knowing truly what you really felt, rather than what you were
supposed to feel, and had been taught to feel, was to put down what
really happened in action; what the actual things were which produced
the emotion that you experienced. (11–12)

In order to reach a high level of self-understanding the artist has
to confront *home* as a place overflown with the confusing desire of the
maternal Other. Krebs has not succeeded to do so yet, but the writer who
organizes his fictional life has. This is why Krebs's fate becomes starkly
etched in the enigmatic dynamics of writing. The reader who loves the
poetic and microtextual incidences of meaning can appreciate the way
the *k* and the *s* phonemes, which frame the two signifiers "Krebs" and
"Kansas," bring another dimension to the text by revealing the other
meaning that the writer gives to work, the work of the letter precisely,
the infinite activity of converting the violence of jouissance and chaos
(KS: *chaos*) into creative language. Not only the chaos of war and its
terrible disorders, but the chaos that the human subject carries within, of
which war is only the most spectacular manifestation. The productivity
of this work presents itself as a formidable liquidation and distribution
of energetic impulses that put the text to work, as the writer strives
uninterruptedly to find a balance between contradictory pressures and
pressuring desires related to the maternal sovereign.

The mother is supreme not only because she is a dominating and
influential person, but also because she is right in pushing her son to
action, getting him out of the depths of melancholia, thus assuming the
defective paternal function. Krebs's aggressiveness, which no doubt
conveys Hemingway's, is determined by the necessity for him to free
himself from home and from the maternal grip. Through writing as an
act of omission, rupture, denial, and symbolization, Hemingway 'commits'
matricide in order to sublimate the invading maternal jouissance.<fnref n="92" /> The
final scene between mother and son is forcefully germane to the story
and to the current discussion.

<footnote n="92">⁹² For a theoretical background to this complex notion of maternal jouissance, see Morel.</footnote>
I was trying to write then and I found the greatest difficulty, aside
from knowing truly what you really felt, rather than what you were
supposed to feel, and had been taught to feel, was to put down what
really happened in action; what the actual things were which produced
the emotion that you experienced. (11–12)

In order to reach a high level of self-understanding the artist has
to confront *home* as a place overflown with the confusing desire of the
maternal Other. Krebs has not succeeded to do so yet, but the writer who
organizes his fictional life has. This is why Krebs's fate becomes starkly
etched in the enigmatic dynamics of writing. The reader who loves the
poetic and microtextual incidences of meaning can appreciate the way
the *k* and the *s* phonemes, which frame the two signifiers "Krebs" and
"Kansas," bring another dimension to the text by revealing the other
meaning that the writer gives to work, the work of the letter precisely,
the infinite activity of converting the violence of jouissance and chaos
(KS: *chaos*) into creative language. Not only the chaos of war and its
terrible disorders, but the chaos that the human subject carries within, of
which war is only the most spectacular manifestation. The productivity
of this work presents itself as a formidable liquidation and distribution
of energetic impulses that put the text to work, as the writer strives
uninterruptedly to find a balance between contradictory pressures and
pressuring desires related to the maternal sovereign.

The mother is supreme not only because she is a dominating and
influential person, but also because she is right in pushing her son to
action, getting him out of the depths of melancholia, thus assuming the
defective paternal function. Krebs's aggressiveness, which no doubt
conveys Hemingway's, is determined by the necessity for him to free
himself from home and from the maternal grip. Through writing as an
act of omission, rupture, denial, and symbolization, Hemingway 'commits'
matricide in order to sublimate the invading maternal jouissance.<fnref n="92" /> The
final scene between mother and son is forcefully germane to the story
and to the current discussion.

<footnote n="92">⁹² For a theoretical background to this complex notion of maternal jouissance, see Morel.</footnote>
In the face of his mother's admonitions Krebs seems frozen like the bacon fat he was about to eat ("Krebs looked at the bacon fat hardening on his plate," 143), a reference to the psychic paralysis caused by the mother's invasive and powerful words that forced him into silence. But how can he oppose this mother who only wants the good of her son, acting and speaking on behalf of that noble and yet so ambiguous affect called love? The subject feels trapped by the language of the mother, which is both intelligent and sentimental. What is more, the mother has a keen sense of observation and seems to be able to see through her son: "'Don't look that way, Harold,' his mother said. 'You know we love you and I want to tell you for your own good how matters stand'" (144). The heroic soldier who, allegedly, stared death in the face, is addressed like a little child who does not know how "matters stand" yet, and who still needs to be reprimanded by his parents.

The mother is all the mightier as her argumentation, not unlike her grammar, is irreproachable. She is the master of knowledge and the master of truth, the one who says how things are exactly and how they should be, leaving no place for doubt or questioning, even more so as her proselytizing is, after all, meant to stir her sluggish son into action. This maternal impeccability proves hard to deal with and to bear, as it chokes down the energies of desire which, in order to develop, need to identify some form of lack, want, and failure in the Other. When the Other bears no mark of lack the subject verges on psychosis. To put an end to his mother's invasive discourse, which is insidiously violent, Krebs mobilizes the energy of cruelty and hatred, and brutally breaks the homogeneous union where she has tried to locate the filial relation between the two:

"Is that all?" Krebs said.

"Yes. Don't you love your mother, dear boy?"

"No," Krebs said.

His mother looked at him across the table. Her eyes were shiny. She started crying.

"I don't love anybody," Krebs said. (144)

Krebs, who cannot inhabit his mother's and his community's world anymore, has to search for new modes of belonging irreducible to that
world and to the identity his mother incarnates. In order to let loose his authentic desires he has to recognize his hatred for home which amounts to the hatred of himself, or, at least, to one part of himself. This is the bitter truth, yet his feelings of guilt still hamper his irresistible though hurtful will for rupture. This is why he feels guilty immediately after the incident, trying therefore to comfort his mother, telling her he "'didn't mean it'":

[...] His mother went on crying. Krebs put his arm on her shoulder.

"Can't you believe me, mother?"

His mother shook her head.

"Please, please, mother. Please believe me."

"All right," his mother said chokily. She looked up at him. "I believe you, Harold."

Krebs kissed her hair. She put her face up to him. (144)

Krebs's reactive kindness toward his mother is obviously motivated by the feeling of guilt she herself has prompted. This guilt peaks when Krebs uses the childish and endearing expression *Mummy*, now proving the effectiveness of maternal sovereignty:

"I'm your mother," she said. "I held you next to my heart when you were a tiny baby."

Krebs felt sick and vaguely nauseated.

"I know, Mummy," he said. "I'll try and be a good boy for you."

"Would you kneel and pray with me, Harold?" his mother asked.

They knelt down beside the dining-room table and Krebs's mother
prayed. (144-145)

The rejection of the mother is a reaction against her dominating power seen also as a castrating threat that probably dates back to early childhood. When called up by the mother, the memory of early childhood does not bring to the sensual surface the feeling of some initial happiness, the melodious music of a lost Eden, but a negative sensation that immediately translates into a symptom of rejection. The mere idea of physical closeness between the two during that phase of absolute
world and to the identity his mother incarnates. In order to let loose his authentic desires he has to recognize his hatred for home which amounts to the hatred of himself, or, at least, to one part of himself. This is the bitter truth, yet his feelings of guilt still hamper his irresistible though hurtful will for rupture. This is why he feels guilty immediately after the incident, trying therefore to comfort his mother, telling her he "'didn't mean it'":

> [...] His mother went on crying. Krebs put his arm on her shoulder.
> "Can't you believe me, mother?"
> His mother shook her head.
> "Please, please, mother. Please believe me."
> "All right," his mother said chokily. She looked up at him. "I believe
> you, Harold."
> Krebs kissed her hair. She put her face up to him. (144)

Krebs's reactive kindness toward his mother is obviously motivated by the feeling of guilt she herself has prompted. This guilt peaks when Krebs uses the childish and endearing expression *Mummy*, now proving the effectiveness of maternal sovereignty:

> "I'm your mother," she said. "I held you next to my heart when you
> were a tiny baby."
> Krebs felt sick and vaguely nauseated.
> "I know, Mummy," he said. "I'll try and be a good boy for you."
> "Would you kneel and pray with me, Harold?" his mother asked.
> They knelt down beside the dining-room table and Krebs's mother
> prayed. (144-145)

The rejection of the mother is a reaction against her dominating power seen also as a castrating threat that probably dates back to early childhood. When called up by the mother, the memory of early childhood does not bring to the sensual surface the feeling of some initial happiness, the melodious music of a lost Eden, but a negative sensation that immediately translates into a symptom of rejection. The mere idea of physical closeness between the two during that phase of absolute
dependence upon the maternal Other, brings back to life infantile traces
probably connected to early incestuous desires not yet symbolized. Indeed,
Krebs's symptom of rejection can also be interpreted as the surge of
unconscious sexual pleasure dating back to archaic pre-symbolic times.
The preverbal jouissance, normally forbidden by the Law of the father,
morphs into a symptomatic reaction against the mother's own blissful
power that held sway during childhood and that still goes on as proved
by the symbolic act of making him kneel down.

Krebs's situation is ambivalent: both trapped and repelled by this
jouissance that holds him from within and from which he has to emancipate
himself. Saying to his mother he does not love her is already an attempt to
*mark* the mother who incarnates the totality of maternal otherness that
still dominates Krebs. The interplay of marking and masking, saying the
truth and lying, is the starting point of a process of rupture Hemingway
has already put in place while writing his story, but that he has to repeat
and confirm through the writing act. Writing (about) home is generated
in between the peremptoriness of *I don't love you*, and the denial implied
by *this is not what I meant*.

The omission of home and especially of the mother from most of
Hemingway's creative work conveys the affective radicality of the subject's
will for rupture, but at the same time omitting one's original home does
not mean annihilating it nor being indifferent to it. Just like negation in
linguistics and psychoanalysis, omission *is* admission. Omitted (textually),
negated (linguistically), denied (psychoanalytically), the maternal figure
combined with the complex effects of home is still present as a congested
affect to deal with repeatedly through a series of dramatizations that
induce the necessary moderation of the death drive and the impulses of
cruelty it conveys. Foreign places and cultures offer some sublimative
possibilities for the protagonist in quest for a subjective home, far from
the original "complicated" one.

Hemingway published in 1935 *The Green Hills of Africa*, a book
where he gave voice to his growingly affective and intercultural relation
with Eastern Africa, and simultaneously his more and more pronounced
rejection of America. It had not been long since he arrived in the Kenyan
dependence upon the maternal Other, brings back to life infantile traces
probably connected to early incestuous desires not yet symbolized. Indeed,
Krebs's symptom of rejection can also be interpreted as the surge of
unconscious sexual pleasure dating back to archaic pre-symbolic times.
The preverbal jouissance, normally forbidden by the Law of the father,
morphs into a symptomatic reaction against the mother's own blissful
power that held sway during childhood and that still goes on as proved
by the symbolic act of making him kneel down.

Krebs's situation is ambivalent: both trapped and repelled by this
jouissance that holds him from within and from which he has to emancipate
himself. Saying to his mother he does not love her is already an attempt to
*mark* the mother who incarnates the totality of maternal otherness that
still dominates Krebs. The interplay of marking and masking, saying the
truth and lying, is the starting point of a process of rupture Hemingway
has already put in place while writing his story, but that he has to repeat
and confirm through the writing act. Writing (about) home is generated
in between the peremptoriness of *I don't love you*, and the denial implied
by *this is not what I meant*.

The omission of home and especially of the mother from most of
Hemingway's creative work conveys the affective radicality of the subject's
will for rupture, but at the same time omitting one's original home does
not mean annihilating it nor being indifferent to it. Just like negation in
linguistics and psychoanalysis, omission *is* admission. Omitted (textually),
negated (linguistically), denied (psychoanalytically), the maternal figure
combined with the complex effects of home is still present as a congested
affect to deal with repeatedly through a series of dramatizations that
induce the necessary moderation of the death drive and the impulses of
cruelty it conveys. Foreign places and cultures offer some sublimative
possibilities for the protagonist in quest for a subjective home, far from
the original "complicated" one.

Hemingway published in 1935 *The Green Hills of Africa*, a book
where he gave voice to his growingly affective and intercultural relation
with Eastern Africa, and simultaneously his more and more pronounced
rejection of America. It had not been long since he arrived in the Kenyan
wilderness, and yet Hemingway (or his persona) already felt "homesick":
"All I wanted to do now was get back to Africa. We had not left it, yet,
but when I would wake in the night I would lie, listening, homesick for
it already" (76). Now that the safari was nearly over he delivered his
thoughts on his homeland in striking words, while expressing his desire
for inhabiting the world authentically:

[...] I would come back to [Africa] where it pleased me to live; to really
live. Not just to let my life pass. Our people went to America because
that was the place to go then. It had been a good country and we had
made a mess of it and I would go, now, somewhere else as we had
always had the right to go somewhere else and as we had always
gone. Now I would go somewhere else. (274-275)

Hemingway would write nearly twenty years later in the posthumously
published book on his second safari to Africa, *True at First Light*, that
he "[...] had been a fool not to have stayed on in Africa and instead had
gone back to America [in 1933] where [he] had killed [his] homesickness
for Africa in different ways" (162). His involvement in the Spanish Civil
War and, later, in World War II, and his move to and permanent residence
in Cuba, barred him for more than two decades from going back "home"
to Africa. When he finally did in 1953-1954 he became a member of one
of the local Kamba tribes he admired so much, thus carrying Africa in
his heart forever. Hemingway's rejection of home is accordingly cultural
(or ideological) and affective. The love of this finally found and founded
subjective home is based upon the dolorous ruins of the objective original
one, negated, rejected, and, on the whole, omitted.

The awareness of being a stranger to one's own family and homeland,
which came up progressively in the 1930s, surges sharply and bitterly
through Robert Jordan's monologue in *For Whom the Bell Tolls* (1940), a
novel that stages the fraternity of humans beyond frontiers—geographical
and ideological—as announced by its very title from John Donne's
"Meditation XVII." The only real family recognized by Jordan are his
brothers in arms now fighting the Fascists: "But you have no house and
no courtyard in your no-house, he thought. You have no family but a
wilderness, and yet Hemingway (or his persona) already felt "homesick":
"All I wanted to do now was get back to Africa. We had not left it, yet,
but when I would wake in the night I would lie, listening, homesick for
it already" (76). Now that the safari was nearly over he delivered his
thoughts on his homeland in striking words, while expressing his desire
for inhabiting the world authentically:

[...] I would come back to [Africa] where it pleased me to live; to really
live. Not just to let my life pass. Our people went to America because
that was the place to go then. It had been a good country and we had
made a mess of it and I would go, now, somewhere else as we had
always had the right to go somewhere else and as we had always
gone. Now I would go somewhere else. (274-275)

Hemingway would write nearly twenty years later in the posthumously
published book on his second safari to Africa, *True at First Light*, that
he "[...] had been a fool not to have stayed on in Africa and instead had
gone back to America [in 1933] where [he] had killed [his] homesickness
for Africa in different ways" (162). His involvement in the Spanish Civil
War and, later, in World War II, and his move to and permanent residence
in Cuba, barred him for more than two decades from going back "home"
to Africa. When he finally did in 1953-1954 he became a member of one
of the local Kamba tribes he admired so much, thus carrying Africa in
his heart forever. Hemingway's rejection of home is accordingly cultural
(or ideological) and affective. The love of this finally found and founded
subjective home is based upon the dolorous ruins of the objective original
one, negated, rejected, and, on the whole, omitted.

The awareness of being a stranger to one's own family and homeland,
which came up progressively in the 1930s, surges sharply and bitterly
through Robert Jordan's monologue in *For Whom the Bell Tolls* (1940), a
novel that stages the fraternity of humans beyond frontiers—geographical
and ideological—as announced by its very title from John Donne's
"Meditation XVII." The only real family recognized by Jordan are his
brothers in arms now fighting the Fascists: "But you have no house and
no courtyard in your no-house, he thought. You have no family but a
brother who goes to battle tomorrow and you won nothing but the wind
and the sun and an empty belly" (376). The final triad brings together a
sense of immanence combined with a will for transcendence or holistic
awareness. The body and its pressures are fundamental elements in the
awareness of oneself as an existing subject, but only after recognizing
oneself through a global perception of belonging. This is probably what
Harry's ultimate "flight" toward the top of Kilimanjaro refers to at the
end of Hemingway's second "African" story, "The Snows of Kilimanjaro"
(1936). Hemingway mentions the Kilimanjaro in the epigraphic introduction
of the story as "the House of God." The meaning of this cultural reference
comes full circle in the final masterful sylleptic passage on the flight of
Harry's soul toward the top of the Kilimanjaro, which appears to him "as
wide as all the world, great, high, and unbelievably white in the sun" (78).

The flight, as experienced in and through Harry's dying mind, is
therefore a return to the original "House." Harry is about to inhabit the
only House fit for his powerful and absolute desire of connectedness,
now appropriated through the East-African culture he has already made
a home of. That belief and the desire of Africa at large are made alive and
communicable—as much as Hemingway's poetics of suggestion allows—in
the fiction, which has become the writer's real home, as "wide" as the
international geography and transnational culture he both created and
enjoyed. A home which is, just like the "square top of the Kilimanjaro"
(78), extensive and inclusive enough to embrace the whole world, and
complex enough to sublimate the maternal sovereign.
brother who goes to battle tomorrow and you won nothing but the wind
and the sun and an empty belly" (376). The final triad brings together a
sense of immanence combined with a will for transcendence or holistic
awareness. The body and its pressures are fundamental elements in the
awareness of oneself as an existing subject, but only after recognizing
oneself through a global perception of belonging. This is probably what
Harry's ultimate "flight" toward the top of Kilimanjaro refers to at the
end of Hemingway's second "African" story, "The Snows of Kilimanjaro"
(1936). Hemingway mentions the Kilimanjaro in the epigraphic introduction
of the story as "the House of God." The meaning of this cultural reference
comes full circle in the final masterful sylleptic passage on the flight of
Harry's soul toward the top of the Kilimanjaro, which appears to him "as
wide as all the world, great, high, and unbelievably white in the sun" (78).

The flight, as experienced in and through Harry's dying mind, is
therefore a return to the original "House." Harry is about to inhabit the
only House fit for his powerful and absolute desire of connectedness,
now appropriated through the East-African culture he has already made
a home of. That belief and the desire of Africa at large are made alive and
communicable—as much as Hemingway's poetics of suggestion allows—in
the fiction, which has become the writer's real home, as "wide" as the
international geography and transnational culture he both created and
enjoyed. A home which is, just like the "square top of the Kilimanjaro"
(78), extensive and inclusive enough to embrace the whole world, and
complex enough to sublimate the maternal sovereign.
Works cited

BACHELARD, Gaston. *The Poetics of Space*. 1958. Trans. Maria Jolas. Boston, Beacon Press, 1994.

BAKER, Carlos. 1969. *Hemingway. A Life Story*. Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1972.

COWLEY, Malcolm. *Exile's Return: A Literary Odyssey of the 1920s*. 1934. Ed. Donald Faulkner. New York, Penguin Books, 1994.

DE BAERDEMAEKER, Ruben. "Performative Patterns in Hemingway's 'Soldier's Home.'" *The Hemingway Review*, vol. 27, n° 1, Fall 2007, pp. 55-73.

FARRELL, Suzan Elizabeth. "'Isn't it Pretty to Think so?': Ernest Hemingway's Impossible Homes." *Imaginary Home: American War Fiction from Hemingway to 9/11*. Rochester, New York, Camden House, 2017.

HEIDEGGER, Martin. "Hebel, l'ami de la maison." Trans. Julien Hervier. *Questions III*. Paris, Gallimard, 1966.

HEMINGWAY, Ernest. *in our time*. Paris, Three Mountains Press, 1924.

—. *In Our Time*. New York, Boni and Liveright, 1925.

—. *The Sun Also Rises*. 1926. New York, Scribner's, 1970.

—. *Men Without Women*. New York, Scribner's, 1927.

—. *A Farewell to Arms*. 1929. Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1935.

—. *Death in the Afternoon*. 1932. New York, Scribner, Simon & Schuster, "Scribner Classics," 2002.

—. *The Green Hills of Africa*. 1935. London, Jonathan Cape, 1936.

—. *The Short Stories*. 1938. New York, Scribner, Simon & Schuster, "Scribner Classics," 1997.

—. *To Have and Have Not*. New York, Scribner's, 1937.

—. *The Garden of Eden*. New York, Scribner's, 1986.

—. *For Whom the Bell Tolls*. 1940. New York, Scribner's, 2019.

—. *True at First Light*. London, Arrow Books, 1999.

LYNN, Kenneth S. *Hemingway*. New York, Simon & Schuster, 1987.

MOREL, Geneviève. *La Loi de la mère. Essai sur le sinthome sexuel*. Paris, Anthropos, 2008.

SMALL, Alex. "Thirst for Booze and for Liberty Sends Americans Abroad." *Paris Tribune*, 20 Sept. 1929. *The Left Bank Revisited: Selections from the Paris Tribune*. 1917-1934. Ed. Hugh Ford. University Park, Pennsylvania State UP, 1972, p. 51.
Works cited

BACHELARD, Gaston. *The Poetics of Space*. 1958. Trans. Maria Jolas. Boston, Beacon Press, 1994.

BAKER, Carlos. 1969. *Hemingway. A Life Story*. Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1972.

COWLEY, Malcolm. *Exile's Return: A Literary Odyssey of the 1920s*. 1934. Ed. Donald Faulkner. New York, Penguin Books, 1994.

DE BAERDEMAEKER, Ruben. "Performative Patterns in Hemingway's 'Soldier's Home.'" *The Hemingway Review*, vol. 27, n° 1, Fall 2007, pp. 55-73.

FARRELL, Suzan Elizabeth. "'Isn't it Pretty to Think so?': Ernest Hemingway's Impossible Homes." *Imaginary Home: American War Fiction from Hemingway to 9/11*. Rochester, New York, Camden House, 2017.

HEIDEGGER, Martin. "Hebel, l'ami de la maison." Trans. Julien Hervier. *Questions III*. Paris, Gallimard, 1966.

HEMINGWAY, Ernest. *in our time*. Paris, Three Mountains Press, 1924.

—. *In Our Time*. New York, Boni and Liveright, 1925.

—. *The Sun Also Rises*. 1926. New York, Scribner's, 1970.

—. *Men Without Women*. New York, Scribner's, 1927.

—. *A Farewell to Arms*. 1929. Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1935.

—. *Death in the Afternoon*. 1932. New York, Scribner, Simon & Schuster, "Scribner Classics," 2002.

—. *The Green Hills of Africa*. 1935. London, Jonathan Cape, 1936.

—. *The Short Stories*. 1938. New York, Scribner, Simon & Schuster, "Scribner Classics," 1997.

—. *To Have and Have Not*. New York, Scribner's, 1937.

—. *The Garden of Eden*. New York, Scribner's, 1986.

—. *For Whom the Bell Tolls*. 1940. New York, Scribner's, 2019.

—. *True at First Light*. London, Arrow Books, 1999.

LYNN, Kenneth S. *Hemingway*. New York, Simon & Schuster, 1987.

MOREL, Geneviève. *La Loi de la mère. Essai sur le sinthome sexuel*. Paris, Anthropos, 2008.

SMALL, Alex. "Thirst for Booze and for Liberty Sends Americans Abroad." *Paris Tribune*, 20 Sept. 1929. *The Left Bank Revisited: Selections from the Paris Tribune*. 1917-1934. Ed. Hugh Ford. University Park, Pennsylvania State UP, 1972, p. 51.
Chapter 6

American Wanderings
and Anchorings:
F. Scott and Zelda
Fitzgerald's Nomadic
Artistic Home

Elisabeth Bouzonviller
Chapter 6

American Wanderings
and Anchorings:
F. Scott and Zelda
Fitzgerald's Nomadic
Artistic Home

Elisabeth Bouzonviller
<figure><img src="image_11.png" /></figure>
<figure><img src="image_11.png" /></figure>
Chapter 6

In F. Scott Fitzgerald's "The Hotel Child," the Schwartzes intend to go "home" after "three years" during which they have "lived in hotels—in Paris, Florence, St Raphael, Como, Vichy, La Baule, Lucerne, Baden-Baden and Biarritz" (Short Stories 606). When the story opens, Fifi rebels: "Mother wants to take me back to America, but I'm not going" (607). Eventually, after various mishaps, the end of the story remains uncertain about the family's geographical intentions, "'We've got to go back and testify, and we'll stay a few months anyhow,'" Fifi says (615). In their own way, the Fitzgeralds were hotel children themselves. They never owned a house and wandered between the United States and Europe, even as far as North Africa, between St Paul, New York, Montgomery and Hollywood, without settling anywhere, only stopping for a few days or months at hotels, rented apartments and villas. Their fictional works stage the turbulence of urban life and the transatlantic exchanges of the age, while their life narratives and Zelda's paintings are also proof of a restless existence within a world that Henry James had predicted would become as small as "an orange,"<fnref n="93" /> that Henry Adams believed was caught in an entropy process<fnref n="94" /> and that Marc Augé describes today as "shrinking,"<fnref n="95" /> thus echoing James's foresight.

<footnote n="93">⁹³ "Who shall say, at the rate things are going, what is to be 'near' home in the future and what is to be far from it? [...] The globe is fast **shrinking**, for the imagination, to the size of an orange that can be played with; the hurry to and fro over its surface is that of ants when you turn up a stone [...]" (James 650). My emphasis.</footnote>

<footnote n="94">⁹⁴ Chapter XXXIV of *The Education of Henry Adams* is entitled "A Law of Acceleration" (489-498) and concludes: "The movement from unity into multiplicity, between 1200 and 1900, was unbroken in sequence, and rapid in acceleration" (Adams 498).</footnote>

<footnote n="95">⁹⁵ My translation from the original French "rétrécissement de la planète" (Augé 44).</footnote>
Chapter 6

In F. Scott Fitzgerald's "The Hotel Child," the Schwartzes intend to go "home" after "three years" during which they have "lived in hotels—in Paris, Florence, St Raphael, Como, Vichy, La Baule, Lucerne, Baden-Baden and Biarritz" (Short Stories 606). When the story opens, FiFi rebels: "Mother wants to take me back to America, but I'm not going" (607). Eventually, after various mishaps, the end of the story remains uncertain about the family's geographical intentions, "'We've got to go back and testify, and we'll stay a few months anyhow,'" FiFi says (615). In their own way, the Fitzgeralds were hotel children themselves. They never owned a house and wandered between the United States and Europe, even as far as North Africa, between St Paul, New York, Montgomery and Hollywood, without settling anywhere, only stopping for a few days or months at hotels, rented apartments and villas. Their fictional works stage the turbulence of urban life and the transatlantic exchanges of the age, while their life narratives and Zelda's paintings are also proof of a restless existence within a world that Henry James had predicted would become as small as "an orange,"<fnref n="93" /> that Henry Adams believed was caught in an entropy process<fnref n="94" /> and that Marc Augé describes today as "shrinking,"<fnref n="95" /> thus echoing James's foresight.

<footnote n="93">⁹³ "Who shall say, at the rate things are going, what is to be 'near' home in the future and what is to be far from it? [...] The globe is fast **shrinking**, for the imagination, to the size of an orange that can be played with; the hurry to and fro over its surface is that of ants when you turn up a stone [...]" (James 650). My emphasis.</footnote>

<footnote n="94">⁹⁴ Chapter XXXIV of *The Education of Henry Adams* is entitled "A Law of Acceleration" (489-498) and concludes: "The movement from unity into multiplicity, between 1200 and 1900, was unbroken in sequence, and rapid in acceleration" (Adams 498).</footnote>

<footnote n="95">⁹⁵ My translation from the original French "rétrécissement de la planète" (Augé 44).</footnote>
In their artistic production, the Fitzgeralds captured this nomadism which had replaced homes by "non-places," those spaces of transience lacking roots and anthropological meaning according to Augé (100). In their own specific ways, through their works, they made a home out of the fleeting places they passed through during their national and international travels. Relying on some of Scott's and Zelda's self-narratives and her paintings (Lanahan), I intend to explore how they both expressed the wandering quality of their lives and the dynamism of modernity, or even "supermodernity," which is the term used by Augé (100), but I shall underline that their homelessness led to contrasting explorations and representations. While Scott's texts keep recalling his American rootedness despite restlessness, Zelda's works appear as an exploration of a much more intimate space behind an impersonal façade.

# 1. Hotel Children

On April 3rd, 1920 the Fitzgeralds married in the Rectory of St Patrick's Cathedral in New York, away from their homes and parents. Zelda's three sisters attended the wedding, but her parents had not made the trip from Montgomery and neither had Scott's from St Paul. No party or wedding lunch concluded the day, and they honeymooned at the Biltmore Hotel at 43rd Street and Vanderbilt Avenue, from which they were eventually expelled for disturbing other guests. Then they settled at the Commodore, two blocks away on 42nd Street. In "'Show Mr. and Mrs. F. to Number—'," first published in *Esquire* in May-June 1934, Zelda chronologically recalls the hotels where they stayed from 1920 to 1933 (419-431). Thus, her article opens on "the Biltmore paneled luxe" and "'[t]he faded rose corridors of the Commodore [which] end in subways and subterranean metropolises" (419). For the newlyweds, this transitory accommodation rhymes with ceaseless movements as Zelda overlooks the rooms themselves and focuses on "the sway of the first bobbed heads," the "corridors," "the revolving door" and bustling underground passages (419). As Bruccoli notices, "'[d]uring the spring of 1920, Fitzgerald tried to be a writer in the confusion of hotel rooms" (*Some Sort* 163). "After a month of New York hotel life [they] were in need of a place where he
In their artistic production, the Fitzgeralds captured this nomadism which had replaced homes by "non-places," those spaces of transience lacking roots and anthropological meaning according to Augé (100). In their own specific ways, through their works, they made a home out of the fleeting places they passed through during their national and international travels. Relying on some of Scott's and Zelda's self-narratives and her paintings (Lanahan), I intend to explore how they both expressed the wandering quality of their lives and the dynamism of modernity, or even "supermodernity," which is the term used by Augé (100), but I shall underline that their homelessness led to contrasting explorations and representations. While Scott's texts keep recalling his American rootedness despite restlessness, Zelda's works appear as an exploration of a much more intimate space behind an impersonal façade.

# 1. Hotel Children

On April 3rd, 1920 the Fitzgeralds married in the Rectory of St Patrick's Cathedral in New York, away from their homes and parents. Zelda's three sisters attended the wedding, but her parents had not made the trip from Montgomery and neither had Scott's from St Paul. No party or wedding lunch concluded the day, and they honeymooned at the Biltmore Hotel at 43rd Street and Vanderbilt Avenue, from which they were eventually expelled for disturbing other guests. Then they settled at the Commodore, two blocks away on 42nd Street. In "'Show Mr. and Mrs. F. to Number—'," first published in *Esquire* in May-June 1934, Zelda chronologically recalls the hotels where they stayed from 1920 to 1933 (419-431). Thus, her article opens on "the Biltmore paneled luxe" and "'[t]he faded rose corridors of the Commodore [which] end in subways and subterranean metropolises" (419). For the newlyweds, this transitory accommodation rhymes with ceaseless movements as Zelda overlooks the rooms themselves and focuses on "the sway of the first bobbed heads," the "corridors," "the revolving door" and bustling underground passages (419). As Bruccoli notices, "'[d]uring the spring of 1920, Fitzgerald tried to be a writer in the confusion of hotel rooms" (*Some Sort* 163). "After a month of New York hotel life [they] were in need of a place where he
could work without distractions and she could swim and amuse herself" (Some Sort 167), therefore they bought a Marmon touring car—"a broken Marmon," says Zelda ("Show" 419). In May 1920, they moved to Westport, Connecticut, where they rented the Wakeman House on Compo Road near the Long Island Sound until October when they moved back to New York City "at 38 West 59th Street between Fifth and Sixth avenues, [...] near the Plaza Hotel, from which they could order meals" (Some Sort 169). This was the beginning of their wandering married life, which included travelling back and fro within the United States, but also staying almost six years abroad, mainly in Paris and on the French Riviera. Indeed, they first sailed to Europe on May 3rd, 1921 to be back home in July. Their second crossing was in early May 1924 with a return in December 1926. They were in Paris again in April 1928 and back in the United States on October 7th. Eventually, they left one last time for Europe in March 1929 with a sad return due to Zelda's health condition on September 15th, 1931. Despite its American enrooting, since they regularly went back to their families and stayed in various American towns and cities for professional or personal reasons, this type of nomadic life and their lack of regular earnings prevented them from ever acquiring a home of their own.

Their ceaseless moving from hotels to other hotels, but also from rented houses to temporary apartments, is consequently a feature of their self-narratives which often turn out to be travelers' narratives. In 1924, Scott published several of these which all emphasize their restlessness and lack of stability. *The Cruise of the Rolling Junk*, written earlier but published in installments in *Motor* in February, March and April 1924, recalls their 1,200-mile road trip from Westport to Montgomery in July 1920. "How to Live on $ 36,000 a Year," published in the *Saturday Evening Post* on April 5th, 1924 and followed on September 20th by "How to live on Practically Nothing a Year," tackles the topic of money and traveling, and how they decided to move to France in early May of that same year.

At the beginning of *The Cruise of the Rolling Junk*, the young couple are elated to be on the move and leave behind "the dullness and the tears and disillusion of all the stationary world" (33). During this trip, the Fitzgeralds' Marmon, transformed into a fictional Expenso, becomes their dilapidated, although cherished, home while they stop on the way
could work without distractions and she could swim and amuse herself" (Some Sort 167), therefore they bought a Marmon touring car—"a broken Marmon," says Zelda ("Show" 419). In May 1920, they moved to Westport, Connecticut, where they rented the Wakeman House on Compo Road near the Long Island Sound until October when they moved back to New York City "at 38 West 59th Street between Fifth and Sixth avenues, [...] near the Plaza Hotel, from which they could order meals" (Some Sort 169). This was the beginning of their wandering married life, which included travelling back and fro within the United States, but also staying almost six years abroad, mainly in Paris and on the French Riviera. Indeed, they first sailed to Europe on May 3rd, 1921 to be back home in July. Their second crossing was in early May 1924 with a return in December 1926. They were in Paris again in April 1928 and back in the United States on October 7th. Eventually, they left one last time for Europe in March 1929 with a sad return due to Zelda's health condition on September 15th, 1931. Despite its American enrooting, since they regularly went back to their families and stayed in various American towns and cities for professional or personal reasons, this type of nomadic life and their lack of regular earnings prevented them from ever acquiring a home of their own.

Their ceaseless moving from hotels to other hotels, but also from rented houses to temporary apartments, is consequently a feature of their self-narratives which often turn out to be travelers' narratives. In 1924, Scott published several of these which all emphasize their restlessness and lack of stability. *The Cruise of the Rolling Junk*, written earlier but published in installments in *Motor* in February, March and April 1924, recalls their 1,200-mile road trip from Westport to Montgomery in July 1920. "How to Live on $ 36,000 a Year," published in the *Saturday Evening Post* on April 5th, 1924 and followed on September 20th by "How to live on Practically Nothing a Year," tackles the topic of money and traveling, and how they decided to move to France in early May of that same year.

At the beginning of *The Cruise of the Rolling Junk*, the young couple are elated to be on the move and leave behind "the dullness and the tears and disillusion of all the stationary world" (33). During this trip, the Fitzgeralds' Marmon, transformed into a fictional Expenso, becomes their dilapidated, although cherished, home while they stop on the way
Later on, in Richmond, they rely on the same introductory words as at
the Willard to obtain "a room with a bath" and unexpectedly get "the
bridal suite—an immense and imponderable affair as melancholy as a
manufacturer's tomb" (*Cruise* 60). The funeral vocabulary is only a prelude
to a macabre discovery as they find "a piece of tongue" on the carpet
in another very comic scene involving the hilarious contrasted reactions
of the outraged guests and the unemotional, deferential staff (60–61).
Zelda's memory of the place avoids the gruesome detail but conjures up
a gothic dimension redolent of romantic entrapment as she describes the
hotel "marble stair and long unopened rooms and marble statues of the
gods lost somewhere in its echoing cells" ("Show" 419).

As they progress further South, hotel accommodation worsens, for
example in Clarksville, Virginia, at the Dominion Hotel, where the travelers
are "not nearly so well housed as the Rolling Junk" with no food and no
hot water for their baths (Cruise 64). Next, about the O. Henry Hotel in
Greensboro, North Carolina, both narrators comment respectively on the
muddy red water in the tub and Scott notices "the elaborate hostelry"
which leads Zelda to hide her traveler's knickerbockers under a skirt for
propriety (Cruise 71, "Show" 419). Then, before arriving in Montgomery,
they both record one more hotel night at Athens, Georgia (Cruise 82,
"Show" 420). There, they are given "a salesman's display room—a huge
chamber with sample tables and a business-like air, haunted by the
pleasant ghosts of lazy southern commerce" (Cruise 82), and they leave
"at dawn" ("Show" 420) to the dismay of a "drowsy clerk" and a "drowsy
watchman" (Cruise 83).

Along the way, all these hotels are always very briefly described,
several recalling the anonymous salesmen who have stayed there on their
way toward professional destinations, and nobody being met apart from
the furtive staff. Through an accumulation process, Zelda's long list of
hotels paradoxically manages to fuse them together despite its precision
and operates a kind of anonymization effect. In the end, the travelers
never manage to inhabit those places; they just stop over for the night
and establish no links either with people or the environment, they do
not even describe their being there, they come and go while thinking of
the outside, which is to them a sign of the remoteness of the South at
Later on, in Richmond, they rely on the same introductory words as at
the Willard to obtain "a room with a bath" and unexpectedly get "the
bridal suite—an immense and imponderable affair as melancholy as a
manufacturer's tomb" (*Cruise* 60). The funeral vocabulary is only a prelude
to a macabre discovery as they find "a piece of tongue" on the carpet
in another very comic scene involving the hilarious contrasted reactions
of the outraged guests and the unemotional, deferential staff (60–61).
Zelda's memory of the place avoids the gruesome detail but conjures up
a gothic dimension redolent of romantic entrapment as she describes the
hotel "marble stair and long unopened rooms and marble statues of the
gods lost somewhere in its echoing cells" ("Show" 419).

As they progress further South, hotel accommodation worsens, for
example in Clarksville, Virginia, at the Dominion Hotel, where the travelers
are "not nearly so well housed as the Rolling Junk" with no food and no
hot water for their baths (Cruise 64). Next, about the O. Henry Hotel in
Greensboro, North Carolina, both narrators comment respectively on the
muddy red water in the tub and Scott notices "the elaborate hostelry"
which leads Zelda to hide her traveler's knickerbockers under a skirt for
propriety (Cruise 71, "Show" 419). Then, before arriving in Montgomery,
they both record one more hotel night at Athens, Georgia (Cruise 82,
"Show" 420). There, they are given "a salesman's display room—a huge
chamber with sample tables and a business-like air, haunted by the
pleasant ghosts of lazy southern commerce" (Cruise 82), and they leave
"at dawn" ("Show" 420) to the dismay of a "drowsy clerk" and a "drowsy
watchman" (Cruise 83).

Along the way, all these hotels are always very briefly described,
several recalling the anonymous salesmen who have stayed there on their
way toward professional destinations, and nobody being met apart from
the furtive staff. Through an accumulation process, Zelda's long list of
hotels paradoxically manages to fuse them together despite its precision
and operates a kind of anonymization effect. In the end, the travelers
never manage to inhabit those places; they just stop over for the night
and establish no links either with people or the environment, they do
not even describe their being there, they come and go while thinking of
the outside, which is to them a sign of the remoteness of the South at
first and then of its exciting, progressive approach. The South seems to
get closer as they see girls dressed in organdy ("Show" 420) or muslin
(Cruise 82), and as they notice African Americans in the fields and towns.
The red water of the tub is also a sign that they are close to Zelda's home
with its typically southern, red-earthed ground. Clearly those hotels are
"non-places," as termed by Augé, although the anthropologist applied
his neologism to a much later period. The travelers go through them, like
the preceding salesmen, and those overnight stopovers conjure up no
sense of belonging. They are dots on a route map, left behind as soon
as they are reached. They herald Augé's "supermodernity" of speed and
excess with its anonymous places devoid of roots, identity and human
relationships (100). In that respect, it is meaningful to notice that in her
Esquire publication, Zelda locates the O. Henry Hotel in Greensville, South
Carolina whereas, it was actually located in Greensboro, North Carolina,
two hundred miles north ("Show" 419). This mix-up precisely recalls the
mistake made by Scott as regards the place where he had asked his bank
to wire them money. In Washington, he had optimistically asked for the
money to be sent to Greenville, South Carolina (Cruise 55), whereas their
tired vehicle takes them only to Greensboro, North Carolina, at the end
of Part Two of the narrative (70-71). Hence, the reason for Part Three
to open with: "Greenville or starve!" (73). Zelda's mistake when she
wrote her article fourteen years later is not surprising and confirms the
anonymous quality of those hotels, "non-places" that fade away from
memory since they are part of a series of places lacking enrooting and
personal connections. Her taxonomic narrative gives an impression of
fleeting time and places, emphasizing more than ever those "non-places"
where the characters only pass through without meeting anyone and
noticing anything striking, although they sometimes stay at fashionable,
luxury hotels. This is precisely in keeping with Augé's theory that "[t]he
traveler's space [is ...] the prototype of non-places."<fnref n="96" /> For the year 1921,
for example, Zelda rapidly mentions a succession of hotels in London,
Paris, Venice, Florence, Rome and eventually St Paul, and never dwells on
the exciting exoticism and singularity of these European landmarks, thus

<footnote n="96">⁹⁶ My translation from the original French "L'espace du voyageur serait [...] l'archétype du non-lieu" (107).</footnote>
first and then of its exciting, progressive approach. The South seems to
get closer as they see girls dressed in organdy ("Show" 420) or muslin
(Cruise 82), and as they notice African Americans in the fields and towns.
The red water of the tub is also a sign that they are close to Zelda's home
with its typically southern, red-earthed ground. Clearly those hotels are
"non-places," as termed by Augé, although the anthropologist applied
his neologism to a much later period. The travelers go through them, like
the preceding salesmen, and those overnight stopovers conjure up no
sense of belonging. They are dots on a route map, left behind as soon
as they are reached. They herald Augé's "supermodernity" of speed and
excess with its anonymous places devoid of roots, identity and human
relationships (100). In that respect, it is meaningful to notice that in her
Esquire publication, Zelda locates the O. Henry Hotel in Greensville, South
Carolina whereas, it was actually located in Greensboro, North Carolina,
two hundred miles north ("Show" 419). This mix-up precisely recalls the
mistake made by Scott as regards the place where he had asked his bank
to wire them money. In Washington, he had optimistically asked for the
money to be sent to Greenville, South Carolina (Cruise 55), whereas their
tired vehicle takes them only to Greensboro, North Carolina, at the end
of Part Two of the narrative (70-71). Hence, the reason for Part Three
to open with: "Greenville or starve!" (73). Zelda's mistake when she
wrote her article fourteen years later is not surprising and confirms the
anonymous quality of those hotels, "non-places" that fade away from
memory since they are part of a series of places lacking enrooting and
personal connections. Her taxonomic narrative gives an impression of
fleeting time and places, emphasizing more than ever those "non-places"
where the characters only pass through without meeting anyone and
noticing anything striking, although they sometimes stay at fashionable,
luxury hotels. This is precisely in keeping with Augé's theory that "[t]he
traveler's space [is ...] the prototype of non-places."<fnref n="96" /> For the year 1921,
for example, Zelda rapidly mentions a succession of hotels in London,
Paris, Venice, Florence, Rome and eventually St Paul, and never dwells on
the exciting exoticism and singularity of these European landmarks, thus

<footnote n="96">⁹⁶ My translation from the original French "L'espace du voyageur serait [...] l'archétype du non-lieu" (107).</footnote>
conjuring up blasé travelers. It is meaningful that for their second stay in London she should comment on "the waiter [who] didn't care whether [they] left or not, and [who] was [their] only contact" ("Show" 420). The description of this sort of "non-place," despite its architectural beauty, emphasizes the travelers' isolation and recalls Augé's claim that "[t]he space of non-places creates neither singular identities, nor relationships, but only solitude and similitude."<fnref n="97" />

This anonymity echoes the deserted cubistic paintings Zelda made of New York and Paris in the 1940's. Those places where they had lived are shown through their famous architectural landmarks but seem devoid of inhabitants, only objects are sometimes left in the foreground, bearing witness to previous human presence but not particularly to meetings. They are a proof of the solitude and emptiness of the great, beautiful cities that Edward Hopper would tackle in his own way although his cityscapes include lonely human figures. As Kathryn Seidel, Alexis and Alvin Wang notice about Zelda's *Time Square*, for example, "Dark, turbulent clouds are in the sky, tall imposing buildings replace people, all of which suggest the coldness and dehumanizing quality of the modern" (148). The same human emptiness and solitude are to be found in the Parisian landscapes of *Notre Dame Cathedral, Place de l'Opera, The Pantheon and Luxembourg Gardens* (Lanahan 57-59), people being at best replaced by empty cars and carriages or abandoned personal objects. Thus, in both the Fitzgeralds' self-narratives and in Zelda's paintings, the travelers are restless, life is a ceaseless succession of journeys, and hotels are necessary stops that leave only very elusive memories as opposed to a chosen, cared-for home, which they actually never had in real life nor managed to imagine in their art works.

"How to Live on $ 36,000 a Year" sets the tone of this nomadic life spent in hotels. It starts with a narrator who feels confident about his financial means due to his hotel choice, although he has actually no money left: "[...] why, it was impossible that I should be poor! I was living at the best hotel in New York!" (89). After a trip to Europe and the birth

<footnote n="97">⁹⁷ My translation from the original French "L'espace du non-lieu ne crée ni identité singulière, ni relation, mais solitude et similitude" (Augé 130).</footnote>
conjuring up blasé travelers. It is meaningful that for their second stay in London she should comment on "the waiter [who] didn't care whether [they] left or not, and [who] was [their] only contact" ("Show" 420). The description of this sort of "non-place," despite its architectural beauty, emphasizes the travelers' isolation and recalls Augé's claim that "[t]he space of non-places creates neither singular identities, nor relationships, but only solitude and similitude."<fnref n="97" />

This anonymity echoes the deserted cubistic paintings Zelda made of New York and Paris in the 1940's. Those places where they had lived are shown through their famous architectural landmarks but seem devoid of inhabitants, only objects are sometimes left in the foreground, bearing witness to previous human presence but not particularly to meetings. They are a proof of the solitude and emptiness of the great, beautiful cities that Edward Hopper would tackle in his own way although his cityscapes include lonely human figures. As Kathryn Seidel, Alexis and Alvin Wang notice about Zelda's *Time Square*, for example, "Dark, turbulent clouds are in the sky, tall imposing buildings replace people, all of which suggest the coldness and dehumanizing quality of the modern" (148). The same human emptiness and solitude are to be found in the Parisian landscapes of *Notre Dame Cathedral, Place de l'Opera, The Pantheon and Luxembourg Gardens* (Lanahan 57-59), people being at best replaced by empty cars and carriages or abandoned personal objects. Thus, in both the Fitzgeralds' self-narratives and in Zelda's paintings, the travelers are restless, life is a ceaseless succession of journeys, and hotels are necessary stops that leave only very elusive memories as opposed to a chosen, cared-for home, which they actually never had in real life nor managed to imagine in their art works.

"How to Live on $ 36,000 a Year" sets the tone of this nomadic life spent in hotels. It starts with a narrator who feels confident about his financial means due to his hotel choice, although he has actually no money left: "[...] why, it was impossible that I should be poor! I was living at the best hotel in New York!" (89). After a trip to Europe and the birth

<footnote n="97">⁹⁷ My translation from the original French "L'espace du non-lieu ne crée ni identité singulière, ni relation, mais solitude et similitude" (Augé 130).</footnote>
of their child, he explains that they have moved “to a town about fifteen
miles from New York, where [they have] rented a house for $300 a month”
(89); it was actually located at 6 Gateway Drive, Great Neck, Long Island.
He then dreams of buying a house once his play<fnref n="98" /> has succeeded (91-92),
which unfortunately fails and leads him ironically to imagine “[getting]
in touch with a reliable poorhouse where [they] could hire a room and
bath for nothing a week” (94). Eventually, synthetizing his account books
and his wife’s household record for the year 1923, he produces a list of
expenses which, among other things, includes “Automobile,” “Taxis,”
“Trips,” and “Hotel bills” (96), the obvious signs of their wandering life.

In "How to Live on Practically Nothing a Year," the family is off to France to "economize" (105). They stop over in Paris to find a nurse for their child; their hotel room is the place fit for interviews where their daughter rings the bells which call "the different fonctionnaires of the hotel" (102). Fitzgerald's hesitant French seems here to point out the lack of charm of the place with its staff performing tasks as if they were a military routine. In Zelda's essay, this anonymous Parisian hotel becomes "The Deux Mondes, [which] ended about a blue abysmal court outside [their] window," the only other memory of the place being the erroneous use of the "bidet" as a tub for their daughter ("Show" 420). For Scott, it is a place to run away from, due to the invasion of "familiar faces" as "[e]very morning a new boatload of Americans poured into the boulevards" ("How to Live on Practically" 104). As if anything that reminded the travelers of home was to be avoided, like a mere linguistic familiarity, they flee to the South in haste. Once in Hyères, on the Riviera, in his comic awkward French, Scott tries to find "le best hotel dans le town" (105) and is the victim of the local crooks in his quest for a "modern hotel, with a bath" (105), which recalls his accommodation requirements during the "cruise of the Rolling Junk." They eventually briefly settle at the "Hôtel du Jardin," the main quality of which being its rate of less than 8 dollars a day for the four of them (106). This was probably the Grimm's Park Hotel, as remembered more accurately by Zelda in her article

<footnote n="98">⁹⁸ This is an allusion to the failure of *The Vegetable*, written in 1922 and staged in Atlantic City, New Jersey, in 1923 (*Some Sort* 195-197, 219-220).</footnote>
of their child, he explains that they have moved “to a town about fifteen
miles from New York, where [they have] rented a house for $300 a month”
(89); it was actually located at 6 Gateway Drive, Great Neck, Long Island.
He then dreams of buying a house once his play<fnref n="98" /> has succeeded (91-92),
which unfortunately fails and leads him ironically to imagine “[getting]
in touch with a reliable poorhouse where [they] could hire a room and
bath for nothing a week” (94). Eventually, synthetizing his account books
and his wife’s household record for the year 1923, he produces a list of
expenses which, among other things, includes “Automobile,” “Taxis,”
“Trips,” and “Hotel bills” (96), the obvious signs of their wandering life.

In "How to Live on Practically Nothing a Year," the family is off to France to "economize" (105). They stop over in Paris to find a nurse for their child; their hotel room is the place fit for interviews where their daughter rings the bells which call "the different fonctionnaires of the hotel" (102). Fitzgerald's hesitant French seems here to point out the lack of charm of the place with its staff performing tasks as if they were a military routine. In Zelda's essay, this anonymous Parisian hotel becomes "The Deux Mondes, [which] ended about a blue abysmal court outside [their] window," the only other memory of the place being the erroneous use of the "bidet" as a tub for their daughter ("Show" 420). For Scott, it is a place to run away from, due to the invasion of "familiar faces" as "[e]very morning a new boatload of Americans poured into the boulevards" ("How to Live on Practically" 104). As if anything that reminded the travelers of home was to be avoided, like a mere linguistic familiarity, they flee to the South in haste. Once in Hyères, on the Riviera, in his comic awkward French, Scott tries to find "le best hotel dans le town" (105) and is the victim of the local crooks in his quest for a "modern hotel, with a bath" (105), which recalls his accommodation requirements during the "cruise of the Rolling Junk." They eventually briefly settle at the "Hôtel du Jardin," the main quality of which being its rate of less than 8 dollars a day for the four of them (106). This was probably the Grimm's Park Hotel, as remembered more accurately by Zelda in her article

<footnote n="98">⁹⁸ This is an allusion to the failure of *The Vegetable*, written in 1922 and staged in Atlantic City, New Jersey, in 1923 (*Some Sort* 195-197, 219-220).</footnote>
"Show" 421), although both writers do not dwell on its architectural interest, but rather remember its unusual dish of goat meat ("Show" 421, "How to Live on Practically" 110). In any case, they do not intend to stay for they want to rent a villa. Thus, they first acquire a car ("How to Live on Practically" 108), which recalls their Rolling Junk, and eventually manage to find a house ("How to Live on Practically" 112), trying to leave behind their hotel experience of transience and impermanence. In real life, they settled at Villa Marie at Valescure, a residential area of Saint Raphaël, which they mistake, in the essay, for a long-sought home: "Within an hour we had seen our home, a clean cool villa set in a large garden on a hill above town. It was what we had been looking for all along" ("How to Live on Practically" 112).

## 2. A National Perspective

Despite the restlessness and lack of stable rooting betrayed by these autobiographical texts, Scott's life narratives never forget the American scene. In *Travelers, Immigrants, Inmates: Essays in Estrangement*, Frances Bartkowski compares the traveler's experience with that of children entering life and language. According to her, travelling places one in a situation of dependence and vulnerability, like children entering social life. Thus, focusing on journeys and their narrations, she claims that "[...] this becoming-a-child-again holds the potential for jubilation as much as it does for humiliation at any given moment; this vacillation tells readers much about the relation of writers to their own sense of authority and identity." She adds that "[t]he demands placed upon the subject in situation of unfamiliarity and dislocation produce a scene in which the struggle for identity comes more clearly into view as both necessary and also mistaken" (XIX). In Scott's case, traveling and writing about it bring about the national issue and a questioning of his own American identity. Whether in the United States or Europe, he always writes about America and his relationship with it. As shown by Bartkowski's pattern, traveling involves issues of power and identity; thus, his personal journeys become spaces for national reflections despite the lack of geographical rooting in one specific home.
"Show" 421), although both writers do not dwell on its architectural interest, but rather remember its unusual dish of goat meat ("Show" 421, "How to Live on Practically" 110). In any case, they do not intend to stay for they want to rent a villa. Thus, they first acquire a car ("How to Live on Practically" 108), which recalls their Rolling Junk, and eventually manage to find a house ("How to Live on Practically" 112), trying to leave behind their hotel experience of transience and impermanence. In real life, they settled at Villa Marie at Valescure, a residential area of Saint Raphaël, which they mistake, in the essay, for a long-sought home: "Within an hour we had seen our home, a clean cool villa set in a large garden on a hill above town. It was what we had been looking for all along" ("How to Live on Practically" 112).

## 2. A National Perspective

Despite the restlessness and lack of stable rooting betrayed by these autobiographical texts, Scott's life narratives never forget the American scene. In *Travelers, Immigrants, Inmates: Essays in Estrangement*, Frances Bartkowski compares the traveler's experience with that of children entering life and language. According to her, travelling places one in a situation of dependence and vulnerability, like children entering social life. Thus, focusing on journeys and their narrations, she claims that "[...] this becoming-a-child-again holds the potential for jubilation as much as it does for humiliation at any given moment; this vacillation tells readers much about the relation of writers to their own sense of authority and identity." She adds that "[t]he demands placed upon the subject in situation of unfamiliarity and dislocation produce a scene in which the struggle for identity comes more clearly into view as both necessary and also mistaken" (XIX). In Scott's case, traveling and writing about it bring about the national issue and a questioning of his own American identity. Whether in the United States or Europe, he always writes about America and his relationship with it. As shown by Bartkowski's pattern, traveling involves issues of power and identity; thus, his personal journeys become spaces for national reflections despite the lack of geographical rooting in one specific home.
In *The Cruise of the Rolling Junk*, the hotels are neglected by the narrative, they become “non-places,” but on the other hand, the American scene of the South is at the heart of the text, which moves from the private to the national. The personal details of the trip are erased or modified, but the journey from the North to the South does unveil national history with the looming presence of slavery and the Civil War with their lasting scars. Even if humor offers comic relief, the ghosts of the dead soldiers in southern marshes as well as those of the slaves cannot be ignored. Although Fitzgerald’s “prejudices reflect rather than transcend the prejudices of his day,” and “[n]owhere in the essay is there any reflection on the history of American race relations,” as Kirk Curnutt says in his review of the latest publication of the text (159), the curse of the South is there to be felt. As Toni Morrison demonstrates in *Playing in the Dark*, “National literatures, like writers, get along the best way they can, and with what they can. Yet they do seem to end up describing and inscribing what is really on the national mind” (14), and in this case, beyond the amusing mishaps of the travelers, the racial issue and the fears it involves are always at stake, whether it be through the description of the “niggery streets of Baltimore” (Cruise 44) or of an isolated attack on the road by a man wearing a “black mask” (Cruise 58), or through the evocation of a crowded store in a “sinister” town named Niggerfoot (Cruise 59).

In the other two self-narratives, Scott offers a generational approach followed by a transatlantic perspective. In "How to Live on $ 36,000 a Year," he is the fashionable writer of the Roaring Twenties, whose success reflects the dynamism of the Jazz Age during which America asserted its new international, cultural, and economic power. The insolence and self-centeredness of the young couple echoes a period of American isolationism and booming economic success. In this self-narrative as in the other two, the car owned by the narrator is typical of the age which celebrated the access to transportation for millions of Americans thanks to Henry Ford's Model T, which was made available due to mass production, advertising and easy bank loans.

In "How to live on Practically Nothing a Year," the couple's hotels are of little importance; what matters is the European experience which had become an American feature of the age as evidenced by the New
In *The Cruise of the Rolling Junk*, the hotels are neglected by the narrative, they become “non-places,” but on the other hand, the American scene of the South is at the heart of the text, which moves from the private to the national. The personal details of the trip are erased or modified, but the journey from the North to the South does unveil national history with the looming presence of slavery and the Civil War with their lasting scars. Even if humor offers comic relief, the ghosts of the dead soldiers in southern marshes as well as those of the slaves cannot be ignored. Although Fitzgerald’s “prejudices reflect rather than transcend the prejudices of his day,” and “[n]owhere in the essay is there any reflection on the history of American race relations,” as Kirk Curnutt says in his review of the latest publication of the text (159), the curse of the South is there to be felt. As Toni Morrison demonstrates in *Playing in the Dark*, “National literatures, like writers, get along the best way they can, and with what they can. Yet they do seem to end up describing and inscribing what is really on the national mind” (14), and in this case, beyond the amusing mishaps of the travelers, the racial issue and the fears it involves are always at stake, whether it be through the description of the “niggery streets of Baltimore” (Cruise 44) or of an isolated attack on the road by a man wearing a “black mask” (Cruise 58), or through the evocation of a crowded store in a “sinister” town named Niggerfoot (Cruise 59).

In the other two self-narratives, Scott offers a generational approach followed by a transatlantic perspective. In "How to Live on $ 36,000 a Year," he is the fashionable writer of the Roaring Twenties, whose success reflects the dynamism of the Jazz Age during which America asserted its new international, cultural, and economic power. The insolence and self-centeredness of the young couple echoes a period of American isolationism and booming economic success. In this self-narrative as in the other two, the car owned by the narrator is typical of the age which celebrated the access to transportation for millions of Americans thanks to Henry Ford's Model T, which was made available due to mass production, advertising and easy bank loans.

In "How to live on Practically Nothing a Year," the couple's hotels are of little importance; what matters is the European experience which had become an American feature of the age as evidenced by the New
York steamship agent, at the beginning of the essay, who keeps seeing customers keen on a transatlantic crossing (101). Even if, at the end of the essay, the protagonists intend to stay "another year" (116) and avoid "hang[ing] around big hotels" (113) and "patronizing tourist hotels" (114), unlike their compatriots who "won't lead a real French life" (113), they remain American and write from an American point of view as they represent a generation of expatriates who recreated an American social life abroad. They embody this generation in quest of pleasure, artistic modernity, and a comfortable life at an excellent rate of exchange, without the constraints of the 18th Amendment and the fundamentalist discourse of the rigorous Bible Belt. In a 1927 interview, Fitzgerald declared: "The best of America drifts to Paris. The American in Paris is the best American. It is more fun for an intelligent person to live in an intelligent country. France has the only two things toward which we drift as we grow older-intelligence and good manners" (Some Sort 299). But "How to Live on Practically Nothing a Year" is nevertheless an opportunity to emphasize a certain American superiority at the expense of French inhabitants,<fnref n="99" /> whose language and customs are neither described accurately nor understood. Gerald Kennedy argues that settling in France meant an access to "an altogether different class status" (120) for American expatriates like the Fitzgeralds. The narrator boasts that he has "entered fully into the life of the Old World" (114), "made excursions to quaint little out-of-the-way restaurants, with the real French atmosphere" and "short trips to beautiful historic old towns, such as Monte Carlo" (114), in short, "[they]'ve become absolutely French" (113). However, his lack of linguistic skills and his portraying of ridiculous and dishonest French characters lead one to doubt his French immersion, especially as we know the Fitzgeralds were mainly in touch with American friends and artists during their stay and only their daughter Scottie eventually managed to speak French fluently. As pointed out by Kennedy, Scott is good at "satirizing [their] own resistance to the foreign" (120) and this humorous essay is actually teeming with self-mockery.

Focusing on "travel narratives" within the autobiographical genre, Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson make the following observation:

<footnote n="99">⁹⁹ See Kennedy 120.</footnote>
York steamship agent, at the beginning of the essay, who keeps seeing customers keen on a transatlantic crossing (101). Even if, at the end of the essay, the protagonists intend to stay "another year" (116) and avoid "hang[ing] around big hotels" (113) and "patronizing tourist hotels" (114), unlike their compatriots who "won't lead a real French life" (113), they remain American and write from an American point of view as they represent a generation of expatriates who recreated an American social life abroad. They embody this generation in quest of pleasure, artistic modernity, and a comfortable life at an excellent rate of exchange, without the constraints of the 18th Amendment and the fundamentalist discourse of the rigorous Bible Belt. In a 1927 interview, Fitzgerald declared: "The best of America drifts to Paris. The American in Paris is the best American. It is more fun for an intelligent person to live in an intelligent country. France has the only two things toward which we drift as we grow older-intelligence and good manners" (Some Sort 299). But "How to Live on Practically Nothing a Year" is nevertheless an opportunity to emphasize a certain American superiority at the expense of French inhabitants,<fnref n="99" /> whose language and customs are neither described accurately nor understood. Gerald Kennedy argues that settling in France meant an access to "an altogether different class status" (120) for American expatriates like the Fitzgeralds. The narrator boasts that he has "entered fully into the life of the Old World" (114), "made excursions to quaint little out-of-the-way restaurants, with the real French atmosphere" and "short trips to beautiful historic old towns, such as Monte Carlo" (114), in short, "[they]'ve become absolutely French" (113). However, his lack of linguistic skills and his portraying of ridiculous and dishonest French characters lead one to doubt his French immersion, especially as we know the Fitzgeralds were mainly in touch with American friends and artists during their stay and only their daughter Scottie eventually managed to speak French fluently. As pointed out by Kennedy, Scott is good at "satirizing [their] own resistance to the foreign" (120) and this humorous essay is actually teeming with self-mockery.

Focusing on "travel narratives" within the autobiographical genre, Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson make the following observation:

<footnote n="99">⁹⁹ See Kennedy 120.</footnote>
Subordinating other aspects of the writer's life, they typically chronicle or reconstruct the narrator's experience of displacement, encounter, and travail and his or her observations of the unknown, the foreign, the uncanny. In this way they become occasions for both the reimagining and the misrecognizing of identity (Bartkowski XIX), and for resituating the mobile subject in relation to home and its ideological norms. (284-285)

Undoubtedly, the Fitzgeralds' journeys, whether through the US or overseas, led Scott to reflect about the nation and his own identity as an American. In fact, he never blended with foreign places neither settled anywhere, as his recurring motif of the car and hotels proves. His traveling rather challenged his sense of American belonging and identity and led him to express his feelings about them in restless self-narratives of transience, which heralded the acceleration of the 20th and 21st centuries. Echoing Caren Kaplan who contends that distance may offer "the best perspective on a subject" (36), historian Lucy Moore concludes about the American expatriates of his kind:

> The more insightful among them recognized that, paradoxically, living abroad made it possible to look more clearly at the United States, to better judge and comment on what they had left behind. Their time away actually intensified their Americanness, rather than diluting it, and this became a powerful inspiration for many. Then, too, returning Americans found that they liked being back home—that the familiar had charms more potent than they remembered. (240-241)

### 3. "[T]he Inmost Me behind Its Veil"<fnref n="100" />

Personal events within an American or European traveling context led Scott to reflect about America itself, whereas we shall see that Zelda's texts function differently. *The Cruise of the Rolling Junk* includes fictional

<footnote n="100">¹⁰⁰ In his introductory chapter to *The Scarlet Letter*, "The Custom House," Hawthorne mentions an irresistible "autobiographical impulse" but also insists on the possibility to "still keep the inmost Me behind its veil" (1-2).</footnote>
Subordinating other aspects of the writer's life, they typically chronicle or reconstruct the narrator's experience of displacement, encounter, and travail and his or her observations of the unknown, the foreign, the uncanny. In this way they become occasions for both the reimagining and the misrecognizing of identity (Bartkowski XIX), and for resituating the mobile subject in relation to home and its ideological norms. (284-285)

Undoubtedly, the Fitzgeralds' journeys, whether through the US or overseas, led Scott to reflect about the nation and his own identity as an American. In fact, he never blended with foreign places neither settled anywhere, as his recurring motif of the car and hotels proves. His traveling rather challenged his sense of American belonging and identity and led him to express his feelings about them in restless self-narratives of transience, which heralded the acceleration of the 20th and 21st centuries. Echoing Caren Kaplan who contends that distance may offer "the best perspective on a subject" (36), historian Lucy Moore concludes about the American expatriates of his kind:

> The more insightful among them recognized that, paradoxically, living abroad made it possible to look more clearly at the United States, to better judge and comment on what they had left behind. Their time away actually intensified their Americanness, rather than diluting it, and this became a powerful inspiration for many. Then, too, returning Americans found that they liked being back home—that the familiar had charms more potent than they remembered. (240-241)

### 3. "[T]he Inmost Me behind Its Veil"<fnref n="100" />

Personal events within an American or European traveling context led Scott to reflect about America itself, whereas we shall see that Zelda's texts function differently. *The Cruise of the Rolling Junk* includes fictional

<footnote n="100">¹⁰⁰ In his introductory chapter to *The Scarlet Letter*, "The Custom House," Hawthorne mentions an irresistible "autobiographical impulse" but also insists on the possibility to "still keep the inmost Me behind its veil" (1-2).</footnote>
inventions, but it is written in the first person and mentions Zelda's name as early as the second paragraph. The travelers are repeatedly alluded to as "Zelda," "I" and "we," establishing that way an "autobiographical pact" (Lejeune) with the reader and promising a kind of true-to-life account of the novelist and his wife's journey. Lejeune defines autobiography as "[...] the retrospective prose narrative that someone makes about their own life, when they emphasize mainly their individual life, in particular the story of their personality," which is what the reader feels he/she gets here.<fnref n="101" />

In "How to Live on $ 36,000 a Year," the narrator mentions his "wife" (105) and the essay is again written in the first person by the successful writer whose name is openly mentioned when he imagines, humorously, he might open "a community store known as 'F. Scott Fitzgerald—Fresh meats'" to fight prices on the rise in his neighborhood (91). In "How to Live on Practically Nothing a Year," the narrator refers again to his "wife," and the couple is now accompanied by "the baby" (116), called once "our child" (102). In a passage in direct speech, the "wife" becomes "Mrs Fitzgerald" for the well-mannered nurse (110), a direct identification which is then repeated twice by the narrator to emphasize humorously her irritation with the nurse, her disgust at the French menu and her consequent sudden disappearance: "'Did you ever taste goat's meat, Mrs Fitzgerald?' But Mrs Fitzgerald had never tasted goat's meat and Mrs Fitzgerald had fled" (110). Toward the end of the narrative, more precisely "[i]n the late afternoon of September 1, 1924," the narrator suddenly refers to a "distinguished-looking young man" and "a young lady" with "a small black child" (113). The strangers described in the third person here turn out to be the Fitzgeralds themselves, well-tanned after a wonderful summer by the sea, who imagine they now pass for "two cultured Europeans" (114) whereas they used to be "barbaric Americans" on arrival five months before (114). This amusing shift does not deceive anyone though, as their financial and cultural troubles with the locals betray their fake assimilation (114-115).

<footnote n="101">¹⁰¹ My translation from the original French: "[...] le récit rétrospectif en prose que quelqu'un fait de sa propre existence, quand il met l'accent principal sur sa vie individuelle, en particulier sur l'histoire de sa personnalité" (L'Autobiographie 14).</footnote>
inventions, but it is written in the first person and mentions Zelda's name as early as the second paragraph. The travelers are repeatedly alluded to as "Zelda," "I" and "we," establishing that way an "autobiographical pact" (Lejeune) with the reader and promising a kind of true-to-life account of the novelist and his wife's journey. Lejeune defines autobiography as "[...] the retrospective prose narrative that someone makes about their own life, when they emphasize mainly their individual life, in particular the story of their personality," which is what the reader feels he/she gets here.<fnref n="101" />

In "How to Live on $ 36,000 a Year," the narrator mentions his "wife" (105) and the essay is again written in the first person by the successful writer whose name is openly mentioned when he imagines, humorously, he might open "a community store known as 'F. Scott Fitzgerald—Fresh meats'" to fight prices on the rise in his neighborhood (91). In "How to Live on Practically Nothing a Year," the narrator refers again to his "wife," and the couple is now accompanied by "the baby" (116), called once "our child" (102). In a passage in direct speech, the "wife" becomes "Mrs Fitzgerald" for the well-mannered nurse (110), a direct identification which is then repeated twice by the narrator to emphasize humorously her irritation with the nurse, her disgust at the French menu and her consequent sudden disappearance: "'Did you ever taste goat's meat, Mrs Fitzgerald?' But Mrs Fitzgerald had never tasted goat's meat and Mrs Fitzgerald had fled" (110). Toward the end of the narrative, more precisely "[i]n the late afternoon of September 1, 1924," the narrator suddenly refers to a "distinguished-looking young man" and "a young lady" with "a small black child" (113). The strangers described in the third person here turn out to be the Fitzgeralds themselves, well-tanned after a wonderful summer by the sea, who imagine they now pass for "two cultured Europeans" (114) whereas they used to be "barbaric Americans" on arrival five months before (114). This amusing shift does not deceive anyone though, as their financial and cultural troubles with the locals betray their fake assimilation (114-115).

<footnote n="101">¹⁰¹ My translation from the original French: "[...] le récit rétrospectif en prose que quelqu'un fait de sa propre existence, quand il met l'accent principal sur sa vie individuelle, en particulier sur l'histoire de sa personnalité" (L'Autobiographie 14).</footnote>
to through the anonymous and collective "we," even though the capital F of the title barely conceals the travelers' identity. The pronoun is used repeatedly as in an effort to annihilate individuality. Under the 1920 caption, "'Show Mr. and Mrs. F. to Number—'

What is emphasized here is a married life at the expense of individuality, and almost an age group existence, as in Annie Ernaux's *Les Années*, which relies on the recurring use of the French terms "nous" and "on" to express a woman's life narrative as part of a generation. Actually, this expresses the lack of individual freedom Zelda enjoyed as a married woman, but above all as a writer. The peculiar publishing circumstances of both her life narratives are, indeed, to be taken into account. Bruccoli specifies that they were "[p]ublished as by F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald], but credited to Zelda in his Ledger" (419, 433). Because she could benefit from Scott's reputation, she often had to publish under his or both their names. It seems that Scott suggested the idea of the hotel essay<fnref n="104" /> and by the end of March 1934, she mailed him "a 35-page triple-spaced typescript, without a title" (Fitzgerald, *My Lost City* 301). The typescripts kept at Princeton University and the University of Virginia

<footnote n="103">¹⁰³ See Milford's biography for Scott's appendicitis episode (127).</footnote>

<footnote n="104">¹⁰⁴ In a letter dated March 1934 from Craig House, a sanatorium at Beacon, New York, Zelda wrote to Scott: "I have been working on the hotels, and will mail them as soon as they're finished" (Bryer and Barks 178).</footnote>
to through the anonymous and collective "we," even though the capital F of the title barely conceals the travelers' identity. The pronoun is used repeatedly as in an effort to annihilate individuality. Under the 1920 caption, "'Show Mr. and Mrs. F. to Number—'

What is emphasized here is a married life at the expense of individuality, and almost an age group existence, as in Annie Ernaux's *Les Années*, which relies on the recurring use of the French terms "nous" and "on" to express a woman's life narrative as part of a generation. Actually, this expresses the lack of individual freedom Zelda enjoyed as a married woman, but above all as a writer. The peculiar publishing circumstances of both her life narratives are, indeed, to be taken into account. Bruccoli specifies that they were "[p]ublished as by F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald], but credited to Zelda in his Ledger" (419, 433). Because she could benefit from Scott's reputation, she often had to publish under his or both their names. It seems that Scott suggested the idea of the hotel essay<fnref n="104" /> and by the end of March 1934, she mailed him "a 35-page triple-spaced typescript, without a title" (Fitzgerald, *My Lost City* 301). The typescripts kept at Princeton University and the University of Virginia

<footnote n="103">¹⁰³ See Milford's biography for Scott's appendicitis episode (127).</footnote>

<footnote n="104">¹⁰⁴ In a letter dated March 1934 from Craig House, a sanatorium at Beacon, New York, Zelda wrote to Scott: "I have been working on the hotels, and will mail them as soon as they're finished" (Bryer and Barks 178).</footnote>
In "Auction— Model 1934," which comes immediately after the previously mentioned article as indicated by its date, the travelers want to believe they have reached a destination, "a perfect house" (433) according to their friends. In real life, for the nomadic Fitzgeralds, it was 1307 Park Avenue in Baltimore:

> The idea was to stay there [...] then we wouldn't have to pack any more [...]. We could travel again in a suitcase, and not be harassed by bills from a storage warehouse. [...] maybe we'd like the new place so well that we'd never move any more but just sit behind the wisteria and watch the rhododendron disintegrate beneath the heat of June, July, and August, and the fanfare of the dogwood over the hills. (433)

A desire for permanence is felt but the botanical perspective amounts to a cliché that already heralds self-delusion. With the benefit of hindsight, we know, indeed, that their hopes would not be fulfilled, home escaping them once more and ceaseless movement, together or apart, remaining their lot till the end.

Imagining they will settle there, they "[open] the packing cases" containing their belongings accumulated over fifteen years of wandering life. Once again, the pronoun "we" is used repeatedly, without any differentiation between the two married subjects, and Scottie is "the daughter" (436). But this essay is less anonymous than the other, as well-known friends are mentioned like Mencken (435), Nathan (436), Mac Arthur or Hemingway (438). Scott's roots are conjured up through the allusion to his illustrious ancestor and name-giver Francis Scott Key (438), although "the family" (434) remains vague when their unfulfilled desire of a life of permanence for the restless couple is suggested through their gift of literature and science symbols to ornate a stable home: "Two bronze busts of Shakespeare and Galileo with which the family had hoped to anchor us to permanent abodes" (434). Last of all, Scott is even referred to nominally as the purchaser of the narrator's Patou suit after "the marriage ceremony" (436), which is incidentally not personalized by the possessive adjective "our": "it seemed very odd to be charging things to Scott Fitzgerald" (436-437). The acquisition seems here to symbolize
In "Auction— Model 1934," which comes immediately after the previously mentioned article as indicated by its date, the travelers want to believe they have reached a destination, "a perfect house" (433) according to their friends. In real life, for the nomadic Fitzgeralds, it was 1307 Park Avenue in Baltimore:

> The idea was to stay there [...] then we wouldn't have to pack any more [...]. We could travel again in a suitcase, and not be harassed by bills from a storage warehouse. [...] maybe we'd like the new place so well that we'd never move any more but just sit behind the wisteria and watch the rhododendron disintegrate beneath the heat of June, July, and August, and the fanfare of the dogwood over the hills. (433)

A desire for permanence is felt but the botanical perspective amounts to a cliché that already heralds self-delusion. With the benefit of hindsight, we know, indeed, that their hopes would not be fulfilled, home escaping them once more and ceaseless movement, together or apart, remaining their lot till the end.

Imagining they will settle there, they "[open] the packing cases" containing their belongings accumulated over fifteen years of wandering life. Once again, the pronoun "we" is used repeatedly, without any differentiation between the two married subjects, and Scottie is "the daughter" (436). But this essay is less anonymous than the other, as well-known friends are mentioned like Mencken (435), Nathan (436), Mac Arthur or Hemingway (438). Scott's roots are conjured up through the allusion to his illustrious ancestor and name-giver Francis Scott Key (438), although "the family" (434) remains vague when their unfulfilled desire of a life of permanence for the restless couple is suggested through their gift of literature and science symbols to ornate a stable home: "Two bronze busts of Shakespeare and Galileo with which the family had hoped to anchor us to permanent abodes" (434). Last of all, Scott is even referred to nominally as the purchaser of the narrator's Patou suit after "the marriage ceremony" (436), which is incidentally not personalized by the possessive adjective "our": "it seemed very odd to be charging things to Scott Fitzgerald" (436-437). The acquisition seems here to symbolize
the transition from girl to wife, without the expected emotional effect
that should have accompanied the transformation.

Whereas Scott's travel narratives transcend the personal to convey
the history of the nation and the spirit of the age, Zelda's hide the per-
sonal behind what appears, at first, to be an extreme detachment, but
this apparent lack of sensitivity points out a deep personal quest which
remains linked with restrictive publishing circumstances. If traveling brings
about wonderings about power and identity, as explained previously,
Zelda's taxonomic and unemotional travel narratives may be perceived as
an original artistic gesture dealing with these issues. The repeated "we"
of her essays, whether it be her choice or not, and the accumulation of
places and objects might stand for an attempt at finding her voice as an
artist and independent woman in the very description of the constraints
she endured. As excellently demonstrated in Linda Wagner-Martin's
biography of Zelda,

[i]nscribed and reinscribed in conventional social roles, the Fitzgeralds
(Scott as breadwinning husband and Zelda as supportive wife) had
never been so unconventional as they had liked to imagine. Zelda's
role as wife had included being Scottie's mother, being the person who
ran the household, and being the beautiful woman known as "Mrs.
Scott Fitzgerald." Once she stopped being only a wifely appendage,
however, she became an object of criticism. (107)

As Bartkowski notices, "The traveler's identity is constructed by
a remobilization of psychic shifts in the face of cultural dislocations in
which, as an adult, the writer once again comes to terms with questions
of language and power, authority and selfhood" (25). Thus, in this quest
for identity, the particular unemotional style of Zelda's travel narratives
recalls the trope of "coming to voice" of the 1970s and 1980s. Smith and
Watson explain that "'[c]oming to voice' meant articulating an emergent
subjectivity outside or against the repressive constraints of asymmetrical
gender relationships" (85), women being called upon "to participate in
consciousness-raising and express feelings that had been repressed in
the patriarchally organized home" (84). In Zelda's apparently impersonal
the transition from girl to wife, without the expected emotional effect
that should have accompanied the transformation.

Whereas Scott's travel narratives transcend the personal to convey
the history of the nation and the spirit of the age, Zelda's hide the per-
sonal behind what appears, at first, to be an extreme detachment, but
this apparent lack of sensitivity points out a deep personal quest which
remains linked with restrictive publishing circumstances. If traveling brings
about wonderings about power and identity, as explained previously,
Zelda's taxonomic and unemotional travel narratives may be perceived as
an original artistic gesture dealing with these issues. The repeated "we"
of her essays, whether it be her choice or not, and the accumulation of
places and objects might stand for an attempt at finding her voice as an
artist and independent woman in the very description of the constraints
she endured. As excellently demonstrated in Linda Wagner-Martin's
biography of Zelda,

[i]nscribed and reinscribed in conventional social roles, the Fitzgeralds
(Scott as breadwinning husband and Zelda as supportive wife) had
never been so unconventional as they had liked to imagine. Zelda's
role as wife had included being Scottie's mother, being the person who
ran the household, and being the beautiful woman known as "Mrs.
Scott Fitzgerald." Once she stopped being only a wifely appendage,
however, she became an object of criticism. (107)

As Bartkowski notices, "The traveler's identity is constructed by
a remobilization of psychic shifts in the face of cultural dislocations in
which, as an adult, the writer once again comes to terms with questions
of language and power, authority and selfhood" (25). Thus, in this quest
for identity, the particular unemotional style of Zelda's travel narratives
recalls the trope of "coming to voice" of the 1970s and 1980s. Smith and
Watson explain that "'[c]oming to voice' meant articulating an emergent
subjectivity outside or against the repressive constraints of asymmetrical
gender relationships" (85), women being called upon "to participate in
consciousness-raising and express feelings that had been repressed in
the patriarchally organized home" (84). In Zelda's apparently impersonal
travel narratives and deserted cityscapes, we might very well hear this
muffled female voice arising.

"Auction—Model 1934" was Zelda's last publication. Discouraged from writing by her husband and most of her doctors, she then focused mainly on her painting. After the urban cityscapes of the places where she had lived but never settled, she eventually turned to natural and biblical topics, which express a permanence never experienced in her traveler's life. As for Scott, after his humorous 1924 narratives, his later darker autobiographical pieces<fnref n="106" /> keep linking his personal life with the wider national scene, as both followed the same ascending line and violent collapse.

Thus, the Fitzgeralds' geographical instability reflected the American spirit of the age and heralded the following decades of speed and excess, the advent of "supermodernity" (Augé 42-43, 55, 100). Moving from hotels to hotels led them to write about their restlessness and evoke the "non-places" of their wandering lives, but they tackled this issue differently, as they perceived and experienced the topics of authority and identity differently. While Scott's travel narratives open on a national reflection, Zelda's works conceal the intimate behind deceptive detachment while she probably aimed at finding a voice of her own. But in both cases, they made of the "non-places" of their journeys their privileged artistic space, finding there the home they never owned in real life.

<footnote n="106">¹⁰⁶ “Echoes of the Jazz Age” (1931), the *Crack-Up* series (1936), “Early Success” (1937) and “My Lost City” (1945).</footnote>
travel narratives and deserted cityscapes, we might very well hear this
muffled female voice arising.

"Auction—Model 1934" was Zelda's last publication. Discouraged from writing by her husband and most of her doctors, she then focused mainly on her painting. After the urban cityscapes of the places where she had lived but never settled, she eventually turned to natural and biblical topics, which express a permanence never experienced in her traveler's life. As for Scott, after his humorous 1924 narratives, his later darker autobiographical pieces<fnref n="106" /> keep linking his personal life with the wider national scene, as both followed the same ascending line and violent collapse.

Thus, the Fitzgeralds' geographical instability reflected the American spirit of the age and heralded the following decades of speed and excess, the advent of "supermodernity" (Augé 42-43, 55, 100). Moving from hotels to hotels led them to write about their restlessness and evoke the "non-places" of their wandering lives, but they tackled this issue differently, as they perceived and experienced the topics of authority and identity differently. While Scott's travel narratives open on a national reflection, Zelda's works conceal the intimate behind deceptive detachment while she probably aimed at finding a voice of her own. But in both cases, they made of the "non-places" of their journeys their privileged artistic space, finding there the home they never owned in real life.

<footnote n="106">¹⁰⁶ “Echoes of the Jazz Age” (1931), the *Crack-Up* series (1936), “Early Success” (1937) and “My Lost City” (1945).</footnote>
## Works cited

ADAMS, Henry. *The Education of Henry Adams*. 1918. Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1973.

AUGÉ, Marc. *Non-lieux : introduction à une anthropologie de la surmodernité*. Paris, Éditions du Seuil, 1992.

BARTKOWSKI, Frances. *Travelers, Immigrants, Inmates: Essays in Estrangement*. Minneapolis, U of Minnesota P, 1995.

BRUCCOLI, Matthew J. *Some Sort of Epic Grandeur. The Life of F. Scott Fitzgerald*. 1981. London, Cardinal, 1991.

BRYER, Jackson R. and Cathy W. BARKS, eds. *Dear Scott, Dearest Zelda: The Love Letters of F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald*. London, Bloomsbury, 2002.

— and John KUEHL, eds. *Dear Scott/Dear Max: The Fitzgerald-Perkins Correspondence*. New York, Scribners, 1971.

CURNUTT, Kirk. "Junk Bonds in a Jerrybuilt America." *The Scott Fitzgerald Review*, vol. 10, Hempstead, The F. Scott Fitzgerald Society and Hofstra U, 2012, pp. 154-153.

DOUBROVSKY, Serge. "Autobiographie/Vérité/Psychanalyse." *L'Esprit Créateur*, vol. 3, 1980, pp. 87-97.

ERNAUX, Annie. *Les Années*. Paris, Gallimard, 2008.

FITZGERALD, F. Scott. *The Vegetable*. New York, Scribners, 1922.

—. *The Cruise of the Rolling Junk*. 1924. London, Hesperus, 2011.

—. "How to Live on $ 36,000 a Year." 1924. *Afternoon of an Author: A Selection of Uncollected Stories and Essays*. New York, Scribners, 1957, pp. 87-99.

—. "How to live on Practically Nothing a Year." 1924. *Afternoon of an Author: A Selection of Uncollected Stories and Essays*. New York, Scribners, 1957, pp. 100-116.

—. *Afternoon of an Author*. Ed. Arthur Mizener. New York, Scribners, 1957.

—. *The Crack-Up with Other Pieces and Stories*. Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1965.

—. *The Short Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald*. Ed. Matthew J. Bruccoli. London, Abacus, 1992.

—. *My Lost City: Personal Essays, 1920-1940*. 2008. Ed. James L. W. West III. Cambridge UP, 2014.

FITZGERALD, Zelda. "'Show Mr. and Mrs. F. to Number—.'" May-June 1934. *The Collected Writings*. Ed. Matthew J. Bruccoli. London, Little, Brown and Co, 1992, pp. 419-431.
Works cited

ADAMS, Henry. *The Education of Henry Adams*. 1918. Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1973.

AUGÉ, Marc. *Non-lieux : introduction à une anthropologie de la surmodernité*. Paris, Éditions du Seuil, 1992.

BARTKOWSKI, Frances. *Travelers, Immigrants, Inmates: Essays in Estrangement*. Minneapolis, U of Minnesota P, 1995.

BRUCCOLI, Matthew J. *Some Sort of Epic Grandeur. The Life of F. Scott Fitzgerald*. 1981. London, Cardinal, 1991.

BRYER, Jackson R. and Cathy W. BARKS, eds. *Dear Scott, Dearest Zelda: The Love Letters of F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald*. London, Bloomsbury, 2002.

— and John KUEHL, eds. *Dear Scott/Dear Max: The Fitzgerald-Perkins Correspondence*. New York, Scribners, 1971.

CURNUTT, Kirk. "Junk Bonds in a Jerrybuilt America." *The Scott Fitzgerald Review*, vol. 10, Hempstead, The F. Scott Fitzgerald Society and Hofstra U, 2012, pp. 154-153.

DOUBROVSKY, Serge. "Autobiographie/Vérité/Psychanalyse." *L'Esprit Créateur*, vol. 3, 1980, pp. 87-97.

ERNAUX, Annie. *Les Années*. Paris, Gallimard, 2008.

FITZGERALD, F. Scott. *The Vegetable*. New York, Scribners, 1922.

—. *The Cruise of the Rolling Junk*. 1924. London, Hesperus, 2011.

—. "How to Live on $ 36,000 a Year." 1924. *Afternoon of an Author: A Selection of Uncollected Stories and Essays*. New York, Scribners, 1957, pp. 87-99.

—. "How to live on Practically Nothing a Year." 1924. *Afternoon of an Author: A Selection of Uncollected Stories and Essays*. New York, Scribners, 1957, pp. 100-116.

—. *Afternoon of an Author*. Ed. Arthur Mizener. New York, Scribners, 1957.

—. *The Crack-Up with Other Pieces and Stories*. Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1965.

—. *The Short Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald*. Ed. Matthew J. Bruccoli. London, Abacus, 1992.

—. *My Lost City: Personal Essays, 1920–1940*. 2008. Ed. James L. W. West III. Cambridge UP, 2014.

FITZGERALD, Zelda. "'Show Mr. and Mrs. F. to Number—.'" May–June 1934. *The Collected Writings*. Ed. Matthew J. Bruccoli. London, Little, Brown and Co, 1992, pp. 419–431.
—. "Auction— Model 1934." July 1934. *Zelda Fitzgerald: The Collected Writings*. Ed. Matthew J. Bruccoli. London, Little, Brown and Co, 1992, pp. 433–438.

HAWTHORNE, Nathaniel. *The Scarlet Letter*. 1850. Mineola, Dover, 1994.

JAMES, Henry. "The Story-Teller at Large: Mr. Henry Harland." *Fortnightly Review*, vol. 63, n° 374, April 1898, pp. 650–654.

KAPLAN, Caren. *Questions of Travel: Postmodern Discourses of Displacement*. Duke UP, 1996.

KENNEDY, Gerald. "Fitzgerald's Expatriate Years and the European Stories." *The Cambridge Companion to F. Scott Fitzgerald*. Ed. Ruth Prigozy. Cambridge UP, 2002, pp. 118–142.

LANAHAN, Eleanor, ed. *Zelda: An Illustrated Life*. The Private World of Zelda Fitzgerald. New York, H. N. Abrams, 1996.

LEJEUNE, Philippe. *L'Autobiographie en France*. Paris, Armand Colin, 1971.

—. *Le Pacte autobiographique*. Paris, Éditions du Seuil, 1975.

MELLOW, James R. *Invented Lives: F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald*. 1984. London, Souvenir P, 1985.

MILFORD, Nancy. *Zelda*. London, Bodley Head, 1970.

MOORE, Lucy. *Anything Goes: A Biography of the Roaring Twenties*. London, Atlantic Books, 2008.

MORRISON, Toni. *Playing in the Dark*. 1992. New York, Random House, 1993.

SEIDEL, Kathryn Lee, Alexis WANG and Alvin Y. WANG. "Zelda Fitzgerald's Art and the Role of the Artist." *The Scott Fitzgerald Review*, vol. 5, Hempstead, The F. Scott Fitzgerald Society and Hofstra U, 2007, pp. 133–163.

SMITH, Sidonie and Julia WATSON. *Reading Autobiography, A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives*. 2001. Minneapolis, U of Minnesota, 2010.

WAGNER-MARTIN, Linda. *Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald, An American Woman's Life*. Palgrave Macmillan, 2004.
—. "Auction— Model 1934." July 1934. *Zelda Fitzgerald: The Collected Writings*. Ed. Matthew J. Bruccoli. London, Little, Brown and Co, 1992, pp. 433–438.

HAWTHORNE, Nathaniel. *The Scarlet Letter*. 1850. Mineola, Dover, 1994.

JAMES, Henry. "The Story-Teller at Large: Mr. Henry Harland." *Fortnightly Review*, vol. 63, n° 374, April 1898, pp. 650–654.

KAPLAN, Caren. *Questions of Travel: Postmodern Discourses of Displacement*. Duke UP, 1996.

KENNEDY, Gerald. "Fitzgerald's Expatriate Years and the European Stories." *The Cambridge Companion to F. Scott Fitzgerald*. Ed. Ruth Prigozy. Cambridge UP, 2002, pp. 118–142.

LANAHAN, Eleanor, ed. *Zelda: An Illustrated Life*. The Private World of Zelda Fitzgerald. New York, H. N. Abrams, 1996.

LEJEUNE, Philippe. *L'Autobiographie en France*. Paris, Armand Colin, 1971.

—. *Le Pacte autobiographique*. Paris, Éditions du Seuil, 1975.

MELLOW, James R. *Invented Lives: F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald*. 1984. London, Souvenir P, 1985.

MILFORD, Nancy. *Zelda*. London, Bodley Head, 1970.

MOORE, Lucy. *Anything Goes: A Biography of the Roaring Twenties*. London, Atlantic Books, 2008.

MORRISON, Toni. *Playing in the Dark*. 1992. New York, Random House, 1993.

SEIDEL Kathryn Lee, Alexis WANG and Alvin Y. WANG. "Zelda Fitzgerald's Art and the Role of the Artist." *The Scott Fitzgerald Review*, vol. 5, Hempstead, The F. Scott Fitzgerald Society and Hofstra U, 2007, pp. 133–163.

SMITH, Sidonie and Julia WATSON. *Reading Autobiography, A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives*. 2001. Minneapolis, U of Minnesota, 2010.

WAGNER-MARTIN, Linda. *Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald, An American Woman's Life*. Palgrave Macmillan, 2004.
<figure><img src="image_12.png" /></figure>
<figure><img src="image_12.png" /></figure>
Chapter
7

Driving Home.
The Car as Domestic
Space in Two Female
Road Trips: Barbara
Kingsolver's The Bean Trees
(1988) and Louise Erdrich's
Books and Islands in Ojibwe
Country (2003)

Catherine Morgan-Proux
Chapter
7

Driving Home.
The Car as Domestic
Space in Two Female
Road Trips: Barbara
Kingsolver's The Bean Trees
(1988) and Louise Erdrich's
Books and Islands in Ojibwe
Country (2003)

Catherine Morgan-Proux
<figure><img src="image_13.png" /></figure>
<figure><img src="image_13.png" /></figure>
Chapter
7

Domestic space and car space are typically considered antithetical. In our collective imagination, “leaving” and “wandering” in pursuit of character-building adventure usually involves leaving domestic space well behind. This antinomy has been at the heart of literary representation of travel, certainly of Western voyagers, since its origins. From Homer’s *Odyssey* to Jack Kerouac’s *On the Road*, the highway, commonly described as open and liberating, is positioned against “home,” which is traditionally considered as anchored and stable. It is often the impulse to roam away from the constraints and routine of home, in a heroic quest for identity, that creates the driving force of the road trip narrative.

This paper will focus on two road trip narratives by women. Barbara Kingsolver's novel *The Bean Trees* (1988) and Louise Erdrich's text *Books and Islands in Ojibwe Country* (2003) which is part memoir, part travel journal. The aim of this paper is not only to give a female perspective on that most masculine of literary genres, the road trip narrative, but to demonstrate how these writers revise the home versus highway binary.<fnref n="107" /> Female protagonists, too, have been drawn to the road "as a way out of the ideology of separate spheres" (Ganser 153), even if the open road is often experienced by women as a site of peril rather than an adventurous

<footnote n="107">107 For a feminist geography of space and its implications for the travel narrative, see Linda McDowell's work: "Travel. Even the idea of travel, challenges the spatial association between home and women that has been so important in structuring the social construction of femininity in the West and western social theories and institutional practices" (206).</footnote>
Chapter
7

Domestic space and car space are typically considered antithetical. In our collective imagination, “leaving” and “wandering” in pursuit of character-building adventure usually involves leaving domestic space well behind. This antinomy has been at the heart of literary representation of travel, certainly of Western voyagers, since its origins. From Homer’s *Odyssey* to Jack Kerouac’s *On the Road*, the highway, commonly described as open and liberating, is positioned against “home,” which is traditionally considered as anchored and stable. It is often the impulse to roam away from the constraints and routine of home, in a heroic quest for identity, that creates the driving force of the road trip narrative.

This paper will focus on two road trip narratives by women. Barbara Kingsolver's novel *The Bean Trees* (1988) and Louise Erdrich's text *Books and Islands in Ojibwe Country* (2003) which is part memoir, part travel journal. The aim of this paper is not only to give a female perspective on that most masculine of literary genres, the road trip narrative, but to demonstrate how these writers revise the home versus highway binary.<fnref n="107" /> Female protagonists, too, have been drawn to the road "as a way out of the ideology of separate spheres" (Ganser 153), even if the open road is often experienced by women as a site of peril rather than an adventurous

<footnote n="107">107 For a feminist geography of space and its implications for the travel narrative, see Linda McDowell's work: "Travel. Even the idea of travel, challenges the spatial association between home and women that has been so important in structuring the social construction of femininity in the West and western social theories and institutional practices" (206).</footnote>
playground.<fnref n="108" /> We shall point out ways in which Kingsolver and Erdrich re-invent this binary, blurring the social boundaries that have defined women as home keepers. Interestingly, it is their re-imagining of “home” that is an essential component of the process.

Ronald Primeau's *Romance of the Road: the literature of the American Highway* (1996), which identifies the key characteristics and defining moments of the genre, is a useful starting point for our understanding of the position of home in road narratives. From the outset, Primeau is clear about the iconic status of the 20th century American road trip and what it signifies for the heroic road traveller. The road has been elevated, as Primeau found in his study, to a "sacred space" (1) where the quest for identity can be enacted. "Getting away is a chance at a new start, a special time to discover self and country" (Primeau 1). According to Primeau, the vastness of the American landscape, combined with the exhilaration of motion, enables the traveller to move in a kind of fantasy world, unanchored by the constraints of reality. In his words, it is a kind of "free-floating state" (6). Importantly, it is a state where the traveller can shape a destiny outside the constraints of conventional domestic life. Home, on the other hand, is associated with "ordinary events and everyday delegations" (Primeau 6). It is where the hero returns after his extraordinary adventure and where he can tell his story.

However, there is a growing body of feminist critical theory (Brigham 2015; Clarke 2007; Enevold 2004; Ganser 2006) which points out that road trip narratives by women do not necessarily follow this pattern of rupture and re-entry into home life. Following a reading of the road narrative genre which takes into account the gendering of space, it would appear that women leave home but home does not necessarily leave them. Could it be said that the domestic plot, with its rituals, its spaces, its inhabitants, does, in some instances, continue to shape the female travel narrative plot in surprising ways? In a very thorough survey of women's road trips in fiction,<fnref n="109" /> Deborah Clarke suggests that this could be so. Clarke posits

<footnote n="108">¹⁰⁸ The hugely successful road movie *Thelma and Louise* (1991) directed by Ridley Scott, with screenplay by Callie Khouri, illustrated that women on the road do not escape the policing power of the state.</footnote>

<footnote n="109">¹⁰⁹ In *Driving Women. Fiction and Automobile Culture in 20th Century America*, Clarke studies 25 women writers including Zora Neale Hurston, Barbara Kingsolver, Toni Morrison, Joyce Carol Oates, Flannery O'Connor, Gertrude Stein and Edith Wharton.</footnote>
playground.<fnref n="108" /> We shall point out ways in which Kingsolver and Erdrich re-invent this binary, blurring the social boundaries that have defined women as home keepers. Interestingly, it is their re-imagining of “home” that is an essential component of the process.

Ronald Primeau's *Romance of the Road: the literature of the American Highway* (1996), which identifies the key characteristics and defining moments of the genre, is a useful starting point for our understanding of the position of home in road narratives. From the outset, Primeau is clear about the iconic status of the 20th century American road trip and what it signifies for the heroic road traveller. The road has been elevated, as Primeau found in his study, to a "sacred space" (1) where the quest for identity can be enacted. "Getting away is a chance at a new start, a special time to discover self and country" (Primeau 1). According to Primeau, the vastness of the American landscape, combined with the exhilaration of motion, enables the traveller to move in a kind of fantasy world, unanchored by the constraints of reality. In his words, it is a kind of "free-floating state" (6). Importantly, it is a state where the traveller can shape a destiny outside the constraints of conventional domestic life. Home, on the other hand, is associated with "ordinary events and everyday delegations" (Primeau 6). It is where the hero returns after his extraordinary adventure and where he can tell his story.

However, there is a growing body of feminist critical theory (Brigham 2015; Clarke 2007; Enevold 2004; Ganser 2006) which points out that road trip narratives by women do not necessarily follow this pattern of rupture and re-entry into home life. Following a reading of the road narrative genre which takes into account the gendering of space, it would appear that women leave home but home does not necessarily leave them. Could it be said that the domestic plot, with its rituals, its spaces, its inhabitants, does, in some instances, continue to shape the female travel narrative plot in surprising ways? In a very thorough survey of women's road trips in fiction,<fnref n="109" /> Deborah Clarke suggests that this could be so. Clarke posits

<footnote n="108">¹⁰⁸ The hugely successful road movie *Thelma and Louise* (1991) directed by Ridley Scott, with screenplay by Callie Khouri, illustrated that women on the road do not escape the policing power of the state.</footnote>

<footnote n="109">¹⁰⁹ In *Driving Women. Fiction and Automobile Culture in 20th Century America*, Clarke studies 25 women writers including Zora Neale Hurston, Barbara Kingsolver, Toni Morrison, Joyce Carol Oates, Flannery O'Connor, Gertrude Stein and Edith Wharton.</footnote>
that female drivers do not necessarily escape attachments, domesticity or responsibility in a "free-floating state" (Primeau 6). Domesticity, and its ensuing constraints, or "everyday delegations" (Primeau 6) sometimes come along with them in the form of passengers or family members to be taken care of. Women at the wheel, in both fictional and life writing road narratives, revise previous representations of home and hearth. In fact, according to Clarke, they invite the reader to reconsider the concept of home as a fixed space, and to imagine it rather as a series of domestic experiences of the everyday where women can reappropriate the travel narrative and gain agency. This is where the car plays a key role in opening up the possibility of "reconfiguring women's place as both situated and mobile, both domestic and independent" (Clarke 116). Our project is to examine how this concept functions in the two texts under discussion. We have selected these two texts in an attempt to cross the boundaries between fiction and non-fiction with the hypothesis that Clarke's critical framework can be applied to both forms of literature.

Barbara Kingsolver's *The Bean Trees* (1988) is an American road narrative telling the story of a transformational road trip from rural Kentucky to Tucson, Arizona made by young Taylor Greer who is fiercely fleeing the constraints of her domestic life. For her, home is the desultory nowhere place of Pittman County. Its emptiness, which is referred to as "the pits" (4), has hollowed out the dead-end streets of a community where the only perspective is to be "hogtied to a future as a tobacco farmer's wife" (4), to borrow Taylor's words. She adds, "Mama always said barefoot and pregnant was not my style. She knew" (4). It is a vision of domestic confinement that Taylor herself flatly refuses, preferring the possibilities of the open road. She is, as the opening chapter title announces, "The One to Get Away" (14) and her getaway car is a "'55 Volkswagen bug with no window to speak of" (14). However, even if the mental space created by departure is thrilling, the physical space provides no easy ride. The landscape of her road trip cannot be considered an empty screen for her to project her fantasies on, when everyday constraints, both technical and familial, catch up with her. Not only is her car barely functional, threatening to break down at any moment, but she is soon burdened, as we shall see, by the kind of family responsibility that she wanted so adamantly to avoid.
that female drivers do not necessarily escape attachments, domesticity or responsibility in a "free-floating state" (Primeau 6). Domesticity, and its ensuing constraints, or "everyday delegations" (Primeau 6) sometimes come along with them in the form of passengers or family members to be taken care of. Women at the wheel, in both fictional and life writing road narratives, revise previous representations of home and hearth. In fact, according to Clarke, they invite the reader to reconsider the concept of home as a fixed space, and to imagine it rather as a series of domestic experiences of the everyday where women can reappropriate the travel narrative and gain agency. This is where the car plays a key role in opening up the possibility of "reconfiguring women's place as both situated and mobile, both domestic and independent" (Clarke 116). Our project is to examine how this concept functions in the two texts under discussion. We have selected these two texts in an attempt to cross the boundaries between fiction and non-fiction with the hypothesis that Clarke's critical framework can be applied to both forms of literature.

Barbara Kingsolver's *The Bean Trees* (1988) is an American road narrative telling the story of a transformational road trip from rural Kentucky to Tucson, Arizona made by young Taylor Greer who is fiercely fleeing the constraints of her domestic life. For her, home is the desultory nowhere place of Pittman County. Its emptiness, which is referred to as "the pits" (4), has hollowed out the dead-end streets of a community where the only perspective is to be "hogtied to a future as a tobacco farmer's wife" (4), to borrow Taylor's words. She adds, "Mama always said barefoot and pregnant was not my style. She knew" (4). It is a vision of domestic confinement that Taylor herself flatly refuses, preferring the possibilities of the open road. She is, as the opening chapter title announces, "The One to Get Away" (14) and her getaway car is a "'55 Volkswagen bug with no window to speak of" (14). However, even if the mental space created by departure is thrilling, the physical space provides no easy ride. The landscape of her road trip cannot be considered an empty screen for her to project her fantasies on, when everyday constraints, both technical and familial, catch up with her. Not only is her car barely functional, threatening to break down at any moment, but she is soon burdened, as we shall see, by the kind of family responsibility that she wanted so adamantly to avoid.
Interestingly for us, her journey takes her through multiple homes and households in a way that would corroborate Clarke's theory of women's road trips as a series of domestic experiences. Firstly, let us consider the automobile itself as a home. It is certainly a getaway car but it also functions as an intimacy generating space, connecting Taylor to other women in ways that echo mother-daughter bonding. From the outset, it is the place where Taylor becomes abruptly, and rather randomly, a mother. Totally unexpectedly, while Taylor has pulled up in a parking lot, a stranger places a toddler in the car, nestling her in the passenger seat as if she were a part of the car: "she pushed it gently back into the seat, trying to make it belong there" (25). With no papers or even a name to identify her, the only clue to her origin is her Native American appearance. Taylor responds with initial incredulity but then with resourcefulness and a sense of responsibility, quickly finding shelter for her and her new travelling companion in another temporary home, the Broken Arrow Motel in Oklahoma. It is run by the nurturing Mrs Hoge whom Taylor persuades to let her and the little girl stay for several weeks despite Taylor's lack of income. This motel-keeper not only provides a roof but also a re-invented home, becoming a kind of surrogate grandmother to the little girl.

It is worth pointing out that the name and the location of the motel add another layer of nuance to this composite theme of home, reminding us that space has the potential to function as a lens that can reveal racial as well as gendered constructs. Broken Arrow, Oklahoma is an identified site on the Trail of Tears where the Creek people of the Cherokee Nation were forced to settle after having been evicted from their homeland in Alabama in 1838 by the United States Government. Within the upbeat travel narrative of Taylor and her unexpected "daughter," erupts a grave reminder of the historical, enforced displacements of Native Americans, a travel reality that had little to do with freedom to roam and everything to do with dislocation and boundaries. It would appear that in this novel the little foundling, found *en route* in the empty space of a car park, is at the intersection of questions about belonging and home. For our argument, this episode of finding a home for little "Turtle" as she becomes to be known, constitutes one of the "domestic experiences" that structures this female road trip, compelling the young woman at the wheel to meditate on what it means to put down roots.
Interestingly for us, her journey takes her through multiple homes and households in a way that would corroborate Clarke's theory of women's road trips as a series of domestic experiences. Firstly, let us consider the automobile itself as a home. It is certainly a getaway car but it also functions as an intimacy generating space, connecting Taylor to other women in ways that echo mother-daughter bonding. From the outset, it is the place where Taylor becomes abruptly, and rather randomly, a mother. Totally unexpectedly, while Taylor has pulled up in a parking lot, a stranger places a toddler in the car, nestling her in the passenger seat as if she were a part of the car: "she pushed it gently back into the seat, trying to make it belong there" (25). With no papers or even a name to identify her, the only clue to her origin is her Native American appearance. Taylor responds with initial incredulity but then with resourcefulness and a sense of responsibility, quickly finding shelter for her and her new travelling companion in another temporary home, the Broken Arrow Motel in Oklahoma. It is run by the nurturing Mrs Hoge whom Taylor persuades to let her and the little girl stay for several weeks despite Taylor's lack of income. This motel-keeper not only provides a roof but also a re-invented home, becoming a kind of surrogate grandmother to the little girl.

It is worth pointing out that the name and the location of the motel add another layer of nuance to this composite theme of home, reminding us that space has the potential to function as a lens that can reveal racial as well as gendered constructs. Broken Arrow, Oklahoma is an identified site on the Trail of Tears where the Creek people of the Cherokee Nation were forced to settle after having been evicted from their homeland in Alabama in 1838 by the United States Government. Within the upbeat travel narrative of Taylor and her unexpected "daughter," erupts a grave reminder of the historical, enforced displacements of Native Americans, a travel reality that had little to do with freedom to roam and everything to do with dislocation and boundaries. It would appear that in this novel the little foundling, found *en route* in the empty space of a car park, is at the intersection of questions about belonging and home. For our argument, this episode of finding a home for little "Turtle" as she becomes to be known, constitutes one of the "domestic experiences" that structures this female road trip, compelling the young woman at the wheel to meditate on what it means to put down roots.
Another "home" resourcefully located by this novice mother is the garage further on down the road where Taylor ends up taking her broken down car. It is run by Mattie, a skilled mechanic mother figure who unquestioningly welcomes this oddball family by providing sustenance and safety. Mattie runs a kind of car refuge where automobiles are not only repaired but where the old, broken ones end up in the nearest thing to a car haven. The garage spills out onto a garden where vegetation and vehicles intertwine in a pastoral idyll. Here, the Machine does not interrupt or disfigure the Garden, according to Leo Marx's paradigm, but instead offers structure and support. Flowers grow out of a Thunderbird car. CB antennas are shaped as a frame for tomato plants and Taylor anticipates seeing turnips sprouting in the car she leaves there for a repair job. This is where the "bean trees" of the title are growing. When Mattie explains that the plants are from her Chinese neighbour who brought the original seeds over in 1907, Taylor pictures the rampant, overgrown bean plants which blur the boundaries between these two neighbours' homes, "marching right over the Pacific Ocean, starting from somebody's garden and ending up right here" (63). It is a striking image of organic migration that turns displacement into fruitful connection. This allusion to a neighbour's unruly bean plants hints at a global travel narrative, which connects Mattie's garden/garage to the American story of migration and diaspora. If we have included this episode in Mattie's garden/garage as one of a series of "domestic experiences" on the road, it is because this episode seems to locate Mattie's place as an example of home-making in a rather unconventional way, beyond societal norms. Not only is it a site of female bonding and care-giving, it presents itself as a locus for cultivating encounters and empowering prospects for freedom.

As it turns out, Mattie's garage is more than a metaphor. It is literally a safe house, a place where undocumented Central American refugees can find temporary shelter from the road and its dangers of being exposed to the threat of state policing. Taylor is sensitive to the vulnerability of the refugees she meets there, and, like Mattie, her surrogate mother, she feels compelled to protect them too. Deep connections of friendship, even love, are made between her and a young married Guatemalan couple. In a rather satisfying denouement to the story, Taylor takes them on a kind
Another "home" resourcefully located by this novice mother is the garage further on down the road where Taylor ends up taking her broken down car. It is run by Mattie, a skilled mechanic mother figure who unquestioningly welcomes this oddball family by providing sustenance and safety. Mattie runs a kind of car refuge where automobiles are not only repaired but where the old, broken ones end up in the nearest thing to a car haven. The garage spills out onto a garden where vegetation and vehicles intertwine in a pastoral idyll. Here, the Machine does not interrupt or disfigure the Garden, according to Leo Marx's paradigm, but instead offers structure and support. Flowers grow out of a Thunderbird car. CB antennas are shaped as a frame for tomato plants and Taylor anticipates seeing turnips sprouting in the car she leaves there for a repair job. This is where the "bean trees" of the title are growing. When Mattie explains that the plants are from her Chinese neighbour who brought the original seeds over in 1907, Taylor pictures the rampant, overgrown bean plants which blur the boundaries between these two neighbours' homes, "marching right over the Pacific Ocean, starting from somebody's garden and ending up right here" (63). It is a striking image of organic migration that turns displacement into fruitful connection. This allusion to a neighbour's unruly bean plants hints at a global travel narrative, which connects Mattie's garden/garage to the American story of migration and diaspora. If we have included this episode in Mattie's garden/garage as one of a series of "domestic experiences" on the road, it is because this episode seems to locate Mattie's place as an example of home-making in a rather unconventional way, beyond societal norms. Not only is it a site of female bonding and care-giving, it presents itself as a locus for cultivating encounters and empowering prospects for freedom.

As it turns out, Mattie's garage is more than a metaphor. It is literally a safe house, a place where undocumented Central American refugees can find temporary shelter from the road and its dangers of being exposed to the threat of state policing. Taylor is sensitive to the vulnerability of the refugees she meets there, and, like Mattie, her surrogate mother, she feels compelled to protect them too. Deep connections of friendship, even love, are made between her and a young married Guatemalan couple. In a rather satisfying denouement to the story, Taylor takes them on a kind
of reverse road trip back to Oklahoma where, thanks to her courage and
her resourcefulness, all three characters find the security and freedom
of a re-invented home.

Louise Erdrich's *Books and Islands in Ojibwe Country* (2003) offers a version of the mother/daughter road trip narrative which resonates with Kingsolver's novel. It is a piece of life-writing that charts a circular road trip from Minneapolis to Ontario, Canada and is a thoughtful meditation on departure, destination, and ancestral heritage. Interestingly for us, this short but eloquent *carnet de voyage* reveals the car as a domestic space that helps us explore the idea of home as a series of "domestic experiences." The narrative voice is that of Erdrich herself who, unlike the fictional character Taylor, is an experienced road tripper. In fact, this trip reminds her of many previous car journeys and some of our pleasure in reading her text lies in its tender layering of memory and musing. Like Taylor, she has a young daughter with her whose presence is fundamental to the experience of the journey. In fact, the motivation for Erdrich's road trip is to take her daughter to the lakes and islands of Southern Ontario, the site of her Ojibwe origins which continue to nourish Erdrich's sense of self and belonging. Here, the conventional adventure quest gives way to a search for ancestral connections, with Erdrich carrying some of her domestic load with her on the road thanks to her trusty minivan.

Let us consider Erdrich's relationship to her car as it is important in
our understanding of how she formulates her road trip. Firstly, she describes
the car as a reliable member of the family whose shared experience of
being on the road has developed into a particular type of intimacy. The
machine becomes a "she," inspiring affection, confidence, and connection:

I am connected to and believe in my 1995 blue Windstar Minivan.
We have history. I know exactly how to pack this vehicle and feel its
personality is with me as I fill the crevices between, under, behind
the blue cloth seats. The blue Windstar is sisterly, accommodating,
personable. And a gallant hauler. (11)

Not only is the car presented as a familiar road trip companion, it also
represents a mobile domestic space. Her vehicle is a living room in the
of reverse road trip back to Oklahoma where, thanks to her courage and
her resourcefulness, all three characters find the security and freedom
of a re-invented home.

Louise Erdrich's *Books and Islands in Ojibwe Country* (2003) offers a version of the mother/daughter road trip narrative which resonates with Kingsolver's novel. It is a piece of life-writing that charts a circular road trip from Minneapolis to Ontario, Canada and is a thoughtful meditation on departure, destination, and ancestral heritage. Interestingly for us, this short but eloquent *carnet de voyage* reveals the car as a domestic space that helps us explore the idea of home as a series of "domestic experiences." The narrative voice is that of Erdrich herself who, unlike the fictional character Taylor, is an experienced road tripper. In fact, this trip reminds her of many previous car journeys and some of our pleasure in reading her text lies in its tender layering of memory and musing. Like Taylor, she has a young daughter with her whose presence is fundamental to the experience of the journey. In fact, the motivation for Erdrich's road trip is to take her daughter to the lakes and islands of Southern Ontario, the site of her Ojibwe origins which continue to nourish Erdrich's sense of self and belonging. Here, the conventional adventure quest gives way to a search for ancestral connections, with Erdrich carrying some of her domestic load with her on the road thanks to her trusty minivan.

Let us consider Erdrich's relationship to her car as it is important in
our understanding of how she formulates her road trip. Firstly, she describes
the car as a reliable member of the family whose shared experience of
being on the road has developed into a particular type of intimacy. The
machine becomes a "she," inspiring affection, confidence, and connection:

I am connected to and believe in my 1995 blue Windstar Minivan.
We have history. I know exactly how to pack this vehicle and feel its
personality is with me as I fill the crevices between, under, behind
the blue cloth seats. The blue Windstar is sisterly, accommodating,
personable. And a gallant hauler. (11)

Not only is the car presented as a familiar road trip companion, it also
represents a mobile domestic space. Her vehicle is a living room in the
sense that it is room for ordinary, everyday living, for sleeping, eating and playing. Erdrich tells us that when the seats are down she can put a comfortable futon inside. Her daughter amuses herself in the car for long stretches of time, the sounds of her plastic, electronic toys signaling she has not yet nodded off. Her car is a domestic space in the way that it serves as a nursery for primary life skills, such as language acquisition. Indeed, Erdrich learns the Ojibwe language in the car thanks to the collection of cassettes that accompany her, not just on this particular trip but, during her everyday domestic journeys. She recalls being: "[i]n the isolation of my car as I dropped off and picked up children, brought groceries, navigated tangled New England roads" (82). Erdrich describes it an exceedingly difficult language, but one she does not consider foreign. It is more like a language of the heart that she embraces in a kind of homecoming gesture or as a new-born remembering the sounds of the mother's voice in the womb: "I love it. The sound comforts me. I feel as though all along this language was waiting for me with kindness" (84). This powerful impression of the car as a comforting space of language acquisition and maternal connection reinforces the idea of the journey as a domestic experience. This reading of the text correlates with Kingsolver's novel. Both stories incorporate the notion of home as an essential component of the road trip, rather than a constraint from which the protagonist needs to break free in order for the road trip to take place.

*Books and Islands* takes us on a journey to a succession of homes inhabited by Erdrich as if the writing of this journey of serial domestic experiences is an invitation to examine what home means to her. The house where she lives with her four daughters resists the notion of home as confinement, conveying instead profusion and unrestricted growth, rather like Mattie's yard. Inhabited by her growing family and an "overflow" (9) of books, it is surrounded, but not contained by trees to which she is emotionally connected. Like the Chinese bean trees of Kingsolver's novel, these trees also stand as a symbol of connection: they are transmitted and nurtured by women. Erdrich has named each one of them: "Tiny Offshoot of the Great Wahpeton Maple grows alongside.... I grew it from a seedling that took root in one of my mother's flowerpots" (7-8).
sense that it is room for ordinary, everyday living, for sleeping, eating and playing. Erdrich tells us that when the seats are down she can put a comfortable futon inside. Her daughter amuses herself in the car for long stretches of time, the sounds of her plastic, electronic toys signaling she has not yet nodded off. Her car is a domestic space in the way that it serves as a nursery for primary life skills, such as language acquisition. Indeed, Erdrich learns the Ojibwe language in the car thanks to the collection of cassettes that accompany her, not just on this particular trip but, during her everyday domestic journeys. She recalls being: "[i]n the isolation of my car as I dropped off and picked up children, brought groceries, navigated tangled New England roads" (82). Erdrich describes it an exceedingly difficult language, but one she does not consider foreign. It is more like a language of the heart that she embraces in a kind of homecoming gesture or as a new-born remembering the sounds of the mother's voice in the womb: "I love it. The sound comforts me. I feel as though all along this language was waiting for me with kindness" (84). This powerful impression of the car as a comforting space of language acquisition and maternal connection reinforces the idea of the journey as a domestic experience. This reading of the text correlates with Kingsolver's novel. Both stories incorporate the notion of home as an essential component of the road trip, rather than a constraint from which the protagonist needs to break free in order for the road trip to take place.

*Books and Islands* takes us on a journey to a succession of homes inhabited by Erdrich as if the writing of this journey of serial domestic experiences is an invitation to examine what home means to her. The house where she lives with her four daughters resists the notion of home as confinement, conveying instead profusion and unrestricted growth, rather like Mattie's yard. Inhabited by her growing family and an "overflow" (9) of books, it is surrounded, but not contained by trees to which she is emotionally connected. Like the Chinese bean trees of Kingsolver's novel, these trees also stand as a symbol of connection: they are transmitted and nurtured by women. Erdrich has named each one of them: "Tiny Offshoot of the Great Wahpeton Maple grows alongside.... I grew it from a seedling that took root in one of my mother's flowerpots" (7-8).
Being on the road is a source of joy to Erdrich the writer and Erdrich the mother. Her travels stimulate her sense of observation and her creativity at the same time including the everyday. In her words, "I've been filming everything I've described all along, as well as somehow brandishing a pen and notebook, all while nursing. One gets used to it" (28). As a member of the Ojibwe community, there is also a fascination with driving into her cultural past: the highway she drives along follows the trail of an old Ojibwe trade route, heading north. The homing frame is intimately connected to the route itself which retraces the itinerary of her ancestors. Erdrich reminds us that they carried with them both tangible and intangible markers of their culture: "Songs travelled this route, and ceremonies, as well as pelts and guns. Medicines, knowledge, sacred shells and secular ideas travelled this road" (20). This reflexion of the relationship between roots and routes and the practice of displacement as constitutive of cultural meanings ascribed to home is beyond the scope of this paper. Suffice it to say for our study of domestic experiences on the road, this collective and personal past, recalled by Erdrich, finds a poetic echo in the present-day trip. She evokes the "dreamy blankness" (28) of being in the here and now that comes with traveling with her daughter. Erdrich overturns the conventional association of family ties as a constraint, particularly the demanding dependency of a toddler, and relishes them as a particularly precious type of anchoring. Here is her description of falling asleep with her daughter while holding onto her foot:

> As I'm drifting away, I feel sorry for anyone else who is not falling asleep this way, holding onto her baby's foot. The world is calm and clear. I wish for nothing. I am not nervous about the future. Her toes curl around my fingers. I could even stop writing books. (65)

This emotional plenitude is matched by Erdrich's joy in revisiting the homeland of her Ojibwe ancestors, the motivation for her road trip. She visits the thousand-year-old rock paintings there and carries back these precious markers of her homeland in the form of photographs. Once home, she contemplates these visual reminders, re-living the trip and finding meaning in the sense of attachment it provided her with:
Being on the road is a source of joy to Erdrich the writer and Erdrich the mother. Her travels stimulate her sense of observation and her creativity at the same time including the everyday. In her words, "I've been filming everything I've described all along, as well as somehow brandishing a pen and notebook, all while nursing. One gets used to it" (28). As a member of the Ojibwe community, there is also a fascination with driving into her cultural past: the highway she drives along follows the trail of an old Ojibwe trade route, heading north. The homing frame is intimately connected to the route itself which retraces the itinerary of her ancestors. Erdrich reminds us that they carried with them both tangible and intangible markers of their culture: "Songs travelled this route, and ceremonies, as well as pelts and guns. Medicines, knowledge, sacred shells and secular ideas travelled this road" (20). This reflexion of the relationship between roots and routes and the practice of displacement as constitutive of cultural meanings ascribed to home is beyond the scope of this paper. Suffice it to say for our study of domestic experiences on the road, this collective and personal past, recalled by Erdrich, finds a poetic echo in the present-day trip. She evokes the "dreamy blankness" (28) of being in the here and now that comes with traveling with her daughter. Erdrich overturns the conventional association of family ties as a constraint, particularly the demanding dependency of a toddler, and relishes them as a particularly precious type of anchoring. Here is her description of falling asleep with her daughter while holding onto her foot:

> As I'm drifting away, I feel sorry for anyone else who is not falling asleep this way, holding onto her baby's foot. The world is calm and clear. I wish for nothing. I am not nervous about the future. Her toes curl around my fingers. I could even stop writing books. (65)

This emotional plenitude is matched by Erdrich's joy in revisiting the homeland of her Ojibwe ancestors, the motivation for her road trip. She visits the thousand-year-old rock paintings there and carries back these precious markers of her homeland in the form of photographs. Once home, she contemplates these visual reminders, re-living the trip and finding meaning in the sense of attachment it provided her with:
> I am looking at photographs I took of the paintings, I am afflicted with confusing nostalgia. It is a place that has gripped me. I feel a growing love. Partly it is that I know it through my baby and through her namesake, but I also had ancestors who lived there generations ago. (80)

Equally cherished, is the home Erdrich has created in the form of a bookstore: Birchbark Books in Minneapolis. She devotes the final pages of her travel journal to this home of her creation, describing the tangible signs that connect her permanently to it: books, of course, but also armchairs, music, wood. We are reminded that birch bark was traditionally used by Native Americans for making not only wigwams and canoes but also for scrolls and maps which gives a particular resonance to this ode to the written page. “[O]ur store is pure comfort,” (137) she writes. “It is a home for people who love books” (137). Her homecoming is particularly comforting, generating as it does, the revelation that her bookstore is another island where she will never be alone.

As a conclusion, we have found that the literary road trips by the women in the texts under study give layered and stimulating versions of the relationship between home and the highway. Cars, parking lots, motels, garages and the road itself are sites where domestic acts can be played out, where individuals and families are cared for, language is acquired, where creativity is stirred and a sense of belonging and lineage can emerge. The intimacy that comes with being in a car is not just an individual one. The collective story too can come alive when the trajectory of journey retraces past trails. These routes may have become invisible but, in these travel narratives, they are subtly revealed and serve as careful reminders that the narrative of road travel cannot be reduced to a version of the road trip as escape from home. Our readings of these women's road narratives support Deborah Clarke's argument, that home and highway are not opposing binaries. They blur, rather, into a *homescape* that is both space and experience, affirming valuable truths about women's journeys and the value of connection.
> I am looking at photographs I took of the paintings, I am afflicted with confusing nostalgia. It is a place that has gripped me. I feel a growing love. Partly it is that I know it through my baby and through her namesake, but I also had ancestors who lived there generations ago. (80)

Equally cherished, is the home Erdrich has created in the form of a bookstore: Birchbark Books in Minneapolis. She devotes the final pages of her travel journal to this home of her creation, describing the tangible signs that connect her permanently to it: books, of course, but also armchairs, music, wood. We are reminded that birch bark was traditionally used by Native Americans for making not only wigwams and canoes but also for scrolls and maps which gives a particular resonance to this ode to the written page. “[O]ur store is pure comfort,” (137) she writes. “It is a home for people who love books” (137). Her homecoming is particularly comforting, generating as it does, the revelation that her bookstore is another island where she will never be alone.

As a conclusion, we have found that the literary road trips by the women in the texts under study give layered and stimulating versions of the relationship between home and the highway. Cars, parking lots, motels, garages and the road itself are sites where domestic acts can be played out, where individuals and families are cared for, language is acquired, where creativity is stirred and a sense of belonging and lineage can emerge. The intimacy that comes with being in a car is not just an individual one. The collective story too can come alive when the trajectory of journey retraces past trails. These routes may have become invisible but, in these travel narratives, they are subtly revealed and serve as careful reminders that the narrative of road travel cannot be reduced to a version of the road trip as escape from home. Our readings of these women's road narratives support Deborah Clarke's argument, that home and highway are not opposing binaries. They blur, rather, into a *homescape* that is both space and experience, affirming valuable truths about women's journeys and the value of connection.
Works cited

BRIGHAM, Anne. *American Road Narratives*. Reimagining Mobility in Literature and Film. Charlottesville and London, U of Virginia P, 2015.

CLARKE, Deborah. *Driving Women. Fiction and Automobile Culture in 20th Century America*. Baltimore, Johns Hopkins UP, 2007.

ENEVOLD, Jessica. "The Daughters of Thelma and Louise. New? Aesthetics of the Road." *Gender, Genre and Identity in Women's Travel Writing*. Ed. Krisi Siegel. New York, Peter Lang, 2004.

ERDRICH, Louise. *Books and Islands in Ojibwe Country. Travelling in the Land of My Ancestors*. Washington, National Geographic, 2003.

GANSER, Alexander. "On the Asphalt Frontier: American Women's Road Narratives, Spatiality, and Transgression." *Journal of International Women's Studies*, vol. 7, n° 4, May 2006, pp. 153-167.

HOMER. *The Odysseus*. Trans. William Cullen Bryant. Standard Ebooks. https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/homer/the-odyssey/william-cullen-bryant/text. Accessed 29 June 2021.

KINGSOLVER, Barbara. *The Bean Trees*. New York, Harper and Row, 1988.

KEROUAC, Jack. *On the Road*. New York, Viking P, 1957.

MCDOWELL, Linda. *Gender, Identity and Place. Understanding Feminist Geographies*. Minneapolis, U of Minnesota, 1999.

MARX, Leo. *The Machine in the Garden*. Oxford UP, 1967.

PRIMEAU, Ronald. *Romance of the Road: The Literature of the American Highway*. Bowling Green State U Popular P, 1997.

SCOTT, Ridley (dir.). *Thelma and Louise*. M.G.M., 1991.
## Works cited

BRIGHAM, Anne. *American Road Narratives*. Reimagining Mobility in Literature and Film. Charlottesville and London, U of Virginia P, 2015.

CLARKE, Deborah. *Driving Women. Fiction and Automobile Culture in 20th Century America*. Baltimore, Johns Hopkins UP, 2007.

ENEVOLD, Jessica. "The Daughters of Thelma and Louise. New? Aesthetics of the Road." *Gender, Genre and Identity in Women's Travel Writing*. Ed. Krisi Siegel. New York, Peter Lang, 2004.

ERDRICH, Louise. *Books and Islands in Ojibwe Country. Travelling in the Land of My Ancestors*. Washington, National Geographic, 2003.

GANSER, Alexander. "On the Asphalt Frontier: American Women's Road Narratives, Spatiality, and Transgression." *Journal of International Women's Studies*, vol. 7, n° 4, May 2006, pp. 153-167.

HOMER. *The Odysseus*. Trans. William Cullen Bryant. Standard Ebooks. https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/homer/the-odyssey/william-cullen-bryant/text. Accessed 29 June 2021.

KINGSOLVER, Barbara. *The Bean Trees*. New York, Harper and Row, 1988.

KEROUAC, Jack. *On the Road*. New York, Viking P, 1957.

MCDOWELL, Linda. *Gender, Identity and Place. Understanding Feminist Geographies*. Minneapolis, U of Minnesota, 1999.

MARX, Leo. *The Machine in the Garden*. Oxford UP, 1967.

PRIMEAU, Ronald. *Romance of the Road: The Literature of the American Highway*. Bowling Green State U Popular P, 1997.

SCOTT, Ridley (dir.). *Thelma and Louise*. M.G.M., 1991.
Chapter
8

"Home" in Ada Cambridge's
Early Works, or the
Search for Belonging
in the Colonial
Australian Context

Alice Michel
Chapter
8

"Home" in Ada Cambridge's
Early Works, or the
Search for Belonging
in the Colonial
Australian Context

Alice Michel
<figure><img src="image_14.png" /></figure>
<figure><img src="image_14.png" /></figure>
Chapter 8

"The homesickness of those whose homes are on the other side of
the world becomes a chronic complaint": it is thus that Ada Cambridge
begins her first fiction written in Australia ("Three Years' Ago" 133).
In her search for a home, Ada Cambridge knew all too well what she was
writing about. A poet and a novelist, born in 1844 in England, she settled
in Melbourne, in the colony of Victoria, in 1870, where she died in 1926.
First feeling as an exile, "homesick practically all the time" (Thirty Years 1),
she nonetheless later claimed that Australia was her "true home"
(Letter, 1911, n.p.).

In Australia, she published regularly in the local press, at first
using only her initials, "A.C.," to sign her serial novels, probably in order
to avoid trouble for her missionary husband, as what she wrote was
anti-conformist enough. Some of her favourite themes were indeed
marriage, women's rights, social equality, class norms and institutional
religion. Throughout her life, Cambridge was a prolific writer who was
praised by her contemporaries, notably by literary critics, such as Henry
Gyles Turner and Alexander Sutherland: "Ada Cambridge is entitled to the
first place amongst the novelists of her sex in Australia, [...] by reason
of the quality of her work, and the varied distinctiveness of her several
stories" (Turner and Sutherland 87). In the 1880s-90s, she was a major
literary figure in Australia, writing in the Australian press as well as for
the British and American book markets. However, at the turn of the
Chapter 8

"The homesickness of those whose homes are on the other side of
the world becomes a chronic complaint": it is thus that Ada Cambridge
begins her first fiction written in Australia ("Three Years' Ago" 133).
In her search for a home, Ada Cambridge knew all too well what she was
writing about. A poet and a novelist, born in 1844 in England, she settled
in Melbourne, in the colony of Victoria, in 1870, where she died in 1926.
First feeling as an exile, "homesick practically all the time" (Thirty Years 1),
she nonetheless later claimed that Australia was her "true home"
(Letter, 1911, n.p.).

In Australia, she published regularly in the local press, at first
using only her initials, "A.C.," to sign her serial novels, probably in order
to avoid trouble for her missionary husband, as what she wrote was
anti-conformist enough. Some of her favourite themes were indeed
marriage, women's rights, social equality, class norms and institutional
religion. Throughout her life, Cambridge was a prolific writer who was
praised by her contemporaries, notably by literary critics, such as Henry
Gyles Turner and Alexander Sutherland: "Ada Cambridge is entitled to the
first place amongst the novelists of her sex in Australia, [...] by reason
of the quality of her work, and the varied distinctiveness of her several
stories" (Turner and Sutherland 87). In the 1880s-90s, she was a major
literary figure in Australia, writing in the Australian press as well as for
the British and American book markets. However, at the turn of the
century, disinterest in Australian colonial women writers grew as their
novels were often disregarded as tackling feminine, domestic concerns,
away from the nationalist, masculinist trend that began to be asserted
in the 1890s. In the 1980s, colonial women writers, including Cambridge,
started to be reassessed by feminist critics. However, her novels remain
neglected in Australian literary history, despite offering an alternative
view on women's role and status in the construction of the Australian
identity. More specifically, Cambridge's texts share a common concern
for the search for a home in the colonial environment, which by definition
disrupted the very meaning of "home" for this English-born writer settling
in Victoria. Her production reflects on the polysemy of the term "home,"
referring in turn to England, Australia, and to the domestic environment.
Indeed, the polysemous definition of "home" has to be read in the context
of the social and literary upheavals of the second half of the nineteenth
century, which led to a gradual change in the meaning of "home" in
Australian narratives. The notion could in turn refer to Britain or to
Australia, either to the place where the settlers came from or the place
where they were now living. However, as human geography has shown,
place is not only a geographical location, but "a way of seeing, knowing
and understanding the world" (Cresswell 16) and is linked to concepts
of movement and (im)mobility. For Yi-Fu Tuan, "place is pause; each
pause in movement makes it possible for location to be transformed into
place" (Tuan 6). Home, which is at the heart of this paper, also articulates
a tension between movement and suspension, which translates as a
tension between displacement, belonging, and elusiveness. This notion is
particularly relevant to nineteenth-century colonial context; as Tamara
S. Wagner points out,

[...] colonial settler fiction formed part of nineteenth-century
transoceanic literary interchanges and genre developments that
radiated through English-language writing across the Pacific as well
the Atlantic. [...] These narratives articulated anxieties about home,
how it could be transported or replicated, and how domestic values
as probably the most definitional aspect of Victorian culture would
bear up elsewhere. (Wagner 2)
century, disinterest in Australian colonial women writers grew as their
novels were often disregarded as tackling feminine, domestic concerns,
away from the nationalist, masculinist trend that began to be asserted
in the 1890s. In the 1980s, colonial women writers, including Cambridge,
started to be reassessed by feminist critics. However, her novels remain
neglected in Australian literary history, despite offering an alternative
view on women's role and status in the construction of the Australian
identity. More specifically, Cambridge's texts share a common concern
for the search for a home in the colonial environment, which by definition
disrupted the very meaning of "home" for this English-born writer settling
in Victoria. Her production reflects on the polysemy of the term "home,"
referring in turn to England, Australia, and to the domestic environment.
Indeed, the polysemous definition of "home" has to be read in the context
of the social and literary upheavals of the second half of the nineteenth
century, which led to a gradual change in the meaning of "home" in
Australian narratives. The notion could in turn refer to Britain or to
Australia, either to the place where the settlers came from or the place
where they were now living. However, as human geography has shown,
place is not only a geographical location, but "a way of seeing, knowing
and understanding the world" (Cresswell 16) and is linked to concepts
of movement and (im)mobility. For Yi-Fu Tuan, "place is pause; each
pause in movement makes it possible for location to be transformed into
place" (Tuan 6). Home, which is at the heart of this paper, also articulates
a tension between movement and suspension, which translates as a
tension between displacement, belonging, and elusiveness. This notion is
particularly relevant to nineteenth-century colonial context; as Tamara
S. Wagner points out,

[...] colonial settler fiction formed part of nineteenth-century
transoceanic literary interchanges and genre developments that
radiated through English-language writing across the Pacific as well
the Atlantic. [...] These narratives articulated anxieties about home,
how it could be transported or replicated, and how domestic values
as probably the most definitional aspect of Victorian culture would
bear up elsewhere. (Wagner 2)
The notion of home thus also had a domestic meaning as household. As such, home was a structural theme in domestic fiction, that is in narratives that focus on household and family concerns, as well as on the way these concerns were impacted by a voyage across the world.

The question of belonging, whether geographical, cultural or familial, was a continual concern of Ada Cambridge's work, from her very first Australian narratives onwards. As we will see, her first narratives written in Australia, notably her first tales and her first serial novel, tackle several themes that would become recurrent in the rest of her production, such as her characters' attachment to England and/or Australia. Ada Cambridge began to publish fiction in *The Australasian* in 1871 and her first literary steps in Australia took the form of a series of seven short tales—what she describes as “trifling little tales” in her memoirs *Thirty Years in Australia* (86). Despite their outwardly light and conventional features, her first narratives focusing on love dilemmas depict the experience of the characters' exile, whether their departure was voluntary or not. They are not altogether short stories, as these texts are closer in form to chapters of a serial novel, even if they remain structurally independent. These short tales are indeed thematically and chronologically linked; together, they form a single plot, foreshadowing the genre of the serial novel which Cambridge would later turn to. These seven narratives were published in the space of two years, three to six months apart, in the journal sections entitled “The Sketcher” and “The Novelist.” These seven tales contain “Three Years' Ago” (July 1871), “Our New Chum” (October 1871), “Charlie” (January 1872), “Charlie's Wife” (May 1872), “Bachelor Troubles” (August 1872), “The History of Six Hours” (February 1873) and “At Sea” (June 1873). The same protagonists can be found in all of them and they include the same narrator, Jim Morris, an English vicar in the colony of Victoria. This article also focuses on Ada Cambridge's first serial novel, “Up the Murray,” which was published a few years later in *The Australasian*, from March 27 to July 17, 1875, at the rate of one to two chapters every two issues. Neglected by critics, the novel, focusing on the three sisters Dorothy, Theresa and Patty, requires to be briefly summarised in order to best understand what is at stake. When the serial novel opens, Patty has settled in Australia and the heroine, Dorothy, is about to leave England to visit her in Melbourne.
The notion of home thus also had a domestic meaning as household. As such, home was a structural theme in domestic fiction, that is in narratives that focus on household and family concerns, as well as on the way these concerns were impacted by a voyage across the world.

The question of belonging, whether geographical, cultural or familial, was a continual concern of Ada Cambridge's work, from her very first Australian narratives onwards. As we will see, her first narratives written in Australia, notably her first tales and her first serial novel, tackle several themes that would become recurrent in the rest of her production, such as her characters' attachment to England and/or Australia. Ada Cambridge began to publish fiction in *The Australasian* in 1871 and her first literary steps in Australia took the form of a series of seven short tales—what she describes as “trifling little tales” in her memoirs *Thirty Years in Australia* (86). Despite their outwardly light and conventional features, her first narratives focusing on love dilemmas depict the experience of the characters' exile, whether their departure was voluntary or not. They are not altogether short stories, as these texts are closer in form to chapters of a serial novel, even if they remain structurally independent. These short tales are indeed thematically and chronologically linked; together, they form a single plot, foreshadowing the genre of the serial novel which Cambridge would later turn to. These seven narratives were published in the space of two years, three to six months apart, in the journal sections entitled “The Sketcher” and “The Novelist.” These seven tales contain “Three Years' Ago” (July 1871), “Our New Chum” (October 1871), “Charlie” (January 1872), “Charlie’s Wife” (May 1872), “Bachelor Troubles” (August 1872), “The History of Six Hours” (February 1873) and “At Sea” (June 1873). The same protagonists can be found in all of them and they include the same narrator, Jim Morris, an English vicar in the colony of Victoria. This article also focuses on Ada Cambridge's first serial novel, “Up the Murray,” which was published a few years later in *The Australasian*, from March 27 to July 17, 1875, at the rate of one to two chapters every two issues. Neglected by critics, the novel, focusing on the three sisters Dorothy, Theresa and Patty, requires to be briefly summarised in order to best understand what is at stake. When the serial novel opens, Patty has settled in Australia and the heroine, Dorothy, is about to leave England to visit her in Melbourne.