112
2019
NORTH CAROLINA L I T E R A R Y RE V I E W
“AND THROUGH IT ALL WE ARE ALONE”: TWO MODERN TALES OF TIMELESS ISOLATION a review by Sara E. Melton Dale Bailey. In the Night Wood. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2018. John Kessel. Pride and Prometheus. London: Saga Press, 2018.
SARA E. MELTON is a lecturer at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, where she teaches literature, composition, and ESL classes. Melton earned her BA and MA at Radford University and her PhD in English from Tennessee with her dissertation “Duties Best Fitted: Servant Characters, Sensibility, and Domesticity in the Victorian Novel.” She lives in Oak Ridge, TN.
At the end of The Graduate, we see the image of the two main characters, the young lovers who have just fled the wedding, together at last, having defied convention and parental wishes, but instead of victoriously falling into each other’s arms, they sit on the bus, lost in their own thoughts, smiling uncomfortably, the human condition wrapped up in one decisive image: we are alone, even when surrounded by others, even in the presence of the beloved. The ideal of union with family, friends, and romantic partner is timeless, but our essential inability to achieve that union is expressed by Mathew Arnold in “To Marguerite: Continued”: “We mortal millions live alone.” In two recent novels, authors John Kessel of Raleigh, NC, and Dale Bailey of Hickory, NC, continue this lament, using the devices of stories within stories, science, and the supernatural, to highlight the very human desire to connect – “Only connect!” as E.M. Forster wrote – the hardest task of all. Mary Bennett, hapless sister of Elizabeth and Kitty, and the melancholy protagonist of John Kessel’s Pride and Prometheus, says, “I realize how small I am, and how great time is. These rocks, this river, will long survive us. We are here for a breath, and then we are gone. And through it all we are alone” (110). Her words echo forlornly over all the main characters of Pride and Prometheus. The halo of the happy families of the Darcys and the Bingleys has a certain dim appeal in this novel, but it seems as far away and unattainable as a fairy
tale. When Kitty declares that she desires the kind of life Elizabeth has with Darcy, Mary replies drily that “There aren’t eight men in England with ten thousand a year and an estate like Pemberley.” But when Kitty laments that “I want to have a man who knows and understands me, who sees who I am and loves me. I want to look into his eyes and find a kindred soul,” Mary sardonically replies that it may be “easier to get the man with ten thousand a year” (93–94). Such is the doggedly pragmatic outlook of our heroine. Mary herself is a socially awkward woman in her thirties, overlooked by her family, ignored by the potential suitors who might, according to received wisdom, make her life “exalted” if they were to offer her marriage. She is sufficiently far removed from her society that she feels human interactions and emotions are sometimes quite alien to her. Mary at least has the consolation of her intellectual curiosity and her studies, but Kitty has no such consolation, so her own misery at receiving no eligible marriage offer is more keenly felt. Their parents are isolated from each other by weariness, and lack of sympathy or understanding. The family members left at Longbourne are secure, but melancholy and adrift. When fate brings Mary into contact with Victor Frankenstein, and later with his creature, she meets people still more isolated and miserable than herself, and with no equanimity or patience to bear their misfortune. The Creature, intelligent and able but outcast from society and comfort, declares he is surely the “most