134
2019
NORTH CAROLINA L I T E R A R Y RE V I E W
AN UNWANTED EDUCATION, DETOXIFYINGLY SATISFYING a review by Donna A. Gessell Kat Meads. Miss Jane: The Lost Years. Livingston: Livingston Press/ University of West Alabama Press, 2018.
DONNA A. GESSELL has a PhD from Case Western Reserve University and is a Professor of English at the University of North Georgia, Dahlonega campus. Her scholarship focuses on the works of Jane Austen, Flannery O’Connor, Gabriel García Márquez, and Judith Ortiz Cofer. She is a frequent reviewer for NCLR, including, most recently, a review of Meads’s novel In This Season of Rage and Melancholy Such Irrevocable Acts as These (Mongrel Empire, 2016) in NCLR Online 2018. KAT MEADS is author of sixteen books and chapbooks of poetry and prose. She has received numerous writing awards, including a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship. A native of Currituck County, NC, she holds an MFA from UNC Greensboro and a BA from UNC Chapel Hill. She currently lives in California, teaches in Oklahoma City University’s lowresidency MFA program, and is a member of the NCLR editorial board. Read an interview with Meads and her play Husbands Found Dead in NCLR 2009.
Kat Meads’s latest novel, Miss Jane: The Lost Years, presents yet another dimension of being “a Cracker hick/chick.” Like so many of Meads’s other heroines drawn from her experiences in North Carolina, Jane proves vulnerable because of her socio-economic and cultural roots. An undergraduate at “a public university, South Atlantic region” (5), she is targeted by Prof P, ironically in his history of feminist studies class. Ninth in his string of sexual predations, she too is selected for her relative powerlessness. Miss Jane’s story is told forthrightly, but unconventionally by a chorus of female voices who doggedly keep the audience’s focus on Jane, guarding against any sympathy for the perpetrator. Their role mediates the action, directing the reader’s gaze firmly toward Prof P’s manipulation. The voices of the chorus save the narration from becoming overwhelmingly depressing. They are in turns witty, humorous, cajoling, scolding, and sanguine – always brutally honest in portraying the unfairness of the relationship:
The story’s detail is unerringly unnerving, perhaps leading the reader to wonder whether Meads is relying on firsthand information. In her note on the book, the author reveals her sources, while explaining her unconventional narrative form: To say I’ve known a few Miss Janes is a lie; I’ve known dozens and “heard tell” of countless others. But how to tell this story? That took awhile to figure out. . . . Because heroine Jane’s perspectives and perceptions are so blinkered, a routine first-person telling wouldn’t do the trick. . . . So after some teeth gnashing and mental anguish, I came up with the idea of narration via a historically aware, pissed-off female chorus. That chorus serves as Miss Jane’s unabashed champions. Never do they give Prof P the benefit of the doubt. Moreover, they make no apology for their female-biased reporting. In their view, the male-side story has had its day and say. Onward.*
The result is quintessentially disquieting: an in-depth exploration of sexual abuse, both its concrete aspects and its psychological ones. The chorus explains: There will be siege. There will be torment. There will be major dis-
You find our stance too polemical, too
tress. Small, medium, and massive
didactic? Our tone too loud and shrill?
humiliation(s) will be visited on our
Our language too coarse and raunchy?
Miss Jane, her self-preservation severely
Our manner of expression too bitchily
tested. Mind games of an increasingly
blunt? You’d prefer we find a prettier,
devious sort will be played. Incidents
more lyrical means of outing the bas-
of intimidations will escalate. Strong-
tard? To you we say: tough titty. Get
arm displays of might and moxie will
off the bus. This is not your ride. To
proliferate. Force (of various sort) will be
those still perplexed by the “fuss” over
exerted. Unfair advantage will (again)
another Cracker hick / chick accepting
be taken. Guilt, the whipping stick, will
her hick / chick fate, we here clarify: it’s
(again) be brandished and applied. Ulti-
the waste, knuckleheads. The waste of
mately at stake: Miss Jane’s guarded /
another hick / chick life. (9)
close-mouthed / disinclined to feelingsshare disposition. (40)
* This quotation comes from the “From my author” note included in the publicity materials sent with the review copy of the book.