124
2021
NORTH CAROLINA L I T E R A R Y RE V I E W
In a novel that is richly echoic without being derivative, Marly Youmans’s Charis in the World of Wonders reaches into a deep repository of traditions (literary and psychological), and posits answers to protagonist Charis Herrick’s probing questions. Reflecting the stop-start nature of life itself, Youmans varies the pace and scale of her novel, from intensely concentrated detailed writing about a “small” event or a short moment, to a rapid excursion through a longer period of time. Charis in the World of Wonders offers diverse sources of enjoyment – an exciting adventure saga, for example. Or, readers interested in the philosophical concepts of time and place, tracing the path of Charis’s adventure offers attractions. For readers interested in history, the book presents a vivid and engaging picture of “a world lit only by fire.”1 Or for those of a metaphysical bent, there is the fascination of the bewildering “forests” of contradictions that drive Every Woman Charis’s interior, psychological journeys. For readers who relish the mot juste, there is delicate and nuanced writing craft and a sparkling use of kennings. My own recommendation is to read the book for all of its many wonders. Set in the late seventeenth century in Falmouth, ME (just north of present-day Portsmouth, an outpost of the civilization of the time), Charis’s adventure begins during an attack on her town and her home. With parents who them-
HOMAGE TO HAWTHORNE: A (NEW) WONDER BOOK a review by Lorraine Hale Robinson Marly Youmans. Charis in the World of Wonders. Ignatius Press, 2020.
LORRAINE HALE ROBINSON is Instructor Emerita in East Carolina University’s Department of English where she served as NCLR Senior Associate Editor from 1998 until her retirement in 2013. During her tenure on staff, she wrote the serialized “Dictionary of North Carolina Writers” and numerous sidebars. MARLY YOUMANS grew up in Cullowhee, NC, and other places in the South. She received degrees from Hollins College (now University), Brown University, and UNC Chapel Hill and now lives in Cooperstown, NY. Read interviews with her in NCLR 2006 and NCLR Online 2020. She has published poetry and had several of her books reviewed in NCLR and NCLR Online, and she has served as a regular NCLR reviewer.
1
William Manchester, The World Lit Only by Fire: The Medieval Mind and the Renaissance: Portrait of an Age (Little, Brown, 1993).
selves embraced the unknown, Charis is heir to the same courage and trail-blazing spirit that led her parents to leave the relative comfort and safety of Boston for the remote, northern settlement. Taking her younger sister Mary with her, Charis flees the attack and finds her way – literally by a thread – to a “bower place” in the forest, the first of her journey’s many waypoints (27). The “green shelter” provides brief respite, but Mary will die in the forest and her body will be – necessarily – abandoned there, a wrenching choice for Charis (33). At that point, Charis will embark alone on a journey that will take her from Maine across coastal New Hampshire and into Massachusetts where she will eventually marry and settle until accused of witchcraft. Her escape from her imprisonment while awaiting trial and her final river-crossing form the last events of the book. Marly Youmans takes Charis and readers on an exciting quest that has many parallels with the classic mythological hero journey articulated by Joseph Campbell in The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Time is the thread that leads Charis inexorably forward as the “call to adventure” summons her from the past and propels her through a series of challenging tests and trials.2 Charis wants to “go back,” but in the charred remains of her home and her past, there is nothing to which she can return. Mehitabel Holt, a sometime friend during Charis’s later sojourn in the “frampled”
2
Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Bollingen Series XVII, 2nd ed. (Princeton UP, 1968) 58.