History, mothering, and manhood in Mary Lee Settle's The Beulah Quintet.

Miller, Wendy Pearce

CRITICS SUCH AS BRIAN ROSENBERG (110) AND JANE GENTRY VANCE (222) note the gradual burgeoning of female power in The Beulah Quintet, (1) and they characterize the power shift as a positive phenomenon; I do not necessarily disagree with such an assessment. One glaring problem in the scant available discussion of gender in the quintet, however, is the lack of attention afforded Settle's major male characters, because it is with these male characters that Settle (or, more appropriately, the narrative voice) most often sympathizes. Despite the quintet's increasing privileging of the feminine in terms of narration, Settle repeatedly directs our attention toward the male characters and their deterioration. The increase in female power is directly proportional to the decrease in male power, and Settle emphasizes the negative effects of the power shift on characters of both sexes.

That the subject of male gender construction should be overlooked in studies involving gender is not surprising. Despite a surge of interest in "masculinist studies" in the 1990s, as late as 1996 Anne Goodwyn Jones argued that "gender essentialism--the belief that gender differences are the result primarily of natural and biological, not social or cultural forces--still holds its own even today" (42). Jones further notes the dearth of scholarship on Southern manhood in general: "Even less has been done on the history of men and manhood in the twentieth-century South; the last pages of Ted Ownby's Subduing Satan only begin to address the question" (48).

Feminist theorists such as Jones herself have contributed much to the study of constructions of womanhood in Southern literature, but relatively little has changed in the past decade regarding the treatment of gender construction and male characters. As masculinist theorist Judith Kegan Gardiner asserts, current feminist theories are ... being changed by the insights of masculinity studies. At present, feminist-inflected masculinity studies have reached consensus about some previously troubling issues. Chief among these is the initial insight that masculinity, too, is a gender and therefore that men as well as women have undergone historical and cultural processes of gender formation.... (11)

The topic of male gender formation is one that Settle is often concerned with; she acknowledges her "obsession" in an interview with John Crane in 1990. During the interview, Crane mentions what he refers to as "the writer's burden," and he inquires of Settle, "What do you think of as being the first burden that you had to get off your chest and into print?" Settle responds to the question at length: To recognize that is to recognize that we write the same book over and over. The first obsession is the last for me, and I have just finished what I hope is the final and deepest dive into it, what I hope to God is the last novel to take place in Beulah Land. It is called Charley Bland and it is the most profound study of the obsession yet. Part of it is the inherent quest for freedom, which has become genetic with Americans.... Then, too, and close to it, is the place of men of diffuse talents and good will, and what is asked of them by the world they live in. Death was asked of Johnny Church in the first volume, Prisons; too little was asked of Johnny McKarkle in The Killing Ground at the end.... There is a self-questioning in such men, sometimes a self-defeat. Am I needed? Have I a place where I can be used well? What does society ask of me that I can give? When it asks nothing, or too little, men die on the vine. Once they farmed and explored and led other men into a wilderness. In the modern world, they take up dangerous sports, do funny things, marry too often, drive too fast, take to drink, exploit women in a kind of sexual revenge ... know, maybe without knowing, that their fatal flaw is to acquiesce to small decencies, and find those glimpses they allow of themselves almost unbearable. It makes them dangerously good at war. But I have learned, in all this exploration of the kind of men I am drawn to, as Hardy was drawn to those great independent women in his Wessex, that they choose their own defeat, and it has been hard for me to face. (52-53)

When Crane asks, "The woods and the city are full of them, but would you say they are still in a minority compared to those who wish not to be used well? Who wish just to be let alone?" (53), Settle clarifies: Oh, you mean the hollow men? (2) There is no wish with them. They work for insurance companies, vote Republican, belong to country clubs, question nothing, and die. Turgenev called them the rich, the happy, and the unjust. The unused and the unjust look the same, all too often. I'm writing about a few of them who are capable of having broken hearts. They are not cynics.... (53)

As established earlier, The Beulah Quintet is a work very much concerned with history, and the novels collectively cover more than three hundred years and numerous generations of the same families. Readers view the history of the fictitious Beulah Valley through a series of relationships--both familial and communal. With the addition of each novel, however, it becomes increasingly clear that Settle is acutely aware of the relationship between history and gender formation, and she is especially concerned with depicting the ways in which men and women consciously and even unconsciously shape each other. Despite the many restrictions imposed upon them because of their sex, Settle's women often prove powerful--they are the actual makers of history; their subtle or sometimes not-so-subtle manipulations of the male characters shape their worlds.

In her lengthy response to Crane's question, Settle acknowledges that her male characters are weakened by a "fatal flaw," and they are guilty of making poor choices, often choosing "their own defeat." Her Canona fiction is haunted by male characters who choose death, either actively or passively; for these men, death signifies a welcome release from the responsibility of providing for and protecting their demanding women. (3) Settle points out that although the male characters participate in the negative shaping of the female gender, the male characters are in turn shaped by their creations--and the shaping is dangerous for both sexes. Readers and critics of literature in general have come to expect explanations (apologies, even) for the behavior of flawed female characters who make poor choices as a result of their shaping by male expectations and demands; we are accustomed to seeing women depicted as victims. We are not accustomed to thinking about male behavior as socially constructed, and for that reason Settle's depiction of male-female dynamics in the quintet is unsettling. Settle does not employ her female characters as two-dimensional villains, as she acknowledges the many historical forces that have made them into what they are. The author's focus, however, is on the ways in which upper-class male characters are negatively shaped through female influence, and she examines the decline in male potency over the course of three hundred years. Settle's male characters are destroyed, in essence, by what women have become, by what generations of their male ancestors have helped create. The quintet is filled with mothers who fail to nurture their sons during formative years--they fail to water the vine (to use Settle's language), or if they water the vine, they do so with tainted water, and the men wither and "die on the vine." The majority of the quintet's leading male characters die prematurely, and they leave wives and daughters who will shape the newest generation of men. The question raised implicitly by the text(s) concerns when and if characters of both sexes will become aware of their self-destructive behavior.

Prisons and O Beulah Land: Setting the Stage

Cruel female characters abound in Settle's fiction, perhaps none more than the figure of the inept mother. Distant, frail, and untouchable, these women damage their offspring, particularly their male children, first through physical and emotional neglect and, later, through guilt. Although little time is spent exploring the theme in the first volume of the quintet, the novel sets a basic pattern that later volumes will follow. In Prisons and in each subsequent text (though I will focus on O Beulah Land, Know Nothing, and The Killing Ground), a "lower" woman--deemed lower for a variety of reasons that include questionable morality, race, and class--proves to be a better mother, capable of acting as surrogate, loving and comforting children not hers.

Of all the books in the quintet, Prisons contains the fewest female characters. Johnny Church narrates the piece, and most of the book concerns his leaving home and joining the Parliamentary Army. The most significant scenes concerning gender, however, appear in the early portion of the text, which provides background information about Johnny's upbringing. Johnny learns through the servant Charity that his father married his mother for her bloodline and that there is no fondness between his parents. More importantly, there is little affection evident between Johnny and his mother. In Prisons, he contrasts his mother with her nurturing sister, Nell; Johnny's description of his pious mother as a soldier anticipates later descriptions of white mothers in subsequent books of the quintet. He muses, "I wish I could have loved her more.... but I feared her thin yellow hands, the bones bit in my flesh. I hated her sad voice and the easy tears that seemed forever swimming in her eyes.... She was to become the sternest soldier of us all" (P27). Despite what we know about Johnny's rigid and selfish father, it remains difficult to sympathize with his mother, who is equally harsh in the treatment of her son. She finds motherhood distasteful, and Johnny, her only child, knows it. Johnny refers to Aunt Nell, on the other hand, as "beautiful and like a fairy princess" (17), and he recalls being in love with her as a young boy (24). The younger Nell, who seems a foil for her sister, "mothers" her nephew, providing him with the attention he craves, attention that later turns sexual; she seduces Johnny and bears his child, whose descendant, Jonathan Lacey, will immigrate to America. Although Johnny views Nell solely as a positive figure, she is in the quintet a precursor to the dangerous mother/lover figure depicted in O Beulah Land, Know Nothing, and The Killing Ground. In these later texts, mothers do not become their sons' lovers in a physical sense, but they tend to display an incestuous attitude toward their male offspring. (4) Each woman will serve as destructive force in her son's/sons' life/lives, and each son will die either literally or figuratively as a result of his mother's influence.

As its title indicates, the second book, O Beulah Land, begins with incredible optimism; the book title is a reference to Isaiah 62:4: Thou shalt no more be termed Forsaken; neither shall thy land any more be termed Desolate: but thou shalt be called Hephzibah, and thy land Beulah: for the LORD delighteth in thee, and thy land shall be married.

Notwithstanding the obvious perils of the eighteenth-century American wilderness, Settle depicts what will become the Beulah Valley as a kind of Eden, the "Adam and Eve" (Garrett 54) being Jeremiah Catlett and Hannah Bridewell, former indentured servant and prostitute, respectively. The second volume of the quintet, therefore, represents both the beginning and the end of innocence. Although these characters (and the other eventual inhabitants of the valley in this book) are so badly flawed that viewing them as innocents is difficult, their attempt to start over in a new land, the Beulah Valley, untainted by previous European settlers, invites such an interpretation. (5) Settle juxtaposes their naive optimism that they can help establish and participate in a society in which all members are equal despite differences in breeding and life experience with Sally Lacey's determination to preserve a rigid Eastern class structure. Whether it is feasible that they could have succeeded in their quest is uncertain, but these first settlers never really have the opportunity to try. By the end of the book, Jeremiah and Hannah are dead, scalped by Indians, and Sally Lacey appears primarily to blame.

In O Beulah Land, set more than a century later than Prisons, Johnny Church's descendant, Jonathan Lacey, attempts to establish an egalitarian society when he founds Beulah. Lacey facilitates the transplanting of other colonists in Beulah, welcoming honest, hardworking Scottish and Irish immigrants like the McKarkles, in addition to the Catletts, squatters on his property. Lacey values character and stamina rather than pedigree, and he regards social status as insignificant in the harsh frontier environment; through his disregard for social status, he echoes the sentiments of his ancestor, Johnny Church. Johnny Lacey works as hard as his lower-class friends and treats them respectfully. When he brings his wife, Sally, to the homestead, however, trouble begins, and Johnny later recognizes the seriousness of his mistake when he refers to "Poor little Sal" as "a mighty dangerous woman" (OBL 259). Sally Lacey disrupts the harmony of the Beulah Valley upon her arrival, as she makes evident her dislike of the other inhabitants and surveys her new home with distaste. Furthermore, she introduces the institution of slavery to the valley by transplanting her two black slaves there to act as household servants.

As will become evident in the next book, Know Nothing, Sal's establishing of slavery has greater consequences than any could anticipate. "I always knowed we oughtn't to a brung no women" (OBL 231), Johnny's friend, Solomon McKarkle, states after he witnesses Sal's dismayed reaction to seeing her new house for the first time; McKarkles's use of the term "women" here refers to women of a certain temperament and what that type of woman represents--exactly the form of oppression that the inhabitants of the valley have attempted to escape by moving west, a common American literary theme. Despite his wife's perpetual abuse of his friends, Johnny tries to humor her. He accepts blame for her behavior and refers to his own shortsightedness in assuming that he could make his wife happy on the frontier: "Ye can't help your ways and they can't help theirs. Back East there might be time for lickin your wounds with bein English-bred and high and mighty, but out here there's no time" (238). Sally insists upon retaining her Eastern habits, however, as is evident when Johnny forces her to entertain her female neighbors in her new home one evening. She dons her best dress and ensures that her guests will feel uncomfortable when she serves them hot chocolate in her finest cups and saucers. Johnny eventually acknowledges the impossibility of achieving his goal when he asks, "What can we become out here? We may have brought the virtues, but we've brought a cancer, too" (249). Johnny appears to be referring to Sal (and, implicitly, to slavery) here, since she poisons the pristine Beulah and ruins its promise for future generations.

The majority of information regarding Sal and her "mothering" skills comes near the novel's close, where we see some similarities between Sally Lacey and Johnny Church's mother in Prisons. In O Beulah Land, however, Settle develops the inept mother theme more explicitly as she will continue to do in later books of the quintet. Settle juxtaposes the cold Sally Lacey with Hannah Catlett, and she emphasizes Sal's distance from her children as well as Hannah's closeness with her own, particularly young Ezekiel, who chooses to wear the buckskin pants she lovingly crafts for his wedding rather than the secondhand Eastern clothing Sal attempts to force upon him.

Admittedly, Sal enjoys a closer relationship with son Perry than she does with daughter Sara (who is clearly her father's daughter)--but that relationship appears more toxic than healthy. More than anything else, Perry wants to gain favor with his mother by disparaging his sister. In fact, Perry's desire to best Sara precipitates her marriage to Ezekiel when he informs Sal that Sara and Ezekiel are alone in the woods. Perry's delight when Sal beats Sara despite her innocence (6) foreshadows his later malevolent behavior. Clearly, there is a connection between Perry's behavior and Sal's influence, and that behavior results in his banishment and disinheritance. His involvement with rift-raft and subsequent participation in the killing of the Indians to take their animal skins embarrasses Johnny Lacey to the point that he removes the young man from his will, and Ezekiel vows to kill him if he returns to the valley. Settle intimates that the murders incite the retaliatory Indian attack on the Beulah settlement at the end of the book, so Perry's behavior directly causes the deaths of Jeremiah and Hannah Catlett. Peregrine Lacey is, in effect, responsible for the murders of the Adam and Eve of Beulah.

Settle contrasts Perry with his sister, Sara, who finds a surrogate mother of sorts in Sally's mulatto slave, Lyddy. Mthough the episode is brief, we see the mutual love between the two as Lyddy comforts Sara following Sal's beating of her. Sara describes Lyddy as "soft and pretty" (OBL 312), and she informs her teacher and mentor Jarcey that both she and her father love Lyddy. Again, a lower woman proves to be a better mother than does a woman of so-called breeding. In addition, Johnny's adulterous involvement with a lower woman sets the pattern for later male characters who love women whom they could never marry, rather than the women society dictates that they marry. (7)

Although Nancy Carol Joyner views Sal as a "comic figure" because of her sense of superiority despite her own questionable social background (38), the effects of Sal's destructive behavior overshadow any comic relief she might provide. As Rosenberg points out, "Ironically, the mixing of classes here will produce more intense class consciousness, and Sally Lacey rather than Hannah Catlett will come to seem the progenitor of later behavior and values" (82-83). (8) Sal's own undoing finally occurs when her daughter Sara marries Ezekiel Catlett, a member of the poorest family in the valley. Sara, like her father, retains none of the snobbery of Eastern influence, and she truly loves her husband. After the wedding, one of the male guests overhears Sally complaining to Johnny about the inferiority of their company: "All them Cohees, common as dirt, entertained like they was quality. To think a daughter of mine should fetch up with dirt such as that" (OBL 321-22). Later in the evening, some of the men accost Sally in an effort to teach her a lesson. After they physically subdue her and cut offher hair (an act that robs her of her femininity and her status), Sally is traumatized to the extent that she regresses into a childlike state, and she returns to the East with Johnny when he leaves the valley to take his newly-won seat in the House of Burgesses. Nevertheless, Sally has irrevocably altered life in the Beulah Valley, and despite her obvious illness at the book's conclusion, "her eyes glittered, as if a light had been lit behind them again at last" (353) as she leaves the valley. Although Sal initially appears to have been defeated here, as evident in her retreat from the valley, it becomes clear by the next book that she has won the war, so to speak.

Know Nothing. Praying against the Timid Demanding Knock

While the first two books of the quintet are at least guardedly optimistic, the third is decidedly pessimistic, as the main character appears doomed to failure from the beginning. Descendants of the squatter Catletts from O Beulah Landare the principals here; they have permanently established themselves in the valley in a mansion they have named "Beulah," a mansion built with profits from salt mined in the valley. Although complicated and eventually divisive political questions plague the male characters throughout the text (this novel ends in 1861 as the Civil War is beginning), political issues remain a strong undercurrent beneath the most significant conflict in the book, that between the sexes.

Know Nothing is from the beginning a dark book; here we begin to witness Sal Lacey's lasting effect on the valley's inhabitants. The novel opens in 1837 as Johnny Catlett is learning to swim: "Uncle Telemachus told about water and women, how they sank a man, weak soft, tears and water, rot and win. He said so. He said, 'Ifn the river don't git ye, a woman will ...'" (KN5). The first lines set the tone for the rest of the work. While young Johnny is afraid of the water, he seems even more afraid of what might lurk beneath the water's surface--the enormous man-eating catfish the old slave Telemachus had warned him about. "A big catfish wait down in the dark, big ole nigger-belly layin in the mud coolin that ole slick hide," he had warned,"and a great big mouth open, Lord God almighty one-two feet across ... open real wide, sick of black meat, the big nigger-belly, she like a little bit of white meat fer a change" (5). Because we are thrust into the narrative with no background information here, we are unsure of Telemachus's exact purpose in relaying such a frightening and exaggerated piece of information to the boy; given his previous statement, however, it seems that the catfish serves as a metaphor for female behavior in the book, since Johnny is in the end figuratively consumed by hungry women. The catfish might as easily serve as metaphor for the institution of slavery, though, as the system has devoured black flesh, and the consequence is that the system is now beginning to consume whites using "its big ugly mouth with its thick smooth lips" (6). Most likely, the two are bound together.

Settle spends more time developing female characters in this book than in the previous two, and Melinda Lacey competes with Johnny Catlett for our attention in earlier portions of the work. The rambunctious and rebellious Cousin Melinda is Johnny's female counterpart, and their friendship evolves toward a romantic relationship that never really comes to fruition because she marries another man and dies young. The third person narrative voice in Know Nothing favors Melinda Lacey because of her rebellious nature, and she provides a refreshing counterpoint to the other white women in the book. As George Garrett notes, the other white women in this book "are turned into variations not on the original model of Hannah, but much more on the lines of the poor deluded Sally Lacey" (59). An unruly female figure such as Melinda is out of place in the antebellum South, though, and the consequences of her eventual transgressions contribute in no small part to her premature death. (9) In the final book of the quintet, Settle reveals that the child conceived during Melinda's one sexual encounter with Johnny is Hannah McKarkle's grandmother.

Other than Melinda Lacey, only two women are depicted sympathetically in the third volume of the quintet--and those women are, not surprisingly, slave women, female domestics who take care of white children. Although they are never the primary characters in any part of the series, African American characters, females in particular, play a significant role in the quintet. Settle juxtaposes the behavior of these nurturing black women with that of their emotionally-distant white mistresses. Perhaps more importantly, she writes African Americans into the history of the Beulah Valley, while simultaneously highlighting the ways in which the white characters are attempting to erase them from that family and regional history. (10) In Dirt and Desire, Patricia Yaeger takes up the frequent subject of black female domestic workers and white children in fiction by white Southerners: African American caretakers provided a bizarrely scaled map of white self-renewal that persisted into adult life.... [W]hite grown-ups maintained, deep into adult life, an infantile fantasy: the wish to be a miniature white child in the care of a gigantic black woman.... [T]he domestic worker, in her vast and enviable scale, becomes a generic ambience, a category of white narcissism and self-affection.... (142-43)

Yaeger further comments on Welty's and Porter's depictions of black female domestics, stating that "these writers restrict their exploration of black women's lives to textual margins, to beseeching vignettes" (143-44). Although Johnny Catlett might on the surface be viewed as an adult who longs for "the care of a gigantic black woman," his relationship with Minna is much more complex. He does not exhibit signs of "wish[ing] to be a miniature white child"; as a child, he longs for a mother's touch, a comforting presence, and in later years he continues to need a nonjudgmental, sympathetic ear. Minna is more of a mother to him than is his biological mother, Leah. Settle's black women (most of whom are depicted as neither gargantuan nor diminished) cannot be written off as atmospheric.

Just as the slave Lyddy functions as mother figure to Sara in O Beulah Land, Minna takes on the role of mother to Johnny in Know Nothing. Minna is a significant presence from the very beginning of the book, as Johnny can think of little else but swimming the river and making his way into the safety of Minna's "dear warm arms" (KN 7); the words "dark" and "safe" are joined with Minna's name countless times over the course of this novel. After emerging from the water, Johnny runs immediately to her, and she praises him with maternal language. Minna's affection for the white child is emphasized throughout the text, and her ability to care for Johnny is contrasted with his real mother's clumsy attempts to interact with him. Later in the book, his mother Leah awkwardly pries him out of Minna's arms and "walk[s] back and forth with him, not holding him as Minna did, but clutching, as Sara had clutched the puppy ..." (88). As he matures into a young man faced with adult responsibilities, Johnny continues to need Minna's comforting presence, despite his recognizing the inappropriateness of his attachment to her because of his age (239).

In both O Beulah Land and Know Nothing, the female slave and surrogate mother is mistress to the patriarch of the family; in this way Settle further develops the theme connecting mothering and sexuality. (11) As Lyddy comforted Johnny Lacey sexually and otherwise in O Beulah Land, Minna comforts Johnny Catlett's father Peregrine here, and the two even share a daughter, Toey. The theme is further complicated by the relationship between Toey and Johnny. Despite their knowledge that they are half brother and sister, Johnny Catlett has sexual relations with Toey at Egeria Springs following the announcement of Cousin Melinda's engagement to another man. Johnny hopes to speak with Minna after he hears the news--"he was ashamed that it was Minna he wanted, to listen and to nod until the sense of loss was gone and himself soothed to strength again"--but Minna is busy helping dress the ladies of the family (KN 239). Later that evening, after Johnny assuages his grief by sleeping with Toey, whose skin is "drenched in Melinda's Florida water" (243), Toey comments on their blood connection and Johnny again thinks of Minna: "Minna, dark Minna, dark as the night, welcoming the other tears of his father, not only his own: dark safe mountain where his father had lost himself, too, away from expectations, away from the thin, frail, breakable demands" (243). (12)

Significantly, like Lyddy, neither Minna nor Toey is depicted as merely a sexual vessel for the white master's lust. Both Minna and Toey are married to slave men, but we know little about the marriages; we do not know much more about the extramarital relations with the white male characters, either. Toey appears to want to sleep with Johnny, despite his warning that she should leave him alone in this instance (the only sexual encounter the two share), but Toey refuses, wanting to soothe his pain as Minna has numerous times previously; the difference is that Toey uses sex to console Johnny. When she hears Johnny's sobs,

she could feel her skin ... quivering ... with that physical sympathy for the sorrow of men that made her stumble toward his voice.... forgetting everything, as startled into protective movement as an animal hearing its young cry....

Toey did not say a word, only held on to him against the darkness, against the questions, knowing with her body that a man was comforted, not with words and not with ways to live, but with moments and surrender, as to a child sometimes. (KN 242)

Toey's instinctive need to mother compels her to sleep with a man she knows to be her half brother. Immediately following the act, Johnny appears so disgusted by his behavior that he begins "to retch, long breathless dry gagging," and Toey exits, "exhausted, as if she were carrying a load on her back" (243). Toey appears to have taken on part of Johnny's burden through the encounter, but she simply returns to her duties as Melinda's slave, while Johnny departs for Kansas. Toey's burden is perhaps best represented by the child that she will bear as a result of their union; the child will be its father's half-nephew. Although this entire series of events clearly results from a number of specific choices made by several different individuals, the inciting incident here is Melinda's decision to marry Crawford to ensure her own survival in the antebellum South. Ultimately, Johnny remains unmarried and is miserable for the rest of his short life, Melinda marries Crawford and dies young, thinking of Johnny until the moment of her death, and Toey bears the bodily consequences of it all.

In Know Nothing, black women nurture and protect their white masters and take on their burdens, while upper-class white women tend merely to make life-draining demands upon those men. Johnny witnesses the effect that white women have on men of his class by carefully observing his father's relationship with his mother, Leah Cutwright Catlett, an outsider from Ohio. The two are at odds from the beginning of their marriage when Peregrine brings Leah down the river to his home at Beulah; a devoutly religious woman, Leah disapproves of slavery, and she views Southerners as bullies that never really allow outsiders in. (13) Despite his place as head of the household, Peregrine appears for the most part to be ruled by women, as they (mother, wife, cousin, and daughter) are in charge of things domestic; though he likens himself to God, he imagines "how lonely God must be sometimes" (KN 65), and he feels "trapped in the master chair" (77-78). (14) As Elizabeth Fox-Genovese writes, "Modern sensibilities may view them [slaveholding women] as the oppressed victims of male dominance, but few of them would have agreed, notwithstanding some bad moments" (192-93). Old by the age of forty-three, Peregrine is overwhelmed by responsibility, and he seems to desire nothing more than quiet time, time alone and away from the demands of his women. Although he is most concerned with protecting his womenfolk from harm of any nature, he appears to be more in need of protection from them. After his father dies, Johnny notes that the women quickly sweep almost all traces of Peregrine's presence from the house: "It had taken sixty-two years for Peregrine Catlett to die; it had taken a year for the women, with that power of survival [Johnny] did not see in men, to kill his memory and his influence after his death" (304). The women can then remember him as they wish, and they are able to omit details they choose to forget. Like other women in the quintet, these women will continue to shape and drive their family history.

The conclusion of the second portion of the book sounds an optimistic note as Johnny contemplates striking out for western territory while watching an eagle soar and sail "free below him down the wind currents of the gorge" (KN 244). As Rosenberg writes, Johnny "is so constrained by his role as a southern gentleman's son that he flees rather than violate its expected codes of behavior" (90). Only a few pages into the third section, however, Johnny attempts to escape his father's fate by leaving home, but he manages to maintain the separation for a period of only seven years. Johnny heads west on his twentieth birthday and returns home a failure just in time to witness his father's death. Although mother Leah greets him with the accusation that he "broke [his] father's heart" (KN 260) by leaving home secretly, the dying Peregrine asks, "Oh, son, what in the hell did you come back for?" (262). Johnny laments rather fatalistically that he "wasn't fitted for nothing. Men like us are only fit to give orders" (263). The remainder of the novel is filled with Naturalistic overtones summarized nicely by the narrator: "Instinct had driven him back to Beulah like an animal as soon as he sensed that he was needed. Instinct and sense, love and need--those had been taught and demanded ..." (304). Johnny seems resigned to meeting his father's fate, and he appears to have become his father when he admits to wanting nothing more than to be left alone as he prays "against a timid demanding knock" (305) on his office door. Johnny inherits the burden that he attempted to escape through going west, and he becomes slave to those he must protect.

Although he hopes to avoid being drawn into war at the end of the book, "trying as so many had to speak for calm," Johnny eventually succumbs to his women's demands and "drown[s] in opinion and let[s] himself be carried, doing what unconsciously they wanted him to do, a hollow careless civilized man ..." (KN325). The book comes full circle as the future Captain Johnny of the Fincastle Greys recalls learning to swim: He remembered old Telemachus and the nigger-belly catfish. All his life he had been trying to swim away from that great mouth, that hungry jaw, never knowing that he would some day have the energy or even the desire for flight taken from him, and stop struggling, as they said a swimmer did when he was drowning, cease to care with his body. (326)

There is further water imagery on the novel's concluding page, as "sweeping, pounding, never-ending rain" falls and Johnny observes the Confederate retreat at what appears to be the Battle of Philippi; the men "moved like slow flood water clogging the street" (334). (15) In the last lines of Know Nothing, Settle intimates that Johnny will soon die in battle, since "only the marks of his fingers ... on the dirty [window] sill" (334) remain when he attempts to "try to stop the running retreating mob" (334). Compelled by a sense of duty to protect his women's way of life, Johnny knowingly drifts toward death. As Bertram Wyatt-Brown notes of men in the antebellum South, "honor itself was defective. Its reliance on shame distorted human personality and individualism, forcing even the good man ... to lose himself in the cacophony of the crowd" (22). Clearly, Johnny's individualistic nature has been squashed, and hope that he will regain it is gone when he conforms to his women's wishes.

"Born between things": The Scapegoat and the Transitional Man

More than anything else, The Scapegoat is a transitional piece that provides an immediate past for characters in the final volume of the quintet, The Killing Ground. In The Scapegoat, Settle introduces some of the characters through whom Hannah McKarkle collects information to reconstruct her own family history. There is no readily-discernible evidence of the dangerous and/or incestuous mother/son relationship here, and the primary characters are female: Ann Eldridge, Althea, Lily, and Mary Rose Lacey are the book's most vividly-drawn characters. At the novel's forefront, however, is the fact that the female characters are enjoying an increase in personal freedom and in power as male potency continues to wane.

The Scapegoat is set during a seventeen-hour period in 1912. As it begins, the Civil War has been over for nearly half a century and characters in the Beulah Valley have become concerned with labor issues, since slavery has been abolished and labor is provided largely by poor, desperate immigrants; valley inhabitants derive their income from coal mines rather than from the salt mines as in Know Nothing. Although the most overt source of tension originates from the relationship between mine owners and mine workers, The Scapegoat is also concerned with gender issues. The miners' strike, Mother Jones's entrance into the valley, and the subsequent murder of an Italian immigrant all serve as backdrop to Beverley Lacey's impending death and daughter Lily's escape from her family; the death of the father and escape of the daughter appear to represent much larger issues, as Settle further develops the theme of impotent Southern man and burgeoning female power evident in Know Nothing.

Although the quintet's female characters have grown in strength with each novel, the overt shift of power in the last two novels of the quintet is striking, and the ramifications of the shift should not be overlooked. When Roger Shattuck asks Settle about the matter: "Is there a feminist theme there?" Settle responds, Yes, but I didn't realize it until I had finished the whole series. These are deep waters. In many Southern men the inherited sense of responsibility to their families is too big for them. The loss of the Civil War did something to them, as if for 50 years, more even, they remained in a posture of apology to their wives. They lost the sense of escape. The women either got out or made demands on the men, dominated them.... In my last two books Lily and Hannah get out. (44)

Settle appears not to have planned the shift in power, but the shift nevertheless happens. In The Scapegoat, the Lacey women dominate the male characters. Settle's protagonists in the last two books, both women, are able to accomplish what generations of male protagonists have been unable to achieve, and we see worked out in fiction what critics and historians have often noted. As Jones observes of the twentieth-century South, "women saw continuity and expansion in their roles ... [but] men saw primarily loss" (50). By the end of the book, Lily Lacey has escaped to attend college in the North, urged onward by her mother, and she then travels to Europe to serve as a nurse during World War I.

Within a fairly large cast of male characters (some of whom we will again meet in the final book of the quintet, The Killing Ground), the most fully developed male figure in The Scapegoat is Beverley Lacey, father to Althea, Lily, and Mary Rose. Beverley has much in common with Peregrine and Johnny of Know Nothing, as he is merely the family figurehead. Unlike Peregrine and Johnny, however, Beverley seems particularly effete, a fact underscored by his androgynous name. To be fair, Beverley is ill--his lungs mined through inhalation of coal dust, the by-product of his family's livelihood--but his physical depletion appears to have resulted at least as much from a continued decline in power suffered through the acquisition of an overbearing wife and through recognition of impending financial disaster. Beverley is an example of the type of man Settle describes in the above passage, and he acknowledges that he is a "mild" man (S36) who "ain't been on fire for a thing in my life, not even my own death. I'm cold, just cold. Born in the middle. Born between things" (35-36). Beverley is the kind of man "to whom nothing happens" (35), and he feels his life has been insignificant as he compares himself with his father, a man who had "opened a coalfield, made money and lost money, made decisions, used all his mental and physical muscles, been to war" (35). Beverley spends much time lamenting that his generation has been passed over by history, yet he has spent little time attempting to contribute anything worthwhile to the world. He even fails to produce a male heir (though there is little for him to will away to an heir), so his family line will end. Beverley muses, "Things had been done for him, a background prepared, the decisions all made, the worrying all taken care of by somebody else. His father had not let go of the reins until he died ... and dumped it all in his lap. Even then Ann Eldridge had taken over" (36).

The forty-two-year-old Beverley, born five years after the end of the Civil War, is precursor to the ruined men in the next volume of the quintet. The first three books chronicle a gradual decline in male vitality, but it is not until The Scapegoat that the primary male character appears to be rendered ineffective through historical circumstances as Settle suggests of post-Civil War Southern men above. This is likewise a theme that will be treated in the last volume of the quintet: men who die as a result of historic depletion. In The Scapegoat, Beverley is ready to die; in fact, he appears to desire escape from his troubles through death, but he is certain that women will continue to plague him even after he is gone. Like Peregrine and Johnny Catlett in Know Nothing, he relishes solitude, and he prays against a woman's knock on his study door (S210).

Although Ann Eldridge at times appears to be a weak character who retires to her "sanctum sanctorum" to nurse a sick headache (a trait she shares with Leah Catlett in Know Nothing and with Sally McKarkle in The Killing Ground), she uses infirmity as a means of manipulating other family members. Ann Eldridge is physically and mentally stronger than husband Beverley, and Beverley has allowed her to assume a leadership position within the marriage to the point that he has lost any small measure of power he might once have enjoyed. Ann Eldridge muses that "She had had to push him into too many decisions for much to be left of the marriage she had once thought was so grand" (S31), and he acknowledges that he has "been cared for all [his] life. Seems to me there's always been some damned woman with wet eyes watching me and waiting for me to say it, whatever it is they want to hear" (37). Ann Eldridge feels little but disgust for her husband toward what appears to be the end of his life.

This segment of the quintet also continues the theme of the inept mother, connecting Ann Eldridge with mothers from Know Nothing and The Killing Ground. In The Scapegoat, Beverley Lacey has (like Peregrine Catlett in Know Nothing) married an outsider, Ann Eldridge, who is, in the words of daughter Mary Rose, "plain people from Pittsburgh" (S6), "overeducated and underbred" (10). She is also similar to Hannah McKarkle's mother, Sally, in The Killing Ground, the next book. Like Sally, she "hated being touched. She always had" (35). Ann Eldridge is not so dangerous as the other mothers are, however, because she is not so manipulative and does not cause her children obvious harm. Significantly, she is also the mother of three daughters, and she confides to Lily that she "never wanted a boy. Boys are a nuisance" (240). She admits, though, to preferring the ambitious, intelligent Lily over her other two daughters; she fails to devote adequate attention to the youngest, Mary Rose, and she feels even further detached from Althea than she does from Mary Rose. While aware of her own shortcomings, she desperately wants to help Lily and "guide her through the rough places ... [so that] she'll get someplace" (34). When Ann Eldridge learns that Lily intends to leave the valley permanently, she verbally assaults her favorite daughter and tries to prevent her departure through heaping guilt upon her and mentioning the sacrifices she and Beverley have made for the girl. (16) But Ann Eldridge quickly overcomes her own grief over losing Lily, as she helps her pack her belongings, gives her $200, and offers advice about her travel plans and future activities. Ultimately, she supports Lily's escape, and despite her affinity with other dangerous mothers, Ann Eldridge is handled a little more softly than are her counterparts. In the last lines of the book, Lily is on a train headed north, and she "dream[s], lulled by the train, of getting off at heaven or New York City, whichever she got to first" (278).

Tainted Fruit: Ruined Manhood in The Killing Ground

The Killing Ground is both the end and the beginning of The Beulah Quintet. The book is the final "installment" of the quintet, yet a character introduced here, Hannah McKarkle, is credited with having authored the series. Hannah is the novel's protagonist, as her predecessor Lily was in The Scapegoat, and like Lily, Hannah has managed to escape physically from her family. The impetus for Hannah's exploration and recovery of her family's lost history is her brother Johnny's death, and although Hannah is the protagonist of The Killing Ground, the book is concerned largely with an exploration of Johnny's relationship with their mother, Sally. What happens between mother and son in The Killing Ground is the culmination of three hundred years of family history; we have come full circle here in the last of the four volumes of the quintet set in America, at least, as Sally McKarkle bears a strong resemblance to her namesake, Sally Lacey of O Beulah Land As Brian Rosenberg notes, "Sally Brandon Neill McKarkle is in many ways the most compelling character in the novel and among the most frightening in the quintet" (129). The similarities between the women emphasize the connection between past and present.

In The Killing Ground, Hannah contemplates how her brother Johnny evolved into the person he became and tries to determine the degree to which he was responsible for his own behavior: "It wasn't enough to find out that my brother had behaved like a son-of-a-bitch. Oh no. I had to find out why. I wanted to know how much of a man was what had been done to him, how much was choice, [and] how much was imitation of some old way of living that had lost its force ..." (KG 148). As Hannah considers the implications of Johnny's death, she retraces his entire life and reconsiders earlier incidents that did not seem unusual or abnormal at the time they occurred. Age and distance, in addition to hindsight, facilitate Hannah's recognition of her brother's limited choices. Hannah views Johnny as having been victimized by their mother; he has been, as have so many of the other major male characters in the quintet, shaped negatively by his mother's influence, and he is ruined as a result. It takes decades, however, for Hannah to realize the full significance of her brother's destructive relationship with their mother. Near the middle of the novel, Hannah recalls a conversation she had with Carlo, her lover, the night of Johnny's death. That night, Johnny had made one of his habitual late-night telephone calls to Hannah, begging her to return to Canona because he needed her. Although Hannah refused to make that particular journey from New York to West Virginia, she had in the past often returned when she felt that he truly needed her. When Carlo angrily, perhaps jealously, suggests that her relationship with Johnny is incestuous, Hannah argues that she is merely loyal, that only an outsider would make such an observation: Carlo "wasn't a Southerner. I could have told him I had been trained like a dog to retrieve my brother from incest, its form the impotent seduction of the mother" (196). (17)

Sally McKarkle is the most fully-developed bad mother figure in the entire quintet; she is the epitome of the weak/strong, retiring/ manipulative, untouchable/grasping mother who devours her male offspring. Sally's relationships with both her husband and her son are influenced by her own history, particularly the loss of her father, and although she typically paints her own father as infallible hero, to whom her husband and son can never measure up, she admits the "truth" about him in a moment of uncharacteristic honesty when she tells Hannah that "He was a weakling" (KG 325). Sally McKarkle's father and favorite parent, James Neill, committed suicide because of financial difficulties when she was fourteen, so Sally suffered from the unexpected loss of her father; she married Mooney McKarkle, and he then assumed a fatherly role for her. Hannah notes that her own "father replaced 'Papa,' and Johnny, the sexless, pure Chocolate Soldier, ha[d] been trained to replace them both" (336-37). (18) As an adult, Hannah recognizes that her brother Johnny had been made to play the part of son-lover and father figure for their needy mother simultaneously. (19) Because of the loss of her father, Sally attempts to ensure (through various machinations) that she will always have a male protector, as she begins to shape Johnny for the role when he is just a young boy. Her plan is ruined, however, when Johnny dies prematurely; she confides to Hannah that she hates men because they "Leave you high and dry. Just when you need them the most" (326). Sally refers here specifically to her father, whose death seems to have caused her need for a male protector, but the sentiment is equally applicable to what she views as Johnny's abandonment of her.

At odds with both father and mother, Johnny McKarkle occupies an unenviable position in his family. His father, Mooney McKarkle, appears to have been jealous of his son because of Johnny's superficial closeness with Sally and for his being born into money, money that Mooney spent a lifetime accumulating. Hannah says of her father after Johnny's death, "He has never liked Johnny. He has envied him for reasons I don't know yet, his social envy a mild version of Jake Catlett's fury" (KG 313). At a young age, Johnny is "cast as a rake," and he attempts to win his mother's approval by "develop[ing] an insolent charm to please her and make her smile and say he was like her father, that ghostly dandy, Mother's model of a gentleman" (184). Hannah refers to her mother as a "lost girl" "who had held [her] brother Johnny in what he called durance vile. He had been caught in a lust for her presence and her notice--no matter what form it took--which he mistook for love. It was evasive flirtation" (130). Like her predecessors who are biologically linked with their children yet emotionally disconnected from them, Sally uses her children and their love for her to satisfy her emotional needs. She never returns their affection, the inexplicable affection that unloved children feel for their parents.

Despite his mother's interference, Johnny is until the age of seventeen at least able to contemplate escaping her control--but his failure to act at a crucial moment alters his life's course. When he fails to behave decisively out of devotion to his mother in this instance, he sacrifices what remains of himself to her, and he then becomes another impotent man who loses his selfhood to a woman; he forgets his youthful ambitions and his dreams. Although she was too young to realize the significance of the event when it occurred, Hannah was present for the moment that defined Johnny's life. As an adult, Hannah recalls Johnny's admiration for Douglas Bader, the legendary RAF pilot, in the summer of 1941, as well as his secret intention to leave Princeton when he turned eighteen to join the Royal Canadian Air Force and serve in World War II. His melancholy and pessimism are evident in her recollection of his recitation of a portion of a Yeats poem (20) to her: I know that I shall meet my fate Somewhere among the stars above; Those that I fight I do not hate, Those that I guard I do not love. (KG 188)

The juxtaposition of Johnny's worship of Douglas Bader with his subsequent recitation of the Yeats poem is puzzling. He finishes the poem weeping, head in arms, and Hannah is unable to hear the rest of the words, so we do not see those in her recounting of events. The remainder of the poem, however, is significant: My country is Kiltartan cross, My countrymen Kiltartan's poor, No likely end could bring them loss Or leave them happier than before, Nor law, nor duty bade me fight, Nor public man, nor cheering crowds, A lonely impulse of delight Drove to this tumult in the clouds; I balanced all, brought all to mind, The years to come seemed waste of breath, A waste of breath the years behind In balance with this life, this death. (ll. 5-16)

Much time could be spent analyzing the full significance of the connection between Yeats's speaker and Johnny McKarkle, but if he identifies with the poem's speaker, he views his past and his future as a "waste of breath," and he is not compelled to join the war out of sense of duty. Instead, he anticipates death and views flight, both literal and figurative, as a brief chance for happiness before death. "A lonely impulse of delight," joy in flying or in the journey itself, serves as sufficient motivation for the pilot and for Johnny.

Settle further complicates interpretation of the event's significance, however, when Johnny and Hannah sing the poem to the tune of "When I Survey the Wondrous Cross," an act that invites us to compare Johnny's potential sacrifice with Christ's. Their behavior approaches blasphemy, yet their song might more appropriately be attributed to both characters' immaturity and the solemnity of Johnny's confession to Hannah, coupled with the popularity of the hymn and its mournful tune. Shortly after he divulges his secret plan to Hannah, their mother, Sally, extracts Johnny's promise not to join the Canadian RAF after pointing out the sacrifices that she and Mooney have made for him. Hannah overhears the conversation:

"I want to exact a solemn promise from you, son," she was saying.

I couldn't hear Johnny answer.

"I know what's on your mind," she went on. "I always know, son. Now, your father and I have made every sacrifice for you to go to Princeton. We are not rich people...." (KG 189)

Hannah states that she had "heard all about the sacrifices, so [she] didn't bother to listen any more" (190), an offhand comment that anticipates her own future rebellion against her mother. Hannah notes Johnny's acquiescence, though, as well as his removing Bader's picture from his bedroom wall and his sudden loss of interest in Yeats; she further chronicles the beginnings of his rakish behavior, including his indulging in alcohol, his getting arrested for the first time, and his debauching of Kitty Puss, (21) the girl his mother hoped he would marry. Rather than sacrificing himself to a cause for whatever the reason, he sacrifices himself to his mother. As Father McAndrew points out to Hannah after Johnny's death, however, "He chose it [his life]. Even in letting go, we choose" (316). Despite the negative shaping that Johnny receives from his mother, Settle depicts Johnny as having made the choice to let go. As she acknowledges in her interview with Crane, men like Johnny "choose their own defeat, and it has been hard for me to face" (52-53). It is likewise difficult for Hannah to face.

At seventeen, Johnny McKarkle in many ways resembles the young Johnny Catlett from Know Nothing. He recognizes the need for self-preservation through immediate escape, but unlike Catlett he fails to try; either he lacks courage or his sense of duty to his mother is too strong. Catlett, at least, made the attempt, even if he did return to his family years later; but McKarkle never even leaves home. McKarkle, unlike Catlett, is not pushed to participate in a war he doesn't care about, but he is forbidden to participate in a war he wants to join. (22)

After age seventeen, Johnny, for the most part, bends to his mother's wishes, although he rebels against her control in insignificant ways. Hannah mentions that he works as a salesman rather than "'going into' insurance or banking" as men of his class are expected to do and she is aware of his frequenting the Wayfaring Stranger and other dive bars where he mingles with lower-class people and with individuals of questionable reputation. Despite these small rebellions, he continues to live in his parents' house until his death at age thirty-six, because "Any hint of his leaving her [Sally's] house, even his boyhood bed, brought on a siege of brokenhearted silence" (KG 170). Sally claims to want Johnny to marry an appropriate girl whom she herself handpicks, yet she simultaneously makes clear her desire to be the only significant woman in his life, since she does everything possible to keep him under her roof. Of his behavior, Hannah concludes, "Now I know that impotent rebellion is a form of slavery" (180).

Though he never really appears "happy," Johnny McKarkle seems most comfortable and content when in the company of lower-class people, particularly when he is with one lower-class woman, Thelma Leftwich, a cousin through marriage. He has been in love with Thelma since age fourteen, but because Sally does not approve of the match, Johnny begins in his adolescence to lead a double life; publicly, he dates the girls his mother chooses for him, but he maintains a secret relationship with Thelma until his death. He is forced to meet his true love, his "sanctuary" as Hannah refers to her (KG 202), in the shadows of seedy bars and rented rooms. "Looking back," Hannah says, "I see it as a first time that Johnny split his life into two worlds to keep the peace, but he gave in so easily that he must have already fallen into the habit" (201). Nearly two decades after his death, Thelma is still single and angry, and she insists that Johnny would still be alive if Sally had let them marry (43). (23) If Sally knows Johnny as well as she claims to know him when he is seventeen, then she would necessarily know about his after-hours activities and his ongoing relationship with Thelma Leftwich. Although there is really no textual evidence to support such a claim, it seems reasonable to surmise that she expects her son to reject each participant in her parade of suitable women. She prefers to let him lead a "secret," miserable life and keep him close than to allow him any chance at happiness with Thelma.

Sally McKarkle's desperation to keep Johnny under her roof is so strong that she becomes increasingly more complicit in his self-destructive behavior. In addition to encouraging his sexual promiscuity, she facilitates his alcohol abuse because inebriation makes him more dependent on her. During her investigation of the night's events leading up to Johnny's death, Hannah discusses her brother with a police officer, Jack, Johnny's childhood playmate and the son of Delilah, the black maid in the McKarkle household. Jack reveals his lifelong hatred of Sally, and he tells Hannah that Sally "stopped me believing in God. If there was a God she would have died when you and Johnny and poor little old Melinda were kids" (KG 224). He further confides that he had often driven the drunken Johnny home and had been disgusted by Sally's behavior upon arrival: She liked Johnny's drinking like that. She liked it. That way he stayed guilty and he stayed home. When I'd take him home her face would melt with affection like butter and she'd take him over. It was obscene. If she could have carried him upstairs like a little baby she would have. Once she turned around under his shoulder and said, "You have to understand, Toey, gentlemen act like this sometimes." She didn't want no man. What she did want I don't know. Jesus, it was disgusting.... (224-25)

While Johnny uses alcohol as a means to escape his problems, Sally capitalizes on his weakness and uses his drinking to trap him further. Eventually, the results of Johnny's alcohol dependency lead to the death blow he receives in jail after he is incarcerated for his drunken misbehavior on a Saturday night.

Had Johnny not died after being struck by Jake in the drunk tank, it seems likely that he would have eventually committed suicide as does his friend and mirror-image, Charlie Bland, years later. (24) Like Johnny Catlett, both Johnny McKarlde and Charlie give up the struggle when they are so tired that they have lost the will to live. Jake's fist serves, for McKarlde, the same purpose that the war did for Catlett--an end to a miserable life not his own. Jake even recalls Johnny's thanking him for the blow before he fell and hit the iron rack in the cell: "He said a real quiet thank you, and just sighed down on the floor and hit that iron rack" (KG 270). Although writer Gail Godwin interprets Johnny's final words as sarcasm (31), the manner in which he utters the words as recollected by Jake suggests sincerity. As Hannah notes, "At least his death saved him from either of the final corruptions; he had not become his oppressors or his disguises" (KG 306-07).

In an act reminiscent of the women's post-death behavior in Know Nothing, though more thoroughly fleshed out with details here, Sally cleans Johnny's room and returns it to the way it looked fifteen years ago. She can remember her dead son as she wishes and she wants to remember him as a boy rather than as the man he was. She erases fifteen years of Johnny's life by eliminating all of his personal tokens and photographs, including a hidden photo of Thelma, which she tears in half and throws in the wastebasket. The only photograph that remains in the dead man's room is a 1930s portrait of herself that she had presented to him on his sixteenth birthday; it now "commands the room, dangerously lovable" (KG 322). Significantly, she hangs a sepia print of Michelangelo's Pieta "alone above the bed, the dawn-young face of the girl-mother gazing without sorrow or pain at the broken man in her lap" (322). The only other specific contents mentioned in the room are tin hussars and a postcard of a German mechanical organ--objects that are specifically connected with Sally's own father--and "Every object Johnny has outgrown or rejected has been returned" (322); rather than thinking about her dead son on the evening after the funeral, Sally grieves over her dead father. There is a direct parallel between the girl-mother who shows no evidence of sorrow in the painting and Sally McKarkle who shows no sorrow about her son's death; the specific mentioning of the Pieta invites comparison of Christ's sacrifice for all of mankind and what might be viewed as Johnny's willing sacrifice for his family. This comparison is amplified when considered alongside his earlier singing of the Yeats poem to the tune of the hymn, "When I Survey the Wondrous Cross." Johnny's sacrifice appears to have served no real purpose, though, because as Hannah notes, "She has already adjusted Johnny's room. Now she is ready to adjust me. Johnny has ceased to function for her; that function must be fulfilled again. He is, like a machine, irreparably broken and must be replaced, first by a nostalgia created in his room, and then by me" (324).

Despite Hannah's knowledge that her mother is a masterful manipulator, she is unaware of exactly how powerful Sally's tactics can be until near the end of the novel. Hannah does not fully appreciate the strength and breadth of Sally's talent for coercion until after Johnny's funeral when her mother attempts to force her to move back to Canona and literally replace Johnny at home. Hannah carefully observes her mother's "Protean" (KG 338) transitions into different personas as she seamlessly moves from the role of wounded young girl to authoritative mother to guileless darky, and then to playful confidante (325-39). Hannah refers to her as a "seducer" (323) and notes that in "her calculated innocence there is something as cold as evil" (336). Sally refuses to accept any response other than what she wants to hear, because she is unaccustomed to being defied.

By the book's conclusion, Hannah comes to believe that Sally's destructive behavior toward her and her siblings is a direct result of Sally Lacey's contamination of the valley and its inhabitants through slavery. She remarks of her mother and her mother's antics, that she

is the descendant of slave owners, and she knows no other way to survive. No matter that the responsibility for great acres has shrunk to a suburban house on a suburban hillside, no matter that Johnny and Melinda and I are all that is left of ownership of people. She takes this for granted and she has never in her life been asked to question it. (KG 338-39)

Although slavery officially ended more than a century ago, Hannah argues, the institution's consequences are still detectable in the Beulah Valley.

Ultimately, through reconstructing her family history, Hannah has learned from her male predecessors' mistakes. She perceives the past, the present, and the future to be the result of a series of choices, and she does not view family members of either sex as merely victims of time and/or circumstance. Whereas many of her predecessors have chosen poorly, she chooses poverty and social ostracism rather than submit to her cannibalistic mother's demands. Hannah chooses life. Sally disinherits Hannah when she refuses to move back home after Johnny's death, so Hannah does not inherit any of her family's money or any of the legacy left by Sally Lacey--she is free from coal money and the land ruined by the coal mining industry. But she does inherit the heirloom ruby ring from Aunt Althea. Hannah notes that the stone "had come full circle, from her [the first Hannah] to me now that there was no eldest son" (KG 84). With the inheriting of the ring that has traditionally been passed down to the eldest son's wife, Hannah becomes, in a sense, the family's matriarch. Although she will have no children of her own, she creates, gives birth to, the history of the Beulah Valley, and the history that she recovers through the writing of the quintet might help future generations make better choices. Hannah has grown stronger through acknowledging all of the past; her complicated "genetic inheritance" has created in her "an ambiguity of steel" (340). Twenty years after leaving home despite the consequences, Hannah is optimistic that the Beulah Valley's next generation will also make better decisions.

The result of Hannah's confrontation with history is overwhelmingly positive. It is difficult not to compare her with a figure such as Faulkner's Quentin Compson who, unable to come to terms with the past, commits suicide. In The Beulah Quintet, the characters who are ignorant about the sins of their ancestors suffer or create suffering, while Hannah gains freedom by learning about and documenting those sins; the telling liberates. For this reason, Richard Gray refers to Hannah's experiences in The Killing Groundas a "personal emancipation that is also a social one": And it is this "house of words," "her" book of homecoming, that enables her to salvage what is meaningful and motivating out of the past and then use it as a beacon for the future. It is an act of narrativity, really, as much as an act of journey that allows her to excavate "a thing deeper than the land"; to that extent, it is not return but the writing of it which leads eventually to her revival. (469)

Hannah is rejuvenated through her telling about the past, and Hannah's remaining close kinfolk in the valley, Uncle Ephraim and wife Rose (Pagano) McKarkle, have revitalized the McKarkle bloodline through procreation. Uncle Ephraim has, unlike his nephew Johnny, married a "lower" woman, the Italian woman Johnny used and rejected years earlier. In a scene that recreates a scene from The Scapegoat (one of many such recreations in the quintet), Rose and Ephraim make Hannah's 1960 escape from the valley possible by facilitating the selling of Johnny's car after his death and giving Hannah the $1,500 for airfare, anticipating her disinheritance (KG 360). (25)

Prior to Hannah's exodus in 1960, Rose had informed her, "I'm pregnant as a bitch. God knows you need some Wop in the family" (KG 361). When considering the valley's future in 1978, Hannah had darkly predicted that "Rose and Ephraim's sons would be or would produce arrogant sons-of-bitches who would marry girls who said 'Imagine!' They would, finally, become their own oppressors, and that was what they had been led to believe they wanted" (146).When Hannah returns for Althea's funeral in 1980, however, her opinion changes completely as she notes that the infusion of new blood in the family has resulted in a new vitality and has created "a new breed of child, maybe as mistaken as we had been, but at least unafraid of the fathers" (382)--or the mothers. In the cemetery following Althea's funeral, Hannah witnesses "something [she] had not seen before, parents taking pride in their children under the cold afternoon sun" (381-82). Hannah overhears the now nineteen-year-old Eddie McKarkle inform Rose, his mother, that he will not attend Harvard Law School as she had hoped but will instead go to Morgantown. Rose does not object (382). Rose is a different kind of mother, and Eddie is a different kind of son. Because of the interaction between parents and children at the cemetery, particularly the interaction between Rose and Eddie, Hannah is hopeful that future generations will enjoy a form of freedom from family expectations that she and others before her could not.

Works Cited

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Morrison, Toni. "Unspeakable Things Unspoken: The Afro-American Presence in American Literature." Within the Circle: An Anthology of African American Literary Criticism from the Harlem Renaissance to the Present. Ed. Angelyn Mitchell. Durham: Duke UP, 1994. 368-98.

Ownby, Ted. Subduing Satan: Religion, Recreation, and Manhood in the Rural South, 1865-1920. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1990.

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Settle, Mary Lee. "The Art of Fiction CXVI: Mary Lee Settle." Interview with John Crane. Paris Review 32 (Spring 1990): 45-77.

--. Charley Bland. New York: Carroll and Graf, 1989.

--. The Killing Ground. 1982. Columbia: U of South Carolina P, 1996.

--. Know Nothing. 1960. Columbia: U of South Carolina P, 1996.

--. O Beulah Land. 1956. Columbia: U of South Carolina P, 1996.

--. Prisons. 1973. Columbia: U of South Carolina P, 1996.

--. The Scapegoat. 1980. Columbia: U of South Carolina P, 1996.

--. "A Talk with Mary Lee Settle." Interview with Roger Shattuck. New York Times Book Review 26 Oct. 1980: 43-46.

Vance, Jane Gentry. "Mary Lee Settle: 'Ambiguity of Steel.'" American Women Writing Fiction: Memory, Identity, Family, Space. Ed. Mickey Pearlman. Lexington: UP of Kentucky, 1989. 214-25.

Wyatt-Brown. Bertram. Honor and Violence in the Old South. New York: Oxford UP, 1986.

Yaeger, Patricia. Dirt and Desire." Reconstructing Southern Women's Writing 1930-1990. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2000.

Yeats, William Butler. "An Irish Airman foresees his Death." The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats." A New Edition. Ed. Richard J. Finneran. New York: Macmillan, 1989. 135.

WENDY PEARCE MILLER

University of North Carolina--Pembroke

(1) The Beulah Quintet is comprised of the following five books: Prisons (1973), O Beulah Land (1956), Know Nothing (1960), The Scapegoat (1980), and The Falling Ground (1982). These books could and should be considered one work, a work whose setting spans two countries and three hundred years, while depicting numerous generations of characters over a total of 1,621 pages. (My page count is taken from the 1996 editions of the books published by The University of South Carolina Press.)

(2) Settle appears to be making a reference to T. S. Eliot's "The Hollow Men" (1925) here; it would be worthwhile to pursue an examination of that poem and The Waste Land (1922) alongside The Beulah Quintet, particularly in terms of images of masculinity, waste, and renewal.

(3) In this essay, I am concerned only with The Beulah Quintet. A number of Settle's other novels are set in Canona, however, and those other novels could contribute much to a discussion of male gender shaping as depicted in Settle's work.

(4) I refer here to Sally Lacey and Peregrine in O Beulah Land; Leah Catlett, Lewis, and Johnny in Know Nothing; and Sally McKarkle and Johnny in The Killing Ground.

(5) Jeremiah's sins include adultery and murder. Jeremiah came to the New World as an indentured servant, but he escaped from his master after his "New Light" conversion. He lives with and has children with Hannah Bridewell, a woman he never actually marries, both because of the difficulty of finding a preacher in the wilderness and because he fears discovery. Jeremiah does not know that Hannah had been imprisoned for theft in London and that she became a conscripted whore traveling with Braddock's army following her deportation to Virginia. Hannah also bore an out-of-wedlock child conceived with Squire Raglan in prison, and she left the child with the Shawnee when she escaped from them. She claims not to have feared for the child's safety, since "They're good to youngins" (OBL 196). Jeremiah later murders Squire Raglan when the Squire threatens his family's well-being. Jeremiah and Hannah are the first white settlers in the Beulah Valley, where they relocate following the Squire's murder; after Hannah confesses to Jeremiah and repents all of her sins, they attempt a new beginning in the remote area, an area Jeremiah believes God has called them to inhabit.

(6) Sal beats Ezekiel and Sara with a switch when she finds them fully clothed yet curled up together in the woods. "No daughter of mine is a-goin to lay out in the woods like a filthy whore," she vows (OBL 292).

(7) Settle does not depict Sally Lacey as mere villain. Readers first meet her when she is an immature sixteen-year-old girl corresponding in "her thin, childish hand" (OBL 136) with her absent twenty-one-year-old husband. Johnny is amused by her childishness here, but he regrets his inability to share with her his concern over financial matters. Sally is described as "the sixteen-year-old stranger" (141) who is "flighty" (140), "neat" (141), "delicate" (141), "blond" (141), and "elusive" (141). As she matures, she appears solely concerned with social status, and the qualities that probably drew Johnny to Sal in younger years are qualities that he no longer finds appealing as he ages. He instead admires the valley's lower-class women who are physically robust and hardworking. Near the end of the book, he expresses his admiration for his "stubborn" daughter who plans to remain in the valley with her husband and child despite the imminent Indian attack: "I'm damned proud of your vinegar," he confides to Sara prior to his departure (351).

(8) In the final book of the quintet, The Killing Ground, Hannah McKarkle muses that she "would, through the years, have a genetic inheritance more powerful than money; slave, slave owner, slave in turn. I would trace the tap of my mother's bare foot back to poor little genteel Sal who carried with her over the mountains, imitation of an oppressor she did not know, a camouflage ..." (KG340). As will be discussed later, Sally McKarkle, Hannah's mother, is similar in character to Sally Lacey. Both are dangerous, but Hannah feels sympathetically toward the women, as she views both as products of their environments.

(9) Johnny is stunned by Melinda's engagement to Crawford Kregg at Egeria Springs, because her decision to marry Crawford is more than a simple romantic betrayal; the act represents her recognition and deliberate choice to play the coquette in order to avoid falling into the role of spinster aunt that Aunt Annie had played for years. An orphan and a poor relation of the Catletts, Melinda must marry and marry well to ensure her own survival, and she chooses to conform to expectations rather than risk missing perhaps her only opportunity for marriage.

(10) In "Unspeakable Things Unspoken: The Afro-American Presence in American Literature," Toni Morrison asks, "'What intellectual feats had to be performed by the author or his critic to erase me from a society seething with my presence, and what effect has that performance had on the work?' What are the strategies of escape from knowledge? Of willful oblivion?" (378). Over the course of the quintet, Settle does the opposite of what Morrison describes here through examining the ways in which history is selectively recorded.

(11) Settle's fascination with the Electra complex is traceable through much of her fiction beginning with her first novel, The Love Eaters, published in 1955.

(12) Elizabeth Fox-Genovese notes that slave women "knew that he [the master] frequently exercised his power severely and might even make sexual demands that mocked the prevalent norms of gender relations to which he claimed to subscribe" (192). During a discussion with Johnny, Peregrine Catlett differentiates between sacred love and lust and emphasizes the need to protect "the tender and the frail" white women from degradation (KN 111). He intimates that he might harbor "real affection" (112) for Minna, but he points out that white men acknowledge such feelings for black women and offspring at risk of public censure. Both father and son are aware of their hypocrisy.

(13) Although I will not discuss this here because I am concerned with Johnny, there is a similarity between Sally Lacey of O Beulah Land and Leah Cutwright Catlett that should, at least, be mentioned. As Sally's influence over her preferred child, Perry, contributes to his questionable moral character and disinheritance, Leah's devotion to her preferred mean-spirited child, Lewis, leads to his eventual estrangement from the family. Leah's religious fervor "ruins" Lewis and prompts him to turn abolitionist preacher. His father will deed him hill land--a gesture with significant ramifications in later novels. Leah plays a part in creating the rift between her sons, and as an adult Lewis will choose to fight for the North in the War. This dividing of the family anticipates the dividing of the state of Virginia and the North/South division of the country during the war. In the final book of the quintet, The Killing Ground Hannah McKarkle notes that the family division in Know Nothing causes her brother Johnny's death; the dispossessed Lewis's grandson, Jake, kills Johnny. Johnny descended from Lewis's sister, Lydia, who had been the recipient of a better inheritance.

(14) Historian Anne Firor Scott asserts that in the antebellum South, "the woman who had been so firmly put in her place, the home, often showed unusual power within that restricted domain" (19).

(15) Rosenberg notes the book's water imagery and writes that the river "represents the current of historical and cultural circumstance into which each individual is placed, sometimes to be carried passively along, sometimes, like Johnny Church, to struggle, sometimes to drown" (87).

(16) Ann Eldridge's speech is surprisingly similar to the one that Sally McKarkle will make to son Johnny in The Killing Ground to prevent him from joining the Canadian RAF.

(17) While Hannah and Johnny share a close sister-brother bond, there is no evidence of any sexual activity between them; the two are confidants at odds with the other members of their family. Because Sally takes no interest in Hannah, "the artistic one of the family," the older Johnny is "left to bring [her] up" (KG 186). Hannah adores her older brother, who at times serves as a parental figure for her. As the two grow older, Hannah takes on a maternal role in the relationship, and Johnny calls upon her when he needs emotional support.

(18) The deliberate choice of the word "chocolate" preceding the word "soldier" here is an interesting one. Chocolate (or cacao) is, of course, a substance easily processed, melted and molded for the purpose of consumption--and Sally both molds and devours Johnny. The image is complicated by the descriptors "sexless" and "pure," though, since Johnny is neither of those. (He is both of those things in relation to his mother, however, and Sally ignores his actual behavior with women.) As Johnny Catlett was in Know Nothing figuratively devoured by a catfish which represents both femininity and slavery (as the two merge in that metaphor), Johnny McKarkle is here the chocolate soldier figuratively devoured by his mother, Sally McKarkle, the genetic and spiritual descendant of Sally Lacey (the first slaveholder in Beulah); her family has consumed generations of African Americans through forced labor, and she now consumes her son, who is "darkened" through the family's association with slavery.

More could perhaps be made of Settle's use of the word chocolate; in particular, scholars might want to consider the implications of the origin of cacao (South America) and its importation to European nations in conjunction with the importation of another dark commodity, Africans. As mentioned earlier in this essay, hot chocolate is associated with Sally Lacey in O Beulah Land and Sally is the individual who introduces slavery to the valley. We might also consider the fact that pure chocolate is typically too strong for human consumption and must be diluted with milk (which is, significantly, white) and other substances. I shall not explore these ideas further here, since they are not immediately relevant to my purpose.

(19) There are some noteworthy similarities between Johnny McKarkle and his uncle Dan Neill (Sally's brother). We meet Dan Neill in The Scapegoat ; between that novel and The Killing Ground he has married Althea Lacey, one of the narrators of The Scapegoat and one of Hannah's most important sources of information in The Killing Ground. Although Dan is not a major character, we know enough to surmise that he was to a degree preyed upon by his mother, his sisters, and his aunt after his father's death. His father, James Neill, committed suicide because of his inability to pay his property taxes; he shot himself after observing his wife's visible grief following the advertisement of his tax delinquency. Sensing the end, the women had begun to call for Dan even before his father shot himself: "The letters, brutal with their self-centered sorrow and fear, followed him, whispered, whined, 'Dan, honey, come back, please come back. We need you'" (S71). Hannah muses that "Uncle Dan Neill had been a shadow over them; he had haunted her mother, as her brother Johnny still haunted her" (KG 75). Like Johnny, Dan Neill lives a life that is not his own. He, however, dies a slow death through alcohol abuse.

(20) He recites the first four lines of William Butler Yeats's "An Irish Airman foresees his Death" (1919). He misquotes the second line of the poem, however: "stars" should instead read "clouds."

(21) Decades after Johnny is dead, Kitty Puss claims that Johnny would have married her if Sally had not interfered (KG 85). Given what we know about Johnny and his preferences in women, however, it does not seem likely that he would ever have married her.

(22) Sally will not permit Johnny to join the RAF, but he later joins the US military and serves in Europe. He is released from the service and returns home at twenty-one (KG 235). There are few details regarding the circumstances surrounding his US military service, but the experience seems to have affected him profoundly, as he suffers from nightmares (236) and "never talk[s] about the war" (242).

(23) Johnny McKarkle is a serial womanizer who "dates" numerous women both from his own social class and from a lower class, including Rose Pagano, who eventually marries his uncle Ephraim. He appears to date women from his own class merely to placate his mother, though, and the lower-class women, such as Thelma Leftwich and Rose Pagano, serve as refuge for him, much as Lyddy, Minna, and Toey serve for Johnny Lacey in O Beulah Land and Peregrine and Johnny Catlett in Know Nothing. Unlike those slave women from whom we hear nothing regarding the relationships, however, Rose Pagano McKarkle recalls Johnny's use of her as a sexual object. She knows that he behaved differently with her than he would have with a girl from his own class, awaking within her an animal passion that he appreciated. Rose tells Hannah that Johnny had failed to defend her honor when another man called her "a Dago whore" and she observes that she was "the kind you people played with but you didn't marry" (KG 138).

(24) Johnny is quite similar to Charlie Bland, a character in this book and the protagonist of another of Settle's books set in Canona, entitled Charley Bland (1989). (Settle spells the character's name "Charlie" in The Killing Ground, but she changes it to "Charley" in Charley Bland.) Although there is no connection between the events, Charlie commits suicide after Hannah has returned to Canona to give a speech and to conduct further research about her family history and Johnny's death. When she learns about the suicide, Hannah feels that she "had come back on her search for Johnny's death and been caught in a repetition" (KG 48). Many of the women of her class who had been involved with her brother twenty years ago have since been involved with Charlie Bland. Interestingly, Hannah herself had been involved with Charlie for a time until she realized that "He had seduced [her] because he had been a model for Johnny.... "but she "saw in time that the real man behind the role Charlie played was Johnny" (87). When Crane asks Settle how Charley Bland connects with her other works, she replies, "It is, I hope, the last unfinished business of Beulah Land.... It's about the most basic triangle there is--the mother-son-woman" (74).

(25) The moment recalls Rose's own father leaving the valley on the train in The Scapegoat in 1912; Eduardo (Eddie) Pagano left with a used suit, a train ticket, and $100.