Re: JCO: "In the Region of Ice"
Oh, no, Anne. I wouldn't want to rewrite it, but I remember being frustrated
by it when I first read it back in the 1970s. I had read a lot of nun
literature at the time -- including K. Hulme's excellent novel The Nun's Story. I
think JCO got the details of convent life well enough for that era -- which was
a time of great change and breakup in US convents. For Sister Irene to run
off to solve her student's problems without consulting her mother superior is
quite typical for the era. Young nuns in the late 60s and early 70s were
questioning authority, modernizing the habit -- in a movie still I saw, Sister
Irene wears a modern suitlike outfit with an abbreviated veil. Many young women
-- and middle-aged women -- left the convent during the 70s -- some to do more
"socially relevant" work among the poor, others to get into the dating scene
and eventually get married (and divorced and remarried, like the rest of US
society.)
I think Sister Irene was carried away with Allan's problem because he
embodied many of the emotional aspects within herself that she had tried to root
out: impulsiveness, rebelliousness, unreasonableness, selfish egoism, pride,
unrestrained intellectual curiousity. He is her male "other" in many ways.
Jung would call Allan her "animus". Also, Sr. Irene found herself in the midst
of a father and son struggle, a battle that she could not hope to win. She
was a pawn between Allan and his father. (You could see how little power
Allan's own mother had in that struggle.)
I was initially put off by the last lines of the story, which implied
that Sr. Irene had no feelings about the way things turned out. On further
reflection, it seems to me that she certainly did have feelings -- of frustration
-- and more importantly relief -- a forbidden aspect of herself had been killed
off once and for all. I think the suicide of JCO's student back in Detroit
in the 1960s provided the emotional drive for In a Region of Ice.
I find "Region" a very well-presented and thought-out story. I wouldn't
change a word. Although one might choose to write one's own short story on a
similar theme.
Cyrano
In a message dated 11/30/2005 11:48:11 AM Eastern Standard Time,
CoonHollow@aol.com writes:
<< I do have some opinions about this story, which seems in a rough draft
form
to me, but then that is my complaint about much of Oates's fiction--that she
seems in a rush to finish, and the finer points that could be developed
don't
get developed. We get sketches instead of development--more so in her
stories
than novels, to be sure, but that follows.
In "The Region of Ice," we get a pretty good sense of Allan Weinstein
through
his explosive conversations, which he may as well be having with himself for
all the contributions Sister Irene makes. What we know about Sr. Irene is
told to us rather than shown, which would have been more effective.
I would have liked more detail of the convent life, too, to understand the
specifics of her practice. She appears to be in a teaching order, but
Oates
calls her prayerful times "meditations," which is the wrong word, so this
confuses rather than expands our understanding of her practice.
It would have been helpful to know why (precisely) she joined the Order.
Did she really feel she had a true vocation, or was she just wanting the
easy
way out of her parents' emotional dependencies? How her practice shaped
her
could add much to the story, in my view.
There is very little conversation between Sr. Irene and anyone. Should she
not have brought her concerns to the Mother Superior, for example? or her
confessor? The story would be the richer for more dialogue and more convent
details. Somehow I don't think these omissions were by design; I think
they
reflect Oates's paucity of background.
What happens instead is that Sr. Irene is a flat character for whom we can
feel no sympathy, only pity.
IMHO, it's a badly written wonderful story. I itch to revise it :)
Anne D'Arcy, Ph.D.
Solano College
>>
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