A Spinster’s Tale (Criticism)

Criticism

Tom Deignan

Deignan has been a teaching assistant in American Cultural Studies at Bowling Green State University. In the following essay, he argues that sexual conflict is the primary theme of “A Spinster’s Tale.”

Critics tend to focus on the sexual themes in Peter Taylor’s “A Spinster’s Tale,” especially as it relates to the budding femininity of young Elizabeth. This discussion seems pertinent when the reader learns that Elizabeth grew up without a mother, has a difficult time with men, and never marries.

It is clear that Elizabeth loves her father and brother, but at the same time she seems to fear certain aspects of their personalities; specifically, she is concerned with similarities between her father and brother and the repugnant Mr. Speed. “As their voices grew louder and merrier, my courage slackened,” Elizabeth recalls. “It was then I first put into words the thought that in my brother and father I saw something of Mr. Speed. And I knew it was more than a taste for whiskey they had in common.”

Such comments, when combined with other aspects of “A Spinster’s Tale” — Elizabeth’s growth into a young women, her irrational fear of Mr. Speed (who, some critics note, is associated with several sexual symbols, such as the phallic cane), and her curious desire to be struck by her brother — make it clear that sexual conflict is one of the major themes of this work.

It is also possible that not only is such a conflict the most important theme in “A Spinster’s Tale,” but that something much more horrific has taken place. Perhaps “A Spinster’s Tale” is a tragedy about a father’s sexual abuse of his young daughter, who is vigorously attempting to repress her memory of these acts.

Such an interpretation may seem far-fetched. Elizabeth’s father, after all, may be clumsy at times, but he seems to be a likable character, hardly one to commit such an awful crime. And yet, the very aspect of the story which makes any sexual reading so uncomfortable — Elizabeth’s youth — may begin to point in the direction of repressed molestation. Such a reading makes Elizabeth’s resulting spinsterhood and her inability to connect with men much more dramatic and painful.

Early in the story, Elizabeth makes an important distinction: her brother’s drinking frightens her, yet “those nights put a scaredness into me that was clearly distinguishable from the terror that Mr. Speed instilled by stumbling past our house. ...” So Mr. Speed, for an unknown reason, is clearly more threatening than her brother.

Elizabeth then notes that “by allowing him the ’Mr.’” she seeks to “humanize and soften the monster that was forever passing our house....” In this way, Elizabeth both eases her fear of Speed, and transforms him into a deformed authority figure.

The next sentence is important: “My father would point him out through the wide parlor window....” Elizabeth later notes that her father, while drinking with her brother and uncles, would refer to Mr. Speed “in a blustering tone of merry tolerance: ’There goes Old Speed, again. That rascal!’” Elizabeth is annoyed at her father’s “tolerance,” and prepares for the “inevitable day when I should have to speak of (Mr. Speed) to someone.”

Elizabeth reveals that it is her father who first points Mr. Speed out to her, that she doesn’t care for his tolerance of Mr. Speed’s behavior, and that Mr. Speed represents something profoundly unsettling to her. This could be an indication that Elizabeth has shifted her mixture of love and loathing — which her father’s sexual violation has inspired — onto Mr. Speed. This may begin to explain her intense fear of him. His ugliness symbolizes and personifies Elizabeth’s repressed knowledge of her father’s acts. This may be one reason she uses the authoritative “Mr.” to refer to Speed.

It also may explain the curious scene before the mirror, when Elizabeth craves to be taken ” A-way-a-way....” Here, the sexual and emotional confusion caused by her father’s sexual violation has overwhelmed her. And whom does Elizabeth see at that moment, gazing out the window? “I beheld Mr. Speed,” she reports. He was walking, “cursing the trees as he passed them, giving each a lick with his heavy walking cane.” Elizabeth is scared, her “breath came short, and I clasped the black bow at the neck of my middy blouse.”

Many important elements suggest that Elizabeth is repressing sexual abuse: her confused desire for escape but inability to articulate why, the presence of the hateful Mr. Speed and his phallic cane, her inexplicable movement to cover up her blouse. Also, it seems that Elizabeth’s defenses — denial and repression — are starting to crack.

Indeed, it is important to note that Elizabeth is maturing constantly throughout the story. (She notes at one point, “my legs had got too long this summer to stretch out straight on the settee.”) Thus, she may only now be becoming aware of the unacceptable nature of her sexual relationship with her father; her behavior suggests that she is confused. After all this is her father, a man she is supposed to love unconditionally, regardless of what he might be doing to her. That he seems a loving father can only complicate things more — for Elizabeth, as well as for the reader.

Elizabeth’s ambivalence is clearly illustrated in the bedroom scene with her brother. He is drunk, suggesting a loss of inhibition. Elizabeth’s mother despised drinking, as Elizabeth does. Furthermore, it is drinking that initially raises questions about Mr. Speed’s relation to her father and brother. As the most persistent drunk in the story, Mr. Speed embodies the least inhibited, most threatening potential of men — such as a sexual relationship with one’s own daughter.

In the bedroom scene, Elizabeth wakes up when her brother comes home drunk. She “smiled at him and beckoned,” as he stumbles up the stairs. Twice, Elizabeth notes (as she does always with Mr. Speed) the redness of her brother’s face. “I stood in my white nightgown,” Elizabeth says, “with my black hair hanging over my shoulders....”

He asks if she’s “been reading something you shouldn’t,” before she throws her arms around him, confessing, “I‘m always lonely.” The scene is quite tender up to this point, as Elizabeth’s brother attempts to conceal his drunkenness and offers to play with her the next day.

Then he “stood up and looked at me curiously, as though in some way repelled by my settling so comfortable in the covers.” Elizabeth’s demands seem to have shaken her brother, which matches a pattern through the story: when Elizabeth is assertive, she is encouraged to be more passive.

This can suggest any number of things. Regarding the thesis of this essay, perhaps Elizabeth, at this moment, believes acting in a sexual way with family members is somewhat normal. She even says that she smells her brother’s whiskey, but that it “was not repugnant to me.” She then expresses a desire to be struck and wishes she had indicated to her brother “that we had in common some unmentionable trouble.”

Many critics have written of the “incestuous overtones” of this scene. It appears her brother’s look of shock has jolted Elizabeth into realizing such sexual behavior around family members is not appropriate. And yet, she cannot deny her love (sexual or otherwise) for her brother. Indicating her intense confusion, Elizabeth simply combines affection and punishment. She wants contact with her brother but seems, on some level, to comprehend the forbidden nature of such behavior.

For Elizabeth, getting hit by her brother at that point would be not only a way to express love, but also a punishment for her feelings. That she desires to share an “unmentionable trouble” with her brother suggests not only that something intense is being repressed, but also that Elizabeth is perhaps starting to comprehend the roots of her confusion — her father’s violation of her and her brother’s silent complicity.

Indeed, later she admits that she “had come to accept (Mr. Speed’s) existence as a natural part of my life.” Since Mr. Speed represents a displaced awareness of Elizabeth’s father’s sexual violation, this may be one of the saddest lines in the entire story. Elizabeth has resigned herself to living with this horrible abuse. And her brother is not innocent either, for he also says of Mr. Speed: “You’ll get used to him, for all his ugliness.”

It is additionally important to note that Elizabeth shares her mother’s name; moreover, she maintains that “from day to day, I began to take my place as a mistress in our motherless household.” This suggests that Elizabeth seems to have become a sort of surrogate mother/wife in this house. As the sole female family member in the house, perhaps her father viewed his desire for her as almost normal — especially now that his wife (and natural sex partner) is dead.

Elizabeth’s own warm (warmth is a key image) affection for her mother can be seen, then, not only as affection for a lost mother, but also a desire for protection from her father that is no longer available. “I remembered only the warmth of the cheek and the comfort of that moment,” Elizabeth says recalling her mother. This is contrasted with the perverted love of her father.

Also, it should be noted that after pleading to the mirror for escape, then seeing Mr. Speed, “a sudden inexplicable memory of my mother’s cheek and a vision of her” strikes Elizabeth. At moments when she is forced to confront her father’s abuse, symbolized by Mr. Speed, Elizabeth always seems to call upon an image of her mother to delay confrontation.

Elizabeth’s dreams also suggest serious sexual violations; in one dream, some men come to see a girl with big hands and the girl decides to hide them under her skirt. The big hands may, in fact, be Elizabeth’s father’s, but guilt and confusion forces Elizabeth to blame herself for the violation. Thus, she believes the hands under her skirt are the girl’s own.

Yet Elizabeth does not fear her father. In a critical scene near the end of the story, she runs to her father, with other family members in the room, proclaiming of Mr. Speed “I‘m afraid of him.... He’s always drunk!” Elizabeth then confides that she “was eager to tell (her father) just exactly how fearful I was of Mr. Speed’s coming into our house.” This scene could be viewed as a confrontation. Again, if Mr. Speed represents her own father’s deviant sexuality, than Elizabeth is, in a sense, proclaiming her displeasure at the situation. She no longer wants her father to treat her in such unnatural ways.

Her father cuts her off, telling her she “had no business watching Mr. Speed, that I must shut my eyes to some things. ’After all,’ he said... ’you’re a young lady now.’” Elizabeth’s father is, in effect, issuing an order here: don’t confront this issue (Mr. Speed/sexual violation), repress it.

So Elizabeth’s assertiveness has been quashed, and she is now “accustomed to thinking that there was something in my brother’s and in my father’s natures that was fully in sympathy with the very brutality of (Mr. Speed’s) drunkenness.” In refusing to hear her concerns about Mr. Speed, both her brother and father refuse to face up to Elizabeth’s abuse.

Elizabeth is a bold girl and because she is growing older and more aware, she will continue to explore ways to confront this issue. Her confidence grows during the scene with the kitchen help (which also foreshadows the story’s climax) when Elizabeth, at the height of her assertiveness, threatens to call the police. She realizes the power in this threat, and decides that she will use this same threat against Mr. Speed when he comes into the house.

Again, this climactic scene fits a pattern found throughout “A Spinster’s Tale.” Mr. Speed breaks though the doorway violently. (Many entrances through doorways occur in this story, and many critics have suggested a possible link to the act of sexual penetration.) References are yet again made to his red face and his cane, and Elizabeth realizes that perhaps “it was the last time I ever experienced the inconsolable desperation of childhood.”

However, even as she leaves childhood behind with this final overt violation, Elizabeth longs “to hide my face away from this in my own mother’s bosom.” Yet another part of her “was making me deal with Mr. Speed ... myself.” Indeed, she has called the police station, asserted herself, and, symbolically anyway, confronted her father’s mistreatment of her.

It is no surprise, then, that Elizabeth’s father is displeased. In his world, acknowledgment of such heinous acts amounts to bad behavior. Elizabeth has confronted her father, and indeed, he has sealed off the doorway, suggesting perhaps an end to his sexual abuse of her.

The fact that Elizabeth becomes a spinster is significant. In dealing with the effects of a lost, abused childhood, perhaps the following passage provides a terrible, conclusive insight. “What ever did happen to Speed’s old-maid sister?’ my uncle the doctor said. ’She’s still with him,’ Father said.”

As an old maid herself, the terrible actions and memories that Mr. Speed represents have remained with Elizabeth and always will. “It was only the other night that I dreamed I was a little girl... again and that there was a drunk horse in our yard,” the story’s last line reads.

As they have throughout the story, such dream images prove the fact that Elizabeth is still haunted by the scary, violent images of her childhood.

Source: Tom Deignan, “Overview of ‘A Spinster’s Tale,”’ in Short Stories for Students, The Gale Group, 2000.

What Do I Read Next?

• Considered a masterpiece, The Diary of Anne Frank is an actual diary written by a young Jewish girl before she was taken away by the Nazis during World War II. Some of the more memorable passages in the diary are about the difficulties of growing up and dealing with family members.
• William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury (1929) depicts the changing landscape of the American South in the early 1900s.
• Conversations with Peter Taylor, published in 1987, is a collection of interviews with the author of “A Spinster’s Tale.” These pieces provide insight into Taylor’s thought processes as an artist. Also, Parting the Curtains (1994) is a book of interviews with many Southern writers, including Taylor, Eleanor Ross, Shelby Foote, Maya Angelou, Pat Conroy, and William Styron.
• There are many studies of Taylor’s life and work, including most recently, Critical Essays on Peter Taylor (1993). Another critical study, Southern Accents: The Fiction of Peter Taylor, written by Catherine Clark Graham, was published in 1994.