Gilead (Criticism)

Criticism

Melodie Monahan

Monahan has a Ph.D. in English and operates an editing service, The Inkwell Works. In this essay, Monahan examines the healing role journal writing plays in the life of John Ames, the narrator of Marilynne Robinson's Gilead.

In Gilead (2004), the central action, it might be argued, is the habitual daily writing Reverend John Ames does during what he anticipates will be his final year. Robinson's protagonist is a man writing a journal, a "letter" to the "grown man" his son will be. At the outset his purpose in writing this journal is clear: John Ames is dying of heart disease, and he wants to leave a message for his little boy to read when he grows up. The novel is that message, a yearlong journal or extended letter. On the surface, this task is transparent: Ames, who has written fifty sermons a year for forty-five years, sets out to do some different writing now. He intends to create a personal account of himself, write something intimate. Someday his son, who stands to inherit precious little, will at least have this book, written by his dad in the last year of his life, quite an inheritance in its own right. What Reverend Ames does not realize, however, is that unlike a sermon that gets tied up neatly in thirty pages or so, ongoing daily writing can lead away from the initial subject into unexpected terrain, and it can affect the writer in ways he does not anticipate. Writing the journal, Reverend Ames fulfills his original intention, but he also accomplishes other work: he learns more deeply about what makes him heartsick, his grief, his anger, and envy; he even engages at one point in a dialogue with himself, part of a valiant effort to sort through his feelings and find the balm his heart requires. Equally important, he extends himself to his namesake, his best friend's son, repairing that longstanding troubled relationship. These unexpected developments in his journal writing may be facilitated by Reverend Ames's resolve to make the journal "an experiment with candor." The novel traces, then, how the writing process itself transforms the writer's thinking and over time may bring healing to chronic, hidden wounds. Gilead provides an opportunity to observe how journal writing draws the writer toward the meaning he implicitly seeks and how that meaning affects his actions. In short, journal writing is shown to be a catalyst for personal transformation and action.

Insomniac John Ames has lived his life awake in more than the literal sense. A poet, a philosopher, and man without pretense who searches for the truth and admits harboring unanswered questions, Ames writes deliberately. In the early pages of the journal, he notes his attention to words. He loves the word "susurrus" (full of whispering sounds) and describes himself as having "a certain crepuscular quality" (resembling twilight). He is self-conscious as he writes, trying to do a good job. He comments on "the care it costs [him] not to use certain words more than [he] ought to." He talks about the word "just," as an ordinary intensifier. He remarks on using the word "'old'" too often but explains that, for him, it "has less to do with age than it does with familiarity with a modest, habitual affection." He calls his lifelong friend, "'old Boughton'"; he refers to Gilead as "'this shabby old town,'" meaning in both instances "very near" his heart. In frequent passages, his word choice reveals his aesthetic eye for detail. He describes soap bubbles, for example, that "ripen toward that dragonfly blue before they burst." He describes his son standing on the swing, with the "planted stance of a sailor on a billowy sea"; the son swings so high "the ropes bow like cobwebs, laggardly, indolent." He wants to save experience by anchoring it in text. He regrets Boughton's remarkable sermons were never written down: "So that is all gone." About his own sermons saved in boxes, they may "seem foolish or dull," but he wrote them with "the deepest hope and conviction. Sifting [his] thoughts and choosing [his] words. Trying to say what was true." Reverend Ames sets out to write the journal with the same deliberate care he used to compose his sermons. However, as he continues writing in his journal, his self-consciousness recedes somewhat; he becomes more engaged with his own ideas and feelings, sorting these out, wondering about them.

Reverend Ames ponders scripture; the stories in both Testaments having to do with fathers and sons and with parents and children recur in his thinking. These stories resonate with his circumstances, and he finds comfort in the way some stories conclude. He reports in his journal how "the story of Hagar and Ishmael" came to him while he was praying. As he worries about how his wife and child will manage without him (once he is dead, they will have to leave the parsonage and find somewhere else to live), he refers to this Biblical story and takes heart: "That is how life goes — we send our children into the wilderness. Even that wilderness, the very habitation of jackals, is the Lord's. I need to bear this in mind." He imagines that without him his wife and child will be thrust into a wilderness of vulnerability. He specifies what in the parsonage belongs to him, things they should take with them, and he cautions his son to accept any help parishioners offer since during his service to the church he has generously helped its members. He repeatedly regrets having so little to leave his wife and son by way of an inheritance.

Full of love and concern for his wife and boy, he nonetheless admits a mean-spirited irritation with John Ames Boughton (called Jack by everyone), the son of his lifelong best friend, Robert Boughton. The emotion stems, perhaps, from an initial event intended as a kindness. Eight years after Reverend Ames's first wife died along with their premature baby daughter, Reverend Boughton had yet another child, a son. Reverend Ames baptized this baby, and when he asked what it was to be called, he was shocked to learn it would bear his own name. In that baptismal moment, Reverend Ames rejected the baby, feeling that this child somehow denied his own little daughter's existence. Remembering this moment late in the journal, Ames writes: "my heart froze in me and I thought, This is not my child." In the same passage, he explains envy as it applies to himself: "covetise is in my experience not so much desiring someone else's virtue or happiness as rejecting it, taking offense at the beauty of it." As he writes now about it, he sees a sermon topic in this line of thinking, and he also ponders whether the baby John Ames Boughton "felt how coldly I went about his christening, how far my thoughts were from blessing him." Jack grew up during the years in which Ames remained widowed and childless, and Reverend Ames confesses that seeing Jack with his father was "one of the great irritations" of his life.

Reverend Ames continues to think of what happened to the Biblical Abraham's sons; as he writes in his journal, he makes plans for a sermon on the subject. He focuses on the idea of wilderness and what can soothe it: "My point was that Abraham is in effect called upon to sacrifice both his sons, and that the Lord in both instances sends angels to intervene at the critical moment to save the child." He concludes, taking Abraham's fate for his own, that the father must "trust to the providence of God." Even more, he realizes that each person is destined for the wilderness, that Abraham "himself had been sent into the wilderness this was the narrative of all generations." As he writes, applying these stories to his own situation, Ames begins to realize that he is called upon to have faith regarding his wife and son (Hagar and Ishmael) and himself (Abraham). Normally in his sermons Reverend Ames would not refer to personal matters, but in writing later in his journal about how he delivered this sermon, he reports digressing to mention how an old pastor may worry about what might become of his congregation after his death; the pastor is called upon to believe that God is in charge. The Old Testament stories are paradigms: no matter what manner the abandonment, Reverend Ames comes to understand in his journal writing, his faith is called upon to recognize that God is in charge in the wilderness. As he soon realizes, the wilderness has both a physiological and a psychological dimension.

As he broods about what he calls his "sin of covetise," Reverend Ames chaffs at the smiling presence of Jack Boughton. He resents Jack's having helped move Reverend Ames's study to the main floor parlor and is offended by Jack's placing the journal in a drawer where Reverend Ames never puts it. He knows he is unreasonable, but with candor he writes out his feelings. Gnawing him is the suspicion that Jack will get close to Lila and their son after Ames dies and may do them harm. This thought torments Ames. These present feelings are triggered by his age-old envy of Boughton, who had four sons, all of whom he saw grow up; Boughton loved Jack the most, the one who since childhood irritated Reverend Ames. Ames defines covetise as "that pang of resentment you may feel when even the people you love best have what you want and don't have." In order to steer clear of breaking the "Commandment, Thou shall not covet," Ames has avoided the Boughton household, despite his love of Reverend Boughton. In 1956, when Jack comes home, he wants to talk privately with Reverend Ames on a matter he cannot discuss with his father; Jack repeatedly approaches, and Reverend Ames recoils, irritated and guarded, tempted repeatedly to warn his wife and son about Jack's potential to harm them, in all feeling increased physical and emotional agitation.

As Ames struggles with this issue, he juxtaposes in the journal different types of writing. In one instance, Ames uses his journal to sort out his feelings about Jack, especially in the face of Jack's request for consultation. Ames engages in a dialogue with himself. He imagines a scene in which he, Ames, calling himself Moriturus, comes to Reverend Ames for consultation, and the dialogue he writes out surprises him:

Question: What is it you fear most, Moriturus?

Answer: I, Moriturus, fear leaving my wife and child unknowingly in the sway of a man of extremely questionable character.

Question: What makes you think his contact with them or his influence upon them will be considerable enough to be damaging to them?

Now, that really is an excellent question, and one I would not have thought to put to myself. The answer would be, he has come by the house a few times, he has come to church once. Not an impressive reply.

This dialogue shows Ames that he does not have evidence to prove Jack's alleged culpability. Ames realizes that his fear is directly connected to the envy he feels when he sees Jack sitting in the pew with Lila and their son: "I stood there in the pulpit, looking down on the three of you, you looked to me like a handsome young family, and my evil old heart rose within me I felt as if I were looking back from the grave." This turmoil is not about Jack but about Reverend Ames, and the journal writing allows Ames to realize it. It makes perfect sense: "The fact is," he concludes, "I don't want to be old. And I certainly don't want to be dead." Even Jesus "wept in the Garden," knowing he was to die; Reverend Ames can feel some compassion for himself; he knows himself to be "failing." Sleep becomes "elusive" and "grueling," and prayer has not quieted him. Then, in the darkness of his suffering, quite surprisingly, Ames undergoes a jolting change of heart.

He reflects again in his journal upon the baptism of Jack Boughton, considering how Reverend Boughton had given John Ames this baby "to compensate for [his] own childlessness." Reverend Ames realizes that his rejecting the baby, in a way, seems like Jack's rejection of his own baby daughter born out of wedlock. He prays now "for the wisdom to do well by John Ames Boughton" yet acknowledges that his "sullen old reptilian self would have handed him over to the Philistines." His conflict heightens: he reports being unable to sleep: "My heart is greatly disquieted. It is a strange thing to feel illness and grief in the same organ." An "old weight in the chest" informs him that he knows more than he knows, and he "must learn it" from himself. He goes back over what he knows about Jack, about his pranks in childhood, particularly how the boy stole a photograph Ames had of his first wife, Louise, and then how the child smiled innocently at him afterward, seeming to mock him while calling him "Papa." Now he thinks the child Jack was "'lonely,' though 'weary' and 'angry'" also describe him. Curiously, he depicts the young Jack in terms that apply to himself now as he writes. Remembering how the child galled him, Ames reports, just writing about it "is not doing me any good at all." He says elsewhere in the journal that transformations can be "abrupt" (as the change in him when he first saw Lila in church on "that blessed, rainy Pentecost"). Suddenly, Ames feels connected to Jack: "John Ames Boughton is my son. If there is any truth at all in anything I believe, that is true also. That language isn't sufficient, but for the moment it is the best I can do." Concern for writing style is less important than this realization: "it is a rejection of the reality of grace to hold our enemy at fault."

In these journal passages, as he seeks both psychological and theological clarification of his feelings about Jack, Ames is fully self-referential. He is no longer writing to his little boy; now he is sorting through his own feelings, outlining his own blind spots. He rereads his journal. He is troubled. In the moment, he concludes, "Oh, I am a limited man, and old, and [Jack] will still be his inexplicable mortal self when I am dust." Because Ames is freighted with these feelings, it is not surprising that the first two private conversations between him and Jack fail. Ames is antagonized by Jack's pleasantries; he reports in his journal, "I am angry as I write this. My heart is up to something that is alarming the rest of my body."

Shortly after this entry, a blank page appears in the journal, not unlike the kind that signals the end of a chapter. When the text begins again, it is on the facing (recto) side of the next page, with a large first letter, matching the format used on the novel's first page. This new section of the journal appears almost to be an epilogue. It begins with the secret Jack confides in Reverend Ames: Jack has a wife and child, "a colored woman, and a light-skinned colored boy." Here all the time Reverend Ames has been mucking around in his own grief, examining his private wounds, interpreting Jack and everything else in terms of his own problems, Jack has been preoccupied with a quite different, but equally weighty problem. Jack cannot speak to his own father about his cross-racial relationship or about his biracial son. He returned to Gilead to see his ailing father, to be sure, but he cherished the hope that Gilead, a place that once harbored runaway slaves, would be a haven beyond anti-miscegenation laws, one in which he could live with his family. While he is in Gilead, however, Jack learns that his common-law wife and their son have been removed from him permanently by her family. He tells Reverend Ames about all of this. Reverend Ames quotes Jack at length, admitting that in doing so he violates "pastoral discretion." He excuses himself to his son: "I just don't know another way to let you see the beauty there is in him." How interesting that here Ames uses that word "just," which in the early pages he says conveys "something ordinary in kind but exceptional in degree." Facing Jack's pain in losing his family, seeing no "grounds for [his] own dread," Reverend Ames admits, "I felt as if I'd have bequeathed him wife and child if I could to supply the loss of his own." This is transformation, indeed.

In the journal's closing pages, Reverend Ames expresses his gratitude "for the splendor" of the world, which he found also in Lila and in their son's "sweetly ordinary face." He knows that "old Boughton," if he could, would rise out of his "decrepitude" and follow Jack into the world to bless him, that son "he has favored as one does a wound." Reverend Ames longs to witness such "extravagant" blessing as Boughton would bestow in Jack, this "prodigal son" who leaves Gilead while Boughton lies on his deathbed. In the consummate scene, Reverend Ames enacts what Boughton cannot physically accomplish: Ames blesses Jack. Jack thinks he is leaving Gilead forever, and Reverend Ames understands. They wait at the bus stop; Reverend Ames has "to sit down on the bench beside him on account of [his] heart." Reverend Ames places his hand on Jack's forehead and pronounces "the benediction from Numbers 'The Lord make his face to shine upon thee.'" All the roles a man may play coalesce in the blessing Reverend Ames adds: "Lord, bless John Ames Boughton, this beloved son and brother and husband and father."

In this moment of benediction, face to face with Jack, as in the journal consultation he faces himself, Reverend Ames evokes what elsewhere he calls "incandescence." In seeing the beauty in John Ames Boughton, John Ames sees the beauty in himself. He resolves to "put an end to all this writing." The first snow arrives. Ames concludes his journal with the best of his faith: "the Lord loves each of us as an only child." Then addressing his son again, he assesses the legacy: "What have I to leave you but the ruins of old courage, and the lore of old gallantry and hope? Well, as I have said, it is all an ember now, and the good Lord will surely someday breathe it into flame again." The journal which began as a letter to this son, grown into manhood after the father's death, has become a journey into the writer's self. Uncovering the "bewilderments" of that "new territory," that wilderness of soul, became the process by which this journal writer made himself known, first to himself, next to his son. Late in his journal writing, Reverend Ames realizes that he set out to do one thing and the writing took him in an unanticipated direction:

I have been looking through these pages, and I realize that for some time I have mainly been worrying to myself, when my intention from the beginning was to speak to you. I meant to leave you a reasonably candid testament to my better self, and it seems to me now that what you must see here is just an old man struggling with the difficulty of understanding what it is he's struggling with.

Journal writing invited this disclosure. This text promises to touch Reverend Ames's beloved son because it depicts with candor the writer's struggle and its resolution.

Source: Melodie Monahan, Critical Essay on Gilead, in Novels for Students, Thomson Gale, 2007.

What Do I Read Next?

• Robinson's first novel, Housekeeping (1980), which was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, is a work of remarkable metaphoric richness, full of American literary allusion. The novel is set in a small western town situated on the edge of a lake and tells the story of three generations of women, coping in various ways with the task of going on despite traumatic losses.
• Robinson's The Death of Adam: Essays on Modern Thought (1998) is "contrarian in method and spirit," as she states in her "Introduction." Of the included essays, "McGuffey and the Abolitionists" and "Puritans and Prigs" cover topics that surface in Gilead.
• Gloria Naylor's novel The Women of Brewster Place (1989) follows the lives of seven women living in Brewster Place, a ghetto housing project in a northern U.S. city. The poignancy of these women's lives and their hopes and challenges clearly depict the difficulty that poor African American women face living in poverty and coping with racial and sexual prejudice.
• Ursula Hegi's Sacred Time (2003) tells the story from three different points of view of an extended Italian family living in the Bronx in the 1950s. The accidental death of one of the children traumatizes parents, aunts and uncles, and cousins, and becomes the shaping event in the lives of that child's generation.
• Against the backdrop of the American Civil War, The Glory Cloak (2004), by Patricia O'Brien, tells the story of an orphan girl who travels to Concord, Massachusetts, in 1858 to live with her cousin, Louisa May Alcott. Susan Gray goes with the Alcott family to Washington, D.C., to volunteer in helping Union casualties.
• Norman Maclean's collection A River Runs Through It and Other Stories (1976), containing two novellas and one short story, tells the story of a young man and his family, set in rural western Montana.
• March (2004), by Geraldine Brooks, is a novel which draws from personal journals and letters of Louisa May Alcott's father. Brooks based the main character on the father in Little Women. In this novel, a father leaves his family to fight in the Civil War and in the process discovers what he believes.
• Letters from an Age of Reason (2001), by Nora Hague, tells a Civil War story of an interracial and cross-class relationship between the rich white daughter of a New York family and the black house servant in a family of French American slave holders.