In the Garden of the North American Martyrs (Criticism)

Criticism

Elisabeth Piedmont-Marton

Piedmont-Marton holds a Ph.D. in English and teaches American literature and administers

the Writing Center at the University of Texas. In this essay she discusses the symbolic and moral dimensions of “In the Garden of the North American Martyrs.

“In the Garden of the North American Martyrs” belongs to the category, or genre, of literature known as modern realism. Tobias Wolff has often expressed his admiration for the stories of John Cheever and is a particular fan of James Joyce’s collection of stories Dubliners. Despite his canny eye for detail and his gift for dialog, however, Wolff seems to work against the constraints of realism. “In the Garden of the North American Martyrs” in particular dramatizes the tension between the realistic and symbolic ways of looking at the world. The story, in Wolff’s own words, “bursts the bounds of traditional realistic fiction.” Reviewer Brian Kaplan writes in the Nation that Wolff “scrutinizes the disorders of daily living to find significant order underneath the surface.” “In the Garden of the North American Martyrs” suggests that this order, or meaning, may be found on both the symbolic and moral levels.

The symbolic strands that will be woven together at the story’s conclusion are introduced at the beginning. The narrator likens Mary’s failure to pursue original thought to birds shrinking away to “remote, nervous points, like birds flying away.” Mary even takes on some physical characteristics of birds, even cocking her head to one side in an effort to “catch everything everyone said.”

Another cluster of images whose symbolic significance unfolds as the story develops is that of the wilderness and that most immutable force of nature, the weather. During the three years she spends at the experimental college in Oregon, Mary feels as if she is being besieged by rain and its consequences. “There was water in Mary’s basement. Her walls sweated, and she had found toadstools growing behind the refrigerator. She felt as though she were rusting out, like one of those old cars people thereabouts kept in their front yards, on pieces of wood. Mary knew that everyone was dying, but it seemed to her that she was dying faster than most.” She develops a lung disorder and her hearing problem is exacerbated by the dampness, almost as though she were trapped underwater.

The climate and scenery in New York at first seem to invigorate Mary, but soon the landscape takes on more ominous features. Louise prattles on about her love life as she drives Mary to her guest cabin, oblivious to the persistent and vaguely menacing presence of the world outside her window. Mary, however, notices “the forest all around, deep black under a plum colored sky. There were few lights and these made the darkness seem even greater.” Though it will not become clear until Mary invokes the spirits of the Iroquois and the martyred Jesuits at the conclusion of the story, the landscape represents the dark and violent history of the place from which, ironically, Louise and her fellow historians are completely disconnected. Mary, whose habit of listening closely serves her well in this instance, is almost able to hear the voices of those who have gone before.

The next day when Mary visits the college she sees that Louise is not alone in her arrogant dismissal of the history of the place. The college, as the student guide Roger explains, is “an exact copy of a college in England, right down to the gargoyles and stained glass windows.” The symbolic heart of the place, as it turns out, is not the library or the chapel, but the power plant, which represents the power that those with wealth and privilege use to grind up those without it. The machine puts its mark on the landscape and appropriates the earth’s resources in order to keep itself running. Wolff is suggesting in this image that Louise and her colleagues have become so obsessed with feeding the machine and so deafened by its noise that they cannot recognize history — even their own — when they are surrounded by it. Ironically, it is the machine that finally reveals the truth to Mary. While watching it hum, Mary comes to understand that “she had been brought there to satisfy a rule,” that the overwhelming mechanisms of power have manipulated her. But the machine also offers her a choice. She can be a smoothly compliant cog, or she can be a stray bolt that brings the whole thing to a grinding halt. Though the machine is a morally neutral object, its symbolic presence offers Mary a moral choice.

Knowing that she has been betrayed by Louise and used by the “machinery” of the prestigious college, Mary must decide whether she should stick to the safe course she has followed all her career, or strike out into the wilderness of the unknown. To do only what is expected — blandly read Louise’s lecture on the Marshall Plan — is to give in. When she comes to the podium Mary is “unsure of what she would say; only that she would rather die than read Louise’s article.” She decides to “wing it,” and all the words that had long ago flown away into “remote, nervous points” return to her, giving her the power not just of speech but of prophecy. In the end, she address the group directly, speaking in the tradition of the stern New England preacher, imploring them to mend their ways and “turn from power to love.”

In invoking the story of Brebeuf and Lalement’s torture and capture by the Iroquois, Mary proves herself the superior historian and defeats the machine reasoning of Louise, Dr. Howells and the rest of the faculty. Her “pronouncements on justice and love disorder the machinery of expectation,” as critic Brina Caplan puts it. Her sense of history is so profound that when she looks around the lecture hall it has been almost transformed to the mission where the French priests were held in 1649: “The sun poured through the stained glass onto the people around her, painting their faces. Thick streams of smoke from the young professor’s pipe drifted through a circle of red light at Mary’s feet, turning crimson and twisting like flames.” Like the North American martyrs, Mary regards her “captors,” or audience, as savages with painted faces. Also like Brebeuf and Lalement, Mary knows that there is nothing she can do to change their minds or alter the inevitable course of action. Her only choice is to make her final moments morally instructive.

While readers appreciate the dramatic and symbolic effect of the comparison between Mary’s ill treatment and that of the North Americans martyred by the Iroquois, and may recognize that Mary’s performance is an act of moral courage, the story poses an even larger moral question that lingers long after reading. Readers must ask themselves whether, by any standards of right and wrong, Mary’s ordeal is even remotely comparable to the hideous torture and execution of Brebeuf and Lalement. While Mary’s speech can be understood as ironic, or even farcical, as Brina Caplan suggests, some readers may still be left with the troubling sense that the tortures and death that Mary so vividly describes have been trivialized in order to serve Mary’s (nonlife-threatening) ends, making her just as morally corrupt as Louise and her colleagues.

Source: Elisabeth Piedmont-Marton, for Short Stories for Students, Gale, 1998.

William Rouster

Rouster has a Ph.D. in rhetoric and composition and has published in a number of composition journals. In the following essay he discusses symbolism in “In the Garden of the North American Martyrs.”

Tobias Wolff’s “In the Garden of the North American Martyrs” was published in his book of short stories, In the Garden of the North American Martyrs: A Collection of Short Stories in 1981. As the title indicates, the story deals with images of martyrdom on this continent. Of the literary devices used in this short story, the dominant one is that of symbolism, which refers to the use of people, objects, creatures, places, and events to represent more than just themselves. Symbolism is one of the most widely used and effective literary devices of all, since many authors wish to give their work greater relevance than just the story that is being told. Therefore, Mary in this story symbolizes more than just this one person, Mary, and the university in the East is meant to represent more than that one university. In “In the Garden of the North American Martyrs,” nearly all of the characters, events, and places have symbolic significance, and the meaning of the story is to be found therein.

Of the characters presented, the most significant is Mary, no last name given, and we are told the story of her academic career. Mary appears to symbolize those members of the academy, or university system, who lose their identity to the power of that system. Mary, in itself, is a very common name, thus the main character could represent almost anyone, and, indeed, she works very hard to not be someone who stands out from the academic crowd in any important way.

Mary particularly strives to remain anonymous after witnessing the dismissal of an intelligent and insightful colleague who had offended powerful members of their college with his ideas. She writes her history lectures out in total and uses not her own ideas, but only those of others who have been judged by the academy to be noncontroversial. In doing this she begins to lose her own ideas: “her own thoughts she kept to herself, and the words for them grew faint as time went on; without quite disappearing they shrank to remote nervous points, like birds flying away.” To avoid being thought too boring, Mary cultivates an image of eccentricity by committing to memory comedy routines and jokes.

Mostly, Mary listens to others. Her image of herself as a listener comes to her from a reflection that she spots in a window as she is listening to a senior member of her department. “She was leaning toward him and had her head turned so that her right ear was right in front of his moving mouth.” This image symbolizes her loss of self to the power of the academy, an academy to which she only listens and does not speak. Eventually, Mary develops hearing problems from, she guesses, listening too much to others.

Fifteen years after Mary’s arrival at Brandon University, it closes its doors. She eventually finds work at an experimental college in Oregon where she is most unhappy in the persistent rain. Mary, however, appears to be rescued from the rust and rain of Oregon when a former colleague, Louise, contacts her to tell her of a job opening at her college in upstate New York, for which Mary applies and gets an interview. She is determined to get this job, mainly by not offending anyone. On the plane trip she begins to feel that she is going home, a feeling which grows stronger during the flight eastward. She describes this feeling to Louise as “deja vu.”

What she is going home to is her own martyrdom at the hands of the machine itself. In this story, the machine symbolizes the almighty, unappeasable, unfeeling force of the university system which feeds on people such as Mary. The student showing her around the campus takes her to view the power plant: “They were standing on an iron catwalk above the biggest machine Mary had ever beheld. . . . Where before he had been gabby Roger now became reverent. It was clear that for him this machine was the soul of the college, that the purpose of the college was to provide outlets for the machine.”

The college served the machine and this college is meant to symbolize all colleges: “Roger, the student assigned to show Mary around, explained that it was an exact copy of a college in England, right down to the gargoyles and stained-glass windows. It looked so much like a college that moviemakers sometimes used it as a set.” The motto of the college, written above the door of the Founder’s Building read “God helps those who help themselves” and listed among the most prominent graduates of the college were men who took a great deal from society in terms of riches, but gave very little in return.

Louise is an interesting example of an individual who takes without giving at this college. She likely represents one of the feeding tentacles of the college machine. Louise is totally self-absorbed, and although she is wreaking havoc on the lives of those around her, she is concerned only with herself. She invites Mary to be sacrificed because Mary cheers her up. She takes a lover in spite of the pain it causes her husband and family because of the positive influence she thinks it has on her: “My concentration has improved, my energy level is up, and I’ve lost ten pounds. I’m also getting some color in my cheeks.” She says about her family’s negative reaction: “there is no reasoning with any of them. In fact, they refuse to discuss the matter at all, which is very ironical because over the years I have tried to instill in them a willingness to see things from the other person’s point of view.” Indeed, Louise is as incapable of feeling for others as the marauding Iroquois had been, and the writer makes it clear that Louise is a modern-day Iroquois: Louise “reminded Mary of a description in the book she’d been reading of how Iroquois warriors gave themselves visions by fasting” because “she had seemed gaunt and pale and intense” at the airport.

It becomes clear throughout the latter half of the story that Mary is to become a North American martyr in this college garden, the sacrificial offering. Fire and smoke play prominently in the story’s imagery. Louise, a chain smoker, asks Mary to light her a cigarette soon after Mary arrives. Smoke drifts from two of the cabins in the visitor’s quarters and, as soon as Mary and Louise step through the door of Mary’s cabin, Louise states “Look . . . . they’ve laid a fire for you. All you have to do is light it.” One of the men interviewing Mary smokes a pipe. As Mary beings to give the lecture part of the interview, “thick streams of smoke from the young professor’s pipe drifted through a circle of red light at Mary’s feet, turning crimson and twisting like flames.” Mary is being symbolically burned at the stake, by an audience of savages who are painted by the sunlight streaming through the windows.

It is in Mary’s lecture that we learn about the North American martyrs and their garden, two Jesuit priests who were tortured and killed by the Iroquois on the site of the college. Originally, Mary is going to read one of Louise’s papers, thereby giving her own voice and identity up completely, but when she learns that she has no chance at the position, she decides to do something she never before would have dared — to “wing it” — and quit playing it safe. The place she is giving the speech is in the Long House of the Five Nations of the Iroquois, a pitiless tribe of torturers and murderers who became powerful through their lack of mercy, much as the members and graduates of this college had done to others. Of the two Jesuit martyrs, one was burned to death and the other tortured and eaten alive as he preached to them. The Iroquois ate strips of his skin and cut off his lips and then drank his blood, all while he was still alive. In much the same way the academy has eaten Mary alive: she has almost nothing left of herself, and cannot even speak her own ideas.

Mary continues to speak through the silence of those listening once she runs out of facts about the Iroquois, and rebuffs the professors much as she imagined the dying Jesuit had rebuffed the Iroquois as they were killing him:

Mend your lives, she said. You have deceived yourselves in the pride of your hearts, and the strength of your arms. Though you soar aloft like the eagle, though your nest is set among the stars, thence I will bring you down, says the Lord. Turn from power to love. Be kind. Do justice. Walk humbly.

Mary is not done talking after this, winging it as she goes. She shuts off her hearing aid so that no one can interrupt her and continues talking. At the moment of her martyrdom, Mary has found her own voice.

Source: William Rouster, for Short Stories for Students, Gale, 1998.

What Do I Read Next?

• This Boy’s Life (1989) by Tobias Wolff is an account of Wolff s adolescence and early adulthood. The memoir is told through the eyes of the boy, leaving the reader free to draw conclusions and make judgements about events the child could not have fully understood at the time.
• The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is the classic novel about another boy whose coming of age is characterized by a tendency to stretch the truth and who must make difficult decisions without much adult guidance.
• Wise Blood, Flannery O’Connor’s darkly comic novella about a misguided preacher’s search for meaning and moral certainty.
• Dubliners is the collection of short stories by Irish author James Joyce that Wolff often mentions as having a major influence on his writing.
• Ellen Foster (1989) by Kaye Gibbons is a novel about a female character whose lonely and unparented childhood resembles Huck Finn’s and the young Toby Wolff’s.
• The Duke of Deception (1979) is Geoffrey Wolff’s memoir of growing up with his father, a con artist.