1980—"The 'key' to most works of fiction is a voice, a rhythm, a unique music; a precise way of seeing and hearing that will give the writer access to the world he is trying to create....Sometimes one must wait a long time for this key to present itself....In the case of Bellefleur I waited several years. (Oates, Afterword to Bellefleur 561)

1972—"I have a big novel in my head now that will have many different episodes encompassing the history of America." (Milazzo, 29)

Apparently the genesis of Bellefleur may have come as early as 1972, belying the frequent suggestion that Oates must write too quickly; she had "acquired more than one thousand pages of notes" before finally beginning to write Bellefleur (Oates, Afterword to Bellefleur 562). It seems likely from its early genesis that Bellefleur was conceived as an autonomous creation which only later inspired the genre series of which it now seems an integral part (the other published novels of the series being A Bloodsmoor Romance, and Mysteries of Winterthurn); and also, Oates seems to have never mentioned the series, in numerous interviews, until after the publication of Bellefleur.

The novels in this series are linked thematically, though one book will emphasize particular themes while another book will emphasize others. All the novels are concerned, for example, with the nature and the passing of time; it is a major thematic concern in Bellefleur, though it is touched on only secondarily in the other novels. And since the series has its genesis in genre, it follows that Mysteries of Winterthurn explores the nature of mystery itself; that A Bloodsmoor Romance explores the nature of romance; and that Bellefleur, the family saga, explores the very nature of family relationships. But

why "genre" one might ask...why choose such severe restraints, such deliberately confining structures? But the formal discipline of "genre"—that it forces us inevitably to a radical re-visioning of the world and of the craft of fiction—was the reason I found the project so intriguing. To choose idiosyncratic but not distracting "narrators" to recite the histories; to organize the voluminous materials in patterns alien to my customary way of thinking and writing; to "see" the world in terms of heredity and family destiny and the vicissitudes of Time (for all five novels are secretly fables of the American family); to explore historically authentic crimes against women, children, and the poor; to create, and to identify with heroes and heroines whose existence would be problematic in the clinical, unkind, and one might say, florescent-lit atmosphere of present-day fiction—these factors proved irresistible. (Oates, Afterword to Mysteries 514-515)

Bellefleur may be the crown-jewel of the series so far, and it is story telling on a grand scale; it is, in fact, about story telling: tall tales, myths, family legends, "real" history. These myriad stories compete and intertwine, creating a conception of family with its attendant duties and expectations. I will look closely at these two themes as well as Oates's treatment of time and relativity, and the related notion of alternate worlds, universes, existences. Defining many of these alternate worlds are the artists populating Bellefleur, who attempt to create individual futures independent of their shared family histories. And underlying everything, (and a perennial Oates concern), is man's animal nature, or Nature itself, and man's attempts to distance, to separate himself—spiritually, intellectually, even physically—from it. These five themes or areas—story telling; family and family obligations; time, relativity, and alternate existences; the artist; and the animal nature of humanity—impinge upon one another and are, I believe, some of the most important thematic elements at work in Bellefleur. I hope to show how these concerns develop into what Oates calls a "critique of America; but...in the service of a vision of America that stresses...the ultimate freedom of the individual" (Oates, Afterword to Bellefleur 562). The complexities of the novel are such that a basic thematic reading is as much as I can attempt in this paper. Bellefleur is a symbolist novel, and a Gothic, with every strange object, place, and occurrence standing for or alluding to something else. The novel as a whole can be seen as an allegory of the American character. Oates points out that

the imaginative construction of a "Gothic" novel involves the systematic transposition of realistic psychological and emotional experiences into "Gothic" elements. We all experience mirrors that distort, we all age at different speeds, we have known people who want to suck our life's blood from us, like vampires....if Gothicism has the power to move us...it is only because its roots are in psychological realism. (Oates, Afterword to Bellefleur 562)

This is a useful note to keep in mind while reading Bellefleur.

That Bellefleur is a narrative about stories (or a story about narratives) is underscored by the text being bookended between two traditional story-telling phrases: the novel begins with a classic fairy-tale formula—"It was many years ago..." (3), a close kin to "once upon a time" —and ends (with the destruction of the castle) with "And so it came to pass..." (547), a biblical formula. Mahalaleel is a cat in reality; one of the "Spirits of the Dead" (8) symbolically; and the title of the opening book of the novel. Mahalaleel, Leah is told, "was out of the Bible, and she halfway wondered if the name was appropriate: for Leah was one of the Bellefleurs who prided themselves on their contempt for the Bible" (15). The name, in fact, first occurs in Genesis, suggesting perhaps that we are in the presence of a narrative from the beginning of time, one which has been told and retold continually, and which, in Bellefleur, will be told once again.

The novel is filled with narratives of all sorts. We encounter historical personages (that is, we are told stories of such encounters): Abraham Lincoln, despairing at the death and destruction he wrought, rumored to have staged his own assassination and to be living as a guest on Bellefleur lands; John Brown, whose disciple Arthur Bellefleur became and dying "while attempting to kidnap John Brown's corpse so that it might be spirited away to the North where partisans planned on reviving it with a galvanic battery" (425).

We encounter real texts quoted verbatim: Benjamin Franklin's "A Narrative of the Late Massacres in Lancaster County of a Number of Indians, Friends of this Province, by Persons Unknown, with Some Observations on the Same" (388); or transmogrified as when Gideon, hunting the Noir Vulture, walks into the bowling scene from "Rip Van Winkle."

We encounter legendary tales: the story of Veronica Bellefleur and her secret lover Ragnar Norst, vampires, narrated teasingly deadpan as nothing more than a doomed romance. No explicit vampirism is ever shown or even suggested; it is just a slow accretion of details that allows the reader to finally realize that aunt Veronica is not just an eccentric old woman.

Most of all, we encounter family tales, told generation after generation. In winter, the children would spend "long lazy hours before the fireplace, listening to stories..." (273), stories "told and retold and embellished and pondered over...stories they'd heard months or even years and decades previously, laced with hilarity, or malice, or envy, or simple frank astonishment at the pathways others' lives took" (69). "But did it really happen, [the children] asked. Really?—what do you mean, really?" (19) Of course this question is never answered; it does not need to be answered, as Oates suggests in another novel:

...human beings impose a more or less arbitrary narrative framework upon their more or less formless lives in order to tell their lives to themselves and others, presenting their actions in the best possible light—usually as heroes but sometimes, surprisingly, as victims. "Innocent" victims....Truth isn't an issue—simply the phenomenon of narrative. (Oates Lives, 185)

Consequently, what "really" happened depends on who is narrating the story. And, consequently, there appear "a dizzying profusion of plots" (378), a "music composed of many voices" (268).

The third-person omniscient narrator is little help in sorting out what really happens, and would at first seem to be of the unreliable variety. On the guilt of Jean-Pierre II, convicted of mass-murder, the narrator states early on: "of course he was not [guilty]: the judge and the jurors, openly prejudiced against the Bellefleur family, had refused to consider his case fairly..." (7). Later, the narrator states that the blame was "placed wrongly" on him (112). Still later: "Jean-Pierre was found guilty...despite his innocence..." (244). This is a case of narrating a life as an "innocent victim." However, narrating the same life in "heroic" mode, the narrator, commenting on the various methods Bellefleur men used to exact revenge on their enemies, matter-of-factly states: "and of course there had been Jean-Pierre II who had murdered eleven men one night, quite calmly and methodically, because of an 'insult' he had overheard..." (301). The narrative changes with the purpose of the narration. The contradictory versions of stories are always narrated, not in real time, but second or third-hand, as if being overheard as they are told to the children and others. But the narrator is not unreliable in any traditional sense; quite the opposite: the narrator is, in fact, so reliable as to report every version of every story, regardless of their contradictions, or their relative veracity. One of the most important stories, that of the massacre of the Bellefleurs in 1825, is related in bits and snatches, always incomplete, usually contradictory, in the second-hand mode mentioned above. The story permeates the entire novel from beginning to end; however, the reader never gets the full story at once but has to piece together the disparate fragments as best he can. Only as the myriad accumulation of details finally gives the story some coherence does the narrator, near the conclusion of the novel, tell the story in full, in real time, and first hand.

Perhaps, some people thought, the Bellefleurs themselves "were just stories, tales, anecdotes set in the mountains..." (550). There is truth in this speculation; the stories told shape the minds of the listeners, who eventually recreate in their own lives the very stories they were told as children. The 1825 massacre and the revenge that followed is the quintessential Bellefleur story. The novel is full of massacres, from Franklin's Narrative, to the historic exploits of John Brown; from the 1825 Bellefleur massacre, to the revenge massacre that followed; the massacre that put Jean-Pierre II in prison, and the one that occurred when he got out. The overall narrative, though looping and twisting wildly in time, nonetheless has a relentless, dramatic forward progression to a double-climax at the end of the book: a double-massacre in fact: the full narrative of the destruction of the Bellefleurs in 1825, and the destruction of the present-day Bellefleurs in Gideon's dive-bomb attack. The 1825 story defines the family:

But should the children be told, generation after generation?...why must they be told, if it terrifies them?—if it makes...the older ones restless with thoughts of revenge? (451)
In order to understand the secret workings of the world— In order to understand what it means to be a Bellefleur— (456)

Whether presenting themselves as heroes or as innocent victims, the Bellefleurs, from generation to generation, are the stories they tell.

A family tree at the beginning of the novel delineates the seven generations of Bellefleurs, from the mid-eighteenth century to the present day—America from its beginnings to the present—a family beset by great tragedies and great triumphs. The Bellefleurs spend much of their time attempting to characterize their experience as a family, and most of them decide that they must be under a curse, though the nature of the curse is unclear. Some Bellefleurs, however, refuse to acknowledge this dark side and find the notion of a curse quite ludicrous: "'It's entirely possible to interpret our history as being a history of—of blessedness'" (511). It is inconceivable to the Bellefleurs that misfortunes happening to a great family are meaningless occurrences; as Oates notes elsewhere: "what is to be done with accident except transform it—romantically—into Fate" (Oates, "Soul" 171), or in this case, into a curse. Equally inconceivable, though more likely, is the notion that the Bellefleurs are, unknowingly, the architects of their own disasters, and their "curse" is that they are unable to understand this fact:

just so do creatures in nature carry the distinguishing, and sometimes magnificently unique, marks of their species and their sex, without ever seeing them: they pass through their entire lives without seeing themselves. (273)

And failing to understand their own history, the Bellefleurs seem doomed to repeat it. Frederick Karl points out that

successive children are named after ancestors, so that young people come on like waves recalling their namesakes....Jean Pierre, who was murdered with his son, turns up as Jean Pierre II, who is a murderer of terrible ferocity and suddenness. (547)

Further, Raphael—who built the great monument to his own vanity, Bellefleur castle; and who, after his death, willed himself made into a skin-drum to be ritually sounded at family gatherings—returns four generations later as young Raphael who disappears into Mink Pond (a symbolic relationship to which I will return later). And Germaine O'Hagen, survivor of the 1825 massacre, returns in the present day as the young Germaine, another survivor of another massacre. The past is the present. "The living and the dead. Braided together. Woven together. An immense tapestry taking in centuries" (114).

Jedediah Bellefleur, the mountain hermit attempting to escape his family and the world in order to find God, is approached (after the massacre of the family in 1825) by an angel who exhorts him to return to the world and marry Germaine, his brother's widow:

you must continue the Bellefleur line; and you must exact revenge on your enemies....I act out of a deep love and respect for your family, because I am Charles Xavier's only surviving brother. (556)

Charles Xavier was an Indian boy lynched by a mob of white men in spite of a Bellefleur's intervention on his behalf. The boy's story is told along with stories of several massacres of Indians by white men; consequently, it is unlikely that this angel has any particular love for the Bellefleurs, as they are simply part of the white family. If anything, he is an angel of death, tempting Jedediah (three times, no less) to continue the cycle of violence upon his own kind, seeking revenge for the death of his brother, and for his brothers. Before Jedediah left for the mountains, his brother Louis, exasperated, tried to point out his folly: "Don't you know you're a Bellefleur!...You can't just hide away from blood ties, from your obligations..." (73). The primacy of family finally wins, and Jedediah leaves his hermitage to continue the Bellefleur line, and the cycle of violence.

And it seems the cycle will continue unchecked: Leah Bellefleur, in the present day, using the psychic abilities of her daughter Germaine, and inspired by the malign influence of Mahalaleel, seeks to re-acquire the nearly three-million acres of original Bellefleur lands, to re-establish the power and authority of the Bellefleur family. In doing so, she continues the exploitation of the poor, unleashes another massacre by Jean-Pierre II, and reasserts the absolute primacy of the family. But something is different this time. The children, the seventh generation, seem to be intuiting the nature of their curse and the necessity of escaping from and breaking the violent cycle that is their family heritage. One by one the children escape: Raphael disappears into Mink Pond; Yolande runs away to become a film actress; Garth marries Little Goldie and moves to Iowa or Nebraska, "somewhere where no one knew the name Bellefleur" (446); Vernon finally leaves to write his poetry (though the family story has it that he was drowned in the river by some thugs in response to his poetry); Christabel marries her beloved and flees to Mexico; and Bromwell runs away to pursue a scientific career. "They are betraying us one by one, they must be stopped!" Leah pleads (537). Their betrayal consists of pursuing their own individual lives and futures, independent of family history, tradition, and obligation. Bromwell, the philosopher of the family, would push

to the very periphery of his mind the subject of family. The subject of Bellefleur. His imagination simply went dead....Family and blood and family feeling and pride. And responsibility, and obligations, and honor. And history. Bellefleur history....How impatient Bromwell was with such palaver....His embarrassment shaded gradually into contempt, he could not escape Bellefleur without escaping history itself; he might belong, then, to a world, but he could never belong to a nation....for wasn't life on this planet clearly a matter of a metabolic current, unstoppable, a fluid, indefinable energy flowing violently through all things from the seaworm to the stallion to Gideon Bellefleur? Why, then, take Bellefleur as central in nature? (225-227)

Bromwell rejects Bellefleur as no more significant than any other entity in the universe; the other children, less calculating, reject it as simply less important than, and certainly destructive of, their own identities. Ironically, it is Leah who really betrays the family as it is her greed for power, the old Bellefleur power, that ultimately drives the children away and brings the literal destruction of the family. Leah's guilt is shown not only through her actions, but is also noted (as is everything in Bellefleur) symbolically. A beautiful, oversized, purple orchid—a belle fleur, if you will—is sent to Leah anonymously; she begins daydreaming and plotting, and

without thinking Leah began to shred the delicate fluted petals with her thumbnail....Seven stamens on seven thin stalks [seven generations]: soon broken and crumbled away to nothing. Ah, Leah cried, what am I doing—! For without thinking she had quite destroyed the lovely flower. (494)

Bellefleur and all it represents—greed and violence and lust for power—is finally destroyed in Gideon's dive-bombing of the castle; but the children, presumably with different ideals, have escaped, and the cycle has ended. This particular cycle, at any rate. America, Oates has said, "is a nation still characterized by youth. Our past may weigh heavily upon us but it cannot contain us, let alone shape our future" (Afterword to Bellefleur 562). This is the hopeful part of the conclusion that she gives the novel. The contending, and more pessimistic conclusion, I will explore later.

A return to the family tree at the beginning of the book reveals that Bellefleurs of the first two generations, and some of the third, are provided with dates of birth and, in most cases, dates of death—most of them 1825. The succeeding generations have no such dates, leaving them oddly out of time, as though their lives were simply extensions or repetitions of what had already happened. And how far into the present the family extends is left decidedly in question for most of the novel, as references to or descriptions of anything that might date the last generations are consistently avoided. Only at the end of the novel, when the castle is destroyed, do we learn that it was "only about 130 years old" (548); Raphael, who built the castle, was born in 1830: assuming he was in his twenties or thirties when he built it, we can place the final generations in the present day, but we are able to do this only after the Bellefleurs, as a family, have ceased to exist.

The epigraph to the novel is from Heraclitus: "Time is a child playing a game of draughts; the kingship is in the hands of a child," suggesting that ultimately the real power is held by the last Bellefleur children, and Germaine in particular, as it is her life upon which the chronology of he novel is based. Each of the five books in the novel represents one year in the life of Germaine, each one ending with one of her birthdays. Yet (and I want to say at the same time, but we are told often enough that "time is clocks, not a clock" (203)) in a different time, her father Gideon ages from a supremely healthy young man at the beginning of the novel to "Old Skin and Bones" (503) at the end. His aging, however, like time in this novel, is symbolic. It seems to represent the aging and crumbling of an outmoded world-view, a world-view of empires and castles and royalty. As a young man at the beginning of the novel, Gideon rides horses, fine steeds appropriate for a wealthy man in an age of great families and privilege. Time passes, and he drives fancy automobiles. By the end of the novel, as a broken, old man, he is enamored of airplanes and purchases a World War II fighter, bringing his world-view into the atomic age. By this time, all that Bellefleur and its symbolic castle represent to Gideon is an anachronistic dream, an evil empire that must be destroyed.

The romance of the past, of the old stories, is also altered as the novel progresses: in Jedediah's time, Mt. Blanc (we are told) "was more than fourteen thousand feet high" (68); later in the novel the narrator mentions in passing that it is "only about nine thousand feet high" (332); by the time Gideon is flying airplanes Mt. Blanc "was only about 3,000 feet high" (505)—and note that it is now reported in unromantic digits. As the author's note suggests, such changes have their own symbolic logic. Leah grows taller, larger (with ambition and power?); Bromwell, ignoring family history in favor of the certainty of science, seems to remain continually a child (retaining a child-like innocence and curiosity?) while his sister Christabel grows normally into a young woman.

Though the novel moves forward in time over five years of Germaine's life (conception to age four), it "twists and coils" continually throughout the past, giving us the stories and lives of the previous generations, the stories which haunt the lives and minds of the present day Bellefleurs. But chronological order is not important when the past is symbolic of the present, when, in essence, it is the present: "the Bellefleurs, reminiscing, quite shamelessly jumbled 'chronological' order—indeed...they had a lofty contempt for it" (342).

Time in Bellefleur is not only relative; it also has the distinction of shrouding the existence of alternate worlds. Oates has spoken elsewhere of the act of reading, in similar terms:

a mysterious process, entirely private, perhaps even secret: a rent in the fabric of time, so to speak, a sudden lifting of the veil that separates one consciousness from another. Sounding the talismanic language of another in our own ears, are we not participating in a reality exterior to our own? ("Dream" 42)

To pass through the rent, to lift the veil, one must be willing to acknowledge these exterior realities; most of the elder Bellefleurs are not willing, their reality being family, being Bellefleur as defined by the original generations. But these alternate realities, alternate worlds, do exist. Bromwell is always trying to see beyond the veils, and his aunt Aveline is concerned about his "looking through that microscope all hours of the night." But Gideon corrects her: "Telescope. Not microscope. You half-literate bitch" (224). Macro or micro, the mistake is irrelevant:

A dust grain turned infinitesimally in the sunshine and revealed to Bromwell's astonished eye a miniature galaxy, diamond-faceted. It might have been the glittering eye of a fly, magnified innumerable times; or the great sun itself, diminished. (225)
Bromwell wondered aloud, while Germaine listened, if there might be a universe simultaneous with this universe...century after century, a shadow-world, a mirror-world....Might there be, there, exact replicas of everything we have here, and would never see, here, without the reality of that other universe, the lead backing of our mirror....And might there not be, granted the identity of these innumerable worlds, a way of slipping from one to another.... (229)

Bromwell's metaphysics becomes Oates's symbol. It is common to suggest that someone with different ideas is in fact living in a different world. Make this observation literal, and we have one of the symbolic devices Oates uses in Bellefleur. When Samuel Bellefleur strangely and literally disappears in the Turquoise room for hours at a time, for days, he points out to his worried family that "'time was different there'" (203). In fact he is having an affair with a black woman (this is the pre-Civil War era) who appears out of the mirror. Finally, Samuel disappears in the Turquoise room never to reappear, as if he had stepped through a rent in time, into a different world; from the point of view of his family, "Samuel Bellefleur had simply ceased to exist" (203). But this is symbolic. Samuel ceases to exist because the Bellefleurs will not recognize the world he has chosen to enter: life with a black woman. Here, from another novel, Oates treats essentially the same situation: a father's refusal to acknowledge the validity of his son's world-view, but in a realistic mode:

With this check and this letter I pronounce you dead to me. You have no existence. You are nothing. You have betrayed the Pedersen family...and now you are eradicated by the family. Never try to contact us again. You are dead. You do not exist. (Oates,Wonderland 186)

The Bellefleurs close off the magnificent Turquoise room forever; the incident—Samuel's vanishing in the haunted room—becomes one of the legends of the family told in whispers from generation to generation; and the room is known from thereafter, ominously, as "The Room of Contamination" (191).

Gideon too, as he sees the folly of the old family beliefs, heads for a different world, a world that is not Bellefleur:

At the mountainous rim, at the edge, of all he could see, there might be a place he could stand, to look back at what he was: but perhaps it was dangerous to go there. Men hacked their way to that place...and did not return. (310)

Gideon attempts to disassociate himself from all he has been, all that Bellefleur represents: "He directed his...plane away from time, away form history, away form the person he had evidently been for so many years" (507). But unable to escape his past, Gideon decides to destroy it all by diving his Hawker Tempest, loaded with explosives, into the castle:

...he seemed to see [the castle] for the first time, as the destiny to which he had been drawn all his life....and he saw that it was his destiny, just as this moment, this last long dive was his destiny, which he would not have wished to deny. He was Gideon Bellefleur, after all. He had been born for this. (552-553)

And so that particular world, too, ceased to exist.

"By squares, by inches, hour upon hour
the great quilts grew.
Serendipity and Felicity and All-Hallows-Eve
and Wonder-Working Providence and Milky Way
and Celestial Timepiece—plants, suns, fireballs, moons—
covering half a wall
like a conqueror's map.

The men, the husbands, drew up such maps.
Their strategy has always been maps.

Look at these massive wool-and-feather-lined quilts,
recording square by square these wondrous years—
1784, 1806, 1848—
Glass Garden survives though frayed, and Fools and Poppies,
and Gyroscope all aflame, of 1864.

Soldiers are always passing along the roads.
Soldiers, the dead, prisoners in churches.
A hospital in a churchyard, the women's fingers working,
1865, 1876, conquerors on horseback along the roads,
Butterflies and Christmas Eve and Jesus Our Savior.

Square by square, spilling to the floor.
Winter days when the sun was a brief parenthesis overhead.
Spring days when no letters came. No news.
Calla lilies for the dead, gowns for the infants,
sunflowers bawdy as the first day of Creation.
Years. Decades. Centuries. Rags
torn from sheets, torn from dresses and trousers,
here is the resurrection of the body!—in the quilt's soiled squares.

The men's maps too are tearing,
so often folded.
The soldiers, the dead.
The conquerors on horseback.

She takes your hand, Feel this, feel each square, she says, do you understand?
So many textures, a Babel of textures—coarse wool, fine silk,
satin, lace, burlap, cotton, brocade, hemp, fussy pleats—
you close your eyes, Can you read it? she asks, Do you understand?
Here, an entire world stitched to perfection.
By squares, by inches. You are the child-witness.
Your fingers read it like Braille."

(Oates Invisible, 50-51)

The "'child-witness" of this poem is certainly, in the novel, little Germaine, the child-survivor, witness to the disintegrating Bellefleur world; but, as Eileen Bender suggests, Matilde's quilts (Matilde lives on the other side of Lake Noir, and will have nothing to do with the goings-on at the castle, but simply lives her quiet life making crafts and quilts, and observing) "provide a sense of continuity" in a fragmented world; and through these quilts, Matilde initiates Germaine "not into the timebound world of recorded history but into the timeless world of women's art" (118, 119). Perry Nodelman would agree that the novel is an example of a distinctly feminine form of art, noting in the novel's structure a complex rhythm of interrupted climaxes, stories interrupting other stories (259), down even to the grammatical level. The compendious and lengthy sentences

are filled, not just with details, but with parallel constructions between dashes, with phrases and clauses in parenthesis; and this intricate grammar implies equally intricate connections among all the details—among everything that relates to the Bellefleurs, which is everything in the novel. What distinguishes Bellefleur as an innovative narrative, then, is not that it is a deliberately incoherent flow, but that its narrative voice so obsessively strives for coherence, for connections and explanations....Paradoxically, however, it is the obsessive striving to make connections and explain details...that effectively distracts attention from its overall narrative shape, the forward movement from beginning through the middle and toward the end, of any given sentence, or of a chapter, or even of the book as a whole. Thus, the novel seems to disrupt narrative just as much as do the experimental novels by masculine writers. But far from making stories disappear, as do those other novels, Bellefleur...tells more stories than five or six more conventional novels of its size. At any given moment, we may be in the middle of two or three or more different stories or events in two or three different time periods, so that parts of one story interfere with the narrative sequencing of others (258). Bellefleur represents...a kind of writing that is neither conventional nor conventionally innovative, a novel whose innovations represent an identifiably feminine form of experimentation. (251)

In an essay titled "Beginnings," Oates puts forth two theories on the genesis of art:

* It originates in play: in experiment, improvisation, fantasy; it remains forever, in its deepest impulse, playful and spontaneous, a celebration of the (child's?) imagination.
* It originates out of the artist's conviction that he or she is born damned; and must struggle through life to achieve redemption. By way of art. (3-4)

Both theories exist in Bellefleur. As much as the novel can be said to celebrate anything, it celebrates the child's imagination, the child's promise, the child's rebellion: "Bellefleur children, in every generation, had 'secret' places" (214). And the second theory is surely present, for all the Bellefleurs are cursed, or damned, and many of them attempt to escape their curse through art.

Vernon, the poet of the family, thought that "his poetry would someday be the means of his escape from those terrible soulless people" (298). He wrote heavily romantic verses about the oneness of the universe and the ultimate good of everything, as he traversed the Bellefleur lands. It wasn't until he witnessed the death of little Cassandra in the talons of the Noir Vulture, however, that his poetry changed. He began writing about

the "fall" of God, the "divorce" between man and God, God's wickedness, God's ignorance,...man's duty to rebel... the mud-devouring lot of the masses....And some of the lines clearly alluded to a certain family who had...exploited tenant farmers and servants and laborers, and the land, and must be stopped.... (322)

Ewan Bellefleur said at hearing this, "'If that wasn't poetry the bastard was reciting...I would have smashed his ugly face in" (322). Through his poetry, Vernon betrays the family and offends the mud-devouring masses (in a back-woods poetry reading) who bind and toss him into the river: "That's what we do to Bellefleurs!...That's what we do to poets'" (324). Vernon's violent end, however, may not be exactly an end, considering the novel's penchant for symbolism. Vernon had said that "the poet knows that he is water poured into water" (155), and the river, in Oates, is nearly always a symbol of the artistic impulse, or of artistic freedom. Like Samuel before him, the traitorous Vernon is pronounced by the family dead, drowned in the river; but he has clearly, like Samuel in the Turquoise Room, made his escape. Later, a small bound volume mysteriously appears in the castle: Query: Poems by Vernon Bellefleur. It is quickly destroyed and forgotten.

Another escape is made, and denied by the family. The Bellefleurs, through Leah's recent purchases, own a movie-theatre; "what they did not own was the play of colored shadows on the screen" (314). Raphael, shocked, recognizes his runaway sister Yolande as one of the actresses in the colored shadows of the movie, but the rest of the family sit stonily silent, his mother included, and refuse to acknowledge any resemblance.

And Matilde (perhaps something of an Oates alter-ego) had escaped long ago to her little cabin across the dark lake from the castle. She often had Germaine brought there to visit, and, significantly, "she was the happiest Bellefleur Germaine knew" (328). Matilde spent much of her time quilt making, and Celestial Timepiece was her largest quilt: a crazy quilt that Noel Bellefleur complained

made his eye jump. You had to stand far back to see its design, and even then it was too complicated—it gave him a headache. "Why don't you just sew some nice little satin comforter... something small, something pretty." "I do what I am doing," Matilde said curtly. (329)

A fit reply to vapid and sexist criticism. "Piecing together a quilted novel is more than a fabulator's witty conceit," Bender astutely points out;

only to some one ignorant of the quilting process does a crazy quilt seem a haphazard construction. Certainly unbound by conventional patterns, taking shape rather than filling in precise and prearranged outlines, it nonetheless represents a deliberate joining of past and present, personality and history, incorporating facts and fragments into an enticing, touching, and often disturbing fabrication. (119)

Oates has noted that the motive for "the braiding together of disparate fragments...is to make of the finite, infinity; and of the self's dying, immortality" ("Soul" 174).

Oates has always been impatient with (and early in her career very vocal about) the stance of literary fragmentists; of those who erect "gigantic paranoid-delusion systems that are self-enclosed and self-destructing" ("Out" 242); writers of a "Literature of exhaustion—a fashionable term to account for the post-Romantic death journeys of innumerable intelligent people;" the architects of what she calls

Amerika—a truly brilliant, inspired, Kafkaesque re-creation of the United States as the "United States," a sinister essence not in our control or available to our interpretations, in fact run by mysterious, demonic people we aren't responsible for ("Whose" 63);

and writers of "airless and claustrophobic...self-referential art" ("Picture" 15). "To impose an order," she says, "is always more challenging than to celebrate disorder" ("Whose" 63). Matilde's quilting is a reaction against, and a corrective to, the Bellefleur entropy. Oates posits a transition of human consciousness, happening now, analogous to the arrival of the Renaissance after the middle ages, against which the voices of these artists and others are working. From "New Heaven and Earth" :

...the Renaissance ideal is still powerful, its voice tyrannical. It declares: I will, I want, I demand, I think, I am....I will exist has meant only I will impose my will on others. To that end man has developed his intellect and has extended his physical strength by any means possible because, indeed, at one time the world did have to be conquered....[The Renaissance man came to] master everything about him, including his own private nature, his own "ego," redefining himself in terms of a conqueror whose territory should be as vast as his own desire to conquer....It is ...disheartening, if we observe the example of one of our most brilliant writers, Norman Mailer, who argues—with all the doomed, manic intensity of a late-medieval churchman resisting the future even when it is upon him—that the universe can still sensibly be divided into God and Devil....Mailer (and many others) exemplifies the old, losing, pitiful Last Stand of the Ego, the Self-Against-All-Others, the Conqueror, the Highest of all Protoplasms, Namer and Begetter of all Fictions....We have come to the end of, we are satiated with, the "objective," valueless philosophies that have always worked to preserve a status quo, however archaic. We are tired of the old dichotomies: Sane/Insane, Normal/Sick, Black/White, Man/Nature, Victor/Vanquished, and—above all this Cartesian dualism—I/It. Although once absolutely necessary to get us through the exploratory, analytical phase of our development as human beings, they are no longer useful or pragmatic. They are no longer true. Far from being locked inside our own skins, inside the "dungeons" of ourselves, we are now able to recognize that our minds belong, quite naturally, to a collective "mind," a mind in which we share everything that is mental, most obviously language itself, and that the old boundary of the skin is no boundary at all but a membrane connecting the inner and outer experiences of existence. Our intelligence, our wit, our cleverness, our unique personalities—all are simultaneously "our own" possessions and the world's. This has always been a mystical vision, but more and more in our time it is becoming a rational truth. It is no longer the private possession of a Blake, a Whitman, or a Lawrence.... (53)

All of Oates's fiction dramatizes (and in Bellefleur it seems particularly so) the Ego confronting other Egos, or the Ego confronting Nature, or God, or Whatever, and usually ending up defeated, but sometimes transcending itself into something larger. The writers that Oates rallies against she generally admires as artists, but certainly not as visionaries.

The Bellefleur castle ("a castellated structure—that is, fortified for war" (Afterword to Bellefleur 561)) is surely a symbol of the Renaissance Ego, of the aforementioned "gigantic paranoid-delusion system, self-enclosed, and self-destructing." And the builder of the castle, Raphael himself, made into a skin-drum after his death, to be "sounded each day to announce meals, the arrival of guests, and other special events" (475), a prime example of the conquering "I," or a portrait of the self-referential artist. And his namesake, young Raphael in the present day, quite his opposite, clearly disturbed by Bellefleur violence and greed, becomes quieter and quieter, "silent, like a forest pond" (3), and withdraws his presence at the castle more and more, spending his time floating on his symbolic Mink Pond, and eventually disappearing beneath its waters in which he could see the myriad life there: "reflections of an eye, multiplied thousands—thousands upon thousands!—of times, in a single drop of water. Eyes reflecting eyes" (313). Or, to put it bluntly, I's reflecting I's. The veil is lifted, the membrane no longer a barrier, he sees the collective life instead of the individual against everything else. The family search for him to no avail; even Mink Pond seems to have withdrawn, as ponds do over the course of time, and has in fact disappeared. Another symbolic escape.

There is one last paranoid-delusion among the Bellefleurs: the Noir Vulture: "a fabulous [emphasis mine] bird composed of steaming vapors, with a glaring red eye and daggerlike beak. It was a monster and must be killed" (335). Another stab at Oates's favorite targets, it seems. As Gideon is out hunting this thing he has never actually seen, the sun begins shining "with a sudden summery warmth" as he smells the moisture and heat of "tall pale oatlike grasses [again, my emphasis]." Suffice it to say we are leaving the darkness of paranoia and entering the relative daylight of a transcendent Oates country. Dismissing the anxiety of influence, continually contracting marriages with other artists' works, it is here that Oates has Gideon stumble into "Rip Van Winkle" (by the way, another tale of time-travel, and alternate worlds), interrupt the bowling, and ambush one of Irving's gnomes only to bring him home to the castle to become Leah's servant Nightshade.

Oates's artist characters and others in this novel are escaping the paranoia symbolized by the Noir Vulture, that part of the Bellefleur curse which is "a terrifying bleakness, a queer emptiness of vision" (6), the same emptiness of vision Oates sees displayed in the literary stances described earlier.

Emblematic of the difficulty most of Oates's characters have reconciling their own animal natures with their senses of self, senses which say they are superior to, and separate from, any merely "animal" nature, that their true self is purely of the mind or of the soul: emblematic of their inability to place themselves within Nature, rather than above it, is Gideon's and Nicholas's encounter, as boys, with a giant black bear. The bear simply walks away from the terrified boys, and they conclude, arrogantly: "it didn't want any trouble from us" (94). But closer to the truth, however, is that

the black bear of their childhood had contemplated them with that uncanny solemnity that belongs to nature, and had appeared to judge them—to judge them as insignificant. (95)

Jedediah delves into the very bowels of the matter, renouncing family and history, living ascetically, trying to reach God—the ultimate symbol of man's separation from and superiority to nature. The chapter titled "God's Face" is devoted to an excruciating, prolonged account of an attack of diarrhea:

he had imagined, these past years, that he had fasted; he had brought his body's humiliating needs under the dominion of his will; but in reality he had gorged like any animal. He had stuffed himself, ravenously, wishing to turn everything into food to be digested in his entrails. (440)

Jedediah dismisses his bodily processes as insignificant relative to his aspirations, to his "real" self. But he is graced with the revelation of a new world:

...his entire lifetime...had been nothing more than an organism's process, an ongoing ceaseless remorseless insatiable process—the gluttonous ingorging of food, the digesting of food, the voiding of food, writhing, seething, bubbling with its own ferocious life, not his, nothing human, nothing with a name, to which, nevertheless, the name Jedediah had been given. What a mockery, that endless stream of food and excrement, given a human name! (440)

Whereas before Jedediah sought to separate himself from his physical being in order to become purely spiritual; now he is brought down to the purely physical, with not even a wrack left of higher thought:

He was a child, an infant, an animal stunned with pain....He had become sheer sensation....There was not a word left, not a syllable, not a sound!...So God showed His face to His servant Jedediah, and forever afterward kept His distance. (439-441)

God's face as an organism's process: it couldn't sound bleaker; but that is simply the obverse of Jedediah's reducing life to nothing more than aspiration. John Gardner points out that

loving God completely, one cares nothing about the world, not even about people, whom one sees, rightly, as mere instances; but on the other hand, completely loving oneself or the world, one loses one's soul and becomes...a figure of death. (102)

By this point Jedediah does not know what to believe, or how to live and reconcile these two aspects of life.

Another image of animal nature, occurring relentlessly throughout the novel, is that of jaws: the wolf's jawbone mysteriously left with Jedediah; Mahalaleel's open jaws as he yawns. And Jeremiah's 2,300 silver foxes that had

...somehow broken through their close-meshed wire fences to tear one another to pieces....the creatures were cannibals, they were monsters, they appeared to have devoured, or attempted to devour their own offspring—! Acres of carcasses. Bloody strips of flesh, and muscle fibers....Jaws devouring jaws.... (510)

This may as well be a dark symbol of the Bellefleurs themselves; or of humanity at large. Such images of jaws are linked in spirit, and very nearly in number, to the recurring images of human massacre. Ferocious deaths inflicted by animals upon other animals are dismissed, with disgust, as simply nature, something beneath human behavior. But then there is the photograph in Raphael's study, a group portrait of 46 men posing before the lynched, burning body of a black youth: "if you studied it long enough, it was a very familiar picture. The blazing body was a blazing body but the men assembled about it were just men" (398). A familiar picture indeed: we desperately wish to tell ourselves, when such pictures are forced in front of our eyes, that it is a shocking and most of all unique and anomalous picture; we do not wish to know that it is as common as, and that it simply is, jaws devouring jaws. This time human jaws.

And so we do not reduce human actions to such terms; we elevate them, thereby transforming them, through language. Such actions become "revenge," or "justice." Or when the actions become so unconscionable as to defy such transformation, the responsibility is transferred to a seemingly exterior agent. For example, when Gideon is "overcome" and rapes Little Goldie—overcome certainly by something from within himself, something that is himself—it is symbolized as something outside himself: "demonic figures" dancing in the fire, seducing him (163). The murderers responsible for the 1825 massacre claimed spirits were responsible:

The Indians had always feared the Spirit of Lake Noir, as an angel of mischief and death. It was that spirit—for it hadn't been they, themselves—who had worked them up to their ecstasy of killing. (456)

Incomprehensible: that a thinking human being (for what makes us human, but our thought) could perform such murderous acts. But of course it wasn't the thinking human that performed them; it was the human animal. And that is just as incomprehensible: the existence of such an animal in us, that is us.

"I begin with the proposition," says Oates, "that the impulse to create, like the impulse to destroy, is utterly mysterious. That it is, in fact, one of the primary mysteries of human existence" ("Beginnings" 3). This is the mystery with which the novel leaves us. Once Gideon has destroyed the castle and the Bellefleur curse ("The place, children say, is not haunted" (548)), thereby ending the chronological narrative, we loop back in time to Jedediah on his mountain, tempted by a spirit to return to the world: to continue his family name, and to seek revenge. To create; to destroy. The novel ends: "I don't know what to believe, Jedediah cried aloud..." (558). the Bellefleur curse has been destroyed, but their story continues to be told, to be lived, elsewhere, everywhere; and the escaped Bellefleur children are presumably left with the same query, the same decision to make as Jedediah. And though we know what he eventually decided, the question, for them, and for us, remains: how to live, and what to live for.

"The Bellefleurs," notes Joanne Creighton, "epitomize and dramatize the dualities at the heart of the American dream and the American character," the heart of which is "the quest for both material betterment and spiritual fulfillment" (39). It is therefore appropriate that the novel has a dual ending, of sorts, both tragic and comic. The fall of the house of Bellefleur is complete; but the children have escaped, one supposes, to build a better house or houses.

Karl believes Bellefleur is "a summa, a cojoining of all [Oates's] previous works" (548); and Gardner agrees: "[it] is a symbolic summation of all this novelist has been doing for twenty-some years..." (99). Again, this is appropriate for a novel trying to encompass, symbolically, all of America: "a tale still being told—in many voices—and nowhere near its conclusion" (Afterword to Bellefleur 562).

Works Cited

Bender, Eileen Teper. Joyce Carol Oates, Artist in Residence. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1987.

Creighton, Joanne V. Joyce Carol Oates: Novels of the Middle Years. New York: Twayne, 1992.

Gardner, John. "The Strange Real World." Joyce Carol Oates (Modern Critical Views). Ed. Harold Bloom. New York: Chelsea, 1987. 99-104.

Karl, Frederick R. American Fictions: 1940-1980. New York: Harper, 1983.

Milazzo, Lee, ed. Conversations with Joyce Carol Oates. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1989.

Nodelman, Perry. "The Sense of Unending: Joyce Carol Oates's Bellefleur as an Experiment in Feminine Storytelling." Breaking the Sequence: Women's Experimental Fiction. Ed. Ellen G. Friedman and Miriam Fuchs. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1989. 250-263.

Oates, Joyce Carol. "Beginnings." (Woman) Writer: Occasions and Opportunities. New York: Dutton, 1988. 3-21.

——. Bellefleur. 1980. New York: Dutton, 1990.

——. Afterword. Bellefleur. 1980. New York: Dutton, 1990. 559-563.

——. "The Dream of the 'Sacred Text.'" (Woman) Writer: Occasions and Opportunities. New York: Dutton, 1988. 41-44.

——. [Rosamond Smith, pseud.]. Lives of the Twins. New York: Simon, 1987.

——. Afterword. Mysteries of Winterthurn. 1984. New York: Berkley, 1985. 514-516.

——. "Out of Stone, Into Flesh: The Imagination of James Dickey." New Heaven, New Earth: The Visionary Experience in Literature. 1974. New York: Fawcett, 1978. 193-245.

——. "The Picture of Dorian Gray: Wilde's Parable of the Fall." Contraries: Essays. New York: Oxford, 1981. 3-16.

——. "'Soul at the White Heat': The Romance of Emily Dickinson's Poetry." (Woman Writer): Occasions and Opportunities. New York: Dutton, 1988. 163-189.

——. "Whose Side Are You On?" New York Times Book Review 4 Jun., 1972: 63.

——. Wonderland. 1971. Princeton: Ontario, 1992.