Murder and Repression in Joyce Carol Oates’ “Tell Me You Forgive Me?”
Becky McLaughlin
Literary Criticism
The more gifted artist, perhaps, is one who doesn’t require rigid control, but is open to promptings from the unconscious. To call a novelist a “power-wielder” is to underestimate the novelist’s dependence upon the ungovernable.
Joyce Carol Oates
If Freud is the father of psychoanalysis, who is the father of Freud?” This is a question I ask students in my early American literature class just before we begin discussing the short stories of Edgar Allan Poe. Very few of my students recognize that this question is a riddle of sorts and that the correct answer is Poe, whose understanding of the human psyche and its defense mechanisms is everywhere apparent in his fiction. Having just finished teaching Joyce Carol Oates’s The Female of the Species, a collection of short stories whose subtitle, Tales of Mystery and Suspense, is reminiscent of Poe’s Tales of Mystery and Imagination, I now have a new riddle to offer my students: “If Edgar Allan Poe is the father of Freud, who is the daughter of Freud and thus Poe’s granddaughter?” The answer is Joyce Carol Oates, for, like Freud and Poe, Oates understands the role that the unconscious plays in shaping the psyche of a character, which in turn shapes the plot of the story to which that character belongs. (Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex is an excellent case in point.) Even if a reader is never directly shown or told of a character’s repressed material, a good writer knows that conscious action is all too frequently and calamitously the result of the promptings of the unconscious, and thus every good writer must know, whether consciously or unconsciously, what his or her characters are repressing. In the story of Elsie Kenelly’s murder of Bud Beechum, entitled “Tell Me You Forgive Me?”, Oates illustrates how the unconscious erupts and seeps out into the world, “[a]s if our most disturbing, unacknowledged dreams had broken their restraints, claiming autonomy” (“Aesthetics” 182). From her equivocating title to the rolling dice on the last page of the story, Oates follows the promptings of an unconscious shaped not only by the concepts of Freud but also by the stories of Poe, and it is these promptings that I will trace in this paper.1
The first thing to note about Oates’s story is that it is divided into twelve chapters, which begin with a letter written from Elsie Kenelly to her daughter, Mary Lynda, and in which Elsie encloses a pair of dice that had belonged to her father. The letter is dated October 16, 2000, the fortieth anniversary of a murder that Elsie has committed. The following eleven chapters are narrated in the third-person, and they move steadily backward in time from the year 2000 to the summer of 1946 when Elsie was sixteen. Given the way the story is structured, it operates like a series of psychoanalytic sessions in which Elsie digs deeper and deeper into her past, recovering one memory after another. Because Elsie has written a letter that fails to do what it proposes to do, there is obviously something she wants to articulate but cannot. In psychoanalysis, this is called fixation or blockage, and the role of the analyst is to help the analysand identify and speak about (dialectize, narrativize, and/or subjectivize) the traumatic event that has created the fixation or blockage. The eleven chapters that follow the letter resemble the work of analysis in which an analyst in the form of the third-person narrator assists Elsie in slowly revealing the murder, its costly after effects, its precipitating cause, and, most importantly, its underlying cause—or what might be called the traumatic kernel around which all of the events of the story circulate. Also revealed, however, are Elsie’s culpability, denial of it, and thus moral turpitude.
The second thing to note about Oates’s story is its strangely equivocal title—“Tell Me You Forgive Me?”—a title that conflates an interrogative sentence, “Can, do, or will you forgive me?” with an imperative, “Tell me you forgive me.” The reason for this equivocation is that the title is at war with itself—plea and demand the antagonists—and so, too, is the story. It masquerades as an apology when, in fact, it is an apologia. In other words, the story is not what it purports to be: a mother who is dying of cancer confessing a crime she committed forty years ago and asking her daughter’s forgiveness for it. As will become apparent by the end of the story, what Elsie offers in her letter to Mary Lynda and what the third-person narrator offers in the chapters that follow is not an expression of remorse for wrong-doing but a justification of it. In this respect, it is very much like “William Wilson,” a story in which Poe raises profound questions about the nature of free will and its relation to accountability. In Poe’s story, as the first-person narrator approaches death, he feels the need to explain the origin of his infamy. What at first seems like a confession to his fellow men and a request for absolution, however, turns into an excuse for his moral depravity and, worse still, an attempt to off-load his guilt onto fate. As he states in the second paragraph of his story,
I would fain have them believe that I have been, in some measure, the slave of circumstances beyond human control. I would wish them to seek out for me, in the details I am about to give, some little oasis of fatality amid a wilderness of error. I would have then allow [. . .] that man was never thus [. . .] tempted before [. . .]. And is it therefore that he has never thus suffered? (1)
In short, he is asking his fellow men to feel sorry for him and to let him off the hook for his crimes.
Elsie Kenelly makes the same move. At the end of her letter’s first paragraph, she states, “I am writing to ask for your forgiveness?” The question mark with which she ends what should be a declarative sentence calls into question the purpose of her letter, but a fragmentary sentence in the second paragraph gives us a clue as to the real reason she is writing: “Tho’ I am fearful of explaining. & maybe cant find the words to explain, what was so clear 40 yrs. ago & had to be done” (163). The first thing an analyst would remark upon had Elsie uttered this in an actual analytic session is the fact that there is no central clause. “Tho’ what?” one might ask. The second thing is the fact that no agent is named for what “had to be done,” the passive-voice wording suggesting that it had been done by the hand of some anonymous other, a form of denial on Elsie’s part. And the third thing is the underscoring of the words “had to be done,” which suggests that, like the actions taken by William Wilson, Elsie’s actions were caused by circumstances beyond her control and/or were dictated by a higher authority such as a moral imperative. What Elsie has done, however, is morally reprehensible, and thus, if we were to use Kantian terms, we might say that she has mistaken a hypothetical for a categorical imperative.2 First, she has planned and executed the murder of her importunate lover, Bud Beechum; second, she has forced her ten-year-old daughter to discover Bud’s body in order to create an alibi for herself, a discovery that causes her traumatized daughter to go mute for nearly a year; third, she has allowed a seventeen-year-old black man to take the fall for the murder; and, fourth, she has indirectly caused the young black man’s death when he is brutally and fatally beaten by his fellow inmates not long after his incarceration. And yet Elsie expresses little or no remorse for what she has done. In fact, she states quite explicitly that she has no fear of God’s judgment for her sins, having adopted her “handsome” daddy’s cavalier attitude: “Remember your Grandaddy Kenelly who laughed when God was spoken of. It was all just b.s. invented to keep weak people in line, Daddy believed” (166). By the end of her letter, she has completely abandoned the idea of asking her daughter’s forgiveness, writing blithely, “Well! It’s too late now, Darling. For any of this, I guess. Even for feeling sorry. Like your Grandaddy said there’s nothing to do with dice except ‘toss ‘em’” (169)—her reference to the tossing of dice suggesting the same fatalism that William Wilson calls upon to excuse his behavior.
As if realizing that fatalism may be too abstract a concept to absorb culpability for a lifetime of villainy, however, William Wilson takes a second stab at placing the blame elsewhere—this time on his parents: “[. . .] my parents could do but little to check the evil propensities which distinguished me. Some feeble and ill-directed efforts resulted in complete failure on their part, and, of course in total triumph on mine” (2). Oates’s third-person narrator does the same. As we are told in the eleventh chapter of the story, “Elsie and her mother hadn’t gotten along” (201), and we are given, as an example, an occasion upon which her mother found seventeen-year-old Elsie French-kissing a boy in her attic bedroom. Upon discovering the two, Mrs. Kenelly had slammed the door hard enough to make the boy wince, later engaging in a screaming match with Elsie during which she called her daughter a “tramp” and a “slut” (202). Where was Elsie’s father on occasions such as this? “Nowhere near. Keeping his distance. He never intervened in such female matters,” explains the narrator (202). The chapter ends with Elsie saying, “Momma I hate you. Momma why don’t you die.” Like William Wilson’s family, Elsie’s is clearly dysfunctional with a father who neglects his role as parent and a mother who rejects hers, engaging instead in verbal abuse, antagonism, and, as will be suggested by the final chapter, rivalry.
Because the story ends with a chapter set at Wolf’s Head Lake in New York in the summer of 1946, we know that we have traveled far from the opening epistolary chapter both temporally and spatially (if we think of the unconscious as somehow occupying space). On the deck of the Lakeside Tavern, Elsie’s dad and his male friends had been “drinking for hours, ignoring their wives’ pleas to come eat supper” (204). And there at her dad’s elbow is sixteen-year-old Elsie, clad in a white two-piece bathing suit, who begs her dad for, and is given, drinks of his beer, puffs of his cigarette, and turns at rolling the dice. As Elsie lounges “boldly on the deck against the railing by the men’s table, liking the attention her dad gave her, [. . .] which meant more to her than the attention she got from boys her own age[,]” Elsie “regard[s] her good-looking father with pride: how muscled his bare shoulders and his bare heavy torso, covered in a pelt of hair, mysteriously tattooed and scarred. She was his girl for life” (204). A few lines later the narrator tells us that there was something in Willie Kenelly that “[y]ou felt [. . .] if you touched him” (204) and, further, that “you had to touch him” (204). Given the context in which this information is relayed, the “you,” here, is Elsie, and thus what the narrator seems to be implying is that the usual prohibitions involving touch between father and daughter have not been obeyed. The words “had to” reappear, here, echoing the words from Elsie’s letter, as do the dice:
Willie Kenelly spoke negligently—‘Sure, honey—toss ‘em’—handing his daughter the ivory dice [. . .]. Elsie is laughing self-consciously, her heart swelling with happiness, and the excitement of the moment[,] as the dice are released from her hand [. . .] and there’s that anxious moment before you dare look to see what, as your dad says, the dice have to tell you. (205)
When you put your faith in the roll of the dice, is it any wonder that moral mayhem will follow? The final two chapters of the story explain Elsie’s lack of conscience but do not excuse it, for one of Freud’s most important principles is “Wo Es war, soll Ich werden.” What he means is best glossed by his French disciple Jacques Lacan, who translates this German statement as “I must come to be where ‘it’ was,” i.e., where unconscious forces (such as the id) reigned. Although our lives begin with the roll of the dice in that we cannot choose where, when, or to whom we are born, we must subjectify the cause of our existence, make it our own. Instead of blaming fate or our parents for our existence and thus our actions, we must take responsibility for it and for them, and this Elsie does not do.
Works Cited
Cologne-Brooks, Gavin. “Written Interviews and a Conversation with Joyce Carol Oates.” Studies in the Novel, 38.4 (Winter 2006): 547-68.
Jones, Ernest. The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud. New York: Basic Books, 1960.
Oates, Joyce Carol. “The Aesthetics of Fear.” Salmagundi 120 (Fall 1998): 176-85.
—. Afterword. Haunted: Tales of the Grotesque. New York: Dutton Book, 1994.
—. The Journal of Joyce Carol Oates, 1973-1982. Ed. Greg Johnson. New York: Ecco, 2007.
Poe, Edgar Allan. “William Wilson.” Tales of Mystery and Imagination, J. M. Dent & Sons Ltd, 1984, pp. 1-20.
Sjöberg, Leif. “An Interview with Joyce Carol Oates.” Contemporary Literature 23.3 (Summer 1982): 267-84.
Becky McLaughlin is a professor of English at the University of South Alabama, where she teaches courses in early American literature, critical theory, film, and gender studies. She is currently writing a book on religious fanatics, heretics, and rebels.
Photo Credit: Katarina Dulude is an American writer, photographer, and actor based in Glasgow, Scotland. She graduated from the University of Glasgow with a master’s degree in Fantasy Literature. Her photography has been displayed in the Glasgow Gallery of Photography as a part of several exhibitions. As a photographer, she is particularly interested in exploring nature and capturing fleeting, ephemeral moments rather than working in a studio. She has also previously published three academic articles and a few short stories. She is currently working on her first novel.
- Oates herself might demur were she to encounter my riddle and its answer, for she seems to have (or have had) an uneasy relationship with these two men despite their obvious influence on her. For example, in an interview with Leif Sjöberg conducted in 1982, she expresses interest in Jung while she is quite dismissive of Freud (281-82). And yet in her own fiction, we see traces not of Jung but of Freud. In fact, you could argue that, taken as a whole, the stories in The Female of the Species raise the same “great question” that Freud posed in a letter to Marie Bonaparte: “Was will das Weib?” or “What does a woman want?” (Jones 474). As for Poe, Oates expresses disappointment in him in a journal entry written in May of 1976 because in his work “nothing speaks in its own voice. All is Poe. Poe Poe Poe Poe” (117). In that same entry, Oates is at pains to distance herself from Poe, stating that what she is struck by when reading Poe are not their similarities but their differences. Nineteen years later, however, Oates has published Haunted: Tales of the Grotesque, a title that echoes Poe’s Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque and that contains an Afterword in which she asks, “Who has not been influenced by Poe—[. . .] however the influence, absorbed in adolescence or even childhood, would seem to be far behind us” (305). Even more noteworthy perhaps is a statement she makes in an interview with Gavin Cologne-Brooks that took place in 2006. There, Cologne-Brooks states that he is “intrigued by the extent to which [Oates] identif[ies] with [her] characters,” stating, “I sometimes feel . . . that what you’re giving us is merely a disguised version of yourself” (560). Oates responds by saying, “I don’t see that there’s any other way you can do it. I don’t think you ever write about anyone other than yourself” (560). ↩︎
- According to eighteenth-century philosopher Immanuel Kant, a categorical imperative is a command or moral law that everyone must follow regardless of one’s desires or mitigating circumstances. A hypothetical imperative, on the other hand, depends upon one’s desires or goals, and thus it is often expressed in causal form as “If you want X, then you should do Y.” A categorical imperative is binding on everyone, while a hypothetical imperative is not. ↩︎
L'Esprit Literary Review 