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A review by readingtrying82
Mudwoman by Joyce Carol Oates
4.0
I tend to prefer Joyce when she mixes her genius for voice and psychological insight with multiple voices and a more objective story like in Gravedigger's Daughter, We were the Mulvaneys, and Little Bird of Heaven.
This is not one of those novels. The novel begins as a realistic psychological novel and then explodes into the realm of gothic and Freudian horror [a combination of the tell-tale heart and American psycho]. The shift is a bit jarring, but once I reframed my approach to the novel it was satisfyingly ghastly.
MR is an outwardly successful academic. She holds strong political views, and inconclusive philosophical viewpoints. All of this bellies a profound lack of a centered self. Her private life is a mess and almost nonexistent. In a way it’s a simple story of what Freud called the return of the repressed. Here it is transmogrified into the revenge of the repressed.
She was thrown way to die as a child by her mother, she is found by a river covered in mud. Her subsequent life is a kind of gutted American dream: small town girl from horrible beginnings makes good with the help of caring adopted parents. But from the start her development isn’t one toward a more inclusive self, but of leaving more and more aspects of life or self/other experiences behind. She “leaves” her adopted parents and good influences as well as the horrific aspects.
This movement is a growing discarding of a lot of life: the body with its desires and motives, the self with its interests and will, other people as equally existent, her sense of the past to belong to, and a sense of the public world outside herself. She is more and more uprooted in body, in mind, in relationships, and in society. That’s what the first 2/3 of the book sets up.
The last third deals with how MR tries to negotiate these upheavals, trying to make sense and trying simply to survive. And as in much of JCO, there is a desire and faith in the possibility of deepening through trauma, surviving through it, forging a self by it[not opposed to it], but it is a perilous and uncertain way in which many more drown then learn to float let alone swim.
Since this novel becomes less realistic and more psychological horror, the last part of the book is as much about the upheavals themselves as MR. I found this a bit unsatisfying and thus the 4 stars instead of 5. It didn’t fulfill the promise of the first half of the novel, but it was still very good.
This is not one of those novels. The novel begins as a realistic psychological novel and then explodes into the realm of gothic and Freudian horror [a combination of the tell-tale heart and American psycho]. The shift is a bit jarring, but once I reframed my approach to the novel it was satisfyingly ghastly.
MR is an outwardly successful academic. She holds strong political views, and inconclusive philosophical viewpoints. All of this bellies a profound lack of a centered self. Her private life is a mess and almost nonexistent. In a way it’s a simple story of what Freud called the return of the repressed. Here it is transmogrified into the revenge of the repressed.
She was thrown way to die as a child by her mother, she is found by a river covered in mud. Her subsequent life is a kind of gutted American dream: small town girl from horrible beginnings makes good with the help of caring adopted parents. But from the start her development isn’t one toward a more inclusive self, but of leaving more and more aspects of life or self/other experiences behind. She “leaves” her adopted parents and good influences as well as the horrific aspects.
This movement is a growing discarding of a lot of life: the body with its desires and motives, the self with its interests and will, other people as equally existent, her sense of the past to belong to, and a sense of the public world outside herself. She is more and more uprooted in body, in mind, in relationships, and in society. That’s what the first 2/3 of the book sets up.
The last third deals with how MR tries to negotiate these upheavals, trying to make sense and trying simply to survive. And as in much of JCO, there is a desire and faith in the possibility of deepening through trauma, surviving through it, forging a self by it[not opposed to it], but it is a perilous and uncertain way in which many more drown then learn to float let alone swim.
Since this novel becomes less realistic and more psychological horror, the last part of the book is as much about the upheavals themselves as MR. I found this a bit unsatisfying and thus the 4 stars instead of 5. It didn’t fulfill the promise of the first half of the novel, but it was still very good.