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• W3007304779 abstract "EDWARD CLOUGH University of East Anglia Poisonous Possibilities: Telling Stories and Telling Ruins in Donna Tartt’s The Little Friend IN THE PENULTIMATE SCENE OF THE LITTLE FRIEND (2002), THE protagonist, twelve-year-old Harriet Dufresnes, lies in a hospital, recovering from injuries and sickness sustained in the novel’s climax. Fixated on the mysterious death of her brother Robin twelve years before, Harriet and her friend Hely Hull have spent the preceding five hundred pages doggedly pursuing the man shebelievestoberesponsible: a local drug-dealer and former schoolmate of Robin’s, Danny Ratliff. Harriet’s final confrontation with him comes inside the town’s water tower, where Danny, who is unable to swim, narrowly avoids drowning, and where Harriet apparently contracts an illness from the brackish water. At the hospital, Harriet learns that Robin and Danny were childhood friends: that Danny was actually Robin’s “little friend” of the novel’s title (543). The reader, however, has possessed this information for eighty pages, through access to Danny’s earlier reflections on Robin’s death. Danny’scomplexresponseofabstractguilt(“He’dletRobindown”[462]) and shame at his grief led him to foolishly brag at school that he was responsible for Robin’s death. As Daniel Mendelsohn notes, it is this “inane childhood confession, which, years later, destroys him,” when Harriet hears it from Hely’s brother Pemberton, and misinterprets it as fact. Danny’s blustering attempt to save face haunts him: “still he felt uneasy when he thought about it,” Tartt writes, “how sadness had turned to lies and swaggering” (463). As a result, the episode in the water tower plays out for the reader with a powerful sense of dramatic irony, which also foregrounds the novel’s central underlying theme: the ways in which narratives can powerfully—and dangerously—shape reality. For Harriet, the new information is difficult to process, coming as it does with consequent realizations: that “maybe she’d been mistaken all along; that maybe she didn’t really know who murdered Robin, and maybe she never would?” (551). Troubled by doubts, Harriet’s mind 320 Edward Clough drifts irresistibly from the uncertainty of “maybes” to the broad possibilities which such doubts offer: maybe Danny Ratliff really had. killed Robin. It would be easier if he had. Certainly it would be the easiest thing to tell Hely: that Danny Ratliff had confessed to her at the end (maybe it was an accident, maybe he hadn’t meant to do it?), maybe that he’d even begged her forgiveness. Rich possibilities of story began to open like poisonous flowers all around her. (552) This moment is the closest Harriet comes to conscious reflection on the appealofthestorytellingthatsustainsher throughout the novel:through the adventure tales of Kipling and Stevenson, the role models—more legendary than real—of Houdini and Captain Scott, and the rich weave of narrative and romance in which members of her maternal family, the Cleves, choose to dwell. It is also the closest Tartt comes to explicitly stating the danger of such attractive fantasy: the corrupting, corrosive effect of the imaginative on the material everyday. In my view, the novel’s conflicting central characters, Harriet and Danny, read less as antagonists than as competing storytellers. They, along with a number of supporting characters, exemplify what Jeff Zaleski describes as “Southerners’ ability to construct a repertoire, veering toward mythology, of tales of the past.” Tartt’s particular interest in The Little Friend. is how this mythology has been applied in the South to reading and shaping the material environment, constructing a southern culture built on rigid stereotypes of place, setting, and identity. Tartt’smethodofdeconstructingthisestablishedhierarchyisparticularly intriguing. She deliberately engages the reader’s familiarity with tropes and generic conventions—not only of southern Gothic, but also of detective fiction and bildungsroman—in order to subvert readers’ expectations in a surprisingly postmodern manner. The effect of this deliberately misleading engagement and subversion is to subtly lead the reader into replicating the same narrative strategies—and dangerous assumptions—as Harriet’s. And the result, upon reconsideration at the novel’s end, is to reveal not only how representations and narratives construct southern culture, but also how they enable and sustain dominant hierarchies, material inequalities, and historical..." @default.
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• W3007304779 date "2015-01-01" @default.
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• W3007304779 title "Poisonous Possibilities: Telling Stories and Telling Ruins in Donna Tartt’s The Little Friend" @default.
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• W3007304779 doi "https://doi.org/10.1353/mss.2015.0001" @default.
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