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• W94853600 abstract "In short story (1969) Mary Lavin constructed a text in which characters', and especially narrator's, bewilderment over and confusion of signification of key words points both to arbitrariness of words themselves and to narrator's inability to understand story that she tells. The narrator's attempt to account for her mother's enigmatic use of word illustrates futility of trying to comprehend verbal constructs; speaker's original construct and narrator's reconstruction of what she thinks that construct signifies negate each other in such a way that reader must accept that, in final analysis, words cannot communicate. If the main purpose of narrative ... is to capture and evaluate Vera's philosophy of life (Peterson 123), Lavin has made inability to communicate a major part of that purpose. Lavin unabashedly based story on her own experience: like Vera, she was left after death of her husband in 1953 with responsibility of raising her three daughters; during first years of her widowhood, Lavin, like Vera, took girls to Florence. Nevertheless, Lavin's narrative seriously alters her experiences: story is narrated by an unnamed daughter, and Vera, who dies at end of story, does not marry Father Hugh despite neighbors' thinking that their relation is too intimate. In 1969, Lavin married Michael Scott, who had applied for and was granted laicization (Bowen 20-21). These deviations from Lavin's autobiographical experience should warn us that story is more complex than it appears at first, even while it provides a striking picture of her own despair and renewed commitment after William's death. Vera, widowed mother who teaches enigmatic lesson that happiness is essence and goal of life, seems at first to be a truth-sayer. Her name derives from Latin verax, and she seems earnest, however unclear her lesson. As a librarian (13), she works with words, an occupation also suggested by her study and sheaf of paper that preoccupies her as if she were, like Lavin herself, a writer. But if she is truthful, her inability to communicate clearly suggests that truth cannot easily be shared: neither Father Hugh nor her three daughters understand what she means by happiness. Her name also suggests Latin ver, youth or springtime, a reading that Lavin supports in repeated references to spring, spring flowers, and rejuvenation of spring following winter's desolation. As youthful or springlike, her name carries an obvious double or paradoxical meaning: she is old (and getting older as story progresses), yet she is youthful in her attitude and springlike in her ability to bounce back from despair. As her name suggests, she is a fulcrum that contains opposites without fully embracing contradictions that those opposites define. As in case of main character, narrator frequently uses words that can be read with contradictory significance, thus generating what Augustine Martin called vibrations in mind and imagination which continue in reader's mind long after story has been put down (396). Twice, for example, she uses word in such a way that reader cannot distinguish whether it signifies Vera's skill in using language effectively or an insincerity concealed behind a grandiloquent barrage of words. The first use of occurs just after Vera declares that Happiness drives out pain, as fire burns out fire, a cryptic statement obviously beyond understanding of her daughters who, nevertheless, thirstily drank in her rhetoric (12; emphasis added). Here word seems to denote narrator's distrust of her mother's glib reply, but in second use of word, there is no hint of glibness: here Vera, on her deathbed, speaks of nun and daffodils in such a way that daughters are mystified, Vera's language seeming to conceal a secret that she cannot or will not communicate (32). …" @default.
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• W94853600 date "1994-09-22" @default.
• W94853600 modified "2023-09-23" @default.
• W94853600 title "Words That Do Not Speak Themselves: Mary Lavin's 'Happiness.'" @default.
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