词条 | The Company She Keeps (novel) |
释义 |
The Company She Keeps is a semi-autobiographical novel by American writer Mary McCarthy. Published in 1942, it was her first book. It is an unconventional work, tracing the journey of a highly-politicised young catholic college graduate through various stages of emotional development, in unusually frank and revealing detail. The story blends many themes that had clearly marked the author’s own life, such as patriarchy, feminism, rebellion and betrayal, as reflected in her later autobiography. The six episodes do not follow directly in sequence, and some had already appeared as magazine fiction. Critics noted that some of the characters are easily recognisable portraits from the contemporary New York literary scene. BackgroundAutobiographical elementsThe Company She Keeps’ protagonist, Margaret Sargent, closely resembles McCarthy’s account of herself in her later autobiography Memories of a Catholic Girlhood. Many of the circumstances of Margaret’s, or Meg’s, life mirror McCarthy’s own young adulthood: A college graduate living in New York City; a young first marriage that ends in divorce; works reading manuscripts for a publisher and writes for a liberal magazine.[1]{{rp|29}} Because McCarthy travelled in high prestigious literary circles, many of the characters are thinly veiled accounts of well-known intellectuals, such as Edmund Wilson and Philip Rahv. However, The Company She Keeps is by no means a purely autobiographical work; McCarthy confesses to reimagining or simply inventing episodes, and doesn’t always remember which parts of her stories are true and which are fictionalized.[1]{{rp|30}} McCarthy has stated in interviews that the episode in “The Man in the Brooks Brothers Shirt” really did happen, though she changed names and cities to retain a degree of anonymity.[1]{{rp|31}} Prior publicationSeveral of the episodes in The Company She Keeps were originally published in other sources. “Cruel and Barbarous Treatment,” written in 1938 and published in Southern Review in the spring of 1939, was one of her first works of fiction.[2]{{rp|99}} McCarthy wrote the other five stories that eventually became The Company She Keeps over the course of the next three and a half years. “The Man in the Brooks Brothers Shirt” was published in Partisan Review in the summer of 1941, “The Genial Host” was published in Southern Review in the fall of 1941, and “Ghostly Father, I Confess” was published by Harper’s Bazaar in April 1942. The other two episodes, “Rogue’s Gallery” and “Portrait of the Intellectual as a Yale Man,” did not appear in any publications prior to the release, in the spring of 1942, of The Company She Keeps.[2]{{rp|100}} FormThe Company She Keeps consists of six episodes featuring the same heroine, Meg Sargent. However, the stories do not easily cohere into a whole. The narrative voice switches between the second- and third-person, and the heroine’s name isn’t even mentioned until the second episode, and then only obliquely.[3]{{rp|111}} McCarthy wrote each story as a stand-alone piece; however, the heroine and the underlying themes remained across the different settings and styles. McCarthy said that she began to think of these six stories as one unified story.[2]{{rp|99-100}} McCarthy put the stories together to form one collection and was adamant about calling it a novel, but her own formal experimentation intentionally obscures the continuity between episodes.[3]{{rp|111}} Content
Literary characteristicsWhile The Company She Keeps is not one of McCarthy’s better-known works, there is still scholarship to be found. Scholarship can be categorized into three main groups. Reality vs. fictionScholars are fascinated by the autobiographical aspects of The Company She Keeps, and view the novel as a developmental stepping-stone on McCarthy’s journey towards discovering her identity as a writer. Nowhere does it say that the stories contained in the novel are meant to be chronological, but by assembling the pieces and publishing them as a unit, we are able to follow a thread from the first story to the last. Because McCarthy endows Meg with an author-like literary consciousness, painting her as a director or artist.[5]{{rp|96}} Thus, readers can approach Meg’s fragmentation and search for an integrated self as a reflection of McCarthy’s own journey.[5]{{rp|97-98}} CatholicismMcCarthy’s most famous work, the autobiography Memories of a Catholic Girlhood, brought to the public’s attention the role of Catholicism in her upbringing. Because of this, some scholars’ interest lies in analyzing McCarthy’s other works through the lens of Catholicism. Despite McCarthy’s avowed Atheism, her early experience with Catholicism shaped her writing and the way she was and continues to be perceived by her Catholic readership. Asceticism and a need for confession and self-understanding permeate her writing.[6]{{rp|102}} In The Company She Keeps, this is evident in the final episode, as well as in the tendency to write thinly veiled accounts of her personal affairs. McCarthy was an important 20th century model of a female, Catholic, coming-of-age story.[6]{{rp|114}} Other scholars note that this Catholic influence is specifically an Irish-Catholic influence, and that McCarthy approaches her work with an Irish-American literary sensibility. McCarthy broke out of the anti-intellectual, sexist Irish-Catholicism, but still struggled with the Church’s sexist and restrictive definition of women and Irish fatalism. She tends to romanticize suffering and penance.[7]{{rp|87-88}} McCarthy and many of her heroines, like Meg, are trapped between the intellectual and bohemian life of New York in the 30’s and 40’s and the restrictive, traditional values and stereotypes of femininity found in the Catholic Church.[7]{{rp|90}} Feminist theorySome scholars approach The Company She Keeps as an artifact, and examine it in the context of the feminist movements occurring during the book’s publishing. The novel falls between the first wave of liberal feminism and second wave feminism, and therefore contains elements of each movement – concern with diminished options for women in the workforce and sexual liberation from the first wave, and psychological implications of sexist stereotypes and the repressive character of psychiatry as an institution from the second wave.[8]{{rp|925}} Feminist literature of the time sought to synthesize Marx and Freud and rework their sexist doctrines for contemporary feminism.[8]{{rp|925-926}} McCarthy’s heady intellectualism doesn’t shy away from engaging in critique of these two giant figures. Her writing signals the beginning of a pushback against the Old Left by a younger generation of intellectuals, in part by taking a strong stance against Freudian psychiatry by aligning it with patriarchal subordination of female independence for fear that it would lead to madness.[8]{{rp|927}} Other theorists analyze The Company She Keeps through more contemporary feminist frameworks, such as Judith Butler’s performativity. Butler’s theory argues that everyone performs identity types in a gendered world.[9]{{rp|305}} Meg both depends on and fears typification. One of her defining characteristics is her ability to sort people into types, yet she is terrified of being “typed” by others.[9]{{rp|306-307}} Simultaneously, Meg’s search for an integrated self throughout the collection of stories is a search for a neat type to fit into.[9]{{rp|307}} By forcing her protagonist to search for yet never find a convenient type for herself, McCarthy uses Meg as a model of resistance against typification.[9]{{rp|308}} ReceptionThe original New York Times review described The Company She Keeps as “strange and provocative” and “a most unusual novel… probably destined to create a minor furor.” The critic praises McCarthy for her original and exciting depiction of her heroine and the world in which she moves, but criticizes her for her viciousness, especially in her semi-transparent, often unflattering portrayals of actual literary figures. She closes by saying that the novel is as full of contradictions as its main character – that on one hand, it is clever and witty; on the other, it lacks maturity.[10] Other contemporaries and publications had similar mixed views. Partisan Review originally published “The Man in the Brooks Brothers Shirt,” but found the sex scene so controversial and immature that they refused to publish “The Genial Host.”[2]{{rp|100}} McCarthy’s husband Edmund Wilson, himself a prominent writer and critic, found the book ingenious, as did Vladimir Nabokov; however, most book reviewers were not as enthusiastic. Many cited McCarthy’s immaturity and sharpness, calling the book unlikeable and gossipy. Despite the mixed reception, The Company She Keeps sold 10,000 copies.[2]{{rp|102}} References1. ^1 2 Hardy, Willene Schaefer. Mary McCarthy. New York: Frederick Ungar, 1981. Print. {{Mary McCarthy}}{{DEFAULTSORT:Company She Keeps, The}}2. ^1 2 3 4 Gelderman, Carol. Mary McCarthy: A Life. London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 1989. Print. 3. ^1 Crowley, John W. “Mary McCarthy’s The Company She Keeps.” Explicator, vol. 51, no. 2, pp. 111-115, MLA International Bibliography, doi:http://doi.org/10.1080/00144940.1993.9937991. 4. ^McCarthy, Mary. The Company She Keeps. New York: Harcourt, 1942. Print. 5. ^1 Hewitt, Rosalie. “A ‘Home Address for the Self’: Mary McCarthy’s Autobiographical Journey.” The Journal of Narrative Technique, vol. 12, no. 2, 1982, pp. 95-104. https://www.jstor.org/stable/30225042. 6. ^1 Campbell, Debra. “‘One of Ours?’: Catholic Readings of Mary McCarthy, 1942-1964.”U.S. Catholic Historian, vol. 20, no. 1, 2002, pp. 99-115, https://www.jstor.org/stable/27671153. 7. ^1 Donohue, Stacy Lee. “Reluctant Radical: The Irish-Catholic Element.” Twenty-Four Ways of Looking at Mary McCarthy: The Writer and Her Work, Ed. Eve Stwertka and Margo Viscusi. Westport: Greenwood, 1996, pp. 87-97. Print. 8. ^1 2 Farland, Maria. “Literary Feminisms.” The Cambridge History of the American Novel. Ed. Leonard Cassuto. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011, pp. 925-940. Print. 9. ^1 2 3 Marsh, Kelly A. “‘All My Habits of Mind’: Performance and Identity in the Novels of Mary McCarthy.” Studies in the Novel, vol. 34, no. 3, 2002, pp. 303-3019. https://www.jstor.org/stable/29533517. 10. ^Wharton, Edith H. Review of The Company She Keeps, by Mary McCarthy. New York Times, 24 May 1942. 5 : Feminist novels|1942 American novels|Debut novels|Coming-of-age fiction|Novels by Mary McCarthy |
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