What saves us and what doesn't

A reflection on John E. Williams' "Stoner"

This march I shared with you an opportunity to read Stoner by John E. Williams as a month-long casual read along, where we read in solitude and share our thoughts at the end of the month. Well, here are my thoughts; a bit late but rather that than never i guess! (Prepare for a lot of quotes…)

This was a reread of the book for me, as I read it for the first time around the fall of 2023. I borrowed the book from the library (I highly recommend using them!) and read it over the course of about a month or two if memory serves me right. I knew upon first reading that this was a book I’d like to reread sometime in the future.

This time I read it in two days. I could not put it down for the life of me, and already on the first day I was over the halfway point. This novel has bewitched me in a way I’ve only experienced once before: when I read Frankenstein for the very first time. (Which I’ll host a read along for in November!)

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Stoner: the dreamer, the madman in a madder world

John E. Williams writes the character portrait of William Stoner in a style that brings to life an otherwise relatively uneventful one. Stoner is a rather stoic character, perhaps shaped so by his upbringing on a small farm from which his ancestors earned their living in an equally stoic manner. Stoner’s personal characteristics, and his impact upon the world (in which he was made possible), are summed up particularly well already on the first page:

Stoner’s colleagues, who held him in no particular esteem when he was alive, speak of him rarely now; to the older ones, his name is a reminder of the end that awaits them all, and to the younger ones it is merely a sound which evokes no sense of the past and no identity with which they can associate themselves or their careers.

Yet this novel is full of emotional ups and downs, musings on life and death, on love in its various forms, on passion and devotion, and—of course—on literature and its impact. It is a campus novel to nearly the most literal degree, scenes switching almost exclusively between taking place at the University and in Stoner’s home.

It seems almost incidental that Stoner’s entry into the University of Missouri, which so delicately yet distinctly shaped his life, happens. A mention of country agents from his father, a small worry about finances, of how his parents would manage the farm by themselves; but it has already been settled.

Stoner’s accommodations would be paid for through his labor at a relative’s small farm not far from the University, a type of work he is already deeply familiar with, and his father assures him they would manage just fine without him. In fact, Stoner’s father insists that he goes; clumsily he tells his son how he never got any schooling of his own, that all he knows is working the land, but the soil has grown dry and that sometimes, out on the field, he gets to thinking—
We never quite really get to know what Stoner’s father thought about. But the message is clear: go to University. And so, Stoner goes.

He did his work at the University as he did his work on the farm—thoroughly, conscientiously, with neither pleasure nor distress. At the end of his first year his grade average was slightly below a B; […] It was not until he returned for his second year that William Stoner learned why he had come to college.

And so, in a way which I’m sure is familiar to many of us writers, Stoner falls in love—with literature. Perhaps it was Providence that the survey of English literature course came upon him, though to Stoner it was a class which “troubled and disquieted him in a way nothing had ever done before”. To me, this is the first real moment we see Stoner portrayed with any meaningful breadth of emotion; his initial frustration with literature and this required course seems to up have come as a reaction to a sudden upheaval to a life which he previously knew to be safe and stable.

He found that he could not handle the survey as he did his other courses. […] He read and reread his literature assignments so frequently that his work in other courses began to suffer; and still the words he read were words on pages, and he could not see the use of what he did.

I think his meeting Archer Sloane was a great turning point in Stoner’s life, but perhaps not to his immediate awareness, instilling in him a sense of the vastness of knowledge and the human incapability of putting quite the right words to it—something which would later be echoed in Stoner’s own experiences with teaching.

I am particularly fond of the description of Archer Sloane:

The instructor was a man of middle age, in his early fifties; his name was Archer Sloane, and he came to his task of teaching with a seeming disdain and contempt, as if he perceived between his knowledge and what he could say a gulf so profound that he would make no effort to close it. He was feared and disliked by most of his students, and he responded with a detached, ironic amusement. He was a man of middle height, with a long, deeply lined face, cleanly shaven; he had an impatient gesture of running his fingers through the shock of his gray curling hair. His voice was flat and dry, and it came through barely moving lips without expression or intonation; but his long thin fingers moved with grace and persuasion, as if giving to the words a shape that his voice could not.
(italics by me)

I find it rather interesting that it is a question of Sloane’s about the meaning of one of Shakespeare’s sonnets (number 73, to be exact, surely not picked on a whim) that causes Stoner to be so frustrated that it leaves him no choice but to pursue literature; I felt nearly that I could answer in his place, as if I was a student in the classroom with my hand held high in an impatient manner, the words ready to just slip off my tongue the moment the professor even looked in my general direction—yet Sloane hones in on Stoner, nearly nagging him: “Mr Shakespeare speaks to you across three hundred years, Mr Stoner; do you hear him?”

I am not certain if Stoner heard Shakespeare that day. He seems to have a habit of disassociation, or perhaps experiencing derealization, especially when distressed in some way; moments in which he sees himself from the outside, as a stranger, almost as an inconsequential character in his own story. On the other hand, he also has moments of experiencing something akin to heightened senses—imagined or not—in which he is acutely aware of himself, his body, and his surroundings. This might be two sides of the same coin. This never seems to really bother him, but to me (especially as someone who has similar experiences) I find it a very peculiar characterization of Stoner on John E. Williams’ part. Whether intentionally related to anything resembling a medical disorder or not, I cannot help but feel that this aspect of Stoner’s character is very particularly planned and certainly not something to dismiss, though it seems to diminish as the novel goes on.

I mentioned earlier the stoicism of Stoner, a man who seems uninterested in life—at least in its material sense—and to some degree unaware of his feelings, if not nearly emotionless. But I don’t think that is quite true; we see several times the indifference to his circumstances juxtaposed against his keen and nearly unruly interest in literature, and the inner emotional life he leads is explosive at times. In the second half of the novel, during his affair with Katherine Driscoll—which I will touch upon later—he is nearly overflowing with emotion to the degree John E. Williams makes that possible. Often I find the style in which the novel is written—not dry by any means, on the contrary I find it to be quite flourished and philosophical, but perhaps distant—is a limitation to the extent we are able to view Stoner’s inner emotional life. In a sense, I find the style of the novel to be quite the example of “show, don’t tell”. But I digress…

Archer Sloane is someone I would describe as a cornerstone in Stoner’s life and eventual career. He is the cataclysmic event that launches Stoner into what would eventually become not only an education and career, but a lifelong commitment. Was it not for him, I doubt Stoner would have changed his major from agriculture to literature, and later become assistant professor.

Thus, Stoner leads a rather unassuming life; finishing his Masters, starting a PhD while teaching, eventually becoming assistant professor—the uncrossable gulf of knowledge echoed in his own experiences of trying to convey what he knows and what he is able to say about it. He befriends David Masters (whose ideas of the University most closely resembles John E. Williams’ own), and Gordon Finch, and the trio get into the habit of meeting on Fridays for a drink at the local saloon.

During one of these hang outs, David Masters tells the group what they think the University is—to Stoner, it is a “great repository […] where men come of their free will and select that which will complete them […]. The True, the Good, the Beautiful.” To Finch, Masters says the University is “an instrument of good—to the world at large, of course, and just incidentally to yourself.” But, he declares, they are both wrong:

“It is an asylum or—what do they call them now?—a rest home, for the infirm, the aged, the discontent, and the otherwise incompetent. Look at the three of us—we are the University. The stranger would not know that we have so much in common, but we know, don’t we? We know well.”

Masters then proceeds to nearly psychoanalyse Finch and Stoner, telling them who they really are in this world and why they ended up in University.

“Let’s take you first, Finch. […] On one hand, you’re capable of work, but you’re just lazy enough so that you can’t work as hard as the world would want you to. On the other hand, you’re not quite so lazy that you can impress upon the world a sense of your importance. […] In the world you would always be on the fringe of success, and you would be destroyed by your failure. So you are chosen, elected; providence, whose sense of humor has always amused me, has snatched you from the jaws of the world and placed you safely here, among your brothers.”

“Who are you [Stoner]? A simple son of the soil, as you pretend to yourself? Oh, no. You, too, are among the infirm—you are the dreamer, the madman in a madder world, our own midwestern Don Quixote without his Sancho, gamboling under the blue sky. You’re bright enough—brighter anyhow than our mutual friend. But you have the taint, the old infirmity. You think there’s something here, something to find. […] You, too, are cut out for failure; not that you’d fight the world. You’d let it chew you up and spit you out, and you’d lie there wondering what went wrong. Because you’d always expect the world to be something it wasn’t, something it had no wish to be. […] And you have no place in the world.”

These are pretty harsh words to hear. But there is something about what Masters says that, somehow, is true. When the first world war breaks out between Germany and the U.S., it’s not long before both Masters and Finch sign up to go fight for their country. But only Finch makes it back; perhaps Masters really was, as he proclaimed, too bright for this world. Stoner decided not to sign up, which Masters is somewhat indifferent to, and Finch nearly furious at.

Archer Sloane, however, is happy to hear that Stoner will not be dying on the battlefield. Distraught at the war, perhaps by history’s relentless repetitions, he tells Stoner what a war really is:

“A war doesn’t merely kill off a few thousand or a few hundred thousand young men. It kills off something in a people that can never be brought back. And if a people goes through enough wars, pretty soon all that’s left is the brute, the creature that we—you and I and others like us—have brought up from the slime.” He paused for a long moment; then he smiled slightly. “The scholar should not be asked to destroy what he has aimed his life to build.”

While Stoner continues to lead his life in much of the same way he did before the U.S. got involved in the war, Archer Sloane deteriorates under the weight of it. When the war is pronounced to be over, everyone apart from Sloane is excited. As the students and faculty celebrate the victory, the end of the brutality, Stoner sees in passing a grieving Sloane, sitting at his desk bitterly weeping.

[Stoner] sat in the dimness of his room and heard outside the shouts of joy and release, and thought of Archer Sloane who wept at a defeat that only he saw, or thought he saw; and he knew that Sloane was a broken man and would never again be what he had been.

Finch returns to the University, having been successful enough in the military to earn the rank of captain. Stoner and him rekindle their friendship, though Finch holds him a bit distant at first. But as time passes, and Finch finds himself slowly rising in the ranks of the University, they become lifelong friends with a deep connection that Stoner, at least at first, is not all too aware of.

Edith: a woman weighed down by stone(r)

It is Finch who introduces Stoner to the woman who would later become his wife, in a doomed and unhappy marriage: Edith Elaine Bostwick. The daughter of a banker, she reminds us of one of those American Women that the literature from the 1910s and 20s so often speaks about; beautiful, unstable, educated yet protected from society. They meet at a function (arranged by Finch on behalf of the dean) in honor of the returning veterans, and Stoner is enamored with her from the moment he lays eyes on her; she is polite enough—perhaps dutiful enough—to entertain his presence for the evening. He asks if he can call upon her again and, although hesitant, she agrees. I have a feeling it was not her will, her desire, to see him again, but her upbringing that felt like a forcing hand upon her lips as she spoke those words.

I find the character of Edith to be quite interesting. From a well-off family, she was brought up the way one might expect her to have been: taking piano lessons, painting, docile and sweet; she was sent to a School for Girls to help her get over her shyness, which she disliked at first but eventually—she says—loved.

She was educated upon the premise that she would be protected from the gross events that life might thrust in her way; and upon the premise that she had no other duty than to be a graceful and accomplished accessory to that protection, since she belonged to a social and economic class to which protection was an almost sacred obligation. She attended private schools for girls where she learned to read, to write, and to do simple arithmetic; in her leisure she was encouraged to do needlepoint, to play the piano, to paint water colors, and to discuss some of the more gentle works of literature. She was also instructed in matters of dress, carriage, ladylike diction, and morality.

She is, quite simply, the opposite of Stoner. Not that he has any brutal, manly bones in his body, but rather that they come from separate lifestyles that have—and do—demand of them completely different things. Stoner is from the lower class, his early life until his entry into University having been nothing but working the soil, good and honest but unaware of the world beyond; Edith is from the middle class, wealthy enough to have never known a day of labor, and under a constant protection in which she feels trapped—she looks upon her life and finds it a prison, the real world out there on the other side of the window bars.

Edith is dutiful, raised to be so and afraid to be anything but, and I think that’s why she eventually agrees to marry Stoner. She sees it not as an act of love, but something expected of her and thus something she must go through with. She asks for the marriage to be quick; they have not known enough other for long (they will never know each other deeply, anyway) before Stoner proposes, and when she eventually agrees and her parents give their blessings, she insists the wedding must be as fast as possible—as if it is a moment she must endure rather than live; as if it is yet another duty to fulfill.

She gives up the plan to go to Europe with her aunt, something she later comments on bitterly; she gives up any hope of an autonomous life, bound by her duties to be a wife and a mother. Maybe she knew all along that she could never truly be free, but the trip to Europe felt like an escape—one that she looked forward to, though she would only experience it for a short while. But she does not postpone the marriage until after her trip, instead opting to do it as soon as possible.

The marriage quickly falls apart. To me it was evident from their first meeting that Edith was not—and never would be—in love with Stoner, though he was with her. Or at least the idea of her, or the look of her, or perhaps in love with the idea of being in love with her. Edith is withdrawn, depressed, and seems at times to be afraid of Stoner. They share a bed, which is rarely used for anything other than sleeping, but they are both too stubborn to reveal to the world—even to themselves, in such a private environment as the bedroom—that they do not love each other like it is expected of them.

Edith was instructed in morals which was “negative in nature, prohibitive in intent, and almost entirely sexual. […] She learned that she would have duties toward her husband and family and that she must fulfill them.” I think this speaks to the baseline of her character, of what she sees as her role as a woman in the world which she has been born into. It colors her entire existence. When she reached puberty, she was unhappy with the transformation; “And the association between the ungainliness of her body and her new sexual estate was one from which she never fully recovered. […] She had no one at home to whom she could talk, and she turned more and more inward upon herself.”

At their marriage ceremony, Stoner’s father tells Edith that every man needs a woman who is good to him and who comforts him, and that she has to be good to William. In response, Edith’s face takes on a sort of shocked expression; for a moment Stoner thinks she might be angry, but she is not. She promises Stoner’s father—as she promised Stoner just a few pages earlier—that she’ll try to be a good wife. I think the realization of the stage of life she is about to enter, to commit herself to, dawns on her. She’s scared like a deer in headlights, and like the deer she cannot move. She is frozen by the facts of her upbringing and the duties she feels weigh on her; duties to which she cannot turn the other cheek, lest she loses her place in the world.

After their marriage they move in together, but Edith is not happy. They sleep in the same bed, but do not sleep with each other, save the times she lies motionless and he ‘‘performs his love as quickly as he can’’. Their honeymoon is a failure, yet they strive not to acknowledge that; ‘‘and they did not realize the significance of the failure until long afterward.’’

Edith buries herself in cleaning the apartment, though she has not been brought up in a way which exposed or otherwise made her used to physical labor, like Stoner had. When he tries to help, she rejects him—another duty that falls on her to fulfill; another stone to weigh her down. She fulfills her duties as a wife—in addition to taking upon herself a thorough cleaning of the house—almost mechanically, a labor without love, but with an intensity that leaves her exhausted. They rarely speak.

Within a month he knew that his marriage was a failure; within a year he had stopped hoping it would improve. He learned silence and did not insist upon his love. If he spoke to her or touched her in tenderness, she turned away from him within herself and became wordless, enduring, and for days afterward drove herself to new limits of exhaustion. […] And he could not speak to her of what he took to be her unhappiness. When he attempted to do so, she accepted what he said as a reflection upon her adequacy and her self, and she became as morosely withdrawn from his as she did when he made love to her. He blamed his clumsiness for her withdrawal and took upon himself the responsibility for what she felt.

It might be true, to a degree, that Stoner is responsible for Edith’s feelings of suffocation. But he is not the only one at fault, for he did not instill in her the morals on which she was brought up, or the coldness of her parent’s love, or the expectations that weigh her down like a stone tied to her ankle in deep, cool water. It might be so that any man she should have married would have made her unhappy; that it is not the man himself who is the root of the problem, but the whole institution of marriage and the expectations that are forcefully placed upon women of her socioeconomic class in the age of which she was brought up.

Perhaps Stoner is one of the better men she could have married; not violent, never angry, rarely makes his presence known more than he has to. A humble, quiet man without much ambition or wants in life. I imagine if Edith married a more traditional man, one brought up her own class or with the same values as her father, it would have been different. I can even imagine that it was a man she could have been happier with, though I do not think her unhappiness stems from Stoner’s quiet demeanor but rather the fact that her life—the direction of which has already been decided for her by her parents and teachers; by the society in which she was born—has only one option in how it can play out.

It does not change much for the better after Edith decides she wants a child; for a while she initiates for them to make love, Stoner as eager as she, but when the child finally comes she reverts back into herself and becomes as distant—if not more—as before. She doesn't want anything to do with their daughter; maybe she thought having a child together would cure her of her depression, or perhaps it was another duty she sought to fulfill, as if she was ticking boxes off a list that, upon its completion, would somehow let her escape this prison in which she lives.

She takes it upon herself to find them a house, going as far as getting a loan from her father (without Stoner’s knowledge).

‘‘I was thinking of you and the baby’’, she said. ‘‘You could have a study, and Grace could have a yard to play in.’’

‘‘I know,’’ William said. ‘‘Maybe in a few years.’’

‘‘In a few years,’’ Edith repeated. There was a silence. Then she said dully, ‘‘I can’t live like this. Not any longer. In an apartment. No matter where I go I can hear you, and hear the baby, and—the smell. I—can’t—stand—the—small! Day after day, the smell of diapers, and—I can’t stand it, and I can’t get away from it. Don’t you know? Don’t you know?”

I’m not so sure if Stoner knows, but he does comply. And in her hunt for a house, Edith loses herself, and some of her unhappiness seems to vanish. She finds something to do vigorously and completely, so that she might forget the weight on her shoulders, the unhappiness that inhabits her; but it can only last for so long until reality comes back to her, and she again finds herself locked up in a prison from which there is no escape.

After the news of her father’s suicide, Edith goes to St. Louis and stays there for two months. Stoner takes care of his daughter, and the two form a close bond. They sit together in his study, him working on what needed to be done for his job, Grace coloring or reading. In Edith’s absence, Stoner begins to find himself:

He was ready to admit to himself that he had not been a good teacher. Always, from the time he had fumbled through his first classes of freshman English, he had been aware of the guild that lay between what he felt for his subject and what he delivered in the classroom. He had hoped that time and experience would repair the gulf; but they had not done so. Those things he held most deeply were most profoundly betrayed when he spoke of them to his classes; what was most alive withered in his words; a what moved him most became cold in its utterance. And the consciousness of his inadequacy distressed him so greatly that the sense of it grew habitual, as much as part of his as the stoop of his shoulders. […] He suspected that he was beginning, ten years late, to discover who he was; and the figure he saw was both more and less than he had imagined it to be. […] It was a knowledge of which he could not speak, but one which changed him, once he had it, so that no one could mistake its presence.

And Edith, upon her return, does notice. Just like Stoner notices the change in her; a bobbed haircut, a new way of dressing, wearing makeup. She has become what we today think of as the flapper girl; this is her way of rebelling against the expectations she had previously been subjected to. When Stoner remarks on her new look, that she looks different, she embraces it wholeheartedly. “And at that moment, somehow, he also knew that beyond her intention or understanding, unknown to herself, Edith was trying to announce to him a new declaration of war.”

I imagine the death of her father—though her mother insists they were close—was something Edith saw as a crack in the prison walls which held her; as if now, with her father dead and buried, the life into which she had been forced was also something that had the ability to become dead and buried. She finds a trunk of her childhood belongings and destroys the ones associated with her father, keeping the ones she had gotten or received in secret.

This made me wonder if the relationship Edith had to her father was deemed ‘‘close’’ by her mother not because they were so in reality, but because Edith’s father had somehow forced himself (sexually) upon her. I found no evidence of this, but to me it was clear that Edith wanted nothing that could remind her of her father. Maybe he was a symbolic, and to a degree direct, representation of her prison. He was the figure head, the breadwinner, the cornerstone of the family—the person which everything else revolved around. He was Edith’s keeper, and a perpetuator of the patriarchal hierarchy her life was modeled on and in which she was trapped; a dream from which she woke up and found to be true.

It seems to me that Edith’s mother married her father not out of love, but out of duty—much like how Edith had married Stoner because she saw it as something expected of her, and she could not afford to leave that expectation unmet. Maybe she knew that her mother, being quiet and complicit, would not retaliate this rebellion as her father would have; I imagine Edith felt, for the first time, that she could become the master of her own life.

A thought occurred to me: is Edith a character in her own gothic story? The question reminded me of a paper I read last summer, “Gothic repetition: husbands, horrors, and things that go bump in the night” by Michelle A. Massé.¹ Massé writes that ‘‘within the Gothic, the trauma is less obvious, so the uncanny repetition of incident, character, structure, and of the formula itself becomes more puzzling the longer we view seemingly static [heroines] experiencing ordeal after ordeal.”

Edith (and likewise Stoner) was born at the tail end of the Victorian era, which her parents firmly grew up in and the values of which were forced upon her, a time in which the gothic genre exploded; Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, and Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights and her sister’s Jane Eyre are some works that come to mind; even Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, though technically penned and published in the Edwardian era right before Queen Victoria reigned. These are hallmarks of the gothic genre and the themes of which it concerns itself—horror, the unknown, the transgressive, and the sublime. The gothic genre came to be before the Victorian era, nearly a century prior with the publishing of The Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole in 1764 and again furthered by Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho thirty years later, yet the genre found its firm ground with the Victorians, who were anxious of almost everything they could not control, categorize or prohibit. We know the Victorians perhaps as prudes, for whom sex and sexuality went unspoken, was controlled, and was practiced in private (Michel Foucault writes about this in his History of Sexuality, should you wish to know more). We thus see very clearly the basis of Edith’s moral upbringing and her aversion to, and to a degree self-imposed cluelessness of, what happens in the bedroom.

One of the things Massé outlines in her paper is what she calls the “marital gothic”; when the husband, present at the beginning of the story rather than being her savior at the end, repeats the role of the father as an oppressive force:

The trope of the husband allows us to considers how and why the figure who was supposed to lay horror to rest has himself become an avatar of horror who strips voice, movement, property, and identity itself away from the heroine. […] In the end, we discover that what Freud calls the uncanny is not just the familiar but the familial, and the horror from which the heroine cannot escape is the limitation of her identity to a mirror for self-representations of father and husband. Furthermore, the overdetermined repetition of this dilemma within individual narratives and in the Gothic genre marks a persistent and active attempt by authors, their characters, and readers to rework the feminine social contract.

I do not claim that Stoner is or in any way attempts to be a gothic novel, it much more fits the genres of a campus novel or literary fiction, yet I could not shake the similarities I saw between Edith and her battle with her upbringing, and that of the gothic heroine stuck in a loop of restriction and trauma. Massé claims in her paper that Mario Praz “characterizes [the Gothic heroine] as ‘anxiety with no possibility of escape’,’’² and that Joanna Russ writes that “the Heroine’s suffering is the principal action of the story because it is the only action she can perform.”³

Massé writes that two points stand out:

The first is the women’s clear adherence to the code of Gothic virtue. They knowingly commit no violation: they obediently place the desire and suffering of another above their own, but it is now the wills of their suitors that they follow instead of those of their fathers. Their punishment for this normal transfer, undertaken for the love supposedly sanctioned by the Gothic, highlights the structure of patriarchy that underlies the ideology of romance. […]

The second striking oddity is the demons’ revulsion and indignation at what the women have done […] The internal logic of [examples brought up by Massé] suggest that self-determined marriages can be nothing but demonic pacts and the death of fathers: whatever happen to the heroine is fit punishment for her presumption.

Nor do I think that Stoner fits the bill of the Gothic husband—he does not assert his social, economic, or emotional dominance over Edith; he does not shackle her, but rather it is she who shackles herself. Rather, it is Stoner who takes on a Gothic heroine-like role; he loves Edith, but she is cruel to him, both indirectly and directly throughout the novel. He is just as much trapped in the marriage as she is, and he does not realize the possibility of divorce (though it would probably have been frowned upon in the time in which the novel takes place).

Likewise, it is Edith who becomes a gothic husband; Edith suddenly takes an interest her daughter Grace, whom she was largely uninterested in since birth. But it is not the interest a mother has in a child she loves unconditionally, purely, and with warmth. Upon Grace, Edith forces piano lessons and other hobbies which Grace does not have any real interest in, but is forced to do for the satisfaction of her mother. It is as if Edith forces upon her own daughter her own childhood, a repetition of her own misery. She becomes the Gothic husband towards herself, Stoner, and Grace.

This comes after a period of intense activity where Edith “no longer [deemed] it necessary to pretend to herself that she was ill or weak”. Suddenly she decides that Grace has had too much freedom while being in the care of her father, and that this freedom has made her quiet and withdrawn to a degree Edith thinks unnatural, and that it is this freedom which has made their daughter unhappy. Stoner, nor really Grace (though she does not prove the contrary) think that this is true, yet they both comply with Edith’s wild wishes.

The enormity came upon him gradually, so that it was several weeks before he could admit to himself was Edith was doing; and when he was able at last to make admission, he made it almost without surprise. Edith’s was a campaign waged with such cleverness and skill that he could find no rational grounds for complaint. After her abrupt and almost brutal entry into his study that night, an entrance which in retrospect seemed to him a surprise attack, Edith’s strategy became more indirect, more quiet and contained. It was a strategy that disguised itself as love and concern, and thus one against which he was helpless.

Edith, no longer attacking Stoner directly through her frivolous activity and new personality, takes to using Grace as the battleground; removing Grace’s desk from her father’s study and painting it pink, redecorating her room while she is away at school, replacing her wardrobe with what Edith deemed more fitting and ‘girlish’, buying her dolls and toys with which Grace played dutifully, all the while Edith hovering over her, carefully supervising her reading and homework. She mentions she wants Grace to be popular, as if that would make her happy—but Grace was never unhappy to begin with, rather it was Edith who projected her own unhappiness, her own insecurities, and perhaps the guilt of rebelling against her upbringing, upon her daughter. Edith never left the prison after all.

Grace grows more silent, withdrawing from her father, growing thinner and wary. She endures what her mother puts her through, but I do not know why. She is not very old when this happens, so perhaps she knows not that resistance is a possibility. Or maybe she is afraid of disappointing her mother, not out of love but of fear. Stoner grows tired of the game Edith is playing:

Without preliminaries he said, “Edith, I don’t like what’s happening to Grace.’’ Instantly, as if she were picking up on a cue, she said, “What do you mean?”

He let himself down on the other side of the sofa, away from Edith. A feeling of helplessness came over him. “You know what I mean,” he said wearily. “Let up on her. Don’t drive her so hard.”

Edith ground her cigarette out in her saucer. “Grace has never been happier. She has friends now, things to occupy her. I know you’re too busy to notice these things, but—surely you must realize how much more outgoing she’s been recently. And she laughs. She never used to laugh. Almost never.”

William looked at her in quiet amazement. “You believe that, don’t you?”

“Of course I do,” Edith said. “I’m her mother.” And she did believe it, Stoner realized. […]

“Don’t use the child.” He could not keep his voice from trembling. “You don’t have to any longer; you know that. Anything else. But if you keep on using Grace, I’ll—” He did not finish.

After a moment Edith said, “You’ll what?” She spoke quietly and without challenge. “All you could do is leave, and you’d never do that. We both know it.”

When he comes home from work the next day, he finds all his belongings jammed together in the living room. Another attack from Edith, who says she has taken up painting and wanted to use his study as her studio, and Stoner does not retaliate. After a while, Edith relaxes her pursuit of Grace, which leads to the occasional smile towards her father and a conversation here and there. “Thus he found it possible to live, and even to be happy, now and then.” But he will always be at war with Edith, for a reason he cannot grasp, and with a defenselessness which left him littered with bullet holes.

Thus Stoner, too, is somehow locked up in a prison—but this one is of his own ignorant, clumsy making. He pursued Edith and succeeded in marrying her, but he did not know (and how could he?) that the marriage would be fruitless save for one poor, innocent child. Maybe he did love Edith, or at least was infatuated with her, but she did not really love him; in fact, at times it seems she might hate him, or how he ties her—through their matrimony—to the duties and expectations of a woman from her socioeconomic class with which she wants nothing to do. And it would be years before he came to realize that there was a love out there for him; a love which would engulf him so entirely it almost cost him everything.

Enter: Katherine Driscoll

Katherine Driscoll is a woman who takes Stoner’s seminar on The Latin Tradition and Renaissance Literature. She was the auditor for the class, stopping at Columbia while finishing her dissertation, but asks to report on a seminar topic as she felt she might have something of value to the other students—a report on Donatus and Renaissance Tragedy. After her delivery of her paper, Stoner compliments her on it, but she stays silent. What Stoner takes to be a product of his own clumsiness and awkwardness, we later find out Katherine’s avoidant behavior stems from her being interested in him.

When a student Stoner has been having some difficulties with, Mr. Walker—another plot point of the novel—finally manages to deliver his report, Stoner sits down next to Katherine. Mr. Walker gives a controversial report, and Stoner finds himself offended at what he believes to be Mr. Walker’s attack on Katherine. But she says it was not her who was being attacked by Mr. Walker, but Stoner himself. Again we see the inadequacy of Stoner’s social understanding; just as he is unaware Katherine likes him, he is unaware that someone else than Edith might attack him. They do not talk or interact much apart from this, and Stoner finds himself wrapped up in a feud with Mr. Walker and his dissertation director Mr. Lomax—whom Stoner already has a rocky relationship with.

It is not before over a year later that Stoner reconnects with Katherine, who knocks upon his office door. As they had previously agreed, Stoner was to read Katherine’s dissertation upon its completion and she came now to deliver it to him. For reasons unknown to him and us, Stoner does not read it within the deadline he had promised. But when he finally starts, he finds himself completely enthralled and misses the meeting with Katherine. Gathering her address to give the manuscript back, he knocks upon her door. Thus begins a habit of his finding excuses to see her, which eventually leads to an affair between the two.

Though he tries at some point to will himself out of it, to withdraw from her slowly so she might not notice his eventual absence, he is not successful. When he finally cannot take it anymore, he finds another excuse to visit her, and she admits to not having been ill for the past two weeks but rather “desperately, desperately unhappy”—because Stoner had not shown up at her door. Unlike Edith who uses her unhappiness to wage a war, Katherine is withdrawn and quiet and withholds herself from the world. She lets herself feel her emotions and not be overcome to the degree where she feels she must rid herself of them entirely; in some ways, Katherine is more mature than Edith, though they are not too far apart in age.

He said at last, heavily and slowly, “In many ways I am an ignorant man; it is I who am foolish, not you. I have not come to see you because I thought—I felt that I was becoming a nuisance. Maybe that was not true.”

“No,” she said. “No, it wasn’t true.”

Still not looking at her, he continued, “And I didn’t want to cause you the discomfort of having to deal with—with my feelings for you, which, I knew, sooner or later, would become obvious if I kept seeing you.”

Which leads right into one of my favorite quotes:

In his forty-third year William Stoner learned what others, much younger, had learned before him: that the person one loves at first is not the person loves at last, and that love is not an end but a process through which one person attempts to know another. […] In this extreme youth Stoner had thought of love as an absolute state of being to which, if one were lucky, one might find access; in his maturity he had decided it was the heaven of a false religion, toward which one ought to gaze with an amused disbelief, a gently familiar contempt, and an embarrassed nostalgia. Now in his middle age he began to know that it was neither a state of grace not an illusion; he saw it was a human act of becoming, a condition that was invented and modified moment by moment and day by day, by the will and the intelligence and the heart.

The pair continue to see each other, to make love, to spend time together. And though Stoner finds their relationship to be something private, secret and hidden from all but themselves, the truth behind his absence at home eventually reaches Edith. She brings it up, almost casually, after breakfast one day. When Stoner catches on to what Edith is alluding to, he proposes they talk about it, but Edith shuts him down. And so, though they both know about the affair, they don’t talk about it.

It eventually reaches other areas of his life, primarily his workplace, where students whisper in the halls and their colleagues make vague references to them. Stoner realizes that he cannot live two separate lives; that his life with Katherine is intertwined mercilessly with his life as a teacher. But Stoner does not know what to do; he cannot divorce Edith, but he cannot will himself to leave Katherine. Neither does Katherine want to leave him, though it dawns on them both the reality of the situation.

Threatened again by his nemesis Lomax, that should the affair not come to an end it would cost Stoner greatly—and so their affair ends. It is Katherine who leaves, secretly during the night and with no note of explanation left behind. Her absence leaves him sick; heartbreak tears on him and transforms his body. He ages rapidly, as if life is being drained out of him at an unnatural speed. Another war looms over the world, and Stoner “thought that he knew now, in a small way, something of the sense of waste that Sloane had apprehended”.

He becomes cold in his lectures, suddenly changing the syllabus and assigning new topics—effectively teaching Middle English to freshmen students. He knew that Lomax would again find something about Stoner that was worthy of humiliation, of punishment. But this time it was a more carefully crafted strategy on Stoner’s part, as payback to Lomax for having removed him from his course of The Latin Tradition and Renaissance Literature in the first place, as punishment for his affair with Katherine.

Later, Grace ends up pregnant at a young age, which offers her an escape from the lifestyle forced upon her by her mother, much to her mother’s dismay. She marries the father of her child, though he dies in the Second World War shortly after—before the baby is born. She removes herself from her parents, living instead in her own apartment supported by her late husband’s insurance, the baby mostly taken care of by its paternal grandparents.

Stoner would have liked to see more of his grandson, but he did not mention that wish; he came to realize that Grace’s removal from Columbia—perhaps even her pregnancy—was in reality a flight from a prison to which she now returned out of an ineradicable kindness and a gentle good will.

Thus, despite Edith’s best efforts, Grace manages to escape the prison crafted for her by her mother; a copy of her own.

Stoner then get diagnosed with cancer, which does not seem to bother him as much as it does his close ones; Edith calls a, at least partial, truce and Gordon Finch becomes even more amiable towards Stoner. Surgery and medicine does not cure him, and he withers away slowly.

In his last moments he finds himself holding the book of his dissertation, that he wrote all those years ago and represent a bygone era to which he cannot return yet holds dear.

It hardly mattered to him that the book was forgotten and that it served no use; and the question of its worth at any time seemed almost trivial. He did not have the illusion that he would find himself there, in that fading print; and yet, he knew, a small part of his that he could not deny was there, and would be there.

His life ends much like it began: with a love of literature.

1. Massé, M. A. (1990). Gothic Repetition: Husbands, Horrors, and Things That Go Bump in the Night. Signs, 15(4), 679–709. http://www.jstor.org/stable/3174638

2. Praz, Mario. (1963). The Romantic Agony. New York: World. P. 134

3. Russ, Joanna. (1973). “Somebody’s Trying to Kill Me and I Think It’s My Husband: The Modern Gothic,” in Fleenor, ed (n.3 and above). P. 50 (italics in original).