The Falls

In Joyce Carol Oates' novels, middle-class, WASPish American families regularly turn out to be dens of sexual repression (or excess), warped emotion, female self-loathing, violent masculinity, and general oddity.  Critics often point to Oates' affinities for the Gothic and the grotesque, and certainly her novels tend to locate the dark side of American culture in the landscape of "normal" domestic life.  The Falls, which unfolds over a period of nearly thirty years, does tread some familiar territory in its representation of life around the Niagara Falls.  But it also deviates from Oates' frequently glum take on both romance and the family by being ever-so-slightly optimistic--about love, about redemption, and, perhaps, about the country itself.

If we look at the novel's parts--"Honeymoon," "Marriage," "Family," "Epilogue"--the narrative appears to travel a well-worn romantic path.  In fact, however, it opens with a failure, told from three points of view: the suicide at Niagara Falls of the Rev. Gilbert Erskine, overcome with sexual revulsion after his grotesque wedding night.  A gay man without knowing it (he is in love with a friend from the seminary), Erskine has married because, in terms of a "normal" life narrative, marriage is what you do.   Already anxious about evolution, with its threat of "[b]lindness, accident" (30), the nevertheless scientifically-inclined Gil simultaneously yearns for and recoils from certainty.  Ariah Littrell, a few years Gil's senior, had appeared to be the solution to Gil's impending identity crisis, but his world explodes when the "[c]haste and virginal and cool to the touch as an icicle" woman of their courtship morphs into a "smeared greedy face" (33) during their desperate (on her part, in any rate) attempt at mating.  The awkward, eventually violent nature of their unerotic grappling turns sexuality into a chaotic abyss--the realm of "accident" from which Gil already cringes.  Seeking sexlessness, the misogynistic Gil instead finds a stereotypically monstrous female body.   Although he attempts to dress it up as a "crucifixion" (37), Gil kills himself in order to make his beloved Douglas "see" and suffer, along with the rest of the world (37).  In effect, Gil dies from the clash between his unspoken (and, in this framework, unspeakable) desires and the life to which society demands he aspire. 

Gil's suicide turns out to be the novel's most repressed non-secret.  It is never clear who fathers Chandler, Ariah's eldest son--Gil or Dirk Burnaby, Ariah's second husband? (Although Gil and Ariah technically fail to consummate the marriage, what the novel describes still allows for a potential pregnancy.)  More to the point, Gil's sudden death structures the rest of Ariah's life, especially her terror of abandonment and her attempts to control her children.  In addition, the manner of Gil's death continually repeats itself in distorted form: Dirk's "suicide" (actually a political assassination), Chandler's work with the Samaritans, and Dirk's daughter Juliet's suicidal impulses.  Even though he disappears in the novel's opening chapters, then, Gil continually resurfaces, like his battered corpse, in unrecognizable shapes.

The Falls themselves, we are told at the beginning, allure suicides because they promise the total erasure of self, "[e]very shadow and echo of every memory erased" (5).  This spectacle of nature at its most brutal and beautiful finds its purely human counterpoint in Love Canal, which destroys Ariah's second husband as the Falls did the first.  But while Gil seeks to obliterate himself because he can neither live with nor without his "normal" marriage, Dirk finds a different form of self-obliteration: he must abandon his class privileges in order to help the so-called "Woman in Black," Nina Olshaker, who has already lost one child to the contamination.  Initially, Dirk imagines the crusade as a "new game," something to "master" (205); it is just one more extension of his upper-class masculine existence.  But soon, Dirk discovers that helping those in need earns him only the hatred of Niagara Falls' social elites, who see him as a threat to their cushy lifestyles.  (As we discover by the end of the novel, the man who orders the hit is one of Dirk's old drinking buddies.)   To make matters worse, he discovers that his own family has been involved in the pollution, making him "involved in this, too" (223).  Like Gil, Dirk dies because he cannot uphold the status quo; unlike Gil, Dirk manages to identify where the rot lies. 

Despite Dirk's obsession with Love Canal, the novel almost completely erases mid-century American politics; we hear next to nothing of Vietnam (beyond Chandler's opposition), the Civil Rights movement, and the like.  This restricted vision echoes Ariah's own refusal to pay attention to current events--in fact, Ariah doesn't even know that Dirk is involved in the Love Canal suit until her sister-in-law claims that he is having an affair with Nina.  Ariah "never watched TV news or read the front pages of newspapers where 'disturbing' news might be printed.  Quickly she turned to features, to women's pages, entertainment, comics" (227).  Like Gil, in a way, Ariah fears anything that might disturb her eternally fragile equanimity; current events always make her "alarmed, agitated" (192).  Too, the only way she can maintain her own "normal" marriage, in which "[s]he was wife who stayed home while husband drove each weekday morning into the city to his law office" (127), is to radically segregate herself from the evils of the outside world; even when she returns to work as a music teacher, the work comes home to her.  Every political crisis or natural disaster brings with it the possibility of Dirk's sudden death or disappearance, which she simultaneously fears and expects (164). 

As a result, this is a historical novel featuring a character who evades history whenever possible--an evasion further manifesting itself in Ariah's figuratively undead status as a "ghost."  As the "Widow-Bride of the Falls," Ariah passes into anonymous local legend, an undatable and supernatural phenomenon instead of an "event."   One young woman explains to her that the "ghost of the Widow-Bride still kept her vigil" at the Falls (175).  Given that Ariah is, in fact, effectively trapped in the past, forever fearing that her first husband's disappearance will be repeated, the legend holds more than a kernel of accidental truth.  It is also in keeping with Ariah's own belief that she is "damned," a judgment she frequently repeats.  Ariah refuses to believe Dirk's account of his relationship with Nina because, of course, she has always been sure that he would abandon her; however, this self-destructive assurance also follows from her belief that she has already been subjected to a final judgment.   Thus, where Gil and Dirk are both killed, more or less, by their refusal to go along with a socially acceptable "story," Ariah assumes that the end of her own story is a foregone conclusion.

The final chapters, however, suggest that there might be a way out of this impasse (although the final ambiguity about second son Royall leaves even this open to question).  Chandler, compelled to face death over and over again in his work with the Samaritans, nevertheless manages to find love.  Juliet, who attempts suicide, is rescued by--and herself rescues--the son of a man involved in her own father's fate.  Royall frees himself from his mother and, despite his earlier failures at school, reinvents himself as a serious college student.  Even Ariah seems to find something that might be love with a Holocaust survivor, whose relationship to his own past--"He was in Birkenau.  He will never not be 'in Birkenau''" (399)--has some commonalities with Ariah's.  And Dirk Burnaby is ultimately celebrated as the man who put the Love Canal crusade into motion, even though, as his children admit to themselves, "You do have to laugh.  Vindication, validation, redemption, and so forth.  Sixteen years too late" (480).  The possibility of a better future rests, somehow, on the belief that there is a future, that the story doesn't have a predetermined end.  And yet, we are still left with the sense that this belief, too, can be easily crushed by history's mill.