I wrote my first novel back in elementary school, soon after reading Gone with the Wind and Little Women. Margaret Mitchell’s book was an easy, gleeful read while Louisa May Alcott’s book was a bit of a slog, but both stories of the Civil War era worked their way into my imagination. Thirty years later, I doubt whether I appreciated that Jo, Meg, Beth, and Amy occupied the moral high ground as they awaited their father’s return from serving as a chaplain in the Union army while Scarlett, for all her suffering and passion, was doomed to hypocrisy. It was clear that the privileges of antebellum plantation life resulted in a more interesting wardrobe—even that dress made of curtains sounded more fashionable than what those poor March girls wore in the virtuous north—so my novel focused on the lives of four sisters living on a plantation-like estate with southern belle wardrobes but without any obvious dependence on slavery. Obviously, this was a flimsy foundation for a story, and that is one reason I never finished this handwritten novel, which is now lost to posterity.
The novel I have been revising throughout 2009 has one thing in common with that first, ill-fated novel: it draws from old stories to create a new story. My tale of the blind orphan Lucy draws upon the rich legacy of orphans in literature, especially those in the novels of Charles Dickens. I owe a debt to many other writers as well, including J.K. Huysmans, whose aesthete Des Esseintes in the novel A Rebours was one source of inspiration for my character Monsieur Touchefeu, the art teacher who first introduces Lucy to painting. Some of my allusions are explicit and some are implicit, but what matters most is that they lie in wait for those avid readers who delight in such narrative treasures, which are theirs for the plundering.
Like all other artists, writers work within a tradition. While some writers are bound down by tradition or by generic conventions, others approach the literary tradition with the opportunistic enthusiasm of a carpetbagger. The use of this term is frequently pejorative, but maybe that has something to do with misplaced sympathy for the Scarlett O’Hara types who clung so passionately to land that had been stolen long ago from Native Americans. As writers we “own” our stories in the way that Americans “own” land: we may have legal claims, but we can never exercise total control or protect ourselves from interlopers. Shakespeare borrowed his plot structures from a variety of classical and historical sources, and subsequent writers have made liberal and creative use of his stories.
I sense that the carpetbagger metaphor may be as flimsy as the plot of my first novel, yet what I love about it is how it suggests that a novel is like a carpetbag—a capacious catch-all into which we pack our narrative treasures. Of course, we writers also need traveling companions to help us choose and arrange our treasures more artfully. Thanks to the support, enthusiasm, and collective wisdom of our writing group, I have begun to feel that fixing up the flimsy spots in our carpetbags is taking us all on an amazing magic carpet ride.
--Posted by Kelly Hand
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