The Foolishness of Dreams in Harriette Arnow's Hunter's Horn and The Dollmaker

The Foolishness ofDreams in Harriette Arnow's *^> Hunter's Horn and The Dollmaker ¿¿£~ { ~-*r by RONALD BUTLER Harriette Simpson Arnow is one of the major writers today telling the story ofpeople crossing one ofthe last frontiers in America, that from the hill country culture to urbanization. In Hunter's Horn1 and The Dollmaker,2 she treats the classic theme of the American dream in terms of this contemporary confrontation of the hill culture with urban living, which Arnow sees as being forced by what she calls "the Great Migration," or "the going out during and after World War II."3 Since the need of earning cash was not being met in the hiircommunities of Eastern Kentucky, the men were forced to go to more populous regions seeking jobs, where they worked till they had earned enough cash to pay for those items their families needed and they could not make themselves, and then returned home. But with the coming ofthe war, "the average man did not stay a few months and come home again. Instead, the wife and children followed," and "the Great Migration twisted, and possibly wrecked" Harriette Arnow's dream of a return of prosperity and continuation of the old way of life for her people (MP-I, n.pag.). Though this transition was inevitable, Arnow presents these people as being very reluctant to change. Those who were about to leave and those who were left behind hung on to a dream—of having things a little better, or of some day getting away to a better place, or of earning enough money to go back home and buy a little piece of land. As the characters leave the hill country, the dream becomes more sharply defined, and the farther they go from the hill culture, the greater the potential for the unhappy outcome, for tragedy. Arnow presents the movement from one culture to another in terms of dreams. In Hunter's Horn, the dream primarily involves Suse Ballew, who wants to get an education and escape from the hills, and her father, Nunn, who wants to catch the fox, King Devil, and the outcome of both dreams is disappointing. In The Dollmaker, dreams are precisely defined, mainly through Gertie Nevéis and her hill country dream of owning the Tipton Place, "a little piece a heaven right here on earth" (D, p. 77), and her husband Clovis' Detroit dream of making money and buying possessions. Yet with Gertie's inability to adjust to 67 life in a wartime Detroit housing project, her dream is hopelessly lost, and the outcome of her story is tragic. The dream is inseparable^from the fabric of these novels, yet the accomplishment of the dream or its loss leads to ever more tragic consequences. The young Harriette Simpson had learned early the harshness of her environment, and the importance of dreaming, and in her first novel, Mountain Path, she made this need for dreams very clear. In this novel,' twenty-year-old Louisa Sheridan, who has come from Lexington to teach for one term in a oneroom school in a remote part of the Cumberland Valley, noticed that when the choir sang hymns "at times their faces would come alive and one could see that they, for the moment at least, believed implicitly in a land of golden streets and joys untold" (MP, p. 191). Later she understood "why most hill women believed so in God. They had to have something. They were so alone" (MP, p. 303). On the last day of her school term, Louisa looked at twelve-year-old Rie and Mable and knew that this would probably be the last day they would ever spend in school. She knew that "Rie's waist would twist yet more when she carried her own children instead of her mother's, and the bend of her shoulders grow as she grew with her children, so that at twenty-five she would be an old woman never having been a young one." But Mable, because of being aware of her dream, "was the weak one. She would always want a green silk dress trimmed with lace, and know she wanted it. Rie...