Perception

Marilyn Nelson’s luminous children’s book, Carver: A Life in Poems (2001), presents the scientist and naturalist’s life through the voices of those around him. Her poems offer a variety of perspectives on Carver’s personal and professional accomplishments. In fact, the text meditates on the significance of perception: just as each poem’s speaker interprets him through a distinct lens, Carver himself offers impassioned reinterpretations of the natural world. To him, the clay in a muddy stream has the potential to become a brilliant azure tint for paint; a diamond sent by Henry Ford, set by Carver into a specimen box marked “Minerals,” permits a reassessment of the beauty of seemingly common stones, like feldspar, quartz, phosphate, and marcasite. Many poems connect a renewed vision of nature to the potential of the rural African American community the scientist serves, as in “The Wild Garden,” which describes the nutritive possibilities of plants considered “the ‘inferior,’ the ‘weeds’” (71). Through Carver’s eyes, we see the clay, the stones, the weeds, and the community anew. As the child in “Ruellia Noctiflora” comments after Carver takes her by the hand to witness a rare night-blooming petunia, “Where he pointed was only a white flower / until I saw him seeing it” (74). A text concerned with the transformative possibilities of perception, Carver reminds us that seeing through another’s eyes can bear significant interpretive rewards.

The essays included in this issue of the Quarterly contend with the productive possibilities of perception. Cristina Mazzoni’s “Treasure to Trash, Trash to Treasure: Dolls and Waste in Italian Children’s Literature” asks us to consider the relationship of doll narratives to that which we understand as human or as valuable. In this fascinating essay, Mazzoni uses doll narratives to explore the role of perception in creating meaning, investigating the line between treasure and excrement, between humanity and the abject. She explains, “The debasement of treasures into trash, namely the placement of dolls in the garbage—whether because the doll has lost its initial monetary value, or never had any to begin with—is the result of a violence that, even as it debases its object, diminishes the humanity of the one operating the transformation.” The elevation of trash to treasure signals a shift in the perception of the doll’s owner, underlining the achievement of human value through maturity. Kim Hong Nguyen’s essay, “Mourning A Series of Unfortunate Events,” considers the use of the series post–9/11, offering a nuanced reading of readers’ perceptions of the books. For Nguyen, the series resists commonplace nationalistic narratives of melancholia and revenge in 9/11 discourse by using a variety of unsettling modes, such as metafictionality and narrative open-endedness. Paying particular attention to the uses of orphans and grief in 9/11 nationalistic discourse, Nguyen argues that “The series both reaffirms the subjective dislocation effected by loss and the need to locate new alternatives within the discursive, social, and political systems in which orphaned protagonists—literal like the Baudelaires and figurative like the American citizen-subject— are embedded.” Both Mazzoni and Nguyen, then, explore the function of perception in articulating human subjectivity.

In “New Miseries in Old Attire: Nuclear Adolescent Novels in the United States in the 1980s,” Tamar Hager asks us to see anew the narratives that structured the threat of nuclear war toward the end of the Cold War. She argues for a new perception of this body of work, explaining that “American nuclear stories of the 1980s in fact seem to avoid addressing nuclear weaponry and war as central topics, instead incorporating nuclear scenarios as challenging, dramatic backdrops for familiar themes of initiation and maturation with their common psychological and educational messages.” Focusing on two mid-decade novels, Hager recognizes the political compromises of the texts, suggesting that the books (and the genre in general) “actually failed to oppose official pronuclear policies, conveying tolerance for and even indirect approval of the nuclear status quo.”

The editors are extremely pleased to conclude the issue with two essays on Maria Edgeworth, both of which analyze stories from The Parent’s Assistant. Susan Manly’s “‘Take...