Beasts (review)

Beasts. By Joyce Carol Oates. New York: Carroll and Graf Publishers, 2002. 138 pp.

"I had not been forbidden to go upstairs, exactly," the young, female narrator of Joyce Carol Oates's novella, Beasts, tells us. "But of course I ventured upstairs." We are two thirds of the way through this tiny book, and if we didn't already know, we are in the land of fairy tales. What unfolds from here is horrible, but we've been prepared. Neither we, nor any of the characters, will be spared; no one gets out unscathed. And Gillian, of course, will survive.

In Beasts, the plot is as transparent as it is dark, and its message as inscrutable as its language pristine. These are all, in my view, extraordinary qualities. Beasts tells the twisted story of Gillian Brauer, a student at Catamount College in southwestern Massachusetts where a spate of arsons have recently occurred. There is the air of distrust, of unstable, oversexed students. Easily unnerved, our quiet Gillian writes poetry and is anachronistically interested in form; she writes sonnets other students find bloodless. These are among the subtle, finely-wrought clues that we are in fairy-tale land.

Enrolled in the exclusive writing seminars of Andre Harrow, Gillian is drawn into a world that is way beyond harrowing. This poetry class will be her undoing, and it will also do him in, and his sculptor-wife, Dorcas. Her name, spelled backwards, is nearly Sacred. Fast-moving and packed with codes, the novella maintains the muted love-threat feel of beast tales, with their special sort of erotic violence, or violent eroticism. The novel contains an anthem that strikes a disturbing chord. It accompanies Dorcas's unsightly wooden sculptures of nude girls: WE ARE BEASTS AND THIS IS OUR CONSOLATION. This string of words might be read synoptically to describe the contents of Oates's novella, with its peculiar arrhythmic sound and its wavering meaning. It does not reveal, although it announces.

And who are these beasts?

One is Andre, as he has his students call him, a real lady killer. At first he seems fairly harmless, though rather unpleasant. He is not even attractive, we are told: "his spade-shaped beard was sometimes unkempt, his graying-brown hair was often greasy and fell about his face in quills. His teeth were uneven and, like his restless fingers [not an alluring image], nicotine-stained." It is his wife, Dorcas-Sacred who contains the real power between them. It is Dorcas whom Gillian followed on a path of needles through the woods before the affair. Dorcas is the seductive one, the beautiful one.

But the girls are beasts too, are they not? Young Gillian is the sort of girl in a novel who seems sweet but is secretly not, or who seems weak but is strong--the kind who can get away with, well, murder. We know she is not innocent, though she begins the book in a childlike state. Unlike the other girls, she does not smoke, and weighing only ninety pounds, she is full of wonder at the other students' erotic powers. We are spared no horrors that await her in her crossing-over to the adult world. As soon as Andre the Beast kisses her, she has turned. It is too late to reverse the path she is on, and it is no surprise when, sated with wine and cassoulet at the Harrows' home, she disrobes and is defiled. That we are not spared any detail is just right; what sort of tale would Bluebeard be without that smear of blood? And the wife is there too. Beasts.

Of course, in not too much time Gillian finds a key to a secret chamber in the bearded lover's home. Of course, she convinces herself that her husband-and-wife captors--here, metaphorical captors, bound to the rules of obsessive desire--have wanted her to take a look. But what she finds inside the locked file cabinet is unspeakably bad: that expected series of girls, indeed...