Transformational Spectacle in Bobbie Ann Mason's Feather Crowns

Modes of spectacle and spectatorship can be found throughout Bobbie Ann Mason's novels and short stories and, for the most part, Mason's Kentucky characters serve as contemporary-era spectators, consuming televised images and incorporating them into their own identities. In Feather Crowns (1994), however, Mason turns to an earlier era whose characters—old enough to be the grandparents and great-grandparents of her usual characters—have less access to popular culture than their late-twentieth century counterparts. For these early twentieth-century characters, popular culture intrudes upon their lives when they become objects of interest to tourists and the press. Feather Crowns tells the story of Christie Wheeler, who in 1900 gives birth to North America's first quintuplets on a rural southern farm. Based loosely on an actual event, the novel follows Christie as she and her babies become first a tourist attraction in their own home and then a sideshow attraction after the babies' deaths. In the final two sections of the novel, Mason brings Christie into the future, first to 1937, when she travels to Canada to see the Dionne quintuplets, and finally to her ninetieth birthday, in 1963, when she records her own story for her granddaughter.

Although not herself a spectator, throughout the novel Christie is concerned with seeing and with how others will view her and her southern home. In the chapters set at the turn of the century, seeing and spectatorship represent versions of power and knowledge that distinguish Feather Crowns from Mason's earlier novels. The final two sections of the novel, which form a sort of double epilogue, upend the spectator/spectacle relationship of the first five sections, presenting Christie first as a spectator, then as a theorist of spectacle. The act of being viewed and later, viewing, transform the Wheelers into something other than what they were before, not only in the perceptions of those who gaze upon them, but also in how they shape their own lives and identities. Christie works throughout the novel to try to reclaim control over her own identity, first by attempting to shape the spectacle of her family, then by positioning herself as a spectator, and finally by rejecting the roles of both spectacle and spectator, retreating from visibility altogether so that she can, she hopes, better control what is "seen." Significantly, what Christie later identifies as the turning point in her life is not the birth of the babies. Rather, it is the day the train stops for the first time, bringing spectators into her home. She is transformed, not by the event itself, but by the spectacle that rises up around it.

Mason opens the novel with the births of the babies, a scene of utter confusion, and Mason heightens this confusion by focusing on what Christie cannot see. Christie's doctor has attributed the uncommon size of her belly to fibroid tumors; Christie worries that she is carrying a "devil," the embodiment of an earthquake prophesied at the camp revival she attended early in her pregnancy. With the exception of the midwife who is afraid to say, no one expects that Christie will have five babies. In the opening sentences of the novel, Christie hears the train and knows that her husband, James, is waiting for it to pass before he can return with the doctor, but even in her imagination, he is shrouded in the darkness, invisible. As the birth progresses, she is continually shrouded with quilts tied around the bedposts like a tent, blocked from viewing what she hears happening around her. Even her own body is concealed from her, a situation that seems both ominous and protective. While her babies are still in her womb, unseeable, Christie tries to understand the unfamiliar sensations. Having three children already, she knows that what she feels is abnormal, and she is afraid of what might be hidden inside her. She confesses her fear to her sister-in-law as her labor begins, saying, "If I live through this, I don't want you to show me what I've got in here" (21...