Mischief Makers

Escape, empowerment, and liberating energy are primary subjects of much post-Victorian children’s fiction (The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Peter Pan, The Wizard of Oz), while common themes of serious adult fiction are often the opposite: alienation, purposelessness, and existential angst. In children’s stories, protagonists can float the river, fly in the air, and kill the witch, while in serious adult fiction, they often can’t quite decide what to do, or, even when they try, their expected social or gender roles and their perennial human weaknesses may doom them to failure. One could almost prefer children’s or escapist fiction to the annoying serious adult stuff. The best-selling controversial right winger Ayn Rand played with those same ideas—the active vs. the passive and the destructiveness of the passive. Much of the attraction of her work was her idea that there are always a few people who can overcome the weakness within themselves, choose to act, and by doing so rule the world. When I first read Ayn Rand at age sixteen, I thought she was the greatest. Maybe I could be powerful, like John Galt! It was even more fun than children’s fiction.

One can remember significant reading experiences from quite long ago, almost as if they were personal events. I recall, for example, first reading Othello and being frustrated at how suggestible the Moor is to Iago’s lies about Desdemona and how submissive she herself is. Eventually adding insult to murder, Othello claims that it was, after all, his altruistic duty to kill Desdemona, “else she’ll betray more men.” Reading Hamlet, I felt the same frustration with the passivity of both Ophelia and Hamlet. At least I could imagine Hamlet’s mother, Gertrude, to be a plain villain, but while Hamlet dithers and her brother and father are killed, Ophelia can only go helpless and crazy. Whether Shakespeare was a feminist of his day will be forever debated, but there is no question that he was aware of the assumptions about the behavior of men and women and that those assumptions are ripe material for tragic disaster or comic misunderstanding. In many moments in his comedies, he openly plays with the presumed roles of the sexes. In Twelfth Night, for example, the shipwrecked Viola dresses as a young man, Cesario, and ends up in a love triangle in which the bereaved lady Olivia has fallen in love with her. And because Olivia’s suitor, Duke Orsino, imagines Viola to be male, Viola cannot express her love for him.

No matter how limited Shakespeare may have been by his own time and culture, he was certainly playing with broader truths of human life and could hardly avoid some degree of feminism. Perhaps he was more openly interested in the effects of action versus inaction or choice versus uncertainty, a subject he looked at quite often that is also a favorite among Modern authors. “Man is born free but everywhere in chains,” said Rousseau in 1762, and by a century later, this had become an enduring theme in the writing of Kate Chopin, Gustave Flaubert, Anton Chekhov, Franz Kafka, Henry James, Edith Wharton, and many others. This issue’s contents remind me of this classic subject of serious Modern literature: the destructive and the comic potential of passivity and passive malice, of people without purpose or direction causing trouble or at least mischief for themselves and others.

Megan Blankenship’s “No Shadow of Turning”—a first-published story by this emerging writer—is told from two points of view: that of Bonny, the granddaughter of a preacher, and that of her grandfather’s neighbor, an out-of-state transplant to this rural area. It recounts the quiet but grounded faith of the old preacher and the steady hold he gains over both his granddaughter and his neighbor, a hold that deepens after the suicide of one of Bonny’s classmates and former friends. Bonny has long been curious about and naturally attracted to the boy, although she later rejects him. While it is his own inner conflict, not her rejection, that causes him to do what...