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57 3 Saul Bellow and the Absent Woman Syndrome: Traces of India in “Leaving the Yellow House” Michael Austin With increasing frequency, scholars are approaching Saul Bellow’s texts with an eye on his female protagonists. While the vast majority of these critics focus on the inadequacy of Bellow’s portrayal of women and the out-and-out misogyny evidenced in his male-female relationships, a few have tried to salvage something of the author’s reputation by locating strong female characters in scattered Bellow texts and attempting to read these characters as rare examples of Bellow’s ability to portray female characters with both sympathy and intelligence. With the publication of A Theft in 1989, Bellow critics were presented with a bona fide female Bellow heroine, someone who could serve as a focal point for debate over Bellow’s inability to create positive female protagonists. Though A Theft represents Bellow’s first novel-length treatment of a female heroine, it is not his first attempt to tell a woman’s story. Bellow’s 1958 short story “Leaving the Yellow House,” written three decades before the publication of A Theft, presents the story of Hattie Waggoner, an aging desert dweller whose only tangible possession, her Yellow House, becomes the focal point of what some have called a typically Bellovian quest for meaning and identity. The scholarly debate over “Leaving the Yellow House” has tended to focus on whether or not Hattie Waggoner should be considered a female forerunner of such prominent male protagonists as Tommy Wilhelm and Moses Herzog. Noriko M. Lippit, in affirming the proposition, insists that Hattie constitutes a partial rebuttal to Charles Newman’s charge that “there is not a single woman in all of Saul Bellow’s work whose active search for 58 Michael Austin identity is viewed compassionately.”1 “While I agree, in the final analysis, with Mr. Newman’s remark,” Lippit writes, “I believe that Bellow’s ‘Leaving the Yellow House’ (1958) provides an exception; Hattie . . . is a female searcher.”2 In a later article, Constance rooke insists that Hattie’s quest for identity cannot be viewed as on par with that of other Bellow heroes because the author stops drastically short of granting Hattie “the full status of ‘sympathetic intellectual’ that he grants to male protagonists: Hattie Waggoner is not a typical Bellow protagonist. While Bellow can grant Hattie certain of the characteristics which he has parceled out from his own riches for the male protagonists, and can accord her the sympathy which is due to her participation in such qualities, he is obliged because she is a woman to withhold the Bellowesque sine qua non of a genuine intellectual life. He cannot in a single leap make of her a woman, a sympathetic character, and an intellectual.”3 Both Lippit and rooke ask the same important question: Does “Leaving the Yellow House” present a substantial portrait of a female character searching for meaning and identity—one that would allow us to acknowledge Hattie Waggoner as the one female star in Bellow’s constellation of quest heroes? On an even more basic level, though, both scholars ask us to consider how we should read Bellow’s fiction within a critical environment that values gender equality and rejects the long tradition of sexism in literature . Can Bellow’s reputation as a misogynist be rehabilitated by examining a story like “Leaving the Yellow House,” or does this story confirm, from yet another perspective, Bellow’s reluctance or inability to portray women in a subject position? While these are precisely the questions that concern me in this article, I propose to approach them from a slightly different perspective. Instead of looking only at Hattie Waggoner and her “active search for identity,” I would like to consider Hattie in relation to the character I consider to be a second protagonist in the story—India (no last name given), the mysterious woman who brought Hattie into her house as a maidservant and subsequently left her the Yellow House in her will. Approaching “Leaving the Yellow House” from India’s perspective presents certain challenges: she has been dead for years when the story begins, she is mentioned only a few times in the text, and what mention we do have of her comes entirely through Hattie’s confused and unreliable memory. Nevertheless, given what we do know about India, I would argue that she exerts a tremendous influence over the way [3.149.230.44] Project MUSE (2024-04...

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