“A Garden of Earthly Delights”: Tour de force

“A Garden of Earthly Delights” by Joyce Carol Oates is an engrossing novel by one of America’s most esteemed authors. The story centers on Clara Walpole who is born into a family of dispossessed farm workers during the era of America’s Great Depression and follows her from her insecure and deprived childhood to her old age.

It is divided into three sections, “Carleton,” “Lowry,” and “Swan,” representing three primary men in Clara’s life, her father, lover, and son, respectively.

When the novel begins, Clara’s father, Carleton Walpole has lost his own small farm and, with it, any sense of security and confidence about his place in the world. Oates’ prose is sensitive and evocative when it describes his feelings: “It was like the earth turning to sand and falling away beneath your feet, something dazzling and clamorous. You could get your balance back but you could never get used to it because nothing was the way it should be.”

Along with his wife and those children of his growing family who are old enough to pick berries, Carleton must do the itinerant work of a migrant farm laborer.

Still Carleton clings desperately and pitifully to the belief that he is better than those who “ain’t from anywhere” “because his family owned land and were farmers and he was about ready to go back there himself.” However, his plans to recover his place as a farmer remain amorphous and the knowledge that there is, realistically, no way for him to do so constantly gnaws at him.

“Garden” is written in the naturalistic tradition of Steinbeck and Dreiser. Carleton Walpole’s life has been shaped or, more accurately, mis-shaped, by forces he cannot comprehend; he is effectively cut off from control over his own future and that of his family. Frustration and confusion lead him to strike out in an act of utterly senseless act of violence against a fellow migrant and friend.

As a young girl, Clara learns about stealing from her best friend and resolves to prove that she can do it to. Her choice of target is utterly unconscious on her part but heavily symbolic on the author’s: an American flag.

Clara, who “thought that ‘Russia’ was a lovely word, with its soft, hissing sound; it might be a special kind of material for a dress, something expensive, or a creamy, rich, expensive food,” hangs her stolen American flag out of the window of her family’s shanty. Oates writes, “Clara always put [the flag] out, good weather or bad. This flag was not like the flags she saw flying at the tops of big buildings or in miniature on cars, whipping furiously in the air. Those flags stood for something abstract and hard to understand. Clara’s flag stood for something simple.”

Oates writes potently of the degradations of poverty. Carleton Walpole’s teenaged daughter Clara has just met Lowry, a man who resembles her father and will eventually become her boyfriend.

“You are dirty. Look at this.” He rubbed her wrist and tiny rolls of dirty appeared. Clara stared. . . . “Your hair too,” he said. “You should wash your hair.”
“My hair’s nice!”
“It['s] nice but it’s dirty. You’re from that fruit pickers’ place, aren’t you?”
“People always say my hair’s nice,” Clara sobbed. She looked up at him as if waiting for him to say something different, something that would show he had only been joking. “Other people think I’m pretty — ”
He parted her hair with his fingers and bent near. He thinks I have lice, Clara thought. She felt sick.

Clara is unschooled and she grows into young womanhood barely literate. However, she has a survivor’s determination to get along in the world. When she realizes that Lowry cannot bring her into the classic American dream of economic security, she casts her net elsewhere.

Her catch is an older, wealthy farmer named Curt Revere. His very masculine-sounding name is, of course, heavily symbolic, connoting both the respect accorded to him because of his station in life, while he can be abrupt or “Curt,” and Clara’s hopes that he will be her rescuer.

Significantly, no chapter bears his name. For Clara, he is a means to an end.

In an early exchange between Clara and Revere, Oates makes a point about the poor young woman’s sensitivity to her place in American society. Guessing at the pale, fair-haired young woman’s ethnic background, Revere calls her “Swedish” and is corrected: “‘I ain’t Swedish,’ Clara said suspiciously. ‘I’m American.’”

Clara believes that she is seizing control of her destiny and that of her (and Lowry’s) to-be-born child when she allows herself to be seduced by Revere: “All her life she would be able to say: Today she changed the way her life was going and it was no accident. No accident.”

However, there is a pitfall since Revere is married. Her life as his mistress brings her economic comfort but not respectability. She settles easily into life supported by an affluent man: an unmarried housewife, she spends her time puttering around the home in which he has placed her. She is isolated because people in the 1930s and ‘40s did not want to associate with a “kept woman.”

When her son is born, Clara puts “Steven” on his birth certificate but calls him “Swan,” a name symbolic of beauty, fragility, and sensitivity.

“A Garden of Earthly Delights” follows Clara’s attempts to rise into respectability and Swan’s upbringing in an atmosphere of material affluence beset by emotional and social confusion. It is a story of love and violence, of aspirations achieved and shockingly dashed.

This novel should be read. It is a page-turner with an exquisite literary sensibility and awesome psychological and social depth.