It took several years for me to acquire the voice, the rhythm, the tone of Bellefleur. Before I finally began writing it I had acquired more than one thousand pages of notes—some of them mere scraps of paper, some fairly complete dramatic scenes that would emerge, in the novel’s narrative, without many changes. It became the most demanding and the most mesmerizing novel I have written. Though I came to think of it as the months passed as my “vampire novel”—for it seemed that it was draining me of vitality in ways I could not control—I passed through a spell of what might be called acute homesickness after completing it, and feel rather melancholy now, at times, when I think of Bellefleur—the landscape, the castle, the people whom I came to love in odd surprising ways.
The imaginative construction of a “Gothic” novel involves the systematic transposition of realistic psychological and emotional experiences into “Gothic” elements. We all experience mirrors that distort, we all age at different speeds, we have known people who want to suck our life’s blood from us, like vampires; we feel haunted by the dead—if not precisely by the dead then by thoughts of them. We are forced at certain alarming periods in our lives not only to discover that other people are mysterious—and will remain mysterious—but that we ourselves, our motives, our passions, even our logic, are profoundly mysterious. And we sense ourselves accursed at times; and then again blessed; singled out, in any case, for what feels like a special destiny. We are superstitious when events—usually coincidences—argue that “superstition” may be a way of grasping an essentially chaotic world. All these factors the novelist who wants to write an “experimental Gothic” will transpose into Gothic terms. If Gothicism has the power to move us (and it certainly has the power to fascinate the novelist) it is only because its roots are in psychological realism. Much of Bellefleur is a diary of my own life, and the lives of people I have known. It must be significant that my father, Frederick Oates, as a young man, succumbed to the lure of flying, and took me up innumerable times in small planes; it must be significant that my mother, Caroline, was, like Leah, a very young mother whom I can remember as young—only a girl, really. But “Gideon” and “Leah” are by no means modeled on my parents.
Bellefleur is more than a Gothic, of course, and it would be disingenuous of me to suggest otherwise. It is also a critique of America; but it is in the service of a vision of America that stresses, for all its pessimism, the ultimate freedom of the individual. One by one the Bellefleur children free themselves of their family’s curse (or blessing); one by one they disappear into America, to define themselves for themselves. The castle is destroyed, the Bellefleur children live. Theirs is the privilege of youth; and the “America” of my imagination, despite the incursions of recent decades, is a nation still characterized by youth. Our past may weigh heavily upon us but it cannot contain us, let alone shape our future. America is a tale still being told—in many voices—and nowhere near its conclusion.
[Originally published in 1980 in The First Edition Society edition of Bellefleur.]
About the Author
Joyce Carol Oates is a recipient of the National Medal of Humanities, the National Book Critics Circle Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award, the National Book Award, and the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in Short Fiction, and has been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. She has written some of the most enduring fiction of our time, including the national bestsellers We Were the Mulvaneys; Blonde, which was nominated for the National Book Award; and the New York Times bestseller The Falls, which won the 2005 Prix Femina. She is the Roger S. Berlind Distinguished Professor of the Humanities at Princeton University and has been a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters since 1978. In 2003 she received the Common Wealth Award for Distinguished Service in Literature, and in 2006 she received the Chicago Tribune Lifetime Achievement Award.
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Novels by Joyce Carol Oates
With Shuddering Fall (1964)
A Garden of Earthly Delights (1967)
Expensive People (1968)
them (1969)
Wonderland (1971)
Do with Me What You Will (1973)
The Assassins (1975)
Childwold (1976)
Son of the Morning (1978)
Unholy Loves (1979)
Bellefleur (1980)
Angel of Light (1981)
A Bloodsmoor Romance (1982)
Mysteries of Winterthurn (1984)
Solstice (1985)
Marya: A Life (1986)
You Must Remember This (1987)
American Appetites (1989)
Because It Is Bitter, and Because It Is My Heart (1990)
Black Water (1992)
Foxfire: Confessions of a Girl Gang (1993)
What I Lived For (1994)
Zombie (1995)
We Were the Mulvaneys (1996)
Man Crazy (1997)
My Heart Laid Bare (1998)
Broke Heart Blues (1999)
Blonde (2000)
Middle Age: A Romance (2001)
I’ll Take You There (2002)
The Tattooed Girl (2003)
The Falls (2004)
Missing Mom (2005)
Black Girl / White Girl (2006)
The Gravedigger’s Daughter (2007)
My Sister, My Love (2008)
Little Bird of Heaven (2009)
Mudwoman (2012)
The Accursed (2013)
Copyright
BELLEFLEUR. Copyright © 1980 by Joyce Carol Oates, Inc. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
FIRST ECCO PAPERBACK EDITION 2013
ISBN 978-0-06-226916-4
EPub Edition JULY 2013 ISBN: 9780062269171
13 14 15 16 17 DIX/RRD 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
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