by Gail Godwin
RN: Can Justin accept the fact that one of her personalities—or internal characters—is a monster and still be okay?
GG: If Justin can recognize that then she’ll be able to put it in its place. We all have monsters. Justin’s monster is the ability to close down when she feels herself threatened or being turned into something against her will.
RN: Let’s talk about how you set the stage for your stories. In The Finishing School, you have a kind of score. Chopin’s Scherzo in B-flat minor and Franz Schubert’s “Der Doppelgänger” play important parts. How did these pieces come to you?
GG: The most important piece is the one that Julian plays as an all-clear signal. I heard Robert play that, and it’s diabolic. It summons trouble. Also, it’s very hard to play. Above the sound of gathering force, there’s a cascade of relief. I chose it intuitively.
RN: Would you be opposed to the book’s being published with a soundtrack?
GG: It should be. My late editor, Alan Williams, when he called me to talk about The Finishing School, played the Scherzo and then came on to talk. Music can express many things that words cannot. Do you know the story “The Jolly Corner” by Henry James? A man comes back to New York and haunts his family’s town house in order to confront the ghost of who he would have been if he had stayed. James’s description of the climactic moment—the meeting of the two—doesn’t work. The ghost comes downstairs and he’s missing two fingers, which is supposed to represent that he had become a powerful business mogul. Music could have made it work better. For an eerie effect, you could tune violins up one whole tone, for instance.
RN: How have you collaborated with Robert on musical compositions?
GG: We created twelve works together, including operas. Magdalen at the Tomb and Anna Margarita’s Will can be heard through links on my Web site, www.gailgodwin.com.
RN: Transformation is an important theme in your work, and it’s an agonizing process for characters. Why is it so hard for people to realize who they’re supposed to be?
GG: That’s what my new book is about, transformation. The other key word—the heroine’s key word in the book—is usurpation. She has gone through her life resisting usurpation. Other people and forces in her life have been trying to usurp her for their own reasons.
RN: Is that what Ursula was doing with Justin?
GG: Yes. Justin was the perfect blank page. Ursula was the most powerful person in her life when she was fourteen. Justin was almost completely drowned in Ursula’s personality until she knowingly drowned, in a sense, in that pond. Even then, you could say that Justin has been controlled by Ursula because she was repeating Ursula’s betrayal of her mother.
RN: You mark characters’ passages with epiphanies. Do you like that term, “epiphany”?
GG: The term was drummed into me at graduate school. It belongs to James Joyce. “Shock of recognition” is good, but we need to come up with our own term. The quickening moment—I like that. It has to do with the speeding up of the story, as well as bringing things to life. The quickening moment for Justin—when everything comes together and comes to a head—is when she dives into that pond. She is, among other things, asserting her ability to swim. She is also trying to protect Ursula from being discovered with her lover.
RN: Just before Justin goes off and instigates the story’s big event, she witnesses the demolition of her subdivision’s old farmhouse. This leads to her getting angry at her mother for her indifference about this, and that leads to her running off to see the DeVanes. The fall of the farmhouse makes the plot work, but is it also symbolic?
GG: The farmhouse represents the place where Justin could be herself, where she could escape the conformity of her new home. It reminded her of her old home. She had a great need for it. When children who were playing around the farmhouse saw Justin coming, they left the place to her. They recognized a need in her that was so strong, it scared them. It spooked them. The farmhouse is a kind of symbol, but with a good symbol, you never can get to the bottom of it.
RN: There is a lot of humor in your books. Aunt Mona is a hilarious character.
GG: I had one person come up to me once and ask me why I was humorless. I’m not. I’m glad you mention the humor. There are levels of humor, and mine tend to lie in the subtler ranges rather than slapstick. Aunt Mona’s funniness comes from her holding on to certain beliefs and habits with great tenacity, so there’s a strength to her weakness. You see her asserting herself over and over again in predictable ways. You look forward to her comment, for instance, that things would have turned out differently for her if she had had others’ advantages. And the contrast between her own terrible decorating style and her image of herself as someone who can give decorating advice is comical.
RN: That’s right. When Mona warms up to Ursula because of Ursula’s cultural knowledge, she suggests that she and Ursula might become good friends, and that she might give Ursula some decorating tips. It’s very funny.
GG: In the end, though, Aunt Mona is redeemed from being primarily comic. There’s a seriousness in that.
RN: People look at your fiction and see that, for instance, the mother characters in the stories are all very different. Yet, they keep wondering about the autobiographical content. How did The Finishing School come to light for you?
GG: It came out of Robert’s and my experience of living in a 250-year-old Dutch farmhouse when we first lived together in 1973. We were not only thrilled by it, but spooked by it. That whole landscape was waiting to be put into a book. For a long time, I had had the idea of an older sister living with her brother in an old house, and a young woman would get involved. At first, my idea for the story had been melodramatic. The girl would be pregnant and the brother and sister would take her in because they wanted a child. They would have researched bee stings in order to figure out how to get rid of the girl. The other thing that inspired me was hearing Robert play the piano. You could hear him playing in the house when you were on the terrace. I once discussed with Robert the possibility of composing a piece for eleven cellos so that we could hear weird music coming out of the house.
RN: How did you come up with some of the characters’ names? Jem is the name of the boy in To Kill a Mockingbird, and “Cristiana” suggests Christ, which contrasts with Abel Cristiana’s personality.
GG: Jem’s short for Jeremy. It’s a good Southern name. I have a feeling that the name Jem had floated into my subconscious from To Kill a Mockingbird. Perhaps I was trying to give a little homage. Cristiana is a real big name around here—a Huguenot name—and I love it.
RN: Does the cover of the 1999 paperback edition of The Finishing School accurately portray the hut and pond scenario? How does it compare to this one?
GG: This new cover is even better. For the previous edition, I had sent a photo of Mohonk for the artist to use. There was no hut in the photo—that was added. This new cover is simply gorgeous, truly strange. You see a window of a hut and you look through it. You then see a vast expanse of field, and you realize that you’re not looking out from the inside of the hut, but you’re looking in from the outside as if into a vision of a vaster life. It relates to putting yourself in another person’s place.
READING GROUP QUESTIONS AND
TOPICS FOR DISCUSSION
1. The Finishing School begins, “Last night I dreamed of Ursula DeVane,” which is reminiscent of the beginning of Daphne du Maurier’s novel Rebecca: “Last night I dreamed of Manderley.” Is a dream a good starting point for a story? Imagine one of your own dreams. How would you develop it? How does Godwin proceed? (I count nine different tacks she takes in the first six pages before preparing herself for the mantra “Fourteen. Be fourteen again.”)
2. On this page, the narrator admits, “I won’t hire a detective to go in search of a real seventy-year old woman … But I will attend to what her image, playing its role in last night’s dream, came to tell me.” She then refers to the theater of her unconscious, “where each figure—based wholly or i
n part on some real person—has its function.” This is a good time to consider Godwin’s cast of characters, chosen for their special roles and symbolic weight. Can you imagine any characters with whom Justin might have engaged but whom Godwin weeded out? Are there any characters she included whom she could have left out?
3. When Aunt Mona dives to pick up a piece of food that Jem, Justin’s brother, had dropped at dinner, Justin gives her mother a look to distinguish “Our Way of Life” from “Theirs.” You can gain insight into the way of life represented in a novel’s universe by asking yourself what the book or its characters have to say about a variety of key topics: religion, politics, the arts and literature, mass media, social class, race, gender, aging, the natural world, human nature, sex, current events, community, crime and punishment, etc.
4. Adolescents do not write many great novels, so we have to trust adults to create adolescent states of mind retrospectively. How accurately does Godwin do it? What aspects of adolescence would an accurate portrait include? How is Justin the same as and different from other adolescents? Review Justin’s awareness of and involvement with sexuality, starting with the Cristiana poltroon farm. How many other adolescents are there in the novel (include the young Ursula!), and how do they fill out the picture?
5. When Justin receives her grandmother’s pearl necklace, initiating her into womanhood, she muses, “There was a lonely, mysterious side of myself I was just beginning to know, a side neither masculine nor feminine but quivering with intimations of mental and spiritual things.” Does the focus on sex stunt other developmental needs in teenagers?
6. There are some good passages for studying the nature of Justin’s confusion. On this page, you read that Justin goes up to the old farmhouse and paints an Ursula-like figure whom she then consults as an oracle. Upon returning home and being swallowed by circumstances there, her painted figure begins to look like one of the mindless milkmaids on her wallpaper—her newly forming self, she thinks. Can a person see his or her fate? How clearly does Justin do so?
7. Also, look at this page. Justin senses the magic of her visit to the DeVanes draining from her as Aunt Mona defends her. How many people are fighting for Justin’s allegiance? Who is Justin if she is not any of the people others think she is? On this page, Justin thinks she might be a monster manipulating others in order to get her mother to move back to Virginia. Could she be a monster? Where does her goodness lie? This is a question that the grown-up Justin asks on this page as she looks back at her fourteen-year-old self. Why does she say, at this point, that she needs to go back and claim the girl she had been?
8. Make a list of the music cited in the novel, get the recordings, and play them. How do they affect your experience of reading and remembering the novel, if at all?
9. Satire lovers, how much satire can you take? How much satire is there in The Finishing School? Does it serve its role well? Would you want more? If there were more, how would that change the novel? Can you think of a novel that has a lot more satire in it? What is that novel missing that The Finishing School has. Look at the first instance of satire in The Finishing School, on this page through this page. (Also, see other satiric passages on this page, this page-this page, this page-this page, this page, and this page-this page.) Notice how Godwin introduces Aunt Mona’s household—with a seemingly banal conversation that, nonetheless, introduces a lot of information and thematic notes.
10. We know that when Godwin introduces a subplot or anecdote, it has a double edge. For example, late in the book, Ursula makes Justin question the admirability of her grandfather’s statement about his wife—“the only woman … who would behave exactly the same way if nobody were looking.” Note the subplots in the novel and puzzle over their double meaning. You can start with the story of how Justin’s mother had eloped (this page-this page).
11. If you were to write a story in the manner of Gail Godwin, what would be the features you would include? In the preceding interview, Godwin says that one of her major motivations for writing is to understand what goes on in others’ minds. In what ways is empathy an active attribute of Godwin’s characters as well as of herself as narrator?
12. How do characters who are good at empathy fare and how do ones who are not? Look at Aunt Mona and the wallpaper and curtains she puts in Justin’s room as an act of empathy. Look at Justin’s mother and judge whether she is indeed to be condemned for not knowing her daughter’s mind. Look at Ursula and her uses of empathy. Rate characters on their levels of empathy. See if you agree with your fellow readers.
13. In representing characters’ states of mind, Godwin does not stick to linear narrative. How would you represent a character’s mental activity? (Try tracking your own.) Find a passage in which Godwin uses flashbacks, reflections, wishes, and actions to dramatize a character. Do you find this exciting? Pleasing? If you take out everything but the drama, with what do you end up, greater or lesser suspense?
14. Justin moves from a Virginia town to an upstate New York one. Godwin lives in New York State, but grew up in the South. Is she a Southern writer? Does her writing have Southern qualities, or does she represent the South in her work? (See this page.)
15. How would you interpret the dream about the magician and the grass-overgrown house on this page?
16. Look at a passage of dialogue—this page through this page, for instance. What are the dynamics? Godwin lets you examine how people jockey for position through their conversation, no matter how light it is. How do they do so in this passage? Justin’s mother tells the story about Justin’s experience at a riding stable. The owner advises Justin to let the horse know who’s boss, and Justin replies, “Oh, he already knows, sir.” As with horses, so with people, no?
17. Somehow, you’re going to have to deal with the character of Abel Cristiana. Try to remember as many things as you can about him. Is he a bully? (See this page.) Why is Ursula attracted to him? What do you make of his World War II experiences (this page)?
18. Godwin says that she keeps track of her characters so that no major character ends up sitting offstage too long. After a while, a character has to assert him- or herself. When and how does Justin’s mother assert herself? Does she assert herself enough? See Chapter IV, for instance.
19. Would you call The Finishing School a symbolic novel? For instance, there are the birthday presents Justin gets—the blue bottle (from Ursula) and her grandmother’s pearl necklace (from her mother). These are intentionally symbolic items. What about dream symbolism? Finally, what about the symbolism of actual things, such as the demolished farmhouse and the murky pond? Don’t be literary, be real. Does symbolism have an effect on people’s lives?
20. What’s the deal with Ursula’s first lover, the European with the same family name? Does the DeVane family have a condition, inflicted by history? What does Justin mean, on this page, when she says that dining with the DeVanes was like “being abducted into a community of ghosts”? How does this aspect of the story compare to Edgar Allan Poe’s “Fall of the House of Usher”?
21. Mr. Mott, as a character, comes to life late in the book. Did you dismiss him as an uninteresting character at first? Do you believe that any character—or person—can make an interesting subject for a story? What might be interesting about Joan Dibble?
22. Chapter VII is a good chapter to look at to see how Godwin uses foreshadowing (see this page and this page). Grown-up Justin returns to the scene of the “crime” and gives hints about things to come. Why does Godwin leave the big revelation until the end—for just dramatic reasons? Is it so terrible that Justin can’t admit it? What might be the parts that Justin can’t bring herself to admit?
23. Have you ever known a brilliantly manipulative person? What techniques did he or she use? Does Ursula use those tricks? Can you be attracted to such a person and hold your own?
24. Writing experts say that the most important element in a story is voice, and that the most important element in voice is authority. You’ve got to believ
e and trust your main speaker. But what if there is more than one main speaker? Do any voices compete with Justin’s for authority? What other voices made an impression on you in The Finishing School? Ursula takes over the first-person voice for a good portion of Chapter IX and Chapter X. How would it be if she had narrated the novel? Where do you think she ended up?
25. Do you agree with Ursula’s need for perpetual youth and her motto, “As long as you yearn, you can’t congeal”?
26. On this page, Ursula confesses to Justin that her mother haunts her and she feels condemned to relive her mother’s life. Is this a common condition, being haunted and falling into a fateful pattern? Can you see it in yourself? Does The Finishing School give us warnings about what may happen to us, or models on how people break away from such influences?
27. Does Godwin draw special significance from the double meaning of the word “finishing” in “the finishing school”?
28. Starting on this page, when Justin considers how she might have responded differently than she did to Julian’s despairing talk, do you see any paths for her other than the one that the plot (fate?) requires?
To the Ursulas of this world,
whoever they were—or weren’t.
Also by Gail Godwin
FICTION
Evenings at Five: A Novel and Five Stories
Evensong
The Good Husband
Father Melancholy’s Daughter
A Southern Family
Mr. Bedford and the Muses (short stories)
A Mother and Two Daughters
Violet Clay
Dream Children (short stories)
The Odd Woman
Glass People
The Perfectionists
NONFICTION
Heart: A Natural History of the Heart-Filled Life