Miss Macintosh, My Darling by Marguerite Young

First published: 1965

Type of plot: Stream of consciousness

Time of work: The 1950’s

Locale: New England and the Midwest

Principal Characters:

• Miss Macintosh, an elderly red-headed nursemaid, sensible and forthright, who symbolizes truth and goodness to the narrator, Vera Cartwheel
• Catherine Cartwheel, Vera’s drug-addicted mother, who languishes in an opium paradise
• Mr. Spitzer, devoted companion to Catherine, composer of imaginary music and twin brother to Catherine’s dead lover
• Esther Longtree, a waitress in a Wabash Valley, Indiana, cafe, forever pregnant with phantom babies
• Vera Cartwheel, the narrator, an unwanted child born of a fugitive marriage and raised in a realm of make believe

The Novel

In Miss Macintosh, My Darling, the first and only novel by Marguerite Young, a young woman embarks on a dreamlike voyage through time and memory in search of her darling childhood nursemaid, Miss Macintosh from What Cheer, Iowa, who has disappeared into the ocean, never to be seen again. Finding herself adrift on a sea of delusion and fantasy, the young woman fervently searches for reality only to discover herself drowning in illusion.

The narrator, Vera Cartwheel, has been reared in a baroque New England seaside house. Her mother, Catherine, an opium addict, is confined to her bed and a world of imaginary visitors when Vera is a small child. In her mother’s “horizontal” existence, every object, from chandeliers to medicine bottles, is endowed with life and becomes a welcomed guest along with such notables as Alexander Pope, Lady Mary Montagu, and Lord Byron. Catherine’s only real visitor is Joaquin Spitzer, her lawyer, who is also the twin brother of Peron, her dead lover who committed suicide years before. Having known Catherine in earlier years, Mr. Spitzer silently endures unrequited love, patiently sitting in the shadows of her room waiting for Catherine’s rare moments of coherence.

Miss Macintosh, hired by Mr. Spitzer as a nursemaid when Vera is seven, is a no-nonsense governess and appears to be the only rational person in Vera’s life. She is sensible and common, forthright and normal, and for seven years, she is both nursemaid and teacher. On the night of her fourteenth birthday, Vera enters her nursemaid’s room only to discover that Miss Macintosh’s reality is far stranger than her mother’s opium-induced dream; she is in fact bald, hairless since birth. A surreal scene ensues in which the nursemaid’s true identity manifests itself to Vera. “Where her head should be, there was another moon, cold and dented and shining, seeming to float upon the waves of corrugated darkness. . . .” Standing naked before the child, red wig tossed aside, she is exposed as a fat old spinster with only one breast. It is a surprising metamorphosis and a hideous nightmare for Vera.

During the following month, Vera’s love for Miss MacIntosh grows as she learns the truth of her tormented childhood and her broken engagement to Mr. Titus Bonebreaker, a street preacher from Chicago who, upon the eve of their wedding, finds her deformities so grotesque and repulsive that he decides to flee into the night. Vera’s discovery of love and death coincide when, for no apparent reason. Miss MacIntosh walks into the ocean, leaving scattered on the beach her wig, false breast, eyeglasses, and broken umbrella.

Years later, Vera discovers herself traveling backward in time on a dilapidated old bus with a whiskey guzzling, long-haired bus driver as they head to the Midwest in search of the reality of Miss MacIntosh. As the barren landscape of her soul passes by, she contemplates her fellow passengers, a pregnant girl and her young husband who are acting out fantasies of their own. In a small cafe in Wabash Valley, Vera meets Esther Longtree, a cross-eyed waitress who, having murdered her first-born infant, is cursed with the idea that she is permanently pregnant. After enduring horrifyingly real labors, she delivers imaginary stillborn babies only to find herself pregnant once again. In a rundown hotel, Vera encounters Weed, a Christian hangman who hangs his victims with dignity while at the same time taking pride in carrying out their sentences in a painless manner, and Dr. Justice O’Leary who delivers imaginary women of imaginary babies. She continues to walk a tightrope between sanity and illusion until she meets a stone-deaf man with whom she falls in love, conceives a child, and looks forward to a new life.

Meanwhile, back in New England, Catherine Cartwheel’s shadowy existence in her hallucinogenic, bed-ridden environment comes to an end when she weans herself from opium. Ironically, when she awakens to confront the reality she long ago had abandoned, the interim years slam into her like a roaring train, and she ages quickly. In the end, death does not take a beautiful woman but rather one crippled from her many years in bed. Her skin wrinkles, and her hearing and vision rapidly diminish as she meets a peaceful death with the ever-faithful Mr. Spitzer at her side.

The Characters

In the style of Dylan Thomas, Marguerite Young utilizes dark, brooding characters and situations that are traditional in gothic literary forms. Catherine, the frail sleeping beauty, lies in her mansion by the fog-shrouded sea and calls for her coachman, who appears to her in the form of a skeleton. Such scenes are the mainstays of this lengthy novel. From Cousin Hannah, the mountain-climbing suffragette who dies leaving behind forty trunks, each containing a wedding dress, to Mr. Spitzer, who hears symphonies of unearthly music in his head, each of Young’s characters is a visionary inhabiting the night world of dreamers rather than the daytime world of pursuit and accomplishment. Young delves into the psyche of her characters, testing their nature and making them more complete in their fragmentation than if they were whole. They are all failures, reveling in confusion and profound chaos; all the while, their search for realities that do not fail them feeds their bizarre existence.

A menage of opium-inspired subcharacters runs the gamut from the mischievously funny to the vivid and haunting. Dead stars of silent films, an Egyptian prince, old kings and queens, New England spinsters, dead horses, and Mr. Res Tacamah, a drug bottle with ears, are all nightly visitors to Catherine Cartwheel’s bedroom. Young’s colorful characters, though steeped in symbolism, are homogenous. The common thread that binds them is that they are cohorts in attempting to attain their aspirations amid the consuming effects of reality.

Young’s work features many of the classic elements of the fable as a narrative form. Supernatural occurrences in the form of animals or inanimate objects behaving or speaking as human beings enable the author to weave into the story a moral lesson.

Critical Context

Miss MacIntosh, My Darling took seventeen years to write and, despite its length of 1,198 pages, was initially published in a single volume. Although it sank into relative obscurity with critics of postmodern fiction and has had little literary influence, some critics tout it to be one of the most ambitious literary achievements of the twentieth century, if only for its supreme amassment and the complexity of its characters. One observer summed up the reaction with the comment that “surely one of the most widely unread books ever acclaimed, it has actually been read by comparatively few, by fewer still all the way through.” At its core it is a picaresque journey into the spirit of humankind, a search for lost utopias, and a study of human experience. While her writing is open to interpretation, Young abandons all established rules of strict allegory as she relates Vera’s struggles against the many obstacles that hinder her path to a sure and lasting understanding of the purpose and meaning of life. In this regard, her novel is considered a valid example of experimental fiction. Her evocative style is replete with metaphors, symbolizations, proliferating images, and enumerations of facts that call to mind James Joyce, Herman Melville, or William Faulkner. They also reflect her deep interest in Elizabethean and Jacobean symbols, a subject in which she received her master’s degree from the University of Chicago. Among the writers who influenced Young were the philosophers Saint Augustine, David Hume, and William James.

Marguerite Young was born in Indianapolis, and she attended Indiana University. She began writing poetry at the age of six and became a member of the Authors League at eleven; at twenty, she won first prize in a literary contest conducted by Butler University. Her first collection of poems, Prismatic Ground, was published in 1937, when she was twenty-eight. In 1945, she won a Best Poetry Award for “Moderate Fable” from the National Academy of Arts and Letters, the same year “Angel in the Forest,” her critically acclaimed account of utopian societies in New Harmony, Indiana, was published. She was awarded an American Association of University Women grant in 1943, a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1948, a Newberry Library fellowship in 1951, and a Rockefeller fellowship in 1954. At the time of her death, Young’s Harp Song for a Radical, a massive biography of Eugene Debs, remained unpublished.

Bibliography

Edelstein, J. M. “Miss MacIntosh, Her Darling.” The New Republic 153, no. 14: 28-29. Edelstein’s critical assessment of Miss MacIntosh, My Darling asserts what is real versus what is a dream to be the central question and theme in a novel rooted in a grand assembly of words, characters, and situations. He asserts the obscure patterns of the narrative act as an impediment to the overall artistic expression.

Goyen, William. “A Fable of Illusion and Reality.” The New York Times Book Review, September 12, 1965, p.5. Goyen views Young’s abundance of descriptive passages and method of relentlessly examining her complex characters as literary devices intended to drive the theme of the novel. He sees the obsessive probing as a technique to turn the interiors of her characters outward so that their terrible natures can be exposed.

Hicks, Granville. “Adrift on a Sea of Dreams.” Literary Horizons, September 11, 1965, 35-36. According to Hicks, Young’s elaborate use of recurring symbols demonstrates her imaginative power and conscientious craftsmanship. He lauds her poetic style and hypnotic use of language to relate the hallucinatory episodes. However, he finds fault in the novel’s lack of fixed points of reference to draw distinctions between the characters and thus eliminate confusion as to whose dream belongs to whom.

Shaviro, Steven. “Lost Chords and Interrupted Births: Marguerite Young’s Exhorbitant Vision” Contemporary Fiction, Vol. XXXI, No. 3 (Spring, 1990): 213-222. In this thorough essay, Shaviro discusses the thematic and complex style of Miss MacIntosh, My Darling, suggesting that one sign of the novel’s uniqueness and strength is the refusal of the text to conform to the usual paradigms of either modernism or postmodernism.

Thomas, Robert McG., Jr. “Marguerite Young, 87, Author and Icon, Dies.” The New York Times, November 20, 1995, p. B11. This obituary provides a concise profile of the author’s life along with commentary on the reception Miss MacIntosh, My Darling received from the literary community. In addition, it relates several of her formative experiences, eccentric behaviors, and relationships with other notable literary figures such as Gertrude Stein and Thornton Wilder, which later provided grist for her work.