In the Autumn of the Year by Joyce Carol Oates
"In the Autumn of the Year" is a poignant short story by Joyce Carol Oates that delves into the complexities of memory, regret, and the passage of time. The narrative centers on Eleanor Gerhardt, a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet who reflects on her past during a visit to a small New England college to receive an award. At sixty-three, Eleanor grapples with her identity as a lifelong spinster, haunted by her youthful romance with Edwin Höller, the father of Benjamin, her host. The story examines a fraught encounter between Eleanor and Benjamin, as he confronts her about the emotional scars left by their past relationships, revealing his anger towards her and the pain endured in his childhood.
The juxtaposition of Eleanor’s memories and her present reality creates a rich emotional landscape, illustrating her struggle between nostalgia and the harsh truths of her past. As Benjamin challenges her romanticized recollections, Eleanor is forced to confront her own guilt and the impact of her choices. The climax of the story underscores themes of self-awareness and the importance of reckoning with one’s history, ultimately leading Eleanor toward a path of acceptance and responsibility for her life. This exploration of emotional dislocation and the search for meaning in the autumn of one's life resonates with readers, inviting reflection on the nature of relationships and the legacies we leave behind.
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In the Autumn of the Year by Joyce Carol Oates
Excerpted from an article in Magill’s Survey of American Literature, Revised Edition
First published: 1978 (collected in A Sentimental Education, 1980)
Type of work: Short story
The Work
“In the Autumn of the Year” received an O. Henry Award in 1979, a year after its first publication in The Bennington Review. Like many of Oates’s stories, it tells of a single but important encounter between a man and a woman from different backgrounds and with different attitudes.
The protaonist, Eleanor Gerhardt, is a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, an articulate spinster suggestive of the nineteenth century American poet Emily Dickinson, who has come to a small New England college to accept an award. Her host for the visit is Benjamin Höller, a man she knew as a boy in Boston, because at the time she was his father’s mistress. Eleanor, now sixty-three years old, lives life with a sense of its near-completion. She lives in the past and no longer considers herself an active, feeling woman. Never married, her passion for Edwin Höller and the dramatic dissolution of their relationship form a memory that she sustains, though she has not seen him in decades and he is now dead. Upon meeting Benjamin and throughout her visit in his midst, her consciousness shifts back and forth from the uneventful present to the tumultuous and deeply felt past.
Then, in a casual meeting after the ceremony, Benjamin and Eleanor start discussing his father. To Eleanor’s surprise, Benjamin expresses accumulated anger and hatred. As he openly confronts her with his father’s cruelty, her own insensitivity, the cheapness of their affair, and their responsibility for the emotional misery of his childhood, her sentimental vision of the past is shattered. She tries impulsively to protest her innocence, but she is shocked and left essentially speechless. Benjamin offers her the love letters and suicide threats that she sent to Edwin upon their separation, but she cannot face them and denies their authenticity. In the end, alone, she tosses the unopened letters in the fire, as if so doing will alleviate her guilt and folly.
Oates uses balance to create powerful emotional dynamics. The juxtaposition of immediate experience and memory communicates the temporal and emotional dislocation with which Eleanor perceives her existence in the “autumn” of her life. Her detached contemplation of seemingly imminent death and the subsequent disposition of her worldly goods contrasts sharply with the suicidal desperation she recalls enduring when Edwin deserted her. The device of remembering a distant past in which she imagined a distant future—now arrived—reinforces the swirling sense of her life.
The second half of the story comes suddenly and unexpectedly, and Benjamin’s brutal honesty plays against the complacent politeness of their earlier encounters. Unbeknown to Eleanor, he provides a missing piece to the puzzle of her life. Without the delusions by which her past drained her present of meaning, she is forced to face the past honestly and, recognizing its mixed qualities, to let go of it. Through this encounter, she can begin to take responsibility for her continued existence and for the long-repressed reality of herself as a woman who is still very much alive and capable of deep feeling.
Bibliography
Bender, Eileen Teper. Joyce Carol Oates: Artist in Residence. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987.
Bloom, Harold, ed. Modern Critical Views: Joyce Carol Oates. New York: Chelsea House, 1987.
Cologne-Brookes, Gavin. Dark Eyes on America: The Novels of Joyce Carol Oates. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2005.
Creighton, Joanne V. Joyce Carol Oates: Novels of the Middle Years. New York: Twayne, 1992.
Daly, Brenda O. Lavish Self-Divisions: The Novels of Joyce Carol Oates. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1996.
Johnson, Greg. Invisible Writer: A Biography of Joyce Carol Oates. New York: Dutton, 1998.
Johnson, Greg. Understanding Joyce Carol Oates. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1987.
Wagner-Martin, Linda, ed. Critical Essays on Joyce Carol Oates. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1979.