Bellefleur by Joyce Carol Oates
"Bellefleur" by Joyce Carol Oates is a sweeping narrative that traces the tumultuous history of the Bellefleur family, beginning with the patriarch Jean Pierre Bellefleur, who emigrates from France to the Lake Noir region in the mid-1700s. Known for his vices of drinking and gambling, Jean Pierre's controversial lifestyle leads to his impeachment from Congress due to scandal and corruption. The story unfolds through generations, highlighting themes of familial conflict, ambition, and violence.
Jean Pierre's son, Louis, continues the family's legacy, while his brother Jedediah retreats into the mountains, becoming a hermit consumed by religious zeal. The family's fortunes decline dramatically after a violent raid, leaving Jedediah to marry the surviving member, Germaine, and attempt to revive the family name. As the narrative progresses, later generations grapple with the weight of their ancestry, with characters like Gideon and Leah Bellefleur embodying both beauty and extremes of ambition, leading to personal and familial downfall.
The novel culminates in a tragic climax when Gideon crashes a plane into Bellefleur Manor, symbolizing the destructive forces that have long plagued the family. Throughout, Oates weaves a rich tapestry that explores complex relationships, the pursuit of power, and the dark legacies that shape individual destinies, making "Bellefleur" a compelling exploration of American gothic themes.
On this Page
Bellefleur by Joyce Carol Oates
First published: 1980
Type of work: Novel
Type of plot: Gothic
Time of plot: Mid-sixteenth to late twentieth centuries
Locale: Upstate New York
Principal characters
Jean Pierre Bellefleur , the American founder of the Bellefleur familyLouis andJedediah , his sonsRaphael , Jedediah’s sonGideon , Jedediah’s great-great-grandsonLeah , Gideon’s first cousin and wifeGermaine , daughter of Leah and Gideon
The Story:
Jean Pierre Bellefleur, banished from his native France and cast out by his father, a duke, settles in the Lake Noir region of the United States in the mid-1700’s and becomes a powerful force in the area. Notorious for his drinking, gambling, and shady business deals, Jean Pierre is impeached from Congress during his second term for scandal and corruption. When his wife, Hilda, flees his house, to the neighbors’ horror, he brings an Onondagan Indian woman, Antoinette, to live with him.
His son Louis marries Germaine O’Hagan, a local woman, and has three children with her. Louis’s family lives with Jean Pierre, and Louis participates in the family businesses with a disregard for the law that equals that of his father.
Jedediah Bellefleur, the less business-minded son, goes off to live in the nearby mountains to prove to himself that he can survive there for a year. The years begin to multiply, and Jedediah does not return. He becomes a hermit, religiously zealous, suspicious of the occasional trappers and hunters he encounters on the mountain, and paranoid that his family will have him forcibly removed back to their home. His mission is to see the face of God.
After nineteen years on the mountain, Jedediah is persuaded to return to his family home; Jean Pierre, Louis, Antoinette, and Louis’s children were brutally murdered by vengeful neighbors. Only Germaine survived the midnight raid on the family home. In order to keep the family name alive, Jedediah marries Germaine and they have three children, including Raphael, who dedicates himself to building the family fame and fortune.
In addition to running for governor and losing three times, helping to found the Republican Party in the area, and creating a hops empire from nothing, Raphael builds Bellefleur Manor, a mammoth, Gothic castle that dominates the landscape in the Lake Noir region. There Raphael entertains numerous politicians, including senators, Supreme Court justices, a vice president, and dignitaries from overseas. He claims that he offered refuge to Abraham Lincoln at the manor when Lincoln, depressed and anxiety-ridden, according to Raphael, hired an actor and staged his own murder. Raphael is best known for having a provision in his will that he be skinned upon his death. He orders that the skin be stretched over a Civil War cavalry drum, that the drum forever reside in the Great Hall of Bellefleur Manor, and that it be “sounded each day to announce meals, the arrival of guests, and other special events.” The drum mainly is used by the Bellefleur children to scare each other and unsuspecting friends.
Subsequent generations of Bellefleurs are punctuated by such members of the family as Jean Pierre II, who is convicted of murdering eleven people in an area tavern; Hiram, an irrepressible sleepwalker; and Vernon, a poet; but most prominent are Gideon and Leah Bellefleur, who live in the twentieth century.
Gideon and Leah are first cousins who marry and have three children. They are beautiful, powerful, and extreme. Anything Gideon drives—a car, a horse, a plane—he drives fast. He races for high stakes and always wins. Leah takes in and tames strays: a large, ferocious cat; a child; a baby that she forcibly removes from its own mother’s care; a dwarf. Her children believe she has the power of foresight. After a lengthy and inactive pregnancy with her third child, she sets about to restore the Bellefleur fortune, which is a bit depleted, to its previous glory. For luck and inspiration in her business deals, Leah brings along her daughter Germaine, whom she believes has power of her own. Germaine is a quiet, precocious child who had been born with an extra torso and set of legs growing from her abdomen. These had been promptly cut off by her grandmother, but Germaine is characterized by a sadness that may have resulted from a sense of loss over the part of herself that was removed or may have resulted from the burden of knowing ahead of time what will happen to family members.
As Leah pursues her business interests and is away from home frequently, her relationship with Gideon, which once had been as passionate as all other aspects of their lives, begins to sour. He has numerous affairs with tawdry, uneducated women, the antitheses of Leah, and eventually becomes obsessed with flying planes. Leah has a number of affairs of her own, which she uses as a means to get business accomplished. They only bother to fight over the affections of Germaine, each claiming to be a more devoted parent to her than the other.
In an act that nullifies not only the accumulating successes of Leah’s business ventures but also Bellefleur Manor and all but a few members of the family, Gideon crashes a plane loaded with explosives into the manor. Only Germaine, whom Gideon safely deposited with a distant aunt, and the Bellefleurs, who long since fled the manor and never returned, are spared.
Bibliography
Bender, Eileen T. “History as Woman’s Game: ’Bellefleur’ as Texte de Jouissance.” Soundings: An Interdisciplinary Journal 76, nos. 2/3 (Summer/Fall, 1993): 369-381. Argues that “unshapely, fueled by waves of ungratified desire, Bellefleur is an audacious and revisionary model of historical fiction.”
Cologne-Brookes, Gavin. Dark Eyes on America: The Novels of Joyce Carol Oates. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2005. Traces the evolution of Oates’s novels, demonstrating how she moved from abstract introspection to a more pragmatic concern with understanding personal and social problems and possibilities.
Creighton, Joanne V. Joyce Carol Oates: Novels of the Middle Years. New York: Twayne, 1992. A critical analysis of Oates’s novels and essays published between 1977 and 1990. Calls Bellefleur Oates’s “most impressive reworking” of the nineteenth century gothic genre.
Daly, Brenda. Lavish Self-Divisions: The Novels of Joyce Carol Oates. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1996. Traces the development of Oates’s female characters from father-identified daughters in the 1960’s to self-identified women in the 1980’s.
Johnson, Greg. Invisible Writer: A Biography of Joyce Carol Oates. New York: Dutton, 1998. Johnson recounts the events of Oates’s life and describes how she transforms them in her fiction.
Nodelman, Perry. “The Sense of Unending: Joyce Carol Oates’s Bellefleur as an Experiment in Feminine Storytelling.” In Breaking the Sequence: Women’s Experimental Fiction, edited by Ellen G. Friedman and Miriam Fuchs. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1989. Argues that Bellefleur, in its nonchronological approach to storytelling, is especially feminine in its experimentation because it transcends “the limitations of both conventional and conventionally innovative forms of fiction” represented by the traditional narrative form of conflict, crisis, and resolution.
Oates, Joyce Carol. The Faith of a Writer: Life, Craft, Art. New York: Ecco, 2003. Reprints twelve essays and an interview in which Oates discusses the writing life.
‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Joyce Carol Oates: Conversations, 1970-2006. Edited by Greg Johnson. New York: W. W. Norton, 2006. In this collection of reprinted interviews, Oates discusses literature, her work, and her life.
‗‗‗‗‗‗‗.(Woman) Writer: Occasions and Opportunities. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1988. A collection of Oates’s own musings on writing and the woman writer. Contains the preface to Bellefleur, in which Oates discusses the classification of the novel as gothic and reveals the one image from which the novel grew.