The Keepers of the House by Shirley Ann Grau

First published: 1964

Type of plot: Mythic chronicle

Time of work: The 1960’s, with frequent references to earlier generations and times

Locale: Mississippi and its environs

Principal Characters:

• Abigail Howland Tolliver, the protagonist, a Southern woman who tries to understand and integrate the pieces of her life and heritage
• William Howland, her grandfather and surrogate father
• Margaret Howland, his mulatto mistress and second wife
• Robert,
• Nina, and
• Chrissy, William and Margaret’s quadroon children
• John Tolliver, Abigail’s husband

The Novel

The Keepers of the House is a compelling narrative about three generations of the Howland family and their relationships to their house and community. The story exists on several levels. On one level, it is a historical account that attempts to explain why a group of Southern men set fire to the Howland barn, threatening not only the house but also its keepers. Looked at another way, the novel is a mythic romance that recounts a love story enacted in a fallen Eden, corrupted before the players come onstage. Still another level focuses on a woman who must learn how to manage threatening forces in a way that will not destroy both the attackers and the attacked in a modern apocalypse, when, as prophesied in Ecclesiastes 12:7, the dust will “return to the earth as it was and the spirit shall return unto God who gave it.” Grau uses lines from Ecclesiastes 12:3-5 as prologue to her novel, and from these lines she takes the novel’s title.

The story is told in four sections and an epilogue. Abigail narrates all the sections, though two, which carry the names of William and Margaret, respectively, focus more on these characters than on Abigail. As narrator, Abigail is gifted with omniscience, entering at will into the minds of the other characters and explaining that her memory goes back before her birth, the people of past generations being like ghosts constantly surrounding her, even at times talking with her. As keeper of the Howland house, she feels the pressure of generations: “It is as if their lives left a weaving of invisible threads in the air of this house, of this town, of this county.”

William’s section chronicles the generations of Howlands. The first William Howland passed through Mississippi on his way to fight alongside Andrew Jackson but returned to settle down. This William was murdered by marauding Indians but left six children to avenge his death. A William Howland was killed in the Civil War, but another took his place as keeper of the house. The present William Howland is a peaceful man, enjoying the bright moon and the scents and sensations of the earth more than he does the hunt. Widowed at an early age, he remains unmarried until he meets Margaret.

Margaret’s genesis in Mississippi also begins with Andrew Jackson, who freed the slaves who fought along with him. Her people, the Freejacks, came to the area, kept apart from other blacks, and intermarried with Choctaws, taking on many Indian customs. Margaret’s mother was impregnated by a white man who was passing through the community and who kept on going, but Margaret shows no outward signs of white blood, and her first memories are of having buttermilk smeared on her face, having her hair dampened, and being placed outside by her mother to bleach in the sunshine.

After William and Margaret meet, she lives with him for thirty years until his death, and she bears him three children: Robert, Nina, and Chrissy, all of whom are sent away to school as soon as they are old enough. The townspeople accept the liaison between William and Margaret as long as no attempt is made to legitimize their relationship.

Howland’s daughter by his first wife is named Abigail, and she comes home after ten years of marriage, bringing her own daughter, also named Abigail. It is this second Abigail, William’s granddaughter, who tells the story. She grows up with Margaret as surrogate mother, William as surrogate father, and Robert, Nina, and Chrissy as surrogate brother and sisters. (For outsiders, however, a strict legitimacy with regard to the separation of the races is maintained—when a white doctor is called to care for Robert, Abigail is put to bed and the doctor is told that she is ill.)

Abigail’s growth and maturation bring Grau’s narrative into contemporary times. In grammar school at the time of Pearl Harbor, Abigail listens as the president declares war. She attends college during the postwar years and marries John Tolliver, a young man with an overriding ambition to run for elective office. At the same time, each in his or her own season, Margaret’s children grow up angry that they have had to be sent away, and they are made more furious by John Tolliver’s public alignment with racist doctrines and policies.

When William dies, Margaret leaves the Howland house, and Abigail and John take over as keepers of the estate, but John leaves when it is made public that William and Margaret had married and legitimized the three children. The announcement moves the townspeople to fury, and they attempt to destroy the Howland house as they believe the Howlands have destroyed the customs and mores of the community. Continuing the line of vengeance, Abigail strikes back by setting fire to the townspeople’s cars and trucks and thus saving her own house. Yet her anger and bitterness remain. She threatens to bring down the entire house of the South and of her part-black but light-skinned brother and sisters. She knows, however, that the action that she takes is not the way of her grandfather, and she knows that to continue to fight her neighbors will cause her own destruction as well.

The Characters

Abigail is the most difficult of the characters to understand because the entire action of the novel is played through her consciousness. Consequently, a reader has the task of clarifying Abigail’s role in the drama as the narrator clarifies the roles of William and Margaret and brings them to life out of her own memories. Adding to the complexity of the character of Abigail is her growth from childhood innocence, to naïve adolescence, to unthinking young adulthood, and finally to an adult awareness of the presence of evil in her community and in herself. Whether Abigail will go on to destroy the community is unclear at the end of the novel, though the novel’s end circles back to its beginning, a November evening in which, with pristine clarity, the stripped trees, bleached grass, drought-shrunken river, and granite outcroppings mirror the condition of Abigail’s soul.

Though William and Margaret have historic roles to play in the chronicle of the South, they are also presented as mythic characters endowed with mysterious attributes and living in their own supernal world. Both are more comfortable in natural surroundings than in society. Both pit their strength against the natural world while willingly aligning themselves with it. Before he meets Margaret, William spends three days in a swamp in a kind of cleansing ritual. Margaret appears to have inherited some of the magic of her great-grandmother, whose hand carries the jagged scar of ceremonial magic. Margaret converses with her dead great-grandmother, and, in the woods, she often sees ghost faces and figures, sometimes friendly and sometimes hostile. She reads signs that signal William’s approach.

In the liaison between Margaret and William, Grau makes a strong tie with the mythic figures of Alberta and Stanley Albert Thompson, who are protagonists of Grau’s short story “The Black Prince.” William appears to Margaret out of nowhere in the same way that Stanley Albert appears to Alberta. William finds himself calling Margaret “Alberta.” Since Stanley Albert is a supernatural being, Alberta’s children simply “come to her” without a father in a way similar to Margaret’s children, whose father is not recognized by society.

The meeting of Margaret and William in the woods takes on an aura of magic, and this magic clings to them throughout the novel. They seem an Adam and Eve in an Eden given to them for a short spell, an Eden that is theirs only if they shut all others out and keep it for their own exclusive use. Thus Margaret sends her children away one by one without what would be, given the conditions of the ownership, false sentimentality. And thus Margaret leaves the Howland house as soon as William dies. After four years, she returns to their original meeting place and there, apparently, takes her own life.

Critical Context

The Keepers of the House, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1965, was Shirley Ann Grau’s third novel. Her first novel, The Hard Blue Sky (1958), received critical acclaim, as did her second, The House on Coliseum Street (1961). Since the publication of The Keepers of the House, Grau has published two more novels—The Condor Passes (1971) and Evidence of Love (1977). Grau is author also of three collections of short stories: The Black Prince and Other Stories (1955), The Wind Shifting West (1973), and Nine Women (1986).

Grau’s work has been difficult for critics to categorize since her themes and styles shift from novel to novel, and she resists being classified as a “Southern” writer. Whether “Southern” or not, her work clearly belongs in the modernist mode. The surfaces of her works are slick; critics often overlook the works’ underpinnings and complexities and thus misread and misinterpret. There is evidence, however, of continuing and growing interest in Grau’s fiction. On the basis of the excellence of her output, Grau should be recognized as a major contemporary author.

Bibliography

Berland, Alwyn. “The Fiction of Shirley Ann Grau.” Critique: Studies in Modern Fiction 6 (Summer, 1963): 78-84. A dated but interesting perspective.

Gossett, Louise Y. Violence in Recent Southern Fiction. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1965. Gossett traces the motif of violence (which can be found in Caldwell, Faulkner, and Wolfe) in several later Southern writers, including Robert Penn Warren, Flannery O’Connor, Truman Capote, and Shirley Ann Grau, among others. Among such writers, themes of loneliness, exploitation, and the inability to escape the past have accompanied new literary approaches. Gossett sees the violence in Grau’s work (including the violence of natural setting and human isolation) as a denial of the romantic notion that “the elemental man is a free agent protected by his environment.”

Kissel, Susan S. Moving On: The Heroines of Shirley Ann Grau, Anne Tyler, and Gail Godwin. Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green State University Press, 1996. This critical analysis of Grau, Tyler, and Godwin reveals how the work of Kate Chopin, Carson McCullers, Flannery O’Connor, and other southern women writers has influenced each author. Also discusses the tendencies in Grau’s work to carry on the tradition of the father.

Martin, Linda Wagner. “Shirley Ann Grau’s Wise Fictions.” In Southern Women Writers: The New Generation. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1990. A useful overview of Grau’s work.

Pearson, Ann. “Shirley Ann Grau: Nature Is the Vision.” Critique 8, no. 2 (1975): 47-58. Pearson sets out to discover a relationship between Grau’s use of natural setting and her use of theme, but she ultimately concludes that Grau consistently “shortchang[es] herself” by failing to integrate the two fully. Stating that Grau is otherwise a “virtuoso,” the author finds this same flaw in The Black Prince, The Hard Blue Sky, The House on Coliseum Street, The Keepers of the House, The Condor Passes, and The Wind Shifting West.

Rohrberger, Mary. “Shirley Ann Grau and the Short Story.” In Women Writers of the Contemporary South, edited by Peggy Whitman Prenshaw. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1984. Attributes the critical failure to recognize the complexity of Grau’s work to the misapprehensions of early critics and reviewers who tended to categorize Grau as a regionalist. Mistaking the smooth surfaces of Grau’s fiction for evidence of a detailed but facile narrative style, critics have ignored the underlying patterns of image and symbol which carry the richest meaning. Argues that, from the beginning, Grau’s stories show both traditional and epiphanic modes of construction and an intuitive mastery of image and structure.

Ross, Jean W. “Shirley Ann Grau.” In The Dictionary of Literary Biography, edited by Jeffrey Helterman and Richard Layman. Vol. 2. Detroit: Gale Research, 1978. Ross supplements biographical information with discussions of Grau’s major works—particularly the novels. Ross traces Grau from an emerging Southern writer compared favorably to Eudora Welty and Ernest Hemingway because of her “precise, impersonal descriptions of nature” and “meticulous craftsmanship” through her development in terms of style, theme, and narrative stance toward multiple points of view.

Schlueter, Paul. Shirley Ann Grau. Boston: Twayne, 1981. This indexed, book-length (but somewhat short) study provides a fairly thorough introductory account of Grau’s career and work up to 1980. Contending that it is appropriate to call Grau a “Southern writer” only because she demonstrates such a strong sense of place, Schlueter does not believe that Grau’s work should be deemed regionalist in any narrower sense. Schlueter concludes that Grau is an important short story writer and that her strength as a novelist rests in style rather than construction; she is a “fine example of a regional novelist whose best work surpasses mere regionalism.”