Mysteries of Winterthurn by Joyce Carol Oates

First published: 1984

Type of plot: Detective and mystery

Time of work: The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries

Locale: Winterthurn, a town in New York State

Principal Characters:

• Xavier Kilgarvan, a detective whose maturity from sixteen to forty coincides with three murder mysteries in the town of Winterthurn
• Perdita Kilgarvan, his cousin and the object of his lifelong passion
• Thérèse Kilgarvan, Perdita’s sister, also in love with Xavier
• Georgina Kilgarvan, a mysterious poet, the eldest of the Kilgarvan sisters.
• Valentine Westergaard, the chief figure in the second murder mystery
• Elery Poindexter, the object of investigation in the third murder mystery

The Novel

Mysteries of Winterthurn is divided into three parts, each several chapters in length. Although the principal characters remain the same, each part is centered on a different murder mystery occurring at three crucial points in the life of Xavier Kilgarvan, a detective cast in the mold of such nineteenth century masters as Sherlock Holmes.

Emulating narrative techniques of the nineteenth century, Oates presents her tale through an “Editor,” a first-person omniscient narrator who not only tells the story but also comments directly to the reader. This commentary is found in chapters entitled “Editor’s Notes” and “Epilogue” and also throughout the narrative in the direct address so much in favor with nineteenth century novelists. The Editor’s identity is never revealed.

The novel’s three mysteries involve puzzling killings, often multiple, that take place in eerie circumstances. Each mystery also serves further to reveal the deep, dark, and complex passion that exists between Xavier and his beautiful cousin Perdita. There is throughout an air of the supernatural, of a tragic family curse extending over several generations, and of a complex union of good and evil. The first mystery, entitled “The Virgin in the Rose Bower,” centers on the horrific death of an infant in the so-called Honeymoon Suite of Glen Marw Manor, the ancestral home of the Kilgarvans. Once presided over by Erasmus Kilgarvan, sometime judge of the local district court, Glen Marw Manor is now the domain of Georgina Kilgarvan, the eldest cousin of Xavier, a never-married poet of considerable accomplishment whose pen name, “Iphigenia,” recalls the ancient Greek myth of a father’s betrayal. Living with Georgina are her two younger half-sisters, Thérèse and Perdita, and her elderly bachelor uncle.

The infant’s murder might have been the work of his mother, but it might also have been caused by malignant spirits inhabiting the room, spirits who seem to grow out of the figures in a wall mural depicting the Virgin in a rose garden. Whatever the case, the mother, found babbling incoherently, never regains her sanity. Only a teenage schoolboy, Xavier Kilgarvan is determined to be a detective, and he sets out for Glen Marw Manor to investigate. There he is met by his twelve-year-old cousin Perdita, with whom he falls in love. Acting in a strangely contradictory manner, Perdita first aids him in his investigation and then thwarts and endangers him by locking him in the manor cellar. He is rescued by Perdita’s sister Thérèse, who suffers an unrequited love for him. Xavier manages to solve the mystery, but the solution contains such terrible and loathsome family secrets that he cannot bring himself to make them public.

Between the first and second mystery, there are other terrible events related to Glen Marw Manor: the bizarre killing of Xavier’s uncle in the Honeymoon Suite, the “ritual slaying” of the old family servant, Pride, and the vicious murder of Valentine Westergaard’s sister in a wooded area near the manor. These disturbing events culminate in the suicide of Georgina Kilgarvan, and the murders then cease. None of the cases is investigated by Xavier Kilgarvan, who has left Winterthurn to seek his fortune as a detective. He does not return to his native city until his twenty-eighth year, just when a new mystery arises. A number of young women working at local factories have been assaulted and their lifeless and mutilated bodies discarded in a remote and desolate spot known as the Devil’s Half-Acre. Now a detective with a growing reputation, Xavier solves the case of “The Devil’s Half-Acre”—to his great personal dismay because of the unhappy turn of events, which involves the revelation of more dreadful family secrets and, unhappiest of all, his outright rejection by his beloved cousin Perdita. Again Xavier Kilgarvan leaves Winterthurn.

At forty and at the height of his professional fame, Xavier returns once more to Winterthurn. This final visit finds him suddenly and mysteriously withdrawing from his profession after his obsessive struggle to solve “The Case of the Bloodstained Bridal Gown.” He does unravel the twisted events surrounding the triple murder, but ironically, his solution forces him to reconcile what he now knows about his family’s curse with his sorely tested but undying passion for Perdita. He chooses Perdita, who comes to him as a newly liberated woman riding a bicycle, and forsakes the highly individualistic profession of detection for a quieter, more domestic life.

The Characters

Joyce Carol Oates approaches her characters in terms of the nineteenth century style she has elected. They are at once symbolic and epic, in service to the narrative, not so much developed as outlined externally by the narrator known as The Editor. As symbols, they are aptly named. Consider the two Kilgarvan sisters who relate to Xavier. Thérèse, the constant, pure one who unselfishly and unrequitedly loves Xavier, carries the name of a saintly mystic. She is the epitome of the nineteenth century gentlewoman. Perdita’s name means “the lost one,” and certainly she brings to Xavier a dark passion that ultimately takes him from his career of exposing malice. In another way, she is lost, for as the prototype of the liberated woman of the new century, she is lost to the Victorian ideal. Xavier Kilgarvan also bears a saint’s name, that of the renowned missionary who brought Christianity to the Far East. Because he was a Jesuit, Saint Francis Xavier is associated both with the passion of God’s love and with cool-headed logic. Xavier is an excellent name for the detective who serves as the central consciousness of the novel, in that the story is presented through Xavier; his innermost thoughts, yearnings, emotional states, religious and ethical convictions are related to readers by The Editor, whose identity remains a mystery (could it be Perdita?). Readers know Xavier to be a good, honest, and courageous man, given to severe headaches when possessed by fear but brave enough to carry forward because he deeply and completely believes in the power of logic, or “ratiocination,” as he and other educated gentlemen of the century call it. Yet he is sufficiently composed of contradictory tendencies to fall mindlessly and passionately in love with Perdita and at last to lose his self-simplicity in saving her.

Of the other characters, readers know less, for it is a technique of nineteenth century literature to see persons in the narration through the central consciousness of the main character—especially in an instance such as this, since it is the burden of a classical detective to reason out a motive for the actions of others. Such assigning of a singular motive tends to relegate characters to stereotypes. Such is the case in murder mystery number one, which is centered on Georgina Kilgarvan, the poet who suggests Emily Dickinson in style and intensity and who is fiercely eccentric and hermitlike because she must guard a dark secret. Like Emily Dickinson, Georgina is trapped within the constraints placed on Victorian women and must conceal the wrongs done to her. Concealment is also the driving motive of Valentine Westergaard, the subject of Xavier’s second murder case, who recalls such famous nineteenth century figures as Lord Byron and Oscar Wilde. Elery Poindexter, the main suspect in the third murder case, is the classic turn-of-the-century scoundrel who, because he is from a moneyed class, can easily get away with illicit sex and even, perhaps, murder. Harmon Bunting, Perdita’s husband, is a similar scoundrel hiding his puerile tendencies behind a clergyman’s collar.

Several minor characters give texture to the story. Perhaps the most enjoyable of these is Simon Esdras, the failed philosopher of the Kilgarvan clan. Yet it is the powerful stereotypes who interest Xavier, most of whom—with the exception of Thérèse—are possessed of grossly evil tendencies.

Critical Context

Mysteries of Winterthurn is a pivotal novel by one of the towering figures in contemporary American writing. Joyce Carol Oates is a writer of prodigious output and wide recognition in American letters. Playwright, essayist, and poet, she is the author of dozens of novels. Among her several honors is the National Book Award for her 1969 novel them. She is both a chronicler and critic of the American experience, and while her early work is concerned with contemporary life, her middle years saw her turn to history as a shaping factor of present-day America, especially American women. Her project in these “middle novels” which include Mysteries of Winterthurn, Bellefleur (1980), and A Bloodsmore Romance (1982), was not only to consider history but also to have the reader live it directly by emulating the very style in which past novels were written.

By emulating a past style, Oates is able to present a critique of both the style and the culture that gave rise to it. Mysteries of Winterthurn takes up the Victorian virtues of clear thinking as well as the Victorian abhorrence of making an honest confession of the darker side of human nature. As such, it is at one and the same time a gripping mystery story, a re-creation of past literature, and a foremost example of postmoderism that examines the abandonment of restraining Victorian values and the emergence of a new feminism.

Bibliography

Bender, Eileen Teper. Joyce Carol Oates: Artist in Residence. Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1987. An especially valuable discussion of Joyce Carol Oates’s use of various historical styles as a method of critically reviewing those styles.

Christian Science Monitor. LXXVI, February 1, 1984, p. 19.

Creighton, Joanne. Joyce Carol Oates: Novels of the Middle Years. New York: Twayne, 1992. An insightful study of Oates’s three novels that employ themes and styles from the nineteenth century as a form of postmodernism.

Johnson, Greg. Invisible Writer: A Biography of Joyce Carol Oates. New York: Dutton, 1998. An overview of the writer’s life and works.

Kirkus Reviews. LI, December 1, 1983, p. 1221.

Library Journal. CIX, January, 1984, p. 111.

Los Angeles Times Book Review. January 8, 1984, p. 1.

Macleans. XCVII, February 20, 1984, p. 60.

Milazzo, Lee. Conversations with Joyce Carol Oates. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1987. A useful collection of interviews with and essays about Joyce Carol Oates that have appeared in various periodicals and newspapers.

The New York Times Book Review. LXXXIX, February 12, 1984, p. 7.

The New Yorker. LX, February 27, 1984, p. 133.

Newsweek. CIII, February 6, 1984, p. 79.

Publishers Weekly. CCXXIV, December 23, 1983, p. 49.

Times Literary Supplement. July 20, 1984, p. 801.

Watanabe, Mary Ann. Love Eclipsed: Joyce Carol Oates’ Faustian Moral Vision. New York: University Press of America, 1998. Surveys the theme of dark emotions in Oates’s work.