Unholy Loves by Joyce Carol Oates

First published: 1979

Type of plot: Stream of consciousness

Time of work: The 1970’s

Locale: Woodslee, New York, 250 miles north of New York City

Principal Characters:

• Brigit Stott, a thirty-eight-year-old writer, the only novelist in the English department of Woodslee University
• Alexis Kessler, a pianist-composer in retreat at Woodslee
• Albert St. Dennis, the most famous living English poet, in a residency at Woodslee
• Oliver Byrne, the dean of humanities
• Marilyn Byrne, his wife
• Warren Hochberg, the chairman of the English department and author of a book on Dryden
• Vivian Hochberg, his wife
• Lewis Seidel, who plans to write on St. Dennis
• Faye Seidel, his wife
• Gladys Fetler, a popular teacher and Shakespeare scholar
• Gowan Vaughan-Jones, the most highly respected critic in the department
• George Housley, a Chaucer specialist
• Mina Housley, his wife
• Stanislaus Chung, a graduate of Oxford and author of a book on Edmund Spenser
• Leslie Cullendon, a wheelchair drunk and a James Joyce specialist
• Babs Cullendon, his wife
• Barry Swanwon,
• Brad Keough, and
• Joe Cuff, younger members of the department

The Novel

Comprising five sections, each subdivided into short chapters, Unholy Loves moves through an academic year in the lives of the members of the English department at Woodslee University in upstate New York. Each section is introduced by a date on which a social event occurs: September 1, November 5, December 31, March 8, and May 10. At the center of each event is the presence or absence of Albert St. Dennis, famous English poet-in-residence, whom more prestigious universities have failed to attract to their campuses. The action of the novel takes place in the consciousness of the participants in the communal rituals of academia.

In the first section, the reader is introduced to the characters of the novel as they react to St. Dennis and to one another at a party given by the dean of humanities, Oliver Byrne, to welcome their famous guest. Not to be outdone, Lewis Seidel, who hopes to publish an article or book on St. Dennis, hosts a second party, this one after the poet’s first public appearance at the university. Seidel is embarrassed when St. Dennis fails to make an appearance. Competition for the attention of St. Dennis is most apparent during the New Year holidays, when it is obvious that those not invited to St. Dennis’s New Year’s Eve party find themselves at the Housleys’, where some of the guests are disturbed at having to settle for second best. In March, a social function at the Wallers in honor of a visiting authority on Russian ecclesiastical history is marked by mordant revelations about failing marriages, ill health, the demise of the love affair between two of the main characters, and, finally, the shocking death of St. Dennis in a fire. A keenly ironic final social event on May 10, a luncheon in honor of the (forced) retirement of Gladys Fetler, a Shakespeare scholar and the department’s most popular teacher, concludes the school year.

Around three main characters—St. Dennis, Brigit Stott, and Alexis Kessler—Oates builds a fictional house of mirrors in which all the characters take turns serving as mirrors for themselves and for all the other characters. Occasions for a labyrinthine series of maskings and unmaskings are provided by the social events honoring St. Dennis. Oates weaves long interior monologues with sparse dialogue to reveal each character from many angles. The illusion prevails through much of the novel that no one angle or point of view dominates, yet Oates returns consistently to her three main characters and especially to Stott, subtly moving Stott to the center of things, so that it is her viewpoint with which the reader is finally left. She is the most fully revealed character. Having experienced the total isolation for which Oates’s characters have become famous, Stott has not surrendered to it, unlike St. Dennis (for reasons of age) and Kessler (who lives only for his music). In existential acceptance of her condition, she has emerged on the other side of despair. Consequently, she gradually becomes the consciousness through which the author filters the dark personal and professional realities of her own life and of the academic profession.

Like Anton Chekhov’s plays, Unholy Loves is plotless. What sketchy plot there is consists mostly of the arrival and death of St. Dennis and of the affair of Stott and Kessler that begins and ends with the passing of the school year. Like Chekhov, who uses a cherry orchard as a device for character revelation in his static drama, Oates employs the visiting poet as an echo for the philosophy of her main character and as a structural device by which her characters reflect and refract images of themselves, images that deteriorate progressively, even as they take on a life of their own as monoliths of modern academic types.

The Characters

A novelist of character, Oates distinguishes among her personae by the degree to which each is revealed. The three main characters reveal themselves in their full human dimensions. Others, such as the dean of humanities and the department chairman, enjoy only three-quarter profiles. Still others seem only half-drawn, such as Gladys Fetler and Gowan Vaughan-Jones, who are admirable for their personal and professional ethics. The least revealed of the characters are the younger members of the English department, who worry about non-retention and who, consequently, appear as floating Dantean shades in the subterranean psychological regions Oates’s characters inhabit.

It is through the mind of Albert St. Dennis that the reader is given first impressions of Woodslee. Nearly seventy-one, he finds himself in America, an alien world, for the first time. Even his deceased wife, Harriet, who flits in and out of his interior monologues, seems quite unable to help him make sense of this strange otherworld. At a welcoming party early in the school year, his dislocation and sense of isolation affect him physically, and he becomes sick on his host’s handsome rug. Of the large group assembled for the occasion, only two persons stand out for him: Stott and Kessler, and, at one point, as though in a prophetic gesture, he clasps a hand of each, joining one to the other. His own isolation, however, only grows until rumor has it that he spends much of his time in the small-town library where tea is served by an aging librarian.

For Brigit Stott, the only novelist in Woodslee’s English department, St. Dennis presents a possibility “for another of her unholy loves.” Recently divorced, she feels her loneliness as a “raging ravenous despair” that has “allowed her to see into the depths of the universe itself, and to find it distinctly inhuman.” Having difficulty writing her novel in progress, she recollects a line from Emily Dickinson: “This is the Hour of Lead,” the title Oates uses for chapter 4, in which the death of St. Dennis is reported. Realizing early that the aging poet will not be her love, she spends the night (after that party in September) with Kessler, and the two continue a torrid love affair for some months.

Alexis Kessler, a beautiful bisexual man in his twenties (Brigit is thirty-eight), takes on mythic qualities of Apollo. Living for music, he has had some success with ballet compositions in New York and has come to Woodslee “in retreat.” He would like to compose music for some of St. Dennis’s poems. With his bleached blond hair, his “epicene features,” and his controversial ballet in New York, he is simply accepted as a genius, a prodigy, “so handsome and yet so unmanly.” He and Stott stir local gossip as they walk along the river arm in arm. When he leaves her for a holiday on a Caribbean island, she returns once more to a serious involvement in her teaching and writing. At the end, he cannot believe that she will not have him back as a lover. He cannot accept her view that their mutual erotic attraction is transient: “But surely, my love, that can’t last?” These are his last words and those with which Oates concludes the novel.

Then there are the self-serving and calculating characters of the novel, who are also taken through the same revelatory process as the main characters. Lewis Seidel hopes to capture the favor of St. Dennis to further his plans for “original research” on the poet. One of the “unassailable” members of the English department, he wields power or gives the impression of doing so. In addition, he envies the attention paid Stott by other males, and he wishes to enjoy her respect and perhaps her more intimate feelings.

Oliver Byrne, the dean of humanities, regards St. Dennis’s residency at Woodslee not only as a coup for the university but also as a means of some sort of promotion, if not at Woodslee, then possibly at a school such as Cornell. Academic intrigue reaches caricature proportions in the self-revelations of both Byrne and Seidel. Seidel has a sordid affair with the wife of a young member of the department whose reappointment is in jeopardy, and he himself has developed an illness, as a result of which he spits phlegm with some blood. Byrne’s wife, Marilyn, suspicious of her husband’s attention to Stott, develops psychological problems that are soon the subject of gossip.

Warren Hochberg, the department chairman and a Dryden scholar, seems to feel threatened by Seidel, who is nearly as powerful as himself. The incongruously named Stanislaus Chung, who specializes in Spenser, was reared as an orphan by American Baptist missionaries in Singapore, attended Oxford, divorced one wife and married another—an American-born Chinese whom he humiliates in public and terrorizes in private. He astonishes the secretaries with filthy obscenities hurled at book salesmen. Still another brilliantly, if briefly, realized character is Leslie Cullendon, who wheels himself into a party already drunk, excusing his bad jokes and stories as a means of bringing cheer to all, frequently at the expense of his harried wife. He is a Joyce scholar.

Like Chaucer’s good clerk of Oxenford, Gowan Vaughan-Jones, the department’s most respected critic, has a genuine love for his profession. One of the honored few invited to St. Dennis’s New Year’s Eve party, he wears overcoats too large for him and carries a battered briefcase. The questions that he wishes to ask St. Dennis are genuine and not self-aggrandizing. Gladys Fetler, the popular Shakespeare scholar, who is also genuine in the pursuit of learning, carries off her disappointing forced retirement with the dignity that has characterized her many years at Woodslee.

With their masks on, the older members of the academic community seem unassailable to the younger members. Unmasked, they reveal themselves not only in their vulnerabilities but also in their metamorphoses into degradation (except for Vaughan-Jones and Fetler).

For St. Dennis, Kessler, and Stott, Oates reserves the recognition and acceptance of their conditions, especially Stott, whose powerful vision of herself includes all the other characters. Accepting the existentialist possibility that “magic might depart from every experience,” she returns to her writing.

Critical Context

Oates’s tenth novel, Unholy Loves contrasts somewhat with her earlier novels in having “struck a cooler note amid the more extreme imaginings,” according to a Times Literary Supplement reviewer. A balance between the masked and naked world is more consistently maintained here than in the earlier works. In the academic world, as illustrated in the retirement luncheon for Gladys Fetler, the fantasies and the bitter disappointments are absorbed by the warmth of experiences shared. Even the most isolated person participates in the sense of community by his or her very presence. “The myth of the isolated self,” Oates has said, “will be the most difficult to destroy.” In her stories about academia, dark and satiric though they may appear, isolation and self-destruction are mitigated by the communal sense.

Oates belongs to a select community of writers whose bizarre and savagely cruel world pits the forces of life and those of destruction against each other within an individual, a struggle mirrored in one’s social conduct and the external world. Charles Dickens, Fyodor Dostoevski, and Joseph Conrad (and earlier, Sophocles and Shakespeare) lead that community of authors.

Bibliography

Creighton, Joanne V. Joyce Carol Oates: Novels of the Middle Years. New York: Twayne, 1992. Creighton presents the first critical study of the novels Oates published between 1977 and 1990, including the mystery novels published under the name of Rosamund Smith. Her critical analysis of Unholy Loves is particularly insightful.

Daly, Brenda. Lavish Self-Divisions: The Novels of Joyce Carol Oates. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1996. An excellent study that argues that the “father-identified daughters in her early novels have become, in the novels of the 1980s, self-authoring women who seek alliances with their culturally devalued mothers.” Offers a perceptive reading of the evolution of feminist elements in Oates’s work. Includes a perceptive reading of Unholy Loves.

Daly, Brenda. “Marriage as Emancipatory Metaphor: A Woman Wedded to Teaching and Writing in Oates’s Unholy Loves.” CRITIQUE: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 37 (Summer, 1996): 270-288. Daly argues that the novel demonstrates the need for reform of academic authority as well as the ways in which competition within the academic setting prevents growth in the community. She shows how Oates’s later novels, Solstice and Marya, A Life, expand and explore feminist themes within academe.

Johnson, Greg. Invisible Writer: A Biography of Joyce Carol Oates. New York: Dutton, 1998. An illuminating look at the novelist once dubbed “the dark lady of American letters.” Drawing on Oates’s private letters and journals, as well as interviews with family, friends, and colleagues, Johnson offers a definitive study of one of America’s most gifted novelists.

Wesley, Marilyn C. Refusal and Transgression in Joyce Carol Oates’ Fiction. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1993. An interesting study spanning the spectrum of Oates’s work. Includes a helpful bibliography and index.