Harriette Arnow – Tuesday 7 July 1908 – Saturday 22 March 1986

Introduction

I am not sure how or why I came to read Harriette Arnow’s The Dollmaker. I think someone recommended it to me and that was a good suggestion. The book provides insight into a different type of life, one that I would never personally experience, and how the transition from a known life to an unknown one can bring forth unexpected challenges, doubts, and triumphs.

Excerpt from Chapter One of The Dollmaker

“DOCK’S shoes on the rocks up the hill and his heavy breathing had shut out all sound so that it seemed a long while she had heard nothing, and Amos lay too still, not clawing at the blanket as when they had started. They reached the ridge top where the road ran through scrub pine in sand, and while the mule’s shoes were soft on the thick needles she bent her head low over the long bundle across the saddle horn, listening. Almost at once she straightened, and kicked the already sweat-soaked mule hard in the flanks until it broke into an awkward gallop. 'I know you’re tired, but it ain’t much furder,' she said in a low tight voice.

She rode on in silence, her big body hunched protectingly over the bundle. Now and then she glanced worriedly up at the sky, graying into the thick twilight of a rainy afternoon in October; but mostly her eyes, large, like the rest of her, and the deep, unshining gray of the rain-wet pine trunks, were fixed straight ahead of the mule’s ears, as if by much looking she might help the weary animal pull the road past her with her eyes.

They reached the highway, stretching empty between the pines, silent, no sign of cars or people, as if it were not a road at all, but some lost island of asphalt coming from no place, going nowhere. The mule stopped, his ears flicking slowly back and forth as he considered the road. She kicked him again, explaining, 'It’s a road fer automobiles; we’ll have to ride it to stop a car, then you can git back home.'

The mule tried to turn away from the strange black stuff, flung his head about, danced stiff-leggedly back into the familiar sanctuary of soft ground and pine trees. “No,” the woman said, gripping his thin flanks with her long thighs, “no, you’ve got to git out in the middle so’s we can stop a car a goen toward th doctor’s. You’ve got to.” She kicked him again, turned him about. He tried one weary, half-hearted bucking jump; but the woman only settled herself in the saddle, gripped with her thighs, her drawnup knees, her heels. Her voice was half pleading, half scolding: 'Now, Dock, you know you cain’t buck me off, not even if you was fresh-an you ain’t. So git on.'

The great raw-boned mule argued with his ears, shook the bridle rein, side-stepped against a pine tree, but accepted soon the fact that the woman was master still, even on a strange road. He galloped again, down the middle of the asphalt that followed a high and narrow ridge and seemed at times like a road in the sky, the nothingness of fog-filled valleys far below on either side.”

Excerpt from the Afterword by Joyce Carol Oates in The Dollmaker

“This brutal, beautiful novel has a permanent effect upon the reader: long after one has put it aside, he is still in the presence of its people, absorbed in their trivial and tragic dilemma, sorting out their mistakes, rearranging their possibilities, pondering upon the fate that makes certain people live certain lives, suffer certain atrocities, while other people merely read about them. Because Harriette Arnow’s people are not articulate, we are anxious to give their confusion a recognizable order, to contribute to their reality, to complete them with language. They are assimilated into us, and we into them. The Dollmaker deals with human beings to whom language is not a means of changing or even expressing reality, but a means of pitifully recording its effect upon the nerves. It is a legitimate tragedy, our most unpretentious American masterpiece.”


Yesterday’s writer – Margery Allingham
Tomorrow’s writer – Jane Austen

Source: Arnow, Harriette. The Dollmaker. Avon Books, August 1972. ISBN 0-380-00947-1. Chapter One Excerpt: pages 7-8; Afterword Excerpt: page 601

Images:

Left: Front cover of my personal copy of The Dollmaker

Center: Harriette Arnow from the website harriettearnow.org