That Tree: Narrative Viewpoint and Semi-Eclipsed Characters

I've found my sympathies shift each time I go back to this story, and I think Porter designed it that way: even though the story is presumably told from the journalist's point of view, there are telling slips in the narrative viewpoint that create little breaks in his character. Through these little breaks we see the journalist as he sees himself, as his "guest" sees him, and as Mariam sees him. While Mariam has some very unattractive qualities as a person--sexually and emotionally cold, uptight, a bit racist, lacking in curiousity--we are forced to reconsider her as a character precisely because we are clearly getting one man's side of the story. This narrative construction is, in my opinion, one of Porter's most interesting and brilliant thus far. I found myself considering sympathy with an unappealing woman because I was forced to work harder to get to the meat of her character through the slippage in her ex-husband's narrative.

The fascinating part of this narrative construction is that we don't know exactly how much the journalist is admitting to his "guest" --(and I think the guest him/herself is one of the most intriguing characters in Porter thus far, as well)--while we might presume that the third person narrative is being relayed in the first person over drinks, intervening sections of first-person, quoted dialogue destabilize this assumption. In third-person, the text remarks that "Miriam knew better. She knew they were looking for the main chance" (76). Then, the journalist jumps into dialogue, without even breaking the paragraph saying, " 'She was abominably, obscenely right." (76) So even in moments when we think we see a bit of self-reflection, we're not sure how much the journalist is actually admitting in conversation. This slippage in the one-sided quality of this man's narrative constantly frustrates our attempts to get at Mariam's character.

She seems terribly unlikable, a bit prudish, and too serious as the journalist paints her--he even makes her seem cowardly in the dancing scene when she dives under the table to avoid the fallout of a potential gun battle. Yet we get little lines from her: her self-preservation instinct "had nothing to do at all with him," and she "had no intention of wasting her life flattering male vanity." Of course, the journalist is upset she didn't have the presence of mind to use him as a gallant human shield--she embarrassed him by her lack of faith in his masculine chivalry. Yet can we really blame her? After all, he's been living with another woman, and really makes very little effort to support her. (If he could get around to committing himself to the real effort of writing his poetry--of finding "that ideal tree he had in his mind's eye"--instead of "trying to live and think in a way that he hoped would end by making him a poet," he might get somewhere). His aspirations of giving her a sexual education are likewise fraught with ambiguous sympathies: in limited third person, we learn that he intended "to play the role of a man of the world educating an innocent but interestingly teachable bride" (73). Yet Mariam is "not at all teachable" and takes "no trouble to make herself interesting" (73). She comes off as emotionally stunted in some way: no imagination, no romantic spirit, no sense of curiousity or humor or adventure. But from a feminist theory perspective, that doesn't necessarily make her stunted as an intellect or as a woman. Tough luck if she isn't interested in sex or his poems. Tough luck if she doesn't want to play into his romanticized notion of masculinity. There is more to Mariam then this man can ever relay fairly to his guest, since she is often in a world of her own altogether: when they were together, "her mind seemed elsewhere, gone into some darkness of its own, as if a prior and greater shock of knowledge had forestalled her attention" (73). Even in the end, when it seems that Mariam is running back to financial security as a fair-weather friend, the very presence of the ambiguous, obscured guest as an audience to a one-sided tale alerts us to the possibility that there may be more to this woman than there appears.