Re: Muriel
Tim O'Connor (tim@roughdraft.org)
Sun, 28 Nov 1999 15:59:00 -0500
At 8:42 PM +0000 on 11/28/1999, Lucy-Ruth wrote:
> Of course if you love Seymour and despise Muriel she is being sold
> short. Let's not forget, he married her. Not out of despair, either.
> There is a wonderful passage from his diary in RHRBC where he speaks of
> WHY he loves Muriel, about how she wants to go to the hotel lobby and
> ask if her husband has picked up the mail, and how he feels that she
> and her mother fill his pockets with endless invisible cosmetics, for
> which he feels immensely grateful but which he doesn't know what to do
> with. I think it's important to remember the overwhelming tenderness
> with which that diary is written when reading "Bananafish". Muriel
> isn't perfect. Maybe she's not one of the Seymours or Frannys or
> Zooeys. But how many of us are?
Good point. I think the needle Muriel pricks in so many fingertips
is that her personality, and her view of life from the good side of
the tracks (which Salinger seems to disdain, but can never REALLY let
loose), are what many of us have seen in Real Life. I've known a
couple of Muriels. I've known a couple of their mothers. (I even
knew an Esme once, though she and I were closer in age than Sgt. X
and Esme, and no, Nothing Became of It.)
Muriel, I think, bothers us because we are immersed in our consumer
culture, and she is something like the high-priestess of that
culture. She seems to be the one for whom the phrase "I want" was
invented.
I've never been able to balance the books on the various Muriels that
have appeared in JDS's work (the one in "Bananafish"; the one who
refuses publication of her husband's poetry; the one who elopes; the
one Seymour writes about in his journal). She's very elusive, almost
as elusive as was her changeling husband.
> Thanks, Tim, for bringing up a genuinely interesting topic.
I hope we can get some of the more shy people to join in. Very few
-- perhaps only one -- of us can claim to be Salinger scholars. We
are readers. And we talk about what we read. So, talk some. Your
comments are welcome!
--tim