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<p style="margin-bottom:0in">“<font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3">Redbeard”
was first published in </font></font><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3"><i>Masques</i></font></font><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3">
in 1984 and is recollected in </font></font><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3"><i>Storeys
from the Old Hotel.</i></font></font></p>
<p style="margin-bottom:0in"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3">SUMMARY:</font></font></p>
<p style="margin-bottom:0in"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3">A
man moves with his wife Mara and son John to a small Texas community
where he feels a definite social separation between the “old
stratum” and the new, since he has only been there “since the end
of the sixties or the Truman Administration or the Second World War.
Since Something.” He becomes friends with a man named Howie, and
one day they go for a drive together, coming across an old house the
narrator remarks looks haunted. </font></font>
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom:0in"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3">Howie
says he can’t bring himself to enter it and proceeds to tell the
story of a man named Jackson from nearby Clinton, Texas who moved
into the area. Jackson was twenty years older than his wife, Sara
Sutter. After a bus crash resulted in several injured children, a
deputy asked Jackson’s help in transporting some of the children to
the doctor’s in his truck, and Jackson suspiciously refused and
tried to drive away. The Sheriff reached under the tarp in the back
of Jackson's truck and found a dead Italian girl who might have been
named Rosa, whose family owned a shoe store. </font></font>
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom:0in"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3">When
the cops came to Jackson’s house, in the basement they found a huge
locked door that the wife said was his “personal place” – the
bodies of three women were found within. During the trial the wife
testified for her husband’s character, and the prosecutor tore into
her by saying him telling her not to enter the room was a cry for
help. The narrator is bored at several places, thinking the story
commonplace and lacking in sensationalism with only three victims.
When Sarah went to visit Jackson in jail, he had borrowed a razor to
shave. He cut his own throat as she arrived, killing himself as she
looked on. She sold the house and married again, having a child
within the year. Howie speaks of the final victim, found by children
in her private sewing room. Sarah had killed herself. Howie asks who
was morally responsible – her husband, the prosecutor, the family
of the victims, or “baby blues”? The narrator says it scarcely
matters now, probably postpartum depression, and Howie reveals that
she was his mother.</font></font></p>
<p style="margin-bottom:0in"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3">COMMENTARY:</font></font></p>
<p style="margin-bottom:0in"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3">The
subtlety we are used to in Wolfe does not seem to extend to plot
details in this story, but rather to the assignation of blame and the
artistic distance the narrator's voice has from Wolfe's narrative
theme. The narrator is bored and uninterested in the story with his
“new” perspective, but he is wrong in believing it is irrelevant
– it is the origin story of his friend, a deeply personal tale for
him. </font></font>
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom:0in"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3">Obviously,
as the text itself says, the story resonates with Bluebeard, which we
will recap - the aristocrat Bluebeard has a vile reputation as well
as an ominous blue beard, and no one knew what happened to his
wives. He marries the younger of two sisters and gives her a key to
his chambers, but instructs her never to enter his private room.
When he is away and her sister is present, she enters, finding his
dead wives on hooks and the floor drenched in blood, in which she
drops the key. When he returns, he sees the blood on the key which
his wife dropped and threatens to behead her, but she implores him
for time to say her prayers and flees with her sister to a locked
room in the tower, and in the time she gains her brothers come and
kill Bluebeard, leaving her with all his wealth.</font></font></p>
<p style="margin-bottom:0in"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3">In
Wolfe's “Redbeard”, the wife winds up on a hook of her own
design, and her unwillingness to press into her husband’s affairs
leads her down a path of self-destruction. However, the difference
between old and new is established constantly throughout the text and
is worth examining. We will return to an older story behind the
Bluebeard myth soon.</font></font></p>
<p style="margin-bottom:0in"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3">POSSIBLE
AMBIGUITIES: </font></font>
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom:0in"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3">This
seems to be a pretty straightforward Wolfe story, but there are a few
things that might be subtle and suspicious, though I don't think they
point to plot trickery in this case. The narrator calls his
friendship unusual, but this could only be because of the thematic
separation between the “old stratum” and the “new” people;
there is usually no connection between new and old in the town. </font></font>
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom:0in"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3">The
attitudes of the narrator are clearly displayed when he pigeonholes
the murder as commonplace and pathetic with only three victims, which
seems pedestrian in comparison to the murders of Gacy or Jack the
Ripper. This displays the attitudes of the “new” people – the
story isn’t significant enough to be engrossing and doesn't matter
anymore, even though it resulted in at least six deaths .
Interestingly, the narrators claim that the murders don't matter echo
his opening statement: “It doesn’t matter how Howie and I became
friends, except that our friendship was unusual.”</font></font></p>
<p style="margin-bottom:0in"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3">Rather
than indicate that our narrator is murderous or that some spirit of
evil lurks throughout this story as it did in “Kevin Malone”, we
should see the callous nature of the narrator as the difference
between old and new. Right from the beginning, the “new” people
in town cut the grass on Sunday morning rather than go to church as
the “old” people do. This is not the only juxtaposition. </font></font>
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom:0in"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3">Some
examples of “new” philosophy in the text: the idea that Jackson
was crying for help and his wife was an accomplice, the concept that
the deputy could never have searched the vehicle without a warrant
and made an arrest now, the feeling that three murders make a boring,
commonplace story, all these ideas culminate in the ideology that “It
doesn’t matter now.” </font></font>
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom:0in"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3">These
are directly juxtaposed with “old” philosophy: Jackson would have
confessed if he wanted to stop, the deputy did a good job in pulling
off that tarp and seeing the evidence, the murders have the power of
a horror story – those human lives mattered.</font></font></p>
<p style="margin-bottom:0in"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3">The
beginning of the story says of the old ones: “Those people are
still here, practically all of them, like the old trees that stand
among the new houses.”</font></font></p>
<p style="margin-bottom:0in"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3">The
final line says, “To our right was another ruined gate, another
outdated house collapsing slowly among young trees.”</font></font></p>
<p style="margin-bottom:0in"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3">This
is about as clear a statement as we can get – the new people, or
the young trees, exist among houses that are falling apart and
ancient, living in untenable circumstances with a destructive
philosophy that casts blame everywhere at once. The old are among
livable houses – their philosophy did not perpetuate an unending
cycle of decay and shifting blame.</font></font></p>
<p style="margin-bottom:0in"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3">The
moral question asked by Howie begging for responsibility for his
mother’s suicide is perhaps the place where the new ideas are
interesting: </font></font>
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom:0in"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3"> “I
thought you said she'd killed herself.”</font></font></p>
<p style="margin-bottom:0in;margin-left:0.5in">“<font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3">That's
what they would have said, back when she married Jackson. But who
killed her now? Jackson – Redbeard – when he killed those other
girls and cut his throat like that? Or was it when he loved her? Or
that district attorney? Or the sheriff? Or the mothers and fathers
and brothers and sisters of the girls Jackson got? Or her other
husband, maybe some things he said to her? Or maybe it was just
having her baby that killed her – baby blues, they call it. ...”</font></font></p>
<p style="margin-bottom:0in"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3"> “Postnatal
depression .. I don't suppose it makes much difference now.”</font></font></p>
<p style="margin-bottom:0in"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3">The
blame here for his mother's suicide winds up being placed on Howie's
shoulders, the teller of the tale. It clearly isn't his fault, and
the assignation of blame becomes impossible in a system which must
consider all of these external forces – it almost precludes the
idea of free will.</font></font></p>
<p style="margin-bottom:0in"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3">The
Wolfe-Wiki posits that the second house mentioned with its ruined
gate is that of Sarah's second family.</font></font></p>
<p style="margin-bottom:0in"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3">While
plot-wise it doesn't seem as if there are many unresolved questions,
there are still a few details that are perhaps not fully fleshed out:</font></font></p>
<p style="margin-bottom:0in">“<font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3">There
had been a certain amount of trouble around Clinton going on for
years, and people were concerned about it. I don’t believe I said
this Jackson was from Clinton, but he was. His dad had run a store
there and had a farm.”</font></font></p>
<p style="margin-bottom:0in"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3">Is
the trouble in Clinton just a continuing part of the cycle that
carries blame forward from the past to the new generation?</font></font></p>
<p style="margin-bottom:0in"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3">A
POTENTIAL WOLF:</font></font></p>
<p style="margin-bottom:0in"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3">The
internet makes research significantly easier in some ways for general
purposes than Wolfe might have enjoyed during the composition of this
story, and there is a possible source for the Bluebeard story that
deals with the Breton King Conomor the Accursed, who was also reputed
to be a werewolf. In this story, Conomor murders his wives when they
become pregnant, and the ghosts of his dead wives warn his new one
when she becomes pregnant. She is beheaded anyway, but miraculously
returned to life by a Saint, and the castle crumbles around Conomor
and destroys him. </font></font>
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom:0in"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3">It
isn't clear that Wolfe would be aware of this source story, but there
are several hints that he might have been. When ascribing guilt for
the death of the mother, our narrator asserts that it is post-natal
depression, effectively blaming Howie. The wife in the story above
will be killed for becoming pregnant. In the story of Conomir, she
is somehow killed and survives, while in Wolfe's story she survives
but kills herself.</font></font></p>
<p style="margin-bottom:0in"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3">Whether
or not Wolfe knew of the evolution of the Bluebeard story is open to
speculation. However, the werewolf angle certainly might have
impelled him to structure a tale around it.</font></font></p>
<p style="margin-bottom:0in"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3">SETTING:
Highway 27 runs from Lubbock to Amarillo. </font></font>
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom:0in"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3">NAMES:</font></font></p>
<p style="margin-bottom:0in"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3">Rosa,
the name of the Italian girl found under the tarp, is the latin form
of Rose</font></font></p>
<p style="margin-bottom:0in"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3">The
narrator’s wife’s name, Mara, implies “bitter” or “strong”.</font></font></p>
<p style="margin-bottom:0in"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3">Howard
means “defender” but the family name Howie means “hollow”.</font></font></p>
<p style="margin-bottom:0in"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3">Sarah
Sutter has the most interesting name as her first name implies
“lady”, but the family name implies “shoemaker.” The dead
Italian girl's family owned a shoestore.</font></font></p>
<p style="margin-bottom:0in"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3">Jackson
means God has been gracious. It is based on the name John … and,
not coincidentally ...</font></font></p>
<p style="margin-bottom:0in"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3">John
is the name of the narrator's son. This creates a cyclical
impression – shifting blame from one generation and family to the
next.</font></font></p>
<p style="margin-bottom:0in"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3">Wolfe
has made two different comments on the story in his afterword and
introduction:</font></font></p>
<p style="background:rgb(255,255,255);line-height:0.25in;margin-bottom:0in;margin-left:0.51in">
<font color="#000000">“<font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3">Redbeard”
is a horror story based upon a house I used to drive past every so
often. It has since burned to the ground, which may be a good thing.
Maybe I should write a story about John Gacy, the killer clown; he
lived a few miles from here, and my friend Jerry Bauer used to take
pictures for him." </font></font></font>
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom:0in"><br>
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom:0in"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3">From
</font></font><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3"><i>The
Best of Gene Wolfe</i></font></font><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3">:</font></font></p>
<p style="margin-bottom:0in;margin-left:0.5in"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3">Long,
long ago, when Rosemary and I were still a young couple with small
children, we moved to a tiny town out in the country. If I remember
right, the population was under three hundred. Everyone in town –
except for us – knew everyone else. Half the time, they were at
least distantly related. Rosemary and I were outsiders, and very
much so. It was much lonelier than an isolated house would have
been, and lonelier too than any city apartment. </font></font>
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom:0in;margin-left:0.5in"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3">Often
I drove past a big white house in which no one lived. Most of its
windows were broken; one shutter hung from a single hinge. The yard
was full of weeds. I never found out why the house had been
abandoned or who had abandoned it, but it has come to haunt my
fiction.</font></font></p>
<p style="margin-bottom:0in"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3">It
is fascinating that Wolfe casts his own portion of the experience of
being “new” in the character of the narrator, whose entire mental
attitude is clearly being criticized by the story.</font></font></p>
<p style="margin-bottom:0in"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3">UNANSWERED
QUESTIONS:</font></font></p>
<p style="margin-bottom:0in"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3">Why
are both the wife and the first victim related to shoes? Sarah’s
last name means shoe-maker, and the first victim’s family owned a
shoe store. What symbolic association should we assume, save that
they protect feet from the outside world and separate man from
nature? Are they somehow the symbolic “sisters” from the
Bluebeard story? One of the versions of the tale identifies one of
the previous dead wives as Rosalinde, but there are many different
versions and names.</font></font></p>
<p style="margin-bottom:0in"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3">CONNECTION
TO OTHER WORKS:</font></font></p>
<p style="margin-bottom:0in"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3">Except
for the narrator’s callous attitude, which I think is thematically
related to the callous nature of the modern world rather than a
murderous curse or a scourge of werewolves, the sinister does not
seem concealed in this tale. Wolfe's recasting of fairy stories will
also occur in “The Death of Koschei the Deathless”, “In the
House of Gingerbread”, “The Little Stranger”, and in many other
tales as he moved toward fairy tales and away from the science
fictional and social elements many of his stories maintained
throughout the 1970s.</font></font></p>
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