A Wreath For Miss Totten by Hortense Calisher, 1947
The magic trick:
Character development that happens outside of the story’s narrative
Stories need movement, we are often told. They need character development. Our protagonist starts at Point A and through a series of events or realizations ends the story at Point B, which we hope for their sake is an improvement over where they began.
The character development we find in “A Wreath For Miss Totten” is an interesting case. The narrator tells us a story of her youth, presumably with the distance of some years’ perspective. We’ve seen many an author take that tact in stories featured here on the SSMT site.
But in “A Wreath For Miss Totten,” what’s interesting is that the character development doesn’t happen within the story the narrator is recalling. Her character acts consistently throughout the memory – observant but oblivious.
It’s during the years between the event and the telling that our narrator realizes the importance of what happened. So, the story becomes less about the events remembered and more about the way that time can educate us about our own memories after the fact.
And that’s quite a trick on Calisher’s part.
The selection:
Children growing up in the country take their images of integrity from the land. The land with its changes is always about them, a pervasive truth, and their midget foregrounds are criss-crossed with minute dramas which are the animalcules of a larger vision. But children who grow in a city where there is nothing greater than the people brimming up out of subways, rivuleting in the streets – these children must take their archetypes where and if they can find them.
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