Allegory in Kate Bernheimer's "Whitework"

Certainly, it could be said to be a story about the anxiety of influence, or, perhaps more aptly, the influence of anxiety—it contains the code to my work with fairy tales as a writer, I think. But the code is submerged, just as secrets should be.

—Kate Bernheimer, Notes to "Whitework" (p. 533)

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Allegory, or The Fairy Tale of Ideas

I get apprehensive teaching works that specifically say they've been coded. "Oh, great," I think to myself, "another writer contributing to the myth that literature is all about coding and decoding, and if you are unable to decode, you are not a good reader." To me, this myth is one part of the waning popularity of reading, especially the waning popularity of reading works that attempt to push against or destroy limits in a well-informed, meaningful way.

And yet I took Bernheimer's cagey comments in her notes to the story "Whitework" in My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me as a challenge to wrestle with the allegory I believe her story contains. For those of you who don't know, an allegory is an extended metaphor (comparison) between two unlike things. In this case, her retelling of Edgar Allan Poe's "The Oval Portrait" deals with the same theme as Poe's short story, an obsession with art at the expense of what is perceived as the real (this is the part where we can have a tangent about the nature of art's reality, but I'll stick with deciphering the allegory for now and collapse that binary later).

The allegory begins with the fairy-tale cottage in the woods to which the speaker is taken for convalescence. The fairy-tale cottage is at once both a comfortable refuge and the object of  derision because it is so cliche (abandoned, forlorn, diminutive). The allegory is cemented by Bernheimer's clever double entendre: "This is where I found myself: in a fairy-tale cottage deep in the woods." On the literal level, the first phrase announces the setting, a physical location in the imaginary time and space of the text. Allegorically, the idea of finding one's self means understanding one's own nature or purpose. In this way (and in knowing what we know about the nature of the story from her notes), Bernheimer decreases the distance between the first-person speaker of her tale and herself as auteur.

In the description of the setting, two object of symbolic import are revealed: a locket and key. Lockets contain keepsakes and keys open things up, although the speaker her is confused and uncertain about the import of the key (wait until later...) among other things like how she even arrived at the cottage.

The cottage, as a metaphor for the fairy-tale genre, is a strange place. From the outside, it appears convetional and cliche, but on the inside, it is surprisingly different than what one might anticipate, full of odd shapes that do not match the boxy, "Christmas package" of its exterior.

Then, of course, the room where the speaker convalesces is decorated with whitework, the story's namesake, which the dictionary tells us is an embroidery technique in which the stitching is the same color as the fabric:



A similar concept can be found in the "White Paintings" of Robert Rauschenberg, which the artist described as having an ambient quality to them where the paintings were hypersensitive to and affected by the setting in which they were experienced.



And so it is with fairy tales. As you might expect with the risk Rauschenberg took, the paintings often enraged critics and audiences for being blank or not being art at all ("Anyone could do that" is a chestnut oft quoted in light of these experiments.). Bernheimer recounts a similar response to fairy tales among creative writers and scholars alike.

The whitework metaphor works so well (as does the complementary white on white painting). The fairy tale can be seen as the base fabric of the white work and its retelling(s) then are the stitching of the emboidery, the artistry of which is often indistinguishable from the base material if done well. And yet, like Rauschenberg's white paintings, fairy tales prove to be ambient, changing with the atmosphere in which they are displayed (Read this tale as a way of revealing fairy tales intertextuality; read LaBute's "With Hair of Hand-Spun Gold" as retelling the Rumpelstiltskin tale through the screen of the digital age.). And all this richness without too great a distance from the source material.

The candle in the story illuminates the art of the whitework after a change in atmosphere. The leather-bound onionskin book that magically appears represents the speaker's discovery of scholarship about the whitework/fairy tales.

Then, of course, the portrait appears in the corner of the circular room. The portrait might be the most complicated part of the allegory, representing simultaneously the speaker's memory, self, the suspension of disbelief, and the postmodern subject. The crucial description of the portrait reveals that "The girl was depicted from top to bottom, smudged here and there, fading into the background, reminiscent somehow of the Kinder- und Hausmärchen [Children's and Household Tales, the German name for the Grimm Brothers' book of fairy tales, look it up yourself, lazy!] yes, you could describe her portrait as an illustration. She was a plain girl, not unlike me" (530).

The speaker's description of the girl in the portait, the portrait resembles "a young girl ripening into womanhood," sounds odd and makes the girl in the portrait seem distant, although "not unlike" the speaker: a memory and also the self that one inserts into a story when reading it (suspension of disbelief). Bernheimer's tale, since the gap between the speaking "I" and the story's speaker is so small, also reveals the postmodern possibility of the fairy tale, where, in the tradition of the New Novel, the author might be inserted into the tale, leading to a meta-tale about the construction of fairy tales.

This adds a conceptual next level to this fairy tale that surpasses, like Rauschenberg's paintings, the dualism of the whitework as an apt allegory for fairy tales. Now fairy tales can include authors that critique the fairy tale's very fairy-tale-ness even as the author is retelling a conventional tale.

This is not only the speaker's postmodern awakening but also the connection to the surprise ending of Poe's "The Oval Portrait." The speaker has a kind of epiphany that her involvement with, in, and on-behalf of fairy tales is so all-consuming and life-replicating that it has no boundary. In other words, she can experience a kind of disembodied death within the story and perhaps also the symbolic "death" that submission to the obsession with the whitework (fairy tales) can be. The limitless possibilities of art and her existential ponderings lead her to realize "in my wonder I possessed complete satisfaction" (531).

The story ends with the speaker waking up to a less-fabulous reality, where it seems she has been more mentally debilitated than physically, as her cottage reverie indicates. The dualism between the fantasy world and this realism is where the companion comes into play. This shadowy companion is like a caregiver, someone who keeps her physically alive by providing sustenance, like a nurse, while she is mentally off in the "prison or home" that is the mind, the seat of ideas and artistic endeavors. Of course, in the last line, the unresolved key is reintroduced, as the doctor urges the speaker to manage her obsession with the art of fairy tales, which has made her suspicious of reality.