"Keep in Motion. Think of Beauty": Salvation in Jane Hamilton's Map of the World

In Jane Hamilton's thoughtful novel, A Map of the World, the fictional couple Alice and Howard live on a piece of romanticized Americana: a Wisconsin dairy farm. Alice remembers it as "the cheapest four hundred acres we could find"(11). It is largely Howard's idea, and neither Alice or Howard is really a farmer, by training or heritage. Their neighbors resent them, see them as interlopers: "it was common knowledge in Prairie Center...we had no business moving into a place that had been in the Earl family for three generations"(11). At the end of the novel, finding themselves in Chicago, Alice quips "I thought that we are where we belong, city people returned to the city"(384).

Yet, this is simply bitterness. The loss of their farm is emblematic; their farm defined Alice and Howard to themselves and the world; it provided them with a mission. Their farm was the body to the soul of Alice and Howard's family/marriage. After they move away, Alice laments "the farm was not as dear to me as flesh, but nearly so...the ground was something that I could have knelt down on and kissed, tried to embrace"(323-324).

The farm and her family, its demands and responsibilities, serve to bind and steady Alice. Early on in the story, waking up to the smells of the farm and her home, she experiences "a brief glimmer of truth....the stink and mess, the frenetic dullness of farming, our marriage, the tedium of work and love-all of it was my savior. Half the world seemed to be scheming to escape husbands or wives, but I was planted firmly enough, striving, striving, to take root(5).

Beyond this, the farm with it's unvarying routines, its ancient patterns,its mix of dirt and order, expresses for Alice the solidity and certainty of Howard. She finds the one in the other and both offer her an existential reassurance. Identifying the two, Alice observes "[Howard] was so good at fixing and managing, tending to details," and then adds, "the barn was as beautiful and clean a barn as could be found in all of Christendom"(88).At one point, Alice restates the connection between Howard and the farm. It is becomes more than simply an expression of Howard. Instead, he is figured as a part of it, and through him, she gains a connection to something transcendental. For Alice, Howard provides a connection to a whole: "When Howard farmed he looked as if he didn't have to do anything much more than pick up a shovel and start digging to be part of the landscape. I don't mean in a pictorial way, but actually part of it, part of the dirt, the sky, the growing things"(323).

All of this is concisely expressed in the opening pages of the book in which Alice recalls the last morning before disaster strikes. On that day, she awakes to a siren. Uncertain as to its origins or meanings, she gains her bearings by picturing in her mind "Emma and Claire [her children]...asleep in their beds, and my own heart seemed to be beating regularly. If the barn was out the window,clean, white, the grass cropped as close as a golf course, the large fan whirring in the doorway, then my husband Howard was alright." Then, untrusting soul that she is, Alice raises herself up to "to take a look. It was still standing, just as I supposed it would be," and jokes to herself "Everywhere that barn goes, Howard, you are sure to be close behind"(1).


The novel explores the possible connection between place and character. Claiming it as a truth, Howard expresses an idea that is central to the novel: "all our meanings are put upon us from the outside. There's nothing much inside that belongs to us at the start, or even along the way. We are shaped, time and time again, by luck, the prevailing winds. I had been formed and reformed a dozen times, according to the personalities of my housemates"(219). At this point, Howard is trying to continue on the farm without Alice, so he equates the "outside" with "housemates." However, I think that the novel has a wiser and more expansive notion of place, one which encompasses landscape, work/institutions particular to a landscape, and the people who inhabit the landscape. In considering the connection between place and character, Hamilton is concerned with the way this broad idea of place affects character.

In particular, Map of the World contests the wholesome effects of life on a family farm. Of course, the whole question might be moot. Hamilton suggests as much. Alice and Howard's farm is pictured as vestigial, surrounded by suburbs. Also, it is not a true family farm. Despite his best efforts to claim the history of the farm, the history he's at pains to know and preserve truly belongs to the family that he bought it from and who farmed it for three generations.

Still, the notion of life on a family farm as a crucible of character and virtue persists in the world of this novel. Despite the fact they're in desperate need of money, Alice's lawyer Rafferty strongly advises Howard and Alice against selling the farm to raise her bail money. Howard and Alice as farm owners is crucial to his defense, "the one thing that should prove to the judge the quality of [their] citizenship. [Rafferty] used the words synonymously: upstanding, moral, hardworking, four hundred acres, sixty head of cattle"(239).

However, the family farm is not really possible or salutary without the family. When Alice is arrested, Howard quickly realizes he "couldn't farm without a wife, that there wasn't any point in farming without a family"(239). Again, Howard realizes a central idea of the novel. Any given place is determined by its people and loses its force and unique stamp if it loses any one of its constituent parts.

Howard comes to this truth gradually. After he loses his wife, he leans on other aspects of his place in an attempt to recapture the solace and blessings of his former life. He throws himself into work. He attempts to find a replacement wife in Theresa. Nothing satisfies. Nothing allows him to regain a shred of the old place he occupied before.

Built into the conception of the family farm as virtuous is the notion of hard work as virtuous. Hamilton's book contest this truth as well. Work is pictured ambiguously throughout the book. In the passage above where she speaks of the farm as her savior, Alice is clearly alluding to all the work that is involved in running a farm. However, as Alice rightfully observes, work might be both cure and curse. In the days just after the accident, Howard finds relief in the demanding work of the farm; "he had his blissful routine, hours in which work was rest"(52). Howard exhorts Alice to follow his lead, demanding she "Bear up...Go get breakfast. Keep in motion, for the sake of Emma and Claire. Keep in motion"(89). However, Howard pursues hard work as a means of escape as well; throwing himself into the routine of the farm shields him from thinking about the horror of the accident. It makes him unavailable to his wife who is unable to follow his lead and is in dire need of his sympathy.

In the book, motion of all types is often viewed with suspicion: a means of escaping pain, hurt and suffering. We foul our nest and in a rootless, modern, post-agricultural world, we simply pack up the car and start anew elsewhere. Howard clearly harbors such notions when he tells the girls that "[they] were going to pack up everything and then pretend [they] were hobos, living in freight trains, eating out of tin cans, singing all the day long, sharing one towel, living the carefree traveling life"(250). Obviously, Howard offers this largely in jest. Yet, his joke contains his fears and hopes, albeit in an exaggerated fashion. Deep down, he's tempted to think that if he launches out on a new life, he will forget the old and shed it's hurt and pain. Ultimately, Howard comes to "realize that...the only thing you really need bravery for is standing still. For standing by"(259).


Howard's sentiment is nostalgic, suggesting people were once better people because they led less mobile and busy lives. The roots a family farm imposes may be a mixed blessing, but still they bless. There is a virtue to being stuck in a place, and a farm will fix you to a place. Attached to the land, a farmer is unable to simply escape tragedy and disaster by packing up and leaving. It's worth noting, how Howard and Alice are 'stuck' in Prairie Junction after the accident while Dan and Theresa go off on a long trip. The novel would have us believe that this rootedness is central to a person's coming to grips with the realities of life, most especially the difficult and seeming senseless realities. At the end, it raises the question of where we find something that will anchor us.

Both Alice and Howard yearn to recapture a way of life. This way of life occurred on the family farm where they first moved after being married. They are stripped of the farm. They can't return. Yet, both hope that somehow, they can recapture their way of life. They ultimately stake their hope of doing so on each other. In part, they stick with the other because that other remains the only element of their former life that they any longer have access to. This book has an open ending but a sad one. Neither Howard or Alice seem confident that together they will be able to regain the place nor the selves they once inhabited.

Map of the World by Jane Hamilton

"Although I long ago lost faith in the idea of Truth, I knew that once I spoke, the stories would take on their own shape, their own truth. In my darkest hour I doubted that there was even a lesson to take from the rubble of time. But whatever the moral was, I knew I needed to fashion the pieces together, and to myself, before all of it came tumbling out, the essence drifting heavenward, gone before I understood what it was"(274).

Reading Jane Hamilton's novel Map of the World, the Book of Job came immediately to my mind. Far from simply being an update of the Bible's classic tale of suffering, Map of the World seems a commentary on it.

Hamilton's take on suffering differs in important ways from The Book of Job. In Hamilton's powerful novel, Alice, a diary farmer's wife who works winters as a school nurse, serves as the Job figure. However, unlike Job who feels his trials as undeserved, Alice feels guilty. Remarkably, her voice is so compelling, at points, the reader's inclined to agree. And, unlike the situation in Job, Alice is not alone in her suffering. Her acts, her suffering, her failings, occasion suffering in those around her. Her tragedy nearly breaks apart her family; it brings about rifts that may heal but will leave scars. It exposes rifts. Near the end of the book, Alice observes: "evil had been done to us, and...we, in our turn had injured those around us.

Alice varies in the responsibility she assumes for her suffering. As to it's cause or justification, sometimes Alice speaks of her suffering as if it were evil done to her and at other times as if it were evil she did.

The novel opens with the books central event. To give each other some free time, Alice and her best and only friend Theresa have agreed to take turns watching each other's children on Monday mornings. While watching Theresa's girls, Alice temporarily loses track of Theresa's toddler daughter Lizzie. Tragically, unwatched, Lizzie wanders off and drowns in a pond on Alice's property. Alice is distraught and nearly suffers a nervous breakdown. She's spared this by the advent of a second tragedy. Alice, who works as a school nurse in the winter months, is suddenly arrested and charged with criminal sexual conduct involving children who came to her with illnesses. Unable to raise bail, Alice is sent to prison while she awaits her trial, and is separated from her husband and two young daughters and from their family dairy farm.

Looking back on this nightmarish sequence of events, Alice speaks of how she "fell from grace," and not in a sudden or as the result of one, large mistake. The experience leads her to conclude, "it takes at least two and generally three things to alter the course of a life: You slip around the truth once, and then again, and one more time, and there you are, feeling, for a moment, that it was sudden, your arrival at the bottom of the heap"(3).

A question that the book raises is whether Alice is indeed a Job figure, a by and large innocent sufferer, or whether her suffering has been occasioned by some sort of failing, or, in the language of religion, sin. Seeking meaning, realizing there can't be any without her bearing some blame for what's happened, Alice quite naturally crafts her role in the matter. And, she's not entirely deluded.


In her mind, Alice has take too casual an attitude to certain truths. Prior to her fall, she failed to fully realize and address certain shortcomings, certain truths about herself. Identifying her failure with a Christian conception of sin, Alice comes to realize that for her "God [the presence in contrast to the absence marking sin] was something within that allowed me to see occasionally"(388). This vision, allowing her to see herself with clarity, only comes after the tragedy, after the misfortune.

At the outset, Alice is blind in a number of ways. On a literal level, she fails to keep an eye on Lizzie and the toddler wanders off to drown in a pond. She is blind on a figurative level. By Alice's lights, Lizzie dies because she failed to she what's demanded of her as a mother, a caretaker of children. Her failure is actually her failures. Judging herself, Alice believes herself guilty on a number of fronts: her house is messy and full of hazards; she's secretive; she's easily distracted, eager to escape the reality of her situation and go off on childish daydreaming spells; she's in poor control of her temper and emotions.

As Alice sees it, all of her admittedly small failings come together in a kind of perfect storm in the sequence of events surrounding Lizzie's death. In the moments when the toddler wanders off to her death, Alice is variously distracted. Her daughter Emma throws tantrums and acts irrationally in a manipulative and successful play on her attention. Alice needs to go off and find her bathing suit and because her home's a wreck, her search takes a great deal of time. Then, she has to tend to her daughter Claire, who is attempting to swallow pennies left on the floor. Still looking for the swimsuit, she comes across maps of an imaginary land that she drew as a child. She spends a great deal of time looking over childhood fantasy maps of a world she drew as a means of escape from an unhappy childhood. As she judges herself afterward, these moments with the imaginary maps seem especially damning. While she was supposed to be keeping close eyes on a child, she instead sought escape in the very same manner she sought it as a child.

Her guilt nearly destroys her. She gradually begins to fall off the edge of her world and spend her days sleeping, unable to dress or feed herself, unable to care for her children. Then, just when all seems darkest and lost, salvation of a sort comes in the guise of a greater tragedy: Alice is falsely accused of molesting a child, a disturbed, neglected and hard to love child named Robbie Mackessy. Alice is bundled off to a horrible jail, her bail is set at $100,000, and the entire community turns against her and her family. Worse, although Alice has never molested Robbie, she does come to admit in the course of her narration she did once strike him in a moment of frustration with the difficult boy. As with her guilt over Lizzie, here too Alice has moments where she thinks she deserves this injustice. She clearly can't accept or forgive herself for striking Robbie. She also wonders if maybe her being punished regardless of the reason might begin to provide atonement for all the sins she and other adults have visited on Robbie.

In her self-condemnation, Alice is convincing. At least initially, I was drawn into it. I found myself coming to judge her for her carelessness, her inattentiveness, her inability to focus. I began to liken her situation to that of a drunk driver who kills someone. Many do it, but that doesn't excuse the lapse in those whose mistake results in hurt. Then, when that situation seemed to harsh an analogy, I began to think of Alice's situation as akin to that of a person who drives carelessly and fast on a neighborhood street and strikes a child. Alice has it out for herself. I almost felt manipulated as a reader. Caught in the midst of a senseless tragedy out of which she's trying to make some sense, she needs a villain, even if it's herself. She needs punishment insofar as it provides evidence of misdeed and sin, and misdeed and sin explain the death.

Yet, I only realized this after I put the book aside and gained some distance from Alice. Alice is careless, irresponsible and inattentive but only in the way many if not most of us are. She's a flawed human being. In trying to account for accident and tragedy, she turns these failings into sins.

The clear vision she gains at the end is honesty. She owns up to hitting Robbie. She owns up to her imperfections. She begins to try and accept Lizzy's death as a senseless tragedy. This is her victory. Many books might present a tragic and senseless accident and have the characters begin to make sense of it. Hamilton suggests that a healthy wisdom lies in learning to live and accept imperfection and tragedy as just that. At some point, attempts to explain and atone become simply attempts to escape the realities of our existence.

"After Eden" by Valerie Miner

Valerie Miner's "After Eden" is both a personal, individual story and a collective one potentially engaged with provocative political questions.

Two groups serve as foci in the book. There are the members of a lesbian land collective in California's McKenzie Valley, Beulah Ranch. It is home to a diverse collection of lesbian couples: Jewish, earth-mother Ruth and her eleven year old daughter Joyce; spunky, Chinese-American, small-scale vintner Lindsey and her older, African-American, graduate student girlfriend Marianne; Biology teacher, salt-of-the-earth Virginia and her working class, UPS truck-driving lover, Sally; and, urban-planner Emily and her lover, Salerno, a jazz saxophonist. These women are the founders and land owners. Beulah also provides community/family to a number of additional characters, as equally diverse as those just listed, who share in the community's activities but don't own land on the ranch..

The fictional McKenzie Valley, situated in the mountains Northeast of San Francisco, serves as a second, broader focus. It is a much less formal and organized 'collective' than Beulah Ranch. As sketched by Miner, various groups have called this fictional valley home, interacting and badacting with each other: Russians, Spaniards, Native Americans, Mexican-Americans, Anglos, vintners, farmers, yuppies, migrant workers, and loggers. Again, another diverse lot. The book is kind of grasping when it comes to diversity in a Noah's ark kind of way. Yet, while the diversity is a little much, the various communities and families in the novel present a host of good questions: what makes a place home; what gives you a right to call a place home; how do we learn to share a place so that it is home to many.

Miner anchors these panoramic, group perspectives with a more traditional, narrative of death and loss. The novel begins with the urban-planner and urban-minded Emily Adams driving from Chicago to spend the summer with her lover, Salerno, at their cabin on Beulah Ranch. Emily arrives a bit before Salerno to Beulah, a place Salerno's has slowly sold Emily on as place of renewal, a place "of unleashrd vitality"(10). Salerno "saw the land as a new home and the women there as a kind of family"(16).

Emily would seem to be of this family and yet apart. While she's friends with the Beulah women, her primary connection is to Salerno, and deep down, right until the very end of the book, she lives apart, in her head. She questions "'Who are friends?'...could you b friends only with the members of your own tribe?...What if you didn't have a tribe?"(99). At the outset, it would seem that Emily's 'tribe' consists of Salerno alone. Arriving at Beulah, Emily's first impulse is to hideaway and wait for Salerno before opening out to the world. Unfortunately, Salerno never comes.

Tragedy strikes when Salerno's plane crashes. Salerno was Emily's entree into the Beulah family and the Valley. Introverted, intellectual, it was Salerno who brought Emily out of herself and introduced her to these worlds. Without her, Emily is inclined to leave Beulah, to flee a place now irrevocably marked by loss. Despite her own impulses and instincts, Beulah and the family it fostered acts like a home, claiming her. When she first returns at the outset of the novel, she inadvertently, half-consciously refers to it as home in the course of conversing with Phoenix, her dog, and she wonders whether the term applies. Emily spends twelve months trying to leave; Beulah Ranch, land and family,calls her back.

Of course, what calls her back may seem circumstance: Ruth's accident keeps her awhile; Lindsey's pregnancy keeps her; a newcomer to the community draws her attention; her San Francisco based brother, distant heretofore, begins to try to connect to her while she remains in the McKenzie Valley; she commits to teaching migrant workers. However, all of these circumstances are related to the fact that Emily has become a part of something. She's entered into a community and found a home. Ok, maybe she's found herself in a home. Regardless, home is what keeps her from following her grief fueled impulse to leave. Home asserts its claims on her being.

This is a political novel of ideas. It has its flaws. Characters are a bit flat, most especially a two-dimensional fundamentalist Christian who proves to be the villain. Or, in this case, ends up "temporarily in a prison for the criminally insane"(244) which seems a weak way to damn opponents you can't bring to life.

Ultimately, as a political novel, I think it fails most particularly on one front. Miner presents the Mackenzie Valley is a diverse collection of peoples whose interaction is marked by conflict. Beulah seems to serve as a relatively peaceable kingdom offered in response. Yet, I'm not certain that Beulah presents a future for communities.

Beulah and the MacKenzie differ in profound ways. Beulah is diverse in some ways. The residents have various ethnic, racial and age differences. However, in the end, they all pretty much think alike. Moreover, Beulah is a community by choice while the Mackenzie is a community of circumstance, a far more common variety of community. Community by choice may seem benign and to be desired. Yet, communities by choice often need to be maintained by harsh methods of exclusion. When Sally begins to act in a manner harmful to the ranch, she is let go. Good for the health of the ranch. Bad for the health of Sally. Perhaps this is what Communities need to do to maintain their peace, but this is hardly a picture of community as a caring family, despite the fact that Miner often applies the family tag to Beulah.