Abstract
The typically feminine space of the balcony has often been construed as a form of material enclosure and confinement for Southern women. Far from dramatizing such patterns of entrapment, Grace King uses the balcony as an intrinsically liminal space allowing her female narrators free play in subverting well-established customs and conventions. This chapter uses Victor Turner’s reflections on liminality and social drama as a theoretical framework to explore King’s Balcony Stories (1893) and examine their ability to effect a reversal of perspectives from the privileged position that the balcony offers to its occupants. King’s women on the balcony may be seen to provide mere “entertainment,” but if we consider, along with Turner, the etymology of the term and its affinities with liminal space, such an activity takes on a much more subversive dimension.
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Notes
- 1.
King herself affectionately refers to “my ‘Balcony Stories’” (Memories 90).
- 2.
See Courtney Leigh Ahlstrom’s thesis A Space in between: Material Enclosures for the Women of New Orleans, 1850–1870, in which the author examines how the people of New Orleans used “iron balconies and crinoline cages to create feminized spaces as they grappled with an evolving social order and the blurring of public and private space in the city.” She goes on to argue that, “[s]imultaneously, women employed these metallic material enclosures to protect their femininity from incursions by those of other races and classes while also seeking to overturn cultural mores and to grasp more social and economic power [in] the urban environment” (2).
- 3.
See Violet Harrington Bryan, Edward J. Piacentino, and Helen Taylor, for instance.
- 4.
Among other things, these various stories “save, in a languor-breeding climate, the ennui of reading and writing books” (Balcony Stories, 8).
- 5.
See Kuilan , and Juncker , “Grace King”.
- 6.
This is how King refers to her mother at the outset of her memoirs (Memories 1) and she significantly dedicated her collection “To my mother whose balcony stories were the delight of my childhood.”
- 7.
On metaphors of sight and blindness, see Kuilan.
- 8.
Turner specifies that the word “performance ” is completely unrelated to any consideration of “form.” It derives instead, he says, from Old French parfournir, which means “to complete” or “to carry out thoroughly,” which leads him to conclude that a performance “is the proper finale of an experience” (13).
- 9.
Think of the name given to the General’s wife, Honorine.
- 10.
Note how the bilingual expression plays on liminality by blurring the boundaries between two languages , leading the reader to wonder whether he or she should pronounce “costume” the English way or the French way.
- 11.
I am here referring to the original 1893 edition of Balcony Stories. A third one, published in 1925, included two more stories, “Grandmama” and “Joe.”
- 12.
Turner actually cites Dumazedier’s opinion on the issue.
- 13.
Note how the adjective “costumed” connects Pupasse with both the dugazon and the little convent girl , two women with whom she would appear to have little in common at first sight.
- 14.
Pupasse’s hoopskirt itself is compared to all these things that “must have emanated from the brains of astronomers, like the orbits, and diameters, and other things belonging to the heavenly bodies” (93, emphasis mine), and let us not forget that her actual name is Marie.
- 15.
In “The Mother’s Balcony,” Clara Juncker draws our attention to King’s references to grammatical rules in her early novel Earthlings (published in 1888). As Misette’s father is teaching her the rules of the French past participle, the young girl appears to balk at the idea that words should have a sex. Juncker points out that “[t]he daughter’s resistance to the rules of grammar (or the Law of the Father) focuses on the necessity of feminine (linguistic) determination (‘the feminine noun requires a feminine participle’). By insisting that words have no sex, young Misette attempts to escape linguistic and social rules and roles and to redefine the space allotted to her in the prison of gender” (40).
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Durrans, S. (2018). “Costume de ghost”: Liminality in Grace King’s Balcony Stories. In: Jacobson, K., Allukian, K., Legleitner, RA., Allison, L. (eds) Liminality, Hybridity, and American Women's Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-73851-2_12
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