The Tattooed Girl

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The Tattooed Girl ("The Tattooed Girl") is a 2003 novel by Joyce Carol Oates . It is about the improbable relationship, marked by difficulties and mutual incomprehension, between an aging writer with a Jewish background and a young, uneducated woman with anti-Semitic affects.

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Joshua Seigl, author of the critically acclaimed bestselling novel The Shadows , published years ago , is now working on a Virgil translation and is looking for an assistant, initially in an academic environment. He cannot make friends with any of the applicants and finally hires Alma Busch, the “tattooed girl”. The heroine in the title is a young woman whom he meets by chance in a bookstore. Alma is attractive, is described as busty, but is disfigured by clumsy tattoos. She comes from the white trash environment of a poor family in one of the mining towns in the backcountry of Pennsylvania , where a coal seam fire has been raising smoke and heat from the underground since 1962 . Alma is not very well educated, but finds her way around the task of organizing Seigl's papers.

When Seigl is diagnosed with a progressive nerve disease, Alma becomes indispensable to Seigl and his affection grows stronger, with no sexual encounter between the two. Alma, in turn, secretly hates her employer because she thinks he is a Jew. Her lover and pimp Dmitri encourages her in this hatred. But when Seigl tells Alma that strictly speaking he is not a Jew, since only his father was a Jew and not his mother, this hatred disappears and turns into complete devotion.

Meanwhile, Alma is viewed with suspicion by Seigl's entourage, treated condescendingly and vehemently rejected by Steigl's sister Jet, who takes offense at the fact that an uneducated "idiot" is arranging Seigl's manuscripts and suspects that Alma is Seigl's "house whore".

When Seigl healed from his nervous disease and overexerted himself, he fell victim to a heart attack. In his will, he gave Alma a monthly allowance and a right of residence. Alma stays in Seigl's house, wanders through the rooms, is heartbroken and increasingly confused. The ending comes when Seigl's sister Jet, who thinks Alma is her brother's murderer, and kills Alma in a fit of delusional anger.

main characters

  • Joshua Seigl (38): Writer, lives in Carmel Heights, an affluent suburb of Mount Carmel in upstate New York
  • Alma Busch: Seigl's assistant. She wears disfiguring tattoos. How it came to this remains unclear. She doesn't remember exactly either, she just knows that it was "men or a man."
  • Dmitri Meatte: Waiter in The Café , Seigl's hangout and chess game meeting place. Alma falls in love with him, but is sadistically tortured by him and forced into prostitution.
  • Jetimah ("Jet") Steadman-Seigl (nee Mary Beth Seigl): Seigl's older sister. In the past there have been several episodes of impulsive, irresponsible behavior and, accordingly, several therapies with several diagnoses.
  • Sondra Blumenthal: University professor and old friend of Seigl
  • Ethan Blumenthal: son of Sondra Blumenthal. Seigl teaches him chess.
  • Morris Friedman: Neurologist Seigls

background

Akron, Pennsylvania, is mentioned as the hometown of Alma. There is a place with this name but it does not match the description in the novel. In contrast, the coal seam fires that broke out in Centralia , Pennsylvania in 1962 are known . When she mentions her hometown, her lover understands “ Acheron ” instead of “Akron”, that is, the underworld river of Greek mythology . In addition to the hell fires in the underground - Alma also describes himself as "Hell Child" - and the echo in the name of the hometown, there are numerous other references to ancient underworld mythology . Seigl is busy translating the Aeneid of Virgil for most of the time , and right at the beginning a passage is quoted that relates to the hero's descent into the underworld:

"Facilis descensus Averno: / noctes atque dies patet atri ianua Ditis"

"[...] the descent to Avernus is easy: / the gate of gloomy Pluto is open day and night"

In the third part of the novel, Seigl lies in the hospital, half unconscious as a result of the treatment and plagued by confused dreams and gloomy visions. A passage from Canto 11 of Homer's Odyssey comes to mind. Odysseus descends into the realm of the dead to question the seer Teiresias. He makes a blood sacrifice and:

"Up out of Erebus they came flocking. Thousands swarming from every side. Shambling, shiftless dead. "

"Out of the Erebos came the naked dead in their thousands, swarming around, shuffling around."

In his vision, Seigl sees himself in the role of Aeneas , only that he has no animal for the blood sacrifice, he only has his own blood, which he needs to live. Eventually he can escape the rush of shadows. The book that made Seigl famous at the time was called The Shadows and describes the experiences of the Jews persecuted and murdered in the Holocaust . Seigl's request by Seigl's sister Jet to give this shadow a voice again by writing another novel on the subject is rejected by Seigl, but he still feels an obligation to his ancestors who were killed in the Holocaust.

Play

As in other works, Oates wrote a corresponding play parallel to the novel. Since she was dissatisfied with the end of the novel and found it too abrupt in hindsight, the end of the play differs from the novel. The play was staged by Theater J , the DC Jewish Community Center's theater company , directed by John Vreeke. It premiered on January 16, 2005 at the Goldman Theater in Washington, DC .

expenditure

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ That cow is your live-in whore, isn't she? Cape. II / 1.
  2. ↑ Honey, I told you: I didn't know their names. Whoever did this to me. But definitely it was men, or a man. I don't remember too much what happened. It was a weird time for me. I know, I am lucky to be living. Not everybody is. Cape. I / 8.
  3. ↑ She said, almost inaudibly, what sounded like “Akron” - “Acheron”? Dmitri asked her to say it again and again she said what might have been "Akron" - "Acheron." Cape. I / 4.
  4. ^ Where do you live, I live in Hell. I am a child of Hell. I am an American and a child of Hell. Cape. II / 6.
  5. ↑ Virgil: Aeneis 6.126 f .. German translation by Niklas Holzberg 2015. In The Tattooed Girl quoted as: Easy is the way down into the Underworld: by night and by day dark Hades' door stands open…
  6. ↑ The relevant passage is in Odyssey XI, 36 f. and 49 to be found. Oates used in Chap. III / 16 (in condensed form) the English translation by Robert Fagles.
  7. ↑ It was horrible to think that among them were Seigl's elders. His parents, grandparents. His ancestors. It was his duty as their son to nourish them with blood, otherwise they were too feeble to speak. And yet — he had only his own blood, he could not survive without it. Alone of this company only Joshua Seigl was alive. Like bleating sheep they called his name, groping blindly for him. He had to escape them. They smelled him, groped and clawed for him. Joshua! Joshua! But here was his salvation, they could not see. Cape. III / 16.
  8. ↑ For example with the novel Blonde (2000) and the corresponding play Miss Golden Dreams (2001).
  9. ↑ The Tattooed Girl by Joyce Carol Oates + Author Interview , American Theater (January 2005), accessed January 4, 2018.