Comparing Seasonal Imagery in Wharton, Le Guin, and Johnson :: comparison compare contrast essays

Seasonal Imagery in Wharton, Le Guin, and Johnson      Ã‚   Summer     Now in November The Left Hand of Darkness   Ã‚  Ã‚  The expression of Yeats's circularity of seasons goes back in literature at least as far as the poet Horace (Wirtjes 533). Traditionally, women's lives, centering on family maintenance, have mimicked the cycles of the seasons far more than men's. Theirs have been the lives that repeat the motifs of each preceding year, always reborn yet never wholly new. Women, then, have less experiential reason to view their lives as a part of an inexorable forward march rather than as several turns on the great wheel of birth and death. Women writers, likewise, may pay more attention than their male counterparts to the seasonal, circular nature of their protagonists' lives. This is the case with Edith Wharton's Summer, Josephine Johnson's Now in November, and Ursula Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness. All three novelists set current protagonist movement against a backdrop of immobility. Both Wharton and Le Guin set thei r protagonists' change against the seeming constancy of summer and winter, while Johnson sets a critical spring-to-fall family transition against her protagonist's assertion of year-to-year sameness. Thus, each novelist, while depicting the movement necessary to build a story arc, sets this movement within a larger context of circularity and sameness, represented for each by the recurring seasons.   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚   Edith Wharton's Summer, written in 1916, charts the sexual awakening of young Charity Royall from her carefree abandon in June through her affair with visiting Lucius Harney in July and August, ending in autumn with her de facto abandonment and marriage of convenience to the man who raised her, Lawyer Royall. As Peter L. Hays notes, the seasonal imagery provides "an appropriate metaphor for Charity's development" (114). Hays links this development explicitly to the seasons, albeit simplistically, with Charity's "growth and maturation" during the summer leading to her "impending harvest, both of wisdom and child" in the fall (116). Yet, like Kate Chopin several years earlier in The Awakening, Wharton, I believe, avoids this simple ending. Indeed, another critic notes that "What Elizabeth Ammons says of The Reef applies with equal force to Summer: 'The fairy-tale fantasy of deliverance by a man appears to be but is not a dream of freedom for women. It is a glorific ation of the status quo'" (Crowley 87). Charity at novel's end neither achieves her dreams (love and freedom with Harney) nor endures her nightmares (destitution and prostitution as a single mother).