46 pages • 1 hour read
Oh, William
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Themes
World War II and Intergenerational Trauma
Lucy and William have no direct experience of WWII, yet the historic conflict has lasting implications on their lives as they were both raised by people who did live through or participate in the war. Lucy’s father served on the Allied side in Germany, and his unprocessed experiences there led to uncontrollable sexual compulsions. Lucy’s refusal to say “anything more about this” speaks to the shame and silence that surrounds trauma and suggests that she has inherited a portion of her father’s own feelings (93). Strout illustrates the persistence of trauma in the rural Maine landscape, even generations after the original conflict. In the novel, rural Maine is now populated with distraught Vietnam and Iraq veterans who make Lucy think that “I had not seen a stranger look at me with such fury since I was a child” (195). She thus speaks to a social problem, where returning veterans are not given the support they need to move on from the moment of conflict and are thus still reacting to it. Strout draws a direct parallel between the unresolved trauma of veterans and the way Lucy and William are also defined or limited by their past experiences.
Exacerbating her father’s post-traumatic stress, Lucy’s family lives in poverty and without modern conveniences, such as a television, that would make them feel that they have moved on from the 1940s with the rest of the world. Lucy’s ignorance of popular music or the actual conflict of her time, the Vietnam War, contributes to her feeling of invisibility and the thought “that if there was a big corkboard and on that board was a pin for every person who ever lived, there would be no pin for me” (62). When Lucy excels at school and leaves home for college, she makes her first foray into the visible world. Later, when she meets and marries William, a man whose father fought on the other side of WWII, she attempts to make peace with the conflict that has had an excessive imprint on her family’s life. However, when she brings the German William home to her parents, his very presence re-traumatizes her father. Lucy’s mother makes it clear that in choosing William, Lucy has gone over to the enemy side, as she refuses to see her. Lucy’s subsequent crying spells and refusal to let William comfort her indicate the guilt she feels about abandoning her parents and crossing over to William’s middle-class, Germanic side. While on the outside Lucy appears to have joined another side, psychically she is in a lonely no man’s land, where she belongs to neither. She attempts to atone for her guilt when following the breakup of her marriage, she immediately embarks on a course on World War II “to understand my father better” (105), and by extension, the trauma that has indirectly shaped her own identity and marriage.
William’s inherited war trauma is just as complex as Lucy’s. He feels guilt about his father Wilhelm’s involvement on the German side of the war and visits the concentration camps in Germany as an attempt to process and atone for his heritage. However, he is also processing the grief of losing a father suddenly when he was only 14. Lucy assumes that William’s grief is what leads him to accept the inheritance of war-gains acquired by his German grandfather. Lucy thinks, “there was—and still is—some sense William had that he was owed something” for his father’s loss (95), and this is what urges him to seek compensation, regardless of the source. While the novel makes clear that William and even his father Wilhelm feel apologetic for Germany’s role in so much human suffering, it also shows that William is not above acting in his own interest. While William used some of this money to ensure that Lucy’s second husband, who is Jewish, could see a better doctor and have a greater chance of extending his life, when Teutonic William survives and Jewish David does not, it symbolically replays the dynamic of the war. However, Strout complicates this stark ending with Lucy’s prevailing memories of David and by William’s loss of authority. When the old-fashioned traits that mark William’s brand of masculinity such as defensiveness, restlessness, and emotional elusiveness no longer have power over Lucy, there is the sense that they no longer need to dominate and that there is the possibility of a different and renewed approach to life, if one can reconcile their identity with their inherited generational trauma.
The Evolution of Marital Intimacy
Strout’s novel centers on a relationship that is still little explored in fiction—that of a couple’s life post-divorce. Unlike William and his second wife Joanne, who are estranged, Lucy and William are friendly and even confide in each other. While Lucy and William were set to have an amicable, if distanced relationship as each focused on their respective spouses, events such as David’s death and Estelle’s leaving William cut them off from the other profound romantic relationships in their lives. Additionally, Chrissy’s miscarriage and the discovery of Catherine’s daughter from her first marriage orient them not towards the future, but towards a past where they were essential to one another. They resume their old nicknames Pillie and Button, puns on the names “William” and “Barton” and embark on a platonic intimacy that grows from the romantic relationship that predates the ones they have made since. Lucy also has a special role in being the spouse who witnessed and understands Catherine, who is essential to William’s identity. Through the evolving dynamic of Lucy and William’s relationship, Strout explores how intimate relationships contribute to identity and evolve over time.
The novel’s road-trip structure and Maine setting provide a context that is both ripe for flashbacks into key events in Lucy and William’s marriage, and gives them the private space of the car to address their shared past. For example, the very fact of their vacation reminds Lucy of the trips that Catherine organized for them, when Lucy was unsure of how to behave felt more aligned to her family of origin than to the one she was creating with William. The sense of panic she feels around the emptiness of vacation time also re-emerges on the Maine trip, as does William’s inability to know how to deal with this. The ex-couple replay their marriage dynamic in which they annoy each other, accuse each other, and then finally forgive each other, this time equipped with the understanding that years of knowing each other has given them. Strout shows that their relationship and understanding of each other has continued, despite a long hiatus where they focused on other partners. For example, William recognizes before Lucy does that the Maine landscape reminds her of her childhood. Her ability to accept his observation and reflect on it for herself leads to her ability to process unresolved parts of her past.
A key part of William and Lucy’s changing dynamic is their discovery that the love story of Wilhelm and Catherine was more complex than they thought. While Catherine edited Lois out of the story to paint a sweeping escapist romance, William and Lucy discover the tensions in this seemingly idyllic relationship. A story of survival and social aspiration complicates the romance narrative, and Lucy contemplates whether part of Wilhelm’s attraction to Catherine was the ability to move to America and make a new start after the humiliation of having to pay war-reparations. Similarly, Catherine’s marriage to Wilhelm follows a similar pattern as her use of her good looks and charm to escape her home life for the relative safety and wealth of Clyde Trask; she further distances herself from her origins by running off with Wilhelm to live out the American Dream and become middle-class in Newton, Massachusetts. When Lucy discovers that Wilhelm’s displeasure over Lois’s existence contributed to Catherine’s silence on the matter, she sees that this concealment was part of living out the middle-class myth of the nuclear family and starting again. The survival aspect of Catherine and Wilhelm’s love story makes Lucy think of her own marriage to William, which enabled her to rise socially and escape poverty. While Lois was the casualty of Catherine’s flight into the middle-class, Lucy’s family and the sense of self that relates to them was sacrificed during her marriage to William. Lucy’s resumption of her maiden name and her sense that “I began to write more truthfully” after the failure of her marriage indicates a return to herself and her beginning to embrace the parts of her identity not defined by romantic relationships (76). Lois, the left-behind daughter, has a symbolic function in Lucy’s narrative too: She represents the potentially lost components of a woman’s identity in patriarchal forms of marriage.
Social Mobility and Rural Origins
Three of the main characters in Oh William! have rural origins, a social categorization that Strout indicates alienates them from the advantages and information of metropolitan American society. Catherine, Lucy, and Lois handle the problem of a background that middle-class urbanites might look down upon differently, even if they cannot help comparing themselves and being informed by each other. Through their differing attitudes, Strout explores the relationship between class, identity, and the possibility of social mobility.
Catherine, the eldest of the three women, left a life of rural obscurity to try to live the American dream of upwards class mobility with Wilhelm in the affluent suburb of Newton, Massachusetts. She talks elliptically about her childhood, only vaguely saying that it was unhappy while she concentrates on latching onto as many middle-class signifiers as she can regarding her dress, her hobbies, and the decoration of her house. She makes these associations so convincingly that Lucy and her daughters consistently picture Catherine with her fashionable, tangerine-colored couch and her middle-class past-time of golf, a game that requires the leisure of a whole day. Catherine further distances herself from her past by repeatedly stating that middle-class pursuits are “too much” for Lucy, pointing out the difference between Lucy’s present life and her childhood. By doing this instead of directly empathizing with Lucy’s plight, Catherine draws a distinction between her daughter-in-law and herself, leaving Lucy to believe that she is the only one facing the challenge of social mobility. To Lois, who knows all the details of Catherine’s broken home and extreme poverty, Catherine’s assimilation into the “citified” classes seems almost offensive. For Lois, Catherine’s integration into the metropolitan middle-class seems like an undue reward for her ruthless abandonment of her daughter, hence Lois’s vehemence in ensuring that Lucy learns the truth of Catherine’s origins. Lois’s insistence that Catherine “came from trash” indicates her wish to express that despite the citified disguise (178), Catherine’s core is rotten and that her abandonment of her child relates to this inherent deficiency. Still, while Catherine built a smokescreen around her origins, Strout conveys a level of falsehood about her acceptance into the middle class, because only Lucy is present at her deathbed, while her Newton friends are conspicuously absent.
Although Lucy accepts Catherine as an adoptive mother figure and role model, even allowing Catherine to choose her clothes, she experiences a sense of betrayal in distancing herself from her family of origin. Also, a generation younger than Catherine, Lucy has undergone therapy and is aware of the unconscious dynamics in changing who one is to assimilate into the middle class. For example, her psychiatrist makes her aware that she wears a scent because of the insecurity that her natural body stinks. This in turn is reminiscent of the social exclusion that surrounded her impoverished state when she grew up in a house without a mirror. The trauma of Lucy’s childhood and her unnatural efforts to redefine her identity produce sleeplessness and depression. Ironically, Catherine also experiences these symptoms, but she tries to dismiss them with an older generation’s term, “the blues” (41). Still, despite the similarities between the two women, Lucy’s ability to be honest about herself both in her writing and her life serves her well. She becomes a writer who tells her own story and connects with others, rather than relying on hiding her true self to achieve. Lucy is aware that people like her are the exception. Both her and Catherine’s stories and the conditions in rural Maine indicate that rural poverty is difficult to escape and that those who live the American dream are few.
Lois, who is as equally strong and spirited as Catherine and Lucy, does not transcend her rural origins, and her desire to do so is portrayed as ambivalent. Symbolically, this is marked early on in her life when she wins the title of Miss Potato Blossom Queen. The juxtaposition of the prominence of queenhood with the bucolic reference to the humble crop grown in the local area encapsulates the idea that Lois is a big fish in a small pond. This is further expressed in her house being by far the biggest and nicest one on the street. The fact that this home belongs to Lois’ wealthy adoptive mother’s family rather than a blood relative indicates that Lois has earned the home rather than merely inherited it. While her father was a potato farmer and her biological mother came from extreme poverty, Lois who was a schoolteacher and married a dentist, has risen to middle-class significance and stable family life. Like Catherine and Lucy, Lois is another type of exception—a person who stays in her hometown and thrives. However, Lois is plagued by the anxiety that she may be forgotten. Her wish to be remembered kindly in Lucy’s future book indicates that she does not want to re-experience the trauma of abandonment. She thus stands to gain more power when Lucy writes her into the story, as this would symbolically affirm the value of her rural life in the more socially-mobile Lucy’s eyes.
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