The Frame

by Ellen Douglas

Hands down my favorite book of the semester so far, and likely to remain so. I can’t decide if I’m just incredibly lucky that I picked this one to write about for my short paper, or if I like it so much at least partially because writing about it made me read it more carefully and work harder to understand it than I did for any of the other books. Possibly some of both, but I think it would’ve been my favorite anyway. Cornelia is a comfortably well-off white woman in the South in 1969; Julia, better known as Tweet, is her black housekeeper. The two women share a kitchen-based relationship characterized by Tweet telling stories from her past and Cornelia pretending to listen (she’s mostly deaf, which becomes one of many metaphors for the way she tunes out the problems and lives of other people). Various traumatic incidents happen which force Cornelia out of her shell. I want to tell more, but I won’t, because it’ll turn into an essay, and nobody reading this site wants that. The best thing about it, though, for me, is the narratorial voice, which is intrusive, tongue-in-cheek, sometimes self-contradictory, and generally complicates everything in the book. I pretty much love it when books are self-aware and highlight their own constructedness, and Douglas does a stupendous job with that. I want to read everything she wrote.
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