Kay Boyle's story "Astronomer's Wife" is a brief exploration of a woman's dissatisfaction with her husband and her life. The 1936 collection in which the story appeared, The White Horses of Vienna and Other Stories, was hailed almost unanimously by critics as a masterpiece and as evidence of an artist at the height of her powers, and the story demonstrates Boyle's maturity and subtlety as a writer. The protagonist, identified only as Mrs. Ames, is transformed in a small but profound way by her encounter with the plumber who comes to fix her house's clogged drain. The ordinariness and unremarkable nature of the action, and its deep emotional resonance, have deep similarities to the Joycean "epiphany" form of fiction while being at the same time striking in their originality.

Author Biography

Like many other members of the famous Lost Generation of American writers who inhabited Paris in the 1920s, Kay Boyle was born to a middle-class family in the Midwest — in her case, to the Boyle family of St. Paul, Minnesota, in 1902. Boyle's family was intellectually active and exposed her to avant-garde art early in her life — she even attended the famous Armory Show in New York in 1913. When she was twenty years old and living in New York, Boyle married a French exchange student, Richard Brault, and in 1923 moved to France with her new husband. By this time, Boyle was deeply involved in the avant-garde literary scene in New York, and while in France, she fell in with the American writers and publishers of Paris — especially Ernest Walsh, who edited This Quarter. By 1926, Boyle had left Brault and moved in with Walsh, whose child she bore soon afterwards. But Walsh died of a lung ailment just before their daughter was born.

Returning, despondent, to Brault in 1927, she quickly left him again to join an artists' colony run by Raymond Duncan, brother of the famed dancer Isadora Duncan. The colony revealed itself to be almost a cult, and Boyle — by this time definitively severed from Brault — moved back to Paris and began to work with husband-and-wife publishers the Crosbys and began to see the artist Laurence Vail. She had become a well-known writer by this time and was publishing in many of the most important journals of the day. During the 1930s, Boyle lived with Vail in England, Austria, and France until returning to the United States in 1941. She divorced Vail soon after and married Joseph Franckenstein, an Austrian aristocrat. She and her new husband returned to Europe where Boyle continued to write as a journalist for the New Yorker and the Nation.

In 1953, Boyle and her husband returned to the United States in an attempt to clear their names of the McCarthy-era smears that had been laid on them. Through the 1950s and 1960s, Boyle and Franckenstein remained in the United States, writing and also teaching at private schools. Franckenstein died in 1963. At this point, Boyle became deeply involved in feminist, civil rights, and antiwar movements while teaching at various colleges and universities and remained active in these causes for the rest of her life. She died in December of 1992.

Plot Summary

"Astronomer's Wife" begins with Mrs. Katherine Ames waking up in the villa in which she lives. She calls for the "girl," her maidservant, to bring her some coffee, and she begins to think about her husband, the astronomer. In her mind, he is distant and interested in abstract things. The maidservant interrupts her thinking by telling her that the plumber has arrived. Before readers learn why the plumber has been called, Mrs. Ames repeats her name to herself: "I am Mrs. Ames . . . I am Mrs. Ames." She shows the plumber to a room that has flooded, at the same time revealing to him and to readers that she and her husband are recent arrivals to the villa. The plumber examines the flooded room and remarks that he is sure the "soil line" is responsible for the plugged drain.

As he leaves to go outside and look at the pipes, the astronomer makes his only appearance in the story. He remains in bed but yells at his wife that "There's a problem worthy of your mettle!" Readers cannot tell whether he is referring to the plumbing or to something else. Mrs. Ames and the plumber proceed outside where the plumber notes that the drains are "big enough for a man to stand upright in them." Mrs. Ames, though, is not paying attention because she is thinking about how her husband's thoughts and the things that he says to her make her sad and make her wish that he would just not speak.

At this moment, Mrs. Ames looks at the plumber and notices that he is looking "up into her face." She notices physical characteristics about him — his hair "was as light as gold," he has "lean cheeks. . . rugged bones. . . firm and clean flesh." He suggests that the astronomer might want to go down into the drain with him. Mrs. Ames begins to think about the difference between men who descend, like the plumber, and men who go up, like her husband. Everything about the plumber becomes appealing to her, and she continues to think about how her husband dissatisfies her. As the story ends, she steps into the drainpipe with the plumber.

Characters

Katherine Ames

Mrs. Ames is the focus of the story. She is married to an astronomer whose distant, overly intellectual nature has caused her to resent him. She is the astronomer's only real link with the day-today world, but she means little to him beside that. Longing for someone who is not wholly immersed in the life of the mind, she is intrigued by and attracted to the plumber, who stands for everything physical.

Mr. Ames

See The Astronomer

The Astronomer

The astronomer is married to Mrs. Ames. The narrator of the story says of the astronomer that "he was a man of other things, a dreamer." He spends his life examining the heavens and attempting at all times to remain as high above the earth as possible — Mrs. Ames says that he likes being "on the roof. Or on the mountains. He's been up on the tops of them many times." He never physically appears in the story, and readers only hear from him once when he yells that there is a problem for Mrs. Ames to solve. For Mrs. Ames, he is "the mind of all mankind."

The Plumber

The plumber is the astronomer's diametric opposite. Where the astronomer prefers to be up high, the plumber goes down into the pipes below the ground. He is described by his physical attributes, and at one point the narrator suggests that he is "brutal," clearly playing on the animal meaning of the word "brute." Mrs. Ames is attracted to him for his physicality, but at the same time he pays attention to her, looks her in the eye when he speaks to her, and treats her politely and pleasantly. At the end of the story, he speaks of a cow he once owned who lost her cud. "I made her another in no time," he tells Mrs. Ames, "out of flowers and things and whatnot." In a sense, Mrs. Ames is that cow, and the plumber wants to give her back an important element of her life — an engagement with the physical world — that she has lost.

Themes

Epiphany/Breakthrough

An "epiphany" is a sudden moment of clarity, often brought on by emotional stimuli or by very minor events. In "Astronomer's Wife," Katherine Ames has an epiphany about her husband and what he has done to her. She wakes up on this day much as she does every other day — alone. The prose of the story gives a sense of deadness, as the author's style is quite flat in the early part of the story. This corresponds with the state of emotional deadness in which the reader finds Mrs. Ames. In the course of the story, though, she begins thinking in specific terms about the way her husband relates to her. Although he is not cruel or abusive in any way, he is not fulfilling her emotional needs. He is distant, and, as befits his profession, he has his head in the clouds. He is always thinking of abstract things, of faraway stars and planets. The little details of daily life do not interest him, and he generally delegates responsibility for any of those details to his wife.

Through her encounter with the plumber, Mrs. Ames begins to take more notice of those very details of daily life that escape her husband. She takes note of the physicality of the plumber, of his vital engagement with the physical world, and this causes her to think even more about how dissatisfied she is with her husband. Years of suppressed emotions begin to well up and overflow, much like the floodwaters that caused the plumber to be called in the first place. In the end, she symbolically joins with the plumber in going underground, going as far away from stargazing husband as possible.

Symbolism: Body/Mind

The conflict between the physical nature of humans and their ability to think and reason has always been a concern of writers, artists, and philosophers. If it is thinking that defines humanity, must humans entirely devote themselves to rationality and intellectual inquiry? In "Astronomer's Wife," the astronomer represents the mind. Like the brain, the astronomer is located on top of the symbolic body of the villa, refusing to descend. He prefers to look above him, into the heavens. He is "a man of other things, a dreamer." He does not even use his body, remaining in bed for the duration of the story, and the reader learns nothing about his physical being.

The wife is caught in the middle. She has adapted to her husband's way of life, and she also relies primarily on her head: she is a problem-solver. She also respects the power of the mind, which "made steep and sprightly flights, pursued illusion, took foothold in the nameless things that cannot pass between thumb and forefinger." However, in the course of solving these problems, her emotions and the physical world come into play. In this story, the emotions are a bridge between the physical, sensual world and the mental world. As the story progresses, Mrs. Ames continues to think about her husband and resents his life of the mind.

The plumber is a blunt representation of the physical world. Where the astronomer works with his eyes and head, the plumber's relation to the world is physical: he works with his hands. Mrs. Ames thinks to herself that "her husband was the mind, this other man the meat, of all mankind." Mrs. Ames also notices physical details about him, such as his hair, his flesh, and even the veins on his hands. He has little respect for the astronomer's refusal to engage with the physical world, and at the end of the story he symbolically becomes part of that physical world when he descends, accompanied by the astronomer's wife, into the underground. Mrs. Ames explains that, by contrast, "Mr. Ames would never go down there alive. He likes going up."

Ascent and descent are treated ironically here. Generally, ascent is a going toward God, an improvement, a positive thing. Descent symbolizes evil, falling, negativity. Yet, by linking the ascent/descent symbol with the mind/body duality, Boyle reverses their usual values. In this story, going down, engaging with the physical world, is a good thing. She even suggests that readers should not be so afraid of death, for death is just part of their nature as physical beings. Going up is the mark of a man who wishes he were not part of the world, and who has crippled his marriage and emotionally scarred his wife because of this desire.

Style

Point of View and Narration

The narration of this story is in the third-person limited, but it is not a conventional third-person limited. Boyle's narrator is very close to the mind of Katherine Ames, and records her thoughts. This is essential, for at the center of the story is her growing realization that she feels that her husband stunts her emotional life — a realization that takes place completely silently.

In addition, the style in which the story is written mirrors Mrs. Ames's increasing recognition of her feelings about her husband. When the narration describes Mrs. Ames's thoughts, the sentences are long and filled with adjectives, reflecting the freedom she has in her mind. But when the narrative begins describing Mrs. Ames's actions and her interactions with the plumber, the sentences become shorter, showing how constrained she feels. As the story progresses toward its epiphany at the end, the language expands and incorporates more imagery, again mirroring Mrs. Ames's expanding emotional state.

Symbolism

Certainly this story is infused with symbolism. In the story's broadest manifestation of symbolism, Boyle turns one of the best-known symbolic structures in Western culture upside down. In this story, sinking, going down, or falling is good, while rising or ascension has a negative connotation. The astronomer has his head almost literally in the clouds; his wife notes that he likes being up high, on the roof or on top of the surrounding mountains. Yet that loftiness has caused him to neglect his wife's emotional needs. The plumber is the opposite of the astronomer; he has his feet on the ground both literally and figuratively. His body engages with the earth and, at the end of the story, descends into the earth, and his earthiness is the salvation of Kathe-rine Ames.

These same symbols work on a narrow level, as well. The plumber's raw physicality represents, to Mrs. Ames, the promise of the sensual life that she has been deprived of while living with the astronomer. The astronomer's dreaminess and his separation from the material concerns of daily life symbolize how Mrs. Ames, as well, has been cut off from those elements of life — yet unlike the astronomer, she craves them.

Although it is not overt, the story also makes some oblique symbolic references to Greek mythology. Like Icarus, who made wax wings in order to fly only to see those wings melt when he passed too close to the sun, the astronomer's loftiness and his scorn for the earthbound seem to be his downfall. Similarly, the journey that the plumber and Mrs. Ames are about to take as the story ends suggests any number of similar journeys in classical mythology. For example, Orpheus, the semidivine avatar of sensual music, had to descend into the underworld in order to rescue his wife, Eurydice, who was imprisoned by Hades, king of the dead. Boyle inverts this myth, having the plumber take his symbolic lover into the underground in order to save her from her lifeless husband.

Irony

Boyle's inversion of traditional values — in her story, going up into lofty intellectual realms is bad, and sinking down into the sphere of the solely physical and sensual is good — characterizes the irony of this story. The story begins with foreshadowed irony, for in the first paragraph Mrs. Ames sings to herself a rhyme about a man leaving his wife, when at the end it is she who symbolically leaves her husband. In the following paragraph, the narrator remarks that Mrs. Ames,"once out of bed, had come into her own possession"; in fact, Mrs. Ames's daily life is barely her own possession, since she is so dominated by the way of life that her dry husband has made her live. The rest of the story shows this kind of subtle irony — seemingly innocent choices of words that reveal themselves to be carrying a much greater meaning when the reader reaches the end of the story.

Historical Context

Advances in Narration

"Astronomer's Wife" shows many of the advances and innovations in narration that were commonplace by the 1930s but were revolutionary in their time. Traditional first-person narration came directly from the voice of a character and used "I," while traditional third-person narration came from the voice of a being outside of the story who would describe all, some, one, or none of the character's thoughts. But in the late nineteenth century, a French author named Gustave Flaubert, who is most famous for his novel Madame Bovary, attempted to meld the two types of narration into a form that he called the "free indirect style."

In the free indirect style, the voice of the narrator speaks as someone outside of the character whose thoughts are being described, but at times the voice of the narrator becomes the voice of the character's thoughts — the diction and sentence structure and imagery will change and become similar to the way the character uses language. "Astronomer's Wife" is a good example of the free indirect style, for as Mrs. Ames becomes more and more interested in the physicahty of the plumber and begins to draw mental comparisons between the dry, intellectual personality of her husband and the vital, earthy character of the plumber, the narrator melds into her, and begins to use much shorter, sharper sentences and physical imagery.

Boyle also uses the stream-of-consciousness narrative technique developed by authors such as James Joyce, William Faulkner, and Virginia Woolf.

In a stream-of-consciousness narrative, the narrator attempts to transcribe, or write down, the exact thoughts of a character. This technique was influenced by the theories of Sigmund Freud, who believed that many of the small, seemingly insignificant details of how people talk and act can tell a great deal about their mental makeup. Mrs. Ames's growing use of words that describe physical objects and sensory impressions, as well as her inability to stop thinking about her dissatisfaction with her husband, indicate to readers that her choice to descend into the drainpipe with the plumber is in fact a very important and symbolic decision.

The Lost Generation

Kay Boyle was a member of a group of artistic-minded young Americans who, after World War I, moved to Paris to live and write and paint and sculpt and, in Boyle's words, "be geniuses together." Some members of this group were the writers Ernest Hemingway (whose novel The Sun Also Rises is considered one of the best portraits of this group), F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ezra Pound, Robert McAlmon, and Hilda Doolittle. The writer Gertrude Stein, another American who had been living in Paris for some time, dubbed these Americans the "Lost Generation" partially because of their aimlessness, dissatisfaction with their home country, and refusal to assimilate into the culture of France. Boyle, however, disliked this term.

Boyle arrived in Paris in 1922 with her first husband, but she had already had a great familiarity with the artistic avant-garde, having known many of the artists while living in New York. During the 1920s, she published stories in the so-called "little magazines" that were the outlets for these Lost Generation writers. She became especially good friends with the writer and publisher Robert McAlmon, and much later added chapters to his chronicle of the Lost Generation, Being Geniuses Together. At the end of the 1920s, Boyle separated from and divorced her first husband and married another expatriate artist, Laurence Vail, and with him moved first to the south of France, then to Austria and England. The 1930s — a period in which the main figures of the Lost Generation moved on, burned out, or became even more famous — then became Boyle's most productive period.

Compare & Contrast

• 1930s: Divorce is still illegal in many Catholic European countries, and even where it is legal it is extremely rare.

1990s: Approximately half of all marriages in the United States end in divorce, and divorce is common even in such Catholic nations as Italy — where it became legal only a few years ago.

• 1930s: The "traditional family model" of a husband working and a wife taking care of the house is quite common, especially among middle-class families.

1990s: Middle-class wives are extremely likely to have a college education and to work outside of the home. In American society as a whole, most families see both parents working outside the home.

• 1930s: Feminism and women's roles in social and political causes surge during the years of the depression. Thanks to New Deal programs and both Eleanor and Franklin D. Roosevelt crusading for women's issues and for women to take active roles in political offices, the number of women in high governmental positions increases dramatically. President Roosevelt positively affects the number of women in government by appointing the first female cabinet member, the first female ambassador, and the first woman on the Court of Appeals.

1990s: The number of women involved in social causes and political offices is the highest it has ever been. Women such as Jody Williams, Princess Diana, and Mother Teresa are recognized the world over for their commitment to humanitarian and charitable efforts. In government, after the 1992 election, the number of women in politics increases. Fifty-four women hold positions in Congress, including six senators and forty-eight representatives. By 1992, 13.4 percent of judicial officers are women and two women, Sandra Day O'Connor and Ruth Bader Ginsburg, hold positions on the Supreme Court.

Critical Overview

Although she was a member of the famous Lost Generation of American artists and writers who inhabited Paris in the 1920s, the poet, novelist, and short story writer Kay Boyle never liked that characterization. Her writing echoes many of the themes common to such Lost Generation writers as F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway — disorientation, the loss of a sense of home, alienation from one's acquaintances and family. But Boyle is different in that, unlike such writers as Hemingway and Fitzgerald, she concentrates on the double alienation of women and especially on middle-class women's difficulty in finding fulfillment.

"Astronomer's Wife" has rarely been specifically discussed by critics. However, most commentators on Boyle's work feel that the short story is her forte, and as a result they have primarily written about her mastery of the short story form, especially in this period of her life. The title story of the volume in which "Astronomer's Wife" appeared, "The White Horses of Vienna," has been frequently considered Boyle's finest story, one in which her concern with the inner lives of her characters — particularly notable in her early stories — is married to her social conscience and her interest in politics and history. In 1935, she won her first major prize for that story, the O. Henry Memorial Prize for the best American short story of the year.

Contemporary reviews for that volume point out Boyle's confident hand as a short story writer. In Books, Elizabeth Hart remarks that Boyle's "stylistic gifts are displayed to their best advantage in her short stories," and R. W. Seaver of the Boston Transcript notes that, in The White Horses of Vienna, "Boyle presents a series of acid-etched vignettes that are sometimes harrowing, occasionally confusing, but always powerful." Richard Carpenter compliments Boyle's "dagger-sharp images and crackling metaphors" and calls her "an exquisite manipulator of the nuances of phrase."

Not all of Boyle's reviewers were so impressed, even if they all recognized Boyle's skills. Criticism of her work from this time often expresses the opinion that Boyle was a brilliant stylist but that she did not concern herself with the issues of the day and how those issues affected people. The eminent mid-century critic Mark Van Doren feels that "her people are motionless, like frost-people on a pane of glass .. . they are [not] interesting in the way that men and women in stories can be interesting." E. H. Walton, of the New York Times, says that Boyle "has taken to lavishing her amazing, but exquisite, skill on situations so tenuous and ratified, on characters so wraithlike or pathological, that she leaves the reader unstirred by anything but her technical virtuosity." And the Springfield Republican writes that Boyle's "point-of-view towards her own creations is so extrinsic as to be really frigid . . . the icy beauty of Miss Boyle's language leave[s] her readers. . . in a state of morbidity."

Critical opinion of Boyle's short stories has grown friendlier over the years. Feminist critics have pointed out that the primary objection to Boyle's stories — that her detached tone left the readers unsympathetic to her characters — often sprung from a sense that as a female writer, Boyle should concentrate more heavily on the emotional reactions of her characters. Boyle is now seen as a pioneering writer, injecting a feminist consciousness into the American short story and into the modernist movement.

Criticism

Sources