Читать книгу The Common Lot and Other Stories - Emma Bell Miles - Страница 13

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A Dark Rose

From Harper’s Monthly Magazine 118 (February 1909): 426–33; illustrated by Lucius Wolcott Hitchcock

Averilla Sargent, the pampered village flirt in “A Dark Rose,” leads young Luther Estill, a budding country preacher, on a merry chase as he woos her to be his wife. Thinking that the constriction of a preacher’s life is not what she had in mind for herself, Averilla declines initially, but then she accepts him and declares herself ready to be a preacher’s wife with all the “goodness” that entails. But the conversion perhaps comes too easily for Averilla and causes the reader to suspect her sincerity. Other questions arise as well: Is Miles deliberately presenting Averilla as an unreliable narrator? Is she positing this character as an archetype of the Appalachian woman who must play a role of subservience because she has no other option in the patriarchal culture she lives in?

. . .

Five preachers, in the intervals of a brush-meeting on Puncheon Camp Creek, were enjoying the hospitality of Brother Zack Lowry, whose big log house was near the place of meeting. Aunt Sa’Jane, the house-mother, quick and tireless as an ant despite her fifty-odd years, was clearing the dinner from the table in the open entry, and the men, sitting on the long porch, told stories of past revivals.