The widely respected author Tobias Wolff followed an unlikely and meandering path to such a position. As his memoir This Boy’s Life chronicles, Wolff’s childhood and adolescence were unconventional and unpromising. Wolff was born in 1945 in Birmingham, Alabama, the second son of Arthur Wolff, an aeronautical engineer, and his wife, Rosemary. When Wolff was four his parents separated. His brother Geoffrey stayed with his father, and Wolff moved on with his mother.

Wolff and his mother moved from Florida to Utah, to Seattle, before settling in the remote Washington town of Chinook. His adolescence was characterized by loneliness, delinquency, and abuse from his stepfather. Finally fed up with his own dead-end life in high school, Wolff reestablished contact with his brother. Geoffrey Wolff, then a student at Princeton University, encouraged his younger brother to make more of himself and helped him channel his imagination into writing. Not completely reformed, however, Wolff forged both his transcript and letters of recommendation so that he would be admitted to and offered a scholarship by the elite boarding school, the Hill School. Though he was successful in getting in, he was eventually expelled because, as he says in This Boy’s Life, he “knew nothing.”

After his expulsion, Wolff joined the army and served in Vietnam. He then legitimately passed the entrance exams at England’s Oxford University where he earned a B.A. degree in 1972. After failing as a journalist, he won one of the coveted fellowships to study creative writing at Stanford University in California. Having at last found his true calling, Wolff published his first story in 1976 and his first collection, In the Garden of the North American Martyrs, in 1981. He is a member of the English department at Syracuse University in New York and is the author of two additional volumes of stories, two memoirs, and a novella. According to an article in Time magazine in 1993, “a couple of years ago, the Hill School invited him back and, on the unanimous vote of his former classmates, gave him his high school diploma. Michael Caton-Jones’ film version of This Boy’s Life, starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Ellen Barkin, and Robert De Niro, was released in 1993.

Plot Summary

The story begins with a distant, omniscient narrator describing Mary, the main character. She is a history professor who has made a career of avoiding controversy and expressing only safe, approved views. After fifteen years of teaching at Brandon College she is forced to look for a new job when the college suddenly closes in the wake of an administrator’s reckless and disastrous mishandling of its funds. Mary’s belief in the rewards of prudence and caution is shaken by the evidence that anyone “could gamble a college.”

Mary’s mid-career job search yields only one offer: at a “new experimental college in Oregon.” The narrator’s description of the place makes it seem more like a high school than a college: “Bells rang all the time, lockers lined the hallways, and at every corner stood a buzzing water fountain.” Mary dislikes Oregon and continues to look for other positions. After three years she receives an unexpected offer from a former colleague in the history department at Brandon, identified only as Louise. Louise, whose career and work on Benedict Arnold have been more high-profile than Mary’s, wants to know if Mary is interested in applying for an opening at “the famous college in upstate New York” where she teaches. The offer surprises Mary, who remembers Louise as self-absorbed and indifferent to other people, but she sends off a resume. Louise calls to tell her she will be interviewed for the job.

Mary researches the area and feels comfortable when she arrives and is picked up at the airport by Louise. On the drive to the college, Louise demands certain responses from Mary—“how do I look?” and “Don’t get serious on me.” She abruptly tells Mary that she has a lover and complains that her husband and children have not been very understanding about it. Louise offhandedly mentions that Mary will have to give a class lecture as part of her interview. When Mary protests that she does not have anything prepared, Louise offers her a paper of her own on the Marshall Plan. She leaves Mary at the college visitor’s center, saying she has to hurry off for a night with her lover.

After only a few hours, Mary is awakened by Louise, “snuffling loudly” and demanding to know if Mary thinks she is “womanly.” She paces, cursing an unnamed “son of a bitch” who can be assumed to be her lover Jonathan, and then demanding “Let’s suppose someone said I have no sense of humor. Would you agree or disagree?” Mary placates Louise with the compliments and praise she expects. Louise delivers a demeaning remark about Mary’s own appearance before settling down to pass the rest of the night chain-smoking on the couch. She leaves at daybreak. Mary has had no further sleep.

Mary spends the morning touring the campus with a student guide named Roger. The campus is an exact duplicate of a college in England, and college-themed movies have been filmed there. Mary notes that the college’s motto, “God helps those who help themselves” takes on an entirely new meaning considering how many of the school’s “illustrious graduates” had “helped themselves to railroads, mines, armies, states; to empires of finance with outposts all over the world.”

Roger is especially reverent when he shows Mary the power plant that runs the college. Mary gets the impression that the machine is the soul of the place. While they are contemplating it, Roger brags that the college has become much more progressive, even letting “girls come here now, and some of the teachers are women.” In fact, a new policy requires that at least one woman be interviewed for each opening.

The interview begins badly and gets progressively worse. Arriving twenty minutes after the scheduled time, Louise and her male colleagues do not even pretend to take Mary seriously. They chat inanely about the weather and the other differences between Oregon and upstate New York and then pronounce that they are out of time. When Dr. Howells, the department chair, asks if there is anything she wants to tell them, Mary laughs and says “I think you should give me the job.” When nobody else laughs, Mary understands that “they were not really considering her for the position.” She confronts Louise about bringing her there on false pretenses, but Louise’s characteristically self-centered response is that she thought a visit from Mary might cheer her up. “I deserve some love and friendship but I don’t get any.”

Mary still has to go through the charade of delivering her lecture. In front of a room full of students and faculty, Mary for once in her professional life does not take the safe path. Rather than reading Louise’s article, Mary tells the gruesome story of the capture and torture of French Jesuits by the Iroquois, one of the tribes native to the region. When Dr. Howells tries to stop her, she begins to preach in the guise of recounting one of the priest’s last words: “Mend your lives. . . . You have deceived yourselves in the pride of your hearts. . . . Turn from power to love. Be kind. Do justice. Walk humbly.” Mary turns off her hearing aid so that she can continue to talk without the distractions of those trying to silence her.

Characters

Dr. Howells

Dr. Howells is the chairman of the department of history at the prestigious college where Louise works and where Mary is led to believe she is a job candidate. He is arrogant, detached, and pretentious. The air of entitlement and superiority with which he presents himself is undermined, however, by his appearance. Mary is able to remember his name in part because he is so strikingly ugly, with a “porous blue nose and terrible teeth.”

Jonathan

Louise describes Jonathan as her lover. He never appears in the story. Because Louise barges in on Mary late on a night she said she would be spending with Jonathan, demanding to know if Mary thinks she is “womanly” or has a sense of humor, readers can guess that he has expressed dissatisfaction with her in regard to those qualities.

Louise

Louise, a former colleague of Mary’s at Brandon College, is now a professor of history at an unnamed “prestigious college in upstate New York.” At first glance she is everything Mary is not: married and

Media Adaptations

“In the Garden of the North American Martyrs” was recorded on audiotape by Symphony Space Literary publishers with Jane Curtin narrating. The story appears on Volume VII of Selected Shorts: A Celebration of the Short Story.

outgoing, but self-centered and pretentious. It becomes evident that she is desperately insecure and has no scruples about using other people to fulfil her own needs: she talks incessently about herself, complains about her husband and children’s negative reactions to her having taken a lover, and frankly admits, when confronted, that she knew Mary did not have a chance at the job, but arranged for her interview because she remembered Mary as “funny,” saying “I’ve been unhappy and I thought you might cheer me up.”

Mary

Mary, whose last name is not revealed, is the protagonist of the story. She has based her career as an academic on saying, writing, and teaching nothing with which anyone could reasonably disagree. As a result she practically loses the capacity for original thought, and has managed to survive fifteen years on the faculty of Brandon College, teaching and writing the blandest of ideas. When she eventually loses her job due to the closing of the college, she is forced to trade her dull credentials on a fiercely competitive job market. An interview at a prestigious college finally gives her the opportunity to take stock of her life and career. At the conclusion of the story she recovers the voice she had lost in a lifetime of listening too closely to the words of others.

Roger

Roger is the college student whose job it is to show Mary around the campus before her interview and lecture. He is cheerful and shallow as he uncritically points out the emblems of the college’s elitism and privilege.

Ted

Ted is Louise’s husband and the father of her children. Though he never appears in the story, he is a sympathetic character because readers understand that his intolerance of Louise’s behavior is completely reasonable and understandable.

Themes

Moral Corruption

The inclusion of the word martyr in the title invites readers to consider the themes of moral corruption and sin. Martyrs are those who are willing to die for their beliefs, usually at the hands of unbelievers or sinners. Because their deaths live on in legend and story, the martyrs serve as examples to others of the ultimate triumph of their purity over corruption, good over evil.

Though no one actually dies in Wolff’s short story, the author does ask readers to compare the martyrdom of Mary by Louise and the members of her department to the Jesuit missionaries at the hands of the Iroquois. Mary’s experience during her campus visit and interview reveals the total moral corruption of the members of the history department, if not of the entire college, and the culture to which it belongs. They have come to believe that their social and intellectual superiority grants them permission to take advantage of and manipulate other people in order to serve their own ends. Mary herself is prepared to behave in the same morally corrupt fashion when she agrees to present Louise’s paper as her own. In the end, though, Mary chooses the martyr’s path, sacrificing her personal success and reputation in order to reveal the corruption of her tormentors.

Betrayal

The theme of betrayal dominates the narrative of “In the Garden of the North American Martyrs.” Mary’s betrayal by Louise and the rest of her department at the upstate New York college is foreshadowed by Mary’s own lifetime of betraying herself. Readers learn early in th story that Mary has betrayed her own inner compass by making a habit of suppressing her true feelngs and practising dull, safe scholarship. The costs of this betrayal are physical as well as intellectual. She loses her ability to speak freely and spontaneously, wryly attributes a premature hearing loss to her tendency to hang on the words of others, and contracts a mysterious illness in her lungs.

Louise betrays Mary by luring her to interview for a job she has no chance of getting. Unlike Mary, though, Louise is arrogantly unaware that there are or will be any consequences for her actions. She does not see, for example, as readers do, that her research into famous traitor Benedict Arnold has taught her history lessons of a more practical variety. She betrays her husband and children by taking a lover and then faults them for being unsupportive of her. Although the story ends before we know what the future holds for Louise, her nervousness, heavy smoking, and evidently unsatisfactory experience with her lover give some indication that her world is fraying around the edges.

In all these instances betrayal is a source of pain and confusion, but “In the Garden of the North American Martyrs” challenges readers to consider another definition of the word. In some instances, betray can mean to give away, disclose, or unconsciously reveal. So when Roger brags about the college’s new recruiting policy for female faculty, he betrays the real reason that Mary has been brought to campus. Dr. Howells and the other committee members betray their true intentions by spending only a few minutes with Mary, chatting inanely about the weather in different parts of the country, clearly not conducting a serious interview for the open position.

Style

Point of View and Narration

“In the Garden of the North American Martyrs” is presented to readers in third-person omniscient narration. The narrator describes Mary’s past in order to clarify her present situation. In the first part of the story, the narrator appears to regard Mary indifferently or even negatively. As the narrative progresses, however, Mary is presented more sympathetically and—importantly—Louise and some other characters are shown in a very bad light. Wolff subtly shifts the point of view. He explained in an interview with Jay Woodruff in 1991 that he always intended to let Mary take over the narration, that his “aim was to hand the story over to her.” He

Topics for Further Study

Why would a college have a rule that requires interviewing at least one female candidate for each job opening? What laws or court decisions have helped shape such policies?
Critics often mention Flannery O’Connor when talking about Wolff. How does Wolff’s exploration of morality and prophecy differ from O’Connor’s as illustrated in her story “A Good Man Is Hard to Find”?
Research the history of the French Jesuits in the Great Lakes region during colonial times. How did their religious views influence their behavior, and what effects did their presence have on the culture?
What are Louise’s motivations for using Mary as she does? What theories of psychology might explain her behavior?

goes on to say that this shift in point of view was necessary because her voice needs to dominate the narrative by the time she gets to her dramatic concluding speech.

Tone

“In the Garden of the North American Martyrs” contains some significant tone variations that help contribute to the meaning of the story and parallel the shifts in point of view. Tone is the dominant attitude that the reader hears in the story. It can be ironic, genial, or objective, for example. The beginning of the story is characterized by the neutral and objective tone of the narrator, but by the end the tone is prophetic, resembling the language of the Old Testament. The success of the story hinges on this dramatic shift in tone, so that Mary’s voice shatters the aura of smug and false objectivity that dominates both the auditorium and the story. Wolff describes Mary’s speech in the interview with Jay Woodruff as language that “bursts the bounds of traditional realistic fiction.”

Imagery

Careful readers will notice that “In the Garden of the North American Martyrs” begins and ends with images of birds. Mary likens her diminishing capacity for original thought to the sight of “birds flying away.” In the final scene, when she delivers her prophecy to her stunned audience, one of the last things Mary hears before she turns off her hearing aid is “someone whistling in the hallway outside, trilling the notes like a bird, like many birds.” According to Wolff’s explanation in his interview with Jay Woodruff, “Language, especially the language which she speaks at the end, her own language, is freedom, is flight.” In an earlier interview with Bonnie Lyons and Bill Oliver, Wolff explains that the sound of the bird in the hallway is “a sign of her own voice coming back to her. An image of the words she has lost, like birds flying away.”

Historical Context

The Iroquois and the Jesuits

The Iroquois are the original inhabitants of the land on which the prestigious college now sits. The League of the Iroquois became a powerful force in colonial America because of the military prowess of its member nations, the Mohawk, Cayuga, Oneida, Seneca, and Onandaga. Although they once presided over most of what is now upstate New York, the remaining 11,000 Iroquois now own less than 80,000 acres.

The Iroquois are also remembered for their savage treatment of Jean de Brebeuf and Gabriel Lalemant. The two French Jesuit missionaries were captured near their mission in March of 1649 and tortured before being executed. They are known as the North American Martyrs and were canonized, or declared saints, in the Catholic church in 1930.

Academia

During the 1970s the job market for college and university professors began a steep decline. There were many more highly educated candidates than there were positions available. Following a trend that continues today, hiring departments can make whatever demands they wish on job candidates and have occasionally regarded applicants with disdain and condescension. Furthermore, the increased competition for jobs among recent Ph.D.s has inflated the importance of scholarly production, of books and articles, in other words. For example, Mary has had to produce a second book in order to be considered for other positions, but nobody cares, not even Mary, that it is not very good. During this period, institutions of higher education were also experiencing the effects of the women’s movement. Elite colleges saw the economic, if not the ethical, advantages of admitting female students and administrators under pressure to hire female faculty launched initiatives to at least create the appearance of fair hiring practices.

Critical Overview

When the collection of which “In the Garden of the North American Martyrs” is the title story was published in 1981, it received almost universal critical praise. The twelve pieces in this collection included the first story Wolff ever published, “Smokers,” which had first appeared in Atlantic Monthly. In 1986 Bantam Books reissued six of the twelve stories in a single volume together with Wolff’s award-winning novella set on a Georgia Army base during the Vietnam War, The Barracks Thief.

Though Wolff published a second volume of short stories, Back in the World in 1985, his first volume remains a favorite with critics. Offering backhanded praise for In the Garden of the North American Martyrs while criticizing Wolff’s newest book, Russell Banks wrote in the New York Times Book Review that “this book is a considerable falling off for Mr. Wolff.” Writing in The Nation, reviewer Brain Kaplan has high praise for Wolff’s first collection, singling out the title story as an exceptional example of Wolff’s ability to “use words to test lives against accidental and self-selected conditions.”

Criticism

Elisabeth Piedmont-Marton

Piedmont-Marton holds a Ph.D. in English and teaches American literature and administers

What Do I Read Next?

This Boy’s Life (1989) by Tobias Wolff is an account of Wolff s adolescence and early adulthood. The memoir is told through the eyes of the boy, leaving the reader free to draw conclusions and make judgements about events the child could not have fully understood at the time.
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is the classic novel about another boy whose coming of age is characterized by a tendency to stretch the truth and who must make difficult decisions without much adult guidance.
Wise Blood, Flannery O’Connor’s darkly comic novella about a misguided preacher’s search for meaning and moral certainty.
Dubliners is the collection of short stories by Irish author James Joyce that Wolff often mentions as having a major influence on his writing.
Ellen Foster (1989) by Kaye Gibbons is a novel about a female character whose lonely and unparented childhood resembles Huck Finn’s and the young Toby Wolff’s.
The Duke of Deception (1979) is Geoffrey Wolff’s memoir of growing up with his father, a con artist.

the Writing Center at the University of Texas. In this essay she discusses the symbolic and moral dimensions of “In the Garden of the North American Martyrs.

“In the Garden of the North American Martyrs” belongs to the category, or genre, of literature known as modern realism. Tobias Wolff has often expressed his admiration for the stories of John Cheever and is a particular fan of James Joyce’s collection of stories Dubliners. Despite his canny eye for detail and his gift for dialog, however, Wolff seems to work against the constraints of realism. “In the Garden of the North American Martyrs” in particular dramatizes the tension between the realistic and symbolic ways of looking at the world. The story, in Wolff’s own words, “bursts the bounds of traditional realistic fiction.” Reviewer Brian Kaplan writes in the Nation that Wolff “scrutinizes the disorders of daily living to find significant order underneath the surface.” “In the Garden of the North American Martyrs” suggests that this order, or meaning, may be found on both the symbolic and moral levels.

The symbolic strands that will be woven together at the story’s conclusion are introduced at the beginning. The narrator likens Mary’s failure to pursue original thought to birds shrinking away to “remote, nervous points, like birds flying away.” Mary even takes on some physical characteristics of birds, even cocking her head to one side in an effort to “catch everything everyone said.”

Another cluster of images whose symbolic significance unfolds as the story develops is that of the wilderness and that most immutable force of nature, the weather. During the three years she spends at the experimental college in Oregon, Mary feels as if she is being besieged by rain and its consequences. “There was water in Mary’s basement. Her walls sweated, and she had found toadstools growing behind the refrigerator. She felt as though she were rusting out, like one of those old cars people thereabouts kept in their front yards, on pieces of wood. Mary knew that everyone was dying, but it seemed to her that she was dying faster than most.” She develops a lung disorder and her hearing problem is exacerbated by the dampness, almost as though she were trapped underwater.

The climate and scenery in New York at first seem to invigorate Mary, but soon the landscape takes on more ominous features. Louise prattles on

“A cluster of images whose symbolic significance unfolds as the story develops is that of the wilderness and that most immutable force of nature, the weather.”

about her love life as she drives Mary to her guest cabin, oblivious to the persistent and vaguely menacing presence of the world outside her window. Mary, however, notices “the forest all around, deep black under a plum colored sky. There were few lights and these made the darkness seem even greater.” Though it will not become clear until Mary invokes the spirits of the Iroquois and the martyred Jesuits at the conclusion of the story, the landscape represents the dark and violent history of the place from which, ironically, Louise and her fellow historians are completely disconnected. Mary, whose habit of listening closely serves her well in this instance, is almost able to hear the voices of those who have gone before.

The next day when Mary visits the college she sees that Louise is not alone in her arrogant dismissal of the history of the place. The college, as the student guide Roger explains, is “an exact copy of a college in England, right down to the gargoyles and stained glass windows.” The symbolic heart of the place, as it turns out, is not the library or the chapel, but the power plant, which represents the power that those with wealth and privilege use to grind up those without it. The machine puts its mark on the landscape and appropriates the earth’s resources in order to keep itself running. Wolff is suggesting in this image that Louise and her colleagues have become so obsessed with feeding the machine and so deafened by its noise that they cannot recognize history—even their own—when they are surrounded by it. Ironically, it is the machine that finally reveals the truth to Mary. While watching it hum, Mary comes to understand that “she had been brought there to satisfy a rule,” that the overwhelming mechanisms of power have manipulated her. But the machine also offers her a choice. She can be a smoothly compliant cog, or she can be a stray bolt that brings the whole thing to a grinding halt. Though the machine is a morally neutral object, its symbolic presence offers Mary a moral choice.

Knowing that she has been betrayed by Louise and used by the “machinery” of the prestigious college, Mary must decide whether she should stick to the safe course she has followed all her career, or strike out into the wilderness of the unknown. To do only what is expected—blandly read Louise’s lecture on the Marshall Plan—is to give in. When she comes to the podium Mary is “unsure of what she would say; only that she would rather die than read Louise’s article.” She decides to “wing it,” and all the words that had long ago flown away into “remote, nervous points” return to her, giving her the power not just of speech but of prophecy. In the end, she address the group directly, speaking in the tradition of the stern New England preacher, imploring them to mend their ways and “turn from power to love.”

In invoking the story of Brebeuf and Lalement’s torture and capture by the Iroquois, Mary proves herself the superior historian and defeats the machine reasoning of Louise, Dr. Howells and the rest of the faculty. Her “pronouncements on justice and love disorder the machinery of expectation,” as critic Brina Caplan puts it. Her sense of history is so profound that when she looks around the lecture hall it has been almost transformed to the mission where the French priests were held in 1649: “The sun poured through the stained glass onto the people around her, painting their faces. Thick streams of smoke from the young professor’s pipe drifted through a circle of red light at Mary’s feet, turning crimson and twisting like flames.” Like the North American martyrs, Mary regards her “captors,” or audience, as savages with painted faces. Also like Brebeuf and Lalement, Mary knows that there is nothing she can do to change their minds or alter the inevitable course of action. Her only choice is to make her final moments morally instructive.

While readers appreciate the dramatic and symbolic effect of the comparison between Mary’s ill treatment and that of the North Americans martyred by the Iroquois, and may recognize that Mary’s performance is an act of moral courage, the story poses an even larger moral question that lingers long after reading. Readers must ask themselves whether, by any standards of right and wrong, Mary’s ordeal is even remotely comparable to the hideous torture and execution of Brebeuf and Lalement. While Mary’s speech can be understood as ironic, or even farcical, as Brina Caplan suggests, some readers may still be left with the troubling sense that the tortures and death that Mary so vividly describes have been trivialized in order to serve Mary’s (nonlife-threatening) ends, making her just as morally corrupt as Louise and her colleagues.

Source: Elisabeth Piedmont-Marton, for Short Stories for Students, Gale, 1998.

William Rouster

Rouster has a Ph.D. in rhetoric and composition and has published in a number of composition journals. In the following essay he discusses symbolism in “In the Garden of the North American Martyrs.”

Tobias Wolff’s “In the Garden of the North American Martyrs” was published in his book of short stories, In the Garden of the North American Martyrs: A Collection of Short Stories in 1981. As the title indicates, the story deals with images of martyrdom on this continent. Of the literary devices used in this short story, the dominant one is that of symbolism, which refers to the use of people, objects, creatures, places, and events to represent more than just themselves. Symbolism is one of the most widely used and effective literary devices of all, since many authors wish to give their work greater relevance than just the story that is being told. Therefore, Mary in this story symbolizes more than just this one person, Mary, and the university in the East is meant to represent more than that one university. In “In the Garden of the North American Martyrs,” nearly all of the characters, events, and places have symbolic significance, and the meaning of the story is to be found therein.

Of the characters presented, the most significant is Mary, no last name given, and we are told the story of her academic career. Mary appears to symbolize those members of the academy, or university system, who lose their identity to the power of that system. Mary, in itself, is a very common name, thus the main character could represent almost anyone, and, indeed, she works very hard to not be someone who stands out from the academic crowd in any important way.

Mary particularly strives to remain anonymous after witnessing the dismissal of an intelligent and

“In ‘In the Garden of the North American Martyrs,’ nearly all of the characters, events, and places have symbolic significance, and the meaning of the story is to be found therein.”

insightful colleague who had offended powerful members of their college with his ideas. She writes her history lectures out in total and uses not her own ideas, but only those of others who have been judged by the academy to be noncontroversial. In doing this she begins to lose her own ideas: “her own thoughts she kept to herself, and the words for them grew faint as time went on; without quite disappearing they shrank to remote nervous points, like birds flying away.” To avoid being thought too boring, Mary cultivates an image of eccentricity by committing to memory comedy routines and jokes.

Mostly, Mary listens to others. Her image of herself as a listener comes to her from a reflection that she spots in a window as she is listening to a senior member of her department. “She was leaning toward him and had her head turned so that her right ear was right in front of his moving mouth.” This image symbolizes her loss of self to the power of the academy, an academy to which she only listens and does not speak. Eventually, Mary develops hearing problems from, she guesses, listening too much to others.

Fifteen years after Mary’s arrival at Brandon University, it closes its doors. She eventually finds work at an experimental college in Oregon where she is most unhappy in the persistent rain. Mary, however, appears to be rescued from the rust and rain of Oregon when a former colleague, Louise, contacts her to tell her of a job opening at her college in upstate New York, for which Mary applies and gets an interview. She is determined to get this job, mainly by not offending anyone. On the plane trip she begins to feel that she is going home, a feeling which grows stronger during the flight eastward. She describes this feeling to Louise as “deja vu.”

What she is going home to is her own martyrdom at the hands of the machine itself. In this story, the machine symbolizes the almighty, unappeasable, unfeeling force of the university system which feeds on people such as Mary. The student showing her around the campus takes her to view the power plant: “They were standing on an iron catwalk above the biggest machine Mary had ever beheld. . . . Where before he had been gabby Roger now became reverent. It was clear that for him this machine was the soul of the college, that the purpose of the college was to provide outlets for the machine.”

The college served the machine and this college is meant to symbolize all colleges: “Roger, the student assigned to show Mary around, explained that it was an exact copy of a college in England, right down to the gargoyles and stained-glass windows. It looked so much like a college that moviemakers sometimes used it as a set.” The motto of the college, written above the door of the Founder’s Building read “God helps those who help themselves” and listed among the most prominent graduates of the college were men who took a great deal from society in terms of riches, but gave very little in return.

Louise is an interesting example of an individual who takes without giving at this college. She likely represents one of the feeding tentacles of the college machine. Louise is totally self-absorbed, and although she is wreaking havoc on the lives of those around her, she is concerned only with herself. She invites Mary to be sacrificed because Mary cheers her up. She takes a lover in spite of the pain it causes her husband and family because of the positive influence she thinks it has on her: “My concentration has improved, my energy level is up, and I’ve lost ten pounds. I’m also getting some color in my cheeks.” She says about her family’s negative reaction: “there is no reasoning with any of them. In fact, they refuse to discuss the matter at all, which is very ironical because over the years I have tried to instill in them a willingness to see things from the other person’s point of view.” Indeed, Louise is as incapable of feeling for others as the marauding Iroquois had been, and the writer makes it clear that Louise is a modern-day Iroquois: Louise “reminded Mary of a description in the book she’d been reading of how Iroquois warriors gave themselves visions by fasting” because “she had seemed gaunt and pale and intense” at the airport.

It becomes clear throughout the latter half of the story that Mary is to become a North American martyr in this college garden, the sacrificial offering. Fire and smoke play prominently in the story’s imagery. Louise, a chain smoker, asks Mary to light her a cigarette soon after Mary arrives. Smoke drifts from two of the cabins in the visitor’s quarters and, as soon as Mary and Louise step through the door of Mary’s cabin, Louise states “Look . . . . they’ve laid a fire for you. All you have to do is light it.” One of the men interviewing Mary smokes a pipe. As Mary beings to give the lecture part of the interview, “thick streams of smoke from the young professor’s pipe drifted through a circle of red light at Mary’s feet, turning crimson and twisting like flames.” Mary is being symbolically burned at the stake, by an audience of savages who are painted by the sunlight streaming through the windows.

It is in Mary’s lecture that we learn about the North American martyrs and their garden, two Jesuit priests who were tortured and killed by the Iroquois on the site of the college. Originally, Mary is going to read one of Louise’s papers, thereby giving her own voice and identity up completely, but when she learns that she has no chance at the position, she decides to do something she never before would have dared—to “wing it”—and quit playing it safe. The place she is giving the speech is in the Long House of the Five Nations of the Iroquois, a pitiless tribe of torturers and murderers who became powerful through their lack of mercy, much as the members and graduates of this college had done to others. Of the two Jesuit martyrs, one was burned to death and the other tortured and eaten alive as he preached to them. The Iroquois ate strips of his skin and cut off his lips and then drank his blood, all while he was still alive. In much the same way the academy has eaten Mary alive: she has almost nothing left of herself, and cannot even speak her own ideas.

Mary continues to speak through the silence of those listening once she runs out of facts about the Iroquois, and rebuffs the professors much as she imagined the dying Jesuit had rebuffed the Iroquois as they were killing him:

Mend your lives, she said. You have deceived yourselves in the pride of your hearts, and the strength of your arms. Though you soar aloft like the eagle, though your nest is set among the stars, thence I will bring you down, says the Lord. Turn from power to love. Be kind. Do justice. Walk humbly.

Mary is not done talking after this, winging it as she goes. She shuts off her hearing aid so that no one can interrupt her and continues talking. At the moment of her martyrdom, Mary has found her own voice.

Source: William Rouster, for Short Stories for Students, Gale, 1998.

Tobias Wolff with Jay Woodruff

In the following excerpt from a longer interview, Wolff describes his writing process and how the story “In the Garden of the North American Martyrs” evolved.

“Language, especially the language which Mary speaks at the end, her own language, is freedom, is flight. It’s why I use the image of birds there.”

[This text has been suppressed due to author restrictions]

Source: Tobias Wolff with Jay Woodruff, in an interview for his A Piece of Work: Five Writers Discuss Their Revisions, University of Iowa Press, 1993, pp. 22-40.