Ode to the Midwest: Refiguring Lorrie Moore’s A Gate at the Stairs as a

Romantic Response to Post-9/11 Trauma

I ran north and north and north and could perhaps have run all the way to

Canada, where, paralyzed with sadness and exhaustion, my arms and fingers

would stiffen upward and I would, in one of grief’s mythic transformations,

become a maple tree, my sappy tears cooked down to syrup for someone’s

flapjacks. (Moore 211-12)

Using imagery from the natural world to verbalise her grief, protagonist-narrator

Tassie Keltjin characterises the Romantic ideology that structures Lorrie Moore’s A

Gate at the Stairs. Moore’s pastoral milieu turns the expected post-9/11 domestic

novel into a narrative that unifies nature and trauma to refigure the repercussions of

the 9/11 terrorist attacks in an identifiable context of localism. This small-world

narrative nevertheless raises and answers deterritorialised questions of grief, (dis)trust

and acceptance to constitute a literary response to 9/11 that testifies to the validity of

the post-9/11 domestic genre.

This essay will argue that critical explorations of post-9/11 domestic

narratives have been limited to interrogating themes that we see cropping up again

and again. The ability or inability of the domestic novel to represent personal trauma

in a national context, the demarcation of spatial boundaries in the post-9/11 domestic

sphere, and the perceived inability of post-9/11 domestic novels to graduate to more

outward-looking global literatures have all been identified in post-9/11 critical

commentaries, and all have invited debate and discussion by contemporary voices.

But I believe there is an opportunity here to progress and extend the debate about the

post-9/11 domestic novel by focusing in a new direction, hitherto unexplored. This

essay will relocate Moore’s protagonist Tassie as a contemporary Romantic,

navigating a “landlocked lake of love” (Moore 54). I will show how Moore’s

understanding of the September 11th

terrorist attacks, and attitude towards the West’s

consequent ‘War on Terror’, is situated and communicated through her narrator’s

interaction with an often beautiful but frequently ambiguous natural world. In doing

so I will refute critical objections to the domestic novel genre, demonstrating that

Moore’s offering, and the genre, can constitute a legitimate authorial response to 9/11.

The role of the domestic novel in post-9/11 literature is one that has attracted

much debate and critical study. Lorrie Moore’s A Gate at the Stairs, Jonathan Safran

Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom and Claire

Messud’s The Emperor’s Children represent some of the most popular domestic

novels that have been released in United States since the Al-Qaeda terrorist attacks of

September 11th

2001. These texts explore the human appetite for safety, security and

kinship, and the tensions that such basic needs propagate in an age of heightened

personal and national (in)security. Whilst the “domestic” novel is a common catch-all

for these narratives, that there is much that is un-domestic in their content: the

processing of almost inconceivable trauma, on a personal but also national or even

transnational level, permeates much of the contemporary canon. It generates scenarios

far removed from hearth and home. Safran Foer’s child protagonist Oskar Schell finds

himself in a convoluted manhunt to the top of New York’s Empire State Building

with adult strangers; Messud’s trio of twenty-something professionals struggle with

personal and global change in disparate locations from Australia to London; Moore’s

narrative never departs from the American Midwest, but Tassie’s affair with a

potential terrorist opens up fundamental dilemmas of love and possession that

dislocate her from the novel’s rural panorama. All these narratives constitute a literary

post-9/11 processing of trauma that mirrors the raw, decade-young national American

grieving process. The 9/11 terror attacks provoked a “trauma rupture” (Dunst 56);

cultural and literary responses alike are inchoate and still learning how to knit

themselves together. The budding post-9/11 domestic novel genre makes visible this

process in often painfully human ways.

The focus on the ways in which the post-9/11 domestic novel has “retreated”

into the domestic sphere, and the consequent extent to which the genre can therefore

do justice to the national and global post-9/11 contemporary context, has energised

critics looking for a salient hook on which to hang contemporary responses to post-

9/11 literatures. Michael Rothberg’s identification of “trauma at home” (“‘There Is

No Poetry In This’” 147) provides one of the first contributions to an intriguing

critical debate pertaining not just to the presence of numerous thematically domestic

narratives in post-9/11 literature, but the nature of these narratives: their etymology

and root cause. For Rothberg, the genesis of domestic narratives comes down to a

recognition of the sheer personal proximity of Americans to the 9/11 terrorist attacks,

which forced them to comprehend the close intimacy of a foreign incursion and its

horrifying “Otherness”. Thus authorial responses must process the implications that

homeland invasion has on their safety and security. Rothberg argues that this “home”

violence comes as a surprise for a powerful nation, whose ideology had previously

repudiated any outside threat, but he notes that America’s “fortunate isolation cannot

last forever” (151). This newly global context of uncertainty and insecurity entails a

traumatic response that must be processed by its citizens. As such, writers responding

to 9/11 must reconfigure their presupposed ideology of “home” and “homeland” in a

new world. This paradigmatic shift offered an opportunity for a new direction in

9/11’s correspondent literature, but the consequent domestic genre that proliferated

has resulted in mixed opinions from critics.

Certainly, Rothberg’s post-9/11 analyses found support from critic Richard

Gray, whose negative assessment of post-9/11 domestic narratives in “Open Doors,

Closed Minds: American Prose Writing at a Time of Crisis” resonated with

Rothberg’s analysis. Perhaps Gray wrote his 2009 essay as an unconscious corollary

to the ever-increasing popularity of post-9/11 domestic novels; he finds much to fault

in novels where “cataclysmic events are measured purely and simply in terms of their

impact on the emotional entanglement of their protagonists” (134). He indentifies and

rejects the sense of “sentimental education” engendered by the domestication of what

he argues should be recognised as a truly national post-9/11 trauma (134). This

critical diagnosis of a traumatised and myopic national genre peopled by writers

lacking a strategy of deterritorialisation is bolstered by Rothberg’s critique of the

trend in contemporary American fiction towards the “re-domestication” of content in

post-9/11 novels (“A Failure” 155). Moore’s A Gate at the Stairs was released in

2009 at the height of this critical conversation, and despite participating in many of

the stock domestic tropes that concerned Rothberg and Gray, it thrived commercially.

A relative paucity of critical interaction with the novel, perhaps due to its recent

release, leaves few opportunities for me to evaluate direct responses to Moore, but it

also leaves the field wide open for an interpretive analysis that breaks new ground in

identifying Moore’s sophisticated nous for communicating a new way of processing

the events of 9/11.

A Gate at the Stairs, at first glance, occupies a recognised space as a post-9/11

domestic novel. It depicts the homeland minutiae of contemporary American family

life as the foreground on a post-9/11 backdrop of national insecurity, and fits neatly

into a genre of what Angeliki Tseti describes as a “literature of crisis mixing the

strange with the familiar” (1). It fulfills the thematic staples of tracking familial

responses to the September 11th

attacks through a domestic lens. The female narrator,

Tassie is a naïve but precocious young college student who works as a childminder

for a middle-class couple and their adopted biracial daughter. She falls in love with an

ostensibly Brazilian student who absconds mysteriously, perhaps to become a

terrorist. Meanwhile, Tassie’s brother Robert enlists to fight in Afghanistan and is

killed within mere days of starting active duty. Reduced to its plotline, the novel

exemplifies David Holloway’s identification of a “failure of family members to

protect one another” to an excruciating extent (108). The novel also lends itself to

Holloway’s reading of an inferred synecdoche for the larger post-9/11 U.S political

picture: the 9/11 terrorist attacks highlighted the incapability of US politicians to

protect their citizenry in the eyes of Holloway and indeed Moore herself (Kelly 18).

But A Gate at the Stairs vivifies its political ideology by locating its narratives of

kinship, loss and survival in a new Romantic context that looks to nature and the

wilderness for help in figuring, refiguring, and understanding domestic and national

trauma.

The Romantic preoccupation evident in A Gate at the Stairs reframes Moore’s

post-9/11 narrative as a part-love letter, part-eulogy to humanity as if on behalf of the

natural world. This emotive positioning echoes the Romantic ideology of John Keats,

William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge before her to an almost uncanny

extent. In passages recalling a pre-9/11 environment, Moore frames Tassie’s domestic

upbringing in a pastoral Romantic context, from the “flat green world” of the Keltjin

farm (4), to Tassie’s explorations with her brother into the hive of activity found in a

fish breeding pond. In the novel’s post-9/11 environment, nature as entity is exempt

from the trauma of terrorism, but it figuratively embodies the conflict in process: this

is a world where “the summer moon [is] a tangerine shard” (291). Moore’s imagery

borrows in particular to Keats’ Odes, characterized by their juxtaposition of beautiful

and vital natural growth tempered by melancholia. Moore’s Romantic locales connote

a simulacrum of Englishness far removed from contemporary Midwest America, but

she cleverly avoids fully dislocating the narrative from its assumed spatial moorings.

Instead she combines the discrete environments in a unique new iteration. Thus

American deciduous forests become “star-leafed maples” (287), and the assumedly

all-American Oklahoma! is riffed humourously in a Romantic context: “there was a

bright golden haze on all meadows” (271). Moore even seems to be conscious of the

better-known Romantic tropes she calls on, employing them deliberately where

Moore wants to emphasise Tassie’s young gaucheness. Tassie is a precocious and

highly observant narrator, improbably comparing washing a floor in patches to

“writing a poem every day until you eventually said everything about the human

condition there was to be said” (213). This humorous simile lightens Tassie’s

narrative role as Romantic visionary whilst simultaneously reminding the reader that

the trope persists, and does so despite its contrasting domestic framework.

Moore’s narrative explores the Romantic concept of negative capability, in

which the writer temporarily absents his or her existence in order to better understand

another object or environment. The concept, positioned in the novel as a site for

multiple structural and thematic interactions, is apt for refiguring trauma in a post-

9/11 environment because survivors trying to understand the terrorist attacks gain an

opportunity to temporarily remove themselves from their own processing of the event.

Tassie’s intense sensory recollections of a farmland pond mimic Keats’ efforts at the

authorial intensity inherent in negative capability. Indeed, the pond and surrounding

copse itself connotes a lush Keatsian bower. This rural haven is a spatially clandestine

pre-trauma space, hidden from urban centres with their manmade terrorism: “[a]bove

and around us green leaves would flash with sunsetting light” (Moore 61). Moore’s

“verdant cove” (ibid.) echoes Keats’ 1819 poem ‘Ode to a Nightingale’, with its

“melodious plot/ Of beechen green, and shadows numberless” (8-9). It is testament to

Moore’s linguistic interpolation that risk of a potential temporal dislocation due to the

two-hundred year gap is obviated. Like Wordsworth before her, Tassie contemplates

“clumps of daffodils huddled near trees” (Moore 171), and like Keats, surveying

“[w]hite hawthorn, and the pastoral eglantine” (‘Ode to a Nightingale’ 46), Tassie

embraces “the columbine with their tiny eccentric lanterns” (171). These Romantic

linguistic devices are not mere decoration. Moore’s method of answering Catherine

Morley’s question of how writers respond to 9/11 in “‘How Do We Write About

This?’ The Domestic and the Global in the Post-9/11 Novel” is to lay out a meticulous

temporal demarcation of Arcadian imagery to represent an innocent pre-9/11

environment which contrasts to “grief’s mythic transformations” evident in the

traumatised post-9/11 landscape (Moore 221). It bolsters the standing of A Gate at the

Stairs as a sophisticated artifact in the post-9/11 domestic genre. Indeed, Morley

celebrates “domestic dramas of everyday life” as valid communicators of the post-

9/11 environment and culture, and notes that writers in the genre consider not just the

local but also the biopolitcal machinations of the world stage (731); Moore’s

Romantic bent can be interpreted as a sophisticated take on this duality. It cannot be

coincidence that the rapid global changes generated by September 11th

closely imitate

the turbulent conflicts of the original Romantic period, which saw unprecedented

violence and revolution between the storming of the Bastille in 1789 and Queen

Victoria’s coronation in 1837. Whilst analysis may, understandably, be limited by

9/11’s temporal specificity, it is possible to suggest that a contemporary relocation of

Romantic unrest has already been signalled in the global foment exemplified by

terrorism, American political dissent, and worldwide outrage at the Abu Grahib

torture revelations.

The geographical demarcation of soil and territory signals another intersection

of nature and Romanticism to complicate the domestic narrative of A Gate at the

Stairs. In a post-9/11 context, ideas of “home” and “homeland” take on new currency

and become sites of multiple interrogations for critical debates. Richard Crownshaw’s

essay, “Deterritorialising the ‘Homeland’ in American Studies and American Fiction

After 9/11” is the most advanced of these responses, in its mapping of spatial

transformations in post-9/11 literatures. By locating trauma in the domestic sphere of

home, Crownshaw is able to extrapolate trauma experienced from 9/11 to a damaged

larger homeland of America and American identity. A Gate at the Stairs reads almost

as a direct response to this idea of spatial reconfiguration. Moore’s decision to

distance her narrative from New York, Washington or even London as the culturally

agreed epicentres of post-9/11 discourse is significant. What seems at first

idiosyncratic soon resolves itself in Moore’s narrative: nowhere could be better

described as the homeland of America than the novel’s Midwestern plains. She is

making a powerful statement in choosing this location as the site of post-9/11

explorations, situated as it is at a concrete remove from previous New York locales

with their correspondent spatial fixity.

Crownshaw’s study notes that post-9/11 writers have focused on temporality

over spatial contexts, rendering 9/11 as only a time-based trauma with pre- and post-

event understandings dominating literary responses rather than spatial considerations.

Unusually, both time and space run throughout A Gate at the Stairs. Indeed they often

combine, lending an unusual anthropomorphism to Tassie’s narration: “[t]he cold

knocked the sloppiness from my head as well as my days-long, tortured hallucination

of deep existential vision” (126). Here, the geographical cues of weather and

temperature clash with the temporal reference to days, and both unite in a wry humour

that is typical of Moore’s prose and certainly atypical of the primary texts Crownshaw

analyses, particularly Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. Domestic narratives interact

with both texts, but the nature of this interaction is sharply contrasted. The post-9/11

domestic narrative is inarguably diasporic in theme; Moore works at the boundaries of

the genre and keeps the reader questioning, via unusual plot development, their

presuppositions surrounding the shape and nature of her characters’ loss. A Gate at

the Stairs at first cannot participate in Crownshaw’s temporal analysis because the

novel is set in the winter following 9/11; as such it does not follow the same pre- and

post- event demarcations. But it can instead remove itself from Crownshaw’s

boundaries, opening with the knowledge of the terrorist attack absorbed and

ostensibly processed. Here, though, Moore re-complicates the framework further, by

reintroducing pre- and post- events on a smaller scale that replicate 9/11 but do not

themselves constitute it. Each event disrupts the progress of narrator and reader alike

with an emotive plot twist, each branching out as aftereffects of 9/11. These

puncturing revelations, from Reynaldo’s identification as proto-terrorist, to Robert’s

death, complicate Crownshaw’s identification of the temporal shift in the post-9/11

novel; adding Romantic ideology into Moore’s spatial narratives further distances A

Gate at the Stairs from Crownshaw’s assessment of space in the post-9/11 novel.

In A Gate at the Stairs, as in Romantic literature, melancholia is never far

from utterance. Like Keats, who in his oft-quoted poem “When I have Fears that I

may Cease to Be” faces “the wide world / [to] stand alone, and think” (13), Tassie

embraces the emotional ambiguity of this natural world: “[p]erhaps we accepted the

weather as being us, weren’t afraid of it, carried around all its severity and storminess

inside us” (Moore 141). Similarly, the shared bond experienced by nurturing her

infant charge generates unfavourable comparative memories of the domestic care

Tassie received from her own mother: “why hadn’t my own mother known [the

beauty of childhood]? Perhaps there was too much winter permanently in our veins”

(172). Here, again, nature and domesticity are intertwined. In this respect I disagree

with Elizabeth Anker’s otherwise excellent article “Allegories of Falling & The 9/11

Novel”, shining, as it does, a considered light on the domestic novel; Anker argues

that entanglements with 9/11 themes bestow A Gate at the Stairs with its emotional as

well as political acumen (480). But it is more complicated than that: it is in,

specifically, Tassie’s Romantic interaction with Moore’s 9/11 narrative traumas that a

poignant power resides. Tassie is figured as a modern-day Wordsworth via the young

naivety recalled in his epic poem The Prelude. Similarly, 9/11 is filtered through

Tassie’s emotionally injured but highly observant Romantic lens. Nature prefaces the

novel: “The cold came late that fall and the songbirds were caught off guard” (1).

9/11 is introduced soon after: “[f]rom our perspective that semester, the events of

September – we did not yet call them 9/11 – seemed both near and far” (5). Indeed,

Moore communicates even at this early stage the novel’s symbiotic relationship

between nature and post-9/11 trauma. Tassie, in a “lyrical extract about birds in

winter” (Kelly 19) – note the Wordsworthian “lyrical” – fears what fate meets the

disoriented birds: “the birds had disappeared. I did not want to think about what had

happened to them” (1).

The nature-9/11 relationship is made explicit as Tassie continues: “I wondered

about them all the time: imagining them dead, in stunning heaps in some killing

cornfield outside of town, or dropped from the sky in twos and threes” (1). This

imagery hints at both the hijacked United Airlines Flight 93 which crashed into a field

in rural Pennsylvania, and victims of the World Trade Centre bombings who fell

and/or jumped from the burning buildings. As if conscious of the cluttered

contemporary cultural discourse surrounding the emotionally-charged trope of the

falling man,1 Moore chooses only “dropped from the sky” for her metaphor. In

referencing this visual allegory of 9/11, and using remarkably similar imagery to

                                                        1 Seen, for example, in art (Richard Drew’s “Falling Man”), fiction (Don Dellilo’s Falling Man) and criticism

(Tom Junod’s “The Falling Man”). 

Safran Foer’s flying birds in Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close – “‘[t]en thousand

birds die every year from smashing into windows’” (250) – Moore shows herself to

be aware of the post-9/11 narrative in which her novel participates. Nevertheless, she

moves away from overpopulated 9/11 territory by manoeuvring her thematic content

in the direction of a new Romanticism. Moore’s birds do not merely meet death, but

instead refigure the ambiguous journey of the “light-winged Dryad of the trees” that

features in Keats’ ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ (7). In most critical interpretations of this

linchpin of Romantic writing, Keats’ bird is a symbol of natural renewal: “[t]hou was

not born for death, immortal Bird!” (61) But it could just as easily constitute a

characteristic Romantic anguish at nature’s mutability, a lament at the indignity of

innocent death. In this refiguring, 9/11’s victims can gain a voice in memory. Moore

leaves the reader to ponder how many more global innocents could multiply the initial

2,996 victims.

Much of Moore’s prose signifies a struggle for equilibrium, and A Gate at the

Stairs is no exception. Moore’s Romantic bird motif recurs at momentous occasions

in the narrative. Tassie’s experience as an airplane passenger uneasily juxtaposes the

natural world with a post-9/11 neurosis: “[t]he plane was small, only a fifty-seater,

hardly a hijacking target, and from my window seat the gray pieces of the wing

seemed fitted together both randomly and intricately, like the plumage of a goose.”

(78). By locating terrorism in the recognisable structures of flight and nature, Moore

plays with Gray’s identification of writers needing to “domesticate, to shepherd that

sense of crisis into the realm of the familiar (After 40). Moore’s narrative may be

domestic, but Gray’s “sense of crisis” is shepherded into not the familiar, but the

natural: in the literal sense of the word. Nature is the framework in which A Gate at

the Stairs can refigure its human grief. Not only is Tassie described as a “bass-faced

bird” who is vulnerably “winged” around her double bass, but she is searching for

guidance in the “sloped shoulders of another bird”, the instrument itself, hoping for

guidance (275). The choice of song is – but of course – ‘Bye Bye Blackbird’. Thus

Moore refigures the bird analogy again, here through impressive dry humour. Yet the

poignancy of her tone remains. It complicates Morley’s earlier identification of the

crux in the post-9/11 domestic genre: making sense of a trauma through knowable

experience (Morley 719).

Moore’s knowable experience is domestic and yet uncommonly

communicated. Typically, her necessary relocation of post-9/11 trauma transforms the

trope of birds in flight as bloodthirsty mosquitos, whose “awfulness and flight

obsessed me, concentrated my revulsion: suspended like mobile, or diving like jets,

they were sinisterly contrapted” (61). These “jets”, contemporary but almost gothic in

description, are the foreboding precursor to both the terrorist planes striking New

York’s twin towers, and the US bomber planes that stand in for her brother’s death.

Tassie even recounts slapping a mosquito into her brother’s back, killing five in a

splatter of blood beneath his shirt. This iteration of the natural world is deliberately

removed from the “green altar” of Romantic poetry (Keats’ “Ode on a Grecian Urn”

32) to emphasise its ugly prescience for the trauma to come. As Gray notes, “the poet

tries to take the measure of the crisis […] by registering one individual experience of

it.” (After 191). Certainly a poet in the Romantic sense, Moore participates in this

attempt at testimony to foster an understanding of an alien trauma, both for herself

and for her reader.

Moore’s almost compulsive return to the bird metaphor is telling. It

emphasises the importance of the trope in the novel’s foretold future tragedies. Tassie

works as a rodent-chaser on her father’s farm, with “fake feather and plastic hawk-

wing extensions” attached as costume (270). Dressed as a bird in an oblique reference

to the novel’s opening imagery, Tassie reforms herself as a weighty Icarus. Whereas

the ancient Greek myth sees Icarus, son of Daedalus, fly too close to the sun on false

wings, A Gate at the Stairs places the daughter, Tassie, as the risky protagonist: “I

could feel myself almost flying, the way I flew in dreams” (270). This inversion is

intentional. The real Icarus, Tassie’s soldier brother Robert, has already ignored his

father’s warning, and flown too close to the sun, here symbolised by the West’s ‘War

on Terror’. Sure enough, his doom is prophesied when Tassie next attaches her wings

and sees a vision of her brother. Tassie relishes “feeling the slight takeoff of my

wings” (292), but soon after sees her brother standing with her estranged lover

Reynalo as ghosts in the cornfield. The very next night, she sees the vision again,

“neither vaporous nor cadaverous, but wordless and turning and walking away” (293).

Narrating with ominous clarity, Tassie concludes: “this made me understand that they

were unfindably dead, all of them” (293). It is a supernatural vision that echoes

Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”, but where

Coleridge’s Romantic-gothic poem stresses moral pedagogy, Moore’s passage

presents a vision shot through only with grief. This trauma is realized just pages later,

at Robert’s untimely funeral. It provides a thematic site for the final iteration of

Moore’s bird metaphor.

Tassie’s funeral barette is fashioned into a black crow – a far cry from Keats’

lyrical nightingale. Robert’s grief-stricken father performs a clumsy eulogy that

echoes the very opening of A Gate at the Stairs in its reference to flight: “[b]oth my

kids seemed always to love the feeling of flying, and so sometimes I looked the other

way” (297). This painful passage embodies Morley’s identification of post-9/11

novels turning “inwards to depict fractured unions and broken homes” (719), and

shows what power this direction can yield. Indeed, Morley’s rejection of new

outward-looking literatures to satisfy Rothberg and Gray’s call for post-9/11 global

healing finds strong support in Moore’s final chapters. Despite refusing to “turn [her]

gaze away from home” (Morley 719), Moore incorporates into a tiny rural worldview

wide-ranging national and transnational traumas represented by Reynaldo’s terrorist

sensibilities and Robert’s army death. In short, Moore’s embrace of localism does not

prevent her from presenting a skillfully deterritorialised picture of grief sketched from

9/11’s repercussive (inter)national tragedies.

Indeed, it is through the domestic narratives in which writers are not talking

about September 11th

that the event makes its cultural and psychological impact

known. The occlusions inherent in seemingly ordinary narratives signal their author’s

preoccupations. Narrating domesticity in the post-9/11 novel is thus a way for writers

to tackle what Ruth Caruth noted as “the impossibility of direct access” (4). By

narrating the knowable and imaginable, Moore allows access to understanding trauma

in human terms that would otherwise be elided. As Tassie asks, expecting no answer,

“[c]ould events return, retrace their heavy-footed passage, to the place from where

they have accidentally come?” (243). Tassie’s humour is a coping tool for her lover’s

abandonment. Its gaucheness symbolises the young and fragile identity of post-9/11

temporality. When Reynaldo explains his pre-narrative move to the Midwest to avoid

connotations of terrorism, Tassie concurs that rural domesticity constitutes a myopic

retreat: “[n]o, no terrorism. What you have to worry about here is – corn mold!”

(192). Her unlucky domestic naïveté, so wincingly familiar to any reader, also

contrasts deliberately to the fraught proto-global narrative of Reynaldo as an

emotionless exile preparing for holy jihad.

Indeed, Tassie’s “self-sabotaing ordeals” are intensely human, and

deliberately constructed as such (Anker 467). As Moore comments in a New York

Times interview, “[t]here were certain scenes that felt so heartbreaking to me that I

didn’t know how I was going to write them […] I cried all the way through the

writing of it” (Motoko n.p). Gray’s sheparding is evidenced here, in the emotional

impasse suggested by Moore’s interview, more than anywhere. But perhaps it is less a

therapeutic authorial shepherding than an engineered juxtaposition of the microcosm

(domestic sphere) and the macrocosm (terrorism) clashing to generate an emotional

response in the reader. To assume that Moore and her contemporaries are merely

writing as vehicles for catharsis would be reductive. Her distaste for post-9/11 U.S

political dirigisme, where, as Kelly notes, “terms are invented, euphemisms

deployed” (144), may be the very impetus that prompts important post-9/11

narratives. That the genre’s political ideologies, like their traumas, are occluded by

ostensible parochialism simply means that the writers believe the issues at stake

benefit from a spatial relocation to the knowable territory of the domestic to ensure

the issues explored strike in a human context.

Finally, relocating A Gate at the Stairs in a Romantic framework allows me to

interrogate the deterritorialised questions that Moore’s narrative poses from a

reference point unexplored by other critics. Keats’ poetic works were characterised by

the Romantic pursuit of permanence that would endure through transience. In A Gate

at the Stairs it is refigured in Tassie’s appeal to Reynaldo to refute his imminent

jihad. Tassie pleads: “As much as you want this world to end, it can’t. The seeds to

everything are being stored, as we speak, in the permafrost of Norway” (209). It is a

laudable, if unsuccessful, rebuke to terrorism, and it provides an answer to the

question of how society processes Daunt’s aforementioned trauma rupture. In Tassie’s

adherence to a Romantic vision of permanence that cannot be altered by decay,

Moore shows that mere optimism constitutes a popular coping strategy for many in

post-9/11 existential scenarios; Moore’s verdict may well be that, in the absence of a

superior survival strategy, the human spirit for life, compromised as it may be by

suffering, can and must suffice. Nevertheless, the anxieties of Keats’ “When I have

Fears that I may Cease to Be” are echoed in Moore’s presentation of Robert’s death in

Afghanistan. Keats’ fear, that he “shall never look upon thee more” (10), is

poignantly echoed in Tassie’s dawning realisation that she, too, is subject to

mutability, that Achilles heel of Romanticism. Whilst her grudging acceptance of

mortal inconstancy begins with Reynaldo’s emotionless rejection, it takes concrete

form where it coheres the larger trauma wrought by 9/11’s diasporic repercussions,

including Robert’s untimely death. Keats’ desire to “leave the world unseen, / And

with thee fade away into the forest dim” (“Ode to a Nightingale” 19-20) is rendered in

close facsimile through Tassie’s grieving process for “death of a man’s trying”

(Moore 203). The fish pond on the Keltjin’s farm that once provided shelter to Tassie

and her brother is now denuded of its domesticity by tragedy, and yet: it still provides

a bower of sorts, one shaped by loss and temporal decay, but intact. The novel

concludes that for survivors of 9/11 and its repercussions, personal and national

insecurity replace safety, but that the natural world can still foster sites of Romantic

humanity.

The unique skill of the post-9/11 domestic novel is in locating a hitherto

inconceivable post-disaster reality within phenomenological, everyday contexts. Thus

narratives featuring normal routines communicated to readers via empathic and

knowable protagonists serves to re-centre the novels from an unknowable and

unlocatable “out there” to a more manageable and recognisable “in here”, a spatial

shift that Crownshaw moved away from in favour of a temporal uncoupling of the

homely from the unhomely (767). That the post-9/11 domestic novel can maneouvre

this spatial shift despite its deep preoccupations with September 11th and its

aftershocks is rightly lauded by Morley, but few other critics; the paucity of praise

suggests either an under-analysis of the genre or, in Rothberg and Gray’s case, a

desire for the genre to not move from the “out there” at all, rather negating its identity

as essentially domestic. The literary retreat into domesticity that these post-9/11

novels embody strikes me as conscious and highly sophisticated. Critics who reject

the domestic narrative approach to post-9/11 processing of personal and national

trauma underestimate the allure of normalcy that the genre manifests, as well as the

complexity of narrating the ‘known’ rather than the ‘Other’. That domestic novels

communicate 9/11 via intensely domestic, inward-looking narratives is hardly

surprising, because it allows them communicate known experience. In this cultural

scenario, Moore’s complication of established tropes via a Romantic lens is valuable.

It is in this refiguring that Moore proves the validity of the domestic genre by merit of

its unusual participants to access “something more revealing” (Moore 297). The

American psyche since 9/11 seems to me to bear a trauma imprint – to use a nuclear

analogy, it bears an all-too-slowly diminishing trauma half-life. The post-9/11

domestic novel has shown itself to be a valuable cultural genre and traumatic

mouthpiece for its numerous readers. Sustained critical interaction with these

arresting literary responses to 9/11 is crucial to ensure ongoing dialogue that can

manageably shape the grief of survivors into lived experience.

EASM143: Post 9/11 Literature & Culture

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