{"id":1274,"date":"2021-07-15T21:30:30","date_gmt":"2021-07-15T21:30:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/ogcmaonline.byu.edu\/?p=1274"},"modified":"2024-05-16T19:46:39","modified_gmt":"2024-05-16T19:46:39","slug":"ada-reads-baucis-and-philemon-into-c-fraziers-cold-mountain-1997","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ogcmaonline.byu.edu\/index.php\/2021\/07\/15\/ada-reads-baucis-and-philemon-into-c-fraziers-cold-mountain-1997\/","title":{"rendered":"Ada reads Baucis and Philemon into C. Frazier’s Cold Mountain (1997)"},"content":{"rendered":"

The protagonist of Cold Mountain<\/em>, Ada, reads to Ruby\u2019s kids and to her own nine-year old daughter the story of Baucis and Philemon, a myth of gained paradise. Without any overt acknowledgement of this myth\u2019s approach within the novel, Frazier uses the myth\u2019s telling as the very final action of the novel. After the myth is read into the record, no further action transpires.<\/p>\n

In the book\u2019s final two paragraphs, Frazier learnedly inserts the reference to Baucis and Philemon while omitting in a periphrasis nearly all details of the referent. Indeed, he glosses over the actual telling of the classical myth.<\/p>\n

Ada took a book from her apron and tipped it toward the firelight and read. Baucis and Philemon. She turned the pages with slight difficulty because she had lost the end of her right index finger four years previous on the day after winter solstice. She had been up on the ridge alone cutting trees in the spot where she had marked the sun setting the day before from the porch. The log chain had kinked, and she had been trying to work loose the disordered links when the horse started forward in the traces and pinched off the fingertip clean as snapping a tomato sucker. Ruby poulticed it, and though it took the better part of a year, it healed so neatly you would think that was the way the ends of people\u2019s fingers were meant to look.<\/em><\/p>\n

When Ada reached the story\u2019s conclusion, and the old lovers after long years together in peace and harmony had turned into oak and linden, it was full dark. The night was growing cool, and Ada put the book away. \u2026 <\/em>\u2014 Frazier, Cold Mountain<\/em>, 448-49<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\"\"
David Ligare, “Landscape for Philemon and Baucis,” 1984, Wadsworth Athenaeum, Hartford, Connecticut. \u2014 “The cottage of Baucis and Philemon has become a temple, while the two spouses have been transformed into the intertwined trees on the right. … The size of the trees and the ruinous state of the temple indicate that the meta-morphosis took place long ago.” Morford & Lenardon, Classical Mythology, 8th ed.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The myth of Baucis and Philemon \u2014 arguably the only happy-ending metamorphosis in Ovid\u2019s multivalent Metamorphoses<\/em> \u2014 is applied with remarkable artistry on the last page of Cold Mountain. <\/em>For the novel overtly adapts the myth of Penelope and Odysseus from its third page right the way through to its epilogue. Homer, Homeric motifs, the study of Greek, thematic comparanda between Inman\u2019s odyssey and Odysseus\u2019 delayed nostos<\/em> all run throughout the novel. Only a reader with no familiarity of Homer\u2019s Odyssey<\/em> can miss how \u201cCold Mountain <\/em>asserts itself as an authentic American Odyssey<\/em>\u201d, as the dustjacket claims. Yet, Baucis and Philemon comes at us not from the Homeric narrative but from out of the blue, entirely unmentioned to this point within Cold Mountain<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Frazier\u2019s application may achieve the same multivalance as Ovid in the Metamorphoses<\/em>, where a humble aging couple, Baucis and her husband Philemon, graciously receive the gods Mercury and Jupiter then receive in turn the gift of metamorphosis from human into intertwined trees \u2014 a linden and an oak \u2014 which shadow the temple of Jupiter in the spot where they once had lived. Ovid summarizes with the moral that \u201cgods love gods and care for those who honor them.\u201d Like Baucis and Philemon within the Ovidian myth and Ada seems to express within the epilogue of Cold Mountain<\/em> a yearning to achieve everlasting (not actually immortal nor eternal) intertwining and natural repose.<\/p>\n

Spoiler alert: the next paragraph includes details that might spoil one\u2019s first reading of Cold Mountain<\/em>.<\/p>\n

The consummation of Inman\u2019s nostos<\/em> and Ada\u2019s occurs over about a dozen pages and several scenes within the novel\u2019s final forty pages. \u00a0There is love-making and detailed intimate planning about the future between Ada and Inman who come to know much about one another\u2019s past that they never could have known before. They talk about growing old together. (434) Frazier thematically intertwines the two lovers in their union, e.g. \u201cAda and Inman lay woven together on their bed.\u201d (430). Elsewhere they are “intertwined” and talking in bed. (435) As Ovid involved several words with the intertwining letter “X” in the metamorphosis of Baucis and Philemon (Met. 8.718-19), Frazier follows suit. Interspersed among all that intertwining Fazier weaves a fascinating negotiation between Ada and Ruby, who at one point speaks her mind with customary clarity: \u201c\u2026 I\u2019ll just say out plain what\u2019s on my mind. It\u2019s that we can do without him. You might think we can\u2019t, but we can.\u201d (409)<\/p>\n

Ada\u2019s character development within the novel is complete in that gloss slipped into the place of the Baucis and Philemon myth. She who entered the novel as a mere girl from Charleston has become a self-sufficient pioneer with the moxy now to mark solstices, clear trees, team a workhorse, and survive an involuntary amputation. Through the novel\u2019s nearly 450 pages, Ada progresses from a girl dressed in chiffon and trained too closely in classical literature and has become this capable woman. Readers of the novel will note how fitting is the detail that Ruby so effectively poulticed the wound. And they will note how very much like Ruby Ada herself has become. Indeed, the narrative has proved that Ruby and Ada together can do without Inman. And in this light that final intertwining of two lovers \u201cafter long years\u201d must be the remarkable joining of Ada and Ruby.<\/p>\n

Linda Hutcheon\u2019s Theory of Adaptation <\/em>calls for adaptations to be \u201cextended intertextual engagement[s] with the adapted work\u201d. (8) Because the myth of Baucis and Philemon receives far less than extended<\/em> engagement within Cold Mountain<\/em>, we are best able to conclude with applying the mythological adaptation only to the novel\u2019s formal \u201cEpilogue: October of 1874\u201d, pages 446-49, rather than to the whole novel. There Homer\u2019s Odyssey<\/em> receives extended adaptation. The reference to Baucis and Philemon does not formally qualify Cold Mountain <\/em>as an adaptation of the myth. For, the myth is not sustained across the novel. That sort of adaptation certainly applies to the novel\u2019s adaptations of Ada as Penelope and Inman as Odysseus. I shall argue elsewhere that reading Ruby\u2019s development within the novel as an Athena adaptation is a thoroughly sustainable. I would like to believe, though, that that argument needs to transpire in a venue where there is more time and space for appropriate development.<\/p>\n

I would assign to the novel the OGCMA index Penelope2.0011_Frazier or OdysseusReturn2.0011, preferring the former because of the novelist’s more surprising development of Ada’s character.<\/p>\n

_____ Roger T. Macfarlane<\/p>\n

Charles Frazier (1997), Cold Mountain: a novel<\/em> (New York: Vintage Books) \u2014 winner of the National Book Award.
\nThe\u00a0New York Times Book Review<\/em> noted that “he has reset much of the\u00a0Odyssey<\/em> in 19th-century America, near the end of the Civil War.”<\/p>\n

Linda Hutcheon (2013),\u00a0A Theory of Adaptation<\/em>, 2nd ed. (London and New York: Routledge), 8-9.<\/p>\n

see Emily A. McDermott (2004), “Frazier Polymetis: Cold Mountain and the Odyssey” Classical and Modern Literature<\/em> 24.2: 101-24.\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0http:\/\/scholarworks.umb.edu\/classics_faculty_pubs\/5
\nThis is a very useful article featuring salient observation, backed by careful documentation.
\n\u201cThe most extensive, systematic and thematically significant intertextuality between Cold Mountain<\/em> and the Odyssey<\/em> occurs in the characterization of Inman, in the portrayal of his relationship with Ada and in the reunion of the two at end of the novel.\u201d
\n\u2014\u2014 McDermott\u2019s article is downright good, to be sure, but I would argue that the characterization of Ruby as Athena, especially in her enhanced adaptation as Ada\/Penelope\u2019s formative helpmeet is even more compelling and more systematically significant than Inman\u2019s as Odysseus.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The protagonist of Cold Mountain, Ada, reads to Ruby\u2019s kids and to her own nine-year old daughter the story of Baucis and Philemon, a myth of gained paradise. Without any overt acknowledgement of this myth\u2019s approach within the novel, Frazier uses the myth\u2019s telling as … <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":1277,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_lmt_disableupdate":"","_lmt_disable":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[125,1,143,142],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1274","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-adaptation-theory","category-uncategorized","category-baucis-philemon","category-odyssey"],"modified_by":"Roger Macfarlane","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ogcmaonline.byu.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1274","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ogcmaonline.byu.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ogcmaonline.byu.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ogcmaonline.byu.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ogcmaonline.byu.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1274"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/ogcmaonline.byu.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1274\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1279,"href":"https:\/\/ogcmaonline.byu.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1274\/revisions\/1279"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ogcmaonline.byu.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1277"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ogcmaonline.byu.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1274"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ogcmaonline.byu.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1274"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ogcmaonline.byu.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1274"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}