The short story is the form that taught the twentieth century how to listen. In four Sundays we asked four questions of it: what is a story; what are the questions every story must answer; when does a story slow down into scene and when does it move; and what is the secret engine — desire — that pulls a story forward. What follows is what we covered, and what we did not have time to.
Ernest Hemingway, “Hills Like White Elephants” (1927)
An American man and a young woman called Jig wait for a train at a small Spanish station between Barcelona and Madrid. They drink beer, then anis del Toro. He is trying to persuade her to undergo what he calls “a simple operation,” which is never named but is plainly an abortion. She looks across the valley of the Ebro at white hills and says they look like white elephants. They argue, gently and not so gently, around the operation. He insists he only wants what she wants. She asks him, finally, to please please please please please please stop talking. A woman tells them the train is coming in five minutes. He carries the bags to the other side of the station. He drinks an Anis at the bar. He goes back to her. She smiles at him. “I feel fine,” she says. “There’s nothing wrong with me. I feel fine.” The story ends.
Read the first paragraph again. Hemingway gives us the Ebro valley, the hills, the no shade and no trees, the station between two lines of rails in the sun, the warm shadow of the building, the bamboo bead curtain, the express from Barcelona that comes in forty minutes and stops for two and goes on to Madrid. There is no human being in the paragraph. The setting is a parable in waiting: a fork of rails, a brief stop, a decision that must be made before the train arrives.
Read the dialogue with attention to who initiates and who refuses. The man returns again and again to the operation, calling it simple, perfectly natural, not really an operation at all. He uses the word simple at least four times. Jig deflects with images — the hills, the absinthe, the curtain. When she says, near the middle, “Then I’ll do it. Because I don’t care about me,” she is naming her own erasure, and the man does not hear it.
Read the last exchange. “Do you feel better?” he asks. “I feel fine,” she says. “There’s nothing wrong with me. I feel fine.” Three times she says fine. In Hemingway, repetition is never reassurance; it is the sound of someone trying to convince themselves.
Modernism, the Lost Generation, and the Iceberg. Modernism in fiction is roughly 1910–1940 and is shaped by World War I, by Freud’s suggestion that the self is mostly hidden, and by a general loss of confidence in the kind of narrator who can tell you what to think. Modernist stories prefer images to explanations, fragments to plots, the unsaid to the said. Hemingway is the form’s most influential American practitioner. The “iceberg theory,” as Hemingway put it: “If a writer of prose knows enough of what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them.”
Historical & political weather. The story was published in 1927. Spain in the 1920s was the dictatorship of Primo de Rivera; women had no political rights; abortion was illegal under both church and state law. The American couple are tourists in a country where Jig’s situation has no civic vocabulary.
What is the operation, and why does Hemingway never name it?
It is an abortion. He does not name it because Jig and the American cannot name it — to either side of them, to themselves, or to each other. Naming would force a position. The unnamed word is the story’s subject and its absence is the story’s shape.
Whose story is this? Whose point of view?
The narration is exterior — a near-camera angle that records gesture and speech without entering thought. But the sympathies of the prose are with Jig. She is the one who sees the hills, names them, looks across the valley at the fields of grain, and is asked, finally, to please please please stop. We do not enter her mind; we are made to side with it.
What does “white elephants” mean?
A white elephant, in idiom, is a gift that costs more to keep than it is worth — a possession that ruins the possessor. The pregnancy, in the American’s mind, is a white elephant. The story does not endorse that view; it records it.
What changes at the end?
She stops talking to him about it. “I feel fine” is the close of a door. Whether or not she has the operation, the relationship as we found it on the first page is over.
Prompt: Write a 250-word scene in which two people are arguing about something neither of them will name.
They were eating peaches at the kitchen table.
“You don’t have to do it,” Henry said.
“I know.”
“I’m just saying.”
“I know what you’re saying.”
She cut the peach into eighths and put the pit on the saucer.
“If you don’t want to, don’t,” he said.
“All right.”
“But you would tell me. If.”
“Henry. Eat your peach.”
He ate it. The juice ran on his wrist and he wiped it with the napkin folded under the saucer. The napkin had a small embroidered grape on it that her mother had embroidered, years ago, before she had grandchildren.
“The thing is,” he said.
“Yes.”
“Never mind.”
She got up and ran water on the saucers in the sink and stood with her back to him a long time, longer than the saucers needed.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman, “The Yellow Wallpaper” (1892)
An unnamed young woman is brought by her husband John, a physician, to a colonial mansion for the summer to recover from what he calls a “temporary nervous depression — a slight hysterical tendency.” She is forbidden to write, to see her baby, to think too much. She is installed in a top-floor nursery with barred windows and a peeling yellow wallpaper whose pattern she begins to study with mounting fixation. She writes secretly in a journal. As the weeks pass she comes to believe a woman is creeping behind the pattern of the wallpaper, trying to get out. On the last day she locks the door, strips off all the paper she can reach, and creeps around the room. John faints in the doorway. She steps over his body and keeps creeping.
Begin with the journal form. The story is a journal — a forbidden journal, written in fragments, dashes, parentheses. The form itself is the first act of rebellion; every sentence she writes is against her doctor’s orders. As her condition worsens the sentences shorten. The dashes proliferate.
Read John’s endearments. He calls her “little girl,” “blessed little goose,” “little goose.” He pats her on the cheek and laughs at her. The story does not need to argue against him; his language argues against him every time he opens his mouth.
Read the ending twice. “I’ve got out at last,” she says, “in spite of you and Jane! And I’ve pulled off most of the paper, so you can’t put me back!” Who is Jane? Possibly the narrator’s own name — the self she has been trying to escape. The story’s last image — John fainting, the narrator creeping over him — is at once liberation and catastrophe.
American Gothic, early feminism, and the proto-modernist. The story sits on three lines at once. It belongs to the American Gothic tradition but where Poe’s gothic is psychological terror as an end in itself, Gilman’s is social critique. It is also early feminist fiction; it names the consequences of a medical, marital, and economic system that infantilized educated women. And formally, with its fragmented sentences and journal form, it anticipates Modernism by twenty years.
Historical weather. The “rest cure” was a real treatment, prescribed widely from the 1870s to the 1910s, almost exclusively to women. The Married Women’s Property Acts had only just begun granting wives legal personhood.
Is the narrator reliable?
Not in the strict sense. But she is the only honest witness in the story. Her unreliability is the truth; John’s composure is the lie.
Why does John faint?
Because his diagnostic vocabulary collapses. He has called this a “slight hysterical tendency.” He cannot account for what he sees, and a man whose authority rests on accounting cannot bear the loss of the account.
Is this a horror story or a feminist tract?
It is both, and refuses to choose. That refusal is the form’s achievement.
Katherine Mansfield, “At the Bay” (1922)
A day at Crescent Bay, a small New Zealand beach community, from a misty pre-dawn to a moonlit night. The Burnell family wakes, bathes, breakfasts, swims, takes tea, plays, quarrels, dreams, and goes to bed. The story moves through twelve numbered sections, each entering a different consciousness. Nothing happens; everything happens.
This is the session in which I tried to teach the difference between scene and summary, and why a story needs both. A scene unfolds in moment-by-moment time — dialogue, gesture, a glass set down. Summary covers ground — a year, a habit, a backstory — in a paragraph. The art is in the proportion. Mansfield is the great teacher of proportion. Look at the section in which Linda lies under the manuka tree with the baby. It opens in summary — Linda’s feeling about motherhood, her sense of her husband, her general weariness — and then drops into scene: the baby smiles at her; she, against her will, smiles back; “‘Hallo, my funny!’ said Linda. And the baby was so pleased that he began to crow.” The moment is two sentences long and carries the whole emotional weight of the story.
Section I — the dawn. There are no human beings for almost a page. There is mist, the sea “sounding faint and dreamy,” sheep moving along the road, a shepherd. Mansfield is teaching us how to look. She begins outside the human in order to remind us that the day exists before we wake to it.
Section VI — Linda and the baby boy. Read this section as a self-contained story. A young mother who is exhausted by her four children and frightened by her husband finds, for one minute, that her son is a person, and that she likes him. This is the entire emotional motion of the story compressed in a few hundred words.
Section XII — Beryl at the window. The story ends not on the family but on the single woman who is being courted, dangerously, by Mrs. Kember’s husband. She nearly goes with him into the garden. She does not. The story closes on the sea, exactly where it began — but with a woman’s near-escape held inside it like a stone.
Modernism, Impressionism, the Bloomsbury circle. Mansfield is the female peer of Joyce and Woolf in the invention of the modernist short story. Where Joyce builds toward the epiphany, Mansfield builds laterally, through a chorus of consciousnesses, so that the “meaning” of the story is the orchestration itself. She is the bridge from Chekhov to Woolf.
Historical weather. 1922 is the great year of modernism — Joyce’s Ulysses, Eliot’s The Waste Land, Woolf’s Jacob’s Room, Mansfield’s The Garden Party and Other Stories. All four were published within months of each other.
Where is the “main character” of “At the Bay”?
There isn’t one. The day itself is the protagonist. Each character is a phrase in the symphony. This is what Modernism freed the short story to do — to dispense with a single point of view in favor of a community of consciousnesses.
When does Mansfield use scene and when summary?
She uses summary to enter a consciousness — a paragraph or two of interiority and habit — and then drops into scene at the emotional pivot. The summary is the breath in; the scene is the breath out.
Why does the story end on Beryl?
Because Beryl is the figure most exposed to the future. The Burnells are settled into their unhappiness. Beryl is unsettled, and so she is the keyhole through which the story’s anxieties about female autonomy escape.
Anton Chekhov, “The Lady with the Dog” (1899)
At a Black Sea resort in Yalta, a bored Moscow banker named Dmitri Gurov, forty, married, contemptuous of his wife and of women generally, notices a young woman walking a small Pomeranian dog. He arranges to meet her. She is Anna Sergeyevna von Diderits, also married, also young, and in Yalta alone. They become lovers within a few days. He expects to forget her, as he has forgotten others; she weeps and goes home to the provincial town of S—. He returns to Moscow expecting to lose her quickly in the crowd of his life. Instead, she does not leave him; she becomes more present in his absence. The story ends with the two of them embracing in a hotel room, weeping, knowing that what is between them is not soluble, and not, as Gurov had thought, the end — but “only the beginning.”
This is the session in which I argued that the engine of every story is desire: not lust, necessarily, but the longing of a person for something they do not have. Without desire there is no motion. A character is not a description; a character is a vector. Tell me what they want and I will tell you the story. Chekhov is the great master of latent desire — desire the character cannot yet name, that the writer must trust the reader to feel.
Read the moment after the first night they sleep together. Anna weeps and accuses herself: “It is not as though I were deceiving my husband. I am deceiving myself.” Gurov cuts a slice of watermelon and eats it. The watermelon is one of the most famous gestures in modern fiction. He has nothing to say to her. He is bored. The detail of the watermelon is more honest about him than any sentence of interior monologue could be.
Read the long passage in part II when Anna leaves Yalta and Gurov goes home. He expects the affair to fade. It does not fade. “She did not visit him in dreams, but followed him about everywhere like a shadow and haunted him.” Chekhov never tells us Gurov has fallen in love. We have to recognize it ourselves.
Read the moment in the hotel at the end. Gurov, looking at himself in the mirror, sees that his hair is going grey. He realizes that this is the first real love of his life and that it has begun, of all places, in middle age, with a woman not particularly beautiful, in circumstances that admit no future. “And only now, when his hair was beginning to be grey, had he fallen in love properly, in good earnest — for the first time in his life.”
Russian realism, late-imperial twilight. Chekhov inherits the realism of Tolstoy and Turgenev but strips out the moral commentary and the great-soul protagonists. His characters are middle-class, provincial, ordinary; his endings are unresolved. He is the bridge from nineteenth-century realism to twentieth-century modernism — every short-story writer of consequence in the next hundred years learned from him.
Historical weather. Late-imperial Russia, 1899. The autocracy is calcifying; the revolution is twenty years off but already legible. Divorce is nearly impossible; adultery is the available form of romantic life.
Why does Chekhov give us so much of Gurov’s petty consciousness — his contempt for his wife, his vanity, his routine — before the affair begins?
Because the change that follows must be earned. We cannot believe Gurov falls in love unless we have first seen the man for whom such a thing was impossible. The first half of the story is the man Gurov was; the second half is the man Anna makes possible.
Is this a love story or a tragedy?
Both, and Chekhov refuses to resolve the question. Love, in this story, is real and late and binding and impossible. The tragedy is not that they cannot have each other; it is that they have found each other only after the rest of their lives have been arranged around other people.
What is the role of the dog?
The dog is the way Gurov first speaks to Anna — “Might I give him a bone?” Chekhov titles the story after the smallest detail in it, which is one of the great instructions of the form. Notice the small thing. The story is in the small thing.
Why does the story end without ending?
Because life ends without ending. Plot endings — marriage, death, reunion — are the conventions of the nineteenth-century novel. Chekhov rejects them. He gives us instead the truer ending: the discovery that the situation is unsolvable and the people inside it are not going to stop loving each other.
Prompt: Give us a character at a moment when their desire surprises them.
She had not thought she wanted to be alone. She had complained, in fact, all the way through Christmas about the lateness of her sister’s arrival and the brevity of her stay. But on the Tuesday morning after Linda left, when she came back into the kitchen with the paper and found the house genuinely quiet — no kettle, no foot on the stair, no second cup — she sat down at the table and felt, for the first time in twelve years, something close to happiness. She did not know what to do with it. She put cream in her coffee and did not stir it and watched the cream make its slow shape and thought, oh. So this is what I wanted. How awful.