When John Gregory Brown first appeared in American letters with Decorations in a Ruined Cemetery (1994), he was hailed as the philosophical heir of celebrated southern writers such as William Faulkner and Walker Percy – an accolade that was again taken up by various critics who reviewed Brown's second novel, The Wrecked, Blessed Body of Shelton Lafleur.Footnote ¹Audubon's Watch (2001), his third book, though perhaps less reviewed, has also received particularly warm praise: as Stewart O’ Nan points out, with Audubon's Watch – a hybrid of fictional biography, historical novel, and gothic mystery – Brown “pushes his style to the limit”; the result is “a brazen performance that few authors would have the skill or the courage to risk.”Footnote ²

Readers familiar with Brown's writings will probably classify Audubon's Watch as the book that unites the author's works. If, for instance, the protagonist of Decorations in a Ruined Cemetery is a doctor who considers his profession a kind of art, and the protagonist of The Wrecked, Blessed Body of Shelton Lafleur a painter who questions the power of the medical gaze, Audubon's Watch can be seen as the mantle that brings all the above issues together: the two narrators of the story are John James Audubon, the famous nineteenth-century painter and ornithologist, and Emile Gautreaux, a fictitious anatomist and graverobber. In line with Brown's previous novels, these two men are both rivals and doubles (even though they follow different paths once the female character that unites them dies, there are numerous references throughout Audubon's Watch which underline their conceptual similarities – culminating in the novel's touching final scene). Brown's strong interest in art and the body becomes much more pronounced here, and what emerges, among other things, is a captivating, sensitive quest for both knowledge and forgiveness.Footnote ³

Further, if Brown's previous novels exhaustively examine the instability of racial identities in the American South, insisting upon a fluid definition of race as “a distillation of a complex crossing of discrete historical forces,”Footnote ⁴ then Audubon's Watch does not fail to invite new questions either about the South's racial past or about the possibilities of racial transgression. Not coincidentally, in this third novel Brown chooses to focus on the early nineteenth century, rather than the twentieth, setting the core of the narrative in a remote Louisiana plantation. The strange associations that emerge between the white and the black characters there (such as Audubon and the Negro Percy, or Myra and Percy's daughter Corinne), construct a particularly intriguing narrative – reminiscent of Faulkner's famous role reversals and character substitutions – that reaffirms both the South's cultural complexity and the author's intellectual resourcefulness.Footnote ⁵

Part of this complexity, of course, can be explored in many other novels that exemplify, like Audubon's Watch, the significance of storytelling in southern literature. In fact, the stories that Brown's male narrators share (or fail to share) as they keep watch over the female protagonist's body – and which comprise the framing narrative that Audubon addresses to his dead daughters – play upon the recognizable motif of the revelation of family secrets that dominates the author's earlier work, as well as the works of his literary predecessors. Though writers like George Washington Cable, Flannery O'Connor, or Ellen Glasgow certainly come to mind here, Eudora Welty's name seems particularly relevant in this context, not only because Brown shares her ideas with respect to the fundamental role of place in literature (his beloved New Orleans is almost the fourth instrumental character in Audubon's Watch), but also because one of Welty's lesser-known short stories gives another interesting view of the real John James Audubon.Footnote ⁶

Last, but not least, if Brown's previous novels make excellent use of the trope of the unconventional yet absent and elusive woman, Audubon's Watch introduces us to a most interesting specimen in the above line of character: Myra Richardson Gautreaux, the contested object of desire, the woman that both separates and connects Audubon and Gautreaux, providing simultaneously a crucial interpretative perspective.Footnote ⁷ Furthermore, Myra's portrait attests to Brown's complex dialogue with the formidable women of southern literature: though I certainly agree with all those critics who have identified, for instance, Faulknerian echoes in Brown's work, I believe that the list should be expanded to include figures such as Kate Chopin. A brief summary of the plot can signal why, so here is a long quotation from the book's front cover:

The two men do not meet again for decades, but each one harbors secrets and deceptions. In the end, however, Audubon summons Gautreaux to his New York estate, for a first and last open discussion of the mystery that has linked them over time.

As will be shown in the course of this paper, Myra Gautreaux is a direct descendant of Chopin's Edna Pontellier (and, to a lesser extent, Faulkner's Caddy Compson), and with this character Brown has created a figure who both pays tribute to the above writers' renderings of the southern belle, and simultaneously challenges their often contradictory views about gender and its social ramifications. The following pages will therefore focus on Myra Richardson Gautreaux – perhaps Brown's most intriguing female protagonist – and, in particular, on all those elements which can be said to renegotiate the notion of gendered space. More specifically, I will discuss how Myra continuously employs “forbidden” language in order to problematize subjects like physical intimacy and sexual desire, and how her linguistic experimentation, combined with her repeated, solitary walks through the dark streets of New Orleans, disrupts the dichotomy of public versus private. In addition, I will argue that Myra's consistent preoccupation with disciplines inaccessible to nineteenth-century women, like anatomy and the depiction of bodily functions in art, establishes a new notion of identity, which redefines both the acceptable limits of “the feminine” in the antebellum South and the gendered spaces of language, science, and art.

But who is Myra, after all, and why does her story become the center of the novel? Ostensibly a respectable, upper-class young woman of impressive beauty, married to a much older physician and living in early nineteenth-century New Orleans, Myra seems nothing more than a character designed along stereotypical plotlines: she is never granted a voice in the narrative, and we never hear her own version of the story. And yet it is Myra's inexplicable death that signals the actual beginning of the narrative, providing the mystery that both Audubon and Gautreaux will be trying to solve for the next thirty years. Moreover, it is this death that urges the two male rivals to overcome their own inability to speak, and eventually seek redemption and forgiveness. It can be argued, then, that the deceptively voiceless female in Audubon's Watch is far from being disempowered, as Myra's structural silence is precisely the source that invests the male narrators' versions with authority and purpose. Despite the explicit privileging of the male narrative perspective throughout the novel, Myra's strategic silence installs “a significant and potentially subversive dissymmetry between the voiceless female and the male narrator of [her] experience,”Footnote ⁹ which can be seen as a clear indicator of Brown's intention to play with the notion of narrative credibility and explore the transgressive potential of his female protagonist.

A typical example of this potential is manifested in Myra's initial encounter with Gautreaux: Myra comes into her future husband's life as a student of anatomy, sitting at the front of the theater where a dissection of a dead body is about to take place. “A single woman, Mr. Audubon, among so many men,” Gautreaux will later say, struck “not so much by [Myra's] youth and beauty but by her apparent concentration and resolve” (147). Significantly enough, Gautreaux will fail to perform the dissection, but his failure will not prevent Myra from declaring her deep interest in this socially unsanctioned process, or from announcing her intention to work as Gautreaux's apprentice. Notice, for example, the following dialogue:

The above dialogue foregrounds all too clearly not only Myra's unconventionality, but also her first attempt to question the strict dichotomy between the public and the private: she is the only woman who manages to trace Gautreaux's dissection advertisements in New Orleans, eventually appearing at the small theater in the Vieux Carré where the dissection was scheduled to take place. The “French” location is, of course, particularly interesting, hinting at Brown's aforementioned affinity with Kate Chopin – for whom “Frenchness” normally signified desire, as well as “illicit and sexual pleasure.”Footnote ¹⁰ Indeed, the small dissection theater had previously been “home to a French opera company” (145) and, after Myra's death, was sold “to a man who gaily asserted that he was planning an enterprise not wholly unlike [anatomy],” and would “grant admission to those wishing to explore in exquisite detail the body's compelling mysteries” (35). Thus Myra's first appearance identifies her both with the laudable search for higher knowledge and with the dark, unsanctioned pleasures of New Orleans: as Helen Taylor reminds us, all too often in the city's early history “it was impossible to draw clear borders between respectability and illegitimacy, wife and mistress, independent female pedestrian and woman of the streets,”Footnote ¹¹ and Myra's attempts to transcend the above contradictions can be read as a parallel effort to remap New Orleans's sociocultural geography and open up new options for its female residents.

Furthermore, as the only woman willing to witness a public dissection of a body – a spectacle not meant for the representatives of her gender – Myra emerges as a dangerous threat to the notion of feminine “properness.” Rosi Braidotti has argued that Western culture “had traditionally held the body in awe,” and that “the dissection of bodies was forbidden till the seventeenth century.” It was the nineteenth century that “sprang open the doors of bodily perception,”Footnote ¹² lifting old taboos which considered the body a metaphysical entity. “Anatomy,” she concludes, “results in a representation of the body as being clear and distinct – visible and therefore intelligible,” and the body that is open to scrutiny “is a body that can be manipulated … and can produce knowledge.”Footnote ¹³ It is this knowledge and visibility that Myra seeks access to, in an attempt to discover, as she says, “the essence.” Conversely, she protests against the invisibility of her gender in the public sphere and its stimulating experiences. Myra cannot abide by the strict codes of behavior and thought for women in the antebellum South, or by the South's dominant androcentric assumptions; after all, as Mary Talbot has shown, androcentric assumptions, especially those surrounding work, are still capable of rendering women invisible, and doctoring (let alone the study of anatomy) is “somehow overtly gendered” and perceived as an implicitly “masculine” domain.Footnote ¹⁴ Myra's initial encounter with Gautreaux, then, can be seen as a clear attempt to renegotiate the gendered space of science, and thus provide herself “a greater challenge.” In addition, her determination to go beyond appearances, experiment with anatomy, and uncover the “true nature” of things in her drawings suggests not only an intense fascination with the body's secrets and the transformative potential of public scrutiny, but also a sharp awareness of the importance of the artist's gaze (more of which later).

Last, but not least, the ease with which Myra talks about all these issues to a complete stranger indicates her resistance to succumbing to commonplace sociolinguistic constraints, which do not permit personal confessions – especially in cross-gender interactions. The above extract implies that Brown's female protagonist may recognize the pervasiveness of gender as a social category and its fundamental role in how her actions are interpreted, and yet maintain a certain kind of detached control as regards the way she is responded to in every interaction.Footnote ¹⁵ Myra does in fact control Gautreaux's response (to the extent that she convinces him to hire her as his sole anatomy assistant), and it becomes quite evident that, for this female character, speech is a most valuable weapon – and certainly not one which women must learn to censor.

Indeed, Myra is repeatedly presented as a speaking subject whose boldness simultaneously thrills and perplexes the two male narrators: her uninhibited language constantly transgresses the sociolinguistic rules of modesty and reserve, assigned to the female gender, and renegotiates the divide between the “acceptable” and the “forbidden.” Gautreaux's following recollection leaves little space for doubt:

In her monumental Language and Woman's Place, Robin Lakoff argued that women are taught to speak in a way that emphasizes uncertainty and weakness, which eventually deprives them of their authority and disadvantages them as language users.Footnote ¹⁶ A few years later, Dale Spender, among others, demonstrated that, for a number of reasons pertaining primarily to cross-cultural differences, research findings that stress the “deficiencies” of women's language “need to be treated with considerable caution.”Footnote ¹⁷ Myra's confident and straightforward language suggests a discourse that resists this deficiency classification and blurs the boundaries between the prescribed feminine “weakness” and the prescribed masculine “advantage.” Through her experimentation with forbidden words, Myra emerges as a knowledgeable authority on the body's mysteries that guides her much older husband to the infinite possibilities of sexual pleasure. In an ironic way, Myra both venerates and yet mocks Gautreaux's precious study of anatomy, reversing the roles of teacher and student and eliciting her partner's confession of ignorance, of total frustration: “I had known nothing,” “I did not understand,” “I could not speak,” he says over and over again, symbolically slipping into the feminized position of passivity and silence.

Myra's empowerment, however, and the symbolically disadvantaged state of the male in the above example are greatly illuminated if we also consider Audubon's recollection of her: not coincidentally, halfway through the narrative we learn that Audubon was first approached by Myra as he was peering through a low window to catch a glimpse of a quadroon ball in New Orleans. Those who are familiar with the cultural framework of southern literature will immediately associate this image with New Orleans's notorious reputation “as a place of sexual license and laissez-faire,”Footnote ¹⁸ and if Audubon's gender justifies his obvious search for (illicit) pleasure, Myra's presence in that context was definitely meant to raise an eyebrow. Helen Taylor has shown that the city is often “configured in terms of the sensual body,”Footnote ¹⁹ and Edward Soja has added that urban spatiality has been “charged with multiple sexualities, eroticisms, and desires … literally and figuratively transgressed with an abundance of sexual possibilities and pleasures, dangers and opportunities”.Footnote ²⁰ Interestingly enough, during the above encounter Myra takes full advantage of the city's anonymity in order to provide Audubon with a rather unusual opportunity: she asks him to meet her in her own, private residence in the Faubourg Marigny and requests that the painter draw her whole figure naked. Here is Audubon's response:

Before getting to the painter's futile attempts to convey the beauty of his model (or to the latter's impressive self-posturing), it is important to return to Audubon's initial hesitation at hearing Myra's proposal – a hesitation “prompted not so much by … surprise … as by … fear.” Indeed, the public spectacle of an unaccompanied woman roaming the streets at night in the antebellum South was anything but common, even for a city associated with “frivolity and pleasure-loving naughtiness” like New Orleans.Footnote ²¹ Helen Taylor has argued that “New Orleans was very much a city of the street, full of spectacular, olfactory, and musical delights, a walker's heaven … but it also tried to refuse those delights of the street to respectable women.”Footnote ²² The hesitation and fear that Audubon experiences once Myra approaches him in the street and makes her proposal is nothing more than an implicit acceptance of the sociocultural stereotype which renders New Orleans “a perilous site for women in public space.” As Taylor succinctly puts it, “a white woman's sexuality and racial and biological destiny meant that to be on the streets suggested, however indirectly, to be of the streets.”Footnote ²³ In line with Chopin's Edna Pontellier – perhaps her closest literary predecessor – Myra stands for the rebellious female walker “who symbolically challenge[s] the gendered meanings of … urban space,”Footnote ²⁴ and demands a full share in the potentially dangerous, unsanctioned delights of this space.

Such delights, of course, involve not only the privilege of free movement and public visibility, but also the ability to own – in more than one sense – the rather problematic concept of the gaze. It has already been established that Myra is perfectly capable of gazing uninhibited both at the city's pleasures (e.g. quadroon balls) and at its gruesome spectacles (e.g. dissections of dead bodies), but, as the above extract makes clear, her boldness goes much further than that, since Myra gradually becomes the transgressive woman who invites, manipulates, and simultaneously controls the male gaze. Nevertheless, her ambivalent oscillation between modesty and defiance suggests that Brown's female protagonist cannot entirely disregard the contradictions inherent either in the concept of the gaze or, for that matter, in the broader relationship between women and art. On the one hand, Myra understands, as Foucault has pointed out, that the body is “the ultimate site of political and ideological control, surveillance and regulation,” and that women experience all the above to a greater degree than men.Footnote ²⁵ And yet she also seems to constitute a classic example of Laura Mulvey's notion of scopophilia. As Mulvey would put it,

However, even though Myra is undoubtedly – and willingly – an exhibitionist, and even though her body is pervasively fetishized by both Audubon and Gautreaux, she is by no means a passive object of visual pleasure: D. N. Rodowick has argued that “the masculine look contains passive elements” which can signify “submission to rather than possession of the female,”Footnote ²⁷ and Elizabeth Gruber has recently shown that “agonized spectatorship” – like Audubon's and Gautreaux's in this novel – “complicates notions of gazing as, inherently, assertions of power,” concluding that objects of visual pleasure “do not necessarily experience powerlessness.”Footnote ²⁸ Taking the argument a step further, Marcelline Block insists that the ability to return the spectator's gaze deobjectifies the woman who is looked at and renders her an active gazer herself.Footnote ²⁹ This, in turn, infuses the visual transaction with new energies and disrupts the stereotypical, voyeuristic perception of feminine passivity. Indeed, whether she poses as a stylized femme fatale who touches her own body and announces her desire, or as a precious artifact that is both aware of and yet oblivious to the constraints of modesty, Myra is anything but passive: she dominates the memories of men, constantly recasting the roles of the erotic game and always reserving for herself the double role of protagonist and director. Reversing thus the traditional narrative structures which present the male characters driving the story forward and the female ones adopting passive roles that are linked to their status as spectacle,Footnote ³⁰ Myra becomes both the central organizing principle of the text and the sole creator of the spectacle that Audubon is allowed to watch.

This willingness to appropriate the gendered concept of the gaze and, by extension, renegotiate her own space and function in art is perhaps most evident in Myra's reaction to the finished portrait that Audubon presents her with, a reaction that leaves the painter, once again, speechless:

In a passage that suggests that, unlike her literary predecessor, Edna Pontellier, Brown's female protagonist has managed to attain artistic maturity,Footnote ³¹ we can observe Myra reenacting with Audubon the same game she had played with Gautreaux – the reversal of the teacher–student relationship: not only does she strip Audubon of the authority of the accomplished artist but, by correcting his “errant” lines, she effectively mocks his art and reduces the drawing to the level of a cheap commodity. It is not coincidental that, unlike the famous bird portraits, Myra's drawing will be the only artifact that the painter will later destroy. Henceforward the destroyed portrait will stand merely as a token of artistic humiliation and frustrated sexual desire, and the brush that the painter is forced to yield to his model becomes, in Lacanian terms, a curious signifier of the phallus – deftly usurped, manipulated and then disavowed by Myra.Footnote ³² It is this symbolic loss of the phallus that leads Audubon to confess, “I could not allow this woman to put on display or even keep in private such an open acknowledgment of my desire … I was unable to quench my rage, my humiliation, my shame” (87). Understanding that “the body image is never static or closed” but rather “a component of a dynamic circuit of exchanges” in which power relations are continuously changing,Footnote ³³ Myra improves the image that Audubon provides her with and thus attains mastery of both the phallus and the gaze; notice that it is Audubon, rather than Myra, who worries about the repercussions of his artistic failure – about the potential spectators of a worthless portrait – in both the public and the private sphere, thus slipping, like Gautreaux, into a “feminized” position of helpless passivity. In a final demonstration of control, Myra will also regulate sexual desire – her own as much as Audubon's – eventually refusing to make love to the painter. Trying to come to terms with her loss and with his own guilt, Audubon can only emphasize, after all, Myra's overwhelming power:

Rather than a typical southern belle, then, Myra becomes almost a premodernist female flâneur, who challenges the gendered meaning of this “firmly … masculine noun,”Footnote ³⁴ roams the dark streets of New Orleans, freely approaches strangers in public view, initiates conversation, and states her demands. At the same time, Myra's oscillation between self-restraint and total surrender to desire also embodies the multiple contradictions of her native city: as Audubon puts it, “I found New Orleans dizzyingly gay and yet inhospitable” (62) – a statement outlining both the city's deceptive facade and the mysterious allure of its transgressive female residents. And, indeed, behind the facade of the respectable upper-class housewife, Myra stands for the independent woman whose language and body cannot be confined to the realm of the domestic, and whose experimentation with authority and the notion of the gaze in both anatomy and painting invite intriguing questions concerning the gendered spaces of both science and art.

Is this, then, why Myra has to die a mysterious and rather undignified death? In other words, is Myra's resistance to conventional gender expectations, and her attempt to reconfigure both the private realm of erotic language and the public space of personal visibility, essentially doomed or pointless? Ultimately, does Brown pay tribute to southern mentors like Faulkner, sharing, to some extent, the latter's fascination with liberated women, and yet appearing to “punish them for their sins”?Footnote ³⁵ The answer is by no means simple, and neither is the intoxication that caused Myra's demise. Monica Soare, for instance, has argued that alcohol and drunkenness suggest “the freedom traditionally accorded to men,” but also “hint at self-destruction”;Footnote ³⁶ even though the text abounds in speculations concerning the motives of this self-destruction, and despite both Audubon's and Gautreaux's obsession to “get at the truth” (155), Brown cleverly refrains from providing his readers with a definitive conclusion. Instead, he focusses on Myra's symbolic significance – which cannot be diminished by death. It is at this point, after all, that the fiercest storm that Louisiana had seen in decades breaks out, striking New Orleans “with all unholy force” (115). Furthermore, it is at this point that the useless watch of the title, purchased earlier by Audubon and given to Gautreaux in remembrance of Myra's passing, begins to function. In an equally uncanny way, the watch had stopped working by the time Audubon's steamboat first approached New Orleans (indicating, perhaps, that Myra's imminent appearance would mark a division in the flowing narration beyond temporality and convention). It will continue to function for the next thirty years, until the two men meet again. As can be expected, of course, the final meeting between Audubon and Gautreaux will not take place in New Orleans, but in the former's estate in upper New York. The mystery and the “dizzyingly gay” atmosphere of the South may have given their place to the soberness of the North but, as the two men will discover, Myra's spirit (and, by extension, the spirit of her city) has transformed their lives in a way that cannot be voiced.Footnote ³⁷ Indeed, the novel's final chapter, which is ironically called “Gautreaux's Answer” and focusses on the anatomist's last encounter with Audubon, intelligently subverts Myra's technical silence by revealing the two men's utter inability to produce a meaningful conclusion:

In a scene dominated by Brown's constant of the elusive yet powerful woman, the two men can only confess their powerlessness: they cannot talk about desire, they cannot talk about art, they cannot talk about anatomy, and they have not uncovered “the truth”: thus, given the chance to speak out and finally “get at the truth,” Audubon and Gautreaux retreat, once more, to the silent respect that Myra's transgressive existence demands.

Despite Brown's obvious distrust of concrete conclusions, then, it can be argued that Audubon's Watch is a novel that interrogates not only the dualism of public versus private, but also the instrumentality of gender to a wide range of projects, ambitions, and intentions. Language, science, and art emerge as particularly important concepts in the above framework and, through his handling of Myra Richardson Gautreaux, Brown manages to question stereotypical gender classifications, and offer new insights into the traditional perception of the feminine space in southern writing. Of course, as Gray and Robinson remind us, “there is no single model of southern writing now, any more than there is a singular frame for present or recent southern culture(s),” and yet southern writers have always explored subjects like social marginality, resistance and aberration, especially “in the sense of being disempowered and different.”Footnote ³⁸ All of Brown's characters in Audubon's Watch continuously shift between the above positions, but it is the author's handling of his memorable female protagonist that drives his work forward: in comparison with Decorations and Shelton Lafleur, Audubon's Watch presents a much more integrated view of the fundamental role of gender in southern society that goes beyond simplistic definitions of “empowerment” or “difference.” By creating a character that is neither wholly subversive nor wholly complicit, Brown both encourages readers to reflect on the precise manner in which gender operates as a collectivized discourse, and simultaneously invites them to celebrate individual acts that attempt to renegotiate the constraints of this discourse.Footnote ³⁹ And, ultimately, by having one of his male characters declare that “such a soul as Myra's cannot be lost” (136), Brown seems to be implying that individual acts of renegotiation are never in vain.