Bellefleur by Joyce Carol Oates

Bellefleur is an novel by American author Joyce Carol Oates (b. 1938), first published in 1980.

The novel is about the Bellefleurs,a wealthy American family of French origins. They live in a veritable castle in Upstate New York. But this is not merely realistic family saga, although it has elements of that, but a novel of supernatural gothic horror with a magic realist. Strange, obviously supernatural things happen to the family, which is said to be cursed. Their gothic castle mansion and the land surrounding is clearly a eldritch location of some kind. 

The bulk of the novel concerns itself with Leah and Gideon, the couple who lead the family somewhere the first half of the 20th century (Time is vague overall in this novel). Leah becomes pregnant with a child, who has obvious psychic abilities (which Leah share during the frightening pregnancy) among other peculiarities. The child who is named Germaine is implied to have been fathered by the cat Mahalalel, who is obviously not a cat, but a shapeshifting supernatural creature of some kind.  As a baby, Germaine telepathically convinces her mother to regain all the land the family founder Jean-Pierre Bellefleur once owned but which they eventually lost.

The novel also tells the stories of the extended Bellefleur family and has frequent flashbacks to their strange history. A running thread is the story of Jebediah, who in 1806 becomes a mountain hermit to find God.  But there are many strange persons with strange fates among the Bellefleurs. A man who just disappeared inside the castle. A spinster aunt who became a vampire after a love affair with european aristocrat. The man whose skin was made into a drum when he died. Jean-Pierre Bellefleur II who is haunted by irrational urges to commit murder. The girl who married a man who turns into a bear. Nightshade, the troll who becomes Leah's manservant. The land surrounding the castle is the hunting ground of a bird-monster called the Noir Vulture who is capable of stealing human babies. In the early 19th century, the wealthy Bellefleurs begin a feud with poor Varrell family. This culminates in a 1825 massacre which kills most of the Bellefleurs, including the founder Jean-Pierre and almost causes their line to go extinct.

 It's difficult to find a theme or even a plot that unites this long, sprawling and surreal novel. Oates herself has said that Gothic literature move us because it is rooted in how we psychologically and emotionally perceive the world. The supernatural elements in such stories mirror our emotional states or attempts to superstitiously explain a chaotic world Or in her words "we have known people who want to suck our life’s blood from us, like vampires; we feel haunted by the dead—if not precisely by the dead then by thoughts of them."

And such connections can also be made between our subjective experiences and the supernatural and surreal elements of this book. Indeed, the surrealism of the story reminds us of the chaos of our own world. The noir vulture is a symbol of our fear of nature and loss. Leah's supernatural pregnancy with Germaine has overtones of body horror which reflects the horror real-life pregnancies can inspire.

Afterwards, in a very interesting scene, Germaine is born as a "well-formed... baby girl". But growing out her abdomen is a "part of another embryo" with male genitalia, legs and its own abdomen. Perhaps a male twin half-absorbed in the womb by his sister. Her grandmother then cuts this male part away with "three skillful chops of the knife". This scene is very interesting from a gender perspective. It could symbolize how children are raised to "cut away" or suppress the parts of themselves that don't fit their prescribed gender role. Or more directly, the operations intersex children are subjected to after being born.

A recurring theme in the book are obsessions, which can entirely consume a person in a self-destructive manner, which in this book becomes literal. A boy becomes obsessed with a decaying pond until he eventually disappears with it. A man literally lays his soul and body into the clavichord he makes. He has an emotional affair with the Bellefleur woman he makes it for and the possessed clavichord becomes not only a symbol but a conduit for their relationship,

Oates has also said the novel is "a critique of America". And the supernatural horror of the book often mirror real horrors of American history. The Bellefleur castle itself is a symbol of inequality, proof that the class system of the old world has duplicated itself in the new, gothic castles and all. In a shocking scene reminiscent of historical violence in labour disputes, Jean-Pierre II lets his murderous urges loose on striking workers,

Ultimately, the cruel, greedy and monstrous nature of most Bellefleurs exemplify capitalism. Their greed and cruelty often leads to their own downfall, as in the climax of the book. The phrase, "The jaws devour, the jaws are devoured" is a mantra often repeated through this book that describes this. One of the final revelations in the story is that the founder Jean-Pierre Bellefleur through one of his many extramarital affairs fathered many of the Varrell family who would later kill him and most of the Bellefleurs in a massacre. Through his own unfaithful actions, he has literally created his own doom, a story his descendants would often repeat.

There is however hope. Many of the Bellefleur children have by the end of the novel left the castle and found happiness elsewhere. They thereby escape the frightening fate that befalls the castle and their parents in the climax of the book. For the author has a " vision of America that stresses, for all its pessimism, the ultimate freedom of the individual".

Bellefleur is a very good novel, if even if it can often feel sprawling and disjointed as a whole.  It can sometimes feel like a collection of short stories with no real overarching plot or theme to tie them all together, except the blood ties of the characters. But the sheer imagination on display and the strength of the writing in most chapters make for a engaging reading experience. That so many of the individual ideas are strong enough to be developed into their own short stories is ultimately a virtue.  And eventually connecting thematic threads can be glimpsed. The prose itself is a delight, with the story being told in beautifully long and complex sentences.

This is a novel that goes against the grain in almost every way. Fashionable literary taste has for almost a century dismissed supernatural horror and long sentences in favor of realism and Hemingwayesque minimalist prose. Joyce Carol Oates has however always rejected these dominant opinions and instead argued for the power of gothic horror and the supernatural in literature. It is a defiant stance that made me interested in her as an author.  And Bellefleur is despite its flaws ultimately a triumphant vindication of her belief in the gothic.