MAPACA

Mid-Atlantic Popular &
American Culture Association

The recent release of Buck’s long-lost novel, some fifty years after her death, proves to be a disguised autobiography of a distressed creative artist seeking his/her reason for living. While the novel has strong similarity to James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Buck’s novel uses familiar feminine mythic archetypes to guide the struggling young man toward his eventual goal as a writer, philanthropist, philosopher, and prophet. Channeling Joyce and the stream of consciousness technique, Buck’s first fifty pages describes the birth to college age of a mother-motivated son. After that, Buck employs the feminine trilogy of ancient major “goddesses” – Mother, Maiden, Mistress – as guides to the young man’s growth and development. His final sign of full growth as an artist comes at the price of love and his acceptance of this appears in his statement of his final goal and mission of his life. The absence of the final Crone/Death goddess may be reflective of Buck’s writing this novel close to her own death in 1973 so that her hero’s acceptance of his reason for living becomes, in part, a final summary of Buck’s entire life’s work and worth.