Ode to the Midwest: Refiguring Lorrie Moores A Gate at the Stairs as a

Romantic Response to Post-9/11 Trauma

I ran north and north and north and could perhaps have run all the way to
Canada, where, paralyzed with sadness and exhaustion, my arms and fingers
would stiffen upward and I would, in one of griefs mythic transformations,
become a maple tree, my sappy tears cooked down to syrup for someones
flapjacks. (Moore 211-12)

Using imagery from the natural world to verbalise her grief, protagonist-narrator
Tassie Keltjin characterises the Romantic ideology that structures Lorrie Moores A
Gate at the Stairs. Moores pastoral milieu turns the expected post-9/11 domestic
novel into a narrative that unifies nature and trauma to refigure the repercussions of
the 9/11 terrorist attacks in an identifiable context of localism. This small-world
narrative nevertheless raises and answers deterritorialised questions of grief, (dis)trust
and acceptance to constitute a literary response to 9/11 that testifies to the validity of
the post-9/11 domestic genre.
This essay will argue that critical explorations of post-9/11 domestic
narratives have been limited to interrogating themes that we see cropping up again
and again. The ability or inability of the domestic novel to represent personal trauma
in a national context, the demarcation of spatial boundaries in the post-9/11 domestic
sphere, and the perceived inability of post-9/11 domestic novels to graduate to more
outward-looking global literatures have all been identified in post-9/11 critical
commentaries, and all have invited debate and discussion by contemporary voices.
But I believe there is an opportunity here to progress and extend the debate about the
post-9/11 domestic novel by focusing in a new direction, hitherto unexplored. This

essay will relocate Moores protagonist Tassie as a contemporary Romantic,

navigating a landlocked lake of love (Moore 54). I will show how Moores
understanding of the September 11th terrorist attacks, and attitude towards the Wests
consequent War on Terror, is situated and communicated through her narrators
interaction with an often beautiful but frequently ambiguous natural world. In doing
so I will refute critical objections to the domestic novel genre, demonstrating that
Moores offering, and the genre, can constitute a legitimate authorial response to 9/11.
The role of the domestic novel in post-9/11 literature is one that has attracted
much debate and critical study. Lorrie Moores A Gate at the Stairs, Jonathan Safran
Foers Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, Jonathan Franzens Freedom and Claire
Messuds The Emperors Children represent some of the most popular domestic
novels that have been released in United States since the Al-Qaeda terrorist attacks of
September 11th 2001. These texts explore the human appetite for safety, security and
kinship, and the tensions that such basic needs propagate in an age of heightened
personal and national (in)security. Whilst the domestic novel is a common catch-all
for these narratives, that there is much that is un-domestic in their content: the
processing of almost inconceivable trauma, on a personal but also national or even
transnational level, permeates much of the contemporary canon. It generates scenarios
far removed from hearth and home. Safran Foers child protagonist Oskar Schell finds
himself in a convoluted manhunt to the top of New Yorks Empire State Building
with adult strangers; Messuds trio of twenty-something professionals struggle with
personal and global change in disparate locations from Australia to London; Moores
narrative never departs from the American Midwest, but Tassies affair with a
potential terrorist opens up fundamental dilemmas of love and possession that
dislocate her from the novels rural panorama. All these narratives constitute a literary
post-9/11 processing of trauma that mirrors the raw, decade-young national American

grieving process. The 9/11 terror attacks provoked a trauma rupture (Dunst 56);
cultural and literary responses alike are inchoate and still learning how to knit
themselves together. The budding post-9/11 domestic novel genre makes visible this
process in often painfully human ways.
The focus on the ways in which the post-9/11 domestic novel has retreated
into the domestic sphere, and the consequent extent to which the genre can therefore
do justice to the national and global post-9/11 contemporary context, has energised
critics looking for a salient hook on which to hang contemporary responses to post9/11 literatures. Michael Rothbergs identification of trauma at home (There Is
No Poetry In This 147) provides one of the first contributions to an intriguing
critical debate pertaining not just to the presence of numerous thematically domestic
narratives in post-9/11 literature, but the nature of these narratives: their etymology
and root cause. For Rothberg, the genesis of domestic narratives comes down to a
recognition of the sheer personal proximity of Americans to the 9/11 terrorist attacks,
which forced them to comprehend the close intimacy of a foreign incursion and its
horrifying Otherness. Thus authorial responses must process the implications that
homeland invasion has on their safety and security. Rothberg argues that this home
violence comes as a surprise for a powerful nation, whose ideology had previously
repudiated any outside threat, but he notes that Americas fortunate isolation cannot
last forever (151). This newly global context of uncertainty and insecurity entails a
traumatic response that must be processed by its citizens. As such, writers responding
to 9/11 must reconfigure their presupposed ideology of home and homeland in a
new world. This paradigmatic shift offered an opportunity for a new direction in
9/11s correspondent literature, but the consequent domestic genre that proliferated
has resulted in mixed opinions from critics.

Certainly, Rothbergs post-9/11 analyses found support from critic Richard

Gray, whose negative assessment of post-9/11 domestic narratives in Open Doors,
Closed Minds: American Prose Writing at a Time of Crisis resonated with
Rothbergs analysis. Perhaps Gray wrote his 2009 essay as an unconscious corollary
to the ever-increasing popularity of post-9/11 domestic novels; he finds much to fault
in novels where cataclysmic events are measured purely and simply in terms of their
impact on the emotional entanglement of their protagonists (134). He indentifies and
rejects the sense of sentimental education engendered by the domestication of what
he argues should be recognised as a truly national post-9/11 trauma (134). This
critical diagnosis of a traumatised and myopic national genre peopled by writers
lacking a strategy of deterritorialisation is bolstered by Rothbergs critique of the
trend in contemporary American fiction towards the re-domestication of content in
post-9/11 novels (A Failure 155). Moores A Gate at the Stairs was released in
2009 at the height of this critical conversation, and despite participating in many of
the stock domestic tropes that concerned Rothberg and Gray, it thrived commercially.
A relative paucity of critical interaction with the novel, perhaps due to its recent
release, leaves few opportunities for me to evaluate direct responses to Moore, but it
also leaves the field wide open for an interpretive analysis that breaks new ground in
identifying Moores sophisticated nous for communicating a new way of processing
the events of 9/11.
A Gate at the Stairs, at first glance, occupies a recognised space as a post-9/11
domestic novel. It depicts the homeland minutiae of contemporary American family
life as the foreground on a post-9/11 backdrop of national insecurity, and fits neatly
into a genre of what Angeliki Tseti describes as a literature of crisis mixing the
strange with the familiar (1). It fulfills the thematic staples of tracking familial
responses to the September 11th attacks through a domestic lens. The female narrator,

Tassie is a nave but precocious young college student who works as a childminder
for a middle-class couple and their adopted biracial daughter. She falls in love with an
ostensibly Brazilian student who absconds mysteriously, perhaps to become a
terrorist. Meanwhile, Tassies brother Robert enlists to fight in Afghanistan and is
killed within mere days of starting active duty. Reduced to its plotline, the novel
exemplifies David Holloways identification of a failure of family members to
protect one another to an excruciating extent (108). The novel also lends itself to
Holloways reading of an inferred synecdoche for the larger post-9/11 U.S political
picture: the 9/11 terrorist attacks highlighted the incapability of US politicians to
protect their citizenry in the eyes of Holloway and indeed Moore herself (Kelly 18).
But A Gate at the Stairs vivifies its political ideology by locating its narratives of
kinship, loss and survival in a new Romantic context that looks to nature and the
wilderness for help in figuring, refiguring, and understanding domestic and national
trauma.
The Romantic preoccupation evident in A Gate at the Stairs reframes Moores
post-9/11 narrative as a part-love letter, part-eulogy to humanity as if on behalf of the
natural world. This emotive positioning echoes the Romantic ideology of John Keats,
William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge before her to an almost uncanny
extent. In passages recalling a pre-9/11 environment, Moore frames Tassies domestic
upbringing in a pastoral Romantic context, from the flat green world of the Keltjin
farm (4), to Tassies explorations with her brother into the hive of activity found in a
fish breeding pond. In the novels post-9/11 environment, nature as entity is exempt
from the trauma of terrorism, but it figuratively embodies the conflict in process: this
is a world where the summer moon [is] a tangerine shard (291). Moores imagery
borrows in particular to Keats Odes, characterized by their juxtaposition of beautiful
and vital natural growth tempered by melancholia. Moores Romantic locales connote

a simulacrum of Englishness far removed from contemporary Midwest America, but

she cleverly avoids fully dislocating the narrative from its assumed spatial moorings.
Instead she combines the discrete environments in a unique new iteration. Thus
American deciduous forests become star-leafed maples (287), and the assumedly
all-American Oklahoma! is riffed humourously in a Romantic context: there was a
bright golden haze on all meadows (271). Moore even seems to be conscious of the
better-known Romantic tropes she calls on, employing them deliberately where
Moore wants to emphasise Tassies young gaucheness. Tassie is a precocious and
highly observant narrator, improbably comparing washing a floor in patches to
writing a poem every day until you eventually said everything about the human
condition there was to be said (213). This humorous simile lightens Tassies
narrative role as Romantic visionary whilst simultaneously reminding the reader that
the trope persists, and does so despite its contrasting domestic framework.
Moores narrative explores the Romantic concept of negative capability, in
which the writer temporarily absents his or her existence in order to better understand
another object or environment. The concept, positioned in the novel as a site for
multiple structural and thematic interactions, is apt for refiguring trauma in a post9/11 environment because survivors trying to understand the terrorist attacks gain an
opportunity to temporarily remove themselves from their own processing of the event.
Tassies intense sensory recollections of a farmland pond mimic Keats efforts at the
authorial intensity inherent in negative capability. Indeed, the pond and surrounding
copse itself connotes a lush Keatsian bower. This rural haven is a spatially clandestine
pre-trauma space, hidden from urban centres with their manmade terrorism: [a]bove
and around us green leaves would flash with sunsetting light (Moore 61). Moores
verdant cove (ibid.) echoes Keats 1819 poem Ode to a Nightingale, with its
melodious plot/ Of beechen green, and shadows numberless (8-9). It is testament to

Moores linguistic interpolation that risk of a potential temporal dislocation due to the
two-hundred year gap is obviated. Like Wordsworth before her, Tassie contemplates
clumps of daffodils huddled near trees (Moore 171), and like Keats, surveying
[w]hite hawthorn, and the pastoral eglantine (Ode to a Nightingale 46), Tassie
embraces the columbine with their tiny eccentric lanterns (171). These Romantic
linguistic devices are not mere decoration. Moores method of answering Catherine
Morleys question of how writers respond to 9/11 in How Do We Write About
This? The Domestic and the Global in the Post-9/11 Novel is to lay out a meticulous
temporal demarcation of Arcadian imagery to represent an innocent pre-9/11
environment which contrasts to griefs mythic transformations evident in the
traumatised post-9/11 landscape (Moore 221). It bolsters the standing of A Gate at the
Stairs as a sophisticated artifact in the post-9/11 domestic genre. Indeed, Morley
celebrates domestic dramas of everyday life as valid communicators of the post9/11 environment and culture, and notes that writers in the genre consider not just the
local but also the biopolitcal machinations of the world stage (731); Moores
Romantic bent can be interpreted as a sophisticated take on this duality. It cannot be
coincidence that the rapid global changes generated by September 11th closely imitate
the turbulent conflicts of the original Romantic period, which saw unprecedented
violence and revolution between the storming of the Bastille in 1789 and Queen
Victorias coronation in 1837. Whilst analysis may, understandably, be limited by
9/11s temporal specificity, it is possible to suggest that a contemporary relocation of
Romantic unrest has already been signalled in the global foment exemplified by
terrorism, American political dissent, and worldwide outrage at the Abu Grahib
torture revelations.
The geographical demarcation of soil and territory signals another intersection
of nature and Romanticism to complicate the domestic narrative of A Gate at the

Stairs. In a post-9/11 context, ideas of home and homeland take on new currency
and become sites of multiple interrogations for critical debates. Richard Crownshaws
essay, Deterritorialising the Homeland in American Studies and American Fiction
After 9/11 is the most advanced of these responses, in its mapping of spatial
transformations in post-9/11 literatures. By locating trauma in the domestic sphere of
home, Crownshaw is able to extrapolate trauma experienced from 9/11 to a damaged
larger homeland of America and American identity. A Gate at the Stairs reads almost
as a direct response to this idea of spatial reconfiguration. Moores decision to
distance her narrative from New York, Washington or even London as the culturally
agreed epicentres of post-9/11 discourse is significant. What seems at first
idiosyncratic soon resolves itself in Moores narrative: nowhere could be better
described as the homeland of America than the novels Midwestern plains. She is
making a powerful statement in choosing this location as the site of post-9/11
explorations, situated as it is at a concrete remove from previous New York locales
with their correspondent spatial fixity.
Crownshaws study notes that post-9/11 writers have focused on temporality
over spatial contexts, rendering 9/11 as only a time-based trauma with pre- and postevent understandings dominating literary responses rather than spatial considerations.
Unusually, both time and space run throughout A Gate at the Stairs. Indeed they often
combine, lending an unusual anthropomorphism to Tassies narration: [t]he cold
knocked the sloppiness from my head as well as my days-long, tortured hallucination
of deep existential vision (126). Here, the geographical cues of weather and
temperature clash with the temporal reference to days, and both unite in a wry humour
that is typical of Moores prose and certainly atypical of the primary texts Crownshaw
analyses, particularly Cormac McCarthys The Road. Domestic narratives interact
with both texts, but the nature of this interaction is sharply contrasted. The post-9/11

domestic narrative is inarguably diasporic in theme; Moore works at the boundaries of

the genre and keeps the reader questioning, via unusual plot development, their
presuppositions surrounding the shape and nature of her characters loss. A Gate at
the Stairs at first cannot participate in Crownshaws temporal analysis because the
novel is set in the winter following 9/11; as such it does not follow the same pre- and
post- event demarcations. But it can instead remove itself from Crownshaws
boundaries, opening with the knowledge of the terrorist attack absorbed and
ostensibly processed. Here, though, Moore re-complicates the framework further, by
reintroducing pre- and post- events on a smaller scale that replicate 9/11 but do not
themselves constitute it. Each event disrupts the progress of narrator and reader alike
with an emotive plot twist, each branching out as aftereffects of 9/11. These
puncturing revelations, from Reynaldos identification as proto-terrorist, to Roberts
death, complicate Crownshaws identification of the temporal shift in the post-9/11
novel; adding Romantic ideology into Moores spatial narratives further distances A
Gate at the Stairs from Crownshaws assessment of space in the post-9/11 novel.
In A Gate at the Stairs, as in Romantic literature, melancholia is never far
from utterance. Like Keats, who in his oft-quoted poem When I have Fears that I
may Cease to Be faces the wide world / [to] stand alone, and think (13), Tassie
embraces the emotional ambiguity of this natural world: [p]erhaps we accepted the
weather as being us, werent afraid of it, carried around all its severity and storminess
inside us (Moore 141). Similarly, the shared bond experienced by nurturing her
infant charge generates unfavourable comparative memories of the domestic care
Tassie received from her own mother: why hadnt my own mother known [the
beauty of childhood]? Perhaps there was too much winter permanently in our veins
(172). Here, again, nature and domesticity are intertwined. In this respect I disagree
with Elizabeth Ankers otherwise excellent article Allegories of Falling & The 9/11

Novel, shining, as it does, a considered light on the domestic novel; Anker argues
that entanglements with 9/11 themes bestow A Gate at the Stairs with its emotional as
well as political acumen (480). But it is more complicated than that: it is in,
specifically, Tassies Romantic interaction with Moores 9/11 narrative traumas that a
poignant power resides. Tassie is figured as a modern-day Wordsworth via the young
naivety recalled in his epic poem The Prelude. Similarly, 9/11 is filtered through
Tassies emotionally injured but highly observant Romantic lens. Nature prefaces the
novel: The cold came late that fall and the songbirds were caught off guard (1).
9/11 is introduced soon after: [f]rom our perspective that semester, the events of
September we did not yet call them 9/11 seemed both near and far (5). Indeed,
Moore communicates even at this early stage the novels symbiotic relationship
between nature and post-9/11 trauma. Tassie, in a lyrical extract about birds in
winter (Kelly 19) note the Wordsworthian lyrical fears what fate meets the
disoriented birds: the birds had disappeared. I did not want to think about what had
happened to them (1).
The nature-9/11 relationship is made explicit as Tassie continues: I wondered
about them all the time: imagining them dead, in stunning heaps in some killing
cornfield outside of town, or dropped from the sky in twos and threes (1). This
imagery hints at both the hijacked United Airlines Flight 93 which crashed into a field
in rural Pennsylvania, and victims of the World Trade Centre bombings who fell
and/or jumped from the burning buildings. As if conscious of the cluttered
contemporary cultural discourse surrounding the emotionally-charged trope of the
falling man,1 Moore chooses only dropped from the sky for her metaphor. In
referencing this visual allegory of 9/11, and using remarkably similar imagery to

Seen, for example, in art (Richard Drews Falling Man), fiction (Don Dellilos Falling Man) and criticism
(Tom Junods The Falling Man).

Safran Foers flying birds in Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close [t]en thousand
birds die every year from smashing into windows (250) Moore shows herself to
be aware of the post-9/11 narrative in which her novel participates. Nevertheless, she
moves away from overpopulated 9/11 territory by manoeuvring her thematic content
in the direction of a new Romanticism. Moores birds do not merely meet death, but
instead refigure the ambiguous journey of the light-winged Dryad of the trees that
features in Keats Ode to a Nightingale (7). In most critical interpretations of this
linchpin of Romantic writing, Keats bird is a symbol of natural renewal: [t]hou was
not born for death, immortal Bird! (61) But it could just as easily constitute a
characteristic Romantic anguish at natures mutability, a lament at the indignity of
innocent death. In this refiguring, 9/11s victims can gain a voice in memory. Moore
leaves the reader to ponder how many more global innocents could multiply the initial
2,996 victims.
Much of Moores prose signifies a struggle for equilibrium, and A Gate at the
Stairs is no exception. Moores Romantic bird motif recurs at momentous occasions
in the narrative. Tassies experience as an airplane passenger uneasily juxtaposes the
natural world with a post-9/11 neurosis: [t]he plane was small, only a fifty-seater,
hardly a hijacking target, and from my window seat the gray pieces of the wing
seemed fitted together both randomly and intricately, like the plumage of a goose.
(78). By locating terrorism in the recognisable structures of flight and nature, Moore
plays with Grays identification of writers needing to domesticate, to shepherd that
sense of crisis into the realm of the familiar (After 40). Moores narrative may be
domestic, but Grays sense of crisis is shepherded into not the familiar, but the
natural: in the literal sense of the word. Nature is the framework in which A Gate at
the Stairs can refigure its human grief. Not only is Tassie described as a bass-faced
bird who is vulnerably winged around her double bass, but she is searching for

guidance in the sloped shoulders of another bird, the instrument itself, hoping for
guidance (275). The choice of song is but of course Bye Bye Blackbird. Thus
Moore refigures the bird analogy again, here through impressive dry humour. Yet the
poignancy of her tone remains. It complicates Morleys earlier identification of the
crux in the post-9/11 domestic genre: making sense of a trauma through knowable
experience (Morley 719).
Moores knowable experience is domestic and yet uncommonly
communicated. Typically, her necessary relocation of post-9/11 trauma transforms the
trope of birds in flight as bloodthirsty mosquitos, whose awfulness and flight
obsessed me, concentrated my revulsion: suspended like mobile, or diving like jets,
they were sinisterly contrapted (61). These jets, contemporary but almost gothic in
description, are the foreboding precursor to both the terrorist planes striking New
Yorks twin towers, and the US bomber planes that stand in for her brothers death.
Tassie even recounts slapping a mosquito into her brothers back, killing five in a
splatter of blood beneath his shirt. This iteration of the natural world is deliberately
removed from the green altar of Romantic poetry (Keats Ode on a Grecian Urn
32) to emphasise its ugly prescience for the trauma to come. As Gray notes, the poet
tries to take the measure of the crisis [] by registering one individual experience of
it. (After 191). Certainly a poet in the Romantic sense, Moore participates in this
attempt at testimony to foster an understanding of an alien trauma, both for herself
and for her reader.
Moores almost compulsive return to the bird metaphor is telling. It
emphasises the importance of the trope in the novels foretold future tragedies. Tassie
works as a rodent-chaser on her fathers farm, with fake feather and plastic hawkwing extensions attached as costume (270). Dressed as a bird in an oblique reference
to the novels opening imagery, Tassie reforms herself as a weighty Icarus. Whereas

the ancient Greek myth sees Icarus, son of Daedalus, fly too close to the sun on false
wings, A Gate at the Stairs places the daughter, Tassie, as the risky protagonist: I
could feel myself almost flying, the way I flew in dreams (270). This inversion is
intentional. The real Icarus, Tassies soldier brother Robert, has already ignored his
fathers warning, and flown too close to the sun, here symbolised by the Wests War
on Terror. Sure enough, his doom is prophesied when Tassie next attaches her wings
and sees a vision of her brother. Tassie relishes feeling the slight takeoff of my
wings (292), but soon after sees her brother standing with her estranged lover
Reynalo as ghosts in the cornfield. The very next night, she sees the vision again,
neither vaporous nor cadaverous, but wordless and turning and walking away (293).
Narrating with ominous clarity, Tassie concludes: this made me understand that they
were unfindably dead, all of them (293). It is a supernatural vision that echoes
Samuel Taylor Coleridges The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, but where
Coleridges Romantic-gothic poem stresses moral pedagogy, Moores passage
presents a vision shot through only with grief. This trauma is realized just pages later,
at Roberts untimely funeral. It provides a thematic site for the final iteration of
Moores bird metaphor.
Tassies funeral barette is fashioned into a black crow a far cry from Keats
lyrical nightingale. Roberts grief-stricken father performs a clumsy eulogy that
echoes the very opening of A Gate at the Stairs in its reference to flight: [b]oth my
kids seemed always to love the feeling of flying, and so sometimes I looked the other
way (297). This painful passage embodies Morleys identification of post-9/11
novels turning inwards to depict fractured unions and broken homes (719), and
shows what power this direction can yield. Indeed, Morleys rejection of new
outward-looking literatures to satisfy Rothberg and Grays call for post-9/11 global
healing finds strong support in Moores final chapters. Despite refusing to turn [her]

gaze away from home (Morley 719), Moore incorporates into a tiny rural worldview
wide-ranging national and transnational traumas represented by Reynaldos terrorist
sensibilities and Roberts army death. In short, Moores embrace of localism does not
prevent her from presenting a skillfully deterritorialised picture of grief sketched from
9/11s repercussive (inter)national tragedies.
Indeed, it is through the domestic narratives in which writers are not talking
about September 11th that the event makes its cultural and psychological impact
known. The occlusions inherent in seemingly ordinary narratives signal their authors
preoccupations. Narrating domesticity in the post-9/11 novel is thus a way for writers
to tackle what Ruth Caruth noted as the impossibility of direct access (4). By
narrating the knowable and imaginable, Moore allows access to understanding trauma
in human terms that would otherwise be elided. As Tassie asks, expecting no answer,
[c]ould events return, retrace their heavy-footed passage, to the place from where
they have accidentally come? (243). Tassies humour is a coping tool for her lovers
abandonment. Its gaucheness symbolises the young and fragile identity of post-9/11
temporality. When Reynaldo explains his pre-narrative move to the Midwest to avoid
connotations of terrorism, Tassie concurs that rural domesticity constitutes a myopic
retreat: [n]o, no terrorism. What you have to worry about here is corn mold!
(192). Her unlucky domestic navet, so wincingly familiar to any reader, also
contrasts deliberately to the fraught proto-global narrative of Reynaldo as an
emotionless exile preparing for holy jihad.
Indeed, Tassies self-sabotaing ordeals are intensely human, and
deliberately constructed as such (Anker 467). As Moore comments in a New York
Times interview, [t]here were certain scenes that felt so heartbreaking to me that I
didnt know how I was going to write them [] I cried all the way through the
writing of it (Motoko n.p). Grays sheparding is evidenced here, in the emotional

impasse suggested by Moores interview, more than anywhere. But perhaps it is less a
therapeutic authorial shepherding than an engineered juxtaposition of the microcosm
(domestic sphere) and the macrocosm (terrorism) clashing to generate an emotional
response in the reader. To assume that Moore and her contemporaries are merely
writing as vehicles for catharsis would be reductive. Her distaste for post-9/11 U.S
political dirigisme, where, as Kelly notes, terms are invented, euphemisms
deployed (144), may be the very impetus that prompts important post-9/11
narratives. That the genres political ideologies, like their traumas, are occluded by
ostensible parochialism simply means that the writers believe the issues at stake
benefit from a spatial relocation to the knowable territory of the domestic to ensure
the issues explored strike in a human context.
Finally, relocating A Gate at the Stairs in a Romantic framework allows me to
interrogate the deterritorialised questions that Moores narrative poses from a
reference point unexplored by other critics. Keats poetic works were characterised by
the Romantic pursuit of permanence that would endure through transience. In A Gate
at the Stairs it is refigured in Tassies appeal to Reynaldo to refute his imminent
jihad. Tassie pleads: As much as you want this world to end, it cant. The seeds to
everything are being stored, as we speak, in the permafrost of Norway (209). It is a
laudable, if unsuccessful, rebuke to terrorism, and it provides an answer to the
question of how society processes Daunts aforementioned trauma rupture. In Tassies
adherence to a Romantic vision of permanence that cannot be altered by decay,
Moore shows that mere optimism constitutes a popular coping strategy for many in
post-9/11 existential scenarios; Moores verdict may well be that, in the absence of a
superior survival strategy, the human spirit for life, compromised as it may be by
suffering, can and must suffice. Nevertheless, the anxieties of Keats When I have
Fears that I may Cease to Be are echoed in Moores presentation of Roberts death in

Afghanistan. Keats fear, that he shall never look upon thee more (10), is
poignantly echoed in Tassies dawning realisation that she, too, is subject to
mutability, that Achilles heel of Romanticism. Whilst her grudging acceptance of
mortal inconstancy begins with Reynaldos emotionless rejection, it takes concrete
form where it coheres the larger trauma wrought by 9/11s diasporic repercussions,
including Roberts untimely death. Keats desire to leave the world unseen, / And
with thee fade away into the forest dim (Ode to a Nightingale 19-20) is rendered in
close facsimile through Tassies grieving process for death of a mans trying
(Moore 203). The fish pond on the Keltjins farm that once provided shelter to Tassie
and her brother is now denuded of its domesticity by tragedy, and yet: it still provides
a bower of sorts, one shaped by loss and temporal decay, but intact. The novel
concludes that for survivors of 9/11 and its repercussions, personal and national
insecurity replace safety, but that the natural world can still foster sites of Romantic
humanity.
The unique skill of the post-9/11 domestic novel is in locating a hitherto
inconceivable post-disaster reality within phenomenological, everyday contexts. Thus
narratives featuring normal routines communicated to readers via empathic and
knowable protagonists serves to re-centre the novels from an unknowable and
unlocatable out there to a more manageable and recognisable in here, a spatial
shift that Crownshaw moved away from in favour of a temporal uncoupling of the
homely from the unhomely (767). That the post-9/11 domestic novel can maneouvre
this spatial shift despite its deep preoccupations with September 11th and its
aftershocks is rightly lauded by Morley, but few other critics; the paucity of praise
suggests either an under-analysis of the genre or, in Rothberg and Grays case, a
desire for the genre to not move from the out there at all, rather negating its identity
as essentially domestic. The literary retreat into domesticity that these post-9/11

novels embody strikes me as conscious and highly sophisticated. Critics who reject
the domestic narrative approach to post-9/11 processing of personal and national
trauma underestimate the allure of normalcy that the genre manifests, as well as the
complexity of narrating the known rather than the Other. That domestic novels
communicate 9/11 via intensely domestic, inward-looking narratives is hardly
surprising, because it allows them communicate known experience. In this cultural
scenario, Moores complication of established tropes via a Romantic lens is valuable.
It is in this refiguring that Moore proves the validity of the domestic genre by merit of
its unusual participants to access something more revealing (Moore 297). The
American psyche since 9/11 seems to me to bear a trauma imprint to use a nuclear
analogy, it bears an all-too-slowly diminishing trauma half-life. The post-9/11
domestic novel has shown itself to be a valuable cultural genre and traumatic
mouthpiece for its numerous readers. Sustained critical interaction with these
arresting literary responses to 9/11 is crucial to ensure ongoing dialogue that can
manageably shape the grief of survivors into lived experience.

EASM143: Post 9/11 Literature & Culture

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