"The Devil"

Attribution and Meaning

In the comments about “The Devil” we’ve seen that some people felt a vague sense of misogyny hanging over the story. 

This has also come up when I’ve taught the story at Syracuse: the sense that there are, not just in Eugene, but in the story itself, some assumptions about women and their place in the world that, somehow, feel weird, or iffy, and therefore, for that reader, undercut the story’s effectiveness; that is, a certain sense of unfairness or bias or, what we might call (to use a rather technical term) “wonkyview” interferes with that feeling of being at-one with a story that makes it so that, up until a story’s final line, we are “with” it – we’ve seen no reason to bail, even slightly.

Some of this, of course, could have to do with the fact that it’s an old story, from an earlier and more patriarchal time, and all of that.

But, as discussed in a recent Office Hours post, if we feel something like this, it’s always good to go one level deeper and try to figure out where and why we felt it; if this misogyny idea has validity, it must be rooted in particular passages of the story.

So, let’s look at this aspect of the story through a technical lens.