lyc-rivalain

“The Temple” involves a fifty-year-old woman literally digging up a sordid piece of the past. In this three-page sketch, the female protagonist imagines hearing a “vexing, mysterious sound! [...] as of something being raked by nails” and upon investigation, which involves digging in an abandoned corner of her family’s property, unearths a dozen or so “child-sized” bones, including a well-preserved skull (346, 348). She collects the bones and places them lovingly in a privileged space in her bedroom, promising never to abandon them: “In this way the woman’s bedroom became a secret temple” (348).

12When the woman first begins hearing the noise, she imagines there must be some rational explanation: “a small animal, perhaps a squirrel, trapped in the attic beneath the eaves, or in a remote corner of the earthen-floored cellar.” However, when her search turns up nothing, she begins to look outside for the origin of the noise and becomes increasingly, the text suggests, open to a supernatural explanation. The sound evokes in her “an obscure horror” and is compared to “a baby’s cry.” Finally, after two months of increasingly disrupted sleep, she feels she has no choice but to “trace the sound to its origin.” As she heads outside to do so, textual clues are already pointing to a relationship between the aural disturbance and a buried part of the family’s past as the protagonist follows the sound to “the lush tangle of vegetation that had been her mother’s garden of thirty years before” (346). In order to uncover the point of origin, the woman must dig in the dirt as an archaeologist excavating fossils. To do so, she uses garden implements “festooned in cobwebs” which suggests she is venturing into a long-forgotten space, a buried past (347). The hole she digs is compared to “a wound in the jungle-like vegetation,” evoking the notion that she may be uncovering a wounded part of the past, both literally and metaphorically. Indeed, the fact that the “terribly distressing” sound has no effect on the steadiness of her heartbeat as she heads to investigate seems to suggest she has a notion, even if it remains unconscious, of that which she is likely to discover (346). This idea is reinforced by the way she responds verbally to the sound as if talking to a living being such as a sibling or a child: “‘Yes. Yes. I’m here,’ she whispered” (347). Once the skull has been uncovered and lifted gently out of the ground, we read:

The woman lifted the skull to stare into the sockets as if staring into mirror-eyes, eyes of an eerie transparency. A kind of knowledge passed between her and these eyes yet she did not know: was this a child’s skull? had a child been buried here, it must have been decades ago, on her family’s property? Unnamed, unmarked? Unacknowledged? Unknown? (348, my emphasis)

13The term “mirror-eyes” together with the unusual attachment the woman feels for the remains—she looks upon them with a “loving eye”—suggest this might be the skull of an unlucky sibling, or ancestor of another generation (348). Oates thus creates an uncanny doubling effect in Sigmund Freud’s sense of the uncanny as “that species of the frightening that goes back to what was once known and had long been familiar.” The child’s skull both frightens by the mysteriousness of its origins and evokes familiarity through the notion that it is a long-lost part of the woman’s past. Interestingly, the translation of Freud’s essay indicates that both “eerie” (used by Oates in the above passage) and “uncanny” are semantic English equivalents to the German word unheimlichused by Freud (124).

14The shortness of the story encourages speculation on the part of the reader who is told next to nothing about the woman’s background, current situation or mental state and is left to make his own conclusions about the authenticity of the supernatural sounds which are wholeheartedly embraced by the protagonist herself. The reader hesitates between embracing the protagonist’s interpretation of the noise as the work of a ghostly revenant desirous of having its remains uncovered and considering it rather to be hallucinated or imagined by the protagonist as a way to confront family secrets that have been weighing on her unconscious and have somehow risen to the surface as a result of sleep disrupted by the myriad sounds of the spring thaw.