Representations of Anne Frank in American Literature

Stories in New Ways

Rachael McLennan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317932598
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Historical Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This book explores portrayals of Anne Frank in American literature, where she is often invoked, if problematically, as a means of encouraging readers to think widely about persecution, genocide, and victimisation; often in relation to gender, ethnicity, and race. It shows how literary representations of Anne Frank in America over the past 50 years reflect the continued dominance of the American dramatic adaptations of Frank's Diary in the 1950s, and argues that authors feel compelled to engage with the problematic elements of these adaptations and their iconic power. At the same time, though, literary representations of Frank are associated with the adaptations; critics often assume that these texts unquestioningly perpetuate the problems with the adaptations. This is not true. This book examines how American authors represent Frank in order to negotiate difficult questions relating to representation of the Holocaust in America, and in order to consider gender, coming of age, and forms of inequality in American culture in various historical moments; and of course, to consider the ways Frank herself is represented in America. This book argues that the most compelling representations of Frank in American literature are alert to their own limitations, and may caution against making Frank a universal symbol of goodness or setting up too easy identifications with her. It will be of great interest to researchers and students of Frank, the Holocaust in American fiction and culture, gender studies, life writing, young adult fiction, and ethics.

1 Prosthetic Fictions

Philip Roth’s Anne Franks

Anne Frank and Narrative Prosthesis

Admittedly, the rich calm of those eyes would have been enough to make me wilt with shyness, but that I couldn’t return her gaze directly had also to do with this unharmonious relation between body and skull, and its implication, to me, of some early misfortune, of something vital lost or beaten down, and, by way of compensation, something vastly overdone. I thought of a trapped chick that could not get more than its beaked skull out of the encircling shell. I thought of those macrocephalic boulders the Easter Island heads. I thought of febrile patients on the verandas of Swiss sanatoria imbibing the magic-mountain air. But let me not exaggerate the pathos and originality of my impressions, especially as they were subsumed soon enough in my unoriginal and irrepressible preoccupation: mostly I thought of the triumph it would be to kiss that face, and the excitement of her kissing me back.

(Roth, GW, 1979: 24)

The protagonist of Philip Roth’s The Ghost Writer (1979), Nathan Zuckerman, aged 23, meditates on the arresting appearance of a young woman at the home of his literary mentor, E. I. Lonoff. The young woman is called Amy Bellette, and although Zuckerman does not say, regarding her appearance, “I thought of Anne Frank,” he will later fantasise that she is Frank, who has survived the Holocaust and made a new life, in disguise, in America. Noting that the young woman’s head seems disproportionately large in comparison to her body, Zuckerman grounds her mysteriousness in physical difference, specifically limitation or aberration. His associative images focus on contradictions, so that he describes the young woman as uniting opposing qualities, primarily lack (‘something vital lost’) and excess (‘something vastly overdone’). The young woman’s body makes Zuckerman think of trauma (‘some early misfortune’) and illness (‘febrile patients’). The young woman’s mysterious appearance constitutes the central enigma of The Ghost Writer, and Zuckerman’s speculations reveal how it prompts him to reflect on, utilise, and articulate the purpose of his artistic powers.

Claiming that his ‘impressions’ are insignificant, Zuckerman nevertheless evaluates them favourably, finding in them ‘pathos,’ ‘originality.’ He seemingly renounces them in order to foreground, instead, the conventional romance plot invoked by his erotic desire. The word ‘pathos’ suggests an audience that could be moved by Zuckerman’s ‘impressions,’ emphasising that his speculations combine the responses of his younger self (who initially experiences these ‘impressions’ as private thoughts) and the older self, the established writer who narrates and has turned these speculations into a narrative.

Literary criticism of the novel has followed Zuckerman’s lead and suppresses or overlooks his striking impressions founded upon physical difference. This chapter argues that focusing on the stimulating character of Amy’s physical difference offers a more productive analysis of Roth’s representation of Frank not only in The Ghost Writer, but also in the several other novels in which she is referenced; My Life as a Man (1974), four Zuckerman novels, The Ghost Writer (1979), Zuckerman Unbound (1981), The Prague Orgy (1985), Exit Ghost (2007), and in two ‘Philip Roth’ novels, Deception (1990) and Operation Shylock (1993). This chapter argues that Roth’s representations of Frank in The Ghost Writer and Exit Ghost rely heavily upon depictions of illness, physical and cognitive impairment, disfigurement, and amputation. These themes can be understood in relation to David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder’s theory of ‘narrative prosthesis’ (Mitchell and Snyder 2001). Furthermore, the trope of prosthesis occurs throughout Roth’s work in depictions of Frank, as both thematic content and writing strategy. David Wills writes that prosthesis is “about nothing if not placement, displacement, replacement, standing, dislodging, substituting, setting, amputating, supplementing” (1995: 9). Wills’s catalogue of terms encapsulates Roth’s restless and repeated revisiting and revisionings of Frank, her biography, and the ways she is represented.

This chapter also participates in some senses of prosthesis as Wills defines it. It aims to dislodge and supplement the dominant critical understanding of how Frank functions in Roth’s work. It argues that Roth’s reliance on narrative prosthesis critiques and illuminates how Frank has been represented in American literature and culture, and it uses its readings of Roth to tentatively identify some important (because recurrent) aspects of American literary treatments of Frank. This latter gesture is warranted because of the important place The Ghost Writer occupies in any discussions of literary representations of Frank. It is not the first literary representation of Frank, but it is one of the most sustained early representations of Frank, and it certainly remains one of the best known.¹ Several factors explain the impact of this novel’s treatment of Frank. When it was published in 1979, the novel received attention because Roth’s previous publications had gained him a significant reputation marked by admiration, fame, and controversy.² The novel’s daring treatment of Frank drew attention. That daring was made possible because by the late 1970s, the Holocaust was discussed more openly in American culture and in a way that acknowledged that its primary victims were Jews.³ The impact of Roth’s novel can also be measured by the important place it occupies in critical studies of Frank (it is never omitted from discussion and often opens the discussion).⁴ However, in using Roth’s works to identify some features of Frank’s representation in American culture, I am not claiming that The Ghost Writer constitutes the ‘best’ representation of Frank or that it inaugurates a central tradition of responses to Frank in American literature; indeed, of all the other works discussed in this volume, only one makes explicit intertextual reference to The Ghost Writer.⁵ While the importance of The Ghost Writer must be acknowledged (indeed, it plays a vital part in my own thinking, as will be seen in the fact that the novel is mentioned in a number of subsequent chapters), the variety of representations of Frank in American literature, and the fact that many writers do not seem beholden to Roth’s novel, suggest that its importance should not be exaggerated. As my introduction to this volume suggested, this is partly because the influence of any fictional representation of Frank is eclipsed by that of the dramatic adaptations of Frank’s Diary; certainly, in American culture.

When critics discuss Frank’s appearance in Roth’s work, they focus on The Ghost Writer. While entirely understandable, sole focus on this novel obscures the full extent of Frank’s role in Roth’s work. Some critics do range more widely; Alan Cooper and David Brauner probably pay the most extensive attention to Roth’s uses of Frank, noting their additional appearances in Operation Shylock and Deception. While Cooper explores representations of Jewishness in Roth’s novels, Brauner’s discussions are framed by his focus on major themes he identifies in Roth’s work: ‘sustained self-examination of [Roth’s] own values, a thorough review of the ethical dilemmas of the Jewish writer and a prolonged meditation on judging Jews, both in the sense of Jews who judge and of Jews who are judged (Brauner 2007: 28).⁶ None of these critics devotes close attention to analysing Roth’s representations of Frank; while this is not their focus, such attention is overdue, not only because careful attention to literary representations of Frank in general is overdue, but because it complicates some of the critical attitudes held about Roth.

Stephen Wade’s analysis is attentive to the fact that Frank appears not only in The Ghost Writer, but it usefully summarises the way in which critics usually understand Roth’s use of Frank. He argues that she recurs in Roth’s work as ‘the reincarnations of the female muse of his fictions’:

Roth’s novels and stories up to Deception (1991) [sic] have three repeatedly prominent themes: depictions of the dichotomies involved in ‘being a Jew’ and being an American, the identity of a writer and the art of narrative, and the woman and sexuality as a metaphor for creativity. Over and over, in various forms, the Anne Frank actress/woman with a story appears in the webs of the fiction, and Roth mixes allure with repugnance, creation with decay.

(Wade, 1996: 118)

Wade’s analysis is valuable for his observations regarding the ways in which Roth’s representations of Frank, like Zuckerman’s observations about Amy’s body, focus on the tension generated by oppositional qualities. His most important point is implicit, with reference to ‘webs of the fiction’ suggesting that he, like Brauner and Cooper and many others, sees Roth’s uses of Frank as places where the dominant themes of his work coalesce (and less attention is paid to what the representations say about American responses to Frank herself). Nonetheless, while the contention that Frank performs as ‘female muse’ correctly underscores the importance of gender in Roth’s representations of Frank, Wade’s summary simplifies the role those representations have in enabling Roth’s fictions. It more accurately describes how Frank functions for Zuckerman.

Debra Shostak provides some evidence that Roth’s and Zuckerman’s representations of Frank are not identical, a point that requires addressing because of the critical tendency to understand Zuckerman as a thinly veiled version of Roth himself.⁷ She notes that Roth’s archival papers suggest that ‘Anne Frank served for Roth during the early 1970s as a kind of aesthetic conscience’:

On a typed page headed “Comments on Courting Disaster” appears, in Roth’s hand, a grade and ‘teacher’s’ comment: ‘A-. Quite good Mr Roth, but there’s still room for stylistic improvement. Do work on your paragraph-sense.’ The ‘comment’ is signed ‘AF.’

(Shostak 2004: 203)

I do not wish to suggest that the description above stands as a definitive statement indicating Roth’s attitudes towards Frank, but I want to underscore that she is not understood in this way by Zuckerman. (It is important to note, too, that strictly speaking, Zuckerman is usually not imagining Frank but women who could be, or perform as, Frank.) In this example Roth imagines Frank as writer, reader, and teacher with high standards, a source of authority and expertise, capable of making valid evaluative judgements. Frank functions in this instance as more than ‘a metaphor for creativity’ and her gender is not central to her role. Roth’s representations of Frank therefore may have the potential to complicate the frequent charges of misogyny his work receives (charges often claimed to be Roth’s own attitudes).⁸ Her gender is, by contrast, integral to Zuckerman’s imaginings of Frank. Zuckerman is nearly always attracted to the women he associates with her. A tendency to give exaggerated or primary importance to women’s bodies and their attractiveness, and a failure to fully imagine or empathise with their experiences places limits on Zuckerman’s imaginings. In the episode with which this chapter began, Zuckerman cannot ‘return [Amy’s] gaze’; this is partly because he is intimidated by her good looks but suggestive of the fact that, in Levinisian terms, she is an ‘other’ (rendered so in this passage, on the basis of her gender) whose claims he cannot acknowledge.⁹By contrast, in the archival notes Shostak cites, Roth impersonates Frank, her voice in his hand; she is part of him.

Focusing on Amy Bellette’s physical difference does not render the desire Zuckerman feels for her insignificant (quite the opposite, it provokes that desire). Zuckerman suggests it might, though, when he says his speculations are ‘subsumed’ by the desire to kiss her. Despite Zuckerman’s claim that sexual attraction overrides his other responses, his desire and his ‘impressions’ are complexly linked. If the Zuckerman novels’ references to Frank tend to expose the limitations of Zuckerman’s attitudes to women, they may also underscore the folly of reading Zuckerman as Roth, and reveal that Frank’s gender plays a complex role in Roth’s work (more complex than Roth’s critics sometimes acknowledge). When Frank is referenced outwith the Zuckerman novels, her gender is not foregrounded in the same way, if at all, suggesting that Zuckerman’s impressions relating to Frank are his alone.

Anne Frank and the ‘Half-Flayed Thing’ in The Ghost Writer

Zuckerman’s observations of Lonoff’s assistant’s body set up the conditions for a narrative structure which Mitchell and Snyder label ‘narrative prosthesis’:

Our notion of narrative prosthesis evolves out of this specific recognition: a narrative issues to resolve or correct – to ‘prostheticise’ in David Wills’s sense of the term – a deviance marked as improper to a social context. A simple schematic of narrative structure might run thus: first, a deviance or marked difference is exposed to a reader; second, a narrative consolidates the need for its own existence by calling for an explanation of the deviation’s origins and formative consequences; third, the deviance is brought from the periphery of concerns to the centre of the story to come; and fourth, the remainder of the story rehabilitates or fixes the deviance in some manner. This fourth step of the repair of deviance may involve an obliteration of the difference through a “cure,” the rescue of the despised object from social censure, the extermination of the deviant as a purification of the social body, or the revaluation of an alternative mode of being.

(Mitchell and Snyder 2001: 53–54)

Zuckerman’s fantasy of Frank in The Ghost Writer is a complex prostheticising narrative. It explains the origins of the ‘deviance’ Zuckerman exposes in his observations about the young assistant’s body. That ‘unharmonious relation between body and skull’ is ‘improper to the social context’ of 1950s American culture, in that it does not meet the demands of a culture focused on assimilation, whether this relates to gendered or ethnic identity.¹⁰ After learning that she is displaced, a refugee (40), Zuckerman imagines that she could be a European Jew, enabling him to explain her unusual embodiment by his implication that she has lived through the Holocaust (55).

However, this is not the only ‘deviance’ the fantasy attempts to explain. Zuckerman and his parents (his father, especially) disagree in interpreting Zuckerman’s story “Higher Education.” The story concerns a dispute over money, inspired by a Zuckerman family feud. Zuckerman’s parents dislike the fact that he has made family matters public and fear that the story supports anti-Semitic characterisations of Jews. Zuckerman claims that as ‘art’ his story transcends these concerns, and chafes against what he perceives as attempts to prescribe what he can write. He resents the fact that his father has approached Judge Wapter, a well-respected member of the community, in relation to their dispute. Wapter writes to Zuckerman, urging him to consider the possible effects of his story in terms of how it represents Jews, recommending in a postscript that Zuckerman view the Broadway production of Anne Frank’s diary (102). Spending the night in Lonoff’s study, and overhearing Amy’s unsuccessful attempts to seduce Lonoff in the room above, Zuckerman constructs a narrative prosthesis (the fantasy that Amy is Anne Frank), which both explains Amy’s physical ‘deviance’ and constitutes an exploration and response to the issues raised by “Higher Education.” The Ghost Writer, then, is a bildungsroman that engages in a complex exploration of the role of the artist, the function of art, American Jewish identity, and the Holocaust in American culture.¹¹

Zuckerman’s fantasy brings that ‘deviance’ of the assistant’s body to the centre of the story, via its central hypothesis – that Amy could be Anne Frank. He imagines Amy revealing her identity to Lonoff after viewing the dramatic adaptation of Frank’s Diary. Amy notes that audience members are upset by the capture of the inhabitants of the secret annexe in Amsterdam, where Frank lived in hiding with her family from 1942 to 1944. With the exception of Otto Frank, Anne’s father, all of the annexe inhabitants perished in concentration camps.¹² The audience response leads Amy (imagined as Anne) to believe that she cannot reveal the fact of her survival to her father. She claims that ‘she’ must remain dead (124). In Zuckerman’s fantasy, the fiction ‘Amy Bellette’ is conceived in the aftermath of liberation from Auschwitz, as she recovers in an infirmary supervised by the SS (126). If imagining Amy as Frank functions as narrative prosthesis for Zuckerman, explaining the ‘deviance’ of Amy Bellette’s body and enabling him to respond to his critics, within Zuckerman’s fantasy ‘Amy Bellette’ also, conceivably, functions as narrative prosthesis for the surviving Anne Frank, to help her cope with the trauma of the Holocaust and begin a new existence in America. (The fact that Frank is used by some writers in relation to a woman’s ‘prosthetic auto/biography’ is discussed in Chapter 3 of this volume.)

Amy’s realisation that she cannot reveal herself as Frank constitutes the key component of critical responses to The Ghost Writer. It is commonly agreed that via Zuckerman’s fantasy, Roth critiques representations of Anne Frank in postwar America.¹³ This reading usually assume...