Marcella

by Marilyn Coffey

Marcella has stumbled into puberty. She’s grown too old to play with toys but is still too young for boys. Songs, Christianity, and curiosity at her changing body fill her time. She practices the piano, talks to her God and, alone in her bedroom, she explores.

"At first she didn't allow it very often, only once every two or three nights, but gradually she let herself...oh, every night, after she'd said her prayers."

Then she finds out there's a name for what she does, that it's a bad thing to do, and that God prohibits it, even though it feels so delightful...

Marcella is the candid and unrestrained story of a school girl and her emotions, of the war of an innocent morality with a grown-up sexuality, plus all the bewilderment of dread, inexperience, and shame she experiences as she battles her way into womanhood.

This 40th Anniversary edition of Marcella bears the distinction of having been the first American novel with auto-eroticism as its main theme.

“We are beginning to speak of subjects we have been taught are unspeakable.
This book is an important part of the truth telling by and for women." -Gloria Steinem

The New York Times also reviewed the book at its original publication and said this:
“Coffey skillfully weaves together the religious, sexual and musical themes that comprise the trinity of Marcella's obsession."

232 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1973

About the author

Great Plains writer Marilyn Coffey has written three books, 600 poems, and dozens of articles and stories. A trained journalist (B.A., University of Nebraska, 1959) and creative writer (M.F.A., Brooklyn College, 1981), she has produced work that includes a popular memoir, a record-setting novel, and a prize-winning poem.

Her poem, "Pricksong," reviewed in the Los Angeles Times Book Review and Newsweek, won a national Pushcart Prize. Coffey’s novel "Marcella" made literary history. It was the first novel written in English to use female autoeroticism as a main theme. Gloria Steinem called it "an important part of the truth
telling by and for women."

In 1989, Coffey’s memoir, Great Plains Patchwork, appeared. The New York Times called it entertaining and insightful. Atlantic Monthly featured a chapter as its cover story. Natural History bought two chapters, American Heritage one. Harper & Row, McGraw-Hill, Macmillan, and Harcourt Brace Jovanovich printed excerpts.

Known as a prose stylist, Coffey eceived a Master Alumnus award for distinction in the field of writing from the University of Nebraska in 1977. Since 1987, the UNL Archives has collected
forty boxes of Coffey’s papers in its Mari Sandoz room. In 1991, Coffey investigated the orphan train movement, developing three programs for the Nebraska Humanities Council. One became the second most popular of the 232 programs underwritten by NHC and spurred her to write Mail-Order Kid.

Now retired, Coffey taught writing at Boston University, Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, and Fort Hays State University in Kansas for thirty-four years, twice earning tenure. She became an interpretive reader/performer, appearing on local radio stations, statewide TV, and before more than 130 groups in twelve states, from Maine to Texas.

Coffey is an Admiral in the Great Navy of Nebraska, the state's highest honor. However, the honorary title is given
tongue in cheek, since Admirals in landlocked Nebraska claim jurisdiction over little but tadpoles. Governor J. James Exon appointed Coffey, a Nebraska native, an Admiral in 1977 for her writing achievements.

Marilyn Coffey also writes as Marilyn June Coffey

Reviews

[Russell Bittner · Rating 5 out of 5]

Almost from the outset, Marilyn Coffey’s Marcella put me in mind of Carson McCullers’s Member of the Wedding. In that novel, McCullers’s principal character, Frankie Addams, is roughly the same age as Marcella and wrestles with many of the same demons. And although both stories are sadly revelatory of the inner contortions a girl must pass through on her way out of childhood and into adolescence, this is where the similarities end.

Coffey’s character (the eponymous Marcella) is more explicitly drawn—which is perhaps indicative of the age in which we live and of what a writer can now permit herself to express in print. I should perhaps mention, however, that what I’ve just read is the 40th Anniversary Edition. Given that Marcella first appeared in 1973, I’d venture to say that Coffey was way ahead of her time.

The backdrop of Marcella Colby’s story—her younger sister, Lucille, her parents, her home life in general—suggests a sterile field in which anguish and obsession would inevitably take root and flourish. While a sympathetic reader might wish for a mother (the father almost doesn’t bear mention—and so, Coffey gives him short shrift) whose same gender, at least, would render her a willing partner in Marcella’s awkward passage through early adolescence, all we get is a wooden prop, a virtual cipher. Marcella’s mother is, in short, deadwood — and Marcella is consequently set adrift to find her own emotional moorings.

At the prompting of a school acquaintance, Marcella happens to wander into a church. Not just any church, mind you, but an Evangelical church. Her epiphany—this day and this place in which she is “saved” by a certain Brother Morgan and his retinue—only serves to contort her mind further and to make her entirely beholden to an all-seeing, all-knowing God. It is, moreover, Marcella’s now fervent belief in this omniscient and omnipresent Being that drives her, by degrees, deeper and deeper down into a cauldron of shame for what she feels is a blasphemy of the most heinous and despicable sort: the discovery, through masturbation, that she is a sentient being. Unfortunately, however, and in the absence of someone to tell her differently, she can conceive of her masturbation only as a “filthy, perverted habit” (p. 192).

Enter Brother Morgan (aka “Big Jim”) once again—but now as what Marcella perceives to be an almost heaven-sent guide, protector and trustworthy confidant. Their communication opens in letters that Marcella is only too happy to write—frequently, imploringly, keeping almost lockstep pace with her autoerotic sessions—and leads to an invitation to spend a couple of weeks far from home at a camp for young Christians. Brother Morgan indeed delivers. But what he delivers in the form of temporary relief and happiness is something those more world-weary readers among us will likely find suspect from the get-go. I, for one, wasn’t in the least surprised when, on the occasion of a one-night sleep-away at the conclusion of Marcella’s two-week stay at “Big Jim’s” camp in Colorado, the absence of his wife, May, and the absence of a sleeping bag for Marcella quite predictably led to Brother Morgan’s laying on of hands (please excuse the obvious double entendre).

Marcella returns home the next day—not precisely deflowered, but spiritually and emotionally debauched.

Is Marcella in any sense a didactic story? Is this novel a Bildungsroman of the sort that was once so popular in German literature? Only in the sense that we, as readers, can feel the anguish of Marcella and wish — as she does at one point late in the story — that it might somehow be possible to turn the clock backwards. Turn it backwards — or force it to jump ahead to a point where Marcella will no longer be demonized by her own fingers and tormented by the knowledge that she may be less than “a perfect Christian” (ibid).

As happens so often in life and literature, religious indoctrination butts heads with human sexuality. Depending upon the nature and extent of our own earlier catechisms, we know this from personal experience. In literature (apart from my earlier citation of Carson McCullers’s Member of the Wedding in which, thankfully, religion doesn’t play any significant role), I was reminded towards the end of Coffey’s novel of Peter Shafer’s play, Equus — which, coincidentally, was written and appeared on the London stage in the same year Coffey’s novel was first published (1973). In the same way in which Alan Strang put iron spikes through the eyeballs of the too-vigilant horses under his care (representing, in the case of his sexual initiation, an all-seeing God), Marcella, in a violent attempt at self-mutilation, tries to cut ...

But no more teasers. Better you should read Marilyn Coffey's novel for yourself to discover Marcella’s fate. What I will say by way of conclusion, however, is that the forty years of social progress we’ve enjoyed since this novel’s first appearance made much of it feel almost medieval in its depiction of character and event. Let’s hope that by the time the 80th Anniversary Edition appears, some of those same characters and events will feel positively pre-historical.

RRB
10/17/12
Brooklyn, NY

[Cathy · Rating 2 out of 5]

Probably scandalous in the 1980s. Not so much now.