{"id":6449,"date":"2013-06-25T09:54:01","date_gmt":"2013-06-25T16:54:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/forallevents.com\/reviews\/?p=6449"},"modified":"2013-06-25T09:54:01","modified_gmt":"2013-06-25T16:54:01","slug":"the-haunted-valley-by-ambrose-bierce-commentary","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/forallevents.com\/reviews\/the-haunted-valley-by-ambrose-bierce-commentary\/","title":{"rendered":"The Haunted Valley by Ambrose Bierce — Commentary"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Haunted Valley<\/em><\/strong> <\/strong><\/p>\n

Short Story by Ambrose Bierce, Commentary<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

“The Haunted Valley” was Ambrose Bierce’s first published story.\u00a0 It appeared in 1871 in the Overland Magazine<\/em>.\u00a0 It deals with gender ambiguity, same sex relationships, racial bigotry, and murder in the American West.\u00a0 The story is divided into two parts.\u00a0 In the first part, the narrator is traveling through a remote area, presumably in California, although it doesn’t say so specifically, where he encounters Jo. Dunfer, a rancher whose most salient personal qualities seem to be his bigotry against Chinese people and his penchant for whiskey.\u00a0 Dunfer launches into a narrative about taking on a Chinese man, Ah Wee, as a cook and servant five years previous.\u00a0 Ah Wee and a man named Gopher assist Dunfer in felling trees for a cabin he had wished to build on a remote part of the ranch.\u00a0 Ah Wee is incompetent at felling trees and Jo Dunfer admits to killing him for this and other faults.\u00a0 The narrative is disrupted at this point by a dramatic scream and Jo. Dunfer’s collapse.\u00a0 Jo. Dunfer’s assistant [Gopher, although he is not named at this point] enters and the narrator briefly encounters him.\u00a0 This incident is not explained in any great detail and the narrator leaves it in this ambiguous state.\u00a0 He departs Jo. Dunfer’s residence in a disturbed state of mind and on his journey chances to come upon the grave of Ah Wee with this curious inscription.<\/p>\n

AH WEE — CHINAMAN<\/p>\n

Age unknown.\u00a0 Worked for Jo. Dunfer.<\/p>\n

This monument is erected by him to keep the Chink’s<\/p>\n

memory green.\u00a0 Likewise as a warning to Celestials<\/p>\n

not to take on airs.\u00a0 Devil take ’em!<\/p>\n

She Was a Good Egg.<\/p>\n

The choice of pronouns is an operative point.<\/p>\n

The second part of the narrative takes place four years later when the protagonist returns to the same area.\u00a0 This time he encounters Gopher, the other (white) assistant to Jo. Dunfer.\u00a0 The narrator inquires about Jo. Dunfer and is informed that he is dead and in the grave beside Ah Wee.\u00a0 Gopher accompanies the narrator to the grave and tells him that indeed Jo. Dunfer had killed Ah Wee, but not out of frustration with his abilities as a house servant, but out of jealousy over Ah Wee’s relationship with himself, Gopher.\u00a0 One day Jo. Dunfer had caught Gopher and Ah Wee together and killed Ah Wee with an ax in a jealous rampage.\u00a0 Dunfer buried Ah Wee in the grave and created the curious memorial marker.<\/p>\n

Now comes the crucial turn on the very last page of the story which I will quote.<\/p>\n

“When did Jo die?” I asked rather absently.\u00a0 The answer took my breath:<\/p>\n

“Pretty soon after I looked at him through that knot-hole, w’en you had put something in his w’isky, you derned Borgia!”\u00a0 [referring to the narrator’s previous visit, four years prior]\n

Recovering somewhat from my surprise at this astounding charge, I was half-minded to throttle the audacious accuser, but was restrained by a sudden conviction that came to me in the light of a revelation.\u00a0 I fixed a grave look upon him and asked, as calmly as I could:\u00a0 “And when did you go luny?”<\/p>\n

“Nine years ago!” he shrieked, throwing out his clenched hands — “nine years ago, w’en that big brute killed the woman who loved him better than she did me! — me who had followed ‘er from San Francisco, where ‘e won ‘er at draw poker! — me who had watched over ‘er for years w’en the scoundrel she belonged to was ashamed to acknowledge ‘er and treat ‘er white — me who for her sake kept ‘is cussed secret till it ate ‘im up! — me who w’en you poisoned the beast fulfilled ‘is last request to lay ‘im alongside ‘er and give ‘im a stone to the head of ‘im!\u00a0 And I’ve never since seen ‘er grave till now, for I didn’t want to meet ‘im here.” (Bierce, p. 126)<\/p>\n

I found three different commentaries on this story and I believe all three misunderstand it.\u00a0 Bierce is admittedly not striving for clarity, but the story is clear if one is attuned to the possibilities of cross-gender identifications and same sex relationships.<\/p>\n

Peter Boag (2012) in his study of cross-dressing in the American West states that “Ah’s sex is never entirely clear; feminine and masculine pronouns interchange readily right up to the story’s conclusion. . . Thus Ah Wee may have been a Chinese woman dressed as a man, or a (typically) feminized Chinese man” (p. 192)<\/p>\n

William Wu (1982) read the story as Ah Wee being a girl whom Dunfer had won in a poker game.\u00a0 Wu notes that the reader is misled through the whole story to think that Ah Wee is a man, but fails account for this misleading or to perceive the significance of the pronoun changes in the story.\u00a0 Wu is focused on the racism in the story and thus misses the sexual implications that are really the crux of it, resulting in a misunderstanding of the murder and the sex triangle.\u00a0 (Wu, 1982, p. 22)<\/p>\n

Hellen Lee-Keller (2006) also tries to normalize the story in the same way as Wu.<\/p>\n

As the tombstone indicated, Ah Wee was not, in fact, a\u00a0he<\/em>, but rather a\u00a0she<\/em>, and Dunfer killed Ah Wee in a fit of jealous rage thinking that Ah Wee and Gopher were involved in a sexual relationship.\u00a0 Ultimately, Dunfer, who had fallen in love with Ah Wee over the years, fell into despair when he realized what he had done, started drinking heavily again, and grew even more anti-Chinese.<\/p>\n

Lee-Keller follows Wu in seeing Ah Wee as female all the way through, but she doesn’t address Dunfer’s referring to Ah Wee as ‘he’ throughout, and seems to call into question that there was a sexual relationship between Gopher and Ah Wee.\u00a0 In other words, she suggests that Dunfer killed Ah Wee out of misunderstanding and self-delusion.<\/p>\n

The straightforward assumption that Ah Wee’s is a girl, won in a poker game, and subsequently killed in a sex triangle, does not make sense of the text, the shifting pronouns, and particularly the contrast between Dunfer’s and Gopher’s constructions of Ah Wee.\u00a0 If you follow the shifting pronouns, there is a logic to their modulations.\u00a0 They do not “interchange readily right up to the story’s conclusion,” as Boag reports.\u00a0 Ah Wee is portrayed as a man by Jo. Dunfer through the whole story up until the very end of his narrative, with the exception of the curious epitaph on the tombstone.\u00a0 Dunfer always referred to Ah Wee as ‘he.’\u00a0 If Ah Wee were a girl, won in a poker game, why would there be any need for Jo. Dunfer to disguise her as a man, or for Ah Wee to adopt the identity of a man?\u00a0 If that were the case, then it would mean that Jo. Dunfer imposed the male identity upon her out of his own psychological need for a male sexual partner.\u00a0 But if that were true, why would he even take a girl home to his ranch, if what he really wanted was a boy all along?\u00a0 The idea that Ah Wee was a girl straight up is untenable.\u00a0 It fails to make sense of Jo. Dunfer’s referring to Ah Wee as ‘he’ throughout, and Gopher’s pronoun shift when he begins to talk about his own relationship with Ah Wee.\u00a0 If you think Ah Wee was “really a she” as Lee-Keller thinks, then you have to explain why the whole story leads you to assume Ah Wee is male.\u00a0\u00a0 I don’t see any way to do that.\u00a0 The story will simply not make sense if Ah Wee were really a female all the way through from the outset.<\/p>\n

Alternatively, if Ah Wee were a female-to-male cross dresser, as one possibility suggested by Boag, it would mean she was presenting as a male throughout the story.\u00a0 A full grown adult male would make an unlikely prize in a poker game and this raises a question mark over the whole tale about Ah Wee being a prize in a poker game.\u00a0 \u00a0This is Gopher’s version probably concocted to mask the fact that Ah Wee left him for Jo. Dunfer.\u00a0\u00a0 The poker game story is Gopher’s attempt at face saving.\u00a0 Ah Wee was very likely Gopher’s lover before leaving him for Jo. Dunfer and moving to his ranch in rural California.\u00a0 But was he\/she male or female?<\/p>\n

If she were a cross-dressed female-to-male, a la Alan Hart (see Boag, pp. 9-14), then you would have a female who gender identified as male becoming involved in “homosexual” relationships with two different males.\u00a0 A rather convoluted\u00a0 maneuver for a female to make.\u00a0 This is not a realistic scenario.\u00a0 I was not able to find any instance of a female who gender identified as male, who then went on to form sexual relationships with other men in her cross gender identity.\u00a0 Somebody out there come forward if you have a counterexample.\u00a0 There is no plausible interpretation of this story where Ah Wee is a natural female.<\/p>\n

Gopher says that “the scoundrel she belonged to refused to acknowledge her and treat her white.”\u00a0 This refusal to acknowledge her I think refers to Jo. Dunfer’s denoting Ah Wee as ‘he,’ that is, refusing to acknowledge his\/her full identification as a female.\u00a0 In other words, Jo. Dunfer insisted on Ah Wee’s biological gender as the proper identifier rather than accepting her psychological identification as a female.\u00a0 This seemed improper and disrespectful to Gopher, and he attributed it to Dunfer’s shame and denial of his own relationship with Ah Wee, and consistent with his further maltreatment of her.\u00a0 Gopher referred to Ah Wee as ‘she,’ when he was relating his own relationship to her, fully acknowledging Ah Wee’s psychological make-up.\u00a0 This makes sense of the pronoun changes in the story and is consistent with the details in the narration.<\/p>\n

The most likely scenario is that Ah Wee was a male-to-female cross-dresser, probably fully gender identified as female in the mode of Mrs. Nash recounted in Boag’s Re-dressing,<\/em> Chapter 4.<\/p>\n

Mrs. Nash was a Mexican male-to-female cross-dresser who successfully passed herself off as a woman among the U.S. Seventh Calvary in the 1870s and 80s for at least a ten year period during which she was married to three different soldiers in the Seventh.\u00a0 Although it was widely known that she had a beard and shaved every day, she dressed and lived as a female, winning high praise as well as financial rewards for her skills in laundering, sewing, cooking, delivering babies, caring for infants, and witchcraft.\u00a0 When she died of appendicitis it was discovered that “she had balls as big as a bull’s.\u00a0 She’s a man!” (Boag, pp. 130-137)\u00a0 The story became a national sensation.<\/p>\n

I believe Ah Wee was a comparable figure to Mrs. Nash, a biological male who dressed and psychologically identified as a female.\u00a0\u00a0 Both Gopher and Dunfer knew Ah Wee’s “real” gender.\u00a0 However, Jo. Dunfer did not recognize Ah Wee’s cross-gender identification, referring to him\/her always as ‘he,’ whereas Gopher, loving Ah Wee in her cross-dressed identity, referred to her as ‘she,’ when he began talking about his own feelings for her.<\/p>\n

The story told by Gopher of Ah Wee’s having been won in a poker game and his following her to Dunfer’s ranch suggests that the original attachment was between Ah Wee and Gopher.\u00a0 Gopher was involved with Ah Wee as a cross-dresssed male-to-female.\u00a0 Jo. Dunfer came between them by some means or other.\u00a0\u00a0 The poker winnings story seems unlikely to me.\u00a0 If Gopher loved Ah Wee with the dedication that he seems to evince, why would he wager her in a poker game?\u00a0 More likely is that Ah Wee fled with Dunfer to get away from Gopher.\u00a0 But Gopher was a persistent, hopelessly attached lover who pursued Ah Wee to Dunfer’s ranch, got himself hired as a ranch hand by Dunfer, and continued his relationship with Ah Wee whenever possible.<\/p>\n

Dunfer caught Ah Wee and Gopher together and killed Ah Wee in a jealous rampage.\u00a0 Gopher suggests that the encounter in which they were caught was actually innocent in that he was reaching into Ah Wee’s clothing to remove a spider.\u00a0 But this again sounds very self-serving on Gopher’s part.\u00a0 Dunfer had almost certainly known of Gopher and Ah Wee’s prior relationship and very likely had an inkling that they were continuing on the sly behind his back.\u00a0 The violent jealous rampage was probably the breaking of a dam of accumulated suspicion and resentment.\u00a0 Dunfer confessed to killing Ah Wee before the authorities, recounting the version he had given the narrator and the case was judged a justifiable homicide.\u00a0 He then erected the grave that Bierce describes with the curious epitaph, where he acknowledges, finally, her true (psychological) identity as a female.<\/p>\n

In response to the narrator’s question about the time of Dunfer’s death, Gopher levels the accusation that he,<\/em> the narrator, had been the one to poison Dunfer.\u00a0 The “revelation” that comes over the narrator at that moment is that Gopher is making a confession.\u00a0 Indeed it was Gopher who had killed Jo. Dunfer and buried him beside Ah Wee.\u00a0 How does he know this?\u00a0 Both he and Gopher know that he, the narrator, did not poison Dunfer.\u00a0 So why would Gopher make such an accusation?\u00a0 The accusation that the narrator had been the one to poison Dunfer is Gopher’s thin — or rather outrageous — cover story, and it brings up the suggestion that Jo. Dunfer did not die of natural causes.\u00a0 Why would Gopher make such an accusation if he knew Jo. Dunfer had died a natural death?\u00a0 In fact he knew perfectly well that Jo Dunfer did not<\/em> die a natural death.\u00a0 The narrator grasped all of this in an instant hearkening back to the moment in Jo. Dunfer’s house when he<\/p>\n

saw that the knot-hole in the wall had indeed become a human eye — a full, black eye, that glared into my own with an entire lack of expression more awful than the most devilish glitter.\u00a0 I think I must have covered my face with my hands to shut out the horrible illusion, if such it was, and Jo.’s little white man-of-all-work [Gopher] coming into the room broke the spell, and I walked out of the house with a sort of dazed fear that delirium tremens<\/em> might be infectious.\u00a0 (Bierce, p. 120)<\/p>\n

The narrator’s visit to Dunfer’s ranch gave Gopher the opportunity he had probably been seeking for some time.\u00a0 Gopher could claim that the narrator had poisoned Dunfer and thus cover his tracks as the murderer.\u00a0 Gopher had plenty of motivation.\u00a0 Gopher had loved Ah Wee, but Ah Wee preferred Dunfer to him — at least that is the way it seemed to Gopher.\u00a0 Dunfer had taken Ah Wee away from Gopher — allegedly in a poker game, but most likely by other means. I think it probable that Ah Wee left with Dunfer willingly to escape Gopher’s clinging attachment.\u00a0 Dunfer treated Ah Wee badly, according to Gopher — this is plausible — and eventually killed her in a jealous fit for continuing her relationship with Gopher.\u00a0 It was Gopher who buried Dunfer beside Ah Wee.\u00a0 It all fits.\u00a0 Ah Wee is consistent with the type of male-to-female cross-dresser described earlier in the case of Mrs. Nash and the Seventh U.S. Calvary.\u00a0 Jo. Dunfer’s referring to Ah Wee as male but then changing the pronoun on the tombstone:\u00a0 “She was a Good Egg”\u00a0 indicates that he had no illusions that Ah Wee had a dual gender identity.<\/p>\n

I think Bierce understood what he was doing, and realized some people would be confused by the story.\u00a0 He probably wanted it that way.\u00a0 I suspect the story is based somehow on real events and that it is not simply a product of Bierce’s fantasy.\u00a0 It was his first published story, and I think it is significant that he would choose this topic as the subject of his first public effort.<\/p>\n

The story was written around 1870, shortly after the Civil War.\u00a0 The frontier was still very much an unsettled place of adventure and opportunity.\u00a0 It was rapidly changing, however, as were prevailing attitudes toward the many variants of sexual expression.\u00a0 America was becoming more anxious even as it grew stronger, men were becoming less confident in themselves and in their place in the emerging industrial society, and people were becoming conscious and questioning of the sexual behavior of individuals.\u00a0 These strains and anxieties are reflected in the intense racism in the story.\u00a0 However, the racial bigotry, which is quite blatant, does not extend to the cross-dresser.\u00a0 The cross-dresser is a curious anomaly, but is not yet pathologized per se.\u00a0 Sexual and gender deviance are being associated with race, and it would not be long before the reflexive racial bigotry that was taken for granted and widely accepted would be extended to sexual minorities of every sort.\u00a0 This story represents a transition stage between a time when sexuality was less of a public preoccupation to one where it became central to one’s position and acceptability in society.<\/p>\n

The three published commentaries on this story that I was able to locate gloss over or miss the full import of the pronoun changes which are the heart of this sordid story of sex and murder.\u00a0 The tendency is to normalize the story, to heterosexualize it first of all, and to completely ignore, or fail to perceive, the cross-gender identification that is central to the whole drama.\u00a0 But Ah Wee’s male-to-female cross-gender identification is the only way to make full sense of the text.\u00a0 If you pay attention to it, the text is clear.\u00a0 It might have been clearer to Bierce’s audience in the late nineteenth century than it is to us.\u00a0 Cross-dressing and cross-gender identifications were much less obtrusive and much more amenable to integration in society than they are today, as Boag’s excellent examination of the subject points out.\u00a0 The bigotry against the male-to-female cross-dresser, was not as pervasive or even as widespread in the nineteenth century as it is today.\u00a0 Racial bigotry was certainly intense and taken for granted.\u00a0 This story illustrates how the country had not yet solidified what would later become rigid stereotypes and expectations for masculinity and male sexual behavior, but present day commentators tend to project back onto the story our own present-day biases and preconceptions which were still forming at the time the story was composed and were far from the fully entrenched cultural norms they later became.\u00a0 This historical blindness not only simplifies the story and robs it of its psychological complexity, it also neutralizes the lessons it has to teach us in how our own culture has evolved in its notions of masculinity and proper male sexual behavior.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Notes<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

Bierce, Ambrose (1984)\u00a0 The Complete Short Stories of Ambrose Bierce<\/em>.\u00a0 Edited by Ernest Hopkins.\u00a0 Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press.<\/p>\n

Boag, Peter (2011) Re-Dressing America’s Frontier Past<\/em>. Berkeley, Los Angeles, London:\u00a0 University of California Press.<\/p>\n

Lee-Keller, Hellen (2006)\u00a0 Ambrose Bierce Project Journal<\/em>, Vol 2, No. 1.\u00a0 http:\/\/www.ambrosebierce.org\/journal2lee-keller.html<\/a><\/p>\n

Wu, William F. (1982)\u00a0 The Yellow Peril:\u00a0 Chinese Americans in American Fiction 1850-1940.<\/em>\u00a0 Hamden, CT:\u00a0 Archon Books.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Haunted Valley Short Story by Ambrose Bierce, Commentary     “The Haunted Valley” was Ambrose Bierce’s first published story.\u00a0 It appeared in 1871 in the Overland Magazine.\u00a0 It deals…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":124,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"yasr_overall_rating":0,"yasr_post_is_review":"","yasr_auto_insert_disabled":"","yasr_review_type":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[837],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-6449","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-joe-cillo"},"yasr_visitor_votes":{"stars_attributes":{"read_only":true,"span_bottom":"