Look Homeward, Angel

It is 1900, the turn of the century. Gant has turned 50 years old and Eliza, who is now 42, is pregnant with her last child. While Gant distresses over the passage of time and laments the choices he has made, Eliza looks forward to a new chapter in her life without the limitations of pregnancy. Gant throws himself into his most intense bout of drunkenness yet, which again results in his admission into a sanitarium for recovery. Desperate and fed up, Eliza confronts each bar owner in Altamont and threatens them with legal action if they serve Gant alcohol.

Embarrassed by Eliza’s public humiliation of him, Gant throws himself into more debauchery. At his mother’s request, their eldest son Steve continually drags his father home from his escapades. Their eldest daughter Daisy hides in shame for her father’s actions, and her sister Helen, Oliver’s favorite child, nurses her father to sobriety with soup. This cycle continues into September 1900, on the night Eliza goes into labor. Gant enters in a fury and assaults a laboring Eliza. As Helen nurses him and the night passes, Eliza begins to give birth.

Eliza and Gant’s last child is born the next morning. Eliza, barring Gant from the delivery room, names him Eugene. Wolfe describes the human events that preceded Eugene’s birth and takes the reader into the mind of newborn Eugene, whom Wolfe portrays as frustrated at his inability to engage with the world around him. Eugene demonstrates from an early age a desire to read, “realizing that his first escape must come through language” (31). Eugene absorbs the sights and sounds of the world around him and eventually speaks his first word—“Moo!”—in response to a neighbor’s cow.

Eugene reaches the age of two and, because of his brother Luke’s illness, he is entrusted into the care of a young black girl. As the girl takes an outside nap one afternoon, Eugene wanders away into the alley of their aristocratic neighbors, the Hilliards. A horse pulling a grocery wagon for the Hilliards tramples Eugene. Eugene survives the incident with no fractures, although he does bear a faint scar for years after the incident.

Luke recovers from typhoid, and the Gant children grow. Steve follows in his father’s destructive path and is expelled from school, which leads to antagonism between son and father, who “grew open and bitter. Gant recognized perhaps most of his son’s vices as his own” (38). The distance between Eliza and Gant continues to grow and, though Gant drinks less often, their relationship is strained.

Eliza decides to venture westward to the 1904 World’s Fair in St. Louis for a trial period while Gant stays in Altamont. The family spends the spring and summer exploring St. Louis; Gant comes to visit, and Eliza sets up a boardinghouse for visitors from Altamont. In the fall, Grover, “the gentlest and saddest of the boys” (46), contracts typhoid from eating a contaminated pear at the fair. Grover dies from typhoid. Eliza laments, “If I had known” (49), repeatedly and regrets her decision to explore. The Gant family returns home, where their neighbors greet them in mourning.