The Magic Barrel

Fiction | Short Story Collection | Adult | Published in 1958

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“The Girl of My Dreams”Chapter Summaries & Analyses

“The Girl of My Dreams” Summary

Mitka, a once-aspiring author, burns the manuscript of his much-rejected, “heartbroken” novel in a trashcan and secludes himself in his room, rebuffing all entreaties and acts of kindness from his “emotional” landlady, Mrs. Lutz, who is also a would-be writer. Because the editors who rejected his novel found its symbolism too “obscure,” Mitka now despairs of ever getting his meaning across in a form that such publishing houses will comprehend. His frustration has given him writer’s block as well as a ringing emptiness. Mrs. Lutz, worried about his reclusiveness and lack of appetite, tries to lure him out with offers of food and with the news that an attractive young woman, also a writer, has moved into the building; but Mitka loses all interest upon hearing that she writes advertising copy.

In the past, Mitka has had a dozen of his short stories published in a local paper (the Globe) that solicits fiction from its readers at five dollars “a throw.” Now, a new story in the Globe by someone named Madeleine Thorn “sock[s]” him “in the belly” with its first-person account of a young woman whose precious handwritten manuscript is burned by her landlady, who mistook the pages for litter. Madeleine’s vivid story gives Mitka feverish dreams in which their two novels “commingle” in a single burning barrel. Believing her story to be true, he begins a passionate correspondence with the author. This allows his words to flow again. Eventually, he overcomes her reluctance to meet him, and they schedule a rendezvous at the local library. As it happens, her “frumpy,” middle-aged figure is far from what he had imagined, and after forcing himself to sit down with her, he makes no secret of his disappointment. Crying, she confesses that her name is not Madeleine, but Olga. Madeleine was her beautiful daughter, who died at age 20. All of her stories are about Madeleine, who resembled Olga when she was young. Olga’s story about the burned manuscript is pure fiction. In reality, she lives with her grown son and his wife, and both her amateur writing and Mitka’s letters offer her a sweet escape from a lonely, thwarted life.

Olga persuades Mitka to come with her to a local bar and pulls a rich miscellany of food from her bag, saying that eating is “self-expression.” Mitka eats a great deal of it, while Olga warmly urges him to persevere in his writing. They part on friendly terms. Asked if he will keep writing her letters, Mitka says, “Who knows?” On his walk home, rejuvenated by the spring air and by the food in his belly, he imagines draping Mrs. Lutz in “flowing white,” then sweeping her off her feet and over the threshold into his apartment, where they will waltz around his “writing chamber.”

“The Girl of My Dreams” Analysis

The character of Mitka bears a passing resemblance to Kessler in “The Mourners,” for he secludes himself in his room and wastes away, indulging in a solipsistic bitterness at a world that he fears will never understand him. Malamud’s satirical treatment of Mitka’s sense of grievance and artistic “impotence” underscores the character’s immaturity, particularly given his callous treatment of his devoted landlady, Mrs. Lutz, whose tender concern and generosity he brushes angrily away. With these details establishing the protagonist’s sense of misery, the stage is set for a spiritual rebirth, and as often in Malamud’s stories, the resulting revelation comes in the form of a double: Madeleine Thorn, whose short story in a local paper mirrors much of Mitka’s personal experience and pain—a rooming house, an over-generous landlady, and a manuscript burned in a trashcan in the backyard. As the tidings of a story that so closely mirrors his own captures the interest of the self-absorbed Mitka, Malamud uses this development to silently critique the shortcomings of his main character, for Mitka cannot help but assume that the story’s young heroine and its author are one and the same, and as a result, he creates a fantasy about a beautiful female version of himself who will understand him completely. Ironically, his first attempt in months to reach out to another human being only occurs because he fancies her to be just like himself. Thus, when he discovers that “Madeleine Thorn” (Olga) bears many similarities to Mrs. Lutz, his resulting disappointment strikes a comical note in the overall narrative. This is a deliberate effect on Malamud’s part, and one that reveals the full range of Mitka’s shortcomings as he treats the lady harshly for failing to live up to his unrealistic expectations.

Befitting the female writer’s double nature, “Madeleine” reveals her true name of Olga and confesses that Madeleine was her beautiful daughter, who died young; this revelation further shatters Mitka’s willful fantasy about his elusive correspondent, who is soon shown to be just as lonely and isolated as he is, for just like Mrs. Lutz, who has tried to lure Mitka back into the dance of life with descriptions of Beatrice, her lovely new tenant, Olga now describes Madeleine to him in the hopes that he will keep writing to her. Also, like Mrs. Lutz, Olga apparently has no interest in a physical relationship with him; instead, she longs only to befriend him and to help his writing. Significantly, her daughter’s name recalls “Proust’s madeleine,” the pastry whose evocative taste triggers the flood of memories in Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. Accordingly, Olga herself uses food to stimulate and interest Mitka, pulling from her bag a veritable feast and asserting that food is a form of “self-expression.” As Mitka gorges himself on this bounty, the scene clearly represents his decision to end his isolation and enjoy the metaphorical feast of life. Olga assures him that he will “invent [his] way out” of his creative “fog,” (39) and on their walk to the bus stop, reveals that all of her stories are about her daughter Madeleine. Memories of her are Olga’s inspiration, just as the madeleine pastry was for Proust’s hero. Love, loss, and life lived, she implies, are the food of creativity. This exchange therefore offers a lesson for Mitka, who has for so long shunned Mrs. Lutz, her food, and the human pageant itself, consumed as he has been by his lonely, monkish self-absorption.

Warmed by Olga’s food and tender words, which have partly filled the “everlasting hollow” gouged in him ever since the burning of his novel, Mitka finds himself embracing the bewitching sweetness of the spring evening. The complete reversal of his mindset toward his own situation and toward life in general is emphasized as he exuberantly imagines a mock wedding night with Mrs. Lutz. Whether or not this ever happens—or whether or not he writes to Olga again—Mitka’s appetite for life has now fully returned and is nourished by people rather than by dreams or the “obscure” symbols of his rejected novel. His new affection for Mrs. Lutz, like Feld’s sympathy for Sobel in “The First Seven Years,” flows from an epiphany of remorse, empathy, and gratitude. The fact that he fantasizes about her and not about the young, pretty Beatrice precludes the possibility that this new tenderness owes much to sexual desire or vanity. The never-seen Beatrice shares her name with the dead muse of Dante’s Divine Comedy, Beatrice Portinari, and her role in the story mirrors the lovely, deceased Madeleine. Thus, the four women are really two pairs of doubles, and by the end of the story, Mitka’s vision of Madeleine no longer haunts him, for she was merely an illusion born of a reclusive writer’s misconceptions about life. His new interest in Mrs. Lutz, on the other hand, foreshadows a reciprocal (and possibly metaphorical) dance of love and compassion with warm, living flesh—Mitka’s long-overdue immersion in the dance of life.