The Brown Chest (1992). Content and Description

Originally published in the Atlantic (May 1992) and then collected in The Afterlife and Other Stories (1994), “The Brown Chest” is one of Updike’s mature stories, reflecting his own aging and the loss of his own mother. Short on plot, the story is symbolically rich with multiple layers of meaning. The story relates the narrator’s relationship to a brown chest his mother kept in the attic during his childhood.

The chest contained mementos of her life and those of her family. The chest was a source of anxiety for the narrator, and its presence and recurrence in the narrator’s life have a distinctly haunting quality. Eventually, when the narrator’s mother dies, the narrator is forced to take possession of the trunk and its contents. While the contents of the chest are not a secret per se, the opening of the chest by his future daughter-in-law results in a Pandora-like outpouring of the memories tied to it.

The story is told from the third-person limited omniscient point of view. This perspective focuses exclusively on the consciousness of the main character and his relationship with the chest and his environment. In this story Updike draws from John Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn” (1820), employs gothic elements, and alludes to the Pandora myth to emphasize the narrator’s fear of the past. Unlike Keats’s urn, which is decorated with images of humans in action, Updike’s chest is devoid of the presence of society or civilization. This absence contributes to the speaker’s fear of worlds without people—he existed in unpopulated space. This relationship to his space lends the story its gothic elements.

The opening paragraph introduces the gothic component of the story. The chest and the boy exist within the house he lives in with his parents and maternal grandparents, and the boy has divided the house into sections containing “popular cheerful places,” “haunted places,” and places that existed not physically, but psychologically, “in between” (225). One such “in between” space is the guest bedroom. This room is where his relationship with his mother is formed, and it is a space for spiritual growth.

The mother prevents the room from becoming haunted. She also keeps the chest. As the keeper of the chest and the recorder of memories, she is the narrator’s link to the past. However, he sees her mostly as a means of protecting him from the past. Only when she dies is he forced to take ownership of the chest. In fact, his fear of the chest is linked to a fear of the attic. The narrator explains that he has defined these spaces and that the chest exists in the haunted space. He fears it by association. Therefore, everything associated with the chest causes anxiety.

As Keats’s urn does, the brown chest represents the past. As the urn inspired Keats, the chest haunts the speaker with its message. However, unlike the urn, whose exterior is decorated with images of civilization, the chest, clad only in brown “paint” (later acknowledged as stain), is devoid of images. As stated, this absence reflects the speaker’s fear of worlds without people. The narrator ascribes meaning to its surface. Indeed, the “blank” side represents the portion of history waiting to be written. The paint itself represents the memories that are attached to it and how we attach memories to objects.

The memories (mementos) collected in the chest belong to the narrator’s mother. They represent many people and many generations and form a catalog of her memories. We cling to such memories; they represent and inform our lives. The chest and its memories become the narrator’s when his mother dies, although they mean something different to him than they did to her (for one, to him the chest is an object of fear).

Updike draws from two sources for the end of the story. As a symbol of the narrator’s fears and anxiety, the chest is a Pandora’s box. Edith Hamilton describes the myth of Pandora: “For Pandora, like all women, was possessed of a lively curiosity. She had to know what was in the box. One day she lifted the lid—and out flew plagues innumerable, sorrow and mischief for mankind” (Hamilton 71-72). Morna, his future daughter-in-law, opens the chest, “and out swooped, with the same vividness that had astonished and alarmed his nostrils as a child, the sweetish deep cedary smell, undiminished, cedar and camphor and paper and cloth, the smell of family, family without end” (233).

Rather than plagues innumerable, out fly smells representing the past. Then, as in Marcel Proust’s multivolume novel Remembrance of Things Past, smells trigger memories in the speaker’s mind, which connect with the same smell of “camphor and cedar” that the speaker remembers from 40 years ago. Thus, in a moment when the text calls attention to itself, its opening triggers memories, which the narrator draws upon to narrate this story.

For Discussion or Writing:
1. How does the point of view shift in the story? Though it is always a third person, limited omniscient point of view, the reader is limited to what the young boy understands. How does this technique echo that used by James Joyce in his short story “Araby” (1914)?

2. In what way is Morna essential to opening the chest? By opening the chest will she bridge the gap between the narrator’s mother’s memories and his grandchildren?

3. The narrator seeks to balance his getting lost with his son’s careless handling of the chest, which results in its splitting. How does the narrator imply personification of the chest? What, then, does the chest represent?

Works Cited and Additional Resources:
Bailey, Peter J. Rabbit (Un)Redeemed: The Drama of Belief in John Updike’s Fiction. Madison, N.J.: Fair-leigh Dickinson University Press, 2006.

Boswell, Marshall. John Updike’s Rabbit Tetralogy: Mastered Irony in Motion. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2001.
De Bellis, Jack. The John Updike Encyclopedia. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2000.

Greiner, Donald J. Adultery in the American Novel: Updike, James, and Hawthorne. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1985.
Hamilton, Edith. Mythology: Timeless Tales of Gods and Heroes. New York: New American Library, 1940.

Hunt, George. John Updike and the Three Great Secret Things: Sex, Religion and Art. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1980.
“Life and Times: John Updike.” New York Times Online. Available online. URL: http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/04/06/lifetimes/ updike.html. Accessed March 25, 2009.