Toward a Textual Understanding of the Labyrinth: Some Literary Precedents

First appearing in the 22 May 1920 issue of “The Saturday Evening Post,” F. Scott Fitzgerald’s famous short story titled “The Ice Palace” features perhaps the first direct reference to an actual, physical labyrinth in American literary history. The story’s female protagonist – a Southern belle by the name of Sally Carrol Happer – finds herself ensconced in the social milieu of the Minnesota upper class upon her engagement to a Northern gentleman of St. Paul birth. Reflecting the recurrent trope of post-Reconstruction North-South irreconcilability (see also “The Jelly Bean” and “The Last of the Belles”), the story climaxes inside of a bizarre and immense palace constructed entirely of ice. Once inside, Sally finds herself completely lost within the tortuous chambers of the palace’s basement:

“She started to run straight forward, and then turned like lightning and sped back the way she had come, enveloped in a sudden icy terror.

She had reached a turn – was it here? – took the left and came to what should have been the outlet into the long, low room, but it was only another glittering passage with darkness at the end.” (67)

While the narrative description of Sally’s “terror” continues beyond the above passage, the significance here is obviously metaphorical. Ill-equipped to assimilate herself into the shockingly “hard” world of the Northern gentry, Sally loses consciousness within the labyrinth and (perhaps more significantly) is finally rescued by a professor of literature (not her fiancé). What I would like to point out is the problematic commentary on endings that Fitzgerald provides in this story. The labyrinth functions as the telos of Sally’s Northern journey. It marks the endgame of her failed engagement (to say nothing of the telos implicit in the labyrinth itself [see Gollensten’s culte du centre]).

Literary grapplings with the labyrinth are not always as successfully nuanced as what we see in Fitzgerald, however. I would argue that Stephen King’s incorporation of the hedge-labyrinth at the end of *The Shining* is something of a red herring, a confusing and overly symbolic prop that leaves the reader/viewer wondering why he doesn’t just tear through the shrubs with his axe.

To be sure, literary appropriations of the labyrinth are not merely relegated to the phenomenon of modernity. Critics often utilize descriptors such as “labyrinthine” to describe the fundamentally meandering prose of postmodernists like Pynchon, Gaddis, and (more recently) Wallace. Though studies on the influence of the labyrinth in textual discourse are in their infancy, I think we can all agree that labyrinths allow us a unique access to the “roots/routes” dichotomy of our cultural inheritance.

Fitzgerald, F. Scott. “The Ice Palace.” The Short Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald. Ed. Matthew J. Bruccoli. New York: Scribner’s, 2003.