Deep Architecture of Miss MacIntosh, My Darling

The Deep Architecture of Miss MacIntosh, My DarlingMiss MacIntosh, My Darling is 1,198 pages long. Marguerite Young spent eighteen years writing it. When it was published in 1965, critics praised it and dismissed it in roughly equal measure, and then the literary culture largely set it aside. This book argues that what was set aside was one of the most extraordinary technical achievements in American literature, and that the reason it has been difficult to assess is that no one has yet built the tools to see what Young actually built.This is that attempt.The Deep Architecture takes sixteen elements of the novel, the Wheel of Fortune, the Problem of Universals, the feminist architecture, the religious architecture, the impossible artist, the colony under no flag, and ten others, and demonstrates what each one is doing inside the novel's structure. Not what it means. What it does. How it bears weight. Which of Young's five philosophical pillars it supports and how.The argument running through all sixteen documents is this: Young did not write a long, difficult, poetic novel. She built a philosophical architecture disguised as a novel, using materials from the whole of Western thought and literary tradition, assembled according to five load-bearing pillars, and designed to teach the reader how to read it while the reader is reading it. The difficulty is not the point. The difficulty is the evidence.This is a companion volume to To All My Darlings: A Guide to Reading Miss MacIntosh, My Darling. That book accounts for what Young put into the novel. This one argues for why she put it there and what it is holding up.