Enemy Women
by Paulette Jiles
List Price: $13.95
Pages: 336
Format: Paperback
ISBN: 0060938099
Publisher: Harperperennial Library
Paulette Jiles is an award-winning poet and memoirist. The idea for Enemy Women,
her first novel, sprung from research she was conducting into her own family's past during
the Civil War in the Ozarks. An avid horsewoman (who learned how to ride sidesaddle as
part of the research for this novel), Jiles lives in San Antonio, Texas, with her husband,
and is currently at work on a new novel.
Her previous books are North Spirit
(1995) and Cousins (1992).
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Q. What inspired you to write Enemy Women?
PJ: I love writing, I love history, and I wanted to write a novel. It’s almost
as simple as that. While researching my family history, I found an unknown or “lost”
piece of the history of the Civil War in southeastern Missouri – the unjust
incarceration of women – and made it a dramatic background to a love story. Once I
stumbled upon that lost history, everything just fell into place.
Q. Is Adair, the heroine of Enemy Women, based on a real person? One of your ancestors,
perhaps?
PJ: No. Her sisters Mary And Savannah were named for my great-great-aunts who lived
through the Civil War in southeastern Missouri, but Adair is entirely made up, including
her name.
Q. Who or what inspired the character of Adair?
PJ: An old photo. While I was researching the Civil War era, I came across a photo of a
young woman. She just seemed so alive and so strong, as if her life and personality were
entirely in her face.
Q. How did you find out about women being sent to prison during the Civil War?
PJ: I came across several instances mentioned in a book called Inside Warby
Michael Fellman, and I was intrigued because it wasn’t generally known and also
because it would make a terrific plot device. Running into the picture of the young woman
who became, for me, Adair Colley, and finding out about women being sent to prison in St.
Louis during the war happened at the same time, and these two things really made the book.
Q. Were your ancestors in the Civil War? Which side?
PJ: I don’t know about the Jiles family; that great-great-grandfather (a
justice of the peace just like Marquis Colley in the book) went missing and I can’t
find any information on what happened to him. Two other great-great-grandfathers fought
for the Union in Missouri – one of them in the hated Union Militia. Two others fought
for the Confederacy in Tennessee units.
Q. Adair seems very bossy with her father in the early scene at the Colley home, yet she
is desperate to find him when he is taken away by the Militia. Is this kind of a
contradiction?
PJ: I suppose I could have included a scene in which Adair was being tender and
affectionate with her father, but in general, Adair is simply being a teenager –
smarting off to her father and being demanding. And then, of course, when he is seized she
regrets every impertinent thing she ever said.
Q. When Adair is first thrown into prison and meets the bully, her fellow prisoner
Chloris, she chooses to fight her instead of appease her. Later, she adopts a somewhat
humble demeanor around another bully, the prison matron. This seems rather inconsistent
with her character.
PJ: Well, I don’t think so. Adair is smart enough to choose her fights and she
will take on one that she can win. She can win against another prisoner, or at
least let the other prisoner know that she will pay a high price for any more bullying.
But the matron is backed up by the entire prison system and its guards and authority.
Adair is brave but she isn’t foolish.
Q. The Major is an interesting character. He’s a real “by-the-rulebook”
kind of guy, and yet he takes an incredible risk at arranging Adair’s escape.
PJ: Yes, he does go by the rulebook but he also gets things done. And, of course, he
is passionately in love with Adair. When people are that deeply in love they take serious
risks. The Major is a resolute and courageous man. Bear in mind, he was with the Army
dragoons in “Bleeding Kansas,” in the field for months at a time. I have tried
to indicate something about his character through his love of languages: the Indian
language he has been studying, his interest in Schoolcraft’s lexicons. I think this
connotes a very serious and inquisitive cast of mind. The man is no dummy and his
adherence to rules is steadfast -- as long as the rules actually work. Clearly, the Army
rules about the incarceration of women don’t work; they are pointless. But what truly
drives the Major is his fervid love for Adair.
Q. Why does the Major actually volunteer to go into combat? He’s got a pretty safe
position away from the front lines, interrogating women.
PJ: People just thought differently in those times. The concepts of “honor”
and “manliness” now seem old-fashioned but it really drove people in those days,
and I didn’t want to write a novel set in the 1860s peopled with characters from the
1990s. I wanted to be true to the times. The Major genuinely wanted to meet the tests of
combat, and after all he was a professional soldier. Besides, his requesting a transfer to
a combat unit and being sent there really helped the plot!
Q. There aren’t any sex scenes in the book at all, and yet the relationship
between Adair and the Major feels really sexy. How did you achieve this effect?
PJ: I worked from the old principle that less is more. The restraint and the
buttoned- down tone of their relationship heighten the sexual tension much more than if I
had just thrown in a graphic sex scene. Besides, I wanted to be different. Graphic sex
scenes are so common these days -- in magazines, movies, television, books, video games,
etc. I wanted to do something that people wouldn’t expect, something challenging and
new. Depicting strong sexual attraction between Adair and the Major without their taking
off their clothes required some skill. When he presents her with a hairbrush and the use
of his mirror, and she brushes out her long hair, the sexual tension is very high. Also,
again, I wanted to be true to my chosen historical period and not pretend they were 1990s
people who could count on privacy and birth control.
Q. Adair’s escape from the prison and flight through St. Louis seems so real. How
did you come up with the details of the city in the 1860s?
PJ: As a writer, I first imagine things visually, and then “translate”
these visual sequences into the English language. I love to create an alternative world,
almost like world-building in science fiction.
The Missouri Historical Society published a book of daguerrotypes of St. Louis scenes
taken in the 1840s and ‘50s, and then I dug up an old map of St. Louis from 1857, and
put the two together. If I calculated that Adair would have gone past the corner of Fourth
and Olive, for instance, I could actually find a daguerrotype of that corner. My dad used
to have an office at Seventh and Olive, but the city has changed so much that the modern
look is useless for historical purposes.
Q. Much of the novel takes place in the Ozark Mountains. Were you raised there? The
descriptions are so vivid.
PJ: I was born in Salem, Missouri, in the Ozarks, but we actually lived in various
small towns in central Missouri. However, we frequently visited my dad’s people down
in southeastern Missouri. I always preferred the beautiful mountains of the Ozarks to
central Missouri, which is generally flat. My cousin Susan and I rode the Ozark trails for
many years and, of course, still do. (Actually, it was on one of our rides that we
discovered a desolate Civil War graveyard in the middle of an oak forest.) I live in Texas
now, but I’m headed back home to ride the mountain trails for two weeks this October.
It’s in the blood.
Q. The horses show up almost as characters in the book, and the reader starts to look
for them and wonder about them. Their behavior is described in wonderful detail. It’s
obvious that you know and love horses. What function do they serve in the plot?
PJ: The horses are like angels, in that they are messengers. Angels aren’t just
cherubic chubby babies; in both the Bible and the Koran angels act as messengers between
heaven and earth. They are asexual, and have an almost magic ability to negotiate the
dangerous distances between one world and another, without being really committed to
either. They are helpful to human beings in that they carry our prayers, or messages, or
cries for help, to the higher regions.
It is also said that angels watch over us (I suppose to be ready to carry an appeal at any
moment). So these horses are, in this sense, angels. They provide an almost magic-carpet
means of transport, they watch over Adair at night, and come to her in the morning. I
meant them to be neutral and angelic. And, remember, they at one time abandon her –
like angels, ultimately they belong to themselves and their purposes are not always our
purposes.
Q. Do Adair and the Major ever make it to the West?
PJ: Gee, I don’t know; I haven’t written that book yet. But I do think
they got to Texas . . .
Excerpted from Enemy Women © Copyright 2008 by Paulette Jiles. Reprinted with permission by Harperperennial Library. All rights reserved.
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