Cracking the Wasp Code: Joan Didion and the Soul Word

“Cracking the WASP Code: Joan Didion and the Soul Word” is a study in Literature and Language. The “Language” component is the idea of the Soul Word, used here as a generic term for words that represent a code of values and behavior that is admired and aspired to in various subcultures. Examples include “Soul” (African-American), “L’Chaim!” (Jewish), “Genutzat” (Armenian), “Sissu” (Finnish), “Dom” (Serbo-Croatian), “Yamato-Damashi” (Japanese), “Machismo” (Hispanic), and—most important for this essay—“Class” (WASP). The “Literature” component of this essay includes definitions and literary excerpts to explain these terms. Among the authors of these excerpts are such writers as Ralph Ellison, Toni Morrison, Saul Bellow, Oscar Hijuelos, Robert Frost, Ernest Hemingway, John Updike, and William Faulkner. The main thrust of this essay is to bring this concept (Soul Word) to bear on the contradictory portraits of the main character in Joan Didion’s masterpiece, A Book of Common Prayer. Charlotte Douglas, Didion’s protagonist, is portrayed as a scatterbrain who does not even seem to know whether she and her daughter did or did not see the Tivoli Gardens in Copenhagen or the rose window in the cathedral at Chartres. In the latter instance, for example, she says her daughter cried upon seeing the beauty of the window; elsewhere she says a British television crew prevented them from entering the cathedral. Yet she sometimes displays exceptional competence and presence of mind, as when she saves the life of a man with an emergency tracheotomy. The bridge between these two portraits, it turns out, is Didion’s deployment of the WASP Code, as I explain in my central argument.