The Hurled Ashtray by Nora Ephron: Critical Commentary

In this essay Ephron is concerned, as her title The Hurled Ashtray suggests, with an event: she has a story to tell. And like any essayist, she also has a persuasive purpose, a point to make. Her purpose, like that of any narrative essayist, is to offer an interpretation of the story-an interpretation that uses the story as a means of commenting on some aspect of experience. Before we can understand her point, however, we must examine the story itself-its plot, its characters, its dialogue-as well as her method of narrating it.

Description predominates in the first section of an essay, and it moves quickly from the quiet scene of "Korda, his wife, and another woman ..:.having dinner" to the noisy climax that winds up with "Korda, his wife, and their woman friend ...out on the street." But Ephron takes us through that rapid sequence of events by way of a carefully structured process. She moves back and forth from one table to the other, repeatedly shifting the focus of our attention, as though we were spectators at a tennis match. And each glimpse of the contestants gives us heavily loaded details that move us to sympathy for the Kordas and disgust with those "drunks" at the other table. Thus, when the first section ends with the statement that "Mrs. Korda was furious," we probably assume that she is outraged with the injustice of the whole situation.

The second section completely reverses our assumption. Mrs. Korda, we discover to our surprise, is not angry at the drunks who abused her, nor is she angry at the restaurant for letting them abuse her. Mrs. Korda is angry with Mr. Korda-for coming to her defense! On top of that, we get another shock when we discover that Mrs. Korda is not the stoically restrained person we thought her to be. The silent lady of the first section becomes a screaming fury in the second. Her true nature-her character-is revealed entirely in dialogue, or, more accurately, in monologue, since she runs on uninterruptedly until Ephron cuts off the diatribe, telling us parenthetically that it was "even longer in the original version." And if we examine Mrs. Korda's monologue in detail, we discover that from beginning to end-from calling her husband a "male chauvinist" to calling herself a "slave"- it is filled with the language and attitudes of the woman's movement. Given the content, intensity, and length of the outburst, she seems to be portrayed as a raving feminist. And that appears to be the point of the story. But then Ephron gives us yet another surprise, when she tells us that Mr. Korda after thinking about his wife's behaviour, considered it to be "doubtless right."

By this point we might very well be confused. No one in the story seems to act sensibly. Everyone, in fact, behaves excessively, as if they were completely out of control. Thus, the story seems to make no sense at all, until in the next paragraph Ephron gives us the first hint of her interpretation:

... I got to thinking about the story, and it began to seem to me that the episode just might be a distillation of everything that has happened to men and women as a result of the women's movement, and if not that, at least a way to write about etiquette after the revolution.

Once she provides that brief commentary, we can begin to see the point of the story. Then we can see that our confusion is appropriate, since everyone in the story is mixed up about etiquette, not knowing how to behave in a difficult social situation. And their problem seems to arise from the clash of masculine and feminist standards of behaviour.

After giving us that insight into the Korda episode, Ephron gives us another perspective on it by telling us another story about another dinner table episode, in this case a dinner at which she asked four of her friends to give their reactions to the Korda story. Her story of that dinner table conversation is quite brief, but the details are significant, for they reveal not only that each of her friends had a completely different judgment of the Korda episode, but also that their judgments had noting to do with their sex. One man, for example, "thought Mrs. Korda was completely right," while the other man "said that both parties had behaved badly." Thus her report of the conversation reinforces the point of the story about the Kordas. Not only are the Kordas mixed up about etiquette, but so is everyone else, including Ephron and her friends.

Once we grasp the meaning of the Korda story and its sequel, we can see why Ephron begins her essay with that story about Gary Cooper. The Cooper story, we might say, is an example- "distillation"-of how men and women got on before the feminist revolution. In that little restaurant episode, no one is confused as to how to handle a difficult social situation. Everyone, in fact, is sure of the way to behave. Gary Cooper reacts like a "cocksure" male, and his woman like a "hensure" female. Cooper is able to handle those Teddy boys calmly and swiftly simply by ruffling his feathers a bit, and the woman at his table does not make any fuss about the matter. She is satisfied with her "henny" role. Thus, the Cooper story seems to represent a past era when men and women got on easily with one another because they were comfortable with their traditional roles. Perhaps that is why Ephron calls the Cooper episode a "swell story." Perhaps that is why she thinks "longingly" of Cooper "and his way with words." Surely that must be why she thinks of the Korda story "as a pathetic contrast to the Gary Cooper story." She seems to long for that simpler time before the "revolution," before women became "cocksure" and men turned "hensure."

At this stage in our analysis, we might be tempted to say that the Ephron essay makes the same point as the Lawrence. Certainly they are concerned with the same basic issue-with the psychological and social consequences of changes that have taken place in the traditional roles of men and women. But they do not invite us to take the same attitude toward those changes. Lawrence is opposed to them, and he reveals that opposition both in the clear cut logic of his analogy and in the clear-cut language of his judgments. Ephron, however, is not clear-cut in her response to the problem. She appears to take a definite stand only because we have restricted our analysis to the narrative elements of her essay. We have done so because a narrative essay should be approached through the story it tells. As we have seen, Ephron tells us three stories rather than one, and that has complicated our analytical procedure. But we must still examine both her commentary on the Korda story and the personality she projects in the essay before we can be certain of exactly what she-wants us to think about "etiquette after the revolution."

When we look for the commentary in a narrative essay, we may expect to find it at almost any point. It may precede the story, or be interwoven with the story, or follow the story. And it may be conveyed explicitly or implicitly. As we have seen, Ephron implicitly comments on the Korda story through the stories she tells before and after it. She also gives us a significant bit of implicit commentary when she introduces the Korda story by describing it as "a sort of reverse-twist update on Francis Macomber." In that comment she alludes to Hemingway's fictional story, "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber," which tells of a married couple whose problems are caused not by the man's being too protective a husband to suit his wife's image of herself, but by the husband's being too weak a man to satisfy his wife's image of him. Thus the old masculine code of behaviour seems to have been as troublesome as the new feminist one for men and women. Gary Cooper, after all, may have been a rare bird rather than a typical rooster. And that is the first hint that Ephron is not taking the same position as Lawrence.

If we turn now to her explicit, extended commentary, most of which follows the third story, we can see just how reluctant she is to take a definite stand. She begins by raising a lengthy series of questions to which she says "I have no answers." All those questions seek information about the Kordas and the immediate circumstances of their story-information that might help her to make a clear-cut evaluation of it. Lacking answers, she then professes only "to offer some random musings." But among those musings she makes a very telling statement of her personal feelings when she says, "Yes, I want to be treated as an equal and not as an appendage or possession or spare rib, but I also want to be taken care of." The very form of her statement- "I want this, but I also want that"- reveals that she finds herself in a dilemma. She is torn between feminist beliefs and a feminine desire for masculine protection. She wants to have it both ways. But when she tries to imagine how both those aspirations might be fulfilled in an actual situation, she once again acknowledges that "I have no positive answers." Thus she does not take a clear-cut stand on how men and women should behave in the wake of "the revolution." Rather, she raises a vexing problem in social behaviour for which she can offer no solution other than the facetious one she proposes at the end, and so her essay concludes with a comic response to the hopelessness of the situation.

Once we confront that comic response, we might wonder just how seriously she takes the problem and how seriously she wants us to take it. But those matters can be determined only by examining the personality Ephron projects in the essay. Since she is a woman writing "about etiquette after the revolution," she is likely to be very self-conscious about the role she plays, about the etiquette she follows, about the kind of woman she appears to be in the essay; and we might assess her personality with an eye to those concerns. She opens her essay, as we noted earlier, by appearing to be a casual and spontaneous person: she does not stand on formalities. But in the second and third sentences she appears also to be a bit unsure of herself; worried about her ability to tell the Cooper story, afraid that "it will lose something in print." And when she has finished telling it, she says, "Well, you had to be there," as though to imply that she thinks she has flubbed the story.

In fact, however, Ephron handles the story quite well, carefully building up the situation to prepare for its climax. For this reason her apologetic manner seems hard to explain, until we discover in the opening of the third paragraph that she "longingly" thinks about Gary Cooper's "way with words." Then it becomes clear that Cooper is one of her heroes, and that all along she has been acting the role of a diffident feminine admirer. Indeed, once she has -disposed of the Cooper story she appears to become quite self-confident. She does not, for example, show any qualms about telling the Korda story, or that of the dinner conversation with her friends. And while she may not have the answers to all the questions she raises about the Kordas, she does not hesitate to register some firm judgements about them: "Korda's reaction was ludicrous, but Mrs, Korda matched them all by reducing a complicated and rather interesting emotional situation to a tedious set of movement platitudes." Nothing diffident, there. That sounds like a tough-minded social critic doing her thing and she retains that tone until the end when she considers how she would like her husband to handle a difficult situation. Then she becomes somewhat tentative, when she says, for example, "I think ... I would prefer that my husband handle it." or "he could ... call over the captain and complain discreetly, perhaps even ask that our table be moved." Finally she turns playful, resolving the question by "going out to have those cards made up right now."

To summarize our impression of her personality: we notice that she begins diffidently when speaking about Gary Cooper, becomes confident when speaking about the Kordas, and then turns diffident again when speaking about herself and her husband. In effect she displays both sides of the personality she revealed when she spoke of wanting "to be treated as an equal," but also wanting "to be taken care of." Thus in the alternation of her personality, in its play back and forth between those two aspects, we can see just how torn she is in her feelings toward the matter of social behaviour, and therefore how difficult things have become for her "as a result of the women's movement." Her facetiousness at the end seems-to be simply a way of keeping her sense of humour about it. Men and women, she seems to be telling us have perennially had difficulty getting on with one another, and their difficulties have been compounded by the women's movement, so that the only thing we can do to keep our sanity is to imagine playful solutions to the eternal problem.

(This commentary has been adapted from “Elements of Literature” edited by Robert Scholes, Nancy R. Comley, Carl H. Klaus, and Michael Silverman)