Tante Melia
An aunt in the narrator's German-American family in Brooklyn. She loses her mind over the course of the book and ends in a state asylum. "Tante" is German for aunt.
The book
At a glance
- An aunt in the narrator's family, called Tante Melia and Mele
- "The Tailor Shop" mostly, with returns in several of the other pieces
- In a state asylum, which the book calls the bughouse
Who they are in the book
Spoiler-freeTante Melia is a figure in Black Spring, the 1936 book by the American writer Henry Miller. The book is ten separate prose pieces rather than a novel, and she turns up in several of them, most often in "The Tailor Shop", the long piece about the narrator's family and his father's business in New York.
She is an aunt on a large German-American family tree that the narrator sets out in full, with all its illnesses and disgraces listed one after another. The family is his own: Miller grew up among German immigrants in Brooklyn, and the childhood material in Black Spring is drawn straight from it. The book calls her Tante Melia and, in the family's own speech, Mele.
Her mind goes one night while the narrator is walking her home. After that the book keeps returning to her in small pieces: at the family table, in a letter she sends from the institution, on visiting day.
This profile is drawn from the Grove Press text of 1963, read in the Internet Archive's scan.
How the book draws them
- At the family tableAt the holiday gatherings, with the stove glowing and the phonograph going and the men arguing about the Franco-Prussian war, she sits in a corner fingering a rosary. When the narrator lists what runs in the family — cancer, dropsy, cirrhosis of the liver, insanity, thievery — he ends the list with his Uncle George and Tante Melia, and calls them the morgue and the insane asylum.
- The birds in her hatA freezing Brooklyn afternoon, the harbour full of ice floes, and Tante Melia is looking for the birds she left in her hat.
- The night she asks for the moonWalking her home, the narrator realises she is mad. She is asking him for the moon. At the corner she leaps forward like a reindeer and shrieks for it.
- The letter from the institutionShe sends the relatives a Valentine greeting. She is in a gray uniform with her hair parted in the middle, she is happy with her new friends and the food is good, and she would like them to remember that she asked for some Fastnacht Küchen last time — could they send it by parcel post? There are lovely petunias growing up around the garbage can outside the big kitchen.
- Kümmel between the napkinsOn visiting days the narrator's mother packs a lunch with a bottle laid in among the napkins, because Mele always liked a drop of Kümmel. Mele, asked how she liked it, says she never saw any Kümmel.