Perhaps the first task in seeing "What I Have Been Doing Lately" from an alchemical perspective, is to establish it as a story about transformation and process. According to Terree Grabenhorst-Randall in C. G. Jung and the Humanities: Toward a Hermeneutics of Culture, alchemy was "the art of transformation." The goal of alchemy was to alter the composition of a substance in order to create an entirely new and pure substance. At first glance, it would seem obvious that "What I Have Been Doing Lately" concerns a process, in that it is possible that the narrator has been getting up to answer the doorbell several times before the story actually begins for the reader. The fact that she returns to bed two times after being there at the beginning of the story suggests that she is.....
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