pishkar's reader's guide
TRANSCRIPT
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Kian Pishkar Nooshin Nasery
A Reader's
Guide to Practical English Literary Analysis
Novel-Drama-Poetry
Azad Islamic Univesity, Jiroft Branch 2006
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Table of Content Acknowledgement Introduction Chapter One: Novel 1.Don Quixtoe 8 2.Robinson Crusoe 36 3.Tom Jones 50 4. Tristram Shandy 55 5. Jane Eyre 66 6 Wuthering Heights 85 7.Alice in the Wonderland 103 8.The Adventures of Tom Sawyer 119 9.The Picture of Dorian Gray 139 10.Jude the Obscure 152 11.Sister Carrie 155 12.Ulysses 177 13.Mrs. Dolloway 233 14.To the Lighthouse 258 15.Great Gatsby 267 16.The Sound and The Fury 286 17.As I Lay Dying 305 18.Absalom ,Absalom 323 19.Brave New World 327 20.The Catcher in the Rye 347 21.Catch 22 364 22.Pale Fire 402 Chapter Two :Drama 418 1.Antigone 419 2.Dr.faustus 438 3.Tempest 455 4.Samson Agonistes 479 5.A Doll's House 483 6.Cherry Orchard 497 7.Chairs 512 8.Rhinoceroses 524
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9.Murder in the Cathedral 537 10.Glass Menagerie 540 11.A Streetcar Named Desire 552 12.End Game 555 13.Cat on a Hot Tin Roof 564 14.Miss Julie 583 Chapter Three: Poetry 596 1.Beowulf 597 2.Sir Gawin and the Green Knight 611 3.The Faerie Queene 637 4.Paradise Lost 663 5.The Pilgrim's Progress 684 6.William Wordsworth 689 7.P.B.Shelley 701 8.Lord Alfred Tennyson 710 9.The Love Song of J.Alfred Prufrock 739 10. The Waste Land 770
Bibliography 775
بھ نام خدا
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کھ درپرتو حضرت حق ولطف حضرت ولی عصر ودر سالییباشدبار دیگر این فرصت بدست کھ بنام پیامبر گرامی اسالم م
سال فعالیت جھت گرداوری مطالبی ارزشمند بھ ینحاصل چند ثمر نشستھ
وقابل ارایھ بھ ھمکاران گرامی و دانشجویان عزیز جھت استفاده ھر چھ بیشتر در رشتھ زبان وادبیات انگلیسی و در مقاطع
کملی استکارشناسی وکارشناسی ارشد باشد.این اثر در حقیقت م Guide to English literature بر کتاب
ال ھ در س ط 1378ک ال توس اپ و در س رخ چ یب س ارات س انتشاپ 1385 املتری چ ورت ک ا بص ارات رھنم ط انتش دوم ان توس
گردیده است..این کتاب دارای سھ فصل می باشد.بخش اول منتشرم وبرجستھ ای می باشد ان مھ شامل نقد و بررسی بیست و دو رم
یت ده شخص ی کنن ده و بررس ھ ش انی ارای ب زم ھ ترتی ھ ب ای ک ھ رمان درون مایھ
اما برای جلوگیری از بر اثر و نقدی کامل ادبی حاکم وعناصردوباره کاری از اوردن وتکرار خالصھ رمانھا ونمایشنامھ ھا
.در فصل دوم کھ ھمانند دیگر کتب نویسنده خوداری شده استو مھمی است کھ در برجستھ شنامھ چھارده نمای بررسی کننده شجویان وھمکاران گرانقدر نمورد نیاز دا مقاطع مختلف
مل بیش از بیست شعر برجستھ از بیش از .فصل سوم شا می باشدده شاعر معرو ف و مشھور انگلیس وامریکا میباشد کھ
بصورت کامل از منابع بسیار معتبر گرداوری جمع بندی و ارایھ ده است.گردی
امید است این کتاب ھمانند بقیھ کتابھای ارایھ شده از سوی این ولذت بردن از ان ی مولف باعث تسھیل مطالعھ ادبیات انگلیس
گردد.در خاتمھ الزم است از ھمھ عزیزانی کھ در جمع بندی این کتاب
تشکر و قدردانی کنم. کمک نمودند بھ اینجانب کیان پیشکار
85تابستان
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فت جیر
Acknowledgment
Compiling of this Guide has been done by help of some of collagues who helped me with advice ,presenting some sources and encouragement .They are Abbas Barany, Seid Hossein Fatemy that I appreciate their great kindness.
To My Landless & Alone Soul
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Introdution This book is a complementry to Guide to English Literature ,by Sib-E-sorkh Press,(2000).The reason of compiling of the book was the shortage of the sources for practical analyzing of well – known novels,plays,and poetry that they are being studied in the universities.The three chapters of the book have been based on analyzing of the masterpieces of literature(novels,plays and poems) that they are tought in B.A and M.A. cources of the English Language and literature,so they can fill the great gaps that students and sometimes
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our collagues encounter with them in understanding and interpreting of the texts .The author will appreciate any kind of help ,guide , and recommendation for future works.
Chapter One
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Novel
Don Quixote
By
Cervance
Character List Don Quixote -
The novel’s tragicomic hero. Don Quixote’s main quest in life is to revive knight-errantry in a world devoid of chivalric virtues and values. He believes only what he chooses to believe and sees the world very differently from most people. Honest, dignified, proud, and idealistic, he wants to save the world. As intelligent as he is
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mad, Don Quixote starts out as an absurd and isolated figure and ends up as a pitiable and lovable old man whose strength and wisdom have failed him.
Sancho Panza -
The peasant laborer—greedy but kind, faithful but cowardly—whom Don Quixote takes as his squire. A representation of the common man, Sancho is a foil to Don Quixote and virtually every other character in the novel. His proverb-ridden peasant’s wisdom and self-sacrificing Christian behavior prove to be the novel’s most insightful and honorable worldview. He has an awestruck love for Don Quixote but grows self-confident and saucy, ending the novel by advising his master in matters of deep personal philosophy.
Rocinante -
Don Quixote’s barn horse. Rocinante is slow but faithful, and he is as worn out as Don Quixote is.
Dapple -
Sancho’s donkey. Dapple’s disappearance and reappearance is the subject of much controversy both within the story and within the literary criticism concerning Don Quixote.
Cide Hamete Benengeli -
The fictional writer of Moorish decent from whose manuscripts Cervantes supposedly translates the novel. Cervantes uses the figure of Benengeli to comment on the ideas of authorship and literature explored in the novel and to critique historians. Benengeli’s opinions, bound in his so-called historical text, show his contempt for those who write about chivalry falsely and with embellishment.
Dulcinea del Toboso -
The unseen force driving all of Don Quixote’s adventures. Dulcinea, a peasant woman whom Don Quixote envisions as his ladylove, has no knowledge of his chivalric dedication to her. Though constantly mentioned and centrally important to the novel, she never appears as a physical character.
Cervantes -
The supposed translator of Benengeli’s historical novel, who interjects his opinions into the novel at key times. Cervantes intentionally creates the impression that he did not invent the character of Don Quixote. Like Benengeli, Cervantes is not physically present but is a character nonetheless. In his prologues, dedications, and invention of Benengeli, Cervantes enhances the self-referential nature of the novel and forces us to think about literature’s purpose and limitations.
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The Duke and Duchess -
The cruel and haughty contrivers of the adventures that occupy Don Quixote for the majority of the novel’s Second Part. Bored and snobby, the Duke and Duchess feign interest in Don Quixote and Sancho but continually play pranks on them for their personal entertainment. The Duke and Duchess spend so much money and effort on their ploys that they seem as mad as Don Quixote.
Altisidora -
The Duchess’s bratty maid. Altisidora pretends to love Don Quixote, mocking his concept of romantic love.
Sampson Carrasco -
A sarcastic student from Don Quixote’s village. Sampson mocks Don Quixote at first but loses to him in combat and then dedicates himself to revenge. Self-important and stuffy, Sampson fails to grasp the often playful nature of Don Quixote’s madness.
The priest - A friend of Don Quixote’s. The priest disapproves of fictional books that, in his opinion, negatively influence society. Nonetheless, he enjoys tales of chivalry so much that he cannot throw them away. Moreover, despite his social conscience, he enjoys Don Quixote’s madness at times. The barber -
Don Quixote’s friend who recognizes Quixote’s madness but intervenes only to help the priest carry out his plans. The barber strenuously disapproves of Don Quixote’s chivalry.
Teresa Panza -
Sancho’s good-hearted wife. Teresa speaks in proverbs, exhibiting more wisdom than most other characters. Unambitious but a bit greedy, she endures Sancho’s exploits and supports him with her prayers.
Cardenio -
An honorable man who is driven mad by the infidelities of his wife, Lucinda, and the treachery of a duke, Ferdinand. Cardenio is the quintessential romantic lover.
Lucinda -
Cardenio’s wife. Silent and beautiful, Lucinda is a model of the courtly woman. Docile and innocent, she obliges her parents and her lover.
Ferdinand -
An arrogant young duke who steals Lucinda from Cardenio with no remorse.
Dorothea -
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Ferdinand’s faithful and persistent love. Dorothea flouts tradition to hunt down Ferdinand when he takes her chastity but refuses to marry her. Deceptive and cunning, smart and aggressive, Dorothea is not the typical female character of her time.
Countess Trifaldi -
A fictitious maidservant in distress who is impersonated by the Duke’s steward. The countess’s sob story sends Don Quixote and Sancho off on their expedition on the wooden horse. She is more ridiculous and fantastic than anyone except Don Quixote.
Gines de Pasamonte -
An ungrateful galley slave whom Don Quixote frees. Gines appears mostly for comic relief, but his justifications for his crimes force us to be more critical of Don Quixote’s justifications for his crimes.
Roque Guinart -
A chivalrous bandit. Inherently conflicted, Roque believes in justice and generosity but kills an underling who challenges him for being so generous to other.
Analysis of Major Characters Don Quixote de la Mancha
The title character of the novel, Don Quixote is a gaunt, middle-aged gentleman who, having gone mad from reading too many books about chivalrous knights, determines to set off on a great adventure to win honor and glory in the name of his invented ladylove, Dulcinea. Don Quixote longs for a sense of purpose and beauty—two things he believes the world lacks—and hopes to bring order to a tumultuous world by reinstating the chivalric code of the knights-errant. Initially, Don Qui-xote’s good intentions do only harm to those he meets, since he is largely unable to see the world as it really is.
As the novel progresses, Don Quixote, with the help of his faithful squire Sancho, slowly distinguishes between reality and the pictures in his head. Nonetheless, until his final sanity-inducing illness, he remains true to his chivalric conception of right and wrong. Even though his vision clears enough to reveal to him that the inns he sees are just inns, not castles as he previously believed, he never gives up on his absolute conviction that Dulcinea can save him from all misfortune. Furthermore, even when
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Don Quixote must retire from knight-errantry, he does so in the spirit of knight-errantry, holding to his vows and accepting his retirement as part of the terms of his defeat at the hands of the Knight of the White Moon. Despite his delusions, however, Don Quixote is fiercely intelligent and, at times, seemingly sane. He cogently and concisely talks about literature, soldiering, and government, among other topics.
No single analysis of Don Quixote’s character can adequately explain the split between his madness and his sanity. He remains a puzzle throughout the novel, a character with whom we may have difficulty identifying and sympathizing. We may see Don Quixote as coy and think that he really does know what is going on around him and that he merely chooses to ignore the world and the consequences of his disastrous actions. At several times in the novel, Cervantes validates this suspicion that Don Quixote may know more than he admits. Therefore, when Don Quixote suddenly declares himself sane at the end of the novel, we wonder at his ability to shake off his madness so quickly and ask whether he has at least partly feigned this madness. On the other hand, we can read Don Quixote’s character as a warning that even the most intelligent and otherwise practically minded person can fall victim to his own foolishness. Furthermore, we may see Don Quixote’s adventures as a warning that chivalry—or any other outmoded set of values—can both produce positive and negative outcomes. Given the social turmoil of the period in which Cervantes wrote, this latter reading is particularly appealing. Nonetheless, all of these readings of Don Quixote’s character operate in the novel.
Sancho Panza
The simple peasant who follows Don Quixote out of greed, curiosity, and loyalty, Sancho is the novel’s only character to exist both inside and outside of Don Quixote’s mad world. Other characters play along with and exploit Don Quixote’s madness, but Sancho often lives in and adores it, sometimes getting caught up in the madness entirely. On the other hand, he often berates Don Quixote for his reliance on fantasy; in this sense, he is Don Quixote’s foil. Whereas Don Quixote is too serious for his own good, Sancho has a quick sense of humor. Whereas Don Quixote pays lip service to a woman he has never even seen, Sancho truly loves his wife, Teresa. While Don Quixote deceives himself and others, Sancho lies only when it suits him.
Living in both Don Quixote’s world and the world of his contemporaries, Sancho is able to create his own niche between them. He embodies the good and the bad aspects of both the current era and the bygone days of chivalry. He displays the faults that most of the sane characters in the novel exhibit but has an underlying honorable and compassionate streak that the others largely lack. Sancho does not share Don Quixote’s maddening belief in chivalrous virtues, but he avoids swerving toward the other extreme that equates power with honor. Though Sancho begins the novel looking more like the contemporaries against whom Don Quixote rebels, he eventually relinquishes his fascination with these conventions and comes to live honorably and happily in his simple position in life. He therefore comes across as the character with the most varied perspective and the most wisdom, learning from the world around him thanks to his constant curiosity. Though Sancho is an appealing character on many levels, it is this curiosity that is responsible for much of our connection with him. He observes and thinks about Don Quixote, enabling us to judge
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Don Quixote. Sancho humanizes the story, bringing dignity and poise, but also humor and compassion.
Through Sancho, Cervantes critiques the ill-conceived equation of class and worth. Though Sancho is ignorant, illiterate, cowardly, and foolish, he nonetheless proves himself a wise and just ruler, a better governor the educated, wealthy, and aristocratic Duke. By the time Sancho returns home for the last time, he has gained confidence in himself and in his ability to solve problems, regardless of his lower-class status. Sancho frequently reminds his listeners that God knows what he means. With this saying, he shows that faith in God may be a humanizing force that distinguishes truly honorable men, even when they have lower-class origins.
Dulcinea del Toboso
The unseen, unknown inspiration for all of Don Quixote’s exploits, Dulcinea, we are told, is a simple peasant woman who has no knowledge of the valorous deeds that Don Quixote commits in her name. We never meet Dulcinea in the novel, and on the two occasions when it seems she might appear, some trickery keeps her away from the action. In the first case, the priest intercepts Sancho, who is on his way to deliver a letter to Dulcinea from Don Quixote. In the second instance, Sancho says that Dulcinea has been enchanted and that he thus cannot locate her.
Despite her absence from the novel, Dulcinea is an important force because she epitomizes Don Quixote’s chivalric conception of the perfect woman. In his mind, she is beautiful and virtuous, and she makes up for her lack of background and lineage with her good deeds. Don Quixote describes her chiefly in poetic terms that do little to specify her qualities. She is, therefore, important not for who she is but for what her character represents and for what she indicates about Don Quixote’s character.
Themes, Motifs & Symbols Themes Themes are the fundamental and often universal ideas explored in a literary work. Perspective and Narration
Don Quixote, which is composed of three different sections, is a rich exploration of the possibilities of narration. The first of these sections, comprising the chapter covering Don Quixote’s first expedition, functions chiefly as a parody of contemporary romance tales. The second section, comprising the rest of the First Part,
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is written under the guise of a history, plodding along in historical fashion and breaking up chapters episodically, carefully documenting every day’s events. The third section, which covers the Second Part of the novel, is different since it is written as a more traditional novel, organized by emotional and thematic content and filled with character development. Cervantes alone reports the story in the first section, using a straightforward narrative style. In the second section, Cervantes informs us that he is translating the manuscript of Cide Hamete Benengeli and often interrupts the narration to mention Benengeli and the internal inconsistencies in Benengeli’s manuscript. Here, Cervantes uses Benengeli primarily to reinforce his claim that the story is a true history.
In the third section, however, Cervantes enters the novel as a character—as a composite of Benengeli and Cervantes the author. The characters themselves, aware of the books that have been written about them, try to alter the content of subsequent editions. This complicated and self-referential narrative structure leaves us somewhat disoriented, unable to tell which plotlines are internal to the story and which are factual. This disorientation engrosses us directly in the story and emphasizes the question of sanity that arises throughout the novel. If someone as mad as Don Quixote can write his own story, we wonder what would prevent us from doing the same. Cervantes gives us many reasons to doubt him in the second section. In the third section, however, when we are aware of another allegedly false version of the novel and a second Don Quixote, we lose all our footing and have no choice but to abandon ourselves to the story and trust Cervantes. However, having already given us reasons to distrust him, Cervantes forces us to question fundamental principles of narration, just as Quixote forces his contemporaries to question their lifestyles and principles. In this way, the form of the novel mirrors its function, creating a universe in which Cervantes entertains and instructs us, manipulating our preconceptions to force us to examine them more closely.
Incompatible Systems of Morality
Don Quixote tries to be a flesh-and-blood example of a knight-errant in an attempt to force his contemporaries to face their own failure to maintain the old system of morality, the chivalric code. This conflict between the old and the new reaches an absolute impasse: no one understands Don Quixote, and he understands no one. Only the simple-minded Sancho, with both self-motivated desires and a basic understanding of morality, can mediate between Don Quixote and the rest of the world. Sancho often subscribes to the morals of his day but then surprises us by demonstrating a belief in the anachronistic morals of chivalry as well.
In the First Part of the novel, we see the impasse between Don Quixote and those around him. Don Quixote cannot, for instance, identify with the priest’s rational perspective and objectives, and Don Quixote’s belief in enchantment appears ridiculous to the priest. Toward the end of the Second Part, however, Cervantes compromises between these two seemingly incompatible systems of morality, allowing Don Quixote’s imaginary world and the commonplace world of the Duke and the Duchess to infiltrate each other. As the two worlds begin to mix, we start to see the advantages and disadvantages of each. Sancho ultimately prevails, subscribing to his timeless aphorisms and ascetic discipline on the one hand and using his rational abilities to adapt to the present on the other.
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The Distinction between Class and Worth
Distinguishing between a person’s class and a person’s worth was a fairly radical idea in Cervantes’s time. In Don Quixote, Cervantes attacks the conventional notion that aristocrats are automatically respectable and noble. The contrast between the Duke and Duchess’s thoughtless malice and Sancho’s anxiety-ridden compassion highlights this problem of class. Despite his low social status, the peasant Sancho is wise and thoughtful. Likewise, the lowly goatherds and shepherds often appear as philosophers. In contrast, the cosmopolitan or aristocratic characters like the Duke and Duchess are often frivolous and unkind. Cervantes’s emphasis on these disparities between class and worth is a primary reason that Don Quixote was such a revolutionary work in its time.
Motifs
Motifs are recurring structures, contrasts, or literary devices that can help to develop and inform the text’s major themes. Honor
Some characters in Don Quixote show a deep concern for their personal honor and some do not. Cervantes implies that either option can lead to good or disastrous results. Anselmo, for example, is so overly protective of his wife’s honor that he distrusts her fidelity, which ultimately results in her adultery and his death. Likewise, Don Quixote’s obsession with his honor leads him to do battle with parties who never mean him offense or harm. On the other hand, Dorothea’s concern for her personal honor leads her to pursue Ferdinand, with happy results for both of them. In these examples, we see that characters who are primarily concerned with socially prescribed codes of honor, such as Anselmo and Don Quixote, meet with difficulty, while those who set out merely to protect their own personal honor, such as Dorothea, meet with success.
Other characters, especially those who exploit Don Quixote’s madness for their own entertainment, seem to care very little about their personal honor. The Duke and Duchess show that one’s true personal honor has nothing to do with the honor typically associated with one’s social position. Fascination with such public conceptions of honor can be taken to an extreme, dominating one’s life and leading to ruin. Sancho initially exhibits such a fascination, confusing honor with social status, but he eventually comes to the realization that excessive ambition only creates trouble. In this sense, Cervantes implies that personal honor can be a powerful and positive motivating force while socially prescribed notions of honor, which are often hollow and false, can be destructive if adhered to obsessively.
Romance
Though many people in Don Quixote’s world seem to have given up on romantic love, Don Quixote and a few other characters hold dear this ideal. Don Louis’s love for Clara, Camacho’s wedding, and the tale of the captive and Zoraida, for instance,
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are all situations in which romantic love rises above all else. Even in the case of Sancho and Teresa, romantic love prevails as a significant part of matrimonial commitment, which we see in Teresa’s desire to honor her husband at court. Ironically, Don Quixote’s own devotion to Dulcinea mocks romantic love, pushing it to the extreme as he idolizes a woman he has never even seen.
Literature
Don Quixote contains several discussions about the relative merits of different types of literature, including fiction and historical literature. Most of the characters, including the priest and the canon of Toledo, ultimately maintain that literature should tell the truth. Several even propose that the government should practice censorship to prevent the evil falsehoods of certain books from corrupting innocent minds like Don Quixote’s. However, we see that even the true histories in the novel end up disclosing falsehoods. Cervantes declares that Don Quixote itself is not fiction but a translation of a historical account. The fact that we know that this claim of Cervantes’s is false—since the work is fictional—makes Cervantes’s symbolism clear: no matter how truthful a writer’s intentions may be, he or she can never tell the whole truth. Despite these inherent flaws, however, literature remains a powerful force in the novel, guiding the lives of many characters, especially Don Quixote. Notions of authorship and storytelling preoccupy the characters throughout the novel, since many of them consider the idea of writing their own histories as their own narrators.
Symbols Symbols are objects, characters, figures, or colors used to represent abstract ideas or concepts. Books and Manuscripts
The books and manuscripts that appear everywhere in Don Quixote symbolize the importance and influence of fiction and literature in everyday life. The books instruct and inform the ignorant and provide an imaginative outlet for characters with otherwise dull lives.
Horses
Horses symbolize movement and status in the novel and often denote a character’s worth or class. The pilgrims outside Barcelona, for instance, walk to the city. The noblemen ride in carriages, and the robbers and Don Quixote ride on horseback. In Don Quixote’s mind, at least, the appearance of horses on the horizon symbolizes the coming of a new adventure. Indeed, Rocinante and Dapple play an important role in the journeys of Don Quixote and Sancho; they are not only means of transport and symbols of status but also companions.
Inns
The inns that appear throughout the novel are meeting places for people of all classes. They are the only locations in the novel where ordinarily segregated individuals speak
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and exchange stories. Inns symbolize rest and food but also corruption and greed, since many innkeepers in the novel are devious. Sancho often longs to stay at an inn rather than follow Don Quixote’s chivalric desire to sleep under the stars. These opposing preferences show Sancho’s connection with reality and society and his instinctive desire for comfort, in contrast to Don Quixote’s alienation from society and its norms. Even when he does stay at inns, Don Quixote is noticeably alienated from the major events that take place there, such as the reunification of the four lovers in the First Part.
Analysis: Dedication
Cervantes’s declaration that Don Quixote is not his own invention layers the novel with self-deception. Claiming to be recounting a history he has uncovered, Cervantes himself becomes a character in the tale. He is a kind of scholar, leading us through the story and occasionally interrupting to clarify points. But Cervantes’s claim to be historically accurate does not always ring true—he does not, for example, name Don Quixote’s town. Instead, he draws attention to his decision not to name the town by saying he does “not wish to name” this “certain village” where Don Quixote lives. In this manner, Cervantes undermines his assertion that Don Quixote is historical. Ironically, every time he interrupts the novel’s story to remind us that it is historical fact rather than fiction, he is reminding us that the story is indeed fiction. We thus become skeptical about Cervantes’s claims and begin to read his interruptions as tongue-in-cheek. In this way, the content of the novel mirrors its form: both Don Quixote and Cervantes deceive themselves.
On its surface, Don Quixote is a parody of chivalric tales. Cervantes mocks his hero constantly: Don Quixote’s first adventure brings failure, not the rewards of a successful and heroic quest, such as treasure, glory, or a beautiful woman. But to Don Quixote, the adventure is not a complete disaster—the prostitutes receive honors, and he becomes a knight. His unwavering belief in his quest fills the tale with a romantic sense of adventure akin to that in other tales of chivalry. Thus, as much as Cervantes scorns the genre of romantic literature, he embraces it to some degree. Furthermore, though he claims in the prologue not to need sonnets, ballads, great authors, or Latin, he peppers the text with all of these conventions. In this way, the novel both parodies and emulates tales of chivalry.
Other characters’ reactions to Don Quixote highlight his tragic role. Unlike us, these characters do not see that Don Quixote is motivated by good intentions, and to them he appears bizarre and dangerous. The innkeeper, who throws Don Quixote out after he attacks the other guests, typifies many characters’ fears. But some characters are genuinely charmed by Don Quixote’s yearnings for the simplicity of a bygone era. The two prostitutes do not understand Don Quixote’s poetry, but he wins them over with his adamant belief in their royal status. On the one hand, his attempts at chivalry open others’ eyes to a world for which they inwardly pine. On the other hand, his clumsiness makes his entire project seem utterly foolish. From our perspective, he is not just absurd but tragic. Though he wishes for the best, he often brings about the worst, as in the case of the young boy whom he inadvertently harms because he cannot see that the boy’s master is lying. In this way, Don Quixote’s complex
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character at once endears him to us and repulses us, since we see that his fantasies and good intentions sometimes bring pain to others.
Analysis:
Chapters V–X
In every way Don Quixote’s opposite, Sancho Panza serves as a simple-minded foil to his master’s complex madness. Cervantes contrasts these two men even on the most fundamental levels: Don Quixote is tall and gaunt and deprives himself in his pursuit of noble ideals, while Sancho is short and pudgy and finds happiness in the basic pleasures of food and wine. Sancho is a peace-loving laborer who leaves his family only after Don Quixote promises to make him a governor. Don Quixote’s violent idealism befuddles Sancho, who consistently warns his master about the error of his ways. Sancho eats when he is hungry but accepts Don Quixote’s fasting as a knightly duty. He complains when he is hurt and marvels at his master’s capacity to withstand suffering. Sancho’s perception of Don Quixote informs our own perception of him, and we identify and sympathize with the bumbling Sancho because he reacts to Don Quixote the way most people would. Through Sancho, we see Don Quixote as a human being with an oddly admirable yet challenging outlook on life.
At the same time, Sancho makes it difficult to sympathize with him since he participates in his master’s fantasy world when it suits his own interests. In robbing the monk, for instance, Sancho pretends to believe that he is claiming the spoils of war. He takes advantage of Don Quixote’s sincere belief in a fantasy world to indulge his greed, a trait that does not fit with our conception of Sancho as an innocent peasant.
Unlike many of the novel’s battle scenes, which at times seem mechanical and plodding, the battle between Don Quixote and the attendant is genuinely suspenseful. As opposed to the fight scene with the guests at the inn or the charge at the windmills, this battle is graphic. Unlike Don Quixote’s previous foes—inanimate objects, unsuspecting passersby, or disapproving brutes—the attendant attacks Don Quixote with genuine zeal, which, along with the attendant’s skill, heightens the battle’s suspense. The attendant accepts the myth Don Quixote presents him—that they are two great enemies battling for honor. The fight thus takes on epic proportions for Don Quixote, and its form underscores these proportions, since the men verbally spar, choose their weapons, and engage. After several blows, the battle concludes when Don Quixote defeats his opponent and forces him to submit to the humiliaton of presenting himself to Dulcinea.
Cervantes’s sudden interruption of the narrative draws attention to the deficiencies of the work and, by implication, those of other heroic tales. Cervantes’s claim that the tale is factual is undercut when he stops the story due to a gap in the alleged historial account. Cervantes seems to be showing his scholarship by cutting off the narrative to credit its source, but the source he then describes turns out to be incomplete. At best, Don Quixote now appears to be a translation—and not even Cervantes’s own translation—which gives the novel a more mythical feel. Though myths are powerful for those who believe them, they are vulnerable to distortion with each storyteller’s version. In forcing us to question the validity of the story during one of its most
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dramatic moments, Cervantes implicitly criticizes the authorship and authenticity of all heroic tales.
In his famous charge at the windmills, we see that Don Quixote persists in living in a fantasy world even when he is able to see reality for a moment. Don Quixote briefly connects with reality after Sancho points out that the giants are merely windmills, but Don Quixote immediately makes an excuse, claiming that the enchanter has deceived him. This enchanter is not entirely fictional—Don Quixote has so deceived himself with his books of chivalry that he seeks to make up excuses even in the face of reality. Throughout the novel, Cervantes analyzes the dangers inherent in the overzealous pursuit of ideals, as we see Don Quixote continually constructing stories to explain a belief system that is often at odds with reality.
Analysis:
Chapters V–X
In every way Don Quixote’s opposite, Sancho Panza serves as a simple-minded foil to his master’s complex madness. Cervantes contrasts these two men even on the most fundamental levels: Don Quixote is tall and gaunt and deprives himself in his pursuit of noble ideals, while Sancho is short and pudgy and finds happiness in the basic pleasures of food and wine. Sancho is a peace-loving laborer who leaves his family only after Don Quixote promises to make him a governor. Don Quixote’s violent idealism befuddles Sancho, who consistently warns his master about the error of his ways. Sancho eats when he is hungry but accepts Don Quixote’s fasting as a knightly duty. He complains when he is hurt and marvels at his master’s capacity to withstand suffering. Sancho’s perception of Don Quixote informs our own perception of him, and we identify and sympathize with the bumbling Sancho because he reacts to Don Quixote the way most people would. Through Sancho, we see Don Quixote as a human being with an oddly admirable yet challenging outlook on life.
At the same time, Sancho makes it difficult to sympathize with him since he participates in his master’s fantasy world when it suits his own interests. In robbing the monk, for instance, Sancho pretends to believe that he is claiming the spoils of war. He takes advantage of Don Quixote’s sincere belief in a fantasy world to indulge his greed, a trait that does not fit with our conception of Sancho as an innocent peasant.
Unlike many of the novel’s battle scenes, which at times seem mechanical and plodding, the battle between Don Quixote and the attendant is genuinely suspenseful. As opposed to the fight scene with the guests at the inn or the charge at the windmills, this battle is graphic. Unlike Don Quixote’s previous foes—inanimate objects, unsuspecting passersby, or disapproving brutes—the attendant attacks Don Quixote with genuine zeal, which, along with the attendant’s skill, heightens the battle’s suspense. The attendant accepts the myth Don Quixote presents him—that they are two great enemies battling for honor. The fight thus takes on epic proportions for Don Quixote, and its form underscores these proportions, since the men verbally spar, choose their weapons, and engage. After several blows, the battle concludes when
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Don Quixote defeats his opponent and forces him to submit to the humiliaton of presenting himself to Dulcinea.
Cervantes’s sudden interruption of the narrative draws attention to the deficiencies of the work and, by implication, those of other heroic tales. Cervantes’s claim that the tale is factual is undercut when he stops the story due to a gap in the alleged historial account. Cervantes seems to be showing his scholarship by cutting off the narrative to credit its source, but the source he then describes turns out to be incomplete. At best, Don Quixote now appears to be a translation—and not even Cervantes’s own translation—which gives the novel a more mythical feel. Though myths are powerful for those who believe them, they are vulnerable to distortion with each storyteller’s version. In forcing us to question the validity of the story during one of its most dramatic moments, Cervantes implicitly criticizes the authorship and authenticity of all heroic tales.
In his famous charge at the windmills, we see that Don Quixote persists in living in a fantasy world even when he is able to see reality for a moment. Don Quixote briefly connects with reality after Sancho points out that the giants are merely windmills, but Don Quixote immediately makes an excuse, claiming that the enchanter has deceived him. This enchanter is not entirely fictional—Don Quixote has so deceived himself with his books of chivalry that he seeks to make up excuses even in the face of reality. Throughout the novel, Cervantes analyzes the dangers inherent in the overzealous pursuit of ideals, as we see Don Quixote continually constructing stories to explain a belief system that is often at odds with reality.
Analysis: Chapters XVI–XX
The graphic accounts of Don Quixote’s and Sancho’s vomiting constitute Cervantes’s basest humor. Cervantes later justifies the inclusion of such bawdy episodes, stating that a successful novel contains elements that appeal to all levels of society. This crude humor seems out of place, especially when compared to the delicate humor of Sancho’s story in Chapter XX. Critics often focus on this disparity, but Cervantes may be using this contrast to draw our attention to the differences between romantic ideals and reality. He highlights reality by emphasizing its physical aspects, reminding us about the inconsistency between the way things play out in Don Quixote’s dreams and the way they play out in the real world.
Don Quixote’s explanation for why the Balsam of Fierbras does not work for Sancho underscores the characters’ perception of class and privilege. Don Quixote seems to believe that bad things cannot happen to knights because they belong to a higher class, one that the mundane world cannot touch. The fact that he persistently attributes all of his misfortunes to an enchantment emphasizes his faith that mortal forces cannot touch him. This class distinction extends to gentlemen as well, who play by a different set of rules than members of the lower class. Cervantes’s attitude toward such class distinctions appears mixed: even though Cervantes includes numerous classist remarks, he pokes fun at Don Quixote’s claim of being separate and superior. Ultimately, Cervantes undercuts the idea that one’s class signifies one’s worth. He criticizes people in all classes in an effort to humanize everyone.
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Sancho’s bizarre, aborted account of the shepherd and shepherdess highlights Cervantes’s tendency to comment on the nature of storytelling and the way literature should be presented and read. Sancho’s storytelling mimics Cardenio’s later refusal, in Chapter XXIII, to finish his story when Don Quixote interrupts him in the Sierra Morena. Here, Sancho asserts his right to tell the story as he sees fit and according to the tradition by which people in his homeland tell stories. This tradition mimics great epic poems, often tedious in their apparently useless repetition and lists of detail. Don Quixote views these conventions as empty formalities and asks Sancho to skip them, which irritates Sancho. But Sancho apparently believes that a story is not truly a story unless it has a certain formal structure. This interplay of structure and content is found throughout Don Quixote, since Cervantes frequently plays with the highly formal framework of chivalric tales. Here, through Sancho, Cervantes implies that a reader must play along with the author’s structural effects to get to the meaning of the story. Sancho’s story thus prompts us to pay attention to the game Cervantes plays throughout his novel.
Analysis: Chapters XXI–XXVI
Cervantes examines the question of crime and punishment by contrasting Don Quixote’s actions with the actions of the galley slaves. Like the slaves, Don Quixote believes that his criminal actions are justified. He steals the basin from the barber, but his theft seems excusable because he is a chivalrous, well-meaning madman. Though Cervantes portrays Don Quixote’s crime as more excusable than the crimes of the galley slaves, we must nonetheless keep in mind that Don Quixote’s actions are still crimes, regardless of the fact that he commits them in the name of chivalry. This issue arises again when a priest argues that Don Quixote is insane and not, therefore, liable for his behavior. Here, when Gines de Pasamonte reappears and steals Dapple to Sancho’s great distress, Cervantes looks at crime from the victim’s perspective. Throughout the novel, the victim’s perspective—in this case Sancho’s—often gets lost amid the humorous narration of Don Quixote’s exploits.
Storytelling is central to Don Quixote. Everyone in the novel has a story, and telling these stories is a major part of the characters’ lives. The abundance of stories makes the novel’s narration less fluid. It is difficult to focus on Don Quixote’s adventures when other characters’ stories and the third-person narrator constantly interrupt us. However, these interruptions give us additional perspectives on Don Quixote’s story. Cardenio’s story, like the tale of Marcela and Chrysostom, does not relate directly to Don Quixote’s life, but it does inspire him to action. In particular, it inspires Don Quixote’s acts of penance, and this subsequent, obvious madness makes us question the heroic nature of Cardenio’s story. Though Cardenio had a valid reason for grieving, he may have, in becoming a wild man, overreacted to Lucinda’s rejection, in effect choosing his madness as much as Don Quixote chooses his.
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At several points in these chapters, the translator of this particular edition, J.M. Cohen, analyzes several inconsistencies in the text. In Chapter XXII, for instance, Cohen points out that the text is inconsistent on the number of guns the guards possess. In the first description, Cervantes says there are two guns, but in the battle that follows, he accounts for only one gun. In Chapter XXIII, Cohen points out that the text is inconsistent concerning Gines’s theft of Dapple. Here, Gines steals Dapple, but later, Sancho is riding him through the mountains. Later, he again laments the loss of Dapple. Because Cervantes places so much emphasis throughout Don Quixote on the narrative layers in the story, it may be tempting to read these inconsistencies as deliberate attempts by Cervantes to remove himself even further from the narrative. It seems more likely, however, that these inconsistencies are merely unintentional errors on Cervantes’s part.
Analysis: Chapter XVII–XXXI
Don Quixote’s madness begins to impose itself on other characters with the scheme the priest concocts to lure Don Quixote home. Though Don Quixote’s madness is his own invention, his refusal to break out of it forces the others to participate in it if they wish to engage him. This madness and play-acting intensifies in these chapters, especially when everyone in the company is forced to adhere to Dorothea’s story to prevent the trickery from being revealed. The group’s constant playacting makes the fictional details of their stories into imitations of reality and makes reality an imitatation of their stories. Dorothea’s story about the giant, for instance, closely resembles her own plight: the real-life Ferdinand has run off with her virginity just as the fictional giant has supposedly run off with her kingdom. Dorothea is, in fact, quite similar to the princess-in-exile she pretends to be in the trick: like the character she plays, she cannot return home out of shame.
Amid this blurring between fiction and reality, Sancho’s character stands out as the mediator between madness and sanity. Unlike the others, each of whom is either entirely mad or entirely sane, Sancho straddles the line between the real world and the fictional world. He sometimes sees the truth, but sometimes falls for trickery. Seemingly half-conscious of what is going on around him, Sancho can be deceived into believing that Dorothea is really a princess but can just as easily deceive Don Quixote into believing that he has gone to see Dulcinea. Sancho’s perspective proves important in the novel because through him we can judge Don Quixote’s madness more fairly. We recognize the complexity of Don Quixote’s madness when we see Sancho get carried away by it even when he seems to recognize it for what it is.
Ironically, Dorothea makes mistakes in her fictional story in the same chapter in which Dapple reappears even though he is supposedly already present. Cohen and others conclude that this inconsistency concerning Dapple indicates nothing more than an oversight on the part of Cervantes, a failure to edit the text fully before sending it to publication. Cohen suggests that if the error were unintentional, it might indicate that Cervantes intended the story be told orally, and so such small details would be more likely to pass unnoticed. But one can argue that if the error was unintentional, Cervantes tried to make it seem intentional when he published the second half of the novel a decade later. At the beginning of the Second Part, the characters actually discuss the First Part and conclude that its inconsistencies
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concerning Dapple can be corrected in a second printing of novels. This discussion highlights the fictitious nature of the novel, fitting in with the idea that literature is unable to tell the whole truth.
Analysis:
XXXII–XXXVII
The section containing the reunification of the lovers provides the dramatic climax of the novel’s First Part, and the fact that Don Quixote misses the action of this scene demonstrates how much his madness has alienated him from the rest of the characters. Coming as it does on the heels of the tragic ending of Anselmo’s story, the reunification scene appears especially sweet, though unlikely. The capture and return of Don Quixote to the inn is almost inconsequential in comparison, since Don Quixote continues to live on in his fantasy life. Lost in his madness, he completely misses the reunion, which represents the climax of his madness and alienation and raises doubts about his position in the novel overall. Here, Don Quixote appears to exist almost outside of the events of the novel itself, as though he were nothing more than a guide. The circumstances related to his return bring the necessary parties together, but the crux of the action in this section takes place with him outside the picture.
Just as every climax is followed by a falling action, Don Quixote’s climax of madness dissipates as he gradually begins to see things for what they really are. In the incident with the wineskins, he wakes to the realization that others do not believe him. He refrains from telling Dorothea about slaying the giant out of an awareness that she will not believe him. He then shocks the crowd with the clarity and sanity of his speech, which lauds the virtues of knights over those of scholars. His understanding that others think he is crazy continues to grow throughout the novel, although at any given moment this awareness ebbs and flows. At this point in the novel, his awareness keeps his madness in check, since his madness has grown to such an extent that he is in danger of falling out of his own story.
The priest’s reading of Anselmo’s tale adds more layers to the narrative in Don Quixote. The manuscript, which is found in a trunk that an unknown man has left at the inn, is shrouded in so much mystery that we do not know who narrates the story. Furthermore, the story, written in a high style with long and improbable speeches, seems to be fictional rather than historical. Despite its alleged falsehood, however, the tale is more plausible than many of the stories in the novel that the characters insist are true. It is certainly more plausible than the scene in which the lovers reunite, a scene that Cervantes heralds as true to life. The priest’s observation that Anselmo’s story cannot be true because a husband would never be that stupid is ironic. Compared with the unlikely reunion of the four lovers in Don Quixote, the stupidity Anselmo displays in the story is plausible.
Analysis: XXXVIII–XLV
The captive’s tale and the story of Clara and Don Louis demonstrate that at least several of Don Quixote’s contemporaries share one of his most insane features—
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unfailing romantic idealization of women they do not even know. With the exception of Dorothea, the women in the First Part of Don Quixote are weak-willed, subservient creatures who rely on their husbands as masters. In the novel, men revere women for their beauty and their chastity, but women remain mere objects over whom men fight or drive themselves insane. Even Dorothea ingratiates and humiliates herself in order to win back Ferdinand’s affection, which seems to be little more than lust. In order to rebel, the women must dress as men and run away from home, but even then they remain frightened young maidens stranded in situations largely beyond their control. Zoraida stands out as the one seeming exception to this model, since she has the will to steal from her father in order to run away from home with the captive. As a Moor, she can step outside the bounds of the conventional roles governing the lives of Cervantes’s women, just as the character Anna Felix is able to do late in the Second Part. Nonetheless, we never hear Zoraida speak, and this muteness symbolizes her lack of power. Therefore, even though her ethnicity and religious passion make her unusual and suggest that she might serve as the model for a new kind of woman in the narrative, she remains an object and a marginalized figure.
With the story of the captive and Zoraida, Cervantes provides a largely autobiographical account of his life in captivity. Cervantes tried to escape captivity in Algiers three times before he was finally ransomed. The fanciful escape of the captive may, then, represent one of Cervantes’s fantasies. The detailed account of the war in which the captive fought is merely a soldier’s account of important historical events, nothing more. It bears no relation to the actual characters or events of the novel and therefore stands out as material related more to Cervantes’s life than to the story in progress.
Class distinctions come into sharp focus at the inn. The captive and Zoraida, who are nobles motivated only by the loftiest intentions, succeed in their crazy scheme to get back to Spain. The lower class characters, on the other hand, become embroiled in various skirmishes. The innkeeper is forced to squabble with two guests over payment for the night’s lodgings, while Sancho and the traveling barber brawl over a harness. The wickedness of the innkeeper’s daughter contrasts sharply with the goodness of Clara, the noble judge’s daughter, highlighting the difference in their social station. Even Don Quixote preserves the standards of his day, upholding the virtues of the aristocrats and condemning the insolence of the poor. He finds Sancho’s impertinence un-bearable when it seems to impinge upon his sense of nobility.
Analysis:
Chapters XLVI–LII
The priest proves to be a muddled character in this section, as we see his mixed opinion about stories of chivalry and his mixed reaction to Don Quixote’s madness. When the priest takes the manuscripts from the innkeeper to read—just as when he reads aloud Anselmo’s story and when he preserves several of the novels in Don Quixote’s library—he shows his unwillingness to purge all tales of chivalry from the world. As much as he rails against the tales as harmful to the general public, it is plain that he enjoys them. In his conversation with the canon, the priest reveals an attachment to the author’s craft that exceeds his apparent disdain for the tales’
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inaccuracy. The priest’s attitude toward his friend Don Quixote is likewise inconsistent. On the one hand, he berates Don Quixote for Don Quixote’s insanity and leads the attempt to bring him home and cure him. On the other hand, however, he apparently enjoys his prank, playing along by caging Don Quixote and telling him that he is under an enchantment. The priest’s alternating attitudes reveal a human affection for books and imagination, even as he outwardly claims to reject both on intellectual grounds.
Cervantes has often been criticized for the insensitivity shown by the group that watches the fight between Don Quixote and the goatherd in Chapter LII. The cheering by the priest and the others—as though they are at a dogfight—suggests that, on a certain level, they consider Don Quixote to be no more than an animal. They first laugh at his madness and then condescend to him by playing along with the idea of the enchantment. Here, they view him as nothing more than a creature for their enjoyment, manipulating him to suit their purposes, sometimes at great physical cost to him. In this regard, the priest’s and the barber’s interest in bringing Don Quixote home safely and curing him is bizarre and inexplicable. One possibility is that the two men are acting out of concern for Don Quixote’s niece and housekeeper, who genuinely seem to care for Don Quixote.
The unfriendly motivations of those who lead Don Quixote back to his home affect Don Quixote, causing him to lose sight of his goals and ideals. At the end of the First Part, Don Quixote nearly relinquishes his chivalric ideals without replacing them with anything of equal value or passion. He appears to be deceived about his enchantment to the end, eventually conceding to go home. He explains that he will rest at home until his foul luck has passed, but he makes no mention of his vow to Dorothea or his love for Dulcinea.This listless quality is not in keeping with his characteristic stubborn insistence on formalities and vows. The end of the First Part is therefore abrupt and somewhat unsatisfying to those who appreciate Don Quixote’s spirit and passion. Nonetheless, his decline appears reasonable in light of the ill intentions and petty desires of those around him on his journey home. Sancho stands out from the others, however, as someone who continues to care about Don Quixote. Despite Sancho’s self-serving intentions, he displays an honest interest in his friend.
Analysis:.
Dedication–Chapter VII
Cervantes’s mention of the imposter who publishes the false sequel of the story makes the novel more self-referential. In real life, an author by the name of Avellaneda wrote a false sequel to Don Quixote that appeared several years after the original publishing of the First Part of Don Quixote, in 1604. This false sequel not only inspired Cervantes to hurry along his own sequel, which he published in 1614, but it altered the context of that text. Cervantes chose to mention the false sequel in his fictional tale, further blurring the line between the novel’s fictional and historical aspects.
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On the one hand, we can argue that the story of Don Quixote remains fictional. In the First Part, the only person who speaks of Cide Hamete Benengeli is Cervantes himself. It is logical for Cervantes to be the only one to do so, since if Cide Hamete Benengeli did indeed originate the tale, as Cervantes claims he did, then the characters in the tale would not be able to speak about him as their author. However, the world of the novel in the Second Part is not logical, and Sancho refers directly to Cide Hamete Benengeli. Therefore, if we still have any doubts about the tongue-in-cheek nature of Cervantes’s initial claim that he is writing from the historical manuscript of Cide Hamete Benengeli, we can put those doubts to rest. One could argue that in the decade that passed between the publication of the First Part and the Second Part, the characters, if they were historical personages, would have been able, in real life, to find out about Benengeli, Avellaneda, and even Cervantes. But the Second Part picks up only one month—not years—after the end of the First Part. Nevertheless, Sancho later writes a letter to his wife and dates it 1614, the year the Second Part was published. Because of the deep correlation between the actual, historical publication of the novel and the story it contains, this letter should also date the first half of the novel as 1614, but we know that it was published in 1604. This discrepancy emphasizes the novel’s fictional nature.
The concept of authorship, especially as it relates to Don Quixote’s control of his own fate, plays a large role in the Second Part. The idea of vague authorship illuminates the conflict between the imaginary world and the real one, a conflict that Don Quixote himself embodies. Essentially, Cervantes allows the characters to influence their own story like authors. When Don Quixote expresses his concern over the accuracy of the First Part of the novel, he, the main character of the First Part, doubts the accuracy of his own story. Moreover, despite the fact that Cervantes states in the First Part that he is the translator of Cide Hamete Benengeli’s work, he now refers to an unidentified translator without providing any clues about this translator’s identity. We are thus left with an even blurrier picture of the truth.
The trickery of Don Quixote’s friends in this opening section reveals their desire to see Don Quixote once again go out to pursue his fantasies. The priest, who spends so much time in the First Part trying to coax Don Quixote home, delights in the fact that his friend is apparently still mad. Similarly, Sampson Carrasco’s lie to the housekeeper that he will talk sense into Don Quixote exposes his knavery and his willingness to play with Don Quixote’s imagination. The priest and Samson mimic Sancho, who buys into Don Quixote’s whims even though he knows that his master is insane. By encouraging Don Quixote’s madness, these characters reveal their own desire for adventure.
Analysis: Chapters VIII–XV
Sancho’s trickery in the incident with the peasant women and Sampson’s deception about his identity emphasize the willingness of Don Quixote’s peers to engage him in his world of deception and fantasy. Sancho is motivated by self-interest, whereas other characters play along due either to a desire to help Don Quixote or a need for a diversion. In all cases, Don Quixote’s imagination shapes the novel’s plot. Don Quixote’s dreams direct the actions of other characters, just as they do when Dorothea
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pretends to be a princess in the First Part. This playfulness influences the characters’ interactions with Don Quixote throughout the remainder of the novel.
The costumes worn by the actors on the wagon and by the Knight of the Mirrors show that the physical world has begun to imitate Don Quixote’s fantasies. Previously, Don Quixote misperceives everything around him, seeing windmills as giants and prostitutes as princesses. Now, however, the physical world has become difficult for anyone to define clearly. Rocinante, mistaking the costumed actor for an apparition, is terrified. Moreover, the Knight of the Wood becomes known as the Knight of the Mirrors in the middle of the chapter due to his change in appearance. Cervantes now mixes reality with elements of deception, which validates Don Quixote’s misperceptions and makes him seem more sane. Whereas earlier it is easy to perceive Don Quixote as insane, it now seems that the world around him is illogical. As a result, Don Quixote becomes more of a driving force in the novel, almost as though his fantasies have begun to dictate the course of the physical world around him.
Cervantes brings up religion by mentioning Benengeli’s praise of Allah and Sancho’s suggestion that he and Don Quixote try to become saints. The novel repeatedly touches on the importance of being a Christian in Cervantes’s Spain. Cervantes often brings up religion in reference to Sancho, who Cervantes says is an old Christian and whose wise aphorisms often stem from Christian sources. The captive’s earlier tale about the Moor Zoraida’s passionate longing to convert to Christiantity and subsequent baptism makes Zoraida appear to be a good and beautiful woman. This depiction of the essential goodness within Zoraida despite her Moorish heritage contrasts with Cervantes’s and his characters’ dismissal of her Moorish countrymen as liars and cheats. Moreover, in the discussion on the way to Chrysostom’s funeral, in Chapter XIII, Don Quixote compromises his extreme faith in chivalric traditions in order to allow knights-errant to praise God. Christianity, then, unlike most of the social customs of the times, receives a positive and somber treatment in the novel and stands alone as the one major subject Cervantes does not treat with a mordant, ironic tone. Here, at the beginning of the third expedition, Cervantes treats Christianity with more reverence than at any other point in the novel. desire vicariously through Don Quixote.
Analysis: Chapters XVI–XXI
Don Quixote is a changed man in the Second Part of the novel. He is milder and wiser, less belligerent, less gullible, and more compassionate toward those he meets. The incident with the lions exemplifies this change in his nature, since he neither attacks the mule-driver for contradicting him nor insists on provoking the lion. The Don Quixote of the First Part would almost certainly do both. Don Quixote’s discussion with Don Lorenzo about poetry reveals a deep intellect that rarely shows itself directly in the First Part. Much like his master, Sancho also matures into a wiser and fuller character. In this second part, we learn about Sancho’s family, fears, vanities, and greedy and gluttonous nature but also see his fidelity to Don Quixote. Both Don Quixote and Sancho more frequently engage in conversations with other characters, fleshing out the deeper aspects of their personalities.
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Whereas Don Quixote often appears alienated from the main plot in the First Part, in the Second Part he remains involved in the action even when the action imitates the style of the First Part. Even Camacho’s wedding, one of the few events in the Second Part that strongly recalls the First Part, does not alienate Don Quixote. As in each of the subplots in the First Part, Cervantes presents the relevant characters, whose lives prove important because they influence the outcome of the novel and inform its major themes. Camacho’s wedding raises questions about the supremacy of love—one of Don Quixote’s obsessions—and about the wisdom of stepping outside class distinctions, an issue that figures prominently in Sancho’s governorship later in the Second Part. Don Quixote’s quelling of the brawl by nonviolent means involves him in the event and illustrates a change in him that is consistent with his maturation. Camacho’s wedding bears directly on Don Quixote’s character and plot advancement, unlike, for example, Anselmo’s story or even the captive’s tale in the First Part. The Second Part, on the whole, is more fluid than the First Part precisely because Don Quixote involves himself in the events.
In these chapters, we see that Cide Hamete Benengeli’s perspective on Don Quixote’s actions begins to differ from Cervantes’s. Benengeli’s praise of Don Quixote’s bravery in the battle with the lions, for instance, contrasts with Cervantes’s own reference to Don Quixote’s “childish bravado.” These competing authorial perspectives highlight the underlying need for us, as readers, to judge Don Quixote’s fantasies by ourselves. In the Second Part, as characters start to modify their behavior according to Don Quixote’s ideas and as Don Quixote’s antics impact the other characters less harshly, Cervantes emphasizes the positive sides of Don Quixote’s faith against the backdrop of an outdated moral system. Whereas Don Quixote’s personality is dangerously anachronistic earlier in the novel, it now appears endearing and quaint.
Analysis:
Chapters XXII–XXVIII
The account of Montesinos’s Cave marks the high point in Don Quixote’s imaginative madness. Don Quixote recounts his dream to Sancho and to Basilio’s cousin with such detail and texture that, were it not for Sancho’s objections, we might wonder whether the story is real. Don Quixote no longer speaks about things that other people can see and use to judge him a madman. In this instance, Don Quixote has the authority to transform a half-hour in a dark cave into three days in a crystal palace. The story, in all its fantastic detail, reveals Cervantes’s talent for storytelling and stands out from the rest of the novel as a unique display of imagination and descriptive force. The description is closely modeled on Trojan hero Aeneas’s encounter with Dido in the underworld in Virgil’s Aeneid. Only Sancho, assured by the knowledge that he previously deceived Don Quixote about Dulcinea’s enchantment, keeps us from believing the description completely. Nonetheless, Don Quixote’s gentle, caring statement—that he understands Sancho’s bewilderment but that Sancho will soon realize the truth—suddenly seems more plausible than Sancho’s rational argument.
The note in the margin that Cervantes mentions in Chapter XXIV deepens the puzzle of the novel’s narration by raising the question of how many translators bear
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responsibility for the text. In the beginning of the Second Part, Sampson tells Don Quixote that the author intends to publish a second part as soon as he finds the manuscript, which the Moor has written in his own language and an unspecified “Christian” has written in his. If the Christian is Cervantes, it is hard to explain why Cervantes refers to him throughout as “the translator.” If the Christian is not Cervantes, it is hard to imagine the role Cervantes plays in bringing the novel to us. This tension and further layering of authors, narrators, and voices draws attention to the circular form of the novel, and makes Don Quixote’s sanity ambiguous. We are forced to question at all times what we are reading and wonder whose perspective is most accurate.
The reappearance of Gines de Pasamonte, disguised as Master Peter, exemplifies the way the second half of the novel mirrors the first. The reappearance of characters from the first half helps join the two parts into a single novel, despite the obvious differences between them. Cervantes clearly wants to establish his work as the authentic sequel to the first half, and tying the two parts together through his characters is one way he manages to do so.
Analysis: Chapters XXIX–XXXV
The Duke and the Duchess indulge Don Quixote’s and Sancho’s fantasies, validating both Don Quixote’s belief that he is a grand knight-errant and Sancho’s belief that he will gain a governorship by being a good squire. Through all of their trickery they exhibit their willingness to engage Don Quixote’s madness. Don Quixote’s imagination does not need to do much work to transform his stay at the Duke’s castle into a magical one; it is the Duchess’s imagination, not his, that drives most of his adventures there. Furthermore, the Duchess’s indulgence of Sancho’s high opinion of himself gives Sancho a chance to express his philosophy about life, which turns out to be quite wise and deeply rooted in Christian ideals of charity. By playing along with Don Quixote and Sancho rather than mocking them outright, the Duke and Duchess gain Don Quixote’s and Sancho’s trust. This trust gives them power over Don Quixote and Sancho, which they abuse to stage their elaborate ruse.
Cervantes uses the encounter at the castle to continue his critique of his era’s conventional wisdom that social class corresponds to personal worth. Sancho is free to disagree with the lower-class Doña Rodriguez, but he is severely chastized by Don Quixote when he presumes to disagree with the Duke or the Duchess at dinner. According to the dictates of chivalry, Sancho, as a servant, may spar only with one of his own class. Likewise, Don Quixote treats the clergyman as roughly an equal, but he treats the Duke and the Duchess with the respect due to royalty. During their antics, the Duke and Duchess pretend that they are above everyone else, acting as puppeteers by stringing Don Quixote and Sancho along, tricking the men into believing each new fantasy simply for their own amusement. Though the Duchess does not appear overtly malicious, we see that she enjoys watching Sancho become more embroiled in Don Quixote’s madness. The pleasure she takes is a symptom of her tendency to look upon the peasant squire with condescension, which compels us to disdain her. The Duchess begins to appear cruel, since she enjoys keeping Sancho in a confused and vulnerable position, most notably when she tells him to believe in the enchantment of Dulcinea despite the fact that it is clearly fake.
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In highlighting the Duchess’s awareness of the existence of the First Part of Don Quixote, Cervantes breaks down the wall between the work’s factual and fictional components. The Duchess has knowledge of Don Quixote’s past exploits, which shows that Cide Hamete Benengeli’s so-called historical account has influenced the events and people Don Quixote encounters. Notably, Don Quixote himself has not read the novel, which accounts for his failure to understand the perhaps good-natured mockery of those who have read it. In essence, he fails to see himself the way other characters within the story see him. Cervantes implies that if only Don Quixote would pick up the book and begin reading his own story, he might respond differently to those around him. Because they have read the story, the Duchess and other characters later in the Second Part can share a joke with us. The result is dramatic irony, since we are aware of the joke while Don Quixote himself is not. This irony draws us deeper into the novel, further blurring the line between madness and sanity, truth and lies.
Analysis:
Chapters XXII–XXVIII
The account of Montesinos’s Cave marks the high point in Don Quixote’s imaginative madness. Don Quixote recounts his dream to Sancho and to Basilio’s cousin with such detail and texture that, were it not for Sancho’s objections, we might wonder whether the story is real. Don Quixote no longer speaks about things that other people can see and use to judge him a madman. In this instance, Don Quixote has the authority to transform a half-hour in a dark cave into three days in a crystal palace. The story, in all its fantastic detail, reveals Cervantes’s talent for storytelling and stands out from the rest of the novel as a unique display of imagination and descriptive force. The description is closely modeled on Trojan hero Aeneas’s encounter with Dido in the underworld in Virgil’s Aeneid. Only Sancho, assured by the knowledge that he previously deceived Don Quixote about Dulcinea’s enchantment, keeps us from believing the description completely. Nonetheless, Don Quixote’s gentle, caring statement—that he understands Sancho’s bewilderment but that Sancho will soon realize the truth—suddenly seems more plausible than Sancho’s rational argument.
The note in the margin that Cervantes mentions in Chapter XXIV deepens the puzzle of the novel’s narration by raising the question of how many translators bear responsibility for the text. In the beginning of the Second Part, Sampson tells Don Quixote that the author intends to publish a second part as soon as he finds the manuscript, which the Moor has written in his own language and an unspecified “Christian” has written in his. If the Christian is Cervantes, it is hard to explain why Cervantes refers to him throughout as “the translator.” If the Christian is not Cervantes, it is hard to imagine the role Cervantes plays in bringing the novel to us. This tension and further layering of authors, narrators, and voices draws attention to the circular form of the novel, and makes Don Quixote’s sanity ambiguous. We are forced to question at all times what we are reading and wonder whose perspective is most accurate.
The reappearance of Gines de Pasamonte, disguised as Master Peter, exemplifies the way the second half of the novel mirrors the first. The reappearance of characters
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from the first half helps join the two parts into a single novel, despite the obvious differences between them. Cervantes clearly wants to establish his work as the authentic sequel to the first half, and tying the two parts together through his characters is one way he manages to do so.
Analysis: Chapters XXIX–XXXV
The Duke and the Duchess indulge Don Quixote’s and Sancho’s fantasies, validating both Don Quixote’s belief that he is a grand knight-errant and Sancho’s belief that he will gain a governorship by being a good squire. Through all of their trickery they exhibit their willingness to engage Don Quixote’s madness. Don Quixote’s imagination does not need to do much work to transform his stay at the Duke’s castle into a magical one; it is the Duchess’s imagination, not his, that drives most of his adventures there. Furthermore, the Duchess’s indulgence of Sancho’s high opinion of himself gives Sancho a chance to express his philosophy about life, which turns out to be quite wise and deeply rooted in Christian ideals of charity. By playing along with Don Quixote and Sancho rather than mocking them outright, the Duke and Duchess gain Don Quixote’s and Sancho’s trust. This trust gives them power over Don Quixote and Sancho, which they abuse to stage their elaborate ruse.
Cervantes uses the encounter at the castle to continue his critique of his era’s conventional wisdom that social class corresponds to personal worth. Sancho is free to disagree with the lower-class Doña Rodriguez, but he is severely chastized by Don Quixote when he presumes to disagree with the Duke or the Duchess at dinner. According to the dictates of chivalry, Sancho, as a servant, may spar only with one of his own class. Likewise, Don Quixote treats the clergyman as roughly an equal, but he treats the Duke and the Duchess with the respect due to royalty. During their antics, the Duke and Duchess pretend that they are above everyone else, acting as puppeteers by stringing Don Quixote and Sancho along, tricking the men into believing each new fantasy simply for their own amusement. Though the Duchess does not appear overtly malicious, we see that she enjoys watching Sancho become more embroiled in Don Quixote’s madness. The pleasure she takes is a symptom of her tendency to look upon the peasant squire with condescension, which compels us to disdain her. The Duchess begins to appear cruel, since she enjoys keeping Sancho in a confused and vulnerable position, most notably when she tells him to believe in the enchantment of Dulcinea despite the fact that it is clearly fake.
In highlighting the Duchess’s awareness of the existence of the First Part of Don Quixote, Cervantes breaks down the wall between the work’s factual and fictional components. The Duchess has knowledge of Don Quixote’s past exploits, which shows that Cide Hamete Benengeli’s so-called historical account has influenced the events and people Don Quixote encounters. Notably, Don Quixote himself has not read the novel, which accounts for his failure to understand the perhaps good-natured mockery of those who have read it. In essence, he fails to see himself the way other characters within the story see him. Cervantes implies that if only Don Quixote would pick up the book and begin reading his own story, he might respond differently to those around him. Because they have read the story, the Duchess and other characters later in the Second Part can share a joke with us. The result is dramatic irony, since we are aware of the joke while Don Quixote himself is not. This irony draws us
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deeper into the novel, further blurring the line between madness and sanity, truth and lies.
Analysis:
Chapters XXXVI–XLI
In these chapters, Sancho’s appealing simplicity contrasts with the distasteful actions of the Duke and Duchess. The incident with the Countess centers on Sancho’s desire to be taken seriously. Overwhelmed by the opinions operating against him, by the desire for a governorship, and by his loyalty to Don Quixote, Sancho decides to brave the heights of heaven on a wooden horse to free others from their enchantments. Despite his unwillingness to whip himself, his courage makes him one of the novel’s most sympathetic characters. We cannot tell whether Sancho is lying or dreaming when he tells the story about the goats of heaven, but, regardless, his story indicates his simple desire to live within the fantasy and receive his governorship. It is his simplicity—not an evil greediness—that motivates Sancho, which later makes his resigned attitude after the failure of his governorship touching.
Cervantes’s sarcastic praise of Benengeli typifies his sarcastic praise of Don Quixote. Exalting over Benengeli’s detail, Cervantes uses melodramatic phrases such as “O most renowned author!” which, in their sarcasm, imply a critical tone. Acting as both critic and author, Cervantes helps shape our experience of his work by interjecting editorial remarks and comments about the translation. He gives us two lenses through which to view his characters’ actions—the lens of his characters’ reactions and the lens of his own reactions. In so doing, he provides us with double vision—not just of the novel’s factual and fictional elements but also of the work’s quality. Cervantes can exalt Benengeli’s descriptive ability at the times that his own descriptive ability is at its best. Cervantes excuses his own flights of fancy—as with the account of Montesinos’s Cave—by allowing Benengeli to say that the manuscript from which he is working is dubious. This self-criticism contributes to the novel’s ironic feel and self-referential tone.
Despite his occasional parodies of writers, in this section Cervantes completes his transition from a self-described historian into a masterful storyteller. We see his change in attitude in his choice of what to emphasize and what to downplay. In the First Part of the novel, Cervantes inserts chapter breaks whenever the characters sleep, and each chapter comprises a single encounter or a series of related encounters. Here, in shorter chapters, Cervantes inserts breaks according to the emotions in the scene. Whereas in the First Part he consistently ends each section with an explicit indication that some speech or incident will be finished in the next chapter, here he makes much less use of such guiding statements. Instead, he allows us to hear more frequently what the characters—both the main characters and the incidental ones—think about the events of the novel. In the Second Part, the main characters—especially Sancho—clearly develop, but even inconsequential characters such as Doña Rodriguez have rich personalities. In essence, the Second Part reads like a traditional novel, rather than a parody of stilted chivalric tales.
Analysis:
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Chapters LXI–LXVI
Don Quixote’s fall from grace is complete when the Knight of the White Moon vanquishes him. This loss of glory is mirrored by Don Quixote’s physical decline. Later, when he dies, he has returned to sanity but has largely lost his chivalric strength, as though his defeat at the hands of the Knight of the White Moon sapped his will to live. Don Quixote’s psychological fall, however, truly intensifies at the ball the night before his defeat. Sancho’s embarrassment over Don Quixote’s collapse after dancing too much attests to the reversal of their roles of master and servant. The ball marks the last time that Don Quixote holds the upper hand over Sancho and the first time that Sancho acts paternally toward Don Quixote. Indeed, Don Quixote follows Sancho’s lead for the rest of the novel, as we see when Sancho steps forward to settle the group’s quarrel on the road home. Though the novel ends before we see how Sancho proceeds in life and what he does with his newfound identity, Cervantes does show that Sancho returns to his own home well-respected despite his humble social position.
The story of Anna Felix and Don Gregorio tempers Cervantes’s otherwise rampant racism. From the outset, Cervantes mocks the Moors as liars and thieves, portraying them as useless cheapskates who deserve their exile from Spain because they threaten the king’s rule. Even Cide Hamete Benengeli, the supposed author of the story, is a target of Cervantes’s racism, since Cervantes blames all textual inconsistencies on Benengeli’s lying Moorish nature. Much like Zoraida in the First Part, the character of Anna Felix challenges this stereotype of Moors, but only to a limited extent. Unlike her Spanish counterparts, Anna Felix is less scrutinized by Cervantes, presumably because he prejudicially considers her less than a true woman. Though Spanish society typically chastised women who dressed as men, Anna Felix, who is dressed as a young man, does not inspire such commentary from Cervantes. Despite the fact that Anna Felix is not the spitting image of a what Cervantes’s readership would have considered ideal, she comes off as a respectable and sympathetic character, mellowing Cervantes’s scathing attack on members of her race.
In general, however, determining whether the novel is prejudiced against the Moors is difficult. It is likely that Cervantes represents Spanish culture fairly—with the same amount of antagonism toward the Moors as toward others. But Cervantes explicitly claims that he is translating a Moorish manuscript, and when this manuscript is racist toward the Moors, we question why a Moor would be racist toward his own race. The various levels of narration and authorship depicted in the novel make it difficult to determine authorial intent.
Analysis:
Chapter XLVII-LIII
The incident with Doña Rodriguez and the conspiracy against Sancho further highlight the snobbery of the Duke and Duchess and, by contrast, exalt Don Quixote and Sancho for their magnanimity in the face of difficulty. While the Duke refuses to help the despairing Doña Rodriguez, even though she is his employee, Don Quixote gladly takes up her quest, making no distinction between her and the noble ladies he
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serves. The Duchess exhibits her nastiness by opening Sancho’s mail with no concern for his privacy and not even delivering the letter to him until he leaves the castle for good, later in the Second Part. Sancho’s mercy toward the man heading to the gallows contrasts with the Duke’s contrived, pitiless assault on Sancho’s “isle.” The Duke and Duchess treat Don Quixote and Sancho as pawns—as characters in a play performed for their entertainment. The honorable and humble actions of Don Quixote and Sancho increases our distaste for those who treat them poorly.
The Panzas, for all their simplicity, turn out to be two of the wisest characters in the novel. Teresa warns Sancho not to wander too far from his God-given sphere—advice Sancho puts into action when he relinquishes his governorship. When the burden of office proves too much for him, Sancho gives it up without bitterness, longing to return to a better life as plain old Sancho. Teresa also shows sense and intuition in her distrust of Sampson, who does show himself to be untrustworthy. Sancho’s laws—though they largely reflect the simplistic concerns of a peasant—prove so effective that they remain, according to Cervantes, codified in the town as “constitutions.” Indeed, despite the Panzas’ denseness and inscrutability, their proverbs are often more intelligent than the lofty but insincere words of Don Quixote. More important, the Panzas’ wisdom sharply contrasts with the conniving actions of the Duke and the Duchess. Though the Duke and Duchess continue to mistreat the Panzas, the commoners rise above the pettiness of the nobles in their acts of sacrifice, discipline, and humility.
The puzzling situations of the townspeople create a diversion in the narration, much as the captive’s tale and Anselmo’s story do in the First Part. Like the stories in the First Part of the novel, these situations, such as the girl who dresses up as a boy in order to see the city and the indecisive judges at the bridge, are independent from the main story. But unlike in the First Part, Sancho now takes an active role in the situations he confronts. The situation of the indecisive judges at the bridge, for example, requires Sancho to identify and enact a solution. Nonetheless, these episodes feel strangely disconnected and fantastic, since they are very different from the issues a real governor would likely have to resolve. It is interesting to note that when faced with these more fantastical trials of governorship, Sancho performs very well and pleases his constituents. When faced with a more realistic trial, however, such as the attack on his governorship, Sancho is completely overwhelmed and unable to cope.
Analysis:
Chapters LIV–LX
Don Quixote’s encounter with the two men who have read the sequel to the First Part of the novel further blurs the line between fiction and reality. By this point, Don Quixote has begun to accept reality: he finally sees an inn as merely an inn and accepts that he must pay for his accommodations. Yet his return to reality comes just after the bulls crush him for standing his ground, an act that raises questions about his sanity. Still, he displays an ability to distinguish between the accurate First Part and the counterfeit sequel, refusing to read the sequel and disparaging its falsehood. Adding to the confusion is Don Quixote’s refusal, in Chapter LIX, to go to Saragossa. At the end of the First Part, Cervantes tells us that the history indicates that Don Quixote goes to Saragossa on his next expedition. Now, however, it seems that
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Cervantes was either wrong or lying, since Don Quixote disobeys the very text in which his exploits are recounted.
As the novel draws toward its close, the status of the knight-errant declines, replaced by the virtue and strength of the peasant. When Sancho overpowers Don Quixote, Don Quixote’s defeat and Sancho’s evolution are nearly complete. Sancho the squire, who at the beginning of the novel would never even consider challenging his master’s word, now physically knocks Don Quixote down without even apologizing, and even forces Don Quixote to swear an oath to him. Sancho’s power and importance in the novel eclipse Don Quixote’s literally trampled stature. At the same time, the chivalric qualities to which Don Quixote adheres so fiercely for so long have begun to lose their hold on him as he becomes a more practical and realistic—and compassionate and caring—human being.
The story of Tosilos, the lackey whom the Duke forces to fight Don Quixote for the Duke’s amusement, is a glaring example of the Duke and Duchess’s cruelty. The two combatants fight exclusively for the entertainment of two wealthy people who in their boredom are amused by the travails of the Countess and her dishonored daughter. Though the Duke takes steps to ensure that neither Tosilos nor Don Quixote will get hurt during the battle, he does not tell them that he has done so, because he wants to them to sweat and suffer as though they were in a real battle. Later, when we learn that Tosilos has been locked up for his refusal to fight and that Doña Rodriguez’s daughter has been sent to a convent, the despicable nature of the Duke and Duchess becomes even clearer. Moreover, while the Duke and Duchess outwardly express grief for Sancho’s troubled governorship, Cervantes writes about this grief with irony and doubts its sincerity. Though the Duke and Duchess claim to be upset at Sancho’s “signs of having been badly bruised and worse treated,” it is clear that Sancho does not merely have “signs” of bruises but that he is bruised. The Duke and Duchess meddle with their servants’ lives merely for the sake of meddling, showing a clear enjoyment of power and a lack of compassion for others.
Analysis:
Chapters XLII–XLVI
In this section, Don Quixote and Sancho become intelligent and sensitive individuals when they are removed from situations involving chivalry. Don Quixote shows remarkable sense and compassion in his practical advice to Sancho about how to run his government, and Sancho demonstrates similar sense in his handling of the problems the townspeople send him. Despite his illiteracy, Sancho shows his remarkable ability to see through the Duke’s tricks. Now distanced from Don Quixote for the first time since the end of the First Part, he does not attribute anything to enchantment or knight-errantry. Don Quixote does much the same: in contrast to his misinformed behavior toward Altisidora, his advice to Sancho concerning political matters is sensible and would serve a governor well.
Don Quixote’s advice that Sancho not put on airs of good breeding—and Sancho’s acceptance of this advice—stands in stark contrast to Don Quixote’s need to play the
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role of the knight-errant. In effect, he tells Sancho to be himself—a message that, on its surface, conflicts with everything we know about Don Quixote. The fact that Don Quixote has not read the historical account of his adventures—the First Part of Don Quixote—indicates that he does not wish to observe his actions from anyone else’s perspective. Instead, he chooses to live a life of self-deception. At the same time, however, he never deceives others: unlike the Duke and Duchess and all those who exploit Don Quixote’s madness in a belittling and insulting way, Don Quixote simply presents himself sincerely. His intentions are so exaggeratedly noble that, when he fears (erroneously) that Altisidora has fallen in love with him, he tries to make it clear that he is devoted to another woman in order to prevent future heartbreak for her.
The incident with the cats is the first of several events in which the Duke and Duchess’s pursuit of self-amusement physically harms Don Quixote. What may appear at first to be a harmless prank becomes an insensitive and haughty act of cruelty. It is no longer possible to ignore the negative impact of the Duke and Duchess’s lack of concern for others. Just as Don Quixote’s inability to see the effect of his actions in the First Part nearly kills the farm boy, the Duke and Duchess here show no regard for Don Quixote’s welfare. However, unlike Don Quixote, who would probably put an end to any plan he knew to be harmful, the Duke and Duchess compel Altisidora to woo Don Quixote even as she tends to his wounds. In this way, the two, who seem so kindly and courteous when we first meet them, slowly become the villains in this section.
Analysis: Chapters LXVII–LXXIV
Once Don Quixote renounces chivalry, he ceases to exist. After much digression on his way home, he unexpectedly has a bout of sanity and dies, as though the chivalric knight within him cannot live and breathe once he returns to a world whose values are different from his own. Don Quixote dreams for one night of being a shepherd and wakes a week later recanting everything that has come before—an act that may devalue many of the novel’s adventures. Benengeli implies this devaluation when he writes about the dubious nature of the incident at Montesinos’s Cave. Not even the apparently earnest attempts of Don Quixote’s friends to make him rise and roam the countryside as a shepherd inspire him to live.
The meeting with Don Alvaro provides Don Quixote with one last chance to assert his identity. Already in a downward spiral, Don Quixote temporarily breaks out of his funk during this meeting. He asserts his dignity and former glory by repudiating the fake Don Quixote and by forcing the best friend of the fake Don Quixote to swear allegiance to him. Though this last-ditch effort to assert his honor may seem pathetic in light of his recent defeat by the Knight of the White Moon and his plans to retire, it displays Don Quixote’s sincere nature.
The end of the novel is deeply concerned with authorship. The novel’s conclusion abounds with insults against the counterfeit sequel to the history of Don Quixote.
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These insults include the remarks about the musician who justifies plagiarism, the tale of the devils who throw the book into hell, and Don Alvaro’s disavowal of the counterfeit Don Quixote. Cervantes allows Benengeli to have the last word, which supports the idea that Cervantes has merely been translating Benengeli’s text all along. At the end of the novel, Cervantes clings to his legacy as the bearer of Don Quixote’s tale just as Don Quixote tries to preserve his name through Don Alvaro.
Even as Benengeli attempts to tear apart traditional chivalric texts, he elevates Don Quixote to an heroic status. Benengeli says that Don Quixote needed him to survive throughout history but adds that he needed Don Quixote in order to write. Cervantes’s purpose in writing Don Quixote is much greater than simple self-glorification, a fact Cervantes highlights by distancing himself from the final words of the text. Benengeli admits that his purpose in writing was to show that chivalric tales are ridiculous, because they deny reality and gloss over the tragedy of trying to live an ideal, romantic life in an imperfect world. Benengeli wants his historical account of Don Quixote to put to rest any remaining chivalric tales that fail to highlight the tragic elements of knight-errantry—tragic elements so evident in the character of Don Quixote. Though Don Quixote’s chivalric spirit and physical body may die, the final paragraph of the novel heightens our sympathy for Don Quixote, ensuring that he will live on with us.
Robinson Crusoe(1719) BY
Daniel Defoe
Character List of Robinson Crusoe
Robinson Crusoe: the main character of the story, he is a rebellious youth with an inexplicable need to travel. Because of this need, he brings misfortune on himself and is left to fend for himself in a primitive land. The novel essentially chronicles his mental and spiritual development as a result of his isolation. He is a contradictory character; at the same time he is practical ingenuity and immature decisiveness.
Xury: a friend/servant of Crusoe's, he also escapes from the Moors. A simple youth who is dedicated to Crusoe, he is admirable for his willingness to stand by the narrator. However, he does not think for himself.
Friday: another friend/servant of Crusoe's, he spends a number of years on the island with the main character, who saves him from cannibalistic death. Friday is basically Crusoe's protege, a living example of religious justification of the slavery relationship between the two men. His eagerness to be redone in the European image is supposed to convey that this image is indeed the right one.
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Crusoe's father: although he appears only briefly in the beginning, he embodies the theme of the merits of Protestant, middle-class living. It is his teachings from which Crusoe is running, with poor success.
Crusoe's mother: one of the few female figures, she fully supports her husband and will not let Crusoe go on a voyage.
Moorish patron: Crusoe's slave master, he allows for a role reversal of white men as slaves. He apparently is not too swift, however, in that he basically hands Crusoe an escape opportunity.
Portuguese sea captain: one of the kindest figures in the book, he is an honest man who embodies all the Christian ideals. Everyone is supposed to admire him for his extreme generosity to the narrator. He almost takes the place of Crusoe's father.
Spaniard: one of the prisoners saved by Crusoe, it is interesting to note that he is treated with much more respect in Crusoe's mind than any of the colored peoples with whom Crusoe is in contact.
Captured sea captain: he is an ideal soldier, the intersection between civilized European and savage white man. Crusoe's support of his fight reveals that the narrator no longer has purely religious motivations.
Widow: she is goodness personified, and keeps Crusoe's money safe for him. She is in some way a foil to his mother, who does not support him at all.
Savages: the cannibals from across the way, they represent the threat to Crusoe's religious and moral convictions, as well as his safety. He must conquer them before returning to his own world.
Negroes: they help Xury and Crusoe when they land on their island, and exist in stark contrast to the savages.
Traitorous crew members: they are an example of white men who do not heed God; they are white savages.
Part 1 Analysis:
Defoe immediately introduces the major tension in his novel between adventure and security. Clearly in the view of the author it is not possible to achieve both of these things; you must choose. Defoe makes no secret of his opinion on the subjectósecurity is indeed the correct choice. He demonstrates this painting a negative view of adventure: it causes both of Robinson's brothers to disappear, and it brings misfortune upon the narrator as soon as he leaves home. What is most crucial to note, however, is that adventure exists as something inferior only in relation to the lifestyle of the
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middle class. This will be the standard by which all other lifestyles are judged. It is a smart innovation on Defoe's part; books focused on the middle class very rarely. This definitely would have extended readership. We might see Robinson's father as the voice of the author, urging his "irreligious" son to be content with a contented life. He is also the voice of a larger society that believes in a type of predestination in lifestylesóby "Nature's decree," Robinson should not go on any voyages because he is neither rich nor poor. Robinson's initial comrade voices a similar argument when he wonders violently how such an "unhappy wretch" wound up on his ship. He appears to be superstitious of Robinson's presence because his sadness is not an acceptable reason for him to be making this voyage. That certain activities are restricted to certain classes of people in certain states of mind indicates how regimented the society is. A modern day reader can admire the narrator in the very least for attempting to break out of these expectations. His voice is factual and tuned to details. Most importantly, it is an individual voice. Robinson speaks for himself and himself alone.
How successful Crusoe is, however, is a matter of dispute. Primarily, the tone of the narration is flatly morose and fatalistic. The narrator is always prefacing his descriptions with comments about what is eventually going to happen: "Had I had senseÖI would have gone home," "It was my great misfortuneÖthat I did not ship myself as a sailor," etc. The reader understands from the start that the story will not work out as Robinson had initially hoped. Alongside any good things that happen in the moment, we are waiting for the impending doom to strike. It is difficult for us to have any hope when Robinson himself has none. Throughout this first part he constantly wavers as to whether or not he made the right decision in running away from home, which is due to the fact that his personality is simply wavering and uncertain. The image of the bobbing sea, constant only in its changes, correlates well to Robinson's persona. His sense of agency comes in spurts of movement. At first he decides to run away, but confesses the plan to his mother. Having seen that he will not be able to get his father's consent, he steals away secretly on the voyage to London. The reader wonders why he bothered to try convincing his parents in the first place. His decisive actions are brief at best. As soon as he is on the ship, he becomes ill, fearful, and regrets leaving. As soon as the weather lightens up, he is happy. Robinson's impressionable youth is apparent in this inability to stay rooted to one emotion or decision. His refusal to go home because he does not want to suffer embarrassment and laughter from the neighbors gives new meaning to the cliched cutting off the nose to spite the face. Robinson is all too willing to take on roles such as sailor and trader with which he has no experience. Clearly he does not know who he is, or who he is supposed to be. We cannot ever be sure that he has faith in himself. This lack of confidence paints a very timid picture of the narrator. It is a picture, though, of who Robinson used to be. The disparity between the narrator and the character he describes is crucial to note. At many moments we cannot help thinking that Robinson has truly made a mistake in leaving; but it appears that the narrator agrees with us sometimes.
Yet as the first part continues, Robinson begins to adjust somewhat. Instead of relying completely on the intelligence and strength of others, he begins to think for himself and show more decisive agency, hatching the scheme to escape from slavery and throwing the Moorish youth overboard. This is his turning point. He is not as wimpy and delicate as he first appears. The killing of the lion for pure enjoyment betrays
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violent tendencies that would not have been expressed in a middle class life. At the sight of unfamiliar "monsters" in the water, Robinson does not faint as he did at the prospect of bailing water on his first voyage; rather, he picks up his gun and takes decisive actions. The narrator demonstrates intelligence in keeping Xury as a companion. He can admit to himself that he will need help in his search for a European ship. The manner in which these two work side by side is touching and unprecedentedóracial bias does not seem to affect their relationship thus far. Xury automatically seems to call Robinson "Master," and he willingly runs errands for the narrator, but for the most part they are equals. Upon exploring the new land, Robinson himself says that they will both go and die together if one must die at all. Out on the sea is the semblance of proprieties, but these two follow their own laws.
Part 2 Analysis:
Generally, we see that there is a major sense of class superiority. Robinson has a "European servant" and a "Negro slave" on his plantation. We are supposed to assume that one is better than the other. The basis of such distinctions is rooted in religion. Defoe introduces what is perhaps the most important background component to the story--the role of Christianity, particularly as it connects to relationships with other people. What appears to be a friendship between Robinson and Xury is turned into a common master-slave relationship when Crusoe decides to part with him so that Xury will be Christian in ten years' time. The fact that he is willing to forsake his companion in this manner indicates how strongly the Christian faith is entrenched within him. Essentially it is the driving force behind this decision. The business-like friendship is further emphasized when the narrator procures a plantation in Brazil. Astounded by the hard work, he wishes dearly for "his boy Xury." The diction of this line demonstrates a possessiveness toward Robinson's companion. Ironically, he only longs for his company when there is back-breaking labor to be done. It appears that Xury's un-Christian status degrades him in the eyes of the narrator and the author. Lack of Christian doctrine and teachings becomes a symbol of ignorance and inferiority. When the captain offers to purchase Xury, he is truly playing the part of a savior, at least in Defoe's mind. Modern day readers cannot help but see this as slightly sarcastic: slavery is not often a device of deliverance. However, the author probably did not intend this reading. Xury is happy, even grateful to forsake his freedom; we must believe for the purposes of this novel that Christianity is the proper walk of life.
"Deliverance" is a word that appears throughout the book. It is introduced to us in this part as the action of Providence. The author seems to define Providence as an ephemeral being, a personification of Christianity's ideals that has the power to decide the fate of its followers. Crusoe uses this concept to justify the course of events that befall him. It is responsible for the kind sea captain who takes Robinson abroad and delivers him to South America, for Robinson's extremely good fortune in purchasing a plantation and amassing wealth. In many respects, he is still a child, depending on the kindness of strangers. Providence, together with Nature, is the temptation that leads him out of his safe, rich haven and onto another sea voyage. Once again, the sea becomes a symbol of trouble and turmoil. Each time Robinson ventures into the ocean, he is punished; first slavery, now a shipwreck. This sentiment is heightened by
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the fact that the rest of the crew perishes when they might have survived. It is as if the narrator is singled out to suffer. Once more, he laments that he did not heed his father's advice. Yet he is not yet willing to take entire responsibility for his decisions. The will of Providence becomes a convenient escape from the simple fact that Crusoe chooses to be on this island through his own mistaken reasoning and greediness. Plantation money was not enough for him; he needed to try and engage in the risky enterprise of slave-trading. It is ironic that the Christian religion condones such human oppression. The book winds up commenting on religion without intending to do so. Again, this is the interpretation of a modern reading. Still, the narrator's decisive actions in the face of hardship are admirable and surprising. We wait to see whether he will prove to be dexterous enough to manage his fate.
Part 3 Analysis:
One of the most prominent features in this part is the contradictory sense of Robinson's behavior--civilization meets the wild. Essentially he oscillates between the roles of civilized, middle-class businessman and primitive nature lover. This brings up the theme of isolation: good or bad? Earlier enslavement experiences have not taught Crusoe, so now he is to be enslaved in another way. Defoe means for us to view the island as a completely distinct world, of which Crusoe is the colonizer. In many ways he is stunned initially, having been suddenly thrust into a very unfamiliar situation. Still, he is level-headed and calculating enough to realize that he must ransack the wrecked ship for provisions. This demonstrates his ingenuity. Although he has not seen other signs of life, he immediately sets out to hide himself and all his possessions from plain view. Crusoe has his wits about him and intends to recreate the European world on this island. But he can only do so by embracing the surrounding materials offered by nature: the grass turns into a thatched roof, the mud is sculpted into a cellar, the tree doubles as a house. This mock European world is literally hewn out of the land with bare hands. The civilized and the primitive thus merge symbolically. We have arrived at a new level of detail in the novel, a deeper type of realism. The account of working is an innovation for the time, and the journal is an extension of the realism.
The fact that creating a calendar and keeping a journal are some of the narrator's most notable first tasks demonstrates his desire to replicate the sense of time present in his former world. The idea is somewhat ridiculous when we first examine it. After all, keeping track of time is only necessary when in a world that imposes expectations based on time. Robinson's choice, however, is a choice to stay as close to the civilized world as he possibly can; to remain sane. Defoe plays with the tracking of time. He inserts statements such as "in one and a half years I had a thatched roof." Then he proceeds to "retell" a story that was never exactly told by recounting the details of that time period. This manner of story-telling is useful because it allows the author to be extremely detail-oriented, which maintains a feeling of veracity, while cramming a long period of time into a few pages. It also provides a stream of consciousness tone. With the exception of a loose timeline, there is not much of an order to Robinson's tale. It is interesting to note that there is not much of a difference between the diction of the "journal" section of this part and the rest of the text. If anything, the journal is
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less reflective than the regular text. We might see the whole novel as a journal, but this is only possible because of the tone.
Crusoe's spoken reason for the calendar is to keep a Sabbath day. We observe here the beginning of Crusoe's struggle to come to terms with his fate. It is a battle that will continue until the end. The list of pros and cons that he draws up indicate his desperate need to believe that Providence has designed his shipwreck for the best. He cannot afford to believe in a concept of bad luck or poor planning on his part. As long as the narrator can place trust implicitly in something more powerful than himself, he will remain optimistic and unafraid. Religion becomes a psychological crutch for him. Therefore he thanks God profusely for his deliverance. When he reads the Bible, he becomes less sick. Christianity is a metaphorical healer of body and spirit. To begin his evolution towards fulfillment, he must begin ill. He seems to identify with his father at these moments.
Part 4 Analysis:
The isle is a place of reflections, and justification of fate continues. The reader repeatedly observes the narrator marveling at the course of events and attributing all of the goodness to Providence and God. Strangely enough, he fails to notice that much of the wonderment comes about because of his own hard work--figuring out how to make the corn bread is actually a large accomplishment, and a credit to Crusoe's diligence and intelligence. However, this self-deceit acts as another psychological trick. In essence it steers Robinson's perspective from the negative towards the positive. If he can look upon the corn bread as a gift rather than a product of hard labor, he can be more grateful for its existence. Every little amenity that Crusoe finds is treated in this manner. The grapes are "fine," the raisins "rich." They make Robinson feel blessed, and are emblems of a charmed life. We can extend this idea to the narrator's general outlook on his solitary life. Robinson examines his past life and is "absolutely horrified" with himself. The diction is a bit extreme, but illustrates the mindset of our main character. If he can convince himself that he is living a more wholesome life on this island, he can be happier now than he was in his life in his former world. The island is paradoxical, because it simultaneously becomes a haven and a threat. It will overwhelm and conquer Crusoe if he does not make it his paradise. The psychological tricks are survival tactics. We can see that gradually, he is becoming more callused. He kills the cats when they are too numerous, and he no longer give his food a second thought--he eats goats and turtles with relish.
Yet as Robinson speaks of how distinct this new life is from the indulgent one he has left behind, he seems to work awfully hard to recreate the indulgences. The fact that he has two residences is highly comical. Even more so is his manner of classifying them: "country house" and "sea-coast house." Apparently in his mind, the narrator is still the wealthy businessman from Brazil. Whether he lives in a house of cement or mud, he maintains the familiar standard of material excellence. Robinson clearly wants to see himself in the role of master-ruler. He keeps pets to have beings subservient to him. The hard work he puts into raising crops and figuring out weather patterns are a means of creating a more leisurely life down the road. A large portion of his time is spent in exploration of the island. Indeed this is the substitute for the
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extensive traveling Crusoe would have done on the sea. His excessive ramblings, however, reveal that his wandering spirit has not changed. Crusoe is deeply fascinated with what is wild and untamed. His only real fear is of savages who may or may not be on the island. In spite of that, he seems to enjoy taking risks, sleeping outside in unknown places. Whether this is intelligent or not is really not a matter of concern--the narrator is a living example of the clichÈ "you can't teach an old dog new tricks."
Part 5 Analysis:
One step up and two steps back. We see immediately that Robinson has come to appreciate the truly simple things in life when he directly states that money is of no use to him; that he would rather have a pipe. He is conservative with his gun powder, so he takes to building up a flock of goats. Crusoe is now a farmer in all respects. He is no longer daunted by a lack of goods. What he does not have, he can make. Certainly his attitude is admirable. This might appear to be a complete renunciation of worldliness, but it is not so. The narrator always views himself in a worldly manner. After he has inhabited the island for a number of years, he begins to talk about his "reign," "sovereignty over the isle." The diction indicates a type of delusional regression--Robinson is not trying to recreate his former world, but a world that never existed, in which he is no longer middle-class but a powerful ruler. It is important to note that Defoe uses governing words that connote unrestrained rule, as opposed to words cooperative rule. The narrator basically claims to have bent the primitive surroundings to his will, which is why he deserves the mastery over them. When he eats amongst his many pets, he sees himself as "a king dining amongst subjects." While this is somewhat comical, we realize that this is another psychological survival tactic. It helps Robinson to not feel so alone, and that his existence has at least the purpose of maintaining the animals around him.
These sentiments of confidence, however, are shaken by the voyage mishap around the island. Finally we see the beginnings of fear in Robinson. He persists in trying to make a sea voyage. As his other encounters with the sea demonstrate, this is not a good idea. The sea essentially represents all of the misfortune that is waiting to befall Crusoe. This time, he seems to heed the warning when he draws the boat ashore without having completed a lap of the island. He "thanks God" for another deliverance. The island has truly become his home, and he is very afraid of leaving it and never seeing it again. It is important to consider that the idea of escape is mentioned very briefly here, and without too much enthusiasm. The minute the idea crosses his mind, misfortune almost befalls him. Thus Robinson's devotion to Providence becomes even more strict, and thoughts of escape are firmly banished for the time being. The anniversary of his shipwreck becomes a sort of solemn holiday to honor Providence. Crusoe is learning to accept life as it comes, without trying to interfere and take too much control over his fate. The discovery of a footprint is the strongest test of his fortitude. The simplicity of the language in light of the startling
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discovery is disconcerting. As soon as there is the possibility of other humans, there is a loss of peace with nature, a loss of faith. This place is no different from the real world that he from which he has enjoyed an escape. The narrator suspiciously watches every step he takes, and runs without reason. His homes are called "castles," sturdy places of protection. We might see this as a subtle comment on the theme of colonization, that humans ruin the natural serenity of uninhabited places. Religiously, Crusoe believes he might be facing the Devil. His unbreakable strength is evident as he says that he will leave the Devil to Providence.
Part 6 Analysis:
Crusoe's imagination continues to be overactive. Clearly his faith in Providence only goes so far, because he is not content to merely sit by and let himself be discovered by other humans. The frenzied manner in which he tries to hide himself is somewhat alarming. The reader wonders whether or not our main character is about to lose his mind. However, he proves that he is more or less stable when he continues going about his daily movements on the island, even though he moves very cautiously at all times. When he suspects the presence of others on the island, the narrator speaks of being haunted by an "evil conscience." While Defoe never elaborates on this statement, we can speculate that its meaning is rooted in the fact that if other people are around, Robinson can no longer be entirely self-contained. His actions, behavior, etc. are subject to scrutiny and judgment. This is the most significant way in which his island paradise can be ruined by the presence of other people. The appearance of that footprint is the rock that shatters Crusoe's window of sovereignty. Initially he tries to convince himself that the print belongs to him, but he is forced to admit that his foot does not fit.
The eventual arrival of the "savages," as Crusoe calls them, introduces a savagery into Robinson's own heart, causing a slight break down in his system of religious beliefs. He refers to these people as "wretches" whom he "abhors," and thanks God profusely that he has the fortune to be more educated than these terrible people. Metaphorically the savages are as much a threat to the narrator's spirit as they are to his body. To him they are the Devil incarnate. However, Crusoe starts to become obsessed with wreaking havoc on these people, his own Crusades. They have done him no personal harm, but he wants to make it a personal mission to exterminate them. Again this is part and parcel of creating a world that never existed--Robinson pictures himself as the gallant hero who sweeps in grandly to save the prisoners. He seeks glory for himself, not for God. Although he has mostly convinced himself that he lives a superior life, there is a quiet desperation for human companionship. That is the only explanation for why Crusoe risks himself to go out to the wrecked Spanish ship to look for survivors. Saving prisoners from cannibals would have the same end effect. He is very lonely--Defoe rarely uses quotation marks, but he does around the phrase
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"Had there been but one!" This is Robinson's refrain when he sees there are no survivors, and we are meant to notice it.
The manner in which he patrols the island and plots ambushes is reminiscent of a wartime general. Clearly there is inner violence that is struggling to come out. The narrator wrestles with his inclinations, trying to tell himself that the savages are best left in God's hands, that he should decide their proper punishment. Yet the moment he sees human remains on the shore, he is so incensed that he vows to wage war upon them. It seems God is no longer capable of handling them. This vow can be analyzed in two directions: as an example of Robinson's terrific devotion to the Christian religion, or as an indication of his extreme pride in himself and his beliefs. Defoe probably intends Robinson's behavior to illustrate both of these. It is evident that the belief in Providence cannot be a passive one. Robinson must be active, at all times.
Part 7 Analysis:
The most significant aspect of this chapter is the manner in which Friday is received by the narrator. Crusoe is still hungry for blood, and he gets his "vengeance" by killing two of the savages. He then proceeds to look upon Friday as a "creature" whom he will care for, giving him water, food, and clothing. The use of this word is somewhat degrading. It certainly indicates that Friday is a person of color. The fact that Robinson does not even try to learn Friday's actual name is testimony to the European supremacy theme that runs through the book. Crusoe has changed in appearance and occupation, but not intrinsically. He grants Friday his name as he would to any kind of pet. Thus Friday becomes, more or less, a little dog who follows Crusoe around. He is dressed in the image of his "master," and becomes a "manservant," willingly yet against his will at the same time, because he understands no English. Saving Friday gives the narrator the chance to play God and be in control of something concrete. He is glorifying his religion and himself by saving a life. Animals can only be "subjects" in a minimal sense. The appearance of Friday will allow Crusoe to live out his role as ruler of the island. He is more than a little power hungry. Even when he learns that inhabited land is not too far away, he goes about preparing for the voyage almost reluctantly. He is jealous when he believes Friday might rather go home than be with him. There is no real evidence of excitement to leave the island. The reader can speculate that this is due to a desire to maintain his solitary post of control over the island and over Friday. Perhaps he is even afraid to rejoin civilization.
In any case, the relationship between the two men is touching. Like Xury who came before, Friday is exceedingly devoted to his master, and very eager to be like him. Robinson is so happy living with Friday because he now has someone whom he can teach; specifically, he teaches religious doctrine. Friday is a justification for slavery--the institution exists so that savages might become good Christians. Ironically, Friday poses difficult questions to his master about why the Devil even exists. It is important to note that Robinson does not fully answer the questions. Comically enough, however, he prides himself after lecturing Friday, because he now feels that his beliefs are more solid than they were. The banishment of Friday's religious beliefs is akin to the colonization theme. We might see Robinson as performing a moral
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colonization on his dedicated servant. Whether this is good or bad, we cannot say. It is certain, however, that Robinson and Friday have a mutual need for one another.
Part 8 Analysis:
The plot becomes tangled at the end of the novel, with many new characters. Why the author waits so long to wrap up Crusoe's time on the island is not clear. We can see this chapter as an extension of Crusoe's imagined world, in which he is a powerful sovereign. Now, however, imagination blurs with reality, for Robinson truly is taking on the role of heroic leader. He does plan the attack on the savages, and the rest of the men listen to him dutifully. Defoe wastes no time in changing the terminology referring to the captured men from "prisoners" to "my people" in the mind of the narrator. A label such as "the Spaniard" becomes "my Spaniard." It is certain that everyone under his gaze is added to his group of subjects, which had previously consisted of Friday and the animals. The narrator states that he is pleased because the island is peopled and because he has "an undoubted right of dominion." This is a rather strange sentiment to express in the line of battle--no fear is seen at all. Robinson does not even really express much concern for the prisoners. Besides providing an account of how he feeds them, Crusoe spends most of his time glorifying his sense of control over people and events. As the number of "subservient" beings increases, his preoccupation with power grows stronger and worse. This does not make him extremely likable, but Defoe means for us to excuse this attitude and attribute it to a hunger for human contact that has gone somewhat haywire.
The excessive need for power demonstrates just how much Robinson's motivations and sense of agency have been altered during his life on the island. Before, we observed great meditations on the will of God, and Crusoe questioned how he was to behave to best act out that will. At this point, there are no real references to what God would want Crusoe to do: the entire battle against the savages takes place with a single reference to a higher power, when the narrator tells Friday to let bullets fly "in the name of God." We cannot be sure how sincere the remark is, but there is a good deal of evidence that lets us assume that Crusoe has forgotten his religious origins in some respects. When he frees the Spaniard and Friday's father, they look upon his as "God-sent." Rather than correct them or view the statement as sacrilegious, Robinson seems to take pleasure in the idea. His absolute authority over the men suggests a mental construction of divinity. Religion is more or less a means of achieving a powerful attitude. Crusoe acts like a leader; therefore the men treat him like one. In spite of this appearance of confidence, Robinson still seems to fear leaving the island because he is scared to fall under the control of someone else. There is more than a little prejudice alive within him. He is not entirely willing to trust the Spaniard because he is Catholic; he fears that the savages on the mainland. will eat him. It is not until an Englishman arrives that the narrator feels comfortable leaving the island and placing himself in the hands of another. The crew who mutinies are essentially white savages; they need to be conquered because they do not heed God.
By far, the most touching moment in the novel is the reunion of Friday and his father. It is the only scene in which affectionate emotions are unrestrained and expressed freely. The tone of the passage, which entails Robinson observing the two men
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embracing, betrays a bit of wistfulness. Crusoe is observing the reunion/reconciliation that will never be able to take place between his own father and himself. He seems to realize that this is his own fault--the beginning of deeper maturity. Still, Friday does not return with his father. He is devoted to Crusoe above everyone in the world.
Part 9 Analysis:
This chapter brings us to the long-awaited fairy-tale conclusion. After crossing a myriad number of obstacles, Crusoe reaches wealth and security. He treats generously those who have helped him, and in short lives a model life. In short, there is a justification of returning to middle-class life. It seems a bit far-fetched in some respects, but we can indulge Defoe. Before this return can happen, though, Robinson's pioneer dream world must reach fruition and he must fully conquer the dangerous forces that are present on the island, thereby safeguarding his religious sensibilities. Robinson is more fully in the role of leader than ever before. The manner in which he is constantly observing before acting illustrates learned patience--the impulsive tendencies are gone. He choreographs strategies but never loses consciousness of his position. It is important to note that he only engages in battle for the captain when it is assured that he will always have authority over the island. When the mutinying crew are finally beaten and captured, the narrator is able to fully live out his fantasy by referring to himself as the "governor" of the isle and having everyone openly acknowledge him as a ruler. Religion has completely exited the battle scene. It is clear that this is a fight between men, for the sheer purpose of control over men. There is no glorification of God. Interestingly enough, the word "deliverance" still appears a number of times. This time, however, it is mostly in reference to human resources as opposed to divine ones. Robinson and the captain call each other "deliverers." Their destinies are altered by one another, not by any sort of Providence. Thus humans become more powerful and capable.
Even after the "escape" from the island, traveling continues to be perilous. It is much to Crusoe's credit that he refuses to travel to England by sea. The fact that the journey by land is fraught with many disasters seems to reveal a predetermined propensity for Robinson Crusoe to encounter misfortune each time he strays from the middle class existence into which he was born. Once in England, his life proceeds peacefully and uneventfully. Somehow this is not enough, for the narrator eventually sets out for the sea once again. Upon seeing his island become a thriving settlement, he is inspired to keep traveling, perhaps in the hopes of starting another such settlement. A placid existence in England will not ever glorify Crusoe enough to keep him there. Therefore, he must leave. There are no other options for him to pursue. Whether this is an adventuresome spirit or a foolhardy one, we cannot really say. But we would wish Crusoe the best in any case.
God Would Not Bless Me: Fatalism and the Father in Robinson Crusoe
Though Robinson Crusoe may be popularly envisioned as a harrowing "adventure tale" of shipwreck and survival, the "adventures" of emotional and spiritual discourse act perhaps equally strongly to frame and direct the text. Crusoe's early travels, in which he says he "I never once had the Word Thank God, so much as on my Mind, or
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in my mouth" (131), are constantly being narrated through the emotional discourse of parental prohibition; his later foreign adventures are often viewed through the lens of the earlier, less turbulent domestic sphere. Though Crusoe's adventures seem at first self-consciously antithetical to life with his parents at home, it is also possible to read them as embedded within that early life, testing out the conditions and prohibitions which his father first set out. Having left the comfortable world of his father, blessed neither by his father or God (7), Crusoe is haunted throughout his travels by feelings of carelessness and impetuousness with which his departure was informed. The narrative itself is framed by prohibition and violation: from the very beginning, Crusoe is commanded by his father not to go to sea. Such a commandment acts with a prophetic fatalism, subsumed only by the driving "Propension" (3) of nature, throughout the rest of the tale.
From the narrative's first sentence, Crusoe is unable to keep the discourse of his father out of the discourse of his own adventure and eventual despair. Even as Crusoe narrates his family history, including the history of the alteration of his name, Crusoe's father plays the central, defining role. Crusoe says his father, "a foreigner of Bremen" rather than a British native, "got a good Estate by Merchandise", allowing him to leave "off his trade" (3) and move elsewhere. Crusoe speaks of him as, at least initially, culturally other, a self-made man who has "become British" through the growth of his business as well as the alteration of his name. Through such a narrative opening, Crusoe delineates not only the evolution of his name from German to English, but his family's economic history as well. Because the "Station" into which Crusoe was born is directly reflective of this history, the reader must be careful not to discount its prominence within the adventure as a whole, especially when one considers it in the context of Crusoe's father's concerns.
In advice given early on, Crusoe's father argues that his own path of stable self-sufficiency has set an ideal example for the life and career objectives of his son. He suggests that son Crusoe's desired deviation from this path is due to a "meer wandring Inclination" (4), and notes that, by remaining, Crusoe might be "well introduced" and have "a Prospect of raising [his] Fortunes by Application and Industry" (4). Rather than simply harboring sentimentality towards his son, Crusoe's father suggests that remaining would allow Crusoe to maximize his potential for economic growth. Not of either "desperate" or "aspiring, superior" fortunes, Crusoe has been set into the "middle State" (4) through the effort and modest successes of his father. Crusoe's father does not lament his failure to rise higher, or to gain more than he already has; instead, he argues for the value of maintaining, even for future generations, the station he is in. Such a station, he argues, is "not exposed to the Miseries and Hardships, the Labour and Sufferings of the mechanick Part of Mankind, and not embarrass'd with the Pride, Luxury, Ambition and Envy of the upper Part of Mankind" (4) -- rather, it exists stably within society, free of the worst extremes. The apparent glamour of the upper classes reveals itself to be full of suffering and vice, and it is rather the middle state "which all other People envied" (4). This explication of an economic Middle Way, the "upper Station of Low Life," (4) allows Crusoe's father to express and give approval to the path of his own life. The avoidance of the worst disasters and the enjoyment of the most commonly available pleasures allows one, in the mind of Crusoe's father, to gain the most from life while being afflicted by the least suffering. Rather than simply avoiding adventure, such a life strategy allows one to go "silently and smoothly thro' the World, and comfortably out of it" (5).
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Crusoe's father argues that acceptance of such a station does not only make oneself comfortable, but in fact allows one to move gracefully through life, achieving goals and garnering pleasures without too much unnecessary travail. Rather than simply admonishing his son, the father is attempting to reveal the wisdom at which he, through the course of his life, has arrived. He suggests that Crusoe's current station is not only the one most suitable for him, but in fact the one in which he could reap the most happiness and rewards. By noting that Crusoe was "born in" this particular "Station of Life" and that "Nature..seem'd to have provided against" his misery, Crusoe's father gives at first the impression of desiring stasis and general immobility for his son. If Crusoe has, like a tool of fate, already been "provided" for, it seems the father would have him accept this providence blindly and not act to alter it in any way. However, in the broader narrative, "Nature and the Station of Life" have been only partial contributors to Crusoe's fate; the father's merchandizing and subsequent marriage have done much to set Crusoe where he is. Indeed, his father implies it is unnecessary for Crusoe to handle "Miseries which Nature and the Station of Life [he] was born in, seem'd to have provided against" (5), arguing for a fatalism of birth which is auspicious rather than limiting. Rather than simply being directed by fate, Crusoe seems at least in part provided for by the previous hard work of his father. Through the work of this "wise and grave Man" (4), Crusoe has been given enough means to enjoy the life his father sees fit. He may live without too many hardships, "sensibly tasting the Sweets of living, without the bitter, feeling that they are happy, and learning by every Day's Experience to know it more sensibly" (5). Through the approval and recommendation of his current station, Crusoe's father reveals his respect for moderation even in enjoyment, and for a "sensibly" won knowledge not admitting of rash desires. The realization of and contentment with the positive aspects of life -- "feeling that they are happy" -- is seasoned through with a progressive knowledge, the process of understanding one's experience more finely each day. Though such a respect remains necessarily modest, not claiming to gain much new emotional territory, it seems also well-tested through long experience of losses and gains. Crusoe's father has, it seems, lived his life in just such a fashion and has ended up generally satisfied with the results.
Yet, at the same time as he recommends this living within one's emotional means, Crusoe's father offers up a dire alternative to Crusoe if he does not follow his advice. As Crusoe narrates, the father says, "if I did take this foolish Step [of going abroad], God would not bless me, and I would have Leisure hereafter to reflect upon having neglected his Counsel when there might be none to assist in my Recovery" (6). Though such a condemnation seems out of proportion to a travel request, Crusoe calls it "Prophetick" (6), revealing an implicit acceptance of his father as prophesier of the actions of God. His rebellion from his father - though he was "sincerely affected with this Discourse," (6), he does not heed it - seems parallel to the spiritual rebellion which he will experience throughout the remainder of the tale. Crusoe's father, who already offers God-like commandments and prophecies regarding the best-lived life, seems also able to dictate whether God will bless his son, and indeed to dictate the regret which Crusoe, unblessed and unhappy, would subsequently feel. While Crusoe does not heed the commands of his father, he never suggests that such commands are unwarranted, or that his father does not have the foresight he might claim. He allows for his father the role of prophet as well as authority figure; because the narrative is told in the past tense, Crusoe may infuse the sense of "destiny" upon what otherwise may have been well-meant, if overbearing, advice. In such an understanding of
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destiny, it seems that Crusoe idealizes his comfortable, middle-station home as the fount of these commands and prophecies. His thoughts of how he might have stayed in with his father, enjoying a life "calculated for all kinds of Virtues and all kinds of Enjoyments" (5), allows him to frame his tale in terms of his rebellious departure and the consequences he has come to know. Rather than describing the constellation of events and circumstances which seem to have been related to his departure and adventures - for instance, the "one Day at Hull" (7) which caused him to decide to travel - he instead frames his story strongly as a narrative arc structured by this "fatal...Propension" and the rebellion against his father's desires.
Though Crusoe's father's comment is structured not as a blind command, but as a (finally prophetic) statement of concern, Crusoe is unable to take that concern to heart. Rather, he seems to have left with no "Consideration of Circumstances or Consequences" and that he left "in an ill Hour, God knows" (7). While clearly possessing a strong belief in the "fatal" quality of nature, Crusoe narrates his own motives as though they were unstructured and haphazard. Without "asking God's blessing, or my Father's" (7) blessings one and the same Crusoe leaves the circumstances in which he has been advised to stay. Through long experience or wisdom, Crusoe's father knows the outcome of this departure, and suggests that the "upper Station of Low Life" is where Crusoe would best have found a home. Crusoe's father seems content with his own station and, with a mixture of wisdom and authority, commands Crusoe to remain where he is. He proceeds to prohibit his son from departing, saying that such departure would prevent him from being blessed. Crusoe will not remain and, because of this clear breaking of prohibition, will feel afterward the weight of grief and rebellion at having left his father and his God.
Tom Jones(1749) By
Henry Fielding Character List
Tom Jones - Tom Jones, a "bastard" raised by the philanthropic Allworthy, is the novel's eponymous hero and protagonist. Although Tom's faults (namely, his imprudence and his lack of chastity) prevent him from being a perfect hero, his good heart and generosity make him Fielding's avatar of Virtue, along with Allworthy. Tom's handsome face and gallantry win him the love and affection of women throughout the countryside. His dignified, though natural air induces characters to assume that he is a gentleman—which ultimately turns out to be true.
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Sophia Western - Sophia Western is Fielding's beautiful, generous heroine and the daughter of the violent Squire Western. Like Tom, Sophia lavishes gifts on the poor, and she treats people of all classes with such respect that one landlady cannot believe she is a "gentlewoman." Sophia manages to reconcile her love for Tom, her filial duty to her father, and her hatred for Blifil through her courage and patience. Sophia's natural courtesy can be contrasted with her Aunt Western's artificial manners.
Mr. Allworthy - Mr. Allworthy is just what his name implies - all worthy. Allworthy has a reputation throughout England because of his benevolent, altruistic behavior. The moral yardstick of the novel, Allworthy's only fault (which ironically propels much of the plot) is that—due to his goodness—he cannot perceive the evil in others.
Master Blifil - Blifil is antagonist to Tom Jones and the son of Bridget Allworthy and Captain Blifil. Although he appears at first to be a virtuous character, his hypocrisy soon exposes itself—Blifil pretends to be pious and principled, but greed governs him. The fact that Blifil has few redeeming qualities makes Tom compassion for him at the end of the novel—after the revelation that Blifil kept the secret of Tom's birth to himself—even more commendable. Blifil's dearth of natural human appetites—he at first does not desire Sophia—does not distinguish him as a virtuous character, but rather provides a depressing picture of what humanity would be like if devoid of passion.
Squire Western - Squire Western is a caricature of the rough-and-ready, conservative country gentleman. Affectionate at heart, the Squire nevertheless acts with extreme violence towards his daughter Sophia, by constantly incarcerating her, and even verbally and physically abusing her. However, since the Squire is a caricature, Fielding does not intend for us to judge these actions too harshly. Similarly, the Squire's insistence on Sophia marrying Blifil has less to do with greed than with his stubbornness and adherence to tradition. Squire Western's speaks in West Country dialect, and peppers his speech with curses.
Mrs. Western - Mrs. Western, the foil of her brother Squire Western, is a caricature of the artificial city lady who always acts out of expediency. Mrs. Western prides herself on being adept at all intellectual pursuits—from politics to philosophy to feminism to amour—yet her ignorance reveals itself on numerous occasions (she thinks that Socrates lectured to students instead of engaging in conversational debate). Mrs. Western's sole aim in the novel is to improve the Western name by marrying off Sophia to the richest, most prosperous man she can find.
Partridge - Partridge is the teacher whom Allworthy accuses of being Tom's father. He is a kind of comedic Harlequin character (Fielding even compares him to Harlequin). Although pathetic, bumbling, and cowardly, Partridge remains a loyal servant to Jones and deserves his reward at the end of the novel. Partridge has a passion for speaking in Latin non sequiturs. Although Partridge creates problems for
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Tom and Sophia by boosting Tom's reputation and defiling Sophia's to all and sundry, Tom cannot help forgiving Partridge, who always has the best of intentions.
Jenny Jones - Jenny Jones (Mrs. Waters) is the student of Partridge whom Allworthy banishes for being Tom's mother—at the end of the novel we learn that Jenny is not Tom's mother. Jenny reappears as "Mrs. Waters" at Upton, where Tom saves her from a robbery. Although Jenny does not possess the beauty of a Sophia, her very white breasts attract Tom to her. Although she protests to Mr. Allworthy at the end of the novel that she has led a virtuous life, her seduction of Tom in Upton suggests otherwise. She eventually marries Parson Supple, a friend of Western.
Bridget Allworthy - Bridget Allworthy is the mother of Blifil and Tom. An unattractive lady who resents beautiful women, Bridget marries Captain Blifil because he flatters her religious views. Although Bridget's affection wavers between Blifil and Tom as the boys mature, she becomes devoted to Tom before her death—largely due to his good looks and gallantry.
Lady Bellaston - Lady Bellaston is a London lady, and a relative of Sophia, whose passionate, lusty personality leads her to dabble in intrigues. The stem of her last name "Bella-", meaning "war" in Latin, points to her malicious nature—she thinks of no one but herself. Lady Bellaston carries out a vengeful battle against Tom and Sophia with the utmost glee.
Harriet Fitzpatrick - Harriet Fitzpatrick is Sophia's cousin and the wife of Mr. Fitzpatrick. Pretty and charming, she is nevertheless selfish and contrives against Sophia in order to improve her relationship with Squire Western and Mrs. Western.
Mr. Fitzpatrick - Mr. Fitzpatrick is a rash Irishman whom Harriet Fitzpatrick casts in the light of an ogre chasing her across the countryside. Fitzpatrick becomes admirable, however, when he admits to initiating the duel with Tom at the end of the novel.
Mr. Dowling - Mr. Dowling is a shrewd, shifty lawyer who becomes a friend of Blifil. Always operating out of expediency, when Dowling realizes that Blifil will not be able to reward him for his efforts, he defects to Tom and Allworthy's side.
Mrs. Miller - Mrs. Miller is a faithful friend to Tom and the most caring and concerned of mothers to Nancy and Betty. Feisty and active, Mrs. Miller carries through on her promises and becomes Tom's biggest advocate to Allworthy. She is trusting and loyal.
Nightingale - Nightingale, although a foppish city gentleman, possesses the laudable traits of loyalty and compassion—although not always in affairs of love. It takes a little time for Tom to convince Nightingale not to abandon Nancy, since Nightingale is caught up in his image in London. To his credit, Nightingale transforms and follows Tom's principles of Honour—that is, fulfilling verbal commitments.
Lord Fellamar - Lord Fellamar is a suitor of Sophia who, though he has a conscience, easily allows himself to be manipulated by Lady Bellaston.
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Square - Square is a philosopher who lives with Allworthy. He justifies his questionable behavior (such as making love to Molly Seagrim) by contorting his philosophical notions. Square, although a foil to Thwackum, is less sinister than the latter. Indeed, Square's virtuous transformation at the end of the novel allows Allworthy to forgive Tom.
Thwackum - Thwackum is the vicious tutor of Blifil and Tom who constantly beats Tom and praises Blifil. Thwackum, who claims to value Religion above all else, seeks only his own good.
Molly Seagrim - Molly Seagrim is the rugged, unfeminine daughter of Black George who seduces Tom. Feisty and aggressive, Molly enjoys the company of men, and fights fiercely for her rights.
Black George - Black George is the servant who is favored by Tom. Although of dubious moral tincture (Black George steals and lies), Black George's loyalty to and love of Tom nevertheless emerges.
Nancy Miller - Nancy Miller is the daughter of Mrs. Miller who becomes Nightingale's wife.
Narrator - The ironic, intrusive narrator can be assumed to be Fielding himself since he reflects on his process of creating Tom Jones.
Character Analysis
Tom Jones - Tom Jones, Fielding's imperfect and "mortal" hero, is the character through whom Fielding gives voice to his philosophy of Virtue. In contrast to the moral philosophizing of many of Fielding's contemporaries, Fielding does not suggest that Tom's affairs with Molly Seagrim, Mrs. Waters, and Lady Bellaston should reflect badly on his character. Rather, keeping with the Romantic genre, Fielding seems to admire Tom's adherence to the principles of Gallantry, which require that a man return the interest of a woman. Interestingly, all of Tom's love affairs, including his relationship with Sophia, his true love, are initiated by the woman in question, which is Fielding's way of excusing Tom from the charge of lustful depravity.
Moreover, the fact that Tom's lovers include a feisty, unfeminine wench and two middle-aged women suggest that his motives are various. Tom also treats women with the utmost respect, obliging their desire to be courted by pretending to be the seducer even when they are seducing him. Tom refuses to abandon Molly for Sophia and is plagued by his obligations to Lady Bellaston. Nonetheless, Tom's refusal of the tempting marriage proposal of Arabella Hunt—whose last name underscores the fact that Tom is hunted more often than he is the hunter—indicates that he has mended his wild ways and is ready to become Sophia's husband. Tom's gallantry reveals itself in his relationships with men as well as women, however. This spirit is evident in Tom's insistence on paying the drinking bill for the army men at Bristol, and in his gallant defense of himself in the duel.
Sophia Western - Sophia Western, according to critic Martin Battestin, is an allegorical figure, meant to represent the feminine ideal and therefore kept as
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anonymous as possible. For example, the narrator does not provide concrete details of Sophia's appearance and character when he introduces her at the beginning of the novel, and by the end of the novel, we do not know much more. Although Sophia's decision to run away from her violent father Squire Western signals her courage and bravery—which the narrator says is becoming in a woman—she actually does very little in the novel. As a woman and obedient daughter, Sophia must allow herself to be acted upon, and even though she falls in love with Tom Jones before he falls in love with her, she cannot, in all decency, say anything. Similarly, Sophia puts up little resistance to her father's violence toward her.
Sophia becomes the spokeswoman for male chastity at the end of the novel—ironically, through her lecture to Jones, she provides the final obstacle to their marriage and thus to the fulfillment of the comic plot. Through her generosity and genuine courtesy, Sophia becomes a representative, along with Jones and Allworthy of Fielding's vision of Virtue. She combines the best of the country and the city, since she has manners, unlike her country father, but they are genuine, unlike those of her courtly aunt, Mrs. Western. Similarly, Sophia combines the merits of the novel's two other heroes without any of their faults—she is kind like Tom, but also remains chaste, and is generous toward others, like Allworthy, without being blind to their faults.
Allworthy - Allworthy, as his name implies, is also an allegorical figure of sorts. His character does not undergo any dramatic changes and thus possesses the consistency and stability found in stock characters in theatrical comedy. Allworthy, as Fielding's moral yardstick and as the novel's ultimate dispenser of justice and mercy, almost takes on the role of a god, although he is still mortal enough to make incorrect judgments. Allworthy's blindness to the evil designs of his nephew Blifil and to Thwackum's insidiousness lead him to make mistakes which propel the plot of the novel forward. For example, it is Allworthy who banishes Tom Jones from his county.
Blifil - Blifil, the antagonist of Tom Jones, is a foil to his uncle Allworthy. In contrast to Allworthy, whose altruism is almost excessive, Blifil not only acts vilely, but coats his evil with sugary hypocrisy. When Allworthy and Tom confront Blifil with his crimes, Blifil weeps not out of remorse, but rather out of terror. He does not reform his ways, but merely his religion, expediently converting to Methodism in order to marry a rich woman. As the static villain, Blifil stands opposite the consistent goodness of Allworthy. Fielding uses Blifil's lack of passion to condone Tom's abundance of "animal spirits" and to sharpen his definition of love. The reader does not admire Blifil's chastity, since it stems from an excessive interest in Sophia's fortune and in a desire to eclipse Tom. Fielding's claim that physical pleasure is a necessary part of true love is further validated when Tom's philandering is contrasted with Blifil's bitter chastity.
Symbols, and Motifs
Themes
Virtue as action rather than thought - Fielding contrasts the concept of Virtue espoused by characters like Square and Thwackum with the Virtue actually practiced by Jones and Allworthy. Tom, as the active hero who saves damsels-in-distress and
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plans on fighting for his country, is the embodiment of the very active type of Virtue that Fielding esteems.
The impossibility of stereotypical categorization - Fielding's novel attempts to break down numerous boundaries. In terms of genre, Fielding cannot decide whether his novel is a "philosophical History," a "Romance," or an "epi-comic prosaic poem." Yet, through these confounded musings, Fielding subtly suggests that cataloguing fiction is silly, and that he would rather think of himself as "the founder of a new Province of Writing."
In another example of broken stereotypes, Fielding's characters cannot be distinguished by "masculine" or "feminine" traits: in this novel both men and women fight and cry.
The tension between Art and Artifice - Although the narrator upholds the value of natural art in his characters, he uses artifice himself in the construction of his novel. For example, he often closes chapters by hinting to the reader what is to follow in the next chapter, or he warns the reader that he is going to omit a scene. In such a way, he prevents us from suspending our disbelief and giving ourselves up to the "art" of the narrative—instead, Fielding constantly entices us to reflect on and review the process of construction.
Motifs
Food - The narrator invokes the motif of food in relation to the process of writing, the process of reading, love, and war. He begins the novel by referring to himself as a Restauranteer who will provide the reader with a feast. He later defines lust as a person's appetite for a good chunk of white flesh.
Travel - Where the narrator opens the novel with a reference to food, he concludes the novel with a reference to travel, casting himself as the reader's fellow traveler. This represents the culmination of a travel motif throughout the novel. As the characters journey from the country to the city, the narrator includes himself as a fellow traveler, remarking that he will not plod through the journey, but will hasten and slow down as he pleases.
The Law - The narrator infuses his language—and the speech of his characters—with legal terms. For example, after a petty domestic argument with Squire Western, Mrs. Western refers to their reconciliation as the signing of a "treaty." Such examples reveal the narrator's technique of hyperbole—he uses technical jargon to build up events that are actually irrelevant. However, there are also cases in which the narrator's legal motif is genuine, as both Allworthy and Western are Justices of the Peace, and the lawyer Dowling plays a large part in the plot against Tom.
The Stage - It is noteworthy that Fielding constantly alludes to the theater, since his novel is in some ways more "dramatic" than it is "literary." The motif of the stage reminds one that Fielding thinks of his characters as "actors." Nevertheless, the fact that Fielding refuses to provide detailed visual descriptions of his characters slightly undermines his theatrical motif. Clearly, he wishes to vacillate between the visual world of the dramatic and the written word of the prose novel.
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Symbols
Sophia's muff - Sophia's muff stands in for her in situations when Sophia cannot physically be present herself. This is made evident by the fact that she attaches her name to the muff before leaving it in Jones's bed at Upton. Since both Jones and Sophia kiss the muff, it allows them to achieve a closeness despite their physical distance.
Trestram Shandy(1767)
By
Laurence Sterne
Characters
Tristram Shandy - Tristram is both the fictionalized author of The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy and the child whose conception, birth, christening, and circumcision form one major sequence of the narrative. The adult Tristram Shandy relates certain aspects of his family history, including many that took place before his own birth, drawing from stories and hearsay as much as from his own memories. His opinions we get in abundance; of the actual details of his life the author furnishes only traces, and the child Tristram turns out to be a minor character.
Walter Shandy - Tristram's philosophically-minded father. Walter Shandy's love for abstruse and convoluted intellectual argumentation and his readiness to embrace any tantalizing hypothesis lead him to propound a great number of absurd pseudo-scientific theories.
Elizabeth Shandy (Mrs. Shandy) - Tristram's mother. Mrs. Shandy insists on having the midwife attend her labor rather than Dr. Slop, out of resentment at not being allowed to bear the child in London. On all other points, Mrs. Shandy is singularly passive and uncontentious, which makes her a dull conversational partner for her argumentative husband.
Captain Toby Shandy (Uncle Toby) - Tristram's uncle, and brother to Walter Shandy. After sustaining a groin-wound in battle, he retires to a life of obsessive attention to the history and science of military fortifications. His temperament is gentle and sentimental: Tristram tells us he wouldn't harm a fly.
Corporal Trim - Manservant and sidekick to Uncle Toby. His real name is James Butler; he received the nickname "Trim" while in the military. Trim colludes with Captain Toby in his military shenanigans, but his own favorite hobby is advising people, especially if it allows him to make eloquent speeches.
Dr. Slop - The local male midwife, who, at Walter's insistence, acts as a back-up at Tristram's birth. A "scientifick operator," Dr. Slop has written a book expressing his disdain for the practice of midwifery. He is interested in surgical instrument and
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medical advances, and prides himself on having invented a new pair of delivery forceps.
Parson Yorick - The village parson, and a close friend of the Shandy family. Yorick is lighthearted and straight-talking; he detests gravity and pretension. As a witty and misunderstood clergyman, he has often been taken as a representation of the writer, Sterne, himself.
Susannah - Chambermaid to Mrs. Shandy. She is present at Tristram's birth, complicit in his mis-christening, and partly to blame for his accidental circumcision by the fallen window shade.
Obadiah - Servant to Walter Shandy.
Bobby Shandy - Tristram's older brother, who dies in London while away at school.
Widow Wadman - A neighbor who has marital designs on Captain Toby Shandy, and with whom he has a brief and abortive courtship.
Bridget - Maidservant to Widow Wadman. Corporal Trim courts Bridget at the same time that Toby courts Widow Wadman, and Trim and Bridget's relationship continues for five years thereafter.
The midwife - The local delivery-nurse who is commissioned to assist at Mrs. Shandy's labor.
Eugenius - Friend and advisor to Parson Yorick. His name means "well-born," and he is often the voice of discretion.
Didius - A pedantic church lawyer, and the author of the midwife's license.
Kysarcius, Phutatorius, Triptolemus, and Gastripheres - Along with Didius, they form the colloquy of learned men whom Walter, Toby, and Parson Yorick consult about the possibility of changing Tristram's name.
The curate - The local church official, also named Tristram, who misnames the baby when Susannah fails to pronounce the chosen name "Trismegistus."
Aunt Dinah - Tristram's great aunt and, in Tristram's estimation, the only woman in the Shandy family with any character at all. She created a family scandal by marrying the coachman and having a child late in her life.
Lieutenant Le Fever - A favorite sentimental charity case of Uncle Toby's and Corporal Trim's. Le Fever died under their care, leaving an orphan son.
Overall Analysis and /Themes
The most striking formal and technical characteristics of Tristram Shandy are its unconventional time scheme and its self-declared digressive-progressive style. Sterne,
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through his fictional author-character Tristram, defiantly refuses to present events in their proper chronological order. Again and again in the course of the novel Tristram defends his authorial right to move backward and forward in time as he chooses. He also relies so heavily on digressions that plot elements recede into the background; the novel is full of long essayistic passages remarking on what has transpired or, often, on something else altogether. Tristram claims that his narrative is both digressive and progressive, calling our attention to the way in which his authorial project is being advanced at the very moments when he seems to have wandered farthest afield.
By fracturing the sequence of the stories he tells and interjecting them with chains of associated ideas, memories, and anecdotes, Tristram allows thematic significance to emerge out of surprising juxtapositions between seemingly unrelated events. The association of ideas is a major theme of the work, however, and not just a structural principle. Part of the novel's self-critique stems from the way the author often mocks the perverseness by which individuals associate and interpret events based on their own private mental preoccupations. The author's own ideas and interpretations are presumably just as singular, and so the novel remains above all a catalogue of the "opinions" of Tristram Shandy.
Much of the subtlety of the novel comes from the layering of authorial voice that Sterne achieves by making his protagonist the author of his own life story, and then presenting that story as the novel itself. The fictional author's consciousness is the filter through which everything in the book passes. Yet Sterne sometimes invites the reader to question the opinions and assumptions that Tristram expresses, reminding us that Shandy is not a simple substitute for Sterne. One of the effects of this technique is to draw the reader into an unusually active and participatory role. Tristram counts on his audience to indulge his idiosyncrasies and verify his opinions; Sterne asks the reader to approach the unfolding narrative with a more discriminating and critical judgment
Commentary
Tristram's story begins ab Ovo ("from the egg"), in defiance of the Homeric epic tradition that begins stories in the middle of things and then allows the background to unfold along with the action. The alternative, seemingly, would be to begin with the beginning; Tristram takes this possibility to an almost ludicrous extreme by beginning before the beginning, from his conception rather than his birth. This strategy leads him into the problem of relating events of which he could have no knowledge, which would call into question his status as an autobiographical narrator. He anticipates and answers this concern by explaining that he has learned the story of his conception from his Uncle Toby, who in turn heard it from Walter Shandy. The effect is to emphasize that Tristram's accounts are not fictional--but neither should we take them as perfectly objective. Tristram represents a type of authorial presence different from that of Sterne himself: he is not free to invent characters or imagine events, but rather filters a "real" world (and a drastically limited and personal one, with a radius of but five miles) through his own experience, memory, personality, and opinions.
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It quickly becomes apparent that the chronology of the story will be more complex and unorthodox than just its ab Ovo beginning. The narrative oversteps its own declared limits, including events that took place long before even the night of conception, and also drawing Jenny, the author's companion as the story is being written, into the book. And not only does Tristam stretch his chronological coverage to its extreme possibilities, he also disrupts it internally by presenting events in the wrong order, interrupting one anecdote with others or with essayistic digressions, and scrambling the beginnings, middles, and ends of his sequences. Yet, he maintains, the story is going on all the while. This is largely true because the narrator's own voice and interpretations provide a source of continuity. By listening to Tristram, we are getting to know him, which was the whole point, and which takes precedence over the details of his birth, or any other single episode. "As you proceed further with me, the slight acquaintance that is now beginning betwixt us, will grow into familiarity; and...will terminate in friendship."
The idea of the hobby-horse, which is introduced casually here, will become a major thematic concern. There is nothing inherently sinister about these hobby-horses; most people have them, and Tristram confesses readily to having a few of his own (we are clearly to assume that his writing is one). But the novel will dramatize the way they can lead into a state of total self-absorption, when they become such a constant preoccupation that everything in the world gets subordinated to a single, all-consuming idea. In exploring this possibility, Sterne seems to see it as simply an extreme instance of what is already our innate psychological nature: drawing on Locke's chapter on association in the Essay Concerning Human Understanding, he dramatizes the way ideas that seem to be unrelated become connected in our minds. The novel will explore the implications of these associations for scientific knowledge, for our everyday understanding of cause and effect, and for social interactions.
The digressiveness of the narrative, in the way it follows chains of association rather than sticking to a rigid, formal structure, is also a manifestation of this principle. Obsessively formal thinking can be a kind of hobby-horse. Walter is the prime example of this deluding approach to the world: "like all systematic reasoners, he would move both heaven and earth, and twist and torture everything in nature to support his hypothesis." The open form of Tristram's writing, then, is an effort to take in the world in all its variety and flux. It is a resistance, in part, to the distortions and manipulations that Tristam sees his father performing to force evidence for his preconceived ideas. It remains for the reader to decide whether Tristram's approach offers any more objective window on reality, or whether Tristram's own set of hobby-horses gives rise to just as much distortion.
Another open question is whether Sterne's attitude toward Tristram and his project is one of endorsement or irony. Tristram's frequent addresses to the reader (imagined variously and flexibly as Sir, Madam, Dear Reader, your worships, etc.) draw us into the novel. From Tristram's perspective, we are asked to be open-minded, and to follow his lead in an experimental kind of literary adventure. The gap between
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Tristram-the-author and Sterne-the-author, however, invites us not only to participate with Tristram, but also to assess his character and his narrative.
Commentary
In calling his work a history of "what passes in a man's mind," Tristram draws attention to the fact that, in writing his own "life and opinions," he will be portraying mostly a mental life. This reassurance is important in light of the fact that we have moved through two volumes without yet arriving at the point of the protagonist's birth. He addresses our expectations on this point not only to help us make sense of the work, but also because those expectations are part of what the work is about--as is the question of how exactly the mental life figures in the life of a man. Still, the comparison to Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding is a provocative one: does Tristram mean that Locke's highly theoretical book is actually more autobiographical and introspective than philosophical? Or is he suggesting that his own book, however personal it may be, will draw out general truths about human nature? The author problematizes, through considerations like these, the relationship between a history of an individual mind and a philosophical account of human thinking in general.
The comparison to Locke also raises the question of the genre of this text. Sterne's book could be considered a novel; Tristram's narrative is certainly not one. Tristram Shandy actually draws on the conventions of a number of genres, if often only to poke fun at them or turn them on their heads. Ultimately, the novel recasts these conventions into a unique structure of its own. Comedy, essay, and satire are all modes the author regularly takes up. He refers to other literary works, and also pronounces his own work's independence from them. The presence of whole documents from various non-literary disciplines (like the sermon in this volume, and the memorandum in the first) contributes likewise to the generic heterogeneity of the book. The inclusion of these texts also develops a thematic concern about the clash between everyday human life and the world of esoteric scholarship.
We begin to see more clearly, in this volume, that the novel is weaving together two major narrative lines: one is the sequence that involves the pivotal events of Tristram's early existence. The other traces the story of Uncle Toby, from his soldiering days to his hobby-horse and eventually to his lovelife. In this volume, the spotlight focuses on Toby while Tristram hangs suspended in the background, just on the verge of being born. As Tristram reveals more about his uncle's hobby- horse, the reader sees the ridiculous behaviors into which his obsession with fortifications carries him. We also, however, see him as genuinely kind and sympathetic: the famous anecdote of Toby and the fly invites us to empathize with him as strongly as Tristram does. Yet the overly sentimental tones in which the story is presented suggest that Sterne might be poking fun at the eighteenth-century culture of sensibility, into which Tristram's tale squarely falls. With the allusion to Toby's modesty in the first volume, and to his affair with the Widow Wadman in this volume, Tristram is outlining the trajectory Toby's part of the story will take.
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Conversation, in these chapters, is governed by dueling hobby-horses. As the male characters compete for the chance to vocalize their various intellectual obsessions, the dialogue degenerates, becoming at certain moments either unintelligible or utterly irrelevant. The real, consequential event that is taking place upstairs is all but forgotten in the stupidity and self-absorption of their discourse. Yet pregnancy becomes a metaphor for these (often abortive) intellectual labors: Tristram speaks of his father's failure "to be safely delivered of" his explanation about women, and he discusses Walter's speculative tendencies in similar terms: "It is the nature of an hypothesis, when once a man has conceived it, that it assimilates every thing to itself as proper nourishment; and, from the first moment of your begetting it, it generally grows the stronger by every thing you see, hear, read, or understand." When Tristram compares Walter's philosophizing with the labor going on upstairs, we are encouraged to think of Tristram's own writing project in the same way. The birth at the center of the novel is a figure for the idea of the "brainchild"--the process of mental construction that is the major subject of the book, and of which the book itself stands as an example.
Commentary
With the amusing portrait of Walter Shandy attempting to reach his right pocket with his left hand, Tristram caricatures the doggedness of his father's philosophical disposition. The visual image of Walter's physical straining and contortions stands as a figure for the absurd intellectual gymnastics he constantly performs in defense of his favorite theories. The episode of the squeaky hinge, similarly, highlights the fact that Walter Shandy's passion for the esoteric causes him to neglect more practical matters. The fact that Tristram still has not fixed the hinge even well after his father's death reminds us that there are strong resemblances between the father and the son, even though Tristram may try to downplay them.
Things do not look good for the child about to be delivered. Tristam has given us sufficient notice that the baby's nose is in jeopardy. The fact that Dr. Slop mangles Toby's hand with the forceps, in combination with Walter's theorizing about brain damage, leaves us cringing in anticipation of the disaster that is about to take place. The confusion about heads and hips firmly links the flattened nose with the possibility of castration. Tristram will deny any such symbolic circuitousness, asserting the literalness of his story. His characters, however, continue to reflect from time to time on the event as a near-miss, keeping the association active in the reader's mind.
In the discussion of time, Toby stumbles onto the Lockean definition of duration upon which Walter meant to expound. Sterne is attending here to the difference between clock-time and mental time. The explanation, though fairly abstruse, comments on the episode from the previous volume in which the elapsed time
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between Obadiah's departure and return became so utterly indeterminate. Each consciousness has its own pacing and tempo, set by whatever mental activity is going on at the moment. The effort to synchronize this tempo with an objective, external time can create strange effects, as when a short span of clock time "seems an age." One result of this discontinuity is to underscore the irreducible separation between individuals--the fact that people live in such separate worlds that each person is, in fact, a world unto himself. Locke's theory also lends an authoritative backing to Tristram's unconventional methodology in the temporal ordering of his narrative.
Tristram's elaborate wordplay on the word "bridge" points out that language, which we typically think of as a vehicle for communication, can actually be another medium for human isolation. The fact that the word suggests so many different contexts testifies both to the slipperiness of language and to the way an individual's private outlook colors his interpretations. Tristram also reminds us in the digression about the bridge that the story of Toby's amours is still forthcoming.
Commentary
The sexually suggestive story from Slawkenbergius reopens the question of whether a sexual innuendo is implied in Tristram's damaged nose. Tristram plays with his audience here: he wants the reader to feel the ridiculousness of the conventional assumption that everything in a story must have a hidden meaning. To create this effect, Tristram must simultaneously encourage and disappoint that expectation. Tristram cultivates this ambiguity in a variety of ways, including the sexual overtones in the description of Uncle Toby's wound to the groin and the incident in which the hot chestnut lands in Phutatorius's fly.
Time continues to be an important theme. In analyzing the way his life outpaces his narration of it, Tristram is stating in concrete terms an idea that has been a premise of the book all along: the extreme difficulty for even the most flexible and resourceful kind of writing to contain an immeasurably rich, complex, and diverse reality. These reflections do not fling Tristram into despair about his project, however. Rather, he seems to approach it with a new vigor, taking the abundance of material as a highly optimistic circumstance.
The accidental mischristening of the baby forces Walter to revise the explanation he gave earlier when he called this day "a chapter of chances." The particular misfortunes that have befallen him touch with perfect precision on each of Walter's most treasured obsessions, the points of his greatest vulnerability. They began to look too coincidental to be accidental, and he decides that he must be the victim of some heavenly conspiracy. Tristram, like his father, is susceptible to far-fetched ideas about the causation of events. They take the remotest precursor to everything that happens as its fundamental cause, overlooking more immediate factors. Such a view contributes to a fatalistic outlook: when a servant's knot is the "real" explanation for medical malpractice, human beings are seen as having very little control over the outcomes of their actions
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Commentary
Tristram's diatribe against borrowing from other authors sounds strikingly modern. He wrote in a time when good writing was supposed to be conventional and allusive, almost by definition; it was not until the Romantic period that originality became the cardinal literary virtue. Yet despite the progressiveness of the sentiment, we are forced to recognize that its author draws unabashedly from every source he can lay his hands on, albeit often putting his borrowed materials to strikingly new and original uses.
In chronicling the family's reactions to the news of Bobby's death, Tristram paints a balanced and thorough portrait of the various members of the household, their mannerisms, and their preoccupations. The tragic event of a family member's death, rather than bringing the household together, sends them each spinning off into their own private orbits. However, Tristram does not sentimentalize this fact any more than he does the fact of his brother's death. The story marches on, and the segment closes with Trim's reference to the story of Lieutenant Le Fever, a thread Tristram will pick up again later.
Walter hopes to compensate for the disasters of Tristram's conception, nose, and name by ensuring that his education is conducted flawlessly. The paradox of the Tristra-paedia is that even though it is meant to regularize Tristram's education, it actually becomes a source of its neglect. "He advanced so very slow with his work," Tristram tells us, "and I began to get forwards at such a rate," that the Tristra- paedia project becomes an exercise in futility. Tristram compares it with "drawing a sundial, for no better purpose than to be buried underground." Thus the project offers another example of the built-in obsolescence of writing. Like Tristram's own book, the Tristra-paedia fails to keep pace with the passage of time in the real world.
Tristram's accidental circumcision is not as grave, from either his father's point of view or his own, as his other mishaps. The scene unfolds as a comedy, and Tristram declines to draw out "the great moral" that is imbedded in this story, claiming to be too busy. In reality, the moral is double: the foolish fortification project has gotten so out of hand, and has so consumed the attention and distorted the judgment of its players, that it has begun to impinge on the everyday lives of the family in ways that are truly dangerous. On the other hand, Tristram credits Trim for his integrity in confessing his own fault when he could have allowed Susannah to take the blame; "How would your honors have behaved?" he asks his audience.
Commentary
The decisive event in this volume comes when Tristram announces a shift in the emphasis of the book. Up to this point, the major sequence of events has involved the conception, birth, baptism, and circumcision of the infant Tristram. Here the author transfers his focus to the adventures of his Uncle Toby. The transition is not as drastic
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as Tristram makes it out to be; we have been gathering pieces of Toby's story all along, as well as promises of more to come (though they have mainly occurred as digressions to the main narrative line). One of the most striking aspects of the book, however, is the degree to which the main plot trajectory often recedes into the background, often seeming like no more than a skeleton on which the author hangs a diversity of opinions and analyses.
Now, however, Tristram declares outright that he would like to leave his own story behind. But he feels he cannot do so: "I must go along with you to the end of the work." This statement reveals the fact that the story of the infant Tristram does not exhaust the "life and opinions" of Tristram Shandy. Toby's story is just as important in disclosing the mental life of the author. As if to prove this fact, Tristram drops the issues of the window sash accident, the tutor, and the breeches and whisks the story back to the early days of Toby's obsessive hobbies. One of the most notable things about this particular hobby-horse is that it keeps Toby firmly rooted in the past, emphasizing re-creations and re-enactments. When the end of the war suspends his pleasures, Toby does look to the future; he hopes for a new war to break out--but only so that he can relegate it just as firmly to the past by retracing its every movement. The intensity of Toby's immersion in this imaginary world is such that it incorporates and transforms everything that comes within his purview.
Commentary
With this volume, Tristram disrupts the patterns his narrative has followed so far. Rather than continuing to build (however haltingly) toward the story of Uncle Toby's romance, he shifts the scene far from the Shandy household in order to relate his own travels to the Continent. From the moment he arrives in Calais, Tristram begins to parody the conventions of travel-writing. He questions whether the sights he sees are worth describing at all, and then describes Calais in such a way as to make it sound identical to any other place. He is more interested in people (even fictional ones) than places, and brags that "by seizing every handle, of what size or shape soever, which chance held out to me in this journey--I turned my plain into a city--I was always in company." He claims to have learned a great deal about human nature as a result.
His ultimate interest, nevertheless, is in himself: not only his own opinions and wanderings, but the strange interaction between the text's own present and past. The number of Tristrams (Tristram depicted simultaneously at different points of his life) we have access to is multiplied in this section. The narrative contains two: the young man on the Grand Tour with his family, and the older man who feels the presence of Death and worries about being able to finish his writing. The voice of the author is still separate from both of these: he is no longer in France, but has returned to his study to record these fairly recent adventures. The author is enchanted with this strange phenomenon of memory by which lived repetitions can create a doubleness in memory.
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For all the discussion about fleeing Death, Tristram still does not betray any real anxiety about his health or his mortality. He declares from the beginning of the volume that his spirits never fail him, and the narrative testifies to the truth of that claim. He is as exuberant and farcical as ever. Nor has he lost any of his ribaldry. He continues to make fun of the prudish morality he expects from his reader, as in the story of the Abbess. The Abbess is both more and less modest than Tristram, for it is she who reveals the dirty words that he so scrupulously withholds, yet he mocks her elaborate measures not to actually say the words. This episode is meant to expose the legalistic absurdity of prudish standards of decency. Tristram is aware that even the most censorious readers have two ears--one that cranes toward the bawdy, and another that is repelled
Commentary
This volume is comprised of a series of delays and restarts, as if Tristram is reluctant to get to the events that will terminate the story because, in doing so, he will force himself off the stage. He is running to keep ahead of the end of his own novel in much the same way that he flew from Death in the last volume: not desperately or fearfully, but enjoying the sights along the way. "One would think I took a pleasure in running into difficulties of this kind," Tristram remarks when he gets hung up in the sixth chapter. He then goes on to demonstrate that he does take pleasure in them, turning the pressing concerns that push him to finish the novel (poverty and illness) into jokes. He got sick while frolicking in Flanders, and prefers to think of the happy cause rather than its unfortunate consequence. He then turns the serious condition of his lungs into a satire of medical professionals, whose diagnoses amount to nothing more than elementary math.
In one of these digressions, Tristram makes the provocative statement, "I am resolved never to read any book but my own, as long as I live." How could he read any other? By this point in the novel we are to understand that Tristram's book, in its broadest sense, amounts to the very workings of his own mind. Everything he encounters (or reads) passes through that same filter, which is itself the substance of the book. Everything Tristram has read is a part of his narrative, almost by definition; indeed much of it is there in a quite literal sense, and he defines the scope of his book so that more can always be included. Tristram's book, in this regard, is his very being--his life and opinions are precisely what he cannot avoid or escape.
When the war ends, Toby really does not know what to do with himself. The affair with Widow Wadman helps him to transition out of a mindset obsessed with the past (which has become translated by means of his hobby into an imaginary and even delusory present). The experience of love and the prospect of marriage require him to think about the present reality and to look forward to the future in ways to which he has become unaccustomed. "It is not easy," he tells Trim, "for one, bred up as thou and I have been to arm, who seldom looks further forward than to the end of his musket, or backwards beyond his knapsack, to know much about this matter [of
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chronology]." Toby is trying to encourage Trim in his storytelling, but he could just as easily be speaking about himself.
Commentary
At the end of the fourth volume Tristram writes, "The thing I lament is, that things have crowded so in upon me, that I have not been able to get into that part of my work, towards which I have all the way looked forwards, with so much earnest desire; and that is the campaigns, but especially the amours of my uncle Toby." Tristram finally leads us to the long-promised conclusion of his Uncle Toby's affair, and at last we learn the reason behind Toby's much-vaunted modesty.
Toby's nervousness and innocence is endearing, and the presentation of the love affair as a battle seems in many ways a more apt use of the military metaphor than all their fruitless and obsessive hobbies. The story of Trim's brother Tom and his successful courtship serves in one way as an inspiration to Toby's efforts. On the other hand, the mention of the Inquisition leaves a lingering suggestion of the marriage state as a kind of prison, contributing to Toby's hesitancy. The prison metaphor certainly also extends to the question of censorship and hovers over Tristram's digression into the question of indecency in his writing.
The unhappy end to the Wadman affair recalls Toby's confession, in Volume 2, that he understands "nothing at all" about women. His naivete here confirms that fact, but it also induces a somewhat bleak answer to the implicit question of what the nature of women actually is. Walter's lecture on the lustfulness of women, just before the novel ends, is a conclusion to his unfinished oration on the same topic earlier in the book. Women seem to bear the brunt of blame and contempt here, especially in light of the attention devoted earlier in the volume to cataloguing Mrs. Shandy's faults. Trim actually makes a more sympathetic statement when he suggests that women are often "put upon...'to please others more than themselves.'" Walter's final speech is so out of tune with the playful attitude the book as a whole takes toward sexuality that we cannot imagine the author endorsing such a view. Where women fit into Sterne's intricate treatment of sexuality and gender remains a complicated question.
The issues of fertility, sterility, and sexuality dominate the closing chapters, bringing the focus back to the same set of concerns with which the book began. The reference to Walter's ritualized first-Sunday-of-the-month activities creates another satisfying symmetry. The final chapter brings together all the major characters to listen to one last cock-and-bull story, effecting a self-ironical reprise that serves as the author's farewell.
Jane Eyre(1847)
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By Charlotte Bronte
Character List:
Jane Eyre: The protagonist and narrator of Jane Eyre, Jane develops from an angry, rebellious, 10-year-old orphan into a sensitive, artistic, maternal, and fiercely independent young woman. While Jane's social class‹continually poor in an atmosphere of wealth‹is one of her biggest barriers, it best serves to underscore Jane's need for independence, both financial and emotional. She rejects marriages to Rochester and St. John because she understands she will have to forfeit her independence in the unions, and marries Rochester only when she has attained the financial independence and self-esteem to maintain a marriage of equality. This self-esteem is gained through Jane's making her mark in various worlds‹Lowood, Thornfield, and particularly Moor House‹in which she is valued for her humanity and values. Paralleling Jane's desire for independence is her search for a proper set of religious values. She rejects the extremist models of Brocklehurst, Helen Burns, and St. John, eventually settling on a spirituality of love and connection.
Edward Rochester: The owner of Thornfield, Rochester's passionate affair with Jane constitutes the middle section of the novel and comments on Victorian gender and class relations. However, the romance is scuttled on two accounts. First, his higher social standing convinces Jane that their marriage could never be on equitable grounds. More pressing is Rochester's previous marriage to the insane, and still living, Bertha Mason. Rochester is an interesting twist on the tragic hero; though not handsome, he is a brooding, aloof, wealthy man with a dark past from which he cannot escape. Jane rejects his marriage proposal after she learns of Bertha, not only because she feels it would flout the law, but perhaps because Bertha's marriage is a cautionary symbol of Victorian marriage: despite Rochester's best intentions and Jane's equal intellectual standing, he may still end up imprisoning Jane in his own way through matrimony, just as he has imprisoned Bertha (his last recourse in the matter, though). Ironically, when Jane finally does agree to marry Rochester after having gained her independence, the fire Bertha set to Thornfield has blinded him. Thus, he grows dependent on Jane, tipping the balance in her favor. On a kinder note, Brontë closes the novel with Rochester's sight regained in one eye‹the marriage is restored to equality.
St. John Rivers: The evangelist who takes Jane in at Moor House, brother to Diana and Mary and, it turns out, cousin to Jane, St. John is the last of the three major Christian models Jane observes. Stoical, cold, devoted to Christianity and nothing else, St. John's religion is far too detached for Jane; she observes that he still knows little about God's love. Jane shoots down his request for her to marry him to accompany him on missionary work in India. While she would gladly accompany him as his cousin (or adopted sister), marrying him under such circumstances would mean forfeiting her rights to a life of passion and love. Losing her autonomy in such a way is unacceptable to her, while accompanying him without marriage violates St. John's sense of propriety. Jane's rejection of St. John's advances seems to spur her return to Rochester, her one chance for more spiritual passion. Indeed, she has a mystical experience concerning Rochester while St. John talks to her.
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Helen Burns: Though she dies early on in Jane's time at Lowood, Helen is perhaps the fourth-most important character in the novel for her symbolic value. Upholding the extreme Christian doctrine of tolerance and forgiveness at all costs, Helen turns the other cheek when accepting all the cruel punishments handed down at Lowood. When she dies of consumption, Jane seems to absorb the lesson that the meek shall not inherit the earth. While Jane rejects Helen's brand of religion, she does incorporate it later on, especially when she relies on the spiritual kindness of strangers after leaving Thornfield.
Mr. Brocklehurst: The head of Lowood, Brocklehurst's evangelic hypocrisy is the first Christian model rejected outright. Depriving the pupils at the school of necessities and justifying it with self-righteous speeches, Brocklehurst uses the money from contributors to line his own pockets. He is eventually replaced as head of the school.
Miss Temple: The beautiful, kindly superintendent of Lowood, Miss Temple serves as one of the novel's surrogate maternal figures for Jane.
Mrs. Reed: Jane's cruel aunt, Mrs. Reed favors her own spoiled children and harshly punishes Jane for her impudence, even locking her up in the "red-room." On her deathbed, Mrs. Reed reveals that she hated Jane ever since her husband took her in as an orphan and loved Jane more than the Reed children.
Bessie Lee: Jane's only saving grace at Gateshead, the servant Bessie is Jane's first maternal surrogate figure, bonding with Jane through songs and stories.
John Reed: Jane's bullying cousin, brother to Eliza and Georgiana, John eventually commits suicide to escape from his massive gambling debts.
Georgiana Reed: The prettier of the two Reed girls, Georgiana's beauty makes her a spoiled, selfish child, though she befriends Jane as Mrs. Reed dies. Georgiana has few ambitions outside of socializing, and she ends up marrying a wealthy man.
Eliza Reed: Described by Jane as headstrong and selfish, Eliza is less pretty than her sister Georgiana, and later becomes a nun in France.
Mr. Lloyd: The kindly apothecary who suggests Jane attend school at Lowood.
Miss Scatcherd: A nasty teacher at Lowood who is cruel to Helen.
Mrs. Fairfax: The elderly housekeeper at Thornfield who warns Jane against marrying Rochester.
Adèle Varens: The French-speaking, scampish ward of Mr. Rochester that Jane tutors.
Céline Varens: Adèle's mother, Céline was a French opera dancer Rochester had an affair with in his youth in Paris. Though Céline cheated on and humiliated Rochester, and though it is doubtful that Adèle is his biological daughter, Rochester nonetheless took care of Adèle when Céline abandoned her.
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Bertha Mason: Rochester's insane wife, Bertha was formerly a beautiful Creole woman from a prominent West Indies family (which had, unbeknownst to Rochester, a history of madness). After growing insane over the course of their union, Rochester imprisoned Bertha in the attic at Thornfield under the watch of Grace Poole, but Bertha occasionally escapes and wreaks havoc. Her last outburst‹setting fire to Thornfield‹leads to her own death.
Grace Poole: The seamstress at Thornfield who guards the third story prison of Bertha Mason; Grace's fondness for drink occasionally allows Bertha to escape.
Miss Ingram: The young, beautiful, and wealthy society lady who tries to woo Rochester and nearly succeeds in marrying him for his money.
Richard Mason: The handsome acquaintance of Rochester's from West Indies, Mason is the brother of Bertha Mason. With Briggs, he successfully stops Rochester's remarriage to Jane.
Mr. Briggs: The solicitor from London who publicly reveals Rochester's marriage to Bertha Mason. Briggs is also instrumental in giving Jane her proper inheritance after her uncle dies.
Diana Rivers: Jane's cousin at Moor House, Jane feels a special bond to the charismatic, independent Diana. Diana supports Jane's decision not to marry St. John.
Mary Rivers: Jane's cousin at Moor House, Mary is, like her sister Diana, a strong, independent woman.
Hannah Rivers: The old servant at Moor House.
Rosamond Oliver: The benefactress of Jane's school, the beautiful, angelic Rosamond loves St. John, but he cannot return her affections.
Mr. Oliver: Rosamond's father.
John Eyre: Jane's uncle (as well as the uncle of the Rivers siblings), John made his fortune in Madeira and leaves his vast fortune to Jane.
Mr. Reed: Jane's other uncle, Mr. Reed lovingly took Jane in when her parents died, and when he was dying made Mrs. Reed promise to look after her as if Jane were one of her own; Mrs. Reed breaks the promise.
Major Themes:
The need for love contrasted with the need for independence: The main quest in Jane Eyre is Jane's search for her kindred spirits, for a sense of belonging and love, but her search is constantly tempered by her need for independence. Jane begins the novel as an unloved orphan and overly relies on the love of others for her happiness. But she gains self-esteem through the loving surrogate maternal figure of Miss Temple and her own success at Lowood. When Rochester, seeing in Jane his
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intellectual equal, asks her to marry him, she ultimately rejects him, feeling that their marriage‹one based on unequal social standing‹would compromise her autonomy. Jane similarly denies St. John's marriage proposal, as it would be one of duty, not of passion. Only when she gains financial and emotional autonomy, after having received her inheritance and the familial love of her cousins, can Jane accept Rochester's offer. In fact, the blinded Rochester is more dependent on her (at least until he regains his sight). Within her marriage to Rochester, Jane finally feels completely liberated, bringing her dual quests for love and independence to a satisfying conclusion.
Jane's search for religion: Jane receives three different models of Christianity throughout the novel, all of which she rejects either partly or completely before finding her own way. Brocklehurst's Evangelicalism is full of hypocrisy, spouting off on the benefits of privation and humility while he indulges in a life of luxury and emotionally abuses the students at Lowood. Also at Lowood, Helen Burns's Christianity of absolute forgiveness and tolerance is too meek for Jane's tastes; Helen constantly suffers her punishments silently and eventually dies. St. John, on the other hand, practices a Christianity of utter piousness, righteousness, and principle to the exclusion of any passion. Jane rejects his marriage proposal as much for his detached brand of spirituality as for its certain intrusion on her independence.
However, Jane frequently looks to God in her own way throughout the book, particularly after she learns of Rochester's previous marriage and before St. John takes her in to Moor House. She has also learned from Helen's forgiveness without being a pushover, and returns to Rochester when she feels she is ready to accept him again. The spiritual culmination of the book is her and Rochester's mystical experience that brings them together through a spirituality of profound love.
The barriers of social class: Shot through Jane Eyre is Brontë's critique of Victorian class differences. Jane is consistently a poor individual within a wealthy environment, particularly with the Reeds and at Thornfield. Her poverty creates numerous problems for her, including low self-esteem and the denial of opportunities. The beautiful Miss Ingram's higher social standing, for instance, makes her Jane's main competitor for Rochester. However, Jane's rising from poverty clearly makes her a better person‹few of the rich people in Jane Eyre receive flattering portraits‹and she generously divides her inheritance with her cousins. Jane is also determined to be financially independent and not reliant on Rochester for her livelihood, and she rejects his marriage proposal largely on these grounds. Jane occasionally stands up for herself by avowing that her poverty does not make her an inferior person.
The barriers of gender: Alongside Brontë's critique of Victorian class hierarchy is a subtler condemnation of the gender gap. The novel begins with Jane's imprisonment in the "red-room" at Gateshead, and later in the book Bertha's imprisonment in the attic at Thornfield is revealed. The connection implies that Jane's imprisonment is symbolic of her lower social class, while Bertha's containment is symbolic of Victorian marriage‹all women, if they marry under unequal circumstances as Bertha did, will end up going crazy and confined by their husbands in some manner. While it is difficult to separate Jane's economic and gender obstacles, it seems clear that her being a woman prevents her from venturing out into the world as many of the male characters do‹Rochester, her Uncle John, and St. John, for instance. Indeed, her desire
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for worldly experience ironizes her last name, as "Eyre" derives from an Old French word meaning "to travel."
Fire and ice: The motifs of fire and ice line the novel from start to finish. Fire is viewed as positive, creative, and loving, while ice is destructive, negative, and hateful. The cruel or detached characters, such as Mrs. Reed and St. John, are associated with ice, while the warmer characters, such as Jane, Miss Temple, and even Rochester, are linked with fire. Interestingly, fire is positive even in destruction, as when Jane burns Helen's humiliating "Slattern" crown, and with the two fires Bertha sets. The first brings Jane and Rochester closer together, while the second destroys Thornfield and leads to Bertha's death, thus liberating Rochester from his shackled past. Although the fire also blinds Rochester, this incident helps Jane see that he is now dependent on her, and erases any misgivings she may have about inequality in their marriage.
Gothic elements: Jane Eyre is filled with many elements that comprise the late 18th- and early 19th-century Gothic novel. These include the prevalence of mysteries (Rochester's past); suspense (Rochester again); a ghostly atmosphere (Jane thinks she sees her uncle's ghost, and Bertha is also a ghostly figure of sorts); a setting in a castle (Thornfield); the appearance of a fortune-teller (Rochester disguises himself as one); "damsels in distress" (this is given a twist: Bertha is something of a "damsel in distress" when imprisoned in the attic, and while Jane is at times helpless and even faints in the red-room, she also inverts this paradigm when she saves Rochester from the first fire); and romantic elements of unrequited, passionate love (Jane and Rochester).
Surrogate mothers: After receiving no parental love from Mrs. Reed, Jane finds surrogate maternal figures throughout the novel. Bessie, Miss Temple, and even Mrs. Fairfax care for Jane and give her the love and guidance of an older woman she needs. She returns the favor by caring for Adèle and the students at her school
Analysis:
Volume I
Chapter 1
Immediately the reader is positioned on Jane's side through careful novelistic craftsmanship. From the first page, Jane is oppressed, sent off while her cousins play. We learn through exposition from John that she is a penniless orphan, dependent on the heartless Reed family; indeed, social class will play an important role in the rest of the novel. She is also a sensitive girl given to flights of fancy while reading, but she also displays her strength in her defense against John. All the elements are in place for a classic "Bildungsroman," the literary genre originating in the German literally as "novel of formation" or, as it is generally known, the "coming-of-age" story. In the Bildungsroman, classic examples of which are Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther, Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn, and J.D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye, the young protagonist matures through a series of obstacles and defines his or her identity.
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Chapter 2
The red-room has both deathly associations (red as the color of blood, the room's containing a miniature version of the dead Mr. Reed, and Jane's belief that she sees a ghost in it) and is a clear symbol of imprisonment. Throughout the novel, Jane will be imprisoned in more metaphorical ways, particularly relating to class, gender, and religion. Ironically, although John is the root cause of Jane's imprisonment here, the three aggressors in this chapter are all women, and Jane's one savior, it appears, was her uncle.
The chapter also introduces Gothic details with the ghost Jane thinks she sees and the revelation that Mr. Reed's body lies beneath the church. The Gothic novel, popularized in the 18th-century, utilizes supernatural, suspenseful, and mysterious settings and events to create an atmosphere of horror and morbidity. The Gothic novel is also characterized by damsels in distress (and women are frequently the protagonists); though Jane faints here, common for Gothic women, she proves herself strong-willed and determined to fight back against her oppressors.
Chapter 3
The conflicts of social class, which were suggested in Chapter I by John's taunting of Jane, deepen here. Jane has the odd situation of being poor within a rich family. As such, her notions of poverty are skewed; as she admits, children "have not much idea of industrious, working, respectable povertyŠpoverty for me was synonymous with degradation." Her parents, too, ran into problems with class, as her rich mother's marriage to her poor father directly resulted in both their deaths.
Adding insult to injury, Bessie's song drums home Jane's status as a "poor orphan child." Jane, of course, is poor in both pitiable and pecuniary terms, without anyone to love her and without any money for self-sufficiency.
Chapter 4
Jane's love for her doll constitutes one of the major themes of the novel, that "human beings must love something." However, being loved is just as important, and the only affection Jane receives is from Bessie, who acts as a surrogate mother figure.
Religion makes its first formal appearance in the novel through Mr. Brocklehurst. Already, we can see the religious hypocrisies Brontë exposes; he believes the deceitful Mrs. Reed over Jane, and relishes the seemingly heartless reformations that take place at school.
Fire and ice are running motifs throughout the novel; the former is associated with Jane and with positive creation, while the latter is associated with her antagonists and with negative destruction. Brontë is often subtle with these symbolic attachments; Mrs. Reed's eyes, for instance, are twice compared to ice in this chapter: "herŠcold, composed grey eyeŠher eye of ice continued to dwell freezingly on mine."
Chapter 5
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Immediately we see that Lowood's religious education does not necessarily mean the orphans are treated well. Their food is basically inedible, their lodgings are cramped, and some of the teachers are cruel. Brontë drops a few hints about the suspicious goings-on when Helen reveals that "benevolent-minded ladies and gentlemen" make up the tuition and that Mr. Brocklehurst is the treasurer of the house.
Another possible surrogate mother figure arrives in the form of Miss Temple. Her name, with its religious overtones, indicates that she is the only teacher at Lowood who truly upholds the Christian ethic.
Chapter 6
Helen presents to Jane her Christian philosophy of forgiveness and endurance: one must bear the sins of others, turn the other cheek, and love thy enemy. Jane, of course, is at odds with this idea, believing that standing up for herself frequently means fighting back. We have already witnessed several situations in which she availed herself of these tactics, particularly the fight with John and her lashing out at Mrs. Reed. The former led to her imprisonment in the red-room, while the latter was a short-lived victory that soon turned into remorse. While Helen's Christianity is not useful for Jane, neither is Jane's attitude of self-defense; she must find and develop her own brand of spirituality.
Chapter 7
Helen's philosophy of Christian forgiveness is tested as Mr. Brocklehurst unjustly punishes Jane. Though Jane does not fight back, she inwardly seethes and thinks, "I was no Helen Burns."
Mr. Brocklehurst's Christianity shows more hypocritical flaws. Though he claims that privation leads to purity, his relatives are dressed to the nines. He even wants to cut off one girl's naturally curly hair, demonstrating his lust for absolute power over others.
Chapter 8
Jane explicates her need for love from others, while Helen outlines her belief that spirituality is enough. While it is clear that Jane will not accept these notions, Helen is correct in noting that Jane needs to be less reliant on others. Jane will have to find a combination of self-reliance and love from others.
As we have seen before, ice is a motif in Jane Eyre for cruel, negative destruction, and here fire fans out as a symbol of goodness and creation. The fire in Miss Temple's room warms the girls, as does Miss Temple's kindness, conversation, and treats. More interestingly, Jane burns Helen's shameful "Slattern" crown in fire; even when destructive, fire is a sort of positive destruction that obliterates evil in the world.
Chapter 9
Jane's devotion to Helen is moving, and Helen lives out her Christian beliefs to her dying day. Jane continues to question Helen's unshakable faith‹she wonders, though
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does not speak aloud, if heaven truly does exist. Helen completes her representation as a Christ figure for Jane, dying so Jane can learn more of what it means to be Christian; though Jane is not willing to accept fully everything Helen espouses, the "Resurgam" tablet (placed by Jane, it seems) indicates that she has incorporated her beliefs into her own ideology.
Chapter 10
This brief transitional chapter jumps eight years through Jane's life, during which she matures greatly from an angry girl bent on self-survival into a mostly independent young woman seeking to serve others.
The mention of Mr. Eyre's visit to Gateshead also suggests he will reappear in some form later on, adding suspense to the narrative.
Chapter 11
The introductory chapter to Thornfield plants a few narrative seeds. First, there is an obvious correspondence between Jane and Adèle, both orphans, although Adèle's living conditions are far better. Rochester's background is mysterious, made more so by Adèle's belief that he "'has not kept his word'" to her by constantly abandoning her and Mrs. Fairfax's opaque label that he is "'peculiar.'" The ghostly laugh at the end of the chapter, emanating from an area "like a corridor in some Bluebeard's castle," also ratchets up the Gothic suspense of the novel, as do Mrs. Fairfax's curious commands to Grace.
Chapter 12
Jane's craving for experience apart from stereotypical female experience is explained in a lengthy passage: "It is narrow-minded in their more privileged fellow-creatures [men] to say that [women] ought to confine themselves to making pudding and knitting stockings, to playing on the piano and embroidering bags." She goes on, and the conflict is clear; Jane desires a life of action and independence unavailable to her as a woman.
Rochester is further cloaked in mystery in Jane's meeting with him by his refusal to identify himself to her and by his somewhat standoffish manner. Still, Jane asserts some power at the beginning of their relationship, since Rochester is placed in a weakened position‹his sprained ankle from the fall‹and is reliant on Jane for aid. Another physical impediment forcing Rochester's dependence on Jane will arise later in the novel.
Chapter 13
The mystery concerning Rochester deepens, and this constitutes the major dramatic thrust of the novel. Gothic novels usually have a romantic component that revolves around passionate, unrequited love; Rochester's dark, brooding, nature and secretive past makes him an ideal candidate for such a love.
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Part of Jane's struggle with Rochester will be assertion of her independence and equality. As we can already see, Rochester only begrudgingly admits Jane's positive qualities, criticizing her even when praising her watercolors. Nevertheless, he seems to regard her as his intellectual equal.
Chapter 14
Regardless of what Rochester says about his superiority in regards to experience with Jane, it is clear from his lengthy, involved discussion with her that he views her, at least, as his intellectual equal. Though she has a fraction of his worldly experience, Jane acquits herself well with the complicated topics Rochester brings up, and even earns his approval at points for her thoughts. Their flirtation also unofficially begins, as Jane admits to herself that though "most people would have thought him an ugly man," he carries himself with a charismatic, detached confidence.
Chapter 15
Beulah" means "marriage" in Hebrew; at Volume I's poetic end, then, Jane is entertaining thoughts of marrying Rochester. However, she feels there is a "counteracting breeze" that makes this impossible.
All the allusions to the odd goings-on in the attic come to a head here. Rochester is obviously trying to sweep this episode under the rug, as his desire to pin its blame on Grace comes across as disingenuous.
However, there is nothing disingenuous about his thanks to Jane for having saved his life, and his reluctance for her to leave tells something about his wounded heart. After his bitter betrayal by Céline, he is yearning for a constant love based on more than mere physical attraction, and Jane seems to provide that.
Volume II,
Chapter 1
The chapter is split into two sections: the plot developments surrounding the fire, and Jane's preoccupation with Rochester.
It is clear that Grace is probably not the culprit behind the curtains, or else Rochester would have fired her. If anything, she knows something about it that she must withhold from Jane, and the odd laugh Jane heard is most likely behind the mystery.
Jane's sense of inadequacy compared to Blanche Ingram pivots around appearance but more around class. Though Rochester is not handsome, his class and noble manners make him attractive, but Jane's personality, for all its sparkle, cannot make up for her relative poverty, especially compared to the beautiful and wealthy Miss Ingram.
Chapter 2
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Although Miss Ingram's beauty and confident manner take center stage in the drawing room, the attraction between Rochester and Jane is evident after Jane leaves, especially in his parting words to her. Miss Ingram demonstrates the snobbery and classism that strikes at the heart of Jane's curious position that she holds both at Thornfield and previously at Gateshead: poverty in the midst of great wealth. The flip comments of the society ladies about their governesses‹and their casual ignorance of Jane in the room‹make Jane a virtual prisoner of her social standing.
Yet another prisoner lurks at Thornfield: Grace. In her third-floor hideaway, she is "as companionless as a prisoner in his dungeon." "Prisoner" is a loaded word for Jane Eyre, suggesting imprisonment far beyond physical confines. However, the mysterious events and hints surrounding Grace suggest she may not be companionless, after all.
Chapter 3
The marriage pantomime has obvious parallels to Jane's romantic anxieties. While she cannot believe Rochester actually prefers Miss Ingram to her, she does believe he can only marry someone of Miss Ingram's elevated social position. Jane is no bride, but a "Bridewell," imprisoned by her social class and confined to limited romantic possibilities.
The Gothic element of the novel continues with the fortune-teller. Brontë creates suspense both by ending the chapter on a cliffhanger‹what will Jane's fortune reveal?‹and by not revealing the nature of Miss Ingram's disturbing fortune.
Chapter 4
The Gothic element of fortune-teller mingles with the novel's Gothic romance once Rochester reveals his disguise; mysticism and the supernatural give way to Rochester's burgeoning love for Jane. The reader is also delighted to see that he is aware of Miss Ingram's mercenary designs on his estate. Rochester's ability to disguise himself also speaks of his hidden, secretive identity.
In a novel that otherwise focuses on Jane's internal world, Brontë keeps the action moving by constantly introducing new pieces of the mystery of Rochester's past; here, Rochester's feelings concerning Mason apparently reverse completely without any explanation.
Chapter 5
It is unclear what prompts Rochester to change his tack with Jane; obviously, he is discussing her in his hypothetical story before revealing that Miss Ingram, supposedly, is his object of desire. Jane describes Rochester's face as "losing all its softness and gravity, and becoming harsh and sarcastic" when he names Miss Ingram. There is little doubt that Rochester prefers Jane to Miss Ingram, so to bolster the romantic plot of Jane Eyre, Brontë continues piling on to the mystery of the room on the third story. Whoever is in there‹and how it relates to the "error" Rochester committed in his youth‹is preventing Rochester's marrying Jane, much more so than the presence of Miss Ingram does.
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Chapter 6
Rochester's impending marriage is vague. Not only does Rochester avoid answering questions about it, he only says that his carriage "'will suit Mrs. Rochester exactly.'" The name could apply to any woman who marries him and, as such, leaves open the possibility that he intends to marry Jane.
Jane's ample growth is demonstrated when she returns to Gateshead. Whereas John Reed fell into a dissolute lifestyle, Georgiana became a spoiled debutante, and Eliza became an aloof, emotionless woman, Jane has dedicated her life to helping others with humility. The initial cold reception from the Reed girls, then, does not disturb Jane as it once might have, nor does Mrs. Reed's unforgiving hatred on her deathbed.
In fact, Jane tells her aunt that "'you have my full and free forgiveness: ask now for God's; and be at peace.'" Jane seems to have found a third way with religion, far from the evangelical posturing of Mr. Brocklehurst and removed from the all-encompassing and self-destructive tolerance of Helen Burns. Jane is forgiving for the past ills done her by Mrs. Reed; they did not destroy her, but only made her stronger. Helen, on the other hand, seems to have been destroyed by her utter forgiveness. The meek, in Jane's eyes, shall not inherit the earth, but neither do the powerful.
In the midst of this emotional chapter, Brontë throws in a twist with the letter from John Eyre. He hints at having accumulated a fortune, so Jane's economic status is again complicated: a poor tutor who squabbles with her wealthy employer over a few pounds before she leaves for Gateshead, she may finally be due some money.
Chapter 7
Rochester's impending marriage is vague. Not only does Rochester avoid answering questions about it, he only says that his carriage "'will suit Mrs. Rochester exactly.'" The name could apply to any woman who marries him and, as such, leaves open the possibility that he intends to marry Jane.
Chapter 8
The long build-up to Jane and Rochester's romance culminates in Rochester's marriage proposal, but a greater change comes about within Jane. Oppressed much of her life because of her poverty, she asserts her validity as a person to Rochester, regardless of her material wealth: "'Do you think, because I am poor, obscure, plain, and little, I am soulless and heartless? ‹ You think wrong! ‹ I have as much soul as you, ‹ and full as much heart!'"
Jane has so much soul and heart, in fact, that she is not necessarily willing to submit her desires to those of someone else. While her search for being loved drives Jane Eyre, Jane is understanding that attachment to others comes at a price, and she will not sacrifice her autonomy: "'I am a free human being with an independent will; which I now exert to leave you.'" Her relationship with Rochester, however, promises the opportunity for a balance of love and independence.
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Chapter 9
Jane discusses her shock at hearing Rochester call her "Mrs. Rochester": "'Because you gave me a new name ‹ Jane Rochester; and it seems so strange.'" She reminds us that the title of the book is Jane Eyre, and that this name will always define her identity as an independent woman. "Eyre" is a 14th-century word that means "a circuit traveled by an itinerant justice in medieval England or the court he presided over," and derives from the Old French word "errer," "to travel." If this etymology was Brontë's intention, then the name is ironic. While Jane travels far mentally as she develops into a woman‹she is an avid reader, an artist, a musician‹her physical journeys are quite circumscribed compared to those of the globe-trotting Rochester.
Jane asserts her desire for both economic and emotional independence. She wants to earn her keep at Thornfield, and her teasing of Rochester, as she calls it, is to ensure she does not completely submit her will to his.
Chapter 10
It should be obvious by now that the woman who entered Jane's room is related to the laughter from the third story and from the fire in Rochester's room (especially because the woman uses a candle as she investigates Jane's closet). It is also clear from the ripped wedding veil that the woman harbors hostility toward the wedding, and that Rochester is still covering something up by claiming the woman was Grace.
Jane's devotion to children, both in her dream and when sleeping with Adèle, also speaks, as she says, to her departure from her childhood identity of Jane Eyre and her ascent into married adulthood as Jane Rochester.
Chapter 11
The loose ends are tied up with the revelation of Rochester's marriage to Bertha: the laughter from the third story, Rochester's early error in life and desire for a new wife, Mrs. Fairfax's warning to Jane to be on her guard, the fire in Rochester's room, and the interloper in Jane's room. Just as Jane has trouble deciding how to judge Rochester, the reader, too, is in a difficult position, especially since the times are different now. Obviously, in modern times Rochester would simply divorce his insane wife and be done with her; in Victorian England, such an arrangement was not so easy, and his imprisonment of Bertha would not be considered quite so barbaric.
Jane narrates the bad turn of events with relentless imagery of ice: "A Christmas frost had come at midsummer; a white December storm had whirled over June; ice glazed the ripe applesŠ" As before, ice symbolizes destruction, cruelty, hopelessness, and death. In this moment of despair, Jane reaches out to God. While she does not have blind faith in Him (as evidenced by her inability to speak the prayer), God is her last salvation and her last chance (so she believes) to be loved by another.
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Volume III,
Chapter 1
Although Jane's departure from Thornfield is her third major exit from a place after Gateshead and Lowood, it is by far her hardest decision. If she stays, she enjoys the love of a man whom she admits she worships, as well as the luxury that his wealth affords (but this is of secondary concern to Jane).
However, if she stays, she feels she will lose self-respect, and more than the love of others, Jane's quest is for self-love and independence. As she puts it to herself, "I care for myself. The more solitary, the more friendless, the more unsustained I am, the more I will respect myself."
Why will marriage destroy Jane's independence? Jane continually uses the excuse of Rochester's marriage to Bertha, but this is most likely not the true reason‹after all, she was at times hesitant about marriage before she learned about Bertha. Rather, we can view Rochester's marriage to Bertha as a symbol for the inequalities of Victorian marriage‹especially in the way it imprisons (literally, in Bertha's case) the female. Jane is worried about similar imprisonment, particularly from Rochester's higher social standing and the proprietary feelings he has for her (note his frequent pet names for her).
Rochester's marriage to Bertha has other implications. Bertha has been identified as a Creole, meaning she is white but was born in the British-colonized West Indies, or she has some actual black ancestry. If we read Bertha's status as a metaphorically imprisoned "colony" of the British empire, then it is safe to assume that Brontë saw the same issues of colonization in marriage.
Chapter 2
Jane, seeking autonomy throughout the novel, finally receives it‹and promptly abandons it. Freed from the bonds of marriage at Thornfield, she learns that truly independent living means sleeping outdoors, scavenging for food, and giving up all dignity. She leans more heavily on God in this chapter, and, indeed, it is a religious man, St. John, who proves her salvation. At the chapter's end, Jane relinquishes whatever independence she previously claimed: "'I will trust you. If I were a masterless and stray dog, I know that you would not turn me from your hearth tonight: as it is, I really have no fear. Do with me and for me as you likeŠ'" She willfully succumbs to the identity of a stray dog, putting her faith in others rather than in herself.
Chapter 3
Brontë draws an obvious contrast between the altruistic, kindly Rivers children‹Diana, Mary, and St. John‹and the spoiled, cruel Reed children‹Eliza, Georgiana, and the far from holy John. That St. John is a parson indicates Jane's view of religion will undergo further revision as she seeks a Christian model applicable to her life.
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In fact, Jane cites Christianity in her defensive speech to Hannah: "'Some of the best people that ever lived have been as destitute as I am; and if you are a Christian, you ought not to consider poverty a crime.'" Once again, Jane is out of sorts financially. Whereas before she was consistently a poor figure in a rich environment (in the Reed house and at Thornfield), she is here identified as a beggar. Although she has indeed been begging, Jane resists this definition, seeking an identity divorced from money.
Chapter 4
Jane finds greater intimacy with the residents at Marsh End, and there is a reason for this not yet revealed in the narrative. The astute reader will notice some connections between the fortune left by the Rivers's uncle and that of Jane's own uncle John.
St. John's calculated, somewhat cold Calvinism is not an ideal Christian model for Jane, as she finds in it "a strange bitterness; an absence of consolatory gentleness." While Helen Burns's doctrine of tolerance and forgiveness was too meek for Jane, St. John's is far too intolerant and unforgiving.
Chapter 5
Jane has come full circle; she was once a neglected, poor orphan at Lowood and is now headmistress of her own school. Following in the mold of the kindly Miss Temple, she resolves to help her students who, while not orphans, are poor and largely uneducated. In fact, Jane nearly turns to snobbishness when describing the students, and must remind herself that "these coarsely clad little peasants are of flesh and blood as good as the scions of gentlest genealogy."
Such a scion comes in the form of the stunning Miss Oliver, the first example in the novel of someone who is rich, beautiful, and good-natured (everyone else has only one or two of the qualities).
Chapter 6
St. John is much like Jane; unwilling to give up his independence for love, he would rather seek his own calling in life than be beholden to someone else, even someone he might love passionately.
Without much fanfare, Jane is, indeed, finding her calling as she teaches girls who are much like she once was. Without romance on her mind, except for the occasional nightmares about Rochester, she is learning to love and be loved in a stable, affirming community.
Chapter 7
Various clues from before‹including that of Jane's wealthy uncle John, the fortune the Rivers children were cut out of by their uncle John, and the scrap of paper St. John tore from Jane's paper‹come together in a satisfying way that allows the reader to overlook one of the more improbable events: that Jane, purely by accident, came across her long-lost cousins.
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Although the fortune is a deus ex machina plot twist that, as Jane says, gives her a victory she "never earned and do[es] not merit," she has, in many ways, earned it. By being selfless, humble, and eschewing the fortune Rochester would have given her in return for her virtual servitude, Jane is most deserving of a gift that will finally give her true independence.
Chapter 8
Autonomy again appears as Jane's main desire. Though the idea of being a Christian missionary appeals to her and would add structure to her life‹and continues her notion of servicing others‹she is unwilling to be imprisoned in yet another marriage. While she disdained Rochester's marriage because, although she would be loved, she feared a status of inferiority, she refuses St. John's proposal because love would not even enter the equation.
Jane thus rejects St. John's model of Christianity, as she formerly rejected Helen Burns's and Brocklehurst's. While St. John's Christianity is neither overly meek nor hypocritical and corrupt, his is too dutiful and not emotional enough. As Jane said earlier, he has not found his peace with God, and his religious zeal seems more mechanical rather than human.
Chapter 9
The continuing debate between Jane's need for autonomy and her desire to succumb to St. John's powers continue, but the outcome is rarely in doubt. Instead, Jane's love for Rochester deepens, and she now has the tools needed for a liberated marriage: self-esteem, the love of others (including relatives), financial independence, and an identity she has carved out on her own. While St. John would most likely batter these traits as he leads Jane through his missionary work in India, a marriage to Rochester would no longer squelch these qualities.
With such assurance, Jane can now also turn to religion in a positive, healthy manner, one different from all other models she has observed: "I...prayed in my way ‹ a different way to St. John's, but effective in its own fashion. I seemed to penetrate near a Might Spirit; and my soul rushed out in gratitude at His feet." Jane's spirituality that has neither the hypocritical postures of Brocklehurst's evangelism, the meekness of Helen Burns's forgiveness, nor the detachment of St. John's proselytizing, but attains a transcendence of love and connection lacking in the philosophies of those three.
Chapter 10
While the fire at Thornfield destroyed both Rochester's estate and his eyesight, fire continues to be a positive force, even through destruction, in at least one respect: it has killed Bertha Mason, thus opening the door for Rochester's remarriage to Jane. In another sense, the fire levels the playing field more between Jane and Rochester; while she has recently gained her own fortune, he has lost much of his.
That Rochester's eyesight is gone seems no impediment to the love between him and Jane, since it was never founded upon physical attraction. As the innkeeper says about Rochester and Jane, "'nobody but him thought her so very handsome.'"
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Chapter 11
Jane's search for religion culminates with the mystical union between her and Rochester. Their bond is based on a profound, spiritual connection that passes through God.
Jane's independence is asserted here, both in her own words ("'I am an independent woman now'") and by a symbolic action at the end of the chapter: "I took that dear hand, held it a moment to my lips, then let it pass round my shoulder: being so much lower of stature than he, I served both for his prop and guide." Though Jane is of "much lower stature" than Rochester‹she comes from humbler origins‹she now has sufficient strength and independence to lead Rochester and, indeed, he is dependent on her for it. Her quest for autonomy is complete, and it does not exclude a happy marriage to someone she leaves.
Chapter 12
Two major themes‹Jane's desire for love and her search for religion‹mingle with her greatest preoccupation, her need for independence, in different ways. As we have already seen, she has blended love with independence in her marriage with Rochester: "To be together is for us to be at once as free as in solitude, as gay as in company."
However, Jane is also able to maintain a spiritual relationship with God without sacrificing her independence. St. John, on the other hand, is not, as his letter to Jane reveals: "'My Master,' he says, Œhas forewarned me. Daily he announces more distinctly, ‹ ŒSurely I come quickly!' and hour I more eagerly respond, ‹ ŒAmen; even so come, Lord Jesus!'" Brontë ends the novel on this note to underscore the connections between St. John's religious devotion and her concern with female subjugation. Unlike St. John, Jane fears yielding her will to her "Master" (or husband), and Brontë has used Bertha's imprisonment in the attic and Jane's imprisonment in the red-room as symbols for the ways in which Victorian society can confine women in marriage or in any other regard. Thus, Brontë concludes the novel on a critique of religion while demonstrating that marriage need not incorporate its restrictions of individual will
Jane Eyre: The Independent and Successful Woman Of the Nineteenth Century
Imagine a girl growing up around the turn of the nineteenth century. An orphan, she has no family or friends, no wealth or position. Misunderstood and mistreated by the relatives she does have, she is sent away to a school where the cycle of cruelty continues. All alone in the world, she seems doomed to a life of failure. What's a girl to do? Does she stand passively by and accept her fate, as the common belief of the times would have it? Or does she stand up for her rights and fight for the life of success she deserves? If the girl is Charlotte Bronte's heroine Jane Eyre, she takes the
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latter route. Although this may have shocked readers of the time, Jane's actions would open the door for a new interpretation of women.
Jane Eyre showed that it was possible for a woman in the nineteenth century to achieve independence and success on her own, no matter what odds were against her. The following paper will examine the stereotype of women that Jane and her creator, Bronte, sought to disprove, explore the obstacles that Jane encounters in her struggle, and show how she is able to overcome them to attain the life she has always dreamed of having.
During the 1800's, the time period in which Jane Eyre was written and the setting of the novel, women were stereotyped as being "submissive, dependent, beautiful, but ignorant" (Harris 42). They were seen only as trophies, meant to cling to the arms of men, but never meant to develop a mind of their own or to venture out on their own. This stereotype proved difficult for women to be taken seriously. Dissatisfied with this interpretation of her sex, Bronte attempted to change it by creating a heroine who possessed the antithesis of these traits. Indeed, Jane may be a plain woman, but she is an intelligent one; she is also self-confident, strong-willed, and morally conscious (Harris 42). She not only trusts in her ability to make decisions, but also in her freedom to do so. Such traits will be necessary to guide her in her journey to self-fulfillment.
The first obstacle that Jane comes across is her own background. Usually, one can count on family or position to get ahead in life; Jane has neither. Since infancy, she has not only worn the label of orphan, but also that of lower-class: her mother had been disinherited from the family fortune upon marriage to Jane's father, a poor clergymen. Jane also faces discouragement in the not one, but two environments in which she is raised. At Gateshead, she is despised by her Aunt Reed and her cousins John, Eliza, and Georgiana. They never let her forget her lack of wealth or position, or their abundance of both. They see her as nothing more than a servant, and treat her as such (Eagleton 41). At Lowood school, Jane finds the ultimate "monument to the destruction of the most basic human unit, the family"(Blom 87). Stationed with other girls like herself, under the watchful and unforgiving eye of Rev. Brocklehurst, she is further made aware of all that she lacks. Perhaps the most important of these is love. Jane's cries for love are mistaken by both Aunt Reed and Rev. Brocklehurst as outbursts of evil.
A constant obstacle that appears throughout Jane's life is oppression. Women of the time often had to deal with oppression because of the stereotype imposed upon them; it is no different with Jane. Whenever she tries to speak up for herself and her needs, she is always met with some form of resistance. It starts with Aunt Reed and Rev. Brocklehurst, who interpret her as being willfully disobedient. It continues with St. John Rivers, who sees her as being selfish and unworthy of God. Even Edward Rochester, the love of her life, finds fault with Jane's need to express herself; it's the one thing that keeps her from being totally possessed by him. Ironically, it may have been Bronte's decision to tell the story in the first-person point of view that most accentuates the constancy of this obstacle in Jane's life. This technique allowed Bronte to tell her heroine's story with an intensity that drew the reader into Jane's thoughts, feelings, and passions, an openness which Jane has often been deprived of in her own life (McFadden-Gerber 3290).
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The most prominent obstacle Jane faces is male power. The four men that Jane must contend with throughout the book are symbolic of the sources of male power over women. There is John Reed, Jane's tormentor at Gateshead, who represents physical force and patriarchal family. There is also Rev. Brocklehurst, Jane's tormentor at Lowood; he signifies the social structures of class, education, and religion. Rochester represents attraction, and St. John moral and spiritual authority (Mitchell 302). The former two try to take advantage of Jane's seeming defenselessness as a child; the latter two try to take advantage of her seeming defenselessness as a woman.
Jane is able to overcome her background chiefly by two means: distance and chance. In leaving for Lowood, she escapes Gateshead and all its disorder; in leaving for Thornfield, she escapes Lowood and its disorder. Jane's later return to Gateshead is a victory in that it not only shows how well she has succeeded on her own, without the Reeds, but it also reveals that as she once needed them, they now need her (Eagleton 39). As for her state of poverty, Jane triumphs over that merely by chance. It is while staying with St. John and his sisters at Whitcross that she is made aware of her relation to them, and the great inheritance from their uncle that they now all share. This is Jane's first step in attaining the wealth and family that has been denied her for so long.
The next obstacle to fall is oppression. Before Jane is sent away to Lowood, she tells Aunt Reed that it is she, not Jane, who is willfully disobedient: "People think you are a good woman, but you are bad, bad-hearted. You are deceitful!" It is with this statement that Jane first feels her soul begin to "expand, to exult, with the strangest sense of freedom, of triumph" she has ever felt (Bronte 30). It is this feeling which drives her in the confrontations she has with Rev. Brocklehurst, Rochester, and St. John concerning their hold over her, and it is one which she resolves never to lose. Armed with this feeling, Jane makes full use of her privileges as narrator. She freely comments on the "role of women in society and the greater constraint imposed upon them", and tells how she is able to overcome both (McFadden-Gerber 3290).
Jane's triumph over male power is her biggest one of all. Her first victory is in overcoming her tormentors. She surpasses John Reed by succeeding in the one area where she had been expected to fail: life. It is Jane, whom he had assumed of being powerless and frail, who ends up outliving him. Jane wins her struggle with Rev. Brocklehurst by refusing to live the rest of her life at Lowood under his orders. Her departure from Lowood is symbolic of leaving her old life behind for a new one.
Leaving Lowood also brings Jane to her hardest challenge. Throughout her life, Jane has always been looking for the one thing, more than wealth or position, that has always seemed to evade her - love. As an adult, she finds it in two men: Rochester and St. John. She realizes that although both men have different views of her and different reasons for wanting to marry her, they share the same motive: ultimately, to "destroy her selfhood" (Blom 99). Rochester's love for Jane is not only spiritual, but passionate. Although she feels the same way about him, she refuses to be his mistress. "It would not be wicked to love me," Rochester protests. Jane stands her ground: "It would be to obey you" (Bronte 301). On the other hand, St. John's love for her is "merely spiritual"; for Jane, this will not do. Her refusal of him for such a reason is considered shocking at a time when women were "imagined as merely inhabiting bodies meant to bear children and being, in other respects, tasteless and without
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appetite" (Oates 7). By rejecting both men, Jane puts her needs before anyone else's (Blom 100). After achieving independence by finding a family in the Riverses and wealth in her inheritance, Jane is now free to return to Rochester to complete her triumph. Following the fire at Thornfield, she finds him not as powerful as he once was; this works well for her, because she is more powerful than she once was. Rochester welcomes Jane back with open arms, realizing that he will never possess her the way he once wanted to, but that she, in fact, will end up possessing him. Their subsequent marriage not only ends the many conflicts involved, but also fulfills every woman's wish of achieving both independence and love (Mitchell 302).
Jane Eyre proved to the world of the 1800's that the idea of a woman beating the odds to become independent and successful on her own was not as far-fetched as it may have seemed. Jane goes against the expected type by "refusing subservience, disagreeing with her superiors, standing up for her rights, and venturing creative thoughts" (McFadden-Gerber 3290). With such determination, she is able to emerge victorious over all that has threatened to stand in her way. She is not only successful in terms of wealth and position, but more importantly, in terms of family and love. These two needs which have evaded Jane for so long are finally hers; adding to her victory is her ability to enjoy both without losing her hard-won independence. As Jane was a role model for women in the nineteenth century, she is also a role model for women today. Her legacy lives on in the belief that as long as there are hopes and dreams, nothing is impossible.
Wuthering Heights(1847) By
Emily Bronte
Wuthering Heights was Emily Brontë's only novel, and is considered the fullest expression of her deeply individual poetic vision. It obviously contains many romantic influences: Heathcliff is a very Byronic character, though he lacks the self-pitying that mars many Byronic characters, and is deeply attached to the natural world. When the novel was written, the peak of the Romantic age had passed: we should be very grateful that Emily Brontë lived such an isolated life, and was in some sense behind the times. The novel expresses deep criticisms of social conventions, particularly those surrounding issues of gender: notice that the author distributes "feminine" and "masculine" characteristics without regard to sex. Brontë had difficulties living in society while remaining true to the things she considered important: the ideal of women as delicate beings who avoid physical or mental activity and pursue fashions and flirtations was repugnant to her. Class issues are also important: we are bound to respect Ellen, who is educated but of low class, more than Lockwood.
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Any reader of Wuthering Heights should recognize immediately that it is not the sort of novel that a gently-bred Victorian lady would be expected to write. Emily Brontë sent it to publishers under the masculine name of Ellis Bell, but even so it took many tries and many months before it was finally accepted. Its reviews were almost entirely negative: reviewers implied that the author of such a novel must be insane, obsessed with cruelty, barbaric... Emily's sister Charlotte's novel Jane Eyre was much more successful. Emily was always eager to maintain the secrecy under which the novel was published, understandably. She died soon after the publication, and Charlotte felt obliged now that secrecy was no longer necessary to write a preface for the novel defending her sister's character. The preface also made it clear that Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell were, in fact, different people: some readers had speculated that Wuthering Heights was an early work by the author of Jane Eyre. It appears that Charlotte herself was uncomfortable with the more disturbing aspects of her sister's masterpiece. She said that if Emily had lived, "her mind would of itself have grown like a strong tree; loftier, straighter, wider-spreading, and its matured fruits would have attained a mellower ripeness and sunnier bloom." Her apology for Emily's work should be read with the realization that Charlotte's character was deeply different from Emily's: her interpretation of Wuthering Heights cannot necessarily be trusted.
Wuthering Heights does not really belong into any cut-and-dried category, nor did it begin an important literary lineage. None of its imitations can approach its sincerity and poetic power. This does not mean that it has not been an important influence, however.
With the passing of time, an immense amount of interest has grown up about the Brontë sisters, Charlotte, Emily, and Anne they have achieved the status of the centers of a literary cult. Brontë enthusiasts are currently involved in convincing the world that the Brontës' work should not be considered children's literature, merely because they are written by women. Nevertheless, it is not infrequent to find Wuthering Heights on lists of golden classics for children, which seems somewhat surprising considering its violent subject matter.
Analysis:
This chapter introduces the reader to the frame of the story: Lockwood will gradually discover the events which led to Heathcliff now about forty years old living all but alone in Wuthering Heights, almost completely separated from society. The casual violence and lack of concern for manners or consideration for other people which characterizes Heathcliff here is only a hint of the atmosphere of the whole novel, in which that violence is contrasted with more genteel and civilized ways of living.
Analysis:
The character of the natural setting of the novel the moors, snowstorms begins to develop, and it becomes clear that the bleak and harsh nature of the Yorkshire hills is not merely a geographical accident. It mirrors the roughness of those who live there: Wuthering Heights is firmly planted in its location and could not exist anywhere else. Knowing Emily Brontë's passionate fondness for her homeland, we can expect the same bleakness which Lockwood finds so disagreeable to take on a wild beauty. Its danger cannot be forgotten, though: a stranger to those parts could easily lose his way
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and die of exposure. Heathcliff and the wind are similar in that they have no pity for weakness. The somewhat menacing presence of the natural world can also be seen in the large number of dogs who inhabit Wuthering Heights: they are not kept for pets.
The power dynamics that Lockwood observes in the household of Wuthering Heights are extremely important. The girl is evidently frightened of Heathcliff and scornful of Hareton; Hareton behaves aggressively because he is sensitive about his status; Heathcliff does not hesitate to use his superior physical strength and impressive personality to bully other members of his household... The different ways in which different characters try to assert themselves reveal a lot about their situation. Most notably, it is evident that sheer force usually wins out over intellectual and humane pretensions. The girl is subversive and intellectual, an unwilling occupant of the house, but she can achieve little in the way of freedom or respect.
Lockwood continues to lose face: his conversational grace appears ridiculous in its new setting. Talking to Heathcliff, for example, he refers to the girl as a "beneficent fairy," which is evidently neither true nor welcome flattery. This chapter might be seen, then, as a continuation of the strict division between social ideals (grace, pleasant social interactions, Lockwood) and natural realities (storms, frost, dogs, bluntness, cruelty, Hareton, Heathcliff). If the chapter was taken by itself, out of context, the reader would see that while social ideals are ridiculed, it is clear that the cruel natural world is ugly and hardly bearable. Fortunately we are only at the beginning.
Analysis:
It is very important that the ghost of Catherine Linton (who is not perhaps simply a figment of Lockwood's imagination) appears as a child. Of course Lockwood thinks of her as a child, since he had just read parts of her early diary, but Heathcliff also seems to find it natural that she appeared in the form she had when they were children together. Rather than progressing from childhood on to a maturer age with its different values, Heathcliff and Catherine never really "grew up." That is to say, everything emotionally important that ever happened in their lives either took place in childhood or follows directly from commitments made then. They never essentially outgrew their solidarity against the oppressive forces of adult authority and religion which is described in Catherine's diary. Thus the ghost of Catherine Linton (and that is her married name) tries to return to her childhood sanctuary, which Heathcliff has kept in its original state. The dominion of linear time is challenged.
It might be relevant here to remember that Emily Brontë kept up the imaginary world created when she was very young well into her early twenties, and hated to leave the home of her childhood
Analysis:
A movement to the past is made in this chapter: from now on, Lockwood will gradually lose importance as the story of Heathcliff and Catherine's childhood becomes more and more vibrant. However, we cannot entirely neglect the role Ellen Dean plays as a narrator: her personality means that the events she recounts are presented in a particular way. She is practical and, like a good housekeeper, tends to
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incline to the side of order. Even when she was young, she did not really participate in the private lives of the children of Wuthering Heights, and has little access to the relationship of Heathcliff and Catherine. Brontë demonstrates her versatility in using different points of view, faithfully recording her various characters' distinctive styles of speech.
Considering character development, it is interesting to know what Heathcliff and Catherine were like as children since, as we have seen in the previous chapter, their essential natures remain very much the same. Seen from Ellen's point of view. Catherine was willful and mischievous and Heathcliff was uncomplaining but vindictive.
Analysis:
The extremely close and entirely sexless relationship between Heathcliff and Cathy already manifests itself in an opposition to the outside world of parental authority and religion. Cathy is already charming and manipulative, though her love for her father is real.
The false, oppressive religion of Joseph is juxtaposed with the pure, selfless thoughts of heaven of the grieving children.
The decline and death of Earnshaw highlights the bond between the physical body and the spirit. The old man had formerly been charitable, loving, and open, but his physical weakness makes him irritable and peevish: the spirit is corrupted by the body's decline. One might remember that Emily Brontë watched her brother die wretchedly of alcohol and drug abuse, having had dreams of glory and gallantry in his youth.
Analysis:
In this chapter we first hear Heathcliff speak for a long time, and it is worth noting how his language differs from the narrators we have heard so far. He is more expressive and emotional than the other two, and his speech is more literary than Ellen's and less artificial than Lockwood's. He tends to speak in extreme and vibrant terms: expressing his scorn for Edgar Linton's cowardice and whiny gentility, he says: "I'd not exchange, for a thousand lives, my condition here, for Edgar Linton's at Thrushcross Grange not if I might have the privilege of flinging Joseph off the highest gable, and painting the housefront with Hindley's blood!" He admires the comparative luxury of the Grange and recognizes its beauty, but he remains entirely devoted to the freedom of his life with Cathy, and cannot understand the selfishness of the spoiled children: "When would you catch me wishing to have what Catherine wanted?" His devotion to Cathy is clear, and appears to him to be completely natural and inescapable: "she is so immeasurably superior to them to everyone one earth; is she not, Nelly?" He admires her for her bravery, and he possesses that same kind of bravery.
The image of the two civilized children inside the beautiful room, and the two wild children outside both boy and girl of similar ages makes the glass of the window
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take on the role of a kind of mirror. However, the "mirror" shows the complete opposite rather than the true images of those who look into it.
Analysis:
This chapter marks the end of Cathy and Heathcliff's time of happiness and perfect understanding; Cathy has moved partly into a different sphere, that of the genteel Lintons, and Heathcliff cannot follow her. Although Cathy still cares for the things she did when the two of them ran wild together, she is under a lot of pressure to become a lady and she is vain enough to enjoy the admiration and approval she gets as such from Edgar, Hindley and his wife. Cathy's desire to inhabit two worlds the moors with Heathcliff and the parlor with Edgar is a central driving force for the novel and eventually results in tragedy. Emily Brontë had experienced a personal inability to remain true to herself while interacting in conventional social terms, and she chose to abandon society as a result. Cathy takes a different route.
Just as the window separated the Wuthering Heights children from the Lintons in the last chapter, a material object separates Cathy from Heathcliff in this one. The fine dress she wears is a very real boundary between the old friends: it must be sacrificed (smudged, crumpled) if the two of them are to be as close as they were before. It is simultaneously valuable for economic reasons (its cost), for social ones (the respect Cathy gets on account of it), and because of its artificial beauty. These same categories will consistently come between Cathy and Heathcliff; he is right to recognize the dress and what it represents as a threat to his happiness.
Analysis:
This chapter marks the end of Cathy and Heathcliff's time of happiness and perfect understanding; Cathy has moved partly into a different sphere, that of the genteel Lintons, and Heathcliff cannot follow her. Although Cathy still cares for the things she did when the two of them ran wild together, she is under a lot of pressure to become a lady and she is vain enough to enjoy the admiration and approval she gets as such from Edgar, Hindley and his wife. Cathy's desire to inhabit two worlds the moors with Heathcliff and the parlor with Edgar is a central driving force for the novel and eventually results in tragedy. Emily Brontë had experienced a personal inability to remain true to herself while interacting in conventional social terms, and she chose to abandon society as a result. Cathy takes a different route.
Just as the window separated the Wuthering Heights children from the Lintons in the last chapter, a material object separates Cathy from Heathcliff in this one. The fine dress she wears is a very real boundary between the old friends: it must be sacrificed (smudged, crumpled) if the two of them are to be as close as they were before. It is simultaneously valuable for economic reasons (its cost), for social ones (the respect Cathy gets on account of it), and because of its artificial beauty. These same categories will consistently come between Cathy and Heathcliff; he is right to recognize the dress and what it represents as a threat to his happiness.
Analysis:
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Hindley's dissipation and moral degradation are further evidence that only a strong character can survive defeat or bereavement without becoming distorted. His desperation is a result of his lack of firm foundations: Ellen says that he "had room in his heart for only two idols his wife and himself he doted on both and adored one." Evidently it is impossible to live well when only caring about one's self, as Hindley does following his wife's death. It would be interesting to compare Hindley's behavior and Heathcliff's in the opening chapters: both survive after the deaths of their beloveds, both live in a chaotic and cheerless Wuthering Heights... Heathcliff, however, has not entirely lost contact with Cathy: their closer relationship rules out a complete separation, even with death.
Emily Brontë's obvious model for Hindley is her brother Branwell, who was sinking into dissipation when she was writing the novel.
This is the first time we really see Cathy behaving badly, showing that her temper makes the gentle and repressed life led by Edgar Linton unsuitable for her. Here she blushes with rage and in a later chapter she refers to her blood being much hotter than Edgar's: heat and coolness of blood are markers of different personalities. The physical differences between Cathy and Edgar are linked to their moral differences, not only in their appearances but even in their blood and bones.
Analysis:
The atmosphere of careless violence, despair, and hatred of the first part of the chapter is almost suffocating. Heathcliff's willingness to kill an innocent child out of revenge is the first real indication of his lack of morality. It is not altogether clear whether that lack is a partly a result of his hard childhood and miserable circumstances, or whether he was always like that. Certainly he appears quite changed from the sensitive boy who wanted to look nice so Cathy wouldn't reject him for Edgar, and who relied trustfully on Ellen, but he had spoken of wanting to paint the house with Hindley's blood much earlier.
The definition of love for Cathy and Heathcliff is perhaps Emily Brontë's original creation. It is not based on appearances, material considerations, sexual attraction, or
even virtue, but rather a shared being. Cathy says: "I am Heathcliff he's always, always in my mind not as a pleasure, any more than I am always a pleasure to myself
Analysis:
Catherine's belief that Edgar should not be jealous of her relationship with Heathcliff emphasizes the difference in her mind between their relationship and ordinary love affairs. She says that she does not envy Isabella's yellow hair, so Edgar shouldn't hate to hear her praise Heathcliff he should be glad for her sake. The comparison with Isabella suggests that she and Heathcliff are sister and brother, which is evidently not the case but it is a comparison that makes sense for her.
Catherine uses natural analogies: Heathcliff would crush Isabella "like a sparrow's egg," he is "an arid wilderness of furze and whinstone." Isabella uses what seems to be a natural metaphor, but is in fact a literary one: Catherine is "a dog in the manger" for keeping Heathcliff to herself. They speak and think quite differently.
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There are also important differences between the ways Edgar and Catherine view class. Edgar thinks that Heathcliff, "a runaway servant," should be entertained in the kitchen, not the parlor. Catherine jokes that she will have two tables laid, one for the gentry (Edgar and Isabella) and one for the lower classes (herself and Heathcliff). She and Heathcliff both call the narrator Nelly, while Edgar coldly calls her Ellen.
but as my own being." In this sense, her decision to marry Edgar is a terrible mistake: she will be abandoning the essence of herself. Apparently the sexual aspect of love is so meaningless for her that she believes marriage to Edgar will not come between her and Heathcliff: she would not consciously abandon her soul. Heathcliff thinks otherwise, since he runs away.
Analysis:
Nelly may seem to be rather unfeeling in her unsympathetic descriptions of Catherine and Heathcliff, but her behavior to Hareton and Hindley (who was her foster-brother) reveals her to be extremely tender-hearted and maternal at time. She is, however, independent and spirited, and doesn't like to be imposed on or bullied by Catherine, so she has no qualms about siding with Edgar when her mistress is being temperamental.
The strain imposed on the three characters, Catherine, Edgar, and Heathcliff, has finally resulted in outright violence: it is no longer possible to conceal the strength of the emotions involved. Edgar in particular is put into a difficult situation: the other two are used to violent expressions of feeling, but he is not, and hates having to adjust to their modes of communication. He is more committed to gentility of behavior than the others, although they now appear as well-dressed and cultivated as he does.
Heathcliff and Catherine call Edgar a "lamb," a "sucking leverett," and a "milk-blooded coward." The first two insults are natural images that might easily come to mind for people who grew up on the moors; the third again uses the "blood" imagery which appears to be central to the way they think about personality.
Analysis:
In her delirium, Catherine reveals that her true emotional identity has not altered since she was twelve, just before she stayed with the Lintons for some weeks. Everything that happened to her since then ceases to have any importance when she is irrational:
"...supposing at twelve years old, I had been wrenched from the Heights, and every early association, and my all in all, as Heathcliff was at that time, and been converted, at a stroke, into Mrs. Linton, the lady of Thrushcross Grange, and the wife of a stranger; an exile, and outcast, thenceforth, from what had been my world You may fancy a glimpse at the abyss where I groveled!"
Time is unimportant: it has no effect on true, deep emotions in Brontë's world.
Edgar's coldness to Isabella seems to result from pique at having his sister desert him for his greatest enemy. His willingness to abandon her because of hurt pride is
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perhaps his greatest moral flaw. The emphasis he places on personal dignity differentiates him from the other characters, who certainly have many faults, though not that one.
Analysis:
Isabella's reactions to her new home reveal her character to be lacking in moral strength: although she tries at first to stand up to Joseph and Hareton, her ladylike education has in no way prepared her for her married life, so when she loses her pride she has little else to fall back on. Her envy upon seeing Hindley's pistol is a little disconcerting, and she herself is horrified by the realization of it.
It is worth noting the unfortunate position of women who depend on men: Isabella cannot escape from Heathcliff without the help of her brother, who does not want to help her. Surrounded by hatred and indifference, she can only fall back on Ellen's pity.
Analysis:
This chapter includes a great deal of criticism for the Lintons: Edgar is called proud and unfeeling, and Heathcliff says that Isabella was actually attracted by his brutality until she herself suffered from it. Edgar's explanation of refusal to write to Isabella is extremely unconvincing: "I am not angry, but sorry to have lost her: especially as I can never think she'll be happy. It is out of the question my going to see her, however; we are eternally divided." He is angry, of course, because he hates Heathcliff: presumably he is jealous of him. Heathcliff considers Edgar's version of love to be selfish, as though Edgar thought he owned his wife, and had a right to restrict her behavior: "Had he been in my place, and I in his, though I hated him with a hatred that turned my life to gall, I never would have raised a hand against him... I never would have banished him from her society, as long as she desired his." Correspondingly, he imagines Catherine's affection for Edgar in terms of property: "He is scarcely a degree dearer to her than her dog, or her horse It is not in him to be loved like me." Material wealth has always been associated with the Lintons, so Heathcliff extends ideas of property and ownership to their emotions as well.
The case of Isabella is somewhat different. Heathcliff despises her because she, knowing what he is, loves him. This is an interesting point: Heathcliff is an obviously romantic figure, with his mysterious past, dark looks, and so on. But Brontë makes it very clear that although he exerts a certain amount of fascination, he should in no way be considered a "hero of romance." For doing so, Isabella is called a "pitiful, slavish, mean-minded brach." In this very romantic novel, one can never rely on conventional notions of romance: brutality should never be considered attractive. Even Catherine does not find Heathcliff attractive she simply finds him inescapable, a part of herself.
Analysis:
The passionate scene between Catherine and Heathcliff in this chapter is probably the emotional climax of the novel, though it only marks the middle of the book. It reveals how little their love relies on pleasure: they can hardly be said to be fond of one another, or to enjoy each other's company, yet they are absolutely necessary to each
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other. It is as though they were members of a different species from other humans, who belonged together. Ellen says: "The two, to a cool spectator, made a strange and fearsome picture." Catherine tore Heathcliff's hair, and he left bruises on her arm. Later, he "foamed like a mad dog, and gathered her to him with greedy jealousy. [Ellen] did not feel as though [she] were in the company of a member of [her] own species." Love appears to be a form of madness.
Their emotional reunion is counteracted by Ellen's cool and rather unsympathetic narration: their passionate conversation is interspersed with dry commentary on her part.
Analysis:
The question of what happens after death is important in this chapter and throughout the novel, though no firm answer is ever given. Ellen is fairly sure Catherine went to heaven, "where life is boundless in its duration, and love in its sympathy, and joy in its fullness." But Heathcliff cannot conceive of Catherine finding peace when they are still separated, or of his living without her. In the chapter before, Catherine said: "I'm wearying to escape into that glorious world, and to be always there; not seeing it dimly through tears, and yearning for it through the walls of an aching heart, but really with it, and in it." It is as though she had in mind a heaven that was like the moors in every way but the constraints of physicality: the spirit of natural freedom.
Another interesting question that comes up in this chapter is that of the value of self-control and reserve: Heathcliff tries to conceal his weakness and grief, holding "a silent combat with his inward agony," but Ellen considers it to be worse than useless, since he only tempts God to wring his "heart and nerves." Yet we know that Emily herself was almost incredibly self-disciplined, refusing to alter her everyday life even when suffering a mortal illness
Analysis:
Isabella's tendency toward impotent cruelty shows up again in the character of her son Linton. The question of how cruelty operates in powerful versus weak characters was evidently of great interest to Brontë and might bear further investigation. One obvious point is that weakness is not simply equated with goodness, as is often the case in the Christian tradition. Although the weak are unable to physically express their hatred, they can, like Isabella, use verbal taunts to hurt their enemies emotionally.
Ellen's particular grief for Hindley emphasizes the way characters are paired in the novel: Ellen and Hindley, Heathcliff and Catherine, Edgar and Isabella. These pairs all grew up together (Ellen's mother was Hindley's wet-nurse, so they literally shared mother's milk) under somewhat fraternal conditions. Brontë's careful structure and concern with symmetry are important presences throughout the novel, and form an interesting contrast with what might be considered the chaotic emotions that seem to prevail.
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Analysis:
Isabella's tendency toward impotent cruelty shows up again in the character of her son Linton. The question of how cruelty operates in powerful versus weak characters was evidently of great interest to Brontë and might bear further investigation. One obvious point is that weakness is not simply equated with goodness, as is often the case in the Christian tradition. Although the weak are unable to physically express their hatred, they can, like Isabella, use verbal taunts to hurt their enemies emotionally.
Ellen's particular grief for Hindley emphasizes the way characters are paired in the novel: Ellen and Hindley, Heathcliff and Catherine, Edgar and Isabella. These pairs all grew up together (Ellen's mother was Hindley's wet-nurse, so they literally shared mother's milk) under somewhat fraternal conditions. Brontë's careful structure and concern with symmetry are important presences throughout the novel, and form an interesting contrast with what might be considered the chaotic emotions that seem to prevail.
Analysis:
We have moved from the violent and discordant world of adulthood back to harmonious childhood. The abrupt contrast between the hellish last chapters and this relatively serene and innocent one could hardly be more clear. One might even suppose that we are witnessing a second chance: the story of the first Catherine ended in grief and bloodshed, but perhaps that of her daughter will be more serene. Indeed there are many similarities between the first Catherine and her daughter, although the mother's bad qualities are minimized in the younger Cathy.
Although Cathy appears to display more Linton characteristics than Earnshaw ones, her desire to explore the wilderness outside of the Grange's park links her strongly to the wild, Wuthering Heights clan. Her sauciness also reminds the reader of her mother, as does her aristocratic unwillingness to be related to Hareton (just as Catherine thought it would degrade her to marry Heathcliff, who was at the time very much like Hareton).
Analysis:
Brontë's novel is full of innocent children who are abandoned into a cold and unfriendly world: Heathcliff as an orphan in Liverpool, Hindley sent away to college, Heathcliff and Cathy again at Earnshaw's death, Hareton, Linton, Cathy Linton at her father's death... The effect of this is that each character, no matter how ruthless and cruel he or she may be, contains at their core the same wish for love and the same loneliness as their former childlike selves. We are never able to judge any character entirely objectively because we know this. Linton is a particularly interesting example of this because he is unpleasant, even as a child, yet one can only pity him for being abruptly introduced to an unloving father and a home where everyone despises him
Analysis:
Brontë's novel is full of innocent children who are abandoned into a cold and unfriendly world: Heathcliff as an orphan in Liverpool, Hindley sent away to college,
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Heathcliff and Cathy again at Earnshaw's death, Hareton, Linton, Cathy Linton at her father's death... The effect of this is that each character, no matter how ruthless and cruel he or she may be, contains at their core the same wish for love and the same loneliness as their former childlike selves. We are never able to judge any character entirely objectively because we know this. Linton is a particularly interesting example of this because he is unpleasant, even as a child, yet one can only pity him for being abruptly introduced to an unloving father and a home where everyone despises him
Analysis:
The issue of trespassing is important in this chapter, and recalls the scene in chapter 6, where Cathy Earnshaw and Heathcliff are caught on the Lintons' land. This chapter is almost an inversion of the other one, especially considering that this Cathy will marry Linton, just as the earlier Cathy married Edgar. In a static world, everyone stays on their own property and the marriages that result from trespassing would not take place. The emphasis on land and privacy might be taken for a metaphor for more emotional intimacy: in order for two people to become close, one must in some way trespass. On the other hand, the marriages that result from trespassing are unhappy, while that which results from exploration (see Cathy Linton's first meeting with Hareton in chapter 18) are happy. The essential point, of course, is that the definition of trespassing versus innocent exploration depends entirely on the attitude taken by the people whose lands are being entered.
Often in literature, land and women are identified with one another, so that trespassing could be taken for a metaphor for sex. This hardly seems to be the case in Wuthering Heights: Linton and Edgar remain passively in their places while their future wives come to see them. This is coherent with the general identification of the male Lintons with female characteristics. Isabella, both biologically female and Lintonishly feminine, meets Heathcliff when he unwelcomedly intrudes at the Grange.
Analysis:
See the analysis of chapter 20 for a discussion of children left alone in the world Cathy Linton is not the only one to fear a parent's death, nor is her fear unjustified. In her case, she is particularly vulnerable because, as a girl, she will not inherit her father's estate: her father's nephew Linton will. This is a result not of Edgar's lack of regard for his daughter, but of legal conventions.
Emily Brontë had good reasons to be especially conscious of the position of orphaned children: although her father outlived her, her mother died when she was very young (like Cathy's) and her older sister Maria who took the place of the mother died in childhood of tuberculosis. See chapter 12 for further evidence of the importance of abandoned children: in her delirium Catherine remembers a nest of baby birds who died of starvation ("little skeletons") after Heathcliff caught their mother. She had been greatly grieved by the sight and made Heathcliff promise never to kill a mother bird again. This may actually be the key to Emily Brontë's continual emphasis on that theme: she was deeply familiar with the natural world, in which orphaned baby animals stand next to no chance of survival.
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Analysis:
In this chapter Brontë explores the intersections between love and power: to what extent does Linton want Cathy to love him freely, and to what extent does he want to have husbandly control over her? It would appear that for him, love is just another form of control: he uses Cathy's love for him to make her do whatever he likes, without any consideration for her own happiness. Is this form of love/control essentially linked to marriage? That might well be the case: see how the relationship between the older Catherine and her husband Edgar breaks down when he tries to control her friendships. However Edgar unmistakably loved Catherine, whereas Linton seems to care for no one but himself. Marriage in Wuthering Heights is not an unqualified good: it must be accompanied by unselfish love on both sides in order to work
Analysis:
The contrast between Linton and Cathy's ideas of how to spend an afternoon sums up the differences in their characters. The juxtaposition of Linton's peaceful ideal afternoon with his furious temper tantrum is somewhat disconcerting, however. Are passivity and laziness essentially related to hatred and fury in the novel? This hardly seems possible, considering Edgar's peaceful and generally loving character. However, the juxtaposition serves to remind us that weakness and goodness are not to be carelessly equated.
Analysis:
The presence of tuberculosis in such a prominent way in the novel is rather disturbing, considering that the illness was soon to be the cause of Emily's own death. Cathy fools herself into thinking that Edgar is getting better, just as Emily (and Frances, Hindley's wife) tried hard to pretend that she was not sick.
Death is a mysterious and yet unavoidable presence: you cannot simply expect people to live until they are old. A cold can turn into a fever, which can turn into consumption, ending in the grave. Life is not predictable in Wuthering Heights, just as it was not in Emily Brontë's own world.
Analysis:
This chapter reveals an extent of cruelty in Heathcliff which has not been seen before: he has no reason to hate his son beyond the fact that he is a Linton, and yet he is perfectly willing to fill his last moments with terror and despair. Linton's life is singularly hopeless, and the mere fact that Brontë invented it testifies to the real darkness of her vision. Linton is unlikable and dislikes everyone; he will die without ever achieving anything worthwhile or good, and probably without ever having been happy. A more pointless, bitter existence could hardly be imagined. Heathcliff's appears energetic and joyful by contrast.
Analysis:
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Further evidence of Linton's bad character. Cathy's pity and kindness are the causes of her misfortunes here: in the presence of Heathcliff's intelligent hatred, her good qualities only serve to leave her vulnerable to his plans.
Analysis:
Part of Heathcliff's revenge fails: Catherine manages to escape in time to see her father again, and Edgar dies happy. Given the great importance attached to last words and dying moments, this is a notable victory for Catherine, and an essential one if all of Heathcliff's evil work is to be undone in the end. If Edgar had died miserably, no amount of happy endings could ever have undone that tragedy.
Analysis:
Heathcliff's continued love for Catherine's dead body after 18 years emphasizes the physical, yet non-physical nature of their relationship. It would appear to physical in a way that transcends conventional ideas about sexuality: Heathcliff was pleased to see that Catherine still looked like herself after 18 years, but claimed that if she had been "dissolved into earth, or worse," he would have been no less comforted by the proximity to her body. His idea of heaven is to be utterly and completely unified with Catherine in body, as in spirit and this could just as well mean to disintegrate into dust together as to be joined in the act of love. The difference between these two forms of union is that while people are joined during sexual intercourse, their separate bodies and identities remain clear. But in Heathcliff and Catherine's corporeal and spiritual unity, as envisaged by him, an observer would not be able to tell "which is which." This is like Catherine's statement in chapter 9 that she was Heathcliff
Analysis:
See the analysis of the next chapter for a discussion of the roles of education and books in the relationship of Catherine and Hareton.
It is generally considered that difficult and painful experiences are also, in a way, valuable as "growing experiences." If this is the case, Catherine's short marriage to Linton should have caused her to grow a great deal from the happy and innocent girl she had formerly been. Instead, it appears to make her venomous and permanently angry. However, one might make the argument that the humbling she undergoes is necessary because, without it, she never would have bothered to see the good in Hareton. Is the time Catherine spends caring for Linton a complete loss, or does she learn anything valuable from it? This is related to the question of whether Wuthering Heights is a Christian novel: in Christian theology, suffering is usually considered ennobling.
Analysis:
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Books take on an important role in the relationship between Hareton and Catherine: Hareton's illiteracy is the most glaring result of Heathcliff's treatment of him, designed to reduce him to rustic ignorance. Hareton never rebels against Heathcliff, but his contact with Catherine, who was carefully educated by her father, makes him extremely conscious of his shortcomings. One might wonder how great the value of book-learning is, in the novel: Linton, who can read, is obviously inferior to his more vigorous cousin Hareton, which might lead one to think that Brontë is championing native energy over imposed refinement. However, for Catherine and Hareton to become close it is absolutely necessary for Hareton to wish to educate himself, and in the last chapter their love will be symbolized in the joint reading of a book. Similarly, Heathcliff's youthful degradation really takes place when he ceases to follow Catherine's lessons. It appears that book-learning is not enough to make a person good, but that the lack of it is enough to make someone ridiculous. It is, in short, an essential quality
Analysis:
The union of Hareton and Catherine should not surprise the reader, who has been following the symmetrical unfolding of the novel. At the beginning of the story, Hindley and Catherine inhabited Wuthering Heights and Edgar and Isabella inhabited the Grange. The obvious symmetrical plot would have been: Hindley married Isabella producing "Hareton," while Catherine married Edgar, producing Cathy. Then Cathy and "Hareton" would marry, unifying the two houses completely, and Cathy Linton would become Catherine Earnshaw, taking on her mother's maiden name. The harmony of this plot was disrupted by the introduction of Heathcliff, an alien figure who destroyed the potential marital balance. By the end of the novel, however, Heathcliff and his issue will be eliminated, and the unifying marriage between the families of Linton and Earnshaw will take place after all, as though Heathcliff had never existed. Hindley, sent away to college because of the outsider, Heathcliff, married an outsider, Frances, producing Hareton Earnshaw. Catherine Earnshaw married Edgar Linton, producing Cathy Linton, and Isabella Linton married Heathcliff, producing Linton Heathcliff. The union between Isabella and Heathcliff should not have taken place, so naturally Linton Heathcliff was a mistake, an unlikable and weakly being. Cathy Linton's marriage to Linton Heathcliff was likewise a mistake, forced by Heathcliff, and in order to preserve the integrity of the pattern, their marriage was childless. No descendants of Heathcliff must remain by the end of the novel, for harmony to be reinstated. Linton's death eliminated a character who should never have existed, and freed Catherine to marry again. In fact, the nature of their marriage made it particularly easy to forget: it seems unthinkable that the marriage could have been consummated. When Cathy Heathcliff marries Hareton, thus becoming Cathy Earnshaw, she will be a virgin. With the death of Heathcliff and his offspring, and the unifying marriage of the Linton and Earnshaw heirs, it is almost as though Heathcliff had never existed.
In this analysis we looked at one alternate plot that in which Heathcliff never entered the novel. It is not, however, the only possible alternate plot. The other obvious one
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would involve the elimination (in terms of offspring) of Edgar Linton, or of both Edgar and Hindley. Then Heathcliff would marry Catherine, and Isabella could marry Hindley or an outsider or not at all, and Edgar could marry an outsider or not at all. It is evidently less elegant than the other alternate plot, involving more outsiders and no unification of the two houses but emotional integrity would have been preserved in the unification of Catherine and Heathcliff. As it is, that unification is finally attained when Heathcliff's body merges with Catherine's as they disintegrate into dust, and their spirits roam the moors together.
Another beauty of Brontë's plot is that the three names that Lockwood reads when he stays at Wuthering Heights in chapter 3 Catherine Earnshaw, Catherine Heathcliff, and Catherine Linton are all taken on at one point or another by the two Catherines. The first Catherine is named Earnshaw, then Linton when she marries Edgar, then perhaps Heathcliff when she and Heathcliff are finally united in the grave. Her daughter is first Catherine Linton, then Heathcliff, then Earnshaw.
Analysis:
We are given an extraordinary window into Heathcliff's mind in the chapter. Whenever he looks at something, he sees Catherine in it he hears her voice in every sound. This is Brontë's conception of true haunting, which seems to bear far more resemblance to madness than to scary noises in the dark. It is mainly an interior phenomenon: if the ghost of Catherine is at work, she has found her home in Heathcliff's mind and her vocation in distorting his perception and his ability to communicate with the outside world.
Analysis:
An essential question for thinking about this novel is: does it end happily or not, and why? Is the novel on the side of the Grange and civilization, since Catherine and Hareton move there after Heathcliff dies? Or should we miss the intensity of the passion in Wuthering Heights? Who wins? It seems at first that the Grange wins, and yet we should remember that Heathcliff achieves his version of heaven as well. Several film versions of Wuthering Heights prefer to delete the whole second half of the novel, ending dramatically with Catherine's death they find that the restabilizing second half detracts from the romance and the power of the first part. Is this the case? Did Emily add the second half because society would not have accepted the first half alone?
The answer to the last question must be negative: the symmetrical structure of the novel is too carefully designed and too deeply imbedded to be the product of outside social pressures. This might lead to the conclusion that civilization really does win, since the marriage of Catherine and Hareton is the final and necessary conclusion to two generations of unrest, and all traces of Heathcliff disappear, at least in genetic terms. In another sense, however, Catherine and Hareton resemble the earlier Catherine and Heathcliff, purified of their wilder and more antisocial elements: so one might assume that their marriage is an echo of the marriage that never took place between Catherine and Heathcliff. This is supported by the fact that the story begins
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and ends with a Catherine Earnshaw, and that the name Hareton is very similar to Heathcliff.
In another reading, one might remember that the first Catherine and Heathcliff belonged above all to the natural and immaterial world, whereas the Lintons belonged to a material society. Then the reunion in death of the two lovers constitutes their achievement of complete freedom and it hardly matters what happens on earth.
One might also conclude that Emily Brontë was really more drawn to her wild characters Catherine and Heathcliff but realized that they posed a great threat to the existence of peaceful life on earth. Perhaps she eliminated them because she was unwilling to sacrifice the rest of the world for such a wild ideal but with Heathcliff's death the novel ultimately had to end because it no longer captured her interest. In this case the ambiguous conclusion of the novel represents an inner conflict in the author herself
Character List:
Catherine (or Cathy) Earnshaw: is Mr. Earnshaw's daughter and Hindley's sister. She is also Heathcliff's foster sister and beloved. She marries Edgar Linton and has a daughter, also named Catherine. Catherine is beautiful and charming, but she is never as civilized as she pretends to be. In her heart she is always a wild girl playing on the moors with Heathcliff. She regards it as her right to be loved by all, and has an unruly temper. Heathcliff usually calls her Cathy; Edgar usually calls her Catherine.
Catherine (or Cathy) Linton: (who marries Linton Heathcliff to become Catherine Heathcliff, and then marries Hareton to be Catherine Earnshaw) is the daughter of the older Catherine and Edgar Linton. She has all her mother's charm without her wildness, although she is by no means submissive and spiritless. Edgar calls her Cathy.
Mr. Earnshaw: is the father of Catherine and Hindley, a plain, fairly well-off farmer with few pretensions but a kind heart. He is a stern sort of father. He takes in Heathcliff despite his family's protests.
Edgar Linton: is Isabella's older brother, who marries Catherine Earnshaw and fathers Catherine Linton. In contrast to Heathcliff, he is a gently bred, refined man, a patient husband and a loving father. His faults are a certain effeminacy, and a tendency to be cold and unforgiving when his dignity is hurt.
Ellen (or Nelly) Dean: is one of the main narrators. She has been a servant with the Earnshaws and the Lintons for all her life, and knows them better than anyone else. She is independently minded and high spirited, and retains an objective viewpoint on those she serves. She is called Nelly by those who are on the most egalitarian terms with her: Mr. Earnshaw, the older Catherine, Heathcliff.
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Frances Earnshaw: is Hindley's wife, a young woman of unknown background. She seems rather flighty and giddy to Ellen, and displays an irrational fear of death, which is explained when she dies of tuberculosis.
Hareton Earnshaw: is the son of Hindley and Frances; he marries the younger Catherine. For most of the novel, he is rough and rustic and uncultured, having been carefully kept from all civilizing influences by Heathcliff. He grows up to be superficially like Heathcliff, but is really much more sweet-tempered and forgiving. He never blames Heathcliff for having disinherited him, for example, and remains his oppressor's staunchest ally.
Hindley Earnshaw: is the only son of Mr. and Mrs. Earnshaw, and Catherine's older brother. He is a bullying, discontented boy who grows up to be a violent alcoholic when his beloved wife, Frances, dies. He hates Heathcliff because he felt supplanted in his father's affections by the other boy, and Heathcliff hates him even more in return.
Heathcliff: is a foundling taken in by Mr. Earnshaw and raised with his children. Of unknown descent, he seems to represent wild and natural forces which often seem amoral and dangerous for society. His almost inhuman devotion to Catherine is the moving force in his life, seconded by his vindictive hatred for all those who stand between him and his beloved. He is cruel but magnificent in his consistency, and the reader can never forget that at the heart of the grown man lies the abandoned, hungry child of the streets of Liverpool.
Isabella Linton: is Edgar's younger sister, and marries Heathcliff to become Isabella Heathcliff; her son is named Linton Heathcliff. Before she marries Heathcliff, she is a rather shallow-minded young lady, pretty and quick-witted but a little foolish (as can be seen by her choice of husbands). Her unhappy marriage brings out an element of cruelty in her character: when her husband treats her brutally, she rapidly grows to hate him with all her heart.
Joseph: is an old fanatic, a household servant at Wuthering Heights who outlives all his masters. His brand of religion is unforgiving for others and self-serving for himself. His heavy Yorkshire accent gives flavor to the novel.
Dr. Kenneth: is a minor character, the local doctor who appears when people are sick or dying. He is a sympathetic and intelligent man, whose main concern is the health of his patients.
Mr. and Mrs. Linton: are Edgar and Isabella's parents, minor characters. They spoil their children and turn the older Catherine into a little lady, being above all concerned about good manners and behavior. They are unsympathetic to Heathcliff when he is a child.
Linton Heathcliff: is the son of Heathcliff and Isabella. He combines the worst characteristics of both parents, and is effeminate, weakly, and cruel. He uses his status as an invalid to manipulate the tender-hearted younger Catherine. His father despises him. Linton marries Catherine and dies soon after.
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Lockwood: is the narrator of the novel. He is a gentleman from London, in distinct contrast to the other rural characters. He is not particularly sympathetic and tends to patronize his subjects.
Zillah: is the housekeeper at Wuthering Heights after Hindley's death and before Heathcliff's. She doesn't particularly understand the people she lives with, and stands in marked contrast to Ellen, who is deeply invested in them. She is an impatient but capable woman.
Throughout Wuthering Heights, Heathcliff's personality could be defined as dark, menacing, and brooding. He is a dangerous character, with rapidly changing moods, capable of deep-seeded hatred, and incapable, it seems, of any kind of forgiveness or compromise. In the first 33 chapters, the text clearly establishes Heathcliff as an untamed, volatile, wild man and establishes his great love of Catherine and her usage of him as the source of his ill humor and resentment towards many other characters. However, there are certain tensions, contradictions, and ambiguities present in Chapter 34 that establish the true intensity Heathcliff's feelings towards Catherine; feelings so intense that they border on a jealous obsession.
Chapter 34 begins with a tension in regard to Heathcliff's disposition. Since Heathcliff's countenance has seldom expressed anything but a sullen disposition, certainly nothing even remotely resembling joy, it comes as somewhat of a surprise when in the last chapter, young Cathy, upon seeing Heathcliff, reports that he looks, "almost bright and cheerful -- No, almost nothing -- very much excited, and wild and glad (276)!" This is entirely unlike the Heathcliff that has been established up until this point. Even Nelly, who is well-accustomed to Heathcliff's personality and dark moods is taken aback by the sudden change, so uncharacteristic of his usual temper --"...anxious to ascertain the truth of her statement, for to see the master looking glad would not be an everyday spectacle, I framed an excuse to go in (276)." Since Catherine has previously almost always been the cause of such wild mood fluctuations, it stands to reason that she has somehow inspired this wild and frightening joy in him as well.
During the final days of his life, Heathcliff's curious behavior continues. He refuses to eat, absents himself from the company of Cathy, Hareton, or Nelly, disappears inexplicably for long intervals of time and refuses to explain his absences. Most disturbing, his strange excitement continues, causing discomfort to all those around him, especially Nelly. When Nelly asks him where he was the night before his he began to exhibit this odd elation, he tells her, "Last night, I was on the threshold of hell. To-day I am within sight of my heaven -- I have my eyes on it -- hardly three feet to sever me (278)!" His statement is ambiguous--it does little to explain his sudden change of humor and little to satisfy Nelly's curiosity and wonder at his state. Joy in most characters in Wuthering Heights is an uplifting state associated with happiness and delighted exhilaration. However in Heathcliff, as Nelly observes, it is a horrible, frightening thing. In Heathcliff, the mood arouses wariness and fear in others and indicates some inner change so dramatic that its cause is almost unthinkable.
Heathcliff offers no coherent explanation for his sudden change of state and the text offers no concrete solution as to what could have caused his dark exhilaration. Thus, the question of his condition is left largely unanswered as Heathcliff continues to
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exhibit such uncharacteristic behavior, inspiring all the more uneasiness in Nelly, especially. He frightens her greatly several times with his agitated state. Once, upon encountering him in his room, Nelly tells Mr. Lockwood, "I cannot express what a terrible start I got, by the momentary view! Those deep black eyes! That smile, and ghastly paleness! It appeared to me, not Mr. Heathcliff, but a goblin; and, in my terror, I let the candle bend towards the wall, and it left me in darkness (278)".
Even Nelly, who has never before, even after many, many years of acquaintance to Heathcliff, shown any intimidation or fear of him despite his blatant displays of brutality, is shaken and haunted by his strange appearance and his agitated condition. So shocking is his countenance that she even asks herself if he is a ghoul or a vampire. Since he is not willing to divulge entirely what it is that is causing him such excitement, Nelly, and all of Bronte's audience, are left to ponder for themselves what could effect such a change.
Of course, the only thing previously that has caused Heathcliff to fluctuate so wildly in his moods and to hover between such dramatically varying temperaments is Catherine. Nelly, having been witness to Heathcliff's fits of passion and rages in regard to Catherine before is shrewd enough to credit his appearance and strange condition to her former mistress, even though she has been dead for many years. Heathcliff has previously professed the misery Catherine's death has caused him and stated his desire to be close to her -- his anticipation to meet her when he dies.
When Nelly attempts to serve Heathcliff food in the last chapter she finds Heathcliff watching some invisible apparition with rapt attention. Though Nelly admonishes him for his refusal to eat and his poor condition, he never moves his eyes from whatever it is he sees -- one may assume it is vision of Catherine, since his expression is a conflicting one of "both pleasure and pain, in exquisite extremes...(280)". Little else could arouse such extreme emotion in Heathcliff, and nothing else, it seems, could make them apparent on his face. Apparently Heathcliff, seeing himself near death, and despite their present separation, feels himself as near to Catherine as he can possibly be given the fact that he is still alive. And given this relative proximity, his mood has been heightened to a delirious agitation at the prospect of seeing her again.
With this anticipation, the text introduces another contradiction. Heathcliff assumes that he will be united again with Catherine in eternal bliss when he dies. Given this belief, Heathcliff apparently believes that Catherine is in heaven. He has admitted to Nelly numerous times that he is an evil man, merciless, and bent on revenge towards his enemies, even if it means hurting those who have never wronged him--young Edgar Linton, and young Cathy, in particular. Heathcliff realizes that he is filled with hate and vengeance and makes no excuse for his behavior. Yet, since he imagines himself being reunited with Catherine after his death, he apparently feels that he will go to heaven when he dies. This is a curious contradiction coming from a man who recognizes his evil and makes no attempt to reform himself. Maybe Heathcliff holds no beliefs concerning heaven or hell, but in the last chapter, he tells Nelly how close his soul is to bliss, which seems to indicate that he does believe in something following death.
When Heathcliff does finally die, the cause of his death is never really ascertained. His countenance in death is almost a smile, at the same time a sneer, according to
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Nelly--a look of life-like exultation. His countenance doesn't suggest which end he met--the sneer he wears in death is close to his normal expression in life. It must be assumed that his obsession with Catherine, his desperate yearning to be with her, and his longing for death was what ultimately killed him.
That such a longing could actually kill Heathcliff suggests that perhaps what he was experiencing was more than love. It seems unlikely that love would inspire in Heathcliff such rage and anger as consumed his life for the many years following Catherine's death. That love alone could cause his physical decline and death seems unlikely as well. Heathcliff's condition indicates that what he felt towards Catherine was more than love--it was more like a violent obsession, fueled by a mad jealousy and hatred of anyone who dared to stand between himself and her.
The text in the last chapter introduces several contradictions and tensions, but also resolves them, in a subtle way. Heathcliff's strange behavior and mysterious death, according to the text, seems ultimately to be the result of his mad obsession with Catherine, and his inability to function rationally without her. The text implicates Heathcliff as nearly a madman--seeing apparitions, rambling almost incoherently about his approaching death, shunning food or anything else that might keep him alive. Heathcliff went beyond what was reasonable and rational in his love for Catherine--his behavior, as illustrated in the last chapter was erratic, and his death disturbing--all indications that Heathcliff was wildly obsessed with Catherine, a premise which does much to resolve many of the complexities in Chapter 34. Bronte does an excellent job of introducing complexities and tensions within the text and then resolving them subtlety and exquisitely through Nelly's narration and observations and through Heathcliff's wild moods and unpredictable actions
Alice in Wonderland(1865)
By
Lewis Carrol
The Alice books were written during the Victorian era, a time now remembered for its stifling propriety and constrictive morals. Carroll had something of an outsider's perspective on this world; he was painfully shy, and he often stuttered. His fondness for little girls has raised more than a few eyebrows, although it is unknown if Carroll ever acted on this obsession. At any rate, these feelings of his served to accentuate his feelings of isolation.
But his position gave him tremendous perspective on his world. The creatures of wonderland have many arbitrary customs. Their behaviors are all defensible with strange logic, but the customs are still silly or even cruel. There are obvious echoes of the Victorian world, as the animals are opinionated and have strong ideas about what constitutes appropriate behavior. The creatures' preciousness and their arbitrary sensitivities mock the fastidiousness of the Victorian era.
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The Alice books also mock the children's literature of the day. In keeping with the character of the time, children's literature was full of simplistic morals and heavy-handed attempts to educate the young. Some of the books supposedly for children were quite dry, and at the least suffered from a lack of imagination.
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland was first published in 1865, and it was an immediate success. Carroll's sense of the absurd and his amazing gift for games of logic and language have made the Alice books popular with both adults and children, and they have remained some of the best-known children's books written in English. The well-known Disney adaptation draws freely from both books, while retaining the basic structure of the first book and remaining faithful to the flavor and central themes of the story.
The Alice books deal with the sometimes precarious world of children; the reader should keep in mind that at the time of their writing, the advent of industrialization had raised people's consciousness of child labor and exploitation. Carroll sees the world of children as a dangerous place, shadowed by the threat of death and the presence of adults who are powerful but often absurd.
The book is refreshingly complex, refusing to take patronize its young audience with simplistic morals or perspectives. A point of comparison is Antoine de St. Exupéry's The Little Prince: while the The Little Prince sets up a rather simplistic binary between children (who are good, wise and innocent) and "the big people" (who are mean, shallow, and foolish), the Alice books satirize the absurdities of adults while avoiding pat conclusions about the difference between adults and children. Childhood is seen as a state of danger, and although Carroll has an evident fondness for children he never idealizes them. Alice's challenge is to grow into a strong and compassionate person despite the idiosyncrasies of the creatures she meets (the creatures symbolizing the adult world). She has to learn the rules of each new encounter, but in the end she must also retain a sense of justice and develop a sense of herself. Rather than set childhood and adulthood as simple opposites, valorizing the former and disparaging the latter, Carroll shows the process by which a good child can become a strong adult. Alice is also not without "adult" friends along the way: in the first book, for example, the Caterpillar and the Cheshire Cat are two enigmatic creatures who seem to understand how Wonderland works. They help Alice at key points.
The books always retain a sense of mystery and a fondness for the sinister; even the characters who aid Alice have a dark edge to them. The hints of mortality and the sense of fear in the books have only contributed to their popularity. The books stand as evidence that children's literature need not talk down to its audience. In fact, it is the depth and sophistication of the Alice books that has won them recognition as some of the best children's literature ever written.
Main Themes
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Growth into Adulthood: This theme is central to both books. Alice's adventures parallel the journey from childhood to adulthood. She comes into numerous new situations in which adaptability is absolutely necessary for success. She shows marked progress throughout the course of the book; in the beginning, she can barely maintain enough composure to keep herself from crying. By the end of the novel, she is self-possessed and able to hold her own against the most baffling Wonderland logic.
Size change: Closely connected to the above theme, size change is another recurring concept. The dramatic changes in size hint at the radical changes the body undergoes during adolescence. The key, once again, is adaptability. Alice's size changes also bring about a change in perspective, and she sees the world from a very different view. In the last trial scene, her growth into a giant reflects her interior growth. She becomes a much stronger, self-possessed person, able to speak out against the nonsensical proceedings of the trial.
Death: This theme is even more present in the second Alice book, Through the Looking Glass. Alice frequently makes references to her own death without knowing it. Childhood is a state of peril in Carroll's view: children are quite vulnerable, and the world presents many dangers. Another aspect of death is its inevitability. Since the Alice books are at root about change (the transition from childhood to adulthood, the passage of time), mortality is inescapable as a theme. Death is the final step of this process of growth. While death is only hinted at in the first book, the second book is saturated with references to mortality and macabre humor.
Games/ Learning the Rules: Every new encounter is something of a game for Alice; there are rules to learn, and consequences for learning or not learning those rules. Games are a constant part of life in Wonderland, from the Caucus race to the strange croquet match to the fact that the royal court is a living deck of cards. And every new social encounter is like a game, in that there are bizarre, apparently arbitrary rules that Alice has to master. Learning the rules is a metaphor for the adaptations to new social situations that every child makes as she grows older. Mastering each challenge, Alice grows wiser and more adaptable as time goes on.
Language and Logic/Illogic: Carroll delights in puns. The Alice books are chockfull of games with language, to the reader's delight and Alice's confusion. The games often point out some inconsistency or slipperiness of language in general and English in particular. The books point out the pains and advantages of language. Language is a source of joy and adaptability; it can also be a source of great confusion.
Just as baffling is the bizarre logic at work in Wonderland. Every creature can justify the most absurd behavior, and their arguments for themselves are often fairly complex. Their strange reasoning is another source of delight for the reader and challenge for Alice. She has to learn to discern between unusual logic and utter nonsense.
Opening Poem and Chapter 1:
Down the Rabbit-Hole
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Analysis:
The poem at the beginning of the book is a reasonably accurate account of how the book came to be. The three girls in the boat are the Lidell sisters, of whom Alice is the second oldest. Carroll often entertained the girls with fantastic stories he made up on the spot. On Alice Lidell's insistence, he took one of his longer tales and wrote it down.
The central theme of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland is Alice's struggle to adapt to the rules of this new world; metaphorically, it is Alice's struggle to adapt to the strange rules and behaviors of adults. The rabbit, with his watch and his concern for schedules and appointments, is a representative of this adult world. Alice's story starts when she follows him down the hole.
She is characterized as a bright child who often says or does foolish things; in other words, Alice has much in common with any child who is trying to behave like someone older than she is. Her blunders come about because of unfamiliarity rather than stupidity. She is also an unusually conscientious child; note the moment when she is falling down the hall, and she puts the marmalade carefully back on the shelf for fear that the jar might kill someone if she were to drop it.
As Carroll sees it, the world of children is a dangerous one. Not knowing the rules, however foolish or arbitrary those rules may be, is a source of great peril. Alice's Adventures in Wonderland is shadowed by hints of death, and death is a recurring theme of both of Carroll's books. Through the Looking Glass, the second book about Alice's adventures, is an even darker story; in Through the Looking Glass, reminders of death are inescapable. But even here, at the start of Alice's adventure, we are reminded of the frailty of humans and of children in particular. The first hint of mortality comes with Alice's concern about the marmalade jar; her worry shows that Wonderland is not an escape from all of the limitations of the real world. Death is still a possibility. A moment later, Carroll treats us to a very macabre joke. When Alice is falling, she takes pride in her composure: "ŒWell!' thought Alice to herself, Œafter such a fall as this, I shall think nothing of tumbling down stairs! How brave they'll all think me at home! Why, I wouldn't say anything about it, even if I fell off the top of the house!'" (13). The narrator adds, grimly, "Which was very likely true." The narrator agrees with Alice, but not for the reason she might think: after falling off a house, the reason why she would not say anything is because she would be dead. Alice makes another unknowing allusion to her own death when she peers into the tiny door. She realizes that she cannot even fit her head through the opening, and even if she could, her head "would be of very little use without my shoulders" (16). She is referring, unknowingly, to her own decapitation. The moment is both an allusion to death and a bit of foreshadowing. At the end of the book, the Queen of Hearts will try her best to separate Alice's head from her shoulders.
In Alice's treatment of the little drink, we are reminded of the specific perils that face children. Carroll writes: ". . . [F]or she had read several nice little histories about children who had got burnt, and eaten up be wild beasts and other unpleasant things, all because they would not remember the simple rules their friends had taught them"
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(17-8). The challenge of mastering the "simple rules" is going to be Alice's main struggle in Wonderland, and this passage hints at some of worst consequences of not knowing the rules. Innocence is closely connected to ignorance: in this book, it is not an idealized or safe state. While we are charmed by Alice's blunders and know that she will make it home in the end, Carroll is constantly reminding us of the consequences of not knowing the rules. Childhood is partially a state of peril, and Carroll names a few of those perils directly: poison bottles that the child cannot read, falls, burns, wounds from blades that the child is too young to handle (18). Not least of these dangers is an adult world that baffles and confuses. Alice is trained enough to read the bottle before she drinks it. She knows the simple rule in this case, and knows well enough to avoid the label "poison." Her challenge will be to learn more complex rules, reading not only labels but also situations and people as she makes her way through Wonderland.
Chapter 2: The Pool of Tears
Analysis:
Alice's shifts in size and inquiries into her own identity reflect the difficulties of growing up. Just as children on the verge of adulthood sometimes find themselves too small for adult privileges while being forced to talk on the no-fun world of adult responsibilities, Alice finds her body thrown back and forth between two extremes of size. The abrupt, almost violent physical changes might also suggest the sudden physical changes that come with the onset of adolescence.
Her inquiries into her own identity parallel a child's search for herself as she grows older. Alice worries that her identity has been displaced; her fears parallel any child's uncertainty about her place in the world. Note that Alice loathes the idea of being Mabel not only because Mabel is less bright, but because Mabel is less affluent. Alice is aware of differences in wealth, but she is still a young child; she sees class only in terms of how many material objects a little girl is allowed to have.
Chapter 3: A Caucus Race and a Long Tale
Analysis:
Puns abound. The two meanings of "dry" are played on at the start of the chapter, as the mouse recites from Havilland Chapmell's Short Course of History. Carroll's taste for puns and the playful side of language is a constant source of amusement throughout the book. The mouse quotes a passage where the antecedent for the word "it" is missing (though the meaning is still quite clear), and the result is general confusion among the animals; this is one of many moments where the creatures of Wonderland create confusion by taking language at absolute face-value. They allow themselves to be confused by pronouns without antecedents; they also take figurative
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language literally, or confuse homonyms. Much of one's ability to understand language comes from the ability to ignore its inconsistencies and incoherencies: for example, the listener can understand the meaning of "it" without hearing its antecedent. The creatures of Wonderland are not merely silly: they always have their own logic, a certain sense and reasoning behind their absurd behavior. Their strange reactions to language point out the potential pitfalls of English, and their bizarre rules and sensitivities parallel the arbitrary nature of any culture's customs and habits. Alice's adventures are wonderful training for adapting to the absurd behavior of adults.
The Caucus Race parodies political process: the participants run around in confused circles, never accomplishing anything. If we can take Alice as a symbol for the average citizen, we see that the Race does very little to benefit her. At the end, Alice is forced to give everyone a prize. Although Alice also receives a prize, she is given something that she already had. More humor comes from the contrast between the animals' sober faces and Alice's secret conviction that the whole process is absurd.
Carroll puns with the homonyms "tale" and "tale," as the shape of the mouse's tail becomes the shape of the mouse's printed story. The pun is playful, and Alice's fascination with the animal's tale makes for a charming moment: the charm of her wandering attention, the shape of the printed words, and the rhyme scheme mask some of the darkness of the mouse's story. He is talking about being cornered by a dog and forced to go on trial. The dog (whose name is Fury) wanted to be prosecutor, judge, and jury; he also wanted to condemn the mouse to death. We never hear the end of the story, as the Mouse, realizing that Alice is paying less than total attention to the meaning of his words, runs off in a huff.
Alice makes more unknowing allusions to death, this time to the death of others. She wishes her cat Dinah was there, so that the cat might fetch the mouse back to finish his story. She seems unaware of the fact that this would mean the mouse's death. And she unthinkingly talks about Dinah's amazing talent for catching birds, not realizing that this kind of talk will offend all of her new avian friends.
Chapter 4: The Rabbit Sends in a Little Bill
Analysis:
More growing. The story plays again with the definition of "growing up." Alice talks to herself when she is stuck in the house, and resolves to write a book about her strange adventures when she is grown up, but then realizes mournfully that she is "grown up" already, in terms of size. In Chapter 2, she made a similar statement when she berated herself, "a great girl," for crying so much. But Alice's size is juxtaposed to her naïve comments and worries; these moments emphasize that growing up is more than a matter of size.
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In fact, many of Alice's victories come when she is small, and being large is often a great hindrance. Against the puppy, Alice has nothing but her wits to help her against the animal. She manages to escape. And note that in the house she is impeded by her giant size, and is only able to escape when she shrinks down again. Size doesn't matter as much as adaptability, and Alice's true "growing up" comes with her adaptation to each new challenge.
A recurring theme is Alice's desire to see the garden. Wonderland is in this way similar to dreams with an unfulfilled desire. But the garden itself merely structures Alice's journey: after each new adventure, she presses on toward the garden, but it is the incidents along the way that are making her into a wiser person.
Chapter 5: Advice From a Caterpillar
Analysis:
The conversation between Alice and the Caterpillar is worth a close look, and makes for an excellent paper topic. The discussion brings into focus the themes of change and growing up; for the Caterpillar, for whom dramatic transformation is a natural part of life, change is neither upsetting nor surprising. He is unshakably calm, with the exception of when Alice complains of being only three inches tall (the Caterpillar is exactly three inches tall). He also seems to be less belligerent than many of the creatures of Wonderland, even though he contradicts almost everything Alice says. He is a sage-figure, whose mysterious silences and terse responses provide a sharp contrast to Alice's exasperation and confused replies. The game in Wonderland is change and transformation, and the Caterpillar understands the game that Alice is trying to learn how to play.
The poem Alice recites, "You Are Old, Father William," is a parody of "The Old Man's Comforts and How He Gained Them," by Robert Southey. The poem is in line with the theme of change and growth: a young man asks his father how he has maintained so many astounding abilities despite his old age.
The Pigeon's classification of little girls as a type of serpent is one of many humorous logical exercises by the creatures of Wonderland. Remember that Carroll was a mathematician with a love of logic puzzles. The creatures of Wonderland always have a reason and a method to their nonsense. They are constantly reasoning their way to absurd conclusions, to the reader's delight and to Alice's confusion.
Chapter 6: Pig and Pepper
Analysis:
Alice shows a considerable amount of composure in this chapter. She never breaks down crying, and she somehow manages to keep her temper despite the argumentative creatures she meets. The theme of growing up works its way through
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this chapter. We meet the Duchess, who almost at first glance tells Alice that she knows very little (71); Alice is quite displeased by the insult, but she holds her own. A moment later, she shows she is adapting to Wonderland's logic when she answers the Duchess smartly. The Duchess says pointedly that the world would go around faster if everyone minded his own business; Alice responds, in Wonderland fashion, that the world going around faster would not be a good thing. The days would become too short. She literalizes the figure of speech and wins another little victory.
Some more of the risks of growing up are apparent in the transformation of the little baby. One of the greatest dangers of making the transition from childhood to adulthood is growing into a disagreeable adult. The child's transformation into a pig (the pig being a symbol for an unpleasant person) is played on for it's full value as a metaphor. The Cheshire cat asks also what became of the child; when Alice tells him that the baby turned into a pig, the cat responds coyly that he thought it would. When the pig trots off into the woods, she thinks of other children she knows who might make good pigs.
Many characters take their names from old expressions. The Cheshire cat's name comes from the phrase, "to grin like a Cheshire cat," an expression of uncertain origin. The March Hare is insane; an old phrase is "mad as a March hare," referring to the animal's wild behavior during mating season. The Hatter's madness makes allusion to the real-life tendency of hatters to go mad; hatters sometimes went insane because of the poisonous mercury used to cure felt.
Chapter 7: A Mad Tea Party
Analysis:
The Mad Tea party is an important scene, as the logic/illogic of the March Hare, the Hatter, and the Dormouse reveals some of the peculiarities of language. They are some of the most argumentative of the creatures Alice meets in Wonderland, and their strange remarks show Carroll's talent for word games and logic puzzles. (The readers should take a moment to look at some of these important scenes up-close, as analyzing every pun and bit of mad reasoning would be too time-consuming for this summary. Of particular note are the scenes with the caterpillar, the Cheshire cat, and the Mad Tea Party.) The illogic of language and the relationship between sense, nonsense, and words is an important theme of the book. At one point, Alice protests that she says what she means, or at least, she means what she says. She insists that the two are the same thing. But the creatures correct, using examples of similar flipped sentences where the meanings are totally different. (Example: "I like what I get" and "I get what I like.")
Alice is participating in that most adult of activities, a tea party, and she comes up against some of the most difficult creatures she has ever met. But she generally maintains her composure, holding her own against the three tea-takers and managing to anticipate some of their conclusions and rules. She also is smart enough to leave when she's had enough.
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The themes of growing up and learning the rules come up in Alice's triumphant entry into the garden. Unlike the first time, when she cried and couldn't maintain control of herself, she remains calm and uses her head to get to the garden.
Chapter 8: The Queen's Croquet Ground
Analysis:
Alice initially faces the Court of Cards with great confidence; she boldly says to herself that they are only a pack of cards, and she has nothing to fear. She is much stronger than when she first arrived in Wonderland. Her confidence comes through when she saves the lives of the three gardeners.
But Alice soon realizes that although the people of the Court are only a pack of cards, their nature does not make them any less dangerous. The Court of Cards, like people of power in real life, rely on rank and costume for their status. Carroll turns rank and costume into a game, mocking it; however, he does not deny that ridiculous people can be frightening or dangerous. Alice begins by thinking she has nothing to fear, but as she spends more time with the Queen of Hearts she becomes increasingly anxious.
The theme of games, and learning their rules, is central in this chapter. Alice is learning to get along in a social set of powerful people; Carroll makes this adaptation into a kind of game by turning the court into a deck of cards. Alice also has to adapt to a very difficult game of croquet. Part of her problem is realizing that no one else is paying any attention to the rules; sometimes, learning to play means more than learning the rules.
The argument about beheading the Cheshire cat is more fun with nonsense, as the king argues that anything that has a head can be beheaded and the executioner argues that being beheaded actually requires having a body. Alice is composed enough to mediate.
The Cheshire cat is one of the few animals in Wonderland who treats Alice with courtesy. He is a figure similar to the Caterpillar, in that he seems tranquil and unbothered by the confusion of Wonderland. He is unimpressed by the King's threats, and he easily escapes when his safety is threatened.
Chapter 9: The Mock Turtle's Story
Analysis:
The Duchess seems different, but her change in behavior actually reflects how Alice has changed. She is no longer the intimidating figure who acted imperiously to Alice; she is instead a rather silly woman, full of cliché wisdom that degenerates into
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nonsense. Alice is now able to see her clearly. The Duchess' tendency to find a moral in everything satirizes the simplistic moralizing children's literature of Carroll's time; but now, Alice has grown enough to view the Duchess critically.
Mock Turtle is another game with language. Mock turtle soup is actually made of veal, which is why the original illustrations for the book show a turtle with a calf's head. The description of the school is full of puns, with several moment of real cleverness. The Mock Turtle says that the turtle who taught the others was called a Tortoise; Alice asks why he was called a Tortoise if he was a Turtle. The answer is that he was called a Tortoise because he taught the others. This joke is actually an illustration of the disconnection between sign and signified; language, in other words, is arbitrary. Tortoise is an arbitrary sound, and it need not mean the animal. To the Gryphon and the Mock Turtle, teaching is part of the definition of "Tortoise." The French thinker Derrida writes about this quality of language, and his work has had a great influence on linguistics and literary theory.
Chapter 10: The Lobster Quadrille
Analysis:
The puns are two numerous to go through here; the Gryphon and the Mock Turtle are good characters to examine if writing a paper on language and wordplay. The sea where they grew up is a place where every possible pun is exploited.
Alice continues to show how she has grown. When she first arrived in Wonderland, she managed to offend everyone by talking about how her cat catches and eats certain animals; although she almost mentions that she has eaten lobster to the Gryphon and the Mock Turtle, she catches herself just in time. She also stops herself from saying that she has had whiting for dinner. She has learned from her previous mistakes, and so she is able to keep things civil between her and her peculiar entertainers.
The Mock Turtle is a strange figure. He is always crying, although the Gryphon says confidentially to Alice in Chapter 9 that the Mock Turtle's sadness is mostly in his own head. But his tears coupled with his song make for a rather eerie moment. Perhaps his sadness comes from the fact that Mock Turtle is meant to be consumed; in real life, it only exists as part of the name of a soup, and in Wonderland Mock Turtles only exists to be made into soup. Remember that the Mock Turtle tearfully told Alice that he was once a real turtle. Though a real turtle need not be eaten, a Mock Turtle probably knows how he will end up. The Mock Turtle's song is about beautiful turtle soup, and even as Alice runs off to the trial she can hear his melancholy chorus. The song is yet another moment that touches on the theme of death.
Chapter 11: Who Stole the Tarts?
Analysis:
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Carroll's explanation of "suppression" is another amusing moment of wordplay. He takes advantage of the word's broad range of meanings, as played off against the very specific meaning the word has in the context of newspaper articles reporting trials. Alice makes the mistake (as children often do) of using a very specific example of "suppression" as the best definition of a word.
The proceedings of the trial are obviously unjust, and Carroll is lightly satirizing the justice system. It is not a specific satire of justice as it existed in Victorian England; it can more accurately be read as a satire of some of the dangers involved in trials. The judge and the ever-present queen are tyrannical; the jurors are simpletons who barely know their own names. Alice is appalled by the injustice of the proceedings; it is one of the marks of her basic compassion and her growth as a person that she will refuse to be intimidated or won over by the workings of this court. The theme of growing up is central here. Note that without eating any mushrooms, Alice begins to grow. She also barely notices it. Her growth here is a metaphor for gradually growing into an adult. She entered Wonderland as a tiny version of herself, but she will leave a giant.
Chapter 12:
Analysis:
We see Alice at the trial as one who cannot be intimidated, or even outreasoned. She manages to fight her way through the king's poor reasoning, and she also stands up against the unjust evidence. She has grown, in all senses: in size, but also in her capacity for thinking independently. She also has a sense of justice, and she refuses to tolerate the terrible proceedings of the unjust trial. The letter, with its poem full of pronouns, plays again with the ambiguity of pronouns. It also satirizes the use of evidence, not only in trials, but in all situations; as people often do in real life, the people in the trial extrapolate the conclusions they want from evidence that is far from sufficient.
The dream ends darkly, as the cards rise up and fly into her face. Although Alice is then a giant and perhaps has little to fear, this moment still hints at some of the difficulties of the world. Alice makes enemies of the Card Court because she refuses to play their games as they want her to; in a book where Alice learns game after game, this final game is one where Alice must learn the rules but then subvert them. In refusing to be bound by the unjust proceedings of the court, she comes into her own as a developed person with a sense of justice and a capacity for independent thought. The final moment of the dream suggest difficulty, but also Alice's ability to stand up for herself. When the cards fly in her face, she screams, but Carroll tells us that the scream is half-fear and half-anger. The attack is frightening, but Alice is prepared to fight back. The waking world continues with this theme of growth, as Alice's sister imagines Alice in the years to come, a strong adult who retains some of her child-like innocence and compassion.
Trapped in Wonderland
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Lewis Carroll's Adventures in Wonderland provides a physical removal from reality by creating a fantastical world and adventure in the mind of a young girl. In this separation, Carroll is able to bend the rules of the temporal world. Although this is self-evident in Alice's physical transfigurations, language and conventions provide additional means to test if a world can defy the rules which are didactically fed to children and become second nature to adults. Perhaps it might be an inescapable outcome given that Carroll has been educated in a world that operates within structured set of rules, but the "wonderful dream" seems to be peculiarly similar to the "dull reality" which Carroll attempts to escape (98). Fantasies seem to be forever bounded by what reality allows the mind to imagine.
The opening scene provides a possible metaphor for Carroll's artistic endeavor in the face of these constraints:
Alice opened the door and found that it led into a small passage, not much larger than a rat-hole: she knelt down and looked along the passage into the loveliest garden you ever saw. How she longed to get out of the dark hall, and wander about among those beds of bright flowers and those cool fountains, but she could not get her head through the doorway (10). Alice seems quite capable of seeing that a more beautiful world exists beyond the confines of her environment. By making a distinction that it is her head, the physical location of the mind, which prevents her from proceeding, Carroll suggests that the mind provides the barrier to entering the Eden-like grounds of pure beauty. Alice's subsequent struggle to physically transform herself to squeeze within these boundaries mirrors Carroll's endeavor to gain entry into the unbounded imagination. Adult consciousness becomes comparable to the "rat-hole" in which Alice finds herself trapped. By grounding the narrative in the eyes and imagination of Alice, who is just beginning to be inculcated with lessons and physically removing her from the temporal world, Carroll adjusts the conditions of his adult world to explore if childhood presents the only opportunity or the "key" to the access the imagination. Yet even as he changes the parameters of the world and the eyes of the beholder, his endeavor appears doomed to failure; when Alice finally locates the garden, she finds that her conception of perfection is tainted. As the gardeners paint the red rose-tree white, Carroll's vision of beauty becomes subject to the same forces that dominate reality.
Alice's youth creates the possibility of viewing an alternate world through eyes not completely corrupted by the social conventions of reality, but her efforts to retain Victorian manners when her new environment creates no pressures to do so, suggest how deeply the rules of the world are impressed upon the mind during childhood. Alice's language is steeped in the artificiality of her world. Her stilted words, "You sh'n't be beheaded," reflect that the training of her schooling is not even abandoned in a moment of apparent crisis (65). In many instances, Alice even tries to transfer her conception of proper manners to this new environment. She finds it "decidedly uncivil" that the Footman looks up at the sky all the time he is speaking (46). She seems to be almost willing to forgive his rudeness if only he could answer her question, "But what am I to do?" (46). Alice's rejection of the Footman's response, "Anything you like," represents Alice's willingness to exchange one set of behaviors for another under the condition that she is told how to behave and act, indicating that
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it is not the actual manners that she values but the freedom from deciding what to do (46). It is at this moment that Alice seems to be rejecting the opportunity for freedom of the imagination and instead opting for the safer boundaries created by the dictates of reality.
Although Carroll succeeds in altering the content of Alice's new education, her systematic attempt to recall her schooling further indicates that her mind has become so conditioned to being told how to act and respond to situations, that it is unable to break out of this trap, even when the possibility presents itself. Just after Alice recalls, "When I used to read fairy tales, I fancied that this kind of thing never happened, and now here I am in the middle of one! There ought to be a book written about me," she realizes that "there's no room to grow up any more here" and concludes that this means that will always "have lessons to learn" (29). The transition of Alice's thought from fantastic stories directly to lessons and books suggests that her imagination is never able to escape the confines of a instruction; she believes that as a child it is her duty to be concerned with schooling (29). She even self-imposes lessons as she "cross[es] her hands on her lap as if she were saying lessons and began to repeat it." (16). Perhaps Alice will achieve grown-up status when she has been so conditioned that the mantras of the educational systems become immediate responses. It is almost as if in projecting his conception of a nonsensical world, that the child, simply by being a product of what Carroll despises, namely a world of socially constructed regulations, forms an obstacle to escaping reality.
Carroll faces a difficulty in allowing his own imagination to escape reality. He creates a mocking parody of the lessons of Alice's reality in the Mock Turtle's informative speech of the educational material of the Wonderland, but never is able to transcend the idea that a world must be ruled by instruction. Carroll's new world might study "Reeling and Writhing" or "Arithmetic-Ambition, Distraction, Uglification, and Derision," instead of the traditional subjects, but inhabitants of Wonderland are still trapped by the process of rote which removes free thought from the educational experience (76). The rules, as the lessons, are certainly different in this imaginary place, but only to be replaced by an entire set of new ones. The croquet game epitomizes how Carroll can only create an alternative reality by constructing a world based upon oppositions to that in which he lives. For instance, in normal croquet there are distinct rules, whereas, in Wonderland "they don't seem to have any rules in particular: at least, if there are, nobody attends to them" (67). The new rules consist of disobeying the old ones. Perhaps fantasy can never escape man's tendency to use his own experience as a starting point to craft change. In this case, an author's imagination as well as those of his characters will be forever grounded by reality. In order to examine what a world look like without rules, one must first understand what a world looks like with rules. Alice's preoccupation with rules materializes in her comment "that's not a regular rule: you [the King] invented it just now" (93). Thus, even if Carroll changes the rules, Alice remains trapped in her desire to define them, creating a further obstacle to exploring how an unlegislated land would operate.
All of the characters which Alice encounters simply seem to be replacements of the adults that Alice encounters in reality, and it is these figure who serve as the teachers of these new lessons and rules. The characters continually change the rules and use language as a weapon which Alice seems to be continually trying to understand. The Duchess is contradictory, condescending, and hopelessly pedagogical. As the Mock
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Turtle stands on the ledge of a rock to tell his story while Alice sits in front of him, the environment mirrors that of Alice's classroom in which a teacher positions himself in front to deliver lessosn. Tuttle even adopts a schoolmasterish tone of voices as he tells Alice, "Really you are very dull." (75). Leach suggests that "[t]hey behave to her as adults behave to a child-they are peremptory and patronizing" (Leach 92). In creating these characters, Carroll is unable to escape the notion that children require instruction and need adult-like figures to enforce rules. Carroll's criticizes the tradition educational system by using Wonderland to parody its flaws, suggesting that even in his mind he finds issues of the imagination and reality inseparable.
The sardonic tone which accompanies Alice's observation of Wonderland's inhabitants and customs, reflects that Carroll is only too aware of the fact that his dreamland is only a distorted version of reality. Peter Coveney suggests that the "dream takes on a quality of horror because Carroll "is painfully awake in his own dream" (Coveney 334). Although Carroll attempts to veil his dissatisfaction with reality in Alice's innocence, he almost seems to be testing Alice's consciousness of his suffering:
It was all very well to say, "drink me," but the wise little Alice was not going to do that in a hurry. "No, I'll look first," she said, "and see whether it's marked 'poison' or not"; for she had read several nice little stories about children who had got burnt, and eaten by wild beasts, and other unpleasant things, all because the would not remember the simple rules their friends had taught them: such as, that a red-hot poker will burn you if you hold it too long; if you cut your finger very deeply with a knife, it usually bleeds; and she had never forgotten that, if you drink much from a bottle marked "poison," It is almost certain to disagree with you, sooner or later. (11).
The insinuation of both suicide and self-inflicted pain seems an incongruous reflection for a seven-year-old; Alice becomes a vehicle through which Carroll reveals his preoccupation with such tortuous thoughts. As Alice proceeds to drink the bottle that is mysteriously labeled "drink me," Carroll toys with a distorted version of attempted suicide (11). He is able to guise his attempt in Alice's innocence, revealed in her childlike recollections of poisoning, which leaves her unaware of the gravity of the consequences of drinking bottle that might contain poison. It seems quite morbid that Carroll chooses to place Alice in a situation which would cause her to even contemplate such violent images. Rackin suggests that Carroll's particular genius "depends heavily on his uncanny ability to enter fully the mind of childhood, to become the child who dreams our adult dreams" (Rackin 113). Even if Alice can not fully comprehend the suggestions that Carroll plants in her head, the author appears fully conscious of the consequences of poisoning.
While the incident with the mysterious bottle marks Alice's initiation to Wonderland, Carroll's decision to culminate his tale of Wonderland in a legal courtroom creates a fitting environment to for his final attempt to use youthful imagination to escape reality. The narrative even admits "very few girls of her [Alice's] age knew the meaning of it all," and by placing Alice in the pinnacle of worldly law, he implies that she too, even in her imagination, is answerable to the rules of reality (86). The courtroom scene seems more of a trial of the imagination rather than an investigation of the identity of the tart thief. The Queen's directive, "Sentence first-verdict afterwards," (96) reveals Carroll's own feelings of entrapment. He has been sentenced
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to growing older and living within the rules of society only to acknowledge that the verdict has always been against the imagination; his construction of "stuff and nonsense" appears to be precluded by a societal conditioning against the imagination (97). It seems odd that Alice awakes to declare this as a "wonderful dream," when moments earlier she is overcome with anger about the injustice of the Queen and King's tyrannical court, potentially creating a serious indictment of the reality she awakes to. A second possibility is that it is Carroll voice pronouncing the word "wonderful," wishing just like Alice that he could respond to society's dictates, "Hold your tongue!"-" I won't" (97) just as Alice had done minutes earlier.
Alice's continued determination to persevere in this world of nonsense, and more specifically, her willingness to point out its weaknesses might help to explain why Carroll undertakes what he consciously seems to believe to be an impossible mission- to escape reality. From the outset, Alice is characterized as believably human- she is rude, impatient, and repeatedly naÔve in her observations. Yet it is her flaws that allow us to identify with her as a representative of our own entrapment in reality. Her youth presents an opportunity for the audience and Carroll to revisit the naÔve belief that there is an escape to our everyday experience and furthermore, that with a methodical, logical approach it is possible to understand our environment. Although Alice is frustrated by the new reality that she encounters and its resistance to her systematic way to comprehend it, in spite of all of her difficulties she optimistically continues her pursuit of the garden. On her second attempt, she confidently asserts with the little golden key in hand, "Now, I'll manage better this time" (61). In her search for escape and understanding, she becomes "the naÔve champion of the doomed human quest for meaning and lost Edenic order" (Rackin 96).
Perhaps Carroll is suggesting that in the face of an earthly surface peppered with disappointment, anger, and frustration, adults must retain the resiliency and unaffected consciousness of Alice. Her ability to awake and immediately go to tea, "thinking while she ran, as well she might what a wonderful dream it had been" provides a demonstration of this survival mechanism in operation (98). There seems to be no distinction between her dreamlike world and her living world; her imagination neatly blends into reality, suggesting that we too must follow Alice's example of how to deal with nonsense as we transition from Alice's world to our own reality. Alice's inability to reflect upon Wonderland is what allows her to energetically proceed to her next encounter. Her retort, "Who cares for you?"Ö"You're nothing but a pack of cards!," functions as an immediate dismissal of unfairness and injustice and brings the issues to a close (97).
If there was indeed a moral of Alice in Wonderland, believing that Carroll is only trying to tell us that we must all retain our naive innocence in the face of reality, would be to collapse the interpretation of his work into one of the maxims espoused by the Duchess. Carroll appears to recognize the impossibility of such a quest and interestingly enough it is one of the Duchess' statements that provides complications to this hypothesized moral:
'Be what you would seem to be'-or, if you'd like it put it more simply-'Never imagine yourself otherwise that what is might appear to others that what you were or might have been was not otherwise than what you had been would have appeared to them to be otherwise' (72).
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The use of the world "imagine" recalls the difficulty of avoiding the reality that childhood cannot be an eternal state, and despite our attempt to escape the experiences of reality, they will always prevent us from recreating a state of innocence. The reality is the force that requires us to be true to ourselves; we cannot pretend to be children and Carroll's suicidal frustrations create consequence enough to avoid this disillusion.
Carroll makes a futile attempt to model Alice's optimistic behavior. Although it is Alice's sister who undertakes the effort to enter Wonderland, Carroll's narrative voice appears to pervade her thoughts. Carroll acknowledges that an adult realizes that the dream is based in reality. It is in this way that he creates the relationship between childhood and the imagination. As discussed earlier, like an adult, a child is unable to imagine life much different than his current reality, but the difference is the consciousness of these restraints. Unlike Alice, her elder sister, Lorena, can only "half believe herself in Wonderland," and quickly identifies all of the elements and sounds of Wonderland as ones originating in her own world (98-99). Alice's Wonderland contains these same elements, but she is able to explore them without the awareness that each illusion has a mundane real life parallel; she is unable to see that the Queen's shrill cries is really the voice of the shepherd-boy. It is with a mixture of nostalgia and bitterness that Carroll guarantees that Alice will someday find herself removed from these fantasies: "she would feel with all their simple sorrows, and find a pleasure in all their simple joys, remembering her own child-life, and the happy summer days" (99). This is the only passage that Carroll truly believes it is possible to imagine anything removed from his immediate environment, and ironically, this vision serves as an attack on imagination because it projects the inevitable end of Alice's dreamlike fantasies. As Lorena falters in her attempt, it appears that childhood presents the opportunity to believe that one has the freedom to imagine before it becomes evident that the only illusion is that which the child possesses: the belief the imagination is separate from reality.
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer(1876) By
Mark Twain(S.L.Clements)
Character List:
Tom Sawyer: The young protagonist of the novel. Living with his aunt St. Petersburg, Missouri, Tom has a penchant for adventure and "showing off." Constantly getting into mischief, he plays hooky from school and would rather go swimming than tend to his Sunday school lessons. Blessed with an active imagination, Tom dreams to be a noble robber such as Robin Hood or a pirate. Hungry for attention, Tom is obsessed with appearing noble and obtaining the envy of his peers. However, Tom is extremely clever and possesses an incredible insight on human nature. Throughout the novel, Tom must learn to listen to his conscience and become accountable for his actions.
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Huckleberry Finn: The town's social pariah. Son of an abusive and drunkard father who left town, Huck has failed to have been raised with any parental guidance or authority figures. Because he can smoke a pipe and never has to attend church or school, he is the envy of every schoolboy and the nightmare of every mother in town. Huck and Tom often have adventures and both believe in various superstitions. Although disregarded by the "sociables," Huck possesses a kind spirit and consideration for others.
Aunt Polly: Tom's somewhat elderly aunt and guardian. Religious, simple-mannered, and kind-hearted, Aunt Polly is respected among the citizens of St. Petersburg. Responsible for Tom's discipline and upbringing, Aunt Polly is constantly torn between expressing her exasperation and showing her lover for Tom. Every time he causes trouble, another hair on her head turns gray; she often wishes Tom would behave properly like his brother, Sid.
Sid Sawyer: Tom's younger half-brother. Always trying to tattle on Tom, Sid keeps a close on eye his brother's wrongdoings. A goody-two-shoes, he is a punctual and studious pupil.
Mary: Tom's older cousin who resides with Aunt Polly. Mary is depicted as a sweet and good-hearted young lady who sees the good qualities in Tom's character. Religious and pious, Mary was an exceptional student the opposite of Tom.
Becky Thatcher: The daughter of Judge Thatcher. Becky is Tom's age and has recently moved into town. Prim and proper, Becky is the opposite of Tom: she has never been in trouble and is used to obeying her mother's words. With blonde hair and dressy frocks, she quickly wins Tom's affection and attention.
Judge Thatcher: Becky's father. A proud and well-respected man of justice, whose family has recently moved into town.
Mrs. Thatcher: Becky's mother, wife of the Judge.
Injun Joe: The antagonist of the novel. Guilty of several murders, Injun Joe possess a violent temperament is set on seeking revenge on those who have treated him harshly in the past. He attempts to frame Muff Potter for one of his own crimes and is pursued by the village authorities.
Muff Potter: The town drunk who is framed for the murder of Dr. Robinson. Although his kind nature and drunken state make him harmless, Potter is persecuted by the entire town that believes that he is a murderer.
Mr. Jones/Old Welshman: The old Welshman who lives with his two strong sons in the vicinity of Widow Douglas's house. With Huck's help, the Welshman is able to come to the widow's aide.
Widow Douglas: A rich, upper-class widow. With a kind spirit and a devotion to the Christian faith, the widow Douglas is known for her open hospitality and good nature. She also appears as a major character in Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.
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Dr. Robinson: The young doctor, guilty of grave robbing, whose murder instigates the chaotic happenings in St. Petersburg.
Joe Harper: Tom's bosom friend. One of Tom's "gang" of pirates, Joe accompanies Tom on some of his adventures.
Mrs. Harper: Joe's mother
Amy Lawrence: Tom Sawyer's former girlfriend, whom he occasionally flirts with and was previously "engaged" to.
Alfred Temple: A well-dressed boy whom Tom thinks is snobby. Alfred also vies for Becky Thatcher's attention.
Mr. Dobbins: The schoolmaster. Hated by all the children, Mr. Dobbins is depicted as a stern and pathetic man who uses lashings as a method of discipline.
Mr. Walter: The Sunday School Superintendent who issues Bibles to the top students.
Mr. Sprague: The long-winded minister.
Ben Rogers: A young boy who is Tom's friend
Chapter 1 Analysis:
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer is considered one of the greatest works of American literature partly because it reflects so perfectly the culture of mid-1800s America. In a period where thoughts of gold and silver drove men West and industrialization had not yet begun, Twain was able to describe small-town life in detail. St. Petersburg is portrayed as a small, tight-knit community on the riverfront where the frontier culture and the classic Southern tradition meet.
At the start of the novel, the reader is immediately introduced to the core characters. The character portraits that are unfolded in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer are extensive and intricate, a quality that makes this piece a distinct work of Mark Twain. In the first chapter, Aunt Polly is introduced as a religious, pious, and stubborn mannered lady; Tom's first impression leaves the reader thinking he is mischievous, lazy, and irresponsible. But as the story unfolds, Twain develops both Aunt Polly and Tom into multi-dimensional characters whose emotions and actions are somewhat unpredictable. The reader, then, must discern between the superficial and the meaningful portrayals of each character.
Chapter 2 Analysis:
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The use of omniscient narrative is very important in establishing Twain's character portraits. A first-person narrative (used in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn) allows only the viewpoint of one character. With a first-person narrative, the reader must question his source of information and can only "see" what the narrator "sees." However, omniscient narration divulges all: the reader can take all his facts as truth. In turn, we are allowed not only to see all the activity within the novel but we are allowed within the thoughts of each character. In chapter two, this narrative plays an especially important role in portraying Tom Sawyer's true intellect and understanding of the world around him
Tom, who is initially portrayed as an incorrigible youth, is able to make commentary on relative nature of "work" and "play." Tom not only loves to fight and play in the dirt, but also has a profound knowledge of human nature that is astounding for his young age. Using his "smarts," he is able to fool his peers as well as outsmart Aunt Polly and other authority figures. Tom may behave like a little boy, but he is able to think greater than perhaps any adult.
Chapter 3 Analysis:
In the previous chapters we have seen Tom as carefree, but there is a darker side to Tom's character. More often than not, Tom's carefree attitude masks what can be construed as low self-esteem. He constantly wants what he calls "glory." He is willing to trade his worldly possessions for the glory of receiving a Sunday school Bible, and he loves to show off. But when he feels unloved, he falls into a kind of depression where he questions his own existence by imagining his funeral. Will anybody care when he is gone? Despite encouragement from his cousin Mary and punishments from Aunt Polly, Tom will never be a "good boy" because he can only gain the attention he craves through bad behavior.
The image of Tom's death and his funeral is a recurring image as well as an example of foreshadowing. Throughout the novel, this constant description of death builds the idea of the "wild frontier," where frontiersmen were notorious for testing their own mortality by braving unmapped territories and undertaking dare-devilish adventures. Tom's own crazy adventures epitomize the life of the carefree frontiersman. On a more profound level, one can take Tom's mental pictures of his own death as a questioning of his own existence. We see that Tom is not religious when he forgets to pray; he fails to exceed at schoolwork; above all else, he thinks that he has failed at gaining Aunt Polly's love. He is by no means considered a "productive" citizen of St. Petersburg like his brother, Sid. Thus we see that even Tom Sawyer seemingly the most carefree and courageous boy in St. Petersburg questions his own worth.
Chapter 4 Analysis:
In chapter four, the reader is first introduced to Mary Tom's cousin who is attempting to prepare Tom for Sunday school. Mary is portrayed by Twain as a "saintly" figure in the novel. Her character, synonymous with purity and chastity, can
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be seen as paralleling her ultimate namesake the Virgin Mary. Twain spends a good portion of the chapter describing the actions between Tom and Mary for two particular reasons. First, we see that Mary is perhaps one of the only authority figures Tom trusts. He allows her to help him with his verses, wash him, and dress him. Second, we see that Mary also trusts Tom. Unlike Aunt Polly who is always quick to punish Tom, Mary sees past Tom's pranks and mischief. Tom is unable to fool Mary, exemplified by his failed attempts to avoid washing his face. Moreover, she provides Tom with praise, referring to him as a "good boy" and rewarding his good behavior with a brand-new Barlow knife. Thus the relationship between the two is built on a foundation of trust and, in turn, Tom learns to respect as well as obey Mary.
Though Mary is described in a revered fashion, the Church is completely satirized in chapter four. Twain's first blow to the Church comes when Tom is able to underhandedly trade for enough tickets to earn a Dore Bible, showing how even the Church could not make the distinction between hard work and bought favors. Twain also seems to laugh at the Church in his portrayal of the Sunday school teachers and Mr. Walters, the superintendent. Although he mentions that Mr. Walters was "very sincere and honest at heart," Twain compares him at the pulpit to a "singer who stands forward on the platform and sings a solo at a concert." This metaphor depicts the religious authority to be somewhat of a show person rather than a member of the clergy. His lectures on religion are likened to a concert: meaningless and purely for entertainment. Similarly, Twain's physical portrayal of Mr. Walter's lacks seriousness, using similes that compare his collar to a bank check and his shoes to sleds. But perhaps the most ironic of moments comes when Twain uses the words "showing off" in description of Mr. Walters and who attended the Sunday school. How humorous that the same words Twain uses to describe the immature Tom Sawyer and all the misbehaved Sunday school children apply to the adults as well!
Chapter 5 Analysis:
The first idea that Twain establishes in chapter five is the centrality of the Church to the town of St. Petersburg. On Sunday morning, all of the town's "respected" inhabitants attend the Church; it is as much a social function as it is a religious one. The town of St. Petersburg is small, poor, and quiet; the church, with its cracked church bell that resounds through the town, becomes a quintessential symbol of small-town life.
Ironically, it is this quality of small-town life the centrality of the church that Twain satirizes throughout the entire novel. The minister is described as unnecessarily long-winded. The subject of his sermon is never given any importance; instead, Twain focuses on his speech and mannerisms, describing his sentences as a plunge "downŠ from a spring-board." Even the prayer seems to drag on forever, with the minister sending his prayers out to anyone and everyone. Even the "sociables" are unable to stay attuned to the misters during his monotonous speech.
The antics between Tom, the dog, and the beetle provide comic relief to the church. What is most important, however, is the fact that the attendees pay more attention to the antics of the pinch-bug than they do to the speech given from the pulpit. When the
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church is "suffocating with suppressed laughter," Twain describes it as "unholy mirth." This dichotomy between the serious and the playful - the moral and the mischievous - parallels Tom's constant struggle between his need for adventure and his will to "be good."
Chapter 6 Analysis:
Here the reader is introduced to Huckleberry Finn, one of Tom Sawyer's most trusted confidants as well as what Twain calls "the juvenile pariah of the village." The son of the town drunkard, Huck abides by no authority and is envied by all of the "respectable boys" of St. Petersburg: Huck is free. The epitome of childhood and mischief, Huck lives under different social standards than other citizens: he doesn't attend church regularly, never goes to school, wears hand-me-down rags rather than Sunday school suits, and smokes a pipe. But rather than depict him as the social outcast that he was, Twain describes Huck in an almost glorified manner (Huck becomes the central figure in one of the most infamous American literary works of all time: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn). "In a word," writes the author," everything that goes to make life precious, that boy had." According to Twain, Huck lives life to the fullest by discarding the nonsense and conformity imposed by the "sociables" of St. Petersburg.
Huck's different standard of living is exemplified by the way in which he and Tom discuss their various rituals and superstitions. Both Tom and Huck are believers of the mysterious. They believe in witches' spells, bad luck, and try to cure everyday ailments like warts by performing strange incantations. No matter how far-fetched their ideas sound, Tom and Huck discuss their secret rituals and chants with the utmost seriousness. In one sense, their belief in the unbelievable reflects their impressionability and naiveté. The two boys still think and act with a kind of immaturity, and this scene seems to remind the reader that Tom and Huck are, after all, just children.
On a more satirical level, parallels can be drawn between the superstitions of the boys and the religious beliefs of the Church. To Twain, both are "hodge-podge" and neither is believable. This connection implies that characters, such as Aunt Polly, who are portrayed as religious are just as naïve as children. Between chapter six and the previous chapters, the reader can draw the conclusion that Twain was highly critical of the Christian faith. According to biographers, Twain himself never accepted the Bible as a guide to spiritual salvation and regarded much of the organized religion as "ignorance and superstition" (Long 178).
Chapter 7 Analysis:
The antics of Tom, Joe, and the tick during their study time at school depict how useless Tom thinks education to be. The schoolhouse is the antithesis of adventure. Twain describes the air as "utterly dead" and uses a simile comparing the murmur of scholars to the drone of bees. School inhibits Tom from his mischief and is seen as a
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kind of jail. For Tom, school represents the opposite of the "frontier ideal" the glorification of adventure and exploration -- presented in the novel.
Chapter six also describes the first "courtship" between Tom and Becky. Their flirtatious behavior can be seen as comical, for both Tom and Becky are not much older than ten years old. Funny enough, their conversation turns from the discussion of chewing gum and circuses to marriage and love. It is ironic that throughout the entire novel, Tom backlashes against authoritative figures, yet in this scene, he is eager to act "adult-like" by becoming engaged. Twain also seems to imply that adult relationships are more child-like than most think. Tom and Becky feel jealousy and anger; their trivial feuds are commonplace in most adult relationships. Just as the two children in love seem to act like adults, adults in a relationship sometimes seem to behave like children. Twain's commentary proposes that love is an illogical, irrational necessity.
Chapter 8 Analysis:
Asking the rhetorical question, "What had he done?" Tom sinks into a melancholy mood. In this scene, Tom is heartbroken and we see him at one of his most vulnerable points in the novel, when he contemplates death as an answer to his problems something that recurs throughout the novel and foreshadows later events. But the reader should note that Tom's does not center his thoughts around suicide so much as around revenge. When he imagines himself dead, he does so out of self-pity. He wishes to hurt the people who care about him the most, to make them feel guilty for their "wrong-doings." In this manner, we see that Tom can be self-absorbed and selfish. His wish to "die temporarily" is a plan that serves only to elevate his own self-esteem.
When Tom and Joe play "Robin Hood," Tom's craving for attention is also portrayed. Tom, of course, acts as Robin Hood whom he considers to be the most noble of thieves. The image of Robin Hood is a motif of the novel, a game that Tom often plays with his friends. Robin Hood's gallantry appeals to Tom's sense of the romantic: Robin Hood is loved by all, and hated by only the people he steals from. His desire to be like Robin Hood stems from his need to be the center-of-attention. We also see that Tom's aspiration is not to cause mischief, but to be a "noble" figure like Robin Hood. But in actuality, the only way Tom can again attention is to misbehave.
Chapter 9 Analysis:
Chapter nine represents a turning point in the novel: the murder that Tom and Huck witness breaks the sense of innocence and wholesomeness that has, until then, enveloped the small-town life of St. Petersburg. The tone of the chapter reflects this sense of gloom. Twain's description of the night is ominous of what is to happen: everything is "dismally still," the night is dark, and Tom begins to notice the eerie stillness. Twain builds up a feeling of anxiety by focusing on details and using very
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simple syntax at the start of the chapter, describing the ticking of the clock, the creaking stairs, Aunt Polly's muffled snore, and various other noises of the night.
Twain places a special emphasis on the stillness of the night, both in the house and at the graveyard. The stillness is described both before and after the murder; only when Injun Joe, Muff, and Dr. Robinson are present is the silence disrupted. In effect, this description reflects how the murder will break the "stillness" of Tom's world, shattering the illusion of small-town life. The "stillness" is symbolic of the security and unadulterated lifestyle that is about to be shaken completely by the events of that night.
Similarly, one can draw meaning out of Tom's and Huck's mistaken assumption that the figures approaching them in the graveyard were devils. Ironically, the grown men become more frightening than any devil or witch in that they haunt Tom's conscience and thoughts. Even young Dr. Robinson, who was the victim of Injun Joe, was guilty of grave robbery. Twain effectively portrays human nature as fully capable of evil, a pessimism that is present in many of his other works.
Chapter 10 Analysis:
After witnessing the murder of Dr. Robinson, Tom and Huck promise to "keep mum" by signing a contract in blood. Their silence shows that they have not yet realized the gravity of their situation. They sign the contract in blood, half mimicking the actions of pirates or robbers. They don't realize the gravity, or reality, of their situation or the situation that Muff Potter will soon be in. Twain uses the howling of the stray dog to foreshadow Muff's misfortune.
In this chapter, we also see that Tom truly cares for Aunt Polly. Despite the trouble he may get himself into, Tom never means to hurt the old woman. "This was worse than a thousand whippings," thinks Tom as Aunt Polly cries over him. When he cries and pleads for his forgiveness, the reader is given no doubt of Tom's sincerity. Similarly, we see that neither Aunt Polly nor Sid is able to realize Tom's sincerity and his better qualities. Like most other young boys, Tom is attracted to mischief but he is still a good boy at heart.
Chapter 11 Analysis:
When Injun Joe openly lies and frames Muff Potter for the murder, both Tom and Huck half expect "God's lightening upon [Injun Joe's] head" as punishment." From this, the reader can gather that both of the young boys possess some kind of moral character, despite their bad reputations. What the boys begin to learn in this chapter is that retribution, or justice, is not always so straightforward. Lightning will not strike one down if one lies; instead, they begin to learn that one's conscience can provide a more powerful form of punishment. Tom's conscience slowly begins to pervade his mind, and in an attempt to silence it, Tom visits Muff potter in jail.
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Twain also presents one of the darker sides of human nature: how men can create their own truths. In Tom Sawyer, we see a whole town willing to condemn Muff Potter without so much as a trial. Even before Muff Potter has admitted to the crime, the citizens of St. Petersburg have already charged him with the crime, shouting, "It's him! It's him!" The same man whom Huck and Tom remember as a kind heart who drank too much for his own good becomes a beast in the eyes of the "good citizens." In fact, we see that Injun Joe is not the only guilty villain; Twain depicts two other crimes. First, there is the town of St. Petersburg, whose inhabitants are quick to assume and punish the innocent. Second, there is Tom and Huck who ignore their conscience and fail to tell the truth. While the town and the boys are guilty of being "passive" in comparison to Injun Joe's brutality, Twain juxtaposes them to point out that each misdeed is equally serious.
Chapter 12 Analysis:
The plot shifts away from the murder when Tom learns that Becky has stopped coming to school due to illness. His state of melancholy seems to manifest itself in his everyday activity, and Tom becomes dreary. Aunt Polly's ability to care for Tom is questioned in this situation when she tries to "fix" Tom's moods by giving him "cure-alls," including painkiller. She isn't able to perceive that Tom's ailments are not physical but emotional. When Tom feed the cat a dose of painkiller, it is his way of showing Aunt Polly that she is treating him like some kind of experiment. "If he'd Œa' had [an aunt]Š she'd Œa' roaster his bowels out of him Œthout any more feeling than if he was a human," cries Tom. Although their relationship seems to strengthen after the incident, the reader is able to see that even Aunt Polly, the authority of the household, is liable to make mistakes.
Tom becomes even more crestfallen when Becky snubs him in the schoolyard. Like he does with Aunt Polly, he attempts to win Becky's attention by "showing off." But with Becky, he is unable to easily win her over by simply displaying his usual antics. It is humorous to see that Tom believes he is acting "heroic" by acting so childish: war-whopping, yelling, laughing, chasing boys, and throwing handsprings. Tom will learn later in his adventures that being a hero means much more than being the center-of-attention.
Chapter 13 Analysis:
The river is a common motif in Twain's works, stemming from his experience traveling in steamboats on the Mississippi River. In this chapter, the image of the river becomes not only a symbol of "frontier adventure," but also of a turning point in Tom's life. In literature, the endless flow of a river has evolved into an archetype of life itself. Often, crossing the banks of a river can be taken to symbolize a "rite of passage." In applying this definition to Tom's adventure on Jackson Island, we do see that the river is a kind of boundary between reality St. Petersburg, Becky, Aunt Polly, school and Tom's fantasy. Once he has crossed the river, he is no longer a troubled
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little boy, but a fearless pirate Tom Sawyer, the Black Avenger of the Spanish Main. By running away to Jackson Island, Tom attempts to runaway from reality.
But we see that Tom is unable to run away from his conscience. He not only says his prayers to himself but also feels guilty for eating a stolen ham. Still afraid that a thunderbolt will be sent to strike him down for his crime, both Tom and Joe vow never to steal in their piracies, for fear of freaking one of the commandments. Fishing, swimming, and doing whatever he pleases, Tom may be able to disobey authority, but he is unable to sleep if he disobeys his conscience
Chapter 14 Analysis:
When Tom wakes up the next morning, he finds beauty in all the insects, the animals, and the scenery of Jackson Island. "The marvel of Nature shaking off sleep and going to work unfolded itself to the musing boy," writes Twain, personifying nature into a kind of all-powerful creator. Twain fills the chapter with descriptive images: a little green worm, a dewy leaf, a brown-spotted lady-bug, the birds, and the foliage. In doing so, he expresses a reverence toward nature that was very prominent in his philosophy on life. According to many of his biographers, Twain often talked about the "unseen forces of creationŠ bringing the seasons with their miracles of diversity and beauty." Through Tom's character, the reader can perceive this appreciation in the beauty of nature.
The atmosphere on the island is a very peaceful one, the land not yet domesticated like the mainland off the Mississippi. The unadulterated landscape seems to reflect the innocence of the young boys as they live off the island. Away from home, they care nothing for society and all its ills. Rather, they are pirates. The only things that disrupt the peacefulness of the boys are the boom of the cannons and their own thoughts of home
Chapter 15 Analysis:
When Tom returns home and sees Aunt Polly crying over his death, he realizes that one of his fantasies of being "dead temporarily" has been fulfilled. Previously, Tom had wished to be dead when he had been full of self-pity. His idea was to make those who had hurt him suffer in guilt and regret for treating him in the wrong manner. He gets exactly what he wished for: Aunt Polly is heartbroken over mistreating him, and even Sid seems sorrowful. But Tom realizes that this scene provides him little comfort, for he feels nothing but pity for Aunt Polly and her sufferings.
An important observation to make is that Tom's return happens in the night. In writing the novel, there is an incredible emphasis between night and day, light and dark. The murder of Dr. Robinson occurs during the night, and so do the later "outings" that Tom and Huck undertake. Nighttime is often used as an archetype; here, the night can
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be seen as a symbol of death and darkness. For Tom, who is believed to be dead, sneaks into the house almost as if he is ghost of some sort. When he returns to St. Petersburg, he really does act as if he were dead: nobody notices his presence and he seems to "haunt" Aunt Polly as she sleeps.
Chapter 16 Analysis:
Like the river and night, a storm is a common archetype to represent a profound change in character, typically the protagonist of the story. The storm on Jackson's Island is of great magnitude, unlike the other storms of the novel. Twain describes ceaseless lightening and a "slanting veil of rain." We can predict that this is a major turning point for Tom's character, particularly because he is about to return home and face reality, so to speak. The river, too, becomes billowy and "white with foam," perhaps a foreshadowing of trouble's Tom must face ahead. Twain even suggests that the "brooding oppressiveness in the airŠ seemed to bode something."
The storm scene of Jackson Island is perhaps one of the most intense and dramatic scenes of the novel in terms of descriptive language. Here Twain uses very powerful imagery to depict each stage of the storm. First a "solemn hush," then all light became "swallowed up in the blackness of darkness." What makes Twain's writing so powerful in this chapter is not flowery language, but a detailed description of action: furious blasts, drenching rain, a rising hurricane, and booming thunderblasts. The description is concentrated and to-the-point, but very effective: "keen and sharp," "ear-splitting explosive bursts," and "clean-cut and shadow-less distinctness." The chaotic use of verbs and description seems to reflect the chaotic nature of the storm itself. The scene exemplifies Twain's great ability to capture action with his words.
Chapter 17 Analysis:
At last, Tom has achieved exactly what he has always wished for: every adult in town mourns his death and every child at school vies to be connected to him in some way, one even claiming that "Tom Sawyer he licked me once." How ironic that the minister and clergymen that used to punish Tom in Sunday school now only relate "many a touching incident" and the boys' "sweet and generous natures." Even the church bell at the start of the funeral service begins to "toll, instead of ringing in the usual way."
When the three boys enter the Church, to the surprise and stares of all those in the congregation, even Huckleberry (at the insistence of Tom) is showered with hugs and kisses. Huck, once the town pariah, is now standing in church and being lavished upon with Aunt Polly's "loving attentions," making him uncomfortable. To the congregation, it is a miracle that the boys are alive, and looking back in the text, there is even more irony in Twain's use of the biblical text: "I am the Resurrection and the Life."
Chapter 18 Analysis:
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Immediately after returning home, we see that Tom is back in his regular routine despite his attempt to change. He easily manipulates Aunt Polly by telling her about the dream, and although he tries to forget about Becky, he flirts with Amy Lawrence only to attract Becky's attention. His actions seem somewhat petty and it doesn't appear that Tom's adventures on Jackson Island have helped him mature at all; instead, he simply seems more self-confident and temperamental.
One thing that should be appreciated about Twain's writing is his sense of humor. His satire, especially regarding authority and the church, are meant to be light-hearted. Here, some of his witty humor appears, but in a more subtle manner. For instance, Aunt Polly says, "It ain't much a cat does that much," when referring to Tom's claims that he dreamed about her. The reference to a cat is an allusion back to chapter twelve, when Tom feeds the cat painkiller and parallels the cat's pain to his own. Similarly, we see that Aunt Polly is as superstitious as Tom, believing that he has prophesied when he recounts his "dreams." Tom may believe in ghosts and witches, but Aunt Polly believes in cure-alls and prophesies!
Chapter 19 Analysis:
When Aunt Polly confronts Tom about his lie, Tom is surprised how his "joke" from that morning could look so "mean and shabby" when seen from Polly's perspective. Although Tom is not as selfish as Polly first claims, she is correct in saying that the child never thinks. Tom's conscience kicks in only in retrospect; he often finds himself lost in guilt or remorse for having committed some grave sin or having not told the truth. Part of growing up is learning how to become accountable for one's actions, a lesson that Tom has not yet learned.
However, in this scene, Polly learns that Tom truly does care for her after finding the piece of bark in his jacket pocket. There seems to be an unspoken love between the two. Despite their opposite nature Tom is a troublemaker, while Polly is always "socially" correct both love each other and maintain a strong mother-son-like relationship.
Chapter 20 Analysis:
Throughout Tom Sawyer, Twain makes a mockery of the adult and authority figures in the novel. In this chapter, we see another example of this mockery when the secrets of Schoolmaster Dobbins are revealed: his lovelorn nature, his desire to be a physician, his secret study of the human anatomy. Dobbins is portrayed not as someone who is fit for instructing schoolchildren, but as a somewhat pathetic character. This attitude toward authority figures schoolmasters, ministers, and parents seems to embody the frontier ideal that opposes restraint of any kind, social or physical.
Tom, as the protagonist of the story, appears to have the most insight and intellect to the reader. Unlike the adults of St. Petersburg, Tom seems to have a good
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understanding of human nature, with his ability to assess characters and situations. In this chapter, we see the more noble side of Tom when he is willing to take the whippings from Mr. Dobbins simply to save Becky from embarrassment. He does so partly because he knows Becky will forever be in debt to him, but also because he truly cares for her.
Chapter 21 Analysis:
Twain's description of "Examination" day is a prime example of his great talent for satire writing. Ultimately, the author shows his contempt for pretentiousness in his mockery of the original compositions written by the young ladies of St. Petersburg. The compositions are flowery, dramatic, and more a matter of showing off vocabulary than showing off good writing. "Good breeding," once said Twain, "consists in concealing how much we think of ourselves and how little we think of the other person." Twain depicts this insincere, holier-than-thou attitude in the young ladies' work. Their pieces are full of clichés and useless words; when the townspeople applaud the girls, Twain makes a mockery of them as well. Twain shows his aversion toward the moral code imposed by small-town life and the pretentious attitude that accompanies it.
Even more humorous is the manner in which the boys are able to humiliate Mr. Dobbins. Whether it be a minister, schoolteacher or guardian, Twain seems to always show how the children are able to punish the authorities rather than vice versa. Examination Day exemplifies Twain's distaste for authority figures while also reminding the reader that with age comes a sense of maturity - something the school children do not yet possess.
Chapter 22 Analysis:
Here, Twain depicts the sleepiness and triviality of small town life. The circus comes, then goes; the minstrel comes, then goes; excitement comes, then goes. Even the largest celebration of the year the Fourth of July seems like any other day. Tom has good intentions by joining the Temperance Cadets, but is so bored with St. Petersburg that he is unable to remain a "good boy" for much longer.
When the revival comes to town, it seems that everyone has found religion. But Twain's rejection of the Christian faith can be seen in this chapter when the revival, too, comes and goes as quick as it came. Religious revival is paralleled to Tom's bout of the measles, or the passing of the storm: each as pestilent and fleeting as the other. In his works, Twain regards the Bible with no deference, and instead expresses a deep-rooted cynicism toward organized religion, regarding it as ignorance and superstition.
Chapter 23 Analysis:
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The trial of Muff Potter finally stirs up the small town of St. Petersburg and is an important turning point in the novel. One theme that is exemplified by the trial scene is the theme of "justice." Twain uses the idea of "justice" throughout the novel: Injun Joe's revenge on Dr. Robinson, Tom's thoughts of revenge, Aunt Polly's need to punish Tom. The idea that "every action has a reaction" is embodied in the legal trial. And of course, in order for justice to happen, Tom must make the decision to come forward with his eyewitness account of the murder.
The first instinct of most readers is to commend Tom for his gallant behavior, citing that his decision to tell the truth is one of maturity and grace. However, we must realize that had Tom told the truth from the very beginning, the trial against Muff Potter would never have begun in the first place. Rather, it has taken Tom a long time to think over his action; and for a while, thoughts of the murder did not even occupy his mind when he was courting Becky or on Jackson Island. Even directly before the trial, we see Tom trying to appease his conscience by talking to Muff Potter through the jail grating; even after Muff Potter's soliloquy, Tom still plans to "keep mum." It is not until he is haunted in his dreams that he finally decides to break his vow of silence with Huck.
Chapter 24 Analysis:
Tom's nightmares represent his unsettled guilt and fear. stemming from his withholding of the truth. Dreams are often an outlet for one's unconscious; we can often gain more insight into the nature of a character through the analysis of his or her dreams. Here, Tom's conscience is manifested in his nightmares because it is the only time his fears are allowed to enter his mind; his fear of Injun Joe and his vow with Huck are impedances to his feelings of guilt. Just as before on Jackson island, when Tom was unable to fall asleep, his conscience haunts him. As part of growing up and assuming responsibility, Tom must learn to listen to his conscience rather than ignore it.
Chapter 25 Analysis:
Throughout the novel, Tom and Huck pretend to be pirates and search for treasure: gold, silver, jewels, and every worldly good imaginable. In some ways, this hunt for treasure parallels the plot of the novel; the more the boys dig and search for treasure, the deeper they get themselves into trouble. Their quest for treasure is perhaps symbolic of man's quest for adventure in life. This meaning fits well into the theme of the frontier, which Twain reinforces with his romanticized sense of adventure.
The haunted house becomes a kind of romantic symbol of the mysterious, the spiritual, and the unknown. Overgrown with weeds and with crumbling architecture, Twain's description of the haunted house is reminiscent of his description of the graveyard during the murder scene: both are isolated, full of "dead spirits," and covered in darkness. The boys even foreshadow the following events with the foreboding that the house truly is haunted, imagining a blue light in the window.
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Chapter 26 Analysis:
When the boys return to the haunted house, they are greeted with "something so weird and grisly about the dead silence," and again, a comparison between the haunted house and the graveyard of chapter eight should be made. Both scenes possess the eerie "silence" that acts as a kind of warning to the two boys, the way a panther is perfectly still before he pounces on his prey. It is the stillness, the lack of "life" that strikes the boys as foreboding. How ironic it is that in all places of extreme isolation, Tom and Huck find themselves in the company of Injun Joe!
When the boys first see Injun Joe, he is wrapped in a serape a traditional Spanish article of clothing and disguised as a deaf and dumb Spaniard. We begin to notice that with his villains, Twain seems to represent an element of the exotic and the foreign. Whether dressed as Injun Joe or a Spaniard, he is never mistaken for a typical inhabitant of St. Petersburg, but rather is presented as out-of-the-ordinary. On a more profound level, we can take Twain's almost too-obvious depiction of Injun Joe and contrast it with the idea that the true villain of the novel is man's inherent malevolence.
Chapter 27 Analysis:
We also see another shift in the plot with the introduction of the buried treasure. Tom's greediness comes out when his eyes feast on the bag of six hundred dollars, so much so that he forgets he would be stealing from a murderous villain. On another level, it is almost unbelievable that there actually is buried gold in the haunted house, showing that even the most outrageous ideas may prove to be true. The recovery of the treasure, then, becomes an integral part of the plot.
Chapter 28 Analysis:
It is important to note that Injun Joe's character is depicted by Twain as extreme. Not only is he a minority, but he is also savage and obsessed with revenge. Similarly, his habits show that he is not law-abiding: he drinks, and represents the epitome of the Christian heathen. One reason why Twain creates such a villainous character is to prevent the reader from expressing any sympathy for him. It is clear that Injun Joe is a "low character" because of his decrepit moral and spiritual worth, rather than because of his social position such as Huck. Thus, when it is established that Injun Joe is a town pariah, there is a clear difference between the murderer and characters that are simply pariahs because they refuse to conform to small-town expectations. Injun Joe falls into play with the theme of dualism: the contrast between "good" and "evil."
Chapter 29 Analysis:
The introduction of MacDougal's Cave is important to the novel, particularly because it plays a prominent role in the coming events. Twain describes the cave a as "labyrinth underneath labyrinth, and no end to any of them." The cave, like the
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haunted house and the graveyard, is another very dramatic location that Twain chooses for the novel. Caves often symbolize mystery and fantasy because in traditional fairy tales and stories, they house gnomes, dragons, and treasure. Similarly, caves often contain secret passageways that run to the underworld, a place of darkness. Here, Twain sets up the cave as a perfect setting for Tom's final adventure of the novel.
In examining Injun Joe's character, it is observed that he is almost a personification of savagery. What makes Injun Joe a unique character in the story is that he never expresses any signs of remorse or regret; his obsession with revenge has driven him to ignore his conscience altogether. He may only be seeking justice on past crimes, but does so selfishly and only with personal gratification rather than moral or ethical reasoning in mind.
In chapter twenty-nine, there is also a shift between characters when the plot begins to focus mainly on the adventures of Huck, who becomes the hero of this chapter and the next. Though he is considered one of the town's social pariahs, Huck not only comes to the widow's aid but also recalls that she had always been kind to him. We see that the juvenile is not quite the delinquent that his reputation makes him out to be, though even the Welshman is hesitant about opening his door to such a straggler.
Chapter 30 Analysis:
When Huck knocks on the Welshman's door, he is greeted with the unfamiliar words: "[Huck] is a name that can open this door night or day, lad! and welcome!" How surprising that Huck, who was held in contempt by every "sociable" of St. Petersburg, is now welcome in any respectable household! But Huck's reputation as a delinquent is only superficial; we see from his good deed that he has perhaps more courage and ethics than many other men. In the novel, Twain is careful not to make any judgments on his characters based on their wealth or social position; rather, he evaluates each rationally based on their intellectual, spiritual, and moral worth. With snobbery aside, Huck commands respect from the reader because of his genuine sincerity and consideration for others.
Meanwhile, the reader is informed that Tom and Becky are missing, lost in McDougal's Cave. Again, Tom "dies" for a second time and the idea of the cave as labyrinth for finding oneself comes into play when the Widow says to herself: "Pity but somebody could find Tom Sawyer!" In analyzing her statement, the reader should be clued that Tom's adventures within the cave is not only a physical trial, but also an emotional one. It is MacDougal's Cave where Tom must "find himself." Chapter 31
Analysis:
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When the story flashes back to Tom and Becky in the MacDougal's cave, the two children do not yet realize that they are lost. However, after an initial period of panic, it is Tom who comes through in their time of need. Perhaps because he feels the need to protect Becky or perhaps because he feels responsible for their situation, Tom seems to undergo a metamorphosis into a mature and accountable "man." As they move aimlessly, it is Tom who conserves their last candle, who comforts Becky, and who is still rational enough to find a source of water to stay near.
One of the more pertinent symbols in the chapter is that of the candle. Again, Twain uses the dichotomy of light versus dark; here the candle becomes a symbol of the children's last flickering hope of being rescued. Serving as their only illumination in the dark depth of the cave, it allows them to "see" both with their eyes and with their minds; the candle is the ultimate representation of clarity and hope. When the last bit of wax melts, both Becky and Tom are famished and "woe-stricken." The only reason Tom has for continuing his search for a way out is to pass the idle time.
One thing that is important to consider is how Tom reacts to seeing Injun Joe inside the cave. Unlike a few days ago, Tom seems less worried that Injun will seek revenge on him. Despite his own fears, he realizes that starvation is a much more pressing problem. Thus, in the face of peril, Tom learns to overcome his fear of Injun Joe
Chapter 32 Analysis:
As Tom tells his story of their adventures in Becky's cave, it is interesting to note the syntax and diction used by Twain when giving Tom a "voice." The narrations of Tom are very distinct because the syntax is simple, yet very drawn-out. Just as if Tom were anxiously telling a story, each sentence extends for several lines. Not only is the diction very simple, but also each sentence is constructed merely by a string of clauses, with repetition of the word "how." We see that Twain uses these stylistic methods to depict Tom's voice, whereas adult "voices" tend to be more constructed and complex
Chapter 33 Analysis:
The death of Injun Joe seems to bring some sort of closure to the novel as a whole. Twain himself expresses this sense of conclusion when he stops, in a moment of philosophical thought, to describe the drop that falls from the stalagmite in the cave, broken off by Injun Joe. "That drop was falling when the Pyramids were new; when Troy fell; when the foundations of Rome were laid; when Christ was Crucified." Twain describes the history of time and wonders whether the single drop was meant to be for Injun Joe's need. He asks the rhetorical question: "Has everything a purpose and a mission?" The author may be questioning his own work, now at a close, asking both himself and the reader what they may draw from the story told.
Similarly, Twain presents the fickle nature of men when he describes the petition for Injun Joe's pardon. "If he had been Satan himself," says Twain, there would have been people to cry over him and sign a petition to pardon the devil himself. It is odd that Twain should include the detail about the petition, for until that point, the story seems to conclude with a rather happy and just ending. Instead, there is distinct tone of
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pessimism in his statement. Perhaps it is the author's intent to show that justice is often betrayed by man's own cowardice and stupidity.
Also in this chapter, Tom seems to resort back to his immature ways, similar to his "relapse" of chapter twenty-two. Even after Judge Thatcher has ordered that no body enter the cave and even after Tom's own near-death experience, he returns to McDougal's cave with Huck to gather the stash of hidden treasure. Tom still dreams of being a robber, even hiding a bunch of Injun Joe's old tools to use for play. The question becomes: Has Tom really matured ?
Chapter 34 Analysis:
To express her gratitude toward Huck, the Widow Douglas decides to take him under her wing, meaning to "give Huck a home under her roof and have him educatedŠ and start him in businessŠ" With the closing chapters of the novel, Huck is introduced into the adult world, the world of the respectable society members who once rejected him as an outcast. With Tom there is an immense desire to grow up quickly: he wishes to be engaged and married, tries to act mature, and be incorporated into adult society. However, Huckleberry Finn wishes the exact opposite: his integration into respectable society is equated with restriction
Chapter 35 Analysis:
In the concluding chapter of the novel, we see that even if Tom is not emotionally ready to enter the adult order, he is being forced to. Judge Thatcher hopes to see Tom become a lawyer or soldier, saying he will see that Tom is admitted to the "National Military Academy." Already, the expectations of others are being imposed upon him. When he runs across Huckleberry Finn, we see that Tom's willingness to conform is not because he has a newfound sense of responsibility; rather, Tom is still interested in appearing noble, not wanting to be a "low character."
When Twain finally ends The Adventures of Tom Sawyer with the clause that going any further would make it the "history of a man," he implies that even the most childish of sorts those who embody imagination, ingenuity, and innocence must grow up.
Tom's Bugs
Tom Sawyer is a boy's boy. He's mischievous, he's adventure seeking, he's fascinated with bugs. Yet while much has been written about these first two personality traits, it is the third one the unexamined territory of Tom's insectuous interactions that a intrigues us. Throughout our reading of Tom Sawyer there was a prevalent buzzing in my ear nipping at my neck. It became apparent to me that while the main characters
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in the novel may be Tom, Becky, and Huck, some of the key players in the story have no lines at all. Instead, they have wings.
In this paper, I examine most of the cases where insects creep their way into Tom's story. Sometimes their presence may go unnoticed, but at others, their sting is long-lasting. The small references to Tom's insect encounters will be mentioned simply to establish that, in an example of art imitating life, the bugs are everywhere. Yet it is the cases when the symbolic message of the insect is impossible to ignore that we will deal with in the greatest detail.
Prior to putting specific examples under the microscope, let us quickly attempt to get all the bugs out of the book. We will examine with an entomologist's precise eye the star bugs: the fly and the beetle in church, the doodlebug in the field, the tick at school, and Tom's equation of man to insect. Yet before doing so, we must first note the minor bugs the cameos so to speak. You may only recall one or two instances where an insect plays a role in the book, but like the saying goes, for every cockroach you see, there a dozen more behind the walls. There's the ventriloquist cricket in Chapter Nine that "no human ingenuity could locate" (65). Later on that same page, Tom hears the ticking of deathwatch, a type of beetle, which according to superstition meant that "somebody's days were numbered." There is the tumblebug on Jackson Island who plays dead when Tom pokes it. Here we also encounter the ants who struggle to carry away a spider five times their size. We also cannot forget the ladybug to whom Tom commands "Lady-bug, lady-bug, fly away home, your house is on fire, your children's alone" (96). Again, while insights could be drawn about the individual appearances of all these insects, at the risk of being repetitive, and quite possibly of bugging you (sorry, I couldn't resist), I will focus on the specific cases mentioned before, beginning with the fly and beetle at church.
This scene is one of the first instances that we see Tom interact with an insect. During the minister's bottomless prayer, Tom is greeted at his pew by a common housefly. The intricate, if not intimate, description which the fly is given, is more reminiscent of a peeping Tom describing his hidden lover than of the supposed praying Tom outlining a winged guest.
In the midst of the prayer a fly had lit on the back of the pew in front of him and tortured his spirit by calmly rubbing its hands together, embracing its head with its arms, and polishing it so vigorously that it seemed to almost part company with the body, and the slender thread of a neck was exposed to view; scraping its wings with its hind legs and smoothing them to its body as if they had been coattails, going through its whole toilet as tranquilly as if it knew it was perfectly safe (40).
It is a significant commentary that the house fly, one of the simplest of all creatures, is more intriguing to Tom than a discussion with The Creator himself the prayer which is taking place. This is just the beginning of Twain's intentional undermining of the Christian Church, and not the last time that he will use a bug as his messenger.
A few moments after the fly departs, another insect acts as Tom's sermon diversion. He remembers that he has in his possession a "treasure" in that he has a pinch-bug. Upon its removal, the beetle immediately lives up to its name. The ensuing pinch causes Tom to fling it into the aisle. Whereas with the fly before, only Tom seemed to
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enjoy the distraction from the prayer it provided, in this instance we see that several people "uninterested in the sermon, found relief in the beetle" (41). With this, Twain further pokes fun at the church. Not only was a boy bored by the tedious proceedings, but a good part of the congregation was as well. Again, even something as low as an insect is more interesting than the apparent height of God's message. Furthermore, the dichotomy of the serious and the playful, or the moral and the mischievous, which these interactions establish, parallels Tom's prevalent struggle between the need for adventure and his desire to be good for Aunt Polly.
Twain uses a doodlebug to further demystify the Church. After his superstition regarding his lost marbles fails to yield the expected result, "Tom's whole structure of faith was shaken to its foundations." In order to satisfy his shaken faith, Tom falls to his knees, not to pray, but to seek the prophetic advice of a bug. "Doodlebug, doodlebug, tell me what I want to know," Tom chants as his mouth is close to the ground. Then suddenly, "the sand began to work, and presently a small black bug appeared for a second and then darted under again in fright." To Tom's delight, his questions have been answered. "He dasn't tell! So it was a witch that done it. I just knowed it" (62, all quotes).
The doodlebug tells us much more than just that Tom's failed superstition was because of a witch's curse. Before calling on it for advice, Tom doesn't say what the doodlebug is supposed to do if a witch is responsible. It is merely when it does something, presumably anything, that his faith is renewed. Twain is mocking the actions of the Christians who say, "Oh Lord, please give me a sign," and then when a rain drop falls or a dog barks, they are certain that God has spoken. Likewise, Tom's interpretation of the doodlebug's message shows us that you can find whatever you want if you are looking hard enough. Tom says, "Doodlebug, doodlebug, tell me what I want to know," not "tell me what you know." It's obvious that he's already made up his mind to be satisfied either way.
In this sense, Twain is relating the superstition of the kids throughout the story to Christianity as a whole. Both become ridiculous when they are reduced symbolically, and literally, to a boy on his knees who is asking a bug to reveal the divine truth. This technique of questioning Christianity by lowering its traditions to childlike games is later used by Twain in Huck Finn. It seems childish when at the beginning of that book the boys are making their life choices based on the writings in Robin Hood and other adventure books. Yet when placed against the reality that adults do the same thing each day with the writings of the Bible, the reader becomes a little uneasy. In Tom Sawyer, placing hope in prayer is like living your life according to the Bible the doodlebug is Robin Hood.
Another key insect encounter is when Tom and Joe choreograph the actions of the tick while at school. Tom typically finds himself bored in the schoolroom as he feels that it stifles his adventures. Drawing upon insects for a metaphor, Tom says "the drowsing murmur of the five and twenty studying scholars soothed the soul like the spell that is in the murmur of bees" (54). In order to alleviate his boredom, Tom begins playing with a tick, by orchestrating its movements with a pin. His friend Joe soon joins in, and as sharing the game becomes difficult, a fight soon follows.
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This scene is an obvious depiction of the little value Tom places on education. School imprisons Tom and attempts to control him much in the same way that he does the tick. The tick scene also allows some insight into the childlike nature of Tom. When things aren't going his way (i.e. the tick staying on his side of the slate) he changes the rules. He's willing to share the tick only as long as it remains on his side of the slate and he's the one who gets to play with it. It is this selfishness that often leads to Tom's getting into trouble.
Sometimes the bugs in Tom Sawyer are not literal. In these cases, their metaphoric weight is increased tenfold. During a thunderstorm, Tom hides beneath his covers fearing that God was finally seeking his vengeance on him.
It might have seemed to him [God] a waste of pomp and ammunition to kill a bug with a battery of artillery, but there seemed nothing incongruous about the getting up such an expensive thunderstorm as this to knock the turf from under an insect like himself" (144). Unlike before where Twain uses bugs to reduce themes like Christianity and education, here Tom himself is reduced to an insect. Tom's role in the world is questioned as he views himself as insignificant as a bug. Furthermore, God is portrayed as a vengeful master who conjures up a storm to squash his trivial creations, not as a loving father who offers forgiveness.
The equating of man to insect appears again later in the book, this time referring to Injun Joe, not Tom. Of the water-drip which created the stalagmite near Injun Joe's dead body, Tom wonders, "Did this drop fall patiently during five thousand years to be ready for this flitting human insect's need?" (202). In a strange twist, Twain doubles Injun Joe with Tom by likening each to insects. Tom constantly struggles with feeling insignificant and contemplates his own death. Now standing before a dead man, this insignificance is reconfirmed, and man is again reduced to an insect that can be squashed at a moment's notice.
After reading Tom Sawyer with the entomologist paradigm in mind, it is apparent that unless the book is fumigated before reading, insects play a large role in the story. Sometimes they merely provide comic relief, but often their role is more important. They are at times used as a means of demystifying the Church, and at others provide a commentary on Tom's view of education. Later, they act to reduce man's view of himself in the world to the most insignificant level. While the insects in Tom Sawyer may at first seem unimportant, once they are looked at with a critical mindset, their buzzing cannot be ignored.
The Picture of Dorian Gray(1890) By
Oscar Wilde
Conflict
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PROTAGONIST Dorian Gray, a man who is jolted out of oblivion at the beginning of the novel and made aware of the idea that his youth and beauty are his greatest gifts and that they will soon vanish with age. ANTAGONIST Lord Henry Wotton, the bored aristocrat who tells Dorian Gray that he is extraordinarily beautiful. He decides to dominate Dorian and proceeds to strip him of all his conventional illusions. He succeeds in making Dorian live his life for art and forget moral responsibility. A secondary antagonist is age. Dorian Gray runs from the ugliness of age throughout his life. He runs from it, but he is also fascinated with it, obsessively coming back again and again to look at the signs of age in the portrait. CLIMAX The climax follows Sibyl Vane’s horrible performance on stage when Dorian Gray tells her he has fallen out of love with her because she has made something ugly. Here, Dorian rejects love for the ideal of beauty. The next morning, he changes his mind and writes an impassioned letter of apology, but too late; Sibyl has committed suicide.
OUTCOME Dorian Gray becomes mired in the immorality of his existence. He places no limit on his search for pleasure. He ruins people’s lives without qualm. His portrait shows the ugliness of his sins, but his own body doesn’t. His attempts at reform fail. He even kills a messenger of reform--Basil Hallward. Finally, he kills himself as he attempts to "kill" the portrait. He dies the ugly, old man and the portrait returns to the vision of his beautiful youth.
Key Literary Elements Setting The novel is set in London at the end of the nineteenth century; one chapter is set at Dorian Gray’s country estate, Selby Royal.
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Characters Major Characters Basil Hallward - the artist who paints the portrait of Dorian Gray. He is so enamored of Dorian Gray that he feels himself dominated by Dorian. His art changes when he paints Dorian Gray. He is eventually murdered by Dorian Gray when he tries to urge Dorian to reform himself. Lord Henry Wotton - the aristocrat who corrupts Dorian Gray with his ideas that morality is hypocrisy used to cover people’s inadequacies. He decides early on that he wants to dominate Dorian Gray.
Dorian Gray - the object of fascination for everyone. He is the most beautiful man anyone has ever seen. He prays that he should change places with a portrait painted of him when he is quite young. He prays that he will stay young forever and the portrait will show signs of age and decadence. His prayer comes true and he remains beautiful even while being corrupt.
LITERARY/HISTORICAL INFORMATION
Wilde entered and expanded the Aesthetic movement in art, also called the "art for art’s sake" movement. He drew on the writings of Walter Pater, as well as those of the Pre-Raphaelites and William Morris. He expounded the notion that life was to be lived for beauty and pleasure, not for duty. Art should not be confined to the page or the canvas. It should be lived. It should be worn. It should structure all of life. Wilde was received with great pleasure and enthusiasm by the aristocracy of London. He was caricatured in the popular presses which served the middle class, but the caricature meant as well that his was a household name in London. In 1890, The Picture of Dorian Gray was published. It was received with great interest. Its Preface became a sort of manifesto of the aesthetes and decadents of the 1890s. Wilde continued in the next few years to write essays expanding the ideas of this Preface. He followed Dorian Gray with the book The Soul of Man Under Socialism there developing the ideas of John Ruskin and others. Wilde’s greatest successes came with his dramatic writing. In 1892, he wrote and put on Lady Windermere’s Fan, in 1893, he produced An Ideal Husband, and in 1895, The Importance of Being Earnest. The latter is Wilde’s masterpiece. It was and is still seen as one of the best comedies ever written.
The Aesthetic movement is summed up in Wilde’s Preface to The
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Picture of Dorian Gray and in his essay The Critic as Artist. He develops Walter Pater’s aestheticism. He proclaims the preeminence of art over life. He scorns the idea that art should imitate life, represent it fairly and accurately. Instead, he argued that life should imitate art. While Oscar Wilde propounded the idea that art and morality are totally separate, his works, including Dorian Gray betray a different philosophy of life. He seems to recognize the problems of the pursuit of pleasure at the expense of moral responsibility.
THEME MAIN THEME The main theme of The Picture of Dorian Gray is the relationship between beauty and morality. Oscar Wilde plays on the Renaissance idea of the correspondence between the physical and spiritual realms: beautiful people are moral people; ugly people are immoral people. His twist on this theme is in his use of the magical contrivance of the portrait. The portrait of Dorian Gray bears all the ugliness and age of sin while Dorian himself remains young and beautiful no matter what he does. The portrait even holds Dorian’s guilty conscience, at least until he kills Basil Hallward.
Minor THEME The minor theme of the novel is the idea of the amorality of art. If something is beautiful, it is not confined to the realm of morality and immorality. It exists on its own merits. This idea is expressed by Lord Henry in its decadent aspect and by Basil Hallward in its idealistic aspect. Dorian Gray plays it out in his life.
Mood The mood of the novel is a counterbalance between the witty, ironical world view of Lord Henry and the earnest and straightforward world view of Basil Hallward. Dorian Gray goes back and forth between these two poles. The novel does too. At times, it is the world of urbane wit making light of the moral earnestness of philanthropists. At times, it is the melodramatic world of lurid opium d
OVERALL ANALYSES Characters
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Basil Hallward: Basil Hallward is perhaps an old-fashioned representative of the aesthetic movement. He lives his life artfully, making a mystery when there is usually predictability, for instance, in his habit of taking trips without ever telling people where he’s going. He dedicates his life to art and, when he sees Dorian Gray, decides to found a new school of art, one devoted to the youthful beauty of his subject. His home is filled with beautiful things. He has clearly devoted his life to the pursuit of the aesthetic as a way of life. He is an old-fashioned aesthete in the sense that he is willing to give up art for the sake of moral responsibility. When he sees Dorian has become upset over the portrait he paints of the boy, he is willing to destroy the painting. This is a painting he has just said is the best work of his artistic career. Basil Hallward is the only one in Dorian Gray’s life who beseeches him to reform himself. In this respect, Basil Hallward is the moral center of the novel. The novel opens with him and the plot action sees a sharp downward turn when he is murdered. Basil Hallward play a small role in the novel, only appearing at three points in Dorian Gray’s life, but his influence is great. Lord Henry Wotten: Lord Henry is the radical aesthete. He lives out all of the precepts of the aesthetic movement as outlined in the Preface to the novel. He refuses to recognize any moral standard whatsoever. He spends his time among aristocrats whom he ridicules in such a witty fashion that he makes them like him. When the novel opens, he and his opposite in aestheticism are discussing the protagonist, Dorian Gray. Basil Hallward earnestly enjoins Lord Henry to leave Dorian Gray alone, not to interfere with him, not to exert his influence on the youth. Lord Henry ignores Basil’s plea entirely. He never has a qualm about doing just the opposite of what Basil begged him to do. He immediately begins to exert his influence on the beautiful Dorian Gray, an opposite influence to that which Basil Hallward would wish for. He makes Dorian Gray self-aware, self-conscious, and even self- involved. He gives Dorian Gray an inward focus and ridicules Dorian’s attempts to find an outward focus in philanthropy. He takes Dorian Gray around to all the fashionable salons and drawing rooms of the London aristocracy showing him off, encouraging him in his self-gratifying pursuits.
When Dorian Gray attempts to reform himself at the end of the novel, Lord Henry remains true to his long-established purpose. He ridicules Dorian’s attempts to deny his gratification for a greater good and thus makes Dorian feel it is futile to attempt to reform. At the beginning of the novel, Basil Hallward scoffs at Lord Henry’s amoral aphorisms, saying that Lord Henry always says
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bad things but never does anything bad. Basil Hallward feels that Lord Henry’s amorality is just a pose. By the end of the novel, when Lord Henry takes Dorian’s last chance of reform away from him, the reader might assume that Basil Hallward was wrong. Lord Henry is immoral in his supposed amorality. ens and tortured suicides
Themes Under debate in The Picture of Dorian Gray from beginning to end is the relationship between beauty and morality. Oscar Wilde sets up the triangular relationship along the lines of this debate. Basil Hallward takes the position that life is to be lived in the pursuit of the beautiful and the pleasurable, but he is unwilling to divorce the good from the beautiful. Lord Henry, on the other hand, goes through life throwing one aphorism after another together to prove the non-existence or the hypocrisy of morality. In the character of Dorian Gray and in his relationship to the his magical portrait, Oscar Wilde dramatizes this debate. In the Renaissance, people believed in the idea of correspondences. They saw correspondences between the heavens and the earth. When something went wrong on the social scale, they looked to the skies for similar upsets. In the literature of the Renaissance, storms always accompany social upheaval. In like manner, there was seen to be a correspondence between beauty and virtue. If a person was beautiful, it was assumed that she or he was also virtuous. If a person was ugly, it was a assumed this person was corrupt. The face told the story of the soul. Oscar Wilde takes this Renaissance idea of correspondences and sees how it works in the world of the aesthetes. The aesthetes of the 1890s were intent on developing a positive philosophy of art. Art was not the classical notion of a mirror held up to life. Art was to be regarded as autonomous. In its own right, it was to be celebrated. It was no longer to be subordinated to life as a mirror is subordinate to the object mirrored. If a comparison was granted, art was superior to life. It was timeless, unchanging, and perfect. In detaching art from its representational function, the aesthetes were also detaching it from its moral aim. Victorian writers had long held art up as valuable for its ability to instruct and correct its readers. The aesthetes wanted no moral task assigned to art. Art existed for its own sake, not as moral instruction, and not as a mirror held up to life. Aesthetes might have overstated the point. In the Preface to Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde sounded the keynote of the aesthetic movement when he wrote "There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book" and added, "No artist has ethical sympathies." Ironically, his novel is just that. It is a moral book.
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Wilde uses the magical contrivance of the portrait as a way to play on the Themes of art in life, life as art, and the amorality of art. For the aesthetes, if something is beautiful, it is not confined to the realm of morality and immorality. It exists on its own merits. This idea is expressed by Lord Henry in its decadent aspect and by Basil Hallward in its idealistic aspect. For Lord Henry, there is no moral imperative. The true lover of beauty is safe to pursue art and pleasure and should think of conventional morality as the enemy of beauty. For Basil Hallward, the beauty should be pursued because it idealizes the viewer. It makes the world a better place. The world is made morally good when it enjoys the beauty of art. Dorian Gray is the beautiful one who plays out the ideal of art in his life. For Basil Hallward, he is the one who can make his contemporaries better people. For Lord Henry, he should pursue pleasure and beauty for no end other than self-gratification. Dorian follows the way of Lord Henry. Oscar Wilde keeps in the forefront of the novel the ideal which Basil Hallward sets up with the use of the portrait. The portrait of Dorian Gray bears all the ugliness and age of sin while Dorian himself remains young and beautiful no matter what he does. The portrait even holds Dorian’s guilty conscience, at least until he kills Basil Hallward.
Art bears the sins of the age. The portrait of Dorian Gray bears all the traces of his sins. It loses its innocent look and begins to look contemptuous and then downright vicious. Dorian Gray, on the other hand, retains the innocent look of youth and so people have a great deal of difficulty believing the stories about his bad habits. Dorian Gray’s portrait even bears the weight of his guiltiness. Since he doesn’t have to pay for his sins in the loss of his looks, it is easier for him to leave them behind and never repent of them. When he is confronted by Basil Hallward, he is confronted by his creator. Without Basil’s portrait of him, Dorian would have had a very different life. He kills Basil when Basil begs him to reform. Dorian hates the creator, the one who enabled him to sin as he has in the first place, and so he kills him. After Basil’s death, though, Dorian cannot go on as he did before. Without his creator, he loses his ability to leave all his sins to mark the portrait. He gets nervous and edgy. Vengeance comes out of his past in the form of James Vane and stalks him. When he is let off the hook by James’s accidental death, he doesn’t feel relief. He attempts to go Basil’s way after all, but it is too late. He has no moral grounding to support moral choices. The only end possible for him is to kill the art that has poisoned his life. In doing so, he kills himself. Oscar Wilde ended up writing a moral book after all. The novel shows the lesson that has been told over and over in story after
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story. Guilt will always out. There is no escape from a guilty conscience. All crime must be paid for.
. Notes The third element of the triangular relationship among Basil Hallward, Dorian Gray, and Lord Henry is in this chapter fully established. Lord Henry decides to dominate Dorian Gray as Dorian Gray dominates Basil Hallward. The chapter is framed by this realization. It opens with Lord Henry walking to his aunt Agatha’s house for lunch at which he knows he will see Dorian Gray. On that walk he decides he will work his strong influence on Dorian. At the lunch, Lord Henry charms everyone present with his Hedonistic philosophy, even those who are staunch supporters of philanthropy. He works his influence on them all with a view toward influencing Dorian Gray. The plan works. At the end of lunch, Dorian asks to accompany him on his walk through the park. He will stand up Basil Hallward, with whom he has an appointment. The reader might be puzzled at the scorn that is heaped on charitable work in this chapter. It’s useful to look at the history of the nineteenth century to see what Oscar Wilde is responding to in this attack on philanthropy. For many years, England had dominated the world, invading countries like India, Africa, and China (not to mention America and Ireland) and taking over, establishing colonial regimes and enslaving the people of those lands or making subordinates of them. The end of the nineteenth century saw the decline of the British Empire. Colonized people began successfully to revolt and England began pulling out of these other lands. Colonization had always been done in the pursuit of raw materials, cheap labor, and land, but the outright theft of other lands and peoples went against England’s sense of itself as a Christian nation. Therefore, it needed a moral justification for colonizing other lands. That justification came in the form of a sense of moral superiority. The English were doing these colonized people a favor by brining them the light of a superior civilization, including a superior religion. At the same time that justification was being built up, people were starving in the streets in England itself. The colonizers realized it was important to help those at home as well as "help" those abroad. Hence, the philanthropic societies of the late nineteenth century. Oscar Wilde was well aware that of the hypocrisy at the heart of much of the philanthropy of his time: workers were ruthlessly exploited, making possible the gourmet dinners of the philanthropic dinners put on for their benefit. The poor remained poor and the rich didn’t feel quite as guilty. A month later, the relationship between
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Dorian and Lord Henry has developed just as Lord Henry wished. Dorian has avoided Basil Hallward and has become a protégé (follower) of Lord Henry, quoting him in everything and looking to him for guidance on all his decisions. Lord Henry is a spectator. He is setting up Dorian Gray with what he thinks of as premature knowledge, so that Dorian will live his youth in the full knowledge that it is fading daily. He recognizes that Dorian will burn out and he doesn’t seem at all affected by this. He isn’t jealous of Dorian’s new passion for Sibyl Vane. It adds to his pleasure as a spectator. He regards himself as something of a social scientist. The bigotry of the late Victorians is brought out in this chapter, expressed by Lord Henry about women’s inferior status as human beinA month later, the relationship between Dorian and Lord Henry has developed just as Lord Henry wished. Dorian has avoided Basil Hallward and has become a protégé (follower) of Lord Henry, quoting him in everything and looking to him for guidance on all his decisions. Lord Henry is a spectator. He is setting up Dorian Gray with what he thinks of as premature knowledge, so that Dorian will live his youth in the full knowledge that it is fading daily. He recognizes that Dorian will burn out and he doesn’t seem at all affected by this. He isn’t jealous of Dorian’s new passion for Sibyl Vane. It adds to his pleasure as a spectator. He regards himself as something of a social scientist. The bigotry of the late Victorians is brought out in this chapter, expressed by Lord Henry about women’s inferior status as human beings and by Dorian Gray about the repulsiveness of Jews. gs and by Dorian Gray about the repulThis chapter takes the reader to an entirely different social scene. The world of the Vanes. It serves to humanize Sibyl for the reader by showing her in her roles as daughter and sister. She is innocent as Dorian told Lord Henry she was. She knows nothing of the position which her social class puts her in relation to Dorian Gray. Her brother and her mother do know. For her brother, she will be used and discarded by a rich man. For her mother, she might be lucky enough to get money out of the rich man before he gets tired of her. The chapter closes with the revelation that James and Sibyl’s father was an aristocrat himself and that their parents never married. siveness of Jews.
Notes This chapter plays a structural role in the plot, brining the three men back together before their parting again to go their own ways. Basil seems out of the loop of Dorian’s affections almost completely. This status is underlined as he is told to take his own conveyance to the theater alone while Dorian rides with Lord Henry. The engagement to Sibyl seems to be Dorian’s last hope of
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regaining the innocence of youth which he has lost to Lord Henry’s theories.
Notes The climax of the novel occurs in this chapter. Dorian takes his friends to see Sibyl’s fine acting and is embarrassed by her dreadful acting. Even when she tells him she has lost her talent for acting because she loves him and thinks only of him, he doesn’t soften toward her. He lets her sob and he leaves her coldly. The consequences of this sin of the heart is that Dorian Gray ages. However, it is not he that ages, but his portrait. Here, Oscar Wilde plays with the notion that art imitates life. When Dorian first saw his portrait, he wished for its timelessness. He wished he could change places with art, living the timelessness of art, and letting the portrait age and wither. In this climax chapter, that reversal seems to happen. Whether the reader is supposed to think of this as Dorian’s guilty conscience projected onto the portrait or a depiction of magic is unclear at this point. The reader has to wait to find out if any other character besides Dorian will see the change in the portrait.
Notes Wilde structures the novel like a play. First, the three men go to the play together and witness the destruction of Sibyl Vane’s acting talent. Next, Dorian scorns her and she kills herself. The next morning, one of his admirers comes to him and convinces him to feel no guilt. The next morning after that, his other admirer comes to him and is shocked that he feels no guilt, but is led to forgive him for it. Wilde continues to play the triangular relationship with symmetrical precision. The portrait is here taken to another level. Dorian hides it desperately, sure that anyone who looks at it will see his shame. Basil Hallway, who himself once swore that he would never exhibit the painting for fear that everyone would be able to see his idolatry of Dorian Gray, now feels that art is after all abstract, nothing but form and
Notes Here, Dorian Gray sinks into paranoia in regard to the portrait. He begins to suspect his manservant Victor of sneaking around the portrait. He wonders if Victor will even extort money from him for his secret knowledge of the portrait. At the end of the chapter, Lord Henry’s influence finds another inroad. He sends Dorian a book by a French Symboliste writer.
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Dorian finds it poisonous like Lord Henry’s ideas, but he is as fascinated with it as he is with Lord Henry. At one point early in the chapter, Dorian wonders if he shouldn’t have confessed to Basil about the portrait and begged him to save him from the influence of Lord Henry. By the end of the chapter, it is clear that Notes A possible turning point occurs in this chapter in which Dorian meets Basil Hallward after many years. He is now 38 years old and, as Basil tells him, has caused so many scandals and ruined so many young men and women’s reputations that Basil has begun to question his integrity. Basil, the artist, is sure that a man cannot sin as Dorian is reputed to have sinned and remain beautiful. For Basil, morality is visible on the surface of the skin. Beautiful people must be pure people and ugly people must be immoral. Basil’s view of beauty and goodness accords with the assumptions behind the story of the novel. Here, Dorian will show him his portrait. The reader must wonder if Basil will be able to see the ugliness that Dorian sees in the portrait or if the changes .
Notes The subject of the portrait kills the artist. Here, the fateful triangle among the three main characters of the novel is broken when Dorian Gray murders Basil Hallward. Basil, as much as the portrait, has served as Dorian’s conscience. Dorian has avoided Basil over the years of his explorations of the aesthetics of evil. Here, Basil finally comes to him to confront him. The reader finds out all the specific charges against Dorian. He has ruined the reputations of young men and women, some of whom have even committed suicide. He is ostracized by all the best families of London. Dorian seems relieved to be able to share the horror of the portrait with Basil, but when Basil sees it, recognizing what it means about Dorian, he wants Dorian to change his ways and repent. Dorian cannot face this possibility and kills Basil instead. ortrait have only been Dorian is far from Basil Hallward’s influence. color.
Notes The psychology of Dorian Gray is perhaps best revealed in this chapter. He wakes up the morning after murdering one of his best friends feeling calm and pleasant. When he remembers what he did, he dreads seeing the body again. He doesn’t feel remorse. He sends for what was probably an ex-lover and forces him on the threat of revealing their past relationship, to dispose of the body so that no trace shows. He has no fear of telling Campbell of what he did because he knows he has power over the man. When he returns
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to the upstairs room to find no trace of Basil Hallward’s body remaining, he is relieved. It seems that the portrait takes on not only the look of a sinful man, but also the guilt of one. Dorian is perfectly ruthless.
Notes Dorian seems, after all, not to have left his conscience upstairs in the room. He is nervous and distracted unable to focus on anything but what has happened. He tries to enjoy himself at the dinner party, but he can’t even eat. If he has gone to the dinner party to allay future suspicion, he has ended up doing just the opposite
Notes Dorian Gray is naive enough at the end of this chapter to think that the death of James Vane means the end of his fears for his own life. The reader probably suspects by now that Dorian Gray’s fears will remain with him because his guilt over killing his friend Basil Hallward will not go away. Dorian Gray’s implacable facade has already cracked. It is only a matter of time until his career in the pursuit of pleasure at the expense of others is over. It seems that Oscar Wilde is an imminently
Notes Dorian spends his last evening with his friend Lord Henry. He tells Lord Henry that he plans to reform himself and asks his friend not to speak to him any more with his characteristic sneer. This chapter serves to convey some important information to the reader and to show Dorian in his submissive relation to Lord Henry one last time. The reader finds out that people are still talking about the disappearance of Basil Hallward, but no one suspects foul play. Since Basil was in the habit of never telling people where he was going when he went on trips, people assume he is doing the same now. The reader also finds out that Alan Campbell has committed suicide. Dorian’s one accomplice in the death of Basil Hallward is now gone. He is completely safe from detection. The second function of this chapter, to show Dorian continuing to be dominated by Lord Henry, is only fully revealed in the last chapter. Dorian tries to convince Lord Henry that he will now reform himself and be good. He gives the evidence of his change when he tells of his recent flirtation of a country girl named Hetty.
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Just when she was ready to run away with him, he left her. Lord Henry tells him it is not a reform, but just another kind of pleasure, the pleasure in renouncing pleasure.
Notes The novel ends with the conflation of the art and the subject. Dorian stabs the portrait, trying to destroy it, and the effect is that he kills himself. The mystery of the novel is kept in tact. The reader never knows if the portrait magically transformed itself, or if it was a figment of Dorian’s--and later, Basil’s imagination. When people who are not at all attached to the portrait see it in the end, they see nothing more than the beautiful portrait of Dorian Gray as young man. oral worth of it, but for his own ego. moral writer after allThe artist creates beautiful things. Art aims to reveal art and conceal the artist. The critic translates impressions from the art into another medium. Criticism is a form of autobiography. People who look at something beautiful and find an ugly meaning are "corrupt without being charming." Cultivated people look at beautiful things and find beautiful meanings. The elect are those who see only beauty in beautiful things. Books can’t be moral or immoral; they are only well or badly written. People of the nineteenth century who dislike realism are like Caliban who is enraged at seeing his own face in the mirror. People of the nineteenth century who dislike romanticism are like Caliban enraged at not seeing himself in the mirror. The subject matter of art is the moral life of people, but moral art is art that is well formed. Artists don’t try to prove anything. Artists don’t have ethical sympathies, which in an artist "is an unpardonable mannerism of style." The subject matter of art can include things that are morbid, because "the artist can express everything." The artist’s instruments are thought and language. Vice and virtue are the materials of art. In terms of form, music is the epitome of all the arts. In terms of feeling, acting is the epitome of the arts. Art is both surface and symbol. People who try to go beneath the surface and those who try to read the symbols "do so at their own peril." Art imitates not life, but the spectator. When there is a diversity of opinion about a work of art, the art is good. "When critics disagree the artist is in accord with him[/her]self." The value of art is not in its usefulness. Art is useless.
Notes
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The Preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray is famous in its own right as a sort of manifesto of the Aesthetic Movement in art and literature. It consists of a series of aphorisms or epigrams (short sayings) which affirm the notions of art for art’s sake. Many of these aphorisms form the basis not only of Aesthetic writing, but also Modernist writing, which was to reach its height in the 1920s. In the nineteenth century, art was supposed to be useful for the moral instruction of the people. It was supposed to mirror life and also teach its readers to live the good and moral life. Oscar Wilde opposes this view of art. For Wilde, art was valuable in its own right, not for its usefulness for other aims. His sayings about art seem strange and against the norm even for late twentieth century readers. People often read them as a humorous overstatement of principles. However, each of the statements is exactly in accord with the ideas of the Aesthetes. They are not necessarily exaggerations. Wilde consistently defended the autonomy of art, that is, the separateness of art from use value
Jude the Obscure(1859) By
Thomas Hardy
Commentary
Early on in the novel, the village of Marygreen is set in opposition to the university town of Christminster. The young Jude sees Christminster as an enlightened place of learning, equating it with his dreams of higher education and his vague notions of academic success. Yet while Jude lives quite close to Christminster and knows a man who is going to live there, the city is always only a distant vision in his mind. It is nearly within his reach but at the same time unattainable, and this physical distance serves as an ongoing metaphor for the abstract distance between the impoverished Jude and the privileged Christminster students.
At the start of the novel, Jude is portrayed as an earnest and innocent young man who aspires to things greater than his background allows. He resists succumbing to the discouragement of those around him and does not fear the gap he is creating between himself and the other people of his village. He is seen as eccentric and perhaps impertinent, and his aspirations are dismissed as unrealistic. It is this climate, in part,
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that leads him to marry Arabella. All through his young adult life, he avoids going to Christminster. Perhaps he is afraid of the failure he might encounter there. In Arabella, he sees something attainable and instantly gratifying, as opposed to the university life, of which he fears he may never become a part. In this way Jude avoids disappointment, but finds that he cannot live within the confines of an unhappy marriage.
Confinement--particularly in regard to marriage--is a major theme in the novel. Jude feels trapped by a youthful mistake and Arabella's manipulation. He finds that the decision is irreversible and resigns himself to living with the consequences. The freedom he receives after Arabella leaves is only partially liberating: It lets him be independent in a physical sense, but because he is still married, it forbids him from achieving legitimate romantic happiness with someone else.
Sue serves to attract Jude to Christminster, and he seeks her out with a strange devotion, as though he is following an inevitable path carved out by destiny. Taken together with his aunt's warning that marriages in their family never end well, Jude's haste to find and fall in love with his cousin creates a sense of foreboding about the young man's fate. His marriage to Arabella prevents him from pursuing Sue fully, but she clearly captivates him.
Jude is disappointed to find that Phillotson does not remember him and has not fulfilled his ambitions. Phillotson is a foil to Jude, his complacency set against Jude's fervor. Phillotson represents a path more accessible to Jude than his aspirations toward an academic career, but Jude is loath to give up his Christminster ambitions. He also clings to Sue, arranging for her to teach with Phillotson as a way of keeping her near him.
Jude finds that the Christminster colleges are not welcoming toward self-educated men, and he accepts that he may not be able to study at the university after all. His propensity for drinking emerges. The episode in the pub, in which he recites Latin to a group of workmen and undergraduates, shows the juxtaposition of Jude's intellect with his outer appearance. Christminster will not accept him because he belongs to the working class, yet he is intelligent and well-read through independent study. The realization that his learning will help him only to perform in pubs sits heavily with Jude, and he is comforted only by the possibility of becoming a clergyman through apprenticeship.
Sue shows herself to be both radical in her intellectual views and conservative in her social practices. She leaves the Training College because she discovers that its rules are intolerably strict, and her supervisors' suspicions are too much for her to bear. She comes to see Jude as a protector, and for this reason is disturbed by the realization that he is in love with her. She wavers back and forth in her protests, sometimes wanting to enter into a romantic relationship with Jude and sometimes believing it to be misguided. When he confesses that he is married, she accuses him of dishonesty, but there is a hint of disappointment in her tone because his marriage only adds a further
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obstruction to their possible romance. She marries Phillotson in this state of anger and frustration, and Jude feels that he cannot and should not dissuade her.
Jude spends the night with Arabella because he feels it is his legal right, and he wants to ease his longing for Sue. When Arabella tells him that she has married a second time, Jude does not know what to do. He regrets his night with her and is dismayed by the realization that he has committed a form of adultery. Meanwhile, Sue tries to push him away again, then invites him to her home soon after. Sue does not know what she wants, but is slowly coming to the understanding that she finds Phillotson repulsive. She does not admit to loving Jude, but still turns to him to be her protector.
The moral implications of the friendship and romance between Jude and Sue emerge as an important issue. Hardy dwells on the question of marriage and its ramifications, and his portrayal of the tragic effects of marital confinement, beginning largely in Part IV, did not sit well with critics of the time. Hardy was accused of attempting to undermine the institution of marriage, and Sue in particular was thought to have inappropriate beliefs for a young female character. In many ways, she is a feminist before her time. She recognizes her own intellect and her potential for a satisfying career in teaching, and marries Phillotson partly out of a desire for a pleasant work environment. She resists a romantic relationship with Jude, but falls in love with him despite her misgivings. However, when it comes time to marry, she does not wish to enter into a legal contract in which she would again be confined.
By marrying Phillotson, Sue hopes to protect her reputation and achieve the traditional lifestyle of a married woman. She likes Phillotson despite his age, but is surprised at her inability to find him attractive. She even comes to be repulsed by him and later admits to jumping out of the window for fear that he would enter her bed. Phillotson tries very hard to preserve at least the external appearance of a typical marriage. As a man, he is legally permitted to force her to stay in his bed and even sleep with him. For this reason he is viewed with contempt for letting her leave him. However, his understanding brings him only more difficulty, as he is personally blamed for Sue's disobedience of convention.
Jude's relationship with Arabella is equally complicated. He does not love her as much as he cares for Sue, but he sleeps with her when she returns from Australia. Again, Hardy's casual depiction of people acting against established societal norms of marital and sexual behavior aroused controversy in Britain and the United States, and Hardy resolved to give up writing fiction as a result.
Jude and Sue are both able to obtain divorces from their first marriages, so legally they can marry each other. Jude decides that he can be happy without being legally married to Sue as long as he is with her, and the two do not tell their neighbors whether they are married or not. However, they live as though they are married and are therefore considered sinful by people around them. The idea of raising Jude's son prompts Sue to think about formalizing their marriage, but ultimately they do not marry. The uncertainty surrounding their status foreshadows difficulties to come, as there is a sense of illegitimacy lingering in their relationship.
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When Arabella sees Jude and Sue with her son she immediately points out to her new husband that the child is too old to be Sue's son, as though claiming motherhood from a distance. Sue immediately develops a relationship with the boy, although she dislikes the fact that he was born of Jude's first marriage. The child's old, world-weary face points to both his premature wisdom and his ability to see beyond childish things. In his eyes there is a danger that Sue senses but cannot, at this stage, define.
The tragic conclusion of the novel arises as the inevitable result of the difficulties faced by the two cousins. Sue sees young Jude's terrible murder-suicide as the result of her transgressions against the institution of marriage, and her only solution is to return to her ex-husband. Sue sees all the forces of nature working against her and comes to regard her love for Jude as a sin in itself.
Arabella is heartless where Sue is passionate. Jude dies after again being tricked into marrying her, but she is unwilling to sacrifice the diversion of a boat race to be with him while he is dying or even to take care of his body after he dies. She personifies the danger of a bad marriage in the novel, and the murder of Sue's children by Arabella's child perhaps more rightly represents the destruction of true love by adolescent infatuation.
Overall Analysis and Themes
Jude the Obscure focuses on the life of a country stonemason, Jude, and his love for his cousin Sue, a schoolteacher. From the beginning Jude knows that marriage is an ill-fated venture in his family, and he believes that his love for Sue curses him doubly, because they are both members of a cursed clan. While love could be identified as a central theme in the novel, it is the institution of marriage that is the work's central focus. Jude and Sue are unhappily married to other people, and then drawn by an inevitable bond that pulls them together. Their relationship is beset by tragedy, not only because of the family curse but also by society's reluctance to accept their marriage as legitimate.
The horrifying murder-suicide of Jude's children is no doubt the climax of the book's action, and the other events of the novel rise in a crescendo to meet that one act. From there, Jude and Sue feel they have no recourse but to return to their previous, unhappy marriages and die within the confinement created by their youthful errors. They are drawn into an endless cycle of self-erected oppression and cannot break free. In a society unwilling to accept their rejection of convention, they are ostracized. Jude's son senses wrongdoing in his own conception and acts in a way that he thinks will help his parents and his siblings. The children are the victims of society's unwillingness to accept Jude and Sue as man and wife, and Sue's own feelings of shame from her divorce.
Jude's initial failure to attend the university becomes less important as the novel progresses, but his obsession with Christminster remains. Christminster is the site of Jude's first encounters with Sue, the tragedy that dominates the book, and Jude's final moments and death. It acts upon Jude, Sue, and their family as a representation of the unattainable and dangerous things to which Jude aspires.
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Sister Carrie(1900)
by Theodore Dreiser
Sister Carrie, published in 1900, stands at the gateway of the new century. Theodore Dreiser based his first novel on the life of his sister Emma. In 1883 she ran away to Toronto, Canada with a married man who had stolen money from his employer. The story as told by Dreiser, about Carrie Meeber who becomes the mistress of a traveling salesman, is unapologetically told and created a scandal with its moral transgressions. The book was initially rejected by many publishers on the grounds that is was "immoral". Indeed, Harper Brothers, the first publisher to see the book, rejected it by saying it was not, "sufficiently delicate to depict without offense to the reader the continued illicit relations of the heroine". Finally Doubleday and Company published the book in order to fulfill their contract, but Frank Doubleday refused to promote the book. As a result, it sold less than seven hundred copies and Dreiser received a reputation as a naturalist-barbarian.
Sister Carrie sold poorly but was redeemed by writers like Frank Norris and William Dean Howells who saw the novel as a breakthrough in American realism. Charges of obscenity were brought against the novel, soon making Dreiser a cause celebre for many young writers. However, the publication battles over Sister Carrie caused Dreiser to become depressed, so much so that his brother sent him to a sanitarium for a short while.
The struggles in getting Sister Carrie published were not undertaken without foreknowledge. Dreiser allowed many cuts and changes to be made to the original manuscript by his wife Sara (known as "Jug") and his friend Arthur Henry. From the 1981 publication of the unedited manuscript by the University of Pennsylvania Press, it appears that Dreiser welcomed the edits and changes although later in life he described the publication of Sister Carrie as one of suppression. Dreiser scholars are still torn over whether the extensive editing helped or harmed the original manuscript.
One of the main problems with the book has been the ending, where it seems that Carrie is rewarded for her illicit relationship. Dreiser wrote as a Realist, and believed that fiction should not merely depict an idealized version of life for readers, but should show how people really felt and thought about things. The scandal of the book is that Carrie is able to move in with the salesman and thereby improve her lot in life. Although Dreiser does not leave her happy at the end, he certainly does not punish her for her actions.
Analysis
Chapter I
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The first chapter sets up a great deal of the overall plot and theme of the novel. Sister Carrie leaves home, makes her first entrance into the world, and is forced to immediately start growing up. The train ride away from home, such a traditional image of departure, parallels Dreiser's own escape from home when he went to Chicago. Thus he is drawing on personal experience but also making a point about what can happen to someone when they are young.
One of the most famous comments that Dreiser makes is when he states, "When a girl leaves home at eighteen, she does one of two things. Either she falls into saving hands and becomes better, or she rapidly assumes the cosmopolitan standard of virtue and becomes worse" (1). This remark is almost immediately followed by Carrie's first test, i.e. her encounter with Drouet. Drouet approaches her from behind and talks into her ear. This is analogous to the devil, whispering from behind, but seducing nonetheless. Thus, Dreiser no sooner gets done describing what two paths a woman in Carrie's position can take than he immediately pushes her down the path of vices, or "cosmopolitan virtues".
In having Carrie trade addresses with Drouet, Dreiser takes advantage of the "fallen woman" genre of literature. However, even in this first chapter we can see him transform the traditional fallen woman into a much more powerful figure. Carrie's decision to trade addresses is not brought about because she likes Drouet, but rather because she is impressed by his clothes. Indeed, Sister Carrie is largely a novel about materialism and taking advantage of what is offered. This even emerges in Dreiser's description of Carrie's intellect, where he states that she has a rudimentary mind, but that her self-interest is her guiding characteristic. Carrie will not be a traditional fallen woman because she does not "fall" for passion or emotion. Instead, she "falls" due to her materialism and desire to advance herself.
This creates a paradox in the idealism behind the novel. Carrie is to be lauded for her desire to succeed, but mercilessly slandered for her amoral ways of going about it. Even in the first chapter, the reader is seduced by her innocence and proud of her courage in leaving home. Yet the reader is also aware, at the point that she exchanges addresses, that she is choosing Drouet as a means of succeeding. In many ways the novel can be construed as an attack on the materialism in society that causes a young girl to choose Drouet instead of hard work as a means of advancement. It should not be forgotten that Dreiser later became a communist, and Sister Carrie shows some of the ideological doubts that Dreiser had about American society at the turn of the century.
One of the things to notice is that Dreiser focuses heavily on beginnings and endings, but rarely on the middle sections. Thus Carrie is beginning her new life in Chicago in this chapter, ending her life at home. This focus is complimented by the fact that the past is immediately forgotten, there are no repercussions for what has come before. Thus Carrie will never write home, and she will never want to return there. The focus on beginnings and endings is known as an ellipse, whereby the middle scenes are conspicuously left out.
Chapter 2
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There is a great deal of irony at the beginning of this chapter. Mr. Hanson only speaks briefly with Carrie before going to bed earlier than his wife, claiming that he has to get up early the next morning. Carrie learns that Minnie, who stays up with her, actually has to get up even earlier in order to make him breakfast and get him ready to go to work. This rather comical scene happens to be part of a larger, more serious problem. Carrie is unable and unwilling to live the kind of life that Minnie is satisfied with. Thus, Carrie gets up at eight in the morning, much later than her sister. Indeed, Minnie is in one of the rooms already sowing, thereby showing how industrious she is.
This chapter introduces a central theme of Dreiser's novel, namely the theme of hope. Chicago is essentially a society of promise, it is an immigrant town growing so fast that it has outgrown itself. Notice that Dreiser describes the city as growing without limits, spreading so fast that sewers have been built for areas where only one house is currently standing, or street lamps have been installed where nothing yet exists. This world of hope has attracted people like the Hansons, immigrants who represent the immigrant stereotype; they slowly accumulate wealth, they pay for two lots of land in installments, and they are skeptical of people who have made money too quickly.
However, most interesting is the fact that Dreiser quickly discards the Hansons approach to life. They are too dull, too dreary, and they lack the magic and fate that Carrie is searching for. Dreiser is writing a novel about unrestricted economic life, the hotbed of industrial growth. We are presented with the daunting spectacle of Chicago's rapid growth but also of the many workers that Carrie sees through the windows. Thus the chapter ends with Carrie feeling her spirit sink at the "thought of entering any of these mighty concerns" (14).
Chapter 3
Carrie's search for work provides a fascinating insight into the difficulties of getting started in a new place without any sort of references. She wanders around aimlessly, hoping someone will help her and give her a job. This serves to epitomize the sense of hope that pervades the novel. Yet at the same time that hope is being presented, Dreiser also gives us another image of Chicago, that of the hopeless. When Carrie enters the factories she is stunned by the mediocrity of the working conditions. Her first job offer represents substantially less financial security than she had hoped to find.
One of the greatest achievements of Dreiser was his pay of making stability seem ephemeral. He struggles throughout Sister Carrie to make his reader view "permanent" structures as only temporary. The example of the department store encapsulates this, "The nature of these vast retail combinations, should they ever permanently disappear, will form an interesting chapter in the commercial history of our nation" (17). Dreiser is writing about his time as if from the future, and he has realized the impermanence of what he is seeing being built. This is amazing given that the department store had only just recently come into existence, and here Dreiser is already predicting its demise!
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For the overall structure of the novel, this impermanence means that people will rise and others will fall. This is exemplified later by Hurstwood's loss of his ability to generate income, an ability that is transferred to Carrie when she becomes a performer. This lack of a steady-state also gives rise to the has-beens and the will-bes. It is the only sort of environment in which hope can really thrive, and thus provides a very mobile background within which Carrie can advance herself. Carrie's search for work provides a fascinating insight into the difficulties of getting started in a new place without any sort of references. She wanders around aimlessly, hoping someone will help her and give her a job. This serves to epitomize the sense of hope that pervades the novel. Yet at the same time that hope is being presented, Dreiser also gives us another image of Chicago, that of the hopeless. When Carrie enters the factories she is stunned by the mediocrity of the working conditions. Her first job offer represents substantially less financial security than she had hoped to find.
One of the greatest achievements of Dreiser was his pay of making stability seem ephemeral. He struggles throughout Sister Carrie to make his reader view "permanent" structures as only temporary. The example of the department store encapsulates this, "The nature of these vast retail combinations, should they ever permanently disappear, will form an interesting chapter in the commercial history of our nation" (17). Dreiser is writing about his time as if from the future, and he has realized the impermanence of what he is seeing being built. This is amazing given that the department store had only just recently come into existence, and here Dreiser is already predicting its demise!
For the overall structure of the novel, this impermanence means that people will rise and others will fall. This is exemplified later by Hurstwood's loss of his ability to generate income, an ability that is transferred to Carrie when she becomes a performer. This lack of a steady-state also gives rise to the has-beens and the will-bes. It is the only sort of environment in which hope can really thrive, and thus provides a very mobile background within which Carrie can advance herself.
Chapter 4
The distinction between the Hansons and Carrie is drawn even wider at this point, and the issue that divides them is money. For Carrie, money represents possibilities. Thus in the department store in Chapter Three she contemplates the amount of things she can buy. Minnie and Sven prefer to focus on what money can provide in the future. They disapprove of theater because it uses up money with no possibility of future gain. Indeed, as Dreiser tells the reader more than once, their entire reason for accepting Carrie is because she can pay rent.
Minnie Hanson's disapproval of the theater is interesting at this point in light of the fact that Carrie will later become an actress. It is therefore worthwhile to note the differences between the two women as much as possible. The primary factor that
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distinguishes Carrie from Minnie happens to be the speed at which she hopes to achieve her goals. Whereas Minnie has accepted the slow-motion build-up of wealth that requires constant saving and long hours of toil, Carrie has not, and nor will she ever. Carrie instead discards this lifestyle as being too boring, it essentially misses out on the rapid growth that Chicago is undertaking by being far too slow. Thus for Carrie, the theater is the Hollywood of her day, the trains are a new and exciting means of travel, and the department store provides unlimited commercial possibilities. Carrie's choice is therefore one of technological advancements over staid, blue-collar work. However, it should not be forgotten that Dreiser has also remarked on the impermanence of the new advancements. He is rejecting the Hanson's way of making money as being too slow, but he is also indicating that it is a safe way as opposed to Carrie who will risk losing her wealth the way Hurstwood does.
The men in the factory present an interesting class group when compared to Drouet. Carrie has really only met three types of men thus far: the smooth, carefully Drouet, the hardworking but suspicious Sven Hanson, and the crass working men in the shoe factory. What is most interesting is that both the crass men and Drouet both "hit" on her, but in entirely different ways. She is clearly seduced by the manner in which Drouet approached her even as she is terrified by her co-workers. In her choice of men, Carrie can be seen choosing one lifestyle over another, the upscale, mobile lifestyle represented by Drouet over the seemingly solid, but boring lifestyle of the working classes.
A common theme in this novel is the use of newspapers to represent people who no longer are able to look forward. Hanson is the first person to read the newspaper, and he will be later followed by Hurstwood at the end of the novel. The newspaper represents old news, things that have already happened. People who rely on the newspaper therefore fall into the category of the has-beens, they are people who no longer look into the future and expect to rise to the top of society. This is more apparent with Hurstwood at the end.
Chapter 5
The use of material comforts here is quite fascinating since it powerfully represents the upward drive. Drouet is doing exactly what Carrie hoped to do; he is sharing in the rich lifestyle before he has even become rich. This again fits in with the idea of hope so pervasive in the novel. Drouet is spending time in the fancy places because he hopes to advance himself; note especially how the eldest boss at his firm happens to frequent the same establishment, Fitzgerald and Moy's .
This chapter also gives the reader the first real introduction to the future men in Carrie's life. Drouet does not come off well as regards his feelings for Carrie. Indeed, it is soon clear that he is shallow and insensitive as a character. He uses Carrie's name frivolously, only expressing his desire to show her off as a possession for Hurstwood to marvel at. Hurstwood, on the other hand, is to be marveled at. He is self-made, having worked his way up to a managerial position. He is also wealthy, but not exceedingly so. The dashingness of Hurstwood stands in marked contrast with Drouet.
Chapter 6
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This chapter marks both the downfall and the subsequent rise of Sister Carrie. She not only loses her job, but she is reduced to borrowing money from Minnie and to walking the streets looking for work again. Perhaps the nadir of the novel is when Dreiser writes, "shortly she would have to give up and go home" (46). At this point she is then saved by the arrival of Drouet who happily informs her that he was going to her home to find her. He not only feeds her, but offers her money for new clothes as well as giving her the chance to go to the theater. For Carrie, this is such a large social advancement that she of course is overcome and acquiesces to his every demand.
There are several key themes that pervade this novel, two of which are strongly represented here. One of the major issues is that of clothing. Clothes are first introduced in the first chapter, where Carrie becomes conscious of her shabby dress in relation to Drouet's suit. As winter approaches, she needs winter clothes, and it is her lack of clothing that causes Carrie to fall ill and lose her job. This contrasts strongly with Drouet, who reappears and immediately notices that Carrie needs new clothes. Indeed, she is aware of what he is wearing as well, noticing the sharp creak of his new suit. Clothes thus represent one of the means whereby social status is attained. For Carrie, Drouet's offer to purchase her new clothes is akin to a social advancement.
The second major theme that needs to be focused on at this point is the nature of mobility. Mobility has many meanings, but is always directly correlated with social status. Thus, during Carrie's downward movement we see her go from trains to street cars to walking. At the point where she not only does not have a job, but cannot afford the street cars, Carrie reaches the bottom of the society. "As on the previous morning, Carrie walked down town, for she began to realize now that her four-fifty would not even allow her car fare after she paid her board" (42). This is again starkly contrasted with Drouet. In the restaurant, Carrie thinks about the fact that "he rode on trains" (48), thereby granting him a higher social distinction.
Notice the choice of Drouet to sit near the window with Carrie. This is intentional, it marks the desire to not only see the world but also to be seen. Being in the restaurant is socially beneficial, and thus having others notice raises one's status. However, the window is also a divide, a barrier between the character's world and the real world. Thus the workmen are seen by Carrie working behind the windows of the factories, but she herself is not working. Later, the store goods will be seen behind a window and Carrie will covet them, yet again she does not actually have them. Window thus are a way of having something without really having it, being somewhere without being there, and seeing something without being involved.
Chapter 7
The chapter opens with a brilliant observation on the meaning of money. "The true meaning of money yet remains to be popularly explained and comprehended" (51). Dreiser then proceeds to give a very good explanation of money. Central to his observation is that if a character has money, it must be spent. Both Carrie and Drouet fall into this category. Further, those that do not have money need to steal it or beg for it. Thus everyone in the novel depends on money to define who they are and what they can do.
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Social status is contingent on money, but is also presented in the novel through two series. For example, Carrie initially rides in a train, then a street car, and finally she is forced to walk. This chain marks the gradual lowering of Carrie's status within the society until she reaches the nadir, a point where she not only has no job but is also forced to walk around the city. Carrie is cognizant of this decline, especially while in the restaurant with Drouet. She not only observes that he can afford to ride in trains, but when he mentions that she will have to return home if she declines his offer, she only notices a wealthy stagecoach passing by on the street. This serves as a visual reminder that only in Chicago can she hope to live that well, and is key to making her accept Drouet's proposal. Her choice immediately raises her, and by the end of the chapter she is already riding in a car.
Clothing forms another series that must be closely observed. When Carrie first meets Drouet, she observes his nice outfit as compared to her shabby dress. This is repeated in the restaurant scene in the previous chapter, where his suit is so new that it can be heard "creaking" (48). The money he gives her is also earmarked for a new jacket and shoes, a sign that Carrie's place in society is going to be determined largely by what she wears. Drouet, keenly attuned to this, purchases her an entire outfit, thereby gaining control over her outward effects in not yet her inner.
Looking in the mirror is often a form of narcissism. This is the case in the store when Carrie looks at herself with the new clothes on. Her sense of wellbeing is enhanced, to the point where she starts to feel "a warm glow" creep into her cheeks. This will again show up in Chapter Eight when she realizes that she is beautiful after looking in a mirror.
Chapter 8
What is quite striking about Carrie's departure is the flatness of with which the Hansons react. It is sadly pathetic to read their words, and the language they use is completely devoid of emotion. This fits in well with Dreiser's overall prose. He has often been accused of being a clumsy writer, but this is due to his writing in things rather than words. The avoidance of language comes through when letters are sent to other characters. Notice how Carrie's first letter to Drouet is difficult for her to construct. Even in the previous chapter, Carrie writes to Minnie:
"Good-bye, Minnie. I'm not going home. I'm going to stay in Chicago a little while and look for work. Don't worry. I'll be all right" (59). Part of the construction of the novel is the way that Carrie is continuously distracted from becoming sad. After the theater, she sees dead branches that make her nostalgic for home. Drouet suggests she wear her boa, thereby distracting her attention away from home and back to the material possessions he can offer her. Soon thereafter she recognizes one of the girls from the shoe factory, but again her thoughts are quickly turned elsewhere, this time by the fancy coaches. Drouet lures her with the promise of getting her a coach, "You stick to me and we'll have a coach" (64).
A recurring theme is the theater as a release from the world. Dreiser remarks that the theater represents what Carrie longs for. Remember that this is pre-movies, and thus the theater is the highest form of entertainment. It is also going to be Carrie's future
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career, and thus each visit to the theater offers a unique steppingstone on her path to becoming an actress.
Of symbolic importance is the coal mine, shown in the dream that Minnie has. She sees Carrie falling into the mine, thereby representing Carrie's declining virtue. The mine is representative of hell, black and dark, a place that Carrie will not be able to get out of. However, it also has a second meaning, namely that of industry. Coal is one of the driving forces behind the industrialization, and as such the dream can also be interpreted to mean that Carrie has been seduced by the materialism that such industrialization offers her.
Chapter 9
An interesting equality is made between the ability to act and the amount of wealth. Jessica remarks that her school is putting on a play at the Lyceum, perhaps The Merchant of Venice given that one of the characters is Portia. She then relates each girls' ability to act with the amount of money they possess. This means that in order to be a good actress, a person already has to be rich. This will pose a later obstacle for Carrie when she becomes an actress.
The mention of theaters is not only done in a positive sense here, but also in a negative sense. Theaters serve as places of seduction throughout this novel. It is a seduction of the senses and as well as a literal seduction. Thus we see Carrie being courted by Drouet at the Mikado while she is simultaneously able to escape from real life for a while. Julia is also fascinated by theater, using it as a way to get back at Hurstwood for his potential infidelity, but compromising her own virtue in the process.
Chapter 10
Dreiser uses this section to address the sticky issue of morality. He fought for several years to get the book published, and then had to watch as the book was banned. This section is therefore significant because it lays bare the author's view of morality and how it fits into reality. Unlike previous novels, Dreiser does no delude himself or his characters into thinking they will be rewarded for morally virtuous behavior. Instead, he is quite insistent in pointing out that Carrie would be starving if she had not made the choice to join Drouet. Carrie's guilty conscience is the only real concession he makes to moralistic tendencies of society, and Dreiser quickly squashes her guilty feelings by showing how much happier she is.
The introduction of Hurstwood is eloquent yet parallels the introduction of Drouet. Hurstwood is described as being like Drouet, only much better. This parallel persists throughout the evening, with Hurstwood first sitting behind Carrie to help her win at cards, and then suggesting that he take them to the theater. Drouet is too shallow to see that Hurstwood is mimicking his exact pattern of seduction, albeit in a much more gentile manner.
Carrie's use of the role "Mrs. Drouet" is important because it is acting. Much the way Carrie shifted her gait in the earlier chapters while looking for a job in order to seem as if she were not looking for a job, she will now assume an even more permanent
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role. Indeed, this scene is full of acting, where they even act at playing cards while allowing Carrie to win the entire time. Indeed, all of the male/female interactions will involve acting of some sort, especially later when Hurstwood fakes a marriage to Carrie.
Chapter 11
One of the central aspects of Carrie's personality is that she does not lust after what she does not see. Her ability to imitate and even exceed others is what allows her to achieve her social grace, and her desires are likewise imitated from others. Thus, Carrie does not consider allowing Drouet to take care of her until she sees the other girls in the shoe factory with other men taking care of them. With the introduction of Mrs. Hale, Carrie once again has a female influence who will shape her desires.
The theme of looking at oneself in the mirror arises again in this chapter. Drouet sees Carrie looking at herself and remarks that she is becoming quite vain. However, the mirror is also used as a means of learning imitation. Thus, we see Carrie standing in front of the mirror practicing her head toss, a motion she has learned from the neighbor's daughter. Mirrors serve not just to heighten vanity but also to reflect social appearances.
Chapter 12
As mentioned earlier, Carrie derives her desires from other women, most notably Mrs. Hale. She is thus introduced to the fine mansions and the buggies, the source of the dissatisfaction that she acknowledges to Hurstwood.The theme of social place as defined by form of mobility is also revisited in the contrast between the buggy and the carriage. Carrie realizes that in order to move to a higher social position, the buggy must be replaced by the finer carriage.
The use of language in Dreiser now comes to the forefront. Dreiser himself states, "People in general attach too much importance to words" (95). Although applied to Carrie's ignoring Hurstwood's words and focusing instead on his heart, the comment applies well to the entire novel. The key moments of seduction are not defined by the words that Drouet or Hurstwood use, but rather by the things they provide. Thus, Carrie is seduced by a jacket and a flat, or a theatrical production. The failure of the characters to realize this crucial fact is what causes them, particularly Drouet, to be blind to what is really happening.
Chapter 13
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There is strong imagery in this chapter of a fly in a spider's web. This serves to foreshadow the novel itself since Carrie will suck Hurstwood dry of everything he possesses. It also provides a better sense of who will be in charge of their budding relationship. Dreiser is liberal in his commentary, indicating that Hurstwood is convinced that he has conquered Carrie. In reality, given their different social positions, it is Carrie who has conquered him.
It is noteworthy that Carrie's thoughts during her second seduction never hint at material lust. Instead, she appears almost innocent and kind, falling for Hurstwood because he invokes her pity. This is an unexpected approach to winning Carrie; we would have thought he would seduce her by acting like Drouet. However, the seduction also takes place in a carriage, again a symbol of upward social mobility. This still parallels Drouet, who puts Carrie in a car, and thus serves to undermine Carrie's apparently "pure" thoughts regarding Hurstwood.
Chapter 14
The issue of marriage finally comes up in this chapter in full force. Marriage is important to Carrie, because it would legitimize everything that she has done thus far. Thus, it serves as a way of making her life morally acceptable. Her belief about Hurstwood, in which she thinks he will marry her, makes his proposal to her stronger when compared to Drouet who has no intention of marrying her.
At the end of the play, a beggar approaches the trio and asks for money. Only Drouet feels enough compassion to help the man. This is a moment of redemption for him because for the first time Drouet is shown being a kinder man that Hurstwood. This hearkens back to the first seduction of Carrie where Drouet is compared to a man giving her clothes and money the way he would to a beggar. Hurstwood, by contrast, has yet to give her anything of substance.
Chapter 15
Hurstwood falls into the traditional suitor mode in that he feels compelled to write to Carrie every day. As mentioned previously, writing letters is problematic because they are not very good. He is in essence giving her words instead of things, but not saying very much. This changes when they meet in the park and consider leaving Chicago together. For the first time a man takes Carrie's desire to be married seriously, and in a sense Hurstwood offers her the one thing she lacks.
It is worth noting Carrie's opinions towards the working people. She pities them, and feels sorrow for all the hard word they do. The reasons for her pity are unclear, although her previous experience working in the factory would make her more sympathetic. This is also a case of Carrie being able to imitate the best qualities of others. Drouet is the only man who gives money to a beggar, and here it appears as if Carrie has emulated his feelings towards the poor. She also will pick up traits from Hurstwood and improve on them as the novel progresses.
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An important moment is when Carrie recalls her father, one of the few times we are given a glimpse into her past. "Her old father, in his dusty miller's suit" (116). This image of her father, a worker in a flour mill covered in the flour dust, is symbolically representing him covered in his work. He cannot extricate himself from his work. This compares to Drouet, a traveling salesman who sells himself to people as much as he sells his goods. Drouet is far less about industry and manufacturing and far more about being able to make money through personal interaction. In this sense he is above Carrie's father. He in turn compares to Hurstwood, a manager who is paid to stand around. There are no longer any material things associated with Hurstwood's job, thereby putting him above Drouet's job as well.
Chapter 16
There is a strong transition from merely seeing plays to acting in them. For Carrie this marks the next step in her life, a step from the passive to the active role. again Drouet is the one who provides her with the chance, bringing her the part from his Mason's lodge. We begin to see that Drouet, in spite of his shortcomings, at least gives Carrie things that allow her to move forward.
Carrie's use of the mirror now takes on a third meaning. Before it represented only vanity and the ability to imitate things. Now Dreiser remarks that this is the mark of a good actress as well, i.e. a good actress serves as her own mirror to her audience. Carrie's greatest ability is that she can reflect back to people what they want to see.
Chapter 17
The split between Drouet and Hurstwood increases dramatically even as the parallels between them continue to grow. They are both in the same lodge together, although it is obvious that Hurstwood enjoys greater prestige. The difference lies in their natures. Drouet is able to get Carrie to start things and encourage her in them. However, he is terrible at showing a follow up interest. Hurstwood on the other hand is incapable of getting Carrie to do something new, but is strong at providing the social context in which she can succeed. The combination of the two men is what makes Carrie able to not only start acting, but then continue it as well.
A comment is needed on the meaning of the park. From Shakespearian times, parks have often been conceived of as an Eden, a place where danger lurks and anything is possible. This is equally true in this novel. The park is where Carrie and Hurstwood meet, thereby entering into the "danger" category. However, it is also where Hurstwood promises to take her away and marry her, making it a realm of dreams and possibility.
Chapter 18
Dreiser uses this chapter to critique the middle classes and their petty behavior. He describes Hurstwood as surrounded by other wealthy men, part of an eminent elite. However, he then belittles this situation, saying, "It was greatness in a way, small as it was" (141). Dreiser is effectively downplaying the scene, showing that this perceived
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greatness is a facade. He is implying that Hurstwood has done nothing great here, yet he is surrounded as if he were important. In reality, the entire audience is contrived for Carrie, not Hurstwood.
Chapter 19
The plays that have thus far been presented not only reflect on the life of the characters, but are an ironic commentary on it. They serve as another way of seeing reality without experiencing it first-hand. Thus Drouet fails to see himself in the role of the absent husband in the previous play that they see. However, in this play, with Carrie directly before their eyes, both men see themselves in the role of the pleading lover. Drouet therefore resolves to marry her, Hurstwood will steal her away.
Dreiser is a realist, and also uses a great deal of naturalism. This is quite evident in the competition between the two men that is now taken to a new level. Hurstwood curses for the first time, saying, "Damn it" when he realizes Drouet is sharing the moment with Carrie that he wants to have. However, what is important is that this competition is confined by social graces. Hurstwood, for all his anger, is forced to pretend, or to act, as if he is not interested in Carrie.
As mentioned in the first chapter, there is a strong emphasis on the beginnings and endings. This scene, as the first performance, marks a beginning for Carrie. Thus Dreiser presents it in detail, giving us the words of the play and all of the characters' emotions. It is also a key moment in terms of the rise of Carrie versus the fall of Hurstwood. This is often drawn as a cross, with Carrie's life being the up arrow and Hurstwood's being the down arrow. Dreiser makes this apparent with his remark, "with the tables turned, she was looking down, rather than up, to her lover" (150).
Chapter 20
For the first time Hurstwood is reading the newspaper. The paper again symbolizes the past, and an inability to rise in the future. We already see his wife making the decisions concerning their future, their children's future, and the future vacation. This contrasts with Carrie who only reads the paper to see if she is mentioned. Recall also that newspapers at this time are a social privilege. Jessica has mentioned that people get put in the paper for going to Europe. Thus, being in the paper is a form of social cache, representing a elevated status. Reading the paper, on the other hand, is a form of social decline.
Chapter 21
The meeting place is again important because it is a park. The park, as mentioned earlier, represents Eden but is also a place of lost virginity and virtue. This is a highly symbolic place for Hurstwood and Carrie to plot their departure, because they are in essence leaving Eden to face an unknown world.
Chapter 22
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The mirror is used by Mrs. Hurstwood to watch her husband when he arrives home. The three uses of the mirror, vanity, imitation, and social appearances, are again called into play. She is preening herself before the mirror initially, but will soon conduct the entire fight while still looking at herself in it. This gives a new use to mirrors, that of abstracting the painful truths that people would rather only hear but not see. By fighting with Hurstwood's reflection, she only sees him abstractly, not in reality. The mirror also is a form of seeing truth, as strange as that seems. Through reflection the mirror is able to represent Hurstwood's fakeness and the fact that he is acting.
Chapter 23
This scene is yet another turning point in the novel, and hence is highlighted by Dreiser in great detail. At issue is not only who Carrie loves, but who loves her. Drouet comes across as a slightly foolish man who nonetheless is kind. Carrie, conversely, acts manipulative and abusive towards him. However, as Dreiser points out, this is a side to her nature that we have not previously seen, namely her active anger rather than her passivity. A crucial moment is when she gets to the door, but is unable to walk through it, instead breaking down into tears. For Carrie, this moment determines whether she can rule herself or continue to be ruled by others. Her inability to walk out means that she is still passively obeying others.
Chapter 24
This chapter continues the decline of Hurstwood. He has now lost not only his wife and children, but also his home. It is important to follow the progression of events at this point. One fact of importance is that Jessica is behind a window when she watches Hurstwood try to enter his home. This is similar to Carrie who watched and desired the goods behind the windows. It marks the separation of desire and reality. From this point on, Hurstwood can no longer be inside the windows, rather he must longingly look through them.
Chapter 25
The fact that Hurstwood is staying in a hotel will become one of the more important points of the novel. In fact, nearly everyone will end up in a hotel by the end of the work. Hotels represent the transitory nature of their lives, and are places where people go when they cannot establish a permanent residence. They further represent the rise and fall of the people, and hence the transitory nature of social status. This will become more clear later when Hurstwood is poor and in a hotel, whereas Carrie is wealthy but also in a hotel.
Chapter 26
This chapter repeats the search for a job scenes presented earlier, but now differs strongly in both the way Carrie applies and where she applies. Whereas before she looked at department stores and then factories, she now looks at theaters and then department stores. This really marks the transition away from manufacturing that
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Dreiser upholds throughout the novel. Much the way we see her move from her miller father to the salesman Drouet to the manager Hurstwood, her own job search progresses from manufacturing to selling to acting. For Dreiser, the complete abandonment of manufacturing is the highest social achievement, one that Carrie is striving towards.
Chapter 27
This is one of the intermediate chapters of the book. The first part of the novel is basically ended at this point with the imminent departure from Chicago. The next chapter will complete this departure and also the first part of the book. Up to now the novel has been about social rising, and particularly about Carrie's rise. However, we see a very immediate shift in this chapter, notably when Dreiser remarks, "At once [Hurstwood] became a man of action" (210). From here on out the book will be a melodrama, starting with the kidnapping of Carrie.
An element that resonates very strongly at this point is that of chance. We have seen chance influencing the novel before, especially when Drouet allows Carrie to act. However, now chance is taken to even more important levels. Hurstwood discovers by chance that the safe is unlocked. After he takes the money the safe accidentally locks. Thus the entire force of events is determined by accident and chance at this stage, rather than any immoral action. This will be relevant later when we look for the consequences of these actions and find that there are none.
Chapter 28
One of the remarkable aspects of Carrie and Hurstwood's relationship is that it is completely built upon deceptions. Hurstwood lies to Carrie first about his wife, then about Drouet's having an accident, and here about his theft of the money. In spite of her love for Hurstwood, Carrie is already starting to have difficulty dealing with his many lies to her, a problem that will escalate as the novel continues.
Carrie's passivity is a theme that continues even through this part of the book. Dreiser remarks, "the progress of the train was having a great deal to do with the solution of this difficult situation" (216). Her inability to stand up and act causes her to not tell the conductor about her predicament and also makes her yield to Hurstwood's demands.
A continuous theme, not yet mentioned in this analysis, is that of rain. Rain is a very powerful image in this book because it serves to make people inactive. Notice how rain prevents Carrie from leaving the house and looking for a job. The threat of rainclouds makes Drouet leave her house early, thereby preventing their reconciliation. Rain is abundant throughout this chapter, pouting down in torrents, and as such it keeps Carrie from leaving the train and returning to Chicago. Indeed, that amount of rain is proportional to the size of each person's desire for action, but always results in inaction. The power of rain to make the characters passive is related to the fact that it also represents chance. Rain, like the safe that accidentally closes for Hurstwood, is a random event that strongly influences the actions of the characters.
Chapter 29
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There is a brilliant scene in the hotel where the two images of windows and mirrors are combined. While they argue, Carrie looks out of window and Hurstwood looks in a mirror. This represents his self-absorbed nature at this point, a trait that will be more apparent in New York when Carrie stands, "wondering at his self-absorption" (230). She meanwhile looks out the window, representing her desire to get away, to be on other side of the window from him.
Hurstwood continues his decline in two ways that have previously been remarked upon. He again looks at newspaper as a source of his information, indicating that he is now operating in the past tense. He also conducts his grandest deception of Carrie, that of a sham wedding. It is obvious that no court would legally uphold the wedding since he uses a fake name and is still married. However, Carrie does not notice this.
One further remark is necessary concerning the consequences of actions. A key part of this novel is that immoral actions do not have any consequences. Thus, Carrie is not punished for her sleeping with Drouet or playing around with Hurstwood. Hurstwood is not punished for his theft of Fitzgerald and Moy's money. This failure to punish results in forward looking society, a society that forgets the past and moves upward. It is the characters that get mired in the past who therefore decline and fall. This is what is happening to Hurstwood, whose focus on his crime is destroying his ability to think into the future. This contrasts with Carrie, who does not even think of Drouet, and who, as a character, rarely contemplates past events except when she is facing starvation.
Chapter 30
Hurstwood as a character is very dependent on his material wealth. In many ways they serve as his props and define the way he acts and reacts. This becomes clear when he is removed from them, having given them all up for his love of Carrie. What stands out is that love alone cannot make him successful. Hurstwood needs wealth in order to be the Hurstwood that seduced Carrie. At this point he is shown thinking about the past more and more, contrasting his current situation with where he formerly worked.
Chapter 31
Carrie is a remarkable character because she is passive until influenced by the people around her. One of main ways in which this happens if for other women in the novel, notably Mrs. Hale and now Mrs. Vance, to open her eyes to new wealth. Recall that Mrs. Hale introduced Carrie to the mansions in Chicago, making Carrie desire something a little better than what Drouet could offer her. Mrs. Vance does the same thing by showing Carrie the Broadway fashion show, causing Carrie to be dissatisfied until she will be able to afford to return looking better.
Chapter 32
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One of the themes in the novel is the series of places that Carrie eats at. These show a marked progression upwards, from Minnie's flat to Drouet's meal with her in Chicago to the fine glamour of Sherry's. There is also a parallel between the restaurants and the men in her life. Drouet captivates her in a restaurant, a scene paralleled here by young Bob Ames. Ames also assumes the role of Drouet in his praise of the theater and acting. In this sense he encourages Carrie to consider acting as a career much the way Drouet encouraged her the first time she was onstage.
Worth noting is the career of Mr. Ames. He is an electrical engineer. This puts him at the forefront of technology at this time. It is said that he was modeled on Thomas Alva Edison. He is special because he represents the future and embodies it not only in his attitude but also in his career.
Chapter 33
A key theme in the novel is elaborated by Dreiser in the second paragraph. Here he lays out his philosophy of life, a philosophy that is expressed throughout the book, namely an upward trend followed by a downward trend. This is shown crunched into one novel through Carrie's youth and rise and Hurstwood's age and fall. Although happening simultaneously, these two should be viewed as one continuous line, first rising and then falling.
Newspapers become an even stronger image and are used more frequently by Hurstwood then ever before. "Each day he could read in the evening paper..." (261). Later Dreiser informs us that Hurstwood spends his time reading newspapers and brooding. This again represent that Hurstwood is only able to look at the past rather than forward into the future.
Chapter 34
Carrie's predicament now becomes the same as when she lived with the Hansons, only now she is in the role of Minnie Hanson. Hurstwood pretends that he is saving up for something better, knowing how impossible it will be. This is unacceptable to Carrie; it is what she went to Drouet for in order to avoid. Hurstwood's decline is further delineated by the image of him burying himself in a newspaper at the end, metaphorically placing him in a dead past.
Chapter 35
The image of windows arises again, but in an entirely new perspective. Hurstwood goes inside the hotel and looks out the windows, no longer longing for what is outside, but happy to be shut out. Here he is escaping what is outside, as an old man who is unable to deal with life. This contrasts with Carrie who prefers to be outside in the action.
The significance of newspapers climaxes in this chapter during the storm. Hurstwood is so completely destroyed as a man that he now gets even his weather from the papers. He reads about how the storm is approaching, how it has arrived, and how it
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has cleared up. This ties in with windows for him; his life has gotten so bad that he cannot even look out the windows anymore.
Chapter 36
The gambling scenes rely heavily on the element of chance, one of the fundamental parts of this novel that influences all of the characters. Thus Hurstwood, even though he is losing money, is able to still blame the loss on external factors (the cards) rather than take the blame himself. As the money disappears we feel the sense of impending climax and realize that Carrie will have to do something very soon.
This also marks Hurstwood's final deception of Carrie. When he reveals that their marriage is a sham, he also gives her the freedom to leave him with no legal strings attached. In each of the deceptions that Hurstwood perpetrates on Carrie we see her feelings towards him erode; at this point she no longer has any positive emotions about him. Carrie has once again reached the nadir of her time in New York and will soon have to start rising if Dreiser's philosophy (the young rise, the old fall) is to hold true.
Chapter 37
The desperation that Hurstwood has led Carrie into has finally prompted her to start taking action. Notice how she differs now from her time in Chicago; she is confident, able to enter the agent's rooms without too much fear, and certain that she wants the job. This differs markedly from her initial job hunt where she hated the work, was terrified of the employers, and had no confidence.
Chapter 38
Dreiser is careful to draw an analogy between the type of work Carrie is doing and the common laborers. He states, "Girls who can stand in a line and look pretty are as numerous as laborers who can swing a pick" (299). This is the job that Carrie gets, one that is replaceable and meaningless. For Dreiser, however, this is a conflation of the top and bottom stratums of society. Working in a ditch is far lower than being in a Broadway show in terms of status, yet the work is compared as if identical.
Chapter 39
Carrie's independence continues to grow at this point, so much so that she is now able to support herself as well as Hurstwood. Her advancement in the chorus is the partially the result of merit, but also chance again playing a role. It is pure luck that the manager starts to like her and moves her up. This independence gives her the financial security to consider leaving Hurstwood. The next step will be her emotional security, the knowledge and maturity to leave him without fearing the results.
Chapter 40
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The strike is extremely important to the novel because it is a staged event. This is part of the acting that permeates every aspect of this book, from Carrie's career to Hurstwood's "acted" love for her. The fact that Hurstwood becomes a scab, a man who works during a strike, is evidence of not only his desperation but also of his facing reality for the first time. The theatrical production of the strike does not delude him as it does many others, instead he faces his reality and goes to work against the desires of thousands of other men.
The novel deviates at this point from focusing solely on Carrie as the main protagonist. Each chapter will soon vacillate between showing Carrie's rise and Hurstwood's fall, alternating the two stories while simultaneously making the reader aware that the novel is really showing only one person's life. Thus, while we watch Carrie progress we are being forewarned that her fate will likely be similar to that of Hurstwood in the end; his life is the latter stage of her own.
Chapter 41
It is interesting to note the sentiment expressed concerning the strike. Hurstwood takes the job because he cannot get anything else. Yet the people around him do not support him. Indeed, they are largely hostile to anyone who breaks a strike line. Dreiser's sentiments are likely in support of the strikers, and he even shows the reader that the police support the union but are forced to do their duty.
Hurstwood's reality slips away even more in this chapter. He experiences the strikes in the most intimate way, even getting shot in the process. Yet when he returns to the apartment, he is unable to accept this experience as valid. Instead, he immediately relies on the newspapers to tell him what is happening. Again, this shows that Hurstwood is incapable of influencing events, or of being a part of what is happening in the papers. Instead, he will run away and read about it after the fact.
Chapter 42
The element of chance again plays a significant role in influencing the events of the novel. Carrie gets her first speaking line purely by chance because she happens to be in the right place on the stage. Her good luck is paralleled by Hurstwood, whom she views as "run down and beaten upon by chance" (344). The upward and downward movements of each of them again is directly overlapped, showing how they represent a single person's life rather than two separate beings.
A key moment is when Carrie receives her first speaking part, not only for her career but also for her as an individual. It is only once she has the ability to leave Hurstwood that she considers doing so. Dreiser remarks, "she thought of leaving Hurstwood and thus making him act for himself" (342). This is important because up to now Hurstwood has only been "acting" for Carrie. He acted for her through the lies he told her and later by pretending to look for a job. This marks a break for him when he is forced to pretend for himself rather than for someone else.
Chapter 43
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There is a slow movement from permanent residences to hotels throughout the novel. This symbolizes the transitory nature of each person's life and the movement socially that they go through. Hurstwood is the first person to end up in a hotel, a lower class establishment that costs very little per night. Carrie will also soon end up in a hotel, although under vastly different circumstances.
The newspaper imagery and symbolism reaches its final moment in this chapter. Carrie is now in the papers, being written about much the way all the famous people are written about, while Hurstwood merely reads about her. This is the ultimate distinction between the forward moving youth and the backward looking aged.
Chapter 44
The consequences of past actions are always considered to be irrelevant throughout this book. This is made clear when Mrs. Vance calls on Carrie and renew their friendship together. The fact that Carrie must have dumped Hurstwood is forgotten, as is the miserable state that Carrie was previously living in. Even Hurstwood does not think to follow Carrie or stay in touch with her. This lack of consequences is part of the Realism movement that Dreiser is writing for. The immorality of Carrie's previous actions is not discussed and it does not harm her in any way. Indeed, even the media could less about her past. The only focus in on her future, as evidenced by the Wellington Hotel's offer to her.
This chapter also puts both Carrie and Hurstwood into hotels. Indeed, it is one of the interesting parallels of the novel that both of them are being housed and clothed virtually for free. Hurstwood, reduced almost the point of being a beggar, relies on other for his welfare. In much the same way Carrie relies on others, but with the difference that she is at the top stratum of society.
Chapter 45
Dreiser sets up a brilliant parallel and contrast between the Bowery and Broadway. Aside from the alliteration, we can recognize that these two places represent the bottom and the top of society, respectively. Again Dreiser puts these two social extremes side by side, showing that they are merely different stages of life rather than fundamentally different places.
The image of windows come up again, showing the billiards rooms and cafes to Hurstwood who is freezing and homeless on Broadway. Hurstwood looks longingly through the windows, placing him in the same situation Carrie dealt with at the beginning of the novel. As before, the windows represent a barrier, both physical and social, to the things Hurstwood sees in them.
Chapter 46
The arrival of Drouet is the only scene in the novel where the past is truly confronted in the present. It is a moment of shock for Carrie; she did not in any way expect to see or hear from Drouet again. In keeping with Dreiser's tone throughout the book, namely that the past is forgotten, Carrie shuns Drouet. Her meeting with him is brief, as long as necessary, and afterwards she refuses to ever see him again. The same thing
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happens with Hurstwood when she meets him. It is a painful meeting that ends quickly with the desire to never repeat the meeting. This is in fact a familiar theme throughout the book. Notice that whenever Hurstwood encounters his old friends, it is always a stilted conversation with the desire to get away as soon as possible.
Ames is the one character who sums up Carrie's success, telling her why her acting is important: "It's a thing the world likes to see, because it's a natural expression of its longing" (385). He is talking about her face, a face he believes would be better used in serious drama rather than comedy. Ames is the Edison of the story, a young inventor who knows what the world is about and looks into the future. He alone understands that life is not only the upward movement of youth, but also the downward decline of old age. He tells Carrie, "The look will leave your eyes. Your mouth will change. Your power to act will disappear" (386). In telling her that her power to act will disappear, we are forced to reflect on Hurstwood, left alone to "act for himself" by Carrie. The point is that Hurstwood was no longer able to act for himself, a dilemma that Carrie does not realize at the time. Ames alone is able to understand both sides of the upward and downward social mobility.
Chapter 47
Note the brilliant contrast at the end of Hurstwood's wife on an ocean liner bound for Rome versus "A slow, black boat setting out from the pier at Twenty-seventh Street upon its weekly errand bore, with many others, his nameless body to the Potter's Field" (399). The black boat with its nameless passengers as opposed to the liner with its famous celebrities, the people that the newspapers mention. Again Dreiser is showing the parallels of the two sides of society.
Her desire, or longing, is the hope for fulfillment. Dreiser has two opinions about this: too much longing leads to disaster, but desire for something else is also hope, innocence, and a form of redemption. Thus Hurstwood, who is successful, wants Carrie and is ruined, an example of the first kind of desire. Carrie on the other hand is also successful, but left looking for something more that she will never find, and example of hope.
One of the key aspects of the novel is to realize that Carrie will never be satisfied with her fate. She is always looking for the next thing that is presented to her and is unable to come to terms with what she has. "Amid the tinsel and shine of her state walked Carrie, unhappy" (399). This leads her to sit in her rocking chair, dreaming about what she could have next. Dreiser, in a dramatic shift in the last paragraph, switches from the third-person to the second-person. This results in the author speaking directly to us, the readers. He says, "In your rocking-chair, by your window dreaming, shall you long, alone. In your rocking-chair, by your window, shall you dream such happiness as you may never feel" (400). This is telling us that we are all like Carrie, desperate for the next best thing, eager to forget the past, and longing for the future that is on the other side of the windowpane.
The Duality of Desire in Dreiser's Sister Carrie
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In Sister Carrie, Theodore Dreiser creates a world in which people are defined by desire. By viewing this world through the eyes of his protagonist, Carrie, the reader becomes aware of a dichotomy. On one hand, there is the desire for wealth, status, and material possessions. While the majority of the novel is dedicated to this kind of desire, there exists another kind of desire of "the mind that feels" (398), which longs for beauty. Most of the way through the novel, Carrie becomes increasingly aware of the superficiality of the former kind of desire, as well as the nobility of the latter, which she explores through her experience in acting. At the end of the novel, Dreiser praises Carrie for transcending the former kind of desire and embracing the latter, nobler kind of desire.
When Carrie is taken in by Drouet, she is confronted with intermittent instances of moral misgivings about her situation. Dreiser writes: "[Carrie] looked into her glass and saw a prettier Carrie than she had seen before; she looked into her mindand saw a worse. Between these two images she wavered, hesitating which to believe" (74). When Carrie is alone, a voice says to her:Oh, thou failure!Look at those about. Look at those who are good. How would they scorn to do what you have done. Look at the good girls; how will they draw away from such as you when they know you have been weak. You had not tried before you failed. (75)These flashes of morality, which become virtually dormant for the majority of the book, reappear in the voice of Ames, who is extremely influential in helping Carrie shed away the desire for materials and focus on the desire for beauty.
Carrie's introduction to acting marks the beginning of her exposure to the positive kind of desire. However, at first she is only fond of acting because of the praise she gets; she is unaware of her potential to have a positive influence on the world. The following passage, in which Dreiser addresses the reader, is one of several which deals with Carrie as an actress. These passages serve as landmarks in Carrie's realization of the better kind of desire:Carrie was possessed of that sympathetic, impressionable nature which, ever in the most developed form, has been the glory of the drama. She was created with that passivity of soul which is always the mirror of the active world. She possessed an innate taste for imitation and no small ability.And shortly after:In such feeble tendencies, be it known, such an outworking of desire to reproduce life, lies the basis of all dramatic art. (125-126).In this passage, Dreiser recognizes Carrie as a talented actress, capable of "reproducing life." The importance of this ability is explained later by Ames.
In her first meeting with Ames, Carrie begins to see the artificiality of the desire for material wealth in the following passage:
"I shouldn't care to be rich," he told her, as the dinner proceeded and the supply of food warmed up his sympathies; "not rich enough to spend my money this way."
"Oh wouldn't you?" said Carrie, the, to her, new attitude forcing itself distinctly upon her for the first time.
"No," he said. "What good would it do? A man doesn't need this sort of thing to be happy."
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Carrie thought of this doubtfully; but, coming from him, it had weight with her. (257)This "new attitude" is one which explicitly denounces the desire for wealth and all things material. At this turning point, Carrie begins to see the wrongness of her desire of her adopting the "cosmopolitan standard of virtue" (1). Not only does she begin to see this, but she also begins to see the righteousness the pursuit of a better kind of desire, which she demonstrates in acting. Carrie is certainly on to this idea when she soon after asks of Ames, "Don't you think it rather fine to be an actor?" (258). Ames' approval is all that she needs to set her on the path to the good kind of desire. Dreiser indicates this dawning of awareness: "Through a fog of longing and conflicting desires she was beginning to see. Oh, ye legions of hope and pity of sorrow and pain! She was rocking, and beginning to see" (258).
At this critical point in the novel, Dreiser begins the chiasmus of plot between Carrie and Hurstwood. Carrie, because of her growing awareness of the righteous path, starts on the rise, while Hurstwood, for opposing reasons, starts on his decline. The key idea in Dreiser's analogy between a man's material progress and his bodily growth is that once a man ceases to move forward, he begins to decay. Carrie does not decay because she does not cease to look forward. In fact, she is constantly longing for something which can never be achieved. However, it is this perpetual longing which keeps her in "youthful accretion" (259). On the contrary, Hurstwood never transcends the hollowness of the desires of the material world. He lives for himself, and subsequently, begins to decay. This passage is paralleled by one at the end of the novel, in which Ames advises Carrie on the evanescence of her gift for acting:You can lose it, you know. If you turn away from it and live to satisfy yourself alone, it will go fast enough. The look will leave your eyes. Your mouth will change. Your power to act will disappear. You may think they won't, but they will. Nature takes care of that. (386)The first significant part of this passage is the matter about the danger of living to satisfy the self alone. This is precisely why Hurstwood does not rise as Carrie does. The other matter of significance is Ames' comment that "Nature takes care of that." Ames' mentioning of Nature as an agent of fate is a direct reference to the passage in which Dreiser describes the scientific process of growth and decay, which, in Hurstwood's case, results in a "sagging to the grave side" (259). When Hurstwood chooses not to go out on that wintry day and look for work, he stops looking for something more, and Nature takes over.
The preceding paragraph is prefaced by one in which Ames tells Carrie how she has the power to voice the feelings of others. "The world is always struggling to express itself," he tells her, and "Most people are not capable of voicing their feelings. They depend upon others" (385). Of her "sympathy" and "melodious voice," he tells her to "make them valuable to others. It will make your powers endure." This is Dreiser's way of suggesting that to use one's abilities valuable to others is the best way to preserve the self. Dreiser concludes the scene saying: "It was a long way to this better thing" (386). At this point Carrie realizes fully her duty in using her gift for expressing the desires of others. She realizes that to do so is a "better thing" than to live for herself and long for material possessions. While this kind of life seems "a long way" for Carrie, it is important to note that she strives for something which can never be attained. Just as the longing for status will never be satiated, "the blind strivings of the human heart" will never be ceased. But it is from the longing for that which cannot be attained that those of the minds that feel gain their pleasure.
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In Dreiser's final pages, Carrie reflects on the futility of the first kind of desire: "Chicago, New York; Drouet, Hurstwood; the world of fashion and the world of stage these were but incidents. Not them, but that which they represented, she longed for. Time proved the representation false" (398). Shortly after, Dreiser writes a passage which refers back to the time when Carrie walked down Broadway with Mrs. Vance, desiring to be rich enough in wealth and status to be part of such a world. In this passage, however, Carrie has realizes the hollowness of such desire: "In her walks on Broadway, she no longer thought of the elegance of the creatures who passed her. Had they more of that peace and beauty which glimmered afar off, then were thy to be envied" (398). This is truly noble: no longer does Carrie envy other women for their clothes, their jewelry, or their collections of expensive possessions. Rather, "peace and beauty" are all that Carrie strives for.
ULYSSES(1922)
by
JAMES JOYCE'S
EPISODE 1--TELEMACHUS (2-23)
SUMMARY
The novel begins at 8:00am on Thursday, June 16, 1904. It has been "two years, one month, and nineteen days" (Adams 124) since the last diary entry of Stephen Dedalus at the end of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Stephen has returned to Ireland from his self-imposed exile in Paris to be with his dying mother. He appears to have taken an Icarus-like fall from the grand picture he draws of himself at the end of Portrait as the potential poet/savior of Ireland. It is revealed, for example, in the Circe episode that Stephen broke his glasses the night before on June 15. He is currently living in a disused Martello tower (a circular masonry fort) on the outskirts of Dublin, with Buck Mulligan, a medical student, and Haines, an English scholar researching Irish culture.
As the novel opens, Mulligan performs "a mockery" (8) of the Mass while he shaves. When Stephen enters, Mulligan says "there is something sinister in [him]" (5) for refusing his mother's dying request that he knell and pray by her bedside, and he asks Stephen "what have you against me now?" (7). Stephen's refusal to serve or give in to the demands of the Catholic Church is clearly emphasized.
The Englishman Haines joins the two for breakfast, and Mulligan continues to chide Stephen for his offense to his mother. They are soon interrupted by an old milk woman who becomes for Stephen "a personification of Ireland" (Campbell 101). He sees her as "a wandering crone, lowly form of an immortal serving her conqueror [Haines] and her gay betrayer [Mulligan]"(14). After breakfast the three men walk out
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to the seaside where Mulligan swims and Haines and Stephen share a smoke. Stephen explains to Haines that he is "the servant of two masters . . . an English ['the imperial British state'] and an Italian ['the holy Roman catholic and apostolic church']" (20). The "third . . . there is who wants [him] for odd jobs" (20) is, of course, Ireland. Stephen leaves Haines and walks on to his job at Mr. Deasy's school, a local private school for boys. As the episode ends, Mulligan asks Stephen for the key to the tower which he reluctantly gives up. As Bernard Benstock points out, "although Stephen has paid the rent for the tower, he surrenders the key to Buck, having already resigned himself to being dispossessed" (11). The final word of the episode--"Usurper"(23)--refers to Mulligan, whom Stephen comes to see as his betrayer.
HOMERIC PARALLELS
The first four books of The Odyssey describe Odysseus's son Telemachus, specifically the helplessness he feels at the mercy of the suitors and his subsequent longing for his father's return. The goddess Athena in the guise of Mentor visits Telemachus as a messenger and tells him first to try once more to convince the suitors to leave and that if his efforts fail (which, of course, they do) to sail away from Ithaca in search of news of his father. Stephen assumes the role of Telemachus, and Mulligan fulfills "his Homeric role as Antinous, the chief suitor, usurping Telemachus's kingdom" (Benstock 12). Mulligan's insistence that Stephen "give up the moody-brooding" (9) echoes "Antinous's blustering speech to Telemachus after the suitors refuse [his] appeal . . . that they end the state of siege in Odysseus's house" (Gifford 18).
The old milk woman, described as "a messenger . . . to serve or to upbraid" (14), assumes the role of Athena who chides or upbraids Telemachus for his boyish refusal to confront the suitors and who serves him by sending him in search of news of his father (Gifford 21). This search for the father theme is prevalent throughout Ulysses, especially in Stephen's relationship with Leopold Bloom. Though Benstock argues that "there is little evidence" in the first episode of this search for the father quest (12), lines such as "the son striving to be atoned with the father" (18) clearly imply otherwise. Mulligan's assertion that Stephen is "Japhet in search of a father" (18) also recalls Telemachus's sailing for news of his own long-lost father (Gilbert 104) . Even the references to Stephen as a "boatman" (21) and the name of the pub he visited the night before ("The Ship" [23]) imply his role as Telemachus in search of a father.
ANALYSIS
Many of the themes prevalent in Dubliners and in Portrait are repeated in this episode. Joyce's quarrel with the Catholic Church appears in Mulligan's parody of the
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Mass and in Stephen's refusal to knell and pray by his dying mother's side. His sense of outrage over England's abuse of Ireland is reflected in the negative depiction of Haines as a "dreadful . . . ponderous Saxon" (4) who says to Stephen and Mulligan when the old milk woman presents a bill, "pay up and look pleasant" (15).
Joyce's attack on Ireland as its own betrayer is also emphasized. Not only is Mulligan described as a "usurper" (23), but because Stephen recognizes his subservient role to Mulligan, he sees himself as "a server of a servant" (11). As noted earlier, the old milk woman, as a symbol of Ireland, serves "her conqueror [Haines] and her gay betrayer [Mulligan]" (14). Even Stephen's vision of "his own image in cheap dusty mourning [clothes] between their gay attires" (18) suggests how the English and the Irish sympathizers have bettered themselves at the expense of the citizens of Ireland. Joyce's refusal to support Irish literary movements also shows up in his description of Irish art as "the cracked lookingglass of a servant"(6).
The feeling in Portrait that Stephen expresses about being trapped by his family is repeated here in a number of references to his mother. Her memory, for example, becomes "a cloud . . . shadowing" Dublin Bay and turning it into "a bowl of bitter waters" (9). His passionate plea--"no mother. Let me be and let me live" (l0)--clearly recalls his need to escape from family ties.
EPISODE 2--NESTOR (24-36)
SUMMARY
It is now 10:00am on Thursday, June 16, 1904. In this section, Joyce takes us to the village of Dalkey, on Dublin Bay. Stephen Dadelus is now a teacher in this small village. He is not quite the artist he had hoped to become in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. He instead finds himself in a small, cramped classroom full of the sons of wealthy gentleman. Stephen has not necessarily failed in his journey as of yet, but I do not believe this was on his agenda.
This episode begins with Cochrane, one of Stephen's students, responding to the instructor's questions. "Tarrentun, sir"(24) is his retort to Stephen's first question. Stephen is questioning the class on the history of Pyrrhus, an ancient Tarentine general. The students respond to Stephen's questions and appear to be paying attention to him. The only exception occurs when Armstrong, one of Stephen's pupils, mistakes Pyrrhus for a pier. His classmates erupt in "mirthless high malicious laughter"(24). After the laughter ceases, the class urges one of their fellow students to read a selection from Milton's "Lycidas." While Talbot is reading the poem, Stephen is
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thinking about the times he spent in the library of Saint Genevieve pondering Aristotelian theories. In the middle of the reading of the poem, Talbot closes his book and packs it away in his satchel. Stephen asks Talbot if he has finished, and Talbot responds, "Yes, sir. Hockey at ten, sir"(26).
The rest of the episode is a conversation between Mr. Deasy, the head master, and Stephen. Their conversation begins with Deasy paying Stephen's "Three twelve"(30) salary out of some sort of change counting device. Deasy is in love with this product and urges Stephen to acquire one. Their discussion continues with Deasy ranting and raving about the "pride of the English"(30) and how the Englishman's proudest boast is "I paid my way"(30). Deasy adds, "I never borrowed a shilling in my life. Can you feel that? I owe nothing"(30). This bothers Stephen, and he begins to make a mental list of his own debts. Mr. Deasy then requests that Stephen look over a document he wishes to have published concerning the threat of foot and mouth disease in Ireland. While Stephen is reading the essay, Deasy comments on how "England is in the hands . . . of the jews"(33). He tells Stephen how they have taken over "her press, her finance"(33). Then Deasy begins to discuss the evils of women and how they "brought Parnell low"(35). After Stephen finishes reading Deasy's letter, he promises to do the best he can to have it published. Their conversation ends with Deasy joking about the Jews in Ireland.
HOMERIC PARALLELS
The second, third, and fourth books of The Odyssey are about Telemachus. The second book describes Telemachus' encounter with and eventual rejection by the suitors. In the third book, he is sent to the mainland to seek news of Odysseus. He there encounters Nestor and his son Pisistratus. Nestor tells him of the history of returning Greek heroes and the story of Agamemnon. In the fourth book, Pisistratus leads Telemachus to the court of Menelaus. While he is here, Telemachus meets Helen, who tells him the story of the return of Menelaus, another Greek hero.
Stephen is the star, and he will continue in his role as Telemachus. The role of Nestor is played by Mr. Deasy. Both of these men are old and full of advice. Sargent shadows the role of Pisistratus, Nestor's youngest son. Parnell's mistress and wife, Kitty O'Shea, plays the part of Helen.
The wise Nestor and Helen both offer counsel to Telemachus. He learns little about his father's whereabouts, but is given hope through the stories of the returning Greek heroes. Stephen, on the other hand, gets absolutely nowhere in his quest. The conversation with Deasy amounts to very little. Stephen learns plenty about the
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eventual conquest by the Jews, how to save money, and that women are the original sinners. He is given nothing to work with here. As opposed to Telemachus, Stephen has little hope at the end of this episode. Instead, as in Portrait, he finds himself trapped and unable to free himself.
ANALYSIS
Many famous Irishman mentioned in Dubliners and in Portrait return in this novel. Names like Parnell and Kitty O'Shea resurface in Deasy's discussion with Stephen. Joyce mentions their names in order to comment once more on Ireland's lack of support for and dedication to Home-Rule. Deasy says, "A woman too brought Parnell low"(35). He, like many other Irishman, blamed her for his demise, when in actuality, the power of the Catholic Church and its ability to win the support of Parnell's followers dealt the decisive blow to his career.
Stephen has definitely been sidetracked from his journey. Instead of striving to become an artist like Daedalus, Stephen finds himself trapped as a teacher. There is little room for growth here for Stephen, and he is in no way challenged by his new profession. Mr. Deasy, the headmaster, has nothing to offer but Anti-Semitic slurs and advice on saving money. An obstacle has once again slowed Stephen in his quest, and he must escape this trap and find out what lies ahead on his journey.
The guilt Stephen feels for denying his mother's dying request plays a role in this episode as well. As his students speak, Stephen's mind often wanders to thoughts concerning his mother. He sees himself as "ugly and futile"(26), lucky to have been loved as he had been. As with Joyce, Stephen will be forever haunted by his decision.
Joyce also comments on those with pro-British attitudes in his native Ireland. Mr. Deasy is labeled as a "west Brition"(Gifford 33). According to Richard Ellmann, Deasy's role is modeled after two gentlemen Joyce knew who were "very pro-British"(153). Deasy's character is formed by molding these two men and their beliefs and mannerisms into one man. Deasy believes Ireland to be the western-most province of England, and his manners and style are fashioned after the British. Although Deasy comments on the downfalls of Parnell and O'Connell, he most likely was happy with their demise. The self-betrayal theme is present here. Even though Deasy claims to be a true Irishman, he supports any efforts to keep Ireland from ruling herself. In his eyes Ireland is better off as long as she is attached to the British Empire
EPISODE 3--PROTEUS (37-51)
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SUMMARY
When he first encountered the opening chapters of Ulysses, William Butler Yeats proclaimed it to be a "mad book," but upon closer examination finally acknowledged that "it is an entirely new thing--neither what the eye sees nor the ear hears, but what the rambling mind thinks and imagines from moment to moment. He has certainly surpassed in intensity any novelist of our time" (qtd. in Ellmann 530-31). This assessment quite adequately sums up the "Proteus" chapter of the book. It revolves around the Irish outsider/poet Stephen Dedalus, who has fallen from grace since the end of A Portral of the Artist as a Young Man. Now a simple school teacher, he takes a walk on the beach at Sandymount strand at approximately 11 AM, and it is there that the chapter takes place (Gifford 144). Its overarching theme is the inherent nature of reality versus illusion.
As in Dubliners, wandering is once again taken up, in both physical and spiritual contexts. The first two paragraphs of "Proteus" employ a stream of consciousness technique that allows the reader to see the inner workings of young Stephen's mind. The beginning paragraph starts off with the "Ineluctable modality of the visible: At least that if no more, thought through my eyes," or in other words, by questioning if what we perceive through our senses is truly reality (37). As he walks by the sea in Buck Mulligan's boots, he encounters two women and pretends they are "midwives," this thinking leading him down a curious corridor of subconsciously connected thoughts (38). After questioning who his real father is, Simon Dedalus or God Himself, he ponders going to his aunt's house to visit. His obvious alienation from his family is apparent, as he makes up an entirely fictitious visit in his mind, and then recalls the lies he told about his family, or as he calls them, "the house of decay," at the Clongowes school he attended as a boy.
As a matter of fact, much of Stephen's ponderings, as his thoughts unravel, orbit around events of his youth that took place during or after Portrait. "You were awfully holy, weren't you?" he asks himself, ironically remembering how when most had thought him pious, in actuality he had been thinking about "naked women" (40). He chastises himself a great deal for his pretentiousness concerning his literary efforts, as well as for his unwillingness to pray at his mother's deathbed, remembering particularly Mulligan's comment that his "aunt thinks you killed your mother" (42).
Though laced with guilt and brooding, "Proteus" is not an exercise in complete hopelessness. Stephen does get out a scrap of paper from Mr. Deasy's school and begins to write again, asking "What is that word known to all men?" (49). The chapter ends with his turning and seeing a ship's sail catching the wind, obviously a tie-in with the book's Homeric themes.
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HOMERIC PARALLELS
A. Walton Litz asserts that "Joyce did more than any other writer to shape our modern views of The Odyssey. The relationship between Ulysses and The Odyssey is a dynamic one, each work modifying our view of the other" (90). In the "Proteus" episode, the parallels with Homer are fairly general. The first four chapters of The Odyssey center around Telemachus and his quest to find his father Odysseus who should have returned home after the Trojan War. The father quest is taken up by Stephen, who questions not where his father is, but rather who his father is.
In The Odyssey when Telemachus arrives at his court, Menelaus tells of how he set sail once on a journey but was detoured by adverse weather to the Pharos, a rocky island west of the Nile delta. There he was trapped by Poseidon, god of the sea, but was taken pity on by Proteus, who was second in command and who also had the power of prophecy. After performing the proper ritual, Menelaus did succeed and escape, for "Proteus answered his questions," telling him not only how to break the spell but also of the whereabouts of Odysseus who was imprisoned on Calypso's island (Gifford 44).
According to Don Gifford in his annotated notes to Ulysses, "Telemachus's visit to the palace of Menelaus is reflected in Stephen's recall of his mission to Paris and of Kevin Egan's 'palace'" (44). Egan was of course the latest in a long line of potential Irish saviors who had been betrayed by their own people. The Homeric parallels also nicely coincide with Irish mythology. As Stephen waits an hour or so for his scheduled meeting with Mulligan, he paces beside the surf and muses about "the whitemaned seahorses, champing, bright-windbridled, the steed of Mananaan" (38). Again, according to Gifford, "the waves are the white manes of the horses of Mananaan MacLir, the Irish god of the sea, who had Proteus's ability for self-transformation" (48). Archetypal shape-shifting deities seem the perfect metaphor for a chapter-long dissertation on the tenuous appearance of reality.
ANALYSIS
"Proteus" has been called the most crucial chapter in our understanding of Stephen Dedalus. The seashore setting alone speaks volumes about the intellectual dilemma confronting him as he stands on the shore assimilating the meanings in and beyond the immediate sensible world. Or as the critic S. L. Goldberg puts it, "the chapter explores the Protean transformations of matter in time . . . apprehensible only in the condition of flux . . . as object . . . and Stephen himself, as subject. In the one aspect Stephen is seeking the principles of change and the underlying substance of sensory experience; in the other, he is seeking his self among its temporal manifestations" (25).
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It is also in this episode that Joyce embraces what his biographer Richard Ellmann calls "the most famous of the literary devices in Ulysses," namely the "internal monologue" (358). As Stephen's thoughts roll about and deconstruct themselves in quick succession in his mind, every single one is recorded for the reader. It is very much a stream-of-consciousness technique that writers such as Virginia Woolf and Joyce himself helped refine. "After he woke me up last night same dream of was?" Stephen questions himself, "Wait. Open hallway. Street of harlots. Remember. Haroun al Raschid. I am almosting it. That man led me, spoke. I was not afraid. The melon he had he held against my face. Smiled: creamfruit smell. You who will see" (47). This dream dialect is just one example of the internal monologue employed frequently in the novel.
The imagery of "Proteus" is varied and rich. Joyce uses everything from Shakespearean allusions to Biblical symbolism, such as the frequent parallels between Stephen and Hamlet and the two "crucified" shirts the protagonist catches sight of on a clothesline (48). Many details also bring it into close union with Portrait. Sound and the other senses are extremely important, and Aristotle and Aquinas, both of whom helped Stephen form his theory of art, are mentioned. All the political and religious turmoil of that novel also reappears in this episode, despite the fact that it ends with hints of potential.
EPISODE 4--CALYPSO (55-70)
SUMMARY
Episode four begins at 8:00am on Thursday, June 16, 1904, in the Bloom house. Throughout the episode, the reader follows Leopold Bloom's movements. He is seen moving "about the kitchen," up and down the stairs, off to the butcher and back, up and down stairs again, off to the privy, moving his legs, arms, jaws, and finally his bowels. The whole sensory world is mustered for this episode. Bloom is all eyes and ears, tastebuds, nostrils, fingers, as he starts the day (Ellmann 32).
As the novel opens, the reader sees Bloom busily preparing Molly's breakfast. (She is still in bed.) Bloom decides that he is hungry for a pork kidney from Dlugacz's. Kidneys are Bloom's favorite because they give "to his palate a fine tang of faintly scented urine" (55). On his return back home from the butcher's, "a cloud" covers the sun and darkens Bloom's mood. This cloud makes Bloom think of his ancestors, the Jews, "the oldest people, who wandered far away over all the earth, captivity to captivity" (61). The "captivity" that Bloom is speaking about is that of his ancestors in Egypt, but also about the waves of anti-Semitism in the late ninetieth century (Gifford 75). His mood darkens more when a "bent hag" crosses his path. The woman represents the "barren land, barren waste" of the world (61). He describes the scene in one word, "desolation" (61). Bloom lets this dark moment pass by thinking, "Got up wrong side of the bed" (61). Bloom returns home to find a letter for his wife from Blazes Boylan. Rather than being addressed "Mrs. Leopold Bloom," the letter is addressed to "Mrs. Marion Bloom" (61). This mode of address was ill-mannered
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during 1904 (Gifford 76). Bloom is now faced with the idea that his wife is unfaithful. His fears are confirmed about his wife when he sees a strip of the torn envelope showing from under a pillow (63). The episode ends with Bloom reading a story in the outhouse. He begins to daydream about Boylan's financial situations (69) but decides not to dwell on the subject. And with a sense of closure he tears "away half the prize story sharply" (70) and wipes himself with it (Fargnoli 29).
HOMERIC PARALLELS
In book five of The Odyssey, Odysseus is discovered after seven years in bondage to the goddess Calypso (whose name means "the Concealer"). Athena intercedes with Zeus and sends Hermes to compel Calypso to allow Odysseus to leave the island and to continue his journey to Ithaca.
Leopold Bloom assumes the role of Odysseus, Molly Bloom assumes the role of Calypso, and together they assume the roles of captive/captor. Leopold constantly dotes upon Molly's every whim and desire and is held captive by this. Assuming the role of Calypso, Molly conceals her secret affair with B1azes Boylan from Bloom. Bloom comments about Molly's resemblance to the nymphs in The Bath of the Nymph, the picture above the bed. He says, "Not unlike her with her hair down: slimmer" (65), perhaps referring to Calypso when she offers Odysseus immortality if he will remain with her. The image of Hermes is seen in the sun: "Quick warm sunlight came running from Berkeley Road, swiftly, in slim sandals, along the brightening footpath. Runs, she runs to meet me, a girl with gold hair on the wind" (61). This message leads Bloom out of despondency and leads him home (Ellmann 38).
ANALYSIS
The theme of isolation is dominant in this episode. Bloom is in many ways representative of the modern man who spends his day in complete isolation or near complete isolation (Ryf 79). We see Bloom preparing breakfast alone and visiting the butcher alone. From the beginning, Bloom is isolated because he is a Jew and is considered an outsider by the people of Dublin. He is a Jew without a homeland, and this isolation would support Bloom's being a wandering Jew. Bloom's wife also isolates him from her because of the affair she is having with Blazes Boylan and Bloom's inability to speak in plain language to her. Bloom wanders through his day alone and finally ends his day alone in the outhouse
EPISODE 5--THE LOTUS EATERS (71-86)
SUMMARY
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The episode begins with Leopold Bloom walking along the city streets, absorbed and wandering in thought. The time is 10am, as the previous episode alludes to the chiming of the bells at St. George's church, and Bloom has walked one and a quarter miles south of Eccles Street to Sir John Robertson's Quay on the south bank (Gifford 84). Bloom reminds himself the funeral he plans to attend this morning is at 11am, and since he has "time enough" to make it, he leisurely strolls through the streets taking in all of the sights and sounds (71). His stop in front of the Oriental Tea Company's window allows further "reverie of sun-drenched ease," and as he wipes his brow, he speculates on life in the far east (Blamires 29). His revealed pseudonym, Henry Flowers, and his thoughts of "the garden of the world, big lazy leaves to float about on . . . not doing a hand's turn all day . . . too hot . . . lethargy . . . flowers of idleness" also set and support the mood of induced drowsiness and dream-like languor.
Finally, Bloom crosses the road to the post office and receives Flowers' mail. He is intercepted by M'Coy, and as they talk, Bloom speculates on what is inside the letter: "something pinned on: photo perhaps. Hair? No" (73). During the conversation with M'Coy, Bloom spots a well-dressed woman waiting to get into a car. He observes her carefully, noting the "silk flash rich stockings white" as she gets into the car. His voyeuristic fantasy is obstructed by a passing car, and he misses catching a glimpse of her legs, reminding himself that he is always on the outside, that he "feels locked out of it paradise and the peri" (74).
He loses M'Coy and finds privacy on Cumberland Street to open and read the letter from his amorous pen pal, Martha. She has enclosed a flower, which he places in his pocket, and begins to walk again reflecting on the letter. She fervently wants to meet him, and he takes pleasure in her words, yet he refuses to meet her, not wanting to become involved with the usual love affair complications; "thank you: not having any . . . usual love scrimmage . . . running around corners" (78). Bloom throws out the pin, shreds the letter, and thus, destroys Henry Flower, as easily destroyed as a check. He then briefly speculates on the check cashed by millionaire Lord Iveagh of Guinness and wonders how much porter it would take to sell "fifteen millions of barrels of porter" (79).
He steps into All Hallow's Church and contemplates the Catholic ceremony -- "there's a big idea behind it" ( 81 ) -- and compares the feeling of "one family party" to the loneliness of his religion. The communion wine reminds him of the porter being sold by the millions to the Dubliners, a "pious fraud but quite right" (81-82). After the ceremony, he walks to the drug store to get face lotion for Molly. He leaves the drugstore with a cake of lemon-scented soap and decides to return for the lotion later. Then he runs into Bantom Lyons who wants to borrow his newspaper, which Bloom was going to throw away. However, Bantom mistakenly interprets Bloom's "throwaway" as a lead for a bet since one of the horses is named "Throwaway" (86).
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Bloom greets Hornblower at the baths, and he fantasizes about how cool and refreshing the water will feel, "naked in a womb of warmth" (86). He visualizes himself floating in the water, his torso, his navel, his "bud of flesh . . . limp father of thousands, a languid floating flower" (86).
HOMERIC PARALLELS
After escaping the island of Calypso, Odysseus and his men land on Scheria and are entertained by King Alcinous and his court. There, Odysseus recounts some of his adventures to the king, one of which was the tale of the Lotus-Eaters. Early in his voyage from Troy, he and his men were forced from the sea by storm to the land of the Lotus-Eaters (Gifford 84). Seeking water and refuge, he and his men leave the ship, meet the friendly natives, eat the lotus flower and succumb to the lethargy and apathy it affects. The men forget their desire to return to their homeland, and Odysseus must drag them back to the ship to let the drug wear off and set sail himself.
As Bloom wanders through the streets, his mood is fragmented, reflective, brooding, and dream-like -- "a mood of drugged surrender to the impression of the moment" -- that expresses the idle, slow-moving sequence of this episode (Blamires 29). Indeed, the references to the Oriental Tea Company induce thoughts of warmth, flowers, and gardens, which quickly transfer Bloom to a state of languor. In fact, the thought Bloom carries on of relaxation and "sleep six months out of twelve" refers to the Lotus-Eaters, according to post-Homeric Greek mythology, who actually slept half the year (Gifford 85). Bloom's own name as well as his pseudonym, Henry Flower, correspond with the flower imagery so prevalent in the opening of this episode and thus link together the mythic lotus flower and the fantasy world of Bloom/Flower.
Bloom's identification with Odysseus can be connected through the use of the newspaper as a baton, "the Ulyssean sword of the modern advertising agent" and the cake of soap, "the shield," that he later purchases at the drug store (Blamires 29 & 33). In fact, the drug store can be seen as the main focus of the lotus-eating world; surrounded by perfumes, oils, lotions, baths, messages, Bloom is enticed to "combine business with pleasure" (85). He quickly forgets the nature of his business, Molly's face lotion formula, and is absorbed with the drug-like pleasure of scents and oils (the lotus flowers' effects). He decides to purchase a refreshing, lemony-scented soap and go to the bathhouse, therefore remaining in the pleasurable state of listlessness.
ANALYSIS
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Joyce's antipathy for the Catholic religion is clearly revealed in this episode as Bloom observes the ceremony of the Eucharist being performed in All Hallow's Church. Again, Joyce points out the debilitating nature of religion and the betrayal of priests. The rites of the ceremony induce assimilation and submission as the women taking communion sublimely accept the Holy wine and bread with "shut your eyes and open your mouth"; the Latin serves to "stupefy them, " and the idea of Confession "lulls all pain" and induces "blind faith" (80-81). To further support his argument, Joyce has Bloom actually admire the Church on the grounds of competent organization, practical psychological devices (such as Confession), and proficient financial administration (Blamires 33).
To further connect the enervation of Catholicism with the sloth-like quality of the Irish people, Joyce holds responsible the two drugs of Ireland: communion wine and (Guinness) porter. Bloom observes that wine "makes it more aristocratic" than the porter and thus equals "pious fraud but quite right" (81-82). Earlier in the episode, Bloom reflects on the millions Lord Iveagh has made from selling millions of barrels of Guinness porter to Dubliners. The two are brought together to reflect the trappings of the Catholic religion and the Irish culture, a theme most predominant in Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist.
Perhaps the parody of the Mass in the opening episode with Stephen and Mulligan is further explored in the Lotus-Eaters episode to reveal the nature of outsider perspective. Since Joyce self-imposed his exile from Ireland, Bloom's own feelings of "loneliness" and separation from the "one family party" (of Catholicism) suggests representation of Joyce's feelings of isolation and disconnection. Bloom’s mentioning of the "paradise and the peri" after the scene with the well-dressed lady symbolizes the "locked out" feeling Bloom admits is "always happening like that" and signifies his isolation and separation from society (74). Ironically, the peri, according to Persian mythology, are creatures descended from the fallen angels and excluded from paradise until their penance has been served (Thornton 78). Since Joyce allows Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom to express feelings of separation and detachment from Ireland and its religion, perhaps it is to voice his own poignant feelings of disappointment and rejection from his own country and its people.
EPISODE 6 - HADES (87-115)
SUMMARY
This episode begins the morning of Paddy Dignam's funeral (at about 11 o'clock Bloomtime). Martin Cunningham, Jack Power, Simon Dedalus, and Leopold Bloom are getting into the funeral carriage that is to accompany the hearse to the graveyard. As the procession moves forward, Bloom stares out of the window and notices an old woman peeking out of her lowered blinds. He thinks it's "extraordinary the interest [the neighbors] take in a corpse" (Joyce 87), and then he wonders who washes the body and cuts the hair and nails. Women do it, he decides, because the "job seems to suit them" (Joyce 87).
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A few blocks later, Bloom spots Stephen Dedalus, which sets Simon Dedalus off on a tirade against Buck Mulligan whom he thinks is a bad influence on his son. Listening to Simon go on about Stephen makes Bloom recall his own son, Rudy, who died when he was only 11 days old. Bloom realizes how much he's missed not having had a relationship with his son, who was the last of the Bloom line, and remembers his own loss as a son whose father has died. While Bloom is busy with his own thoughts, Cunningham spots Blazes Boylan just as Bloom is thinking of him. Bloom dislikes Boylan and can't understand why the other men think so highly of him. While the other men greet Boylan, Bloom studies his nails and begins thinking about how his body is aging. When the conversation of the others turns to Paddy's sudden death, Bloom thinks it came about because Paddy drank too much, but that's not what he says. He comments that Paddy's sudden death was "the best death" (Joyce 95). The others stare at him not quite comprehending that he means that Paddy went quickly without suffering.
As they near the cemetery, Bloom spots the tiny coffin of a child and is again reminded of little Rudy. A conversation about death begins, and Powers comments that the worst death of all is "the man who takes his own life" (Joyce 96) because it disgraces the family. Dedalus says that a man who commits suicide is thought to be a coward. Bloom, however, thinks that people who die in this way should be shown mercy. He remembers that "they used to drive a stake of wood through [the suicide's] heart in the grave . . . as if it wasn't broken already" (Joyce 96). Unlike Power, the others all know that Bloom's father committed suicide.
When the carriage finally arrives at Glasnevin Cemetery (where the rest of the episode takes place), they see that Paddy's coffin has somehow arrived ahead of them. Bloom thinks, "Got here before us, dead as he is" (Joyce 101). As Father Coffey delivers the eulogy, Bloom's mind wanders over a myriad of subjects. He figures it "makes [the dead] feel more important to be prayed over in Latin" (Joyce 103) and is curious to know whether the priest finds the repetition of his job tiresome. Bloom wonders why only man buries his dead, and thinks that's the "first thing strikes anybody. Bury the dead" (Joyce 109). But then he thinks that, like Parnell, people eventually forget you: "Ivy day dying out" (Joyce 111).
HOMERIC PARALLELS
The XI book of The Odyssey describes Odysseus' visit to the Kingdom of the Dead. This parallels Bloom's visit to Glasnevin Cemetery for Paddy Dignam's funeral. Odysseus is a little anxious about making the trip to Hades and says he "embarked in no happy mind" (Homer 124). Bloom isn't much looking forward to his visit to the cemetery either. On the way to the graveyard, the carriages cross four waterways, which correspond to the four rivers of Hades. Bloom's father's dog, Athos, who pined away after the father's death, is seen as a parallel to Odysseus' dog, Argos, who dies after seeing Odysseus again after so many years. Paddy Dignam is the Elpenor-figure because he had only recently died and "had not yet been buried in the earth" (Homer 125). When Odysseus asks how Elpenor came to be in Hades, he says he was bad to drink and fell off of Circe's roof. This is in keeping with Bloom's idea that Paddy died
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from alcohol abuse. Also, Elpenor's request that he not be forgotten is kin to the idea that Bloom thinks we are all, at some point, forgotten after death.
Just as Odysseus meets his mother again in Hades, so Bloom is brought face-to-face with his own deceased parent. Bloom's musings over all of the dead he can remember recalls Odysseus' meeting with all of "the company of the dead" (Homer 124). Martin Cunningham becomes like Sisyphus in that his life is one of futility. Week after week Martin tries to keep his family out of debts that are incurred by his alcoholic wife. Bloom's description of Father Coffey as "bully about the muzzle
. . . with a belly on him like a poisoned pup" (Joyce 103) perhaps puts Father Coffey in the position of Cerberus, the dog who guards the entrance to Hades.
Bloom becomes Odysseus in that he is seeking answers from the dead and is trying to find his way back to a place where he feels more comfortable. He is ill at ease at the funeral because the priest is speaking of the rebirth of the soul, and he doesn't believe in it. As far as Bloom is concerned, dead is dead.
ANALYSIS
Much of what is clear in Hades is Bloom's isolation from his fellow man, mostly it seems, because of religion. At the cemetery Bloom is excluded because he doesn't believe the most serious aspects of Catholicism such as the Resurrection. He imagines it as "every fellow mousing around for his liver and his lights and the rest of his traps" (Joyce 106). He goes so far as to joke to himself that when God called Lazarus to come forth, he came fifth and lost the job (Joyce 105). Bloom's Judaism keeps him isolated from his friends who consider themselves "true" Catholics since Bloom only converted to Catholicism in order to marry Molly. According to Richard M. McKain, Bloom has the "ethnic role as the archetypal Jew . . . and an archetypal Hungarian born in the year of Hungary's rebirth. In this dual role his experiences parallel those of Ireland: he has been exiled, dispossessed, tyrannized over by foreigners, [and] forced to conform to foreign religions" (61). Bloom doesn't adapt well; hence he is always the outsider.
One of the things Bloom recalls while standing around by himself in Glasnevin is that the last time he was there was for Mrs. Sinico's funeral whom he believes died from "love that kills" (Joyce 114). This connection to Mrs. Sinico becomes important since Bloom's father poisoned himself after he became grief-stricken over his wife's death. It is interesting to note that two of the characters in this episode, Martin Cunningham and Jack Power, are themselves "resurrected" from the story in Dubliners called "Grace" where they attempt to save the lost soul of their friend, Mr. Kernan. Perhaps Joyce intends for them to try to save Bloom next.
EPISODE 7--AEOLUS (116-150)
SUMMARY
This episode begins at noon, in the combined newspaper office of the Freeman's Journal and National Press (the morning daily) and the Evening Telegraph (the evening daily).
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"Bloom's plight" (Kopper 57) begins as he is "working away, tearing away" (117) to secure the Keyes' ad for his newspaper; this task proves difficult as Keyes wants a two month ad subscription but the foreman, Mr. Nannetti, demands that Keyes "give us a three months' renewal" (121). Bloom decides to call Keyes before he "tram[s] it out all the way and then catch[es] him out" (122), and in the ET office, he encounters Ned Lambert, Professor MacHugh, and Simon Dedalus. J.J. O'Molloy soon enters, and these four Dubliners begin talking about "Doughy" Dan Dawson's speech of the previous night (126). Bloom is pondering "why they call him Doughy Dawson" (126) when his editor Myles Crawford "violently" (126) enters the room. Ned and Simon quickly leave to go "to the Oval [bar] for a drink" (130), and Bloom finally makes his call. Bloom, reappearing, insists that he will "be back in no time" (129) and rushes out to meet Keyes, colliding with the newly arrived Lenehan.
O'Madden Burke and Stephen Dedalus arrive, the "Youth led by Experience visit[ing] Notoriety" (131), as Burke proclaims. Stephen's purpose is to deliver Mr. Deasy's paper on foot-and-mouth disease to Crawford for printing. Stephen is quickly immersed in the group's raucous conversations on Ignatius Gallaher and his "farthing press [or sensationalistic]" (139) reporting of the Phoenix Park murders by "the invincibles" (138). Crawford leads this discussion until he is inconveniently interrupted by a phone call from Bloom, who is promptly told to "go to hell" (137). Professor MacHugh turns the conversation to the famous orator John F. Taylor, whose speech, quoted by MacHugh, compares England to the enslaving Egypt and Ireland to the enslaved Israelites.
All leave the office as Bloom returns, announcing that Keyes "will give a renewal for two months" (146) if he is allowed free space in other papers, a request which is denied by Crawford's "tell him to kiss my royal Irish arse" (147). Bloom is left standing alone as Crawford walks on "jerkily" (147) to catch up with the group. The episode ends at Nelson's pillar, after Stephen's telling of his "Parable of the Plums" (149), with the Dubliners' recollections of the adulterous Lord Nelson.
HOMERIC PARALLELS
Odysseus and his crew arrive on Aeolia island, home of the "warden of winds" (X.24), where they are "lodged in town and palace" (X.14) until Odysseus asks to continue their journey home. Aeolus graciously gives the hero what he needs, "stint[ing] nothing,/adding a bull's hide sewn from neck to tail/into a mighty bag, bottling storm winds" (X.20-2) and providing favorable wind for his voyage. After nine days of sailing, the crew becomes suspicious of the bag's contents and decides to hoard the suspected treasure for themselves. They instead unleash "every wind/ [which] roared into hurricane" (X.51-2), causing the ship to return to Aeolia. Greeted again by Aeolus, Odysseus begs him to "make good my loss/dear friend! You have the power!" (X.74-5); yet Odysseus is violently rejected by his friend: "Take yourself out of this island, creeping thing/no law, no wisdom, lays it on me now/to help a man the blessed gods detest/out!" (X.77-80).
Like Odysseus, "Bloom, within sight of 'home'--that is, successfully negotiating the Keyes advertisement--is foiled in his attempt by the demanding Keyes and by the irritation of [his] boss, Myles Crawford" (Kopper 55). Bloom, who sees his success with the Keyes' ad as clearly as Odysseus knows his return home is guaranteed, is
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side-tracked by the squalls of "contrary winds" (Gifford 151) from his Aeolus, Crawford, who does not seem to have the time or patience to discuss the matter with him. Left standing alone to "weigh the point" (147), Bloom must straighten out the matter himself, just as Aeolus discourteously dismisses Odysseus with "out!".
Bloom initially receives the kind words "the world is before you" (129) from Crawford as he leaves to meet Keyes, but this temperament quickly becomes "go to hell" (137) as Crawford comes to detest Bloom's interruptions, a parallel to Odysseus' experience of being first welcomed, then despised, on Aeolia. Bloom experiences the same "peremptory dismissal" (Gifford 152) from Crawford that Odysseus receives from Aeolus as each has a change of heart toward their lesser counterpart: Aeolus demotes Odysseus from friend to "creeping thing," and Crawford transforms Bloom from conqueror to nuisance.
Stephen, who also represents Odysseus, fears that he is caught in a "nightmare from which [he] will never awake" (137). Stephen becomes trapped among the windbags Crawford, Burke, and MacHugh, who pompously spout their opinions over his passive head. He is unable to escape the Dubliners' squalls of "hurrican[ic] contrary winds" (Gifford 151) just as Odysseus is unable to escape the unrelenting hurricane released from his "bull's hide" bag.
ANALYSIS
Though he does not dominate this episode, Bloom certainly emerges as a figure of isolation. "Bloom is an outsider here and the butt of others' jokes. He has little palpable impact on the events of the episode" (Mikics 535). Bloom remains in the shadows, almost paralyzed by his inability to communicate with and relate to the Dubliners. There are clear signs that there is no room for him in the group, such as when "the doorknob hit [him] in the small of the back" (124) as Lenehan enters the ET office or when Lenehan "clutch[es] him for an instance . . . [in his] suffering grip" (129) after Bloom bumps into him in his haste to leave. Bloom is the unwanted, unnecessary man.
Joyce also makes it clear that the Dubliners depicted in this episode--Crawford, MacHugh, O'Molloy, Dedalus, Lambert, and Lenehan--are paralyzed by past memories and people, too caught up in the way life used to be to live in the present. "The[se] principals in the newspaper office . . . worship the lifeless heroes of the past. The[y] . . . pursue chimeras" (Kopper 57) through their glorification of "the previous generation of Irish orators" (Mikics 545). Just as Dublin is paralyzed by the "motionless trolleys" (149) at "the heart of [its] life: its trams" (Kopper 59), so too are the Dubliners motionless to pursue life in the present day.
John Taylor, the orator glorified by MacHugh, is important to the novel because he continues, and especially verbalizes, the anti-British sentiment popular in Ireland, combining it with religious sentiment and tradition. He presents himself as a modern Moses, trying to lead his people and country away from "bow[ing] their head, bow[ing] their will, and bow[ing] their spirit" (143) to the imposing British. Taylor analogizes that Ireland contains the potential to be submerged in British culture and
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tradition because England believes Ireland "has but emerged from primitive conditions" (142); thus the British see great potential to demonstrate their power and will upon an unwilling, yet helpless, people. In his Biblical comparison, Israel, "weak and few" (143), becomes Ireland, struggling to resist the tyrannical force of Egypt, "a host [with] terrible arms" (143), or England, who wants to dominate the seemingly uncivilized country. Bloom's unanswered question of "whose land?" (124) heightens the controversy of "whether, and in what sense, Ireland 'belongs' to its Irish origins" (Mikics 538).
Important to the outcome of the novel is the first crossing of paths of Bloom and Stephen, which occurs in the newsroom. As Bloom cannot become part of the Dubliners' group and Stephen struggles to escape "the nets of Irish language and culture" (Mikics 543) the Dubliners represent for him, this episode "forecasts Stephen's movement toward Bloom" (Mikics 535); this movement toward an acquaintance can also be seen in their common keylessness: Stephen having to give his key to Mulligan in Episode 1 and Bloom because he cannot secure the Keyes ad.
EPISODE 8--LESTRYGONIANS (151-183)
SUMMARY
As the episode begins, at 1 p.m. on Thursday, June 16, 1904, we see Leopold Bloom wandering the streets of Dublin, hungry for his midday meal, "the thought of food much in mind" (Blamires 60). He passes a shop which sells sweets and then encounters a young Y.M.C.A. man, who hands him a newspaper containing a reference to "Blood of the Lamb." Bloom at first glance expects the "Bloo" to complete itself as his name, "Bloom." The implied connection between the "cannibalistic" symbolism behind the Christian ritual of communion and Bloom as modern Odysseus is made.
Bloom continues his lunchtime journey, catching sight of Dilly Dedalus, Stephen's younger sister, and this glimpse of her undernourished form triggers a rush of sympathetic thought in Bloom's mind. He ponders the recurrent pattern of large Roman Catholic families: "Increase and Multiply" (Joyce 151). Bloom's sincerity and kindness as he contemplates Dilly's plight is one example of a continuous exhibition of sympathy and kind behavior throughout the episode, as Bloom distinguishes himself from the brutishness of the diners around him.
Bloom crosses a bridge over the River Liffey and purchases some cakes with which to feed the hungry gulls. He continues to consider issues relating to food and the consumption of it, reflecting to himself about the consumption of swan-meat by Robinson Crusoe (another wandering figure) as the gulls feed. Bloom's thoughts move to the Liffey itself as he muses "life is a stream" (Joyce 153). Bloom is caught up short by what appears to be a moment of fear over the possibility that Blazes Boylan, his wife's lover, might have venereal disease, but he immediately dismisses the idea as impossible (Blamires 61).
Bloom passes the city ballast office and begins to ponder the meaning of the word "parallax," which reminds him of his wife's earlier puzzlement over the meaning of metempsychosis. As he, ironically, considers the parallel between his word and hers,
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he spies a line of men advertising the stationer Wisdom Hely's. He crosses Westmoreland Street, and the image of the Hely's ad-men sets him to thinking of his earlier life with Molly, when he himself was employed by Hely. As he walks along, he meets an old sweetheart, Mrs. Breen, who has become "feeble-minded" (Blamires 63) over the years. He plays a bit on her sympathy as he tells her of Paddy Dignam's funeral and has news from her of the labor of Mina Purefoy, an acquaintance of his and Molly's. As Bloom and Mrs. Breen converse, the eccentric form of Cashel Boyle O'Connor Fitzmaurice Tisdall Farrell passes.
Bloom walks past the offices of the Irish Times, which provokes a series of thoughts about his correspondence with the young woman Martha, and a stream of sympathetic thoughts for Mina Purefoy's childbirth pangs. A flock of pigeons flies overhead, causing Bloom a moment's humorous consideration of the "fun" it must be for them to defecate on passersby from above (Joyce 162). As Bloom passes the statue of Thomas Moore and a group of Dublin policemen, he recalls some personal conflict with the authorities during his involvement with an anti-Boer war demonstration in his youth (Gilbert 202). A cloud passes over the front of Trinity College, momentarily darkening his mood, and as the sun re-emerges he catches a glimpse of Parnell's brother, John Howard Parnell, passing by. He feels a sense of disdain over the political machinations surrounding the Parnells: "Let them all go to pot" (Joyce 165). Next Bloom notices the literary figure A.E. and a young woman, whom he imagines to be Lizzie Twigg, with whom he corresponded briefly (Blamires 68).
The display of binoculars in the window of Yeates and Son sets forth a reverie concerning astronomical patterns and their implications. Bloom sees Bob Doran (of "The Boarding House" in Dubliners) on his annual drunk, stumbling into the Empire pub. As he heads towards Grafton Street, Bloom recalls the termination of his full marital relationship with Molly upon the death of their infant son Rudy, ten years prior. He observes a series of window displays of lingerie and women's clothing, thinking to himself of a potential gift for Molly. Finally overcome by hunger, he enters the Burton restaurant, and is confronted by images of ravenous diners sloppily consuming their lunch: "See the animals feed" (Joyce 169). He is so repulsed by the savagery of the patrons that he re-enters Grafton Street, moving on to Davy Byrne's pub, where he orders a glass of red wine and muses to himself about the idiocy of the "Plumtree's Potted Meats" advertisement in the newspaper, just below Paddy Dignam's obituary. An acquaintance, Nosey Flynn, asks after Molly's singing career, and Bloom responds politely, though it is extremely painful for him to be reminded of the connection between Blazes Boylan and his wife. Davy Byrne and Flynn converse over racing matters, which Bloom listens to distractedly and with a mild sense of moral disapproval, thinking "Fool and his money" (Joyce 174).
The glass of wine relaxes Bloom a bit, and this gives rise to a stream of thought including various dining habits and proclivities, his own and those of various peoples around the world. These thoughts lead to a remembrance of the passionate kiss with Molly during their first sexual encounter. He's struck hard by the contrast between his relationship with Molly then and now. On a window nearby, two stuck flies repeatedly buzz, emphasizing the stasis of his sexual connection with her now.
Bloom finishes his wine and leaves Byrne's pub. After his footsteps can no longer be heard, the inhabitants of the pub discuss him briefly, noting his status as a freemason.
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They remark upon Bloom's relative temperance and order another round for themselves. Bantam Lyons mistakenly thinks Bloom has given him a tip concerning an afternoon horse race. Bloom heads towards Dawson Street and then at Duke Lane notices a terrier coughing up a bit of food. He sees a blind youth standing on the curb and helps him across, providing the youth with specific directions as to where he is and thinking of the various physical implications of the young man's handicap. As he contemplates the ramifications of blindness, he runs his hands over the contours of his own person, considering its colors and textures.
Sir Frederick Falkiner enters the freemasons' hall in front of Bloom, and Bloom feels a surge of annoyance over the judge's snobbery and skewed sense of justice. An advertising placard puts Bloom in mind of Handel's Messiah, and in conjunction with this thought a flash of light illuminates a straw hat, tan shoes, and turnedup trousers, which Bloom imagines to be Blazes Boylan's. Sadly, he turns to the museum, trying to avoid meeting up with Boylan. As he puts his hands in his pockets, he comes across a cake of soap which he has put there. The episode ends as Bloom reaches the museum gate, "Safe!" (Joyce 183) from the image of Boylan, as well as the cannibalistic connotations of the brutish diners in the Burton and the dull Dublin sensibilities of the drinkers in Byrne's pub.
HOMERIC PARALLELS
In Book X, the Laestrygonians episode of Homer's epic The Odyssey, we see Odysseus on his journey home to Ithaca encountering a band of cannibalistic creatures "not like Men, like Giants!" (Fagles 234) who kill and devour a number of his crew.
As Odysseus and his crew leave Aeolus' island, they sail forth for nine days and nights, only to be blown back by fierce winds to the island. Finally they set forth again and reach the land of the Laestrygonians, where they encounter a young woman, the daughter of Antiphates, King of the Laestrygonians. As Odysseus' shipmates ask her of their whereabouts, she indicates her father's palace nearby. As Odysseus' crew enters the palace, they are attacked by the husband of the princess, and "the king let loose a howling through the town that brought tremendous Lestrygonians swarming up from every side" (Fagles 234). The fierce, brutish cannibals slaughter and eat a number of Odysseus' crew.
Frantic to get away, Odysseus marshals his remaining crew, and they flee. "In terror of death they ripped the swells--all as one--/and what a joy as we darted out towards open sea, clear of those beetling cliffs . . . my ship alone" (Fagles 234).
The Homeric parallels here concern then the symbolic understanding of the bestiality of the diners in the Burton and the drinkers in Davy Byrne's pub, but additionally they include an examination of much of Dublin society, with its Catholicism and its lack of personal restraint, as animalistic, unrefined, and threatening. Joyce's Lestrygonians episode is full of the imagery of constant consumption, both on the part of Bloom and on the part of those humans and animals surrounding him, but the distinction between his dining habits and those of the others illuminates him as more fully human, as the wanderer who is threatened by the cannibalistic nature of those he encounters on his travels.
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The episode is full of references to blood, beginning with the "Blood of the Lamb" early in the episode. Sacrificial imagery attends Bloom's consciousness throughout, as he thinks, walking towards the Liffey, "All are washed in the blood of the lamb. God wants blood sacrifice. Birth, hymen, martyr, war . . . Our Savior. Wake up in the dead of night and see him on the wall, hanging" (Joyce 151). It is Bloom's own continuous hunger which symbolizes the pitiless King Antiphates, and the visions and aromas of the food he encounters parallel the "decoy" figure of Antiphates' daughter. In a literal sense, the Lestrygonians are symbolized by the body part of the teeth, as well as by those creatures throughout the episode who consume food (Gilbert 210).
Bloom's vision of the diners in the Burton parallels Odysseus' view of the ravenous, cannibalistic Lestrygonians: "Stink gripped his trembling breath: pungent meatjuice, slop of greens. See the animals feed" (Joyce 169). Upon leaving the Burton, Bloom begins pondering the merits of vegetarianism as images of animals being slaughtered for consumption assail him, much like the Lestrygonians themselves attack Odysseus and his crew. He thinks, "Famished ghosts," and we're reminded of the ghosts in Book XI of The Odyssey, who must drink from a trench of blood before they can speak (Gifford 144).
Joyce's episode parallels Odysseus' escape with his decimated crew from the cannibals with Bloom's safe arrival at the museum gate after having fled the ravenous diners of the Burton, the coarse ways of the drinkers at Byrne's pub, and the images of blood sacrifice that surround him in the Dublin streets. The fact that he is passing from the roughness of these streets to the more refined, artistic demesne of the museum signals a movement into a realm more concerned with art than with the functions of the body (Kenner 251).
Finally, the constant examples of Bloom's kindness in this episode--his sympathy for the undernourished Dilly Dedalus, his desire to feed the hungry gulls, his consideration of Mrs. Purefoy and her labor pains, his assistance of and concern for the blind stripling--parallel what Homer shows us of Odysseus' concern for his crew, his family, and his underlying sensibility as a figure of great kindness and generosity.
ANALYSIS
Throughout this episode Joyce shows us a recurrent pattern of Bloom as the heroic wanderer trapped amidst the more animalistic citizens of Dublin. In conjunction with the theme of food is the theme of cannibalism as manifested in the ritualistic "blood" sacrifice of Catholic communion. This underscores the Homeric parallels of the episode, but it also distinguishes Bloom, as the wandering Jew, as one apart from the ritualized blood ceremonies of Catholicism. Bloom's perspective on the Church is one which transcends its tenets to take into account the wellbeing of its human members, as in his contemplation of the "Increase and multiply" edict of Genesis 1:28 (Gifford 127).
As the kindly Bloom shakes the crumbs from his hands upon feeding the gulls, he thinks of the River Liffey: "It's always flowing in a stream, never the same, which is the stream of life we trace. Because life is a stream" (Joyce 153). This analogy gives the reader a foretaste of the stream-like structure of Molly Bloom's soliloquoy in the final episode of the book.
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There are constant pairings of food imagery with religious symbols and images ("Pillar of salt" and "Feast of Our Lady of Mount Carmel"). These contribute further to Bloom's sense of singularity as the virtuous wanderer surrounded by ravenous brutes. Still, despite Bloom's repulsion at the animalistic appetites of those around him, his hunger forces him to eat, to move into the stream of hungry humanity himself.
Bloom's encounter with the blind stripling as he is passing towards the museum gate is important for many reasons other than as an example of his kindness. His acknowledgment of the blind man causes him to consider the physical effects of such a disability: "Sense of smell must be stronger too. Smells on all sides bunched together . . . Tastes. They say you can't taste wines with your eyes shut or a cold in the head" (Joyce 181-182). He runs his fingers through his hair and over his own body, and as he does so he grounds himself ever more firmly in that stream of humanity. This is his parallel gesture to Stephen Dedalus' consideration of "the ineluctable modality of the visible" (Joyce 37). He is here laying claim to his own completion as a man, grounding himself in the temporal and the physical just before his passage into the safety of the museum (where, ironically, he will examine the goddesses' statues to see if, like live women, they have anuses) (Bowen 473). Bloom locates a cake of soap, the ad which has been in his coat pocket (Agendath Netaim, reminscent of the East, of escape to an exotic Edenic locale), and his potato, which grounds him geographically in the context of Ireland. Having thus reassured himself, he moves on, "safe" for the moment
EPISODE 9--SCYLLA AND CHARYBDIS (184-218)
SUMMARY
The ninth episode of Ulysses opens up in the National Library of Ireland. It is 2:00pm, and we find Stephen sitting amongst a group of scholarly Dubliners in the office of the director. The episode is dialectical, with the main action centralized in the flow of words between dialogue and Stephen's inner monologue. The shifts between spoken word and inner thought create a battleground for Stephen. Stephen, like the episode, develops an inner conflict of two forces. One is representative of Stephen's need to prove his artistic genius by "debunking critical theorists by out-theorizing them"(Blamires 76). The other force is representative of his need to be accepted by these "critical theorists," his fellow Dubliners.
As the episode opens Stephen tries to "debunk" his companions by telling them about his theory of Shakespeare's use of the creative and mystical forces in his plays. However, while Stephen wants to conquer his companions through an intellectual showing, he tries hard to keep an outwardly polite demeanor. The conflict between Stephen's thoughts and actions develops the conflict between Stephen's wants and needs. This, in turn, causes his dual personality. Stephen launches into his theory with the definition of a ghost. Stephen's ghost---"One who has faded into impalpability through death, through absence, through change of manners" (188)--is, unknowingly to Eglinton, actually a parallel to his own self . It is realized here that Stephen is muddling his task to prove his own genius. Due to this, the theme of Stephen's inevitable failure emerges. The heightening battle within Stephen is therefore established, and the flow between inner and outer voices strengthens.
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The episode carries on as the discussion turns to debate and then into that of butting heads. Once Buck Mulligan enters the room a more apparent competition develops. Mulligan and Stephen become rivals "under the ambiguous cover of a dubious friendship" (Fargnoli 199). This competition causes Stephen's desperation to grow as he enters an outward battlefield with Mulligan. Eventually, Stephen allows himself into a child-like fight with Eglinton over Shakespeare's second best bed. As Stephen allows for his needs to surface his instability becomes painfully obvious to the group of men. They stare at him, unable to comment, yet Stephen "faced the silence" (203). The silence is the separation between Stephen and these men, but only Stephen sees the enormity of this gap.
Finally the debate dies out with cries from Eglinton who makes a mockery of Stephen's theory asking if he believes it himself . Stephen's realization that he is losing the battle is expressed through his simple answer--No. Stephen's thoughts explain this answer with a prayer: "I believe 0 Lord, help my unbelief " (214). If Stephen had been able to believe and then not believe his theory, then he would have been able to discuss instead of insist.
Defeated, Mulligan and Stephen depart from the group together. However, only Stephen realizes the extent of what just happened when Mulligan remarks "Couldn't you do the Yeats touch?" (216). He feels a presence, Bloom, coming from behind that will separate Mulligan from him and desires to part company.
HOMERIC PARALLELS
The seventh book of The Odyssey describes Odysseus's encounter with Scylla and Charybdis. Odysseus must pilot between these two perils in order to continue his journey. Circe has advised him to stay near Scylla, the lesser of the two evils. Knowledgeable to the fate of his crew, Odysseus must choose between losing six men to the monster Scylla or sacrificing his entire crew and ship to Charybdis the whirlpool.
Stephen must also choose between two dangers yet those which he faces "are not physical but oratorical" (Blamires 76). These two dangers are based around the inner and outer voices of Stephen and his companions. Stephen is representative of both Scylla and Odysseus. Scylla is Stephen's inner voice, the part of Stephen that wishes to out-logic the scholarly group of Dubliners that he faces. Stephen is the six-headed monster that craves to bend down and feast on these men. At the same time, Stephen is also Odysseus trying to steer between the voices. He is torn between Scylla, his inner voice that wishes to destroy, and Charybdis, the whirlpool of the collective's voice that tries to pull him in. Stephen must choose a path between the two, and like Odysseus, choose the path less damaging.
ANALYSIS
The main theme of this episode is dueling forces. The episode "emphasizes the need to make choices and the inevitability of having to skirt danger in order to succeed" (Fargnoli 198). At many points during this episode Stephen finds himself having to
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steer his way through dangers. The major conflict is the one inside of Stephen. He feels a strong need to gain acceptance from those he wishes to leave. In trying to develop his artistic genius Stephen looks down upon his fellow Dubliners. Yet Stephen cannot find complete glory in this for he inwardly needs the approval of these men. Stephen made his escape to Paris only to end up in Ireland again. He finds himself unable to navigate through the voices of his fellow men. His need to define his own self is very strong and keeps him from being able to fall into the whirlpool of ideas that the others have created and thus he is ostracized. Unfortunately, Stephen cannot handle this rejection because of his deep need to be accepted by his fellow men. In the end Stephen is ostracized by his companions, still having not been able to prove his superior intellect to them either. Stephen loses the battle.
EPISODE 10--THE WANDERING ROCKS (219-255)
SUMMARY
At "five to three" the episode of the Wandering Rocks opens and flows through the maze of Dublin on a calculated trip until 4 p.m. Being the middle of Ulysses, and practically the middle of June 16, 1904, the Wandering Rocks "has absolutely no relation to what precedes or follows" (Tindall 179). In other words, what occurs is a theme summary, or an intermezzo within the novel's movement toward conclusion. This episode also "may be regarded as a small-scale model of Ulysses as a whole" (Gilbert 225). It consists of eighteen parts (with one coda), and though certain sections can be connected with corresponding episodes (parts 1, 2, 4, 5, 6, 11, 12, 16, 18), in the same context some parts are too vague to reflect a comparison (parts 3, 7, 8, 9, 13, 14, 15, 17). Also noteworthy is that all these sub-sections can be connected in one way or another with the river or blood being the organ that ties the substance of the body on the trek through the self.
The first, and most lengthy section of this episode, begins with Father Comnee, the Jesuit rector of Clongowes Wood College, putting away his watch while walking through the city toward Artane in the northeastern outskirts of Dublin. He stumbles upon a "one legged sailor" begging and contemplates for a moment the sailor's fate: "If [he] had served [his] God as [he] had served [his] king [God] would not have abandoned [him] in his old days" (219). Later in his walk Father Conmee muses over all the lost souls who missed the word of God and "of the millions of black and brown and yellow souls that had not received the baptism of water when their last hour came like a thief in the night" (223). Father Conmee sees this as a waste, one less notch in the bed post of the Roman Catholic Church, one more suicide out of, or one less solider in the army of God that the Pope commands. Remember Joyce's commentary is at times done through sarcasm, and Ulysses is a comic book.
From here Father Conmee's train of thought switches to the history of the area, almost romanticizing the first Countess of Belvedere and whether she had or had not been faithful to her husband's brother, the second Hamlet allusion of this section. The section closes with Father Conmee blessing two young lovers coming out of the bushes flustered, whereas here, we have romanticism having the final say over religion.
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Other sections include Corney Kelleher, after examining a coffin, strolling through Dublin. Katey and Boody Dedalus pass a one legged sailor, and later in section four they discuss whether they got any money for their brother Stephen's books. They did not. In section five Blazes Boylan picks out a fruit basket to be sent from Thornton's shop to Molly's residence by tram. The betrayer and lothario within Boylan ogles the fruit girl, just as Bloom flirts with Martha a flower girl. In the sixth section Stephen is speaking with Almidano Artifoni the music teacher and misses the tram. The seventh section focuses on Blazes Boylan's secretary Miss Dunne and her doodles and daydreams. In the next section Ned Lambert explains "the most historic spot in all Dublin" to a visitor and later complains of the cold he has made worse by attending Paddy Dignam's funeral in the Hades episode of that morning (230). The tenth part is the famed section when Bloom grazes through certain passages of Sweets of sin (which later in the day Bloom recalls at certain points). The first and third books that Bloom picks up, The Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk and Tales of the Ghetto, are ironically books that, firstly gave rise to Anti-Catholic sentiment, and lastly in Tales of the Ghetto consist of stories of anti-Semitic persecutions. This is the ring and connection Joyce is preparing the reader for with the later connection of Stephen and Leopold Bloom. In the eleventh section Dilly Dedalus greets her father Simon, who demeans and mocks her posture. She does get one shilling and two pence out of him, but intertwined with foul drunken remarks.
The thirteenth section is a return to Stephen's trek through Dublin, while thoughts of Catholicism cloud his inner compulsion. We can relate this section to that of Portrait where "blood will have blood," and again Hamlet enters his interior-dialog. In the fifteenth section, John Wyse Nolan, speaking with Martin Cunningham, says "I see Bloom put his name down for five shillings" towards the Dignam orphans (246) and concludes that "there is much kindness in the Jew"(246). Section sixteen consists of Buck Mulligan and Haines discussing Stephen's mental imbalance: "wandering Aengus I call him" (249). Aengus is the Irish god of youth, beauty and love, in other words driven by emotion and unstable.
The final section or the coda seems to be the final synopsis of the episode as a whole. Each character mentioned throughout this episode is either seen, ignored, or missed (but mentioned). In the final section the lord and lady (William Humble and Lady Dudley) are driven through the streets of Dublin on their way to Mercer Hospital.
HOMERIC PARALLELS
There is no literal parallel between Joyce's Wandering Rocks and Homer's text. When Odysseus was given the choice of two routes by Circe, he chose Scylla and Charybdis over the Wandering Rocks. This becomes Joyce's step out of and above Homer as he goes where even the "birds cannot pass" (223). Joyce therefore chooses both paths as a summary of the immovability in Homer's Wandering Rocks, and as his conclusion to the dead ends of Dublin.
Here in the Wandering Rocks episode we not only see an overview of the stagnation of Joyce's Ulysses, but as in typical Joycean fashion, a relation to Dubliners and most of Joyce's writings up to this point. Joyce's Wandering Rock has become an iceberg, moving, melting, and reforming to solidify another angle of avoidance in crossless paths that constantly cross
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EPISODE 11--SIRENS (256-291)
SUMMARY
This episode begins just before 4:00pm at the bar and restaurant of the Ormond Hotel. The first two pages of the episode contain brief extracts from the narrative that follows. Though these fragments appear at first to be meaningless, Stuart Gilbert points out that "they are like the overtures of some operas and operettas, in which fragments of the leading themes and refrains are introduced" (243). Another possibility is that they are simply the sounds of the orchestra warming up before the performance actually begins.
The first plot detail connects this episode with the previous as two barmaids observe and comment on the Viceregal's cavalcade that ends Episode 10. The barmaids also catch a glimpse of Bloom who is on his way to buy paper to answer Martha Clifford's letter. Simon Dedalus and then Lenehan both enter the hotel bar looking for drink and companionship. Having bought his paper, Bloom sees Blazes Boylan for the third time (he sees him while riding in the carriage in the Hades episode and then hides from him in the museum at the end of the Lestrygonians episode) and decides to follow him into the Ormond Hotel bar. The clock almost immediately strikes 4:00, and Boylan quickly pays for his drink and leaves to meet his 4:00 appointment with Molly.
Bloom stays in the hotel restaurant and eats with Richie Goulding--Simon Dedalus's brother-in-law who is yet another outsider--"dinners fit for princes" (269). While "in liver gravy Bloom mash[es] mashed potatoes" (270), listens to Simon Dedalus, Bob Cowley, and Ben Dollard sing about Ireland's war-torn past, and then writes a letter to Martha Clifford. Having stayed long enough to hear Ben Dollard sing "The Croppy Boy," Bloom leaves the restaurant, avoids a prostitute, and passes the blind piano tuner he helped in the Lestrygonians episode (see 180-181). The episode ends with a bang when Bloom, while examining a picture of Robert Emmet (another failed Irish hero), supplies his own musical note to the orchestra, a loud "pprrpffrrppfff" (291) or fart.
HOMERIC PARALLELS
In Book 12 of The Odyssey, having been warned by Circe of the beautiful Sirens whose songs lure sailors to their deaths on their rocky shore, Odysseus places wax in the ears of his shipmates and then insists that they tie him to the mast so that he can hear their songs. Though he begs his crew to untie him from the mast, they refuse and he escapes from yet another potential quest-ending danger.
The most obvious sirens in Joyce's narrative are the two bar maids. In the first bit of action, one of the officials in the Viceregal's cavalcade stares at the bar maids and "he's killed looking back" (257), creating a parallel with Odysseus who "struggles against the bonds that secure him to the mast" (Gifford 294). When one of the bar maids informs Simon Dedalus she spent her recent vacation "lying out on the strand all day," he asserts that her action "was exceeding naughty . . . tempting poor simple males" (261). During another scene one of the bar maids tempts Blazes Boylan and Lenehan with the sound of her garter smacking her thigh (266), and later the other bar
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maid draws the attention of the entire bar by moving her hand up and down in a repetitious motion on "the smooth jutting beerpull" (286). Bloom also encounters Sirens in the form of the window advertisement he sees with "a swaying mermaid smoking mid nice waves . . . lovelorn. For some man" (263) and the "frowsy whore with black straw sailor hat askew" whom he passes on the street (290).
One other group of important Sirens are the male singers--Simon Dedalus, Bob Cowley, and Ben Dollard--who songs of "love and war" tempt Bloom to share their sentimental surrender to the "old times" (268) of Ireland's past. The rubber band Bloom plays with suggests the strong pull of their sterile drinking songs, but when the rubber band finally twangs and snaps (277), it is clear that he will not succumb to their sterile or paralyzed insistence that "all is lost now" (272). Bloom's final musical note--a loud fart he releases while looking at a picture of Robert Emmet--emphasizes his avoidane of these Sirens and their paralytic beer songs.
One final important connection with Homer's Sirens is Joyce's recognition of the overall power of music in general. Bloom associates music with sexual desire and concludes that "music hath jaws" which women use "to catch rattlesnakes" (284).
ANALYSIS
Part of the difficulty of this episode is that Joyce wrote it in the style of "a fugue with all musical notations" (Ellmann 459). Even Ezra Pound, a great experimenter himself and one of Joyce's strongest supporters, complained about the difficulty of Joyce's approach (Ellmann 459). However, Stuart Campbell's analysis of the three-part structure of a fugue makes Joyce's effort much more accessible: "the Subject is obviously the Sirens' song: the Answer, Mr. Bloom's entry and monologue; Boylan is the Counter-Subject" (253). The episode becomes then a musical confrontation between Bloom and his rival Blazes Boylan. The musical motif that defines Boylan is the variations on the "jingle jingle jaunted jingling" (256) which occur throughout the text.
One of the musical pieces mentioned throughout the episode is a German opera called Martha. In this opera Lionel experiences great grief and even madness over his unrequited love for Martha (see Gifford 129). The connection between Lionel and Bloom is clear even without Joyce's referring to the latter as "Lionelleopold" (288). Though Bloom feels great loneliness and humiliation as he bides his time while waiting for Molly and Blazes Boylan to complete their afternoon tryst, he still thinks that it may not be "too late" for him and Molly and admits that "he bore no hate" (285). Lionel also is eventually reconciled with Martha, regains his sanity, and lives happily ever after.
Other references in the episode also undercut the recurrent motif that "all is lost" (272) now that Molly has kept her afternoon meeting with Boylan. Though Lenehan hails Boylan as "the conquering hero" (264), Joyce describes Bloom as an "unconquered hero" (264). By following Boylan into the Ormond Hotel, Bloom demonstrates that he still has not given up the contest for Molly. Boylan's admission that he "plunged a bit" (265) on Sceptre in the Gold Cup race implies that he will eventually lose to Bloom. After all, though Bloom is currently a "thrown away" or discarded husband and Boylan clearly possesses a stud-like sceptre, the eventually
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winner of the race is Throwaway. At the beginning of the episode, Bloom is also referred to by one of the bar maids as having "greasy eyes" and a "greasy nose" (260). Because "grease" is pronounced as "grace" in Ireland (Gifford 296), the name "Greaseabloom" which is repeated throughout the episode (see 260 and 291) associates Bloom with God's grace and thus with Christ.
Jackson Cope argues that this is the episode "in which the possibility of renewed communion is recognized and, as the final word of the prelude promises, the movement toward that renewal is begun" (242). Cope concludes that all the diverse musical fragments of the episode "are drawn together in a cohesive pattern" that allows Bloom to move "toward a new harmony" (242). As Gilbert points out, the jingle of Blazes Boylan gradually dies out, and "a new motif makes itself heard in the closing pages of the episode--the blind tuner tapping his way back to the Ormond to recover the tuning-fork which he left on the piano" (249). This tuning-fork becomes a key symbol in the new feeling of harmony gradually associated with Bloom. And, of course, it was Bloom's act of kindness as a Good Samaritan helping the blind piano tuner across the street in the Lestrygonians episode that made it possible for him to arrive at the Ormond Hotel bar and tune the piano in preparation for the musical interlude supplied by Joyce in this episode.
EPISODE 13--NAUSICAA (346-382)
SUMMARY
The thirteenth episode of Ulysses opens up on Sandymount Strand with Howth Hill in the background and the parish church nearby. The time is 8:00pm and the benediction of the Most Blessed Sacrament is taking place at the church. On the strand Gerty MacDowell, accompanied by her two girl friends and their younger brothers, lies against the rocks listening to "the voice of prayer to her who is in her pure radiance a beacon ever to the storm-tossed heart of man, Mary, star of the sea" (Joyce 346). While the girls frolic about with their brothers, Gerty remains to the side lost in her own thoughts. She is seen as a pure and innocent girl-woman with a face "almost spiritual in its ivory-like purity" (Joyce 348). The words of prayer drifting down the strand and the depiction of Gerty's features create a parallel between Gerty and the Virgin Mary.
Gerty's thoughts, as expressed through her stream of consciousness, revolve around the organ of her eyes. She displays child-like romantic notions by recalling a previous boyfriend and by realizing the presence of a stranger standing a bit down the strand. Gerty is aware of her clothing, especially her panties and garters both of which are blue to match and for luck. Like Gerty, the Virgin Mary is represented by the color blue which advances the parallel between the two women. Gerty's musings over her panties, her lost love and the stranger before her create a world of romance and mystery for her.
Bloom has made his way to the rocks of Sandymount Strand where he encounters the young beauty. Bloom becomes the romantic stranger to Gerty by watching her from a distance. She sees Bloom's troubled face and ponders over what terrible thing may have cast him out upon this rocky shore. It is here that Gerty becomes like the Virgin
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Mary, the beacon "to the storm-tossed heart of man" (346). Her romantic notions of marriage and passion become more abundant as she views Bloom.
Gerty becomes anxious for her friends to leave and inquires of the time as a subtle hint that they should be getting on their way. One of the girls approaches Bloom, asking for the time. Bloom discovers that his watch has stopped at four o'clock. Later the reader discovers that this is probably the time at which Bloom's wife, Molly, was committing adultery with Blazes Boylan. Bloom does not strike up a conversation with the girl but rather keeps his focus on Gerty who is now fully aware of her admirer. The girls decide that it is late and begin to leave. As they are packing up the children's things, Gerty begins to entice the stranger through the exploitation of her body.
At about this time the benediction at the church has drawn to a close and fireworks are set off. Everyone runs to see the fireworks except for Gerty and Bloom. Gerty, filled with passion, is enticed by the fireworks as she tilts her body backwards to see. As she moves back on the rocks she deliberately exposes herself fully to Bloom. At this moment a long Roman candle is shot off into the air. Gerty sees the long rocket as it goes "higher and higher" (Joyce 366) and leans back even further, exposing even more to Bloom. Gerty's sexual excitement grows as she is "trembling in every limb" (Joyce 366). The imagery of the long rocket corresponds with Bloom's manhood as he is masturbating to Gerty's display in time with the rocket. Finally the two reach their climax as the Roman candle explodes in the air and from it gushes out "a stream of rain gold hair threads" (Joyce 367).
After the two have achieved sexual climax, Gerty becomes embarrassed and runs after her friends, not looking back to the man. However, before running away she waves her scented handkerchief in the air towards Bloom. The scent finally does waft over to Bloom much like the censors that were swung during the ceremony of the benediction, bringing the sweet fragrance to the worshipping man. Bloom ponders over the scent, leading him to think about certain odors that attract one to another. Bloom's stream of consciousness takes him back to Molly and her own infidelity earlier that afternoon. Bloom finally comes to the conclusion that much like the priest's cuckoo clock, he is a cuckold. Gerty MacDowell is very much a female and fully aware of her actions as she sees Bloom to be a cuckold before he knows it.
HOMERIC PARALLELS
Book five of The Odyssey ends with Odysseus crawling storm-tossed and weary upon the beach in the land of the Phaeacians where he conceals himself behind a thicket in order to rest. Book six opens to the Phaeacian Princess Nausicaa and her hand-maidens coming down to the rocks where Odysseus sleeps to do the washing. Nausicaa and the maidens begin a game when suddenly Nausicaa drops the ball into the stream. The girls' shrieks awaken Odysseus as he springs forward from his hiding place stopping only to conceal his manhood behind a great leaf. Odysseus charges upon them like a wild naked man, and the maidens run in fear, all except Nausicaa who stands fearless before Odysseus. Odysseus keeps at a distance from Nausicaa
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deciding to approach her only through charming words. His tactic works and Nausicaa leads him back to the village to seek help.
Bloom is Odysseus, the storm-tossed wanderer lying amongst the rocks. Gerty is Nausicaa, the one wanting to draw this mysterious traveler into her arms. Like Odysseus, Bloom stands back from Gerty and looks on in admiration. The two men see the Virgin maidens as picturesque statues, such as the Virgin Mary might be seen. Just as Nausicaa is depicted as the girl of the white arms, Gerty is repeatedly described as having ivory-like features all of which depict the Tower of Ivory.
ANALYSIS
The Sandymount Strand becomes significant in this episode for various reasons. This is where Stephen paused earlier that day in his morning walk and also the hill in the background is where Bloom and Molly had exchanged vows of love years before. The coincidence of Stephen and Bloom is important for it reinforces the idea that they are destined to come together. The image of Bloom and Molly making love near the same spot years before gives an idea of Bloom having to deal with Molly's infidelity. It is ironic that Bloom chooses this spot to masturbate to a young girl-woman's exposure. This all comes back to Bloom wandering around, not wanting so much to return to his wife. Bloom's adventures bring him closer, however, to Molly's infidelities as his public display is seen as an inability to deal with the situation at home.
Gerty's youthful notions of romance and marriage lead her into her encounter with Bloom. Gerty envisions Bloom coming to her and making her the perfect wife. Gerty wants to take Bloom in with her feminine wiles and cause him to forget any pain. This desire for a romantic encounter with a stranger is echoed through Nausicaa's response to Odysseus. Both girls are taken by the mystery involved with the men that adore them from afar and wish to save their storm-tossed souls.
Bloom worships Gerty's statue-like appearance much as he worshipped the statues in the museum earlier that day. However, Bloom's worship evolves from a desire to look at the female body. Part of the irony of this episode is that Gerty never loses her romantic notions, and readers might believe that all this is amiss until they enter the conscious of Bloom, who has only sexual desires for the young girl. She gives him his release yet is unable to fulfill her role as the Virgin by saving his storm-tossed soul.
EPISODE 14--THE OXEN OF THE SUN (383-428)
SUMMARY
The scene opens at the National Maternity hospital on Holles Street with a Latin incantation: "Deshil Holles Eamus" (383) repeated three times in the manner of the Roman Arval Brethren whose purpose was to publicly honor the goddess of fertility and plentitude (Gifford 408). The midwife cry of "Hoopsa boyaboy hoopsa!" also celebrates the birth of a male child while she bounces his breath into stability (Gifford 409). The juxtaposition of the public ceremony in honor of the fertility goddess and the celebration of the male child's birth signifies the beginning of the confused and disordered evolutionary process of creation. Thus, the next few paragraphs reflect the nonsensical and unintelligible prose from the Latin linguistic origination to the
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modern language form. The text begins with the Old English style, or rather, an "alliterative Anglo Saxon flavor" as we see that Bloom stopped by the hospital to check on Mrs. Purefoy who is in labor (Blamires 147). Dr. A. Horn is in charge of the hospital, seventy beds, with the help of the sisters/nurses. One of them greets Bloom and lets him in the hospital, comments on his mourning clothes, and is reassured after he explains the cause of his dress. Bloom inquires about Mrs. Purefoy's condition, and the nurse says the "woman was in full throes now for three days" and that "she had seen many births of women but never was none so hard" (386).
Bloom is led into a room full of drunken students, is offered beer, but does not drink any of it. The students are arguing about making the decision, in the necessary situation, to save the life of the mother or the child; they agree to save the mother and ignore the "official view to the contrary" (Blamires 148). Here, Bloom meets Mulligan and Stephen, but is too concerned for Mrs. Purefoy's suffering to share in the revelry. Stephen proposes a toast to the Pope, gives a short sermon, and Punch Costello launches into a melody of "Staboo Stabella" (392). Thereafter, Stephen is teased about his abandonment of the ministry and his scandalous sexual adventures at college. Stephen continues his discourse on adultery and betrayal, the "usurper" theme, but is interrupted by a storm of thundering. He is frightened but tries to hide it in front of male company; however, Bloom notices and tries to comfort him to no avail. The thunder reminds Stephen of his mortality, and his "moral and spiritual condition is analyzed" (Blamires 150).
Buck Mulligan, on his way to the Maternity Hospital, runs into Milly Bloom's boyfriend, Bannon, and thus begins the progression to a more advanced style of prose, reminiscent of the eighteenth century (Blamires 151). Mulligan, acting as "le Fecondateur," begins the parody of fertilization and contraception whereas cloaks, umbrellas "were it no bigger than a fairy mushroom", and raincoats mock (sexual) protection (405). Nurse Callan comes in the room to ask the students to keep quite and as soon as she leaves she becomes the subject of their sexual desires, "the lustre of her own sex" (406).
Bloom reflects momentarily on the ugliness of Costello and becomes impatient with the crude and obnoxious manner in which the students are carrying on. He wonders how "frivolous medical students like these can be so quickly transformed into respectable practitioners" and subsequently, his right to question the students' sincerity is presented at a mock-board of eighteenth century design (Blamires 153). Bloom is bombarded by his past immoral and adulterous behavior; the jury concludes that he is a hypocrite, "stagnant, acid and inoperative," and thereby further discredited from moral judgments (409).
The announcement of Mrs. Purefoy's childbirth provokes conversation between the medical students on various aspects of obstetrics, such as "the prolongation of labour pains, the premature relentment of the amniotic fluid . . . artificial insemination by means of syringes, involution of the womb consequent upon the menopause . . . females impregnated by delinquent rape . . . multigeminal, twikindled and monstrous births" (410-411). Mulligan recites a tale of horror where he is the murderer of the Englishman Haines whose ghost stalks him in the form of a "black panther" (412). At this point, Stephen and Bloom reflect on their "observations about boyhood days and
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the turf, recollecting two or three private transactions" while a debate develops on the "epitome of the course of life" (417).
After the discussion dies out, they all congratulate the missing father, "One above, the Universal Husband . . . her dear Doady" (420-421). The room becomes quiet as the "'antechamber of birth'" establishes "the calm of shepherds and angels about the crib in Bethlehem" and is finally disrupted by Stephen's exhalation of "'Burkes,'" the name of a pub (Blamires 156). Stephen takes them out of the room and out to the street; Bloom remains behind for a minute to send congratulations to Mrs. Purefoy.
A celebration of fertility ensues as the group walks down the street in the form of intricate and succinct thoughts, words, and proclamations. At the pub, they order various beers and drinks, and their conversations become muddled symbolizing the slang and modern language of the Twentieth Century. They are at last expelled from the pub at closing time, and their numbers have increased to eleven members (the number present at the Last Supper). The closing imagery, indeed, suggests the final judgement: "sinned against the light and even now that day is at hand when he shall come to judge the world by fire" (428).
HOMERIC PARALLELS
Once Odysseus and his men have encountered the Sirens and Scylla and Charybdis in Book 12 of The Odyssey, they find themselves near the coast of the land of Helios, the Sun God. They have been warned by Circe and Tiresias to avoid the island altogether and, most importantly, not to harm Helios' sacred cattle. Odysseus is hesitant to set on shore for fear his men may disobey the warnings, but they do not want to spend the night at sea and convince Odysseus that they will not touch the cattle. He assents and they land on the island. Hostile weather maroons them, their provisions run out, and they "forswear their oath, and slaughter enough cattle for a six day feast" (Gifford 408). Odysseus is outraged but can do nothing. The weather clears up and they set sail; however, Helios has appealed to Zeus for revenge and is awarded by a lightening bolt that destroys Odysseus's ship and kills all of his men. In despair, he ties the mast and keel together, suffers through the whirlpool of Charybdis, passes Scylla's rock, and is stranded on Calypso's island (Gifford 408).
The introductory Latin verses, the Maternity hospital, the nurses, and Dr. Horn are symbols of fertility which the oxen of the sun embody. Indeed, the name Dr. Horn closely suggests cow/oxen horned symmetry, and the watchful nurses represent the "daughters of Helios entrusted with guarding the sacred cattle" (Gifford 408). The crime against fertility is explored in this episode in various forms, such as contraception and the abnormalities of obstetrics; however, the basic conviction of crime is committed by the medical students whose drunken and boisterous behavior dishonors and slanders the maternity patients: "the ribald and riotous students in the Maternity Hospital commit a kind of sacrilege against the hospital's patients who, like the Oxen of the Sun, are symbols of fertility" (Blamires 146). The boardroom, where all of the discourse takes place, can be viewed as the island on which Odysseus and his men are stranded, and certainly the fierce thundering that Stephen fears exemplifies Zeus' thunderbolt that destroyed the ship.
ANALYSIS
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Joyce's predominant defective, or failing, father theme is evident in this episode as he recreates the process of human evolution: "Bloom is the spermatozoon, the hospital the womb, the nurse the ovum, Stephen the embryo" (Ellmann 475). Indeed, Bloom's own son died soon after childbirth, and so upon meeting Stephen at the hospital, he adopts him as his own son. His failure occurs when he tries to console Stephen's fear of lightening during the storm. The father connection also closely parallels the father-son relationship between Telemachus and Odysseus: Telemachus sails in search of his missing father, since Stephen's own father has failed him, he searches for a father figure in Bloom, and since Bloom could not sufficiently soothe Stephen from the lightening he fears, he fails just as Odysseus fails Telemachus by his abandonment. Indeed, as Joyce states, the theme of Ulysses "is reconciliation with the father" (Ellmann).
The nine part creation mimics the nine months of pregnancy in which Joyce mocks his ability to become the ultimate father, to create a human form out of literature: "this progression is linked back at each part subtly with some foregoing episode of the day and . . . with the natural stages of development in the embryo and the periods of faunal evolution in general" (Ellmann 475). Thus the nine patterns of linguistic style and progression imitate the stages of human development. Joyce begins with Old English style alliteration, moves to seventeenth century prose, then eighteenth century prose, and ends in current modern dialogue. Harry Blamires explains that "The theme of embryonic growth is reflected in a series of often brilliant parodies (or pastiches) of English style prose from Anglo-Saxon days to the twentieth century. Formally there is a division into nine parts (like the nine months of gestation)" (146). Therefore by creating his own progeny, Joyce fulfills his desire for the father figure, reconciled and secured.
Joyce also amplifies the theme of betrayal, the "usurper," through adulterous and marauding behavior by the drunken students. The crime committed by Odysseus' men, killing the sacred oxen of Helios, suggests the parallel crime of treachery and debauchery committed by the students at the hospital. Contraception acts as a foil to fertility, and drunken obscene behavior despoils the innocence and beauty of birth. Blamires states that Joyce "expands the theme of the usurping adulterer who betrays . . . in the style of the Authorized Version of the Old Testament, echoing Lamentations and the Reproaches from the Good Friday liturgy. Overtones associate Molly Bloom with Ireland in adulterous betrayal" (149-150). Bloom, who abstains from drinking and obnoxious behavior and who is betrayed by Molly's infidelity, therefore becomes the complete human being, subjected to all the temptations and sufferings that life sustains. He fulfills his role as hero, father, and husband, thus becoming the prolific fledgling of Joyce's literary creation.
EPISODE 15--CIRCE (429-609)
SUMMMARY
"Circe" has the structure of a written play complete with extensive narrative stage directions "of lbsenian amplitude, not Shakespearean sparseness" (Kenner, Ulysses 123). The play moves between a naturalistic description of events and simultaneous hallucinatory fantasies from the minds of Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus. The
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imagery of the play, both the naturalistic and hallucinatory events, is bestial; the characters are carnival grotesques.
It is midnight and the drinking party which moved from the hospital to Burke's public-house at the end of the "Oxen of the Sun" episode has now adjourned to Nighttown, Dublin's red-light district. Stephen has been abandoned by all of his friends but Lynch. Bloom is tailing him somewhat incompetently from a distance, and they enter Nighttown by train on Mabbot Street. Stephen, drunk on alcohol and absinthe, proclaims "gesture, not music not odours, would be a universal language" (Joyce 432). Regardless of Stephen's drunken and drugged musings, it is theatrical gesture indeed that will be the language of "Circe." Moreover, foreshadowing the content of the coming hallucinations, Stephen comments on the "shrewridden Shakespeare," "henpecked Socrates," and Aristotle, "the allwisest stagyrite . . . bitted, bridled and mounted by a light of love" (432).
Having momentarily lost his quarry and suffering from "brainfogfag" (43 6), Bloom compulsively enters a pork butcher's shop in Nighttown and purchases innards, which he will later feed to a stray dog. Bloom's first hallucination is of a "Gaelic league spy" (436), an agent of the Citizen from Barney Kiernan's. He then encounters the ghost of his father as an exaggerated Jew, "an elder in Zion" (437), who scolds him for being a spendthrift. He is then haunted by a succession of women: his mother, his wife, and the most recent object of his lust--Gerty MacDowell. Throughout these encounters, we hear the real voice of the Bawd, hawking maidenheads in a Dublin fleshpot.
Next he recalls his earlier encounter with Mrs. Breen, yet his memory of the event dissolves into a fantasy of flirtation and then accusation. As he wanders Nighttown he wonders if his search for Stephen is a "Wildgoose chase" (452). In this moment of apprehension and uncertainty he is accosted in an hallucination by two policeman. After failing to evade them with lies, cliched excuses, and intimations of Masonic power, Bloom is made to stand in a show trial for sexual indiscretions and social pretensions, most of which he is only guilty of in thought.
Again, the play returns to reality with the whore Zoe informing Bloom that Stephen is inside Bella Cohen's brothel. Zoe relieves him of his talismanic potato, and he becomes lost in fantasies of popular acclaim. His increasingly absurd daydreams have him as the "world's greatest reformer" (48 1), "emperor, president and king chairman" (482), and a "hero god" (492). He is the munificent ruler of "the new Bloomusalem" (484). However, Bloom just as absurdly plummets from these lofty heights by abasing himself as hypocrite and masturbator. But he reclaims the sympathy of the people by giving birth to eight male children, all "handsome . . . respectably dressed and wellconducted" (494) and presumably messianic. It is the voice of Zoe which once more returns Bloom to reality.
Meanwhile Stephen, prompted by the conversation of the whore Florry, imagines the coming of the Anti-Christ. He then sees his earlier companions as a goosestepping chorus intoning the Beatitudes or more precisely "the secular . . . B' attitudes" (Blamires 178) of earthy life: "beer beef battledog buybull businum barnum buggerum bishop" (Joyce 509). After a brief intercession of reality, Bloom's late grandfather Virag arrives by the chimney to aid Bloom in scientifically analyzing the various attributes of the prostitutes. Bloom divides into two personas: the solemn
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Bloom and the romantic Henry. Nearby, Stephen, influenced by the conversation of Florry and Lynch, transforms himself into a Cardinal.
At this point Bella Cohen enters after servicing a customer, and almost immediately Bloom is entranced by the "massive whoremistress" (527). Bella is transformed into the masculine Bello and Bloom is humiliated, tortured, and feminized. A chorus of "The Sins of the Past" (537) recounts all of Bloom's past sexual aberrations of thought and of deed. He is condemned to "empty the pisspots" (539) of the whorehouse by day and by night to be a whore himself. Bella/Bello then taunts Bloom by reminding him that "a man of brawn" has taken his place in his Eccles Street bed.
As Bloom returns to reality, he immediately demands the return of his potato from Zoe. He also lucidly takes Stephen's money under his protection from the deceitful prostitutes. Stephen himself, however, is lost in remembrance of breaking his glasses at Clongowes and being pandybatted by Father Dolan who appears to speak the same lines he spoke sixteen years earlier. Bloom, in one final flight of hallucination, imagines himself present at the scene of his own cuckolding by Blazes Boylan. Bloom becomes an antlered hat stand who escorts Boylan to Molly. Boylan tells Bloom: "You can apply your eye to the keyhole and play with yourself while I just go through her a few times" (566).
Stephen engages in a "Dance of Death" (579), and in his final hallucination in the whorehouse is visited by the ghost of his mother from whom he seeks absolution for the matricide for which he feels responsible. He leaves the hallucination, though, reiterating his Miltonic mantra "non serviam! " (582) once again. He climactically smashes Bella Cohen's chandelier with his ashplant. Again, it is Bloom who defends Stephen from the predatory Bella and pays for the damage--notably what he has assessed as its worth, not what she has demanded.
Stephen flees the brothel and immediately embroils himself in contretemps with two British soldiers, and Bloom, after settling Stephen's damages inside, must try to extricate him from his new threat. "Dublin's burning!" (598) in Stephen's mind as Edward VII, a pantheon of Irish heroes, clerical figures, and martial bands materialize to expand the localized street brawl into a national conflagration.
Stephen is ultimately struck down by one of the soldiers, Private Carr, and Bloom courageously keeps the soldiers from doing further damage to him. When the police arrive, he again bravely accuses the soldiers of assaulting Stephen. The episode comes to its final scene as Bloom, caring for the barely coherent young Dedalus, has a vision of his beloved, dead son Rudy.
HOMERIC, SHAKESPEAREAN, AND BIBLICAL PARALLELS
The Homeric analogue of "Circe" is taken from Book X of Tlle Odyssey, in which Odysseus and his crew arrive on the island of the enchantress Kirke, a witch who turns men into beasts. Odysseus remains with his ship and sends a party of men under Eurylokhos to explore the island. All of the party except skeptical Eurylokhos are lured into the hall of Kirke where they are seated on thrones, fed a feast, and given wine laced with a drug "to make them lose desire or thought of [their] dear father land" (Homer 172). After they are drugged, the witch turns them into swine, "though
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their minds were still unchanged" (I 72). Odysseus approaches the hall after Eurylokhos escapes and reports to him. On the way Hermes meets Odysseus and bestows a talismanic root that will protect him from Kirke's drug. Hermes further instructs Odysseus that he must not decline her bed and that he must force her to swear not to trick him or else he will "be unmanned by her as well" (I 74). Odysseus does exactly as the god had instructed him and evades the enchantress' traps. He further appeals to her compassion to return to human form those of his men she has already sent to the sty. Robert Fitzgerald translates the subsequent Homeric catharsis:
"and they were men again, younger, more handsome, taller than before. Their eyes upon me, each one took my hands, and wild regret and longing pierced them through, so the room rang with sobs, and even Kirke pitied that transformation. " (177)
Leopold Bloom too emerges from his dehumanizing scene with Bello, where he is ridden like a horse and threatened with being eaten "like a suckling pig" (Joyce 533), strangely stronger and bolder as he goes on to confront the whoremistress in her den and later Privates Compton and Carr in their street. Bello's earlier Circean claim that Bloom has been "unmanned" (535) is shown to be fallacious.
Other parallels with The Odyssey include Bloom's beloved potato, obviously analogous to the root plant amulet given by Hermes to Odysseus. The feral but gentle "wolfdog . . . with begging paws" (453), which Bloom feeds, recalls the wolves outside Kirke's hall which would not attack but only wag "their long tails . . . like hounds, who look up when their master comes with tidbits for them" (Homer 17 1). Finally, it is in "Circe" that Odysseus/Bloom reunites with Telemachus/Stephen for the return to Ithaca.
The "Circe" play, especially the ghost scene with Stephen and his mother, parallels or more accurately twists Shakespeare's Hamlet. Hamlet the mad prince is haunted by the ghost of his father and the knowledge of his mother's complicity in the dead king's murder. In Ulysses, Stephen Dedalus the mad poet is haunted by the ghost of his mother and his guilt over his own possible complicity in her death. In Hamlet, the prince tries to convince his mother that the ghost of his father is in the bedroom with them. Hamlet tells the Queen, "look you how pale he glares!" (Shakespeare 1168). In a playful echo, Florry the whore points to the ghost-enthralled Stephen and says, "Look! He's white" (Joyce 581). In Shakespeare's play, Hamlet exhorts his very much alive mother to "Repent what's past, avoid what is to come" (Shakespeare II 69); while in Joyce's play it is the ghost-mother who exhorts the melancholy Irishman to "Repent! 0, the fire of hell!" (Joyce 581). Shakespeare even appears as a character in "Circe" to garble his lines from Hamlet: "Weda seca whokilla farst" (568).
Joyce apparently found Homer and William Shakespeare insufficient as sources and was compelled to mine yet another touchstone of the Western Canon: the Bible. In "Circe" the biblical parallels are numerous and strong, especially the imagery of death and resurrection. Bloom rises from the hangman Rumbold's grip as a savior to establish "the new Bloomusalem" (484). Elijah appears to prophesy "Florry Christ, Stephen Christ, Zoe Christ, Bloom Christ, Kitty Christ, Lynch Christ" (507). And in the strongest death and resurrection imagery Stephen, betrayed by "Judas" (600)
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Lynch, carries his ashplant-cross through the crowd to be crucified by the legionnaires of English occupation. In opposition to the Christ imagery of Stephen a black mass replete with black candles
and an "epistle of horns" (599), is performed as a priest in "reversed chasuble . . . celebrates camp mass" (599) over the naked, pregnant body of Mina Purefoy, "goddess of unreason" (599).
ANALYSIS
Stephen Dedalus states in his conversation with Mr. Deasy in "Nestor" that "history . . . is a nightmare from which [he is] trying to awake" (34). With this in mind, Hugh Kenner observes that in "Circe" Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus "must exorcise the nightmare of history: Hebraic, Irish, human" (Ulysses 118). Throughout "Circe," Bloom and Dedalus confront the nightmares of their lives and emerge in the cab shelter in "Eumaeus" somehwhat triumphant.
Stephen, the failed exile, is still in mourning for his mother. He must confront her death and in it come to peace with the heresy he so brazenly declares, but about which he is also so obviously conflicted. He faces her "choking with fright, remorse, and horror" (Joyce 580), but stands firm and tells her, "Cancer did it, not I" (580). Purging her violently with the smashing of the lamp, he goes to the street and is in top intellectual form as he confronts the other specters haunting him: the Irish Church and the English state. He effortlessly outwits the obviously outmatched British privates. Lynch notes, "he likes dialectic, the universal language" (600)--dialectic presumably replacing gesture as Stephen regains his intellectual faculties if not his better judgment. Echoing Voltaire's assertion that the freedom of mankind hinges upon the last king being strangled with the entrails of the last priest, Stephen assaults the personified agents of imperial power by threatening to "kill the priest and king" (589) with the weapon of his mind. In this episode, even if not victorious and even if doomed to wage these battles repeatedly, Stephen at least does valorous and honorable battle on this night.
Bloom journeys to Nighttown ostensibly to watch over Stephen, and does in fact rescue him more than once. However, in the course of the night at the Bella Cohen's brothel, Bloom too must confront the nightmare of his history. Perennially outside, he must engage his own demons--absurd sexual guilt, insurmountable social frustrations, his wife's unfaithfulness, his son's death, and the standard Irish political problems compounded exponentially by his own Jewish ones. Kenner says, "if Bloom is not crushed by his guilt, his apprehensions, and his frustrations, it is because their energies leak off into fantasy, and as 'Circe' proceeds we may follow him working out a course of psychic purgation" ("Circe" 356). Indeed, Bloom awakens from each of his fantastic digressions and remarkably, as Anthony Burgess observes, "the practical man reasserts himself, shakes off the hallucinations" (161). It is, after all, immediately following Bloom's most intensely masochistic scene that he saves Stephen from being fleeced by the prostitutes. Further, it is after a night of living these horrible scenes in his mind that Bloom is able to take charge of the mayhem following Stephen's destruction of Bella's lamp and even successfully challenge the "massive whoremistress" (527) herself. Bloom is once more the cool-headed firm-footed man,
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who as Kenner says, "managed Stephen's assailants with aplomb" (Ulysses 127) in the incident with Private Carr.
Aside from the cathartic possibilities that it offers its two protagonists, "Circe" is necessary to James Joyce's project of creating a "complete man." Kenner states that "what 'Circe' shows us is what we could see and hear were everything pertinent to the going-on translated into terms of seeing and hearing" ("Circe" 345). In the fourteen previous episodes the reader believes he has been privy to the most private thoughts of Bloom. "Circe" truly offers the most private thoughts, possibly those even beyond the consciousness of the thinker himself, and with those we at last have Joyce's Complete Man.
EPISODE 16--EUMAEUS (613-655)
SUMMARY
The Eumaeus episode takes place after midnight, around 1 a.m. It begins after Bloom pulls Stephen away from a street quarrel and is the first episode in which Bloom and Dedalus are together. On Stephen's "expressed desire for some beverage to drink" (613) Bloom suggests the cabman's shelter, and the two begin their walk to the proposed shack/eating house. Wandering through the dark streets of Dublin, Bloom can not help but think about the many dangers of the nocturnal world, such as "desperadoes" who terrorize "pedestrians by placing a pistol at their head" (616). On one dark street, Stephen is hailed by a figure in the shadows, who he eventually recognizes as Corley, a friend of his father's who is recently "on the rocks" (617). Bloom stands aside while the two talk. Corley tells his "on the rocks" story, and Stephen is moved to give Corley a half crown, "even though this sort of thing went on every other night" (617).
Stephen rejoins Bloom and the two navigate their way to the cabman's shelter, passing by a group of Italians in the midst of a heated conversation in their native tongue. The cabman's shelter is owned by a man nicknamed "skin the goat," who may or may not have been involved in a murder committed years earlier by a radical group named the "invincibles." The shack is occupied by sailors and nocturnal prowlers, as Bloom would most likely call them. One red headed sailor, Murphy, asks Stephen his name and then asks if he knows a Simon Dedalus. "I've heard of him" (623) Stephen replies. The sailor then recounts a story of how Simon once shot two eggs off of the heads of bottles from fifty yards, firing with his left hand. The sailor continues to tell a series of adventures he has been on and explains how he is returning to his wife whom he hasn't "seen for seven years now, sailing about" (624). Bloom dreams of sailing about, establishing a singing tour for Molly, and visiting all of the grand places the world has to offer.
The sailors become engrossed in their conversation. Bloom and Stephen have a discussion about religion and politics, where Stephen once again rejects every notion Bloom offers, from socialism to the reality of the soul. "Skin the goat" then professes to everyone the superiority of Ireland and its people and predicts the "return of Pamell" (648), saying the once great leader isn't really dead, but hidden somewhere,
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waiting for the proper time to return to Ireland. Eventually Bloom realizes Stephen hasn't eaten in many hours and invites him back to his house for supper. Stephen accepts the invitation, and the two make their way out of the cabman's shelter and back onto the streets.
HOMERIC PARALLELS
Eumaeus is the first chapter that describes Odysseus's return to Ithaca. Upon return, the voyager encounters Eumaeus, the most faithful of his former servants. Odysseus takes on the guise of a beggar and tells Eumaeus he is a Cretan and recounts several false tales of adventure as a sailor. Odysseus continues this guise when Telemachus arrives at Eumaeus'shack, freshly home from his unsuccessful journey to find his father. Odysseus reveals his true identity once he is assured of both his son's and his servant's loyalty.
The Homeric roles of Stephen and Bloom and other characters are not consistent throughout the Eumaeus episode. On his voyage home, Telemachus avoids an ambush contrived by his mother's suitors. While walking the streets of Dublin, Bloom is always on the lookout for prowlers waiting in the shadows for innocent pedestrians. Corley plays the role of Odysseus as beggar during the encounter on the street, and Stephen plays Eumaeus. In The Odyssey, Eumaeus gives Odysseus food even though he has "heard [his] tale so many times" (Evslin 133), and Stephen gives Corley food even though he has heard his sad tale "every other night" (617). The Cabman's shelter, of course, "corresponds to the steading of the swineherd Eumaeus" (Gilbert 361). The owner of the shelter, "skin the goat," remains loyal to his lost king, Parnell, just as Eumaeus remained loyal to Odysseus. The false tale Odysseus gives to his servant is told in Ulysses through the sailor who approaches Stephen, as he recounts stories of crocodiles biting "the fluke of an anchor same as I chew that quid" and "maneaters in Peru that eats corpses and the livers of horses" (625). Also pervading through Eumaeus is the idea of the "wanderer home from sea after long absence" (Gilbert 362). This idea is also portrayed through the tale-telling sailor returning to his wife and through "skin the goat's" hopeful "return of Parnell." The end of the episode has Bloom finally deciding to return home to Molly, aware of the possibility of suitors lying in wait, just as in Penelope's house.
ANALYSIS
Eumaeus "circles back over the political and social emptiness of Dublin" (Goldberg 291). This theme is expressed the same way it is in other works of Joyce; older people talking of better times such as "skin the goat" talking about Parnell. Beyond this recurrent theme, however, the "primary subject of Eumaeus is language as deception" (French 214). This deception is evident throughout the entire chapter on many levels. The sailor's tales are obviously meant to deceive, just as Corley's sad story is meant to deceive. Bloom is in awe of the beauty of the foreign language being spoken by the Italians outside the cabman's shelter. Stephen lets him know that beautiful as the language may be, the foreigners are merely "haggling over money" (622). Stephen continues to say, "sounds are imposters
. . . like names . . . what's in a name?" (622). This line alludes to Romeo and Juliet, but also reinforces the idea of language as deception. One critic, Marilyn French,
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carries this idea of deception even further, suggesting the "narrative voice is deceptive" (208). French notes the confusing sentence structure in many of the passages, the inability of the two main characters to communicate effectively, and the increase of euphemisms and cliches in this chapter, saying these techniques imply an "avoidance, a concealment or obscurantism" (211) on the narrator's and author's part. This use of narrative technique again suggests the deceptive nature of language.
EPISODE 17--ITHACA (666-737)
SUMMARY
The "Ithaca" episode of Ulysses finds Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus adjourning to 7 Eccles St. at approximately 1:00 a.m., June 17, 1904 (Kenner 25) to decompress from the day's events with cocoa and conversation. The episode is presented as a series of interrogatories and their answers by an apparently objective authorial voice. These answered queries produce a windfall of information. The reader of "Ithaca" learns the physics of a falling Bloom (668), the engineering of the Dublin waterworks (671), and a complete inventory of Bloom's kitchen (675), his bookshelf (708), and his private drawers (720). In addition to this catalog of minutiae, which serves to orient the characters within a grander macrocosm, the formal, catechetical style yields tightly structured representations of the memories, fantasies, and abstract ideas of both Stephen and Leopold that are much more accessible than if they were embedded in the stream-of-consciousness that is the norm throughout the rest of the text.
"Ithaca" begins with Stephen and Leopold traveling to the Bloom house from the cab-shelter of "Eumaeus." Along the way the pair find commonality in their enthusiasm for music, in their "inherited tenacity of heterodox resistance" (666), and their views of the maddening nature of heterosexual attraction. Stephen shows little interest in Bloom's political beliefs, and Bloom show's little interest in Stephen's aesthetic theories. The subject of Stephen's collapse also causes dissent. Bloom common-sensically attributes it to "gastric inanition" (667) and acute alcoholism. Stephen points, pessimistically, to the "matutinal cloud" (667) seen by both that morning.
The couple arrive at the Bloom house and the keyless Leopold, "doubly irritated" (668) at having forgotten after reminding himself twice not to forget his key, devises a "stratagem" (668) to gain entry to the house without waking Molly. He sneaks in through the basement and then opens the hall door to his guest. Bloom next prepares cocoa for the two of them. Bloom, as an act of hospitality, does not use his favorite cup, instead serving both cocoa drinks in identical cups and giving his guest the more generous serving of Molly's precious breakfast cream. By frequently using the word "host," along with "massproduced" and "creature cocoa," Joyce turns the drinking into a "jocoserious" communion (Blamires 228).
Bloom goes on to consider the mathematical relationship of their ages (679), and discusses their common acquaintance, Mrs. Riordan of A Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man. Their parentages, baptismal records and formal educations are compared (682). Neither mentions the racial differences between them (681). Stephen retells the "Parable of the Plums," first told by him in "Aeolus" (147). This evokes in Bloom the "financial . . . possibilities" of "model pedagogic themes" (685), but also a comparison
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with the three Moses', especially Maimonides who synthesized Jewish revelation and Aristotle, or Bloom and Stephen (Blamires 233). The two go on to comparisons of ancient Hebrew and ancient Irish languages and the possible historical connections of their respective peoples. This mingling into the composite "Stoom" and "Blephen" (682), "an apparent instance of circumincession, in that father and son exist reciprocally in one another" (Blamires 234), displays Odysseus and Telemachus, but not in their traditional parent-child roles, rather in more mystical incarnations echoing Bloom's day-long fascination with metempsychosis.
Unmaliciously and at his host's urging, Stephen recites an anti-Semitic rhyme to which Bloom reacts typically by observing his "law of the conservation of energy" (692) that has served him so well whenever violence, physical or emotional, is near. Bloom, who had earlier lamented Molly's "deficient mental development" (686), offers Stephen a room for the night hoping for Italian lessons for her, intellectual stimulation for himself, and possibly a suitor for his daughter (695). "The way to a daughter led through her mother" (695), Bloom avers. He is apparently unaware of his wife's sexual attraction to "clean" Stephen, as she expresses later in "Penelope" (776). She presumably is unaware of Stephen's aversion to bathing. The offer of shelter for the night is declined, but Italian lessons are tentatively bartered for vocal instruction (696). Bloom returns the money that he had tended to for Stephen during "Circe," later itemizing it in his June 16, 1904, budget as a "loan" and a "loan refunded" (71 1), a testament to his scrupulous decency and integrity. Stephen leaves the house with Bloom, and they meditate on the stars and the relationship between moon and woman when Molly luminously makes her presence felt in the window. The masculine pair who had been contemplating silently begin to simultaneously urinate, almost reflexively, as they gaze upon the source of the light.
Alone Leopold Bloom relaxes in his fantasy of landed gentry. He ruminates, motivated by the contents of his locked drawer, upon his father and his father's suicide, which leads to his own imagined destitution and the alternatives available. Finally, exhausted, he retires to his bedroom where he notes the imprint of Blazes Boylan upon his sheets. Rejecting violence he reserves the right of future legal recourse (733). Respecting his "approximate erection" he kisses each of Molly's rear cheeks which leads to a "proximate erection" which is met with "catechetical interrogation" (735). He delivers a prudently edited account of his day, highlighting his encounter with "Stephen Dedalus, professor and author" (735). Molly is conscious of the ten year drought of intercourse with Leopold as he drifts to sleep, at rest except for the motion of the earth, in a fetal position, thinking of Sinbad the Sailor.
HOMERIC PARALLELS
Attempting to alleviate the exertion of forcing the text of Ulysses to conform too narrowly to the structure of The Odyssey, Hugh Kenner states that "in the eighteen episodes . . . the Homeric titles point less to analogy of incident or character than to analogy of situation" (24). However, he counsels that lesser, trivial correspondences' "dubious immanence adds fun to our endless exploration of (Joyce's) book" (30). "Ithaca" does abound with Homeric correspondence and contrast of incidents and characters.
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Bloom devises a "stratagem" to regain entry to his home (Joyce 668) as Odysseus laid a plan to re-enter his home (Homer 264), both like a "menial, by the service door" (Gilbert 371). Bloom kisses the upended rump of Molly (Joyce 734) as Odysseus kisses the ground of Ithaca (Homer 258). And the most overt reference to The Odyssey is in Bloom's recitation of the day's events, eliding what transpired in "Nausicaa" as had Odysseus in telling his adventures to Penelope.
Joyce deviates from Homer with a Telemachus/Stephen who is not terribly interested in Bloom/Odysseus as a father figure whatever other bonds they may have forged. Bloom also, notably, fails to dispense with the suitor Boylan, who is not only not killed, but is not even confronted, and is left unmolested to cuckold him another day. And finally, the reunion of Bloom/Odysseus and Molly/Penelope is ambiguous and unconsummated.
ANALYSIS
Leopold Bloom--defined as a Jew by himself, by his acquaintances (suffering their ignorant and callous remarks in "Hades"), and by vile anti-Semites like the Citizen in "Cyclops" (342)--is confirmed to be of dubious ethnicity in "Ithaca." It is revealed in "Circe" that his mother's maiden name was Irish--"Higgins" (Kenner 141). This is reconfirmed in "Ithaca," and it is further revealed that his maternal grandmother also had an Irish surname--"Hegarty" (682). Talmudic interpretation dictates that Jewish blood is transferred through the distaff line. Bloom's immediate distaff line is shown to be thoroughly Gentile. "Ithaca" also reveals his three baptisms: two Protestant, one Catholic (682), and his father's conversion to Christianity during Bloom's infancy (716). These anomalies--along with the previous revelations such as his intact foreskin in "Nausicaa" (373); his statement in "Eumaeus" that "Christ was a jew . . . like me, though in reality I'm not" (643), refuting his statement in "Cyclops" (Kenner 141); his ravenous appetite for pork; and his apparent atheism--reveal Leopold Bloom as a Jew only by virtue of his father's name. He is defined by the Irish around him as Jewish and therefore defines himself as such, despite his cognizance of the error. The definition has been actualized to the extent that he is reluctant to ask Hynes for repayment of a loan (375) for fear he would be thought of as Reuben J. Dodd, the money-lender. Bloom battles the insurmountable bigotry with the quiet generosity of his giving more of his time and money to Paddy Dignam's widow than anyone else and without drawing attention to himself, visiting Mina Purefoy in the hospital, and caring for Stephen Dedalus. Joyce juxtaposes the oppressed Irish with the oppressed children of Israel, ironically displaying the former as tormentors, ignorant of the object of their scorn, and one of the latter as able, somehow, to live as a decent man despite the intolerable inhospitability of his environment. Stripped of his Judaic credentials, Bloom is transformed from a persecuted minority, victimized by powers beyond his control, to a beleaguered Everyman, victimized by powers beyond his control. By questioning the efficacy of humanity's compulsion to categorize each other, Joyce demonstrates the utter absurdity of racial and religious hatred. This absurdity becomes glaringly obvious in the case of Bloom: a minority of one. This demonstration also begs the question: What is an Irishman? If accurately defining Jewishness is problematic, defining Irishness, given the Celtic propensity for the ethnic assimilation of their centuries of conquerors (Vikings, Normans, English), becomes impossible. It is possible, however, to define Leopold Bloom as a transcendently decent human being.
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Molly in "Penelope" describes Bloom describing himself as the "first socialist" (743). Bloom himself declares his love of "rectitude" as evidenced by his progressive views in the "economic, scientific, and political spheres" (Blamires 240). His quaint, utopian fantasy of himself as dispenser of "unbiased homogenous indisputable justice" (716) yet "mentioned in court and fashionable intelligence" (715) demonstrates his inclinations for social justice dwelling uncomfortably with his craving for material comfort and social acceptance. The two competing ideals can only harmoniously exist in his mind at play. In reality these conflicting goals cause him trouble as in "Oxen in the Sun" where it is shown Bloom "made pro-Boer noises while hanging on to his Empire investments" (Kenner 141). The absurdity of his fantasy is shown in preposterous schemes by which he proposes to finance his dream world, such as a grant from a Rockefeller or the discovery of a gold seam (719). His fantasies, along with his compulsion to calculate costs and profits of virtually every material commodity he encounters, are also a demonstration of how thoroughly the hegemony of capitalism can overwhelm even a remarkably decent and astutely sensitive man like Bloom and define his world for him.
Stephen and Bloom act as a pair of magnetically attracted opposites. Stephen is intellectually brilliant, yet dissipated; Bloom is grounded, yet intellectually pedestrian. Their differences are magnified by their parallax approaches: the youth's vigorous Aristotelian scrutiny which yields knowledge, yet never satiation, and the elder's experiential savvy which yields survival yet never comfort. Stephen Dedalus "affirms his significance as a conscious rational animal proceeding syllogistically from the known to the unknown and a conscious rational reagent between a micro- and a macrocosm ineluctably constructed upon the incertitude of the void" (697). Leopold Bloom "not verbally" but "substantially" affirms "that as a competent keyless citizen he had proceeded energetically from the unknown to the known through the incertitude of the void" (697).
It is this "competent keyless citizen"(697) who returns home in "Ithaca" triumphant over the day. He is even triumphant over Boylan as he notes that Boylan is "a bounder," "a billsticker," and "a boaster" (732); none of these epithets could be used to describe Bloom. His moral triumph over Boylan is demonstrated by his feelings of "more abnegation than jealousy, less envy than equanimity" (733). By demanding breakfast in bed and kissing his wife "on each plump melonous hemisphere" (734), Bloom proclaims his victory. The "beset indestructible man" (Kenner 4) returns undefeated by his journey.
EPISODE 18--PENELOPE (738-783)
SUMMARY
The final episode of Ulysses takes place in the early hours of Friday, June 17, and takes the form of a monologue uttered by Molly Bloom. The structure of the episode is intensely stream-of-consciousness, lacking punctuation and traditional sentence structure. We're taken inside the consciousness of Molly, and to do so is "to plunge into a flowing river. If we have hitherto been exploring the waste land, here are the refreshing, life-giving waters that alone can renew it" (Blamires 608).
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The episode begins with the word "Yes," which resonates throughout Molly's soliloquy and ends the episode as well in a stream of affirmation of life and human love. The entire episode takes place in bed, except for a succession of moments upon the chamber-pot as Molly attends to her menstrual needs and urinates (thereby continuing the theme of herself as symbolic of the female "stream" working for renewal and regeneration of life). Leopold has asked Molly to bring him his breakfast in bed the following morning, and this leads to a series of reflections and reminiscences concerning him. She surmises that he must have ejaculated somewhere: "Im sure by his appetite anyway love its not or hed be off his feed thinking of her" (Joyce 738).
Molly's thoughts turn to a servant-girl, Mary Driscoll, with whom Leopold apparently once had a flirtation, and then to her own connection with Blazes Boylan. She recalls walking between the two men, singing the duet she and Boylan had performed earlier in the evening. Her thoughts turn to matters of sex from there, and then to a confession she once made to a priest. She scoffs at the priest's verbal prudishness and then fantasizes a bit about an imagined sexual liaison with him. Her thoughts segue into a recollection of her afternoon tryst with Boylan. Though she admires the size of his penis-- "no I never in all my life felt anyone had one the size of that to make you feel full up" (Joyce 742)-- she concludes that "Poldy has more spunk in him yes" (Joyce 742).
Molly recalls an old argument over politics and religion she and Poldy once had, and this leads to another succession of reminiscences about her early married days with him. She thinks to herself that while women may be bad enough, men are actually much worse: "Id rather die 20 times over than marry another of their sex of course hed never find another woman like me to put up with him the way I do" (Joyce 744). This leads Molly to recall her first meeting with Boylan, which inevitably sets in motion another series of memories of her days of courtship with Leopold. She then becomes a bit self-conscious about her physicality, thinking "my belly is a bit too big Ill have to knock off the stout at dinner" (Joyce 75).
These reflections about her own body lead Molly to an aesthetic appreciation of her own sex, thinking "the woman is beauty of course" (Joyce 753). She recalls her days of nursing her daughter Milly, and then again her orgasmic afternoon with Boylan. A train whistle sounds, and Molly begins to remember her old days in Gibraltar, before moving to Dublin. She thinks of an old flame, Lieutenant Mulvey, and of their courtship and of a sexual encounter with him. She also remembers her beauty as a young girl and uses the cover of the passing train-whistle to break wind.
Molly's thoughts move from Bloom's late hour of arrival home to her loneliness for Milly, away learning the trade of photography. She notices that her monthly period has arrived, and with it substantial physical discomfort. She hopes that it won't keep her from intimacy with Boylan the following Monday (Joyce 769). She moves to the chamber pot, where she urinates as the menstrual blood flows from her (Joyce 769). Molly considers Leopold's sleeping posture (with his feet at her head), and as George's Church clock strikes the hour, she feels annoyed again with Leopold's late arrival home (Joyce 772).
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Molly's ensuing thoughts of the Glencree Dinner put her in mind of Stephen Dedalus; she thinks "he was on the cards this morning" (Joyce 774) and begins to fantasize about an affair with the young poet. She resolves to throw the cards again the following morning, and soon her thoughts turn again to Boylan, and then as ever back to Bloom. She thinks of the contrast between men and women and their habits, and then sadly of her infant son Rudy's death a decade earlier (Joyce 778). She resolves to give Leopold one more chance at establishing marital relations with her, and thinks that if he doesn't respond, she'll let him know just to what extent he is a cuckold. Molly then recalls her period in annoyance and tries to fall asleep. As her mind continues to drift, she thinks of her love for flowers-- "Id love to have this whole place swimming in roses God of heaven theres nothing like nature" (Joyce 781)-- and this begins the final rush of thoughts which involve her vivid recollection of her first sexual encounter with Leopold, of the passion and affirmation of it. She recalls, "I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes" (Joyce 783).
HOMERIC PARALLELS
In the "Penelope" episode of The Odyssey, Odysseus returns home to Ithaca and his wife Penelope in the guise of "a huddled mass of rags" (Fagles 458). Though her nursemaid tells Penelope of Odysseus' identity, she at first refuses to believe it and sets up a test for the stranger in which she instructs her maid to move Odysseus' bed out of their bedchamber for him. Odysseus responds, "Woman, your words--they cut me to the core! Who could move my bed?" (Fagles 461) and relates how he built their bed around an olive trunk which rendered it immobile: "That's our secret sign, I tell you, our life story!" (Fagles 462). Penelope realizes that the stranger is indeed her husband, and the two retire united to their chamber, Odysseus declaring, "come, let's go to bed, dear woman--at long last delight in sleep, delight in each other, come!" (Fagles 463).
At the end of Joyce's "Penelope" episode, we see Molly Bloom preparing a test for Leopold as she prepares to give him one more chance for marital reparation: "Ill just give him one more chance Ill get up early in the morning . . . Ill put on my best shift and drawers let him have a good eyeful out of that to make his micky stand for him" (Joyce 780). In the same sense that Penelope makes Odysseus pass a test of recognition in homecoming, so Molly, in her own bed, which parallels the olive-trunk marriage bed of The Odyssey, prepares to offer Leopold an opportunity for homecoming through a test involving his knowledge of her, of them, of their "life story."
Though there is not the same sense of closure as in The Odyssey, Molly's final uttered affirmation--"yes I said yes I will Yes" (Joyce 783)--reasserts her essential love for Leopold, as well as her own engagement with the natural world, of the essence of creation. Her stream of conscious reverie is analogous to the waters which wash Odysseus home to his own wife and bed.
ANALYSIS
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The household symbol for Molly's monologue is the bed, which represents a Homeric parallel of homecoming as well as the theatre for human procreation, for restoration of life's creative forces through sexual intercourse. Molly's voice is the essence of female creative energy, with its constant recurrent "Yeses" and its streamlike structure as her inner discourse flows from one subject to another, with an emphasis on her love for Leopold and all its implications the point to which it consistently returns. The soliloquy is full of images of nature, of mountains and flowers and rivers and seas. Stuart Gilbert asserts that Molly "is not a degenerate modern playing at a 'return to nature', phallus-worship, the simple life and what not; she is the voice of Nature herself, and judges as the Great Mother, whose function is fertility . . . whose pleasure is creation and the rite precedent" (Gilbert 400).
The episode is full of references to the Virgin Mary, ranging from Mary Driscoll, the Bloom's old houseservant, to Molly's singing of Ave Maria (Joyce 729), to a momentary use of "O Maria Santissima " as expletive. Molly is the conjunction of the two mythic Marys, of the temptress and the maternal, compassionate Mother of God. While her sexuality is undeniable and lush, she is not strictly representative of a Magdalene archetype. She speaks in the tones of a Gaia figure, her voice encompassing rich natural metaphor, and her own wit and quick mind flesh her out as a woman who sees beyond the scope of what men see. Her train of thought is honest, rich, and associative, informing us with unsparing honesty in each of her smallest personal rituals and bodily functions. Her menstruation and urination reinforce the metaphor of her voice as streamlike, of the cyclical river of consciousness which celebrates the physical, the earthly, and the real.
The Context of James Joyce's Ulysses
Ulysses, a Modernist reconstruction of Homer's epic The Odyssey, was James Joyce's first epic-length novel. The Irish writer had already published a collection of short stories entitled Dubliners, as well as A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, the semi-autobiographical novella, whose protagonist, Stephen Dedalus, reappears in Ulysses. Immediately hailed as a work of genius, Ulysses is still considered to be the greatest of Joyce's literary accomplishments and his first two works anticipated what was to come in Ulysses. The novel was written over the span of several years, during which Joyce continued to live in self-imposed exile from his native Ireland. Ulysses was published in Paris in the year of 1922--the same year in which T. S. Eliot published his widely regarded poem, "The Waste Land."
Within English literature, the "Modernist" tradition includes most of the British and American literary figures writing between the two world wars, and James Joyce is considered among the likes of T. S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf: standard-bearers who initiated the Modernist "revolution" against the Victorian "excesses of civilization." Even today, Ulysses is widely regarded as the most "revolutionary" literary efforts of the twentieth century if only for Joyce's "stream of consciousness" technique. In his efforts to create a modern hero, Joyce returned to classical myth only to deconstruct a Greek warrior into a parody of the "Wandering Jew." Joyce's hero, Leopold Bloom, must suffer the emotional traumas of betrayal and loss, while combating the anti-Semitism of 1904 Dublin. In place of Greek stoicism and power, Joyce set a flawed
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and endearing human being. And while Homer's The Odyssey only touched upon "epic," dignified themes, Joyce devoted considerably detailed passages to the most banal and taboo human activities: gluttony, defecation, urination, dementia, masturbation, voyeurism, alcoholism, sado-masochism and coprophilia-and most of these depictions included the hero, Bloom.
Joyce saw Ulysses as the confluence of his two previous works. From Dubliners, Joyce borrowed the fatalistic and naturalistic depictions of a gritty, urban center. Ulysses is impressive for its geography alone, charting almost twenty hours of Dublin's street wandering, "bar-hopping" and marine commerce. Even though Joyce took alternate residences in Switzerland, Italy and France, he was able to paint Dublin from his almost perfect memory. While Leopold Bloom is the major character of the work, Joyce spends considerable time focusing on Stephen Dedalus, the protagonist of his first work. It is through Stephen, that Joyce is able to debate the contentious religious and political issues that dominated the novella. Unsurprisingly, Joyce's portrays Dublin as the semi-complicit victim of Britain's aggression and the Roman Catholic Church's oppression. Joyce continues his argument as a non-conformist, that the Roman Catholic Church's structure facilitated corruption and more generally contributed to the alienation and rot of the human soul as opposed to its uplift.
At the same time, the Irish population was governed by the British and kept under close watch. The British occupying force humiliated Irish patriots, and this permanent military presence was one of the principal obstacles on the path towards Irish "Home Rule." Despite Joyce's resentment towards Britain's colonial outlook, his most dramatic political evolution since Portrait, is his rejection of Ireland's nascent nationalist fervor. The patriots and zealots of Ulysses are invariably buffoons or villains. Frequently they are drunk, and their national agendas usually feature misogynist and anti-Semitic corollaries. Most notably, Joyce satirizes the campaigned "Renaissance" of the Irish language and we should remember that Ulysses accomplished the double act of establishing Joyce as the premier stylist of the English language while giving Ireland a national bard and epic.
But Ulysses' ascension into the literary canon was not a simple one even though the novel sold well in Paris. Critics heralded Joyce's genius and wit, though the book's incredible opacity, numerous deceptions and tedious allusions were a source of contention. In Ulysses, Joyce attempted to replicate the thoughts and activities of genuine human beings, but Joyce's "outhouse humor" even drew criticism from literary familiars like Virginia Woolf. The allegedly "pornographic" novel was immediately banned in the United Kingdom as well as the United States. The frank sexuality of the "Penelope" episode and Bloom's sado-masochistic "hallucinations" in the "Circe" chapter elicited the strongest reactions. Despite the moral indignation, Ulysses was a smuggled commodity and Joyce's literary stature rose considerably among literary communities on both sides of the Atlantic. Nonetheless, it was well over a decade before a Random House court victory ined the first American publications of the novel, which became available in Britain two years later.
Concealing Dalkey Hill: Evasion and Parallax in "Nausicaa"
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T.S. Eliot declared that Ulysses was a masterpiece because it demonstrated the futility of all prior literary styles. Indeed, the episodes of "Oxen of the Sun" and "Aeolus" could be taken as challenging primers on English style and rhetoric. This kaleidoscopic potential is seemingly reduced to a stark black-and-white vision in "Nausicaa." As many critics have pointed out, Joyce stylizes Gerty MacDowell's half of the narrative with a saccharine veneer which euphemizes her sexual encounter (itself a distanced and euphemized rendezvous) with Bloom. The first-time reader and seasoned critics alike are led into sneering at Gerty behind the safety of the author's overt critique of her superficiality; only when Joyce reveals the psychological origin of her constant evasion - her lame leg, a condition which is only hinted at until Bloom notices it post-climax - are the first seeds of pity sown in the reader's mind. The audience's appreciation of Gerty's "defect" grows "ten times worse" (301) in light of Bloom's uncharacteristically cavalier and scurrilous attitude towards a fellow outsider in which he, too, is guilty of his own brand of sexual evasion. As the reader implicitly identifies Bloom's rather heartless outlook with his own, he compensates for his initial condemnation of Gerty's character by sentimentalizing her with a Dickensian gloss - and thus is held as culpable of evasion as the episode's heroine and hero. Joyce's manipulation of his audience's expectations is never deployed through explicit moralizing but through his parallactic style (a concept distinct from the stylistic cornucopia present elsewhere in the novel), a shifting mode through which he questions the objectivity of sentiment.
Euphemism, linguistic and otherwise, is the most obvious form of evasion throughout "Nausicaa." But the root of Gerty's flowery language runs deeper than simple women's-magazine parody. The ambiguous tension between romanticization and shame-avoidance clouds the first half of the narrative, even before Gerty has been introduced. After Cissy Caffrey coaxes the words " - A jink a jink a jawbo" out of the baby, Joyce continues the baby-talk alliteration: "Cissy Caffrey cuddled the wee chap" (284). Cissy later chides her two other brothers for fighting: "And you, Jacky, for shame to throw poor Tommy in the dirt sand" (285). "Shame" is the operative word here; the conservative narrative dispenses only negations and puns on prostitution: "His little man-o'-war top and unmentionables were full of sand but Cissy was a past mistress in the art of smoothing over life's tiny troubles" (285). The cause of Tommy's own thrice-repeated cry of "Nao," a negation which recalls the cat's "Mkgnao" (45) and Molly's "Mn" (46) of "Calypso," is incontinence, an act so shameful it must be hidden from Bloom's view: "Cissy whispered to Edy Boardman to take him there behind the pushcar where the gentleman couldn't see and to mind he didn't wet his new tan shoes" (285).
Underneath the hyperbolic surface, Joyce exercises great restraint when dropping faint clues to Gerty's lameness. When the children's ball falls by her feet, Gerty is forced to kick it away and the narrative voice merges with hers: "Gerty drew back her foot but she wished their stupid ball hadn't come rolling down to her and she gave a kick but she missed and Edy and Cissy laughed" (292). Gerty - or Joyce, whoever is controlling the voice here - doesn't detail any further why "A delicate pink crept into her pretty cheek" (292) after her missed kick; the decision not to succumb to self-pity concerning her lameness is the product of a stoicism we are initially unequipped to attribute to Gerty, or is obscured by her omnipresent shame which manifests itself later in the paragraph (when induced by Bloom's gaze): "She felt the warm flush, a danger signal always with Gerty MacDowell, surging and flaming into her cheeks"
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(292). Her blushing itself serves a similarly dual purpose, attracting Bloom as coquettish make-up and exteriorizing her juvenile embarrassment. Joyce prompts a dissection of his/Gerty's heightened prose when she first acknowledges her lameness (without ever specifically defining it):
Art thou real, my ideal? it was called by Louis J Walsh, Magherafelt, and after there was something about twilight, wilt thou ever? and ofttimes the beauty of poetry, so sad in its transient loveliness, had misted her eyes with silent tears for she felt that the years were slipping by for her, one by one, and but for that one shortcoming she knew she need fear no competition and that was an accident coming down Dalkey hill and she always tried to conceal it. (298)
Joyce's subtextual wordplays and rhymes are masterful in this extended sentence, one whose subject and rhythm correspond to her limping gait. "Wilt," of course, also means "To cause to become limp" (OED, 3.2a), and plays off the sound (and a reordering of the first four letters) of the romantic "twilight." The real versus ideal dilemma posed by Walsh receives reinforcement from the rhymes or half-rhymes throughout: real/ideal/tears/years/hill/conceal. The ideal is the sweeping language of the first half of the sentence, and the real is the awkward run-on phrasing of the remainder. As a synopsis for Gerty's questioning of Bloom throughout the episode, her lofty and idealized self-indulgence also butts against the very real and hastily delivered admission of her "one shortcoming." We now slightly recant our impression of Gerty and are made to group her as another of the novel's many outsiders, a status that is difficult not to sentimentalize. The relative weight of her mysterious ailment is still too minimal compared to her superficial prose, however, to warrant our full sympathy. Nevertheless, the poetic, if hackneyed, language of "Nausicaa" does provide great relief from the previous oppressive atmosphere of "The Cyclops" and spurs an identification with Gerty away from which the reader reluctantly turns - we both detest and delight in the liberal and sensuous prose. Only later, when the familiarity of Bloom's vulgarity becomes unbearable, does Joyce allow the reader any potential room to disavow his connection with Bloom and favor Gerty.
But it is still not so easy to choose sides in "Nausicaa." The recognition of his recent cuckolding impedes Bloom's merriment in both his masturbatory and literary conquests and redeems him for the reader. However crass he may be, his bare, critical introspection is compensatory enough for the reader, who remains aware of the undercurrent of sexual anxiety in all of Bloom's thoughts. He wonders about the coincidence between his stopped watch and that afternoon's tryst: "Funny my watch stopped at half past four.Was that just when he, she? O, he did. Into her. She did. Done" (303). The fragmented sentences are typical of Bloom's self-censorship of unpleasant issues, but his cry of "O" inverts the euphoric and orgasmic repetition of "O" during the fireworks: "And then a rocket sprang and bang shot blind blank and O! then the Roman candle burst and it was like a sigh of O! and everyone cried O! O!" (300) Bloom similarly negates the "O," perhaps worth noting as Elizabethan allusion to the vagina, after he notes Gerty's lameness: "Tight boots? No. She's lame! O!" (301) Bloom's causes for evasion from love are many; his interrupted scrawl in the sand of "I. AM. A" (312) can, in the context of the episode, gain some significance in the Latinate root of ama-, or love. Bloom's diminished capacity for love finds its simile in the staying power of evanescent sand: "Mr Bloom effaced the letters with his slow boot. Hopeless thing sand. Nothing grows in it. All fades. No fear of big vessels
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coming up here" (312). The vessel is a symbolic constant throughout Ulysses for the woman's body, and Bloom's evasion from bodily intimacy throughout "Nausicaa" (where even writing fails him, unlike in previous erotic "encounters") pivots around the centrality of the masculine gaze as a detached and alienated form of intercourse.
Joyce abandons his subtle description of Gerty's leg and exaggerates the episode's treatment of eyes and their spatially opposed purpose of assimilating external information while applying it internally, usually to self-centered use. Edy's "shortsighted" or "squinty" eyes are brought up three times (285, 287, 295) as evidence for her jealousy, unattractiveness, and inability to project; conversely, Gerty's beautiful eyes, given to equally beautiful projections, are praised as "a charm few could resist" (286). Even when she is seemingly left alone, Joyce makes it clear that her gaze is always reciprocated: "Gerty MacDowell who was seated near her companions, lost in thought, gazing far away into the distance was, in very truth, as fair a specimen of winsome Irish girlhood as one could wish to see" (285-286). Gerty's receptive role as a magnified "specimen" confers on her a distorted sense of autoerotism (or in Gerty's euphemized case, auto-emotion-ism) rooted in her eyes: "Her very soul is in her eyes and she would give worlds to be in the privacy of her own familiar chamber where, giving way to tears, she could have a good cry and relieve her pentup feelings though not too much because she knew how to cry nicely in front of a mirror" (288). Like Martha's malapropian dislike of "that other world" (63), Gerty's "worlds" are a nexus of the public and private; nothing about Gerty's internal world, not even her vision, is entirely self-directed (unlike Bloom who, at times, hardly exists outside his head). This doesn't detract from the potency of her eyes - Bloom's self-appraisal shows his insecurity in receiving the gaze: "Saw something in me. Wonder what ought to attend to my appearance. Didn't let her see me in profile. Still, you never know. Pretty girls and ugly men marrying" (302). "In profile" - is Bloom hiding his Jewishness? That Gerty is the cyclopean Citizen's granddaughter - "the photograph of grandpapa Giltrap's lovely dog Garryowen" (289) - only heightens the irony that, even with her two perfect eyes, Gerty has little depth perception. Still, at times Gerty somehow knows details of Bloom's life without seeing them, and at other times is completely oblivious. This polarity lies at the heart of her romanticization of their encounter, as she (and Joyce) places Bloom and herself into alternating categories of opposition.
Gerty's parallactic perceptions of Bloom are remarkable, often allowing for adjustment in a single phrase. She correctly identifies Bloom through his countenance as a "foreigner," but is unable to determine "whether he had an aquiline nose or a slightly retrous ) "293 . If Bloom is hiding his profile for religious reasons, Gerty is certainly confused: "Even if he was a protestant or methodist she could convert him easily if he truly loved her" (293). Later, however, she gains petty satisfaction from the fact that Edy is out of contention for Bloom's attention because of her outsider status, social or sexual - the one supposed link, albeit tenuous, between Bloom and Gerty herself: "and they both knew that [Edy] was something aloof, apart, in another sphere, that she was not of them and never would be and there was somebody else too that knew it and saw it" (297). The reader cycles between astonishment at Gerty's sixth sense and contempt for her blind insensitivity. Just as she is referred to as a "girlwoman" and then as a "womanly woman" (293), Gerty amalgamates Bloom's role as both the somewhat effete tragic hero "in deep mourning" (293) and the aggressive bermensch: "Then mayhap he would embrace her gently, like a real man, crushingذ
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her soft body to him, and love her, his ownest girlie, for herself alone" (294). The dichotomy of gentleness and crushing is further stratified by the ambiguous sense of possession - the phrases "his ownest" and "for herself alone" suggest Gerty's conflicting desire for selfish subjugation. That she shares her name with Hamlet's appetitive mother and has "a languid queenly hauteur" seems to cast Bloom in two roles, as both the cuckolded King Hamlet and the adulterous Claudius. Our perception of him is similarly divided, with sympathy for his failing marriage but disapproval for his seduction of a young girl.
Joyce toys with these oppositions in the entr'acte between Gerty's and Bloom's narrative halves. The narration veers towards Bloom's mind at first: "A fair unsullied soul had called to him and, wretch that he was, how had he answered? An utter cad he had been!" (300) Though in the third person, these sentences may very well be in Bloom's head. But the authorial voice is again fractured: "Should a girl tell? No, a thousand times no. That was their secret, only theirs" (301). Perhaps Gerty is wondering if she should reveal her secret to anyone - the girlish confirmation of "only theirs" validates this claim - but the question may also be borne from Bloom's sudden panic that he will be discovered. The perspectival splintering is not exclusive to Gerty and Bloom. Gerty's contention that "she felt instinctively that he was like no-one else" may be true in Bloom's case, but her embellishment to fit her own selfish needs contrasts with Molly's generalized view of Bloom during his proposal: "I thought as well him as another" (643-644). Molly refuses to endow Bloom with the uniqueness she knows exists, but her motivation for accepting him makes her stubbornness more palatable and honest: "yes that was why I liked him because I saw he understood or felt what a woman is" (643).
Gerty's sentimentally evasive reasons for accepting Bloom's visual proposition are countered, as usual, by similar evasions on Bloom's part, justifications that extend deep into taboo and both titillate and disturb the reader. Immediately after Bloom makes his obligatory comment of "Poor girl!" (301) as he does for Dignam and any other unfortunate creature, he allows his faءade to fall: "Glad I didn't know it when she was on show. Hot little devil all the same. I wouldn't mind" (301). His thoughts then run the gamut from his generalizations of women to explicit sexuality to Molly - all retreats from the fact that he just masturbated in the presence of a seventeen-year-old. Yet these are difficult passages for the reader to ignore. The graphic content that courses through the episode excites us as much as it does Bloom, and we find ways to separate ourselves from him. Joyce twice triangulates paragraphs of the sexual encounter, the temperance litany backdrop, and the children at play (292, 294) as a means of exposing evasion in its simplest terms in hopes that the reader will recognize similar escapism in himself.
Ultimately, the motive behind evasion must remain somewhat unclear, at least for Bloom. When he thinks back on his decidedly evasive action from violence in Barney Kiernan's, he reminds himself of the necessity for perspectival inclusion:
"Mistake to hit back. Or? No. Ought to go home and laugh at themselves. Always want to be swilling in company. Afraid to be alone like a child of two. Suppose he hit me. Look at it other way round. Not so bad then. Perhaps not to hurt he meant. Three cheers for Israel." (311)
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Bloom's mollification of the Citizen's undoubtedly hostile remark may spring from either cowardice or his underlying sense of humanity, depending on how one takes it. And that parallactic means of interpretation is what "Nausicaa" requires - not only for interpreting the text, but for interpreting our interpretation. We, after all, are the ultimate voyeurs in an episode of purely visual interaction. To commit our literary resources to uncovering the work alone, and not ourselves, is yet another instrument of evasion.
Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) In 1878, Leslie Stephen and Julia Jackson Duckworth married, a second marriage for both. They gave birth to Adeline Virginia Stephen four years later on the 26th of March at 22 Hyde Park Gate, London. Virginia followed Vanessa and Julian Thoby and preceded Adrian. Leslie Stephen began his career as a clergyman but soon became agnostic and took up journalism. He and Julia provided their children with a home of wealth and comfort. Virginia, though denied the formal education allowed to males, was able to take advantage of her father's abundant library, to observe his writing talent, and to be surrounded by intellectual conversation. The same year Virginia was born, for instance, her father began editing the Dictionary of National Biography, a huge undertaking. Virginia's mother was more delicate and helped to bring out the more emotional sides of her children. Both parents were very strong personalities. By them, Virginia would feel overshadowed for years.
Virginia would suffer through three major mental breakdowns during her lifetime. In all likelihood, her compulsive drive to work, which she acquired from her parents, combined with her natural fragile state largely contributed to these breakdowns. Yet, the situation was more complicated. Her first breakdown was suffered shortly following the death of her mother in 1895, which Virginia later described as "the greatest disaster that could have happened." Some have suggested that Virginia may have felt guilt over choosing her father as the favorite parent. However, her mental state could not have been aided by the excessive mourning period enacted by her father. Two years later, Stella Duckworth, Virginia's stepsister, died. Stella had assumed charge of the household duties after Julia's death, causing a rift between her and Virginia. Virginia fell sick soon after her death. The same year, Virginia began her first diary.
Over the next seven years, Virginia's decision to write took hold and her admiration for women grew. She educated herself and greatly admired women such as Madge Vaughan, daughter of John Addington Symonds, who wrote novels and would later be illustrated as Sally Seton in Mrs. Dalloway. Her admiration for strong women was coupled with a growing dislike for the male domination in society. Virginia's feelings were likely effected by her relationship to her stepbrother, George Duckworth, who was already fourteen when Virginia was born. In the last year of her life, Virginia wrote to a friend regarding the shame she felt when, at the age of six, she was fondled
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by George. Similar incidents reoccurred throughout her childhood until Virginia was in her early twenties.
In 1904, her father, shortly after he finished the Dictionary and received a knighthood, died. Though freed from his shadow, Virginia was still overcome by the event and suffered her second mental breakdown, combined with scarlet fever and an attempted suicide. When she recovered, Virginia left Kensington with her three siblings and moved to Bloomsbury, where she began to seriously consider herself an artist. She was able to immerse herself in the intellectual company of Thoby and his Cambridge friends. This group, including E.M. Forster and Lytton Strachey, later formed what was known as the Bloomsbury Group, under the Cambridge don G.E. Moore . They were dedicated to the liberal discussion of politics and art. In 1906, Thoby died of typhoid fever and Virginia's sister married one of Thoby's college friends, Clive Bell. Virginia was on her own.
Over the next four years, Virginia would begin work on her first novel, The Voyage Out. In 1909, she accepted a marriage proposal from Strachey, who later broke off the engagement. She received a legacy of 2,500 pounds the same year which would allow her to live independently. In 1911, Leonard Woolf, another of the Bloomsbury Group, returned from Ceylon and they were married in 1912. Woolf was the stable presence Virginia needed to control her moods and steady her talent. He gave their home a musical atmosphere. Virginia trusted his literary judgment. Their marriage was a partnership, though some suggest their sexual relationship was nonexistent. Virginia fell ill more frequently as she grew older, often taking respite in rest homes and in the care of her husband. In 1917, Leonard founded the Hogarth Press to publish their own books, hoping that Virginia could bestow the care on the press that she would have bestowed on children. She had been advised by doctors to not become pregnant after her third serious breakdown in 1913. The Voyage Out was published earlier in that year. Virginia was fond of children, however, and spent much time with her brother and sister's children. Through the press, she had an early look at Joyce's Ulysses and aided authors such as Forster, Freud, Isherwood, Mansfield, Tolstoy, and Chekov. She sold her half interest in 1938.
Before her death, Virginia would publish an extraordinary amount of ground breaking material. She was a renowned member of the Bloomsbury group and a leader of the modernist literary movement. Over the course of many illnesses, the most notable publications of Virginia's were Night and Day, The Mark on the Wall, Jacob's Room, Monday or Tuesday, Mrs. Dalloway, To The Lighthouse, Orlando, A Room of One's Own, The Waves, The Years, and Between the Acts. She had intense powers of concentration which allowed her to work ten to twelve hour days. In total, she accumulated a treasure chest of work, containing five volumes of collected essays and reviews, two biographies (Flush and Roger Fry), two libertarian books, a volume of selections from her diary, nine novels, and a volume of short stories. In March of 1941, Woolf left a suicide note behind for her husband and sister before drowning herself in a nearby river. She feared her madness was returning and that she would not be able to continue writing. She wished to spare her loved ones. The time was World War II England; she and Leonard had sworn to commit suicide if the Nazis had invaded.
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Mrs. Dalloway
In Jacob's Room, the novel preceding Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf works with many of the same themes she later expands upon in Mrs. Dalloway. To Mrs. Dalloway, she added the theme of insanity. As Woolf stated, "I adumbrate here a study of insanity and suicide; the world seen by the sane and the insane side by side." However, even the theme that would lead Woolf to create a double for Clarissa Dalloway can be viewed as a progression of other similar ideas cultivated in Jacob's Room. Woolf's next novel, then, was a natural development from Jacob's Room, as well as an expansion of the short stories she wrote before deciding to make Mrs. Dalloway into a full novel.
The Dalloways had been introduced in the novel, The Voyage Out, but Woolf presented the couple in a harsher light than she did in later years. Richard is domineering and pompous. Clarissa is dependent and superficial. Some of these qualities remain in the characters of Mrs. Dalloway but the two generally appear much more reasonable and likeable. Clarissa was modeled after a friend of Woolf's named Kitty Maxse, whom Woolf thought to be a superficial socialite. Though she wanted to comment upon the displeasing social system, Woolf found it difficult at times to respond to a character like Clarissa. She discovered a greater amount of depth to the character of Clarissa Dalloway in a series of short stories, the first of which was titled, "Mrs. Dalloway in Bond Street," published in 1923. The story would serve as an experimental first chapter to Mrs. Dalloway. A great number of similar short stories followed and soon the novel became inevitable. As critic Hermione Lee details, "On 14 October 1922 [Woolf] recorded that ŒMrs. Dalloway has branched into a book,' but it was sometime before [Woolf] could find the necessary balance between Œdesign and substance.'"
Within the next couple years, Woolf became inspired by a Œtunneling' writing process, allowing her to dig Œcaves' behind her characters and explore their souls. As Woolf wrote to painter Jacques Raverat, it is "precisely the task of the writer to go beyond the Œformal railway line of sentence' and to show how people Œfeel or think or dream...all over the place.'" In order to give Clarissa more substance, Woolf created Clarissa's memories. Woolf used characters from her own past in addition to Kitty Maxse, such as Madge Symonds, on whom she based Sally Seton. Woolf held a similar type of affectionate devotion for Madge at the age of fifteen as a young Clarissa held for Sally.
The theme of insanity was close to Woolf's past and present. She originally planned to have Clarissa die or commit suicide at the end of the novel but finally decided that she did want this manner of closure for Clarissa. As critic Manly Johnson elaborates, "The original intention to have Clarissa kill herself in the pattern of Woolf's own intermittent despair was rejected in favor of a Œdark double' who would take that act upon himself. Creating Septimus Smith led directly to Clarissa's mystical theory of vicarious death and shared existence, saving the novel from a damaging balance on the side of darkness." Still, the disassociation of crippling insanity from the character
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of Clarissa Dalloway did not completely save Woolf from the pain of recollection. Woolf's husband and close friends compared her periods of insanity to a manic depression quite similar to the episodes experienced by Septimus. Woolf also included frustratingly impersonal doctor types in Bradshaw and Holmes that reflected doctors she had visited throughout the years.
As the novel focused mainly on the character of Clarissa Dalloway, Woolf changed the name of the novel to Mrs. Dalloway from its more abstract working title, The Hours, before publishing it. Woolf struggled to combine many elements that impinged on her sensibility as she wrote the novel. The title, Mrs. Dalloway, best suited her attempts to join them together. As Woolf commented, "In this book I have almost too many ideas. I want to give life and death, sanity and insanity; I want to criticize the social system, and to show it at work, at its most intense." Furthermore, she hoped to respond to the stagnant state of the novel, with a consciously Œmodern' novel. Many critics believe she succeeded. The novel was published in 1925, and received much acclaim
Character List:
Clarissa Dalloway: The heroine of the novel, Clarissa is analyzed in terms of her life, personality, and thought process throughout the book by the author and other characters. She is viewed from many angles. Clarissa enjoys the moment-to-moment aspect of life and believes that a piece of her remains in every place she has visited. She lacks a certain warmth, but is a caring woman who is touched by the people around her and their connection to life in general. Clarissa feels that her parties are her gift to the world and is proud to share herself with others. She loves to be accepted but has the acuity of mind to perceive her own flaws, especially since her recent illness. Clarissa is a representative of an uppity English gentry class and yet, defies categorization because of her humanity and her relation to her literary double, Septimus Warren Smith. She is superficially based on Woolf's childhood friend, Kitty Maxse.
Richard Dalloway: Clarissa's husband, Richard is in love with his wife but feels uncomfortable showing his affection. A member of the government, he continually must attend councils, committees, and important meetings. He is called on by Lady Bruton for counsel, but is viewed by Sally Seton as not reaching his potential. She and Peter feel that he would have rather been in the country on a farm. Clarissa was attracted to him for his direct ideas, command of situations, and facility with animals.
Elizabeth Dalloway: Clarissa and Richard's daughter, she is described as strangely dark and exotic looking. She garners much attention from suitors but would rather spend her time in the country with her father and dog than at her mother's party. She is close to Miss Kilman but finds Miss Kilman odd and awkward at times. She sometimes imagines that she may be a veterinarian so that she can care for animals.
Peter Walsh: Clarissa's beau before Richard, Peter does not see Clarissa often after their break up. He had moved to India, married, separated, and then fallen in love again. The day of the novel, he returns to London and visits Clarissa. There is still an intensity between them and Peter reveals later to Sally Seton that Clarissa ruined his life by refusing to marry him. He rethinks much of their time at Bourton and decides
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to attend Clarissa's party even though he hates her parties. He waits the entire party just to speak with her or be near her.
Lucy: Clarissa's principal servant, Lucy has the run of the house. She is proud of its ability to effuse beauty and honor.
Mrs. Walker: Another servant, Mrs. Walker is older and has been handling the dinners at the parties for many years.
Sally Seton/Lady Rosseter: As a young woman, she was Clarissa's best friend, staying with Clarissa at Bourton because she was considerably poorer than Clarissa. Sally enjoyed causing a raucous by making outrageous claims and acting on a rebellious instinct that led her to smoke cigars, run naked down the halls, and do other crazy stunts that were not condoned by Clarissa's relatives. She represents Clarissa's true but unfulfilled love. As an older woman, she has surprisingly married a wealthy man and had a family, though she retains many of her spirited qualities.
Hugh Whitbread: A proper English gentleman, Hugh feels that he makes an important contribution to English society by writing letters to the London Times, helping different committees, attending parties at the Palace, and giving to small charities. He has been friends with Clarissa since childhood. Peter and Richard find him stiff and boring.
Miss Kilman: The woman whom Richard has hired to tutor Elizabeth in history, she is continually at odds with Clarissa. She has communist sympathies and feels bitter and repulsed by those of wealth and privilege such as Clarissa. Clarissa detests the attention she takes from her daughter as well as her self-sacrificing, condescending demeanor.
Miss Pym: The woman who works at the florist on Bond Street, she notes that Clarissa was once very kind. She is polite and apologetic to an extreme.
Septimus Warren Smith: Often considered Clarissa's doppelganger, Septimus was a successful, intelligent, literary young man before World War I. During the war, he wins many honors and friends. After a good friend, Evans, is killed, he realizes that he can no longer feel. Marrying Rezia in an attempt to move on, Septimus never regains an emotional attachment to the world. The couple moves back to London and Septimus returns to his good job, but he slowly slips into further depths of despair and horror. He hears voices, namely of Evans, and becomes extremely sensitive to color and natural beauty. The doctors compound his problems by ignoring them, and they become the embodiment of evil and humanity, in his mind. When Dr. Holmes pushes into his home to see him, Septimus throws himself out the window to his death.
Lucrezia Warren Smith: Septimus' wife, Lucrezia lived in Italy before marrying and made hats with her sister. She is young and fun loving, but becomes seriously humiliated and sad when Septimus starts slipping into insanity. She wanted a normal marriage with children, not a man who talks to himself. When they first met, he had introduced her to Shakespeare and listened to her. Rezia tries to protect her husband from the doctors, but, in the end, she cannot.
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Maisie Johnson: A young woman fresh from Scotland, she is frightened by the Smiths in Regent's Park and wonders if she should have come to London after all.
Carrie Dempster: An older, lower class woman in Regent's Park, who imagines the future life of Maisie Johnson based on Maisie's appearance while evaluating her own life.
Lady Bruton: The daughter of a general, she is an older woman much more concerned with the British Empire than relationships or society. She invited Richard, but not Clarissa, to lunch causing Clarissa to question her own purpose. She and Clarissa have little in common.
Dr. Holmes: The overbearing doctor who first treats Septimus, he insists that nothing is wrong with Septimus and commands that Rezia try to keep his mind on other things. Septimus views him with hatred, feeling that the doctor represents the evils of human kind trying to stifle him. It is Holmes rushing up the stairs past Rezia that persuades Septimus to kill himself.
Sir William Bradshaw: The esteemed psychologist who treats Septimus after Dr. Holmes, Bradshaw recommends rest in the country for Septimus so he can be reoriented to Bradshaw's strict ideal of proportion. He recognizes that Septimus is seriously suffering from post-war anguish. He is hated by Septimus because he represents humanity along with Holmes, by Rezia because he tries to separate the couple, and by Clarissa because he makes the lives of his patients intolerable.
Lady Bradshaw: The doctor's upstanding wife, the Lady tells Clarissa of Septimus' death, bringing unwanted death into Clarissa's party. The Lady is a very good amateur photographer, but, ironically, had a mental breakdown years ago.
Milly Brush: Lady Bruton's secretary, Milly is also a confidant and good friend. She cannot tolerate the pomposity and extreme politesse exuded by Hugh Whitbread.
The Morrises: A family that is staying at Peter's hotel, they eat dinner at the same time as Peter and befriend him in the smoking room afterwards.
The Prime Minister: The man perceived as close to royalty by English society, the Prime Minister is kind enough to visit the party. The guests are surprised at how ordinary he appears. Many of the other characters reflect on him throughout the novel.
Ellie Henderson: Clarissa's poor, quiet, and less than sociable cousin, Ellie is only invited to the party because another of Clarissa's guests invites her. Clarissa thought her too dull to invite. She speaks only to Richard at the party. The rest of the time, she simply observes the guests and gathers gossip to tell her friend, Edith.
Professor Brierly, Jim Hutton, Lord Gayton, Miss Blow: All guests at Clarissa's party, Clarissa has a few moments to speak to each of them and to try to smooth over any conflicts or boredom.
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Miss Helena Parry: Clarissa's old aunt, Miss Parry is part of the memories of Burton, where she chastised Sally and befriended Peter. At the party, she tolerates the crowds and speaks to Peter about Burma. Most are surprised that she is still alive.
The old woman: The neighbor whom Clarissa could view in the house adjacent, the old woman seems a mystery to Clarissa. Though she often appears to be connected to others in her life, Clarissa admires the elder neighbor's privacy. Clarissa watches the woman as Clarissa looks outside after hearing of Septimus' suicide. The old woman's turning off the lights to go to bed triggers Clarissa's realization that she must return to life and her party.
Main Themes:
The sea as symbolic of life: The ebb and flow of life. When the image is portrayed as being harmonized, the sea represents a great confidence and comfort. Yet, when the image is presented as disjointed or uncomfortable, it symbolizes disassociation, loneliness, and fear.
Doubling: Many critics describe Septimus as Clarissa's doppelganger, the alternate persona, the darker, more internal personality compared to Clarissa's very social and singular outlook. Woolf's use of the doppelganger, Septimus, portrays a side to Clarissa's personality that becomes absorbed by fear and broken down by society and a side of society that has failed to survive the War. The doubling portrays the polarity of the self and exposes the positive-negative relationship inherent in humanity. It also illustrates the opposite phases of the idea of life.
The intersection of time and timelessness: Woolf creates a new novelistic structure in Mrs. Dalloway wherein her prose has blurred the distinction between dream and reality, between the past and present. An authentic human being functions in this manner, simultaneously flowing from the conscious to the unconscious, from the fantastic to the real, and from memory to the moment.
Social commentary: Woolf also strived to illustrate the vain artificiality of Clarissa's life and her involvement in it. The detail given and thought provoked in one day of a woman's preparation for a party, a simple social event, exposes the flimsy lifestyle of England's upper classes at the time of the novel. Even though Clarissa is effected by Septimus' death and is bombarded by profound thoughts throughout the novel, she is also a woman for whom a party is her greatest offering to society. The thread of the Prime Minister throughout, the near fulfilling of Peter's prophecy concerning Clarissa's role, and the characters of the doctors, Hugh Whitbread, and Lady Bruton as compared to the tragically mishandled plight of Septimus, throw a critical light upon the social circle examined by Woolf.
The world of the sane and the insane side by side: Woolf portrays the sane grasping for significant and substantial connections to life, living among those who have been cut off from such connections and who suffer because of the improper treatment they, henceforth, receive. The critic, Ruotolo, excellently develops the idea
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behind the theme: "Estranged from the sanity of others, Œrooted to the pavement,' the veteran [Septimus] asks Œfor what purpose' he is present. Virginia Woolf's novel honors and extends his question. He perceives a beauty in existence that his age has almost totally disregarded; his vision of new life... is a source of joy as well as madness. Unfortunately, the glimpse of beauty that makes Septimus less forlorn is anathema to an age that worships like Septimus' inhuman doctor, Sir William Bradshaw, the twin goddesses ŒProportion' and ŒConversion.'"
Part One
Section One Analysis:
Woolf begins the novel in her typical fashion, symbolically and methodically. We meet Clarissa in the first sentence, in a proclamation of independence. She will get the flowers because Lucy has work to do. The proclamation is thus tinged with a sense of irony because though Clarissa has chosen to handle the burden of work herself, the work only consists of buying flowers. The irony inherent in the entire text will be fleshed out as we continue but, the very first sentences hint at the underlying theme of social commentary which Woolf instilled in order to illustrate the superficiality of the members of Mrs. Dalloway's social circle.
However, Clarissa's character is not meant solely to represent the vainness of a certain social group. Much deeper and more intense symbolism exists in the novel and in this central character. The novel is one of moments. Moments of time and life are highlighted and intensely analyzed. The narrative, though in third person, focuses on Clarissa but moves from character to character, and often provides insight into the persona of Clarissa. Clarissa, unlike her double whom we will meet shortly, loves life and embraces the present.
The two exclamations which begin the third paragraph are symbolic of Clarissa's attitude toward life and the moment to moment structure of the book. The ejaculations are short, stark, and positive. They give the language a bursting feeling which will tie into the overarching theme of the sea in the novel. Note how the second exclamatory sentence ends with the word "plunge." Other imagery at the beginning of this section adds to the feeling of jumping into a pool of water. Clarissa thinks of opening French doors and bursting into the fresh, morning air. She is plunging into life, into memory, and into self-evaluation. She is opening the windows of life and plunging into it. The language has a light airy feel supported by the name of Clarissa herself. The name originates from the word clarity and alludes to the "luminous Saint Clara," as described by Nadia Fusini.
The sea imagery arises again when Clarissa nears Big Ben. The bells which Big Ben ring break the hush that Clarissa feels before the bells are to ring. The effect of the bells is described as, "The leaden circles dissolve in the air." This image reminds one of water after a body has plunged into it. Once water is disturbed, a ring of circular ripples emanates outward from the central point. This idea provides an insight into the very writing of Woolf. Mrs. Dalloway's character, as well as the character of Septimus and a few outside occurrences, sends ripples outward into time and life, affecting the being of those around her. Scrope Purvis notices and thinks about Clarissa, and we enter those thoughts. We also enter the thoughts of Miss Pym,
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allowing the reader the knowledge that Clarissa had been very kind, in the past tense. We wonder what is meant but are told no more. The reader receives glimpses into the ripples which are effected by day to day living.
The writing reflects the sea and rippling wave imagery broadcast through the character's intuitions. Woolf refused to follow the conventional format for writing a novel. A member of the Bloomsbury group and a peer of James Joyce, she did not feel a need to prescribe to traditional organization, thus allowing for a much more loose form in terms of syntax, plot, and narrative voice. As critic Irene Simon stipulates, "It is just the purpose of Virginia Woolf to abolish the distinction between dream and reality; she effects this by mixing images with gestures, thoughts with impressions, visions with pure sensations, and by presenting them as mirrored on a consciousness." Thus the language too is moment to moment, short, and dense. She writes in a flow of consciousness, floating from sensation to sensation and from the mind of one character to the next.
Though often descriptive, every thought and phrase in Woolf's writing has a distinct and analyzable purpose. We learn that Clarissa was sick and now feels a deep, intense anger inside which never seems to completely disappear. The enigmatic character of Miss Kilman brings about the fury inside of Clarissa though Woolf's description of why is confusing. Again, the text mirrors the feeling within it. The sentences run-on in a rush of anger, sentences begin with lower case letters, and adjectives and nouns are chosen such as encumbered, scraped, brute, and hooves which spark harshness and hurt. Woolf constantly blurs the distinction between dream and reality, both within the plot and the text itself. Clarissa enters the flower shop overcome with embarrassment, trying to hush her anger, but she is soon overcome and distracted by color. She opens up her eyes, an allusion to the first metaphor with the open window, and takes in the flowers. She is transported back to the moment and we are reminded of how transparent the present is within Woolf. The episode also foreshadows the theme of doubling, as Clarissa quickly rushes between hatred and love, which will surface with the introduction of Septimus.
Part I Section Two Summary (p. 14-29 "The violent explosion...writing a T, an O, an F."):
Part One
Section Two Analysis:
The explosive situation with the car allows us two specific insights into the text. One, it again highlights the emphasis of the British culture on figure heads and symbols. No one is sure which great figure resides within the important looking car, but each onlooker feels touched "by magic," as Clarissa notes. Traffic slows and onlookers halt and then rush to Buckingham Palace. The car, as with many of the objects with which Clarissa surrounds herself, is an empty symbol. What is inside does not matter. The shell of the car, in a postmodern sense, represents the empty significance that is often placed on social status within the world of Mrs. Dalloway's London.
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It is at this moment that we also meet Septimus Smith. At the same time when Clarissa is frozen in delight, imagining the Queen and Prince and parties, Septimus is frozen by apprehension and fear. Many critics describe Septimus as Clarissa's doppelganger, the alternate persona, the darker, more internal personality compared to Clarissa's very social and singular outlook. However, a few critics hint that to characterize Septimus as Clarissa's double is too limiting for both of their characters. Perhaps the best way to describe their relationship is to think of it as a means to flesh out the intensity of the human mind. The novel takes the reader through only one day in Clarissa and Septimus' lives, and yet we learn so much more about their characters and about humanity in general. These two personas allow the reader to discern how two seemingly opposite characters correspond and interrelate. Clarissa and Septimus never meet and yet, their lives are intertwined from the moment in the street to the news of Septimus' death at Clarissa's party.
We also meet Rezia, Septimus' wife, in this section of the book, as she struggles through the embarrassment of having a crazy husband. The way Septimus is told that nothing is wrong with him alludes to circumstances in Woolf's life. With her fragile mental state, she encountered many psychologists, most of whom did not know how to treat mentally ill patients. Often, they did more harm than good. Septimus is the victim of this psychosocial establishment in post-War England. As a representative of the "lost generation," a topic touched on by many of Woolf's contemporary's most noticeably T.S. Eliot in The Wasteland, Septimus suffers from delusions and hallucinations. The husband and wife, as a result, can no longer communicate as they once had.
Another confused symbol of communication exists in the form of the airplane that spreads incomprehensible words across the sky, gaining much of London's attention after the excitement of the important car passes. Letters are strewn about but no character agrees on the message delineated. Ironically, however, many people are connected through the inability to communicate symbolized by the plane's skywriting. In his sickness, Septimus believes the plane is talking to him. Yet, the other characters who view the plane believe in much the same idea.
Part I Section Three Summary (p.29-48 "'What are they looking at'...very far away as Peter Walsh shut the door."):
Part One Section
Three Analysis:
We see many echoes of Woolf within the character of Clarissa during this chapter. The theme of the virgin, symbolizing seclusion, independence, and sexual aridity, takes over as we move from Clarissa, excited with life, to Clarissa, secluded, reflective, and lonely. Her relief at returning home is compared explicitly by Woolf to a nun returning to her habit and yet, ironically, she only ventures to her virginal, narrow attic room when she feels snubbed by society. Because of this snub, we learn further how much Clarissa cares about societal issues as she meditates on her worth as a result of it. Conversely, we learn that she enjoys being alone to the extent that she
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has slept alone in the attic since her illness. Directly after Woolf describes Clarissa's starch white sheets pulled tightly over her narrow attic bed, an overt metaphor for virginal sexuality, she includes that Clarissa wondered if she had failed Richard. She also states that Clarissa had loved Sally as a man loves a woman, implying that Clarissa had never truly loved Richard in this manner, and perhaps had never loved any man in this manner. The flaws of communication and intimacy between Richard and Clarissa are foreshadowed. In the eyes of some critics, Woolf insinuates that Clarissa was stifled in her homosexual love for Sally by the standards of society and her own conservatism.
Sally was Clarissa's inspiration to think beyond the walls of Bourton, to read, to philosophize, to fantasize. Woolf describes the kiss between Sally and Clarissa as an epiphany of sorts, an ecstasy,
Sally stopped; picked a flower; kissed her on the lips. The whole world may have turned upside down! The others disappeared; there she was alone with Sally. And she felt that she had been given a present, wrapped up, and told just to keep it, not to look at it - a diamond, something infinitely precious, wrapped up, which, as they walked (up and down, up and down), she uncovered, or the radiance burnt through, the revelation, the religious feeling! (35-36).
As Clarissa's relative loneliness and lack of intimacy in marriage is symbolized through the metaphor of a virginal nun, the most intense sexual moment in Clarissa's life is symbolized through intense religious feeling. Thus, the kiss represents and understates the sexual attraction and revelation that Sally brought to Clarissa. The present given to Clarissa, the diamond, the flower picked, the "radiance burnt through," all symbolize this sexual experience. It is not surprising, then, that Clarissa feels so violated when men intrude upon her moment. Peter and old Joseph's intrusion symbolizes the dominance of men in society and the conservatism of sexual relations that would not allow for Clarissa's true yearnings. Whether Woolf had sexual feelings toward women or not, biographers describe her relationship with her husband as a strong, caring friendship without much sexual intimacy. This sexual component is similarly lacking in her proponent's life.
Clarissa's continued longing for Peter also illustrates that her relationship is lacking with Richard. At one point in her conversation with Peter, she wishes that he would take her away. The moment subsides, but the intensity between the two remains throughout the novel. Peter's tendency to play with his pocketknife is a phallic metaphor, symbolizing Peter's repressed sexual urges toward Clarissa. He not only invades Clarissa's peace, but her virginal sense of self as well. Woolf describes Clarissa's reaction to the moment of Peter's entrance as, "She made to hide her dress, like a virgin protecting her chastity, respecting privacy."(40) Yet, she does feel passion in Peter's presence, a fleeting gaiety and vivacity for life. Representative of the everyman, Clarissa is prone to wonder what if. These emotions come and go like waves, synecdochal for the theme of the sea. The waves of time are introduced by the bells of Big Ben.
Part I Section Four Summary (p.48 -56 "Remember my party, remember...feathers of sleep, sank, and was muffled over."):
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Part One
Section Four Analysis:
The theme of the intersection of time and timelessness arises as we watch Peter walk through London and wander through Regent's Park as Clarissa had done only a few hours earlier. Unlike Clarissa, however, he does not notice the beauty of the day or feel the effect of the bells on a cosmic, spiritual level. He does not appreciate the moment as Clarissa often does. Instead, everything for Peter relates to his past, present, or fantasy. His thoughts are always internalized. In this manner, time blurs with timelessness as Peter's memories blur with present images, wishes, and fantasies.
As soon as Peter leaves Clarissa's home, he is overcome with combative thoughts. He believes that Clarissa said the wrong thing to Elizabeth, for example. He hates Clarissa's parties. Clarissa dominates his thoughts to the point where external stimuli simply function to remind him of her in different ways. St. Margaret's bells remind him of Clarissa as the hostess. This reference alludes to Clarissa's thoughts earlier in the day of Peter and his comment to her that she would be the perfect hostess. Thus, the bells symbolize a line of conflict between Peter and Clarissa.
Consequently, Peter is soon reminded of Clarissa's heart condition and he pictures her dying. Clarissa's imaginary death foreshadows the death of her double, Septimus, later in the novel. Peter shakes off the bad image because he does not want to think of himself being old enough to die. He thus uses the next images that come his way, the marching boys and the beautiful young woman, as symbols of his youth and his courage.
He tells himself that he was a rebel when young and that the world needed men like him. Peter is trying to rationalize the dissociation he feels from the humanity surrounding him. The waves of emotion he experiences touch on the theme of the sea. The words that describe him following the young woman allude to the motions of the sea. The phrases are short and choppy, yet rhythmic. The text states, "She moved; she crossed; he followed her...But other people got between them on the street, obstructing him, blotting her out. He pursued; she changed" (53). His mood changes again when he stops to actually look around at the world passing him by. He is impressed by the civility of London as compared to the Indian culture in which he had been living. London is a metonym for Clarissa and the type of society she represents. Though Peter wants to rebel, he cannot help but yearn for inclusion within the society he tries to despise.
Part I Section Five Summary (p. 56-64 "The grey nurse resumed...He never saw her again."):
Part One
Section Five Analysis:
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Much of this section takes place in Peter's memory, allowing us to relive the past relationship between Clarissa and him. However, the beginning of the section relates the interesting appearance of the solitary traveler. Though Woolf's prose often edges on the poetic, this is one of the only portions of the novel where her writing becomes extremely abstract. Why? What does the solitary traveler add to this section or the novel as a whole? Critics suggest that the traveler is Peter Walsh, as both are male, primarily alone (at least during the day on which the novel takes place), and over fifty years old. He travels through the wood until reaching the giant figure, who ironically is one of the least imposing figures possible, an old matron or nurse. Thus, the archetype of the eternal feminine is evoked. This figure will reappear as we continue through the novel. The section during Peter's dream introduces the idea to the reader abstractly because of the larger symbolism the feminine figure will hold.
Using Peter's recollection as a vehicle, Woolf provides insight into both Clarissa and Peter's characters. Clarissa is often referred to throughout the novel as being cold, as if she was missing something that warmed other humans. The memory that Peter has describes Clarissa as a prude because she is utterly disgusted by the thought of a woman becoming pregnant before marriage. This occurrence was not supported by her social circle, but her peers obviously do not react in the same way as she. Ironically, however, Sally Seton, a figure who loved rebelling as a youth, deeply attracted Clarissa. Perhaps Clarissa seeks that warmth that other people offer because of her own lack of warmth.
This absence in Clarissa is also suggested in her manner toward Richard. She is eager to bestow a maternal instinct toward Richard, as she would her sheepdog, to compensate for that flaw. It is possible also that the warmth she lacks could inhabit the sense of awakened sexuality that Sally evidently provokes but whom the men do not. Thus, Clarissa can mother a man or a dog, but not feel impassioned by them. Clarissa quickly dismisses the passion of feeling that Peter does awake in her for more tranquil, controllable emotions.
The recollection also illustrates Peter's overabundance of emotion as he allows himself to be ruled by his feelings. He is able to discern future events through his instincts, such as his feeling that Clarissa and Richard will marry. The memory also presents the separation of Clarissa and Peter as a couple, a moment that haunts both characters during the novel. The theme of water is emphasized as the break up takes place at a fountain. The flow of life is symbolized by the flow of the fountain's stream, creating imagery for a change in life that would cause heartbreak, freedom, and loneliness.
Part II, Section One Summary (p. 64-94 "It was awful, he cried...Dr. Holmes, looking not quite so kind."):
Part II
Section One Analysis:
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The archetype of the feminine maternal is represented by the woman seen by the solitary traveler and now, the vagrant woman singing in the subway. She sings of eternal love. The figure serves as a vehicle to transition the reader from Peter to Rezia Smith, two characters lacking companionship. The theme of eternal love is examined within the theories held by the love interests of Peter and Rezia: Clarissa and Septimus, respectively. Clarissa espoused a theory in earlier chapters when she reflected on the idea that a piece of her remained in every place she has been. As Manly Johnson, critic, notes, "...[Clarissa's] theory [is] about the affinities between people and how one must seek out those who complete one: the Œunseen part of us' might survive, Œbe recovered somehow attached to this person or that.'"
Septimus' theory of the beauty in the world does not differ greatly, and it is through their similar approaches to the world about them that one begins to see the real similarities between Septimus and Clarissa. He too notices the ever-present beauty of the moment. In fact, Septimus can be said to fill the void of feelings that Clarissa lacks. Septimus first applauds himself for not feeling sadness when his friend, Evans, is killed and then punishes himself for not feeling it afterward. However, as critic, Isabel Gamble, asserts, "The real truth is, of course, that Septimus has felt too deeply, has been shaken and numbed by shell shock and the war, specifically by the death of his friend, Evans; his feelings have flowed through channels deeper than any so far sounded by Clarissa. But he has never gone by the first paralyzing numbness to see, consciously, the reality of his emotion." Septimus believes that his initial emotionless reaction to Evans' death is real and progressively bases his construction of reality on this miscalculation. Instead of facing his grief, he represses it until the remainder of his reality is shattered. He pictures dogs turning into men (an inversion of the image he created to represent himself and Evans, as dogs, playing in front of a fire) because the truth has become demented in his mind to the point of delusion. One must applaud Woolf's coupling of the sane and insane as an advanced social commentary. She illustrates the humanity lacking in a sane person and the depth of feeling possessed by an insane character, reversing the stereotypes that plagued them both.
Septimus represents a Œlost generation' of men following the end of World War I. As the pomp and circumstance of British upper class society continues, a group of men return from war unutterably changed but without a resource to ease their frustration. The politics of a Britain still trying to dominate world politics cannot peacefully absorb a collection of men so altered from the British civilization that had sent them to the war. The reflection of war, its effect on postwar society, and the British infatuation with the memory of it are inseparable from the main plot of the novel, though many readers try to diminish the postwar circumstances within the book. However, as Lee R. Edwards, critic, mentions, nothing necessitated Woolf's inclusion of characters' comments on the War, characters involved with the military such as Lady Bruton and Miss Parry, Peter's thoughts concerning Empire and the marching boys, or Septimus' mental anguish. The novel takes place five years after the war but exists within its shadow. Simple contemplation transforms into social commentary when one realizes the import of the many references to the post-war environment. For instance, Peter's simple musing of the marching boys has a malicious subtext because of the mechanical manner in which the boys are described. Young and eager, the boys lose their individuality as we watch. As Edwards describes, "...[They are] human beings who have shifted their allegiance to some set of monumental abstractions."
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Septimus, we learn, shifted his allegiance from Shakespeare and Isabel Pole to the British cause. However, his goal in signing up for the army was to protect those very things. He is persuaded to join the army by his boss because he lacked the manliness that only athletics or war could provide. Yet, turning into a man allows Septimus to keep neither Shakespeare nor Isabel Pole. He loses the ability to appreciate either. He is stripped of his passions. His mentality is replaced by a hardened vision that teaches one not to love and not to care. He tries so hard not to feel that the guilt he does feel incapacitates him. As Edwards deftly theorizes, "Surviving, unfortunately, killed him; for Septimus was finally unable to turn himself into a statue by a simple exercise of will...He feels anguish because of the discrepancy between his feeling that the natural world is beautiful, the human world corrupt, and guilt because, despite the discrepancy, the feeling for goodness and the beauty of life persist."
Part II, Section Two Summary (p.94-117 "It was precisely twelve o'clock...Lunch parties waste the entire afternoon, he thought, approaching his door."):
Part II
Section Two Analysis:
The more the reader has learned about Septimus, the more he can see that Septimus is slipping from sanity. He feels so extremely guilty, confused, and powerless that he has lost the power to control his emotions. Woolf brings to the fore the ineptitude of the day's psychiatric help with the characterizations of Holmes and Bradshaw. These characterizations allow her to air her grievances, to some extent, against the evils of the doctors whom she has visited throughout her episodes of mental instability. Bradshaw is capable of noticing the mistakes made by Holmes in not realizing the severity of Septimus's problems, but he too takes a forceful and dominating approach to Septimus.
Woolf imposes an interesting section onto the narrative in which the author appears to speak out. Though Bradshaw has agreed to help and tells Rezia that he will make all the necessary plans, Rezia feels deserted and betrayed. Why? Woolf responds to this question in her discussion of proportion versus conversion. In Bradshaw's attempt to make his patients adhere to his sense of proper proportion, he converts them into new, unoriginal form mirroring the doctor himself. In effect, he takes the life out of them, the agency out of their being. Woolf felt that many of the doctors with whom she came into contact were more trying to convert her than heal her. As Johnson notes, "In his compulsion to put people away, Woolf casts Sir William as an agent of death. For insanity, as she describes it, is isolation from people, from things, from all the stuff of life death, in short." It is not a coincidence that the other doctor's name is Holmes and that Bradshaw wishes to send Septimus to a home. As Septimus asks when told the plan, " One of Holmes' homes?" After this realization, Septimus equates Bradshaw to Holmes. Symbolically, they both are figures of evil that stifle the life out of an ailing human being. Bradshaw's country home represents the isolation and the conversion, as well as the psychiatric insensitivity, forced on the mentally ill of Woolf's time.
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Similarly, the sterile, stolid character of Lady Bruton is developed during this section of the novel. She too has little interest in the personalities behind the people with whom she comes into contact. She is not viewed as malicious by the author or the other characters. Yet, Clarissa senses that Bruton dislikes her, a feeling that is substantiated in the mind of Lady Bruton during the luncheon she holds with Richard and Hugh. She excludes Clarissa from the meal, not because she is mean, but because Clarissa's presence would not have served Lady Bruton's desired purpose. The Lady sought advice, suggestions, and help. She wanted Richard's opinions and Hugh's letter-writing ability. Thus, in a parallel manner to the doctors, Lady Bruton uses her guests as tools to manipulate a conversion. She feels that wives, like Clarissa, distract men from their proper duties in government and public affairs. Like Holmes, her name is also symbolic because it refers to the brute force of title, acquisition, and status quo. In short, Lady Bruton represents England as empire, society as means, and men as dominators. Peter, sensitive to passion and emotion, senses the changes in London much more acutely than Lady Bruton ever will. Richard, though swayed by Lady Bruton's family history, sees beyond the objective world into the happiness of his marriage. Ironically, however, he is not motivated to buy flowers for his wife until he is faced with jealousy, caused by the return of Peter Walsh.
Part II, Section Three Summary (p.117-133 "The sound of Big Ben flooded...bowing her head very politely, she went."):
Part II
Section Three Analysis:
The theme of the sea as symbolic of life is invoked as Richard returns from the luncheon with flowers for Clarissa. The suspense is properly built for the moment where Richard will tell Clarissa he loves her. Clarissa has been visited by Peter that morning, and her thoughts continually stray to him. Richard has been provoked to this moment of passion by the very mention of Peter and finally breaks from Hugh so that he can return to Clarissa, the happiness of his life. As he enters their home, the bell signifies the break in time and progression. Woolf writes, "And the sound of the bell flooded the room with its melancholy wave; which receded, and gathered itself together to fall once more, when she heard distractingly, something fumbling, something scratching at the door." The sure-handed prose certainly does not introduce the seeming moment of passion the reader expects. Instead, Woolf's verbiage here reads more like Edgar Allen Poe, foreshadowing a dreaded event through repetition and imagery. The melancholy waves gather their force only to stumble and fumble about. One expects some kind of monster to enter behind this sea rather than a loving husband with flowers. Woolf foreshadows the failure of Richard to say ŒI love you' and to properly communicate with his wife by describing the failed motion of a wave, having to retreat after crashing, only to gather, and crash once more.
Similarly, the reader gets the feeling that Richard has hoped to express his love to Clarissa at other times as well, but has also failed. The failed connection exists between husband and wife, between fellow humans. Clarissa's conversation still returns to Peter. Richard holds her hand, but a gulf exists between husband and wife
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that allows little verbal connection to take hold. The theme of insanity coupled with sanity appears in this context as Maureen Howard, author of the introduction to the novel, illuminates. She writes, "...Virginia Woolf knew from her own illness how close to endurance and civilization lay insanity and mayhem...It is so difficult to endow our words with meaning. ...Clarity, like simple sentences ŒI love you' is hard to come by." In a war-torn world, crumbled and disillusioned following World War I, Woolf attempted to illustrate the difficulty of simply living. Howard elaborates, "In Mrs. Dalloway, she began to assemble the bits and pieces, to find the angles, the original voice that would make us feel" and thus, communicate successfully again.
In this sense, Richard is no more connected to the meetings he attends. In fact, he fails to know if he is meeting to discuss the Armenians or Albanians. The importance of his societal duties is undermined by his nonchalance, commenting on Woolf's view of the English upper classes and the state of all-important English duty. The reader is acquainted with Richard's many good qualities, yet his loyalty to the status quo and the establishment is mirrored in his leaving his wife for a meeting that he obviously does not care about and in the awe he feels toward Lady Bruton's family history.
Ironically, Clarissa's parties are developed by Woolf, in contrast to Richard's work, as entities of value and significance. Both Peter and Richard, whose opinions she relies most upon, judge Clarissa's parties harshly. However, in this section of the novel, Clarissa comes to realize why her parties are so important to her and the reader learns that the parties signify Clarissa's gift to the world around her. Woolf once described insanity as a form of death because its intense loneliness created a human void for the sufferer. In Clarissa's parties, she fights this emptiness, this void. Clarissa brings people together and thus, creates a human dialogue. She creates life, and thus, sanity. What at first seems quite superficial and vain becomes quite substantial and meaningful upon reflection.
Miss Kilman, however, is one character that cannot be helped by a social offering of this type. The woman is so embittered by her experiences, beliefs, and station in life, that she refuses to open herself to anything that is offered, especially by one viewed as a socialite, such as Clarissa. Her hold on Elizabeth, though, is quite strong and a sexual relationship between the two women is even hinted at. Yet, their connection breaks down during the trip to the store and café. Miss Kilman is extremely self-involved and dependent as shown by her attempts to keep Elizabeth with her. The image of Miss Kilman gobbling down her cake stands as a metaphor for her personality. Though Doris Kilman hungers for companionship and acceptance, she is unable to see beyond the cake in front of her. The text describes the desperation of Miss Kilman when Woolf states, "If [Doris Kilman] could grasp [Elizabeth], if she could clasp her, if she could make her hers absolutely and forever and then die; that was all she wanted." Consumed with jealousy and rage, she loses her grasp on her young friend, becoming nothing more than a ridiculous caricature "fingering the last two inches of a chocolate éclair."
Part II, Section Four Summary (p.133-151 "She had gone...So that was Dr. Holmes."):
Part II
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Section Four Analysis:
Elizabeth Dalloway is compared often to a blooming flower, the metonym for spring and growth, as she is a young girl coming into womanhood. Against her will, Elizabeth is being drawn into adult life. Woolf writes, "People were beginning to compare her to poplar trees, early dawn, hyacinths, fawns, running water, and garden lilies, and it made her life a burden to her, for she so much preferred being left alone..." This list of images creates in the reader a sense of renewal and vitality that is essential to Elizabeth's character. Miss Kilman employs Woolf's metonyms for Elizabeth when she substitutes, "Elizabeth had gone. Beauty had gone, youth had gone." As Elizabeth breaks from Miss Kilman, Elizabeth renews and revitalizes her sense of self. She enjoys the feel of being alone and outdoors and revels in the noise of the crowds and in life rushing around her. As she rides the bus through London, she is inspired to think of future professions and aspirations. Critic, Manly Johnson, relates, "There is a Dickensian delight in movement and sounds in the description of Elizabeth's recommitment to life on her own..." The ride through London symbolizes a rite of passage for Elizabeth who begins exploring the path from adolescence to vital adulthood.
Woolf also frequently compares Rezia Smith to a tree or flower of life. Johnson explains, "Crippled within, [Septimus] seeks out Lucrezia to marry her, with the instinctive knowledge that her health is what his sickness needs. She appears to him as the tree of life..." As Woolf develops the theme of the sane along side the insane, she again describes Rezia, through Septimus, as a flower attempting to protect her battered husband with her maternal petals. Woolf illustrates, "...she did up the papers...as if all her petals were about her. She was a flowering tree..." Rezia too represents vitality and life, and as such, she is incapable of protecting or understanding her husband. Her attention to detail and the love she gives to her hat making depicts the care she gives to the world around her. Rezia's declaration that she and Septimus will not be separated is used to explore the necessity of togetherness in sanity. When she leaves to take the young girl home, Septimus begins to lose his grasp on reality. He falls asleep and when he wakes up, he has clearly returned to the separate world of his own delusions. His desperation is reflected in the text: "That was it: to be alone forever. That was the doom pronounced in Milan..." The devastation caused by the war and his realization that he can no longer feel illustrates the lack of emotional connection Septimus retains to those around him.
The period that Rezia and Septimus spend together before he falls asleep displays a healthiness and happiness rarely felt in the novel. The hat that the husband and wife create together stands as a metaphor for life and sanity. The hat allows the two to communicate, playfully and warmly. They discuss people they know and cooperate in the hat's design and construction. The pattern that Septimus pieces together for the hat symbolizes the novel itself. The novel, as a truly modern novel of the post-World War I era, is also constructed of fragments pieced together. How does one learn about Clarissa's character, for instance? We learn from Clarissa herself, but also from comments and thoughts made by others, by memories discovered, and by symbolic reference. The postmodern novel is a pastiche of reflections, alternating narration, poetic allusion, direct prose, metaphor, dialogue, and character development. Like the
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hat, several layers of emotion, sentiment, logic, character, and motive create the design. The moment of creation is thus a culmination of life and significance in the novel.
Dr. Holmes, seen as the symbol of the evil of human nature by Septimus, drives the life out of man. He and Bradshaw represent the figures of conversion and proportion detailed earlier by Woolf. In their attempts to smooth over Septimus' very real problems and ultimately, to separate him from the life connection he still holds, the physicians force Septimus to his death. Insanity, in Woolf's eyes, was very near to death. Johnson explains, "In his compulsion to put people away, Woolf casts Sir William as an agent of death." As Septimus awakes from his nap, his thoughts flow directly to Bradshaw's words of separation. Rezia tries to alleviate Septimus' fears, but the arrival of a forceful Dr. Holmes makes the fears very real to Septimus. He feels that he must escape the grasp of Holmes and Bradshaw. Yet, Septimus does not want to die. Before jumping, he states, "But he would wait till the very last moment. He did not want to die. Life was good. The sun hot." As he jumps, he screams that he will "give it to [Holmes]."Septimus feels pushed into a position where he must save himself from the smothering hold of conversion and proportion. Woolf writes, "[Rezia] saw the large outline of his body standing dark against the window. So that was Dr. Holmes." Holmes is a figure, a symbol, of darkness and destruction whereas Septimus, last alive in the hot sun, reflects ruined innocence and goodness. His moment in the sun foreshadows Clarissa's later reaction to Septimus' death and the connection that will be solidified between them.
Part II, Section Five Summary (p.151-165 "One of the triumphs of civilisation...He opened the big blade of his pocket-knife."):
Part II
Section Five Analysis:
Woolf writes, "It was as if he were sucked up to some very high roof by that rush of emotion and the rest of him, like a white shellsprinkled beach, left bare. It had been his undoing in Anglo-Indian society this susceptibility." Expanding on Woolf's theme of life as the sea, Peter Walsh too experiences the waves of emotion that rise and fall in Clarissa's life. He notes that his inability to weep or laugh at the right time has left him as empty and lonely as a beach that is washed clean after the sea pulls back. In this case, the thematic metaphor functions to illustrate Peter's societal isolation when he is stripped of the metaphoric sea that connects him to life. Immediately following Peter's thoughts in the text, Woolf describes Peter's memory of Clarissa's transcendentalist-like theory of living. The theory follows, "...since our apparitions, the part of us which appears, are so momentary compared with the other, the unseen part of us, which spreads wide, the unseen might survive, be recovered somehow attached to this person or that, or even haunting certain places after death..." Clarissa has served this purpose to Peter as thoughts of her frequently, or infrequently, occur to him, causing him to relive their times together at the most unexpected times. In this sense, Clarissa acts as metaphoric sea in Peter's life. Her absence leaves him empty
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and wondering; whereas her presence provides connections to a life that he desires for years after her presence has ceased.
Peter has trouble facing these reminders of Clarissa, these remnants of her unseen surviving, and thus, becomes embittered when he receives the note from her at his hotel. Unlike her husband, Clarissa has an easier time communicating and has successfully expressed herself in the written form and delivered this expression to Peter before he arrives back at his hotel. Peter feels bombarded by the memories he suffers of Clarissa, and her ghost makes an even greater appearance in the form of the note. The blue (symbolic of the sea) envelope, recognizably addressed in Clarissa's hand, stands as a symbol of Peter's continuing attachment to Clarissa and his proclaimed susceptibility. He looked at a picture he had carried with him of Daisy and felt a different sentiment entirely. With Daisy, "All [is] plain sailing." This ocean of feeling does not haunt Peter; this relationship he can navigate.
England as society and civilization passes by and impresses Peter. Yet, he still is incapable of escaping the past. His thoughts, and Woolf's prose, merge and blur with the past as the two are expressed interchangeably. They exist as one for Woolf's characters. The intersection of time and timelessness most noticeably occurs directly in front of Peter's gaze as he sits on the veranda of the hotel and as he slowly ambles to the party. London had changed since Peter last visited, and the changes that he can perceive pass by him on his journey back to Clarissa's house.
Since time stands as Woolf's greatest marker of life and living, it is not surprising that she signals the changes that have occurred since Peter's last appearance in England with a reference to time. Peter sits on the porch of the hotel and Woolf writes, "For the great revolution of Mr. Willett's summer time had taken place since Peter Walsh's last visit. The prolonged evening was new to him. It was inspiring, rather." Mr. Willett's summer time is an allusion to the adoption of daylight savings time. The lengthened evening allows Peter to observe much of London as he slips in and out of his own memories. In this artificial expansion of day, Peter is transported to a space and time where age and being seem less established and immoveable. He remarks that he is "as young as ever." Past and present intersect in Woolf's writing, which lacks transitions and purposely avoids specifying pronouns in order to emphasize the blurred distinction between the two. The immediacy of the moment is blended beautifully and generously with the timeless memories of the past.
Part II, Section Six Summary (p. 165-194):
Part II
Section Six Analysis:
Clarissa's role of the hostess is fulfilled with the occurrence of the actual party in the last section of the novel. The final preparations take place as the servants hurry around with last minute additions and gossip. People begin arriving and Clarissa is put into play. For the rest of the novel, she rarely has time to stand with any one guest and speak with him before she must run off to greet another. She is a servant to societal
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conventions and her offering to society forces her to sacrifice herself to its performance. One can see this best when Clarissa's great old friend, Sally Seton (now Lady Rosseter), is surprisingly introduced. Even though Sally has lost some of her old luster, Clarissa is overjoyed to see her. Yet, a moment later, she is called upon to attend to another guest. She is pulled away before she knows whom the guest is, and after hearing that it is the Prime Minister, she must show him around the party personally.
As the Prime Minister walks around the party, Woolf describes the guests trying not to laugh or notice how common the man looked. She writes, "He tried to look somebody. It was amusing to watch. Nobody looked at him." How one is perceived is examined in this section, as the partygoers clearly notice that the man is trying to look important and yet, they are still impressed. Their perception of the name, the symbol, the status of the Prime Minister overcomes any physical evidence in the contrary. The prestigious car that slowly made its way through London, peaking everyone's curiosity and wonderment, foreshadowed this moment of the Prime Minister's actual appearance. In a similar fashion, the onlookers of the event feel important simply to have been present. Woolf's description of the reaction to the Prime Minister parallels the earlier viewing. She describes the crowd, "...they all knew, felt to the marrow of their bones, this majesty passing; this symbol of what they all stood for, English society." The figure of the Prime Minister symbolizes the hierarchy of English society and the deeply encoded sense of civility and status that still ruled the society even after the devastation of World War I. The society continues to look down upon young men such as Septimus who have suffered in the War while also continuing to glorify men such as Hugh Whitbread who do little else but write pithy articles and attend meetings.
This thread of society, symbolized by the figure of the Prime Minister, carries the reader through the novel, from the car that stirs all of London's citizens to Richard's post in Parliament to Hugh Whitbread's gatherings at Buckingham Palace to Lady Bruton's luncheon to the party where the Prime Minister appears in the flesh. The Prime Minister is a metonym for English society itself. Even Peter Walsh recognizes that England has not changed much in this sense during his absence. He comments, "Lord, lord, the snobbery of the English!" Peter had foreshadowed the role that Clarissa would play in the furtherance of English snobbery in his retort to her that she would someday be the Prime Minister's wife. Standing atop the stairs, greeting the guests of her party, leading around the Prime Minister, she nearly fulfills this prophecy. And, as one critic states, Richard's career is not over, and so she may someday be married to the Prime Minister.
The break in the mood of the party occurs with the arrival of the Bradshaws. After hearing of Septimus' death, Clarissa is no longer worried about making sure everyone is happy or leading around the prestigious members of the crowd. She retires to a small room in order to deal with the feeling of death that has invaded her party and her being. She, of course, does not know the stranger who committed suicide, but the doppelgangers of Woolf's imagination become connected in this moment. They become physically connected as Clarissa reflects the feelings of pain and death experienced by Septimus through her body. She identifies with the fall he experienced and the rusty spikes piercing his body.
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She, then, realizes that his death is a sacrifice for her, and for the others at her party and everywhere, to allow them to continue living. Septimus' role as a Christ figure becomes apparent. Woolf originally planned for Clarissa to commit suicide, or simply die, at the end of the novel. Instead, she decided that a part of Clarissa, constructed in the form of a man destroyed by war and society, would take his own life in order for the rest of Clarissa's being to appreciate the life she had. Clarissa believes, "A thing there was that mattered...This he had preserved. Death was defiance. Death was an attempt to communicate." The Œthis' to which Woolf refers is purposely ambiguous. Life could obviously be inserted in its place, but the essence of life, "the thing that mattered," is impossible to define. Yet, the essence is possible to preserve and Septimus' decision to throw it all away has done so. The words of Shakespeare come to Clarissa, linking her undeniably to the young Septimus. The words tell her, "Fear no more the heat of the sun." Septimus, who had gone to war so that he could protect Shakespeare, stands in the heat of the sun immediately before jumping to his death.
Woolf is borrowing from Shakespeare's play Cymbeline, as she had earlier in the novel when Clarissa notices the same words in an open book as she walks through Bond Street. The repetition of the statement emphasizes its significance to the thematic progression of the novel. Critic, Avrom Fleishman, notes that, though the quotation has generally been understood as an illustration of Clarissa's strength in the face of death and disillusionment, "Clarissa's affinity for the refrain may be taken as a mark of her strong propensity for death ..." Clarissa notes, before returning to her party, "She felt somehow very like him the young man who had killed himself. She felt glad that he had done it; thrown it away." His sacrifice, his affirmation of life's inconstancy and immediacy, allows Clarissa to face her own fears and desires. His death permits her to "feel the beauty" and "feel the fun." As critic Isabel Gamble concludes, "In comprehending Septimus' death he has Œplunged holding his treasure' Clarissa herself discovers her own identity and becomes whole."
The short time Clarissa spends in the little room is saturated with significant images and allusions. This time is the climax of the novel. The old lady appears in the neighboring house at this moment as well. Because of Septimus' death and the old lady, Clarissa steps out of the social circle of her party and connects to the larger sense of life and death occurring around her. The text states, "It was fascinating, with people still laughing and shouting in the drawing-room, to watch that old woman, quite quietly, going to bed." Just as the woman connected Clarissa to the movements of life after Miss Kilman and Elizabeth depart for the stores, she once again creates in Clarissa a wonderment for life and being.
Clarissa returns to the party charged with a sense of life and with a need to "assemble" with the people important to her. She has conquered the sense of isolation and returned to social connection. The novel ends with a scene that can be considered a microcosm of the novel. Peter is suddenly filled with a sense of ecstasy. He had been looking for Clarissa for a long time and suddenly she was there. Woolf writes in a simple structure, reminiscent of the short sentences that begin the novel and permeate its body, "It is Clarissa, he said. For there she was." The reader is filled with an "extraordinary excitement" as she becomes increasingly involved in the discovery of Clarissa's being throughout the novel. As critic Lucio P. Ruotolo analyzes, "During her parties it was not what she did or said that one remembered but rather the
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extraordinary sense of her being there, ŒThere she was.'" The conclusion of the novel is as much an end as a beginning
Mrs. Dalloway: Body and Room as Box of Flowers and Health
Somewhere within the narrative of Mrs. Dalloway, there seems to lie what could be understood as a restatement - or, perhaps, a working out of - the essentially simple, key theme or motif found in Woolf's famous feminist essay A Room of One's Own. Mrs. Dalloway does in fact possess "a room of her own - " and enjoys an income (or the use of an income) that is at least "five hundred a year - " (Room: 164). But most importantly, Clarissa Dalloway also deals with ways of working out female economic necessity, personal space, and the manifestation of an "artistic" self-conception. That this perceived "room" of her famous essay can also serve as a psychological model becomes clearer in Mrs. Dalloway, and the novel reveals another face to this classical essay's main motif. A personal room is, more profoundly, a certain conception of the "soul" or psyche's journey through life, as Sally states in the novel's climax: "Are we not all prisoners? She had read a wonderful play about a man who scratched on the wall of his cell, and she had felt that was true of life - one scratched on the wall" (293). Mrs. Dalloway is a more nuanced mediation of the imagination that powerfully brings into relief qualifications, extensions, and variations on her later, more sociological work's powerful central and titular metaphor.
The book commences with the sentence, "Mrs. Dalloway said that she'd buy the flowers herself."(3) It is an immediate and assertive portrayal of Clarissa Dalloway as a pecunious and fully self-motivated agent. It is a one-sentence paragraph, and indeed could stand alone as a sort of summary of the entire book (or the book's main philosophical thrust).
Clarissa is a woman who has decided to never let the "wolf" (no pun intended) of necessity near her door, and, through her ambitious nature ("she had wanted success": 282), made the firm decision to seek and assure her own material well-being. Hence, in the course of her life as depicted in her narrated memories, she moves from one safe house (as the enclosing, larger conglomerate of rooms, and an enclosed space congruent to the room) and garden to another. The passages on Clarissa move back and forth between reoccurring memories of Bourton from the first and last pages of the novel (" - she had burst open the French windows and plunged at Bourton into the open air.."(3) - "And once she had walked on the terrace at Bourton":282) and her present actions in the well-established Dalloway residence over which she presides. She moves safely and consciously from her father's house to Richard's house: indeed, it is within the walls and gardens of Bourton that Clarissa makes her firm decision against marrying Peter and then to marry Richard.
To marry Peter would have been an impecunious choice, although it seemed potentially more romantic and contained an intimacy that was in the moment of Clarissa's decision painful to give up (" - she had borne about with her for years like an arrow sticking in her heart the grief, the anguish - ": 10). But, Clarissa realizes that this overwhelming intimacy would have been stifling in the long-term. Her choice of spouse, Richard, comprehends a need for personal intellectual and emotional space:
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"For in marriage, a little licence, a little independence there must be between people living together day in day out in the same house; which Richard gave her, and she him."(10). With Peter, she would never have the means nor the spatial allowances to achieve "a room of her own."
That the house is conceived of as a larger personally and psychically protective shell somewhat congruent to the personally-protective room(s) it encloses is illustrated in Clarissa's opening excursion out into the wider world of London. Here, in the public streets, Clarissa is preoccupied with her and Peter's miraculous "survival"(12) in this hostile environment: "She had a perpetual sense, as she watched the taxi cabs, of being out, out, far out on the sea and alone; she had always had the feeling that it was very dangerous to live even one day."(11). The world outside of her house brings disorientation (in that the narrative moves quickly between sensory observation and Clarissa's agitated thoughts), violence in "a pistol shot on the street outside" (19: a "shot" foreshadowing Septimus's death, actually the sound of the car backfiring that serves as a link, through a chain of events, to the characters of with Lucrezia and Septimus in the next pages - Septimus, in turn, shows that there are in fact some how do not survive in "the wide world", and the danger that Clarissa perceives is very real), discordant thoughts and echoes of a war just past (5). It is a wider world that perhaps tempts Clarissa, as she was tempted to marry a man who eventually settled in India, and when Peter returns she spontaneously thinks: "Take me with you, Clarissa thought impulsively, as if he were starting directly upon some great voyage - "(70). Her longing for journey is juxtaposed to her choice of sedentary establishment as a psychological necessity.
From the outer city world, then, the break into the haven of her home is clear-cut: "The hall of the house was cool as a vault - she felt like a nun who has left the world and feels fold round her the familiar veils and the response to old devotions. .. [she] felt blessed and purified - as if some lovely rose had blossomed for her eyes only - "(43). The excursion into the external world of the city was in fact only a brief foray made in order to procure flowers for this same abode. Her entry into the flower shop (a literal "box of flowers") is the most extreme point she reaches in her excursion into "enemy territory" (in that it is the last locale depicted in the narrative scene of her excursion before she returns home), is a portrayal of the ecstasy she finds in this alternate haven: " - turning her head from side to side among the irises and roses and nodding tufts of lilac with her eyes half closed, snuffing in, after the street uproar, the delicious scent, the exquisite coolness. And then, opening her eyes, how fresh like frilled linen clean from laundry laid in wicker trays the roses looked."(18). It is odd, interesting and appropriate that this oasis of flowers in the middle of the outer, dangerous world is full of flowers that only evoke images of beautiful and ordered domesticity: it is Clarissa's house where the main activities take place, for which her flowers (acquired by her buying action) are destined and on which our attention should be fixed.
Then, it is Clarissa's room proper where the place where she has some "moment" (47) of personal revelation. Here is Mrs. Dalloway's most direct intersection with Woolf's later essay: this is literally a room of Clarissa's own that this married woman has strangely acquired, after "her illness" and Richard's insistence (46). Woolf is enforcing an ideal of female solitude, space and intellectual privacy (Clarissa reads Baron Marbot's Memoirs deep into the night: 46) , that Mrs. Dalloway achieves
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despite being a married woman and a mother. Clarissa, in contrast to Sally Seton's production of a brood of five, has only one child: this makes her formally a mother, but a very controlled one. Further, she retains her "virginity" (read- physical "integrity") despite her marriage, motherhood and age: " - she could not dispel a virginity preserved through childbirth - that clung to her like a sheet" (46). The motif of Clarissa as a sort of devotional nun (she ascends to her attic room "like a nun withdrawing, or a child exploring a tower - ": 45) fits with the metaphor of life as a sojourn in a difficult cell ("There was an emptiness about the heart of life - narrower and narrower would her bed be - ": 45), that yet allows for the production of spiritual fruits: "It was a sudden revelation - like a match burning in a crocus" (47).
Similar to Clarissa's preserved interiority and bodily privacy throughout her marriage, her title, "Mrs. Dalloway" serves as another figurative box in which her more personal identity, "Clarissa" is contained. This name, like a room or a house, serves as a shell or protective "container" around her person. The "Mrs." attained via beneficent Richard ("Richard, her husband, who was the foundation of it [her house/life and the peace she found in it] - ": 43), provides her with a protected and sustained personal space which includes a literal room of her own (it was, indeed, at Richard's suggestion that she take her own room). Woolf's choice of title reveals her central preoccupation with this idea and theme.
In Mrs. Dalloway, Woolf uses flowers extensively (and perhaps desperately) as a deep metaphor of meaningful adornment of one's room, real and figurative. They are strange vehicles of pleasure-giving and transcendent speech (as opposed to, or in conjunction with, the difficult and clumsy "scratches") in life's cell. Much is expressed constantly through these strangely beautiful, proliferating organisms. In Mrs. Dalloway, there seems to be occurring a whole sphere of communication in which flowers mysteriously replace more tangible communication or information: for instance, all that Peter "knew of" Sally's husband is that he wore "two camellia's on his wedding day"(286). Elizabeth is "like a poplar" (287), and now, in adolescence, begins to run the dubitable risk of being compared "to hyacinths - and garden lilies" (204). A young woman Peter encounters on the street is stained by the flower she wears ("the red carnation he had seen her wear as she came across Trafalgar Square burning again in his eyes and making her lips red - ":79) and its impression blends with Peter's surmisal of certain details of her life: "But she's not married; she's young - She was not worldly, like Clarissa.. she is not rich, like Clarissa - " (79). Peter's new fiancÈ, "his Daisy" (68) bears the name of the most humble of flowers, as if to underscore the lesser real and flower economy in which he deals. And, most markedly, there is Clarissa's revelation of a feminine sense via the metaphor of the crocus.
As such, gardens are a natural result of the hybridization of these two motifs (an enclosed and humanly-defined spatial area and flowers) is a garden: we accordingly see this metaphor also reoccur meaningfully throughout the novel. Just as colorful flora is springing up in contained interior spaces (a match in a crocus in her own room, the imagined rose as she re-enters her home from the street, or more tangibly in the flower shop) another spatial containment of flora is manifest with the mentions of different sorts of gardens throughout the book. Regent's park serves as a second main stage for action in the novel (apart from the Dalloway residence) and it sees Mrs.Dalloway, Hugh Whitbread, and the Smiths cross it in the morning and it is
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where, for instance, Peter's strange (vegetation-based) vision of the traveler's way and the woman occurs after he seats himself next to a nurse and perambulator. At a moment of desperation in the park, aghast that her husband is insane, Rezia says "You should see the Milan gardens" (34) as a general statement "to no one in particular"; she speaks of a better, foreign garden, disillusioned by the contents of the English park. Bourton has another striking garden where the main action of marriage negotiation (by the fountain) between Clarissa and Peter take place and finally, near the end of the novel, there are the two significant gardens maintained by the book's central female characters, Sally and Clarissa. We learn that Sally possesses a garden of endless exotic plants ("in the wilds":284) and Clarissa, unbeknownst until a guest effusively and epiphanically remarks on it, possesses a sort of transcendent, magical garden (291). It is only noticed at her crowning dinner party, and is a creation by which she is declared "a magician", a mystical artiste, as it were; surely, she is producing existential pleasures within her enclosed domain.
Thus, it seems that flowers represent some sort of transcendent language that mark the interior (artistic) growth and status of the novel's characters. Sally at first, as a young woman, plucked the heads off of flowers at Bourton (Clarissa thinks: " - wicked to treat flowers like that - ": 50). Peter, from the outset, only seems to understand or see vegetables. "I prefer men to cauliflowers" (4), he claims, not seeing or even acknowledging the flowers in Bourton's garden, and privileging the discourse and company of men above that of flowers. Aunt Helena Parry, the indefatigable botanist, is the most articulate advocate of using the seemingly more female "language" of flowers to counter the valuation system used in the world of men: " - she had no tender memories, no proud illusions about Viceroys, Generals, Mutinies - it was orchids she saw - " (271).
Clarissa, as in the opening sentence, has a consistently assertive relationship to flowers; she peers out onto the world over her "arms full of sweet peas"(21), and Sally's main image of her at Bourton is "Clarissa all in white - with her hands full of flowers" (287). And, that her husband Richard understands this ineffable, mute discourse is underscored by his silent but meaning-filled gift of roses (179). Sally too, in her marriage and gardening that came with adulthood, seems learned the language of plants: " - she often got from her flowers a peace which men and women never gave her" (294). Indeed, in her maturity, for Sally "Bourton is tobacco" (287). She uses a precisely evocative plant-metaphor for the sleepless nights, political debates, and youthful challenges to authority that occurred there in their youth: she has become greatly articulate in the symbolic language of plants.
We can see why Woolf might be attracted to flowers as a metaphor for artistic or psychological sublimation, as they are both androgynous and sexual, unlike the mere "cabbages" that Peter is fixated upon, and ephemerally beautiful, like the "epiphanic" events of consciousness. They, are further, often markers of luxury and economic means: as a socialist-materialist Peter overlooks their importance, and the beauty of a moment, "however beautiful the day," and sees only the commodity of book as a source of interior nourishment (9).
In the case of A Room of One's Own Woolf describes the potential fruits of having an independent room as literary production by women: Shakespeare's sister will be born, she declares. Here, Clarissa's primary creative production are existential fruits (an
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appropriate word, as they would be the next biological transition of a flower). Clarissa employs flowers in her creative role as hostess, and flowers occupy the central scene in which Clarissa realizes that her dinner party is a success: "The curtain with its flight of birds of Paradise blew out again. And Clarissa saw - she saw Ralph Lyon beat is back, and go on talking. So it wasn't a failure after all!" (258). These floral representatives of otherworldly birds, figuratively fly out the window, merge with the wind, and the house's curtain caresses guest beside the flowers who goes on talking. This placement of guest by window with curtain and flowers, evokes a careful but intuitive precision of placement that might be used in the art of flower arrangement. Clarissa's creative victory as hostess in rooms over which she presides, in which is achieved an overcoming of seeming opposites and her personal and interior space is validated by a social world: in this particular scene, there seems to occur a harmonious discourse of flowers and men, such that neither minds the other.
Thus, we see the use of flowers in a "cultivated" space surface as a potentially psychological model - as an achieved model of sanity in the face of madness. Clarissa Dalloway remains a model of thankful sanity (because of Richard, calmly sitting there reading the Times: 281) and balance, while the character of Septimus has an irrecoverably fractured internal personal space. He must loosely and wildly wander through a public park, in which his wife (his female counterpart) sees no great beauty or merit. It is only in the walls of his own home that experiences some moments of peace achieved here in his personal space, after which he can make the decision to kill himself (a good choice, according to Clarissa: 283). Septimus was doomed to deal mostly in plants (trees, to be exact), and was fixated on saving them from human destruction. Just as he was never able to "understand" art, or was able to master his relationship to it (or declare himself as artist), he hasn't learned to use flowers.
The other main male character counterpoised to Clarissa, Peter, is slightly better off, and is growing to understand flowers, as with his tentative engagement to "Daisy." He is growing to embrace a more androgynous state, thanks to the women that surround him (Clarissa prime among them) and the giant female-figure that occurs in his dreamy vision in the park. Both he and Sally, however, are on the outskirts of civilization, in a "wilderness" (284), away from the "cultivated" civilization with which Mrs. Dalloway has achieved a truce. There struggles and peripheral forays of main contrasting characters serves to underline Mrs. Dalloway's more central and fore-square psychological victory achieved in London, the seat of governorship of the state of England and its entire empire.
Thus too does Clarissa's character (and spatial extensions) incorporate the extreme death of Septimus. Her thoughts of his death occurs when she is alone in an empty "little room" (279), freshly left by the Prime Minister and Lady Bruton, representatives of temporal power, nearing the end of her victorious party. She feels the death of Septimus as if it were her own, and then, suddenly, sees the old woman preparing for bed in her own "room of her own". What this scene succinctly portrays is Clarissa's symbolic conquering of the extremes of youth and the quiet aestheticism of old age (the young is dead, the old is alone), and shows her establishment in a place of psychological moderation and control, and peace with the external social and political world that surrounds her (as is symbolized by the imprint of the Prime Minister's recent presence in this temporary personal room).
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Hence the book ends with Peter's probing inner words: "What is this terror? what is this ecstasy?... What fills me with extraordinary excitement? It is Clarissa... For there she was." This statements of two psychological extremes, terror and ecstasy, and the demonstrative portrayal of Clarissa, end with a clear iteration of the character of Clarissa Dalloway as model of reconciliation of extreme psychological forces, and as a projective antidote to the inadequate contemporary persona of psychological doctor, Sir. William, that Clarissa critiques.
In this short narration of Peter's elated consciousness, he contemplates and feels his experience of Clarissa. The book is about "Mrs. Dalloway", yet ends with Peter's contemplation of her: he is "filled" (a usage of a word that invokes a interior-spatial sense) with this woman, and thus the genders are criss-crossed as the book comes to its end with Peter's perspective. A sort of spontaneous androgynous union of the male and female minds occurs. Peter uses her "real" name, Clarissa, "Mrs. Dalloway" without the protective shell, in effect, to expose her purer essence, and his moment of revelation is parallel to Clarissa's earlier revelation (that she achieved by way of entering a male perspective) represented by the crocus.
Thus, in Mrs. Dalloway, a more lyrical ideal and various perspectives on the room of one's own motif and themes arises, and is manifest also as the enriching "box of flowers" idea. Woolf hints at a psychological androgynous alchemy that might be achievable via literal marriage (as in the case of Clarissa's marriage to Richard), or a purely imagined or "negative" marriage (as with Peter), and works out a model of negotiated psychological health as an antidote and remedy to the bad doctoring portrayed in her book, and that must have been typical of her time.
To the Lighthouse(1927) BY
Virginia Woolf
The Window: Chapters I–IV Analysis—The Window: Chapters I–IV
Virginia Woolf read the work of Sigmund Freud, whose revolutionary model of human psychology explored the unconscious mind and raised questions regarding internal versus external realities. Woolf opens To the Lighthouse by dramatizing one of Freud’s more popular theories, the Oedipal conflict. Freud turned to the ancient Greek story of Oedipus, who inadvertently kills his father and marries his mother, to structure his thoughts on both family dynamics and male sexual development. According to Freud, young boys tend to demand and monopolize their mothers’ love at the risk of incurring the jealousy and wrath of their fathers. Between young James Ramsay and his parents, we see a similar triangle formed: James adores his mother as completely as he resents his father. Woolf’s gesture to Freud testifies to the radical nature of her project. As much a visionary as Freud, Woolf set out to write a novel that mapped the psychological unconscious. Instead of chronicling the many things characters say and do to one another, she concentrated on the innumerable things that exist beneath the surface of speech and action.
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Achieving this goal required the development of an innovative method of writing that came to be known as stream of consciousness, which charts the interior thoughts, perceptions, and feelings of one or more characters. Although interior monologue is another term often used to refer to this technique, an important difference exists between the two. While both stream of consciousness and interior monologue describe a character’s interior life, the latter does so by using the character’s grammar and syntax. In other words, the character’s thoughts are transcribed directly, without an authorial voice acting as mediator. Woolf does not make use of interior monologue; throughout To the Lighthouse, she maintains a voice distinct and distant from those of her characters. The pattern of young James’s mind, for instance, is described in the same lush language as that of his mother and father. It is more apt to say, then, that the novel is about the stream of human consciousness—the complex connection between feelings and memories—rather than a literary representation of it.
Through these forays into each character’s mind, Woolf explores the different ways in which individuals search for and create meaning in their own experience. She strives to express how individuals order their perceptions into a coherent understanding of life. This endeavor becomes particularly important in a world in which life no longer has any inherent meaning. Darwin’s theory of evolution, published in 1859 in The Origin of Species, challenged the then universal belief that human life was divinely inspired and, as such, intrinsically significant. Each of the three main characters has a different approach to establishing the worth of his or her life. Mr. -Ramsay represents an intellectual approach; as a metaphysical phil-osopher, he relies on his work to secure his reputation. Mrs. -Ramsay, devoted to family, friends, and the sanctity of social order, relies on her emotions rather than her mind to lend lasting meaning to her experiences. Lily, hoping to capture and preserve the truth of a single instant on canvas, uses her art.
The Window: Chapters V–VIII
Analysis
The line of poetry that Mr. Ramsay recites as he blusters across the lawn is taken from Tennyson’s “Charge of the Light Brigade.” The poem, which tells of 600 soldiers marching bravely to their death, ends with the lines
When can their glory fade? O the wild charge they made!
All the world wonder’d. Honour the charge they made!
A meditation on immortality, the poem captures the tumultuous state of Mr. Ramsay’s mind and his anxiety about whether he and his work will be remembered by future generations. Here, Mr. Ramsay emerges as an uncompromising but terribly insecure intellectual. He knows the world almost exclusively through words, so he tries to express and mediate his sadness with the lines by Tennyson. He yearns for the “glory” and the “wild charge” of which the poem speaks in the form of brilliant contributions to philosophy. Although he acknowledges a more profound truth—that in the end no
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immortality exists, and even a stone will outlast a figure as influential as -William Shakespeare—Mr. Ramsay cannot help but indulge his need to be comforted, to have others assure him of his place in the world and its importance. The posture he assumes as he approaches his wife in Chapter VII is one that he returns to often. Again and again, he displays a relentless desire for sympathy and understanding from her.
Mr. Ramsay is not alone in his need for his wife’s affections. Through Mrs. Ramsay, Woolf suggests that Mr. Ramsay’s traits belong to all men. Charles Tansley exhibits similar behavior in the opening chapters. He navigates the world according to what he has studied and read, and lashes out with “the fatal sterility of the male” for fear that his contributions will be deemed lacking. Mrs. Ramsay believes such daunted and insecure behavior to be inevitable, given the importance of men’s concerns and work. She sees men as well as women forced into roles that prescribe their behavior. In her extended sympathy for her husband and in her attempts at matchmaking, Mrs. Ramsay recognizes and observes these roles while trying to make it less painful for the people in her life to have to play them. This question of gender roles, which occupies much space in the coming chapters, is played out most fully in the relationship between Mrs. Ramsay and Lily Briscoe. Mrs. Ramsay’s maternal and wifely devotion represents the kind of traditional lifestyle to which Lily Briscoe refuses to conform.
Mr. Ramsay, who is obsessed with understanding and advancing the process of human thought, reveals the novel’s concern with knowledge. To the Lighthouse asks how humanity acquires knowledge and questions the scope and validity of that knowledge. The fact that Mr. Ramsay, who is decidedly one of the eminent philosophers of his day, doubts the solidity of his own thoughts suggests that a purely rational, universally agreed-upon worldview is an impossibility. Indeed, one of the effects of Woolf’s narrative method is to suggest that objective reality does not exist. The ever-shifting viewpoints that she employs construct a world in which reality is merely a collection of subjectively determined truths. Analysis: The Window: Chapters IX–XI
While Mrs. Ramsay’s reliance on intuition contrasts with her husband’s aloofness and self-interest, she shares with him a dread of mortality. Mrs. Ramsay’s mind seizes “the fact that there is no reason, order, justice.” It is only in her “wedge-shaped core of darkness” that she escapes “being and doing” enough to be herself. She realizes that happiness is, without exception, fleeting and ephemeral. Refrains of “children never forget” and “the greenhouse would cost fifty pounds” and other expressions of domestic anxiety break into her peace and solitude and advance the notion that life is transactional. However, it is exactly this awareness of death and worry that make her moments of wholeness so precious to her. Her sense of the inevitability of suffering and death lead her to search for such moments of bliss.
According to Mr. Ramsay’s conception of human thought, Mrs. Ramsay may not be as far along in the alphabet as he, but she has surpassed her husband in one important respect. Unlike Mr. Ramsay, she is able to move beyond the “treacheries” of the
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world by accepting them. Mr. Ramsay, on the other hand, becomes so mired in the thought of his own mortality that he is rendered helpless and dependent upon his wife.
Lily’s complicated reaction to Mrs. Ramsay in this section advances the novel’s discussion of gender by introducing a character who lives outside accepted gender conventions. As a single woman who, much to Mrs. Ramsay’s chagrin, shows little interest in marrying, Lily represents a new and evolving social order and raises the suspicions of several characters. Mrs. Ramsay suggests that she cannot know life completely until she has married, while Charles Tansley insists that women were not made to be painters or writers. Lily’s refusal to bow to these notions, however, testifies to her commitment to living as an independent woman and an artist. Indeed, by rejecting these once universally held beliefs, Lily creates a parallel between her life and her art. On canvas, she does not mean to make an assertion of objective truth; instead, she hopes to capture and preserve a moment that appears real to her. Her determination to live her life according to her own principles demands as great a struggle and commitment as her painting.
Woolf’s pairing of Lily with Mrs. Ramsay highlights her interest in the relationships among women outside the realm of prescribed gender roles. Mrs. Ramsay takes on the conventional roles of wife and mother and accepts the suffering and anxiety they bring. At the same time, she remains aware of her power: “Was she not forgetting how strongly she influenced people?” Lily rejects gender conventions, but she remains plagued by artistic self-doubt and feels that others’ notice of her work somehow takes the work away from her. Woolf uses the relationship between these women to show the detrimental effect of male society on female artistic vision, and to illustrate the potential intimacy and complexity of such relationships.
The Window: Chapter XVII Analysis
The stunning scene of Mrs. Ramsay’s dinner party is the heart of the novel. Here, the dominating rhythm emerges as the story moves from chaos to blissful, though momentary, order. To Mrs. Ramsay’s mind, the party begins as a disaster. Minta, Paul, Andrew, and Nancy are late returning from the beach; Mr. Ramsay acts rudely toward his guests; Charles Tansley continues to bully Lily; and, although she recognizes it as her social responsibility, Lily feels ill-equipped to soothe the man’s damaged ego. The opening of the chapter shifts rapidly from one partygoer’s perceptions to the next, giving the impression that each person is terribly “remote”—like Tansley, they all feel “rough and isolated and lonely.” But a change comes over the group as the candles are lit. Outside, the dark betrays a world in which “things wavered and vanished.” The guests come together against this overwhelming uncertainty and, for the remainder of the dinner, fashion collective meaning and order out of individual existences that possess neither inherently.
At the start of the party, Mrs. Ramsay’s thoughts sharply contrast with the literary allusions and learned talk of her male guests. By the end, however, she prevails in her gift, which Lily considers to be almost an artistic talent, for creating social harmony.
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If Mrs. Ramsay is an artist, the dinner party is her medium; indeed, if the purpose of art for her, as it is for Lily, is to break down the barriers between people, to unite and allow them to experience life together in brief, perfect understanding, then the party is nothing less than her masterpiece. The connection Lily feels between herself and Mrs. Ramsay deepens in Chapter XVII. When Lily finds herself acting out Mrs. Ramsay’s behaviors toward men in her banter with Tansley, she realizes the frustrations that all women, even those in traditional roles, feel at the limitations of convention.
Despite all the tensions and imperfections evident in the Ramsay household, such as Mr. Ramsay’s sometimes ridiculous vanity and Mrs. Ramsay’s determination to counter the flaws in her own marriage by arranging marriages for her friends, the tone of “The Window” remains primarily bright and optimistic. The pleasant beach, the lively children, and the Ramsays’ generally loving marriage suffuse the novel’s world with a feeling of possibility and potential, and many of the characters have happy prospects. Paul and Minta anticipate their marriage, and Mrs. Ramsay comforts herself with her daughter Prue’s future marriage as well as her son Andrew’s accomplished career as a mathematician. Perhaps most important, Lily has a breakthrough that she thinks will allow her to finish her painting. With this insight comes the determination to live her life as a single woman, regardless of what Mrs. Ramsay thinks. The hope of the novel lies in Lily’s resolve, for it reiterates the common bond that allows Mrs. Ramsay to have one opinion and Lily another. As the chapter closes, however, Mrs. Ramsay’s realization that such harmony is always ephemeral tempers this hope. As Mrs. Ramsay leaves the room and reflects, with a glance over her shoulder, that the experience of the evening has already become part of the past, the tone of the book Analysis— The Window: Chapters XVIII–XIX
The harmony of the dinner party dissipates as Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay retire to the parlor to read, and the unity they feel earlier that evening disappears as they sit alone, two remote individuals reestablishing distance between them. Much of To the Lighthouse depends upon a rhythm that mimics the descriptions of the sea. Like a wave that rolls out and then back in again, the feeling of harmony comes and goes for the Ramsays. Their interaction in Chapter XIX is one of the most moving in the novel. In her journal, Woolf wrote that she meant To the Lighthouse to be such a profoundly new kind of novel that a new name would need to be found to describe the form. She suggested the word “elegy,” meaning a sorrowful poem or song. There is a mournful quality to the work that gathers particular strength at the end of “The Window.” Although the Ramsays share an unparalleled moment of happiness, we are keenly aware of something equally profound that will forever go unspoken between them. Given the ultimate trajectory of the novel, elegy seems a fitting description. In the second part of the novel, the ravages of time, which Mrs. Ramsay has done her best to keep at bay, descend upon the story. In this section, the symbol of the boar’s skull hanging on the wall of the children’s nursery prefigures this inevitable movement toward death. The juxtaposition of youth and death is a particularly potent reminder that all things, given enough time, come to the same end.
Woolf further anticipates this inevitable life cycle and, more particularly, the death of Mrs. Ramsay through her use of literary allusions. Throughout the novel, Woolf refers to other works of literature to great effect. For instance, in the opening pages Mr.
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Ramsay blunders through a recitation of “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” which captures his anxieties about immortality, while at the dinner party the recently engaged Minta recalls Mr. Ramsay’s comments about Middlemarch, George Eliot’s novel about an unhappy marriage, whose story bears some resemblance to the -trouble she later encounters with Paul. In this section, Mrs. Ramsay latches onto snatches of poetry that resonate with the larger concerns and structure of the novel. The lines from the Shakespeare sonnet that she reads, which describe the lingering presence of an absent loved one, foreshadow Mrs. Ramsay’s death and continuing influence over the living. The other poem, written by Charles Elton, is titled “Luriana Lurilee.” The lines that Mrs. Ramsay recites from this poem are doubly significant:
And all the lives we ever lived And all the lives to be,
Are full of trees and changing leaves. First, the “changing leaves” confirm the larger cyclical pattern of life and death. Second, the image of the tree links Mrs. Ramsay to Lily, who believes that the success of her painting rests in moving the tree to the middle of the canvas. This connection becomes particularly important, as the hope of achieving harmony in their world comes to rest on Li Analysis— Time Passes: Chapters I–X
The “Time Passes” section of To the Lighthouse radically alters the novel’s development. Many of the characters from the first section disappear. What we learn of them in this brief following section is presented as an aside, set apart by brackets. To the Lighthouse frequently comments on the notion and passage of time. In “The Window,” Woolf conceives of time as a matter of psychology rather than chronology. She creates what the French philosopher Henri Bergson termed durée, a conception of the world as primarily intuitive and internal rather than external or material. Woolf returns to this narrative strategy in the final section of the novel, “The Lighthouse.” But here, in the intervening chapters, she switches gears completely and charts the relentless, cruel, and more conventional passage of time. The brackets around the deaths of Prue and Andrew associate them with Mrs. Ramsay’s intermittent refrains in “The Window” and accentuate the traumatic suddenness and ultimate lack of impact these events possess. These bracketed sentences take on the tone of news bulletins or marching orders.
While “The Window” deals with the minute details of a single afternoon and evening, stretching them out into a considerable piece of prose, “Time Passes” compresses an entire decade into barely twenty pages. Woolf chooses to portray the effects of time on objects like the house and its contents rather than on human development and emotion. “Time Passes” validates Lily’s and the Ramsays’ fears that time will bring about their demise, as well as the widespread fear among the characters that time will erase the legacy of their work. Here, everything from the garden to the prized Waverley novels slowly sinks into oblivion.
Because the focus shifts from psychology in “The Window” to chronology in “Time Passes,” human beings become secondary concerns in the latter section of the novel. This effect replicates the anxieties that plague the characters. Mr. Ramsay’s fear that there is little hope for human immortality is confirmed as Woolf presents the death of
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the novel’s heroine in an unadorned aside. This choice is remarkable on two levels. First, thematically, it skillfully asserts that human life is, in the natural scheme of things, incidental. As Mr. Ramsay notes in “The Window,” a stone will outlive even Shakespeare. Second, the offhand mention of Mrs. Ramsay’s death challenges established literary tradition by refusing to indulge in conventional sentiment. The emotionally hyperbolic Victorian deathbed scene is absent for Mrs. Ramsay, and Woolf uses an extreme economy of words to report the deaths of Mrs. Ramsay, Prue, and Andrew.
In this section, the darkened tone that begins to register toward the end of “The Window” comes to the fore both literally and figuratively. Mrs. Ramsay’s death constitutes the death of womanhood and the dismantling of domesticated power in the novel. With the deaths of Prue and Andrew, the world’s best potential and best hope seem dashed. Prue’s death in childbirth strikes out at beauty and continuity, while Andrew’s demise brings out the impact of war and the stunting of masculine potential so important to the novel’s historical context. In a way, the novel miniaturizes a vast historical moment for Europe as a whole. “Time Passes” brings to the Ramsays destruction as vast as that inflicted on Europe by World War I. When the Ramsays return to their summer home shaken, depleted, and unsure, they represent the postwar state of an entire continent.ly’s shoulders. Da Analysis—
The Lighthouse: Chapters I–III
The structure of To the Lighthouse creates a strange feeling of continuity between drastically discontinuous events. “The Window” ends after dinner, as night falls; “Time Passes” describes the demise of the house as one night passes into the next over the course of ten years; “The Lighthouse” resumes in the morning, at breakfast. Woolf almost suggests the illusion that Lily sits at the table the morning after the dinner party, even though the scene takes place a decade later. This structure lends the impression that Mr. Ramsay’s voyage to the lighthouse with Cam and James occurs the next day as James had hoped, though his world is now wholly different.
In spite of these differences, the Ramsays’ house in the Hebrides remains recognizable, as do the rhythmic patterns of the characters’ consciousnesses. As Woolf resumes her exploration of the subtle undercurrents of interpersonal relationships, she begins with characters who are “remote” from one another. They occupy, in fact, the same positions of private suffering as at the beginning of Mrs. Ramsay’s magnificent dinner party. Mr. Ramsay, a man in decline, is no longer imposing to Lily. Rather, he is awkward and pathetic. His children are waging a barely veiled revolt against his oppressive and self-pitying behavior. Still desperate for sympathy but unable to obtain it from Mrs. Ramsay, Mr. Ramsay turns to Lily and his children to satisfy his need. Lily, on the other hand, still feels unable to give of herself in this way. Her reluctance to show sympathy to Mr. Ramsay recalls her reaction to Charles Tansley at the dinner table. Then, as now, she cannot bring herself to soothe the tortured male ego. The world, as a result of these disjointed personalities and desires, seems “chaotic” and “aimless,” and Lily concludes that the house is brimming with “unrelated passions.”
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“The Window” establishes a rhythm between chaos and order, which allows us to anticipate the direction that “The Lighthouse” will take. Mr. Ramsay eventually reaches the lighthouse, just as Lily eventually completes her painting. The poignant scene in which Mr. Ramsay bends to knot Lily’s shoe foreshadows the “common feeling” that the two share when Lily’s consciousness becomes tied to her host’s. Before this union can happen, though, the two must be separated. Indeed, Lily’s thoughts toward Mr. Ramsay begin to soften only after he leaves her alone at her easel and sets off for the lighthouse. Only then does the sight of Cam, James, and Mr. Ramsay reveal itself as a potential image of harmony—“a little company bound together and strangely impressive to her.”
Memory is another vital step toward this harmony. Though long dead, Mrs. Ramsay lives in Lily’s consciousness in the final section of the novel, for it was Mrs. Ramsay who taught Lily a valuable lesson about the nature of art. As her hostess once demonstrated on an outing to the beach, art is the ability to take a moment from life and make it “permanent.” With this goal in mind, Lily Analysis
Chapters IV–VII
Although Chapter VI is presented in brackets and is only two sentences long, its description of a live mutilated fish is important to the novel since the fish represents the paradox of the world as an extremely cruel place in which survival is somehow possible. The brackets also hearken back to the reports of violence and sorrow in “Time Passes,” which recount the deaths of Prue and Andrew Ramsay. To the Lighthouse is filled with symbols that have no easily assigned meaning. The mutilated fish, the boar’s head wrapped in Mrs. Ramsay’s shawl, Lily’s painting, and the lighthouse itself are symbols that require us to sift through a multiplicity of meanings rather than pin down a single interpretation.
Mrs. Ramsay and the pasts of her guests and children haunt the novel’s final section. As Lily stands on the lawn watching the Ramsays’ boat move out into the bay, she is possessed by thoughts of Mrs. Ramsay, while Macalister spins out stories of shipwrecks and drowned sailors, and Cam reflects that there is no suffering on the distant shore where people are “free to come and go like ghosts.” At first, Mrs. Ramsay exerts her old pull on Lily, who begins to feel anxious about the choices she has made in life. But as her thoughts turn to Paul and Minta Rayley, around whom she has built up “a whole structure of imagination,” Lily begins to exorcise Mrs. Ramsay’s spirit and better understand her old friend. Though she readily admits in regard to her imagining of the Rayleys’ failed marriage that “not a word of it [is] true,” she believes that her version of their lives constitutes real knowledge of the couple; thus, the novel again insists upon the subjective nature of reality. These thoughts allow Lily to approach Mrs. Ramsay, who insisted on Paul’s marriage, from a new, more critical, and ultimately more truthful angle.
Lily’s longing for Mrs. Ramsay is a result of understanding her as a more complicated, flawed individual. When she wakes that morning, Lily reflects solemnly that Mrs. Ramsay’s absence at the breakfast table evokes no particular feelings in her; now, however, Lily calls out Mrs. Ramsay’s name, as if attempting to chant her back from the grave. Lily’s anguish and dissonance force us to reassess her art. Mrs.
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Ramsay’s beauty has always rendered Lily speechless, but Lily now realizes that “[b]eauty had this penalty—it came too readily, came too completely. It stilled life—froze it.” She mimics Mrs. Ramsay’s psychological gesture of smoothing away life’s complexities and flaws under a veneer of beauty. Continuing to paint, Lily feels a deeper need to locate the Ramsays’ boat on the water and reach out to Mr. Ramsay, to whom a short while earlier she feels that she has nothing to give. Analysis Chapters VIII–XIII
James’s reflection on the lighthouse underlines the contradictory psychological and narrative structures of the book. The lighthouse provides James with a chance to consider the subjective nature of his consciousness. He decides that the tower can be two competing images at once: it is, for him, both a relic of his childhood fantasy and the stark, brutally real and somewhat banal structure he now sees before him. Just as Lily concludes that she would need more than fifty pairs of eyes in order to gain a complete picture of Mrs. Ramsay, James realizes that nothing is ever only one thing—the world is far too complex for such reduction and simplification. These metaphors explain Woolf’s technique. Only by presenting the narrative as a collection of varied and competing consciousnesses could she hope to capture a true likeness of her characters and their worlds.
In the final pages of the novel, Woolf reveals the key to the reconciliation of competing impressions that allows James to view the lighthouse and Lily to see Mrs. Ramsay in the context of both the past and present. This key is distance, which Lily notes in Chapter IX has “extraordinary power.” Lily has had ten years to process her thoughts regarding Mrs. Ramsay, ten years to work her way beyond an influence that, in the opening pages of the novel, overwhelms her with its intensity. When, earlier, Lily sits at Mrs. Ramsay’s feet, she is blinded by her love for the woman. Her opinion of Mrs. Ramsay has changed considerably by the end of the novel. She recognizes Mrs. Ramsay’s dated ways and somewhat manipulative nature, and her vision of Mrs. Ramsay is now more complete. Likewise, James is better able to see the lighthouse and, more pivotal, his father because of the distance that separates him from his childhood impressions. Mr. Ramsay, as Cam realizes, is not the same man he was ten years ago. Although still domineering, he has become more sensitive, a fact that James, overjoyed with the compliment his father has paid him, might finally begin to see.
Woolf’s phrasing of Lily’s declaration of “[i]t is finished” lends gravity and power to the moment with its biblical echoes of death and impending rebirth. The moment also parallels James’s ability to see the lighthouse and his father anew but holds singular importance for the structure of the novel. Mr. Ramsay, Mrs. Ramsay, and Lily Briscoe make three distinct attempts to harness the chaos that is life and make it meaningful. As a philosopher, Mr. Ramsay fails to progress to the end of human thought, that elusive letter Z that he believes represents the ultimate knowledge of life, while Mrs. Ramsay dies before she sees her children married. Thus, both the intellectual and social attempts to order life fall short. Only Lily’s attempt at artistic order succeeds, and it does so with grace and power. Lily has a “vision” that enables her to bring the separate, conflicting objects of her composition into harmony. This synthesizing impulse counters the narrative fragmentation as well as the competing worldviews
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among the characters. The painting represents a single instant lifted out of the flow of time and made permanent.paint.
The Great Gatsby(1925) By
F.Scott Fitzgerald
Analysis
Fitzgerald establishes Nick Carraway as an impartial narrator; he is not, however, a passive one. Though he is inclined to reserve judgment, he is not entirely forgiving. From the novel's opening paragraphs and onward, this will continue to be a tension in Nick's character. Though Gatsby represents all that Nick holds in contempt, Nick cannot help but admire him. The first paragraphs of the book foreshadow the novel's main themes: we realize that Gatsby presented, and still presents, a challenge to the way Nick is accustomed to thinking about the world. We know, from the story's opening moments, that Gatsby will not be what he initially appears: despite the vulgarity of his mansion, Nick describes Gatsby's personality as "gorgeous."
Both the book and its characters are obsessed by class and privilege. Though Nick, like the Buchanans, comes from an elite background, their relationship to their social position is entirely different. Tom Buchanan vulgarly exploits his status: he is a grotesque, completely without any redeeming features. His wife describes him as a "big, hulking physical specimen," and he uses his size only to dominate others. He has a trace of "paternal contempt" that instantly inspires hatred. Tom is, in short, a hypocritical bully: he propounds racist dogma over dinner and takes calls from his mistress while his wife is in the room.
Daisy Buchanan stands in stark contrast to her husband. She is frail and diminutive, and actually labors at being shallow she laughs at practically every opportunity. Daisy is utterly transparent, feebly affecting an air of worldliness and cynicism. Though she breezily remarks that everything is in decline, she does so only in order to be heard agreeing with her husband. She and Jordan are dressed in white when Nick arrives, and she mentions that they spent a "white girl-hood" together; the ostensible purity of Daisy and Jordan stands in ironic contrast to their actual decadence and corruption, as later events will reveal.
The first appearance of Gatsby has a religious solemnity, and Gatsby himself seems almost godlike: Nick speculates that Gatsby has "come out to determine what share of our local heavens [was his]." He is utterly alone, a solitary figure in a posture of mysterious worship. When first we see Gatsby, he is reaching toward the green light something that, by definition, he cannot grasp. In this scene, Fitzgerald wholly sacrifices realism in favor of drama and symbol: the green light symbolizes the as-yet-nameless object for which Gatsby is hopelessly striving.
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Chapter Two
Analysis
The road from West Egg to New York City exemplifies decay. It is a "valley of ashes," a place of uninterrupted desolation. The eyes of Doctor T.J. Eckleburg are an indelibly grotesque image: these are eyes unattached to any face or body, gazing out at a hellish wasteland. They, like the valley as a whole, are profoundly unnatural and decaying. Fitzgerald's description of the drawbridge and passing barges makes an allusion to the River Styx the river in Greek mythology which one crosses to enter the realm of the dead. The eyes of Dr. T.J. Eckleburg seem to be a monstrous parody of the eyes of God: they watch, but they do not see; they are heartless, and entirely unknowing. This, Fitzgerald seems to be saying, is what remains of the idea of God in the post-industrial age. Like the scene in which Gatsby reaches for the green light, high symbolism is given priority over the demands of realism: we are given a completely implausible, but highly affecting, image of two detached eyes looking out over dust and ashes.
The novel's only impoverished characters live in the valley of ashes; it is the grim underside to the hedonism of the Eggs, and of New York. George Wilson, Myrtle's dejected husband, seems almost made of ashes; "ashen dust" coats his clothes and his hair. This, Fitzgerald seems to be saying, is what poverty looks like: it lies beneath wealth (as represented by the Eggs and New York), and is used by the wealthy as a mere dumping ground. It is what the wealthy wish not to see.
In comparison to Daisy Buchanan, Myrtle Wilson is sensuous and vital. While Daisy wears pale white, Myrtle is dressed in saturated colors; her mouth is a deep red. While Daisy is affected and insubstantial, Myrtle Wilson is straightforward, fleshy, almost coarse. Fitzgerald presents her fleshiness her large breasts and hips as a sign of her robust femininity.
At Tom's party, the characters engage in vulgar, boorish behavior: Myrtle Wilson reads tabloids; she and her sister gossip viciously about Gatsby and each other; Mr. McKee does not say that he is an artist, but instead claims to be in the "artistic game."
Clothing plays an important role in the development of character, and is reflective of both a character's mood and his personality. This device emphasizes the characters' superficiality: you are truly shallow, Fitzgerald seems to be saying, when you are what you wear. When Myrtle changes into a cream-colored dress, she loses some of her vitality. Like Daisy, she becomes more artificial; her laughter, gestures and speech become violently affected.
This chapter explores a world that has collapsed into decadence: Fitzgerald's society is a society in decay. The only rationale that Myrtle gives for her affair with Tom is, "You can't live forever." Nick Carraway remains both "within and without" this world: though he is repulsed by the party's vulgarity, he is too fascinated to compel himself to leave. It becomes patently clear in this chapter that Tom is both a bully and
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a hypocrite: he carries on a highly public affair, but feels compelled to beat his mistress in order to keep her in her place. The fact that Tom feels no guilt about his violence toward Myrtle indeed, he seems incapable of feeling guilt at all will become pivotal in later chapters.
Chapter Three
Analysis
Though we have finally been introduced to Jay Gatsby, he remains fundamentally a mystery. Few of the partygoers have so much as met their host, and Gatsby stands aloof from his own celebration. He does not drink, he does not dance he remains only an observer. The man himself stands in stark contrast to the sinister gossip Nick has heard about him: Gatsby is young and handsome, with a beautiful smile that seems to radiate hope and optimism. Nick falls instantly in love with Gatsby's smile, remarking that it has "a quality of eternal reassurance in it." Gatsby's innate hopefulness is contagious.
Though Nick implies throughout the novel that wealth and ostentation tend to mask immorality and decay, Gatsby's wealth seems to serve another purpose one that is not yet clear. We already know that not everything about Gatsby is mere display: his books are real, for example; his smile is real. At the same time, however, he has a queer quasi-English accent that is clearly false. Gatsby, at this point in the novel, remains an enigma, a creature of contradictions.
Fitzgerald gives great attention to the details of contemporary society: Gatsby's party is both a description and parody of Jazz Age decadence. It exemplifies the spirit of conspicuous consumption, and is a queer mix of the lewd and the respectable. Though catered to by butlers and serenaded by professionally trained singers, the guests are drunk, crude, and boisterous. The orchestra plays a work by Tostoff called The Jazz History of the World; though it has had a fantastic reception at Carnegie Hall, the piece is the antithesis of classical respectability. Fitzgerald's Jazz Age is clearly in the gutter, but struggling to look up at the stars.
At the time of this book's publication, cars were still novelty items; in the novel, they are imbued with a sense of luxurious danger. A car accident disturbs the end of the party, when a drunken Owl Eyes crashes his car into a ditch. Nick admonishes Jordan for being an unspeakably awful driver, and her near-accident serves as a metaphor for the behavior of her contemporaries: Jordan is a careless driver because she considers caution the responsibility of others. It is up to them to keep out of her way.
The chapter also reinforces Nick's position an objective and reliable narrator: it ends with his claim that he is one of the few honest people he has ever known. Jordan Baker, by contrast, is compulsively dishonest; the fact that she cheated to win her first golf tournament is entirely unsurprising. She assumes that everyone else is as dishonest as she: she automatically concludes that Gatsby's books, like the better part of her own personality, exist merely for the sake of appearance.
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Chapter Four
Analysis
This chapter is primarily concerned with the mystery of Gatsby's background, and of the source of his wealth. Though Nick was first taken with Gatsby's seeming purity and optimism, Gatsby remains enigmatic and not entirely trustworthy. Gatsby's own account of his illustrious past seems comically exaggerated. His readiness to provide evidence to corroborate his story is itself suspect; an honest man, one imagines, would be insulted by Nick's skepticism.
The introduction of Meyer Wolfsheim serves to increase Nick's and the reader's doubts concerning Gatsby's virtue. Nick begins to suspect that the rumors of Gatsby's involvement with organized crime and bootlegging may not be entirely false.
Jordan's story of Gatsby, by contrast, portrays him as a yearning romantic, forced to worship his lover from afar. Though Jordan implies that there was something in Gatsby's background that caused Daisy's parents to oppose their marriage, it is clear that the young Jay Gatsby was a man of unimpeachable virtue. Fitzgerald draws upon a few centuries of romantic cliché to present Gatsby as the ideal lover: he is a soldier going off to war, brave and handsome, young and pure. Nick's ambivalence toward Gatsby, in which he finds himself constantly oscillating between admiration and distaste (recall that Nick found the excesses of Gatsby's party repellent), is emphasized here. The contradiction inherent in Gatsby's character between his guileless optimism and putative moral corruption is also reinforced.
It is important to note that Wolfsheim, the novel's symbolic representative of the "criminal element," is obviously Jewish: Fitzgerald gives the character a number of the "Jewish" physical features (a large nose, a diminutive stature) that were a staple of racist caricature in the 1920s. During this period, anti-Semitism in America was at an all-time high: Jews, as a result of their "characteristic greed," were held responsible for the corruption of the nation as a whole. Fitzgerald seems to be uncritically drawing on this racist ideology in his presentation of Wolfsheim; the character is nothing more than a grotesque stereotype.
This chapter also reveals the object of Gatsby's yearning: it was Daisy, and his love for Daisy, that caused him to reach out toward the mysterious green light in Chapter I. The green light serves as a symbol for a number of things: among them are Gatsby's dauntless romantic optimism, Daisy herself, and the American dream as a whole.
Even Gatsby's infamous parties are thrown for the sole purpose of attracting Daisy's attention; she is his animating force. Everything Gatsby does and has done has been out of love for her: he has reinvented himself as a cultured millionaire solely to court her love and approval. In this way, Daisy too seems to serve as a symbol of the American Dream (at least in its 1920s manifestation); her corruption and emptiness will reveal the corruption that has befallen the great dream itself.
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Chapter Five
Analysis
The exchange between Nick and Gatsby that opens this chapter highlights the uncertainty at the heart of their relationship: is Gatsby's friendship with Nick merely expedient that is, is he merely using him to draw closer to Daisy or is he genuinely fond of him?
The question cannot be absolutely decided: while it becomes clear that Gatsby has great affection for Nick, it is also true that he uses his money and power as leverage in all of his personal relationships. Gatsby, in his extreme insecurity about class, cannot believe that anyone would befriend him if he did not possess a mansion and several million dollars a year. Fitzgerald seems to bitterly affirm this insecurity, given the fact that Gatsby was abandoned by Daisy because of his poverty, and remains ostracized by the East Eggers even after his success. In the world of the novel, only Nick does not make friendships based upon class.
The gross materialism of the East and West Egg milieus explains the obsessive care that Gatsby takes in his reunion with Daisy. The afternoon is give over to an ostentatious display of wealth: he shoes Daisy his extensive collection of British antiques and takes her on a tour of his wardrobe; Gatsby himself is dressed in gold and silver. His Gothic mansion is described as looking like the citadel of a feudal lord. Nearly everything in the house is imported from England (the scene in which Gatsby shows Daisy his piles of English shirts is one of the most famous scenes in American literature). Fitzgerald implies that Gatsby is attempting to live the life of a European aristocrat in the New World of America. This, Fitzgerald suggests, is a misguided anachronism: America committed itself to progress and equality in abandoning the old aristocracy. To go back to such rigidly defined class distinctions would be retrograde and barbaric as is implied by the fact that the major proponent of such ideas is Tom Buchanan, who is clearly a cretin and a brute.
This chapter presents Gatsby as a man who cannot help but live in the past: he longs to stop time, as though he and Daisy had never been separated as though she had never left him to marry Tom. During their meeting Nick remarks that he is acting like "a little boy": in Daisy's presence, Gatsby loses his usual debonair manner and behaves like any awkward young man in love. Gatsby himself is regressing, moving back in time, as though he were still a shy young soldier in love with a privileged debutante.
Nick describes the restless Gatsby as "running down like an over-wound clock." It is significant that Gatsby, in his nervousness about whether Daisy's feelings toward him have changed, knocks over Nick's clock: this signifies both Gatsby's consuming desire to stop time and his inability to do so.
Daisy, too, ceases to play the part of a world-weary sophisticate upon her reunion with Gatsby. She weeps when he shows her his collection of sumptuous English
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shirts, and seems genuinely overjoyed at his success. In short, Gatsby transforms her; she becomes almost human. Daisy is more sympathetic here than she is at any other point in the novel.
The song "Ain't We Got Fun" is significant for a number of reasons. The opening lyrics ("In the morning/ In the evening/ Ain't we got fun") imply a carefree spontaneity that stands in stark contrast to the tightly-controlled quality of the lovers' reunion. This contrast is further sharpened by the words of the next verse, which run: "Got no money/ But oh, honey/ Ain't we got fun!" It is bitterly ironic that Gatsby and Daisy should reunite to the strains of this song, given the fact that she first rejected him for his poverty.
Chapter Six
Analysis
Nick begins the story of Gatsby's past by saying that Gatsby "sprang from his Platonic conception of himself." In order to understand this statement, the reader must remember that the "Platonic conception" of a person or thing refers to that thing's ideal form. That is, the Platonic form of an object is the perfect form of that object. Therefore, Nick is suggesting that Gatsby has modeled himself on an idealized version of "Jay Gatsby": he is striving to be the man he envisions in his fondest dreams of himself. Gatsby is thus the novel's representative of the American Dream, and the story of his youth borrows on one of that dream's oldest myths: that of the self-made man. In changing his name from James Gatz to Jay Gatsby, he attempts to remake himself on his own terms; Gatsby wishes to be reborn as the aristocrat he feels himself to be.
It is significant that Gatsby leaves college because he finds his work as a janitor degrading. This seems a perverse decision, given the fact that a university education would dramatically improve his social standing. His decision to leave reveals Gatsby's extreme sensitivity to class, and to the fact of his own poverty; from his childhood onward, he longs for wealth and perhaps more importantly for the sophistication and elegance which he imagines that wealth will lend him. His work as a janitor is a gross humiliation because it is at odds with his ideal of himself; to protect that ideal, he is willing to damage his actual circumstances.
Fitzgerald uses the character of Dan Cody to subtly suggest that the America of the 1920s is no longer a place where self-made men can thrive. Cody, like Gatsby, transcended early hardship to become a millionaire; also like Gatsby, he is remarkably generous to his friends and subordinates. Cody takes to drinking because, despite his wealth, he remains unable to carve out a place for himself in the world of 1920s America. It is important to note that Cody's death is brought about, at least in part, through the treachery of the woman he loves; this foreshadows the circumstances of Gatsby's death in Chapter VIII.
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The painfully awkward luncheon party at Gatsby's mansion underlines the hostility of the American 1920s toward the figure of the self-made man. Both the Sloanes and Tom Buchanan treat Gatsby with contempt and condescension, because he is not of the long-standing American upper class. Though Gatsby is fabulously wealthy perhaps wealthier than Tom himself he is still regarded as socially inferior. For Fitzgerald, nothing could be more inimical to the original ideals of America. The first Americans fought to escape the tyrannies of the European nobility; Tom Buchanan longs to reproduce them.
This chapter makes it clear that Daisy, too, is a part of the same narrow-minded aristocracy that produced her husband. For Gatsby, she became the symbol of everything that he wanted to possess: she is the epitome of wealth and sophistication. Though Gatsby loves this quality in Daisy, it is precisely because she is an aristocrat that she cannot possibly fulfill his dreams: she would never sacrifice her own class status in order to be with him. Her love for him pales in comparison to her love of privilege.
Chapter Seven
Analysis
The reunion of Gatsby and Daisy is the novel's pivotal event; it sets all the subsequent events into inevitable motion. In Chapter VII, the story of their romance reaches its climax and its tragic conclusion.
Gatsby is profoundly changed by his reunion with Daisy: he ceases to throw his lavish parties and, for the first time, shows concern for his public reputation. In the past, Gatsby has simply ignored the vicious rumors circulating about him; for Daisy's sake, however, he must now exercise some discretion.
Daisy, by contrast, is extremely indiscreet with regard to her romance with Gatsby. Inviting Gatsby to lunch with her husband would be a bold, foolish move under any circumstances; when one takes Tom's snobbery and intense suspiciousness into account, Daisy's decision seems to border on madness. Tom is profoundly insecure, obsessed with both his own inevitable downfall and the downfall of civilization itself. It is important to recognize that, for Tom, they are the same thing: he believes that he, as a wealthy white male aristocrat, is Western civilization's greatest achievement. This odious mindset is borne out by his choice of reading material, which views the end of the world and interracial marriage as being equally catastrophic.
The confrontation between Gatsby and Tom serves to reveal the major flaws and motivations of both characters. For Tom, the affair between Gatsby and Daisy is evidence of the decline of civilization; he seems less disturbed by his wife's infidelity than by the fact that she is involved with a man of an inferior social class. Tom's gross misogyny and hypocrisy assert themselves here: he obviously does not regard his affair with the lower-class Myrtle Wilson in the same apocalyptic light. As Nick remarks, Tom moves "from libertine to prig" when it suits his needs.
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Tom uses the fact of Gatsby's criminal activity to humiliate him before Daisy. Tom, for all his crudeness, possesses a subtle knowledge of his wife: he realizes that Daisy's innate snobbery is ultimately identical with his own. She would never desert her aristocratic husband for "a common bootlegger" regardless of the love she felt for the bootlegger in question. Daisy refuses to submit to Gatsby's pleas, and will not say that she has never loved Tom. Gatsby is ultimately unable to recapture his idyllic past; the past, the future, and Daisy herself ultimately belong to Tom.
The distinction between "old" and "new" money is crucial here: while Gatsby earned his fortune, Daisy is an aristocrat, a woman for whom wealth and privilege come effortlessly. As Gatsby himself remarks, even her voice is "full of money." This is what he loves in Daisy's voice, and in Daisy herself: for Gatsby, Daisy represents the wealth and elegance for which he has yearned all his life. Gatsby thus loses Daisy for the same reason that he adores her: her patrician arrogance.
The introduction of Daisy's daughter provides incontestable proof of Gatsby's inability to annul the passage of time. He does not believe in the child's existence until actually confronted with her; even then, he regards her with shock and bewilderment. Daisy, for her part, seems scarcely to regard the girl as real: she coos over her as though she were a doll, and seems to leave her almost entirely in the care of a nanny. The selfish and immature Daisy is essentially a child herself, and is in no position to be a mother.
Daisy remains characteristically passive throughout Chapter VII; she is only a spectator to the argument between Gatsby and Tom. Her weakness is particularly important here: Tom and Gatsby fight over who can possess Daisy and provide for her. Gatsby, tellingly, does not say that Daisy is leaving Tom, but that Tom is "not going to take care of her anymore"; both men regard her as being incapable of independent action.
Daisy's carelessness and stupidity eventually lead to the death of Myrtle Wilson, and Gatsby is forced to leave the scene of the accident and to hide the fatal car simply to protect Daisy's fragile nerves. His decision to take responsibility for Myrtle's death reveals that his love for Daisy is unassailable; her cruelty has changed and will change nothing. Gatsby, despite his criminal activities, remains essentially noble: he is willing to sacrifice himself for the woman he loves.
Chapter Eight
Analysis
The final line of The Great Gatsby is one of the most famous in American literature, and serves as a sort of epitaph for both Gatsby and the novel as a whole.
So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past. Here, Nick reveals Gatsby's lifelong quest to transcend his past as ultimately futile. In
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comparing this backward-driving force to the current of a river, Fitzgerald presents it as both inexorable and, in some sense, naturally determined: it is the inescapable lot of humanity to move backward. Therefore, any attempt at progress is only a conceit, the result of hubris and outsize ambition.
Nick, in reflecting on America as a whole, links its fate to Gatsby's. America, according to Fitzgerald, was founded on the ideals of progress and equality. The America envisioned by its founders was a land made for men like Gatsby: it was intended as a place where visionary dreamers could thrive. Instead, people like Tom and Daisy Buchanan have recreated the grotesqueries and excesses of the European aristocracy in the New World. Gatsby, for all his wealth and greatness, could not become a part of their world; his noble attempt to engineer his own destiny was sabotaged by their cruelty and by the stunted quality of their imaginations. Fitzgerald's America is emphatically not a place where anything is possible: just as America has failed to transcend its European origins, Gatsby, too, cannot overcome the circumstances of his upbringing.
Though Nick worships Gatsby's courage and capacity for self-reinvention, he cannot approve of his dishonesty and his criminal dealings. Gatsby, both while he is alive and after his death, poses an insoluble challenge to Nick's customary ways of thinking about the world. Nick firmly believes that the past determines who we are: he suggests that he, and all the novel's characters, are fundamentally Westerners, and thus intrinsically unsuited to life in the East. The West, though it was once emblematic of the American desire for progress, is presented in the novel's final pages as the seat of traditional morality an idyllic heartland, in stark contrast to the greed and depravity of the East.
It is important to note that the Buchanans lived in East Egg, and Gatsby in West Egg; therefore, in gazing at the green light on Daisy's dock, Gatsby was looking East. The green light, like the green land of America itself, was once a symbol of hope; now, the original ideals of the American dream have deteriorated into the crass pursuit of wealth. In committing his extraordinary capacity for dreaming to his love for Daisy, Gatsby, too, devoted himself to nothing more than material gain. In Fitzgerald's grim version of the Roaring Twenties, Gatsby's ruin both mirrors and prefigures the ruin of America itself.
Character List
Jay Gatsby (James Gatz): Gatsby is, of course, both the novel's title character and its protagonist. When first we meet him, Gatsby is a mysterious, fantastically wealthy young man. Every Saturday, his garish Gothic mansion in West Egg serves as the site of extravagant parties. Later in the novel, we learn that his real name is James Gatz; he was born in North Dakota, to an impoverished farming family. While serving in the Army in World War I, Gatsby met Daisy Fay (now Daisy Buchanan) and fell passionately in love with her. He worked briefly for a millionaire, and there became acquainted with the people and customs of high society. This, coupled with his love of Daisy, inspired Gatsby to devote his life to the acquisition of wealth. His fortune has
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been made through illegal activities: he has sacrificed all claims to propriety in the hopes of growing wealthy and thereby winning Daisy's love.
Nick Carraway: The novel's narrator, Nick Carraway comes from a well-to-do Minnesota family. He travels to New York to learn the bond business; there, he becomes involved with both Gatsby and the Buchanans. Though he is honest, responsible, and fair-minded, Nick nevertheless shares some of the flaws of the East Egg milieu. He, too, frequently neglects to take the emotions of others into account. Of all the novel's characters, he is the only one to truly recognize Gatsby's "greatness" thereby revealing himself as a young man of unusual sensitivity.
Tom Buchanan: A brutal, hulking man, Tom Buchanan is a former Yale football player who, like Daisy, comes from an immensely wealthy Midwestern family. His racism and sexism are symptomatic of his deep insecurity about his own elevated social position. Tom is a vicious bully, physically menacing both his wife and his mistress. He is a thoroughgoing hypocrite as well: though he condemns his wife and Gatsby for their infidelity, he has no qualms about carrying on his own affair.
Daisy Fay Buchanan: Born Daisy Fay, she is Nick's cousin, Tom's wife, and the woman Gatsby loves. In her youth, she fell in love with Jay Gatsby and promised to wait for him until the end of the war. During their separation, however, Tom Buchanan proposed to her; comparing Tom's wealth to Gatsby's poverty, Daisy decided not to wait for Gatsby after all. Daisy is insubstantial and vapid, a careless woman who uses her frail demeanor as an excuse for her extreme immaturity. She, in her wealth and beauty, is the symbol of all that Gatsby desires. She kills Myrtle Wilson while driving Gatsby's car. Gatsby selflessly assumes responsibility for Myrtle's death.
Jordan Baker: Daisy's longtime friend, Jordan Baker is a professional golfer who cheated in order to win her first tournament. Jordan is extremely cynical, with a masculine, icy demeanor that Nick initially finds compelling. The two become briefly involved, but Jordan rejects him on the grounds that he is as corrupt and decadent as she is.
Myrtle Wilson: An earthy, vital and voluptuous woman, Myrtle is desperate to improve her life. She shares a loveless marriage with George Wilson, a man who runs a shabby garage in the valley of ashes. She has been having a long-term affair with Tom Buchanan, and is incredibly jealous of Daisy. After a fight with her husband, she runs out into the street and is hit and killed by Gatsby's car.
George B. Wilson: George is a listless, impoverished man whose only passion is his love for his wife, Myrtle. He is devastated by Myrtle's affair with Tom. After her death, the magnitude of his grief drives Wilson to murder Jay Gatsby before committing suicide himself.
Meyer Wolfsheim: A notorious underworld figure, Wolfsheim is a business associate of Gatsby. He is deeply involved in organized crime, and even claims credit for fixing the 1919 World Series. His character like Fitzgerald's view of the Roaring Twenties as a whole is a curious mix of barbarism and refinement (his cufflinks are made from human molars). After Gatsby's murder, however, Wolfsheim is one of the only people
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to express his grief or condolences; by contrast, the socially superior Buchanans fail to attend Gatsby's funeral.
Henry Gatz: Gatsby's father; his son's help is the only thing that saves him from poverty. Gatz tells Nick about his son's extravagant plans and dreams of self-improvement.
Dan Cody: A somewhat coarse man who became immensely wealthy during the Gold Rush. He mentored Gatsby was he was a young man and gave him a taste of elite society. Though he left Gatsby a sum of money after his death, it was later seized by Cody's ex-wife.
Michaelis: Wilson's neighbor; he attempts to console Wilson after Myrtle's death.
Catherine: Myrtle Wilson's sister. Tom, Myrtle and Nick visit with her and her neighbors, the McKees, in New York City.
The McKees: Catherine's neighbors. Mr. McKee is an artist; both McKees are shallow gossips who concern themselves only with status and fashion.
Ewing Klipspringer: A shiftless freeloader who almost lives at Gatsby's mansion. Though he takes advantage of Gatsby's wealth and generosity, Klipspringer fails to attend his funeral.
Owl Eyes: An eccentric, bespectacled man whom Nick meets at one of Gatsby's parties. He is one of the few people to attend Gatsby's funeral.
Chapter 1 "His speaking voice, a gruff husky tenor, added to the impression of fractiousness he conveyed. There was a touch of paternal contempt in it, even toward people he liked and there were men at New Haven who had hated his guts." -Pg. 7 fractious (adj) - unruly, quarrelsome, irritable. "Something was making him nibble at the edge of stale ideas as if his sturdy physical egotism no longer nourished his peremptory heart." - Pg. 20-21 peremptory (adj) - admitting of no contradiction, often characterized by arrogant self-assurance
Chapter 2 "The supercilious assumption was that on Sunday afternoon I had nothing better to do." supercilious (adj) - arrogant, contemptous "Wilson's mother which hoveblue like an ectoplasm on the wall. His wife was shrill, languid, handsome, and horrible. She told me with pride that her husband had photographed her a hundblue and twenty-seven times since they had been married. " -Pg. 30
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ectoplasm (n) - a gel substance held to produce spirit materialization "I wanted to get out and walk southward toward the park through the soft twilight, but each time I tried to go I became entangled in some wild, strident argument which pulled me back, as if with ropes, into my chair. " - Pg. 36 strident (adj) - commanding attention by a loud or obtrusive quality
Chapter 3 "Laughter is easier minute by minute, spilled with prodigality, tipped out at a cheerful word." - Pg. 40 prodigality (n) - reckless extravagance, lavishness, luxuriance "A celebrated tenor had sung in Italian, and a notorious contralto had sung in jazz, and between the numbers people were doing "stunts" all over the garden, while happy, vacuous bursts of laughter rose toward the summer sky." -Pg. 47 vacuous (adj) - marked by lack of ideas or intelligence; devoid of serious occupation "I had expected that Mr. Gatsby would be a florid and corpulent person in his middle years." -Pg. 49 corpulent (adj) - having a large bulky body "But young men didn't - at least in my provincial inexperience I believed they didn't - drift coolly out of nowhere and buy a palace on Long Island Sound." -Pg. 49 provincial (adj) - limited in outlook, narrow; unsophisticated "In spite of the wives' agreement that such malevolence was beyond cblueibility, the dispute ended in a short struggle, and both wives were lifted, kicking, into the night." -Pg. 53 malevolence (adj) - intense often vicious ill will, spite, or hatblue
Chapter 4 "This quality was continually breaking through his punctilious manner in the shape of restlessness. -Pg. 64 punctilious (adj) - concerned about precise exact accordance with details of codes or conventions "He's quite a character around New York - a denizen of Broadway." -Pg. 74 denizen (n) - inhabitant; one that frequents a place
Chapter 6 "He was a son of God - a phrase which, if it means anything, means just that - and he must be about His Father's business, the service of a vast, vulgar, and meretricious beauty." meretricious (adj) - tawdrily and falsely attractive, pretentioius, gaudy
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"The none too savory ramifications by which Ella Kaye, the newspaper woman, played Madame de Maintenon to his weakness and sent him to sea in a yacht, were common knowledge to the turgid sub-journalism of 1902." - Pg. 102 turgid (adj) - swollen; excessively embellished in style or language,bombastic, pompous "She was appalled by West Egg, this unprecedented "place." that Broadway had begotten upon a Long Island fishing village - appalled by its raw vigor that chafed under the old euphemisms and by the too obtrusive fate that herded its inhabitants along a short-cut from nothing to nothing." euphemism (n) - substitution of an agreeable or inoffesive expression for one that may offend or suggest something unpleasant
Chapter 7 ""Is Mr. Gatsby sick?." "Nope.." After a pause he added "sir." in a dilatory, grudging way." -Pg. 113 dilatory (adj) - intending to cause delay; procrastinating "Before me stretched the portentous, menacing road of a new decade." - Pg. 136 portentous (adj) - eliciting amazement or wonder, prodigious; self-consciously weighty, pompous. "Only the negro and I were near enough to hear what he said, but the policeman caught something in the tone and looked over with truculent eyes." -Pg. 141 truculent (adj) - cruel, savage; deadly, destructive; vitriolic; belligerent
Chapter 8 "For Daisy was young and her artificial world was redolent of orchids and pleasant, cheerful snobbery and orchestras which set the rhythm of the year, summing up the sadness and suggestiveness of life in new tunes." -Pg. 148 redolent (adj) - exuding fragrance, aromatic; scented; evocative, suggestive "I suppose there'd be a curious crowd around there all day with little boys searching for dark spots in the dust, and some garrulous man telling over and over what had happened, until it became less and less real even to him and he could tell it no longer, and Myrtle Wilson's tragic achievement was forgotten." -Pg. 156 garrulous (adj) - pointlessly or annoyingly talkative "A new world, material without being real, where poor ghosts, breathing dreams like air, drifted fortuitously about . . . like that ashen, fantastic figure gliding toward him through the amorphous trees." -Pg. 162 fortuitously (adv) - occuring by change; fortunate, lucky
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Foreshadowing Destiny "Gaudy primary colors and hair shorn in strange new ways and shawls beyond the wildest dreams of Castille. . . The air is alive with chatter and laughter, and casual innuendo and introductions forgotten on the spot, and the enthusiastic meetings between women who never knew each other's names. . . The party has begun." The beauty and splendor of Gatsby's parties masks the decay and corruption that lay at the heart of the Roaring Twenties. The society of the Jazz Age, as observed by Fitzgerald, is morally bankrupt, and thus continually plagued by a crisis of character. Jay Gatsby, though he struggles to be a part of this world, remains unalterably an outsider. His life is a grand irony, in that it is a caricature of Twenties-style ostentation: his closet overflows with custom-made shirts; his lawn teems with "the right people," all engaged in the serious work of absolute triviality; his mannerisms (his false British accent, his old-boy friendliness) are laughably affected. Despite all this, he can never be truly a part of the corruption that surrounds him: he remains intrinsically "great." Nick Carrway reflects that Gatsby's determination, his lofty goals, and most importantly the grand character of his dreams sets him above his vulgar contemporaries. F. Scott Fitzgerald constructs Gatsby as a true American dreamer, set against the decay of American society during the 1920s. This is the same world that produced what Gertrude Stein called the "Lost Generation"; this is the same world that T.S. Eliot condemned in "The Wasteland." By eulogizing the tragic fate of dreamers, Fitzgerald thereby denounces 1920s America as an age of blindness and greed an age hostile to the work of dreaming. In The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald heralds the ruin of his own generation.
Since America has always held its entrepreneurs in the highest regard, one might expect Fitzgerald to glorify this heroic version of the American Dreamer in the pages of his novel. Instead, Fitzgerald suggests that the societal corruption which prevailed in the 1920s was uniquely inhospitable to dreamers; in fact, it was these men who led the most unfortunate lives of all. The figure of Dan Cody exemplifies the hardships faced by the dreamer. Cody is a miner, "a product of the Nevada silver fields, of the Yukon, of every rush for metal since seventy-five." He becomes a millionaire through hard work, ambition and a little bit of fine American luck. Despite these admirable qualities, he dies alone, drunk, and betrayed. Through Dan Cody, Fitzgerald suggests that 1920s society manipulates its visionaries, milks them for their hard-earned money, and then, promptly forgets them.
This formula is reiterated through the story of Gatsby. A child growing up in a nameless town in the middle of Minnesota, Gatsby dreams of the impossible and makes the impossible a reality. He begins this grand undertaking in an endearingly methodical way: he makes a list of "General Resolves: Study electricity, baseball, practice elocution and how to attain it. . . " Less than two decades later, he is one of the richest men in New York. Gatsby, too, is exploited by the very society of which he longs to become a part. At his own parties, "Girls were swooning backward playfully into men's arms, even into groups, knowing that someone would arrest their falls - - - but no one swooned backward on Gatsby, and no French bob touched Gatsby's shoulder, and no singing quartets were formed with Gatsby's head for a link." His home was full of the Leeches, Blackbucks, Ferets and Klipspringers or at least it was while the champagne was flowing, at Gatsby's expense. When he dies, no
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one attends his funeral: Gatsby dies alone, and only a handful of people mourn his passing. In a healthy society, dreamers are respected and encouraged; in Fitzgerald's version of the American Twenties, they are exploited, maltreated, and discarded. For Fitzgerald, the destruction of dreams is the hallmark of his lost generation.
Another symptom of the decline of American society is its inability to fulfill its dreamers' desires. As a child, Gatsby dreams of wealth and success in this way, he hopes to become a part of the social elite. When Gatsby finally invites members of that elite (as exemplified by the Sloans and Buchanans) to his home, they have nothing but contempt for him. After Gatsby accepts Mrs. Sloan's invitation to dinner, the entire party rebukes him behind his back. They leave without him, hissing that they "couldn't possibly wait." Though Gatsby is now wealthy and successful, the hypocritical division between those with "new money" and those with "old money" keeps him, despite all his striving, barred from high society.
Gatsby's longing for Daisy which is, of course, inseparable from his desire to be a part of her social class is another dream that remains unfulfilled. Since Daisy initially refused to marry him because of his poverty and low birth, Gatsby resolved to elevate himself. It never occurs to him to condemn her for her cruelty, nor for her indefensible snobbery; instead, Gatsby strives to live up to her misconceived ideal. His idea of Daisy is of a woman pure, a woman perfect as clear as a green light in June. When he and Daisy are reunited after a five year separation, Nick incisively remarks, "There must have been times that afternoon when Daisy tumbled short of his dreams. No amount of fire or freshness can challenge what a man will store up in his ghostly heart." Daisy is tainted by her association with the brutal and loutish Tom; she is, in fact, more like him than she is like the idealistic Gatsby. During this first meeting, Fitzgerald focuses on the fact that she is no longer dressed completely in white: "her brass buttons glint in the sunlight." She is not "the grail" that Gatsby has sought nor will he ever find it. Daisies are seasonal flowers they decay in the heat (the passion) of summer. Fitzgerald uses Daisy as an emblem of "old money's" pompous hypocrisy: it can never be equal to Gatsby's dreams.
The tragedy of Gatsby's life a tragedy that is painfully clear to Nick remains invisble to the rest of society. Blindness is one of the novel's central theme: it is populated almost entirely with people who wish not to see. They seek out blindness in the form of drunkenness: Daisy binges on alcohol the night before her wedding, in order to obliterate her vision of a miserable future. Jordan, Daisy, Tom and the other "jet-setters" of the 1920s drive recklessly; they remain blind to danger, so caught up are they with the selfish pursuit of pleasure. They thoughtlessly risk their own lives and the lives of others. Nick says to Jordan, "You're a rotten driver. Either you ought to be more careful, or you oughtn't drive." Jordan responds, "They'll keep out of my way. It takes two to make an accident." For Fitzgerald, Twenties society was "driving on toward death through the cooling twilight." Only Nick who is, above all else, an observer (the novel is, in some sense, his memoir, and thus a collection of his observations) truly sees. He is Fitzgerald's representative within the narrative.
Throughout the novel, Fitzgerald heralds the decay of his generation. During the climactic confrontation between Tom and Gatsby, when Gatsby learns that Daisy will never be his, Nick muses, "I just remembered it's my thirtieth birthday." This signifies the end of the corrupt lifestyle of the Twenties; now is the dawn of the Thirties. The
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characters attempt to escape the calamity represented by the end of the decade by moving West, away from the decaying East. Tom and Daisy leave New York, in an attempt to escape the violence they themselves have caused; Nick remarks, "They smashed up things and creatures and then retreated away. . . " America was once a land meant for dreamers; now, the mindless pursuit of wealth has destroyed the American dream. Fitzgerald saw a society hurtling recklessly onward, without direction, unwilling to take responsibility for its actions; for him, this represented the annihilation of the very fabric of America. His book was meant as a grim harbinger of that destruction.
Setting: The story takes place during the 1920's, there are four major settings:
1. East egg 2. West Egg 3. The valley of ashes 4. New York City.
The West Egg is the "less fashionable" side of Long Island where Gatsby and Nick live. The East Egg is the "fashionable" side of Long Island where the Buchanans and other "old money" people live. The Valley of Ashes is the desolate wasteland where the Wilsons live. New York City is a symbol of what America has become in the 1920's : a place where anything goes, where money is made and bootleggers flourish, and where the World Series can be fixed by a man such as Meyer Wolfsheim.
Background Information:
Nick Carraway, the narrator is a young midwesterner who, having graduated from Yale, had fought in World War I and returned home to begin a career. He decides to move east to New York and learn the bond business. The novel opened early in the summer of 1922 in West Egg, Long Island where Nick has rented a house. Next to his house is a huge mansion which belongs to Mr. Gatsby. Before leaving the Midwest, Nick's father tells Nick not to be quick to judge. Nick believes his father means never to judge at all. That created a problem. In the 1920's money was very abundant. This was known as "the golden age." People were very materialistic during this time period. The wealthy families in the novel such as Gatsby or the Buchanans, were always trying to impress rather than trying to be themselves. This was a period of drinking, partying, and endless talk, which was best portrayed by the Buchanans. They seem to be very self-centered people who couldn't give up a bit of the "ritzy" life to take care of their own child.
Major Characters:
Nick Carraway - The narrator of the novel; moves from the Midwest to New York to learn the bond business.
Jay Gatsby - Lives next to Nick in a mansion; throws huge parties, complete with catered food, open bars, and orchestras; people come from everywhere to attend these parties, but no one seems to know much about the host.
Daisy Buchanan - Shallow girl who is the emodiment of Gatsby's dreams; she was going to marry Gatsby but he went off to war.
Tom Buchanan- Husband of Daisy; a cruel man who lives life irresponsibly.
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Jordan Baker - A cynical and conceited woman who cheats in golf; wants Nick to go out with her.
Myrtle Wilson - Tom has an affair with this married woman, and then abandons her after he become bored with her.
Plot Summary: Nick Carraway having graduated from Yale and fought in World War I, has returned home to begin a career. He is restless and has decided to move to New York to learn the bond business. The novel opens early in the summer of 1922 in West Egg, Long Island, where Nick has rented a house. Next to his place is the Gatsby's mansion.
Tom and Daisy Buchanan live in East Egg. Daisy is Nick's cousin and Tom had been in the same senior society at Yale. They invite Nick to dinner at their mansion, and he meets a young woman golfer named Jordan Baker, whom Daisy wants Nick to be interested in. During dinner the phone rings, and when Tom and Daisy leave the room, Jordan informs Nick that the caller is Tom's woman from New York.
Myrtle Wilson, Tom's woman, lives is a section of Long Island known as the Valley of Ashes. In the Valley of Ashes is George Wilson's garage. Painted on a large billboard nearby is a fading advertisment for an optician with the eyes of a Doctor looking over them with a pair of glasses.
One day Tom takes Nick to meet the Wilsons. The party breaks up when Myrtle starts using Daisy's name, and Tom breaks her nose with a blow of his open hand. Several weeks later Nick is invited to one of Gatsby's elaborate parties. Nick watches Gatsby and notices that he does not drink or join in the revelry of the party.
At a luncheon with Nick in New York, Gatsby tells Nick that he graduated from Oxford. During lunch Gatsby introduces Nick to his business associate, Meyer Wolfsheim, who fixed the World Series in 1919.
At tea that afternoon Nick finds out the Gatsby wants Nick to arrange a date between him and Daisy. Gatsby had loved Daisy five years ago, but he had been sent oversees by the army. Daisy had given up waiting for him and had married Tom. Gatsby decides to win Daisy back and his first step is to buy a house in West Egg. His house is across the bay from Daisy's house, and he can see a green light at the end of Daisy's dock. It represents his hope.
Gatsby and Daisy meet for the first time in five years, and he tries to impress her with his mansion and his wealth. Tom, Daisy, Gatsby, Nick and Jordan go into the city where the truth is revealed about Gatsby and Daisy. Daisy will not go away with Gatsby and the five year dream is over. Gatsby and Daisy go home together in a yellow Rolls Royce. On the way home they get into a car accident in which Myrtle was killed. Gatsby will take the blame for Daisy who was driving. George Wilson shoots Gatsby and then kills himself.
Not many people showed to Gatsby's funeral except Nick, Mr. Gatz, and a few servants. Nick returns to his home town.
Themes:
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1. Hope - represented by the light across the bay that Gatsby was fixated on. It was the embodiment of his sole goal in life, which was a reunification with Daisy.
2. Success - Gatsby felt that the only way he would win Daisy was through his money.
3. Ignorance - The characters have little self-knowledge and even less knowledge of each other.
4. Judgement - Nick misinterprets the advice of his father and tries not to judge people.
5. Disillusionment - Gatsby dreams of getting back together with Daisy even though she is married and has a daughter.
6. Morals - The morals of people with great wealth seem to be less than desirable, but many times are more socially accepted than lower classes.
Key Issues:
Success - Gatsby uses a corrupt form of the American dream to acquire the wealth he thinks he needs to win back Daisy. Tom and Daisy must have a huge house, a stable of polo ponies, and friends in Europe. Gatsby must have his enormous mansion before he can feel confident enough to win Daisy. The energy that might have gone into the pursuit of noble goals has been channeled into the pursuit of power and pleasure, and a very showy, but fundementally empty form of success. Gatsby had been in love with Daisy for a long while. He tried every way that money could buy to try to satisfy his love and lust for Daisy. Instead of confronting her with his feelings, he tried to get her attention by throwing big parties with high hopes that she might possibly show up. Gatsby was actually a very lonesome and unhappy man who lived in a grand house and had extravagant parties. He did it all for one woman, who initially was impressed with his flagrant show of wealth. Daisy was extremely disenchanted after she found out how Gatsby had aquired his fortune.
Morals - The characters in this novel live for money and were controlled by money. Love and happiness cannot be bought, no matter how much money was spent. Tom and Daisy were married and even had a child, but they both still committed adultery. Daisy was with Gatsby and Tom was with Myrtle. They tried to find happiness with their lovers, but the risk of changing their lifestyles was not worth it. They were not happy with their spouses but could not find happiness with their lovers. Happiness cannot be found or bought. Daisy lost her love and respect for Gatsby when she found out he was a bootlegger. Tom, after having an affair himself was angry about Daisy's affair. Hypocrisy tends to be a trait in the very rich.
Hope - Gatsby bought a house in West Egg, in the hopes that he would win Daisy back. He did this so that he could look across the bay to the green light at the end of Daisy's dock. He expected her to turn up at one of his parties, and when she didn't, he asked Jordan to ask Nick to ask Daisy. Fitzgerald stresses the need for hope and dreams to give meaning and purpose to man's efforts. Striving towards some ideal is the way by which man can feel a sense of involvment, a sense of his own identity. Fitzgerald goes on to state that the failure of hopes and dreams, the failure of the American dream itself, is unavoidable, not only because reality cannot keep up with ideals, but also because the ideals are in any case usually too fantastic to be realized. Gatsby is naive, impractical and oversentimental. It is this which makes him attempt
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the impossible, to repeat the past. There is something pitiful and absurd about the way he refuses to grow up.
Lessons/Morals/Application
1. Money cannot buy happiness. 2. You cannot relive the past. 3. If dreams are too fantastic, and reality cannot keep up with ideals they are
usually not fulfilled
The Sound and the Fury
By W.Faulkner
Background to The Sound and the Fury:
The Sound and the Fury was published in 1929, although it was one of the first novels Faulkner wrote. Many critics and even Faulkner himself think that it is the best novel that he wrote. Its subject is the downfall of the Compson family, the offspring of the pioneer Jason Lycurgus Compson. The family consists of Jason Compson III and his wife Caroline, their four children Jason IV, Quentin, Candace (Caddy), and Maury (whose name is changed in 1900 to Benjamin), Caroline's brother Maury Bascomb, and their family of black servants: Dilsey and Roskus and their children Versh, T.P. and Frony. In 1928 when the story mainly takes place, two other important characters are Quentin, Caddy's illegitimate daughter, and Luster, Frony's son.
Each of the first three sections of the novel is narrated by a different member of the Compson family; the first is narrated by Benjamin, the second by Quentin (Jason III's son, not Caddy's daughter), and the third by Jason IV. The fourth section is a third person narrative, although many readers see it as "narrated" by Dilsey, the Compson's old black servant. Although narrated by the three brothers and the servant, the focus of the novel is really the sister Caddy. Each of the three brothers has a different view on Caddy and her promiscuity. To Benjy Caddy is a gentle caretaker whose absence - caused by her promiscuity and marriage - fills his adult life with a sense of loss. To Quentin Caddy's sexuality is a sign of the dissolution of the antebellum Southern world of family honor and the event that spurs him to commit suicide. To Jason Caddy's promiscuity means the loss of a job opportunity and is the reason he is stuck at a desk job that he finds demeaning, as well as the reason he is stuck at home with a hypochondriac mother, retarded brother, rebellious illegitimate niece and family of servants who are eating him out of house and home. The last section of the novel provides a less biased view of Caddy's life and the downfall of the Compson family. Faulkner himself acknowledged the fact that the novel revolves around the absent center of Caddy and her story; he claims that the novel began as a single idea - an
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image of a little girl up a tree with muddy drawers - and grew into a short story entitled "Twilight." But Faulkner loved Caddy's character so much that he developed this short story into an entire novel.
The first three sections are narrated in a technique known as stream of consciousness, in which the writer takes down the character's thoughts as they occur to him, paying little attention to chronology of events or continuity of story line. The technique is the most marked in the first section, wherein Benjy's mind skips backward and forward in time as he relives events from the past while simultaneously conducting himself in the present. Quentin's section is slightly more ordered, although his agitated state of mind causes him to experience similar skips in time. Jason's section is almost totally chronological, much more structured than the first two. In order to make reading this difficult novel easier, Faulkner at one time suggested printing it in colored ink in order to mark the different time periods, but this was too expensive. Instead, in the first section, he writes some sentences in italics in order to signal a shift in time. Even with these italics, however, the story is difficult to read.
Not much happens in the three days in which the novel is mainly set; instead the stream of consciousness narration allows the reader to experience the history of the Compson family and step into the lives of this dwindling Southern family. The troubled relationships of the family are at once mundane and sweepingly tragic, pulling the reader into its downward spiral.
Character List:
Jason Compson III: The head of the Compson family, he is an intellectual whose alcoholism finally kills him. His wife Caroline is an ineffectual mother, and he does most of the parenting of the children when they are small. However, he is also not an ideal parent, too interested in intellectual, logical matters. His view on Caddy's precocious sexuality upsets Quentin, who takes his statements to heart and kills himself in order to make sure that his pain over Caddy's betrayal never wears away with time.
Caroline Bascomb Compson: A neurotic and hypochondriac, she is unable to mother her children properly or give them any love, leaving them to mother each other under the guidance of their housekeeper Dilsey. She sees her son's retardation as a curse on the family and changes his name from Maury (her brother's name) to Benjamin to try to cleanse herself of this curse. She is passive-aggressive and manipulative, using guilt to force others to do her bidding. She sees Caddy, Quentin and Benjamin as having "Compson blood" and Jason as being a "true Bascomb" and loves him more than the other children.
Uncle Maury Bascomb: Caroline's brother, he shares an unnaturally close relationship with her. He has an affair with a married neighbor when the children are
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young, drinks before his brother-in-law's funeral, and is a bad businessman, having to ask Caroline for money to make investments.
Quentin Compson: the oldest child of Jason and Caroline, he suffers from his mother's coldness and substitutes his sister's love for his mother's. He has romantic ideals about purity and virginity, repulsed by his own sexuality. When Caddy becomes promiscuous in her teens it shatters Quentin's world. He tries to tell his father that he committed incest with Caddy, but his father doesn't believe him. The family sells his brother Benjamin's pasture in order to send him to Harvard, and after his freshman year there he kills himself.
Candace Compson (Caddy): the only daughter of Jason and Caroline. She is kind and motherly to Quentin and Benjy and becomes the center of their worlds. Imperious and enthralling, she was also Faulkner's favorite character. She becomes pregnant at eighteen and marries Herbert Head, a wealthy banker who promises Jason a job in his bank. When he discovers that he is not he father of her child, he divorces her, leaving Jason without a job and her child without a father. She sends the child, Quentin, home to be raised by her parents, and sends Jason $200 a month to look after her.
Jason Compson IV: an isolated and perverse little boy, he grows up to be an antisocial, sadistic, angry man who resents his sister for depriving him of a job. He views young Quentin as the cause of all his problems and is excessively cruel to her. He is the only character who is able to stand up to his mother, because he can be just as manipulative and passive-aggressive as she. He cashes the checks Caddy sends to him every month and brings home false checks for his mother to burn.
Benjamin Compson (Benjy): the youngest child, he is mentally retarded, unable to speak or take care of himself. He is also unable to distinguish between past and present, and therefore his section jumps around in time as he constantly relives his memories. He is attached to Caddy, who acts as his mother, and her sexuality and marriage shatter his life. He cries whenever anyone upsets the daily routine of his life. When his mother discovers that he is retarded at age five, she changes his name from Maury to Benjamin.
Quentin Compson II: Caddy's illegitimate daughter, who may or may not be Dalton Ames's child. When Herbert Head learns that he is not her father, he divorces Caddy. Caddy is forced to leave Quentin with her parents, and after her father dies, Jason takes over as her primary caregiver. Convinced that she is "bad," Quentin is rebellious and promiscuous. Jason and Caroline think that she has inherited all the bad tendencies of the Compson family.
Dilsey: the Compson's black housekeeper, she is the only selfless and kind individual in the novel. She cares for the children as if they are her own and is protective of Benjy and young Quentin. By the time the novel ends she is very old and arthritic, and seems to think she is about to die. She will be the only witness to the beginning and the end of the Compson family.
Roskus: Dilsey's husband and another servant to the Compsons, he is superstitious, and, like Caroline, thinks that there is a curse on the Compsons. When he becomes too
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arthritic to do any work, his son T. P. takes over for him, and his death is one of the memories that Benjy lives through in his section.
Versh: Dilsey and Roskus's son and Benjy's first caretaker. He is kind and responsible.
T. P.: Dilsey and Roskus's son and Benjy's second caretaker. He takes over for Roskus when Roskus becomes ill, and gets drunk at Caddy's wedding.
Frony: Dilsey and Roskus's daughter. She has a minimal part in the story, but serves as a mirror to Caddy when she has a child by an unknown father.
Luster: Frony's son. He is Benjy's last caretaker, with a mischievous streak. He is a responsible baby-sitter, but also delights in making Benjy cry. Section one deals with his search for a quarter to go to the circus.
Dalton Ames: the town boy with whom Caddy loses her virginity. Quentin challenges him to a fight and calls him a "blackguard," but in fact he is kind and chivalrous, refusing to hit Quentin and sincerely concerned when he finds out that Caddy is pregnant. Quentin asks Caddy if she loves Dalton, and at first she says no, then later shows him that whenever she hears his name, her heart begins to pound.
Herbert Head: the man Caddy marries. He owns a bank and offers Jason a job there. He makes an honest attempt at befriending Quentin, but Quentin is so rude to him that the two begin to fight. When Herbert discovers that he is not the father of Caddy's baby, he divorces her.
Shreve: Quentin's roommate at Harvard. He is well-meaning, although he is from Canada, which makes him inferior in the eyes of his friend Gerald's mother. When Quentin begins acting strange he shows some concern, but is unaware that he is actually suicidal.
Gerald Bland and his mother: nouveau riche from Kentucky, Gerald and his mother put on airs like wearing the kind of caps that English rowers use and driving fancy cars. Quentin intrigues them because he actually is a member of the Southern aristocracy into which they are trying to insinuate themselves. Gerald is rather crass, and Quentin gets into a fight with him when he speaks badly of women.
Spoade: another of Quentin's friends who joins Shreve, Gerald, and Gerald's mother for a picnic on the day Quentin kills himself.
"Sister" and Julio: Quentin meets "Sister" in a bakery outside Cambridge, and she follows him around. She may or may not speak English; she is an Italian immigrant. Her brother Julio finds them and accuses Quentin of kidnapping her.
The Deacon: a black entrepreneur from the south who is able to adapt to any kind of change. He lives in Cambridge and befriends all the southern boys who come to Harvard. At first he dresses in "Uncle Tom's Cabin" style clothing to make the boys feel at home, then eventually becomes more and more cosmopolitan.
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Earl: Jason's boss at the farm store. He is loyal to Caroline and so he puts up with Jason's sullen and rude behavior. He knows that Jason spent the thousand dollars that Caroline gave him to invest in the store on a car instead. He is kindly and good-natured.
Short Summary:
April Seventh, 1928: Benjy accompanies Luster as he searches for a quarter to go to the circus that night. At the same time he relives memories of his youth, most of which have to do with Caddy. He remembers, for example, the night his grandmother (Damuddy) died, when Caddy climbed a tree to look in the parlor windows, showing her siblings her muddy drawers. He also remembers her precocious sexuality, which led to her pregnancy and marriage, taking her out of his life. He can smell the change in Caddy; when she is young and pure she smells like trees to him, and when she begins to have sex she no longer smells like trees. He has a specific order to the day's events, and when Luster interrupts this order, he howls.
June Second, 1910: this section follows the events of the last day of Quentin's life, as he makes meticulous preparations for his suicide. He puts on clean clothes and packs all his belongings, then buys two flat irons to weight himself down with and heads out of town (he is attending Harvard at the time). He arrives in a little riverside town and meets up with a small immigrant girl, who follows him around until her brother finds them and accuses him of kidnapping her. He also runs into his friends, who are in town for a picnic. He ends up getting into a fight with one of them when he confuses his rantings on women with those of Dalton Ames, the boy who got his sister pregnant. He returns to Cambridge to clean his clothes, then heads back out to the same town to drown himself in the river. Throughout the day he is haunted by memories of Caddy, especially of her affair with Dalton Ames, her pregnancy, and her marriage to Herbert Head.
April Sixth, 1928: this section follows Jason through his day as he deals with Quentin, Caddy's illegitimate daughter, who skips school and sleeps around. He takes her to school but then sees her skipping later with one of the musicians who is in town for the circus. Furious, he chases the two of them out of town but loses them when they let the air out of his tires. At the same time he is dealing with the finances of his life. He loses $200 in the stock market, and also receives a $200 check from Caddy for Quentin's upkeep. He cashes this check, then makes out a fake check for his mother to burn. He resents Quentin as the symbol of the job he was deprived of when Caddy divorced Herbert Head. We discover that he has embezzled thousands of dollars from Caddy, money that should have been Quentin's.
April Eighth, 1928: This section continues to follow Jason while also following Dilsey through her day. It is Easter Sunday, and Dilsey takes her family and Benjy to church and is powerfully affected by Reverend Shegog's sermon. She proclaims that she has seen the beginning and the end, the first and the last. At the same time, Jason wakes to discover that Quentin has run away and has taken the money he was saving in a strongbox in his room, $7,000 in total. Caroline is sure that Quentin has
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committed suicide like her namesake, but Jason drives out of town trying to find her. He meets up with the traveling circus in the next town, but is forcibly driven away by some circus workers. The owner of the circus tells him that Quentin and her boyfriend have left town. He returns to Jackson. At the end of the section, Luster is taking Benjy to the graveyard. When Luster takes a wrong turn, Benjy starts to howl, and Jason, who has just returned to town, stops the carriage and turns it the right way.
Analysis of April 7, 1928:
The title of this novel comes from Shakespeare's Macbeth, Act five, scene five, in Macbeth's famous speech about the meaninglessness of life. He states that it is "a tale / Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, / signifying nothing." One could argue that Benjy is the "idiot" referred to in this speech, for indeed his section seems, at first reading, to "signify nothing." No one vignette in his narrative seems to be particularly important, much of it detailing the minutiae of his daily routine. His speech itself, the "bellering" with which me makes himself heard, does, in fact, "signify nothing," since he is unable to express himself even when he wants to in a way other than howling. However, Benjy Compson is not merely an idiot, and his section is much more meaningful than it first seems.
When discussing Mr. Compson's death, Roskus states that Benjy "know a lot more than folks thinks" (31), and in fact, for all his idiocy, Benjy does sense when things are wrong with his self-contained world, especially when they concern his sister Caddy. Like an animal, Benjy can "smell" when Caddy has changed; when she wears perfume, he states that she no longer smells "like trees," and the servants claim that he can smell death. He can also sense somehow when Caddy has lost her virginity; she has changed to him. From the time she loses her virginity on, she no longer smells like trees to him. Although his section at first presents itself as an objective snapshot of a retarded boy's perceptions of the world, it is more ordered and more intelligent than that.
Most of the memories Benjy relates in his section have to do with Caddy, and specifically with moments of loss related to Caddy. The first memory of Damuddy's death, for example, marks a change in his family structure and a change in his brother Jason, who was the closest to Damuddy and slept in her room. His many memories of Caddy are mostly concerned with her sexuality, a fact that changes her relationship with him and eventually removes her from his life. His later memories are also associated with some sort of loss: the loss of his pasture, of his father, and the loss associated with his castration. Critics have pointed out that Benjy's narrative is "timeless," that he cannot distinguish between present and past and therefore relives his memories as they occur to him. If this is the case, he is caught in a process of constantly regenerating his sister in memory and losing her simultaneously, of creating and losing at the same time. His life is a constant cycle of loss and degenerative change.
If Benjy is trapped in a constantly replaying succession of losses, the objects that he fixates on seem to echo this state. He loves fire, for instance, and often stares into the "bright shapes" of the fire while the world revolves around him. The word "fire" is
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mentioned numerous times in the memory of his name change. Caddy and the servants know that he stops crying when he looks at the fire, which is the reason in the present day that Luster makes a fire in the library even though one is not needed. The fire is a symbolic object; it is conventionally associated with the contrast between light and dark, heat and cold. It is a comfort, not merely to Benjy because of the pleasure he receives in watching it, but because it is associated with the hearth, the center of the home. As critics have pointed out, it is often Caddy who places Benjy in front of the fire: "she led me to the fire and I looked at the bright, smooth shapes" (64). The fire is therefore tied in Benjy's mind with the idea of Caddy; both are warm and comforting forces within a cold family. But unlike Caddy, the fire is unchanging; there will always be a fire, even after she leaves him. The fact that Benjy burns himself on the kitchen stove after Luster closes the oven door reveals the pain - both physical and mental - that Benjy associates with Caddy's absence.
Another object that provides comfort to Benjy is the library mirror. Like the fire, the mirror plays a large part in the memory of his name change, as Benjy watches the various members of his family move in and out of the mirror: "Caddy and Jason were fighting in the mirror . . . . we could see Caddy fighting in the mirror and Father put me down and went into the mirror and fought too . . . . He rolled into the corner, out of the mirror. Father brought Caddy to the fire. They were all out of the mirror" (64-65). The mirror is a frame of reference through which Benjy sees the world; people are either in or out of the mirror, and he does not understand the concept of reflection. Like the mirror, Benjy's section of the book provides readers with a similar exact reflection of the world that Benjy sees, framed by his memories. Characters slide in and out of the mirror of his perception, their conversations and actions accurately reported but somewhat distorted in the process.
As the "tale told by an idiot," Benjy's section makes up the center kernel of the story of the Compson family tragedy. And the scene of Damuddy's death in many ways makes up the center around which this section and the entire story revolve. Faulkner has said that the story grew out of the image of a little girl's muddy drawers as she climbs a tree to look into the parlor windows at the funeral taking place. From this image a story evolved, a story "without plot, of some children being sent away from the house during the grandmother's funeral. There were too young to be told what was going on and they saw things only incidentally to the childish games they were playing" (Millgate, 96). This original story was entitled "Twilight," and the story grew into a novel because Faulkner fell in love with the character of this little girl to such an extent that he strove to tell her story from four different viewpoints.
If this one scene is the center of the story, it is also a microcosm of the events to follow. The interactions of the children in this scene prefigure their relations in the future and in fact the entire future of the Compson family. Thus Caddy's soaking her dress in the water of the branch is a metaphor for the sexual fall that will torment Quentin and ruin the family:
She was wet. We were playing in the branch and Caddy squatted down and got her dress wet and Versh said,
"Your mommer going to whip you for getting your dress wet." . . .
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"It's not wet." Caddy said. She stood up in the water and looked at her dress. "I'll take it off." she said. "Then it'll be dry." "I bet you won't." Quentin said. "I bet I will." Caddy said. "I bet you better not." Quentin said. . . . "You just take your dress off," Quentin said. Caddy took her dress off and threw it on the bank. Then she didn't have on anything but her bodice and drawers, and Quentin slapped her and she slipped and fell down in the water (17-18). Caddy sullies her garments in an act that prefigures her later sexuality. She then takes off her dress, a further sexual metaphor, causing Quentin to become enraged and slap her. Just as the loss of her virginity upsets Quentin to the point of suicide, his angry and embarrassed reaction to taking off her dress here reveals the jealous protectiveness he feels for her sexuality. Benjy, too, is traumatized by the muddying of Caddy's dress: "Caddy was all wet and muddy behind, and I started to cry and she came and squatted in the water" (19). Just as her sexuality will cause his world to crack later on, her muddy dress here causes him to cry.
Jason, too, is a miniature version of what he will become in this scene. While Caddy and Quentin fight in the branch, Jason stands "by himself further down the branch," prefiguring the isolation from the rest of his family that will characterize his later existence (19). Although the other children ask him not to tell their father that they have been playing in the branch, the first thing he does when he sees father is tattle. He is as perverse and mean here as he is sadistic in the third section of the book. His reaction to Damuddy's death, too, is a miniature for the way he will deal with the loss that he sees in Caddy's betrayal of the family later on:
"Do you think the buzzards are going to undress Damuddy." Caddy said. "You're crazy." "You're a skizzard." Jason said. He began to cry. "You're a knobnot." Caddy said. Jason cried. His hands were in his pockets. "Jason going to be rich man." Versh said. "He holding his money all the time" (35-36). Here Jason cries over the loss of Damuddy with his hands in his pockets, "holding his money," just as later he will sublimate his anger at Caddy's absence by becoming a miserly workaholic and embezzling thousands of dollars from Quentin and his mother.
The scene ends with the image of Caddy's muddy drawers as she climbs the tree: "We watched the muddy bottom of her drawers. Then we couldn't see her. We could hear the tree thrashing . . . . the tree quit thrashing. We looked up into the still branches" (39). This image of Caddy's muddy undergarments disappearing into the branches of the tree, the scene that prompted Faulkner to write the entire novel, is, as critic John T. Matthews points out, an image of Caddy disappearing, just as she will disappear from the lives of her three brothers:
What the novel has made, it has also lost . . . . [Caddy] is memorable precisely because she inhabits the memories of her brothers and the novel, and memory for Faulkner never transcends the sense of loss . . . . Caught in Faulkner's mind as she
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climbs out of the book, Caddy is the figure that the novel is written to lose (Matthews, 2-3). Thus the seminal scene in this section of the story is that of the sullied Caddy, "climbing out of" Benjy's life.
The scene of Damuddy's death is not the only part of this section that forecasts the future. Like a Greek tragedy, this section is imbued with a sense of impending disaster, and in fact the events of the present day chronicle a family that has fallen into decay. For Benjy, the dissolution of the life he knows is wrapped up in Caddy and her sexuality, which eventually leads her to desert him. For his mother and the servants, the family's demise is a fate that cannot be avoided, of which Benjy's idiocy and Quentin's death are signs. This is what prompts Roskus to repeatedly vow that "they aint no luck on this place," and what causes mother to perform the almost ritualistic ablution of changing Benjy's name. It is as if changing his name from Maury, the name of a Bascomb, will somehow avert the disastrous fate that the Compson blood seems to bring. This overwhelming sense of an inescapable family curse will resurface many times throughout the book.
Analysis of June Second, 1910:
From the very first sentence of the section, Quentin is obsessed with time; words associated with time like "watch," "clock," "chime," and "hour" occur on almost every page. When Quentin wakes he is "in time again, hearing the watch," and the rest of the day represents an attempt to escape time, to get "out of time" (76). His first action when he wakes is to break the hands off his watch in an attempt to stop time, to escape the "reducto absurdum of all human experience" which is the gradual progression toward death (76). Perversely taking literally his father's statement that "time is dead as long as it is being clicked off by little wheels; only when the clock stops does time come to life," he tears the hands off his watch, only to find that it continues to tick even without the hands (85). Throughout this section, Quentin tries to escape time in similar ways; he tries to avoid looking at clocks, he tries to travel away from the sound of school chimes or factory whistles. By the end of the section he has succeeded in escaping knowledge of the time (when he returns to school he hears the bell ringing and has no idea what hour it is chiming off), but he still has not taken himself out of time. In the end, as he knows throughout this section, the only way to escape time is to die.
Jean-Paul Sartre, in his analysis of this novel, sees Quentin's suicide as not merely a way of escaping time but of exploding time. His suicide is present in all the actions of the day, not so much a fate he could dream of escaping as "an immobile wall, a thing which he approaches backward, and which he neither wants to nor can conceive" (Sartre, 91). It is not a future but a part of the present, the point from which the story is told. Quentin narrates the day's events in the past tense, as if they have already happened; the "present" from which he looks back at the day's events must be the moment of his death. As Sartre puts it:
Since the hero's last thoughts coincide approximately with the bursting of his memory and its annihilation, who is remembering? . . . . [Faulkner] has chosen the infinitesimal instant of death. Thus when Quentin's memory begins to unravel its recollections ("Through the wall I heard Shreve's bed-springs and then his slippers on the floor hishing. I got up . . . ") he is already dead (92).
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In other words, time explodes at the instant of Quentin's suicide, and the events of this "infinitesimal instant" are recorded in this section. By killing himself, Quentin has found the only way to access time that is "alive" in the sense that his father details, time that has escaped the clicking of little wheels.
But why does Quentin want to escape time? The answer lies in one of the conversations with his father that are recorded in this section. When Quentin claims that he committed incest with Caddy, his father refuses to believe him and says:
You cannot bear to think that someday it will no longer hurt you like this . . . it is hard believing to think that a love or a sorrow is a bond purchased without design and which matures willynilly and is recalled without warning . . . no you will not do that until you come to believe that even she was not quite worth despair perhaps (177-178). Quentin's response to this statement is "i will never do that nobody knows what i know." His attempt to stop the progression of time is an attempt to preserve the rawness of the pain Caddy's promiscuity and marriage have caused him; he never wants to think of her as "not quite worth despair."
Like Benjy, Quentin is obsessed with an absent Caddy, and both brothers' sections are ordered around memories of her, specifically of her promiscuity. For both brothers, her absence is linked to her promiscuity, but for Quentin her promiscuity signals not merely her loss from his life but also the loss of the romantically idealized idea of life he has built for himself. This ideal life has at its center a valuation of purity and cleanness and a rejection of sexuality; Quentin sees his own developing sexuality as well as his sister's as sinful. The loss of her virginity is the painful center of a spiral of loss as his illusions are shattered. Critics have read Quentin's obsession with Caddy's virginity as an antebellum-style preoccupation with family honor, but in fact family honor is hardly ever mentioned in this section. The pain that Caddy's promiscuity causes Quentin seems too raw, too intense, too visceral to be merely a disappointment at the staining family honor. And perhaps most importantly, Quentin's response to her promiscuity, namely telling his father that he and she committed incest, is not the act of a person concerned with family honor. Rather it is the act of a boy so in love with his sister and so obsessed with maintaining the closeness of their relationship that he would rather be condemned by the town and suffer in hell than let her go. He is, in fact, obsessed with her purity and virginity, but not to maintain appearances in the town; he wants her forever to remain the unstained, saintly mother/sister he imagines her to be.
Quentin did not, of course, commit incest with Caddy. And yet the encounters he remembers are fraught with sexual overtones. When Caddy walks in on Quentin and Natalie kissing in the barn, for instance, Quentin throws himself into the "stinking" mud of the pigpen. When this fails to get a response from Caddy, he wipes mud on her:
You dont you dont I'll make you I'll make you give a damn. She hit my hands away I smeared mud on her with the other hand I couldnt feel the wet smacking of her hand I wiped mud from my legs smeared it on her wet hard turning body hearing her fingers going into my face but I couldnt feel it even when the rain began to taste sweet on my lips (137).
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Echoing the mud-stained drawers that symbolize her later sexuality, Quentin smears mud on Caddy's body in a heated exchange, feeling as he does so her "wet hard turning body." The mud is both Quentin's penance for his sexual experimentation with Natalie and the sign of sexuality between Quentin and Caddy.
The scene in the branch of the river is similarly sexual in nature. Quentin finds Caddy at the branch trying to wash away the guilt she finds; amid the "suck[ing] and gurgl[ing]" waves of the water. When he asks her if she loves Dalton Ames, she places his hand on her chest and he feels her heart "thudding" (150). He smells honeysuckle "on her face and throat like paint her blood pounded against my hand I was leaning on my other arm it began to jerk and jump and I had to pant to get any air at all out of that thick gray honeysuckle;" and he lies "crying against her damp blouse" (150). Taking out a knife, he holds it against her throat and tells her "it wont take but a second Ill try not to hurt." She replies "no like this you have to push it harder," and he says "touch your hand to it" (151). In this scene we have the repetitive surging both of the water and of Caddy's blood beneath Quentin's hand. We have the two siblings lying on top of one another at the edge of this surging water, the pungent smell of honeysuckle (which Quentin associates with sex throughout the section) so thick around them that Quentin has trouble breathing. We have a knife (a common phallic symbol) which Quentin proposes to push into Caddy's blood-flushed neck, promising he will "try not to hurt." Overall, the scene overflows with sexual metaphors; if the two do not actually commit incest, they certainly do share a number of emotionally powerful, sexually loaded moments.
Quentin's wish to have committed incest is not a desire to have sex with Caddy; that would shatter his ideals of purity even more than her encounters with Dalton Ames. Nor is it, as we have determined, a way to preserve the family honor. Instead, it seems to be a way to keep Caddy to himself forever: "if it could just be a hell beyond that: the clean flame the two of us more than dead. Then you will have only me then only me then the two of us amid the pointing and the horror beyond the clean flame" (116). Separated from the rest of the world by the "clean" purifying flames of hell, Quentin and Caddy could be alone together, forever burning away the sin of her sexuality. He would rather implicate himself in something as horrible as incest than leave Caddy to her promiscuity or lose her through her marriage to Herbert Head.
If time-words are the most frequently occurring words in this section, the second most frequent is the word "shadow." Throughout his journeys, Quentin is just as obsessed with his shadow as he is with time. For example, he walks on his shadow as he wanders through Cambridge: "trampling my shadow's bones . . . . I walked upon the belly of my shadow" (96). When asked what the significance of shadows was in this section, Faulkner replied "that shadow that stayed on his mind so much was foreknowledge of his own death, that he was - Death is here, shall I step into it or shall I step away from it a little longer? I won't escape it, but shall I accept it now or shall I put it off until next Friday" (Minter, qtd. in Martin, 6). This explanation certainly seems to fit some of Quentin's thoughts; for example, at one point, he imagines drowning his shadow in the water of the river, just as he will later drown himself: "my shadow leaning flat upon the water, so easily had I tricked it . . . . if I only had something to blot it into the water, holding it until it was drowned, the shadow of the package like two shoes wrapped up lying on the water. Niggers say a drowned man's shadow was watching for him in the water all the time" (90). Here
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Quentin imagines his drowned shadow beckoning him from the river, drowned before him and waiting for him to follow suit.
Like his shadow mirroring his motions and emotions, certain aspects of his day's travels mirror his life and the troubled state of his mind. Most obvious among these is his encounter with the Italian girl he calls "sister" and the reaction of her brother Julio. Calling this little girl "little sister" or "sister" ironically recalls Caddy, whom Quentin at one point calls "Little Sister Death." But whereas his suicidal mission is caused by the fact that he cannot hold on to Caddy, here he cannot get rid of this "little sister," who follows him around the town and will not leave him. Then when Julio finds them, he accuses Quentin stealing her, just as Quentin feels Dalton Ames and Herbert Head have stolen Caddy from him.
Julio is not the only character to mirror Quentin, though. As Edmond Volpe points out, Dalton Ames himself is a foil for Quentin, the embodiment of the romantic ideal he has cast for himself:
Quentin's meeting with Dalton is a disaster. His conception of himself in the traditional role of protector of women collapses, not only because he fails to accomplish his purpose [of beating Dalton up] but because he is forced to recognize his own weakness. Dalton is actually a reflection of Quentin's vision of himself: calm, courageous, strong, kind. The real Quentin does not measure up to the ideal Quentin, just as reality does not measure up to Quentin's romantic vision of what life should be (113).
Quentin is in actuality the "obverse reflection" of himself, a man who does not live up to his own ideals, who fails to protect his sister from a villain who turns out to be as chivalrous and Quentin is weak.
Thus at the "infinitesimal instant" of his death, Quentin is a man whose disillusionment with his shattered ideals consumes him. His death, one of the "signs" Roskus sees of the bad luck of the Compson family, is one step in the gradual dissolution of the family, a degeneration that will pick up speed in the sections to come.
Analysis of April Sixth, 1928:
Jason's section appears more readable and more conventional; its style, while still stream-of-consciousness, is more chronological in progression, with very few jumps in time. It reads more like a monologue than a string of loosely connected events, like Benjy's and Quentin's sections were. Critics have claimed that the book progresses from chaos to order, from timelessness to chronology, from pure sensation to logical order, and from interiority to exteriority as it travels from Benjy's world of bright shapes and confused time through Jason's rigorously ordered universe to the third-person narrative of the fourth section. This third section represents a shift into the public world from the anguished interiority of Benjy and Quentin, and a shift into "normal" novelistic narrative as Jason recounts the story of the events of the day.
The first sentence of each section reveals a lot about the tone and themes of that particular part; this is especially true with Quentin's and Jason's section. In Quentin's
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section, the first sentence draws the reader into his obsession with being caught "in time" and includes two of the most common symbols in the section: time and shadows. Jason's section begins "once a bitch always a bitch, what I say," introducing both Jason's irrational anger not only toward his sister and her daughter, but toward the world in general, and also the rigorous logic that runs through this section (180). Jason's world is dominated by logic. Once a bitch, always a bitch; like mother, like daughter. Caddy was a whore, so is her daughter. He is furious at Caddy for ruining his chances at getting a job, and the way she ruined his chances was to bear an illegitimate daughter; therefore the way he will get revenge on her and simultaneously recoup the money he lost is through this same daughter. Caddy should have gotten him a job, but instead she had Quentin; therefore it is his right to embezzle the money she sends to Quentin in order to make up for the money he lost when he lost the job.
Jason's logic takes the form of literalism. Caddy is responsible for getting him money, no matter where it comes from. She sends money each month for Quentin's upkeep; he keeps Quentin clothed, housed and fed, so the money should go to him. He himself claims that he "make[s] it a rule never to keep a scrap of paper bearing a woman's hand," and yet he keeps the money from the checks Caddy sends him; this act fits into his system of logic because he cashes the checks, literally getting rid of her handwriting while keeping the money. He allows his mother to literally burn the checks she sends, but only after he has cashed them in secret. When Caddy gives him 100 dollars to "see [Quentin] a minute" he grants her request to the letter, holding the baby up to the carriage window as he drives by, literally allowing Caddy only a minute's glimpse (203-205). When Luster can't pay him a nickel for tickets to the show, he burns the tickets rather than give then to him (255). All of these acts fit into a rigid and literally defined logical order with which Jason structures his life.
Some readers see Jason's logic as a sign that he is more "sane" than the rest of his family. He is not retarded like Benjy or irrationally distraught like Quentin. He is able to live his life in a relatively normal way, with a logical order to both his narrative and his daily activities. However, Jason is just as blind, just as divorced from reality as his brothers. Like them, he tries to control his life through a strictly defined order, and when this is disrupted he collapses into irrationality. Benjy's system of order is the routine of everyday life, disrupted on a grand scale when Caddy leaves and on a small scale when Luster turns the horses the wrong way or changes the arrangement of his "graveyard." Quentin's system of order is the honor and purity he saw in himself and Caddy when they were young, disrupted when Caddy loses her virginity and leaves him. Jason's system of order is the rigidity of his logic, most of which has to do with money, and with this he tries to control the world around him. This system is disrupted when he loses his job opportunity (Quentin gets a career boost in going to Harvard, so should Jason get a career boost from Herbert Head), and again when Quentin refuses to come to dinner, skips school, or runs away with his money. For each brother, the systems he has established help to control everyday life, and the way they do so is by controlling Caddy. As long as she is motherly to Benjy, virginal to Quentin, and profitable to Jason, their worlds are in order. But these controlling mechanisms are inflexible, breaking down entirely as soon as Caddy or her daughter defies them.
Each brother remains irrationally connected with the past, particularly with memories of Caddy. Benjy relives his memories of Caddy all the time, making no distinction
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between the present and the past. Quentin goes through the routines of life washed in a sea of memories of Caddy. And Jason, for all he seems to have cut himself off from her entirely by refusing to mention her name, is perhaps the closest of all to her. Not only is he surrounded by reminders of her in the shape of her daughter and her money, but he is also constantly reminded of her in his anger. It has been eighteen years since she lost him his job opportunity, and yet he remains as angry with her as he ever was. Certainly this is no way to forget her, nor is it any more "sane" than his brothers.
Nor is Jason even a particularly good businessman, for all he obsesses about money. In the course of this one day he loses $200 in the stock market, for example; he has been warned that the market is in a state of flux and yet he leaves town on a wild goose chase when he should be watching the market and deliberately defies his broker's advice by buying when he should sell. He is rude and spiteful to his boss, which is certainly not the best way to succeed in business. He buys a car even though he knows that gasoline gives him headaches. And perhaps the clearest indication of his bad business sense is the fact that when Quentin steals his savings in the fourth section, she steals $7000. This is the money that he has been embezzling from Caddy and Quentin, and Caddy has been sending him $200 a month for fifteen years. By this point he should have amassed upwards of $30,000; where did it all go? Even though he thinks of little else besides money, he is not capable of handling it properly.
Mrs. Compson spends much of the novel telling Jason that he is different from Quentin and Benjy, that he is a Bascomb at heart. And yet, underneath the sadism, money-grubbing and isolation, Jason is surprisingly similar to his brothers. He is just as obsessed with Caddy as they are, and her sexuality shatters his world just as much as theirs.
Analysis of April Eighth, 1928:
Readers commonly refer to this section of the novel as "Dilsey's section," although it is narrated in the third person. Dilsey plays a prominent role in this section, and even if she does not narrate this section, she serves a sort of moral lens through which to view the other characters in the section and, in fact, in the novel as a whole. The section contrasts Dilsey's slow, patient progress through the day with Jason's irrational pursuit of Quentin and Mrs. Compson's self-centered flightiness. As we watch Dilsey slowly climb up the stairs as Mrs. Compson watches to tend to Benjy, only to discover halfway up that he isn't even awake yet, we begin to sympathize with this wizened old woman. As we see her tenderly wiping Benjy's mouth as he eats, we come to see her as the only truly good person in the book. Even Caddy, the object of Benjy and Quentin's obsessions, was not as selflessly kind or as reliable as Dilsey. Throughout the course of the section, she is witness to any number of the Compson family's flaws, yet she never judges them. The only statement she makes that resembles a judgement is her concern that Luster has inherited the "Compson devilment." Instead she stands calmly in the midst of the chaos of the disintegrating household, patiently bearing what she is dealt "like cows do in the rain" (272). Unlike any of the Compson family, Dilsey is capable of extending outside herself and her own needs. Each of the brothers is selfish in his own way; Benjy because he cannot take care of himself and relies on her to, Quentin because he is too wrapped up in his ideals, Jason because of his greed and anger. Mrs. Compson is even worse, passive-aggressively manipulating the members of the family as she lies in her sickbed. And
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Miss Quentin is too troubled and lonely to sympathize with anyone else. Dilsey, however, in her kindness, ungrudgingly takes care of each family member with tenderness and respect.
In her selflessness, Dilsey conforms to the Christian ideal of goodness in self-sacrifice; therefore it is not surprising that the section takes place on Easter Sunday. This section of the novel resounds with biblical allusions and symbols and revolves around the sermon delivered by Reverend Shegog at Dilsey's church. The sermon profoundly affects Dilsey, who leaves the church in tears. Perhaps this is because the sermon seems to describe perfectly the disintegrating Compson family. Benjamin is the youngest son described as being "sold into Egypt" in the Appendix to the novel; here Shegog lectures on the Israelites who "passed away in Egypt" (295). Matthews notes that Jason is a "wealthy pauper" (11), fitting Shegog's description: "wus a rich man: whar he now, O breddren? Wus a po man: whar he now, O sistuhn?" (295). He has embezzled thousands of dollars from his sister, yet he lives like a poor man. Even Mrs. Compson, Matthews claims, is described in Shegog's sermon: "I hears de weepin en de lamentation of de po mammy widout de salvation en de word of God" (296). Matthews even suggests that Quentin is implied in the voice of one congregation member that rises "like bubbles rising in water" (11).
Much has been made of the religious symbolism in this chapter. Aside from Shegog's sermon there is Benjy's age: he is 33 years old, the age Christ was when he died. Like Christ, or like a priest, he is celibate. And he seems to be one of the only "pure" members of the family, incapable of doing anything evil merely because of his handicaps. But he is not the only Christlike member of the family. Quentin, the daughter of the woman whose brother wanted to remember her as both virginal and motherly, has an unknown father, just as Christ, the son of the Virgin Mary, had no earthly father. Like Christ, Quentin suffers a misunderstood and mistreated existence. But most compelling is the fact of her disappearance on Easter Sunday. Just as the disciples found Christ's tomb empty, the wrappings from his body discarded on the floor, Jason opens Quentin's room to find it empty: "the bed had not been disturbed. On the floor lay a soiled undergarment of cheap silk a little too pink, from a half open bureau drawer dangled a silk stocking" (282). If Quentin is a Christ figure, however, she seems to have a very un-Christlike effect on her family. Whereas the pure and virginal Christ's disappearance signaled the end of death and the beginning of new life in heaven, the promiscuous Quentin's disappearance signals the destruction of her family.
Other elements of the section seem more apocalyptic: there is Shegog's name, for instance, which sounds much like the Gog and Magog mentioned in the Book of Revelation. There is the story's preoccupation with the end of the Compson family: Jason is the last of the Compsons, and he is childless, his house literally rotting away. And finally there is Dilsey's comment that she has seen the first and the last, the beginning and the end: although the meaning of this statement is unclear, she seems to be discussing the end of the Compson family as well as her life, and perhaps the end of the world. Dilsey has borne witness to the alpha and the omega of the Compson family.
Nevertheless, none of this religious symbolism is particularly well-developed. It is impossible to tell who, if anyone, is the Christ figure in this Easter story. It is
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impossible to know what will happen to Quentin, or if the family will really dissolve as Dilsey seems to think it will. Nor is it particularly clear why Reverend Shegog's sermon has such an effect on Dilsey or what his actual message is; he has seen the recollection and the blood of the Lamb, but why is this important? What should the congregation do about it? What can they do in order to see this themselves?
The problem with this last section is that it doesn't satisfactorily bring the story of the Compson family to a close. The reader is left with a glimpse of the family's psychology and slow demise, but no real answers, no redemption. We don't know what will happen to the family or its servants: will Jason send Benjy to Jackson? Will Dilsey die? Will Quentin get away? John Matthews has pointed out that the story doesn't really end but keeps repeating itself. This is partially due to its nature as a stream-of-consciousness narrative; none of the three brothers' sections is purely chronological, therefore when the story ends their memories continue on. Matthews claims that the fourth section does not "[complete] the shape of the fiction's form" or "retrospectively order" the rest of the book; in fact it does not have much to do with the first two sections at all (9). The Compson clock ticks away toward the family's imminent demise, but it chimes the wrong hours, mangling the metaphor. Reverend Shegog's sermon does not have the intended effect, so he modifies it and tells it again: it "succeeds because it is willing to say, and then say again" (12). The story doesn't end; its loose ends are not tied together. Instead it constantly repeats. Faulkner himself said that the novel grew because he wrote the story of Caddy once (Benjy's section), and that didn't work, so he wrote it again (Quentin's section), but that wasn't enough either, so he wrote it again (Jason's section), and finally wrote it again (Dilsey's section), and even this wasn't good enough. The story of Caddy and the Compsons does not end, but repeats itself eternally in its characters' memories
The Sound of a Lot of Furious Crying: Moving Past the Present in The Sound and the Fury and Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49
It is fitting to discuss the recollection of the past in an age advancing to an unknown futurity and whose memories are increasingly banished to the realm of the nostalgic or, even worse, obsolete. Thomas Pynchon and William Faulkner, in wildly contrasting ways, explore the means by which we, as individuals and communities, remember, recycle, and renovate the past. Retrospection is an inevitability in their works, for the past is inescapable and defines, if not dominates, the present.
Pynchon maintains an optimistic, Ovidian view of the past - we recycle our cultural memories into another, perhaps better, form. The resulting disordered array of culture, one as much filled in by the glut of contemporary television channels as by 17th-century revenge dramas, is organized by some supervisory principle. Much as the postal system orders geography into specific postal codes and zones, Maxwell's Demon in The Crying of Lot 49 "connects the world of thermodynamics to the world of information flow" (106); it applies a controlled, scientific objective to the sprawling, aesthetic subjective.
But Pynchon's culture is not one haunted by the ghosts, except for the ghosts in Hamlet and Scooby-Doo. Faulkner's landscape is tortured by the tragedy of the South. In his view, the land is cursed because of two of the white man's presumptions: that he
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could own other men, and that he could own the land. Focusing on the microcosm of the fallen Compson family, Faulkner details the extent to which various family members are saddled by past loss and how they confront their searing memories. In what has canonized The Sound and the Fury, Faulkner recreates the temporal confusion of the Compsons in the narrative, as well, through a non-sequential chronology and through sentences that combine past, present, and future tenses. Despite the occupational differences between the two authors, they share a surprising wealth of concerns, namely in the ordering of chaos. Pynchon's order, however, remains a fruitful one of universality and coherence, while Faulkner contends that there is no real possible way to order memory, that each event is singular (indeed, he wanted the different times of the novel printed in corresponding colors), and that loss permeates the present despite attempts at reassessment or separation of the past.
The first sentence of The Crying of Lot 49 introduces "Mrs Oedipa Maas" (9). Her name immediately and forcefully conjures up for the reader all the cultural baggage associated with the name Oedipa. It is, of course, the Latinate feminine of Oedipus, the tragic Greek hero who was fated to murder his father and sleep with his mother. Yet the female version of Oedipus is not Oedipa, but Electra. The obvious Freudian associations dare the reader into a (most likely pointless) psychoanalytic reading. Her name is not so much about psychological complexes as about language, and how language can act for the character. Oedipa also has "pa" within the name, but that is directly followed by the "Ma" in Maas. Furthermore, the initials of "Mrs Oedipa Mass" spell out "MOM." Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, her husband's nickname for her is "Oed," or the abbreviations of the Oxford English Dictionary. This is what Oedipa is, a dictionary of various etymologies whose roots we uncover. Postmodernism often does away with traditional characterization at the expense of names because of all the name can offer us through its etymological past. There is nothing sinister about this recycling; it is simply a mode of cultural awareness, a way to recycle the chaotic past into some sort of organized present.
Names in Faulkner carry with them the literal and figurative pronunciations of their forebears. Consider the following exchange in Benjy's memory:
Your name is Benjy, Caddy said. Do you hear. Benjy. Benjy. Dont tell him that, Mother said. Bring him here. Caddy lifted me up under the arms. Get up, Mau - I mean Benjy, she said. (39) Benjy was named Maury, after his uncle but, as Faulkner tells us in the index, "when at last even his mother realised what he was and insisted weeping that his name must be changed, was rechristened Benjamin" (213). Rechristening is a euphemistic term for what many of the Compsons try for in vain, the purging of their dark past in hopes for a second chance at baptism. But he is no longer even Benjamin; that seems too adult a name for his childlike status. This is not the only instance of a disastrous choice of names. Caddy names her daughter after her brother, Quentin. Jason, tormented by both his sister, for her escape and promiscuity, and by his brother, for his escape to Harvard and the ensuing financial detriment to the family (and preventing Jason from attending college), treats the female Caddy as her mother's daughter, with cruelty and barbarity. Making up for the losses extracted from him by her mother and by Quentin, he creates a loss for her by bilking her of the money her
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mother sends her (a tangible inheritance) and forbidding any contact between the two (a more emotional inheritance). Unlike in Pynchon, the name in Faulkner is burdened, not burnished, by memorial associations.
Nevertheless, these associations are ubiquitous in TCL49, with high and low cultural artifacts meshing together in a grand equation of cultural consciousness. For Pynchon, the collective cultural memory recognizes little difference between a museum of abstract, intellectual art and the stored experience of a concrete, dirty mattress. All gets conflated to one, as with one of the many catalogs of seemingly disparate items in the book:
...clipped coupons promising savings of 5 or 10 cents, trading stamps, pink flyers advertising specials at the markets, butts, tooth-shy combs, help-wanted ads, Yellow Pages torn from the phone book, rags of old underwear or dresses that were period costumes...all the bits and pieces coated uniformly, like a salad of despair, in a gray dressing of ash, condensed exhaust, dust, body wastes... (14) What a clipped coupon and a deteriorating piece of underwear have in common is that they are both refuse, that they are both "coated uniformly" with the markers of decay, that their shared heritage is one of waste. In fact, the acronym W.A.S.T.E. courses through the novel, and not only for the effect of mystery. The acronym gives new meaning to a word (in this case, it stands for "We Await Silent Tristero's Empire"), infusing its letters with rich language while simultaneously obscuring its past incarnations as a single word. Similar meanings are grafted onto Mucho's radio station, KCUF (a curse reversed), and to the C.I.A. (not for Central Intelligence Agency, but for Conjuración de los Insurgents Anarquistas). Indeed, the term "anarchist miracle" refers to a chaotic dance does not burst into collisions but that "some unthinkable order" pervades "of music, many rhythms, all keys at once, a choreography in which each couple meshed easy, predetermined" (131). Maxwell's Demon assigns order to the seemingly untamable, giving random pieces of information spatial organization, just as the postal system supervises the geographic sprawl of society. This organization, culling from the past to produce a new, ordered present, lends an optimistic air to cultural recycling, as exemplified by the tasty dandelion wine and its graver roots: "'...You see, in spring, when the dandelions begin to bloom again, the wine goes through a fermentation. As if they remembered'" (98). Oedipa denies this meaning, but Pynchon implies that the world does function in this way, taking the scraps of refuse and reformulating them as something utile, even consumable.
The cultural residue in Faulkner is of a far more pessimistic nature. Taken in conjunction with T.S. Eliot's "The Wasteland," The Sound and the Fury critiques the sterility of a non-ritualized modern society. Eliot's poem demonstrates a fear of rain, of a fertile land in which "April is the cruellest month" and "Winter kept us warm." The desiccated landscape provides a retreat for the individual against the march of time (since fertility and seasonal rituals are abolished) and has settled over the South:
The day dawned bleak and chill, a moving wall of gray light out of the northeast which, instead of dissolving into moisture, seemed to disintegrate into minute and venomous particles, like dust that, when Dilsey opened the door of the cabin and
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emerged, needled laterally into her flesh, precipitating not so much a moisture as a substance partaking of the quality of thin, not quite congealed oil. (165)
Only Dilsey's outsider status (from the Compson family, at least), the quality that will make her and the other blacks "endure," as Faulkner writes in the Appendix, turns the dust of death into a somewhat liquid state. The novel's many losses - of family members, of innocence, of money, of land, of manhood (Benjy's castration) - turn into one overpowering symptom of sterility, of a land stuck in the past and unwilling to engage the future. Even the title comes from a line in "Macbeth," pointing not only to the novel's tragic structure but to its associations with the high culture of the past (ironically, ambition, that most future-oriented of drives, is the major theme of Shakespeare's play).
With this harmful past to work from, it is no wonder that the Compson family has such trouble mining any good from its memory banks. Each of the three brothers' narratives negotiates in a different, and equally destructive, manner with the past. Benjy's narrative blends all times together in a disordered, fragmented style. Unable to distinguish between times, Benjy is reduced to, as much as his retarded development limits him to, a child-like state of perception. What is the cause and what is the effect is negligible - seeing the world in a temporal blur is akin to seeing it as an infant. Quentin, on the other hand, more logically perceives the past - but to an extreme. He is mired in the past, consumed with Caddy's loss of virginity, with the pasture that was sold to send him to Harvard, with his uncaring father, and with the minute clicking away of his watch's hands. This Hamlet-like absorption in the past sends him to his suicide, through which he continually steps in his own deathly shadow. The losses of the past negate any sort of future for him, and prove as unsuccessful a strategy as Benjy's time warp. Finally, Jason proceeds through life as if the past were nonexistent. However, he, too, cannot escape memory, and must face the legacies of both Quentin and Caddy in the 17-year-old Caddy. That he tries to shackle her promiscuity also suggests his aversion to a fertile future, and squeezes Jason into the condensed middle of the present, an unbearable one which cannot help but notice the fading past and deteriorating future. The Compson family ultimately stands as a microcosm of ante-bellum South, showcasing the various approaches Southerners used for their own tragic, enduring history.
The individual in TCL49 also sifts through his cultural stock, but for better use. Characters act in way they "doubtless learned from watching the TV" (108). Similarly, they react emotionally to popular culture as they would to other humans:
But Roseman had also spent a sleepless night, brooding over the Perry Mason television program the evening before, which his wife was fond of but toward which Roseman cherished a fierce ambivalence, wanting at once to be a successful trial lawyer like Perry Mason and, since this was impossible, to destroy Perry Mason by undermining him. (18)
As with star-struck fans who confuse actors with their screen personae, Roseman, and the rest of media-saturated America, receives its reality from culture, and not only from the contemporary culture of "Perry Mason," but from the cultural pastiche behind the show: previous lawyer shows, previous legal plays and movies (the "quality of mercy" scene from "Merchant of Venice," for instance, as much as "12
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Angry Men") and the legal system itself, from our society to the Greeks. Perry Mason is not simply Perry Mason; he is a mongrel blend of Portia, Henry Fonda, and Hammurabi. The individual is swallowed up in the whole, as with the group therapy sessions to which Oedipa travels in a car pool. Encountering collective pain in a collective transport, the element becomes the whole, just as Benjy, Quentin, and Jason become the Compson family, which, in turn, becomes the South.
The structure of each book mirrors its approach to the past. A typical Faulknerian word is "undishonored," used in the phrase "as yet undishonored." He also writes sentences such as "She did not yet know she was a woman." In both cases, there is negation ("undis"/"did not...know") that precludes knowledge in the present and only allows it in future retrospection. It is the same principle behind having Benjy sparely relate in the opening scene "They were hitting," having the word "caddie" spiral him off into thoughts of Caddy, and then understanding later in the book that the company was playing golf. In the same way that the hectic present can only be understood through the steadier lens of the future, the scattered past can only be understood through the (somewhat) more stable perception of the present. The Sound and the Fury must be read several times until the disorder of narrative coheres as an intelligible story. TCL49, too, is a mystery whose willful obfuscation and numerous red herrings add up only after a few readings, and whose "solution" never really appears, except for the mystery of the title in the final sentence. Some critics read the title of Faulkner's novel as a challenge to the reader, in that, as "a tale told by an idiot, signifying nothing," the book defies traditional literary understanding. Faulkner ends the novel with Benjy howling, fulfilling the line from "Macbeth," but after that has an image of order. The form of narrative, and not the content of life, is the only chance for order in the world. A new framing device of literary technique replaces the conventional teleological frame. The novel moves from Good Friday to Easter, from the innocence of Benjy's opening section to the omniscience of Faulkner's (or Dilsey's) concluding section. While Perry Mason and Benjy's howl seemingly signify nothing, the precision of authorial control reveals the deep material of the past in each novel from which we can attribute meaning.
As I Lay Dying(1930)
By
W.Faulkner
Character List:
Darl Bundren: One of the fifteen narrators. The second oldest son of the Bundren family. Darl is the first and most important narrator of the novel. He is sensitive,
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intuitive, and intelligent, and his monologues are some of the most eloquent; they are also a more intricate representation of the process of thought. Some of the interior monologues are fairly straightforward, but Darl's passages are stream-of-consciousness narrative. For much of the novel, he acts as a kind of narrative anchor. One of the challenges of the novel is the complete absence of an objective third-person narrator. Everything we know about these characters is told to us through the lens of a subjective speaker; because of Darl's sensitivity and isolation from the other characters, most readers come to rely heavily on his version of events. He is eloquent, intelligent, and isolated. He ends up being put in an asylum.
Vardaman Bundren: One of the fifteen narrators. The youngest son of the family, and the second most frequently used narrator of the novel. Vardaman seems to teeter on the brink of mental collapse early on. His mother's death is extremely traumatizing, and his sensitive and imaginative nature is thrown out of balance by the event. He is at an age where he is becoming conscious of his status as a country boy (as opposed to a town boy), and he wonders why it should be so. He has a special bond with Darl.
Addie Bundren: One of the fifteen narrators. Mother of the family. Gravely ill at the start of the novel, she dies early on. She has always wanted to be buried among her birth family in Jefferson. Once a schoolteacher, she married Anse and gave birth to four children by him: Cash, Darl, Dewey Dell, and Vardaman. She also had a secret affair with Whitfield, resulting in the birth of Jewel. The transport of her body is the main event of the novel.
Anse Bundren: One of the fifteen narrators. Patriarch. Anse is maddeningly stupid and lazy. He unimaginatively applies himself to his wife's wish, but the physical and mental cost to his family is tremendous. He is a begrudging father, without real love or concern for his children. There is nothing overtly hostile about him; mostly he comes off as a weak and irritating man, but his decisions cause real harm throughout the book.
Cash Bundren: One of the fifteen narrators. Oldest son of the Bundren family. Cash is a carpenter, and his identity is wrapped up in his work. Although his monologues are few in number and unrevealing for most of the novel, his voice comes to dominate the closing events. He lacks Darl's sublime imagination and sensitivity, but he is nonetheless a relatively compassionate and trustworthy narrator.
Jewel: One of the fifteen narrators. Middle child of the Bundrens. Secretly, he is the illegitimate child of the minister Whitfield. Jewel is a fiery and physical being. He is hot-tempered and impatient. He loves horses and is physically powerful.
Dewey Dell: One of the fifteen narrators. Only daughter of the Bundren family, and the second youngest child. Dewey Dell's monologues are characterized by unarticulated wishes, powerful but poorly misunderstood emotions, and fatigue. She is pregnant and is secretly seeking an abortion.
Vernon Tull: One of the fifteen narrators. A neighboring, wealthier farmer. Tull is often frustrated by Anse's laziness. He has helped Anse a great deal over the years, and his family helps the Bundrens during and after Addie's death.
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Cora Tull: One of the fifteen narrators. Vernon's extremely religious wife. Cora has a special love for Darl, whom she recognizes as special. Often, her religious beliefs make her an extremely judgmental person.
Eula Tull: Daughter of Vernon and Cora.
Kate Tull: Daughter of Vernon and Cora. She predicts that Anse will have a new wife soon if Addie dies.
Peabody: One of the fifteen narrators. The doctor of the county. He is elderly and overweight, but he continues to work. Anse's stupidity maddens him. He tends to Addie and later to Cash.
Samson: One of the fifteen narrators. Local farmer. He puts up the Bundrens on the first night of their journey.
Whitfield: One of the fifteen narrators. Local minister. Father of Jewel. Years ago, he had a secret affair with Addie.
Armstid: One of the fifteen narrators. Farmer who puts up the Bundrens for several nights.
Gillespie: Farmer who puts up the Bundrens for a night. Darl burns his barn down.
MacGowan: One of the fifteen narrators. Assistant in a town store. He tricks Dewey Dell into believing he is a doctor, and peddles a bogus abortion treatment to her in exchange for sex.
Main Themes:
Isolation: Faulkner's structure is particularly suitable for the theme of isolation. The characters exist within their own series of interior monologues; we encounter each character, alone with their secret longings and fears. With many characters, we are struck by their loneliness. Darl's isolation is the most poetic and the most tragic. He is a powerfully intuitive observer, but his sensitivity and brilliance often isolate from others. He views his siblings with a paradoxically mixed attitude swerving from empathy and loyalty to supreme and insensitive detachment. Many characters resent Darl because of how he encroaches on their isolation: Dewey Dell hates Darl for making her feel vulnerable, and Jewel lashes out at Darl for seeing the truth about him.
The Physical: The novel dwells on the realities of land, nature, and physical processes. One does not feel detached from nature, with all of its power and nastiness. The land and the difficulty of earning a living from it, as well as the power of the flooded river, reveal men as being part of an often hostile environment. Nature's belligerence is seen in our very bodies. The sanitized version of death favored by Whitfield is used only as a foil for the much nastier reality faced by the Bundrens.
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The stinking corpse and the ever present buzzards present a vision of death at its most repulsive and physical.
Work: Work is a recurring theme of the novel, most often connected to Cash. Cash is a man whose work gives him an identity; we hear the sound of his saw before we see him, and in all of the characters monologues Cash is inseparable from his work as a carpenter. Work plays itself out in another way with Anse, whose laziness and stupidity, along with his whining and self-pity, earn the reader's unqualified contempt.
Poverty: The Bundrens are among the poorest characters in all of Faulkner's work. This poverty imposes harsh limits on them. It makes them dependent on their neighbors, and resentful of that dependence; often, the Bundrens display a pathetic mixture of dependency and pride. Their poverty also makes life so harsh that little time can be allotted for grief, or healing. Pain is concealed, and the work of everyday life goes on.
Religion: Many character muse about God and man throughout the novel. Faulkner tends to be rather critical of simplistic Christianity. The minister Whitfield is revealed as a self-satisfied hypocrite, hiding his transgression with Addie yet maintaining that he has wrestled with the devil and won. Cora's piety also grows increasingly annoying, especially when it becomes clear that she ignores any fact or event that contradicts her pre-established beliefs.
Duty: Obligation is an important theme of the novel. The family is bringing Addie's body to Jefferson, to bury her as she wished to be buried. There is much talk about duty. Addie herself speaks of duty regarding her relationship to Anse; to hear her speak of it, duty is a joyless but necessary part of life. Anse, too, constantly speaks of his duty to Addie, and the need to bury the body where she wished it to be buried. But duty seems somewhat fragile. Anse takes up with a new woman less than two weeks after Addie's death. And in terms of duty, the ties within the Bundren family fray rather quickly when it comes time to turn in Darl.
Being: Both Vardaman and Darl are taken by questions of being, consciousness, and identity. His mother's death has only added confusion to these questions; Vardaman cannot understand how something that "is" can become "was." Darl's musings veer between striking eloquence and a kind of elegant crudeness. Darl engages in intense sessions of questioning, in which he examines the foundations of being and consciousness. These questions take on a tragic significance when Darl loses his mind, and his concept of himself is completely undermined.
Mortality: With the central action being the delivery of Addie Bundren's body to Jefferson, mortality is an inescapable theme. Mortality here is nasty and extremely physical, with a stinking corpse and fat buzzards always following close behind. Death is also rendered more painful in light of the harshness of life. Addie is not allowed real rest. Her dead hands are described as still unresting, as if they could not believe that their work was done. And even after death, her body is made to suffer a number of new indignities.
First Section (Darl, Cora, Jewel, Darl, Cora, Dewey Dell;)
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Analysis:
As I Lay Dying is an important experiment in narrative. The language is intense and highly subjective, with a recognizable change in language depending on the narrator. Each section falls somewhere in the range from confessional to stream-of-consciousness. The novel is a series of interior monologues, and through these fragmented passages we piece together the story of Addie Bundren's death and the transport of her body to Jefferson.
The narrative appears fragmentary, but the story demonstrates admirable unity: it is limited to the span of a few days, and the different sub-plots are logically and skilfully interwoven. Faulkner's innovation is in how we see this unified set of events: we are forced to look at the story from a number of different perspectives, each of which is highly subjective. In The Sound and the Fury, Faulkner made use of some elements of this technique. However, As I Lay Dying presents us with a far greater range of voices. Additionally, The Sound and the Fury provides a clearer distinction between unreliable and reliable narrators. Part Three of The Sound and the Fury is narrated by a man who is unmistakably evil, and Part Four helps clarify the novel through its use of a more objective third-person narrator. The voices in As I Lay Dying are more numerous and more ambiguous.
Darl is the first and most important narrator of the novel. He is sensitive, intuitive, and intelligent, and his monologues are some of the most eloquent; they are also a more intricate representation of the process of thought. Some of the interior monologues are fairly straightforward, but Darl's passages are stream-of-consciousness narrative. For much of the novel, he acts as a kind of narrative anchor. One of the challenges of the novel is the complete absence of an objective third-person narrator. Everything we know about these characters is told to us through the lens of a subjective speaker; because of Darl's sensitivity and isolation from the other characters, most readers come to rely heavily on his version of events. He is eloquent, intelligent, and isolated. Isolation is one of the recurring themes of the novel. Because of the novel's unique structure, the isolation of the characters is highlighted. Darl tells us what he and alone can observe, and his isolation is the most poetic; ultimately, it is also the most tragic.
From the very first section, the sensory and sensual images of the novel are a strong element. Although the novel takes the form of interior monologues, each character is powerfully influenced, in his own way, by the sheer physicality of their world. As I Lay Dying presents one of the most rugged and rural settings of any Faulkner novel; this South is the South of heartbreaking poverty and life lived close to an often unforgiving land. Nature and physical needs dominate as a theme: Darl narrates a long passage on the pleasure of drinking water, and relates a memory of seeing the stars reflected in a bucket full of water. He is described as always having his eyes "full of the land" by other characters; he sees something in the world that the others don't, and his descriptions of nature are often striking for their sensuality and the unusual metaphors he employs.
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Work is part of the relationship to the land, and it is an important theme of the novel. Cash is a man whose work gives him an identity; we hear the sound of his saw before we see him, and in all of the characters monologues Cash is inseparable from his work as a carpenter. The sound of his saw is the constant background noise that accompanies us all the way to Addie Bundren's death. Jewel is furious at Cash for building the coffin right near Addie: "It's because he stays out there, right under the window, hammering, and sawing on that goddamn box. Where she's got to see him. Where every breath she draws is full of his knocking and sawing where she can see him saying See. See what a good one I am making for you" (11). But Jewel love's is possessive and perhaps ignores Addie's wishes: she wants to see the coffin being made. Cash is doing for her the only thing he can do. He takes his identity from his work as a carpenter, and the coffin is the only gift he can give his mother.
We do not only hear about the negative aspects of characters from other characters; characters often inadvertently present their own faults in their own sections. In Cora Tull's first section, Cora's self-righteousness and irritating piety come through loud and clear. Her daughter Kate seems far healthier in comparison: Kate complains about the insensitivities of the rich. Cora's attitude of acceptance seems at first to be kinder, but in the end turns out to be self-righteous and equally angry. She continues to talk to us about the cakes, thinking about them again and again without reason, and continuing to take comfort in the power of God, who "can see into the heart" (4). Implicit in Cora's interior monologue is that she feels she does not need to judge the rich because her God will. Religion is a theme of the novel, and often Faulkner is deeply critical of the religious characters of the book. Characters often are blinded by their own piety.
Poverty is an important theme of the novel. The Bundrens are one of the poorest families in any of Faulkner's books. Jewel and Darl are going to miss their mother's death for three dollars. The family lives in a perpetual state of need, always slightly short of cash.
Isolation also is apparent in Dewey Dell's narrative. She is the only daughter of the family, and Addie's death will leave her as the sole female. This fact might explain the extreme possessiveness with which she watches over Addie. Dewey Dell is clearly lonely, and has found comfort in the arms of a boy who lives nearby. But although she is lonely and isolated and suffers for it, some part of her treasures this isolation. Part of her resents and fears Darl because he intuitively understands her and can see her secrets. Most of the time, Dewey Dell seems very partial to Darl. The two enjoy a closeness and love that is evident to the other members of the family. But in Dewey Dell's first section, she voices a resentment that will explain her actions later: "And that's why I can talk to him with knowing with hating because he knows" (23).
Second Section (Tull, Anse, Darl, Peabody, Darl, Vardaman, Dewey Dell;)
Analysis:
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Poverty is one of the novel's recurring themes. The harshness of the Bundren's life is emphasized again and again. For the rural, life is hard work with no chance for rest. The Bundrens are particularly poor, and their situation has always been difficult. Because of this poverty, Jewel and Darl end up having to ship lumber, missing their mother's death for three dollars.
Anse's laziness is most decidedly a factor in their state. Anse generally comes off as a despicable character; he clearly means to have the boys go off and ship the lumber, missing their mother's death for three dollars, but he is not man enough to say it directly. Instead he waffles and whines until his decision becomes clear. He is a weak man, always excusing his own behavior and acting with little real feeling for his family. When Addie dies, he thinks that finally he'll be able to get false teeth. He makes some attempt at tenderness, but it is as if he does so because he knows he should, or he has seen others doing it. He attempts to smooth out the quilt, "as he saw Dewey Dell do" (47), but he only succeeds in wrinkling it. Faulkner's language is heavy here, emphasizing Anse's hands as bringing disorder and ugliness to whatever they touch. His gesture lacks real feeling; it is sentiment contrived because sentiment is appropriate, and to drive the point home to us Faulkner has Anse looking forward to his false teeth with his wife's body not yet cold.
Anse's neighbors have had to help him constantly throughout the years, so much so that they have become resigned to it. The voices coming from outside of the family are often characterized by a harsh judgment of the Bundrens and of Anse in particular. Faulkner also emphasizes that for those outside of the family, Addie's death cannot be the sole focus of attention. Life is too demanding. Mortality as a theme is often juxtaposed to the need to keep on living. Peabody, being pulled up the mountain to see Addie, reflects on his old age and the demands of his work. Cora thinks of her cakes. Vernon Tull sends Jewel and Darl to ship lumber for him. The intent is not always to show that a character is petty, but to depict a life that is demanding and unrelenting in its harshness.
Darl's voice continues to be the most eloquent and relied-upon. Anse's interior monologue reveals his weak will and dimness. Dewey Dell's interior monologues are delivered from the throes of powerful fear and emotion. Vardaman's monologues are similar to Darl's in many ways. They are, not surprisingly, less mature, but the young boy shares Darl's taste for bizarre imagery and relentless questioning of the very terms of his own existence.
The Tulls and Peabody provide valuable outsiders' perspective. They universally condemn Anse, more or less, for his laziness and weakness. Tull notes that one can always tell Anse's shirts apart: there are no sweat stains, the implication being that Anse never works (27). On the other Bundrens, their opinions vary. Cora is extremely fond of Darl; she sees in him a sensibility finer and gentler than among any other Bundren. So much so that she seems to cling to illusions about him: she believes that he begged to stay with Addie instead of delivering the lumber, and claims in her interior monologue that Vernon told her so. Yet in Vernon Tull's own interior monologue, we hear the exchange with Darl. As Vernon Tull's interior monologue depicts it, Darl is hesitant and seems sad about leaving while Addie dies, but he does not beg.
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This example highlights the complexity of the portraits that emerge in As I Lay Dying. We listen to the very strong opinions characters have of one another. Usually interior thought is emphasized far more than dialogue. While dialogue as a way to reveal characters would provide more objective evidence, we would lose the psychological complexity of the portraits.
The Tulls talking among themselves as they leave is one of the rare moments when we learn from dialogue. The family, heading home, begins naturally to discuss the Bundrens. Kate and Eula seem preoccupied with Cash, Darl, and Jewel, and the possibility that they'll get married soon; Kate speaks with some scorn about Jewel's fiery nature. Kate also speaks with scorn about Anse, predicting that if Addie dies Anse will find a new wife before cotton-picking time (28). Though people help Anse, no one seems to respect him.
The death scene itself is revealed in Darl's section, although he is not there to witness it. The passage merits close examination, so that readers can reach their own conclusions. Although Darl is not there, the passage seems to be narrated from a more detached version of Darl's own voice. Anse is referred to as "Pa," for example, suggesting that we are seeing things from Darl's perspective. But the italicized passages are more strongly in a personal voice: in these italicized passages, we hear about the wagon accident. Also, Darl continues to narrate the death in the italicized passages, although the tense (future: ie "She will go out where Peabody is") suggests that Darl is imagining what is happening. But there is continuity between the italicized passages and the non-italicized. Darl's voice is the only voice Faulkner seems willing to use for this scene. He and Jewel are among the most affected by Addie's death. Darl's sensitivity and eloquence are matched throughout the novel with his strange detachment and isolation. In this light, it makes some sense that Darl's voice should narrate Addie's death. The situation mirrors Darl's own paradoxical relationship to the event. He is more close to it, more moved by the event and its implications, but his mind leads him to be isolated from his own family. He is literally removed from his mother by the errand, just as he is psychologically and spiritually isolated from all around him.
As Faulkner depicts it, and as the structure of the novel suggests, real intimacy and tenderness are close to impossible in the Bundren family. Work and the realities of poverty darken all aspects of life, and hope and longing are always expressed alone. The family lives in squalid, cramped conditions, and yet isolation is one of their trademarks. Remember Darl reflecting on his boyhood, and the first times he masturbated: Cash was sleeping not a few feet away, but Darl does not know if Cash was doing the same thing. Solitary masturbation in complete darkness is the only glimpse we get of Darl's and Cash's sexuality. Dialogue between the Bundrens is almost always spare and minimal, and juxtaposed to a torrent of powerful, often violent internal reflections. Darl is the only character who occasional gives voice to his thoughts, and probes into the interior lives of his siblings: with both Jewel and Dewey Dell, this habit of Darl's earns resentment, even hatred.
In Addie's death we are reminded again of the harshness of rural poverty. The themes of poverty and work run through the passages. Motherhood, as depicted here, is a life-destroying venture, without joy or tenderness. Peabody says of Addie, and her fierce unspoken insistence that he leave the room: "Seem them [women like Addie] drive
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from the room them coming with sympathy and pity, with actual help, and clinging to some trifling animal to whom they never were more than pack-horses" (41). Even more striking is the description of Addie's hands: "the hands alone still with any semblance of life: a curled, gnarled inertness; a spent yet alert quality from which weariness, exhaustion, travail has not departed, as though they doubted even yet the actuality of rest, guarding with horned and penurious alertness the cessation which they know cannot last" (46). Addie's hands bear the marks of her hard life.
For Dewey Dell, there is not time enough to articulate her own emotions to herself: "I try to but I can't think long enough to worry" (53). Her thoughts are some of the must muddled in the book: she speaks not with the complicated and eccentric eloquence of Darl but in a voice near-hysterical with worry. Her mother's death is deeply painful: she throws herself on Addie's corpse with an unexpected intensity. She has lost her lover, who has abandoned her and left her pregnant. Her isolation is clear. But she is so used to being alone that she resents intrusions. Darl, for example, earns her resentment because of how intimately he understands her. Even more intrusive is the growing presence in her womb: "I feel my body, my bones and flesh beginning to part and open upon the alone, and the process of coming unalone is terrible" (55). Dewey Dell must begin to worry about finding a way to end the pregnancy.
Third Section (Vardamann, Tull, Darl, Cash, Vardaman, Tull, Darl, Cash, Darl, Vardaman, Darl, Anse)
Analysis:
Both Vardaman and Darl are taken by questions of being, consciousness, and identity. His mother's death has only added confusion to these questions; Vardaman cannot understand how something that "is" can become "was." In other words, the destructive power of time, the terror of mortality, and the mystery of ceasing to exist have been too much for Vardaman. In his mind, his mother has become something else. Vardaman turns death into transformation. His mother is a fish. He then imagines her as a rabbit, because she has gone far away, just as the rabbits did. He is disturbed by the fact that they are going to eat the fish.
Vardaman struggles to find teleology for the events around him. He tries to connect what happens to reasons, when in fact often things happen for no reason at all. He blames his mother's death on Peabody, because Peabody's arrival preceded his mother's death. He also has linked the fish and his mother. His reasoning is clearly incorrect, but in many ways it is no less reasonable than explanations given by other characters of the novel. Consider Cora Tull, he repetitively maintains that all happens by God's will, for God's reasons. Yet she is so wrapped up in forcing events into a Christian framework that her pronouncements become tiresome. She sees Vardaman's instability as God's punishment for Anse. Her reasoning is no more sophisticated than Vardaman's; the sole difference is that she has the backing of her near-fanatical religious beliefs.
Questions of identity and being are linked to poverty and rural life for Vardaman. In, Vardaman's first interior monologue of this section, he asks others and himself why
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he is who he is: "Why ain't I a town boy, pa?" (59). With a stopover "in town" imminent, the themes of poverty and rural vs. town life creep up. For Vardaman, the event gives rise to questions about why he has been born poor, without the things town boys have.
Poverty and rural hardship continue to be themes. Even for the Bundren children, the trip to bring Addie's body to burial must be mixed with business; life is too harsh to grant mourning periods. Cash brings his tools, so that he can stop and work at Tull's on the way back. Anse says that this act is disrespectful, but Darl defends Cash. And Dewey Dell must bring Cora's cakes to sell in town.
The Tulls are studies for the theme of religion. Cora's piety, as Faulkner depicts it, is something easy to admire and equally easy to ridicule. Cora's faith makes her a great help at times, but she is also judgmental, self-deceiving, and often misinterprets situations out of a zealousness to force all events into a Christian framework of understanding.
Tull's fatalism is a counterpoint to his wife's faith. He too believes in God, a God who directs all things, but he seems to derive little confort. He wonders about the burden of being human: what God decides, man must do. He respects his wife, and says that if God were to put things into mortal hands, they would be Cora's. But he seems resigned to suffering as a constant of life: "And I reckon she would make a few changes, no matter how He was running it. And I reckon they would be for man's good. Leastaways, we would have to like them. Leastaways, we might as well go on and make like we did" (67). This passage touches on Tull's religious attitudes, while doubling as a concise statement of how he feels about his overbearing wife.
Cash is seen in glimpses; so far, his only interior monologues are closely tied to his work as a carpenter. Cash is doing the only thing he knows how to do. He draws meaning from his work. Tull remarks that Cash takes care over carpentry jobs that require little craftsmanship (79). He is so bound up in his work and the details of craftsmanship that he seems unreasonable to his siblings. Jewel dismisses Cash's protests, while Cash continues to fuss. But carpentry is Cash's life; without it, he is nothing.
The siblings have strongly defined personalities, and each one is very different from the others. Jewel is evidently the hothead of the family. He is also tall and incredibly strong, hoisting Addie's coffin into the wagon almost single-handedly. His interior life is far less complicated that Darl's or Vardaman's. He expresses his grief not through thought, but through explosions of physical power. His feelings are intense and sincere, expressed mostly as bursts of defiance and anger and disgust. After he gets the coffin up into the wagon, he says "Goddamn you" repeatedly, and the target of his cursing here seems to be just about everyone. His defiance becomes clear again in his dispute with Anse, and his decision to come along, separate from the others, on horseback. His pride is clear, and he rides the horse despite the fact that it could be considered disrespectful to his family and dead mother.
Darl continues to be the most intuitive of the characters. He speaks with Vardaman as if he can read the boy's mind, and he accurately predicts Jewel's behavior.
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Darl's musings veer between striking eloquence and a kind of elegant crudeness. When struggling with questions of what it means to be, his syntax becomes simple, almost childlike; at these times, he and Vardaman have the most in common of any of the siblings. He also recognizes that his questioning, rather than buttress his understanding of himself, makes him far less certain as an entity than someone like Jewel: "I don't know what I am. I don't know if I am or not. Jewel knows he is, because he does not know that he does not know whether he is or not" (73). Jewel's thickheadedness protects him from the kind of philosophical self-torture that Darl cannot help but engage in. Tull believes firmly that Darl thinks too much, and the thinking has made Darl go funny in the head (64). Darl forces himself to question the very foundations of his being. As he falls asleep, he feels his identity disappearing. He reasons back and forth, confirming his existence, but also seeming to realize that his being is unstable: "And then I must be, or I could not empty myself for sleep in a strange room. And so if I am not emptied yet, I am is" (74). Falling asleep, for now Darl is able to affirm his being, and yet this whole monologue foreshadows the unraveling of Darl's being later in the novel.
The conversation between Darl and Vardaman is one of the novel's more unsettling moments (90-1). Darl seems to be playing with Vardaman as older brothers do, but given their interior monologues the dialogue becomes disturbing. This section merits close inspection. Vardaman speaks of how his mother is a fish, and Darl does not seem to contradict him. They ask aloud who their mothers are. Darl tells Vardaman that he doesn't have a mother: "Because if I had one, it is was. And if it is was, it can't be is" (91). He also repeats to Vardaman a thought Darl had in an earlier monologue: "Jewel's mother is a horse" (90). He seems for now to be alluding to Jewel's incredible love for his horse, which seems more meaningful to him than Addie. But Darl also explains to Vardaman that just because Jewel's mother is a horse, it doesn't necessarily follow that Vardaman's is. Darl's meaning will become clear later.
Something important to note: the interior monologues of the Bundrens are almost always in the present tense, while the interior monologues of those outside the family are usually, but not always, in the past tense. This move separates characters like the Tulls from the main action, making their narratives come from a position of some distance. The struggle to bring Addie's body to Jefferson is the Bundrens'; they suffer the most, and the woman they bury is theirs and no one else's. The emotions of those outside the family are appropriately less intense, and this distance is reflected in the verb tense.
Fourth Section (Darl, Anse, Samson, Dewey Dell, Tull, Darl, Tull, Darl, Vardaman);
Analysis:
Logistical concerns dominate this part of the novel. The must difficult part of the journey comes right at the start; the river has to be crossed, but heavy rains have led to the highest water levels in memory, and the bridges have been destroyed. To make these logistical matters worse, the body has begun to stink. The smell of carrion is beginning to attract fat buzzards, heavy with water. The buzzards are a dark and heavy symbol of mortality, and the nasty physicality of death. They will follow the Bundrens all the way to Addie's burial, growing in number all along the way.
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Anse never quite manages to be a likable, or even forgivable character, even when he is speaking. His interior monologue is about the inability of the poor honest man to make a go of it, but it's clear that he's lazy and weak. On the banks of the river, his sons have to make all of the decisions. He is not capable of deciding anything; he is too weak and too afraid to take responsibility for even the simplest of choices.
The family displays a strange, often pathetic mix of dependency and pride; this paradoxical combination comes from their extreme poverty. When staying in Samson's bar, they refuse to accept much of the hospitality Samson offers, out of pride. But it is clear from the earlier monologues that the Bundrens have been dependent on neighbors' help many times in the past. The spectacle of the Bundrens bringing the body to Jefferson takes on a whole new dimension when seen from the eyes of outsiders. We see them through the eyes of people who often look down on them, but our sympathy for the characters, and the fact that we have seen things from the Bundrens' perspective, makes this perspective painful. When others condescend to the Bundrens, the reader pities the family even more. Anse is the character who remains farthest from most readers' sympathies. But the others all command our sympathy, even respect; to see them looked on with contempt is painful.
Darl's relationship to his family and his neighbors is paradoxical. He is at once the most connected to and the most isolated from all of the people around him. His incredible powers of intuition take on a mystic dimension; years ago he learned, in a flash of insight, that Jewel's father is not Anse. The leap suggests that Darl knew his mother better than any of the other Bundren children could have. Her favoritism of Jewel had much to do with the fact that he was something that was hers and not Anse's.
But Darl's insights also make him hated. The novel is full of isolated voices, but isolation is often cherished. Dewey Dell says that she feels naked in front of Darl's intuitive gaze: in her dreams, she plays out fantasies of killing him (107-8). Darl is fiercely loyal to her in his own way: she observes that "He'll do what I say. He always does" (108), but his loyalty is not recompense enough for how vulnerable she makes him feel.
Darl's eyes are the most common source of discomfort. Dewey Dell recoils under his gaze. Tull sums up Darl succinctly, "He is looking at me. He don't say nothing; just looks at me with them queer eyes of hisn that makes folks talk. I always say it ain't never been what he done so much or said or anything so much as how he looks at you. It's like he had got into the inside of you, someway. Like somehow you was looking at yourself and your doings outen his eyes" (112). The look into Darl's eyes is the key, for other characters, to knowing that their isolation has been violated. Darl penetrates deeply into the consciousness of others. Despite the powerful loneliness of so many of the characters, with Dewey Dell being among the loneliest of them all, this psychological intimacy is not at all welcome.
Jewel is full of fierce pride, as well as a selfishness and aggression that isolate him from his family in a different way. Earlier in the novel, Dewey Dell insisted that Jewel "don't care about anything he is not kin to us in caring, not care-kin" (22). His fierce temper and pride are sometimes self-defeating. He refuses Samson's offer of feed for his horse (103); he lashes out at Tull and then seems angry a minute later
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when he asks Tull for help and Tull refuses (113). He is, at times, supremely selfish. He works himself tirelessly for the money to buy his horse, forcing his siblings to pick up the slack around the Bundren farm. But Jewel's isolation might come from a sense that he is not a full sibling to the others; we never hear directly from Jewel if he knows the truth of his parentage, although certainly it is hinted. And living with Anse, Jewel has learned to resent and despise the begrudging generosity with which Anse treats his children. When Jewel returns with the newly bought horse, Anse is angry that he'll have to feed it. Jewel's response is withering and fierce: "He won't never eat a mouthful of yours. . . Not a mouthful. I'll kill him first. Don't you never think it. Don't you never" (123). Pride, often carried to ridiculous extremes, and a determination to do everything for himself and by himself, have been Jewel's reactions to Anse's half-hearted fathering.
Cash and his work continue to be inextricable. When Jewel rides by at a gallop, splattering the coffin with mud, Cash meticulously removes the mud and scrubs out the stain. He works silently, without voicing any complaint to Jewel (97). While a cynical reader might argue that Cash is more concerned about his piece of carpentry work than what is inside of the coffin, a strong case can be made that the coffin is the embodiment of Cash's grief. He is not an emotive person, but there is something tender and gentle about him. At least on an unconscious level, his grief at Addie's passing is wrapped up in the piece of work he created for her.
Fifth Section (Tull, Darl, Cash, Cora, Addie, Whitfield, Darl, Armstid)
Analysis:
The voyage to Jefferson has been incredibly difficult. They logistical challenges are amplified by the increasing stench of the body.
But in the middle of this most difficult stretch of the voyage, we pause for three interior monologues that take place outside of the central action. We have Cora, urging penance and humility; Addie, defiant and full of venom; and Whitfield, full of hypocritical self-righteousness. These three voices flesh out our view of Addie, who has been a completely enigmatic figure until now. Cora's monologue comes first, and the following two monologues make many of Cora's statements ironic, as well as revealing Cora as limited and naïve. Cora tells Addie, "Just because you have been a faithful wife is no sign that there is no sin in your heart" (154). She also says that Brother Whitfield is "a godly man if ever one breathed God's breath" (155). We soon learn that Addie, in fact, has not been faithful to Anse, and that the other man was Brother Whitfield himself. Cora's talking about faith and sin and salvation sounds ridiculous to Addie.
Cora's worldview is incredibly simplistic, controlled completely by giving herself over to God. But we have seen also that she ignores inconvenient facts. Tull points out that her criticisms of Anse are riddled with contradictions; when Tull calls her on it, she ignores him and sings (140-1). After her conversation with Addie, she seems more off-track than ever; in effect, she loses credibility as a narrator. Tellingly, it is the last time she narrates in the novel.
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Addie, in the few pages that we see her, seems to have a dark and honest interior life. She is not afraid of her emotions; to herself, at least, she admits that she hated her pupils. And she speaks honestly of her relationship with her children, which was not characterized by an abundance of love. With Jewel, all was different. Jewel was her own, not Anse's; Addie's distance from her other young seems to be connected to a contempt for Anse. But despite her infidelity, she remains faithful to Anse in many other ways. The theme of duty is important in the novel. She never demands that he be a better man than he is; she accepts his failings. And she gives him children.
She is supremely disillusioned by her marriage to Anse. She speaks of words and their limits, but she is also speaking of the emptiness of certain ideas. To her, motherhood and love are often just words, employed by those who are afraid that they don't have them. She sees a separation between words and the ideas that they represent. It is part of why she does not seem to respect Cora. From Addie's perspective, her sin makes her more capable of understanding salvation, while both concepts remain abstract for Cora. In a memorable line, Addie says "people to whom sin is just a matter of words, to them salvation is just words too" (165). From these few pages, Addie emerges as a woman who has little faith in platitudes or empty ideas.
She stands in sharp contrast to both Cora and Whitfield. Whitfield clings hypocritically to his status as holy man. While Addie full admits her sin, and seems to even revel is the part of sin that gives her back her independence, Whitfield still talks like a simple-minded minister. He claims to have wrestled with Satan and won (166), because he has decided to confess his union with Addie. He sees his trip to the Bundren home as some kind of mighty spiritual journey, the difficulties proving that God is testing him. He welcomes the tests with ridiculous bravado. This event is outside of the chronology of the main action; remember that Whitfield arrived shortly after Addie died. We hear about Whitfield's crossing of the river right in the middle of the Bundrens' difficult crossing, and the juxtaposition makes Whitfield look ridiculous. If a rickety bridge is a test of God in his eyes, it cannot be seen in the same way by the reader, who has just watched the Bundrens cross, with a wagon and coffin, with no bridge at all. And of course, the minister conveniently interprets Addie's death as God letting Whitfield off the hook. Especially after Addie's blasting of empty words, the minister's religious talk seems foul and empty. The theme of religion, touched on often in this novel, takes a critical turn. Faulkner often shows the comfort and beauty of simple religion, but here he blasts the hypocrisy and simplistic worldviews with which some religious people arm themselves.
The two crossings also juxtapose two very different perspectives on mortality. Through these two perspective, Faulkner explores the theme in a way that does not flatter Whitfield or his beliefs. Whitfield deals in a kind of tidy spiritualism. His journey across the river, with all of its supposed hardships, resembles a children's story for Christians. He wants to make peace before Addie's death. But her death, as a problem, seems to take care of itself. In reality, the Bundrens have to deal with the nasty physical side of death. The now soaked body has begun to stink, and the buzzards suggest a side of death quite different from the hymn-filled heaven evoked by Cora and Whitfield.
Cash is hurt badly once again, but he clings to what he is. He demands to see his tools, with the sad irony being that with a newly broken leg it will be some time
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before he works again. And as he lies, barely conscious, he keeps repeating to himself the expert advice he gave the others before the crossing; he is repeating the advice that the others, particularly Jewel, ignored. Arguably, listening to Cash might have prevented the accident. But although Cash has taken the worst of the disastrous crossing, characteristically he says nothing.
The selling of Jewel's horse is another atrocious action by Anse. It is the first time in the novel that he makes a dramatic decision on his own, but Anse seems to be doing it for the sake of being cruel to Jewel. Anse could borrow Armstid's team, but he chooses not to. The horse, it must be remembered, is not even his to sell. Jewel bought it himself, with money earned from months of backbreaking labor. Anse justifies himself by saying that he's gone without teeth for fifteen years, scraping by as a sacrifice for the family. But the horse is not his, and the one decision Anse has made so far is not one that was his to make; there is an element of suppressed glee when Anse announces what he has done: "Like he had done something he thought was cute but wasn't so sho now how other folks would take it" (177).
Sixth Section (Vardaman, Mosely, Darl, Vardaman, Darl, Vardaman, Darl, Vardaman, Darl)
Analysis:
The Bundrens' treatment of Cash's leg and the reactions of townfolks to their family and the wagon's cargo drive home the differences between the Bundrens and "townfolk." Even among farmers, the Bundrens are particularly impoverished. Although members of the family such as Darl and Vardaman show great intelligence, they cement cast for Cash's leg is an act of total ignorance, one that is embarrassing for the family as they encounter the reactions of others: Mosley says damningly, "Didn't none of you have more sense than that?" (210). Anse's leadership seems to be mostly to blame. He's the father, and his habits have left their mark on the children. Always cheap, he does not take Cash to a doctor, despite the clearly horrific state of Cash's leg.
Vardaman thinks of town as a magic place; his obsession with the toy train grows as they approach Jefferson. His family is far too poor to buy the train, but he longs just to see it: "It made my heart hurt" (202). Vardaman's longing touches on the themes of poverty, and of the division between rural and town people.
Town is a place where the Bundrens become vulnerable. At key points, Faulkner allows us to see the Bundrens through the interior monologues of town folk, and the perceptions are not flattering. Dewey Dell wanders into Moseley's store, seeking an abortion treatment but terrified and unsure of how to ask. And the Bundrens have an embarrassing run in with the sheriff of Mottson, who confronts them about the stench emanating from their wagon.
During the events at the Gillespie farm and immediately afterward, we hear only the monologues of two characters: Darl and Vardaman. The choice is not surprising; Vardaman, and to an even greater extent, Darl, have been the dominant narrators of the novel. Both share a strong bond, great sensitivity, and have a strong mystic side. Vardaman, as the younger boy, defers to Darl's interpretations of many events. At
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Addie's coffin, Vardaman can hear Addie but cannot understand what she is saying. Darl tells him that Addie is talking to God, crying out to him to hide her away from the sight of man (200). Implicitly, Darl is humiliated and disturbed by the travails that his mother's body has had to undergo.
The event Vardaman sees, which Dewey Dell forbids him to speak of, is Darl setting fire to the barn. Various interpretations are offered for Darl's act, but the "he's just gone crazy" interpretation seems unsatisfactory. Darl does seem to think that he hears Addie talking to him, or at least he says so to Vardaman: arguably, Darl might be speaking metaphorically about the body's need to be destroyed or buried, so that it will no longer be a source of disgust and loathing in others. Whether Darl believes Addie is speaking to him in a literal sense or not is really beside the point; his action is not dramatically out of synch with his behavior throughout the rest of the novel. In so many of his monologues Darl seems to transcend the division between literal and metaphoric; there is a powerful mysticism in much of what Darl says.
Undoubtedly, he is rattled by Addie's death in a way that the others are not. The humiliation of bringing the rotting body to Jefferson has clearly traumatized him. He is sensitive, and he believes that this act is an affront to his mother. For all of these reasons, Darl sets fire to the barn. Admittedly, it is not the most reasonable action. But burning the barn seems more the action of a desperate and traumatized man than a man who is simply insane.
Darl's attempt to end the indignities against his mother's body are thwarted by Jewel, who once again expresses grief and loyalty through the physical. His effort to save the coffin is almost super-human.
Note that as Darl becomes more traumatized, his sense of boundaries are diminished. Though he has clearly known about Jewel's fathering for some time, he chooses now to pick at Jewel about it. In part, he may be reacting to Jewel's indifference to the family. His comments allude not just to Jewel's bastard parentage but his lack of love for their mother: "Your mother was a horse, but who was your father, Jewel?" (198). Darl seems particularly obtuse here; we are hearing about the event in his own interior monologue, but even so we cannot guess at his motivations for confronting Jewel now. Certainly, the words seem to hurt. Jewel is furious, cussing at Darl, but Darl's reaction seems so innocent, it seems hard to believe that he is saying this to hurt Jewel.
Especially since Darl arguably saves Jewel's life. When Jewel nearly gets himself into a fight with a man wielding a knife, Darl steps in and calms everyone down. He is the only one in the family capable of doing so: Vardaman is too young, Anse too weak, Cash too sick, and Dewey Dell is a girl. Darl's approach to the stranger is diplomatic, soothing, clever. Hardly the performance of an insane man.
The tone of Darl's interior monologues does at times seem more fragmented, less coherent, but the monologues are marked still by the eloquence and beauty that we have come to associate with Darl's language. While Darl's monologues show increasing signs of trauma and grief, they are not the ramblings of a crazy man. Darl's last monologue in the book is different; more on that in the next section.
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An important structural feature is the chiasmus of Darl in relation to the other Bundrens. While Darl establishes himself early as the most reliable narrator, with Dewey Dell and Vardaman nearly mad with grief and Cash totally absorbed in his work, there is an interesting inversion by the end of the novel. Note that with each monologue, Vardaman becomes more sane, more balanced. Dewey Dell and Cash will soon speak, in voices that seem to have made peace with Addie's death; Cash barely mentions it, and Dewey Dell not at all. It is Darl who seems to sliding in the opposite direction. The journey to Jefferson is not a time to make peace for Darl. His betrayal by his family will deal a killing blow to his sanity.
Seventh Section (Cash, Peabody, MacGowan, Vardaman, Darl, Dewey Dell, Cash)
Analysis:
Cash comes to dominate as the narrator near the end of the novel. His two lengthy monologues reveal the climactic events that finish the story. His monologues are delivered in past tense, giving him a more detached perspective.
Cash is not a vocally articulate character. For much of the novel, he is more or less silent. Yet he seems to provide just the right balance of tenderness and detachment for the novel's closing. He is a sensitive character, less intuitive and intelligent than Darl, but also more stable. His work grounds him.
Although in the end he goes along with Darl's institutionalization, it is clear that he has feelings of guilt about it. These feelings of guilt stand in sharp contrast to Anse's indifference and Dewey Dell's and Jewel's outright hostility. Discussing the plan to commit Darl, Anse seems to welcome it: "ŒI reckon he ought to be there,' pa says. ŒGod knows, it's a trial on me'" (219). Anse, as usual, is thinking only of himself. He evaluates Darl's institutionalization only in terms of convenience. Dewey Dell and Jewel are downright hostile. When Darl tries to escape, Dewey Dell leaps on him "like a wildcat" (224); when they have Darl pinned, Jewel snarls "Kill him . . . Kill the son of a bitch" (225). Most readers have tremendous sympathy for Darl. And while Jewel seems initially to be an impressive character, his behavior here leaves a distinctly unfavorable impression of him. Remember that only a few hours ago Darl intervened and possibly saved him from serious harm. Jewell is full of venom against Darl because Darl dared to ask Jewel about his fatherhood. Dewey Dell is angry at Darl because his powers of observation make her feel violated; in fact, it was probably Dewey Dell who told Gillespie about Darl setting the fire (224). The two siblings turn savagely on Darl at the end. The theme of isolation is developed in a surprising way: Dewey Dell and Jewel feel their aloneness violated by Darl, and they betray him in the most horrible way imaginable.
But Darl's last few hours with his family show him at his best. He intervenes and helps Jewel; he insists on bringing Cash to the doctor before burying Addie. He is capable of deep compassion and feeling. He is shocked by his betrayal. Cash himself observes that he and Darl have always shared a special bond, partly because they are so much older than the others. And indeed, it is Cash's betrayal that Darl finds the most shocking. When he is held down by the others, who looks up at Cash helplessly: "I thought you would have told me" (225). Although Cash remains a sympathetic
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character, he also has betrayed Darl. In the end, he says that listening to the graphophone in years afterward always made him feel sorry that Darl wasn't there to enjoy the music with them, but he too has decided that it is for Darl's own good.
Anse's act is despicable, and Peabody's monologue emphasizes that fact. Peabody's criticism of Anse is the most direct and damning speech about Anse in the whole novel. Nothing can be respected about a man who takes so little care of his son's shattered leg, or who can be so unbothered by having a son committed.
Vardaman is the sibling who seems to miss Darl the most. He keeps dwelling on Darl's absence, although it is clear he does not understand what has happened. He thinks of Darl with envy, because Darl is going to Jackson and will ride a train. He continues to repeat to himself that Darl is his brother. The truth about what has happened will hit Vardaman later, when he is older.
The two brothers continue to have a special bond. Darl's final, raving monologue echoes elements of Vardaman's monologue. But the trauma of being betrayed by his family and committed has pushed Darl into a complete breakdown. He has lost all sense of self: he speaks of "Darl" as if he is not Darl. Darl's philosophical ponderings of being and the basis of being have taken a tragic turn. Trauma has led him to lose all sense of his identity. His family views him as an outside, and this view is tragically paralleled by Darl himself, as his consciousness splits from himself. He views himself from the outside: "Darl is our brother, our brother Darl" (242). He seems to be dwelling on how he has been betrayed. And he cannot stop laughing. His final interior monologue is one of the most terrifying representations of insanity in all of literature. But it also seems to be a dramatic change, a collapse brought on suddenly by his family's betrayal, rather than the inevitable end of a gradual process. The final image is chilling: Darl in a cage, foaming at the mouth, repeating "yes" to himself again and again. His musings on the instability of identity have degenerated into a loss of identity.
To return to Cash's thoughts about sanity and insanity, the relativism of Cash's analysis is an important element of Faulkner's modernist experiments. Faulkner used stream-of-consciousness to explore truth as emerging from multiple perspectives. More than James Joyce or Virginia Woolf, Faulkner's experiments more self-consciously emphasize the lack of an objective vantage point. Truth emerges from a fragmented narrative. Cash's observations about insanity drive home the point. Insanity is as much a matter of social convention as anything else.
The others continue with life. We hear no more from Jewel, though from Cash's narrative it seems that Jewel took some satisfaction in Darl's institutionalization. Dewey Dell is absorbed in her own problems. Vardaman remembers his brother, but he also thinks about the toy train and the buzzards; he has become more lucid as the novel has progressed. Still, his connection with Darl may be cause to doubt the boy's future.
And Anse takes a new wife. Cash lets us know that this is the case from an earlier monologue, when he refers to the women whose spades they borrow as Mrs. Bundren (222); even so, most readers slip over the name without realizing what is being indicated. Cash's narrative being in the past tense also contributes to the sense of life
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going on; his love of the graphophone music and his regret for Darl hint at many evenings spent quietly together at the Bundren home, enjoying the music. But this is hardly an idyllic ending. Anse is one of the most repugnant of Faulkner's characters, primped and ridiculous with his new teeth and wife; he remains the family patriarch, with Peabody snarling that the whole family would be better off with Anse dead. The new Mrs. Bundren comes not with a smile, but with a fierce look of hostility. There is the specter of the pregnancy that Dewey Dell has not succeeded in terminating. And the family's betrayal of Darl hints at how fragile the Bundrens' loyalty to each other really is. The novel has ended, with sensitive, beautiful Darl destroyed and Anse pleased as punch, able to lose a son and wife without so much as batting an eye. Jewel can call on officials to kill his own brother without having his sanity questioned, but Darl, for trying to spare his mother further indignity, is destroyed. The final tone of the novel is of loss and pain; the voyage has not been about healing so much as about scarring. For the sensitive ones among them, life does not give enough rest for healing.
The Anomaly of Moseley The single chapter in As I Lay Dying where Moseley becomes the narrative focalizer, is anomalous because the focalizer is a character that had not yet been mentioned, and is never mentioned again. The general pattern in the novel is that each focalizer is either a recurring character, or is mentioned for the first time in the last sentences of one chapter, and then becomes the narrative focalizer in the next. In the last sentence of one early Darl chapter, Darl says that "When Peabody comes, they will have to use the rope" (40). The reader has not heard the name Peabody yet, and as if to answer the question of Peabody's identity, in the next chapter Peabody is the focalizer (41-46). It is as if we are introduced to somebody at a party, and then are allowed to have a conversation with them. Being introduced to them in the previous chapter is important in giving the reader some understanding of where the character fits in. The sentence "when Peabody comes . . ." certainly does not give us too much information, but at least we know he is somebody the family knows, who is coming to help them out. In a similar way, Darl, and Dewey Dell, and Jewel are all introduced into the novel. Moseley, by contrast, is like an individual who comes up to you at a party and just starts talking. There is no way for the reader, as he or she first reads this chapter, to place this woman in the larger framework of the story, and more importantly, no way to place the short tale of the chapter in the larger framework of the story. We see a girl who has gone to a drugstore to get an abortion, but up to this point, none of the focalizers have even been in a town.
As the chapter continues we realize that this scene, which was so confusing while in the midst of it, is actually incredibly elucidating for one of the largest themes of the book. We see that it is Dewey Dell who needs an abortion, and that her child is a product of incest. While in the midst of the micro-narrative, this chapter seems entirely confusing,. The reader is not able to situate any of the elements of the chapter in the framework the reader has developed through previous experience in the novel. But in the macro narrative, this tale is more obvious than most other information we receive in the novel. While this chapter is anomalous on a micro-level (the level of immediate experience as one reads the book) in giving the reader an unintroduced focalizer, in the larger structure of the book (as one is able to look back on previous
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events), it is representative of a recurring pattern: confusion being caused on a micro-level and resolved on a macro-level. The most obvious indication of this pattern, is that the first word of many chapters is a pronoun with no antecedent. "He" or "it" is the first word of nearly half the chapters. And when a mysterious word does not open a chapter, an equally mysterious sentence does. These first sentences are always a shock, after what minimal comfort the reader may have begun to feel with the focalizer in the previous chapter. Again, we are plunged into a darkness, out of which we must wade. But, of course, as the chapter goes on, it becomes clear who the "he" was, and who the "it" was, and why this unknown woman named Cora "saved out the eggs and baked yesterday" (6). It was a choice to deprive us of that information early in the chapter‹a choice that logically follows from the intense subjectivity of the narrators‹but a choice that consciously throws the reader into confusion that could be easily resolved.
Absalom, Absalom(1936) By
W.Faulkner
Absalom, Absalom! was published in 1936, after Faulkner's three seminal novels The Sound and the Fury (1929), As I Lay Dying (1930) and A Light in August (1932). One of the strange things about this chronology is that two of the narrators of Absalom, Absalom! (Mr. Compson and Quentin Compson) have already met their decline and destruction in an earlier work about the Compson family, The Sound and the Fury. Faulkner, who was not widely read at the time but had a small core audience, could have expected his readers to be familiar with Quentin and Mr. Compson. Although resurrecting Quentin and Mr. Compson for this work has the curious effect of bringing back the dead, it is both appropriate--given the subject of this novel--and unusual. The two novels have a great deal in common thematically, and the presence of Mr. and Quentin Compson allow the reader to see the destruction of two Southern families in the context of the South's destruction.
For the destruction of the South, ultimately, is Faulkner's concern. He was born in 1897, after the Civil War but before the great project of industrialization had tarnished the memories of Southern residents. At that time the South was impoverished and fallow, bitter and obsessed with its history. Faulkner was born, indeed, into a region of the country that was already dead. And he faced this fact with an eye towards fact and observation that far bypassed the skills of most Southern historians. Many critics, in fact, have quipped that Faulkner is a better historian of the post-Civil War South than any "real" Southern historians. And Arthur Kinney has said: "The single most indelible fact about William Faulkner's work is his persistent concentration on observing and recording the culture and country in which he was born; what is most striking now, as we look back on his legacy from our own, is the enormous courage and cost of that task. Faulkner's Lafayette County, in northeastern Mississippi, not far from the battle sites of Brice's Cross Roads, Corinth, and Shiloh, is still marked in its town squares with statues of soldiers of the Confederate Army of the United States, in full battle dress and, more often than not, facing South towards the homeland they mean to protect with their lives."
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Faulkner's "courage," in facing the torrid history of his homeland is also what attracted the author Toni Morrison to his work. Although Faulkner has garnered much criticism for his portrayals of black characters, he is also lionized for his willingness to admit the horrors of racism and slavery. It is Toni Morrison, for example, who claimed that Faulkner was one of the first people to help her see the possibility of ""that artistic articulation of [the] past that was not available in history"--and certainly would have not been available in the history books that Faulkner read, as post-Civil War history as written by Southern historians was notoriously biased. Faulkner's project in Absalom, Absalom! is to correct some of these biases by showing, through fictional characters, the destructive power of clinging to a terrible past. With his fascinating project of telling the Sutpen legacy through multiple narrators, Faulkner shows how any history--not just the history of the South--can be radically different depending on who is telling the story.
Character List
Quentin Compson: Grandson of General Compson, Thomas Sutpen's first (and only) friend in Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi. He is 20 years old and preparing to attend Harvard in Massachusetts. He has lived all of his life in Jefferson, a member of an old and socially elite family there, and has grown up with the legend of Thomas Sutpen. He is a troubled young man, tortured by the horrors of Southern history and unable to be at peace with his own role in that history.
Shreve McCannon: Quentin's roommate at Harvard. A young man from Edmonton, Canada. He is curious about the South and asks Quentin to explain his home region. Quentin responds with the story of Thomas Sutpen, and Shreve, quick to understand that storytelling depends on the teller, joins in with his own reinterpretation.
Mr. Compson: Quentin's father. He is one of the first narrators of the Sutpen legend and one of the most objective. He does not have all the information about Charles Bon, and this leads him to make the wrong conclusions. A wise but ineffectual man who believes in fate above all else.
Miss Rosa Coldfield: Ellen Sutpen's younger sister; aunt to Henry and Judith Sutpen (although she was born four years after Judith and six years after Henry). She summons Quentin out to her home in order to tell him her version of the Sutpen legend and asks him to accompany her to Sutpen's Hundred late at night. She was briefly engaged to Thomas Sutpen after her sister died, and then left his house when he insulted her. Since then, she has been a spinster, burning up with bitterness over the events that took place regarding Thomas Sutpen decades ago.
Thomas Sutpen: A mysterious figure who towers over the book. Although we never come to know him fully, he is a man of indomitable will and frightful immorality. He materialized in Jefferson out of thin air in 1833 and proceeded to swindle Indians out of 100 acres and use a team of 20 slaves to raise an enormous estate, then marry Ellen Coldfield and begin his "dynasty." Born of impoverished Scots-Irish stock in the West Virginia mountains, his life was consumed by a "design" that he decided upon at the age of fourteen.
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Clytie Sutpen: Thomas Sutpen's half-black daughter. A dominant, though silent, presence throughout the book. She was born of one of Sutpen's slaves and lived in the house, serving the Sutpens until the Civil War. After the war, she and Judith and Rosa scrapped to get food, and she lived on the property until December 1909, when she burned it down.
Ellen Sutpen: Born Ellen Coldfield. Rosa's older sister; mother of Henry and Judith. Thomas Sutpen's second wife in Jefferson, Mississippi. She is a rather foolish woman, eager only that herself and her children live in comfort. She is done in by the tragedy that consumed the household during the Civil War, and dies at a young age.
Judith Sutpen: Daughter of Ellen and Thomas Sutpen. She was engaged to Charles Bon although she barely knew him, and was determined to marry him at all costs. Possessed of her father's will and ability to act quickly, she was also possessed of his taste for blood and violence. Though she frightened many people--Miss Rosa included--her last act was a gentle one, nursing Charles Etienne de St. Valery Bon while they both suffered from yellow fever.
Henry Sutpen: Son of Ellen and Thomas Sutpen. Raised on Sutpen's Hundred, begins attending the University of Mississippi in 1859. A romantic, indecisive young man lacking his father's will and his father's taste for blood. (But he does have his father's sense of purpose and follow-through.) In love with both his sister and his friend Charles Bon, whom he meets at the University of Mississippi, so much so that he widows the latter before she is married by murdering the former.
Charles Bon: Son of Thomas Sutpen and Eulalia Bon. His mother, Eulalia, was abandoned by Thomas Sutpen for unknown reasons in 1831, although Quentin belives that it was because Sutpen learned Eulalia had black blood. A worldly and sophisticated young man who grew up in Haiti and New Orleans, he attended the University of Mississippi beginning in 1859 and was engaged to Judith Sutpen throughout the Civil War.
Goodhue Coldfield: Father of Ellen Sutpen and Rosa Coldfield. A small-town merchant with strange, but unshakeable morals. When the Civil War began he nailed himself into the attic and died there.
Wash Jones: A poor white squatter on Sutpen's Hundred. He lives on an abandoned fishing camp with his young granddaughter, Milly Jones, occasionally doing odd jobs for Thomas Sutpen and, after the Civil War, drinking with Sutpen as well. He kills Sutpen after Sutpen insults his granddaughter.
Milly Jones: Wash Jones' granddaughter. Only one year old when she begins to live on Sutpen's Hundred, she begins sleeping with Thomas Sutpen at the age of fifteen and bears his child. She dies the same day that Thomas Sutpen does, and by the hand of the same man--her grandfather, Wash Jones.
Charles Etienne de St. Valery Bon: Son of Charles Bon and his octoroon mistress in New Orleans. Orphaned at the age of 12 and fetched, by Clytie, to live at Sutpen's Hundred. He grows up a disturbed and tortured young man, unable to reconcile himself to the fact of his black blood, and finally dies of yellow fever in 1884.
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Jim Bond: Son of Charles Etienne de St. Valery Bon and his black wife. Described as a "hulking" idiot, he lives on Sutpen's Hundred with Clytie until the fire in 1909, at which point he disappears. From then on, his "howl" is heard occasionally by residents of Jefferson
Brave New World(1932)
By
ALdous HUXLEY
Character List John -
The son of the Director and Linda, John is the only major character to have grown up outside of the World State. The consummate outsider, he has spent his life alienated from his village on the New Mexico Savage Reservation, and he finds himself similarly unable to fit in to World State society. His entire worldview is based on his knowledge of Shakespeare’s plays, which he can quote with great facility.
Bernard Marx -
An Alpha male who fails to fit in because of his inferior physical stature. He holds unorthodox beliefs about sexual relationships, sports, and community events. His insecurity about his size and status makes him discontented with the World State. Bernard’s surname recalls Karl Marx, the nineteenth-century German author best known for writing Capital, a monumental critique of capitalist society. Unlike his famous namesake, Bernard’s discontent stems from his frustrated desire to fit into his own society, rather than from a systematic or philosophical criticism of it. When threatened, Bernard can be petty and cruel.
Helmholtz Watson -
An Alpha lecturer at the College of Emotional Engineering, Helmholtz is a prime example of his caste, but feels that his work is empty and meaningless and would like to use his writing abilities for something more meaningful. He and Bernard are friends because they find common ground in their discontent with the World State, but Helmholtz’s criticisms of the World State are more philosophical and intellectual than Bernard’s more petty complaints. As a result, Helmholtz often finds Bernard’s boastfulness and cowardice tedious.
Lenina Crowne -
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A vaccination worker at the Central London Hatchery and Conditioning Centre. She is an object of desire for a number of major and minor characters, including Bernard Marx and John. Her behavior is sometimes intriguingly unorthodox, which makes her attractive to the reader. For example, she defies her culture’s conventions by dating one man exclusively for several months, she is attracted to Bernard—the misfit—and she develops a violent passion for John the Savage. Ultimately, her values are those of a conventional World State citizen: her primary means of relating to other people is through sex, and she is unable to share Bernard’s disaffection or to comprehend John’s alternate system of values.
Mustapha Mond -
The Resident World Controller of Western Europe, one of only ten World Controllers. He was once an ambitious, young scientist performing illicit research. When his work was discovered, he was given the choice of going into exile or training to become a World Controller. He chose to give up science, and now he censors scientific discoveries and exiles people for unorthodox beliefs. He also keeps a collection of forbidden literature in his safe, including Shakespeare and religious writings. The name Mond means “world,” and Mond is indeed the most powerful character in the world of this novel.
Fanny Crowne -
Lenina Crowne’s friend (they have the same last name because only about ten thousand last names are in use in the World State). Fanny’s role is mainly to voice the conventional values of her caste and society. Specifically, she warns Lenina that she should have more men in her life because it looks bad to concentrate on one man for too long.
Henry Foster -
One of Lenina’s many lovers, he is a perfectly conventional Alpha male, casually discussing Lenina’s body with his coworkers. His success with Lenina, and his casual attitude about it, infuriate the jealous Bernard.
Linda -
John’s mother, and a Beta. While visiting the New Mexico Savage Reservation, she became pregnant with the Director’s son. During a storm, she got lost, suffered a head injury and was left behind. A group of Indians found her and brought her to their village. Linda could not get an abortion on the Reservation, and she was too ashamed to return to the World State with a baby. Her World State–conditioned promiscuity makes her a social outcast. She is desperate to return to the World State and to soma.
The Director -
The Director administrates the Central London Hatchery and Conditioning Centre. He is a threatening figure, with the power to exile Bernard to Iceland. But he is secretly vulnerable because he fathered a child (John), a scandalous and obscene act in the World State.
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The Arch-Community-Songster -
The Arch-Community-Songster is the secular, shallow equivalent of an archbishop in the World State society.
Popé -
Popé was Linda’s lover on the New Mexico Savage Reservation. He gave Linda a copy of The Complete Works of Shakespeare.
The Warden -
The Warden is the talkative chief administrator for the New Mexico Savage Reservation. He is an Alpha.
Analysis of Major Characters John
Although Bernard Marx is the primary character in Brave New World up until his visit with Lenina to the Reservation, after that point he fades into the background and John becomes the central protagonist. John first enters the story as he expresses an interest in participating in the Indian religious ritual from which Bernard and Lenina recoil. John’s desire first marks him as an outsider among the Indians, since he is not allowed to participate in their ritual. It also demonstrates the huge cultural divide between him and World State society, since Bernard and Lenina see the tribal ritual as disgusting. John becomes the central character of the novel because, rejected both by the “savage” Indian culture and the “civilized” World State culture, he is the ultimate outsider.
As an outsider, John takes his values from a more than 900-year-old author, William Shakespeare. John’s extensive knowledge of Shakespeare’s works serves him in several important ways: it enables him to verbalize his own complex emotions and reactions, it provides him with a framework from which to criticize World State values, and it provides him with language that allows him to hold his own against the formidable rhetorical skill of Mustapha Mond during their confrontation. (On the other hand, John’s insistence on viewing the world through Shakespearean eyes sometimes blinds him to the reality of other characters, notably Lenina, who, in his mind, is alternately a heroine and a “strumpet,” neither of which label is quite appropriate to her.) Shakespeare embodies all of the human and humanitarian values that have been abandoned in the World State. John’s rejection of the shallow happiness of the World State, his inability to reconcile his love and lust for Lenina, and even his eventual suicide all reflect themes from Shakespeare. He is himself a Shakespearean character in a world where any poetry that does not sell a product is prohibited.
John’s naïve optimism about the World State, expressed in the words from The Tempest that constitute the novel’s title, is crushed when he comes into direct contact with the State. The phrase “brave new world” takes on an increasingly bitter, ironic, and pessimistic tone as he becomes more knowledgeable about the State. John’s
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participation in the final orgy and his suicide at the end of the novel can be seen as the result of an insanity created by the fundamental conflict between his values and the reality of the world around him.
Bernard Marx
Up until his visit to the Reservation and the introduction of John, Bernard Marx is the central figure of the novel. Bernard’s first appearance in the novel is highly ironic. Just as the Director finishes his explanation of how the World State has successfully eliminated lovesickness, and everything that goes along with frustrated desire, Huxley gives us our first glimpse into a character’s private thoughts, and that character is lovesick, jealous, and fiercely angry at his sexual rivals. Thus, while Bernard is not exactly heroic (and he becomes even less so as the novel progresses), he is still interesting to the reader because he is human. He wants things that he can’t have.
The major movement in Bernard’s character is his rise in popularity after the trip to the Reservation and his discovery of John, followed by his disastrous fall. Before and during his trip to the Reservation, Bernard is lonely, insecure, and isolated. When he returns with John, he uses his newfound popularity to participate in all of the aspects of World State society that he had previously criticized, such as promiscuous sex. This about-face proves Bernard to be a critic whose deepest desire is to become what he criticizes. When John refuses to become a tool in Bernard’s attempt to remain popular, Bernard’s success collapses instantaneously. By continuing to criticize the World State while reveling in its “pleasant vices,” Bernard reveals himself to be a hypocrite. John and Helmholtz are sympathetic to him because they agree that the World State needs criticizing and because they recognize that Bernard is trapped in a body to which his conditioning has not suited him, but they have no respect for him. Lenina’s relationship to Bernard is different: she sees him merely as a strange, interesting fellow with whom she can take a break from her relationship with Henry Foster. She is happy to use him for her own social gain, but she doesn’t have the emotional investment in him that she does in John.
Helmholtz Watson
Helmholtz Watson is not as fully developed as some of the other characters, acting instead as a foil for Bernard and John. For Bernard, Helmholtz is everything Bernard wishes he could be: strong, intelligent, and attractive. As such a figure of strength, Helmholtz is very comfortable in his caste. Unlike Bernard, he is well liked and respected. Though he and Bernard share a dislike of the World State, Helmholtz condemns it for radically different reasons. Bernard dislikes the State because he is too weak to fit the social position he has been assigned; Helmholtz because he is too strong. Helmholtz can see and feel how the shallow culture in which he lives is stifling him.
Helmholtz is also a foil for John, but in a different way. Helmholtz and John are very similar in spirit; both love poetry, and both are intelligent and critical of the World State. But there is an enormous cultural gap between them. Even when Helmholtz sees the genius in Shakespeare’s poetry, he cannot help but laugh at the mention of mothers, fathers, and marriage—concepts that are vulgar and ridiculous in the World State. The conversations between Helmholtz and John illustrate that even the most
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reflective and intelligent World State member is defined by the culture in which he has been raised.
Mustapha Mond
Mustapha Mond is the most powerful and intelligent proponent of the World State. Early in the novel, it is his voice that explains the history of the World State and the philosophy upon which it is based. Later in the novel it is his debate with John that lays out the fundamental difference in values between World State society and the kind of society represented in Shakespeare’s plays.
Mustapha Mond is a paradoxical figure. He reads Shakespeare and the Bible and he used to be an independent-minded scientist, but he also censors new ideas and controls a totalitarian state. For Mond, humankind’s ultimate goals are stability and happiness, as opposed to emotions, human relations, and individual expression. By combining a firm commitment to the values of the World State with a nuanced understanding of its history and function, Mustapha Mond presents a formidable opponent for John, Bernard, and Helmholtz.
Themes, Motifs & Symbols Themes Themes are the fundamental and often universal ideas explored in a literary work. The Use of Technology to Control Society
Brave New World warns of the dangers of giving the state control over new and powerful technologies. One illustration of this theme is the rigid control of reproduction through technological and medical intervention, including the surgical removal of ovaries, the Bokanovsky Process, and hypnopaedic conditioning. Another is the creation of complicated entertainment machines that generate both harmless leisure and the high levels of consumption and production that are the basis of the World State’s stability. Soma is a third example of the kind of medical, biological, and psychological technologies that Brave New World criticizes most sharply.
It is important to recognize the distinction between science and technology. Whereas the State talks about progress and science, what it really means is the bettering of technology, not increased scientific exploration and experimentation. The state uses science as a means to build technology that can create a seamless, happy, superficial world through things such as the “feelies.” The state censors and limits science, however, since it sees the fundamental basis behind science, the search for truth, as threatening to the State’s control. The State’s focus on happiness and stability means that it uses the results of scientific research, inasmuch as they contribute to technologies of control, but does not support science itself.
The Consumer Society
It is important to understand that Brave New World is not simply a warning about what could happen to society if things go wrong, it is also a satire of the society in
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which Huxley existed, and which still exists today. While the attitudes and behaviors of World State citizens at first appear bizarre, cruel, or scandalous, many clues point to the conclusion that the World State is simply an extreme—but logically developed—version of our society’s economic values, in which individual happiness is defined as the ability to satisfy needs, and success as a society is equated with economic growth and prosperity.
The Incompatibility of Happiness and Truth
Brave New World is full of characters who do everything they can to avoid facing the truth about their own situations. The almost universal use of the drug soma is probably the most pervasive example of such willful self-delusion. Soma clouds the realities of the present and replaces them with happy hallucinations, and is thus a tool for promoting social stability. But even Shakespeare can be used to avoid facing the truth, as John demonstrates by his insistence on viewing Lenina through the lens of Shakespeare’s world, first as a Juliet and later as an “impudent strumpet.” According to Mustapha Mond, the World State prioritizes happiness at the expense of truth by design: he believes that people are better off with happiness than with truth.
What are these two abstract entities that Mond juxtaposes? It seems clear enough from Mond’s argument that happiness refers to the immediate gratification of every citizen’s desire for food, sex, drugs, nice clothes, and other consumer items. It is less clear what Mond means by truth, or specifically what truths he sees the World State society as covering up. From Mond’s discussion with John, it is possible to identify two main types of truth that the World State seeks to eliminate. First, as Mond’s own past indicates, the World State controls and muffles all efforts by citizens to gain any sort of scientific, or empirical truth. Second, the government attempts to destroy all kinds of “human” truths, such as love, friendship, and personal connection. These two types of truth are quite different from each other: objective truth involves coming to a definitive conclusion of fact, while a “human” truth can only be explored, not defined. Yet both kinds of truth are united in the passion that an individual might feel for them. As a young man, Mustapha Mond became enraptured with the delight of making discoveries, just as John loves the language and intensity of Shakespeare. The search for truth then, also seems to involve a great deal of individual effort, of striving and fighting against odds. The very will to search for truth is an individual desire that the communal society of Brave New World, based as it is on anonymity and lack of thought, cannot allow to exist. Truth and individuality thus become entwined in the novel’s thematic structure.
The Dangers of an All-Powerful State
Like George Orwell’s 1984, this novel depicts a dystopia in which an all-powerful state controls the behaviors and actions of its people in order to preserve its own stability and power. But a major difference between the two is that, whereas in 1984 control is maintained by constant government surveillance, secret police, and torture, power in Brave New World is maintained through technological interventions that start before birth and last until death, and that actually change what people want. The government of 1984 maintains power through force and intimidation. The government of Brave New World retains control by making its citizens so happy and superficially fulfilled that they don’t care about their personal freedom. In Brave New World the
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consequences of state control are a loss of dignity, morals, values, and emotions—in short, a loss of humanity.
Motifs Motifs are recurring structures, contrasts, or literary devices that can help to develop and inform the text’s major themes. “Pneumatic”
The word “pneumatic” is used with remarkable frequency to describe two things: Lenina’s body and chairs. “Pneumatic” is an adjective that usually means that something has air pockets or works by means of compressed air. In the case of the chairs (in the feely theater and in Mond’s office), it probably means that the chairs’ cushions are inflated with air. In Lenina’s case, the word is used by both Henry Foster and Benito Hoover to describe what she’s like to have sex with. She herself remarks that her lovers usually find her “pneumatic,” patting her legs as she does so. In reference to Lenina it means well-rounded, balloon-like, or bouncy, in reference to her flesh, and in particular her bosom. Huxley is not the only writer to use the word pneumatic in this sense, although it is an unusual usage. The use of this odd word to describe the physical characteristics of both a woman and a piece of furniture underscores the novel’s theme that human sexuality has been degraded to the level of a commodity.
Ford, “my Ford,” “Year of our Ford,” etc.
Throughout Brave New World, the citizens of the World State substitute the name of Henry Ford, the early twentieth-century industrialist and founder of the Ford Motor Company, wherever people in our own world would say Lord” (i.e., Christ). This demonstrates that even at the level of casual conversation and habit, religion has been replaced by reverence for technology—specifically the efficient, mechanized factory production of goods that Henry Ford pioneered.
Alienation
The motif of alienation provides a counterpoint to the motif of total conformity that pervades the World State. Bernard Marx, Helmholtz Watson, and John are alienated from the World State, each for his own reasons. Bernard is alienated because he is a misfit, too small and powerless for the position he has been conditioned to enjoy. Helmholtz is alienated for the opposite reason: he is too intelligent even to play the role of an Alpha Plus. John is alienated on multiple levels and at multiple sites: not only does the Indian community reject him, but he is both unwilling and unable to become part of the World State. The motif of alienation is one of the driving forces of the narrative: it provides the main characters with their primary motivations.
Sex
Brave New World abounds with references to sex. At the heart of the World State’s control of its population is its rigid control over sexual mores and reproductive rights.
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Reproductive rights are controlled through an authoritarian system that sterilizes about two thirds of women, requires the rest to use contraceptives, and surgically removes ovaries when it needs to produce new humans. The act of sex is controlled by a system of social rewards for promiscuity and lack of commitment. John, an outsider, is tortured by his desire for Lenina and her inability to return his love as such. The conflict between John’s desire for love and Lenina’s desire for sex illustrates the profound difference in values between the World State and the humanity represented by Shakespeare’s works.
Shakespeare
Shakespeare provides the language through which John understands the world. Through John’s use of Shakespeare, the novel makes contact with the rich themes explored in plays like The Tempest. It also creates a stark contrast between the utilitarian simplicity and inane babble of the World State’s propaganda and the nuanced, elegant verse of a time “before Ford.” Shakespeare’s plays provide many examples of precisely the kind of human relations—passionate, intense, and often tragic—that the World State is committed to eliminating.
Symbols Symbols are objects, characters, figures, or colors used to represent abstract ideas or concepts. Soma
The drug soma is a symbol of the use of instant gratification to control the World State’s populace. It is also a symbol of the powerful influence of science and technology on society. As a kind of “sacrament,” it also represents the use of religion to control society.
Analysis: Chapter 1
Huxley’s Brave New World can be seen as a critique of the overenthusiastic embrace of new scientific discoveries. The first chapter reads like a list of stunning scientific achievements: human cloning, rapid maturation, and prenatal conditioning. However, the satirical tone of the chapter makes it clear that this technology-based society is not a utopia, but the exact opposite. Like George Orwell’s 1984, Brave New World depicts a dystopia: a world of anonymous and dehumanized people dominated by a government made overwhelmingly powerful by the use of technology.
The almost religious regard in which the World State holds technology is apparent from the start. The starting date for the calendar is Henry Ford’s introduction of the Model T, an automobile cheaply and efficiently produced by the assembly line system. All dates are preceded by “a.f.,” “After Ford,” just as today’s calendar system begins with the birth of Jesus, a.d. (Anno Domini, meaning “in the year of the lord”). Other satirical hints of a warped religion are scattered throughout the text. The Predestinators, for example, are a farcical secular manifestation of the Calvinist religious belief that God predestines individuals for heaven or hell before birth. The World State’s religious adherence to technology is far from innocent. In fact it becomes one of the pillars of stability for the totalitarian World State. As the Director
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says, “social stability” is the highest social goal, and through predestination and rigorous conditioning, individuals accept their given roles in society without question. The caste structure is created and maintained using specific tools, and it is technology that allows the most powerful members of the World State’s ruling Alpha caste to solidify and justify the unequal distribution of power and status.
Conditioning individuals genetically, physically, and psychologically for their “inescapable social destinies” stabilizes the caste system by creating servants who love and fully accept their servility. Moreover, conditioning makes them virtually incapable of performing any other function than that to which they are assigned. The satirical tone of the text makes it clear that, though social stability may sound like an admirable goal, it can be used for the wrong reasons toward the wrong ends.
One theme emphasized repeatedly in this first chapter is the similarity between the production of humans in the Hatchery and the production of consumer goods on an assembly line. Everything about human reproduction is technologically managed to maximize efficiency and profit. Following the rule of supply and demand, the Predestinators project how many members of each caste will be needed, and the Hatchery produces human beings according to those figures. One of the keys of mass production is that every part is identical and interchangeable; a steering wheel from one Model T fits neatly onto the steering column of any other Ford. Similarly, in the Hatchery, human beings are standardized by the production of thousands of brothers and sisters in multiple groups of identical twins using the Bokanovsky and Podsnap Processes.
The lower castes are more subject to these forces of anonymity and mechanization. Members of the higher castes are decanted one by one, without any artificial intervention. Thus the higher castes retain at least some level of the individuality and creativity that is denied completely to the lower castes.
Analysis: Chapter 2
The first half of the students’ tour, described in the previous section, illustrates the World State’s abuse of biological science in conditioning its citizens. This section focuses on the use of psychological technologies to control the future behavior of World State citizens. Conditioning, combined with prenatal treatment, creates individuals without individuality: each one is programmed to behave exactly like the next. This system allows for social stability, economic productivity within narrow constraints, and a society dominated by unthinking obedience and infantile behavior.
The conditioning technique used to instill a dislike for flowers and books in infants is modeled after the research of Ivan Pavlov, a Russian scientist. Pavlov demonstrated that dogs could be trained to salivate at the ringing of a bell if the sound was consistently visually associated with food. This led to the observation that other kinds of responses could also be conditioned. His work became known to Western science in the decade before Brave New World was written. By applying Pavlovian theory to human infants, the state literally programs human beings to uphold the status quo.
The conditioning also drives the population to support the capitalist economic system. Because the World State wants children to be loyal consumers as adults, the
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importance of the individual is diminished in order to further the interests of the larger community. Even during their off-work hours, World State citizens serve the interests of production and, therefore, the interests of the whole economy and society, by consuming transportation and expensive sporting equipment. Any opportunity for individual, idiosyncratic behavior that might not feed the economy is eliminated.
Analysis: Chapter 3
As the Director and Mustapha Mond explain to the boys how the World State works in an abstract way, the interspliced scenes of Lenina and Bernard show the society in action. The sexual play of the children at recess, the boys’ discomfort at the word “mother,” Lenina’s relaxed nakedness, and the conversation between Henry and the Predestinator all serve to illustrate how the traditional taboos regarding sexuality have been discarded. Bernard is the sole character to protest—almost silently—the way the system works. His discomfort with the commodification of sex marks him as a misfit. It is worth noting that the novel explicitly establishes that Bernard’s dissatisfaction with the State stems from his own isolation within it, introducing Bernard with the words “Those who feel themselves despised do well to look despising.” Bernard may be a rebel, but that rebellion does not come from any ideological objection to the World State. It comes from a sense that he might never fully belong to that society. This facet of Bernard’s character will be brought into play as the novel progresses.
In addition to prenatal and postnatal conditioning, the World State controls the behavior of its members through the forces of social conformity and social criticism. Lenina’s friend Fanny warns her that the Director does not like it when Hatchery workers fail to conform to the expected promiscuity standards. Even as an adult, a World State citizen must fear being seen doing something “shameful” or “abnormal.” The adult citizen has no private life. As Lenina notes, the only thing that one does when one is alone in the World State is sleep, and one can’t do that forever. In and out of the office, the adult citizen is under surveillance to ensure that his or her body and mind are following the World State’s moral value system. Both peers and superiors, like Fanny and the Director, are constantly watching to ensure that each citizen is behaving appropriately.
In his long speech about the history of the World State, Mustapha Mond blames the previously sacred institutions of family, love, motherhood, and marriage for causing social instability in the old society. As Mond explains it, these old institutions shared the work of mediating the conflict between the individual’s interests and the interests of society with the State, but the personal institutions and State institutions were themselves out of alignment, creating instability. Individuals cannot always be relied upon to choose the path of most stability since family, love, and marriage produce divided allegiances. Freely acting individuals must constantly weigh the moral value and the moral consequences of their actions. Mond argues that the divided allegiances of individuals produce social instability. For this reason, the World State has eliminated all traces of non-State institutions. The citizen is socialized to only have an allegiance to the State; personal connections of all sorts are discouraged, and even the
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desire to develop such connections is conditioned away. The constant availability of physical satisfaction evident in the feelies, the abundance of soma, the easy attainment of sex through state sanctioned promiscuity, and the lack of any historical knowledge that might point to an alternate way of life, ensure that the way of life developed and instituted by the World State will not be threatened.
Mustapha Mond and the Director spend a good deal of time discussing the importance of consumption. They are really talking about creating a population that will always want more—a captive market created by conditioning that will want whatever goods the World State produces. This culture of constant consumption allows the Government to act as a supplier, propelling the economy and creating a happy community dependent on its supplier. But the economic discussion led by Mond and the Director does not refer only to the economy of money and goods. In Brave New World, everything, including sex, operates according to the logic of supply and demand. Citizens are taught to view one another, and themselves, as commodities to be consumed like any other manufactured good. Bernard rebels against this sentiment when he notes that Henry and the Predestinator view Lenina as a “piece of meat”—and that Lenina thinks of herself the same way. Consumption as a way of life is never justified by the World State; it is taken as a way of life.
In Mustapha Mond’s discussion of history, Brave New World gives some thought to a theme that George Orwell explores in detail in 1984. Implicit in Mond’s statement that “history is bunk” and his discussion of the history of the World State, is the fact that Mond and the other nine World Controllers have a monopoly on historical knowledge. This ensures their positions of power. In 1984, Orwell describes the mechanisms of this manipulation, as the government of Oceania actively revises history in order to serve its political goals from moment to moment. But in the World State, active revision is unnecessary because the population is conditioned to believe that, as Mond says, “history is bunk.” Because they are trained to see history as worthless, they are trapped in the present, unable to imagine alternative ways of life. It is unclear why Mond takes the time to explain the history of the World State to the boys, though it certainly is a convenient way of explaining a possible pathway from the reader’s world to that of the World State.
Analysis: Chapters 4–6
Bernard’s role as the protagonist—a role that John will later take over—continues in this section. Increasingly, he appears less like a political rebel and more like a social misfit who believes that changing society is the only way for him to fit in. His conversations with Helmholtz reveal that he is boastful of his liaison with Lenina, afraid of being caught criticizing the World State, and subservient to Helmholtz when it comes to matters of real rebellion. Bernard is a paradoxical character, at one moment lusting after Lenina and at the next hoping that he will have the strength to resist her advances.
Helmholtz, whom we meet for the first time in this section, has the exact opposite of Bernard’s problem. Whereas Bernard is too small and strange for his caste, Helmholtz is, if anything, too perfect. His success with women, in his career, and in every other aspect of his life has led him to believe that there must be something more to life than high-tech sports, easy sex, and repetitive slogans. He talks to Bernard because
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Bernard shares his dislike for the system, but he is aware that Bernard’s dislike has a different basis than his own.
The setting of these chapters changes rapidly: from the workplace to Helmholtz’s apartment; from Henry’s helicopter to Westminster Abbey Cabaret to a Crematorium; from Bernard’s apartment to the Community Singery; and so on. Some of the scene-shifting is simply used to flesh out a day in the life of a World State member. Lenina and Henry’s visit to the Westminster Abbey Cabaret is a blunt joke about the uses to which the World State puts ancient religious sites.
Every one works for every one else. We can’t do without any one. Even Epsilons are useful. We couldn’t do without Epsilons.
As Henry and Lenina contemplate the crematorium, they come close to acknowledging that the caste system may be less than perfect. But then Lenina, troubled and disliking, retreats to one of her stock hypnopaedic phrases, regains her happiness, and the crisis is over. Once again, she is happy to be in her caste and disdainful of those in other castes. This episode, made possible by the setting of a helicopter trip past a Crematorium, shows how conditioning can keep the population from questioning the assumptions of the state in which they live. The biggest change in setting is from the World State to the Reservation, though a detailed description of the Reservation is held until the next section.
Although the World State most obviously controls its members by conditioning them and gratifying their desires, there are hints that stability is maintained through methods that are still more sinister. Bernard’s sudden fear that someone is listening to his heretical conversation with Helmholtz suggests a totalitarian aspect of the World State. Outside work hours, World State citizens attend strictly regulated, scheduled social activities and never spend any time alone. The lack of time for reflection keeps them occupied and docile. Bernard’s fear shows that he is aware of the unwritten but potentially serious consequences of his heretical beliefs.
Analysis: Chapters 7–8
These chapters contain a crucial plot development: the meeting of Bernard and John. John is an outcast who has always dreamed of living in the World State; Bernard is a World State misfit who is looking for some way to fit in. Their meeting sets in motion a chain of events that produces shattering consequences for both of them.
Huxley uses a literary device called a flashback to bring Bernard, and the reader, up to date on John’s background. This device allows Huxley to present a collage of images from John’s childhood that would otherwise fit awkwardly into the overall structure of the narrative. If the narrative had been presented in strict chronological order, John and Linda’s story would have been told first. Coming in the middle of the novel, it has a greater impact because the reader already knows about the vast differences between World State and Reservation culture. Linda’s failure to fit in on the Reservation, and John’s confused upbringing, only make sense within the context that has already been provided.
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Linda’s experiences on the Reservation, as described by herself and by John, demonstrate the extent to which the World State citizens are dependent upon “civilization”—that is, on a life that is completely structured by the state. On the Reservation, she is practically helpless: she does not know how to mend clothing, cook, or clean, and the very idea of taking care of a child horrifies her. She turns to mescal as a poor substitute for soma, which until then had been her only method for dealing with unpleasant situations.
John is a cultural hybrid, absorbing both his mother’s culture and that of the Indians on the Reservation. But he is also culturally adrift. The Reservation’s community does not accept him, and Linda’s Other Place is a distant world he only hears about in stories. So he turns to Shakespeare in his isolation and absorbs a third cultural value system.
Shakespeare’s The Tempest provides an important parallel to Brave New World, and the two texts relate to one another on many levels. In the play, Prospero and his daughter Miranda are exiled to an island because Prospero’s brother betrayed him in order to gain political power. The only inhabitant on the Island is a native, Caliban, to whose deceased mother the island had belonged. Prospero usurps control of the island and decides to raise Caliban as a slave because he pities him and intends to civilize him. Shakespeare deftly portrays Caliban as an angry, violent figure, who could easily be interpreted as less than human, ruled by bestial appetites rather than higher instincts. When a ship arrives on the island, two of the stewards introduce Caliban to liquor, and liquor becomes Caliban’s “God.” Yet Shakespeare also manages to imbue Caliban with all the complexities of the colonized individual. Caliban may be angry and violent, but he has been oppressed by Prospero. Caliban becomes enthralled by liquor and sees it as a god, but he has never seen alcohol before, and the effects of becoming drunk must be staggering to him. Prospero purports to help Caliban by “civilizing” him, but Caliban resents Prospero for the theft of his home. Prospero views Caliban’s resentment as unfounded and as evidence of his bestial nature, and this prompts him to treat Caliban even more harshly. Caliban responds with violent action that only increases Prospero’s belief that Caliban is an animal. In The Tempest, Caliban is both “savage” and a “Noble Savage,” he is utterly displaced in every community, just as John is on the Reservation, and will come to be in the World State.
Both The Tempest and Brave New World can be interpreted as allegories of colonization. Prospero decides to raise Caliban and “civilize” him in the same way that European colonials attempted to “civilize” the African, Asian, and native American cultures with which they came into contact. For British and other European colonizers, civilizing the savages was a process of replacing native cultures and languages with the culture and language of the colonizer. The colonizers effectively separated colonized peoples from their own history and culture, making it more difficult for the latter to rebel against the new implanted culture that had become their own. The entire World State is built on just such a premise, effacing the past and all its cultural legacies. The World State, in a sense, has colonized everyone.
Analysis: Chapters 9–10
In these chapters the interlude at the Reservation ends and John’s life in the World State begins. The conflict between John’s values and the social mores of the World
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State starts to become obvious. The shift of setting, from the Reservation in New Mexico to the World State in England, foreshadows the shift that is about to take place in the lives of both John and Bernard.
John’s character is revealed more fully in his confrontations with World State culture. His struggle to suppress his desire to touch Lenina demonstrates the moral code that he has internalized from Shakespeare and from the “savages” on the Reservation. A World State resident would have gone for instant gratification. John finds himself in the unenviable position of living in the World State without World State conditioning. He is attracted to Lenina, but his views on sex are so radically different from hers that conflict is inevitable. The struggle between John’s intense desires and his equally intense self-control is a major facet of his character.
John’s habit of quoting lines from Shakespeare’s plays not only highlights his distance from World State society, it also serves as a reminder of the distance between our society, in which Shakespeare is revered as a writer with deep insight into human nature, and World State society, in which Shakespeare is unknown and even incomprehensible.
Stylistically, John’s Shakespearean quotations contrast vividly with the utterances of the World State citizens. But there is one notable similarity between them. Both the World State citizens and John habitually speak in quotes and soundbites. Hypnopaedic messages like “A gramme in time saves nine,” are on everybody’s lips in the World State. At times the conversations between John and Lenina degenerate into a war of propaganda, each person spewing memorized phrases without even stopping to think about them. John’s propaganda sounds more palatable than Lenina’s, because Shakespeare’s poetic lines put the hypnopaedic messages to shame. Next to Shakespeare, “progress is lovely” sounds cheap and trashy. The juxtaposition of the two contributes to the satirical tone of the novel.
The confrontation between Bernard and the Director illustrates the power of social condemnation. The Director decides to denounce Bernard in front of the other workers in order to make an example out of him. In part, World State members are forced to conform merely by peer pressure and the threat of public shame. Bernard turns the Director’s ploy on its head by shaming him with the spectacle of John and Linda. Bernard’s willingness to use John and Linda for his own gain further helps to portray him as someone who will do anything to gain social standing. By presenting Linda and John to the Director in front of the workers, he not only manages to save his own position but also to spitefully attack the Director and reduce his social standing.
Lenina’s role throughout this chapter is a passive one, for the obvious reason that she is on soma-holiday for most of it. Going on soma-holiday is her only way of dealing with the negative emotions aroused by the Reservation. It is particularly ironic that she goes on soma-holiday in the middle of what should have been a real holiday (her vacation).
Analysis: Chapters 11–12
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In this section John gets a thorough introduction to World State society, which, for the most part, disgusts him. He perceives the culture of the World State to be superficial, inhumane, and immoral.
The relationship between John and Bernard dramatizes the major themes of The Tempest. John, who originally believed he would play the part of Miranda, learning to love the new world revealed to him, becomes known as “the Savage” and takes on a role similar to Caliban’s; Bernard, by exposing John to civilization and expecting that to win John’s everlasting gratitude, plays Prospero to John’s Caliban.
The fate of John’s mother, Linda, demonstrates what Mustaph Mond meant in suggesting that truth and happiness are incompatible. Everyone but John is content to allow Linda to abuse soma, even though they know it will kill her within a month or two. The doctor’s explanation to John demonstrates the World State’s callous attitude that human beings are things that should be “used up until they wear out.” Just as with manufactured goods, when people get old and worn out, they become disposable. Linda goes on permanent soma-holiday, living out the short remainder of her life in a blissful haze of hallucinations and fantasies.
Bernard’s personal reasons for allowing Linda to succumb to soma are even more unpleasant. Everyone in London clamors to see John, but they are equally determined not to see Linda. With Linda safely out of the way, Bernard is free to use John for his own purposes. Through his exploitation of John, Bernard demonstrates that his previous dissatisfaction with the World State had merely stemmed from his desire to enjoy more of its privileges, rather than from any true desire to live as an “adult” (which is how he had presented the matter to Lenina on their first date). When he becomes successful and begins to enjoy the benefits of his Alpha status, he even drops his friendship with Helmholtz, a nonconformist with an increasingly bad reputation. Helmholtz threatens Bernard’s newfound success.
The feely that John attends with Lenina involves some old racist stereotypes, but it is quite complicated in its irony. It begins with a scene in which a “gigantic negro” copulates with a blonde woman. This scene in itself would be highly shocking and taboo to Huxley’s white, middle-class, early-twentieth-century audience, but so far the feely-goers find it perfectly conventional. They even marvel at the realistic special effects. What the audience within the book finds shocking is when the black man, following a blow to the head that erases his conditioning, kidnaps the blonde for a monogamous three-week sexscapade in a helicopter. It’s shocking to them because of the monogamy. Finally, three Alpha males rescue her and order is restored.
This scene reminds the reader of a feature of movies that is even older than Huxley’s novel. Theatergoers love to watch characters in movies transgress against the rules that the viewers themselves have to abide by. This vicarious enjoyment is given a thin veneer of respectability through a decorous ending that restores the status quo. But the fact remains that the audience enjoys fantasizing about the transgression. In part, this whole scene is Huxley’s joke, but it is also possible that monogamy is not as unusual a fantasy in the World State as we have been led to believe.
The scene in which John reads Romeo and Juliet demonstrates the power of conditioning. Even though Helmholtz is fairly unorthodox, he is still a product of
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World State conditioning. He appreciates the artistic value of Shakespeare’s language, but he does not appreciate the drama of Juliet’s parents trying to convince her to marry Paris. Because John identifies his desire for Lenina with the love between Romeo and Juliet, Helmholtz’s laughter insults both his cultural values and his own innermost feelings. But Helmholtz cannot help it; the situations and emotions expressed in the play mean something very different to him than they do to John.
Analysis: Chapters 13–15
The dramatic riot incited by John is the climax of the novel. John’s growing revulsion against everything in the World State finally propels him into a direct confrontation with it, and the authorities are forced to intervene. The events that immediately precede the riot reveal the conflicting forces that culminate in John’s outburst.
John’s struggle with his physical desires, first introduced on the Reservation, continues when Lenina tries to seduce him. He insists on seeing Lenina as a pure, virginal woman, possessed of complete sexual modesty. To John, Lenina is only an abstract rendering of all the virtuous women he has read about in Shakespeare’s works. He struggles with the physical side of sexuality to the point that he wants to repress it entirely. When Lenina makes a pass at him, he calls her a whore for breaking the rules of a moral code she is not even aware of. “Whore” is the only other category that he has to understand Lenina. It is significant that when he locks himself away from Lenina, he chooses to read Othello, a play about the doomed relationship between a black African man and a white Venetian woman. Like John, Othello veers between the extremes of perceiving his beloved as a chaste statue and as a whore. It is this misperception that leads Othello to slaughter his wife, not an incompatibility between their two cultures.
John’s experience in the Hospital for the Dying demonstrates the dehumanizing logic that the World State applies to death experience. Any tolerance he might once have felt for the practices and people of the World State disappears. He thinks of the Bokanovsky twins as maggots who defile his grieving process. Unfortunately for John, his mother is no help. Drugged on soma, she mistakes him for Popé. John’s fury and agony reflects the growing anguish he experiences when he is not recognized in the World State, even by his own mother. The society of the World State names him “the Savage,” associating him with a set of stereotypical characteristics. When John visits Eton, he watches a group of children laughing at “savages” on a Reservation performing ceremonial self-flagellation purification rituals. He sees himself reflected in their laughter as a curious, comedic spectacle, not as a human being. Bernard uses John as a curious specimen of “savagery” to attract important people into his own social circle. Helmholtz’s laughter at Romeo and Juliet makes John recognize that his struggle with his physical attraction for Lenina is a comedic, offensive spectacle even for one of the World State’s few nonconformists. Worse yet is the fact that he considers Helmholtz a friend with whom he can discuss his feelings for Lenina. The end result of all these separate episodes is that John acknowledges that he, as an individual, cannot exist within World State society. He is forced either to be a
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stereotyped representative of “the savage” or to succumb to the warped morals of the World State.
John’s attempt to stir the Delta workers into rebellion by throwing away their soma symbolizes his struggle against happiness as the ultimate goal. John would rather see truth and real human relationships—even painful ones—than the near-slavery of soma. His own mother’s death by soma is also a contributing factor. Linda and the Deltas use soma to escape all pain and responsibility. This makes them become infantile, something that John points out when he asks the Deltas why they want to be “babies . . . mewling and puking.” John’s outcry describes the essential logic that produces the “stability” that the World State loves so much. The vast majority of World State citizens remain childlike their whole lives through the use of conditioning, social reinforcement, and soma.
Helmholtz throws himself into the fray when he and Bernard arrive at the hospital, but Bernard hesitates. His hesitation is caused by the conflict between his desire to fit into the World State social machine and his desire to change the way it works. He fears associating himself with the nonconforming blasphemy of John’s revolutionary cry and Helmholtz’s support of John’s actions. Bernard knows that his participation will forever mark him as a dangerous subversive.
Analysis: Chapter 16
The conversation between Mond and John is the intellectual heart of Brave New World. It is here that the issues implied by the rest of the novel are made explicit, and discussed in an abstract form.
The rationale that Mond provides for suppressing John’s beloved Shakespeare gives us a crucial key to understanding the rest of their conversation. The mere fact that Shakespeare is old means that he doesn’t contribute to consumer behavior. (Huxley, of course, ignores the fact that people purchase new editions of Shakespeare, Shakespeare college courses, SparkNotes, etc.) While this reason seems superficial in comparison with Mond’s more developed arguments, it draws our attention to the fact that consumerism is central to the world of Brave New World. Like other dystopias, this novel doesn’t simply show us a world that is different from our own, it shows us a world that is a mirror of ours, with the worst features of our world drawn out and exaggerated. One of the central facets of Huxley’s novel is directed against the ever-increasing value it places on consumerism.
By showing a world that suppresses institutions and experiences that are sacred in our own world in order to make way for the development of consumer values, Huxley demonstrates a conflict of values that exists in our own society. The “value” that drives the consumer is simply the gratification of appetites. In Brave New World, this one value has been developed to the point that people are “adults during worktime,” but infants in their leisure time and in their relationships. So Huxley’s first criticism of consumerism is that it is infantile—adults should be capable of other things.
If consumption is the “happiness” that Mond refers to in his description of the World State, the other value that his society is predicated on is “stability.” In Mond’s account, happiness and stability depend upon one another. The stability Mond is
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talking about is economic stability, the uninterrupted cycle of production and consumption. But emotional, psychological, and social stability are also important, because they all contribute to the first kind of stability.
Mond’s argument about the things that must be sacrificed to create a “stable and happy” society may be read, ironically, as an argument that our values are incompatible with consumer behavior and economic stability. The values that Mond sacrifices may be summarized as follows:
Feelings, passions, commitments, and relationships. Citizens of the World State have no fathers, mothers, husbands, wives, children, or lovers, because such relationships produce emotional (and therefore social) instability, strife, and unhappiness. While it is easy to think of ways that relationships make people unhappy, it may be difficult for the reader to understand why Mond thinks these relationships fundamentally create instability, when common sense and tradition dictate exactly the opposite, that the family is one of the stabilizing institutions of our society. One answer may be found in Chapter 3, in Mond’s lecture to the students. Here he argues that the most dangerous part of passionate commitments to other individuals is the strength of the feeling involved. Moreover, he maintains that all feelings and passions arise from arrested impulses, such as the longing one experiences when one can’t immediately have the lover that one wants. This is probably the basis for his idea that the consumer’s need for immediate gratification is at odds with long-term human commitments.
Equality. Mond is quite forthright about the fact that social stability depends upon inequality. Most of society is going to have to perform uninteresting tasks most of the time. This feature of World State society is by no means peculiar to the World State. In fact, it is probably true of every society that has ever existed. It might even be possible to argue that our own society has as much inequality as the World State, and that Mond is just more honest about it, refusing to pay lip service to the ideal that all humans are created equal. However, the complete abandonment of the ideal of equality leads to horrifying results. The majority of human embryos in the World State are altered so that their potential for excellence or growth is stunted. When the comparison is made between the novel’s world and our own, we are left with troubling questions rather than distinct conclusions. Given that economic and social stability depends upon an unequal distribution of labor, does this create destructive contradictions with our democratic ideal that individuals are equal? (This theme is clearly indebted to the writing of Karl Marx, whose ideas are part of the intellectual background of this novel. It is no accident, for instance, that the dissident Bernard’s last name is Marx.)
Truth. Mond says that science has to be suppressed because a society that is predicated on the search for happiness cannot also be committed to truth. He may mean that science, and the search for truth more generally, has an irresistible tendency to overthrow old, established ways of looking at things. Authority and conventional wisdom both contribute to the stability of society, and in the search for truth both of these are liable to come under interrogation.
Art. Art is not a consumer product, and great art draws its subject matter from feelings, passions, commitments, and relationships, which are discussed above.
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One final category of experiences that are sacrificed in the world state might simply be labeled “problems.” Huxley might argue that we value problems (old age, death, doubt, even suffering), because we value the responses that they produce in human beings. These Mond dismisses as the “overcompensation for misery.”
One criticism that the reader might be inclined to level at Mond’s entire line of argumentation is that it is self-serving. Mond is at the very top of the ruling class and enjoys exemption from the laws that he makes. One could easily dismiss everything he says on the basis that his real interest is the stability of his own position, and not the stability and happiness of his society as a whole. On the other hand, it would be a mistake to simply dismiss his argument out of hand, because it does possess considerable power and subtlety, challenging the reader to dispute it on its own terms.
Analysis: Chapters 17–18
Bernard and Helmholtz leave the scene, and the novel, at the beginning of Chapter 17. By being exiled to the islands, and by accepting their exile, they have lost the fight against the World State. Helmholtz may continue to struggle through his writing. That is the implication of his choice of a particularly harsh environment. But both of them are being physically transported to a location where they can cause little harm to the World State. Only John is left to criticize and debate with Mond.
The discussion of religion carries the book to its most abstract and metaphysical level, and the reader may have difficulty following the thread of the argument from Chapter 16 to Chapter 17, particularly given the long passages of quotation. However, this section goes to the heart of what is wrong with Huxley’s dystopia: the fact that nobody conceives of any purpose for existence beyond the gratification of their own appetites. The passage from Newman that Mond quotes suggests that individuals feel the need for religion as they lose the sense that they are in complete control of their own lives, as they experience loss and the weakening that comes with age. The sense that one is not in control of one’s life precedes the understanding that one is part of something larger (God’s plan). In the World State, no one grows old or experiences loss, so no one ever arrives at religious experience.
In one sense, this can be seen as yet another criticism of consumerism. But Huxley is actually criticizing something larger than 1920s England and America, with its Ford motor cars, diamond rings, and conspicuous consumption. He’s criticizing the way philosophers, economists, and social scientists have been thinking about society for almost 400 years—roughly since Shakespeare’s day. Before that time, political philosophers from the ancient Greeks onward thought of civil society as serving some purpose. What that entailed varied from culture to culture. For Pericles, an ancient leader of Athens, the purpose of the polis (city-state) was to enable the small minority of free men to perform heroic exploits. In the Middle Ages, the purpose of the nation was frequently conceived as being to carry out God’s plan by serving the King, his representative on Earth.
Seventeenth-century writers and philosophers such as Thomas Hobbes began to conceive of societies as governed by observable laws, such as the law of supply and demand, which could determine the behavior of large numbers of people. The models of society promoted by Hobbes, and later by the political economists, ultimately
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generated a sufficient understanding of economic and sociological dynamics to permit governments to effectively promote greater stability, as the government does in Brave New World. But these models simplify human life to the mere struggle to survive and escape starvation, and their insights come at the price of the earlier sense that human lives or societies have a greater purpose. And while the lack of a purpose, divine or otherwise, may be a serious flaw in the worldviews of sociology and economics, Huxley observes a much more dangerous tendency within them: the tendency for the government to produce more and more intervention into human life.
The meaning of the novel as a whole lies in Huxley’s critique of modernity, characterized by technocratic government, social sciences dedicated to the control of society, and rampant consumerism, and the remarkable observation voiced by Mond in Chapter 3, that everything we think of as fundamentally human—love, passion, desire, art, and culture—comes about because of the experiences of loss and unsatisfied desire. It appears that the point of Brave New World is that modernity is developing in a direction that will ultimately change human nature itself. A world in which consumerism is developed to the extent it is in the World State, where desires are immediately gratified, in which “external secretion” is carried to the baby before it has barely begun to cry, would eradicate the most fundamental fact of human existence: its inconvenience.
But at the same time that it points to this conclusion, there are signs throughout the novel that this alteration in human nature has not yet taken place, and perhaps could never take place. Just as we are being told that there are no more jealous lovers, we meet Bernard Marx. Beneath the surface of the “free love” practiced among the higher castes lurks the specter of monogamy and violent passion. Lenina has already dated one man exclusively for far too long, and she indulges with an entire feely-going audience in a scandalous fantasy of monogamy practiced in a helicopter. Routinely, the citizens find themselves having to supplement their soma ration with drugs that replicate pregnancy or violent attachment. And there is the continuing problem of the dissidents who have to be exiled.
The last section of the novel consists of John’s departure to the lighthouse to punish himself. His self-flagellation is a desperate attempt to hold onto his own values—truth over happiness among others—in the face of overwhelming pressure from the world around him. Lenina Crowne symbolizes that pressure. John feels a powerful sexual attraction to her, a temptation to give in to the “pleasant vices” that he finds so loathsome and prevalent in World State society. When she arrives along with the chanting crowd, his resolve collapses and, when he wakes the next morning, his realization that he has succumbed to the very thing he was most set against drives him to kill himself.
The language of these chapters continues in the same tone as in the rest of the book: it is a mixture, at times awkward, of didacticism, satire, and farce. The later chapters have a more serious and didactic tone, particularly in the conversation between John and Mustapha, when issues of free will, morality, God, and society come to the fore. In the last chapter, John’s frantic self-flagellation contrasts with the superficiality of the gawking reporters and crowds that come to watch him at the lighthouse. The comparison between the two groups symbolizes the basic difference between John and the society in which he finds himself.
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The Catcher in the Rye(1951) By
J.D.Salinger
Analysis:
Chapter One
J.D. Salinger begins The Catcher in the Rye with a bold and sarcastic declaration. His main character immediately rejects the idea that the events that he describes in the novel consist of his life story or that this story is indicative of any larger message. He eschews the Dickensian idea of literature, in which plot points and narrative progression serve a moral end, and rather adopts a discursive style with no concrete Œmessage.' Salinger resists the idea that Catcher in the Rye serves an instructive end or acts as a cautionary tale; rather, as Holden insists, it is a tale that exists independent of any larger meaning or message.
Although Holden insists that his story serves no larger purpose, in this first chapter Salinger establishes several conventions of a cautionary tale. Holden indicates that he has to "take it easy" at a new place, strongly implying that he now is found receiving psychiatric help. Also, details of Holden's life indicate that he is pursuing an aimless and self-destructive path. Expelled from school for failing several classes, Holden essentially describes himself as a perpetual failure. Even worse, in his failings he takes a complete disregard for others. His solipsistic self-destruction makes him unable to grasp the consequences of his actions. When he loses the fencing equipment on the trip to New York, he is unable to comprehend that his action was irresponsible; instead, he focuses on how he feels his mistake, which he insists is not his fault, is humorous.
Holden Caulfield is in many ways a typical teenager, skeptical of all authority and with a truculent attitude that stems from a cynical naïveté. Within the first several paragraphs he dismisses his parents as "touchy" and his brother as a sellout to Hollywood consumerism, yet provides no real critique of their behavior. With the exception of Mr. Spencer and, to a more limited extent, Selma Thurmer, Holden displays contempt for every character he mentions and all of the actions they undertake. The one value that he tends to espouse is authenticity, although he has no concrete definition of what this entails. Although he finds Selma Thurmer's failed attempts to artificially better her appearance, his greatest compliment about the
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headmaster's daughter is that she portrays her father honestly, in Holden's view. This focus on authenticity and, in turn, the essential phoniness of others around him, will be a recurring theme for Holden Caulfield throughout the story.
Chapter Two
In this chapter, Salinger continues to develop the history of Holden Caulfield in direct contradiction of the opening statement that the novel is not his life story. Salinger gradually indicates that Caulfield has a longer history and troubles that are more deeply rooted than the conventional disaffected teenager, as he moves from boarding school to boarding school with no sense of purpose. Even Holden's style of narration reveals this lack of any coherent vision. He admits that he cannot concentrate on any particular topic, thinking about ice skating while Mr. Spencer lectures him.
As established in the previous chapter, Holden exemplifies typical teenage feelings of alienation. He rejects the idea that life is a game, convinced that he is a misunderstood underdog (an unlikely scenario for a teenager privileged enough to move easily among eastern prep schools), and justifies his immaturity by claiming that he is going through a phase. His critiques are glib and without actual substance, such as his insistence that other are "phonies" or his dislike of certain phrases such as "good luck." Holden's diatribes against phonies are particularly instructive; although he insists upon authenticity, he humors and flatters Mr. Spencer by agreeing with him. Holden demonstrates a great aversion for everything associated with adulthood, such as the smell of Vicks Nose Drops that permeates Mr. Spencer's home and the behavior of Mr. Haas, just as he occupies a precarious space between childhood and the adult world. In appearance he is an adult, with his tall stature and prematurely graying hair, yet as he and others around him realize, he is still quite immature.
Yet Salinger rejects the idea that Holden's behavior is typical and excusable adolescent behavior. He is not Mr. Spencer shatters this illusion by dismissing Holden's vague justifications for his behavior and confronting him with his failures. Mr. Spencer confronts Holden with his own failures and solipsistic attitude, a critique to which Holden cannot respond.
Chapter three
Holden's admission that he is the "most terrific liar" one could meet is an apt statement, for his delusions extend beyond making others believe his deceptions. In fact, it is debatable whether or not persons such as Mr. Spencer believe Holden's lies. Rather, it is clear that Holden's ability to lie is most manifest in his own sense of self-delusion. Continuing to berate others for phoniness, Holden cannot recognize the same sense of vapidity within himself. He claims to be both illiterate and an avid reader, and when identifying his favorite authors he cannot identify any particular reason why he likes those authors' works.
Salinger introduces two other Pencey students in this chapter, each of whom represent contrasting types of reprehensible behavior. Ackley is ostentatiously boorish; in appearance and in manners he is disgusting and oblivious to all social graces. Hopelessly vulgar and unclean, Ackley is unaware of the contempt that Holden
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Caulfield has for him, even when Holden confronts him with it. Stradlater, in contrast, is outwardly friendly and considerate, yet still one of the phonies that Holden abhors. Stradlater is playful and charming, but is still self-centered and arrogant. He flaunts his assets, whether physical or monetary; whether giving away a tie or strutting around the dormitory in a state of undress, he performs these actions to show what he possesses. These characters do, nevertheless, serve the purpose of showing the stifling conditions that Holden faces at Pencey. Ackley and Stradlater demonstrate that Holden's disgust for the school and its "phonies" is not completely unfounded.
However, Holden's descriptions of both of these characters cannot be trusted entirely; Holden is an unreliable narrator whose conceptions of the characters reveal his particular point of view. These descriptions must be taken with some skepticism, for they reveal Holden's skewed perspective on others. This also can be seen in Holden's description of Ossenburger. Holden can view his contribution to the school only in cynical terms: He thinks that Ossenburger prays to Jesus "to send him a few more stiffs." Holden is inherently suspicious of all around him, particularly authority figures. His view that adults serve only their self-interest is aggressively cynical; his disillusion with realit y has become such that it forms a more jaded naïveté.
Chapter Four
Salinger devotes this chapter to Holden's fixation on Stradlater's behavior. Holden has an eye for detail and the nuances of Stradlater's behavior; he even analyzes the rhythm of the conversation that the two have when Stradlater asks Holden to write a paper for him. Stradlater emerges as conceited and self-centered, obsessed with his appearance and image. Although Holden does not employ his standard term "phony" to describe Stradlater in this chapter, he makes it clear that Stradlater exemplifies a strong sense of artificiality. According to Holden, Stradlater is "Yearbook" handsome, implying that his attractive appearance is best shown in photographs and is thus divorced from Stradlater's actual self. Salinger also makes the distinction between appearances and actuality when Holden describes Stradlater's razor, which demonstrates that Stradlater is only concerned with matters that relate to his public persona. Stradlater compounds his vanity with a strong egotism. He cannot even remember the name of his date that evening, and expects Holden to write his paper for him simply because he asked.
However, if Stradlater is vapid and superficial, Holden proves himself equally so by detailing each of these aspects of his roommate's behavior with such precision. Holden does not let any slight against him go unnoticed, such as Stradlater's use of his jacket and his hair gel. Like Stradlater, Holden has a narrow focus; however, his self-centered behavior does not center on physical appearance as it does with Stradlater. Both use others as means to a particular end. Stradlater uses Holden for favors such as writing papers, while Holden uses Ackley for amusement.
Stradlater does give the reader a new perspective on Holden Caulfield. Holden does have his merits, as Stradlater indicates when he asks him to write his composition. Beneath the cynical self-absorption Holden may be a talented and intelligent writer who fails to apply himself to tasks. Holden continues to behave erratically throughout the chapter. He does things purely out of impulse, such as giving Stradlater a half nelson. This pattern of behavior will continue throughout the novel on a greater scale.
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Chapter Five:
Salinger gives the first major indication of the source of Holden Caulfield's psychological troubles in this chapter when he describes the composition that Holden writes for Stradlater. Holden elaborates on his family history, telling about how his brother died of leukemia. This may be one of the events that has caused Holden's current psychological troubles, although as narrator Holden seems to resist such simplistic interpretations. Whatever the cause of his difficulties, the paper does reveal that Allie's death is still a major concern for Holden and that the erratic and often violent behavior that Holden demonstrates during the course of his tale has a precedent. This chapter also serves to reinforce Holden's deep cynicism and negative attitudes. Holden rarely describes an event without caustic comment, whether noting Ackley's lies or the Pencey dinner menu.
Chapter Six
By this chapter, Salinger has established that Holden suffers some great psychological difficulties, yet knowledge of these instances come from secondary sources; in this chapter, Salinger brings Holden's unpredictable behavior to the fore. Holden behaves almost solely on impulse, even when there seems to be no rational motivation for his behavior. As this chapter demonstrates, this inability to control his behavior reaches far beyond any normal teenage impulses, as shown when Holden rips up Stradlater's essay when he fails to appreciate Holden's work. The fight between Stradlater and Holden also shows Holden's inability to control himself; when he suspects that Stradlater has slept with his old friend, Holden responds by punching him. This event reveals contradictory impulses within Holden. Although he claims that he is a pacifist, a dubious statement that reinforces his status as an unreliable narrator, Holden seems disconnected from the violence he causes and the pain that he suffers. He views his fight from a distant perspective, appreciating the look of his bloody face without considering the actual fight itself. This predilection for extreme behavior and lack of connection to his own actions will be a consistent theme throughout The Catcher in the Rye, as Holden continues to allow his behavior to reach disturbing extremes.
Chapter Seven:
Despite the fact that Holden is still bleeding from his fight with Stradlater, he remains curiously unconcerned with his wounds, allowing his mind to focus upon details external to his action physical condition. Holden reveals more of his psychology during this chapter. His greatest concern seems to be whether Stradlater seduced Jane Gallagher, revealing an unhealthy, if predictable, view on sexuality. Holden follows his thoughts on Jane Gallagher by musing about joining a monastery and thus becoming celibate. Holden seems to harbor a disgust for any type of sexuality, whether Ackley's obviously false boasts or Stradlater's successful seductions. At this point Salinger leaves ambiguous the actual reason why Holden would be concerned about Jane Gallagher in particular, for the only information Holden gives about Jane is that they would often play checkers together.
Holden finally reaches a breaking point in this chapter by leaving Pencey early, with no concrete plan for what he will do. In many ways this is typical of Holden's
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established patterns of behavior: impulsive, selfish and aimless. His final insult to his fellow students shows that Holden believes himself to be in some major respect different from the other Pencey students, possessing a greater, more acute intelligence. An innate sense of superiority, however unfounded, separates Holden from the other students, for he believes himself to be more honorable and Œdeep' than the vapid and self-centered Stradlater and more refined than the piggish Ackley. Yet Holden demonstrates qualities similar to those of his peers; he suffers from a self-imposed delusion that he is different and misunderstood and chooses to leave Pencey for an uncertain future.
Chapter Eight:
In this chapter, Holden bolsters his earlier claim that he is an excellent liar, as his conversation with Mrs. Morrow contains nothing but falsehoods. The only statement that he makes to Mrs. Morrow that contains any truth is that he is a student at Pencey; otherwise, all of his statements are deliberately misleading. He tells Mrs. Morrow exactly what she wants to hear about her son, humoring her own sense of vanity and self-absorption by making her believe that her son, whom Holden loathes, is one of the most honorable and decent students at Pencey. These lies reveal the complete contempt that Holden holds for Mrs. Morrow and, by extension, all authority figures. He lies in order to mock Mrs. Morrow's sense of delusion while relishing the false view that she has of her son. Holden claims a sense of superiority over Mrs. Morrow, for he believes that he can see clearly Ernest Morrow's personality, while she has a false, idealized portrait of her son. Whatever her delusions, however, Holden treats Mrs. Morrow horribly. He views her either as a target for ridicule or a sexual object, as he flirts with her and even offers to buy her a drink. This chapter is indicative of Holden's state of mind. He takes a trait that demonstrates a typical teenage immaturity, in this case lying and flatter adults, and moves it to an unbearable extreme; his lies become more shameless and outlandish, revealing the disturbing disconnect between Holden's psyche and reality.
Chapter Nine:
In the first part of this chapter, Salinger demonstrates that Holden has absolutely no purpose for his actions. He wavers between decisions, whether the decision involves whom he should call when he arrives or where he should go. Holden approaches these decisions haphazardly, almost reaching his home address before realizing that he wants to avoid his parents. His decision-making process, however, does reveal Holden's particular preoccupations. He has a fixation with Jane Gallagher that reaches beyond what the original mentions of her would indicate. When he thinks of Jane Gallagher, his mind wanders to sexual matters, but he does not think of sex related directly to her. This indicates that Holden suffers from a Madonna/whore complex; he can view a woman either in terms of absolute purity or absolute degradation but cannot reconcile this view. Holden even explicitly conceives of sex in disgusting terms. When he muses on sexual matters, he repeatedly describes such behavior as "crumby," but then admits that he himself is "pretty horny" and cannot control the sexual urges that can "spoil anything really good." Salinger further demonstrates Holden's Madonna/whore complex through the juxtaposition of Jane Gallagher and Faith Cavendish, who represent two opposing aspects of female sexuality. To Holden,
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Jane Gallagher is the prototypical Œgood' girl whom he remembers for playing checkers, while Faith Cavendish is nothing more than a prostitute.
Chapter Ten:
Salinger continues to establish Holden as a character with an entirely cynical view of others around him, particularly women and even including himself. His cynicism reaches nearly all those with whom he interacts, with a few notable exceptions. The most significant exception to emerge in this chapter is Phoebe, Holden's young sister. He lavishes nearly unconditional praise on Phoebe, detailing without any apparent sense of irony her intelligence and talents. He even appears charmed by her foibles, such as misspelling the name of her Œgirl detective.' Significantly, Holden compares her to Allie, one of the few other characters for whom Holden does not express contempt. These two characters, along with Jane Gallagher, represent for Holden a sense of innocence and childhood. Phoebe is still a child, Allie never had the change to mature, and Jane exists for Holden as an innocent girl playing checkers. Those characters who represent an adult sensibility serve primarily as targets for Holden's derision. The three women in the Lavender Room are significant examples of this. Holden finds Bernice's insistence on propriety laughable, and dismisses her and her companions' tourist activities. For Holden, their actions are trite and meaningless, yet while they have a purpose and a plan, however simplistic, Holden behaves randomly and without motivation. This chapter continues a pattern of pseudonyms that Holden adopts for himself. He treats his interaction with others as a performance, refusing to honestly depict himself to those around him. His honesty is entirely internalized; he admits his faults and lies in narration, but cannot do the same with other persons.
Chapter Eleven:
Jane Gallagher continues to occupy a great deal of Holden's thoughts, and the stories about her reinforce other themes that emerge throughout The Catcher in the Rye. The story about Jane Gallagher reminds the reader that Allie's death has had a major effect on Holden. For Holden, information about Allie remains secretive and private, to be shared only with certain persons. This also gives more weight to the earlier chapter in which Holden writes a paper about the baseball mitt for Stradlater. This information, which he once considered so private, emerges as part of an essay written for others, indicating that Holden has been repressing certain emotions concerning his brothers death that may eventually emerge. The chapter also reinforces the recurrent suspicion that Holden has for adults. He believes that Jane Gallagher has been abused by her alcoholic stepfather, which bolsters Holden's idea that all authority figures are dangerous. This also elaborates part of the reason why Holden has such a jaded view of sexuality, for he may associate it with actions such as Mr. Cudahy's predatory behavior toward Jane.
Chapter Twelve:
Salinger continues to establish Holden's great dissatisfaction for those around him in this chapter. He continues to show a latent hostility toward everyone he meets, whether Lillian Simmons or Horwitz. In most of these encounters, Holden expresses a false sense of cordiality toward the people he encounters, yet describes only their
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most negative traits. As he expresses his own false exterior, he becomes fixated on phoniness in others, finding only cynical interpretations of their behavior, such as when he suspects that the "Joe Yale" guy is telling the girl about the suicide attempt while trying to feel her up. This hostility becomes more pronounced when he argues with Horwitz, who in a minor way challenges Holden for his foolish questions. Holden's anger seems most directed at those of his own particular social situation: he hates "prep school jerks" and "Joe Yale" guys, people who travel in similar circles. This emerges as a particular form of self-loathing. As a prep school student who is expected to attend an Ivy League college, Holden loathes those persons who are most like him.
Chapter Thirteen:
Holden emerges as a scared adolescent in this chapter, as he admits to himself his own cowardice. He believes that he is incapable of standing up to another Pencey student and fighting him in defense of his property, a claim that stands contradictory to his earlier fight with Stradlater. However, in that instance he fought Stradlater out of sheer impulse. When a decision requires any degree of forethought, Holden cannot commit to it. This inability to follow through on decisions is also demonstrated during Holden's encounter with the prostitute, which also serves as a reminder of his view of women as either purely virginal or irredeemable whores. The prostitute questions Holden's age, just as others have done during the course of the novel, again proving that however old Holden thinks that he appears, he presents himself as a child to the adult characters around him.
Chapter Fourteen:
Holden's behavior becomes increasingly self-destructive as this chapter progresses. Although he knows that Maurice and Sunny threaten him, he persists in arguing with them, even though they only dispute a five dollar charge and he believes that he is in serious danger. During this encounter Holden once again reveals himself to be a child, breaking down into tears as soon as Sunny and Maurice take the money from him, yet he displays more than extreme teenage disaffection. Holden fantasizes about murdering Maurice after he leaves, but gives this thought only passing consideration. Rather, the more important threat that Holden poses is to himself. His behavior toward Maurice and Sunny indicates that he is at some level unconcerned that they will hurt him, and he even seems to take some perverse pleasure from the pain Maurice inflicts, as he uses this as a chance for role-playing as a movie gangster. Salinger includes several instances indicating Holden's masochistic attitudes, such as his admission that his favorite character in the Bible is one who mutilates himself. These details accumulate throughout the chapter to Holden's final revelation that he is considering suicide. Although he finally dismisses the idea of jumping out the window because of the particular details of his death, this is a clear sign of Holden's despair. Salinger clearly foreshadows that Holden will engage in some suicidal action, possibly the reason why he is in psychiatric care as the book begins.
Chapter Fifteen:
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After the jarring events of the previous night, Holden returns to his normal state of affairs and preoccupations. He treats Sally Hayes in the same manner as he does the other persons he meets or mentions in the course of the novel: outwardly friendly and cordial while masking a core of contempt for their values and idiosyncrasies. Holden continues to elaborate on his family history, this time expanding the scope of Allie's death to include other family members. The death of his brother has had a significant impact on Holden, but has also had devastating consequences for the rest of his family. Holden also continues his preoccupation with sex when he meets the nuns at Grand Central and wonders how they react to "sexy" literature such as Romeo and Juliet. This encounter is indicative of Holden's earlier established Madonna/whore complex. He believes that nuns are so divorced from any sense of sexuality that they could not reasonably deal with works with erotic themes. However, the most significant revelation in this chapter concerns Holden's sense of class arrogance. Although he chastised Stradlater and others for their snobbery in previous chapters, Holden reveals himself to be an equal snob in this chapter, condescending to others because of their cheap suitcases. He believes that the common factor linking people is not intelligence or talent, but rather social class as defined by consumer taste. This further establishes Holden's sense of hypocrisy: although he decries the behavior of the class to which he belongs, he shares their behaviors and even accepts this value system as reasonable.
Chapter Sixteen:
Although Holden can himself be a snob, he detests social pretension as manifested by the Lunts (Alfred Lunt and Joan Fontanne, considered the prominent couple in Broadway theater) and Laurence Olivier. Like so many other things, he dislikes both film and theater because they are inherently phony and, in the case of Broadway theater, validate others' notions of their own sophistication. However, Holden does not comprehend the inherent contradictions in his belief system. He rejects superficial markers of status and taste such as Broadway theater, yet in the previous chapter he used superficial markers of status (expensive suitcases) as a mark of validation.
Holden's primary interest shifts from Jane Gallagher to his sister, Phoebe. He even seems more preoccupied in seeing Phoebe than in his imminent date with Sally Hayes, for whom he has little more than contempt. The fascination that Holden has for Phoebe seems part of a longing for childhood. Holden resists change; he dislikes trips to the museum precisely because their static nature reminds him how much he changes at every visit. Holden seems to fear change and maturity, giving great sentimental weight to childish pleasures while fearing the qualities that mark adult life.
Chapter Seventeen:
Holden's date with Sally Hayes reiterates several of the basic problems from which Holden suffers. He has intensely contradictory feelings for Sally, which even he realizes. Although he dislikes her, when he first sees her he feels that like marrying her. Holden shifts from seeming to loathe Sally to seeming to care about her, as when he proposes that they run off to New England and then calls her a pain in the ass once she refuses his offer. The confrontation between Holden and Sally in the restaurant
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demonstrates Holden's unreliability as a narrator. He does not realize that he is shouting at Sally Hayes through their conversation and denies it repeatedly to both the reader and to himself.
Holden's proposal is a mark of desperation, for he wishes to reject the entire society around him. He does this partially because he cannot coherently articulate what he so dislikes about the society in which he lives. Holden claims that he hates "everything," and locates this aversion in random things such as taxicabs and phonies who call the Lunts "angels." Holden even admits to himself that his actions have no logic, revealing that he does not know where he thought of escaping to New England. This continues a pattern of demonstrated behavior by Holden, while foreshadowing further desperately random actions. The New England idea also reinforces the idea that Holden stands at a difficult boundary between childhood and adulthood. Sally Hayes claims that they cannot run off together because they are still practically children, yet her rejection shows more sensible maturity than Holden's immature notions of running away from home and responsibility.
Chapter Eighteen:
Holden returns to reminiscing about Jane Gallagher in this chapter, once again revealing his unfortunately short attention span. Soon after proposing that he and Sally Hayes run off together, Holden has already forgotten Sally and moved on to other considerations. In this chapter Salinger allows Holden more coherence than usual. His cynical observations are not always misinterpretations; in some cases, he makes accurate statements about human foibles and failings. His diatribe concerning "inferiority complexes" is a particular case when Holden's suspicions have a particular coherence. He accurately finds that people have hypocritical standards of judgment for others and justify the behavior in those they like while condemning similar behavior in others. That Holden can make such observations is significant for the story, for it reinforces the idea that, although he is perpetually cynical, Holden still has the capability for intelligent and rational thought. This is a significant point, for it implies that external factors have promoted Holden's psychological difficulties and that he is not the perpetual failure that he perceives himself to be. Also, those moments when Holden shows himself to be rational make his outrageous statements more potent, such as when Holden ends his remembrance of D.B.'s war experience with the statement that he would want to sit on an atomic bomb during wartime.
Chapter Nineteen:
SalinHolden returns to his obsession on sex in this chapter, a preoccupation that demonstrates great immaturity and a lack of propriety toward others. Holden appreciates sexuality in its most lurid forms, relishing Carl's gossip about which actors are closeted homosexuals, and can only conceive of Carl's relationship with the sculptress in terms of exotic sensuality. He even persists after Carl tells him how inappropriate his questions are, barely realizing that Carl is disgusted by Holden's behavior.
Salinger uses Holden's meeting with Carl Luce to give a more broad perspective on his behavior. Once again, this reinforces that others consider Holden to have some
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significant problems, but Salinger takes this viewpoint further in this chapter. Carl indicates that Holden's behavior when they meet at the Wicker Bar is typical behavior, and not the product of his altered psychological state. Holden has been suffering from his current problems since he went to Whooten with Carl Luce, and these problems have been significant; Carl even had suggested psychiatric treatment for Holden, a relatively significant recommendation in an era when therapy was highly stigmatized. Furthermore, this diagnosis comes from one of Holden's peers. This perspective on Holden's problems cannot be dismissed as easily as others, for Carl's recommendation is not the advice of the elderly Mr. Spencer or another authority figure who presumably could not understand Holden's problems.
Chapter Twenty
Saliger continues to foreshadow an eventual suicide attempt by Holden throughout this chapter. Holden once again pretends that he was shot, as he did after his confrontation with Maurice, but his thoughts shift to more serious mortal concerns. He imagines his funeral as if it is an impending event, yet is curiously ambivalent about the consequences. His only concern is not whether or not he will die, but how Phoebe will react to his death. Holden's decision to visit Phoebe at the end of the chapter shows that his actions are somewhat premeditated. He approaches this visit as a means to set his affairs in order, as if he knows that he will soon die.
Otherwise, Holden continues to display more of his typical inappropriate behavior, as when he calls Sally while drunk and tries to chat with the "flitty-looking" guy. Salinger shows how Holden has become more sensitive to occurrences in this chapter. He nearly breaks down into hysterics when he breaks Phoebe's record, and it is this event that provokes his meditations on death. This foreshadows later instances in which minor events will provoke more serious catastrophes for Holden.
Chapter Twenty-One:
Holden views his sister with a sense of wonder: he recounts with a sentimental appreciation each aspect of Phoebe's life, viewing her as a complete innocent. Of all the characters in The Catcher in the Rye, Phoebe is the only one that Holden treats with any degree of tenderness or respect. He listens intently to everything she says and does not react with the cynical observations that mark the rest of Holden's commentary. This is the most obvious manifestation of Holden's idealization of childhood. However, the child Phoebe does not share her brother's views. Where Holden is sentimental, Phoebe is realistic. She realizes how angry her father will be at Holden and refuses to listen to Holden when he tells how he will go to a ranch in Colorado. Like Carl Luce, Phoebe confronts Holden with his own immaturity and lack of direction, but this criticism goes farther. Even a nine year old child can realize that Holden needs to mature, yet Holden has not come to this revelation himself.
Chapter Twenty-Two:
Of all of the characters in The Catcher in the Rye, Phoebe ranks with Carl Luce and Mr. Spencer as one of the most mature and perceptive. She realizes that Holden's major problem is his overwhelmingly negative attitude toward everything and
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everyone around him and confronts him on this fault. When Holden talks with Phoebe, he once again reveals his hypocrisy. He laments that everyone at Pencey excluded Robert Ackley, yet Holden himself loathed Ackley, considering him boorish and obnoxious. Significantly, Holden has difficulty finding an answer to the question of what he actually likes. When he does think of a response to that question, his answers are both questionable and disturbing. That Holden appreciates the suicide of James Castle indicates his own emotional state and gives greater credence to earlier foreshadowing that Holden himself will attempt to kill himself. Holden attaches some sense of nobility to death, which he additionally shows through his idealization of Allie. This also relates to Holden's sentimental feelings about childhood. His dream of becoming a "catcher in the rye" shows that Holden has an affection for childhood. He wishes to save these children from danger so that they may frolic in the fields; one can interpret this as Holden's wish to save the children from the difficulties of adulthood.
Holden responds to Phoebe's confrontation by preparing to leave the house. This continues a pattern for Holden: he escapes responsbility, whether leaving a club early when he sees someone he dislikes or running away from boarding school. When Holden faces something that he dislikes, he cannot confront it; instead, he chooses to leave for another random destination, whether New England or Colorado.
Chapter Twenty-Three:
Salinger fills in some information in Holden's biography in this chapter, relating Mr. Antolini to the previous story about James Castle. This serves to show Holden's thought processes. Holden's choice of Mr. Antolini seems a more desperate move once he relates it to James Castle, as if that story was a momentary reminder of any person who can give Holden a place to stay that night. Holden's gift of the hunting hat is a significant event, for it is one of Holden's few meaningful possessions. He gives her the hunting hat as a sign that he may never see Phoebe again, whether because he has run away to Colorado or because of impending tragedy.
Chapter Twenty-Four:
Mr. Antolini is the third consecutive person that Holden encounters who forces him to confront his difficulties. Like both Carl Luce and Phoebe, Mr. Antolini senses that Holden suffers from serious problems, and definitively tells him that he is headed for a fall. However, where Mr. Antolini departs from the previous two confrontations is that he grasps the seriousness of the situation. His observation that Holden will end up having contempt for nearly everyone he meets has been made in different forms by others, yet only Mr. Antolini senses the mortal seriousness of the situation. When he quotes Wilhelm Stekel, he implies that he expects Holden to commit suicide as a form of foolish martyrdom.
Mr. Antolini is perhaps the only adult in the story that Holden can trust and respect; Holden even does not derisively call him as Œold' as he does with other adults, instead referring to him by his proper title. However, like all other adults in the story, Holden feels that Mr. Antolini betrays his trust. When Holden awakens to find Mr. Antolini touching his head, he immediately concludes the worst, suspecting him of "flitty" behavior. However, Holden is a notoriously unreliable narrator, coming to Mr.
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Antolini's apartment inherently suspicious of all adults and perhaps still drunk from the evening's escapades. It seems unlikely that Mr. Antolini had any malicious intent, yet Holden suspects the worst. Once again Holden must escape from a situation to avoid any sort of difficult confrontation. Holden can now dismiss Mr. Antolini's advice to him, for he can now perceive this once-respected teacher as a predator.
Chapter Twenty-Five:
Holden becomes increasingly paranoid and delusional throughout this chapter, the last one in which he recounts his tale. Throughout this chapter he operates under the assumption that he will not survive much longer, as when he is convinced that he will not get to the other side of the street. Holden's observations become increasingly random and disjointed, as when he obsesses over profane graffiti on the school. Holden's obsession with the profanity is notable, for it shows his distaste for anything that may corrupt the innocence of children. Holden wishes to shelter children from any adult experiences, revealing his own fear of maturity. Salinger bolsters this aspect of Holden's character by concluding the chapter with Holden watching Phoebe on the carousel.
Although Holden decides to leave New York after seeing Phoebe for once last time, he has no definitive plan of action. His behavior in this chapter demonstrates a tenuous grip on sanity. Holden wishes to reject society altogether, proposing extreme ideas such as pretending to be a deaf-mute, and appears barely in control of himself throughout the chapter. His physical health begins to mirror his emotional state; he suffers from illness that renders him less than lucid and even loses consciousness. By the conclusion of this chapter, Holden finds himself completely broken down both physically and emotionally, comforted only by the sight of Phoebe and her simple, childish pleasures.
Chapter Twenty-Six
Salinger leaves the actual events of Holden's presumed suicide attempt and hospitalization ambiguous; Holden only uses euphemisms such as "getting sick" to describe what has happened to him, but the implications are clear. Yet even more ambiguous than what happened to Holden is whether or not Holden will recover from his difficulties. Holden seems to harbor some sense of regret over what has happened; he claims that he even misses Stradlater and Ackley, and has used the telling of his story as a form of penitence for his behavior. Nevertheless, while looking back on his situation Holden still harbors some of the same suspicions and deep cynicism that afflicted him throughout the novel, as shown when he dismisses the question whether or not he will apply himself. Salinger ends the novel inconclusively: he gives no strong indication what Holden has learned from his difficulties, if he has learned at all, and allows for a strong possibility that Holden will continue his self-destructive and suicidal behavior
Character List:
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Holden Caulfield: The narrator of The Catcher in the Rye and its protagonist, Holden is the son of a wealthy New York family who moves from boarding school to boarding school as he is either expelled for failing classes or chooses to leave. Although he displays a number of typical teenage characteristics, but his adolescent foibles take a turn for the more disturbing throughout the novel, as he reveals himself to be self-destructive and dangerously cynical.
Phoebe Caulfield: Holden's nine year old younger sister, she is more mature and intelligent than her age implies and thus realizes how misguided her brother is behaving. Holden appreciates every minute detail of Phoebe's existence, such as her series of stories about "Hazle Weatherfield, Girl Detective" and treats Phoebe with more respect and kindness than he treats any other character in the story.
Mr. Antolini: Holden's former English teacher at Elkton Hills who now teaches at NYU, Mr. Antolini allows Holden to stay with him and his wife after Holden leaves his home. He tells Holden that he is headed for a fall and that he envisions Holden dying nobly for an unworthy cause. However, Holden awakes to find Mr. Antolini touching his head, which Holden interprets as a homosexual advance, and quickly leaves him.
Ward Stradlater: Vain, self-centered and arrogant but nevertheless a "secret slob," Stradlater is Holden's roommate at Pency Prep. He asks Holden to write an English essay for him, but then rejects the essay when it is not to his satisfaction. Holden gets into a fight with Stradlater after he suspects that Stradlater seduced Jane Gallagher.
Carl Luce: One of the most intelligent people that Holden knows, he was a student at Whooton when Holden attended, and then went to Columbia. He meets Holden at the Wicker Bar, where he chastises him for his immature behavior and recommends that he get psychiatric help.
Robert Ackley: A boorish, obnoxious student at Pencey, Ackley lives in a dorm room connected to the one where Holden lives. He is socially inept and physically disgusting; his complexion is horrible and Holden suspects that he never brushes his teeth.
Sally Hayes: Holden goes out on a date with this girl, whose pretentious mannerisms and affections Holden dislikes. Despite his contempt for her, Holden asks her to run away with him to New England, where they can live in a cabin in the wilderness together.
Mr. Spencer: Holden's history teacher at Pencey, he discusses Holden's expulsion with him before he leaves the school, and advises him to get some direction in his life.
Maurice: The elevator man at the Edmond Hotel who is also a pimp, Maurice assaults Holden after he refuses to pay a ten dollar fee to the prostitute he arranges for him.
Sunny: A prostitute whom Holden hires for the evening but then rejects, she demands a ten dollar payment when Holden believed that he was only required to pay five.
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Bernice Krebs: A blonde woman from Seattle whom Holden meets at the Lavender Room, Holden dances with her but grows to dislike her because she displays too much enjoyment for being a tourist in New York City.
Faith Cavendish: A former burlesque stripper and supposed prostitute, Holden calls her late at night to set up a date, but she refuses him.
Lillian Simmons: One of D.B.'s old girlfriends, Holden meets her at Ernie's and promptly leaves to avoid her.
Lillian Antolini: The wife of Mr. Antolini, she is an older woman who married Mr. Antolini because they shared similar intellectual interests.
Horwitz: Holden argues with this cab driver on his way to Ernie's.
Allie Caulfield: Holden's younger brother, he died from leukemia. Holden often reminisces about Allie, particularly his baseball mitt, which Holden uses as the subject for Stradlater's essay.
Jane Gallagher: Stradlater's date for the evening, she was a close friend of Holden several summers before. Holden consistently reminisces about spending time with her. Jane is one of the few people whom Holden speaks about in entirely positive terms.
D.B. Caulfield: Holden's older brother, he is a war veteran who is currently a screenwriter in Hollywood.
Selma Thurmer: The daughter of the Pencey headmaster, she is a nice but unattractive girl, according to Holden, because she does not treat her father as a person to be admired.
Dr. Thurmer: The headmaster of Pencey, Dr. Thurmer gives Holden advice that "life is a game" when he expels Holden from the school.
Mr. Haas: Headmaster of Elkton Hills who, according to Holden, ignores "funny-looking" parents of Elkton students in favor of more elite parents.
Ossenburger: Wealthy undertaker and Pencey graduate who gives a speech to the Pencey student body in which he exalts his relationship with Jesus.
Edgar Marsalla: Holden tells how this Pencey student farted during the speech by Ossenburger.
Mr. Hartzell: Holden's English teacher at Pencey, he is the only teacher who did not fail Holden during the previous semester.
Mal Brossard: He accompanies Holden and Ackley into the city to see a movie the night before Holden leaves Pencey.
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Ernest Morrow: According to Holden, Ernest is "the biggest bastard that ever went to Pencey." Holden meets his mother on the train to New York and lies about how popular and respected Ernest is at Pencey.
Rudolf Schmidt: The janitor at Pencey, Holden uses his name as a pseudonym when he talks to Mrs. Morrow on the train to New York.
Raymond Goldfarb: Holden remembers how he and this student at Elkton Hills got drunk together.
Dick Slagle: One of Holden's former roommates at Elkton Hills, Holden remembers him primarily because he had bad suitcases.
Harris Macklin: Elkton Hills; intelligent bore who whispers.
Al Pike: A former boyfriend of Jane Gallagher, Holden tells that he is an arrogant student at Choate who presumably suffers from an Œinferiority complex.'
James Castle: Holden tells a story about how this student at Elkton Hills committed suicide by jumping out of his window after an argument.
Phil Stabile: According to Holden, James Castle committed suicide after an argument with this student.
The Etymology and Symbolism of Characters' Names
Catcher in the Rye's pallid cover, adorned only with seven multicolored bands in its upper-left corner, is not what one would call eye-catching. Its reverse side lacks criticisms or reviews of any sort; in fact, it is bare of anything except a copyright date. Human beings are advised not to judge books by their covers, rather that they should look further than the obvious and try to apprehend the implied meaning. The world has peered past Catcher in the Rye's cover, cracked its pure, uniform shell of cardboard and discovered the novel of a decade, a story that has now made the name "Holden Caulfield" synonymous with "cynical adolescent." Within the novel, however, there are more "books" into which we can read a bit more deeply - the characters. It seems quite obvious that their personalities correspond with the root meanings of their names. Would brilliant author J.D. Salinger pick the name "Holden" for the protagonist without reason? Analysis uncovers connections between themes and mannerisms that are far too relevant to have been coincidental. Holden Caulfield, his younger sister Phoebe, and a cast of minor characters such as Ackley, James Castle, Carl Luce, Faith Cavendish, and Sally Hayes are several characters whose names display these connections.
As the novel opens, Holden Caulfield stands poised on a hill separating him from the rest of his school at the annual football game. He is both isolated from and above the level of his peers, watching the big game from a distance. His position is a metaphor for his views on life. The phoniness of life disgusts him, and he longs to live in a world free of the tainted hypocrisy he is seeing more and more of as he grows older.
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He sees the game as a collection of the "phonies" he detests, and is avoiding joining them. He is "Holden" back, not allowing himself to become a part of the ugliness he sees in virtually everyone. Chains of contempt for the world act as manacles that secure his superior attitude and ensure he will not become what he hates. The name "Holden" flawlessly portrays his inability to join society because of his high ideals for it. Caulfield, his last name, relates to recurring theme of childhood innocence. A "caul" is defined as a part of the amnion, one of the membranes enveloping the fetus, which sometimes is around the head of a child at its birth. The caul protects young children, just as Holden dreams to do when he tells Phoebe his ideal profession would be the catcher in the field of rye. Of course, the second section of his last name represents the field of rye. The few instants when Holden is genuinely happy and unaffected by his painful awakenings to the adult world deal with children, because he feels they are uncorrupted. Walking down the street in New York, Holden's rusted manacles of almost perpetual depression are unlocked when he sees a little boy singing "if a body catch a body coming through the rye." He criticizes his father, saying he wanted to appear "sharp" with the ratty hat he was wearing, and says neither parent was paying any attention to their son. He feels any adult has been demoralized, but will go to great lengths to come into any contact with a child. His perfect job, the catcher in the rye, prevents children from falling abruptly off the cliff of adulthood. He is greatly saddened by the profanity he sees on the walls of Phoebe's school because he doesn't want any children to worry about its meaning. He realizes that he cannot possibly smudge out all the profanity children are exposed to; he cannot halt their inevitable transfer into the adult world. The few characters in the novel he does not speak of negatively are those unruffled by adult phoniness- Jane, who kept her kings in the back row, "holden" back like the protagonist, the boys at the museum, Phoebe, the girl with the skate key, Allie, forever preserved a child, and the little boy singing. Holden Caulfield is held back from a society led by those whose innocence has left them as long ago as their cauls. His name illustrates more about himself than he admits.
The Catcher in the Rye had a wide array of minor characters, many of whom Holden talked to in person and others through which he merely recalled his dealings. Ackley, Holden's across the hall neighbor at Pencey, is described as:
"...one of those very, very tall, round shouldered guys - he was about 6'4- with lousy teeth. The whole time he roomed next to me, I never even once saw him brush his teeth. They always looked mossy and awful, and he damn near made you sick if you saw him in the dining room with his mouth full of mashed potatoes and peas or something. Besides that, he always had a lot of pimples. Not just on his forehead or his chin, like most guys, but all over his whole face. And not only that, he had a terrible personality. He was also sort of a nasty guy. I wasn't too crazy about him, to tell you the truth." Holden's blunt description disgusts the reader and provides a clear, graphic account of Ackley. The name "Ackley" sounds like acne, one of Ackley's more prominent features. It also sounds similar to a reaction of disgust. When hurt, humans use "ouch" as an exclamation of their pain; when disgusted, we tend to make an "ecch" or "ack" noise. Ackley's loathsome features could evoke this type of reaction. Ackley frustrated and disgusted Holden, but even in his distaste for his roommate, Holden still concluded the novel saying that he misses him. James Castle's last name is
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pertinent to his high ideals. He is in a castle, above his insincere peers. He refused to take back an insult even while being tortured by a group of boys, and committed suicide before he would apologize for his comment. James plunged out of his window to his death, or out of his castle of higher ideals. The word "castle" brings to mind great heights; kings were above their subjects both in the height of their dwelling and in their power. The character of James Castle also relates to the theme of falling throughout the story- Holden's gradual fall of health to fanaticizing falling to his death after Maurice attacks him. Holden admires Carl Luce because of his intelligence, saying he had the highest IQ of anyone at The Whooton School. He says he does not like him too much, but he was very intellectual, citing his IQ as the only reason why he was worth talking to. Carl's last name, "Luce", means "light" in Spanish. Knowledge is the light of life, ignorance the darkness. Carl's last name illustrates the quality for which Holden most respects him. Faith Cavendish's character expands on Holden's beliefs that he can appear older and more mature than his actual age. He believes he can give the impression of greater age by his gray hair, height, and incessant drinking and smoking, although he does not seem to realize that he is the only person who thinks he can pass for 21. Holden smoked a great deal of cigarettes at the Edmont and then decided to call Faith Cavendish. His smoking symbolizes his struggle to seem older. When he called, he lowered his voice to conceal his age as well. Faith's last name is defined as leaf tobacco softened, sweetened, and pressed into plugs or cakes. It is certainly not by chance that the very thing Holden does excessively to conceal his age around women is Faith's last name. Sally Hayes is a shallow socialite Holden used to date before he attended Pencey. He says he used to think she was intelligent, because she knew quite a lot about the theatre and literature, but when enough time went by he saw she was lacking in intelligence. He says "My big trouble is, I always sort of think whoever I'm necking is a pretty intelligent person. It hasn't got a goddamn thing to do with it, but I keep thinking it anyway." Even after reflecting on her stupidity, he was struck dumb by her looks. "The funny part is, I felt like marrying her the minute I saw her. I'm crazy. I didn't even like her much, and yet all of a sudden I felt like I was in love with her and wanted to marry her. I swear to god I'm crazy. I admit it." Holden is aware of his actual feelings towards her even as he feels an intense, sudden attraction to her. Her last names, Hayes, shows the phony haze even Holden himself becomes lost in due to her looks.
Holden's love for children first shows itself in his description of his young sister, Phoebe. All of his thoughts up to those of his sister are dark and unsettling. Phoebe's description is so outrightly loving that the reader is shown an entirely new side to Holden, one that shows he is not entirely incapable of happiness. Phoebe's role as a minor character in the novel is to keep Holden anchored to reality; to prevent him from ruining his life completely and losing all hope in his future. It is because of his fear of what Phoebe would do without him that keeps Holden from moving out west. When she tries to accompany him, Holden implicitly realizes that the trip west would destroy Phoebe's innocence, and that his erratic behavior would prove harmful to her. He makes the decision to stay to comfort Phoebe and to keep her from falling over the cliff by the rye field before her time. Phoebe is the light countering Holden's overwhelming dark depression. Her name is a species of bird known for flicking its tail and hopping about. Phoebe is skinny, "but a good skinny, a roller skate type of skinny," who is in constant motion- dancing, laughing, writing stories, talking about her friends. The word "phoebe" also means "shining" when traced to its old English roots. In mythology, Phoebe was a Titaness who became identified with Artemis as
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goddess of the moon. All three of the meanings relate to heavenly heights. Phoebe shines as the light in Holden's life, bringing him pure joy when nothing else possibly can. As the moon orbits the earth, Phoebe is always in Holden's thoughts, affecting his decisions for the better, subconsciously holding him back from blindly stumbling off the cliff of the rye field.
From the etymology of "luce" to "light" to Phoebe's name conveying shining, it is apparent there is much beneath the surface of J.D. Salinger's character's titles. Whether he intended for Holden's last name to signify his love for preserving innocence has been disputed, but its meaning cannot be more obvious than if it were written out for the reader. Books cannot be judged by their covers; doing so would show phony qualities Holden despises and limit the reader's understanding of what is available to them. In both reading and living, one must delve at times to see intended meaning. To achieve the greatest knowledge of The Catcher in the Rye, the reader must examine the many levels of meaning associated with the character's names.
Catch 22(1961)
By
Joseph Heller
Themes:
Pity - The reader has pity for each soldier every time he is afraid to go on a mission.
Reality- Each soldier has to face the fact that there is a chance that he may never come down from a mission alive.
Hope- Orr has a constant hope of crashing successfully and escaping to Sweden.
Sanity--Yossarian claims that he is the only sane one in the squadron and everyone else is crazy.
Friendship- -Yossarian's bonds with the other men are important. Confusion-- A great deal of confusion is caused by the use of the term Catch-
22. Greed-- The Machiavellian philosophy of Cathcart and Milo demonstrates
this theme. Guilt-- The death of Snowden plagues Yossarian throughout the war.
Key Issues
Confusion: Catch-22 is a military term that is confusing and difficult to describe. In short, its basic meaning is that if there was a rule, no matter what the rule is, there is always an exception to it. It is a mysterious regulation that is in essence a circular
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argument. This catch keeps Yossarian in the war because a concern for one's own life proved that he is not really crazy, and to get out of combat you have to be crazy. The catch is used by the superior powers to uphold and increase their power, and yet it is harmful to those who do not have power in the first place. It creates situations where, when you think everything is perfect, Catch-22 pops up and makes your plans impossible.
Greed--Machiavellian philosophy- the end justifies the means- Cathcart cares only about becoming general, and he will do anything to impress an existing general. Therefore he keeps raising the number of missions that his men are required to fly so that his group has more total missions than any other. He does not care that he is raising his man's chances of dying- he only wants to be promoted to a more powerful position. Milo is another prime example of a man who follows this type of idea. He wants money and will do anything to get it. He goes to so far as to bomb his own squadron because he can make a huge profit. He confiscates vital supplies and sells them, simply to acquire more money. When Orr's plane is shot down, the life jackets will not inflate because Milo has taken the carbon dioxide to make ice cream sodas.
Guilt- Snowden dies during a routine mission. While Yossarian is sitting in his bombardier's compartment, his plane is being surrounded around by enemy fire. Snowden is unfortunately a victim of the flak, and is wounded fatally. When Yossarian discovers that Snowden is injured, he rushes to his aid. Sadly, though, Yossarian nurses the wrong wound, and Snowden dies from a hidden chest wound. This incident thoroughly changes the meaning of the war for Yossarian. Before this incident, Yossarian was a dedicated bombardier, who , although he did not agree with the idea of war, he almost enjoyed the missions and did not mind the danger. After the death of Snowden, Yossarian decides that his only mission is to come down alive. The war suddenly has a personal meaning to him, and he can see what hardships war could bring.
Lessons, Morals, and Applications
From the themes of confusion and greed, as well as the men's experiences with the idea of catch-22, it is quite plain to see that men with power will keep power, and those without power suffer the consequences. As a familiar quote says, "Absolute power corrupts absolutely." Yossarian learns the hard way that men with power have a tendency to abuse their authority.
He did find, though, that if one believes in something hard enough and works diligently towards a goal, the goal will at one point be accomplished, or at least a portion of the goal will become true. Yossarian wants to be grounded, yet every time he requests to be, his attempt is denied. In the end, Yossarian actually defies the laws of military life and escapes. Yossarian learns that even thought Catch-22 does not exist, it actually does because everyone believes it does. It is here that the theme of reality plays a role, because although Catch-22 may not exist in physical reality, it does in the minds of all the characters, making it a real part of their lives.
Guilt is a visible theme in Heller's novel, but the reader finds that guilt is not always needed. For example, Yossarian could not have helped Snowden in his hour of need, but he felt guilty because he did not save his life. It is only human nature to feel guilt
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when one takes the blame for an incident, even if it was not his fault. Human emotion is a strong feeling that can plague one person for years after an incident.
Setting
The novel takes place during World War Two in an American army camp on the island of Pianosa as well as in Rome.
Background Information / Plot
The main character is Yossarian, who suffers from a severe fear of death. He and his comrades are in the Air Force. All of the men are in the 256th squadron (2 to the fighting 8th power, of you want to use it in a poem). This novel takes place during World War II. Yossarian's main antagonist is Colonel Cathcart, whose goal in life is to become a general. Yossarian wants to stop flying missions so he does not get killed, yet Cathcart's aim is to continue raising the number of required missions in order to impress his superiors. He uses Catch-22's unfair illogical rules to keep the men flying. This creates a constant conflict between Yossarian and Colonel Cathcart.
Orr manages to escape the horror of the war through careful planning. Each mission he goes on is a practice in the art of crashing and survival in the sea. He makes sure he is able to inflate rafts, get food, and maneuver properly using a tiny spoon. These plans come in use when one mission he crashes but does not return. It is only then does Yossarian realize Orr's genius. All of this planning was used to help Orr sail off to freedom in Sweden, away from the death and destruction of World War II.
In a quick summary, some of the other important sub-plots in Catch-22 are as follows:
Nately and his whore are having a love affair throughout the novel. His whore never really responds to his love, but once she decides she loves him, Nately is killed in battle. Yossarian broke the news to her, and the novel concludes with Nately's whore trying to kill Yossarian in violent rage.
Throughout the novel, Milo is constantly concerned with his syndicate and making profit. He goes through multiple attempts of raising money, such as selling chocolate covered cotton, which does not go over well with the men. He even goes as far as to bomb his own squadron for money.
For further information on the personal situations of characters, please refer to "Characters."
Characters
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Yossarian- paranoid, thinks everyone is trying to kill him (which is true); thinks everyone is crazy; feels guilty about the death of Snowden, which was the traumatic experience which changes his view of war
Orr- shares tent with Yossarian, practices crashing every mission- eventually crashes and escapes; good with his hands
Doc Daneeka- depressed, dies figuratively (dies on paper, so he is considered dead); doctor for the squadron; self-pitying hypochondriac; refuses to ground Yossarian because Doc is selfish
AATappman- chaplain, very timid, but wants to be stronger; given the third degree for stealing a tomato; misses his wife terribly
Milo Minderbinder- mess officer; leader of the syndicate (black market/underground business dealings); aim is to give the men the best meals in the world; will do anything for a profit, even bomb his own squadron
McWatt- freckled nose; buzzes Yossarian's tent for fun, but stops when he finds it scares him; Yossarian's pilot; slices Kid Sampson in half by accident, and then kills himself
Major Major- misfit his entire life, not accepted because he was promoted to squadron commander- became a recluse; told Sgt. Towser to only let people into his office when he was out- tried to avoid people
Cathcart- colonel that desperately wanted to be a general; unsure of himself, wanted to impress the generals- this is why he keeps raising the number of missions
Snowden- soldier who dies in Yossarian's plane; while Yossarian was treating him for minor leg wounds, Snowden was dying of fatal chest wounds- Yossarian feels guilty because if he had known about the real problem, he thinks he could have saved Snowden's life; now he thinks that his only mission is to come down alive; Yossarian keeps speaking about Snowden's "secret"- man is garbage without his spirit
The Portrayal of Capitalism and Free Enterprise in Catch-22
Joseph Heller wrote Catch-22 not only in order to make a statement about the absurdity of war, but also to illustrate the absurdity of the human condition itself. Through its style, language, and characters, Catch-22 vividly depicts the absurdity of life using World War II as its medium. One of Heller's most significant parodies is that of capitalism and free enterprise, which he embodies in the character of Milo Minderbinder.
The reader is first introduced to Milo in chapter 2 of the novel, where he is described as the most incredible mess officer ever, providing a luxurious dining experience complete with Italian waiters, tablecloths, and a lunch consisting of shish-kabob and asparagus tips followed by cherries jubilee, coffee, Benedictine, and brandy. Milo is mentioned again briefly in chapter 3 during the Great Big Siege of Bologna, when it is said that he had bombed the squadron. Already the reader has a taste for the absurdity to come with this character, such as, "Why did Milo bomb his own soldiers?"
It is in chapter 7 where the reader gets a first glimpse at the madness behind Milo. Milo admires Yossarian for a letter Yossarian persuaded Doc Daneeka to give him. It says that Yossarian can have all of the fruit he wants (due to his liver condition which
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he feigns having). Milo is horrified, however, to learn that Yossarian simply gives the fruit away. Giving violates Milo's most basic principle- extort as much as you can. He hopes to make tremendous profits from the black market syndicate he is establishing. As Milo explains his ideas (which are heavily intricate, not to mention convoluted), he tears up a bedsheet that was originally stolen from McWatt. To Milo, it's a symbol of business, but to McWatt and Yossarian (and probably the reader), it's just a torn sheet. Milo's reasoning in this episode clearly illustrates Heller's distrust in the power and complexity of capitalism, and he shows this through Milo's absurd rationale. Also, Heller writes in this chapter, "They were like Milo's disunited eyes, which never looked at the same thing at the same time. Milo could see more things than most people, but he could see none of them too distinctly." All of this suggests that Milo could think of various economically profitable schemes that most people can't, yet he fails to see what is truly important in life.
In chapter 13, Milo is given the position of mess officer by Major ___de Coverly in exchange for fresh eggs and butter. De Coverly also grants Milo planes to go to Malta and Sicily for the food. Many other squadrons soon make the same deal, and Milo operates daily shuttles to procure everything from artichokes to lobster tails. Milo is made out to be a modern-day sleazebag/businessman. He is quickly making his way to the top through manipulation and he doesn't care whom he hurts along the way. He is also obsessed with making profits and is constantly thinking about money. This is Heller's warning, that if we don't do something soon, to change "the system," we will all end up like profit-hungry Milo.
In chapter 22, Milo humorously reveals how his private empire has spread. Orr and Yossarian give up trying to grasp the intricacies of Milo's business, meanwhile learning that grateful civilians have named him everything from city mayor to assistant governor. Thus, Heller is not only parodying the complexity of what Milo is doing (because it is so convoluted that nobody understands anything he is doing), but he is also showing the close and potentially harmful relationship between governmental positions and profit. Milo goes on to claim that "everybody has a share." Later on, when Milo writes the word "share" on a piece of paper, the reader not only sees the absurdity of what Milo is pulling off, but also the absurdity of everyone around him falling for it. Also, Milo sums up his beliefs in one line- "...what's good for the syndicate is good for the country." So here we see that the satire includes the industrial and financial domains as well as the military.
Chapter 24 serves to illustrate more of Milo's power. He can get an uncooperative officer transferred and can even lure enemy planes and officers into his syndicate. The growth of his business through the war heavily parallels empires of the past and multinational businesses of today. Heller's message- businesses can fall just as easily as the empires once did. Later in the chapter, we learn of various international contracts Milo has made including a contract with the Germans to bomb his own base which offsets his losses on Egyptian cotton. He gets away with maiming and killing Americans because he makes such a huge profit; the absurdity is disturbing. What Milo is doing is very similar to arms manufacturers who sell to both sides in a conflict.
Later in this chapter, the reader is exposed to symbolism that points to Milo being evil. After Snowden dies, Yossarian takes off his uniform (because he hates what it
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symbolizes) and walks around naked. During Snowden's funeral, Yossarian stays in a nearby tree. Milo comes to Yossarian, mourning only his loss on cotton. He claims that the only way to offset this loss is for the squadron to eat the cotton, and he practically begs Yossarian to eat this chocolate-covered cotton that he has created. The scene is strikingly similar to Adam and Eve, with Milo being the evil serpent tempting Yossarian to eat the cotton. Heller is now saying that capitalism and its ways are not only convoluted and money-driving, but it is also evil and immoral.
By chapter 35, Milo's trade goods have expanded and now include artifacts of Western culture from the "Piltdown man" (which doesn't even really exist) to "Cedars from Lebanon." His slogan has shifted from "everyone has a share" to "what's fair is fair." So he has truly shifted from sugar-coating his position, to pessimistically justifying his position. Heller is obviously cynical about the future of capitalism and large businesses; they might in the end use Machiavellian practices and beliefs- "The end justifies the means."
Milo Minderbinder builds his empire himself. Just as his eyes do not focus properly, so his mind cannot take in any other value than profit. Everything he does is designed to enhance his profitable black-market syndicate. He draws group after group into his plan by doubletalk, flattery, or blackmail. Milo operates entirely on his own, twisting the military system to his purposes. Nothing stops Milo, and Milo is the character through which Heller makes his satire on capitalism, free enterprise, and immoral international business practices. It is through Milo's absurdity that the absurdity of the industrial and financial situation in this country can be seen.
In the preface to his renewed edition, Joseph Heller recalled when he originally submitted Catch-22 to various magazines, including The Atlantic and The New Yorker, how it had been dismissed and did not even make the New York Times bestseller list. Even among the elitist literary circles, it was snubbed. Despite this initial lukewarm reception, the popularity of Catch-22 soared among the masses. For once, readers felt that the phrase ìcatch-22î so appropriately expressed their frustrations with contradictory institutions and bureaucracies that they were forced to deal with constantly. The black humor and wit of Catch-22 also appealed to many. Eventually, ìcatch-22î became a common phrase for situations in which
After Catch-22's immense popularity, though, Joseph Heller felt a need to redefine himself through other means. He attempted to address other issues, such as the Jewish identity in American society and his very personal mentally degenerative disease which struck him later in life. Nevertheless, Catch-22 proved to provide a difficult standard for him to live up to as of his other works were as a widespread success. An attempt to follow this satirical theme of war, the drama We Bombed New Haven, did not run long on Broadway.
However, the movie based on the book was well-received and well-loved as the original. The book itself had become a symbol for many cults who were rebelling against ìthe institution,î and the movie only fed the frenzy more. After exploring other avenues in his literary career, at the end, Heller felt a need to return back to Catch-22 and wrote a sequel, Closing Time. This novel touched upon the lives of many of Catch-22's characters, including Yossarian and Milo Minderbinder. Unfortunately, the reaction was considerably mixed. Some readers finding it well-crafted and just as
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humorous as its predecessors, but other readers felt that it was an attempt to resurrect Catch-22 without the craft or freshness. Heller claimed, though, the portrayal of Yossarian as a hypochondriac sixty-eight year old businessman was partially autobiographical, and reflected his true voice
Despite such difficulties throughout his literary career, Catch-22 still remains widely admired today and will be considered the hallmark of Heller's works. The behavior of Yossarian has not only provided much amusement to the masses but also the source of much psychological analysis of the isolated character trying to flee from neurotic or hostile societies which fail to recognize the needs of the individual. As people find themselves struggling between the impositions of societies' institutions and the These topics have and will continue to generate much interest in Heller's writings for many years to come.
Time period: World War II
Setting: island of Pisona; briefly in Rome and other battlefields
Captain Joseph Yossarian: a squadron bombardier who represents the individual. He views the war as a destructive tool of both the institutions and their supporters. While his arguments about self-survival are unusual and even appear to be paranoid, they sometimes possess an amazing amount of common sense and lucidity. He futilely protests against Colonel Cathcart's continuous increase of the number of missions. At the end of the book, Yossarian decides to flee than to face an unjust court-martial hearing.
Mates in Yossarian's squadron
Orr, Yossarian's roommate: His strange habits include putting apples and horse chestnuts into his cheeks, installing new luxuries such as running water into his tent, and crash landing every mission. Yossarian dismisses him as crazy, but one day Orr disappears after another typical crash landing. At the end of the book, Yossarian realizes that he had been tricking everyone into thinking that he was crazy so he could escape without being caught.
Mudd: the dead roommate in Yossarian's tent, who, except for his name, remains unknown and unclaimed. He is killed just two hours after his arrival to Pisona, and does not even have a chance to unpack his bags. Yossarian tries to get the officers, to no avail, and bemoans the wrongful, immediate death he suffered.
Clevinger: an overbrainy Harvard graduate who argues with Yossarian about his tactics to try to avoid flying more missions. Always questioning everyone about ìdeep issues,î Colonel Scheisskopf constantly recruits cadets to testify against him, although Clevinger cannot be charged with any crimes. One day, Clevinger mysteriously disappears and is presumed dead. By the end of the book, Yossarian assumes that Clevinger has come to his senses and deserted.
Havermeyer: the other leading squadron bombardier who enjoys chewing peanut butter brittle and shooting field mice with his 0.45. Unlike Yossarian, he never takes
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evasive action and volunteers to go on every mission. Consequently he becomes the darling of Colonel Cathcart and the object of hatred by the other troops. At the end of the book, though, he secretly admits to Yossarian that he is sick of flying missions and asks Yossarian to take him along if Yossarian gets an order to leave.
Chief White Halfoat: Captain Flume's roommate. He curses the Americans for their wrongs they have committed against his people and enjoys scaring Captain Flume to the point where the other goes to hide in the woods, lest his throat be sliced. Suffering from alcoholism, he forges other men's names to get more alcohol and once steals Captain Black's car and drives it into a ditch. He dies of pneumonia, as he predicts from the start of the book.
Captain Flume: Chief White Halfoat's roommate. He is in constant fear that Chief White Halfoat will slit his throat while he is asleep. Consequently, Captain Flume goes to live in the woods, where the chaplain finds him. When winter comes, though, he moves back inside, hoping that Chief White Halfoat will die of pneumonia.
Lieutenant Milo Minderbinder: an unscrupulous but very shrewd businessman in the squadron and the owner of M&M Enterprises. His sense and duplicity allow him to earn immense profits of the war. He expands his business by arguing that everyone has a share of the syndicate and thus should support him. Milo manages to earn a great deal of business by bribing the officers with delicious specialties such as artichokes and baby lamb chops. He makes the terrible mistake of buying the entire crop of Egyptian cotton, though, and loses all his profits since there is no market for the cotton. After attempting to self-destroy the unwanted crop, Milo decides to bribe the government into buying it off of him. Later, he tries to pass the syndicate off onto the army so he can fly missions again, but Colonel Cathcart persuades him to continue running it by offering him more planes and any medals which may be awarded for those men who die while flying these missions.
Corporal Snark: Milo's cynical, bitter assistant cook. He despises all the men as being philistines and being unable to recognize good food. To prove his point, he mashes tons of GI soap into the mashed potatoes, and although it gives them diarrhea, they clamor for more.
Ex-P.F.C. Wintergreen: a nasty man who is in charge of the mail and constantly plays politics with everyone's correspondence. Every time he goes AWOL, he is required to dig six-foot holes as a punishment. Actually he cherishes his job and is hoping to win a medal for his exemplary work. He is also involved in the feud between Generals Peckem and Dreedle, and constantly throws out General Peckem's letters because they are too verbose.
Chaplain (Captain) Albert Taylor Tappman: the squadron's nice but ineffectual chaplain. He is kind, weak-willed but firmly believes in trying to save human life, particularly Yossarian's. The chaplain enjoys his isolation in the woods despite the black presence of his assistant and his questions about God, life, and creationism. Outside of his little world, though, problems arise. He appeals hopelessly to Major Major and Colonel Cathcart to stop the ongoing increase of required missions and is wrongfully interrogated about absurd incidents such as the theft of a plum tomato and Colonel Cathcart's insincere condolence letters.
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Corporal, later Sergeant, Whitcomb: the atheistic chaplain's assistant. He tries to make his superior's life as miserable as possible by criticizing him and taking over his operations. Unfortunately, the chaplain is too weak-willed to oppose him and eventually Whitcomb reports his various misdemeanors to Colonel Cathcart in an attempt to get the chaplain in trouble and to take over.
Dunbar: Yossarian's wardmate who enjoys shooting skeet to kill time and tells Yossarian strange dreams, which are passed onto the ward psychiatrist. After realizing that the soldier in white is empty, he is ìdisappearedî by the doctors.
Mates in Yossarian's flight crew
Captain Aardvark: nicknamed Aarfy, and a constant nuisance in the cockpit. He pretends to be friends with Nately, in an attempt to endear himself to Nately's rich dad. He is always persuading ìnice girlsî to not sell their bodies, much to the anger of Yossarian and the other men. Brainless and senseless, Yossarian resents seeing him and constantly punches when they are together in the cockpit.
Nately: one of Yossarian's co-pilots. He falls in love with a whore that he meets in Rome while staying at one of the specially rented apartments. Nately pursues her to no avail until one night he and his friends rescue her. After a good night's sleep, she awakes and falls in love with him too. Unfortunately, Colonel Cathcart threatens to send Nately home without the whore, unless he continues to fly the missions. Nately is killed just after he tells Yossarian that he will probably manage to survive after flying so many missions.
Admiral Kid Sampson: one of Yossarian's crew members. He turns around the plane when Yossarian claims that he cannot hear him. Later, he is sliced into half by McWatt when the latter flies his plane just a few inches above the water.
McWatt: Yossarian's pilot. He enjoys driving Yossarian up the wall by flying his airplane just a few inches over Yossarian's tent. During combat practice, once, Yossarian loses his temper with McWatt and threatens to choke him to death. McWatt becomes frightened and realizes that Yossarian is indeed losing it. One day, McWatt is flying just above the beach water and accidentally slices Kid Sampson in half. Immediately after that, McWatt crashes into the side of the mountain and dies.
Doc Daneeka: the squadron's insensitive doctor. He refuses to help any of the men with their illnesses or problems and evokes ìcatch-22î as an excuse to not ground the men. A hypochondriac himself, he is wrongfully declared dead because he is supposedly in McWatt's plane when it crashes, and his existence is denied.
Officers in the Twenty-Seventh Air Force Squadron
General Peckem: a pseudo-sophisticated, verbose general who is trying to displace Dreedle. However, ex-P.F.C. Wintergreen continuously throws out his correspondence because it is too prolix. After much effort, he succeeds in throwing out General Dreedle, only to have General Scheisskopf become his superior.
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Lieutenant: later Colonel and then Lieutenant General, Scheisskopf, an officer obsessed with the weekly parades and trying to get Clevinger into trouble over unknown crimes. He is too busy trying to figure out to win the parades to care about his wife's sexual overtures. Upon becoming a colonel, he works under General Peckem, who despises Scheisskopf for his ignorance and stupidity. Finally, Scheisskopf is accidentally promoted to Lieutenant General due to an oversight and misunderstanding of memos by General Peckem. Upon this, Scheisskopf sends out commands ordering all the men to march.
General Dreedle: a mean, nasty man who taunts General Peckem for his veneer of sophistication. He also hates his son-in-law and tortures him by keeping a beautiful nurse.
Colonel Moodus: General Dreedle's highly despised son-in-law. He is constantly abuse by his cruel father-in-law and the beautiful nurse that General Dreedle keeps to torment him. Chief White Halfoat also enjoys punching Colonel Moodus in the face when he is drunk.
Colonel Cargill: a subordinate of General Dreedle. Formerly an idiot in marketing, he prides himself still on his exemplary stupidity.
Major Danby: the goggled-eyed group operations officer. At the end of the book, he encourages Yossarian to run away to avoid court-martialing for rejecting Colonels Cathcart's and Korn's ìodiousî deal.
Major ñ de Coverley: an almost Jehovahlike figure who is feared and admired by everyone, especially Captain Black. Ironically, though, he puts an end to Captain Black's ludicrous Glorious Loyalty Oath crusade. He enjoys renting floors of apartments filled with beautiful women so the enlisted men and officers can enjoy themselves on their rest leaves.
Colonel Cathcart: a ruthless, cold-blooded ambitious officer. His goal in life is to become a general, and determined to get attention for himself, continuously raises the number of missions that the men must fly to obtain leave. In the end, he makes a dirty deal with Yossarian to try to cover up his illegal number of missions.
Major Major: a shy awkward boy misnamed by his cruel father and a Henry Fond lookalike. He is promoted by Colonel Cathcart to squadron commander and is banished away into a trailer and forced to sign piles of useless papers. Eventually, he pretends to be ìWashington Irvingî and pits the two C.I.D. men against each other for his own amusement.
Sergeant Towser: Major Major's assistant.
Captain Black: another cold-blooded officer. He starts the Glorious Loyalty Crusade, an in attempt to avenge himself on Major Major. Eventually his idol, Major ñ de Coverley puts an end to such foolishness.
Colonel Korn: Colonel Cathcart's competitor and sometimes sidekick. He is just as cruel as Colonel Cathcart, although he is more inclined to admit to his stupidity
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sooner. He also joins Colonel Cathcart in trying to coerce Yossarian into making the dirty deal to cover up the illegal number of missions.
Medical staff and patients in the hospital
Nurse Cramer: a puritanical nurse who diligently attends to cleaning the soldier in white. Yossarian suspects of her of having killed the soldier in white, because she is the one who discovers that he has died. Nevertheless, she is a good friend of Nurse Duckett, although she strongly disapproves of her love affair with Yossarian.
Nurse Duckett: one of the nurses in the ward who originally despises Yossarian and a good friend of Nurse Cramer. Later, she pursues a passionate fling with Yossarian and enjoys flirting with the other men, but eventually leaves Yossarian for a doctor.
The Soldier in White: a soldier encased entirely in white bandages with two zinc jars, one of which is connected to his mouth to feed him, and the other to collect his waste. When the latter is full, the jars are switched. Both Nurses Cramer and Duckett vigilantly watch over him. Nobody talks to him, except the overfriendly Texan, and the unknown figure never replies. When the first one dies though, Yossarian suspects the Texan, then Nurse Cramer, of murdering him. He reappears a second time, much to everyone's alarm, and when Dunbar claims that no one is inside, the doctors ìdisappearî him.
Giuseppe: the soldier who sees everything twice. Yossarian imitates him to avoid leaving the ward. After he dies, Yossarian impersonates him.
Others
Luciana: a beautiful young woman who Yossarian falls madly in love with when he goes to Rome. However, he foolishly tears up her address after she leaves him, and despite a frenetic search, never sees her again.
The maid in lime-colored panties: a woman who will sleep with any man, regardless of creed, color, or religion. Yossarian goes to bed with her after he cannot find Luciana. Later, as Rome is being destroyed, Aarfy rapes her and throws her out the window afterwards.
Nately's whore: the woman Nately falls passionately in love with when he meets her in an apartment in Rome. She treats him with apathy and resents his attempts to regulate her life. When Yossarian hits Nately in the nose and then breaks to her the news of Nately's death, she becomes extremely vindictive, doggedly follows him from Rome back to his camp, and tries to kill him with a butcher knife.
Nately's whore's kid sister: the whore's younger twelve year old, sister. She constantly imitates her and follows her around. After everyone is driven out of Rome, Yossarian returns to look for her.
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Nately's old man: a disgusting old man Nately runs into. He is guilty of having thrown the firecracker that blew Major ñ de Coverley's eye and is strongly anti-American and pro-Italian. His ugly, grotesque features painfully remind Nately of his own father, who is handsome and good mannered.
Lieutenant Scheisskopf's wife: a sensual woman who sleeps around with the officers. Yossarian particularly enjoys having an affair with her, to get back at Lieutenant Scheisskopf's cruel behavior towards Clevinger.
C.I.D. man: an official sent by the government to investigate the mysterious ìWashington Irving,î a pseudonym used by Yossarian when censoring the enlisted men's letters.
Second C.I.D. man: another official sent to investigate again ìWashington Irving,î the pseudonym used by Major Major to sign the useless memorandums. Major Major pits the two men against each other for his own amusement.
Short Analysis
The plot structure of Catch-22 is unusual in several aspects, and requires careful attention from the reader. The timeline is quite disorienting and much of it entails reminiscences of the various characters. Figures that are alluded to by other characters are often not more fully developed and explored until their appropriate chapter. Hence, much of the description and anecdotes are quite incidental, and although, they do provide a more complete picture of the character, requires the reader to sift through the material and determine what is relevant to the main plot and what is not. Despite this confusion, the reader's interest is maintained by using the plot device of foreshadowing and . Seemingly arbitrary episodes and flashbacks, such as Yossarian's traumatic recollections of Snowden's death, will become a common device for the rest of the book. The importance of the flashback of Snowden's death cannot be understated.
The content of the plot touches on several crucial themes that form the groundwork for the maddening atmosphere of Pisona. First, Yossarian constantly reiterates his right to life and using whatever means to save himself from being killed. Survival, not winning the war, is what matters to him. Also being questioned are the morals of the country. Captain Black's episode with the Glorious Loyalty Crusade points out how patriotism can be abused for someone's personal ambition or agenda. Religion is also repeatedly questioned. The chaplain himself is thrown out from the officers' headquarters and happily lives in his own world. Even he has his own doubts about God and morality, and once, when he lies, he feels so wonderful about it.
The institutions that run the war and support the war, the military establishment, the government, big business, and the medical institution, are also severely satirized. Perhaps the most targeted institution is the military establishment. Throughout the book, it is criticized for its bureaucracy, its inner squabbling, the absurd tactics to move up the ranks, and its absurd obsessions. Generals Peckem and Dreedle continuously squabble Colonel Cathcart constantly increases the number of missions, in an attempt to be promoted to general. The big business, represented by Milo, comes to represent a parasite that profits off of the war. This financial obsession is so bad
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that even Milo is willing to destroy his own squadron simply to ensure a profit. Finally, the medical institution, throughout the entire book, the doctors are presented as ignorant and presumptuous, and treat their patients without compassion, and sometimes even lack humanity. This is particularly ironic, because the traditional view of doctors is that their interest is to preserve life and to heal the sick and wounded. The representative character from this establishment is Doc Daneeka. He never listens to anyone's troubles and refuses to ground any of the men, on the grounds of the catch-22 argument.
Lastly, and perhaps, most importantly, the viewpoint and logic of ìcatch-22î expose the dangers of the war. Doc Daneeka points out that the men are trapped because those who are mad will fly the missions and if they deny madness, they will be forced to fly them because they are capable of doing so. Orr turns this logic against the military bureaucracy when he begins to hope for the improbable: that he can row to Switzerland in a boat, using only an oar the size of a Dixie-cup spoon. After all, which is more likely: that he will get to Switzerland before the war ends, or that Colonel Cathcart will allow the men to take leave and return home? While ìcatch-22î is a method of rationalizing absurd ends, it lacks any common sense. Minor incidents such as the falsified theft of a plum tomato become the crucial points of evidence against the chaplain. Calamities such as the death of Nately are blown off as unimportant, because they do not serve as useful evidence in achieving the military's ends. This lack of context for the events and disproportionate viewpoint of them only underscore the horrifying lesson of the war: that rationalization (not reason) can be used for the wrong purposes when the general population does not protest against such use or lack the sense to recognize the dangers of such a technique.
Chapter 1: Analysis
The first chapter sets the satirical tone that will be seen in the rest of novel. Heller¹s cynicism about the war and the government is clearly indicated. An entire ward is pretending to ill and waiting for the war to end. Oddly enough, no one realizes what a widespread tactic this has become. Even worse, the men manage to avoid the front by the most ludicrous tactics, such as Dunbar¹s falling on his face. Meanwhile, Yossarian is forced into performing the menial governmental duty of censoring. As he quickly discovers, the letters are quite boring and there is very little material to censor. Consequently, Yossarian begins to censor everything that should not be censored. His games fail to attract any notice, though, until he actually begins to mark the envelopes themselves. Then the C.I.D. man fails to find out who this nonexistent "Irving Washington" is and apparently does not realize that this is a fake name. The C.I.D. comes to symbolize the obtuseness of the government.
The medical establishment is also severely ridiculed. Ironically, the men are seeking to avoid actual injury or death by pretending to be ill. Dunbar claims he can lengthen his lifespan by lying in a deathlike state for hours on the end. Somehow the doctors are all deceived into believing that the entire ward is ill, while the nurses have come to realize that the soldiers are simply pretending. Despite their extensive medical testing and knowledge, the doctors fail to realize that the men are faking their illnesses. They have been trained such that they can only recognize certain types of diseases, such as jaundice, and the fake illnesses that do not fit a known category bewilders them. Moreover, their methods of treatment are absurd. They keep on
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giving Yossarian a daily pill, hoping he will either get well or become jaundiced. The encased man is fed his own urine. This symbolizes the entire futility of life, as it is nourished by its own waste. At last, the stupidity of the doctors is exposed when the ill-educated, bigoted Texan proves that everyone in the ward except the C.I.D. man is a hypochondriac and sends them back to the front.
Heller also cleverly uses irony for more humorous purposes especially in character development. The Texan talks about being American as apple pie and the Brooklyn dodger and the lack of patriotism among his comrades‹yet he turns out to a hypochondriac avoiding the war just as much as everyone else in the ward. Yossarian, the pathetic censor, claims to be the famous literary figure Washington Irving. The man who is encased in white bandages turns out to be a cleverly concealed black man.
Perhaps the nicest example of Heller¹s ability to pile up one ironic incident on the other is the interaction between Yossarian and the chaplain. One time when Yossarian is censoring the letters, he deletes the entire letter except for the salutation and then writes an absurd sentence in which the group¹s chaplain is pining away for love for her. Then when the chaplain does arrive, Yossarian is censoring romantic passages from the letters. It is at that instant, Yossarian himself falls in love with the chaplain. On the other hand, the chaplain is so shy and lacks confidence that he is worried that Yossarian does not even like him. These cleverly placed layers of irony within this chapter foretell this technique¹s extensive use for the rest of the novel.
Finally, the apparent feature of this chapter is the constant presence of suspense and foreshadowing. Heller cleverly uses the technique of writing a cliffhanger but then going off on a tangent until much later in the chapter. The result is a strange discontinuity and constant switching between descriptions of the characters and recollection of the events. Chapter One begins with, "It was love at first sight. The first time Yossarian saw the chaplain he fell madly in love with him." However the subject is then abruptly changed to Yossarian¹s rather irrelevant background. It is not until the end of the chapter does the chaplain reappear‹and then the visit is strangely dismissed as being only a rather casual interaction. Another suspenseful scene, in which the Texan is accused of murdering the encased black man, is never explained. Then suddenly at the very end of the chapter, everyone abruptly departs. The only tantalizing clue is that "the Texan drove everybody in the ward back to duty." Whether or not this is connected to the alleged murder will remain an issue for future chapters. Clearly, the discontinuity of this chapter leaves much room for plot development and explication for the rest of the novel.
Chapter 2: Clevinger
Chapter 2: Analysis
Chapter 2 introduces Clevinger, a foil to Yossarian. Clevinger comes to represent the defender of the ideas of social and political institutions and a person indoctrinated that their impersonality is part of life. He argues that war is impersonal, and everyone has to become used to it. Yossarian, on the other hand, represents the individual who protests against such mass destruction, even if that destruction is not intentionally targeted against him in particular but any individual. Under normal conditions,
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Yossarian would be considered paranoid, claiming that everyone wants to kill him. However, under the circumstances of war, his declarations are strikingly accurate.
Yossarian's loud declarations of being various personas will become particularly important later, when a psychiatrist diagnoses him as having split personalities. In the second case, though, Yossarian is simply being misinterpreted. What is amazing, at first, is the fairly dismissive reaction Yossarian receive. In a camp where each person has his own method of madness, Yossarian fits nicely into this atmosphere of madness. Presently, what seems to be a person's eccentricity will change Yossarian and the other men's lives. Nately's whore will try to kill Yossarian, McWatt's habit of flying a few inches from the surface will result in Kid Sampson's death.. In the end, it will be not the seemingly major but hollow decisions that will affect the men, but the unimportant details and a few superficially unimportant incidents. First, Yossarian's ìinaneî declarations that the cooks are poisoning the food will be justified. Indeed, Corporal Snark is putting cakes of GI soap into the mashed potatoes, and most of the men do not even notice the difference in taste and clamor for moreóalthough it is giving them diarrhea. Second, Yossarian's gorging on what seems to be luxurious food points to an important development in the plot: M&M Enterprises. Finally there is the random mentioning that Colonel Cathcart has increased the number of missions required to go homeóa recurring theme throughout the rest of the book.
Chapter 3: Havermeyer
Chapter 3: Analysis
Chapter 3 discusses in greater detail the characters that were only briefly mentioned before, including Orr and Havermeyer. The incidents with which they are introduced will becomes their trademarks. Orr, Yossarian's roommate, is engaged in peculiar activities, such as putting together a faucet with almost invisible pieces, putting apples in his cheeks, and being beaten by a whore. For the time, these incidents will remain obscure, although Orr will bring them up again right before he escape. Only after Orr's disappearance will Yossarian realize what the motive is behind such strange behavior. Whether Orr's madness actually lets him see the light or whether Orr is a brilliant man who can pretend to be mad, is never clearly answered.
Two other episodes form the terrible web of events for the book. First, the strange infighting between Generals Peckem and Dreedle is now mentioned. Their attempts to outwit each other will result in strange incidents such as the T.S. Eliot episode and the eventual promotion of Lieutenant Scheisskopf. Second, Doc Daneeka's refusal to help Yossarian (and later the other men) be grounded because of illness or insanity, allows Colonel Cathcart to trap his men into flying an unbelievable number of missions.
Colonel Cargill, General Peckem's colonel, represents who enters the military ranks: a loser. To prove his obtuseness further, he orders his men to enjoy themselves at the U.S.O. shows, as if he controlled their emotions. His attempts to sound patriotic instead prove his stupidity. He is even so dull that he does not even recognize his own men are making fun of him when they correct him. Such idiocity makes the reader wonder why he is in charge of the enlisted forces.
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Havermeyer, the title character, comes to stand for the brainless human being who has been converted into a war machine. Unlike Yossarian who is sensitive about the possibility of dying and insisting upon retaining his independent thinking, Havermeyer cares nothing about his own life or his mend and readily accedes to all the demands made by his superiors. Havermeyer is not brainless like Aarfy, though. He has a cruel, destructive streak. War has become a game in Havermeyer's mind. He takes a disgusting pleasure in shooting field mice with a 0.45 This inhumane, bloody act only demonstrates how war and death can destroy people's sensitivity and caring for each other.
Chapter 4: Doc Daneeka
Chapter 4: Analysis
In chapter 4, several important institutions are satirized: the medical establishment, the military bureaucracy, and the officers. Doc Daneeka comes to represent the ineffective doctor, whose only interests are improving his financial and personal situation rather than caring for his patients. The medical treatment, painting gums and toes with gentian violent solution, is quite absurd and, of course, ineffective. Oddly enough, the doctor himself is a hypochondriac and is too concerned with all the potential illnesses that he has to care about the diseases of others. However, Doc Daneeka is not only useless as a healthcare provider; he also fails to provide his patients with the emotional empathy and compassion they need. Despite Yossarian's pleas for help, Doc Daneeka ignores him or coldly blows him off with the strange ìcatch-22î argument. It seems as if his soul and heart have died, and as it will turn out, Doc Daneeka will indeed symbolically die later in the book.
The T.S. Eliot incident exposes rather humorously the infighting between Generals Peckem and Dreedle. Oddly enough, the entire cause is an arbitrary memo by Colonel Cargill. Since there is so much paperwork, even Colonel Cargill fails to recognize the answer to his own question in the memo. Instead, the answer triggers yet another strange skirmish between the two generals. The poor communication among officers is only underscored when General Peckem suspects it might be a code.
The military bureaucracy is not only seen as cumbersome but also stifling. It prefers to remain on the safe path and seeks to stop people such as Yossarian who ask disturbing questions, such as where is Snowden, the man who died on the Avignon mission. Instead, they prefer to keep the men's brains happy and dull by preoccupying them with activities such as the skeet-shooting range.
The skeet-shooting range symbolizes the place where the men internally rot into the soldier in whiteóan empty shell. As the men learn to tolerate boredom and discomfort, they lose their sense of pleasure and love for life. These characteristics make tem more apathetic to life and willing to fly missions. Eventually, these feelings reach such a point that officers such as General Dreedle and Colonel Cathcart have completely lost their sexual appetites. On the other hand, those men such as Yossarian who retain their feelings and realizes the danger of flying these missions, refuse to give up their lives for such a worthless cause.
Chapter 5: Chief White Halfoat
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Chapter 5: Analysis
As in the previous chapters, Chapter 5 continues to introduce the characters as well as open up new motifs that will figure into the rest of the book. The use of foreshadowing and episodic narration is still pervasive, but Chapter 5 includes several particularly important episodes that will drive the book and resurface continuously. Perhaps the most critical plot development is Yossarian's seemingly tangential but emotionally intense flashback of Snowden's death. Amazingly, enough, this memory is triggered entirely by Yossarian's entrance into the bomber. While this arbitrary flashback is not clearly explained, it will reappear again throughout the books in bits and pieces, particularly in the episodes involving death or destruction, and will explain itself. However, the importance of the memory of Snowden's death cannot be understated. It symbolizes Yossarian's fears of the casualties and the frailty of human life. Later on, in other incidents involving
Two other major notions are also introduced. First, Doc Daneeka proposes the notion of a ìcatch-22,î as a means of justifying the never-ending process of the men having to fly missions. While irrational behavior and a peculiar rationalization has been pervasive throughout the book, it has not be labeled until now, and, as will be seen later, be the prevailing philosophy in this war Yossarian is protesting against. It is only brought up briefly now but will refigure again, in a more prominent fashion, later on.
Another character from the camp is also introduced in greater detail. Chief White Halfoat, provides yet another opportunity to expose another terrible facet of military life and American culture. While racism was hinted at in the first chapter when the Texan was accused of murdering the soldier in white because he was black, racial discrimination is more directly addressed here. Chief White Halfoat cleverly points out the irony that Native Americans are the true Americans, as they were here first. Despite the exaggerations, the mood and essential complaints that Chief White Halfoat have much historical precedence. The Native Americans being wrongfully driven onto reservation, denied basic rights of citizenship and being treated as subhuman, and worst of all the
However, the style in which this racial discrimination is described prevents the reader from being offended and lessens the blow with hyperbolic humor. Yossarian claims quite correctly that most of Chief White Halfoat's anecdotes are inaccurate or simply made up. Yet his ìstory-tellingî is funny and even forgivable. Chief White Halfoat is not seeking to lecture to Yossarian in a dry cut sense. Rather, he is drawing on the ancient oral tradition of his ancestors. As Yossarian remarks, Chief White Halfoat is simply telling what had been told to him by his family and parents, and simply did not know the truth.
Chapter 6: Hungry Joe
Chapter 6: Analysis
Chapter 6 touches on a very important theme: the war is a nightmare. This deception will reappear at the end of the book when Yossarian is running madly about the ruins of Rome, looking for the kid sister. Hungry Joe's nightmares come to symbolize the
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men's fear of being killed. Just as Hungry Joe denies that he has nightmares when he wakes up, similarly the other men, except for Yossarian, deny that they are humans and admit their fear of being killed in the fighting.
This inability to reject authority and to stand up for themselves and is exemplified in both Doc Daneeka and ex-P.F.C. Wintergreen. The two men create the fallacious argument of catch-22 when Yossarian tries to argue himself out of the ever-increasing number of missions. Much of Colonel Cathcart's success in having the men fly so many comes Colonel Cathcart's doing, but that of the entire military bureaucracy.
Two incidents that will be explained later are worth noting note. First, Chief White Halfoat has managed to make Captain Flume's life into a living nightmare by threatening to kill him. Chief White Halfoat takes pleasure in this metamorphoses of Captain Flume from a happy and nice to a disturbed and agonizing. This episode presents a particularly nice parallel to Hungry Joe's ongoing nightmares. Second, the random mention of Colonel Cathcart telling Major Major that he is the new squadron commander will have important implications in future chapters, because this too will transform him from a happy, accepted man to a paranoid outcast.
Chapter 7: McWatt
Chapter 7: Analysis
Although Chapter 7 is entitled McWatt, it instead recalls the origins of what will eventually become M&M Enterprises. The new mess officer, Milo, is inspired when he discovers that Yossarian's friends are selling fruit on the black market. Like most good businessman, he recognizes an opportunity when he sees it. His initial transaction with McWatt indicates the nature of what sort of business Milo will run. McWatt is utterly unaware that any transaction has ever gone on. Instead, he is left clueless and bewildered. Likewise, Yossarian is given totally useless product from the exchangeóa quarter of bedsheet. This unequal, manipulative trading will become the standard of Milo's business.
Milo is the star character in this chapter while McWatt represents the first of what will be a series of people Milo dupes and leaves clueless. Milo has a quick mind and is ruthlessly practical. He soon recognizes McWatt is the sort that can be dealt with unevenly, without the victim even realizing what is going on. This attitude differs from that of Yossarian, who generously gives away all of his fruit. These two different type of deals will reappear when Milo bombs his own outfit ìfor businessî reasons, and Yossarian reacts with honor.
Yet Yossarian should not be dismissed as a clueless jerk, like McWatt. He is quite capable of deception. He confides into Milo that he actually does not eat any of the liver because he wants to remain ìsick enough.î When Milo inquires about his condition, Yossarian answers Milo as enigmatically as Milo does when McWatt enters with the torn bedsheet. However, there is the subtle but important distinction between Yossarian's and Milo's deceptions. Yossarian's motive is to protect himself from danger while Milo's is to capitalize off others. As the plot develops, Yossarian, for all his flaws, will be seen as a man who respects human life and will, at any cost, protect it, whereas Milo will be willing to pursue the money trail at any cost.
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Chapter 8: Lieutenant Scheisskopf
Chapter 8: Analysis
Chapter 8 introduces one of the most important figures in the book: Lieutenant Scheisskopf. As the book progresses, he comes to represent the despicable, military type: the brainless commander who gives orders to his men, is concerned with fanfare and bravado, and not meaningful military action, and is the stupid person who somehow manages to be promoted. His name in German literally means "shit-head".
Also Lieutenant Scheisskopf's strange obsession with parades will reappear each time he is promoted. His fascination with superficial grandeur points to a hollow mind. However, one of the most humorous concerns is when Lieutenant Scheisskopf is too busy trying to plan his parade that he ignores the amorous advances of his wife. This apathy towards sexual pleasure is also present in the other officers such as Colonel Cathcart and General Dreedle. Such behavior reflects the effect of war: an inability to have pleasure and a desensitization to life. When Lieutenant Scheisskopf accedes to his wife's innuendoes, his whipping of her demonstrates a destructive, cruel streak in what should be a pleasurable, relaxing activity.
The other major event in this chapter is the inquisition of Clevinger. Rather than having the trials being based on justice, Lieutenant Scheisskopf uses the Action Board inquiry as a personal vendetta against Clevinger. Here the logic and concept of due process are violated. Rather than being charged with a crime and then having evidence presented against him, Lieutenant Scheisskopf decides to create false testimony in an attempt to make up a crime so Clevinger can be punished. This same vindictive, unjust pattern will be used again in the inquisition of the chaplain.
Chapter 9: Major Major Major Major
Chapter 9: Analysis
The evolution of Major Major from what should have been a normal, mediocre child to a paranoid, insane officer points to an underlying trend among all the soldiers. Basically Major Major is a man who finds himself trapped by the circumstances. His father tricks him into thinking that he is a normal child until it is too late. People think that he looks like Henry Fonda. Major Major finds himself appointed to a position, which he does not even aspire to at all, that forces him to ostracize himself and deal with paperwork. Worst of all, he is victimized by the infuriated Captain Black.
The father of Major Major represents another of the person who professes American values but like the Texan and Colonel Cathcart, is quite despicable. In this case, the father represents the rural farmer who upholds traditional values. Yet underneath all of these trappings, he is just as deceptive and cruel as Colonels Cathcart and Korn or General Peckem. The values he pretends to aspire to, small government, support for small farmers, and hard core religious beliefs, are in conflict with what he actually practices. This belief will be emphasized at the end of the book when Colonel Cathcart admits he has only flown four missions but coercing his men to fly eighty so he can be promoted to general.
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Major Major's new position exemplifies the faults in the military bureaucracy. First his work is quite unclear and later General Peckem confides into Colonel Cathcart that ìdelegation of responsibilityî means that the work is just passed on to someone lower. Thus Major Major ends up with loads of meaningless paperwork. This paperwork can only stop when the military bureaucracy accomplishes its purposeówhen Major Major rejects his personal identity. To emphasize this, Major Major wears a disguises and refuses to see anyone, because he no longer exists. At last, Colonel Cathcart ha accomplished his purpose: to completely obliterate the existence of a person and leave behind a malleable, unidentified soul.
Chapter 10: Wintergreen
Chapter 10: Analysis
Chapter 10 is one of the more amusing chapters and provides further explanations, or contradictions, to incidents discussed. The briefly mentioned dead man in Yossarian's tent is now given a name, Mudd. However, the refusal to recognize him as a person, symbolizes the military institution's denial of the meaning of human life of those who die. This deprivation of identity will be seen again in other characters, including the soldier in white and Major Major. In fact, this action points to the underlying, erroneous belief of the military bureaucracy that since their soldiers are no longer self-actualized human beings with lives of their own. They are just another expendable resource like oil or
The role of ex-P.F.C. Wintergreen is explained more fully here. He was mentioned earlier in the squabble between Generals Peckem and Dreedle. Another facet is now shown, that of a ìsnide little punkî who enjoys going AWOL. His pride is just as misdirected as Colonel Cathcart'sóhe gets pleasure out of his punishment to dig six-feet holes. This action of digging holes comes to symbolize Wintergreen's slow descent into the inferno and his sadistic pleasure he receives out of stirring up even more trouble with the military correspondence each time he returns. Wintergreen will come to play a subtle but critical role in following events, as he prevents Colonel Cathcart from becoming a general and thus causing indirectly the increase of the required number of missions, and the displacement of General Peckem by the newly promoted General Scheisskopf.
Chapter 11: Captain Black
Chapter 11: Analysis
Being personally vindictive can also take other forms besides Lieutenant Scheisskopf's method of persecution in the courts. In this chapter, Captain Black takes advantage of the ongoing war to drive his Glorious Loyalty oath campaign. He uses patriotism as an excuse to coerce his will upon the men. Gradually like Lieutenant Scheisskopf's infatuation with parades, Captain Black's obsession with the Glorious Loyalty Oath consumes not only his own life but even others. He wrongfully imposes upon the other men, and those who oppose him such as Milo and Doc Daneeka, are quickly forced upon submission. Justice and innocence of the victim are completely ignored in Captain Black's mad pursuit for revenge. His supervisors, Colonels Cathcart and Korn, refuse to take responsibility, and the unfortunate Major Major is
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left to fend for himself. What seems to have been an absurdly created paranoia by Major Major is now seen in the perspective of Captain Black's terrible actions against him.
The end of Glorious Loyalty Oath is particularly ironic. The basic denial of food unless they sign the oath makes no sense to Major ñ de Coverley. Ironically, Captain Black brings upon his own destruction when he invites Major ñ de Coverley. Strangely enough, the Major is described as a god with a white hair and Jehovean bearing. Figuratively speaking, he does act as a god when he saves the entire squadron from the dangerous clutches of Captain Black.
Chapter 12: Bologna
Chapter 12: Analysis
Chapter 12 exposes the weakness of the military bureaucracy: the poor communication within the military, the severe lack of common sense, and worst of all, the greed to get medals and promotions. This initial conversation among the officers point to their apathy. In fact, Colonel Cathcart is extremely relieved because he only wants the honor of having accomplished the mission. Whether any military effective action is taken does not matter as long as Colonel Cathcart earns the honor. Medals are not determined by merit but by politics. Amazingly enough, no one inquires about what seems to be a very unusual action. For some reason, the people in charge of the land operations are not in close communication with their airpower.
More importantly, though, Yossarian for the first time takes direct action against the military to stop flying more missions. This step foreshadows his future open refusal to not fly any more missions. His subsequent conversation with calving reveals that Yossarian refuses to conform to the institutional thought patterns. Instead Yossarian sees everything from the viewpoint of an individual whose main interest is to survive. Just as General Peckem sees General Dreedle as his enemy, Yossarian also sees anyone who tries to kill him as his enemy. Here, Clevinger plays the devil's advocate and takes on the institutional viewpoint that the people give up their self-identity and their duty to their own survival when they becomes soldiers. However, Colonel Cargill's and General Peckem's give evasive answers to why they are not fightingóthey are better administrators. So while Yossarian may seem strange to profess, the secret confidences to ex-P.F.C. Wintergreen that the officers are trying to kill them indicate that Yossarian's suspicions are justified.
Chapter 13: Major -- de Coverley
Chapter 13: Analysis
Chapter 13 has two major incidents in the plot. The first is Major ñ de Coverley's peculiar habit of renting apartments with lots of beautiful women for the enlisted men and the officers. Ironically, this eccentricity will end up haunting Yossarian when Nately meets the whore who later tries to kill Yossarian to avenge Nately's death. More importantly (for now), Colonels Cathcart and Korn also try to cover up Yossarian's evasive action by promoting him to captain and giving him a medal. While these two incidents do not seem to bear any relationship to each other, this
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strange habit and Yossarian's accolades will be intimately tied together at the end of the book when the officers threaten to use the whore incident to deprive Yossarian of his awards.
The apartments represent a false paradise for the men, a haven from the insanity and meaninglessness of the war. This contrasts very heavily with the Eden, later described in Chapters 20 and 25, that the chaplain enjoys. Whereas the chaplain elevates his wife to a Beatrice prototype, Yossarian treasures very highly the maid in the lime-colored panties who lays for all the men without any discrimination.
A strange logic pervades the book. Rather than sensibly punishing Yossarian for his evasive actions, Colonels Cathcart and Korn decide to award him a medal so they won't be caught
Chapter 14: Kid Sampson
Chapter 14: Analysis
In this chapter, Yossarian continues to aggressively fight against flying more missions. This time he tears apart the intercom. Admiral Kid Sampson, the innocent victim of this plot, is only to eager to comply and turn back. The conversation between Yossarian and Kid Sampson is especially telling about Kid Sampson. Although everything is going quite well, Yossarian quickly dupes Kid Sampson into thinking that something is wrong. Underneath his cheerful, happy-go-lucky veneer, Kid Sampson is revealed to be just like Yossarian, eager to g home for any petty reason. As will be shown later, the entire squadron secretly are Yossarians inside. They simply lack the courage to openly express it.
The beach represents yet another superficial paradise in the book, much like the hospital and the apartments. There is a false sense of lull; although it appears to be a haven, it turns out to the sight of a disturbing scene to Yossarianóthe presence of the bomb squad. Yossarian incorrectly assumes that death is awaiting him already. Actually, his timing is off since the mission is only a milk run. Rather his terrible premonition about death will come when he least expects it, when McWatt accidentally slices Kid Sampson in half with his airplane
Chapter 15: Piltchard and Wren
Chapter 15: Analysis
The digression of the plot in mood and content is particularly noticeable in this chapter. It begins with the mellow, cheerful speech made by Piltchard and Wren then reaches an abrupt, horrifying climax with Yossarian and his crew in the cockpit. Then without warning, the drama completely collapses when the men return safely and silly Orr safely putts back into the field.
The pair featured in the this chapter, Piltchard and Wren, represent the do-gooders who obediently and blissfully follow the institution's orders. They never question the commands of the institution and their constant association with each other throughout the book indicates their lack of individuality, as compared to the very independent-
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thinking Yossarian. Yossarian's reaction to being in the cockpit . While Aarfy has his own chapter, he figures prominently into the scene as being the dope who fails to the recognize the danger his life is in, and is just as oblivious as Piltchard and Wren. His lack of sensitivity is demonstrated when Yossarian punches him, and he does not respond at all.
Chapter 15 starts off with the satirical tone typically used throughout the book. However, the extensive scene of Yossarian flying in combat dramatically alters its viewpoint from the macroscopic view to the microscopic one of what exactly is going on in Yossarian's mind. For once the reader fully appreciates that Yossarian's arguments with Clevinger that everyone is trying to kill him are in earnest and not just to get out of a war.
Chapter 16: Luciana
Chapter 16: Analysis
In this chapter, Yossarian engages in a search for pleasure, which is symbolized by Luciana. She represents a curious person who lives on the periphery of temptation and fulfillment. On one hand, she talks dirty with various men but not with Yossarian, whom she persuades to dance with her and buy her dinner. At last when Yossarian thinks that the game is up and has won her over, she unexpectedly departs. The evening continues to be filled with twists. Once again, what appears to be mere eccentricities turn out to affect the plot in crucial ways. First, Aarfy refuses to sleep with ìnice girlsî and will not pay for sex. His consequent dissuasion of Luciana not to sleep around creates much suspense, as the reader wonders whether she will return to Yossarian or not. When she does, then another strange habitóthis time Hungry Joe's insane desire to photograph naked women having sexóinterferes with what should be a normal evening of love making. This strange trend of seemingly unimportant details becoming turning points in the plot will grow even more important as the book progresses.
The strange logic of catch-22 pervades Yossarian's and Luciana's about getting married is a mix of infatuation and absurd rationalization. Luciana insists that Yossarian is crazy to want to marry her, and he laughs back that she is crazy not to marry him. Later, his mad, futile search parallels his claustrophobia in the plane and fear of death when flying his missions. Just as Yossarian punching Aarfy in the plane out of confusion and frustration, Yossarian likewise madly throws himself onto the maid in lime-colored pants. This desperation for pleasure, no matter who the woman may be, points to Yossarian's need for enjoyment and sensation in these times of cruelty and destruction.
Just as Luciana stands for the unattainable woman who leaves Yossarian behind, almost as if she were just a dream, the maid in lime green pants provides a source of pleasure for the entire squadron, as she will sleep with anyone. Ironically, though, just as she is the symbol of sensuality, she is also tied to death. Yossarian notices Snowden's bag just right outside the door, as Snowden had also seen her before his death. Later, in a reverse situation, Aarfy rapes and kills the maidójust because he does not want to pay for sex. This future incident serves as an antiparallel to Aarfy's
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strange action in which he dissuades Luciana from sleeping with him, although she will do so for free.
Chapter 17: The Soldier in White
Chapter 17: Analysis
The hospital seems to represent a haven of safety and sanity away from the dangers and senselessness of the war. Yet this appearance of rationality turns out to be only a faÁade. The nurses waste their time diligently attending to the soldier in white, who turns out to be empty. Doc Daneeka declares his mission is not to save lives but to save himself from being sent to the Pacific. The lack of emotional support for the men and the feeling that they are being protected from death create a delusional obsession with disease and illness in Yossarian and Hungry Joe. What starts off as a natural concern for one's life and health turns out into a craze to protect oneself from death. The war has suddenly made them realize how fragile life is and how close people always are to the brink of death, and their inability to accept sickness and death from disease (than in war) as a natural process of life results in their insane behavior. Doctors are not immune from this fear either, as Doc Daneeka is very susceptible to Yossarian's sarcastic suggestion that he has Ewing's tumor. Ironically, these men are quite physically healthy but now have made themselves mentally sick by their paranoid fears.
The question of justice in the world comes up repeatedly in this chapter. As the men in the hospital talk about illness, they come to realize that disease and death randomly chose their victims, without any regard to the justice. The same lack of fair treatment arises when Yossarian approaches Doc Daneeka and demands to be grounded. Doc Daneeka is unfairly concerned with saving himself from being banished to the Pacific, and not about the lives of the men. His unwillingness as a doctor to make a sacrifice to protest the unjust increase of missions is especially ironic, because doctors, especially in wartime, are generally envisioned as idealists devoted to the lives of wounded and wronged men.
The main character, the soldier in white, is a curious plot device. Having been briefly alluded to in Chapter One, he is explained somewhat more clearly in this chapter. However, it is still unclear what exactly is his role in the book. For the first time, the idea that no one is inside, and the case is just a deception comes up. Yossarian's suggestion that it could be Mudd, the dead man inside his tent, points to a terrible possibility. Perhaps this man all bandaged up is simply a rendition of a mummy. Another hypothesis is that the soldier in white is the fate of whichever soldier is so unfortunate to get caught in the middle of all the fire. As the artillery captain appropriately points out, this figure is simply a ìmiddlemanî and should just be eliminated. Essentially, the soldier in white comes to represent the former civilian who is tossed into the war and, in the process, is deprived of his spirit and identity and transformed into a hollow, dead soldier.
Chapter 18: The Soldier Who Saw Everything Twice
Chapter 18: Analysis
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In Chapter 18, the medical institution becomes the primary target of the satire. The doctors are unable to diagnose the strange disease of Giuseppe. Despite this, they decide to declare a diagnosis anyway. This ignorance and the absurd panic that results from this unknown disease only prove that the doctors' role is superficial and useless. Strangely enough, the doctors' inability to do any worthwhile treatment is actually quite fortunate because most of the men are feigning illness and do not need assistance.
Moreover, the doctors' medical ignorance and unjustified arrogance assist Yossarian as he devises plans to remain in the hospital. Initially the English doctor is the one who tells Yossarian that a liver condition is incurable. Similarly when Yossarian decides to copy off the man who feigns an strange illness, the doctors are so afraid of having him die and being exposed that they keep in the ward. However, when one of the doctors threatens to expose Yossarian's liver condition as fake, he decides to take part in the doctor's scheme.
The scene with Giuseppe's family only proves the lack of scruples and consideration of the doctors. Rather than breaking the truth to them, he takes pleasure in deceiving the family and receiving credit for this. The grief of the family is somewhat lightened with the humorous confusion of their son's own name. Instead of realizing that they have been deceived, the family members simply make sincere but inapplicable comments such as he cannot be pushed around because he is Italian. This is especially ironic because Yossarian is an Assyrian who does not believe in God.
Chapter 19: Colonel Cathcart
Chapter 19: Analysis
The Saturday Evening Post incident mocks the use of religion during war. Rather than praying on behalf of the Christian ideals of brotherhood and love, the men seem to be asking God to save their lives. As Colonel Cathcart points out, the ìpreachingî is fairly useless in these times of mass destruction, and what are necessary are economical, practical prayers. In times of war, religion does not provide ideals but instead, for the ever-opportunistic Colonel Cathcart, a chance to gain publicity and fame. Much to his shock, he discovers from those who are devout, such as the chaplain, that religion is not a means which can be bent to his convenience.
While Colonel Cathcart's offering of a plum tomato to the chaplain seems fairly unimportant at this moment, this episode will play a crucial role when Colonel Cathcart later accuses the chaplain of stealing a plum tomato. It is interesting to note how this petty occurrence will be twisted into a melodramatic theft, when the officers want to victimize the chaplain. Likewise, the other slight comment that the chaplain makes about atheism not being against the law will also be turned against him.
Colonel Cathcart forms a paradoxical image of an officer who has no values or his own judgment and can only evaluate himself based on the others. He has a very limited view on life, as he prides himself on foolish petty things. Like Yossarian, he suffers from paranoia but instead of being afraid of being killed, is afraid of people endangering his position and attempts to be promoted. He lacks any kindness or compassion as he mercilessly increases the number of required missions, in a mad
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effort to become a general. Later, the colonel's distortion of the minor episodes of the plum tomato and atheism will reveal that he is also a destructive, cruel man who is trying to avenge the chaplain's indirect refusal to assist his mission to seek more power.
Finally, Colonel Cathcart and the chaplain serve as foils to each other. Since religion is usually associated with persecution, it is quite ironic since Colonel Cathcart is the one who quite tolerant of atheists and enlisted men. Rather the chaplain is the one who expresses tolerance for everyone despite his religious beliefs or military background. Colonel's conception of religion is based on the military bureaucracy. He sees the enlisted men as almost separate species, who need to be kept separate from the officers. This exclusivity and lack of respect is diametrically opposite to the egalitarian and accommodating attitude of the chaplain.
Chapter 20: Corporal Whitcomb
Chapter 20: Analysis
Chapter 20 introduces the material which will late refigure in the trial of the chaplain. Seemingly unimportant episodes such as the plum tomato episode and the Washington Irving signature on the letters and Major Major's correspondence, will become extremely critical when the chaplain is grilled by Colonels Cathcart and Korn. The other important aspect is the character of Corporal Whitcomb, who is the foil to the chaplain. Corporal Whitcomb, like the officers, seeks to win the good graces of his superiors by falsifying evidence against his hated superior, the chaplain. Whereas the chaplain quietly pities Corporal Whitcomb, Corporal Whitcomb openly usurps the chaplain's power and seeks to earn the gratitude of his superiors to receive promotions.
The description of the chaplain's home uncannily resembles Eden with its flowers, beauty, and serenity. Like Eve, the chaplain fails to recognize the dangers of the diabolical Corporal Whitcomb, or at least is ineffective in fighting him off. On one hand, Corporal Whitcomb tells the chaplain of all the wrongful charges against the latter but then denies having any hand in itóand even claims that he is the chaplain's best friend. Such hypocritical behavior confuses the chaplain. Gradually, Corporal Whitcomb plants doubts into the innocent chaplain about God and his religion. Eventually, like Eve, the chaplain will discover sin and will enjoy it without even realizing the evil cause of the process.
Chapter 21: General Dreedle
Chapter 21: Analysis
Chapter 21 focuses upon two major themes: first, the overzealous pro-American spirit, and second, the eccentricity and cruelty of the military bureaucracy. Colonel Cathcart's initial, angry reaction at seeing Yossarian's name reflects the prevalent mood among other officers. Immediately, he assumes that because Yossarian is a foreign name, that he is a traitor. Like Captain Black, Colonel Cathcart has no justification for such a belief. This prejudice, along with his paranoia, also foreshadows what will drive the communist witchhunts after World War II:
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unjustified fears and a need to purge what was considered ìun-Americanî based on an agenda of political vindication such as that of Colonel Cathcart's. His paranoia also differs greatly from that of Yossarian's or even Major Major's. First Colonel Cathcart's fears are not based on any actual events. While Yossarian may be taking an extreme view of the war when he declares that everyone is trying to kill him, after reading his viewpoint of a bombing mission from the cockpit, at least one can understand how the human instinct to survive has overwhelmed him. Colonel Cathcart, though, suffers from an egotistical need to become a general. He cannot trust anyone above him because he sees others as more successful than him, and thus depriving him of his status. Anyone who is equal to him is his competitor, and anyone below him is trying to subvert him. His inability to trust anyone results in a strange mania in which he seeks to attract attention by increasing the number of missions to an absurd amount. However, Colonel Cathcart is not the only one suffering from such an egotistical mania. Colonel Korn's moment of self-importance when performing the insignificant activity of synchronizing the watches, parallels Colonel's Cathcart arrogant notion that he should increase the number of missions to a thousand.
Finally, the title character, General Dreedle, comes to represent the boorishness and cruel autocratic nature of the military. On one hand, he ignores Yossarian's utterly absurd behavior of receiving his medal naked. Yet, he arbitrarily orders Major Danby to be put to death immediately while he is performing the routine of synchronizing the squadron's watches. The timid Colonel Moodus represents the few people who have the audacity to speak up. Much to his shock, General Dreedle realizes that he is not a dictator, as he had thought earlier. This is particularly ironic, because one of the reasons that World War II was being fought was to prevent the world from being controlled by maniacs such as Hitler and Mussolini. Instead, the war has allowed other dictators, such as General Dreedle, to flourish.
Chapter 22: Milo the Mayor
Chapter 22: Analysis
Chapter 22 has two important parts: the first is another flashback by Yossarian of Snowden's death and the second is a description of Milo and his ever-expanding syndicate. In fact, at the end of this chapter, Milo purchases the Egyptian cotton. The connection among all three pieces is not clear for now. However, when Milo creates havoc by bombing his own side to be rid of the unprofitable crop of Egyptian cotton, Yossarian reacts to the death of the innocent people as he does to Snowden's death, with fear and indignation. Likewise, the superiors' death will be the same. Milo denies any responsibility and claims that it is good for the syndicate. Colonel Cathcart will reason to himself that someone will die in the mission, so it might as well be his men, and cares only for earning enough glory to become a general.
Another peculiar paradox of this chapter is that despite his great political power, Milo seems to be unable to obtain them a room. The reader has to wonder whether this is a subterfuge by Milo to coerce Yossarian and Orr to fly everywhere for his business interactions. What is amazing, though, that just through his business transactions, how much Milo has converted this economic power into political power. The seemingly unprofitable transactions for the syndicate turns out to be personally profitable for Milo as he slowly gains control of the world. Ironically, while both sides in the war
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are engaged in pointless military engagements and inner squabbling for medals, Milo is effectively taking over the world without anyone noticing.
Chapter 23: Nately's Old Man
Chapter 23: Analysis
The setting for these strange incidents are the apartments, which are labeled ìa paradise.î The description of this place will heavily contrast with that in Chapter 39 when Yossarian returns and finds the apartments and city destroyed. Another parallel situation of beauty and horrific arises in comparing Nately's old man and Nately's father. This polar opposition, though, will hint at the abrupt switch Nately will undergo after he wins over the whore. He transforms from a nice affable person like his dad to a dominating nasty man who tries to control the whore.
The conversation itself provides much food for though. The old man questions all of the beliefs that Nately has been taught to believe as a child. He points out the wasted expenditure of wars and argues that losing wars is actually more profitable in the long run. He also questions the point of having ideals and practically switches sides each time to stay alive. The old man correctly sees Major ñde Coverley for what he is for, an useless, stupid looking beggar. These practical notions and refusal to confirm to the institutional thinking bear a remarkable similarity to the Yossarian's strange arguments such as everyone who is trying to kill him is the enemy. In fact, the arguments between Yossarian and Clevinger nicely parallel Nately and the old man. In each case, the outcast is dismissed by most people as crazy and his beliefs absurd whereas the man who dresses well and speaks the thoughts of the institution. Nevertheless, while the declarations of the former seem subversive and radical, they turn out to be true in strange world of catch-22.
Nately's characters and background are explained quite well at the end of the chapter. While he has the veneer of sophistication, his isolated, elitist childhood had caused him to not experience any hardships or be able to recognize evil. At first, Nately and Clevinger have similar behavior patterns but their backgrounds and reasoning lead to different fates. Both have remarkable faith in their superiors and believe every word they say. Nately is very upset when he discovers it is the old man who injures Major ñ de Coverley's up and defends him passionately against the old man's criticism. Likewise, despite Yossarian's contradictions, Clevinger wholeheartedly believes Lieutenant Scheisskopf when the latter says he does not mind being corrected. However, while Clevinger may lack common sense and suffer from intellectual isolation, he is naÔve and gullible like Nately. Nately without any intellectual development cannot think for himself.
Chapter 24: Milo
Chapter 24: Analysis
The rapid growth of Milo and his syndicate are documented in this chapter. As Milo expands and slowly takes over the world, clearly his success depends upon the greed
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of the officers, who are more interested in eating delicious food than winning the war. This abuse of power, along with other previous examples, highlights that the officers are selfish and are using the name of the country and patriotism to coerce their subordinates into furthering their own interests. If nothing else, Milo's success on both sides proves that greed is universal. Moreover, people are too eager to believe Milo's fallacious argumentóeven if they sound too good to be true. The wiping out of the slogan written on the airplanes such as ìCourageî and ìTruth,î and their replacement by the label ìM&M Enterprisesî prove that money, not ideals, run the war. If there is a profit to be made, then its transaction is justified. For Milo, every military operation is a financial endeavor in which someone can profit, and it might as well be him.
However, the Egyptian cotton fiasco and Milo's subsequent self-bombing mission underscore how most people are willing to overlook atrocities conducted on even themselves, if the price is high enough. Yossarian, though, recognizes Milo's false justification and continues to protest against the death of Mudd. Appropriately, the two men witness the burial of Snowden, who had died because Colonel Cathcart had volunteered his men for the dangerous missions, just to win accolades for himself.
The seemingly disparate episodes in Chapter 22 of Yossarian's flashback and then his insane trek with Milo are now tied together. Milo in many ways resembles Colonel Cathcart, especially in their attitudes' towards men's lives. They are expendable when it comes to achieving whatever goals they wish. This truth will be underscored when, at the end of the book, Milo and Colonel unite together to run the syndicate.
Chapter 25: The Chaplain
Chapter 25: Analysis
Unlike many of the other chapters, much of chapter 25 actually does center around the character listed in the title. Its mood and content are also much more introspective than the more descriptive and arbitrary narration generally used throughout the book. The pace of the plot slows down considerably, relatively speaking, since much of it is concerned with the more troubling issues such as the existence and omnipotence of God, the worth of a man's life, and the power of memory. The last two, in particular, are the driving forces behind Yossarian's refusal to fly more missions and his nightmares of Snowden's death. The conversation between the chaplain and Yossarian is particularly interesting. It touches on the confusion of the timeline created by the war. The chaplain has lost a sense of when certain events has occurred, which not coincidentally, is reflected in the disjunction of the retelling of the incidents throughout the entire book.
The chaplain represents the conformist era with its ìfamily valuesî now forgotten or abandoned in light of the war. He longs for his wife and does not sleep with the various prostitutes to satiate his physical desire. He feels displaced from this insane, cruel world of war and cherishes his Eden away from this mess. Unfortunately, this Eden has its serpentóCorporal Whitcomb who seeks to subvert the authority of the kind, good chaplain. Rather than serving the holy chaplain, Corporal Whitcomb instead goes the diabolical Colonel Cathcart. In turn for his betrayal, Colonel Cathcart gives him a promotion to Sergeant. The third character touched on great detail in this chapter, Captain Flume, represents the downfall of the man who has committed a sin.
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Like Adam and Eve who suffer after being banished from Paradise, Captain Flume is in fear of life, cold, and starving. While he too lives in the woods, he is suffering from malnutrition and freezing. There are a couple of ironic differences, though. Captain Flume does not depend upon the grace of God or Nature to survive, but rather the corrupt food of Milo's M&M Enterprises. Also, he eagerly anticipates the dark time, wintertime, because he predicts that Chief White Halfoat will die of pneumonia, and he can return the camp.
The characters' views about religion indicate ambivalence, if not outright spite. General Peckem abruptly switches from an attitude of inclusion of the chaplain in the mess hall to all-out exclusion. Even the chaplain himself wonders about the existence of God and whether he is even a good chaplain. His mind is also affected by the common, nonsectarian trends. He questions why the Bible is so special and compares it to other literature books, either British or American books from the nineteenth century. The choices are particularly interesting because they focus upon characters, such as Ethan Frome, who are trapped in life-threatening or personally agonizing situations because of ill luck or social and historical circumstances. The final sentence that the prophetic Captain Flume is waiting for the winter indicates the dark episodes that will haunt the book in the chapters to come.
Chapter 26: Aarfy
Chapter 26: Analysis
Chapter 26 is rather digressive. Aarfy is presented as a paradoxical character. On one hand, he has enough sense to pursue a rich girl and mocks Nately for his stupidity for falling in love with the whore; he can plan long-term, as he hopes to profit off of his friendship with Nately. Yet, Aarfy seems to lack common sense and to recognize the obvious. He constantly gets lost, whether it be in the air during a battle or on the streets of Rome. It is fair to wonder whether he is a dullard that he cannot hear and recognize when Yossarian is shot in the groin, or whether he is feigning this just to see Yossarian in pain.
The bed switching in the hospital is especially amusing. First, there is the complete disregard for individuality and military rank. Dunbar ìpullsî rank just to get a desirable bed. Despite his spite for military rank, Yossarian uses this to scare off an inferior warrant officer. When Yossarian tries to resume his former identity, he is denied this right by Nurse Cramer. This loss of self-identity is underscored when she tells Yossarian that he does not own his bodyóinstead this is the property of the U.S. government. This denial of basic human rights nicely summarizes the basis for the coercive power of the military bureaucracy and is especially hypocritical, because the basis of World War II was to restore basic human rights of the repressed.
Chapter 27: Nurse Duckett
Chapter 27: Analysis
The nominal title character, Nurse Duckett, only plays a tangential role. When Yossarian grabs her bosom, Major Sanderson the psychiatrist comes to investigate him. Yossarian engages in another subterfuge to try to get out flying missions. He
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succeeds in convincing the doctor that he is crazy. Ironically, while Dunbar creates the havoc that attracts so much attention to Yossarian in first place, Dunbar's earlier bedswitching creates so much confusion that A. Fortiori is dismissed rather than Yossarian.
Major Sanderson, the war psychiatrist, provides even more rational to satirize the medical institution. Like the other doctors, he is incompetent in his field and lacks common sense to figure out the obvious, such as Yossarian is not A. Fortiori or that Dunbar is the man next to Yossarian and not a persona of Yossarian. However, as a psychiatrist, Major Sanderson is also more amusing than the other doctors. He interprets all of Yossarian's actions as a sign of mental illness. Simple, meaningless actions such as Yossarian rejecting a cigar one blown up into being symptoms of insanity and analyzed in immense detail. As a follower of Freud, Major Sanderson tries to diagnose in light of sexual repression. His ignorance, though, results in absurdly false diagnoses such as Yossarian being impotent and only underscores the incompetence and untrustworthiness of the medical institution. Gradually, Yossarian begins to realize Major Sanderson's incompetence and decides to play a game with him so Yossarian can be grounded. The deception succeeds, but Yossarian's game fails, ironically, because of Major Sanderson's incompetenceóas he is convinced that Fortiori rather than Yossarian is actually mad. When Yossarian approaches Doc Daneeka to try to obtain leave from him, Doc Daneeka cruelly dismisses himófollowing the dangerous logic of catch-22.
Chapter 28: Dobbs
Chapter 28: Analysis
This chapter is particularly climactic as it parallels the initial encounter between Yossarian and Orr. The two men are again talking about the same odd subjectsóthe whore and Orr's constant crashes whenever he flies. Curiously, Orr is also engaged in the same seemingly fruitless activity of repairing the stove with its ever invisible parts. However, a crucial event has occurred since the initial conversation in the bookóOrr has picked up on the very absurd notion of rowing to Switzerland in a boat, using an oar that is as small as a Dixie spoon. Of course, this idea makes no sense whatsoever and moreover, appears to be a joke. However, Orr's subsequent disappearance forces the reader to seriously consider what is impossible has indeed happenedóOrr has indeed escaped in such an odd fashion.
The most important scene, though, is when Orr magically discovers all the wonderful goods that are available in the lifeboat. While the other men merely dismiss Orr as a loon, Orr retains his composureóhe may be acting or even be mad, but there is a method to his madness. Strangely, enough, Orr cleverly uses the logic of catch-22 to his advantage. Just as Colonel Cathcart indefinitely raises the number of missions each time but leaves an improbable hope for his men that they still might leave, Orr decides that against the odds, he can also hope that he too will escape under such insane conditions.
Dobbs, the title character, plays a very minor role in this chapter. His main function is as the narrator of the episode in which Orr discovers the food supplies in the lifeboat. Dobbs' attitude towards Orr is that of the normal person. He derides Orr as being a
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loon and merely laughs at the entire situation as being absurd. These comments reflect what would be ìnormalî under general conditions. However, the fact that Orr triumphs in the endóhe successfully escapes from the clutches of Colonel Cathcartópoints out that fighting fire with fire, in other words, the rationalization of catch-22 against itself, is only what can allow the individual to be saved from this frightful world.
Chapter 29: Peckem
Chapter 29: Analysis
Chapter 29 severely exploits not only the ineffectiveness of the military bureaucracy but also the abuse of powers by its officers, who seek only to glorify themselves at the expense of others' lives. Two figures appropriately represent the dangers of the military bureaucracy: General Peckem and Colonel Korn. General Peckem's verbosity satirizes the bombastic language. As the general himself admits, he really has no skills and is utterly incompetent. Rather he attempts to cover up his lack of skills by ìdelegating responsibilities,î or handing the work off and hoping that someone else can do it, and through his veneer of sophistication and intellectual powers. His conversation with Lieutenant Scheisskopf demonstrates the enormous contrast between the two characters. General Peckem tries to show off his brilliance through absurd, incomprehensible statements and superficially ingenious literary allusions. Lieutenant Scheisskopf is unbelievable practical and concerned with only one thingóparades. His defiant attitude and unhealthy obsession is the opposite of Colonel Cathcart's subservient adulation. Ironically, the promotion to general will be determined by any merit or pleasing General Peckem. Instead it will depend upon some seemingly unimportant paperwork.
Colonel Korn's speech at the end of the chapter shows a remarkably similar attitude to Colonel Cathcart's continuous increase of the mission. Just as Colonel Korn feels that the enemy brought their misery upon themselves and thus the troops should not feel guilty about bombing them, Colonel Cathcart feels that the troops have brought their misery upon themselves and must fly whatever number of missions he requires. This planned mission to bomb a small, almost invisible Italian mountain village highlights the empty fanfare of military operations. Moreover, the officers have no consideration for the lives of the innocent civilians or military strategy. Dunbar's and McWatt's practical advice are completely ignored, and Colonel Cathcart is more interested in getting a tight bomb formation to look good rather than achieving any real meaningful military action. Such a short-sighted, self-centered viewpoint only underscores the waste of human life for those who are fighting and the officers' desire to be promoted, no matter what the cost.
Chapter 30: Dunbar
Chapter 30: Analysis
As the incidents in the book slowly begin to come together, chapter 30 more directly addresses an underlying issue that has been feeding the tension throughout the entire book: how an ìautomatedî war brings out the primitive side and murderous rage of human beings. The description of the machine gun here is particularly apropos. It comes to represent the perfect killeróit has no emotions, regrets or qualms about
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death, and kills simply when pointed in the proper direction. Such cold-blooded ruthlessness naturally incites Yossarian's memory of Snowden's death. The introduction of this machine beautifully correlates with the incident of Kid Sampson's gruesome death. For the first, these well-tested soldiers are horrified at what death means. As members of the Air Corps, the men often do not witness death firsthand. However, the gruesome slicing apart of Kid Sampson reminds them of the blood and guts that are shed when victims die.
In this chapter, the reader also witnesses the physical decay of Dunbar that reflects his mental decay from playing constantly on the skeet-shooting range. His behavior has now degenerated from human to that of a primitive being. His failure to now belong to human race results in his complete disregard for his superior. Even Yossarian's vision of where he is going, symbolizes by his pilot McWatt, is blocked by the brainless, thoughtless Aarfy.
The primitive behavior of Dunbar at the beginning of the chapter parallels Yossarian's murderous behavior in the airplane. His sudden rage indicates the internal decay within Yossarian from a civilized comrade who lovingly cared for the dying Snowden to the senseless madman who tries to kill Dunbar. When McWatt and Yossarian converse immediately afterwards, McWatt McWatt's pathetic demise exemplifies the dangers of becoming a person who has lost all his powers of judgment for various situations and independent thinking to such a point that he now acts without discretion and even insanely.
The only brief light note in this otherwise bleak and horrid chapter is Yossarian' intimacy with Nurse Duckett. His constant need to enjoy and touch her body represents his desire for any physical relief from the physical and mental torment he suffers from the war and his memories of Snowden's death. Yet even in these brighter times, Yossarian is still plagued with the thoughts of death as he looks for the bodies of Orr or Clevinger in the water. Ironically, it instead turns out to be the sliced corpse of Kid Sampson.
Chapter 31: Mrs. Daneeka
Chapter 31: Analysis
Finally in chapter 31 after much ado, Doc Daneeka symbolically dies. This episode touches upon three important concepts. First, the military bureaucracy only believes in its own paperwork and completely disregards any contradictory evidence. Second, Doc Daneeka's has been emotionally dead for the entire book as reflected by his inhumane response to Yossarian's pleas for help and his own obsession with his nonexistent illness. As the men point out, quite bitterly but correctly, he has been dead the entire time, but they never realized it until now. Third, as Doc Daneeka's wife discovers, for those who remain alive, corpses are far more profitable than living bodies. When she realizes that her husband's death earns her unbelievable pot of wealth, she decides to ignore her husband's existence and leave. Such a cruel materialistic attitude is only just for Doc Daneeka, who likewise ignored Yossarian's pleas for help.
Chapter 32: Yo-Yo's Roomies.
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Chapter 32: Analysis
This chapter craftily hints upon the horrible question: who is really a human being? First, Yossarian's roommates are introduced as oblivious, innocuous people. Like Aarfy, they fail to recognize what is wrong with the war and see it as nothing but a game. This empty-headedness differs greatly from the madness of Orr, Yossarian's former roommate. While Orr engaged in eccentric activities, it turns out his stupidity has a point. Yossarian's roomies, though, lack the peculiar insanity that will allow them to recognize the dangerous logic of catch-22. Just like the average soldiers, these men are easily indoctrinated into believing the military's precepts. Doc Daneeka also represents another specimen of the war. He does not blame himself for deserving his wretched fate of being ìdeadî and lacks the humility or introspection to realize how his greed has lead to his fate. For as the roomies are dead because they lack ìbrains,î Doc Daneeka is also dead because he lacks a heart and kindness for his fellow mates. Finally, Chief White Halfoat, who is constantly intoxicating himself throughout the chapter, represents the victim who is unable to deal with the horror of the war and simply is physically killing himself by drinking himself to death. Yossarian comes to represent the human being in this book because he is alive in these three crucial aspects: he has the brains to recognize how the war is endangering his identity; he has the heart to care for his other humans, such as Snowden, and thus is not just a selfish worm but a warm-hearted person; and finally, he has the sense to physically preserve himself, such as when he takes evasive action and realizes the dangers of the poisoned mess food. These characteristics will give Yossarian the courage to make the crucial decision in the final chapter of the book.
Chapter 33: Nately's Whore
Chapter 33: Analysis
Chapter 33 focuses upon the problems of men in sexual heat or suffering from romantic passions and the roles of women when men are in such a state. The chapter starts on a more earthy level. Yossarian's sexual heat is confused and absurd. He longs for Nurse Duckett but tries to pursue Luciana and the maid in the lime-colored panties. Likewise the officers who hold Nately's whore captive are suffering from distorted, confused emotions. They do not want sexual pleasure but simply to have a woman at beck and call. They see the whore as simply another target in their lives, much like their military ones. The entire strange episode in which the officers are infuriated by the whore's apathy, symbolizes the soldiers' need for control of something in their chaotic world. Unfortunately, the easiest, most satisfying object to purchase is women.
The episode in which Nately's whore falls asleep and then wakes upóa transformed woman now in love with Nately has almost a fairy tale quality, reminiscent of ìSleeping Beauty.î This dream world only lasts shortly. Nately tries to force the whore to become someone she is not, and her adamant retention of the old man's friendship demonstrates her independent thinking.
Nately has clearly turned into love's fool as he dreams of an ideal world, independent of social rank and situation. He envisions all the other officers falling in love with the whores and everyone living quite happily together ever after. Ironically, Nately is
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stuck in a war in which hierarchy is everything in the ever pervasive military hierarchy. The only attempt to reject the military hierarchy is when Yossarian and his friends throw out the officers' uniforms. For once, they find themselves without rank or respect, as well as clothes. Yossarian's threat to turn them in as German spies demonstrates that there is very little difference between men, and it is the uniforms and the fanfare surrounding it that blow small differences out of proportion.
Comparing the characters of Nately and the whore is especially critical. After Nately has won this seemingly unattainable object, he begins to try to control her because ìhe is the manî in the relationship. The boy who seemed to be sweet, pleasant and even docile turns out to be just as controlling and dictatorial as Colonel Cathcart or General Peckem. Oddly enough for a woman of the streets who is supposedly experienced, the whore appears to be very naÔve in certain regards. She has no conception of how a normal woman should act. Walking about naked in front of other men is perfectly acceptable, and she cannot understand why Nately objects to what seems to her, normal behavior.
Chapter 34: Thanksgiving
Chapter 34: Analysis
This entire chapter is filled with horrifying irony and probes more deeply at disturbing questions only touched on previously. Whereas Thanksgiving should be a time to celebrate prosperity and good fortune, the military celebration turns out to not only be debauched but on the verge of anarchy. Instead of respecting life and being grateful for what they have, the men instead change this into a world of madness in which people's pleasure is destroying each other. What should be a safety zone from all the dangers of war instead becomes even more dangerous than the battle zone itself, as Yossarian is almost killed in his sleep.
Two issues, that of Yossarian's murderous rage and the chaplain's inner personal struggles, are expanded upon. Nately, the idealist who tries to intervene for Yossarian's sake, is severely injured by the very man he is trying to help. The madness that McWatt had witnessed earlier is not just an arbitrary episode but part of a behavior that indicates that Yossarian is indeed going mad.
Perhaps the most important character is the resurfaced soldier in the white. This time, everyone realizes the danger that he presents. While the shape is different from the first time the result is the sameóthis man is an omen of the dark and terrible fate of those who remain in the waróan empty man who feeds upon his own waste. Unfortunately, the man who realizes this and has the audacity to say so publicly, Dunbar, is punished by being ìdisappeared.î This inexplicable, strange punishment reflects the lack of rationalization behind the waróthe logic (or rather lack of) of catch-22.
Chapter 35: Milo the Militant
Chapter 35: Analysis
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Chapter 35 is filled with various ironic incidents and at times, the reader begins to wonder whether the characters have changed. First, there is an unexpected twist in Milo's behavioróhe wishes to sell off his very profitable M&M Enterprises in order to fly more missions. Milo's behavior appears to genuine; however, this new ìdo-gooderî attitude is short-lived when Colonel Cathcart offers him a deal which will allow both men to profit. This struck deal and Milo joining the ìspecial buddy clubî foreshadows a similar agreement made between Yossarian and the other officers in chapter 40.
The La Spieza mission indicates that the men are coming to their senses, as foreshadowed by Dunbar's behavior and Kid Sampson's death. Even Havermeyer sees that this war is no longer worth fighting and resorts to terrible evasive action. Terribly enough, Nately has finally lost his bet with Death and, after surviving so many missions and so much danger, is killed. To worsen the matter even worse, he flew the missions because he wanted to stay with the whore he was so madly in love with.
Chapter 36: The Cellar
Chapter 36: Analysis
The inquisition of the chaplain ultimately symbolizes the repression and the cruelty of the military bureaucracy. Seemingly innocuous events such as the chaplain's receiving a plum tomato or meaningless statements such as atheism not being against the law are maliciously misinterpreted as evidence against him. Here the dangerous logic of catch-22 prevails over simple reason. A foolish statement about atheists being in foxholes is taken out of context to trap the chaplain about a deeper and more profound issue of whether heaven exists. There is also an upcoming resemblance of this trial and that of Clevinger's. The suspect is assumed to be guilty and direly threatened with severe punishments. Even worse, the chaplain is not given a chance to provide any evidence to prove his innocence. Here, two basic tenets of American justice are denied: the assumption of innocence until proven guilty, and the right to due process. The irony of this situation is particularly poignant because the entire point of World War II was to restore or ensure these human rights worldwide. Instead of resolving this situation, the war has propagated the evils it has tried to end.
The immoral logic exposes the cruelty of Colonel Korn but also touches upon a very disturbing question. Assuming that someone must die in the war, does it matter who it is? Clearly, the answer depends upon the viewpoint taken. To the military bureaucracy who only sees human lives as an expendable resource, and who consumption is necessary to achieve their missions, it does not. Likewise, to big business, it does not either, as long as the maximum amount of profit is achieved. However, from the individual standpoint, as represented by Yossarian, it does matter who dies. However, as Clevinger has pointed out, if everyone felt that way, their side would lose. This crucial point summarizes the impasse of the book and the conflict between Yossarian's claim to his rights as an individual versus society's imposition of the war upon its civilians for a ìhigher cause.î
Chapter 37: General Scheisskopf
Chapter 37: Analysis
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Although Chapter 37 is quite brief, one critical event does occur: Scheisskopf is promoted to being a general. After much squabbling, General Peckem does succeed to General Dreedle's position. Ironically, though, his superior is someone even worse than General DreedleóLieutenant General Scheisskopf. This incident exposes two flaws with the military bureaucracy. First, it is not merit-based, as would be expected but instead on unimportant paperwork. Second, after much sophisticated maneuvering by General Peckem to displace General Dreedle, Lieutenant Scheisskopf triumphs without even the least effort. The new general is not interested in any of the bureaucracies' interests, such as delegating responsibilities or squabbling, but the martial parades.
Chapter 38: Kid Sister
Chapter 38: Analysis
This chapter is dominated by Nately's whore madly chase to kill Yossarian. Yossarian is torn between two desires. On one hand, he does not want to be killed but there is an sexual irresistibility that prevents him from leaving her when he can safely flee from her. This sexual desire so strong that the whore even offers to sleep with the other man if they kill let her kill Yossarian. At last, Yossarian's paranoia that everyone is trying to kill him appears rather justified.
For the rest of the chapter, Yossarian searches for his newly expressed identity. The men possess a curious split personality. With the daytime, they appear to conform to their superiors, but at the nighttime, they become very different creatures. Everyone is secretly a Yossarian inside but lacks the courage to express it. Underneath the facades of absurd behavior and bravado, the only critical difference between Yossarian and the men is that Yossarian has the courage to express it to his superiors. The new side that Yossarian discovers is to aid others in need, although his life is in risk. His determination and humane concern to help the kid sister provide a more complete picture of Yossarian, who had seemed self-centered in previous apathetic statements that he does not care if others die as long as he lives.
Chapter 39: The Eternal City
Chapter 39: Analysis
The world seen in the chapter represents a fallen paradise. The beautiful city in which the officers enjoyed themselves the apartments with lots of beautiful women has now come a hell overrun by the military police. The streets are deserted except for random insane people. The war has taken away most of the men, and many of the women have turned to prostitution and are now being driven away.
For a brief moment, Milo's restitution seems possible. He has given up the materialistic goal of his syndicate and sacrificing himself for Yossarian's greater cause to save an innocent girl. Unfortunately, reality catches up with Milo too quickly. Unwittingly, the policeman Luigi provides Milo with another idea for his business, although illegal. Milo is unable to change himself and his ways. Like most businessmen, pragmatism and money, rather than ideals and humans in need, touch his heart.
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Also, in this chapter, a new, disturbing dimension of Aarfy is seen. His rape and murder of an innocent, poor Italian servant girl exposes his apathy, if not even cruelty, towards human life. Aarfy is not just a dope sitting around in the plane; he suffers from twisted, sickening desires, in this case the pride of having the pleasure of a woman without having to pay for it, which he is willing to fulfill without regard to human life. While he is not cold-hearted as Colonel Cathcart or Colonel Korn is, the war has desensitized him so much to the importance of human life. To him, life and a person are objects of convenience, to be disposed of or used at his convenience.
Chapter 40: Catch-22
The Chapter 40: Analysis
suspense used throughout the book is especially evident in this chapter. Colonels Cathcart and Korn appear to have a multiple plan strategy. At first, they try to bully Yossarian into flying more missions. When this fails, they then try to persuade him to fight, asking for him to be a good patriot, to fight on their behalf. However, Yossarian is too smart to fall for this, and he even has Colonel Korn admit that he does not buy his own argument. Finally, Colonels Cathcart and Korn offer to send home under the agreement that he likes them. Much to the reader's surprise, Yossarian agrees. At the end of the chapter, though, two twists occur. First, Yossarian breaks out laughing. Second, before this can be explained in greater detail, Nately's whore knifes him.
The sudden personality transformations of Colonels Cathcart and Korn also bring up the question of the honesty of both men. At the beginning of the chapter, they accuse Yossarian of preventing them from fulfilling their ambitions and wish he were dead. Yet by the end of the chapter, they call him ìYo-Yo.î It is fair to genuinely wonder whether or not they will fulfill their end of the deal or if this is another cruel trap that they have set up. As it will turn out, these colonels will use this deal against Yossarian to trap him in a corner: either yield to their interpretation of Yossarian's departure or face court-martial. These abrupt reversals foreshadow the sudden decisions that must be made by Yossarian in the final chapter.
Chapter 41: Snowden
Chapter 41: Analysis
The scene with Yossarian and doctors presents a powerful antiparallel with that of Yossarian's attempts to save Snowden the doctors that Yossarian with contempt and hatred and even wish him dead. One of them even sees Yossarian as a toy to play with and wants to cut him up for fun. On the other hand, Yossarian treats Snowden with compassion and empathy. He tries to comfort Snowden who constantly complains that he is cold and covers him up. Yossarian finds himself in the terrible situation of having to amputate Snowden's leg. Later, when the mysterious figures comes to him and say, ìWe have your pal,î the meaning is quite symbolic. In an essential sense, Yossarian has become Snowden. While his life is not as endangered as Snowden's is, his mental and self-identity is as much as stake as Snowden's physical life is.
In fact, Snowden comes to represent the soldier whose physical identity has been destroyed. As Yossarian watches Snowden's guts spill out, Snowden becomes the
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soldier in white, whose internal organs have been dumped out and whose outer body has been cut apart and defiled so that nothing remains of him.
Finally, the conversation between Yossarian and chaplain touches upon a critical moral issue: at what cost should a person give up himself for justice? In other words, when should practicality yield to ideals? Yossarian can achieve his practical endpoint and save his life by agreeing to the deal. On the other hand, the argument, that this continual increase of missions is unjust, will be defeated. This issue becomes the major question in the final chapter.
Chapter 42: Yossarian
Chapter 42: Analysis
The last chapter of Catch-22 succinctly explains what is driving the often irrational, if not cruel, behavior of everyone from the officers to the doctors and to even the enlisted men. Innocent men can be punished, if that is necessary to keep the war effort going. Major Danby finally elucidates these ongoings to Yossarian. He admits that he cannot stand Colonels Korn and Cathcart. However, the difference between Major Danby and Yossarian is that the former is willing to compromise on the surface without sacrificing his ideals. At this critical juncture, Yossarian must decide whether or not he wishes to follow Danby's method of compromise and conceal his true self or whether he wishes to openly express himself and take the consequences.
In the process of their conversation, Major Danby admits that he would just like to be a vegetable. In a sense, Major Danby serves as yet another foil to Yossarianóthe civilian who seeks stability and peace and does not wish to do anything significant. Danby is not interested in expressing himself but knows what he must do: run away. When Yossarian realizes that he has no other choice and decides to actively face the consequence of becoming a deserter, he is rejecting the status of being a ìvegetableî and re-establishes his identity as a human being. Although he may indeed be caught and punished by the military bureaucracy, the individual has triumphed against the institution because he is no longer afraid of the punishment that the institution uses as a deterrent against such behavior.
Pale Fire(1962)
By
V.Nabokov
There is a major political context to Nabokov's novel Pale Fire. Within the chronology of Nabokov's works, Pale Fire was published in 1962, years after Lolita and The Real Life of Sebastian Knight. Pale Fire conjures up the unreal world of Zembla, and one can't help but consider Zembla in terms of the transformation of
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Russia into the Soviet Union. Certainly, the theme of exile is autobiographical, and it is also worth noting that politically, Nabokov remained a Tsarist. He never condoned the Russian Revolution that forced his family into exile, and he dreaded the Soviet Union. It is no stretch of the imagination, to conclude that Nabokov's sympathy for King Charles stems from his own experiences of exile. His contempt for Gradus (who is assisted by the Soviets) is based upon his own political stance in favor of enlightened monarchy and entirely opposed to Soviet-style one-party rule.
By 1962, the Soviet Union was only growing in power and ascendancy, and its political hold on Eastern Europe grew only tighter. The triangular relations between the U.S., U.S.S.R. and Cuba only further dramatized the political structure that Nabokov describes. Politics never comes to the foreground of the novel; rather, the consequences of politics on the private lives of Charles remain the primary focus. Exile produces a sort of nostalgia that becomes a form of dementia. Stranded on an alien and bitter continent, Kinbote admits at one point: "Solitude is the playground of Satan," essentially arguing that his intense loneliness has moved him to madness.
Besides the political context, the literary context of Pale Fire is also well worth mentioning. Pale Fire is considered to be one of the antecedents to Post-modernism. This is mainly because of the focus on narrative structure. There is a willingness to interrogate the narrator and expose the inherent fallibility of human record. There is also the tendency to expose the vulnerability and changeability of pre-recorded texts, whether they are the poems of a next-door neighbor or allusions to Classical Greek mythology. The instability of the text forces us to continually question truth vs. falsehood and exposes the hazy, shady lines that traditionally divide fiction from non-fiction. Perhaps for this feature alone, Pale Fire enjoys a prominent status on college reading lists devoted to "Post-modernism." The novel also appeared as number 53 on the Modern Library's list of the 100 greatest novels of the 20th century (Lolita was #4).
Main Themes:
The Artist, Art, and Criticism: Perhaps even more dynamic than the conflict between Gradus and King Charles is the inherent conflict between John Shade, the author of the poem "Pale Fire," and Charles Kinbote, the expert who writes extensive commentary on the poem. In terms of volume, it is immediately obvious to the reader that the critic's commentary is far longer and far more involved than the actual poem. Kinbote really ceases to be a critic and he creates his own work of creative literature, presenting a romantic portrait of an exiled king and a crystal land. The question remains as to which work of art is true; this is complicated because both the poem and the commentary follow the conventions of their respective genre. The poem "Pale Fire" is a work of ekphrasis, in that it is "art about art." We find that the artist John Shade primarily defines himself in terms of his artistic and aesthetic experiences. Likewise, the use of the written text in Kinbote's hands is much like Humbert Humbert in Nabokov's Lolita, who writes as a means of immortalizing himself and his love. If there is any tragedy on display in the creative lives of the novel's characters, it is the sad unhappy fact of too much artistic passion exceeding artistic capability. One can't help but genuinely pity John Shade at the beginning of his Canto IV, when he stresses "Now I will do that none has done before." His repetitive strains ("Now I willٹ") produce the effect of someone trying to get out of a rut.
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Reality, Disguise, and Delusion: Charles Kinbote is really at the center of this theme, as one of the novel's plot elements forces the question of whether or not Charles Kinbote is really King Charles the Beloved of Zembla. Either reality has been seriously disrupted and Kinbote is the exiled king of Zembla, or else Kinbote is dangerously delusional. Kinbote's descriptions of his rival critics and professors have a way of making him seem less honest and less professional. For that matter, Sybil explicitly states that Kinbote is deranged. The difference between the poem and the biography that Kinbote produces also suggests that reality is difficult to understand and "know" in a comprehensive, satisfying way.
Besides the disguise of Charles the Beloved as Charles Kinbote of New Wye, there is the red-clad escape from the Zemblan palace and the one hundred look-alike Royalists. Gradus, the incompetent assassin is nonetheless, a man full of disguises and pseudonyms. D'Argus, Gradus, Degre becomes disguises that also refer to the meaning of disguise. Not mere pseudonyms, D'Argus and Gradus are anagrams. Gradus and Degre refer to gradations of change, from one identity to another. Gradus' disguises meet with varying degrees of success in New Wye. The irony of all of the efforts to disguise oneself is the fact that Gradus makes his way to New Wye quite by accident. When Gradus has the opportunity to kill Charles Kinbote (who may or may not be the exiled king of Zembla), he accidentally kills John Shade (who is definitely not the exiled king of Zembla). In the end, none of Kinbote's commentary can be assumed to be "true."
Exile and Memory: Exile is one of the autobiographical themes that dominate the body of Nabokov's major work. There is, of course, a major parallel between Nabokov (who fled the Soviet Union and eventually ended up teaching in New England) and Charles the Beloved/Charles Kinbote, who flees Zembla (a Russia-like place, whose name is, in fact, derived from that of a Russian island Novaya Zemlya). There is generally a combination of nostalgia and memory-loss in addressing ones homeland. Kinbote remains full of nostalgia to the point that he sees Zembla, his "crystal land" in John Shade's descriptions of the wintry New England landscape. It is also worth noting that Kinbote is double-exiled, for after leaving Zembla, he moves to New Wye only to be ostracized after the events surrounding John Shade's death. He is literally writing the commentary form some hideout among the desolate caves of the American West.
Charles the Beloved's exile is described as far more political, while the cultural displacement experienced by Charles Kinbote is much like Humbert Humbert's bewildering experiences in Lolita as a continental European in 1950s America. The exiled individual in this novel however is less of a participant than Humbert was. Instead of trying to get away from the Americans, Kinbote is trying to get join their midst. He remains disconnected from the larger community and he does not participate in the family-centered activities that dominate the lives of the people around him.
Fate and Destiny: The idea of fate and destiny is challenged throughout Nabokov's novel. The underlying argument that Nabokov essentially makes is that there are so many accidents (so much chaos) that it is difficult to thread a direct connection between "act" and "consequence." The most dramatic example of this is the murder of John Shade by Gradus, an assassin who intended to kill the disguised exiled king of
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Zembla. If fate does exist, Nabokov shows that it is not determined by intention, but can be foiled by disguises and by human error. The idea of destiny is related to "purpose." In one sense, the exiled king represents the idea of destiny (dynasty) gone awry; on the other hand, Gradus, the assassin, is described as a man who is inept but full of purpose. His trajectory goes from Zembla, through Europe, across the Atlantic and deep into New England, and it is dribed as the workings of fate to bring murderer to victim. Logically, the concept of "fate" cannot really be proven or denied.
Character List:
Major Characters:
Charles Kinbote/King Charles of Zembla: Kinbote is the major character of the work. He is an exiled literature Professor in a small New England college town called New Wye. He is originally from a country called Zembla. Kinbote is a deranged liar and his loose grip on the truth makes the novel interesting. The novel Pale Fire is composed of John Shade's poem of the same name and a largely inaccurate commentary composed by Kinbote. Throughout the novel, Kinbote drops hints that he is the exiled king of Zembla, King Charles the Beloved. To the extent that Kinbote actually is the king of Zembla, it is well worth remembering that there is no king of Zembla.
John Shade: John Shade is the poet-professor who wrote the poem "Pale Fire." He is the next door neighbor of Prof. Charles Kinbote, who writes the commentary and introduction to the published version of the poem "Pale Fire." We know very little about John Shade besides the biographical information that is provided in his poem. Kinbote's commentary offers information about Shade that is questionable at best. What do know about Shade is mostly information that is skeletal in structure: we know that he is married to Sybil, that his parents died when he was young, that he was raised by Aunt Maud, and that his daughter committed suicide midway through her troubled adolescence. Shade is accidentally killed by the assassin Gradus, who intended to kill Charles Kinbote.
Gradus: Gradus is an assassin hired by the anti-Karlist movement of Zembla; he is assigned the task of finding and killing the exiled King. Gradus has several aliases (Jacques D'Argus, Gradus, Jack Degre, etc.) but little professional ability. As assassins go, Gradus is extremely incompetent. With the help of a few Soviet spies, Gradus is able to locate the exiled king, but when the moment of assassination comes, Gradus accidentally shoots at the wrong person. He is apprehended by authorities and soon after, he commits suicide in a psychiatric facility.
Minor Characters:
Aunt Maud: The aunt of John Shade, she raises him into adulthood after his parents died very early in his childhood.
Hazel Shade: The daughter of Sybil and John Shade, she was both highly unattractive and depressed. She committed suicide as a teenager.
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Sybil Shade: Sybil is the wife of the poet, John Shade. While John Shade's poem suggests that their marital relationship was vibrant and full of love, Kinbote's commentary suggests that John is unhappy with Sybil.
Odon: Odon is King Charles' bodyguard and right-hand man. He assists in Charles' escape from the palace and joins him, for a time, in France.
Disa: Disa is the princess that King Charles is supposed to marry. She remains largely spurned by him however, as he has little sexual interest in women.
Professor Pnin: A colleague of John Shade and Charles Kinbote who has contempt for Charles Kinbote.
Analysis:
The narrative structure of Nabokov's novel Pale Fire is complicated from the beginning. Two of the central characters are writers: John Shade, a poet; and Charles Kinbote, a literary critic. Following Kinbote's "Foreword" is John Shade's poem. Shade's poem is followed by Kinbote's long, extensive commentary on the poem.
In several key ways, Charles Kinbote will become a parallel to Humbert Humbert, the character/narrator of Nabokov's novel Lolita. Humbert and Kinbote are both foreigners who are unaccustomed to living in 'Smalltown, U.S.A.' The theme of exile permeates both novels. Pale Fire is considered one of the early novels of postmodernism because of the complicated narrative structure. Parody adds to the complicated roles of author/writer, and in the end, the novel questions our understanding of what is "real" and "true." Within the fictional world of the novel, we are asked to determine what is true or false. The name of the poet‹"Shade"‹ultimately parallels the name "Haze" (from Lolita) as a symbol of confusion. The details of what is true and false, of what actually happened and what is imagined become shady and hazy
Analysis:
John Shade's poem continues in the tradition of James Joyce's famous novella Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. As in Joyce's work, Canto One focuses on the budding artist and tries to explain how Shade formed himself into a poet. The death motif is pervasive in Canto One: Shade's parents die when he is very young and the images of "snow" and "shadows" sustain a somber tone. This tone is balanced by the idea of nature as a life-giving force. The excess of verdant images, variety of trees and insects keep life going on a smaller level, in between the discussions of death and mortality.
There are a few puns and literary references in Canto One: Shade refers to two literary figures called "Goldsworth" and "Wordsmith" and this is a revision of the names "Goldsmith" and "Wordsworth." Oliver Goldsmith (1730?-1774) was the author of The Vicar of Wakefield. William Wordsworth (1770-1850) is a far more famous Romantic poet. In a sense, Shade becomes a "wordsmith" by inventing these new names.
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There is also a reference to "Chapman's Homer" and this combines popular and literary culture. The newspaper headline refers to a home run scored by Ben Chapman, a player for the Boston Red Sox. The literary reference is John Keats' poem entitled "On First Looking Into Chapman's Homer." In this poem, Keats discusses his impressions while reading Chapman's translation of Homer's great works. The importance here is that the process of reading and interpretation is confused. Names have been conflated and references crisscross. Later on, Kinbote's reading of Shade's poem will make gross errors of interpretation. This theme of reading and "misreading" is introduced early on. Behind this theme, there are larger aesthetic questions that we can ask: Is there a right way and a wrong way to interpret a literary work? How important is the author's intention? How do we know what the author intended? These questions lead to considerations of the proper relationship between a literary work and literary criticism.
Analysis:
One of the main questions that John Shade asks himself deals with poetry: Is poetry an appropriate medium for philosophical discussion, for remembering the past, and for grappling with grief? We might ask whether Shade's poem still seems like a poem‹considering the fact that it is part of a larger novel. There is tension between Shade's arguments on poetry and the poem's narrative role as part of the novel. We can understand this as a tension between the inner and outer structures of the poem. Within the poem, Shade discusses the functions of poetry as a genre. But as a whole, the poem functions in a narrative way: it becomes an early chapter in a longer story. Of course, if Shade's poem was more lyrical (complicated rhyme scheme, rhythm, poetic devices) it would read more like an individual poem and less like a part of the bigger story.
The death motif continues in Canto Two. The reader should note that death has claimed both the young and the old: Shade's parents, Aunt Maud, and Shade's daughter. Shade tries to discuss life and the afterlife in a theoretical philosophical way, but these actual deaths in the family force Shade to come up with a theory. Shade isn't just philosophizing; rather, he is trying to deal with details of his personal life. Philosophy and poetry are therapy for John Shade‹these aren't mental or artistic exercises.
Charles Kinbote mentions Sybil Shade in his Foreword, but Canto Two is the first time that John Shade mentions his wife. Sybil's name is derived from the "sibyl" of Greek and Near Eastern mythology. The sibyls were female prophets with divinely bestowed abilities to foresee the future. Sybil Shade is a reversal of this mythological archetype. By the end of the four cantos, it will be clear that John Shade's life is full of tragedy. At no point does Sybil become a "Sibyl" who foresees tragedy (for example, the suicide of the daughter). Because there is so much tragedy in John's life, Sybil's inability to prophecy stands out. Of course, this isn't actually a character flaw on her part and we can't rationally hold this against her. Nabokov's argument is that in the modern era, "Sybil" is just a name. The Greeks could use sibyls as a way to get through life, get advance notice on death, and prepare for the afterlife. In the modern era, John Shade doesn't have access to the Greek sibyls. He is forced to look elsewhere.
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In terms of female mythological archetypes, Sybil/sibyl provides insight into another trend in Shade's poetry. In the Greek tradition, there were many prophetesses (like Cassandra), oracles and sibyls. The male prophet (like blind Tiresias) seldom appears in Greek myth: this vocation was almost exclusively female.
Besides the role of the prophetess, the role of the "Muse" is the only other place where we find an "exclusively female" group making philosophical or intellectual contributions. The idea of the female muse (usually a love interest) recurs throughout western literature, but Shade's poem discards the traditional muse (he presents an alternative in Canto Four). Much later, Kinbote will argue in the "Commentary" that he was Shade's muse.
Canto Two focuses on the strategies of poetry of philosophy, but the canto also provides indirect commentary on "translation." When Shade tries to turn his private drama into a publishable work of art, he admits: "How ludicrous these efforts to translate/ Into one's private tongue a public fate." Shade's private tongue includes words like "Aunt Maud" and "Lochan Head." This personal information makes it more difficult for the "public" to read Shade's argument as a broader commentary that discusses human "fate" in general. At this moment in Shade's poem, "translation" refers to the difficulty of translating poetry into philosophy. The word "translate," however, should provoke thoughts on Nabokov's own literary situation: Nabokov began writing in Russian (and French) well before he began writing novels in English. Part of the exile experience is literary, what is "lost in translation." Of course, Shade's use of the word "translate" doesn't carry this significance. However, later passages of the Commentary will extensively discuss translation between three languages (English, Russian, and Zemblan). In retrospect, these lines of the poem will become important.
Finally, a literary allusion to T.S. Eliot is set within an ironic context. Shade's daughter asks the question: "What does sempiternal mean?" T.S. Eliot is so famous (perhaps, infamous) for his deliberately obscure vocabulary, and Nabokov takes a jab at Eliot here. "Sempiternal" simply means "eternal." The word appears in the poem "Little Gidding," the fourth of Eliot's Four Quartets. The opening lines of the poem read: "Midwinter spring is its own season/ Sempiternal though sodden towards sundown, / Suspended in time, between pole and tropic."
One of the ironies here is that Eliot's concept of an eternal season is sharply different from Shade's abundance of death and snow, shadows and ice. The more violent irony here is that a teenage girl who later drowns herself in a frozen lake poses the question "What does sempiternal mean?" The suicide of youth (in winter) can be read as condemning‹or at least, exposing a flaw of modern poetry. Eliot's "sempiternal" poetry fails to communicate in a necessary way here
Analysis:
The typographical error, confusing "fountain" and "mountain," adds to the theme of reading and misreading. Shade is reading properly here; the problem is that the wrong word is written down. Looking at John Shade as a character within the novel, we can see two characteristics that are uncommonly paired. On one hand, Shade is not a social conservative by any means. In fact, he is somewhat eccentric and is willing to
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hold unpopular views that go against longstanding public opinion. For example, Shade does not believe in God; moreover, Shade believes that he saw a "white fountain" in the afterlife. On the other hand, Shade has very high demands for accuracy and precision. Shade's ideas may not be conservative, but Shade is conservative in his dismissal of slight "error" and his demands to have a precise answer. The fact the woman claimed to see a mountain, does not change the fact that she claims to have seen something. Nevertheless, Shade rejects this potential commonality because they have not seen the same exact thing. It is important to
understand how Shade is averse to error, inaccuracy and ambiguity. In the "Commentary," Kinbote will significantly alter Shade's poem, but his arguments
about Shade's errors and ambiguities won't ring true given what we know about John Shade .
Canto III does more with the death motif than the previous cantos did. We can see the irony of falling down (and into unconsciousness) at the pinnacle of ones literary
success (the book reading). At this point, it is worth noting that the name SHADE is an anagram of HADES, the underworld of Greek mythology. The phrase "Elysian life" alludes to Elysium (or the Elysian Fields), a region of Hades where dead heroes
lived a peaceful afterlife. Specifically, the blessing of Elysium is that the dead have no memory or recollection of life on earth. This is in direct opposition to Shade's demand
to "never to forget ".
Shade agrees to the idea of death as a form of metamorphosis )changing into "a floweret /or a fat fly"). This is closer to Eastern philosophies of unity and reincarnation, as opposed to the more thorough physical death described in Greek and
Christian traditions. Shade doesn't want his death to interrupt his earthly life. As the Foreword explained, however, Shade dies soon after he completes a draft of the poem. Shade's own use of the word "newlydead" (in opposition to "newlywed") doesn't
foreshadow his death. It reminds us of what we already learned .
"Hesperus" was the name that the Greeks gave to the Straits of Gibraltar. The Greeks believed Hesperus to be the edge of the known world. The metaphor of Hesperus, as the edge of the known, is presented in IPH. IPH seeks to investigate and explore what
lies beyond the Hereafter/Hesperus. "Fra Karamazov" is final literary allusion of different extraction. Shade's poem refers to "Fra Karamazov, mumbling his inept/ All is allowed." In Dostoevsky's novel, The Brothers Karamazov, one of the characters
essentially claims that if God does not exist, "all is allowed." Shade is hardly focused on the implications of the hereafter on morality. Further, Shade does not believe that God exists, though he does not express anything close to Fra Karamazov's amorality.
Nabokov's works frequently criticize traditional social institutions, and Nabokov was hardly a fan of organized religion. The character of John Shade proposes Nabokov's idea of religion and morality as discrete and potentially separable: without believing
in God, Shade is able to reject the claim that " all is permitted
Analysis:
As poets go, Shade is not the best. Canto Four promises to "try what none has tried"‹but this is probably more true of Nabokov than John Shade. In terms of structure, Shade's poem is incredibly simplistic. Shade's discussion of the "vital
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rhythm" ironically occurs in an irregularly stressed line. Like Shade's ailing heart, Shade's poem keeps an irregular, erratic beat.
Several literary critics have addressed the idea of "authorship" in dividing Shade from Nabokov. On one hand, Shade is a character within a fictional work‹but "Pale Fire" is the poem that Shade wrote. Plenty of books feature writers as characters, but in Pale Fire we happen to read what the character wrote. On the other hand, Nabokov is the author of Pale Fire, and the poem "Pale Fire" as well. For whatever reasons, the structure that Nabokov has put in place certainly disadvantages John Shade. Shade seeks to explain to us why he writes. He is a writer writing about writing. Kinbote's Commentary, as we will soon see, undoes all of Shade's work. In Line 937, Shade refers to "Old Zembla." As Kinbote takes the reins from Shade, the story sharply veers towards "Zembla" and Shade's poetic concerns become irrelevant
Analysis:
As fictional characters go, Charles Kinbote is rather unique in terms of psychological complexity. From the beginning, Kinbote's sanity and reason are called into question. At this juncture in the novel, our estimation of Kinbote's sanity depends upon whether or not we think Zembla is an actual place (within the fictional world). Of course, there is no country called Zembla on our map, but that doesn't mean that there isn't a Zembla within the novel Pale Fire. However, if Kinbote has invented Zembla, he is not merely dishonest‹he is delusional and probably a little dangerous as well. As the novel progresses, Kinbote gives us more information about his personal history. And it shouldn't take the reader too long to catch on to Kinbote's heavy-handed hints that he, Charles Kinbote, is in fact the Zemblan King Charles in disguise.
Though there is no actual nation called Zembla, Zembla does bear strong parallels to Russia, which is Nabokov's homeland. The overthrow of the monarchy parallels the Bolsheviks' termination of the Romanov dynasty. As described, the language, climate and geographic location of Zembla also bear strong correlation to Russia: The Zemblan phrases sound like Russian, or another Slavic language. Zembla is capable of producing Russian winters. Zembla is at the eastern edge of the European continent.
Nabokov took the name "Zembla" from a poem by Alexander Pope; Pope's "Zembla" is an imprecise reference to Novaya Zemlya, an Arctic Russian island. In terms of narrative structure, Zembla represents one of the "post-modern" features of Pale Fire. Nabokov has taken details of the actual world and created a duplicate. The humorous references to Zemblan literature and translation are parody. In post-modern circles, Nabokov's compilation of these "Zemblan" details (Russian sounds, Russian winter, Russian geography, Russian names, and Russian political history) is described as "pastiche"‹a collage.
This doesn't suggest that all Zemblan details correspond to Russia. Nabokov's diverse academic interests (for example: Alpine butterflies, American media, British poetry) prevent Russian-ness from being a totalizing theme. Zembla's "Charles the Beloved," for example, is the namesake of France's similarly polarizing King Charles VI (1368-
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1422). Charles VI had two nicknames: "Le Bien-Aimé" ("The Well-beloved") or "Le Fol" ("The Insane") and both are applicable to the Zemblan King Charles.
Ironically, Kinbote tells us that Charles the Beloved's reign from 1936-1958 was a "reign of peace." The facts of Nazi aggression, World War Two and its horrors, and the friction of the Cold War make it difficult for us to imagine 1936-1958 as a "reign of peace." Zembla seems believable as a "pastiche" or illustration of Russia‹but if Zembla is like Russia, how was this a time of peace?
Pale Fire borrows the motif of "synchronicity" from James Joyce's works. For the duration of the commentary, Gradus' travels are synchronized with Shade's writing. As the assassin travels westward, the poet moves closer to completing his final work. The synchronicity motif foreshadows Shade's death: Gradus arrives in New Wye as Shade is completing his poem, and soon after Shade stops writing, Gradus unintentionally kills the poet.
Kinbote describes the long course that will take Gradus "from distant dim Zembla to green Appalachia." This speaks to theme of exile. In Pale Fire and Lolita, Nabokov illustrates how the barriers of memory and language complicate distances of time and space. "[D]istant dim Zembla" becomes increasingly difficult to remember and describe. Furthermore, as Gradus leaves Zembla for America, he comes into the light. Zembla remains vague and mysterious, but mysteries unravel in America. Aliases and motives are revealed.
As an exile, Charles Kinbote is a parallel character to Lolita's Humbert Humbert (though Humbert is not Russian, but French-Swiss). Both Humbert and Kinbote are "unreliable narrators." In part, language barriers complicate communication between the narrator and the reader, but both men are psychologically unsteady. Over the course of the novel, unfolding details about Kinbote will strengthen the parallel: Both men are continental Europeans and social/political conservatives. They are both writer-teachers on the fringes of the university establishment, but their academic efforts are complicated by insanity, and are pseudo-intellectual at best. Trapped in a New England small town, neither man can play a sustained role within a traditional family structure, but both men have nontraditional sexual interests. Both exiles become itinerant and go into hiding at some point: Humbert hides because he is a murderer, but Kinbote is hiding from a murderer.
Kinbote and Humbert's similarities emphasize the moral confines of small town provinciality; the psychological complications of immigration and exile; and the proven vulnerability of social structures, like marriage or monarchy that once seemed durable. In sum, both men are unsuccessful in their attempts to integrate the mainstream society. One ends up in prison, and the other in a cave.
There are a few literary references worth noting. The word "stillicide" alludes to "Friends Beyond," an 1898 poem by Thomas Hardy. Lines 6-8 of the poem read:
"They've a way of whispering to me‹ fellow-wight who yet abide- In the muted, measured note Of a ripple under archways, or a lone cave's stillicide."
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Hardy's "stillicide" refers to a cave's silence (a death to noise), but Kinbote's stillicide refers to Gradus' murderous intentions.
As indicated in the text, the phrase "Pale Fire" does in fact come from Shakespeare's play Timon of Athens. In an English-Zemblan-English translation exercise, Kinbote re-writes Shakespeare's phrase "pale fire" as "silvery light." The implications of such an error are vast. This error speaks to the theme of translation, and more specifically, what is lost in translation. Shakespeare uses the word "resolves" but Kinbote replaces it with "dissolves." Kinbote's translation of Shakespeare "dissolves" the original intent. This is a parallel to how Kinbote "dissolves" Shade's "Pale Fire" into something different. In this passage of Timon of Athens, Shakespeare's "pale fire" is moonlight, light that the moon has stolen from the sun. We might ask ourselves whether the relationship between Kinbote's criticism and the original texts (Shade's and Shakespeare's) is similarly thieving.
Literary criticism often enlists actual psychological terms and theories as a means of better understanding fictional human characters. The term "cathexis" is defined as a relationship where one person "binds" another person to himself, and then defines that person by their relationship with and utility to him. Consistently, literary critics have used the term "cathexis" to describe Kinbote's relationship with John Shade. (Sybil Shade later uses the words "parasite" and "tick"). Kinbote is not mentioned anywhere in Shade's poem; for all of Kinbote's protestations, it is doubtful that the two men were friends. Kinbote claims that he and Shade were neighbors, but Shade gives no evidence to substantiate this claim. Kinbote "binds" Shade to himself as friend and neighbor. Having done this, Kinbote tells us that he has inspired Shade to write "Pale Fire." Kinbote only focuses on the pieces of the poem that are useful and interesting to him. Kinbote makes a motif out of the poem's phrase "I could make out" and writes:
"By the end of May I could make out the outlines of some of my images in the shape his [Shade's] genius might give them."
Kinbote is only interested in what Shade's poem can be made to say about Zembla. Substantially portions of the poem's "Fair Copy" are deleted and rewritten. Additionally, numerous passages are added on to the 999-lined poem‹which Kinbote's claims is unfinished. Unsurprisingly, Kinbote will give himself permission to finish the poem once he reaches the end of the commentary
Analysis:
This commentary section takes the motif of synchronicity and incorporates it as part of the narrative structure. Kinbote tells us that the story will "become gradually clearer as gradual Gradus approaches in space and time." This indicates that the relationship between Gradus and Shade is neither minor nor coincidental. This synchronicity gives structure to the plot. Like other characters in Nabokov's novels, Gradus has a name with a meaning. The alias "Gradus" suggests obscurity: the presentation of Gradus is "gradual." Another alias, "Le Degre," suggests that Gradus will emerge by degrees.
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Gradus/Le Degre suggests an obscurity or mystery that is gradually explained over time. On the other hand, the name "Shade" is like the name "Haze" in Lolita. "Shade" suggests an obscurity that remains obscure. "Shade" does not emerge nor become clearer by degrees. Kinbote's commentary fails to illuminate Shade's poem in a significant way. The suicidal daughter is doubly mysterious as "Hazel" ("Haze") and "Shade." Indeed, the reader should note that Kinbote tells us Hazel's name‹John Shade never names Hazel in his poem.
The commentary alludes to Boswell's Life of Dr. Johnson. Boswell's work is the definitive prototype of modern biography. Boswell is renowned for his accurate recollection and attention to close detail. Kinbote's depiction of John Shade is less balanced than Boswell's depiction of Dr. Johnson. Much unlike Boswell, Kinbote seeks to integrate himself within near every aspect of Shade's life. Kinbote lacks the personal distance that worked towards Boswell's credibility as a fair observer.
Kinbote injects so much of his personal life into the commentary that the lines between literary criticism, biography, and autobiography are blurred. For example, Kinbote offers a biography of the exiled king. Whenever Kinbote suggests that he is, in fact, the exiled king, the commentary becomes more autobiographical.
The commentary also mentions Professor Pnin, the main character of Nabokov's novel Pnin. Pnin blocks Kinbote's chance of becoming a tenured professor. Here, Nabokov refers to his own ill fated though highly publicized attempt to become a tenured professor at Harvard. Nabokov's chief adversary famously argued that having Nabokov teach Russian literature simply because he was a Russian writer, would be like having "an elephant teach biology." In Pnin, Nabokov's bitterness is on full display.
Again, the text alludes to the literature of Pope and Shakespeare. Kinbote cites lines that refer both to "Zembla" and a "king." Asking if the reader has "guessed my secret," Kinbote suggests that he is the exiled king of Zembla.
Commentary/Canto Three:
Analysis:
The interactions between Gradus and the quirky Soviet agents are a farce. Extremely important affairs have been placed in the hands of extremely incompetent men. Andronnikov is a name that alludes to Russian history. Andronnikov was a man rumored to be involved with Rasputin, a famous enigmatic figure in late Tsarist Russia. Nabokov's political views are not well hidden here. Nabokov's father was very involved in reform movements during the rule of the last Tsar, Nicholas II. A desire for parliamentary reform is not the same thing as a desire for revolution‹and certainly not communism. Nabokov held sympathies for monarchy, despite its flaws. This sympathy is matched with a contempt for the Soviet regime. At one point, Kinbote (the king in disguise) says that "the one who kills is always his victim's inferior." While Nabokov can't argue that the Tsarist rule was bloodless, the Communist coup and subsequent regime was far bloodier.
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The argument about whether sin is necessary for art is important to our considerations of Nabokov's collected work. Nabokov consistently exposes the taboos and subjectivity of American small towns and totalitarian state regimes alike. Nabokov's novel Lolita suffered censorship, even in a democratic nation like the United States. Here, Nabokov's response to censorship is that the body of sin includes many things worth writing about.
Kinbote draws a parallel between God and the Artist when he describes the artist as a God-like "Judge of life andٹDesigner of Death." This serves to emphasize the number of editorial decisions required of a writer, once the characters are in place. Kinbote draws criticism for his abuse of his position, however. As a writer, Kinbote has the ability to "judge" and "design" as he pleases, but he has been arbitrary and dishonest. Kinbote admits that at one point he found himself at the "brink of falsification" because he did not like a section of Shade's poetry. Of course, Kinbote has already falsified much the story. Kinbote consistently refers to the "Fair Copy" of Shade's poem but as a critic, Kinbote has been consistently unfair.
Throughout this section, there is a balance between the comic and the tragic. This balance is maintained even in the literary allusions. Kinbote's term, "Hudibrastic," is a word that refers to a poem by Samuel Butler called "Hudibras." "Hudibras" was a parody of Professor Hudibras, written in doggerel verse. "Hudibras" fits well within the context of Nabokov's parody of Professor Pnin and mainly Professor Kinbote.
The allusion to "Arcadia" is more tragic in significance. Kinbote borrows the ideas of "Arcadia" and "Dementia" from Greek Mythology. Arcadia was a town that represented the perfection of nature. To this day, the phrases "Arcadian" and "Arcadian rhythm" describe a natural utopia. Dementia was a personality of characteristic insanity and delusion (dementia). Like Humbert in Lolita, Kinbote is a demented man who has found his way into Arcadia. Kinbote writes: "ŒEven in Arcady am I,' says Dementia, chained to her gray column." This sinister combination of opposing images is a pollution. In terms of the plot, this phrase foreshadows the arrival of Gradus in Arcadian New Wye. In terms of character development, Kinbote's personification of Dementia (as a chained woman who speaks) alerts us to Kinbote's own pain and suffering.
Nabokov's "Pale Fire" fractures the traditional doppelganger story (as do other novels of his, such as "Despair," "The Real Life of Sebastian Knight," and "Lolita"), which often relies on clear black-and-white doubles (Stevenson's "Dr. Jekyl and Mr. Hyde" comes to mind), by coloring in the nuanced tones between the aptly named John Shade and his commentator, Charles Kinbote. Several instances blur the line between the two men; perhaps one invented the other, perhaps they are one and the same, perhaps they invented each other. This is somewhat irrelevant, as there is enough conflicting evidence for all cases to be made in Nabokov's detective story. What is important, rather, is that "Pale Fire," the poem, ties to the commentary - neither of these could exist without the other. In the end it is art that carries through, not any man's personality; as Kinbote concludes, "Yes, better stop. My notes and self are petering out...My work is finished. My poet is dead" (300).
Nabokov immediately paints his convoluted double theme with a favorite pigment, numbers. Kinbote tells us that Shade was "born July 5, 1898, died July 21, 1959" - he
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was alive for 61 years and 16 days (13). Furthermore, the second and third canto's 334 lines double (plus two more) the 166-lined first and fourth cantos. Kinbote, too, has an affinity for doubles, as revealed in the foreword: "nother tormentor inquired if it was true that I had installed two ping-pong tables in my basement. I asked, was it a crime? No, he said, but why two? 'Is that a crime?' I countered, and they all laughed" (21-2). Nabakov is known for his distaste of doppelgangers; "The doppelganger is a great bore," he once lamented. Much of his fiction is devoted to advancing the doppelganger past the relatively simplistic clash of the superego and the id in previous literature. His wordplay - even "ping-pong" sounds like the same word repeated, is often ironic and self-conscious of its mystery novel intents: "...I was about to have a kind of little seminar at home followed by some table tennis, with two charming identical twins and another boy, another boy" (23).
Kinbote explains his purpose, even his existence, by arguing that authorial intent is meaningless without a guiding hand: "...without my notes Shade's text simply has no human reality at all since the human reality of such a poem as his...has to depend entirely on the reality of its author and surroundings, attachments and so forth, a reality that only my notes can provide...for better or worse, it is the commentator who has the last word" (28-9). Shade's "attachments" seems an oblique reference to Kinbote himself, adding to Kinbote's presumption that not only is an author's work incomprehensible without adding a critic's eye, but that the author's life was, too, tempered by Kinbote's presence. Whether this is Nabakov's view is difficult to ascertain; given his mockery of Kinbote's commentary - on why Shade gave a hurricane the name Lolita: "Why our poet chose to hive his 1958 hurricane a little-used Spanish name (sometimes given to parrots) instead of Linda or Lois, is not clear" - it seems more feasible that Nabakov believed the original body of art, and not its layers of skin, should stand the test of time.
With its multiple pairings and confusions (one of Gradus's alias is Jacques de Grey, pointing to a possible alliance to Shade; Kinbote's identity complex with Zemblan King Charles II), "Pale Fire" can be read as a detective novel of misplaced identity; allegorically, it seeks to answer the question of what gives art its artistry - here, it is not the poem, nor the commentary, but overall Nabakov's novel that provides the final synthesis. After all, regardless of inner machinations, Nabakov ultimately invented all of the characters.
Character List:
Satan: Called Lucifer in heaven before the his disobediance, Satan is one of God's favorite angels until his pride gets in the way and he turns away from God. Satan brings many of heaven's angels with him, however, and reigns as king in hell. He continues an eternal battle with God and goodness for the souls of human beings. Satan, at first, is an angel with a single fault, pride, but throughout the story he becomes physically and morally more and more corrupt.
God: The Absolute, ruler of heaven, creator of earth and all of creation. God is all seeing, though he seems to pay less attention to things further away from his light. He is surrounded by angels who praise him and whom he loves but, when Satan falls and brings many of heaven's population with him, he decides to create a new creature, human, and to create for him a beautiful universe in the hopes that someday humans
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will join him in heaven. God has a sense of humor, and laughs at the follies of Satan and seems to be a firm and just ruler.
Son of God: God's begotten Son, later to become fully human in the form of Jesus, the Christ. God's Son will continually beat down Satan, first in the three day battle in heaven, then, as Jesus, when he sacrifices himself for the salvation of man. The Son of God is more sympathetic to the plight of mankind and often advocates on behalf of him in front of God.
Holy Spirit: Third of the God/Son Trinity. Although the Holy Spirit does not play a large part in the narrative (leading some critics to think that Milton did not even believe in the Trinity), he is continually referred to as Milton's inspirational "muse" in the writing of the epic. The Holy Spirit is, in fact, the creature through whom the Old and New Testament were written according to Christians, therefore he is the best vehicle from which Milton can draw the truth.
Sin: Daughter of Satan born when Satan first disobeyed God. Satan later rapes Sin and they have Death. The three form the unholy trinity in contrast to God, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Sin is sent to hell with Satan and stands guard at hell's gates. She is a horrible looking thing, half serpent, half woman, with hellhounds circling her. She will invade earth and mankind after Satan causes Adam and Eve to fall.
Death: Spawn of Satan and Satan's daughter Sin. He is a dark, gigantic form who guards the gates of hell with Sin. He, too, will reign on earth after Satan causes the Fall. Death, however, will plague not only men and women, but all living creatures on earth down to the smallest plant. Death, as a terminal end, will be defeated when God sends his Son Jesus Christ to earth.
Adam: First created man, father of all mankind. Adam is created a just and ordered creature, living in joy, praising God. Lonely, Adam will ask for a companion and will thereafter feel deep and uncontrollable, though ordered, love for her, named Eve. This love will ultimately get Adam in trouble, as he decides to disobey God rather than leave her. Adam has free will and, by the end of the poem, also has the knowledge of good and evil.
Eve: First created woman, mother of all makind. Eve is rather a fickle and vain woman, easily flattered by Adam and Satan. Her weakness becomes her downfall, as her vanity drives her to disobey God. She loves Adam as well, though the implicaiton is that she loves herself much more.
Raphael: Gentle archangel sent to befriend and warn Adam of the dangers in the Garden. Raphael is traditionally seen as a friendly and sociable angel and, in fact, sits down to eat and gab with Adam for most of an afternoon. Raphael is a gentle guide and appears as a luminous, soft being.
Michael: General in God's army. In contrast to Raphael, Michael is a firm, military type of angel. He is more of an instructor and a punisher than he is a friend and a guide,. He and Gabriel are sent to battle Satan's forces in the heavenly war, and he is sent to evict Adam and Eve from Paradise.
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Gabriel: Another archangel who is a general in God's army. He, too, was sent to lead God's forces into battle against Satan and it is he who, with a squadron of angel soldiers, finds Satan in the Garden of Eden the first time.
Abdiel: The only angel who stands up to Satan and his thousands of minions when Satan first suggests rebellion. He is praised as being more courageous than even those who fight in God's army because he stood up in the middle of evil and used words to battle it.
Beezlebub: Lord of the Flies, one of the Fallen Angels and Satan's second in command. Beezlebub is the name of one of the Syrian gods mentioned in the Hebrew Bible. He is the first with whom Satan confers when contemplating rebellion and he is the first Satan sees when they are in hell. Beezlebub relies totally on Satan for what he thinks and does. Later, Satan uses Beezlebub as a plant to get hell's council of fallen angels to do what he wants them to do.
Moloch: another fallen angel, one of the generals of Satan's army. Moloch is an authoritarian military angel, who would rather fight and lose battles than be complacent and passive. Victory over God is less important to Moloch than revenge against him.
Belial: a complacent, passive fallen angel. Belial doesn't want to fight. He represents a part of all the fallen angels that secretly wishes God would take them all back.
Mammon: another fallen angel. Mammon thinks that the fallen angels should try to build their own kingdom and make their life as bearable as possible in hell. He is the ultimate compromiser, and, though his compromise is illogical and will not work, the crowd loves. him
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Chapter Two
Drama
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Antigone
By
Sophocles
Biography of Sophocles (496-406 BC)
The Greek playwright Sophocles was born in 496 BC at Colonus, near Athens. Unlike his younger contemporary, the often-misunderstood Euripides, Sophocles had the fortune of being revered for his genius during his own lifetime. He lived to the ripe old age of ninety, and his life coincided with the great golden age of the city-state of Athens. Sophocles came from a stable, well-to-do family, and from the beginning, it seemed that he was blessed in every way. Handsome, wealthy, and well-educated, Sophocles lived and died as one of Athens' most beloved citizens.
In 468 BC, his debut dramatic production took first prize at the festival of Dionysis - no small feat for a beginner in his twenties, especially considering that among his competitors was the great Aeschylus. By 450 BC, Sophocles had written some two dozen plays. He was the most prolific of the three great Greek tragedians, writing 120 plays over the span of his remarkable career. Only seven complete plays survive. He received the prize at the Dionysia a total of twenty-four times‹more than Aeschylus or Euripides‹and in the years that he competed and did not win, he took second place. Since playwrights produced trilogies for the Dionysia, this impressive record means that seventy-two of Sophocles' plays were first-place winners.
He was an innovator in his art: Sophocles improved stage scenery, reduced the importance of the chorus, and, most significantly, added a third speaking actor to the traditional two. He made some of the best use of this last convention, writing scenes that capitalized on the dramatic potential of three on-stage actors. Of the three tragedians, he has what is arguably the best sense of drama and pacing. His plays are cleanly made, tightly constructed and filled with beautiful poetry. In many ways, he was a conservative man, a firm believer in Athenian religion and Athenian government. Sophocles' characters are tragically flawed, but their heroic stature is beyond question. The larger-than-life attributes that make them great are the same traits that cause their destruction‹but their greatness is preserved, even emphasized, by Sophocles' unique dramatic sensibility. They are far from the complex and troubling psychological portraits we see in the plays of Euripides. This difference should not be seen as a shortcoming on the part of Sophocles, because his vision would not have been served by the kinds of characterization found in Euripides' plays. Nor was Sophocles unaware of these differences of characterization: supposedly, Sophocles himself said that he wrote men as they ought to be, while Euripides wrote them as they really are.
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A long tradition of criticism exalts Sophocles above both Aeschylus and Euripides, hailing his work as the apex of Greek tragedy. Aristotle praised him above all other playwrights, using Oedipus the King as a model in his highly influential Poetics. A very old paradigm treats Aeschylus' plays as the preparation for Sophocles' work, with Euripides' plays representing the decline of the art form. This model tends to draw heavily on the Aristotelian approach to dramatic criticism, but it says more about Aristotle's taste than it does about the three tragedians. More nuanced critical approaches make it almost meaningless to exalt one of the three men as "the Greatest." All had very different concerns‹although their lives overlapped and they lived in the same city-state, each man had his own unique voice and powerful vision. In the end, perhaps the frenzied descent into disorder so often imagined by Euripides was truest to Athens' fate‹infighting and the dirty work of politics compromised Athens' good name, and Athens fell to her hated enemy, Sparta, just two years after the death of Sophocles.
Sophocles continued to write and serve in government well into his eighties. Oedipus at Colonus and Philoctetes are two of his last plays, and they are among the most praised works of classical art. He died in 406 BC. With only seven complete surviving plays, Sophocles left a legacy powerful enough to make him one of the founding fathers of Western drama.
Background Information on Antigone
The specific circumstances surrounding the origin of Greek drama were a puzzle even in the fourth century BC. Greek drama seems to have its roots in religious celebrations that incorporated song and dance. By the sixth century BC, Athenians had transformed a rural celebration of Dionysis into an urban festival with dancing choruses that competed for prizes. An anonymous poet came up with the idea of having the chorus interact with a masked actor. Later, Aeschylus transformed the art by using two masked actors, each playing different parts throughout the piece‹making possible Greek drama as we know it. With two actors and a chorus, complex plots and conflicts could be staged as never before, and the poets who competed in the festival were no longer writing elaborate hymns, but true plays. Athens was the only Greek city-state where this art form evolved; the comedies, tragedies, and dramas handed down to us from the period, although labeled generically as "Greek," are in fact all Athenian works. After the defeat of the Persians in a decisive campaign (480-479 BC), Athens emerged as the superpower of the independent Greek city-states, and during this time, the drama festival, or the Dionysia, became a spectacular event. The Dionysia lasted four to five days, and the city took the celebrations seriously. Prisoners were released on bail and most public business was suspended. Roughly ten thousand free male citizens, along with their slaves and dependents, watched plays in an enormous outdoor theater that could seat seventeen thousand spectators. On each of three days, the Athenians were treated to three tragedies and a satyr play (a light comedy on a mythic theme) written by one of three pre-selected tragedians, as well as one comedy by a comedic playwright. The trilogies did not have to be an extended drama dealing with the same story, although often they were. At the end of the
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festival, the tragedians were awarded first, second, and third prize by the judges of Dionysis.
Although Antigone is grouped together with Oedipus the King and Oedipus at Colonus as a trilogy (sometimes called "The Theban Plays" or "The Oedipus Trilogy"), the three works were actually not written as a trilogy at all. It would therefore be totally erroneous to say that Antigone presents some kind of "final word" on the themes of the trilogy. In fact, although Antigone deals with the events that happen chronologically last in the myth, the play was produced in 441 BC‹some fourteen or fifteen years before Oedipus the King, and a full thirty-six years before Oedipus at Colonus. Sophocles was clearly fascinated by the Oedipus myth, but inconsistencies in the events of the three plays seem to indicate that he wrote each play as a separate treatment of the story.
For modern readers, the Chorus may be the most alien element of the play. Greek drama was not meant to be what we would consider "naturalistic." It was a highly stylized art form: actors wore masks, and the performances incorporated song and dance. The Chorus delivers much of the exposition and expounds poetically on themes, but it is still meant to represent a group of characters. In the case of Antigone, the Chorus is constituted by the Theban elders, old and powerful citizens of the city who watch and comment on the action. It interacts with the actors, and in Antigone the Chorus intercedes at a crucial point near the end of the play.
Consistent with the norms of Greek drama, Antigone is not divided into acts or scenes. Action flows uninterrupted from beginning to end. However, time elapses in non-naturalistic fashion: at certain points, from reports of what has happened offstage, it is clear that a great amount of time is meant to have passed even though only a few minutes have passed for the audience. In general, as noted by Aristotle, most Greek tragedies have action confined to a twenty-four hour period.
In his influential Poetics, Aristotle set guidelines for the form of tragedy, using Oedipus the King as his ideal model. Tragedy is usually concerned with a person of great stature, a king or nobleman, who falls because of hubris, or pride. There are unities of time, place, and, most importantly, action. Action may be though of simply as motive or "movement of spirit": in Oedipus the King the action for most of the play is "find Laius' killer and stop the plague in Thebes." The action in Antigone is "preserve rightness and order in Thebes." Antigone is a strange case because the "movement-of-spirit" arguably comes from two directions: Antigone and Creon are both championing what is right, but they define rightness through different sets of values. Key elements include the moments of reversal and recognition, although not every tragedy has these moments. Reversal means a great and unexpected turn in events when the action veers around and becomes its opposite. Antigone experiences no reversal, but Creon does: at the Chorus' prodding, he finally backs down and listens to the advice he has been given, turning against the preservation of the kind of order he cherishes. Recognition means that a character gains sudden and transformative understanding of himself and the events he has experienced, moving from ignorance to knowledge. In Antigone, Creon finally recognizes that he has been misguided and that his actions have led to the death of his wife and son. Ideally, according to Aristotle, the reversal and the recognition hit at the same instant, as they do in Oedipus the King. While the Poetics are indispensable for the student of Greek
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drama‹and, indeed, drama in general‹Aristotle's theories should not be a straitjacket. Aristotle's guidelines make it difficult to appreciate the genius of Euripides, and by the standards of the Poetics, the great tragedies of Shakespeare would be failures. Aristotle is writing from a particular time and place, and he is also speaking from a very specific artistic sensibility. He may be the first word on Greek tragedy, but he is not the last.
For these summaries, the quotations and the line numbers given with the citations match the lines in the David Grene translation; the reader is encouraged to look at different translations of Antigone to get a feel for the great difference that a translator can make
Character List
Antigone: Daughter/sister of Oedipus, she and Ismene are the last of the Labdacid family. After her father went into exile, she and her sister were raised in the house of Creon. Her brothers Polyneices and Eteocles were casualties in a brutal war for power, each brother dying by the other's hand. Creon has declared that Eteocles will be honored with burial while Polyneices' body is left to rot; this edict is the thing that drives Antigone to defy the state. At times self-righteous and off-putting, she is nonetheless the character who has most consistently captured the imaginations of the audience since the play's first performance over two-and-a-half millennia ago. Her deeds expand the possibilities of human action, as she sets her individual conscience and her love for her dead brother above and against the power and authority of the state.
Ismene: Antigone's last surviving sibling, she is the foil for her stronger sister. Compared to Antigone, she has almost no agency. She does not help to bury Polyneices, nor is she able to die with Antigone later on. She has great love for her family, but she lacks the fierce pride and strength of will exhibited by Antigone.
Chorus of Theban Elders: The Chorus comments on the action and interacts with Creon, actively interceding with advice at a critical moment late in the play. They are Theban elders, important for maintaining order in the city, and Creon summons them to win their loyalty. They watch the unfolding of events with sympathy and a discerning eye, pitying Creon and Antigone but also commenting critically on their faults.
Creon: Ruler of Thebes in the wake of war, Creon cherishes order and loyalty above all else. He cannot bear to be defied, any more than he can bear to watch the laws of the state defied. He has Polyneices' body defiled while Eteocles is honored because he feels that he cannot give equal to share to both brothers when one was a traitor and the other was loyal. He does not recognize that other forms of justice exist, and in his pride he condemns Antigone, defies the gods, and brings ruin on himself.
A Sentry: The Sentry brings the news that Polyneices has been buried. He also captures Antigone later on. His speech is an interesting experiment in the history of Greek drama, as it attempts to approximate the rhythms and diction of natural speech.
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Haemon: Son of Creon and Eurydice. Haemon is engaged to be married to Antigone. In a dramatic dialogue with his father, Haemon defends the moral grounding of Antigone's actions while warning his father that the people of Thebes sympathize with the girl. He and his father part in anger. Haemon's devotion to Antigone is clear; at her death, he is so distraught that he tries to kill his father and then kills himself.
Teiresias: The blind prophet. He warns Creon that the gods do not approve of his treatment of Polyneices' body or Antigone. Creon then insults him. Teiresias responds with a prophecy foretelling the death of one of Creon's children, warning that all of Greece will despise the king if he does not relent. The prophet is an important part of Sophocles' vision. Through him, the will of the gods is made known, and his existence implies that there is a definite will of the gods to defer to and obey.
A Messenger: The Messenger reports the suicides of Antigone and Haemon to the Chorus and Eurydice. He leaves to follow Eurydice when she runs off in grief.
Eurydice: Creon's wife and Haemon's mother. Broken by her son's suicide, she kills herself, calling curses down on Creon for causing the tragedy.
Second Messenger: The Second Messenger reports Eurydice's suicide to the Chorus and Creon. Creon, already broken by Haemon's death, is forced to confront the suicide of his wife as well.
List of Themes
Pride: Pride and its effects are a central part of Antigone. It is a trait despised by the gods, who bring suffering to the proud, but to the Greek mind pride is also an inextricable part of greatness. Both Antigone and Creon are incredibly proud, making it impossible for either one of them to back down once they have taken a stand. Pride is part of what makes Antigone heroic. Pride is a complex and multifaceted concept in Greek tragedy; it is discussed in greater depth in the detailed summaries.
Individual versus State; Conscience versus Law; Moral or Divine Law versus Human Law: These three conflicts are very closely related, but this crude set of pairings helps to untangle some of the central issues of the play. Antigone and her values line up with the first entity in each pair, while Creon and his values line up with the second. Antigone continues to be a subversive and powerful play, inspiration for generations of rebels and dissidents. In our own century, a version of Antigone rewritten during the Second World War became one of the most powerful texts of resistance against the Nazis. The conflict between the individual and the power of the state was as pressing for Greek audiences as it is to modern one. Antigone is a threat to the status quo; she invokes divine law as defense of her actions, but implicit in her position is faith in the discerning powers of her individual conscience. She sacrifices her life out of devotion to principles higher than human law. Creon makes a mistake in sentencing her‹and his mistake is condemned, in turn, by the gods‹but his position is an understandable one. In the wake of war, and with his reign so new, Creon has to establish his authority as supreme. On the other hand, Creon's need to defeat Antigone seems at times to be extremely personal. At stake is not only the order of the state, but his pride and sense of himself as a king and, more fundamentally, a man.
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Gender: the Position of Women: Antigone's gender has profound affects on the meaning of her actions. Creon himself says that the need to defeat her is all the more pressing because she is a woman. The freedom of Greek women was extremely limited; the rules and strictures placed on them were great even for the ancient world. Antigone's rebellion is especially threatening because it upsets gender roles and hierarchy. By refusing to be passive, she overturns one the fundamental rules of her culture. The detailed summaries below have more to say on this important theme.
Inaction/Lack of Agency versus Agency: Closely related to the above theme, this theme plays itself out in the contrast between Antigone and Ismene. When faced with injustice, the two women react in very different ways. Ismene chooses to do nothing, and Antigone chooses to act; later, Antigone proves again and again that she is the character with the most agency. She is arguably the only character in the play who walks into her fate with her eyes open all along the way.
The Threat of Tyranny: Athenians were sensitive to the idea of tyranny and the fine line between a strong leader and a brutal tyrant. Creon is in many ways a sympathetic character, but he often abuses his power. His faults do not necessarily lie in a lust for power; often, he has noble intentions. He is completely loyal to the state, but he is subject to human weakness and poor judgment
Short Summary
Polyneices and Eteocles, two brothers leading opposite sides in Thebes' civil war, have both been killed in battle. Creon, new ruler of Thebes, has declared that Eteocles will be honored and Polyneices disgraced. The rebel brother's body will not be sanctified by holy rites, and it will lay unburied to be the food of carrion animals. Antigone and Ismene are the sisters of the dead brothers, and they are now the last children of the ill-fated Oedipus. In the opening of the play, Antigone brings Ismene outside the city gates late at night for a secret meeting: Antigone wants to bury Polyneices' body, in defiance of Creon's edict. Ismene refuses to help her, fearing the death penalty, and she is unable to dissuade Antigone from going to do the deed by herself.
Creon enters, along with the Chorus of Theban elders. He seeks their support in the days to come, and in particular their support for his edict regarding Polyneices' body. The Chorus pledges their support. A Sentry enters, reporting fearfully that the body has been buried. A furious Creon orders the Sentry to find the culprit or face death himself. The Sentry leaves, but after a short absence he returns, bringing Antigone with him. Creon questions her, and she does not deny what she has done. She argues unflinchingly with Creon about the morality of the edict and the morality of what she has done. Creon grows angrier, and, thinking Ismene must have helped her, summons the girl. Ismene tries to confess falsely to the crime, seeking to die with her sister, but Antigone will have none of it. Creon orders that the two women be temporarily locked up inside.
Haemon, Creon's son and Antigone's fiancé, enters to pledge allegiance of his father. He initially seems willing to obey Creon. But when Haemon tries gently to persuade his father to spare Antigone, the discussion deteriorates and the two men are soon bitterly insulting each other. Haemon leaves, vowing to never see Creon again.
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Creon decides to spare Ismene but to imprison Antigone in a cave. She is brought out of the house, and she bewails her fate and defends her actions one last time. She is taken away, with the Chorus expressing great sorrow because of what is going to happen to her.
Teiresias, the blind prophet, enters. He warns Creon that the gods side with Antigone. Creon accuses Teiresias of being corrupt, and Teiresias responds that because of Creon's mistakes, he will lose one child for the crimes of leaving Polyneices unburied and putting Antigone into the earth. All of Greece will despise him, and the sacrificial offerings of Thebes will not be accepted by the gods.
The Chorus, terrified, asks Creon to take their advice. He assents, and they tell him that he should bury Polyneices and free Antigone. Creon, shaken, agrees to do it. He leaves with a retinue of men to help him right his previous mistakes. The Chorus delivers a choral ode on/to the god Dionysis, and then a Messenger enters. He tells them that Haemon has killed himself. Eurydice, Creon's wife and Haemon's mother, enters and asks the Messenger to tell her everything. The Messenger reports that Haemon and Antigone have both taken their own lives. Eurydice disappears into the palace.
Creon enters, carrying Haemon's body. He understands that his own actions have caused these events. A Second Messenger arrives to tell Creon and the Chorus that Eurydice has killed herself. With her last breath, she cursed her husband. Creon blames himself for everything that has happened, and, a broken man, he asks his servants to help him inside. The order he valued so much has been protected, and he is still the king, but he has acted against the gods and lost his child and his wife. The Chorus closes by saying that the gods punish the proud, but punishment brings wisdom
Beginning of the play to the entrance of the sentry. (Lines 1 to 240)
Analysis:
Sophocles is very concise in laying out the issues of the play and the values most cherished by his characters. In the argument between Antigone and Ismene, Ismene seems doubly powerless. She provides a contrast to her stronger sister throughout the play. Though she is saddened by the fate of Polyneices' body, she does not believe that there is anything she can do. She reminds Antigone that they are only women and are relatively helpless. Though she is sorry to be unable to help her brother, she will not disobey the state: "Extravagant action is not sensible" (l. 78). Ismene also seems to think that Antigone will not even be able to bury the body, which might be guarded: "But you are in love / with the impossible" (ll. 104-5). She is convinced that burying Polyneices is not only imprudent because of law, but impossible because of logistics. Ismene's powerlessness takes another form: she is completely unable to sway the headstrong Antigone. Antigone's personality and values are sketched concisely in this first dialogue. She says that she will be a criminal, "but a religious one" (l. 85). Antigone reasons that the next world is more important than this one: "The time in which I must please those that are dead / is longer than I must please
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those of this world. / For there I shall lie forever" (ll. 86-88). Ismene is not even able to convince Antigone to be discrete: Antigone will not attempt to perform the rites in secret, but will "shout it out. I will hate you still worse / for silence" (ll. 99-100).
The position of women is an important theme of the play. Sophocles is aware of the impact of gender on Antigone and her choices. In the opening, Ismene reminds her sister that their gender makes them vulnerable, and Ismene's gender seems to have everything to do with her belief in her own powerlessness. Antigone does not stress her own gender explicitly, but the state does‹Creon will later say that he cannot back down because the triumph of a woman is unacceptable. One interpretation of Antigone links the position of women to Antigone's fascination with death. She seems hell-bent on being executed, refusing even Ismene's entreaty to do the rites in secret. Creon later accuses her of being in love with death, and her own words do little to refute him. She speaks in this opening of lying down in the earth beside her brother, and her words reveal a morbid kind of longing. The importance of attending to the next world outweighs, in her mind, the importance of human laws. In an oblique way, the play links this willingness to die with Antigone's social position as a woman. She is a woman caught between obligations to two different men. The first is her dead brother, and the second is her hostile ruler. But Creon is more than her king: he is also her future father-in-law, as well as the man in charge of her well-being since the exile of Oedipus. Her obligations are not only to the abstract state, but to a man with whom she is intimately connected. In this case, struggle against patriarchy is made literal (patriarchy: rule of the father), as Antigone clashes with the man who has had a father's authority over her since she was a child, the same man who is her future father-in-law. The result is that Antigone is restricted and ruled not only by a distant state but by the closest familial relationships: indeed, the state is embodied in the men with whom she has these relationships. It is significant that Antigone, out of a sense of duty and filial piety as well as compassion, tirelessly helped Oedipus during his exile. Sophocles depicts her as a long-suffering and faithful aid to Oedipus in Oedipus at Colonus, making Oedipus yet another man to whom Antigone was bound by serious obligation.
Held by this claustrophobically tight and conflicted system of obligations, the two sisters react in two very different ways. Ismene invokes her own supposed powerlessness as the defense of her inaction, while Antigone commits herself to a series of choices that she knows will result in her own execution. A common statement by critics is that Antigone seems to have a love affair with Death. The idea of a love for death is enforced by a grim symmetry between this "love affair" and her engagement to Haemon, Creon's son. Antigone is a bride-to-be, and though Haemon is devoted to her, her marriage will give her yet another man whom she will have to obey. Eventually, the groom she chooses instead is Death. Her morbid fascination with death may be the reaction of a strong-willed woman who, in life, is caught in a system that divides her between any number of male masters. In line with this reading, one can view Antigone as being frustrated by limitation and intoxicated by the power of martyrdom. This attachment to martyrdom may be part of her motivation‹although clearly, she is also motivated both by a love for her brother and by the conviction that divine law has been disobeyed. But perhaps the death penalty makes the consequences of her action an additional benefit of burying Polyneices, rather than an obstacle. In her culture, the only power she can have is as a martyr, and by committing herself to becoming one she takes her agency back into her own hands.
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In his talk with the Chorus, Creon praises the glory of the state while trying to make himself synonymous with it. He couches the worth of a person in terms of that person's patriotism: "anyone thinking / another man more a friend than his own country / I rate him nowhere" (ll. 202-4). Many of Creon's statements are in this vein, and it is in line with this perspective that Creon decides the fates of the two brothers' corpses: the loyal Eteocles honored, the dissident Polyneices horribly dishonored. He asks for the obedience of the Chorus, and they promise it‹although their assent is couched in terms of the need to avoid punishment by the state. The elders do not comment on the ethical validity of the decree itself.
The selection of the Theban elders as the Chorus of the play is significant. The Chorus always functions as a way to comment on the action, but this specific group of elders has been called by Creon for a reason. Creon asks for their support, and he also sets the tone for his interactions with them by commenting on the importance of counsel. The Chorus in Greek plays often functions as a kind of barometer, with their reactions indicating to the audience how a situation should be read. In many plays, the Chorus is powerless to intervene in the events being witnessed. In Antigone, the Chorus acts in a slightly more active role, playing a part in Creon's crucial but belated decision near the end of the play.
The Chorus condemns pride, but in Greek tragedy, "pride" is used as an inclusive term for a complex set of weaknesses and virtues. Pride and its results constitute a central theme in any Greek tragedy, but it is easy for the reader to oversimplify the meaning of pride in these plays in a condemning or moralizing manner. These works are not simple morality plays in which the audience learns a tidy lesson about how "Pride goeth before a fall." The reader needs to remember that the Greek worldview is pre-Christian. In the wake of Christianity, pride is typically seen as a one-dimensional vice, one of the seven deadly sins and the opposite of the central Christian virtue of humility. The pride/humility binary is not central to Greek understandings of pride as it is to Christian morality: the reader is hard-pressed to find a single Greek hero known for his humility or modesty, and the gods are certainly above humility. In contrast, the central hero of Christianity, Jesus Christ, comes to earth in total humility, born in a manger and eventually forced to endure an utterly humiliating death. Tellingly, the Christian tradition attributes pride to Satan, linking pride to Satan's fall from heaven. In Greek tragedy and in the epic work of Homer, pride is always an inextricable part of greatness. Pride comes with dignity and determination; it also brings stubbornness, blindness, and cruelty. Pride can be seen as the origin of both strength and self-destruction. Antigone and Creon are both extremely proud people, and part of Antigone's pride is her unwillingness to yield to the laws of man. In her case, pride is an affront to the state rather than an affront to divine law. Though her fanaticism about her position can alienate the modern audience‹as it would have alienated the original Greek audience‹she is typical of a Greek hero in that her greatness goes hand in hand with excess.
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Entrance of Sentry to the second entrance of Ismene. (Lines 242-578)
1) Analysis:
The Sentry is an interesting experiment in the history of Greek drama. He speaks in a manner that in some ways approximates natural speech. He is out of breath and nervous, but his speech is also full of stale poetry and strangely affected turns of phrase, as if he were nervous speaking to the city's ruler and made a bad attempt to use fancy language. The character is captured in his language, as well as through his made-and-broken oath and triumphant return: he wants to stay out of trouble, and in his interaction with Creon he wavers between obsequiousness and cockiness.
The Chorus' questions about the possibility that God might have buried Polyneices reveals how uncertain they are about the justice of Creon's decree. Creon's outraged reaction and his imperious threatening of the Sentry show some of his weaknesses. He is prone to anger and has the markings of a tyrant. His values emphasize law and hierarchy, but he is showing none of the openness to counsel that he praised when he first addressed the Chorus.
The Chorus' beautiful speech praising man closes with remarks that attempt to map out the relationship between pride, the individual, and society. Important themes in their speech include pride and the relationship between the individual and society. Thematically, the play maps out conflicts between opposing needs and obligations: individual versus society, conscience versus law, divine law versus laws of man. The last stanza begins with a pairing of two kinds of virtue: honor to the laws of earth and obedience to the justice of the gods. Although the Chorus lumps these two prioritized values together, in the next scene Antigone and Creon's argument will polarize these values, as Antigone defends her rejection of earthly laws by claiming to act by the rules of justice and the gods. The fate of those who are reckless is exile from society; no city has room for them, but in light of the play's events, the Chorus' easy pairing of earthly law with divine justice becomes problematic. The values praised by the Chorus can come into conflict, but for the proud individual who recklessly dishonors law or God, there is no place in society. Both Antigone and Creon, though they champion different values, will fall under this harsh directive. The closing lines are strange, as the Chorus prays not only that such a reckless person should never be a friend, but also that the people in the Chorus should never be that reckless person: "may he never think my thoughts!" (l. 411). This closing suggests that recklessness and pride are sins that can take hold in all men.
The sudden and mysterious dust storm witnessed by the guards seems to indicate that the gods are less than pleased with Creon's decree. The guard assumes that the storm was created by a divine power, but Creon ignores the event. In her replies to Creon, Antigone defends the supremacy of God's law, but the fact that the laws of God are "unwritten and secure" means, necessarily, that Antigone's conscience must decide the will of God. Antigone's struggle deals with two closely connected themes: the laws of god or morality versus the laws of man, and the individual conscience versus the
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power of the state. Though she claims to be an agent of the divine will, she is also pitting the judgments of her individual conscience against the dictate of human law‹human law here symbolized and championed by Creon. This idea would have been somewhat discomfiting for a Greek audience‹and it does not always sit well with audiences today. Although Antigone never justifies her actions by invoking her individual conscience, her talk about the supremacy of divine law assumes that she knows what the divine will is‹this knowledge comes from someplace outside of man's laws, because the divine law, as Antigone reminds us, is "unwritten." She must use her conscience to decide what to do. Later, Antigone's conscience is validated by the gods themselves, through signs and the soothsayer Teiresias. Sophocles is making a very powerful statement about the individual's conscience and the existence of principles higher than the laws of the state, and even today this perspective makes Antigone a stirring and subversive work.
In her argument with Creon, Antigone also shows more of her morbid longing for death, saying that for one who has lived as she has, death is welcome. These statements are in line with the interpretation offered in this study guide's analysis of the first section. Antigone's motives and character can be seen in light of the special demands and conflicts she faces, demands and conflicts shaped profoundly by her position and obligations as a woman in a patriarchal society. Consider Creon's last words before the entrance of Ismene: Creon says in one breath that Antigone will "love them" [the dead], and then in the next breath asserts that while he is alive no woman shall rule (ll. 577-8). In Creon's angry attack, the vulnerable position of women is made clear in the same moment that Creon alludes to Antigone's fascination with death.
Creon also shows how personally he interprets the struggle against Antigone. He has conflated his own person with the sanctity of the law and the state. The proclamation was his, and disobedience means disrespect for Creon, which means disrespect for the law, which means disrespect for Creon. Clearly, the struggle is not only about the need to obey law. His own manhood seems to be at stake: "I swear I am no man and she the man / if she can win this and not pay for it" (ll. 528-9). At this point, Creon has equated masculinity with victory and compromise with defeat. Antigone's gender makes it all the more important that Creon enforce his will.
Ismene's second entrance to Haemon's exit. (Lines 579-832)
Analysis:
Ismene provides an interesting contrast to her strong-willed sister. Form beginning to end, she seems to be a powerless character. The theme of agency versus inaction is embodied in the two sisters. At the start of the play, Ismene invoked the powerlessness of women as a defense of her own inaction. She believed she was powerless to bury her brother; she was unable to convince her sister not to do the deed. After her second entrance, she continues as a character without a shred of agency, outspoken and out-willed by her stronger sister. Here again, she is unable to take her fate into her own hands: she seeks to die with her sister, but Antigone will have nothing to do with this plan. She corrects Ismene's lie that the burial of
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Polyneices was the act of both women. Once again, Ismene is not able to do anything: Antigone decides not only her own fate, but her sister's. Antigone is the only one with agency.
Two motivations are possible for Antigone's rejection of her sister's lie, and a combination of the two seems most likely. The first motivation is that Antigone views her burial of Polyneices as glorious, and the punishment for the act is part of that glory. As Ismene has not helped to do the deed, Ismene should not share in the reward. This motivation comes through clearly in the first part of Antigone's dialogue with Ismene, when Antigone harshly rejects her. But as Antigone's tone softens, a second motivation seems likely. She wants Ismene to live. In determining which motivation is stronger, much depends on the interpretation of the actress playing Antigone. A harsh tone can be played throughout the entire scene; on the other hand, the actress can address Ismene with great tenderness even at the beginning of the dialogue, when Antigone's words are least gentle.
Judith Butler and her writings about identity and performativity provide some interesting insights into Creon's statements about women and men. Notice the word choice of the translator: "From this time forth, these must be women, and not free to roam" [emphasis added] (ll. 636-7). Creon uses the word "be"‹as if Antigone and Ismene would not be women if they were free to roam. Creon is saying that restriction of movement and submission to the authority of men is not just appropriate for women‹it defines "woman" as a category. In her writings about the performative, Judith Butler argues that performance is constitutive of identity‹and not the other way around. Identity, and, in this case, gender identity, is not stable and unchanging. It is mutable and discrete, dependent on a performance that must be repeated. We treat our conceptions of gender as stable and real, when in fact they are so unstable that repetitive performance is necessary to maintain them.
For example, in line at a grocery story, a young woman dressed in a T-shirt and cut-offs and drenched in sweat is overheard saying to a friend, "Yeah, we've been moving today. I've been carrying heavy stuff back and forth, sweating up a storm. I can't wait to take a shower and slip into some nice clothes, so that I can feel like a girl again." What a strange thing to say: "so that I can feel like a girl again." The overheard woman's comment reveals the slippery nature of gender categories. We tend to treat gender as real, innate, but at the same time, our comfort within our own genders is maintained by our repetition of activities. The act of heavy labor was sufficient in destabilizing the young woman's sense of her own femaleness: to reinstate her sense of her own femininity, she must cleanse and dress herself in appropriately female garb. Feeling stable in one's gender is dependent on action and exterior situations‹in drag acts, the theory finds application as gender becomes a matter of pure performance. Returning to Creon, he sees the maintenance of gender categories as an essential part of maintaining general order. Locking up Ismene and Antigone indoors is a way to make them be women‹and to be a woman, in ancient Greece, is to be under the authority of men. Thus, making them be women is a way to control them, maintaining both gender hierarchy and power hierarchy, which in this case are conflated. Remember Creon's earlier assertion that gender's stability was being threatened: "I swear I am no man and she the man / if she can win this and not pay for it" (ll. 528-9). Creon feels that his manhood is dependent on victory‹it takes action to maintain one's claims on the label, "man." At the same time, Antigone's defiance is
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seen by Creon as an attempt to usurp male status and claim it as her own. Later, he speaks with urgency to Haemon about the need to defeat Antigone, especially because she is a woman. Antigone destabilizes gender hierarchy and power hierarchy at the same time; Creon wants her to be a woman (submissive, shut up indoors, obedient, defeated), and needs to make sure that he stays a man (dominant, free, authoritative, victorious). Gender needs to be maintained along the traditional lines; this division is an integral part of the order that Creon cherishes. Significantly, Antigone never grounds her defiance in these gendered terms, nor does she make statements that dwell on the performative aspect of gender as Creon does. The sex-gender system's instability is solely the concern of Creon, who, as a man and a man in power, has the most to gain from the protection of that system.
Creon's speech to Haemon sums up the king's prioritization of authority and obedience. He sees the rejection of authority as the destroyer of cities and lives. Remember that Creon's need to assert himself is made more urgent by the fact that Thebes has just barely survived a civil war. As the new ruler, Creon's authority is fresh and untested. But Creon rejects Haemon's counsel, acting agains the spirit with which he addressed the Theban elders near the beginning of the play. Creon's anxieties about power make him behave like a tyrant: "Is not the city thought to be the ruler's?" (l. 800). He claims ownership of Thebes‹a sentiment that would not have gone over well in democratic Athens. Haemon gives the populist retort: "There is no city / possessed by one man only" (l. 801). The theme of tyranny and its threat is dealt with in an insightful way in Antigone. Creon's abuse of his authority comes in part from a real love for Thebes and a concern for her wellbeing. Again and again, he praises loyalty, patriotism, and obedience to the law as the greatest virtues. Yet he is in some ways the embodiment of a bad ruler: "Should the city tell me how I am to rule them?" (l. 794). Although the question is rhetorical, the answer, for many modern audience members and ancient Athenian audience members as well, is Yes. He rejects his son's moderate advice out of stubbornness and an uncompromising attachment to a certain set of virtues. Creon's exaltation of order and love of authority, combined with his stubbornness and pride, lead to an unthinking hatred for any perceived threat to that order. He is at his most barbaric when he tells the servants to bring Antigone so that she can die while Haemon watches. Creon's love of order and the state is carried to an immoral extreme, one that violates the bonds of family. He tries to use Antigone's death to hurt his own son, abusing his authority for the sake of gratuitous cruelty. Haemon's comments also call the words of the Chorus into question, as Antigone has done just a few moments earlier: the possibility that fear motivates the Chorus' responses to Creon means that the voice of the Theban people is inaccessible to us. It is not even clear if Haemon is telling the truth when he says that the people of Thebes disapprove of Antigone's execution. Although different characters (Chorus, Creon, Haemon) claim to speak the will of the people, the true wishes of the people, or for the wellbeing of the people, these claims are never on any grounds that are accessible to the audience.
Haemon's exit to Teiresias' exit. (Lines 833-1164
Analysis:
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Ismene provides an interesting contrast to her strong-willed sister. Form beginning to end, she seems to be a powerless character. The theme of agency versus inaction is embodied in the two sisters. At the start of the play, Ismene invoked the powerlessness of women as a defense of her own inaction. She believed she was powerless to bury her brother; she was unable to convince her sister not to do the deed. After her second entrance, she continues as a character without a shred of agency, outspoken and out-willed by her stronger sister. Here again, she is unable to take her fate into her own hands: she seeks to die with her sister, but Antigone will have nothing to do with this plan. She corrects Ismene's lie that the burial of Polyneices was the act of both women. Once again, Ismene is not able to do anything: Antigone decides not only her own fate, but her sister's. Antigone is the only one with agency.
Two motivations are possible for Antigone's rejection of her sister's lie, and a combination of the two seems most likely. The first motivation is that Antigone views her burial of Polyneices as glorious, and the punishment for the act is part of that glory. As Ismene has not helped to do the deed, Ismene should not share in the reward. This motivation comes through clearly in the first part of Antigone's dialogue with Ismene, when Antigone harshly rejects her. But as Antigone's tone softens, a second motivation seems likely. She wants Ismene to live. In determining which motivation is stronger, much depends on the interpretation of the actress playing Antigone. A harsh tone can be played throughout the entire scene; on the other hand, the actress can address Ismene with great tenderness even at the beginning of the dialogue, when Antigone's words are least gentle.
Judith Butler and her writings about identity and performativity provide some interesting insights into Creon's statements about women and men. Notice the word choice of the translator: "From this time forth, these must be women, and not free to roam" [emphasis added] (ll. 636-7). Creon uses the word "be"‹as if Antigone and Ismene would not be women if they were free to roam. Creon is saying that restriction of movement and submission to the authority of men is not just appropriate for women‹it defines "woman" as a category. In her writings about the performative, Judith Butler argues that performance is constitutive of identity‹and not the other way around. Identity, and, in this case, gender identity, is not stable and unchanging. It is mutable and discrete, dependent on a performance that must be repeated. We treat our conceptions of gender as stable and real, when in fact they are so unstable that repetitive performance is necessary to maintain them.
For example, in line at a grocery story, a young woman dressed in a T-shirt and cut-offs and drenched in sweat is overheard saying to a friend, "Yeah, we've been moving today. I've been carrying heavy stuff back and forth, sweating up a storm. I can't wait to take a shower and slip into some nice clothes, so that I can feel like a girl again." What a strange thing to say: "so that I can feel like a girl again." The overheard woman's comment reveals the slippery nature of gender categories. We tend to treat gender as real, innate, but at the same time, our comfort within our own genders is maintained by our repetition of activities. The act of heavy labor was sufficient in destabilizing the young woman's sense of her own femaleness: to reinstate her sense of her own femininity, she must cleanse and dress herself in appropriately female garb. Feeling stable in one's gender is dependent on action and exterior situations‹in drag acts, the theory finds application as gender becomes a matter of pure
429
performance. Returning to Creon, he sees the maintenance of gender categories as an essential part of maintaining general order. Locking up Ismene and Antigone indoors is a way to make them be women‹and to be a woman, in ancient Greece, is to be under the authority of men. Thus, making them be women is a way to control them, maintaining both gender hierarchy and power hierarchy, which in this case are conflated. Remember Creon's earlier assertion that gender's stability was being threatened: "I swear I am no man and she the man / if she can win this and not pay for it" (ll. 528-9). Creon feels that his manhood is dependent on victory‹it takes action to maintain one's claims on the label, "man." At the same time, Antigone's defiance is seen by Creon as an attempt to usurp male status and claim it as her own. Later, he speaks with urgency to Haemon about the need to defeat Antigone, especially because she is a woman. Antigone destabilizes gender hierarchy and power hierarchy at the same time; Creon wants her to be a woman (submissive, shut up indoors, obedient, defeated), and needs to make sure that he stays a man (dominant, free, authoritative, victorious). Gender needs to be maintained along the traditional lines; this division is an integral part of the order that Creon cherishes. Significantly, Antigone never grounds her defiance in these gendered terms, nor does she make statements that dwell on the performative aspect of gender as Creon does. The sex-gender system's instability is solely the concern of Creon, who, as a man and a man in power, has the most to gain from the protection of that system.
Creon's speech to Haemon sums up the king's prioritization of authority and obedience. He sees the rejection of authority as the destroyer of cities and lives. Remember that Creon's need to assert himself is made more urgent by the fact that Thebes has just barely survived a civil war. As the new ruler, Creon's authority is fresh and untested. But Creon rejects Haemon's counsel, acting agains the spirit with which he addressed the Theban elders near the beginning of the play. Creon's anxieties about power make him behave like a tyrant: "Is not the city thought to be the ruler's?" (l. 800). He claims ownership of Thebes‹a sentiment that would not have gone over well in democratic Athens. Haemon gives the populist retort: "There is no city / possessed by one man only" (l. 801). The theme of tyranny and its threat is dealt with in an insightful way in Antigone. Creon's abuse of his authority comes in part from a real love for Thebes and a concern for her wellbeing. Again and again, he praises loyalty, patriotism, and obedience to the law as the greatest virtues. Yet he is in some ways the embodiment of a bad ruler: "Should the city tell me how I am to rule them?" (l. 794). Although the question is rhetorical, the answer, for many modern audience members and ancient Athenian audience members as well, is Yes. He rejects his son's moderate advice out of stubbornness and an uncompromising attachment to a certain set of virtues. Creon's exaltation of order and love of authority, combined with his stubbornness and pride, lead to an unthinking hatred for any perceived threat to that order. He is at his most barbaric when he tells the servants to bring Antigone so that she can die while Haemon watches. Creon's love of order and the state is carried to an immoral extreme, one that violates the bonds of family. He tries to use Antigone's death to hurt his own son, abusing his authority for the sake of gratuitous cruelty. Haemon's comments also call the words of the Chorus into question, as Antigone has done just a few moments earlier: the possibility that fear motivates the Chorus' responses to Creon means that the voice of the Theban people is inaccessible to us. It is not even clear if Haemon is telling the truth when he says that the people of Thebes disapprove of Antigone's execution. Although different characters (Chorus, Creon, Haemon) claim to speak the will of the people, the true wishes of the people,
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or for the wellbeing of the people, these claims are never on any grounds that are accessible to the audience.
Analysis:
Creon allows his anger to master him; his decision to kill both girls, although he relents, reveals how vindictive he can be. He is not cool-headed. His punishment for Antigone can be seen either as an act of mercy (she will not be directly executed, but will be provided with only enough food and water to live) or as an exercise in creative cruelty. He will not give her a martyr's death, but will instead torture her with a punishment that alludes to the love for death that Creon ascribes to her. The theme of tyranny is here again, as the fates of these girls are subject to the whims of a ruler who can grant or withhold mercy and design punishments that he finds most appealing.
Antigone shows that she can play an audience. At the end of the Chorus' speech, the people of Thebes hold back tears at the entrance of Antigone. Although the Chorus continues to look at her willfulness as a fault, they do not want her to die. Antigone is either oblivious to her surroundings because of grief or she is a shrewd performer: Antigone insists that none will weep for her, although we know from the Chorus' own words that they are already weeping for her. She defends herself one last time, with reasons that sound strange to some modern audience members. Her brother was irreplaceable, unlike a child or a husband. Although this strange line of reasoning hardly sounds like meaningful justification to some viewers, her words stress her youth. She is cut off from the normal pattern of a woman's life. She has never known child or husband, and so these relationships seem less valuable to her than the irreplaceable brother, or the irreplaceable parents to whom she briefly alludes. Antigone bemoans the fact that she will never know marriage because of a premature death. Her prioritization of her relationship to her brother emphasizes a detachment from the relationships to the children and husband that she will never have.
The use of the character Teiresias is an important part of Sophocles' vision. The themes throughout Sophocles' plays reveal a world where there is ultimate truth and order. A common theme is that though fate may seem capricious, gods' reasons are beyond man, and the justice of men does not apply to them. Deities need not justify themselves to mortals, and for mortals obedience to the gods is a virtue. This faith means that in Sophocles' plays there is a guideline for behavior, a sense, albeit in Antigone a complicated one, that there is a definite right and wrong. Teiresias is the mouthpiece of the gods and of a strongly defined ethical system. In both Oedipus the King and Antigone, he is a source of infallible truth. The use of Teiresias reflects Sophocles' vision; an interesting contrast is the way Euripides uses the same character. While the Teiresias of Sophocles is always right, providing characters with solid advice that could help them if only they would listen to it, the Teiresias in Euripides' The Bacchae is a vulnerable and foolish old man. In Euripides' plays, the result is that the gods and divine will become muddied, darker, and the kind of ultimate order envisioned by Sophocles is relentlessly destabilized.
We knew from Teiresias' words that, without question, Creon has done wrong. The theme of pride and its disastrous consequences is here again. Even confronted by a prophet who has never been in error, Creon cannot back down. Creon has so much
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faith in his own sense of order that he cannot imagine the gods' will being different from his own sense of right and wrong.
Exit of Teiresias to the end of the play. (Lines 1164-1424)
Analysis:
Finally, Creon relents and takes the advice of the Chorus. At last shaken by Teiresias' prophecies‹though too proud to admit it to the prophet's face‹Creon is able to make the great step of reversing his position and swallowing his pride.
The Chorus' praise of Bacchus might seem superfluous, but the festival in which Antigone was performed was devoted to Bacchus/Dionysis. It is important to remember that Bacchus is not the plump god of wine imagined by the Romans; the Greek divinity is more complex. He is sacred to Thebes, his birthplace, and he is a god of nature and divine ecstasy. Through the Dionysia, he is specially connected to drama and art. His presence is therefore not surprising in a dramatic work set in Thebes. Their might be a kind or irony that the prayers of the Chorus are followed by news of ruin, but the irony may not be intentional.
A common reading of Antigone asserts that the play should be called Creon. His tragedy, according to this reading, is the axis of the work. The need to name one hero as central seems to be another lingering effect of Aristotle, and it is an abuse of the Poetics; it goes hand in hand with a very pristine idea of the mechanics of Greek tragedy. It is important for readers to remember than Aristotle lived long after Sophocles' death, and the drive to name Creon as "the tragic hero" of the play is more of a classroom exercise than it is a meaningful or insightful interpretation of Antigone. Rather than try to jam Antigone's structure into the framework suggested by Aristotle (and Aristotle was explaining a model, not providing interpreters with a skeleton key that could unlock any play), readers make more productive use of their time by looking at the specific features of Antigone. Too often, readers plug in the formulas of Aristotle and then stop thinking.
Examining the symmetry between Creon and Antigone provides important insights into the themes of the work. The play is about a war between different values as much as it is about the struggle between two strong-willed people. Antigone is struggling against Creon, but she is also struggling against patriarchy, the power of the state, and the rules of larger society. Creon is battling Antigone, but he is also fighting against chaos, disorder, the unraveling of the social fabric. In the twentieth century, the theme of the individual and the individual conscience struggling against the power of law and the state has caught the imagination of audience members most vividly. For modern audiences and the Athenians who first saw Antigone, Creon is the symbol of a certain kind of tyrant. His good intentions, even coupled with his stubbornness and pride, would seem to frustrate shelving Antigone as a play that teaches the cliché lesson of "Power corrupts." Creon's mistake is not that he puts lust for power ahead of the interests of the state; rather, Creon's weakness is an absolute confidence in a
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certain set of values. Again and again, he praises patriotism, loyalty to fathers, and civil obedience, elevating these values so highly that other kinds of justice are forgotten. His position, however, is in many ways more comfortable for audiences then and now. His view means that there is at least a definite set of guidelines and rules, and the abuses and vagaries of individual conscience are not allowed to pose a threat to social order. Creon fears disorder; in the wake of civil war, his need to establish himself as ruler is clear. Antigone's struggle is just as single-minded. Her devotion is to her brother and the dictates of her conscience, through which she claims to know the "unwritten" laws of God. But Antigone's actions are also an affront to important values: "You went to the extreme of daring / and against the high throne of Justice / you fell, my daughter, grievously" (ll. 908-10). The Chorus declares that Antigone is in opposition to "the throne of Justice," reminding us that her actions are a threat to order and the institutions of law that protect the good of the people. There are different kinds of justice at work in the play: there is the justice of man-made laws and institutions, symbolized by Creon, and the justice of the conscience and morality not written in law, symbolized by Antigone. Antigone proudly defies the laws of men, and suffers at the hands of those laws. Creon, in his pride, defies the laws of the gods and unwritten morality. He suffers at the hands of fate and divine retribution. The Chorus pities both of them while condemning both characters' actions.
But the differences between the two of them are more telling. Antigone's action is ultimately more heroic; she defies the power of the state out of love for her brother and faith in her conscience. The gods themselves validate her position. An important theme of the play is the conflict between law and other forms of morality, forms like divine law or the dictates of the human conscience. The play suggests that there are laws that are higher than the laws written by men; it takes Antigone, even though she can be read/played as proud and glory-seeking, to champion these higher values in defiance of the state. Antigone wins a glorious martyrdom for herself, and her fall, unlike Creon's, is entirely self-willed. Her eyes are open as she moves toward her fate. Creon's fate, although the king is given fair warning, sneaks up on him from behind. His position is the safer one, but because of his unimaginative interpretation of justice he unwittingly defies divine law. Aristotle's recognition scene is his because Creon is the one who goes through most of the play in ignorance. The deaths of his son and wife are not brought on willingly, but out of his slowness in reversing his position. Antigone is the hero who amazes audiences with her determination, even as she angers some with her stubbornness and pride. Her pride is an inextricable part of her greatness. In contrast, the audience can only wait for Creon to belatedly change his mind. While Antigone is allowed to walk forward, eyes open, into a martyr's death, a crushed Creon must ask his servants to help lead him away as he recognizes his hand in the deaths of his son and wife. Creon, after making a mistake, has persisted in that mistake out of stubbornness. His decision to relent comes too late to save him, and he is destroyed by the results of his own misguided actions.
Influence of Antigone on A Doll's House
It is very difficult to label something as a first in literature. Much the way inventions are often adaptations of previously patented objects, most authors borrow ideas and techniques form pre-existing media. In order to truly classify something as a first one must look for something entirely revolutionary, something that has never been done before. Two of these so called "firsts" include the first modern novel with Flaubert's
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Madame Bovary and what has been called the first modern play in Ibsen's A Doll's House. Regarding the latter, it is important to realize that while the play did break several molds which had endured for centuries, much was borrowed and adapted from past works. Of these, another "first" emerges for having shown a strong influence on Ibsen and his revolutionary play. Coincidentally, it is what historians refer to as on of the first plays in existence, Sophocles' Antigone.
In merely looking at the surface, one notices right away that both plays are significant in that they avoid the social temptation of using a man as a protagonist. Looking deeper into the stories, however, one can see that in even more contradiction with society, the female characters go against men. Both Antigone and Nora step into the spotlight as the female hero who has been put in a compromising situation and is forced to decide whether it is more important to follow what society dictates, or go with what they feel is moral and just.
Antigone is faced with the death of both brothers, one who is to be buried with full military rites, while the other, under dictate of the king, is to be cast aside and allowed to rot in the sun. She places family before the law, and ventures out to give her brother a proper burial. In A Doll's House, Nora too must decide where the line between right and wrong is drawn. In order to save her husband's life, Nora forges her father's name on a promissory note. Both women thus break the law using similar justifications. Antigone does so under the premise that the Gods dictated that all men deserved a proper burial. Likewise, Nora commits her crime with the belief that since it is saving a life, her situation is an exception to the rules.
The leading men in both works also have similar characterizations. Both Creon and Helmer are egotistical men, who put too much value on their position of authority; Creon so much so that he is willing to put a decree that defies the laws of the Gods. Furthermore, both are close-minded and too stubborn to see that they could be wrong. When Nora reveals her crime to Helmer, the audience expects to see a grateful and understanding husband, but instead is greeted with a spiteful and unappreciative man who does not see the true purpose of Nora's deed. Similarly, Creon, instead of seeing that his niece Antigone placed family and the Gods before the law of the land, solely sees that he has been disobeyed.
Both men worry about how their social status will be affected by the actions of the women; Creon is afraid he will look weak if he allows Antigone's deed to go unpunished, and Helmer is worried about aling his wife to commit such a crime. One could argue that the true criminals are the men themselves, for not having the conscience to step down. Both men realize too late the consequences of their behavior. After yelling at Nora, and revealing to her in not so many words that she is merely a doll in his doll house, Helmer tries to apologize. Likewise, after much debate, Creon heads to the cave where he had exiled Antigone to free her. In both instances their apologies are too late. After Helmer's soliloquy, Nora walks out on her family to find a new life and discover herself. When Creon arrives to his destination, he finds Antigone hanged and his son dead by his own hand. It is due to both mens' stubbornness that their stories take this tragic turn.
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While Sophocles and Ibsen are from two entirely different times and cultures, and although their writing styles differ dramatically, the influence of Antigone on the story of A Doll's House cannot be overlooked.
Doctor Faustus (1589) By
Christopher Marlowe Character List Faustus -
The protagonist. Faustus is a brilliant sixteenth-century scholar from Wittenberg, Germany, whose ambition for knowledge, wealth, and worldly might makes him willing to pay the ultimate price—his soul—to Lucifer in exchange for supernatural powers. Faustus’s initial tragic grandeur is diminished by the fact that he never seems completely sure of the decision to forfeit his soul and constantly wavers about whether or not to repent. His ambition is admirable and initially awesome, yet he ultimately lacks a certain inner strength. He is unable to embrace his dark path wholeheartedly but is also unwilling to admit his mistake.
Mephastophilis -
A devil whom Faustus summons with his initial magical experiments. Mephastophilis’s motivations are ambiguous: on the one hand, his oft-expressed goal is to catch Faustus’s soul and carry it off to hell; on the other hand, he actively attempts to dissuade Faustus from making a deal with Lucifer by warning him about the horrors of hell. Mephastophilis is ultimately as tragic a figure as Faustus, with his moving, regretful accounts of what the devils have lost in their eternal separation from God and his repeated reflections on the pain that comes with damnation.
Chorus -
A character who stands outside the story, providing narration and commentary. The Chorus was customary in Greek tragedy.
Old Man -
An enigmatic figure who appears in the final scene. The old man urges Faustus to repent and to ask God for mercy. He seems to replace the good and evil angels, who, in the first scene, try to influence Faustus’s behavior.
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Good Angel -
A spirit that urges Faustus to repent for his pact with Lucifer and return to God. Along with the old man and the bad angel, the good angel represents, in many ways, Faustus’s conscience and divided will between good and evil.
Evil Angel -
A spirit that serves as the counterpart to the good angel and provides Faustus with reasons not to repent for sins against God. The evil angel represents the evil half of Faustus’s conscience.
Lucifer -
The prince of devils, the ruler of hell, and Mephastophilis’s master.
Wagner -
Faustus’s servant. Wagner uses his master’s books to learn how to summon devils and work magic.
Clown -
A clown who becomes Wagner’s servant. The clown’s antics provide comic relief; he is a ridiculous character, and his absurd behavior initially contrasts with Faustus’s grandeur. As the play goes on, though, Faustus’s behavior comes to resemble that of the clown.
Robin -
An ostler, or innkeeper, who, like the clown, provides a comic contrast to Faustus. Robin and his friend Rafe learn some basic conjuring, demonstrating that even the least scholarly can possess skill in magic. Marlowe includes Robin and Rafe to illustrate Faustus’s degradation as he submits to simple trickery such as theirs.
Rafe -
An ostler, and a friend of Robin. Rafe appears as Dick (Robin’s friend and a clown) in B-text editions of Doctor Faustus.
Valdes and Cornelius -
Two friends of Faustus, both magicians, who teach him the art of black magic.
Horse-courser -
A horse-trader who buys a horse from Faustus, which vanishes after the horse-courser rides it into the water, leading him to seek revenge.
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The Scholars -
Faustus’s colleagues at the University of Wittenberg. Loyal to Faustus, the scholars appear at the beginning and end of the play to express dismay at the turn Faustus’s studies have taken, to marvel at his achievements, and then to hear his agonized confession of his pact with Lucifer.
The pope -
The head of the Roman Catholic Church and a powerful political figure in the Europe of Faustus’s day. The pope serves as both a source of amusement for the play’s Protestant audience and a symbol of the religious faith that Faustus has rejected.
Emperor Charles V -
The most powerful monarch in Europe, whose court Faustus visits.
Knight -
A German nobleman at the emperor’s court. The knight is skeptical of Faustus’s power, and Faustus makes antlers sprout from his head to teach him a lesson. The knight is further developed and known as Benvolio in B-text versions of Doctor Faustus; Benvolio seeks revenge on Faustus and plans to murder him.
Bruno -
A candidate for the papacy, supported by the emperor. Bruno is captured by the pope and freed by Faustus. Bruno appears only in B-text versions of Doctor Faustus.
Duke of Vanholt -
A German nobleman whom Faustus visits.
Martino and Frederick - Friends of Benvolio who reluctantly join his attempt to kill Faustus. Martino and Frederick appear only in B-text versions of Doctor Faustus.
Analysis of Major Characters Faustus
Faustus is the protagonist and tragic hero of Marlowe’s play. He is a contradictory character, capable of tremendous eloquence and possessing awesome ambition, yet prone to a strange, almost willful blindness and a willingness to waste powers that he has gained at great cost. When we first meet Faustus, he is just preparing to embark on his career as a magician, and while we already anticipate that things will turn out badly (the Chorus’s introduction, if nothing else, prepares us), there is nonetheless a grandeur to Faustus as he contemplates all the marvels that his magical powers will produce. He imagines piling up wealth from the four corners of the globe, reshaping
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the map of Europe (both politically and physically), and gaining access to every scrap of knowledge about the universe. He is an arrogant, self-aggrandizing man, but his ambitions are so grand that we cannot help being impressed, and we even feel sympathetic toward him. He represents the spirit of the Renaissance, with its rejection of the medieval, God-centered universe, and its embrace of human possibility. Faustus, at least early on in his acquisition of magic, is the personification of possibility.
But Faustus also possesses an obtuseness that becomes apparent during his bargaining sessions with Mephastophilis. Having decided that a pact with the devil is the only way to fulfill his ambitions, Faustus then blinds himself happily to what such a pact actually means. Sometimes he tells himself that hell is not so bad and that one needs only “fortitude”; at other times, even while conversing with Mephastophilis, he remarks to the disbelieving demon that he does not actually believe hell exists. Meanwhile, despite his lack of concern about the prospect of eternal damnation, -Faustus is also beset with doubts from the beginning, setting a pattern for the play in which he repeatedly approaches repentance only to pull back at the last moment. Why he fails to repent is unclear: -sometimes it seems a matter of pride and continuing ambition, sometimes a conviction that God will not hear his plea. Other times, it seems that Mephastophilis simply bullies him away from repenting.
Bullying Faustus is less difficult than it might seem, because Marlowe, after setting his protagonist up as a grandly tragic figure of sweeping visions and immense ambitions, spends the middle scenes revealing Faustus’s true, petty nature. Once Faustus gains his long-desired powers, he does not know what to do with them. Marlowe suggests that this uncertainty stems, in part, from the fact that desire for knowledge leads inexorably toward God, whom Faustus has renounced. But, more generally, absolute power corrupts Faustus: once he can do everything, he no longer wants to do anything. Instead, he traipses around Europe, playing tricks on yokels and performing conjuring acts to impress various heads of state. He uses his incredible gifts for what is essentially trifling entertainment. The fields of possibility narrow gradually, as he visits ever more minor nobles and performs ever more unimportant magic tricks, until the Faustus of the first few scenes is entirely swallowed up in mediocrity. Only in the final scene is Faustus rescued from mediocrity, as the knowledge of his impending doom restores his earlier gift of powerful rhetoric, and he regains his sweeping sense of vision. Now, however, the vision that he sees is of hell looming up to swallow him. Marlowe uses much of his finest poetry to describe Faustus’s final hours, during which Faustus’s desire for repentance finally wins out, although too late. Still, Faustus is restored to his earlier grandeur in his closing speech, with its hurried rush from idea to idea and its despairing, Renaissance-renouncing last line, “I’ll burn my books!” He becomes once again a tragic hero, a great man undone because his ambitions have butted up against the law of God.
Mephastophilis
The character of Mephastophilis (spelled Mephistophilis or Mephistopheles by other authors) is one of the first in a long tradition of sympathetic literary devils, which includes figures like John Milton’s Satan in Paradise Lost and Johann von Goethe’s Mephistophilis in the nineteenth-century poem “Faust.” Marlowe’s Mephastophilis is particularly interesting because he has mixed motives. On the one hand, from his first
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appearance he clearly intends to act as an agent of Faustus’s damnation. Indeed, he openly admits it, telling Faustus that “when we hear one rack the name of God, / Abjure the Scriptures and his savior Christ, / We fly in hope to get his glorious soul” (3.47–49). It is Mephastophilis who witnesses Faustus’s pact with Lucifer, and it is he who, throughout the play, steps in whenever Faustus considers repentance to cajole or threaten him into staying loyal to hell.
Yet there is an odd ambivalence in Mephastophilis. He seeks to damn Faustus, but he himself is damned and speaks freely of the horrors of hell. In a famous passage, when Faustus remarks that the devil seems to be free of hell at a particular moment, Mephastophilis insists,
[w]hy this is hell, nor am I out of it. Think’st thou that I, who saw the face of God,
And tasted the eternal joys of heaven, Am not tormented with ten thousand hells
In being deprived of everlasting bliss? (3.76–80)
Again, when Faustus blithely—and absurdly, given that he is speaking to a demon—declares that he does not believe in hell, Mephastophilis groans and insists that hell is, indeed, real and terrible, as Faustus comes to know soon enough. Before the pact is sealed, Mephastophilis actually warns Faustus against making the deal with Lucifer. In an odd way, one can almost sense that part of Mephastophilis does not want Faustus to make the same mistakes that he made. But, of course, Faustus does so anyway, which makes him and Mephastophilis kindred spirits. It is appropriate that these two figures dominate Marlowe’s play, for they are two overly proud spirits doomed to hell.
Themes, Motifs & Symbols Themes Themes are the fundamental and often universal ideas explored in a literary work. Sin, Redemption, and Damnation
Insofar as Doctor Faustus is a Christian play, it deals with the themes at the heart of Christianity’s understanding of the world. First, there is the idea of sin, which Christianity defines as acts contrary to the will of God. In making a pact with Lucifer, Faustus commits what is in a sense the ultimate sin: not only does he disobey God, but he consciously and even eagerly renounces obedience to him, choosing instead to swear allegiance to the devil. In a Christian framework, however, even the worst deed can be forgiven through the redemptive power of Jesus Christ, God’s son, who, according to Christian belief, died on the cross for humankind’s sins. Thus, however terrible Faustus’s pact with Lucifer may be, the possibility of redemption is always open to him. All that he needs to do, theoretically, is ask God for forgiveness. The play offers countless moments in which Faustus considers doing just that, urged on by the good angel on his shoulder or by the old man in scene 12—both of whom can be seen either as emissaries of God, personifications of Faustus’s conscience, or both.
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Each time, Faustus decides to remain loyal to hell rather than seek heaven. In the Christian framework, this turning away from God condemns him to spend an eternity in hell. Only at the end of his life does Faustus desire to repent, and, in the final scene, he cries out to Christ to redeem him. But it is too late for him to repent. In creating this moment in which Faustus is still alive but incapable of being redeemed, Marlowe steps outside the Christian worldview in order to maximize the dramatic power of the final scene. Having inhabited a Christian world for the entire play, Faustus spends his final moments in a slightly different universe, where redemption is no longer possible and where certain sins cannot be forgiven.
The Conflict Between Medieval and
Renaissance Values
Scholar R.M. Dawkins famously remarked that Doctor Faustus tells “the story of a Renaissance man who had to pay the medieval price for being one.” While slightly simplistic, this quotation does get at the heart of one of the play’s central themes: the clash between the medieval world and the world of the emerging Renaissance. The medieval world placed God at the center of existence and shunted aside man and the natural world. The Renaissance was a movement that began in Italy in the fifteenth century and soon spread throughout Europe, carrying with it a new emphasis on the individual, on classical learning, and on scientific inquiry into the nature of the world. In the medieval academy, theology was the queen of the sciences. In the Renaissance, though, secular matters took center stage.
Faustus, despite being a magician rather than a scientist (a blurred distinction in the sixteenth century), explicitly rejects the medieval model. In his opening speech in scene 1, he goes through every field of scholarship, beginning with logic and proceeding through medicine, law, and theology, quoting an ancient authority for each: Aristotle on logic, Galen on medicine, the Byzantine emperor Justinian on law, and the Bible on religion. In the medieval model, tradition and authority, not individual inquiry, were key. But in this soliloquy, Faustus considers and rejects this medieval way of thinking. He resolves, in full Renaissance spirit, to accept no limits, traditions, or authorities in his quest for knowledge, wealth, and power.
The play’s attitude toward the clash between medieval and Renaissance values is ambiguous. Marlowe seems hostile toward the ambitions of Faustus, and, as Dawkins notes, he keeps his tragic hero squarely in the medieval world, where eternal damnation is the price of human pride. Yet Marlowe himself was no pious traditionalist, and it is tempting to see in Faustus—as many readers have—a hero of the new modern world, a world free of God, religion, and the limits that these imposed on humanity. Faustus may pay a medieval price, this reading suggests, but his successors will go further than he and suffer less, as we have in modern times. On the other hand, the disappointment and mediocrity that follow Faustus’s pact with the devil, as he descends from grand ambitions to petty conjuring tricks, might suggest a contrasting interpretation. Marlowe may be suggesting that the new, modern spirit, though ambitious and glittering, will lead only to a Faustian dead end.
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Power as a Corrupting Influence
Early in the play, before he agrees to the pact with Lucifer, Faustus is full of ideas for how to use the power that he seeks. He imagines piling up great wealth, but he also aspires to plumb the mysteries of the universe and to remake the map of Europe. Though they may not be entirely admirable, these plans are ambitious and inspire awe, if not sympathy. They lend a grandeur to Faustus’s schemes and make his quest for personal power seem almost heroic, a sense that is reinforced by the eloquence of his early soliloquies.
Once Faustus actually gains the practically limitless power that he so desires, however, his horizons seem to narrow. Everything is possible to him, but his ambition is somehow sapped. Instead of the grand designs that he contemplates early on, he contents himself with performing conjuring tricks for kings and noblemen and takes a strange delight in using his magic to play practical jokes on simple folks. It is not that power has corrupted Faustus by making him evil: indeed, Faustus’s behavior after he sells his soul hardly rises to the level of true wickedness. Rather, gaining absolute power corrupts Faustus by making him mediocre and by transforming his boundless ambition into a meaningless delight in petty celebrity.
In the Christian framework of the play, one can argue that true greatness can be achieved only with God’s blessing. By cutting himself off from the creator of the universe, Faustus is condemned to mediocrity. He has gained the whole world, but he does not know what to do with it.
The Divided Nature of Man
Faustus is constantly undecided about whether he should repent and return to God or continue to follow his pact with Lucifer. His internal struggle goes on throughout the play, as part of him of wants to do good and serve God, but part of him (the dominant part, it seems) lusts after the power that Mephastophilis promises. The good angel and the evil angel, both of whom appear at Faustus’s shoulder in order to urge him in different directions, symbolize this struggle. While these angels may be intended as an actual pair of supernatural beings, they clearly represent Faustus’s divided will, which compels Faustus to commit to Mephastophilis but also to question this commitment continually.
Motifs Motifs are recurring structures, contrasts, or literary devices that can help to develop and inform the text’s major themes. Magic and the Supernatural
The supernatural pervades Doctor Faustus, appearing everywhere in the story. Angels and devils flit about, magic spells are cast, dragons pull chariots (albeit offstage), and even fools like the two ostlers, Robin and Rafe, can learn enough magic to summon demons. Still, it is worth noting that nothing terribly significant is accomplished through magic. Faustus plays tricks on people, conjures up grapes, and explores the
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cosmos on a dragon, but he does not fundamentally reshape the world. The magic power that Mephastophilis grants him is more like a toy than an awesome, earth-shaking ability. Furthermore, the real drama of the play, despite all the supernatural frills and pyrotechnics, takes place within Faustus’s vacillating mind and soul, as he first sells his soul to Lucifer and then considers repenting. In this sense, the magic is almost incidental to the real story of Faustus’s struggle with himself, which Marlowe intended not as a fantastical battle but rather as a realistic portrait of a human being with a will divided between good and evil.
Practical Jokes
Once he gains his awesome powers, Faustus does not use them to do great deeds. Instead, he delights in playing tricks on people: he makes horns sprout from the knight’s head and sells the horse-courser an enchanted horse. Such magical practical jokes seem to be Faustus’s chief amusement, and Marlowe uses them to illustrate Faustus’s decline from a great, prideful scholar into a bored, mediocre magician with no higher ambition than to have a laugh at the expense of a collection of simpletons.
Symbols Symbols are objects, characters, figures, or colors used to represent abstract ideas or concepts. Blood
Blood plays multiple symbolic roles in the play. When Faustus signs away his soul, he signs in blood, symbolizing the permanent and supernatural nature of this pact. His blood congeals on the page, however, symbolizing, perhaps, his own body’s revolt against what he intends to do. Meanwhile, Christ’s blood, which Faustus says he sees running across the sky during his terrible last night, symbolizes the sacrifice that Jesus, according to Christian belief, made on the cross; this sacrifice opened the way for humankind to repent its sins and be saved. Faustus, of course, in his proud folly, fails to take this path to salvation.
Faustus’s Rejection of the Ancient Authorities
In scene 1, Faustus goes through a list of the major fields of human knowledge—logic, medicine, law, and theology—and cites for each an ancient authority (Aristotle, Galen, Justinian, and Jerome’s Bible, respectively). He then rejects all of these figures in favor of magic. This rejection symbolizes Faustus’s break with the medieval world, which prized authority above all else, in favor of a more modern spirit of free inquiry, in which experimentation and innovation trump the assertions of Greek philosophers and the Bible.
The Good Angel and the Evil Angel The angels appear at Faustus’s shoulder early on in the play—the good angel urging him to repent and serve God, the evil angel urging him to follow his lust for power and serve Lucifer. The two symbolize his divided will, part of which wants to do good and part of which is sunk in sin.
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Analysis: Prologue
The Chorus’s introduction to the play links Doctor Faustus to the tradition of Greek tragedy, in which a chorus traditionally comments on the action. Although we tend to think of a chorus as a group of people or singers, it can also be composed of only one character. Here, the Chorus not only gives us background information about Faustus’s life and education but also explicitly tells us that his swelling pride will lead to his downfall. The story that we are about to see is compared to the Greek myth of Icarus, a boy whose father, Daedalus, gave him wings made out of feathers and beeswax. Icarus did not heed his father’s warning and flew too close the sun, causing his wings to melt and sending him plunging to his death. In the same way, the Chorus tells us, Faustus will “mount above his reach” and suffer the consequences (Prologue.21).
The way that the Chorus introduces Faustus, the play’s protagonist, is significant, since it reflects a commitment to Renaissance values. The European Renaissance of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries witnessed a rebirth of interest in classical learning and inaugurated a new emphasis on the individual in painting and literature. In the medieval era that preceded the Renaissance, the focus of scholarship was on God and theology; in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the focus turned toward the study of humankind and the natural world, culminating in the birth of modern science in the work of men like Galileo Galilei and Isaac Newton.
The Prologue locates its drama squarely in the Renaissance world, where humanistic values hold sway. Classical and medieval literature typically focuses on the lives of the great and famous—saints or kings or ancient heroes. But this play, the Chorus insists, will focus not on ancient battles between Rome and Carthage, or on the “courts of kings” or the “pomp of proud audacious deeds” (Prologue.4–5). Instead, we are to witness the life of an ordinary man, born to humble parents. The message is clear: in the new world of the Renaissance, an ordinary man like Faustus, a common-born scholar, is as important as any king or warrior, and his story is just as worthy of being told. Analysis: Prologue
The Chorus’s introduction to the play links Doctor Faustus to the tradition of Greek tragedy, in which a chorus traditionally comments on the action. Although we tend to think of a chorus as a group of people or singers, it can also be composed of only one character. Here, the Chorus not only gives us background information about Faustus’s life and education but also explicitly tells us that his swelling pride will lead to his downfall. The story that we are about to see is compared to the Greek myth of Icarus, a boy whose father, Daedalus, gave him wings made out of feathers and beeswax. Icarus did not heed his father’s warning and flew too close the sun, causing his wings to melt and sending him plunging to his death. In the same way, the Chorus tells us, Faustus will “mount above his reach” and suffer the consequences (Prologue.21).
The way that the Chorus introduces Faustus, the play’s protagonist, is significant, since it reflects a commitment to Renaissance values. The European Renaissance of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries witnessed a rebirth of interest in classical learning and inaugurated a new emphasis on the individual in painting and literature. In the medieval era that preceded the Renaissance, the focus of scholarship was on God and
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theology; in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the focus turned toward the study of humankind and the natural world, culminating in the birth of modern science in the work of men like Galileo Galilei and Isaac Newton.
The Prologue locates its drama squarely in the Renaissance world, where humanistic values hold sway. Classical and medieval literature typically focuses on the lives of the great and famous—saints or kings or ancient heroes. But this play, the Chorus insists, will focus not on ancient battles between Rome and Carthage, or on the “courts of kings” or the “pomp of proud audacious deeds” (Prologue.4–5). Instead, we are to witness the life of an ordinary man, born to humble parents. The message is clear: in the new world of the Renaissance, an ordinary man like Faustus, a common-born scholar, is as important as any king or warrior, and his story is just as worthy of being told. Analysis: Scene 1
The scene now shifts to Faustus’s study, and Faustus’s opening speech about the various fields of scholarship reflects the academic setting of the scene. In proceeding through the various intellectual disciplines and citing authorities for each, he is following the dictates of medieval scholarship, which held that learning was based on the authority of the wise rather than on experimentation and new ideas. This soliloquy, then, marks Faustus’s rejection of this medieval model, as he sets aside each of the old authorities and resolves to strike out on his own in his quest to become powerful through magic.
As is true throughout the play, however, Marlowe uses Faustus’s own words to expose Faustus’s blind spots. In his initial speech, for example, Faustus establishes a hierarchy of disciplines by showing which are nobler than others. He does not want merely to protect men’s bodies through medicine, nor does he want to protect their property through law. He wants higher things, and so he proceeds on to religion. There, he quotes selectively from the New Testament, picking out only those passages that make Christianity appear in a negative light. He reads that “[t]he reward of sin is death,” and that “[i]f we say we that we have no sin, / We deceive ourselves, and there is no truth in us” (1.40–43). The second of these lines comes from the first book of John, but Faustus neglects to read the very next line, which states, “If we confess our sins, [God] is faithful and just to forgive us our sins, and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness” (1 John 1:9). Thus, through selective quoting, Faustus makes it seem as though religion promises only death and not forgiveness, and so he easily rejects religion with a fatalistic “What will be, shall be! Divinity, adieu!” (1.48). Meanwhile, he uses religious language—as he does throughout the play—to describe the dark world of necromancy that he enters. “These metaphysics of magicians / And necromantic books are heavenly” (1.49–50), he declares without a trace of irony. Having gone upward from medicine and law to theology, he envisions magic and necromancy as the crowning discipline, even though by most standards it would be the least noble.
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Faustus is not a villain, though; he is a tragic hero, a protagonist whose character flaws lead to his downfall. Marlowe imbues him with tragic grandeur in these early scenes. The logic he uses to reject religion may be flawed, but there is something impressive in the breadth of his ambition, even if he pursues it through diabolical means. In Faustus’s long speech after the two angels have whispered in his ears, his rhetoric outlines the modern quest for control over nature (albeit through magic rather than through science) in glowing, inspiring language. He offers a long list of impressive goals, including the acquisition of knowledge, wealth, and political power, that he believes he will achieve once he has mastered the dark arts. While the reader or playgoer is not expected to approve of his quest, his ambitions are impressive, to say the least. Later, the actual uses to which he puts his magical powers are disappointing and tawdry. Analysis: Scenes 2–4
Having learned the necessary arts from Cornelius and Valdes, Faustus now takes the first step toward selling his soul when he conjures up a devil. One of the central questions in the play is whether Faustus damns himself entirely on his own or whether the princes of hell somehow entrap him. In scene 3, as Faustus makes the magical marks and chants the magical words that summon Mephastophilis, he is watched by Lucifer and four lesser devils, suggesting that hell is waiting for him to make the first move before pouncing on him. Mephastophilis echoes this idea when he insists that he came to Faustus of his own accord when he heard Faustus curse God and forswear heaven, hoping that Faustus’s soul was available for the taking. But while the demons may be active agents eagerly seeking to seize Faustus’s soul, Faustus himself makes the first move. Neither Mephastophilis nor Lucifer forces him to do anything against his will.
Indeed, if anything, Mephastophilis seems far less eager to make the bargain than Faustus himself. He willingly tells Faustus that his master, Lucifer, is less powerful than God, having been thrown “by aspiring pride and insolence, / … from the face of heaven” (3.67–68). Furthermore, Mephastophilis offers a powerful portrait of hell that seems to warn against any pact with Lucifer. When Faustus asks him how it is that he is allowed to leave hell in order to come to earth, Mephastophilis famously says:
Why this is hell, nor am I out of it. Think’st thou that I, who saw the face of God,
And tasted the eternal joys of heaven, Am not tormented with ten thousand hells
In being deprived of everlasting bliss? (3.76–80)
Mephastophilis exposes the horrors of his own experience as if offering sage guidance to Faustus. His honesty in mentioning the “ten thousand hells” that torment him shines a negative light on the action of committing one’s soul to Lucifer. Indeed, Mephastophilis even tells Faustus to abandon his “frivolous demands” (3.81).
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But Faustus refuses to leave his desires. Instead, he exhibits the blindness that serves as one of his defining characteristics throughout the play. Faustus sees the world as he wants to see it rather than as it is. This shunning of reality is symbolized by his insistence that Mephastophilis, who is presumably hideous, reappear as a Franciscan friar. In part, this episode is a dig at Catholicism, pitched at Marlowe’s fiercely Protestant English audience, but it also shows to what lengths Faustus will go in order to mitigate the horrors of hell. He sees the devil’s true shape, but rather than flee in terror he tells Mephastophilis to change his appearance, which makes looking upon him easier. Again, when Mephastophilis has finished telling him of the horrors of hell and urging him not to sell his soul, Faustus blithely dismisses what Mephastophilis has said, accusing him of lacking “manly fortitude” (3.85). There is a desperate naïveté to Faustus’s approach to the demonic: he cannot seem to accept that hell is really as bad as it seems, which propels him forward into darkness.
The antics of Wagner and the clown provide a comic counterpoint to the Faustus-Mephastophilis scenes. The clown jokes that he would sell his soul to the devil for a well-seasoned shoulder of mutton, and Wagner uses his newly gained conjuring skill to frighten the clown into serving him. Like Faustus, these clownish characters (whose scenes are so different from the rest of the play that some writers have suggested that they were written by a collaborator rather than by Marlowe himself) use magic to summon demons. But where Faustus is grand and ambitious and tragic, they are low and common and absurd, seeking mutton and the ability to turn into a mouse or a rat rather than world power or fantastic wealth. As the play progresses, though, Faustus’s grandeur diminishes, and he sinks down toward the level of the clowns, suggesting that degradation precedes damnation. For now, however, Faustus’s dreams inspire wonder.
Having learned the necessary arts from Cornelius and Valdes, Faustus now takes the first step toward selling his soul when he conjures up a devil. One of the central questions in the play is whether Faustus damns himself entirely on his own or whether the princes of hell somehow entrap him. In scene 3, as Faustus makes the magical marks and chants the magical words that summon Mephastophilis, he is watched by Lucifer and four lesser devils, suggesting that hell is waiting for him to make the first move before pouncing on him. Mephastophilis echoes this idea when he insists that he came to Faustus of his own accord when he heard Faustus curse God and forswear heaven, hoping that Faustus’s soul was available for the taking. But while the demons may be active agents eagerly seeking to seize Faustus’s soul, Faustus himself makes the first move. Neither Mephastophilis nor Lucifer forces him to do anything against his will.
Indeed, if anything, Mephastophilis seems far less eager to make the bargain than Faustus himself. He willingly tells Faustus that his master, Lucifer, is less powerful than God, having been thrown “by aspiring pride and insolence, / … from the face of heaven” (3.67–68). Furthermore, Mephastophilis offers a powerful portrait of hell that seems to warn against any pact with Lucifer. When Faustus asks him how it is that he is allowed to leave hell in order to come to earth, Mephastophilis famously says:
Why this is hell, nor am I out of it. Think’st thou that I, who saw the face of God,
And tasted the eternal joys of heaven,
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Am not tormented with ten thousand hells In being deprived of everlasting bliss?
(3.76–80)
Mephastophilis exposes the horrors of his own experience as if offering sage guidance to Faustus. His honesty in mentioning the “ten thousand hells” that torment him shines a negative light on the action of committing one’s soul to Lucifer. Indeed, Mephastophilis even tells Faustus to abandon his “frivolous demands” (3.81).
But Faustus refuses to leave his desires. Instead, he exhibits the blindness that serves as one of his defining characteristics throughout the play. Faustus sees the world as he wants to see it rather than as it is. This shunning of reality is symbolized by his insistence that Mephastophilis, who is presumably hideous, reappear as a Franciscan friar. In part, this episode is a dig at Catholicism, pitched at Marlowe’s fiercely Protestant English audience, but it also shows to what lengths Faustus will go in order to mitigate the horrors of hell. He sees the devil’s true shape, but rather than flee in terror he tells Mephastophilis to change his appearance, which makes looking upon him easier. Again, when Mephastophilis has finished telling him of the horrors of hell and urging him not to sell his soul, Faustus blithely dismisses what Mephastophilis has said, accusing him of lacking “manly fortitude” (3.85). There is a desperate naïveté to Faustus’s approach to the demonic: he cannot seem to accept that hell is really as bad as it seems, which propels him forward into darkness.
The antics of Wagner and the clown provide a comic counterpoint to the Faustus-Mephastophilis scenes. The clown jokes that he would sell his soul to the devil for a well-seasoned shoulder of mutton, and Wagner uses his newly gained conjuring skill to frighten the clown into serving him. Like Faustus, these clownish characters (whose scenes are so different from the rest of the play that some writers have suggested that they were written by a collaborator rather than by Marlowe himself) use magic to summon demons. But where Faustus is grand and ambitious and tragic, they are low and common and absurd, seeking mutton and the ability to turn into a mouse or a rat rather than world power or fantastic wealth. As the play progresses, though, Faustus’s grandeur diminishes, and he sinks down toward the level of the clowns, suggesting that degradation precedes damnation.
Analysis: Chorus 2–Scene 8
The scenes in Rome are preceded by Wagner’s account, in the second chorus, of how Faustus traveled through the heavens studying astronomy. This feat is easily the most impressive that Faustus performs in the entire play, since his magical abilities seem more and more like cheap conjured tricks as the play progresses. Meanwhile, his interests also diminish in importance from astronomy, the study of the heavens, to cosmography, the study of the earth. He even begins to meddle in political matters in the assistance he gives Bruno (in the B text only). By the end of the play, his chief interests are playing practical jokes and producing impressive illusions for nobles—a far cry from the ambitious pursuits that he outlines in scene 1.
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Faustus’s interactions with the pope and his courtiers offer another send-up of the Catholic Church. The pope’s grasping ambition and desire for worldly power would have played into late-sixteenth-century English stereotypes. By having the invisible Faustus box the papal ears and disrupt the papal banquet, Marlowe makes a laughingstock out of the head of the Catholic Church. Yet the absurdity of the scene coexists with a suggestion that, ridiculous as they are, the pope and his attendants do possess some kind of divinely sanctioned power, which makes them symbols of Christianity and sets their piety in opposition to Faustus’s devil-inspired magic. When the pope and his monks begin to rain curses on their invisible tormentors, Faustus and Mephastophilis seem to fear the power that their words invoke. Mephastophilis says, “[W]e shall be cursed with bell, / book, and candle” (7.81–82). The fear-imposing power these religious symbols have over Mephastophilis suggests that God remains stronger than the devil and that perhaps Faustus could still be saved, if he repented in spite of everything. Faustus’s reply—“Bell, book and candle; candle, book, and bell / Forward and backward, to curse Faustus to hell”—is fraught with foreshadowing (7.83–84). Hell, of course, is exactly where Faustus is “curse[d]” to go, but through his own folly and not the curses of monks or the pope.
The absurd behavior of Robin and Rafe, meanwhile, once again contrasts with Faustus’s relationship to the diabolical. Robin and Rafe conjure up Mephastophilis in order to scare off a vintner, and even when he threatens to turn them into animals (or actually does so temporarily—the text is unclear on this matter), they treat it as a great joke. Yet the contrast between Faustus on the one hand and the ostlers and the clown on the other, the high and the low, is not so great as it is originally, since Faustus too has begun using magic in pursuit of practical jokes, like boxing the pope’s ear. Such foolishness is quite a step down for a man who earlier speaks of using his magic to become ruler of Germany. Although Faustus does step into the political realm when he frees Bruno and sends him back to Germany, this action seems to be carried out as part of the cruel practical joke on the pope, not as part of any real political pursuit. The degradation of Faustus’s initially heroic aims continues as the play proceeds, with Faustus coming to resemble a clown more and more.
Analysis: Chorus 3–Scene 9
Twenty-four years pass between Faustus’s pact with Lucifer and the end of the play. Yet, for us, these decades sweep by remarkably quickly. We see only three main events from the twenty-four years: Faustus’s visits to Rome, to the emperor’s court, and then to the Duke of Vanholt in scene 11. While the Chorus assures us that Faustus visits many other places and learns many other things that we are not shown, we are still left with the sense that Faustus’s life is being accelerated at a speed that strains belief. But Marlowe uses this acceleration to his advantage. By making the years pass so swiftly, the play makes us feel what Faustus himself must feel—namely, that his too-short lifetime is slipping away from him and his ultimate, hellish fate is drawing ever closer. In the world of the play, twenty-four years seems long when Faustus makes the pact, but both he and we come to realize that it passes rapidly.
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Meanwhile, the use to which Faustus puts his powers is unimpressive. In Rome, he and Mephastophilis box the pope’s ears and disrupt a dinner party. At the court of Emperor Charles V (who ruled a vast stretch of territory in the sixteenth century, including Germany, Austria, and Spain), he essentially performs conjuring tricks to entertain the monarch. Before he makes the pact with Lucifer, Faustus speaks of rearranging the geography of Europe or even making himself emperor of Germany. Now, though, his sights are set considerably lower. His involvement in the political realm extends only to freeing Bruno, Charles’s candidate to be pope. Even this action (which occurs only in the B text) seems largely a lark, without any larger political goals behind it. Instead, Faustus occupies his energies summoning up Alexander the Great, the heroic Macedonian conqueror. This trick would be extremely impressive, except that Faustus tells the emperor that “it is not in my ability to present / before your eyes the true substantial bodies of those two deceased / princes” (9.39–41). In other words, all of Mephastophilis’s power can, in Faustus’s hands, produce only impressive illusions. Nothing of substance emerges from Faustus’s magic, in this scene or anywhere in the play, and the man who earlier boasts that he will divert the River Rhine and reshape the map of Europe now occupies himself with revenging a petty insult by placing horns on the head of the foolish knight.
The B-text scene outside the emperor’s court, in which Benvolio and his friends try to kill Faustus, is utterly devoid of suspense, since we know that Faustus is too powerful to be murdered by a gang of incompetent noblemen. Still, Faustus’s way of dealing with the threat is telling: he plays a kind of practical joke, making the noblemen think that they have cut off his head, only to come back to life and send a collection of devils to hound them. With all the power of hell behind him, he takes pleasure in sending Mephastophilis out to hunt down a collection of fools who pose no threat to him and insists that the devils disgrace the men publicly, so that everyone will see what happens to those who threaten him. This command shows a hint of Faustus’s old pride, which is so impressive early in the play; now, though, Faustus is entirely concerned with his reputation as a fearsome wizard and not with any higher goals. Traipsing from court to court, doing tricks for royals, Faustus has become a kind of sixteenth-century celebrity, more concerned with his public image than with the dreams of greatness that earlier animate him.
Analysis: Scenes 10–11
Faustus’s downward spiral, from tragic greatness to self-indulgent mediocrity, continues in these scenes. He continues his journey from court to court, arriving this time at Vanholt, a minor German duchy, to visit the duke and duchess. Over the course of the play we see Faustus go from the seat of the pope to the court of the emperor to the court of a minor nobleman. The power and importance of his hosts decreases from scene to scene, just as Faustus’s feats of magic grow ever more unimpressive. Just after he seals his pact with Mephastophilis, Faustus soars through the heavens on a chariot pulled by dragons to learn the secrets of astronomy; now, however, he is reduced to playing pointless tricks on the horse-courser and fetching out-of-season grapes to impress a bored noblewoman. Even his antagonists have grown increasingly ridiculous. In Rome, he faces the curses of the pope and his monks, which are strong enough to give even Mephastophilis pause; at the emperor’s
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court, Faustus is opposed by a collection of noblemen who are brave, if unintelligent. At Vanholt, though, he faces down an absurd collection of comical rogues, and the worst of it is that Faustus seems to have become one of them, a clown among clowns, taking pleasure in using his unlimited power to perform practical jokes and cast simple charms.
Selling one’s soul for power and glory may be foolish or wicked, but at least there is grandeur to the idea of it. Marlowe’s Faustus, however, has lost his hold on that doomed grandeur and has become pathetic. The meaning of his decline is ambiguous: perhaps part of the nature of a pact with Lucifer is that one cannot gain all that one hopes to gain from it. Or perhaps Marlowe is criticizing worldly ambition and, by extension, the entire modern project of the Renaissance, which pushed God to one side and sought mastery over nature and society. Along the lines of this interpretation, it seems that in Marlowe’s worldview the desire for complete knowledge about the world and power over it can ultimately be reduced to fetching grapes for the Duchess of Vanholt—in other words, to nothing.
Earlier in the play, when Faustus queries Mephastophilis about the nature of the world, Faustus sees his desire for knowledge reach a dead end at God, whose power he denies in favor of Lucifer. Knowledge of God is against Lucifer’s kingdom, according to Mephastophilis. But if the pursuit of knowledge leads inexorably to God, Marlowe suggests, then a man like Faustus, who tries to live without God, can ultimately go nowhere but down, into mediocrity.
There is no sign that Faustus himself is aware of the gulf between his earlier ambitions and his current state. He seems to take joy in his petty amusements, laughing uproariously when he confounds the horse-courser and leaping at the chance to visit the Duke of Vanholt. Still, his impending doom begins to weigh upon him. As he sits down to fall asleep, he remarks, “What art thou, Faustus, but a man condemned to die?” (10.24). Yet, at this moment at least, he seems convinced that he will repent at the last minute and be saved—a significant change from his earlier attitude, when he either denies the existence of hell or assumes that damnation is inescapable. “Christ did call the thief upon the cross,” he comforts himself, referring to the New Testament story of the thief who was crucified alongside Jesus Christ, repented for his sins, and was promised a place in paradise (10.28). That he compares himself to this figure shows that Faustus assumes that he can wait until the last moment and still escape hell. In other words, he wants to renounce Mephastophilis, but not just yet. We can easily anticipate that his willingness to delay will prove fatal.
Analysis: Chorus 4–Epilogue
The final scenes contain some of the most noteworthy speeches in the play, especially Faustus’s speech to Helen and his final soliloquy. His address to Helen begins with the famous line “Was this the face that launched a thousand ships,” referring to the Trojan War, which was fought over Helen, and goes on to list all the great things that Faustus would do to win her love (12.81). He compares himself to the heroes of Greek mythology, who went to war for her hand, and he ends with a lengthy praise of her beauty. In its flowery language and emotional power, the speech marks a return to
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the eloquence that marks Faustus’s words in earlier scenes, before his language and behavior become mediocre and petty. Having squandered his powers in pranks and childish entertainments, Faustus regains his eloquence and tragic grandeur in the final scene, as his doom approaches. Still, asimpressive as this speech is, Faustus maintains the same blind spots that lead him down his dark road in the first place. Earlier, he seeks transcendence through magic instead of religion. Now, he seeks it through sex and female beauty, as he asks Helen to make him “immortal” by kissing him (12.83). Moreover, it is not even clear that Helen is real, since Faustus’s earlier conjuring of historical figures evokes only illusions and not physical beings. If Helen too is just an illusion, then Faustus is wasting his last hours dallying with a fantasy image, an apt symbol for his entire life.
Faustus’s final speech is the most emotionally powerful scene in the play, as his despairing mind rushes from idea to idea. One moment he is begging time to slow down, the next he is imploring Christ for mercy. One moment he is crying out in fear and trying to hide from the wrath of God, the next he is begging to have the eternity of hell lessened somehow. He curses his parents for giving birth to him but then owns up to his responsibility and curses himself. His mind’s various attempts to escape his doom, then, lead inexorably to an understanding of his own guilt.
The passion of the final speech points to the central question in Doctor Faustus of why Faustus does not repent. Early in the play, he deceives himself into believing either that hell is not so bad or that it does not exist. But, by the close, with the gates of hell literally opening before him, he still ignores the warnings of his own conscience and of the old man, a physical embodiment of the conscience that plagues him. Faustus’s loyalty to Lucifer could be explained by the fact that he is afraid of having his body torn apart by Mephastophilis. But he seems almost eager, even in the next-to-last scene, to reseal his vows in blood, and he even goes a step further when he demands that Mephastophilis punish the old man who urges him to repent. Marlowe suggests that Faustus’s self-delusion persists even at the end. Having served Lucifer for so long, he has reached a point at which he cannot imagine breaking free.
In his final speech, Faustus is clearly wracked with remorse, yet he no longer seems to be able to repent. Christian doctrine holds that one can repent for any sin, however grave, up until the moment of death and be saved. Yet this principle does not seem to hold for Marlowe’s protagonist. Doctor Faustus is a Christian tragedy, but the logic of the final scene is not Christian. Some critics have tried to deal with this problem by claiming that Faustus does not actually repent in the final speech but that he only speaks wistfully about the possibility of repentance. Such an argument, however, is difficult to reconcile with lines such as:
O, I’ll leap up to my God! Who pulls me down? One drop of blood would save my soul, half a drop: ah my Christ—
(13.69–71)
Faustus appears to be calling on Christ, seeking the precious drop of blood that will save his soul. Yet some unseen force—whether inside or outside him—prevents him from giving himself to God.
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Ultimately, the ending of Doctor Faustus represents a clash between Christianity, which holds that repentance and salvation are always possible, and the dictates of tragedy, in which some character flaw cannot be corrected, even by appealing to God. The idea of Christian tragedy, then, is paradoxical, as Christianity is ultimately uplifting. People may suffer—as Christ himself did—but for those who repent, salvation eventually awaits. To make Doctor Faustus a true tragedy, then, Marlowe had to set down a moment beyond which Faustus could no longer repent, so that in the final scene, while still alive, he can be damned and conscious of his damnation.
The unhappy Faustus’s last line returns us to the clash between Renaissance values and medieval values that dominates the early scenes and then recedes as Faustus pursues his mediocre amusements in later scenes. His cry, as he pleads for salvation, that he will burn his books suggests, for the first time since early scenes, that his pact with Lucifer is primarily about a thirst for limitless knowledge—a thirst that is presented as incompatible with Christianity. Scholarship can be Christian, the play suggests, but only within limits. As the Chorus says in its final speech:
Faustus is gone! Regard his hellish fall, Whose fiendful fortune may exhort the wise
Only to wonder at unlawful things: Whose deepness doth entice such forward wits To practice more than heavenly power permits.
(Epilogue.4–8)
In the duel between Christendom and the rising modern spirit, Marlowe’s play seems to come down squarely on the side of Christianity. Yet Marlowe, himself notoriously accused of atheism and various other sins, may have had other ideas, and he made his Faustus sympathetic, if not necessarily admirable. While his play shows how the untrammeled pursuit of knowledge and power can be corrupting, it also shows the grandeur of such a quest. Faustus is damned, but the gates that he opens remain standing wide, waiting for others to follow.
The Tempest(1611)
By William Shakespeare
Plot Overview
A storm strikes a ship carrying Alonso, Ferdinand, Sebastian, Antonio, Gonzalo, Stefano, and Trinculo, who are on their way to Italy after coming from the wedding of Alonso’s daughter, Claribel, to the prince of Tunis in Africa. The royal party and the other mariners, with the exception of the unflappable Boatswain, begin to fear for their lives. Lightning cracks, and the mariners cry that the ship has been hit. Everyone prepares to sink.
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The next scene begins much more quietly. Miranda and Prospero stand on the shore of their island, looking out to sea at the recent shipwreck. Miranda asks her father to do anything he can to help the poor souls in the ship. Prospero assures her that everything is all right and then informs her that it is time she learned more about herself and her past. He reveals to her that he orchestrated the shipwreck and tells her the lengthy story of her past, a story he has often started to tell her before but never finished. The story goes that Prospero was the Duke of Milan until his brother Antonio, conspiring with Alonso, the King of Naples, usurped his position. With the help of Gonzalo, Prospero was able to escape with his daughter and with the books that are the source of his magic and power. Prospero and his daughter arrived on the island where they remain now and have been for twelve years. Only now, Prospero says, has Fortune at last sent his enemies his way, and he has raised the tempest in order to make things right with them once and for all.
After telling this story, Prospero charms Miranda to sleep and then calls forth his familiar spirit Ariel, his chief magical agent. Prospero and Ariel’s discussion reveals that Ariel brought the tempest upon the ship and set fire to the mast. He then made sure that everyone got safely to the island, though they are now separated from each other into small groups. Ariel, who is a captive servant to Prospero, reminds his master that he has promised Ariel freedom a year early if he performs tasks such as these without complaint. Prospero chastises Ariel for protesting and reminds him of the horrible fate from which he was rescued. Before Prospero came to the island, a witch named Sycorax imprisoned Ariel in a tree. Sycorax died, leaving Ariel trapped until Prospero arrived and freed him. After Ariel assures Prospero that he knows his place, Prospero orders Ariel to take the shape of a sea nymph and make himself invisible to all but Prospero.
Miranda awakens from her sleep, and she and Prospero go to visit Caliban, Prospero’s servant and the son of the dead Sycorax. Caliban curses Prospero, and Prospero and Miranda berate him for being ungrateful for what they have given and taught him. Prospero sends Caliban to fetch firewood. Ariel, invisible, enters playing music and leading in the awed Ferdinand. Miranda and Ferdinand are immediately smitten with each other. He is the only man Miranda has ever seen, besides Caliban and her father. Prospero is happy to see that his plan for his daughter’s future marriage is working, but decides that he must upset things temporarily in order to prevent their relationship from developing too quickly. He accuses Ferdinand of merely pretending to be the Prince of Naples and threatens him with imprisonment. When Ferdinand draws his sword, Prospero charms him and leads him off to prison, ignoring Miranda’s cries for mercy. He then sends Ariel on another mysterious mission.
On another part of the island, Alonso, Sebastian, Antonio, Gonzalo, and other miscellaneous lords give thanks for their safety but worry about the fate of Ferdinand. Alonso says that he wishes he never had married his daughter to the prince of Tunis because if he had not made this journey, his son would still be alive. Gonzalo tries to maintain high spirits by discussing the beauty of the island, but his remarks are undercut by the sarcastic sourness of Antonio and Sebastian. Ariel appears, invisible, and plays music that puts all but Sebastian and Antonio to sleep. These two then begin to discuss the possible advantages of killing their sleeping companions. Antonio persuades Sebastian that the latter will become ruler of Naples if they kill Alonso. Claribel, who would be the next heir if Ferdinand were indeed dead, is too far away to
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be able to claim her right. Sebastian is convinced, and the two are about to stab the sleeping men when Ariel causes Gonzalo to wake with a shout. Everyone wakes up, and Antonio and Sebastian concoct a ridiculous story about having drawn their swords to protect the king from lions. Ariel goes back to Prospero while Alonso and his party continue to search for Ferdinand.
Caliban, meanwhile, is hauling wood for Prospero when he sees Trinculo and thinks he is a spirit sent by Prospero to torment him. He lies down and hides under his cloak. A storm is brewing, and Trinculo, curious about but undeterred by Caliban’s strange appearance and smell, crawls under the cloak with him. Stefano, drunk and singing, comes along and stumbles upon the bizarre spectacle of Caliban and Trinculo huddled under the cloak. Caliban, hearing the singing, cries out that he will work faster so long as the “spirits” leave him alone. Stefano decides that this monster requires liquor and attempts to get Caliban to drink. Trinculo recognizes his friend Stefano and calls out to him. Soon the three are sitting up together and drinking. Caliban quickly becomes an enthusiastic drinker, and begins to sing.
Prospero puts Ferdinand to work hauling wood. Ferdinand finds his labor pleasant because it is for Miranda’s sake. Miranda, thinking that her father is asleep, tells Ferdinand to take a break. The two flirt with one another. Miranda proposes marriage, and Ferdinand accepts. Prospero has been on stage most of the time, unseen, and he is pleased with this development.
Stefano, Trinculo, and Caliban are now drunk and raucous and are made all the more so by Ariel, who comes to them invisibly and provokes them to fight with one another by impersonating their voices and taunting them. Caliban grows more and more fervent in his boasts that he knows how to kill Prospero. He even tells Stefano that he can bring him to where Prospero is sleeping. He proposes that they kill Prospero, take his daughter, and set Stefano up as king of the island. Stefano thinks this a good plan, and the three prepare to set off to find Prospero. They are distracted, however, by the sound of music that Ariel plays on his flute and tabor-drum, and they decide to follow this music before executing their plot.
Alonso, Gonzalo, Sebastian, and Antonio grow weary from traveling and pause to rest. Antonio and Sebastian secretly plot to take advantage of Alonso and Gonzalo’s exhaustion, deciding to kill them in the evening. Prospero, probably on the balcony of the stage and invisible to the men, causes a banquet to be set out by strangely shaped spirits. As the men prepare to eat, Ariel appears like a harpy and causes the banquet to vanish. He then accuses the men of supplanting Prospero and says that it was for this sin that Alonso’s son, Ferdinand, has been taken. He vanishes, leaving Alonso feeling vexed and guilty.
Prospero now softens toward Ferdinand and welcomes him into his family as the soon-to-be-husband of Miranda. He sternly reminds Ferdinand, however, that Miranda’s “virgin-knot” (IV.i.15) is not to be broken until the wedding has been officially solemnized. Prospero then asks Ariel to call forth some spirits to perform a masque for Ferdinand and Miranda. The spirits assume the shapes of Ceres, Juno, and Iris and perform a short masque celebrating the rites of marriage and the bounty of the earth. A dance of reapers and nymphs follows but is interrupted when Prospero suddenly remembers that he still must stop the plot against his life.
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He sends the spirits away and asks Ariel about Trinculo, Stefano, and Caliban. Ariel tells his master of the three men’s drunken plans. He also tells how he led the men with his music through prickly grass and briars and finally into a filthy pond near Prospero’s cell. Ariel and Prospero then set a trap by hanging beautiful clothing in Prospero’s cell. Stefano, Trinculo, and Caliban enter looking for Prospero and, finding the beautiful clothing, decide to steal it. They are immediately set upon by a pack of spirits in the shape of dogs and hounds, driven on by Prospero and Ariel.
Prospero uses Ariel to bring Alonso and the others before him. He then sends Ariel to bring the Boatswain and the mariners from where they sleep on the wrecked ship. Prospero confronts Alonso, Antonio, and Sebastian with their treachery, but tells them that he forgives them. Alonso tells him of having lost Ferdinand in the tempest and Prospero says that he recently lost his own daughter. Clarifying his meaning, he draws aside a curtain to reveal Ferdinand and Miranda playing chess. Alonso and his companions are amazed by the miracle of Ferdinand’s survival, and Miranda is stunned by the sight of people unlike any she has seen before. Ferdinand tells his father about his marriage.
Ariel returns with the Boatswain and mariners. The Boatswain tells a story of having been awakened from a sleep that had apparently lasted since the tempest. At Prospero’s bidding, Ariel releases Caliban, Trinculo and Stefano, who then enter wearing their stolen clothing. Prospero and Alonso command them to return it and to clean up Prospero’s cell. Prospero invites Alonso and the others to stay for the night so that he can tell them the tale of his life in the past twelve years. After this, the group plans to return to Italy. Prospero, restored to his dukedom, will retire to Milan. Prospero gives Ariel one final task—to make sure the seas are calm for the return voyage-before setting him free. Finally, Prospero delivers an epilogue to the audience, asking them to forgive him for h Character List Prospero -
The play’s protagonist, and father of Miranda. Twelve years before the events of the play, Prospero was the duke of Milan. His brother, Antonio, in concert with Alonso, king of Naples, usurped him, forcing him to flee in a boat with his daughter. The honest lord Gonzalo aided Prospero in his escape. Prospero has spent his twelve years on the island refining the magic that gives him the power he needs to punish and forgive his enemies.
Miranda -
The daughter of Prospero, Miranda was brought to the island at an early age and has never seen any men other than her father and Caliban, though she dimly remembers being cared for by female servants as an infant. Because she has been sealed off from the world for so long, Miranda’s perceptions of other people tend to be naïve and non-judgmental. She is compassionate, generous, and loyal to her father.
Ariel -
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Prospero’s spirit helper. Ariel is referred to throughout this SparkNote and in most criticism as “he,” but his gender and physical form are ambiguous. Rescued by Prospero from a long imprisonment at the hands of the witch Sycorax, Ariel is Prospero’s servant until Prospero decides to release him. He is mischievous and ubiquitous, able to traverse the length of the island in an instant and to change shapes at will. He carries out virtually every task that Prospero needs accomplished in the play.
Caliban -
Another of Prospero’s servants. Caliban, the son of the now-deceased witch Sycorax, acquainted Prospero with the island when Prospero arrived. Caliban believes that the island rightfully belongs to him and has been stolen by Prospero. His speech and behavior is sometimes coarse and brutal, as in his drunken scenes with Stefano and Trinculo (III.ii, IV.i), and sometimes eloquent and sensitive, as in his rebukes of Prospero in Act I, scene ii, and in his description of the eerie beauty of the island in Act III, scene ii (III.ii.130-138).
Ferdinand -
Son and heir of Alonso. Ferdinand seems in some ways to be as pure and naïve as Miranda. He falls in love with her upon first sight and happily submits to servitude in order to win her father’s approval.
Alonso -
King of Naples and father of Ferdinand. Alonso aided Antonio in unseating Prospero as Duke of Milan twelve years before. As he appears in the play, however, he is acutely aware of the consequences of all his actions. He blames his decision to marry his daughter to the Prince of Tunis on the apparent death of his son. In addition, after the magical banquet, he regrets his role in the usurping of Prospero.
Antonio -
Prospero’s brother. Antonio quickly demonstrates that he is power-hungry and foolish. In Act II, scene i, he persuades Sebastian to kill the sleeping Alonso. He then goes along with Sebastian’s absurd story about fending off lions when Gonzalo wakes up and catches Antonio and Sebastian with their swords drawn.
Sebastian -
Alonso’s brother. Like Antonio, he is both aggressive and cowardly. He is easily persuaded to kill his brother in Act II, scene i, and he initiates the ridiculous story about lions when Gonzalo catches him with his sword drawn.
Gonzalo -
An old, honest lord, Gonzalo helped Prospero and Miranda to escape after Antonio usurped Prospero’s title. Gonzalo’s speeches provide an important commentary on the events of the play, as he remarks on the beauty of the island when the stranded party
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first lands, then on the desperation of Alonso after the magic banquet, and on the miracle of the reconciliation in Act V, scene i.
Trinculo & Stefano -
Trinculo, a jester, and Stefano, a drunken butler, are two minor members of the shipwrecked party. They provide a comic foil to the other, more powerful pairs of Prospero and Alonso and Antonio and Sebastian. Their drunken boasting and petty greed reflect and deflate the quarrels and power struggles of Prospero and the other noblemen.
Boatswain - Appearing only in the first and last scenes, the Boatswain is vigorously good-natured. He seems competent and almost cheerful in the shipwreck scene, demanding practical help rather than weeping and prayer. And he seems surprised but not stunned when he awakens from a long sleep at the end of the play.is wrongdoing and set him free by applauding Analysis of Major Characters Prospero
Prospero is one of Shakespeare’s more enigmatic protagonists. He is a sympathetic character in that he was wronged by his usurping brother, but his absolute power over the other characters and his overwrought speeches make him difficult to like. In our first glimpse of him, he appears puffed up and self-important, and his repeated insistence that Miranda pay attention suggest that his story is boring her. Once Prospero moves on to a subject other than his absorption in the pursuit of knowledge, Miranda’s attention is riveted.
The pursuit of knowledge gets Prospero into trouble in the first place. By neglecting everyday matters when he was duke, he gave his brother a chance to rise up against him. His possession and use of magical knowledge renders him extremely powerful and not entirely sympathetic. His punishments of Caliban are petty and vindictive, as he calls upon his spirits to pinch Caliban when he curses. He is defensively autocratic with Ariel. For example, when Ariel reminds his master of his promise to relieve him of his duties early if he performs them willingly, Prospero bursts into fury and threatens to return him to his former imprisonment and torment. He is similarly unpleasant in his treatment of Ferdinand, leading him to his daughter and then imprisoning and enslaving him.
Despite his shortcomings as a man, however, Prospero is central to The Tempest’s narrative. Prospero generates the plot of the play almost single-handedly, as his various schemes, spells, and manipulations all work as part of his grand design to achieve the play’s happy ending. Watching Prospero work through The Tempest is like watching a dramatist create a play, building a story from material at hand and developing his plot so that the resolution brings the world into line with his idea of goodness and justice. Many critics and readers of the play have interpreted Prospero
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as a surrogate for Shakespeare, enabling the audience to explore firsthand the ambiguities and ultimate wonder of the creative endeavor.
Prospero’s final speech, in which he likens himself to a playwright by asking the audience for applause, strengthens this reading of the play, and makes the play’s final scene function as a moving celebration of creativity, humanity, and art. Prospero emerges as a more likable and sympathetic figure in the final two acts of the play. In these acts, his love for Miranda, his forgiveness of his enemies, and the legitimately happy ending his scheme creates all work to mitigate some of the undesirable means he has used to achieve his happy ending. If Prospero sometimes seems autocratic, he ultimately manages to persuade the audience to share his understanding of the world—an achievement that is, after all, the final goal of every author and every play.
Miranda
Just under fifteen years old, Miranda is a gentle and compassionate, but also relatively passive, heroine. From her very first lines she displays a meek and emotional nature. “O, I have suffered / With those that I saw suffer!” she says of the shipwreck (I.ii.5–6), and hearing Prospero’s tale of their narrow escape from Milan, she says “I, not rememb’ring how I cried out then, / Will cry it o’er again” (I.ii.133–134). Miranda does not choose her own husband. Instead, while she sleeps, Prospero sends Ariel to fetch Ferdinand, and arranges things so that the two will come to love one another. After Prospero has given the lovers his blessing, he and Ferdinand talk with surprising frankness about her virginity and the pleasures of the marriage bed while she stands quietly by. Prospero tells Ferdinand to be sure not to “break her virgin-knot” before the wedding night (IV.i.15), and Ferdinand replies with no small anticipation that lust shall never take away “the edge of that day’s celebration” (IV.i.29). In the play’s final scene, Miranda is presented, with Ferdinand, almost as a prop or piece of the scenery as Prospero draws aside a curtain to reveal the pair playing chess.
But while Miranda is passive in many ways, she has at least two moments of surprising forthrightness and strength that complicate the reader’s impressions of her as a naïve young girl. The first such moment is in Act I, scene ii, in which she and Prospero converse with Caliban. Prospero alludes to the fact that Caliban once tried to rape Miranda. When Caliban rudely agrees that he intended to violate her, Miranda responds with impressive vehemence, clearly appalled at Caliban’s light attitude toward his attempted rape. She goes on to scold him for being ungrateful for her attempts to educate him: “When thou didst not, savage, / Know thine own meaning, but wouldst gabble like / A thing most brutish, I endowed thy purposes / With words that made them known” (358–361). These lines are so surprising coming from the mouth of Miranda that many editors have amended the text and given it to Prospero. This reattribution seems to give Miranda too little credit. In Act III, scene i comes the second surprising moment—Miranda’s marriage proposal to Ferdinand: “I am your wife, if you will marry me; / If not, I’ll die your maid” (III.i.83–84). Her proposal comes shortly after Miranda has told herself to remember her “father’s precepts” (III.i.58) forbidding conversation with Ferdinand. As the reader can see in her speech to Caliban in Act I, scene ii, Miranda is willing to speak up for herself about her sexuality.
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Caliban
Prospero’s dark, earthy slave, frequently referred to as a monster by the other characters, Caliban is the son of a witch-hag and the only real native of the island to appear in the play. He is an extremely complex figure, and he mirrors or parodies several other characters in the play. In his first speech to Prospero, Caliban insists that Prospero stole the island from him. Through this speech, Caliban suggests that his situation is much the same as Prospero’s, whose brother usurped his dukedom. On the other hand, Caliban’s desire for sovereignty of the island mirrors the lust for power that led Antonio to overthrow Prospero. Caliban’s conspiracy with Stefano and Trinculo to murder Prospero mirrors Antonio and Sebastian’s plot against Alonso, as well as Antonio and Alonso’s original conspiracy against Prospero.
Caliban both mirrors and contrasts with Prospero’s other servant, Ariel. While Ariel is “an airy spirit,” Caliban is of the earth, his speeches turning to “springs, brine pits” (I.ii.341), “bogs, fens, flats” (II.ii.2), or crabapples and pignuts (II.ii.159–160). While Ariel maintains his dignity and his freedom by serving Prospero willingly, Caliban achieves a different kind of dignity by refusing, if only sporadically, to bow before Prospero’s intimidation.
Surprisingly, Caliban also mirrors and contrasts with Ferdinand in certain ways. In Act II, scene ii Caliban enters “with a burden of wood,” and Ferdinand enters in Act III, scene i “bearing a log.” Both Caliban and Ferdinand profess an interest in untying Miranda’s “virgin knot.” Ferdinand plans to marry her, while Caliban has attempted to rape her. The glorified, romantic, almost ethereal love of Ferdinand for Miranda starkly contrasts with Caliban’s desire to impregnate Miranda and people the island with Calibans.
Finally, and most tragically, Caliban becomes a parody of himself. In his first speech to Prospero, he regretfully reminds the magician of how he showed him all the ins and outs of the island when Prospero first arrived. Only a few scenes later, however, we see Caliban drunk and fawning before a new magical being in his life: Stefano and his bottle of liquor. Soon, Caliban begs to show Stefano the island and even asks to lick his shoe. Caliban repeats the mistakes he claims to curse. In his final act of rebellion, he is once more entirely subdued by Prospero in the most petty way—he is dunked in a stinking bog and ordered to clean up Prospero’s cell in preparation for dinner.
Despite his savage demeanor and grotesque appearance, however, Caliban has a nobler, more sensitive side that the audience is only allowed to glimpse briefly, and which Prospero and Miranda do not acknowledge at all. His beautiful speeches about his island home provide some of the most affecting imagery in the play, reminding the audience that Caliban really did occupy the island before Prospero came, and that he may be right in thinking his enslavement to be monstrously unjust. Caliban’s swarthy appearance, his forced servitude, and his native status on the island have led many readers to interpret him as a symbol of the native cultures occupied and suppressed by European colonial societies, which are represented by the power of Prospero. Whether or not one accepts this allegory, Caliban remains one of the most intriguing and ambiguous minor characters in all of Shakespeare, a sensitive monster who allows himself to be transformed into a fool.
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. Themes, Motifs & Symbols
Themes Themes are the fundamental and often universal ideas explored in a literary work. The Illusion of Justice
The Tempest tells a fairly straightforward story involving an unjust act, the usurpation of Prospero’s throne by his brother, and Prospero’s quest to re-establish justice by restoring himself to power. However, the idea of justice that the play works toward seems highly subjective, since this idea represents the view of one character who controls the fate of all the other characters. Though Prospero presents himself as a victim of injustice working to right the wrongs that have been done to him, Prospero’s idea of justice and injustice is somewhat hypocritical—though he is furious with his brother for taking his power, he has no qualms about enslaving Ariel and Caliban in order to achieve his ends. At many moments throughout the play, Prospero’s sense of justice seems extremely one-sided and mainly involves what is good for Prospero. Moreover, because the play offers no notion of higher order or justice to supersede Prospero’s interpretation of events, the play is morally ambiguous.
As the play progresses, however, it becomes more and more involved with the idea of creativity and art, and Prospero’s role begins to mirror more explicitly the role of an author creating a story around him. With this metaphor in mind, and especially if we accept Prospero as a surrogate for Shakespeare himself, Prospero’s sense of justice begins to seem, if not perfect, at least sympathetic. Moreover, the means he uses to achieve his idea of justice mirror the machinations of the artist, who also seeks to enable others to see his view of the world. Playwrights arrange their stories in such a way that their own idea of justice is imposed upon events. In The Tempest, the author is in the play, and the fact that he establishes his idea of justice and creates a happy ending for all the characters becomes a cause for celebration, not criticism.
By using magic and tricks that echo the special effects and spectacles of the theater, Prospero gradually persuades the other characters and the audience of the rightness of his case. As he does so, the ambiguities surrounding his methods slowly resolve themselves. Prospero forgives his enemies, releases his slaves, and relinquishes his magic power, so that, at the end of the play, he is only an old man whose work has been responsible for all the audience’s pleasure. The establishment of Prospero’s idea of justice becomes less a commentary on justice in life than on the nature of morality in art. Happy endings are possible, Shakespeare seems to say, because the creativity of artists can create them, even if the moral values that establish the happy ending originate from nowhere but the imagination of the artist.
The Difficulty of Distinguishing “Men” from “Monsters”
Upon seeing Ferdinand for the first time, Miranda says that he is “the third man that e’er I saw” (I.ii.449). The other two are, presumably, Prospero and Caliban. In their first conversation with Caliban, however, Miranda and Prospero say very little that shows they consider him to be human. Miranda reminds Caliban that before she taught him language, he gabbled “like / A thing most brutish” (I.ii.59–60) and Prospero says that he gave Caliban “human care” (I.ii.349), implying that this was
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something Caliban ultimately did not deserve. Caliban’s exact nature continues to be slightly ambiguous later. In Act IV, scene i, reminded of Caliban’s plot, Prospero refers to him as a “devil, a born devil, on whose nature / Nurture can never stick” (IV.i.188–189). Miranda and Prospero both have contradictory views of Caliban’s humanity. On the one hand, they think that their education of him has lifted him from his formerly brutish status. On the other hand, they seem to see him as inherently brutish. His devilish nature can never be overcome by nurture, according to Prospero. Miranda expresses a similar sentiment in Act I, scene ii: “thy vile race, / Though thou didst learn, had that in’t which good natures / Could not abide to be with” (I.ii.361–363). The inhuman part of Caliban drives out the human part, the “good nature,” that is imposed on him.
Caliban claims that he was kind to Prospero, and that Prospero repaid that kindness by imprisoning him (see I.ii.347). In contrast, Prospero claims that he stopped being kind to Caliban once Caliban had tried to rape Miranda (I.ii.347–351). Which character the audience decides to believe depends on whether it views Caliban as inherently brutish, or as made brutish by oppression. The play leaves the matter ambiguous. Caliban balances all of his eloquent speeches, such as his curses in Act I, scene ii and his speech about the isle’s “noises” in Act III, scene ii, with the most degrading kind of drunken, servile behavior. But Trinculo’s speech upon first seeing Caliban (II.ii.18–38), the longest speech in the play, reproaches too harsh a view of Caliban and blurs the distinction between men and monsters. In England, which he visited once, Trinculo says, Caliban could be shown off for money: “There would this monster make a man. Any strange beast there makes a man. When they will not give a doit to relieve a lame beggar, they will lay out ten to see a dead Indian” (II.ii.28–31). What seems most monstrous in these sentences is not the “dead Indian,” or “any strange beast,” but the cruel voyeurism of those who capture and gape at them.
The Allure of Ruling a Colony
The nearly uninhabited island presents the sense of infinite possibility to almost everyone who lands there. Prospero has found it, in its isolation, an ideal place to school his daughter. Sycorax, Caliban’s mother, worked her magic there after she was exiled from Algeria. Caliban, once alone on the island, now Prospero’s slave, laments that he had been his own king (I.ii.344–345). As he attempts to comfort Alonso, Gonzalo imagines a utopian society on the island, over which he would rule (II.i.148–156). In Act III, scene ii, Caliban suggests that Stefano kill Prospero, and Stefano immediately envisions his own reign: “Monster, I will kill this man. His daughter and I will be King and Queen—save our graces!—and Trinculo and thyself shall be my viceroys” (III.ii.101–103). Stefano particularly looks forward to taking advantage of the spirits that make “noises” on the isle; they will provide music for his kingdom for free. All these characters envision the island as a space of freedom and unrealized potential.
The tone of the play, however, toward the hopes of the would-be colonizers is vexed at best. Gonzalo’s utopian vision in Act II, scene i is undercut by a sharp retort from the usually foolish Sebastian and Antonio. When Gonzalo says that there would be no commerce or work or “sovereignty” in his society, Sebastian replies, “yet he would be king on’t,” and Antonio adds, “The latter end of his commonwealth forgets the
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beginning” (II.i.156–157). Gonzalo’s fantasy thus involves him ruling the island while seeming not to rule it, and in this he becomes a kind of parody of Prospero.
While there are many representatives of the colonial impulse in the play, the colonized have only one representative: Caliban. We might develop sympathy for him at first, when Prospero seeks him out merely to abuse him, and when we see him tormented by spirits. However, this sympathy is made more difficult by his willingness to abase himself before Stefano in Act II, scene ii. Even as Caliban plots to kill one colonial master (Prospero) in Act III, scene ii, he sets up another (Stefano). The urge to rule and the urge to be ruled seem inextricably intertwined.
Motifs Motifs are recurring structures, contrasts, or literary devices that can help to develop and inform the text’s major themes. Masters and Servants
Nearly every scene in the play either explicitly or implicitly portrays a relationship between a figure that possesses power and a figure that is subject to that power. The play explores the master-servant dynamic most harshly in cases in which the harmony of the relationship is threatened or disrupted, as by the rebellion of a servant or the ineptitude of a master. For instance, in the opening scene, the “servant” (the Boatswain) is dismissive and angry toward his “masters” (the noblemen), whose ineptitude threatens to lead to a shipwreck in the storm. From then on, master-servant relationships like these dominate the play: Prospero and Caliban; Prospero and Ariel; Alonso and his nobles; the nobles and Gonzalo; Stefano, Trinculo, and Caliban; and so forth. The play explores the psychological and social dynamics of power relationships from a number of contrasting angles, such as the generally positive relationship between Prospero and Ariel, the generally negative relationship between Prospero and Caliban, and the treachery in Alonso’s relationship to his nobles.
Water and Drowning
The play is awash with references to water. The Mariners enter “wet” in Act I, scene i, and Caliban, Stefano, and Trinculo enter “all wet,” after being led by Ariel into a swampy lake (IV.i.193). Miranda’s fear for the lives of the sailors in the “wild waters” (I.ii.2) causes her to weep. Alonso, believing his son dead because of his own actions against Prospero, decides in Act III, scene iii to drown himself. His language is echoed by Prospero in Act V, scene i when the magician promises that, once he has reconciled with his enemies, “deeper than did ever plummet sound / I’ll drown my book” (V.i.56–57).
These are only a few of the references to water in the play. Occasionally, the references to water are used to compare characters. For example, the echo of Alonso’s desire to drown himself in Prospero’s promise to drown his book calls attention to the similarity of the sacrifices each man must make. Alonso must be willing to give up his life in order to become truly penitent and to be forgiven for his treachery against Prospero. Similarly, in order to rejoin the world he has been driven from, Prospero must be willing to give up his magic and his power.
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Perhaps the most important overall effect of this water motif is to heighten the symbolic importance of the tempest itself. It is as though the water from that storm runs through the language and action of the entire play—just as the tempest itself literally and crucially affects the lives and actions of all the characters.
Mysterious Noises
The isle is indeed, as Caliban says, “full of noises” (III.ii.130). The play begins with a “tempestuous noise of thunder and lightning” (I.i.1, stage direction), and the splitting of the ship is signaled in part by “a confused noise within” (I.i.54, stage direction). Much of the noise of the play is musical, and much of the music is Ariel’s. Ferdinand is led to Miranda by Ariel’s music. Ariel’s music also wakes Gonzalo just as Antonio and Sebastian are about to kill Alonso in Act II, scene i. Moreover, the magical banquet of Act III, scene iii is laid out to the tune of “Solemn and strange music” (III.iii.18, stage direction), and Juno and Ceres sing in the wedding masque (IV.i.106–117).
The noises, sounds, and music of the play are made most significant by Caliban’s speech about the noises of the island at III.ii.130–138. Shakespeare shows Caliban in the thrall of magic, which the theater audience also experiences as the illusion of thunder, rain, invisibility. The action of The Tempest is very simple. What gives the play most of its hypnotic, magical atmosphere is the series of dreamlike events it stages, such as the tempest, the magical banquet, and the wedding masque. Accompanied by music, these present a feast for the eye and the ear and convince us of the magical glory of Prospero’s enchanted isle.
Symbols Symbols are objects, characters, figures, or colors used to represent abstract ideas or concepts. The Tempest
The tempest that begins the play, and which puts all of Prospero’s enemies at his disposal, symbolizes the suffering Prospero endured, and which he wants to inflict on others. All of those shipwrecked are put at the mercy of the sea, just as Prospero and his infant daughter were twelve years ago, when some loyal friends helped them out to sea in a ragged little boat (see I.ii.144–151). Prospero must make his enemies suffer as he has suffered so that they will learn from their suffering, as he has from his. The tempest is also a symbol of Prospero’s magic, and of the frightening, potentially malevolent side of his power.
The Game of Chess
The object of chess is to capture the king. That, at the simplest level, is the symbolic significance of Prospero revealing Ferdinand and Miranda playing chess in the final scene. Prospero has caught the king—Alonso—and reprimanded him for his treachery. In doing so, Prospero has married Alonso’s son to his own daughter without the king’s knowledge, a deft political maneuver that assures Alonso’s support because Alonso will have no interest in upsetting a dukedom to which his own son is
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heir. This is the final move in Prospero’s plot, which began with the tempest. He has maneuvered the different passengers of Alonso’s ship around the island with the skill of a great chess player.
Caught up in their game, Miranda and Ferdinand also symbolize something ominous about Prospero’s power. They do not even notice the others staring at them for a few lines. “Sweet lord, you play me false,” Miranda says, and Ferdinand assures her that he “would not for the world” do so (V.i.174–176). The theatrical tableau is almost too perfect: Ferdinand and Miranda, suddenly and unexpectedly revealed behind a curtain, playing chess and talking gently of love and faith, seem entirely removed from the world around them. Though he has promised to relinquish his magic, Prospero still seems to see his daughter as a mere pawn in his game.
Prospero’s Books
Like the tempest, Prospero’s books are a symbol of his power. “Remember / First to possess his books,” Caliban says to Stefano and Trinculo, “for without them / He’s but a sot” (III.ii.86–88). The books are also, however, a symbol of Prospero’s dangerous desire to withdraw entirely from the world. It was his devotion to study that put him at the mercy of his ambitious brother, and it is this same devotion to study that has made him content to raise Miranda in isolation. Yet, Miranda’s isolation has made her ignorant of where she came from (see I.ii.33–36), and Prospero’s own isolation provides him with little company. In order to return to the world where his knowledge means something more than power, Prospero must let go of his magic.
Act I,scene i Analysis
Even for a Shakespeare play, The Tempest is remarkable for its extraordinary breadth of imaginative vision. The play is steeped in magic and illusion. As a result, the play contains a tremendous amount of spectacle, yet things are often not as they seem. This opening scene certainly contains spectacle, in the form of the howling storm (the “tempest” of the play’s title) tossing the little ship about and threatening to kill the characters before the play has even begun. In terms of stagecraft, it was a significant gamble for Shakespeare to open his play with this spectacular natural event, given that, in the early seventeenth century when the play was written, special effects were largely left to the audience’s imagination.
Shakespeare’s stage would have been almost entirely bare, without many physical signs that the actors were supposed to be on a ship, much less a ship in the midst of a lashing storm. As a result, the audience sees Shakespeare calling on all the resources of his theater to establish a certain level of realism. For example, the play begins with a “noise of thunder and lightning” (stage direction). The first word, “Boatswain!” immediately indicates that the scene is the deck of a ship. In addition, characters rush frantically in and out, often with no purpose—as when Sebastian, Antonio, and
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Gonzalo exit at line 29 and re-enter at 33, indicating the general level of chaos and confusion. Cries from off-stage create the illusion of a space below-decks.
But in addition to this spectacle, the play also uses its first scene to hint at some of the illusions and deceptions it will contain. Most plays of this era, by Shakespeare and others, use the introductory scene to present the main characters and hint at the general narrative to come—so Othello begins with Iago’s jealousy, and King Lear begins with Lear’s decision to abdicate his throne. But The Tempest begins toward the end of the actual story, late in Prospero’s exile. Its opening scene is devoted to what appears to be an unexplained natural phenomenon, in which characters who are never named rush about frantically in service of no apparent plot. In fact, the confusion of the opening is itself misleading, for as we will learn later, the storm is not a natural phenomenon at all, but a deliberate magical conjuring by Prospero, designed to bring the ship to the island. The tempest is, in fact, central to the plot.
But there is more going on in this scene than initially meets the eye. The apparently chaotic exchanges of the characters introduce the important motif of master-servant relationships. The characters on the boat are divided into nobles, such as Antonio and Gonzalo, and servants or professionals, such as the Boatswain. The mortal danger of the storm upsets the usual balance between these two groups, and the Boatswain, attempting to save the ship, comes into direct conflict with the hapless nobles, who, despite their helplessness, are extremely irritated at being rudely spoken to by a commoner. The characters in the scene are never named outright; they are only referred to in terms that indicate their social stations: “Boatswain,” “Master,” “King,” and “Prince.” As the scene progresses, the characters speak less about the storm than about the class conflict underlying their attempts to survive it—a conflict between masters and servants that, as the story progresses, becomes perhaps the major motif of the play.
Gonzalo, for instance, jokes that the ship is safe because the uppity Boatswain was surely born to be hanged, not drowned in a storm: “I have great comfort from this fellow: methinks he hath no drowning mark upon him; his complexion is perfect gallows” (I.i.25–27). For his part, the Boatswain observes that social hierarchies are flimsy and unimportant in the face of nature’s wrath. “What cares these roarers,” he asks, referring to the booming thunder, “for the name of king?” (I.i.15–16). The irony here, of course, is that, unbeknownst to the occupants of the ship, and to the audience, the storm is not natural at all, but is in fact a product of another kind power: Prospero Act I, scene ii ’Analysis
Act I, scene ii opens with the revelation that it was Prospero’s magic, and not simply a hostile nature, that raised the storm that caused the shipwreck. From there, the scene moves into a long sequence devoted largely to telling the play’s background story while introducing the major characters on the island. The first part of the scene is devoted to two long histories, both told by Prospero, one to Miranda and one to Ariel. If The Tempest is a play about power in various forms (as we observed in the previous scene, when the power of the storm disrupted the power relations between
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nobles and servants), then Prospero is the center of power, controlling events throughout the play through magic and manipulation. Prospero’s retellings of past events to Miranda and Ariel do more than simply fill the audience in on the story so far. They also illustrate how Prospero maintains his power, exploring the old man’s meticulous methods of controlling those around him through magic, charisma, and rhetoric.
Prospero’s rhetoric is particularly important to observe in this section, especially in his confrontation with Ariel. Of all the characters in the play, Prospero alone seems to understand that controlling history enables one to control the present—that is, that one can control others by controlling how they understand the past. Prospero thus tells his story with a highly rhetorical emphasis on his own good deeds, the bad deeds of others toward him, and the ingratitude of those he has protected from the evils of others. For example, when he speaks to Miranda, he calls his brother “perfidious,” then immediately says that he loved his brother better than anyone in the world except Miranda (I.ii.68). He repeatedly asks Miranda, “Dost thou attend me?” Through his questioning, he commands her attention almost hypnotically as he tells her his one-sided version of the story. Prospero himself does not seem blameless. While his brother did betray him, he also failed in his responsibilities as a ruler by giving up control of the government so that he could study. He contrasts his popularity as a leader—“the love my people bore me” (I.ii.141)—with his brother’s “evil nature” (I.ii.).
When he speaks to Ariel, a magical creature over whom his mastery is less certain than over his doting daughter, Prospero goes to even greater lengths to justify himself. He treats Ariel as a combination of a pet, whom he can praise and blame as he chooses, and a pupil, demanding that the spirit recite answers to questions about the past that Prospero has taught him. Though Ariel must know the story well, Prospero says that he must “once in a month” recount Ariel’s history with Sycorax, simply to ensure that his servant’s fickle nature does not cause him to become disloyal. Every time he retells Ariel’s history, we feel, he must increase both the persuasiveness of his own story and his control over Ariel. This is why he now chooses to claim that Ariel is behaving badly—so that he can justify a retelling of the history, even though Ariel is perfectly respectful. He forces Ariel to recall the misery he suffered while trapped in the pine tree (“thy groans / Did make wolves howl,” I.ii.289–290). He then positions himself as the good savior who overthrew Sycorax’s evil. However, he immediately follows this with a forceful display of his own magical power, threatening to trap Ariel in an oak just as the “evil” Sycorax had trapped him in a pine. In this way, Prospero exercises control both intellectually and physically. By controlling the way Ariel and Miranda think about their lives, he makes it difficult for them to imagine that challenging his authority would be a good thing to do, and by threatening Ariel (and, shortly thereafter, Caliban) with magical torture, he sets very high stakes for any such rebellion. For his part, Ariel promises to “do my spiriting gent
You taught me language, and my profit on’t Is I know how to curse. The red plague rid you For learning me your language! (I.ii.366–368)
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The introduction of Caliban at the start of this section gives Prospero yet another chance to retell the history of one of the island’s denizens, simultaneously filling the audience in on the background of Sycorax’s unfortunate son and reasserting his power over the dour Caliban. Unlike Ariel and Miranda, however, Caliban attempts to use language as a weapon against Prospero just as Prospero uses it against Caliban. Caliban admits that he once tried to rape Miranda, but rather than showing contrition, he says that he wishes he would have been able to finish the deed, so that he could have “peopled . . . / This isle with Calibans” (I.ii.353–354). He insists that the island is his but that Prospero took it from him by flattering Caliban into teaching him about the island and then betraying and enslaving him. Prospero lists Caliban’s shortcomings and describes his own good treatment of him, but Caliban answers with curses. We sense that there is more at stake here than a mere shouting-match. If words and histories are a source of power, then Prospero’s control over Caliban rests on his ability to master him through words, and the closer Caliban comes to outdoing Prospero in their cursing-match, the closer Caliban comes to achieving his freedom. In the end, Caliban only relents because he fears Prospero’s magic, which, he says, is so powerful that it would make a slave of his witch-mother’s god, Setebos.
The re-entrance of Ariel creates an immediate and powerful contrast between Prospero’s two servants. Where Caliban is coarse, resentful, and brutish, described as a “[h]ag-seed” (I.ii.368), a “poisonous” (I.ii.322) and “most lying slave” (I.ii.347) and as “earth” (I.ii.317), Ariel is delicate, refined, and gracious, described in the Dramatis personae as an “airy spirit.” Ariel is indeed a spirit of air and fire, while Caliban is a creature of earth. Though the two are both Prospero’s servants, Ariel serves the magician somewhat willingly, in return for his freeing him from the pine, while Caliban resists serving him at all costs. In a sense, upon arriving on the island, Prospero enslaved Caliban and freed Ariel, imprisoning the dark, earthy “monster” and releasing the bright, airy spirit. Readers who interpret The Tempest as an allegory about European colonial practices generally deem Prospero’s treatment of Ariel, and especially of Caliban, to represent the disruptive effect of European colonization on native societies. Prospero’s colonization has left Caliban, the original owner of the island, subject to enslavement and hatred on account of his dark countenance and—in the eyes of Prospero, a European—rough appearance.
Prospero’s treatment of Ferdinand at the end of this scene re--emphasizes his power and his willingness to manipulate others to achieve his own ends. Though he is pleased by his daughter’s obvious attraction to the powerful young man, Prospero does not want their love to get ahead of his plans. As a result, he has no qualms about enchanting Ferdinand and lying to Miranda about Ferdinand’s unworthiness. This willingness to deceive even his beloved daughter draws attention to the moral and psychological ambiguities surrounding Shakespeare’s depiction of Prospero’s character.
Though many readers view The Tempest as an allegory about creativity, in which Prospero and his magic work as metaphors for Shakespeare and his art, others find Prospero’s apparently narcissistic moral sense disturbing. Prospero seems to think that his own sense of justice and goodness is so well-honed and accurate that, if any other character disagrees with him, that character is wrong simply by virtue of the disagreement. He also seems to think that his objective in restoring his political power is so important that it justifies any means he chooses to use—hence his lying, his
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manipulations, his cursing, and the violence of his magic. Perhaps the most troubling part of all this is that Shakespeare gives us little reason to believe he disagrees with Prospero: for better or worse, Prospero is the hero of the play.ly” from now on.s magic. Act II,scene i Analysis As in the storm scene in Act I, scene i, Shakespeare emphasizes and undercuts the capacity of the bare stage to create a convincing illusion throughout Act II, scene i. As the shipwrecked mariners look around the island, they describe it in poetry of great imagistic richness, giving the audience an imaginary picture of the setting of the play. Even so, they disagree about what they see, and even argue over what the island actually looks like. Adrian finds it to be of “subtle, tender, and delicate temperance,” where “the air breathes upon us . . . most sweetly” (II.i.42–47). Gonzalo says that the grass is “lush and lusty” and “green” (II.i.53–54). Antonio and Sebastian, however, cynical to the last, refuse to let these descriptions rest in the audience’s mind. They say that the air smells “as ’twere perfumed by a fen” (II.i.49), meaning a swamp, and that the ground “indeed is tawny” (II.i.55), or brown. The remarks of Antonio and Sebastian could be easily discounted as mere grumpiness, were it not for the fact that Gonzalo and Adrian do seem at times to be stretching the truth. (Adrian, for example, begins his remarks about the island’s beauty by saying, “Though this island seem to be desert . . . Uninhabitable, and almost inaccessible” [II.i.35–38].) Thus the bareness of the stage allows the beauty and other qualities of the island to be largely a matter of perspective. The island may be a paradise, but only if one chooses to see it that way.
Shakespeare uses this ambiguous setting for several different purposes. First, the setting heightens the sense of wonder and mystery that surrounds the magical island. It also gives each audience member a great deal of freedom to imagine the island as he or she so chooses. Most importantly, however, it enables the island to work as a reflection of character—we know a great deal about different characters simply from how they choose to see the island. Hence the dark, sensitive Caliban can find it both a place of terror—as when he enters, frightened and overworked in Act II, scene ii—and of great beauty—as in his “the isle is full of noises” speech (III.ii.130–138). Therefore, both Gonzalo (at II.i.147–164) and Trinculo (throughout Act III, scene ii), colonially minded, are so easily able to imagine it as the site of their own utopian societies.
Gonzalo’s fantasy about the plantation he would like to build on the island is a remarkable poetic evocation of a utopian society, in which no one would work, all people would be equal and live off the land, and all women would be “innocent and pure.” This vision indicates something of Gonzalo’s own innocence and purity. Shakespeare treats the old man’s idea of the island as a kind of lovely dream, in which the frustrations and obstructions of life (magistrates, wealth, power) would be removed and all could live naturally and authentically. Though Gonzalo’s idea is not presented as a practical possibility (hence the mockery he receives from Sebastian and Antonio), Gonzalo’s dream contrasts to his credit with the power-obsessed ideas of most of the other characters, including Prospero. Gonzalo would do away with the very master-servant motif that lies at the heart of The Tempest.
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The mockery dished out by Antonio and Sebastian reveals, by contrast, something of the noblemen’s cynicism and lack of feeling. Where Gonzalo is simply grateful and optimistic about having survived the shipwreck, Antonio and Sebastian seem mainly to be annoyed by it, though not so annoyed that they stop their incessant jesting with each other. Gonzalo says that they are simply loudmouthed jokers, who “would lift the moon out of her sphere, if she would continue in it five weeks without changing” (II.i.179–181). By conspiring against the king, however, they reveal themselves as more sinister and greedier than Gonzalo recognizes, using their verbal wit to cover up their darker and more wicked impulses. However, their greediness for power is both foolish and clumsy. As they attempt to cover their treachery with the story of the “bellowing / Like bulls, or rather lions” (II.i.307–308), it seems hard to believe that Antonio ever could have risen successfully against his brother. The absurdly aggressive behavior of Antonio and Sebastian makes Prospero’s exercise of power in the previous and following scenes seem necessary. It also puts Alonso in a sympathetic position. He is a potential victim of the duo’s treachery, a fact that helps the audience believe his conversion when he reconciles with Prosper Act II,scene ii Analysis
Trinculo and Stefano are the last new characters to be introduced in the play. They act as comic foils to the main action, and will in later acts become specific parodies of Antonio and Sebastian. At this point, their role is to present comically some of the more serious issues in the play concerning Prospero and Caliban. In Act I, scene ii, Prospero calls Caliban a “slave” (II.ii.311, 322, 347), “thou earth” (II.ii.317), “Filth” (II.ii.349), and “Hag-seed” (II.ii.368). Stefano and Trinculo’s epithet of choice in Act II, scene ii and thereafter is “monster.” But while these two make quite clear that Caliban is seen as less than human by the Europeans on the island, they also treat him more humanely than Prospero does. Stefano and Trinculo, a butler and a jester respectively, remain at the low end of the social scale in the play, and have little difficulty finding friendship with the strange islander they meet. “Misery acquaints a man with strange bedfellows,” says Trinculo (II.ii.36–37), and then hastens to crawl beneath Caliban’s garment in order to get out of the rain. The similarity, socially and perhaps physically as well, between Trinculo and Caliban is further emphasized when Stefano, drunk, initially mistakes the two for a single monster: “This is some monster of the isle with four legs” (II.ii.62).
More important than the emphasis on the way in which Caliban seems to others more monster than man, is the way in which this scene dramatizes the initial encounter between an almost completely isolated, “primitive” culture and a foreign, “civilized” one. The reader discovers during Caliban and Prospero’s confrontation in Act I, scene ii that Prospero initially “made much of” Caliban (II.ii.336); that he gave Caliban “Water with berries in’t” (II.ii.337); that Caliban showed him around the island; and that Prospero later imprisoned Caliban, after he had taken all he could take from him. The reader can see these events in Act II, scene ii, with Trinculo and Stefano in the place of Prospero. Stefano calls Caliban a “brave monster,” as they set off singing around the island. In addition, Stefano and Trinculo give Caliban wine, which Caliban finds to be a “celestial liquor” (II.ii.109). Moreover, Caliban initially mistakes Stefano and Trinculo for Prospero’s spirits, but alcohol convinces him that Stefano is a “brave
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god” and decides unconditionally to “kneel to him” (II.ii.109–110). This scene shows the foreign, civilized culture as decadent and manipulative: Stefano immediately plans to “inherit” the island (II.ii.167), using Caliban to show him all its virtues. Stefano and Trinculo are a grotesque, parodic version of Prospero upon his arrival twelve years ago. Godlike in the eyes of the native, they slash and burn their way to power.
By this point, Caliban has begun to resemble a parody of himself. Whereas he would “gabble like / A thing most brutish” (I.ii.359–360) upon Prospero’s arrival, because he did not know language, he now is willfully inarticulate in his drunkenness. Immediately putting aside his fear that these men are spirits sent to do him harm, Caliban puts his trust in them for all the wrong reasons. What makes Caliban’s behavior in this scene so tragic is that we might expect him, especially after his eloquent curses of Prospero in Act I, scene ii, to know better.o at t Act III,scene i Analysis
There be some sports are painful, and their labour Delight in them sets off. Some kinds of baseness
Are nobly undergone, and most poor matters Point to rich ends. This my mean task
Would be as heavy to me as odious, but The mistress which I serve quickens what’s dead
And makes my labours pleasures.
This scene revolves around different images of servitude. Ferdinand is literally in service to Prospero, but in order to make his labor more pleasant he sees Miranda as his taskmaster. When he talks to Miranda, Ferdinand brings up a different kind of servitude—the love he has felt for a number of other beautiful women. Ferdinand sees this love, in comparison to his love for Miranda, as an enforced servitude: “Full many a lady / I have eyed with the best regard, and many a time / Th’ harmony of their tongues hath into bondage / Brought my too diligent ear” (III.i.39–42). When Miranda stops the conversation momentarily, remembering her father’s command against talking to Ferdinand, the prince hastens to assure her that he is worthy of her love. He is royalty, he says, and in normal life “would no more endure / This wooden slavery [carrying logs] than to suffer / The flesh-fly blow my mouth” (III.i.61–63). But this slavery is made tolerable by a different kind of slavery: “The very instant that I saw you did / My heart fly to your service; there resides, / To make me slave to it” (III.i.64–66). The words “slavery” and “slave” underscore the parallel as well as the difference between Ferdinand and Caliban. Prospero repeatedly calls Caliban a slave, and we see Caliban as a slave both to Prospero and to his own anger. Ferdinand, on the other hand, is a willing slave to his love, happy in a servitude that makes him rejoice rather than curse.
At the end of the scene, Miranda takes up the theme of servitude. Proposing marriage to Ferdinand, she says that “I am your wife, if you will marry me; / If not, I’ll die your maid. . . . / You may deny me; but I’ll be your servant / Whether you will or no” (III.i.83–86). This is the only scene of actual interaction we see between Ferdinand and Miranda. Miranda is, as we know, and as she says, very innocent: “I do not know
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/ One of my sex, no woman’s face remember / Save from my glass mine own; nor have I seen / More that I may call men than you, good friend, / And my dear father” (III.i.48–52). The play has to make an effort to overcome the implausibility of this courtship—to make Miranda look like something more than Prospero’s puppet and a fool for the first man she sees. Shakespeare accomplishes this by showing Ferdinand in one kind of servitude—in which he must literally and physically humble himself—as he talks earnestly about another kind of servitude, in which he gives himself wholly to Miranda. The fact that Miranda speaks of a similar servitude of her own accord, that she remembers her father’s “precepts” and then disregards them, and that Prospero remains in the background without interfering helps the audience to trust this meeting between the lovers more than their first meeting in Act I, scene ii.
Of course, Prospero’s presence in the first place may suggest that he is somehow in control of what Miranda does or says. At the end he steps forward to assure the audience that he knew what would happen: “So glad of this as they I cannot be, / Who are surprised with all” (III.i.93–94). But Prospero’s five other lines (III.i.31–32 and III.i.74–76) do not suggest that he controls what Miranda says. Rather, he watches in the manner of a father—both proud of his daughter’s choice and slightly sad to see her grow up.he Act III,scene ii Analysis
As we have seen, one of the ways in which The Tempest builds its rich aura of magical and mysterious implication is through the use of doubles: scenes, characters, and speeches that mirror each other by either resemblance or contrast. This scene is an example of doubling: almost everything in it echoes Act II, scene i. In this scene, Caliban, Trinculo, and Stefano wander aimlessly about the island, and Stefano muses about the kind of island it would be if he ruled it—“I will kill this man [Prospero]. His daughter and I will be King and Queen . . . and Trinculo and thyself [Caliban] shall be viceroys” (III.ii.101–103)—just as Gonzalo had done while wandering with Antonio and Sebastian in Act II, scene i. At the end of Act III, scene ii, Ariel enters, invisible, and causes strife among the group, first with his voice and then with music, leading the men astray in order to thwart Antonio and Sebastian’s plot against Alonso. The power-hungry servants Stefano and Trinculo thus become rough parodies of the power-hungry courtiers Antonio and Sebastian. All four men are now essentially equated with Caliban, who is, as Alonso and Antonio once were, simply another usurper.
But Caliban also has a moment in this scene to become more than a mere usurper: his striking and apparently heartfelt speech about the sounds of the island. Reassuring the others not to worry about Ariel’s piping, Caliban says:
The isle is full of noises, Sounds and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not.
Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments Will hum about mine ears, and sometime voices,
That, if I then had waked after long sleep, Will make me sleep again: and then, in dreaming,
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The clouds methought would open and show riches Ready to drop upon me, that, when I waked,
I cried to dream again. (III.ii.130–138) In this speech, we are reminded of Caliban’s very close connection to the island—a connection we have seen previously only in his speeches about showing Prospero or Stefano which streams to drink from and which berries to pick (I.ii.333–347 and II.ii.152–164). After all, Caliban is not only a symbolic “native” in the colonial allegory of the play. He is also an actual native of the island, having been born there after his mother Sycorax fled there. This ennobling monologue—ennobling because there is no servility in it, only a profound understanding of the magic of the island—provides Caliban with a moment of freedom from Prospero and even from his drunkenness. In his anger and sadness, Caliban seems for a moment to have risen above his wretched role as Stefano’s fool. Throughout much of the play, Shakespeare seems to side with powerful figures such as Prospero against weaker figures such as Caliban, allowing us to think, with Prospero and Miranda, that Caliban is merely a monster. But in this scene, he takes the extraordinary step of briefly giving the monster a voice. Because of this short speech, Caliban becomes a more understandable character, and even, for the moment at least, a sympathetic one. end. Act III,scene iii Analysis
Ariel’s appearance as an avenging harpy represents the climax of Prospero’s revenge, as Antonio, Alonso, and the other lords are confronted with their crimes and threatened with punishment. From Prospero’s perspective, the disguised Ariel represents justice and the powers of nature. He has arrived to right the wrongs that have been done to Prospero, and to punish the wicked for their sins. However, the audience knows that Ariel is not an angel or representative of a higher moral power, but merely mouths the script that Prospero has taught him. Ariel’s only true concern, of course, is to win his freedom from Prospero. Thus, the vision of justice presented in this scene is artificial and staged.
Ariel’s display has less to do with fate or justice than with Prospero’s ability to manipulate the thoughts and feelings of others. Just as his frequent recitations of history to Ariel, Miranda, and Caliban are designed to govern their thinking by imposing his own rhetoric upon it, Prospero’s decision to use Ariel as an illusory instrument of “fate” is designed to govern the thinking of the nobles at the table by imposing his own ideas of justice and right action upon their minds. Whether or not Prospero’s case is really just—as it may well be—his use of Ariel in this scene is done purely to further his persuasion and control. He knows that a supernatural creature claiming to represent nature will make a greater impression in advancing his argument than he himself could hope to. If Prospero simply appeared before the table and stated his case, it would seem tainted with selfish desire. However, for Ariel to present Prospero’s case in this fashion makes it seem like the inevitable natural order of the universe—even though Prospero himself is behind everything Ariel says.
This state of affairs gets at the heart of the central problem of reading The Tempest. The play seems to present Prospero’s notion of justice as the only viable one, but it simultaneously undercuts Prospero’s notion of justice by presenting the artificiality of his method of obtaining justice. We are left to wonder if justice really exists when it
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appears that only a sorcerer can bring about justice. Alternatively, Prospero’s manipulations may put us in mind of what playwrights do when they arrange events into meaningful patterns, rewarding the good and punishin Act IV,scene i Analysis
The wedding of Ferdinand and Miranda draws near. Thus, Act IV, scene i explores marriage from several different angles. Prospero and Ferdinand’s surprisingly coarse discussion of Miranda’s virginity at the beginning of the scene serves to emphasize the disparity in knowledge and experience between Miranda and her future husband. Prospero has kept his daughter extremely innocent. As a result, Ferdinand’s vulgar description of the pleasures of the wedding-bed reminds the audience (and probably Prospero as well) that the end of Miranda’s innocence is now imminent. Her wedding-night will come, she will lose her virginity, and she will be in some way changed. This discussion is a blunt reminder that change is inevitable and that Miranda will soon give herself, in an entirely new way, to a man besides her father. Though Prospero somewhat perfunctorily initiates and participates in the sexual discussion, he also seems to be affected by it. In the later parts of the scene, he makes unprecedented comments on the transitory nature of life and on his own old age. Very likely, the prospect of Miranda’s marriage and growing up calls these ideas to his mind.
After the discussion of sexuality, Prospero introduces the masque, which moves the exploration of marriage to the somewhat more comfortable realms of society and family. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, masques were popular forms of entertainment in England. Masques featured masked actors performing allegorical, often highly ritualized stories drawn from mythology and folklore. Prospero’s masque features Juno, the symbol of marriage and family life in Roman mythology, and Ceres, the symbol of agriculture, and thus of nature, growth, prosperity, and rebirth, all notions intimately connected to marriage. The united blessing of the union by Juno and Ceres is a blessing on the couple that wishes them prosperity and wealth while explicitly tying their marriage to notions of social propriety (Juno wishes them “honor”) and harmony with the Earth. In this way, marriage is subtly glorified as both the foundation of society and as part of the natural order of things, given the accord between marriage and nature in Ceres’ speech.
Interestingly, Juno and Ceres de-emphasize the role of love, personal feeling, and sexuality in marriage, choosing instead to focus on marriage’s place in the social and natural orders. When Ceres wonders to Iris where Venus and Cupid, the deities of love and sex, are, she says that she hopes not to see them because their lustful powers caused Pluto, god of the underworld, to kidnap Persephone, Ceres’s daughter (IV.i.86–91). Iris assures Ceres that Venus and Cupid are nowhere in sight. Venus and Cupid had hoped to foil the purity of the impending union, “but in vain” (IV.i.97). Ceres, Juno, and Iris have kept the gods of lust at bay; it seems that, through his masque, Prospero is trying to suppress entirely the lasciviousness of Ferdinand’s tone when he discusses Miranda’s virginity.
In almost all of Shakespeare’s comedies, marriage is used as a symbol of a harmonious and healthy social order. In these plays, misunderstandings erupt, conflicts break out, and at the end, love triumphs and marriage sets everything right.
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The Tempest, a romance, is not exactly a comedy. However, it is deeply concerned with the social order, both in terms of the explicit conflict of the play (Prospero’s struggle to regain his place as duke) and in terms of the play’s constant exploration of the master-servant dynamic, especially when the dynamic appears unsettled or discordant. One reason Shakespeare might shift the focus of the play to marriage at this point is to prepare the audience for the mending of the disrupted social order that takes place at the end of the story. Calling upon all the social and dramatic associations of marriage, and underscoring them heavily with the solemnity of the masque, Shakespeare creates a sense that, even though the play’s major conflict is still unresolved, the world of the play is beginning to heal itself. What is interesting about this technique is that the sense of healing has little to do with anything intrinsic to the characters themselves. Throughout this scene, Ferdinand seems unduly coarse, Miranda merely a threatened innocent, and Prospero somewhat weary and sad. But the fact of marriage itself, as it is presented in the masque, is enough to settle the turbulent waters of the story.
After this detailed exploration of marriage, the culmination of Caliban’s plot against Prospero occurs merely as a moment of comic relief, exposing the weaknesses of Stefano and Trinculo and giving the conspirators their just deserts. Any hint of sympathy we may have had for Caliban earlier in the play has vanished, partly because Caliban’s behavior has been vicious and degraded, but also because Prospero has become more appealing. Prospero has come to seem more fully human because of his poignant feelings for his daughter and his discussion of his old age. As a result, he is far easier to identify with than he was in the first Act. Simply by accenting aspects of character we have already seen, namely Prospero’s love for Miranda and the conspirators’ absurd incompetence, Shakespeare substantially rehabilitates Prospero in the eyes of the audience. We can cheer wholeheartedly for Prospero in his humorous defeat of Caliban now; this is one of the first really uncomplicated moments in the play. After this moment, Prospero becomes easier to sympathize with as the rest of the story Act V, scene I and Epilogue Analysis
In this scene, all of the play’s characters are brought on stage together for the first time. Prospero repeatedly says that he is relinquishing his magic, but its presence pervades the scene. He enters in his magic robes. He brings Alonso and the others into a charmed circle (V.i.57, stage direction) and holds them there for about fifty lines. Once he releases them from the spell, he makes the magician-like spectacle of unveiling Miranda and Ferdinand behind a curtain, playing chess (V.i.173, stage direction). His last words of the play proper are a command to Ariel to ensure for him a safe voyage home. Only in the epilogue, when he is alone on-stage, does Prospero announce definitively that his charms are “all o’erthrown” (V.i.1).
When Prospero passes judgment on his enemies in the final scene, we are no longer put off by his power, both because his love for Miranda has humanized him to a great extent, and also because we now can see that, over the course of the play, his judgments generally have been justified. Gonzalo is an “honourable man” (V.i.62); Alonso did, and knows he did, treat Prospero “[m]ost cruelly” (V.i.71); and Antonio is an “[u]nnatural” brother (V.i.79). Caliban, Stefano, and Trinculo, led in sheepishly
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in their stolen apparel at line 258, are so foolish as to deserve punishment, and Prospero’s command that they “trim” his cell “handsomely” (V.i.297) in preparation for the evening’s revels seems mild. Accusing his enemies neither more nor less than they deserve, and forgiving them instantly once he has been restored to his dukedom, Prospero has at last come to seem judicious rather than arbitrary in his use of power. Of course, it helps that Prospero’s most egregious sins have been mitigated by the outcome of events. He will no longer hold Ariel and Caliban as slaves because he is giving up his magic and returning to Naples. Moreover, he will no longer dominate Miranda because she is marrying Ferdinand.
Prospero has made the audience see the other characters clearly and accurately. What is remarkable is the fact that the most sympathetic character in the play, Miranda, still cannot. Miranda’s last lines are her most famous: “O wonder!” she exclaims upon seeing the company Prospero has assembled. “How many goodly creatures are there here! / How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world / That has such people in’t!” (V.i.184–187). From Miranda’s innocent perspective, such a remark seems genuine and even true. But from the audience’s perspective, it must seem somewhat ridiculous. After all, Antonio and Sebastian are still surly and impudent; Alonso has repented only after believing his son to be dead; and Trinculo and Stefano are drunken, petty thieves. However, Miranda speaks from the perspective of someone who has not seen any human being except her father since she was three years old. She is merely delighted by the spectacle of all these people.
In a sense, her innocence may be shared to some extent by the playwright, who takes delight in creating and presenting a vast array of humanity, from kings to traitors, from innocent virgins to inebriated would-be murderers. As a result, though Miranda’s words are to some extent undercut by irony, it is not too much of a stretch to think that Shakespeare really does mean this benediction on a world “[t]hat has such people in’t!” After all, Prospero is another stand-in for the playwright, and he forgives all the wrongdoers at the end of the play. There is an element in the conclusion of The Tempest that celebrates the multiplicity and variety of human life, which, while it may result in complication and ambiguity, also creates humor, surprise, and love.
If The Tempest is read, as it often is, as a celebration of creativity and art, the aging Shakespeare’s swan song to the theater, then this closing benediction may have a much broader application than just to this play, referring to the breadth of humanity that inspired the breadth of Shakespeare’s characters. Similarly, Prospero’s final request for applause in the monologue functions as a request for forgiveness, not merely for the wrongs he has committed in this play. It also requests forgiveness for the beneficent tyranny of creativity itself, in which an author, like a Prospero, moves people at his will, controls the minds of others, creates situations to suit his aims, and arranges outcomes entirely in the service of his own idea of goodness or justice or beauty. In this way, the ambiguity surrounding Prospero’s power in The Tempest may be inherent to art itself. Like Prospero, authors work according to their own conceptions of a desirable or justifiable outcome. But as in The Tempest, a happy ending can restore harmony, and a well-developed play can create an authentic justice, even if it originates entirely in the mind of the author.
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The plot of The Tempest is organized around the idea of persuasion, as Prospero gradually moves his sense of justice from his own mind into the outside world, gradually applying it to everyone around him until the audience believes it, too. This aggressive persuasiveness makes Prospero difficult to admire at times. Still, in another sense, persuasion characterizes the entire play, which seeks to enthrall audiences with its words and magic as surely as Prospero sought to enthrall Ariel. And because the audience decides whether it believes in the play—whether to applaud, as Prospero asks them to do—the real power lies not with the playwright, but with the viewer, not with the imagination that creates the story, but with the imagination that receives it. In this way, Shakespeare transforms the troubling ambiguity of the play into a surprising cause for celebration. The power wielded by Prospero, which seemed unsettling at first, is actually the source of all of our pleasure in the drama. In fact, it is the reason we came to the theater in the first place.folds.g the bad.
Samson Agonistes(1671)
By John Milton
Blindness of Beauty
What Do We Learn Of The Characters Of Samson And Dalila And What Is The Significance Of This Episode ?
The character of Dalila is first described by Samson, in his opening dialogue with the Chorus, as "that specious Monster, my accomplish'd snare." He also later describes her as "fallacious, unclean, unchaste". Thus when she finally appears in person, the reader is perhaps surprised to hear the Chorus uses a simile of a pulchritudinous ship to describe Dalila, "so bedeck'd, ornate and gay". It is the first mention of her physical beauty. Neither does the Chorus merely mention it in passing; the chorus takes a total of eleven lines to describe the full extent of Dalila's beauty. The Chorus continues this extended simile, admiring her "tackle trim . . . and streamers waving". She even smells sweet, being followed by a damsel train and "amber scent of odorous perfume". It seems as if the Chorus has fallen under Dalila's spell as Samson had.
Samson, however, is under no such illusions. Perhaps his blindness prevents him from capitulating to her beauty, in the same way that in Greek mythology, sailors, having blocked up their ears, saw the Sirens for the evil creatures that they were, rather than be charmed to their deaths by their beautiful singing. His blindness is perhaps the reason that he has made no reference to Dalila's beauty - her seemingly only asset he is no longer able to appreciate. Unlike the Chorus, Samson is not so welcoming. He calls her a "Traitress" and bids the Chorus not to let her go near him. The Chorus, however, seems powerless to act against Dalila, as "yet on she moves". They appear to still be under the spell of Dalila's captivating beauty, this time assimilating her beauty with that of "a fair flower".
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At this point Dalila is weeping, "wetting the borders of her silken veil". She appears to take pity on Samson's sorry state, and she stands with her "eyes [on Samson] fix'd". Her first words in Milton's poem take the form of a transferred epithet, claiming that she has come with "doubtful feet and wavering resolution", the reason behind this being her fear of Samson's "displeasure". She acknowledges that this would be fairly warranted, and that she can offer no excuse, "I came . . . without excuse". This gives the reader the impression of a meek Dalila, seeking to expiate her treachery against Samson, and humbly accepting the blame. She insists that "her penance hath not slackened" and her pardon is "no way assured". She claims that "conjugal affection" is her motive for visiting Samson, and her love is so great that she was prepared to risk his wrath. This effusive display of humility and repentance gives the impression that maybe Samson has misjudged her, and that she is not the "monster" that had initially been thought. Yet it is only a short matter of time before we discover that Dalila, however, is lying. She has not come "without excuse", but with many excuses, and this show of humility is just the first of her many ploys.
Samson, unlike the Chorus, and perhaps the reader, is not so easily taken in. He tells her to leave in the manner that one would a dog, "Out, out", and calls her a "Hyaena". This is a reference to Ecclesiasticus, where the hyena is described as a beast which "counterfaiteth the voyce of men, and so entiseth them . . . and devoureth them". Samson bitterly feels that he has been treated and tricked in the same way by Dalila. He is not likely to fall for such hypocritical trickery again. He recognises her deception, describing it as "thy wonted arts". He then mocks her tactic of "breaking all faith, all vows" then repenting "with feign'd remorse" before once again transgressing. Samson reveals that he has learned his lesson, stating that the penitent are likely to "wear out miserable days" if they do not remove themselves from "pois'nous bosom snakes", like Dalila. From this incident we learn that, although Samson may have initially seemed foolish, for going against Manoa's wishes and for giving in to Dalila's importunity, he now appears wiser for it. He is no longer blinded by Dalila's beauty, and, in this respect, his actual blindness appears to have opened his eyes. Dalila realises that Samson will not be won over as easily as before, and is thus forced to change tack.
Dalila then, despite her previous words, attempts to make excuses for her actions. She explains that she is not trying to "extenuate [her] offence" but by presenting her case, Samson will find it easier to forgive her and hate her less. She claims that she acted through moral feebleness, "it was a weakness", alleging that the "importune of secrets", and then the publishing of them, was "incident to all our sex" and thus naturally it was not her fault. She also claims that Samson, too, was weak for "making known for importunity, that wherein consisted all thy strength", and thus he is also to blame. Had he not been weak in revealing his secret, then she wouldn't have been able to betray him. She believes that because they have both been weak, he should forgive her: "let weakness then, with weakness come to parle . . . thine forgive mine". However, Samson's weakness did not cause Dalila to be captured by her enemies, constantly mocked, forced into hard labour, be chained up like a slave, held captive and blinded. In the same speech, Dalila also claims to have been motivated by love, she wanted to keep him by her. She says that she knew "liberty would draw [Samson] forth to perilous enterprises". Dalila insists that all she ever wanted was for Samson to be her and "Love's pris'ner, not the Philistines'". This long speech does not create the same impression as Dalila's first speech, as it merely demonstrates her cunning and
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wiliness. No longer does either Samson or the reader fall for Dalila's effusive calls for forgiveness, and the more that she tries to expiate herself, the more that the reader, along with Samson, turns against her. This is significant in that it helps the reader to associate with Samson and form a common bond with him that lasts until the end of the poem.
Samson counters Dalila's arguments, echoing the reader's own feelings. He calls her a "sorceress" and mockingly admires her cunning for turning her own transgressions into criticisms of him. He argues that it was "malice" that has brought her back to see him. He also refuses to accept her argument that they were both weak - he sees her only weakness as greed, "a weakness for Philistian gold". He argues that "all wickedness is weakness" and therefore it is no excuse. He refuses to condone his own weakness, and thus why should he condone hers ? Samson also asks what sort of love would seek fulfilment through treachery, "love seeks to have love". He accuses Dalila of "striving to cover shame with shame", that is, such arguments only reveal the wickedness that they try to hide.
Dalila is once again forced to shift her ground and change her arguments and excuses. She refutes the charges of lust for money, "it was not gold, as to my charge thou lay'st". Instead she attempts to blame the Philistine rulers and priests, by whom, she insists, she was pressurised into betraying Samson. She claims that "the Priest was . . . ever at my ear, preaching how meritorious . . . it would be to ensnare [Samson]". She describes her battle with her conscience as being like a "siege" before she consented, as even "the best-resolved of men" would have. She insists that she had nothing with which to counter "such powerful arguments", and it was only her "great love" which prevented her from betraying Samson sooner.
Samson refutes these claims, saying that if Dalila's love for him had "been, as it ought, sincere" then she should have put him before her tribe and people. After all, he did the same for her, forsaking all the Jewish women of his tribe for her, and ignoring the wishes of his people, including his own father. This shows the love that Samson must have initially felt for Dalila in the beginning, and shows how far from grace she has fallen in his eyes. This is thus a secondary tragic strand in the poem. He asks her why she initially received him as a husband, as he was "thy country's foe professed" then, as he is now. Finally he questions her religion, asking what sort of gods are "unable to acquit themselves and prosecute their foes but by ungodly deeds". There is something of an anomaly in this argument, however, as Samson had previously slaughtered "a thousand fore-skins" (Philistines) on behalf of the Lord for the people of Israel. Despite this fact, however, Samson's arguments show that he is, at heart, a religious man, whose faith is important to him. He ends his speech asking Dalila, now that he has countered all of her arguments and excuses, dismissing them all, "how foul must [she] appear ?".
At this point, Dalila seems to have run out of excuses, and takes refuge in querulousness, pleading that "in argument with men a woman ever goes by the worse". Samson sarcastically replies, "for want of words, no doubt, or lack of breath". This is the first perceptible nuance of humour from Samson, and signifies a lightening of his spirits, brought about from his meeting with Dalila. It is almost as though he is has released an enormous quantity of pent-up anger and bitterness, and is beginning to feel a little like his former self.
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Dalila, having realised that there is no excuse or reasoning that Samson will find acceptable, resorts to material inducements and even sexual innuendo. She pleads with him not to "afflict [himself] in vain" and allow him to enjoy other solaces, "where other sense want not their delights". She asks him to return home to "leisure and domestic ease", exempt from "many a care and chance". She requests that she may nurse him diligently, "to old age". Samson resists Dalila's offers and is shown to be no longer susceptible to such temptations, especially as he could now expect Dalila to be even less faithful than before, as his blindness would put him at her mercy. "I must live uxoriously to thy will in perfect thraldom". If she can trick him when he has his strength and sight, what hope will he have now ? Instead he orders her to heed not his condition, and he tells her simply, "thou and I long since are twain". In fact, he seems to despise her so much that he prefers his captivity alone, to freedom with her, "this Gaol I count the house of Liberty to thine".
Dalila makes one final effort, pleading to be able to touch his hand and impress upon one of his other senses. In continuing this obviously lost cause, the reader increasingly sympathises with Samson, understanding the haranguing and importunity that he must have suffered before divulging his secret to Dalila. It gives even more credence to his descriptions and feelings towards Dalila. On this occasion, however, he resists her temptation. Not only that, but he warns her that should she approach him, he is liable to "tear [her] joint by joint". This gives us an indication to the extent of Samson's hatred for her. He finally bids her farewell.
The ferocity of Samson's reaction finally convinces Dalila as to the hopelessness of her cause and she finally reveals her true nature: why should she humble herself any further ? Although she will be vilified in Israel, she will be recompensed by the gratitude and esteem of the Philistines, "fame, if not double-faced is double-mouthed". She believes that she will be treated as a national heroine and henceforth will accept their homage. This is a clear demonstration of Dalila's shallowness, and this is fully understood by the Chorus and Samson, who puts Dalila's offences into context by saying that although "love-quarrels oft in pleasing concord end, not wedlock treachery endangering life".
Thus the encounter between Samson and Dalila ends. Such a meeting is the greatest dramatic opportunity which Milton's poem offers, and is the turning point in the poem. It is a confirmation that Samson has learnt his lesson and is able to resist her. The effect that this meeting has on Samson is significant. His rejections of Dalila's temptations rouse him from his previous depressed lethargy. The moral strength with which he resists her is the basis on which he builds the will to find the great physical strength on which he relies in the finale of the poem.
Another great significance of this episode is that Samson no longer places the entirety of the blame on his own shoulders "I myself have brought them [these evils] on". Seeing the deceitful Dalila allows him to alleviate some of the guilt that he feels. It is as if through sparring with Dalila, he has regained some of his strength, optimism and old assurances.
Dalila's appearance provides a welcome change from the misery and depression that enshrouds Samson Agonistes up until that point. Her femininity, beauty and elegance provide a stark contrast. Her deviousness and cunning are also effective contrasts with
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the emphatic morality of most of the other characters. It is, however, difficult to get a great insight into the true persona of Dalila, as her character is largely based on image and appearance, and any character aspects masquerade behind an array of deception, lies and mendacity
A Doll's House By
H.Ibsen
Character List:
Nora Helmer: Main character of play. Nora has never lived alone, going immediately from the care of her father to that of her husband. Inexperienced in the ways of the world as a result of this sheltering, Nora is impulsive and materialistic. However, the play questions the extent to which these are mere masks that Nora uses to negotiate the patriarchal oppression she faces every day. Over the course of the three Acts, Nora emerges as a fully independent woman who rejects both the false union of her marriage and the burden of motherhood.
Torvald Helmer: Husband of Nora Helmer of eight years who, at the beginning of the play, has been promoted to manager of the bank. Torvald has built his middle-class living through his own work and not from family money. Focused on business, Torvald spends a great deal of his time at home in his study, avoiding general visitors and interacting very little with his children. In fact, he sees himself primarily as responsible for the financial welfare of his family and as a guardian for his wife. Torvald is particularly concerned with morality.
Dr. Rank: Friend of the family and physician of Torvald, Dr. Rank embodies and subverts the theatrical role of the male moral force that had been traditional in the plays of the time. Rather than providing moral guidance and example for the rest of the characters, Dr. Rank is a corrupt force, both physically and morally. Sick from consumption of the spine as a result of his father's sexual exploits, the Doctor confesses his desire for Nora in the second Act and goes off to die in the third.
Mrs. Christine Linde: An old schoolmate of Nora's, Christine comes back into Nora's life after losing her husband and mother. Pressed for money, Christine successfully asks Nora to help her secure a job at Torvald's bank; ultimately, Christine decides that she will only be happy if she goes off with Krogstad. Christine's older, weary viewpoint provides a foil for Nora's youthful impetuousness as well as a symbol of the ultimate hollowness of the matriarchal role. Her relationship with Krogstad also provides a point of comparison for that of Nora and Torvald.
Nils Krogstad: Man from whom Nora borrows money to pay for trip to Italy and an employee at the bank with Torvald. Krogstad was involved in a work scandal many years previously; as a result, his name has been sullied and his career stunted. When
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his job at the bank is jeopardized by Torvald's refusal to work with a man he sees as a hopelessly corrupt, Krogstad blackmails Nora to ensure that he does not lose his job. However, after being reunited with Mrs. Linde (an early amorous connection), he repents and sends back the bond.
Three children (Ivar, Bob, and Emmy): Nora's young children. Raised primarily by Anne, the Nurse (and Nora's old Nurse), the children spend little time with their mother or father. The time they do spend with Nora consists of Nora playing with them as if she were just another playmate.
Anne: The family Nurse. Anne raised Nora, who had lost her mother, and stayed on to raise Nora's children.
Helen: A Housemaid
Ibsen's A Doll's House (1879), written while Ibsen was in Rome and Amalfi, was born in a time of revolution in Europe. Charged with the fever of the 1848 revolution, a new modern perspective was beginning to emerge in the literary and dramatic world, challenging the romantic tradition; it is Ibsen who can be credited for mastering and popularizing the realist drama derived from this new perspective. His plays were both read and performed throughout Europe (in numerous translations) like no other dramatist before. A Doll's House was published and premiered in Copenhagen.
His success was particularly important for Norway and the Norwiegian language. Freed from four centuries of Danish rule in 1814, Norway was just beginning to shake off the legacy of Danish domination. A Doll's House was written in a form of Norweigan that still bore heavy traces of Danish. Ibsen deliberately chose a colloquial language style to emphasize the theme of realism. Ibsen quickly became Norway's most popular dramatic figure. But, it is the universality of Ibsen's writings‹and particularly A Doll's House‹that have made this play a classic.
A Doll's House was the second in a series of realist plays by Ibsen. The first, The Pillars of Society, penned in 1877, caused a stir throughout Europe, quickly spreading to the avant guarde theaters of the island and continent. In adopting the realist form, Ibsen abandoned his earlier style of saga plays, historical epics, and verse allegories. Ibsen's letters reveal that much of what is contained in his realist dramas is based on events from his own life. Indeed, he was particularly interested in the possibility of true wedlock and in women in general, later writing a series of psychological studies on women.
One of the most striking and oft-noted characteristics of A Doll's House is the way in which it challenged the technical tradition of the so-called well made play in which the first act offered an exposition, the second a situation, and the third an unravelling. This had been the standard form from the earliest fables up until A Doll's House. Ibsen's play was noteable for exchanging the last act's unravelling for a discussion. Critics agree that, up until the last moments of the play, A Doll's House could easily be just another modern drama broadcasting another comfortable moral lesson.
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However, when Nora tells Torvald that they must sit down and "discuss all this that has been happening between us", the play diverges from the traditional form. With this new technical feature, A Doll's House became an international sensation and founded a new school of dramatic art.
Additionally, A Doll's House subverted another dramatic traditions, this one related to character. Namely, Ibsen's realist drama disregarded the tradition of the older male moral figure. Dr. Rank, the character who should serve this role, is far from a moral force; instead, he is sickly--rotting from a disease picked up from his father's earlier sexual exploits--and lascivious, openly coveting Nora. The choice to portray both Dr. Rank and the potentially matronly Mrs. Linde as imperfect, real people was a novel approach at the time.
The real nature of Ibsen's characters were and remain a challenge for actors. Many actresses find it difficult to portray both a silly, immature Nora in the first act or so and the serious, open-minded Nora of the end of the last act. Similarly, actors are challenged to portray the full depth of Torvald's character. Many are tempted to play him as an slimy, patronizing brute, disregarding the character's range and genuininess of emotion and conviction.
A more obvious importance of A Doll's House is the feminist message that rocked the stages of Europe when the play was premiered. Nora's rejection of marriage and motherhood scandalized contemporary audiences. In fact, the first German productions of the play in the 1880s had an altered ending at the request of the producers. Ibsen referred to this version as a "barbaric outrage" to be used only in emergencies.
In large part, Ibsen was reacting to the uncertain tempo of the time; Europe was being reshaped with revolutions. The revolutionary spirit and the emergence of modernism influenced Ibsen's choice to focus on an unlikely hero‹a housewife‹in his attack on middle-class values. Quickly becoming the talk of parlors across Europe, the play succeeded in its attempt to provoke discussion. In fact, it is the numerous ways that the play can be read (and read it was‹the printed version of A Doll's House sold out even before it hit the stage) that make the play so interesting. Each new generation has had a different way of interpreting the book, from feminist critique to Hegelian allegory of the spirit's historical evolution. The text is simply that rich.
Short Summary:
A Doll's House traces the awakening of Nora Helmer from her unexamined life of domestic comfort. Ruled her whole life by either her father or her husband, Nora must question the foundation of everything she believes in when her marriage is put to the test. Having borrowed money from a man of ill-repute named Krogstad by forging her father's signature, she was able to pay for a trip to Italy to save her sick husband's life (he was unaware of his condition and the loan, believing that the money came from Nora's father). Since then, she has had to contrive ways to pay back her loan, growing particularly concerned with money.
When the play opens, it is Christmas Ever and we find out that Torvald has just been promoted to manager of the bank, where he will receive a big raise. Nora is thrilled
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because she thinks that she will finally be able to pay off the loan and be rid of it. Her happiness, however, is marred when an angry Krogstad approaches her. He has just learned that his position at the bank has been promised to Mrs. Linde, an old school friend of Nora's who has recently arrived in town in search of work, and tells Nora that he will reveal her secret if she does not persuade her husband to let him keep his position. Nora tries to convince Torvald, using all of her feminine tricks that he encourages, but is unsuccessful. Torvald tells her that Krogstad's morally corrupt nature is too repulsive to him, and impossible to work with. Nora becomes very worried.
The next day, Nora is nervously moving about the house, afraid that Krogstad will appear at any minute. Luckily for her sake, she has the preparations for a big costume ball that will take place the next night, to preoccupy her. She converses with a concerned Mrs. Linde while Mrs. Linde repairs her dress. When Torvald returns from the bank, where he has been taking care of business, she again takes up her pleas on behalf of Krogstad. This time, Torvald not only refuses, but also sends off the notice of termination that he has already prepared for Krogstad, reassuring a scared Nora that he will take upon himself any bad things that befall them as a result. Nora is extremely moved by this comment and begins to consider the possibility of this episode transforming their marriage for the better as well as the possibility of suicide. Meanwhile, she converses and flirts with a very willing Dr. Rank. Learning that he is rapidly dying, she takes up an intimate conversation that culminates in him professing his love just before she is able to ask him for a favor (to help her with her problem). His words stop her and she steers the conversation back to safer grounds. Their talk is interrupted by the announcement of Krogstad. Nora asks Dr. Rank to leave and has Krogstad brought in. Her loaner asks tells her that he has had a change of heart and that, though he will keep the bond, he will not reveal her to the public. Instead, he wants to give Torvald a note explaining the matter so that Torvald will be pressed to help Krogstad rehabilitate himself. Nora protests Torvald's involvement, but Krogstad drops the letter in Torvald's letterbox anyway, much to Nora's horror. Nora exclaims aloud that she and Torvald are lost. However, she still tries to use her charms to prevent Torvald from reading the letter, luring him away from business by begging him to help her with her tarantella for the next night's ball. He agrees to put off business until after the tarantella is over.
The next night, before Torvald and Nora return from the ball, Mrs. Linde and Krogstad, old lovers, reunite in the Helmer's living room. Mrs. Linde asks to take care of Krogstad and his children and to help him become the better man that he knows he is capable of becoming. The Helmers return from the ball as Mrs. Linde is leaving (Krogstad has already left), Torvald nearly dragging Nora into the room. Alone, Torvald tells Nora how much he desires her but is interrupted by Dr. Rank. The Doctor, unbeknownst to Torvald, has come by to say his final farewells, as he covertly explains to Nora. After he leaves, Nora is able to deter Torvald from pursuing her anymore by reminding him of the ugliness of death that has just come between them (Nora having revealed Dr. Rank's secret) and, seeing that Torvald has collected his letters, resigns herself to committing suicide. As she is leaving, though, Torvald stops her. He has just read Krogstad's letter and is enraged by its contents, accusing Nora of ruining his life. He pretty much tells her that he plans on forsaking her, contrary to his earlier claim that he would take on everything himself. During his tirade, he is interrupted by the maid bearing another note from Krogstad (addressed to
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Nora). Torvald reads it and becomes overjoyed‹Krogstad has had a change of heart and has sent back the bond. Torvald quickly tells Nora that it is all over, that he has forgiven her, and that her pathetic attempt to help him has only made her more endearing than ever. Nora, seeing Torvald's true character for the first time, sits her husband down to tell him that she is leaving him. After protestations from Torvald, she explains that he does not love her and, after tonight, she does not love him. She tells him that, given the suffocating life she has led until now, she owes it to herself to become fully independent and to explore her own character and the world for herself. As she leaves, she reveals to Torvald that she was hoping that they would be able to unite in real wedlock, but that she has lost all hope. The play ends with the door slamming on her way out.
Analysis:
Act I, in the tradition of the well made play in which the first act serves as an exposition, the second an event, and the third an unraveling (though Ibsen diverges from the traditional third act by presenting not an unraveling, but a discussion), establishes the tensions that explode later in the play. Ibsen sets up the Act by first introducing us to the central issue: Nora and her relation to the exterior world (Nora entering with her packages). Nora serves as a symbol for women of the time; women who were thought to be content with the luxuries of modern society with no thought or care of the world in which they lived. Indeed, there is some truth in this (the extent of this is debatable). As the play reveals, Nora does delight in material wealth, having been labeled a spendthrift from an early age. She projects the attitude that money is the key to happiness. By presenting this theme of the relationship between women and their surroundings at the beginning, Ibsen indicates to the reader that this is the most basic and important idea at work in the play.
However, it is also clear that Nora's simplistic approach to the world is not entirely her fault. Torvald's treatment of Nora as a small helpless child only contributes to Nora's isolation from reality. Just as Nora relates to the exterior world primarily through material objects, Torvald relates to Nora as an object to be possessed. The question becomes who is more detached from reality? Though Torvald's attitude pervades every word he speaks to Nora, his objectification of her is most evident in his use of animal imagery. He refers to her as his little "lark" and "squirrel"‹small harmless animals. Similarly, Torvald repeatedly calls Nora his "little one" or "little girl", maintaining the approach of a father rather than husband. Nora is fully dependent on Torvald, from money to diet (the macaroons); and, because she is so sheltered, her perception of the world is romanticized.
Nora's skewed vision of the world is most evident in her interactions with Mrs. Linde. Whereas her old school friend is wizened and somber, Nora is impetuous. Her choice to tell Mrs. Linde about her secret seems to be more of a boast of a small child than a thoughtful adult; in fact, Nora only reveals her secret after being called a child by Mrs. Linde. Similarly, in her talk with Krogstad, Nora seems unable to accept that what she sees as acts of love could be seen as illegal and wrong. She refuses to believe that she is just as guilty as Krogstad.
However, it is apparent that Nora is at least partly aware of the falseness of her life. When pressed as to whether she will ever tell Torvald about the loan, she replies that
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she would, but only in time. For now, she believes that it would upset the lies that have built her home: Torvald's "manly independence" and even the basis of their marriage. This suggests that Nora is at least vaguely aware that Torvald's position as the manly provider and lawgiver is just as fabricated as her role as the helpless child-wife and mother. Indeed, it is important to examine the language of the opening scene between Nora and Torvald and realize that Nora's words can be read as both sincere and insincere; the text suggests an ambiguity in Nora's awareness of her situation. However, though Nora is somewhat aware, she does not want to face the implications of this reality, believing that material wealth will render her "free from care", allowing her to play with her children, keep the house beautifully, and do everything the way that Torvald likes. The lie can be preserved. Moreover, it seems that it is her lie, her knowledge that she has done something for Torvald that keeps Nora happy. Mrs. Linde's complaint that she feels unspeakably empty without anyone to care for reinforces the importance of this role for women in general in the text.
Consequently, Nora is content to continue to act as a child, romping with her children as if she is one of them. Indeed, it is clear that, just as she is not as much a wife as a child in her marriage, she is not a mother in any real sense either. It is the nurse who actually takes care of the children; Nora mostly plays with them and occasionally takes on more serious responsibilities but only because she views them as "great fun".
When Nora realizes that all may not go to plan after her talk with Krogstad because she is unable to either influence Torvald or talk to him on a straight level about her predicament, she begins to feel helpless. In the last scene of the act, when Nora is trimming the tree and conversing with Torvald, the full falseness of her situation becomes clear. Acting helpless, Nora tells Torvald that she absolutely needs his help, even with such a trifling thing as picking a costume for the upcoming ball. Torvald is not surprised and is even delighted, promising to help her. When the subject turns to the more serious matter of Torvald's views on Krogstad, it becomes apparent that Torvald is perhaps hopelessly invested in a false and twisted image of the world in which women are charged with the moral purity of the world, claiming that if men turn out badly it is because of poor mothering. As a result, at the end of the scene, when Nora reassures herself that "it must be impossible", she is worried both about the impossibility of her position in the immediate sense (i.e., concerning the loan) as well as the impossibility of her larger situation‹as a participant in a marriage and family built on lies. In fact, it is possible to view her last words of the act‹a defiance of Torvald's views on women‹as the beginning of her rejection of the marriage altogether.
Act II
Analysis:
Whereas Act I set up the initial invasion of reality into Nora's world and the rattling of the basic underpinnings of the falseness of Nora's life (i.e., marriage and motherhood), Act II eventually sees her set up a test that will determine whether or not her world is false. In other words, she is confronted with the fact that Torvald will find out about her lie but believes that, if he is the man she thinks he is, his discovery will only strengthen their marriage. Her reaction to Krogstad finally dropping his letter in the letter box is the climax of the play. In the traditional well made play, this
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would be followed by a unraveling and moral resolution of the dilemma set up in the first act and brought to head in the second. However, Ibsen deviates from this mold, turning the third act into a discussion.
At the beginning of the second Act, before the climax, Nora is still trying to confront the fact that her world can be touched and shattered. Though she is shaken, she still believes that her family and her material comforts will protect her. However, she is worried enough about the matter that she has already begun to consider the idea of both running away and committing suicide (though she admits that she does not have the courage for this last part). Luckily, the ball temporarily distracts her. This ball is extremely important for Nora because, through the costumes and dance, she is able to embrace the basic elements of the basis of her relationship with Torvald that she is still trying to preserve; she can sing and dance for him as a lovely creature. Mrs. Linde refers to Nora's dress as her "fine feathers" reinforcing the general perception of Nora as a non-human entity, a creature free of cares. In fact, the dress itself serves as a potent symbol of Nora's "character". Like Nora, it is torn and in need of repair. However, as in real life, Nora feels she is incapable of fixing the problem herself, giving the dress to Mrs. Linde to mend. The idea of the dress serving as a symbol for Nora's everyday mask is reinforced when Nora reports that Torvald dislikes seeing dressmaking in action. In other words, Torvald enjoys the character that Nora adopts but has no desire to see its origins, the real Nora.
Indeed, Nora tries to maintain her relationship with Torvald, unsuccessfully attempting to manipulate him on behalf of Krogstad through playing the part of his innocent and darling creature. One of the key turning points of the play comes when Torvald tells her that, come what may, he will take everything upon himself. Whereas before, Nora merely sought to find some way to avoid this disaster, now the idea that this episode may prove the strength of her marriage has been planted in her head. An important quotation to look at is Nora's remarks after she is left alone that "He was capable of doing it. He will do it. He will do it in spite of everything. No, not that! Never, never! Anything rather than that! Oh, for some help, some way out of it!" One way to read this is as a comment on Krogstad's actions‹that he will reveal her after all. Another way to read this statement is as a commentary on Torvald's decision to fire Krogstad and the problems it will cause. Still another way to read this is as concern that Torvald will take responsibility for her actions as he promised.
After this realization, Nora begins to act a bit more daring than before, using her awareness of the possibility of Dr. Rank's affection to manipulate him. When things go too far for her, however, and he admits that he is in love with her, she can not continue, her manipulation ruined by the blatant statement of reality. After all, Dr. Ranks' revelation that he, like Torvald, would give his life to save Nora's ruins her belief that Torvald's position is somehow unique.
Nora's hopes of averting disaster are dashed when she sees Krogstad drop the letter into Torvald's box. Perhaps already aware of the inherent problems of the relationship, she exclaims that all is lost for her and Torvald as Krogstad deposits the letter. Nora's fear, now that she knows that there is no turning back, is that the "wonderful thing" will happen: that Torvald will try to take this all upon himself and that, by knowing what she has done for him, they will become equal partners in the marriage. Nora both fears this and wishes for it. But, Nora is not ready to face this just
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yet. She wants to act out her last chance to be a creature for Torvald, dancing the tarantella. It is only after this dancing that she consents to letting him free. Interestingly, her last statement that she only has thirty-one hours to live can be read two different ways. On the one hand, it can be interpreted as saying that she plans on committing suicide in order to free Torvald from having to take the responsibility on himself; she would die knowing that she had once again saved his life. On the other hand, it may be a comment only that her life as she knows it will be over and that, in thirty-one hours, she will have to embark upon a new, radically different life because her relationship with Torvald will be over.
Act III
Analysis:
Act III is extremely important in A Doll's House. Rather than presenting the traditional unraveling of the well made play, it confronts the reader or viewer with a discussion of the themes presented in the first two acts. The act is also the deciding point of Nora's life: will the "wonderful thing" happen or not? It begins with a foil for Nora and Torvald's marriage. In fact, Mrs. Linde and Krogstad's decision to be together can be seen as ironic in the context of Nora and Torvald's marriage because, though Mrs. Linde and Krogstad both suffer from significant personal and moral problems, they have a better chance of a happy and true marriage than Nora and Torvald. Mrs. Linde advocates revealing all to Torvald because, as her union with Krogstad suggests, she believes that it is possible to build a relationship of mutual dependence of unformed characters as long as both parties are fully aware of each other's motives. Mrs. Linde hopes that, through this union, both she and Krogstad can become the better people they know that they can be.
The extent of Torvald's investment in a fantasy world and the importance of Nora's false characterization is revealed when he describes how, at parties, he pretends not to know her so that he may seduce her all over again. And, perhaps more importantly, Nora is quite candid about her understanding of all this, telling him flatly that she knows.
It is important to notice that Nora's time at the party has been the first time that she has left the confines of the one room in the entire play. Moreover, she has to be dragged back in. This suggests that it is Torvald's own desires to have Nora entertain him that necessarily forces Nora to journey into the real world. Also, it is interesting to note that she also temporarily leaves the room to exchange her party dress for everyday clothing, her first lone foray from the room. This new trend is the beginning of her final departure from the room‹a departure that ends the play, shattering the values that had supported the walls of the house.
But, when she leaves for the final time, she is leaving for reasons other than what she had intended at the beginning of the Act. Before Torvald confronts her with the letter, she is on her way to commit suicide, determined that Torvald should not have to sacrifice his life for hers. She considers this the appropriate thing to do because she believes that he would willingly give his life for hers as well. In this way, they have an equal relationship. However, she is extremely disappointed to discover that he clearly has no intention of sacrificing himself for her. Instead of refusing to abide by
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Krogstad's demands and taking the blame on himself, Torvald accuses Nora of ruining his life, telling her that she will no longer be able to see her children or maintain their marriage except in public appearances. Nora even asks him whether he would give his life for her and her fears are confirmed when he answers that he would never sacrifice his honor for a loved one. Consequently, Nora resolves to leave Torvald, aware that true wedlock is impossible between them because neither of them loves the other, or is even capable of doing so. Nora realizes that, before she can be a wife, she must first discover herself through venturing out into the world. She leaves an unformed soul, determined to become a full person rather than the doll of the male figures in her life
Themes/Metaphor/Symbol:
Act I: Setting: It is important to note that the whole play takes place in one room and that, until the last act, Nora is in every scene; she never seems to leave the room‹everything comes to her. She is literally trapped in domestic comfort.
Also, the first Act takes place on Christmas Eve. However, though there is a great deal of talk about morality throughout the play, Christmas is never presented as a religious holiday and religion as a concept is later questioned by Nora in the third Act. In fact, it is discussed primarily as a material experience. This emphasis is similar to the general theme of the centrality of material goods over personal connection.
Women and Men:
This play focuses on the way that women are seen, especially in the context of marriage and motherhood. Torvald, in particular, has a very clear and narrow definition of a woman's role. He believes that it is the sacred duty of a woman to be a good wife and mother. Moreover, he tells Nora that women are responsible for the morality of their children. In essence, he sees women as both child-like, helpless creatures detached from reality and influential moral forces responsible for the purity of the world through their influence in the home.
"HEL: That is like a woman!" "NORA: It was like being a man." "HEL: Almost everyone who has gone to the bad early in life has had a deceitful mother." "HEL: It seems most commonly to be the mother's influence, though naturally a bad father's would have the same result." "NORA: Because one is a woman it does not necessarily follow that--- When anyone is in a subordinate position, Mr. Krogstad, they should really be careful to avoid offending anyone who-who‹" The perception of manliness is also discussed, though in a much more subtle way. Nora's description of Torvald suggests that she is partially aware of the lies inherent in the male role as much as that of the female. Torvald's conception of manliness is based on the value of total independence. He abhors the idea of financial or moral
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dependence on anyone. His desire for independence leads to the question of whether he is out of touch with reality.
"NORA: And, besides, how painful and humiliating it would be for Torvald, with his manly independence, to know that he owed me anything! It would upset our mutual relations altogether; our beautiful happy home would no longer be what it is now." "NORA: Christine is tremendously clever at bookkeeping, and she is frightfully anxious to work under some clever man, so as to perfect herself‹" Tied to the discussion of men and women are the frequent references to Nora's father. Throughout the play, there are references to Nora's father. Furthermore, Nora is frequently equated with him, from her actions (though people think he gave Nora and Torvald the money for their trip to Italy, it was actually Nora) to her disposition. Quotations like the one below suggest that Nora does wish that she were like her father and, taking that further, male. Her desire suggests a deeper understanding of the confinement she faces than might otherwise be apparent.
"HEL: Very like your fatherŠ. NORA: Ah, I wish I had inherited many of Papa's qualities"
Materialism v. People:
Another central theme of this play is the importance placed on materialism rather than people. This is particularly important for Torvald, whose sense of manhood depends on his independence. In fact, he was an unsuccessful barrister because he refused to take "unsavory cases". As a result, he switched to the bank, where he primarily deals with money. In other words, money and materialism can be seen as a way to avoid the complications of personal contact.
Images of women:
Nora, as a symbol of woman, is called a number of names by Torvald throughout the play. These include "little songbird", "squirrel", "lark", "little featherhead", "little skylark", "little person", and "little woman". Torvald is extremely consistent about using the modifier "little" before the names he calls Nora. These are all usually followed by the possessive "my", signaling Torvald's belief that Nora is his.
Torvald's chosen names for Nora reveal that he does not see her as an equal by any means; rather, Nora is at times predictable and silly doll and at times a captivating and exotic pet or animal, all created for Torvald.
Act II:
Setting:
This Act takes place on Christmas Day, after the magic and mystery of Christmas Eve has passed. As in real life, all has been revealed.
Also, notice that Nora complains about not daring to leave the house. She is still confined to the domestic world that she knows so well.
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Light:
Light is used to illustrate Nora's personal journey. After the turning point of Torvald's claim to want to take everything upon himself and while she is talking to Dr. Rank, the light begins to grow dark, just as Nora sinks to new levels of manipulation. When Dr. Rank reveals his affection, Nora is jolted out of this fantasy world and into reality and insists on bringing a lamp into the room, telling the Doctor that he must feel silly saying such things with the light on.
The Dress:
Nora's ball dress symbolizes the character she plays in her marriage to Torvald. Take note of when Nora is supposed to be wearing it and for whom.
"MRS. L: I see you are going to keep up the character NORA: Yes, Torvald wants me to."
The Tarantella:
A tarantella is a folk dance from southern Italy that accelerates from its already quick tempo and alternates between major and minor keys. In its constant fluctuation, it is like Nora's character. In this Act, it serves as Nora's last chance to be Torvald's doll, to dance and amuse him. Also, the tarantella is commonly (and falsely) known as a dance that is supposed to rid the dancer of the bite of the tarantula. Applied to the play, its use suggests that Nora is trying to rid herself of the deadly poison of an outside force, however fruitlessly. Rather than alleviating the bite, though, the music and her life only continue to accelerate and spin out of control.
"HEL: But, my dear Nora, you look so worn out. Have you been practicing too much? NORA: No, I have not practiced at all. HEL: But you will need to--- NORA: Yes, indeed I shall, Torvald. But, I can't get on a bit without you to help me; I have absolutely forgotten the whole thing."
Women and Men:
Torvald's belief in the importance of independence is emphasized in this Act. When confronted with Nora's pleas to change his mind about Krogstad's dismissal, he tells her that he would hate to appear to have been influenced by his wife.
"HEL: Do you suppose that I am going to make myself ridiculous before my whole staff, to let people think I am a man to be swayed by all sorts of outside influence?" "HEL: You see I am man enough to take everything upon myself." Nora's father continues to be mentioned in Act II, this time as a foil for Torvald. Though Torvald has early compared Nora to her father, he insults his character.
"HEL: My little Nora, there is an important difference between your father and me. Your father's reputation as a public official was not above suspicion. Mine is, and I hope it will continue to be so as long as I hold office." "NORA: But surely you can understand that being with Torvald is a little like being with Papa---"
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Names for Nora:
Torvald continues to call Nora a number of different names, all diminutive in nature. However, it is interesting that they are less consistently animal and innocuous in nature. He calls her his "little rogue", "little skylark", "little person", "helpless little mortal", and "child".
Money v. People:
Images of monetary wealth appear throughout the text.
"RANK: Lately I have been taking stock of my internal economy. Bankrupt!"
Act III:
Themes:
Dr. Rank and Mrs. Linde:
The juxtaposition of their entrances at the beginning of the play (they enter together) suggests that there is something similar about the two. In fact, given both the theatrical standards of the time and the expectations of women, it is easy to see that they might be considered moral forces within the play. In fact, Dr. Rank represents the male moral figure that had been common to plays at the time that Ibsen was writing. Dr. Rank's character usually provided moral standards on which the other, more confused characters of the play could depend. However, Dr. Rank subverts this role. He is both physically and morally tainted. He is dying from a disease begotten from his father's early sexual indiscretions, his body rotting. Additionally, though he presents himself as a great friend to the Helmers, his motives are far from pure‹he is in love with Nora.
Mrs. Linde, similarly, represents the hollowness of the role of wife and mother. Left destitute and unhappy by an unloving marriage, she has derived her livelihood from being useful to others. However, when she is left alone, she only feels empty. Her life has been based upon appeasing material wants for herself and for others and has had little to do with personal growth.
Both Dr. Rank and Mrs. Linde enter the play as influences on Nora and Torvald. Dr. Rank is a foil for Torvald's unyielding sense of morality and Mrs. Linde a foil for Nora's belief in the importance of motherhood and marriage. Over the course of the play, the problems of both Dr. Rank and Mrs. Linde are solved through either death or a knowing embrace of another union of dependency. In the case of Mrs. Linde, though, it is arguable as to whether her decision to go off with Krogstad is a positive or negative decision. On the one hand, she will be entering the relationship on roughly equal footing with Krogstad; they are both dependent on the other (unlike Nora and Torvald). On the other hand, Mrs. Linde is only entering into another situation in which she derives her livelihood from taking care of others; she still has not gone through a real process of self-discovery (which Nora advocates at the end).
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Names for Nora:
By the end of the play, Torvald seems confused as to what to think of Nora‹is she a woman, a creature, or a small child? It is this uncertainty that is the basis of the discussion aspect of the act; the reader or playgoer is left to decide for him/herself. Names include: "little skylark", "fascinating, charming little darling", "my darling wife", "my little singing bird", "miserable creature", "a thoughtless woman", "my frightened little singing bird", "little, scared darling", "blind, foolish woman", and "a heedless child".
Burning Down the Doll House
'Until death do us part.' Well, not always. Everywhere one looks, divorce is plaguing society, and it has become widely accepted throughout the world. Now the violent shredding of a family is shrugged off like the daily weather, and the treasured marriage vows have become nothing but a promise made to be broken. In the novel The Lost World, a divorce was described along with sports cars and money as success, not failure. The Norwegian play A Doll's House, by Henrik Ibsen, is a prime example of a relationship that didn't work. The marriage of Torvald and Nora Helmer had many problems, and was doomed because the husband and wife couldn't match up to the elements of a successful couple-hood. To keep a marriage alive and growing it must hold true to four qualities: love, communication, trust and loyalty, and perseverance. With the incorporation of these qualities any marriage would work.
Without love a relationship would probably not even begin. Two people meet, a friendship forms, and soon a romance blossoms. Though the basis for Nora and Torvald's relationship appeared to be centered around love, the needed balance was not obtained. Torvald didn't really love Nora; to him she was just another child to mind. He said, 'And I wouldn't want you to be any different from what you are-just my sweet little song bird. But now I come to think of it, you look rather-rather-how shall I put it? -rather as if you've been up to mischief today' ( 151). Calling his wife names such as 'skylark,' 'squirrel,' and 'spendthrift,' Torvald does not love his wife with the respect and sensitivity a man should. The main area where Torvald showed his lack of love for Nora was in the way he managed his house. Torvald was the owner of what he believed to be a perfect doll house. This doll house was first controlled by Nora's domineering father, and once Nora entered marriage, the titles and deeds to this doll house were handed over to Torvald. Torvald manipulated Nora, and then the children through her according to his wants, sure that he could never lose control over his precious doll house. This lack of love and imperious attitude would eventually ruin their marriage. Nora was the only one of the two partners who showed love for the other in this play. Going against all the odds a woman faced in the late nineteenth century, Nora went behind her husband's back, borrowed a large sum of money, forged her father's signature, and went on to pay it off with hopes of Torvald never hearing of it. She refused to be a doll, and would alternate personalities between 'Torvald's little skylark,' and 'Nora the intelligent and strong woman.' A balance of love between man and wife that is needed in any marriage was certainly not reached. This immoderate and unbalanced behavior definitely hurt the relationship of Torvald
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and Nora, but this was not the only factor that contributed to the break down of their partnership.
Two soul-mates need to communicate in a relationship. Before the wife pays the electric bills, she should inform her husband of the monetary situation. In the same sense, before the husband goes to the casino with his friends for beer and entertainment, he should tell his wife. The possibility exists that if Nora had informed Torvald of her plans to borrow money, a conflict such as this would have never happened. But that possibility is unrealistic. Torvald, a stubborn man in terms of money, could never accept the fact that even he, the powerful doll master, would need help from one of his unintelligent dolls. These two did not talk enough, as Nora says, 'We've been together for eight years now. Don't you realize that this is the first time that we two-you and I, man and wife-have had a serious talk together?' (225). The answer was no. The communication throughout their entire marriage was poor, as this quote illustrates. Throughout the entire play irony becomes a hammer that knocks the reader or viewer on the head, reminding him or her that the plot is ever thicker with each situation that arises. The truth is clear that when all of Nora's secret information is disclosed, something bad is bound to happen. Plainly, without a steady stream of communication a marriage can never hope to live onward.
Another problem with the communication was that neither spouse could truly trust the other. Without trust, marriage becomes impossible. Lacking honesty and loyalty, trust cannot be obtained. Two people cannot live together without trust for each other. If one spouse feels like he or she must constantly check up on the other, the marriage will fail. Torvald had almost no trust in Nora. In the first Act, he continually lampoons her for her flirtatious way of spending money, stating, 'It would be ( sensible ) if you really kept the money I give you, and actually bought something for yourself with it. But if it goes in with the housekeeping, and gets spent on all sorts of useless things, then I only have to pay out again' (150). If a man checks up on his wife like this any type of relationship is doomed from the start. Torvald's lack of trust toward Nora could be justified if she really were a spendthrift. In this case the wife would have to build up trust with her husband. As well as the husband would have to do the same in other circumstances. In order to gain this trust each individual must remain honest and loyal at all times. By being responsible in his or her own actions, trust can be earned through a husband and wife's honesty. With the amount of trust that Nora and Torvald have for each other, no marriage could be possible. But even united together these elements alone cannot completely hold a couple as one.
Life is a rough and tough road, and in order to navigate down its treacherous curves a pair must be able to persevere in difficult times. A couple can have a great bond, but in a time of pain or dilemma that bond can be forgotten and all their problems shadow the great relationship they have. If the two cannot pick up the pieces and move onward, only one fight or hard time can cause a couple to break up, . An attitude must be adopted in these times that simply says, 'I'm angry with you, but I will forgive you.' Hard events in life are inevitable, but not unbeatable. Torvald and Nora didn't have problems persevering because Torvald did all of the problem solving for them both, and took care of Nora's problems himself. Torvald did not act like this out of selfishness, but rather to be the dominate male in the relationship, not allowing Nora to think and act for herself. Because of Torvald's lack of love and trust, and abundance of control, Nora decided that to persevere would only result in more
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problems. Perseverance is only a good idea if the other three qualifications are met, because at that point only more problems will arise.
Nora and Torvald's marriage failed because they lacked in all of the qualifications for a successful marriage. And the marriage failed because of Torvald's imperious control over his family. If any type of doll house is present in a marriage such as that of the Helmers', it would be a serious impediment to any attempt at success. Before Nora leaves, she tells Torvald, 'I've been your doll-wife here, just as at home I was Papa's doll-child. And the children have been my dolls in their turn...That's what our marriage has been' (226). In order to ensure a wonderful and happy life together, any doll house must be burnt to the ground, and the lighter fluid must be the fuel bearing the names of love, trust, communication, and perseverance. When the smoke is cleared, the wonderful bond of marriage can be enjoyed to it's fullest extent, and until 'death do us part.'
The Cherry Orchard By
A.Chekhov
The nineteenth century offered two important developments to Russia which manifest in the play. In the 1830's, the railroads arrived, an important step in Russia's move into a more international sphere. More importantly, in February of 1861, Russia's vast population of serfs was liberated for good, bringing a long-awaited social change. These two dimensions, social change and the growing importance of the international community, pervade the play and even drive the plot.
The railroad facilitates Madame Ranevsky coming and going across borders, but the intrigue itself deals with the theme of social change: the aristocratic family loses power as the former serf gains, and a whole host of other characters fall in between. With the changes in the class system, debates about the nature of progress and freedom sprung up across Russia, and these questions are reflected in The Cherry Orchard as well. The theme of social change is an international theme at the moment when the play was written: countries everywhere, including the United States, were experiencing similar growing pains and similar philosophical debates.
Chekhov's writing style is very pertinent to the population of Russia at this moment. While former aristocrats still patronized the arts, there was also a growing class of less educated, nouveau-rich attending the theater. Chekhov's plays are famous for their simple language, which many hold partly responsible for his popularity. The fact that his play discusses every social class in language that everyone can understand makes his play accessible to people of all backgrounds. It makes high-brow jokes while it provides comedy anyone can understand.
Chekhov had a strong sense of social duty; his play implies that a sense of social duty towards others is necessary for the advancement of humanity. This idea is manifested in the fact that nearly all of his characters are sympathetic. Chekhov felt it was important that his characters be sympathetic, and indeed, The Cherry Orchard lacks a villain. While the play certainly criticizes our faults, it only does so to guide us in the right direction: the sympathetic quality of the characters, the accessibility of the
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language, combined with the factors of social change makes The Cherry Orchard critical and philosophical, yet fundamentally an optimistic work.
Character List:
Madame Ranevsky: Madame Ranevsky is one of the leading characters in the play. She is the owner of the cherry orchard estate, and she is a woman with a complicated history. She comes from an aristocratic family, but she married beneath her, and her husband was an alcoholic. She had three children with him before his death: Barbara, Anya, and Grisha. Grisha drowned shortly after his father's death, causing Madame Ranevsky to flee in despair. Grisha died approximately five years before Act I. Madame Ranevsky took a lover in Paris, and abusive man who has robbed her and taken another mistress. She is returning to Russia after leaving him.
Madame Ranevsky has accumulated many debts upon her arrival in Russia, and cannot pay the mortgage on her estate. Throughout the play, her debts are a symbol of her personality; she is an excessive woman who does whatever her emotions incline her to do, regardless of consequences, financial or otherwise. One moment she cries in panic and despair about how to pay her mortgage, yet the next moment she gives her neighbor a healthy loan to pay his own. Her behavior is irrational, and that characteristic is both her most charismatic quality and her most serious weakness.
Of all of the characters in this play, Madame Ranevsky is among those with no capacity to adapt to a changing society. She continues to be generous with her friends, and even with strangers, living the life of a kind and wealthy aristocrat, even though the power of the aristocracy no longer ensures her any wealth, and the few assets that she has are dwindling quickly. She tells herself that she can control her purse and abandon her horrible liver, she cannot keep even these most fundamental of resolutions. Even after losing the cherry orchard, Madame Ranevsky remains sadly unable to change: she continues to surround herself with expensive and suspicious help, such as Yasha, and she rejoins her lover in Paris, despite his abusive history.
Yermolai Alexeyitch Lopakhin: Lopakhin is the other lead character in The Cherry Orchard. He is a neighbor of Madame Ranevsky, perhaps in his thirties, unmarried. His father and grandfather were serfs on the cherry orchard estate all of their lives. Although he was born into a family of serfs, Lopakhin has managed to use the Liberation of the serfs to his full advantage and is now a wealthy landowner and a shrewd businessman.
The change in class Lopakhin has experienced during his lifetime is amazing; at the end of the pay, he is not only a wealthy man, but he is the owner of the estate where he was born a serf. Lopakhin is a symbolic character in that he epitomizes the success possible for the newly freed serfs. However, while his bank account makes him more powerful than the aristocratic former owners of the estate, he is an interesting specimen because he still has qualities that betray his modest beginnings. He is well dressed and respected, yet he is not literary or cultured; both his preposterous misquotings of Hamlet and his poor penmanship embarrass him.
Lopakhin's talent for business distinguishes him from the other characters; this attribute is both his best and worst quality. His preoccupation with money and success
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are his trademark. On the one hand, his savvy allows him great personal success with finances; he has completely overcome the poverty he was born into. On the other hand, as Barbara points out, he is almost too preoccupied with business to enjoy important aspects of humanity, such as love and friendship. In some sense, his appetite for business opportunities leads him to betray Madame Ranevsky, his first benefactor, by buying and cutting down her cherry orchard. Lopakhin is a complicated character, and he can be portrayed as a villain, a hero, or something in between the two. The ambiguity in his character is precisely what makes him, and all the other characters in the play, so mesmerizing to the audience.
Leonid Andreyitch Gayef: Gayef is Madame Ranevsky's older unmarried brother. He has no particular profession, and apparently lives off of the family fortune. He and Lopakhin do not get along; there is evidence to suggest that Gayef resents Lopakhin's success, for he treats all of the non-aristocratic characters with derision.
It is ironic that Gayef can be so snotty towards other characters, because he himself is a walking disaster. He is constantly running off at the mouth and embarrassing himself. His trademark behavior is an imaginary game of billiards; whenever he has put his foot in his mouth, he acts like he is playing billiards to distract himself and others. He is humorous, but he is clumsy and ungraceful. He clearly demonstrates that being of the nobility and being a noble person are two mutually separable categories.
Although he is a constant social catastrophe, Gayef does demonstrate some ability to adapt that his sister lacks. Although he is never effective, he is always dissuading her spending. Moreover, at the end of the play, he is one character who makes a somewhat positive decision, accepting a modest position in a bank. In some ways this job is a step down, but it is also a step into reality, something which many of the characters in the play do not attain.
Barbara: Barbara is Madame Ranevsky' oldest daughter. She is somewhat old to still be single, perhaps in her twenties; her family anticipates that she will marry Lopakhin, and although she would like to, Lopakhin never proposes to her. Barbara virtually runs the estate, a fact visually represented onstage by the massive ring of keys she wears at her waist. She is a controlling person, but she cannot look out for her mother as well as she looks out for the servants. She cries frequently, usually over her mother's spending or Lopakhin's mixed signals.
Barbara's controlling practicality is her best and worst quality. On the one hand, her level head keeps the estate running when there is no money to run it with; on the other hand, the responsibility she feels towards the cherry orchard causes her nothing but grief and stress. Her desire to help and be productive keeps the household running as it drives everyone mad. Barbara's greatest wish is to join a convent or become a pilgrim. At the end of the play she takes on a position as a housekeeper.
Anya: Anya is Madame Ranevsky's youngest daughter, in her teens, the complete opposite of her fretful, responsible older sister. Anya is very innocent and appears very much a child. She is usually happy. She is an idealist, like Trophimof, but she is not as philosophical as he. Her happiness is inspiring, helping the family even through these hardships, yet it does not accomplish anything concretely productive. Anya can
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comfort her mother with her optimism, but she cannot influence her. It is unclear whether Anya's idealist attitude will be enough to bring her success.
Peter Trophimof: Trophimof is and important character in the play because, amid a world full of Madame Ranevsky and Gayef, he consistently speaks some sort of sense. He tutored Madame Ranevsky's deceased son, and as such, represents the past, although he is very concerned with the future. He is an idealist and a student. His intellectual qualities both empower him, by leading him to demand more from Russia and humanity than any other character, and hinder him, by making him appear a bit inaccessible, emotionally. The play creates a romantic tension between he and Anya, which he is too philosophical to act upon. He often speaks wisely, but he holds powerless position and is not able to exert influence.
Firs Nikolayevitch: Firs was born a serf on Madame Ranevsky's estate, and although the serfs have been freed, Firs remains on the estate, like many former did, because he has no other opportunities. Although he and Lopakhin share the same background, Firs has not been able to adapt to the changing society as Lopakhin has. Firs is a figure who represents time, a character who symbolizes the old class system. At the end of the play, he is accidentally left behind, and he presumably dies onstage. His death marks the passing of the old class system, the passing of the aristocracy's reign on the cherry orchard, and the passing of a phase in Russian history.
Dunyasha: Dunyasha is a young servant on the cherry orchard. She enjoys the attention of Ephikhodof, but is far more interested in Yasha, with whom she enjoys a romance. She is a comic character who represents many of the class issues at work in the play. Despite her humble station, Dunyasha fancies herself a lady, and her pretensions constitute some of the funniest moments in the play. These dreams of hers are funny because they are annoying and hopeful because they are possible all at once. Her character has a serious function when one regards her interactions with other characters: Lopakhin and Firs, for example. Both men criticize Dunyasha for not remembering her station. This criticism is ironic because both of these men are former serfs who defy conventional classifications of station. Consequently, Dunyasha's character serves to focus attention to a lot of the hypocrisy and also hope at work in the play: in this new topsy-turvy social order, no one is in the position to criticize Dunyasha's plans.
Yasha: Yasha is Madame Ranevsky's man-servant. Like Dunyasha, he is young, from the village, and extremely pretentious. He is involved with Dunyasha. He is also a very comic character, although he is also the only character in the play who seems truly cold and without consideration for anyone but himself. He follows Madame Ranevsky around like a parasite, feeding off of her loose control of her purse and begging to be taken abroad. He is a snob to most everyone, often openly rude and insulting other in public. He refuses to see his own mother, a villager. Yasha is the only character in the play who does not appear to have any redeeming personality traits.
Simeon Panteleyitch Ephikhodof: Ephikhodof is a young clerk who works on the estate. He is a comic character, and his nickname is "Twenty-Two Misfortunes" (or "Two and Twenty Hard Knocks," depending on the translation). His entrances and exits are generally marked by his falling on or off stage. He is infatuated with
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Dunyasha, but she does not return his interest. At the end of the play, Lopakhin employs him. Ephikhodof is an optimistic figure, because despite the disasters which constantly follow him, he is always relatively happy. He accepts fate as it comes to him, and he deals with it calmly, if not gracefully. He also has an enormous capacity to laugh at himself, and this ability perhaps contributes to his good humor. Perhaps his significance is that we should never take ourselves too seriously: if we do, we will be disappointed, but if we don't, we can still be content even under adversity.
Charlotte Ivanovna: Charlotte is Anya's governess, although she is no longer employed at the end of the play. She is an orphan, and she is popular for her magic tricks. She is a strange character, generally treated as more of a spectacle than a person, and many of her lines address her own isolation. She is not depressed; on the contrary, she is lively and energetic, but neither does she bring great cheer to the play. Depending on the performance, she can be either an amusing or an uncomfortable character to watch.
Simeonof-Pishtchik: Pishtchik is a land-owning neighbor of the cherry orchard. He is always impressed with Charlotte's magic tricks, and he is a very social fellow, always making successful jokes where others fail. He spends the play in debt, although he is able to pay off some of it at the end. His requests for loans can often be interpreted as disrespectful and selfish, as Madame Ranevsky does not have enough money for her own debt. However, because Pishtchik is able to pay some of his loans at the end of the play, he is one character who may achieve a sort of redemption through the course of the drama. The miracle that saves his estate is an optimistic aspect to the end of the play, although the fact that he has forgotten that Madame Ranevsky must leave it.
Themes and Literary Techniques:
Indirect Action:
Indirect Action is a technique Chekhov was most famous for. It involves action important to the play's plot occurring off-stage, not on. Instead of seeing such action happen, the audience learns about it by watching characters react to it onstage. Lopakhin's speech at the end of Act III, recounting the sale of the cherry orchard, is the most important example of indirect action in the play: although the audience does not see the sale, the entire play revolves around this unseen action.
Mixing of Genres:
Traditionally, humor and tragedy have been kept separate in dramatic works. Although Chekhov is certainly not the first playwright to mix comic and tragic elements onstage, he develops this tendency by creating a play that defies classification as either one of these two dramatic genres. Works such as The Cherry Orchard, which cannot be subjected to the traditional standards of classification, have helped build new modern literary traditions through their innovation in genre.
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Symbolism:
There are many symbols in this play. The keys at Barbara's waist symbolize her practicality and her power. Gay's imaginary billiards game symbolizes his desire to escape. The cherry orchard symbolizes the old social order, the aristocratic home, and its destruction symbolizes change. Firs himself is a figure of time; Anya is a figure of hope. The symbols in this play are too numerous to count, but many of them hinge on the idea of the changing social order or the specific circumstance of a given character.
Irony and Blindness:
Irony appears in many instances throughout the play, and when it is not used for purely comic effect, it is tightly bound to the theme of blindness. On the one hand, the positions of the character's themselves are ironic. For example, the opposite circumstances of Lopakhin, Firs, and Dunyasha point out the irony in the now supposedly free-moving class system; characters talk about and praise a system of economic mobility. Still, they cannot see the contradiction in the situations of those around them that have no opportunity to improve their standing or are criticized for attempting to do so. In other cases, the play erects ironic moments, where the power in a given scene comes from a combination of two different images. For example, in Act II, Madame Ranevsky complains loudly about how she cannot control her money, while in the same breath she allows Yasha, the most untrustworthy character, to pick up her spilled purse. The fact that she is able to talk about her weakness and neglect the safety of her money in the same breath indicates that, despite her complaints, she is still blind to much of her problem.
Social Change and Progress:
Several characters address the potential difference between social change and social progress. Firs and Trophimof are two of them. Both question the utility of the Liberation. As Firs notes, it made everyone happy, but they did not know what they were happy for. Firs himself is living proof of this discrepancy: society has changed, but his life, and the lives of countless others, have not progressed. Both characters insinuate that the Liberation is not enough to constitute progress; while it was a necessary change, it was not enough to bring mankind to the idealized future Trophimof imagines. The play leaves the impression that while change has come, there is more work to be done.
Independence, Liberation, and Freedom:
This play deals with the theme of independence in many different ways. Fundamentally, it demands that we ask what it is to be free. What with the Liberation, The Cherry Orchard deals with independence in a very concrete way: shortly before the beginning of the play, much of Russia's population was not free. The play's characters demonstrate the different degrees of freedom that result from the Liberation. On opposing ends of this question are Lopakhin and Firs. One man has
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been able to take advantage of his liberation to make himself independent; the other, although he is technically free, has not changed his position at all and is subject to the whims of the family he serves, as he has always been. The difference in their situation demonstrates the observations of many Russians of the time: officially liberating a group of people is not they same as making them free if you do not also equip them with the tools they need to become independent, i.e, resources such as education and land.
Trophimof, the play's idealist, offers one definition of freedom for the audience to consider when he declines Lopakhin's offer of money. According to Trophimof, he is a free man because he is beholden to no one and nothing more than his own concept of morality. His observations seem accurate in light of other forms of non-freedom in the play. Madame Ranevsky, for example, is not free in a very different way from Firs. She has enough assets to be able to control her own destiny, but she is a slave to her passions, spending extravagantly and making poor decisions in romance, and therefore cannot follow a higher moral code as Trophimof does. What with the combination of economic circumstances and the bizarre weaknesses of the characters, the play therefore suggests that there are two sources which control freedom and the lack thereof: economics, which comes from without, and control over oneself, which comes from within.
Analysis:
Act IV is an act when many of the play's loose ends come together. At the same time, the end of the play also remains ambiguous, and a performance may choose to either alleviate or preserve some of the loose end that the text does not provide definite answers to.
Act IV is an act when many characters are most themselves. Lopakhin and Trophimof, for example, share a stunning good-bye. They are fond of each other, and they each make a gesture towards one another which acts a sign of their respect for one another; however, their gestures differentiate in such a way that they are a complete and true expression of each man's own personality. Trophimof, for example, analyzes Lopakhin and gives him advice. This sort of mental exercise is what Trophimof, the philosophical idealist, does best, and although his words are somewhat critical, they are also well-meaning. Lopakhin, true to his recent success and consequent sense for the financial, offers Trophimof a small sum of money as a parting gift. He takes care to explain that he offers the money not out of pity, but out of respect, because he understands how inconsequential ideas of lass can be. They each offer the other the best thing they have that the other could find useful: Trophimof offers wisdom and Lopakhin offers free money. We cannot quite know if Lopakhin follows Trophimof's advice, but we do not that Trophimof is too philosophical to accept Lopakhin's money. In this sense, their gestures are somewhat stunted, yet the scene remains extremely tender nonetheless, optimistically demonstrating that two such different individual have more in common than one would expect at the beginning of the play.
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Although Lopakhin and Trophimof part so gracefully, not all of the characters' final appearances inspire optimism. While things are looking up for Pishtchik and Anya radiates hope, Charlotte forces the audience to remember that this final parting of ways is not joyous for everyone. The loss of the cherry orchard does not only affect Madame Ranevsky; as a result of the sale, Charlotte finds herself unemployed, with an uncertain future. Ephikhodof, Barbara, and Gayef have new jobs, and self-centered Yasha is allowed to travel with Madame Ranevsky, but loyal Firs is left behind altogether, and Barbara's hopes for romance with Lopakhin are dashed. In this way, the ending of the play is mixed, for while some see great opportunities ahead, other characters suffer great losses.
When Madame Ranevsky and her brother leave their family home for the final time, there is a sense that they have come to peace with the loss of the estate. The two of them look forward to the future, and their enthusiasm is contagious even if the audience doubts their abilities. It is another character, a much more minor character, who provides perhaps the most symbolic moment to Act IV: Firs. Act IV ends with Firs unmoving and unconscious, perhaps dead, forgotten, locked in the house where he was born a serf. In some ways it does not even matter whether or not he is dead: he might as well be. His position at the end of the play is symbolic ad can be read as a metaphor for the passing of the old order in Russia. This man was born a serf, and although he lived through the Liberation, he chose to maintain his position in the household because he had no other opportunities. Liberation was meaningless to him, and he stayed loyal to the family his whole life. The family, however, did not stay loyal to him; for all his service, no one could even be bothered to confirm whether this sick old man had been sent to the hospital, properly cared for. This negligence provides an extremely sharp criticism of the other characters' priorities: themselves. The fact that Firs has been forgotten demonstrates a lack of respect to Firs as a person, to his long service with the family, and to all the serfs that the Russia of Chekhov's day would not be held responsible for.
It is unclear whether or not Firs has died in the final scene, and while this neglect seems cold, it is not entirely pessimistic. Firs dies symbolically, and his immobility in the last scene indicates the passing of the old order. The class system, after so much upheaval, begins to settle down again with the passing of time, the deaths of the former serfs, and the integration of their children into society. Firs' presumable death is the last phase in a long process of change, beginning with former serfs like Lopakhin gaining power, the aristocracy losing power, and ending with the deaths of those who continued to live by the old system. In some ways, The Cherry Orchard describes nothing more than the growing pains of a society, and the fact that the play ends with a potential death should not be used to label the play a tragedy. The play describes the cycle of life, and it is important that we do not know for certain whether these characters will succeed or fail, live or die, because such an ending would rob the play of its greatest asset: its infinite possibilities. It is the play's ambiguity that provides so many interpretations and so many morals to so many different people
Analysis:
The Cherry Orchard focuses on the tensions of changing times. For example, the room in Act I is called a nursery, although it has held no baby for years, and this misnomer introduces a nostalgic atmosphere into Madame Ranevsky's house. This
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tension between what was and what is centers on different levels. One level, personal tragedy, is very specific, and the death of Madame Ranevsky's son Grisha five years before the start of the play is one example. On another level, the play centers on the complications with major changes in an entire society: the recent freedom of the serfs and the decaying power of the aristocracy are two more general aspects of Russian history which affect the play.
Lopakhin's first speech is important because it immediately introduces this theme of Russia's newfound class mobility. In 1861, the system of serfdom was ended in Russia, and although this event happened perhaps fifteen years before Act I, it drives the action of the play. Lopakhin himself points out the irony in the situation developing in Russia; Lopakhin, born a serf, is now a wealthy, well- dressed landowner, calling on his aristocratic neighbor, Madame Ranevsky, as an equal. Despite his financial success, he still refers to himself as "a peasant of the peasants," noting a difference between himself, a nouveau rich, and the aristocratic members of the upper class which. This speech introduces an ambiguity in Lopakhin's character which can only be resolved in a performance of the play; it is unclear from the text alone whether Lopakhin feels love, respect, and gratitude towards Madame Ranevsky and her family, or whether he harbors some resentment towards this household that held his father and grandfather as slaves. All of the characters in the play possess a similar ambiguity, which can only be alleviated by a director's choice.
Not only are Lopakhin's intentions unclear from the text alone, but he interacts with the other characters in very complicates ways, due, in part, to his own change in class. Although Lopakhin revels in his own economic transformation, he chides Dunyasha for not remembering her place in society, acting too much like a lady when she is only a maid. The close chronology between these two moments at the very opening of the play creates a tension about class differences which pervades the entire play. Dunyasha and Lopakhin come from similar, lower class backgrounds; however, Lopakhin has been able to fulfill his aspirations and rise through the class system, while Dunyasha is still trying. Lopakhin can easily be portrayed as a hypocrite for moments like his criticism of Dunyasha.
Ephikhodof, the next character to enter, is something of a clown, and his entrances are sources of comedy. Although he is an extreme example, he is not unlike the rest of the characters in the play: they are all ridiculous in some way. Even Barbara, who seems so stern, can be portrayed as a parody. Her keys, for example, are often as enormous as they are loud, depending on the performance. These keys are attached to her throughout the play, and they are a symbol of her authority in the household; her practicality and her sense of duty are both her biggest strength and her most ridiculous quality. While the sight and sound of her keys are a symbol of her power, they are also an unwieldy and ridiculous object. Barbara and her keys stand in sharp contrast to the younger sister, Anya, one of the play's two idealists. Anya is a charismatic character because she is both capable of being appalled at her mother's extravagant spending, and capable of forgiving her every flaw. She may appear more comic in later acts, when she and Trophimof, the other idealist, voice their philosophies.
Anya's criticism of her mother's overspending in France is important because it is one of The Cherry Orchard's many examples of indirect action, a technique Chekhov is famous for. The action described in the speech has not taken place on the stage, and is
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therefore indirect; the play revolves around the character's on-stage reactions to such off-stage action, for although this sort of action is not seen, it actually drives the plot. Lopakhin's opening speech is another example of indirect action, which both informs the audience of the past and maneuvers the development of the action.
Firs is a highly symbolic character, for as the oldest character, he is a remnant of the past. He spent almost his entire life as a serf on the estate. Freedom has not changed his life as it has changed Lopakhin's; although neither is a serf now, Firs is old and has nowhere else to go, so he stays on in the household as he always has, while Lopakhin has become independent and wealthy. The two of them reflect two different sides of the Russian serfs' freedom; together on stage, they create rather a complete picture of the fate of the old serfs, while Madame Ranevsky and her brother Gayef illustrate the fate of the old aristocracy. Madame Ranevsky's often comically joyful tirades on her homeland and her family demonstrate that she is a woman of excess. This excessiveness is both her most charismatic trait and her greatest weakness; she too is a ridiculous character. The contrast in her reactions to seeing her furniture again and the reality of he acquaintances' deaths implies early on in the play that this woman is completely incapable of dealing with difficulty; she ignores problems and constantly exaggerates her abilities and her emotions to create a perfectly happy world for herself.
For Madame Ranevsky and Gayef, cutting the cherry orchard down is not an option: the estate is too important. Their inability to comprehend the sense of Lopakhin's lucrative suggestion implies that they are two characters of the old aristocracy who cannot change with the changing times. They do not understand that if they do not cut down the orchard, it will go to auction and whoever buys it will cut it down anyway. Pishtchik is another character who does not seem capable of adapting and saving himself. He feeds off of others; he knows Madame Ranevsky has her own financial problems, yet he insists on asking her for money, complimenting her and goading her until she agrees. Madame Ranevsky agrees because of her own fundamental flaw, her excessiveness; she continues to live the life of a wealthy woman even as her assets dwindle. Even Gayef, the bumbling social idiot, can criticize her for this behavior, although he is too weak to stop her. Yasha is similar to Pishtchik in the way he feeds off Madame Ranevsky. His behavior with regards to his mother demonstrates his own flaw as a character. He has not seen his mother for five years, and he is more concerned with himself and impressing the family he serves than he is with visiting his own mother. Although he and Pishtchik both have charismatic moments on stage, they are both fundamentally parasites who frequent the cherry orchard for the purpose of benefiting from Madame Ranevsky's weak control of her purse.
Charlotte and Trophimof are the two final characters who appear onstage in this act. Each appears only briefly. They are both outsiders, and it is therefore appropriate they neither is fully integrated into the action until a later act.
Analysis:
Act I is thematically occupied with the development of different characters' strengths and weaknesses. These themes are demonstrated again during Act II, but the central issue in Act II is the development of the play's views on Russian history, social and economic change, and the concept of progress.
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These ideas of social change are demonstrated in the personalities and actions of the characters. For example, the moment when Madam Ranevsky drops her purse is a symbolic one. She is talking to herself, complaining that she spends more that she should, when she drops her purse and spills her money. This action is an accident, yet it differs very slightly from the way she behaves in general. She complains that she does not have enough money to pay her own mortgage, then, moments later, she gives Pishtchik money for his mortgage. She laments that there is barely enough for the servants of the household to eat, then she dines at restaurants and tips the waiters in gold. Her words suggest that she wants to save her money, but her actions always betray a tendency to the opposite. She is careless with her purse, whether she is dropping her money deliberately or not. After she drops it in the garden, Yasha scurries to her side to help her collect the coins; this picture continues the symbolism established at the beginning of this sequence. Although Yasha is only helping his employer to collect what she has dropped, his eagerness to help with this particular task parallels the way in which he shadows Madame Ranevsky so that he might benefit personally from her own excessive tendencies with her purse.
Another thematically loaded moment in Act II immediately follows the incident of the spilled coins; Lopakhin tries to persuade Madame Ranevsky and Gayef to sell their property as villas, and they will have none of it. The siblings hesitate for two reasons. In Act I, they explained that their estate and cherry orchard are too important to be torn down; at this moment, in Act II, they condemn the idea of dealing with villa residents as "vulgar." This exchange between the decaying aristocratic family and Lopakhin, the wealthy former serf, illustrates many of the important social issues at work in the play. Now that the serfs have been freed, the older upper class no longer has an economic position with such long-term security. However, Madame Ranevsky and Gayef appear incapable of taking any economic threat seriously. It is interesting that the prospect of having villa residents is so distasteful to them. Villa residents would not come from old money, as Madame Ranevsky and Gayef do, but would rather come from the nouveau rich created by the rearrangement of the Russian classes. Madame Ranevsky and Gayefs' resistance to Lopakhin's suggestions therefore illustrates their inability to adapt to their changing society; they continue to think themselves somehow above their problems and above having to depend on people from common families. The intrigue of the play revolves around whether or not they can overcome this current blindness to their necessity to adapt.
Firs addresses this same issue in his entrance; he recalls the happiness of the serfs immediately following the Liberation, but laments that they did not understand why they should be happy. At least before the Liberation, Russia was an ordered society. Although the Liberation created a more fair class system, it did not necessarily improve the lives of individuals or create a stronger country. Firs' choice to remain with Madame Ranevsky and Gayef, despite his freedom, demonstrates the same reservations about social change that they have, but from a different class perspective.
Trophimof has a much stronger presence in this act, and his philosophical remarks further meshes out the ideology of the play. Trophimof is the only character in the play who consistently speaks words of wisdom. The tensions he meshes out in his own views of Russian society may represent the thesis of the play as a whole, as many of the details he points out are directly dealt with in the action. Through his final discussion on the cherry orchard, Trophimof contrasts the idea of change with the idea
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of progress. While he is apparently in favor of the freedom of the serfs, he also does not consider the Liberation as a source of positive social change. He is optimistic, in that he hopes Russia and humanity will correct their shortcomings in the future, but he is also realistic, in that he views the Liberation as necessary change, but not sufficient.
Analysis:
Act I is thematically occupied with the development of different characters' strengths and weaknesses. These themes are demonstrated again during Act II, but the central issue in Act II is the development of the play's views on Russian history, social and economic change, and the concept of progress.
These ideas of social change are demonstrated in the personalities and actions of the characters. For example, the moment when Madam Ranevsky drops her purse is a symbolic one. She is talking to herself, complaining that she spends more that she should, when she drops her purse and spills her money. This action is an accident, yet it differs very slightly from the way she behaves in general. She complains that she does not have enough money to pay her own mortgage, then, moments later, she gives Pishtchik money for his mortgage. She laments that there is barely enough for the servants of the household to eat, then she dines at restaurants and tips the waiters in gold. Her words suggest that she wants to save her money, but her actions always betray a tendency to the opposite. She is careless with her purse, whether she is dropping her money deliberately or not. After she drops it in the garden, Yasha scurries to her side to help her collect the coins; this picture continues the symbolism established at the beginning of this sequence. Although Yasha is only helping his employer to collect what she has dropped, his eagerness to help with this particular task parallels the way in which he shadows Madame Ranevsky so that he might benefit personally from her own excessive tendencies with her purse.
Another thematically loaded moment in Act II immediately follows the incident of the spilled coins; Lopakhin tries to persuade Madame Ranevsky and Gayef to sell their property as villas, and they will have none of it. The siblings hesitate for two reasons. In Act I, they explained that their estate and cherry orchard are too important to be torn down; at this moment, in Act II, they condemn the idea of dealing with villa residents as "vulgar." This exchange between the decaying aristocratic family and Lopakhin, the wealthy former serf, illustrates many of the important social issues at work in the play. Now that the serfs have been freed, the older upper class no longer has an economic position with such long-term security. However, Madame Ranevsky and Gayef appear incapable of taking any economic threat seriously. It is interesting that the prospect of having villa residents is so distasteful to them. Villa residents would not come from old money, as Madame Ranevsky and Gayef do, but would rather come from the nouveau rich created by the rearrangement of the Russian classes. Madame Ranevsky and Gayefs' resistance to Lopakhin's suggestions therefore illustrates their inability to adapt to their changing society; they continue to think themselves somehow above their problems and above having to depend on people from common families. The intrigue of the play revolves around whether or not they can overcome this current blindness to their necessity to adapt.
Firs addresses this same issue in his entrance; he recalls the happiness of the serfs immediately following the Liberation, but laments that they did not understand why
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they should be happy. At least before the Liberation, Russia was an ordered society. Although the Liberation created a more fair class system, it did not necessarily improve the lives of individuals or create a stronger country. Firs' choice to remain with Madame Ranevsky and Gayef, despite his freedom, demonstrates the same reservations about social change that they have, but from a different class perspective.
Trophimof has a much stronger presence in this act, and his philosophical remarks further meshes out the ideology of the play. Trophimof is the only character in the play who consistently speaks words of wisdom. The tensions he meshes out in his own views of Russian society may represent the thesis of the play as a whole, as many of the details he points out are directly dealt with in the action. Through his final discussion on the cherry orchard, Trophimof contrasts the idea of change with the idea of progress. While he is apparently in favor of the freedom of the serfs, he also does not consider the Liberation as a source of positive social change. He is optimistic, in that he hopes Russia and humanity will correct their shortcomings in the future, but he is also realistic, in that he views the Liberation as necessary change, but not sufficient.
Analysis:
Act III is full of juxtapositions. In this act, not only do characters' class and social differences come out, but the way in which they interact in various moments emphasizes both the extreme differences between their personalities, and the similarities. Paradoxically, it is these exaggerated distinctions between these characters that create an awareness of some quality that unites them all.
The characters in this play are all remarkably distinct from one another on a individual level, but in a greater sense, they are similar because they all possess a tendency towards excess. For example, in the scene where Madame Ranevsky and Trophimof discuss their involvement with love, Trophimof asserts that he and Anya are "above love," to which Madame Ranevsky responds that she must be "beneath love." This moment is ironic because it emphasizes the differences between these two characters. On the one hand, Trophimof has found a lovely young woman with whom he shares certain chemistry. However, he and Anya are intellectual idealists, and they will part from each other at the end of the play forever, without having taken advantage of any opportunity they might have had together. On the other hand, Madame Ranevsky is fleeing to Russia from her cheating, abusive lover. She, however, is a woman controlled too much by her passions and not enough by her intellect, and at the end of the play she will return to the side of this monster who has so mistreated her. Trophimof and Madame Ranevsky have opposite problems when one considers the details of their situations, but in terms of the end of the play as a whole, they are in the same position: they each had a good opportunity, but by being so much themselves, they have managed to lose it.
Act III also contains the pivotal moment of the play's action: the sale of the cherry orchard, bought by none other than Lopakhin himself. This moment brings together many of the central ideas in the play. In the first place, it is the most beautiful example of indirect action, the technique which Chekhov is famous for, in the entire play. The sale of the cherry orchard takes place offstage, far away, yet its expectation fruition completely drives the action of the plot. Moreover, this moment, which occurs offstage, provides the most dramatic of all moments on-stage, teaching us that
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visual action is superfluous, and indeed, unnecessary, next to the reactions of finely sculpted characters.
This scene is a moving account of the social change occurring in Russia; Lopakhin is now the owner of the estate where his father and grandfather were serfs, and Madame Ranevsky is homeless. This moment is full of the most powerful irony in the entire play, as the roles of the two main characters have been completely reversed from the beginning of their history to this moment. Theirs is the most extreme example of the changes in class which effect each character in the play.
In addition to being the most important moment in the play in this respect, this scene also has the potential to be the most important moment in terms of the development of Lopakhin and Madame Ranevsky as characters. Lopakhin is both triumphant and tactless; Madame Ranevsky is naïve and devastated. This dual aspect of the scene exits in the text, and it can be either emphasized or done away with, depending on the performance of the play. In any interpretation of the play, however, this interpretation of this scene must control the characters' identities from the beginning of a performance, and even still there are endless possibilities. Whether Lopakhin comes off as vindictive or as lovable throughout the play, this speech can be either the moment where the audience most identifies with him and feels his triumph, or most resents him for his lack of tact. By the same token, whether Madame Ranevsky is charmingly innocent or annoyingly naïve throughout the first two acts, at this moment, the audience sees her at her weakest; we may see her as a fool who acted too late or as a poor abused woman, beaten down by misfortune.
These moments of irony and symbolism are the fabric of the entire play, not only Act III. Part of the richness of the play depends on the variety of interpretations it supports. However, in choosing their own interpretation, the reader should bear in mind that Chekhov was disappointed when his play was performed as a tragedy; the fact that the play may contain various moral lessons should in no way undermine the light-hearted, comic moments which pervade the entire play and are just as important to its substance
Analysis:
The Cherry Orchard focuses on the tensions of changing times. For example, the room in Act I is called a nursery, although it has held no baby for years, and this misnomer introduces a nostalgic atmosphere into Madame Ranevsky's house. This tension between what was and what is centers on different levels. One level, personal tragedy, is very specific, and the death of Madame Ranevsky's son Grisha five years before the start of the play is one example. On another level, the play centers on the complications with major changes in an entire society: the recent freedom of the serfs and the decaying power of the aristocracy are two more general aspects of Russian history which affect the play.
Lopakhin's first speech is important because it immediately introduces this theme of Russia's newfound class mobility. In 1861, the system of serfdom was ended in Russia, and although this event happened perhaps fifteen years before Act I, it drives the action of the play. Lopakhin himself points out the irony in the situation developing in Russia; Lopakhin, born a serf, is now a wealthy, well- dressed
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landowner, calling on his aristocratic neighbor, Madame Ranevsky, as an equal. Despite his financial success, he still refers to himself as "a peasant of the peasants," noting a difference between himself, a nouveau rich, and the aristocratic members of the upper class which. This speech introduces an ambiguity in Lopakhin's character which can only be resolved in a performance of the play; it is unclear from the text alone whether Lopakhin feels love, respect, and gratitude towards Madame Ranevsky and her family, or whether he harbors some resentment towards this household that held his father and grandfather as slaves. All of the characters in the play possess a similar ambiguity, which can only be alleviated by a director's choice.
Not only are Lopakhin's intentions unclear from the text alone, but he interacts with the other characters in very complicates ways, due, in part, to his own change in class. Although Lopakhin revels in his own economic transformation, he chides Dunyasha for not remembering her place in society, acting too much like a lady when she is only a maid. The close chronology between these two moments at the very opening of the play creates a tension about class differences which pervades the entire play. Dunyasha and Lopakhin come from similar, lower class backgrounds; however, Lopakhin has been able to fulfill his aspirations and rise through the class system, while Dunyasha is still trying. Lopakhin can easily be portrayed as a hypocrite for moments like his criticism of Dunyasha.
Ephikhodof, the next character to enter, is something of a clown, and his entrances are sources of comedy. Although he is an extreme example, he is not unlike the rest of the characters in the play: they are all ridiculous in some way. Even Barbara, who seems so stern, can be portrayed as a parody. Her keys, for example, are often as enormous as they are loud, depending on the performance. These keys are attached to her throughout the play, and they are a symbol of her authority in the household; her practicality and her sense of duty are both her biggest strength and her most ridiculous quality. While the sight and sound of her keys are a symbol of her power, they are also an unwieldy and ridiculous object. Barbara and her keys stand in sharp contrast to the younger sister, Anya, one of the play's two idealists. Anya is a charismatic character because she is both capable of being appalled at her mother's extravagant spending, and capable of forgiving her every flaw. She may appear more comic in later acts, when she and Trophimof, the other idealist, voice their philosophies.
Anya's criticism of her mother's overspending in France is important because it is one of The Cherry Orchard's many examples of indirect action, a technique Chekhov is famous for. The action described in the speech has not taken place on the stage, and is therefore indirect; the play revolves around the character's on-stage reactions to such off-stage action, for although this sort of action is not seen, it actually drives the plot. Lopakhin's opening speech is another example of indirect action, which both informs the audience of the past and maneuvers the development of the action.
Firs is a highly symbolic character, for as the oldest character, he is a remnant of the past. He spent almost his entire life as a serf on the estate. Freedom has not changed his life as it has changed Lopakhin's; although neither is a serf now, Firs is old and has nowhere else to go, so he stays on in the household as he always has, while Lopakhin has become independent and wealthy. The two of them reflect two different sides of the Russian serfs' freedom; together on stage, they create rather a complete picture of the fate of the old serfs, while Madame Ranevsky and her brother Gayef
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illustrate the fate of the old aristocracy. Madame Ranevsky's often comically joyful tirades on her homeland and her family demonstrate that she is a woman of excess. This excessiveness is both her most charismatic trait and her greatest weakness; she too is a ridiculous character. The contrast in her reactions to seeing her furniture again and the reality of he acquaintances' deaths implies early on in the play that this woman is completely incapable of dealing with difficulty; she ignores problems and constantly exaggerates her abilities and her emotions to create a perfectly happy world for herself.
For Madame Ranevsky and Gayef, cutting the cherry orchard down is not an option: the estate is too important. Their inability to comprehend the sense of Lopakhin's lucrative suggestion implies that they are two characters of the old aristocracy who cannot change with the changing times. They do not understand that if they do not cut down the orchard, it will go to auction and whoever buys it will cut it down anyway. Pishtchik is another character who does not seem capable of adapting and saving himself. He feeds off of others; he knows Madame Ranevsky has her own financial problems, yet he insists on asking her for money, complimenting her and goading her until she agrees. Madame Ranevsky agrees because of her own fundamental flaw, her excessiveness; she continues to live the life of a wealthy woman even as her assets dwindle. Even Gayef, the bumbling social idiot, can criticize her for this behavior, although he is too weak to stop her. Yasha is similar to Pishtchik in the way he feeds off Madame Ranevsky. His behavior with regards to his mother demonstrates his own flaw as a character. He has not seen his mother for five years, and he is more concerned with himself and impressing the family he serves than he is with visiting his own mother. Although he and Pishtchik both have charismatic moments on stage, they are both fundamentally parasites who frequent the cherry orchard for the purpose of benefiting from Madame Ranevsky's weak control of her purse.
Charlotte and Trophimof are the two final characters who appear onstage in this act. Each appears only briefly. They are both outsiders, and it is therefore appropriate they neither is fully integrated into the action until a later act.
Chairs By
Eugene Ionesco
Eugène Ionesco was one of the major figures in the Theatre of the Absurd, the French dramatic movement of the 1940s and 50s that emphasized the absurdity of the modern condition as defined by existential thinkers like Jean-Paul Sartre. The existentialists followed Soren Kierkegaard's dictum that "existence precedes essence"—that is, man
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is born into the world without a purpose, and he must commit himself to a cause for his life to have meaning.
Born in Romania in 1912, Ionesco spent his childhood in Paris until the family returned to its homeland. Ionesco developed a hatred for Romanian's conservatism and anti-Semitism and, after winning an academic scholarship, returned to France in 1938 to write a thesis. There, he met anti-establishment writers such as Raymond Queneau. He lived in Marseille during World War II. His first play, The Bald Soprano (1950), a one-act piece that borrowed its phrasing from English language-instruction books, garnered little public attention but earned Ionesco respect among the Parisian avant-garde and helped inspire the Theatre of the Absurd.
Spearheaded by Samuel Beckett and other dramatists living in Paris, the Theatre of the Absurd emphasized the absurdity of a world that could not be explained by logic. The Absurdists' other major themes focused on alienation, the specter of death, and the bourgeois mores that have displaced the significance of love and humanity onto work. In the character of Berenger, a semi-autobiographical persona who figures in several of his plays, Ionesco portrays the modern man trapped in an office, engaged in shallow relationships, and escaping with alcohol from a world he does not understand. Yet this is all presented in the Theatre of the Absurd's characteristic morbid wit, an often self-conscious, comic sensibility that makes us laugh at the most horrific ideas—death, alienation, evil—in an effort to understand them. The Chairs premiered in 1952 but was overshadowed that year by Beckett's Waiting for Godot, which infused its similar themes—repetition, boredom, loss of memory—with a greater sense of comedy and empathy.
Ionesco wrote more plays in the 50s, but it was not until Rhinoceros, first produced in 1960, that he received global attention. Absurdity and purposelessness frames the play, a study in a single man's transformation from apathy to responsibility as the world around him descends into violence and greater levels of absurdity. He called it an anti-Nazi work, and it was performed just long enough after WWII for tensions to settle down, but not so long that fascism was forgotten; its debut had a reported fifty curtain calls in Germany. This is understandable, as the play demonstrates how anyone can fall victim to collective, unconscious thought by letting their wills be manipulated by others. Walter Benjamin stated that one could not write poetry after the Holocaust, and though others have since refuted this as hyperbole, the world was indisputably damaged beyond repair and left searching for answers. Ionesco skirted the problem of trying to represent realistically the Holocaust by dressing his play in heavy but apparent symbolism. Through this indirect path, achievable only through the untamed techniques of the Theatre of the Absurd, he comes closer to answering the unanswerable questions left in the wake of fascist brutality.
Ionesco remained a prolific writer until the early 1980s, although none of his works, dramatic or critical, ever reached the same heights of tragedy and comprehension as Rhinoceros or The Chairs. His work has influenced playwrights as
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diverse as Harold Pinter and Sam Shepard. He died in 1994, but his plays are still performed across the world, testaments to the timelessness of Absurdism's questions and techniques.
Character List
Old Man -
The protagonist of the play. The Old Man has been married to the Old Woman for seventy-five years, and entertains her nightly with the same story and imitations he has always done. Living on the island, he spends his time with a few hobbies, but mostly devotes himself to his "message" with which he will save humanity.
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Old Woman -
Has been married to the Old Man for seventy-five years. On the island, her only entertainment is listening to her husband's stories and imitations, which she keeps fresh by erasing her memory nightly. She often reminds her husband of what jobs he could have had, and frequently plays the role of the Old Man's surrogate mother
Orator -
Since the Old Man cannot express himself well, the Orator—who looks like a pompous 19th-century artist—is scheduled to deliver the Old Man's message. He has an actor's regal bearing and hands out autographs.
Emperor -
The most esteemed invisible guest the Old Man welcomes. The Emperor is bathed in light, and the Old Man and Old Woman defer to him at all times.
Belle
The invisible former lover of the Old Man, and the current wife of the Photo-engraver. The Old Man reminisces with Belle about their romantic past and appears to hold on to what could have been.
Photo-engraver -
The husband of Belle. He gives the Old Woman a painting when they arrive, and she is much taken with him, flirting with overt sexuality.
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Lady -
The invisible first guest of the Old Man and Old Woman. They engage in casual conversation with Lady.
Colonel
The second invisible guest, a famous soldier. The Old Woman rebukes him for spilling his cigarettes on the floor, though she is also taken with his grandness, as is the Old Man with his prestige.
Newspapermen and other guests -
The newspapermen and other guests arrive at the end. They are all eager to hear the Orator deliver the Old Man's message.
Analysis of Major Characters
Old Man (In-Depth Analysis) -
The Old Man believes his life of suffering will translate into a "message" that will save humanity. But his message fails—the deaf and dumb Orator can only mumble the words and spell out nonsensical ones. The failure for this lies less with the Orator, than with the Old Man himself. The existential philosophers argued that man's condition was absurd and meaningless unless he committed himself responsibly to a greater good. The man believes his life will become meaningful with his message, but he has lived an irresponsible life. He relieves himself of the blame for his fights with his brother and friends, and his double suicide with the Old Woman is a retreat from death, not a confrontation with it. He also indulges in the fantastic illusions he and his wife create to escape from reality, and though he claims his life has been well lived, he clearly regrets not having taken up with Belle. Moreover, he has been a neglectful parent and son, abandoning his dying mother and failing his son, who called his parents responsible for his departure. His final touch of irresponsibility is his inability to deliver the message himself as he relies on the Orator.
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The Old Man is also bored of his repetitive existence. He has told the same story to his wife every night for their seventy-five married years, and his day is filled with routine. Life is so cyclical for him, in fact, that he seems to be confused about his age. Though he is ninety-five years old, he defers tremendously to his superiors and, moreover, is infantile. He sobs on his wife's lap—whom in fickle fits he calls his "Mamma" and then decides she is not the Mamma. He calls himself an orphan, though he is the one who abandoned his mother. This confusion over beginnings and endings is understandable, since he cannot even recall the details of when he and his wife were cast out of a garden years ago—an allusion to the Garden of Eden, another prominent ending of one godly world and initiation into a human world.
Ultimately, we can view the Old Man as Ionesco's projection of his own literary frustrations. Ionesco has similarly toiled on his message, built from his life and philosophy, and the actors—or the Orator—do not understand his work, rendering it meaningless. On the other hand, the Old Man is an irresponsible coward, afraid and unable to deliver his message himself, and Ionesco may be launching a self-critique.
Old Woman -
The Old Woman is a comforting presence to the Old Man. She plays the role of his surrogate parent, rocking him on her knees while he sobs about his orphanhood. She pulls him back from the window when he leans over too far. She praises him for his stories, imitations, and mental faculties. She is his workhorse, getting chairs and selling programs. But underneath this calming exterior is a woman who is deeply unhappy with what her life has become. She asks him to tell stories so she can forget the repetitive nature of their existence. She doses herself with salt each night so she loses the memory of the story, which is more extreme evidence of her need to escape, as is her participation in their fantasy world of imaginary characters. Her loss of memory is much like the characters in Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot lose their memory of the previous day. For every time she praises her husband, she reminds him that he could have been more in life had he tried harder. Her sexual frustrations emerge, as well, when she is taken by the Colonel's kissing her hand and, more explicitly, when she flirts with the Photo-engraver and makes obscene gestures. In her conversation with the Photo-engraver, she is really talking to her husband and defending her age and beauty against his flirtations with the invisible Belle.
The Old Woman also harbors much pain over their son's departure. While the story does not make much sense, as the boy accused them of killing birds, his final words—"It's you who are responsible"—summarize the woman's and man's
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irresponsible life, in which they take little accountability for the past and try to escape the present. While she chastises her husband for not owning up to his fights with family and friends, she is also implicitly guilty, and her suicide with her husband is a retreat from death, from a direct and responsible confrontation with it.
Orator) -
The Orator is a virtual actor. He is dressed the part as an ostentatious artist, he signs autographs, and he skims past the crowd as if only he exists. This is almost true, literally, since everyone else but the Old Man and Old Woman are invisible, but he believes they are all there. The Old Man has put all his hopes into the Orator's delivery of his "message," since the Old Man cannot express himself well. But the Orator turns out to be deaf and dumb, and the message, as both spoken and written words, is unintelligible. The reason for this is because the Old Man has not taken responsibility for his life and for the delivery of the message, and thus the message becomes irrationally absurd, but Ionesco probably intended another meaning. As an emerging playwright, Ionesco was most likely frustrated with actors and productions that failed to understand and convey his work. The Orator, then, is the actor who bumbles the work, mismatching his pleasant face and voice with the difficult words. But Ionesco could also be criticizing himself for allowing the Orator—or actors—to deliver his work in the first place. The Old Man is cowardly and worships the godly Orator, and Ionesco may find himself at fault for allowing incompetents to handle his plays.
Themes, Motifs, and Symbols
E.1 Themes
The repetitive present and inaccessible past -
The Old Man and Old Woman are stuck in a repetitive existence, retelling the same story and performing the same imitations day after day—even the water around their island is stagnant. The man can hardly even advance his story, rarely getting past "Then at last we arrived," which is itself a conflation of an ending and a beginning that circles around itself. In fact, they are not entirely sure what does come next. When the man resumes the story, after having remembered they were in Paris, he says "at the end of the end of the city of Paris, there was, there was, was what?" He keeps pushing to "the end of the end," but the end of the road is shrouded in mystery. But perhaps a previous comment the man has made sheds some light. Giving an explanation for why the sky gets darker earlier now, he says "the further one goes, the deeper one sinks. It's because the earth keeps turning around, around, around,
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around…" The revolutions—of earth and of a repetitive existence—grind the couple into deathly routines, cyclical actions that inch them closer to death as they seek ways to create some excitement in their lives. The man, especially, is such a prisoner of this repetition that he is at times infantile, belying his ninety-five years, and calls his wife his mother, and father, at one point. His confusion over beginnings and endings—whether he is a child or old man—and finds some roots in his story, which is about being cast out of a garden. The reference is to the Garden of Eden, and since he cannot remember mankind's initiation into the real world and expulsion from a godly one, it helps explain his confusion over lesser beginnings and endings.
In this never-ending present-tense cycle, the man and woman both try to access a past that is now beyond reach. The woman even takes a dose of salt each night, she says, to erase her memory of her husband's story, while the man expresses his distaste for history. More than that, they both regret the course their lives have taken. She continually reminds her husband that he could have had a better occupation had he been more ambitious, a notion he derides, as he is already the "general factotum" of their house. While the woman flirts with the Photo-engraver, the man has a deeper attachment to Belle, waxing poetic about their lost chance at romance. When he says, "I loved you, I love you," it is clear he has not given up on her and wishes he could change his past. Much like the tramps in Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot and the old couple in Beckett's Happy Days, the couple in The Chairs is trapped in a repetitive prison with their best days either behind them or completely forgotten.
Responsibility and a meaningful life -
Ionesco was one of the founders of Theatre of the Absurd, the French postwar theatrical movement. The Absurdists shared many ideas with the existentialist philosophers, such as Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus. Above all, the existentialists believed man's condition in the universe was absurd—beyond human rationality—and therefore meaningless. Only by committing oneself responsibly to a greater good, they thought, could a life have meaning. The old man in The Chairs certainly aims for this; he feels his life of suffering will have meaning once he communicates his message and saves humanity. But when the Orator finally delivers the message, it comes out garbled, nonsensical, irrational—in other words, it is absurd.
The failure of the message can be attributed to the fact that the old man did not take responsibility through his life. Most notably, in the play we see him and his wife create an illusory world so they can escape from the real one. Escape marks the man's character for much of his life. He denies being in the wrong in his rifts with his brother and someone named Carel, and his double suicide with his wife is another form of escape. The existentialists believed that taking responsibility in life meant accepting death as inevitable, confronting it rather than shying away from it. But suicide, most of their literature suggests, is not a confrontation but a retreat. The only
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part of the Orator's message that makes any sense is something he writes on the blackboard that looks like "Adieu, Papa." Whether this is intentional is unclear—the blackboard sequence was not even in the original production, making the message all the more cryptic—it does recall what the couple's son said to them before he left: "It's you who are responsible." The parting shot has a double meaning; the parents are responsible for his departure, and it's also an ironic comment since they are not, in fact, responsible. The man denies they even had a son, another form of irresponsibility, but he does own up to his cruel abandonment of his dying mother, though his wife refutes this. Finally, a more immediate reason behind the message's irrationality is the man's irresponsibility in the actual delivery. He fears he cannot express himself well, so he doles out the responsibility of conveying the message to the Orator.
E.2 Motifs
Self-conscious theatricality -
The Theatre of the Absurd is known for its innovative use of self-conscious dramatic techniques. In Ionesco's Rhinoceros, for example, a character recommends the plays of Ionesco. The Chairs is ripe for this, since the stage can be seen as another auditorium, filled with chairs for an audience. When the old man introduces himself before the message is to be delivered, and thanks everyone involved in the evening—the crowd, the Orator, the organizers, the construction workers, the technicians, and writers of the programs—it bears more than a passing resemblance to the way a playwright might thank everyone involved in a production of a play. The old man, especially, is much like a playwright; not only he has toiled over his "message," culled from his life and his philosophy, but he is a storyteller and an illusionist, crafting characters with his wife out of thin air. The Orator, then, would be an actor, someone who merely delivers the lines the man has written. "Merely" is an appropriate word, since The Chairs suggests that Ionesco does not think highly of actors. The failure of the garbled message may be Ionesco's charge that actors ruin his work, and that they do not understand it and render it unintelligible. On the other hand, the old man is a coward, not taking responsibility for many things, among them delivering his own message. The Orator's failure, then, may be a self-criticism of his inability to deliver the message on his own.
E.3 Symbols
Semicircular stage -
Ionesco's semicircular stage design evokes one of the main themes of The Chairs, that the present is circular and repetitive. But the semicircle is just that—a half-circle.
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While the complete half can be seen as the present that the couple must circle around endlessly, the missing half is the inaccessible past.
Analysis Ionesco's semicircular stage design immediately evokes images that develop a main theme of The Chairs: the present is circular and repetitive. The man and woman lead static lives, retelling the same ritualistic story every night, even the water around their island is "stagnant." The exact details of where they are and how they ended up there—apparently as the remaining survivors in some kind of post-apocalyptic world—are not as important as the comment Ionesco makes on old age. When one has lived for so long, one is cut off from the outside world, and each day melts into the next—until it doesn't seem like the "next" anymore. Consider the opening sentence of the man's story: "Then at last we arrived." First, he repeats the sentence each time he resumes the story, so in a sense he never advances but also returns in cyclical fashion—it even closes out the story. Second, the wording reveals its own circularity. The phrase starts off with a seeming progression in time ("Then"), but combines an ending ("at last") with a beginning ("arrived"). The end and beginning are fused, and the sentence is not an advancing "Then" but a repetitive "Then." The nonsensical story, too, is itself repetitive, but we do not know where these repetitions lead. The man's explanation as to why it now gets dark earlier provides a poignant answer: "…the further one goes, the deeper one sinks. It's because the earth keeps turning around, around, around, around…" These cycles, he implies, lead them down into the earth, into a deathly, dark burial.
Complicating the man and woman's view of the present is their relationship to the past. The woman willfully loses her memory each night, much like the tramps in Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot, lose their memory of the previous day, though not necessarily on purpose. Cut off from the past, life is even more circular, spinning around on its present-tense axis like the rotating earth. While the man does not voluntarily erase his memories, he does not heed history, as suggested by his shrugging off the story of François I). As in Waiting for Godot, and Beckett's 1958 play Happy Days, the two stranded characters are co-dependent, each having nothing but conversation with the other to keep himself from stultifying boredom. The man and woman, however, maintain a less rancorous relationship than the characters in the other plays. The man's name for his wife—"Semiramis"—is an allusion on his part to the legendarily beautiful 9th-century B.C. queen of Assyria, known as a fertility goddess, who was both wife and mother to Nimrod. However, it could also mean "half-branch." "Semi" is the prefix for "half," and "ramus" means a branch or an extension of bone, especially the lower jaw. Read this way, the woman completes the branch for him or, more saliently, together they form a complete jaw. In other words, together they have the capacity for speech, the ability to withstand loneliness through communication.
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2.2 Analysis
The man and woman's "conversation" with the invisible Lady hints that all their guests will similarly arrive in their minds. While the man's story he always retells is a ritual that, in making life bearable, also drives the couple closer to death, their imaginary conversation is more than that: it is an illusion they have created that tries to make their lives meaningful. Ionesco was a prominent playwright of the Theatre of the Absurd, the French postwar theatrical movement that was closely allied with existentialist philosophy. The existentialists believed man's condition in the universe was absurd—beyond human rationality—and meaningless. The only way for a life to have meaning was to commit responsibly to something beyond the self. In Ionesco's play Rhinoceros, a man overturns his apathetic, irresponsible life by committing himself to saving humanity. It appears that the old man's "message" is an attempt to do the same thing, and the play's tension is over what the message will be. The woman seems to uphold this existentialist argument when she tells the man that needs only to have his mind made up, and the ideas will come through his words. She believes that with a mental commitment, he will attain some kind of meaning. However, her argument is circular, and she wonders how we can make up our mind before the ideas have entered into it.
The man's anxiety over his actual communication and whether he will even be able to communicate, then, is an additional tension in the play. His reliance on the Orator to deliver the message can be viewed as a self-conscious move by Ionesco, as he, too, relies on actors to speak his words. The Lady, as a fiction of the man and woman's minds, is also a character whose dialogue and actions they "write." Self-conscious techniques were used frequently in the Theatre of the Absurd, generally as ways to keep the audience honest; they were reminded that what they were watching was not an escape, but an artificial representation of life. In Rhinoceros, for instance, one character recommends the plays of Ionesco. In The Chairs, Ionesco uses self-consciousness more subtly and for a more personal effect, as a comment on himself as a frustrated playwright. This theme will grow more important as the play continues.
The man's continuation of the story that repeats words and dangles into nothingness—"at the end of the end…there was, there was, was what?"—picks up on the theme of a repetitive present that slowly approaches death. He keeps inching closer to the end, but never reaches it, just as they keep inching closer and closer to death with each passing moment but never reach it. His faulty memory again means that the past is inaccessible and all he knows is the cyclical present. That they were cast out of a garden is also an explicit Biblical reference to Eden, the event that began mankind's life in the real world. But the old man cannot remember this well, so even the most momentous beginning is blurry. A further fusion of beginnings and endings comes out in the old man's character. At times he is senile, as his spotty memory indicates, but at other times he is child-like, sitting on his wife's lap and sobbing for his mother. The woman's status as his wife and confirms her name of Semiramis, the wife and mother of Nimrod in 9th-century B.C. Assyria.
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3.2 Analysis
The man and woman's regrets over the path their lives have taken dominate this section, and cement the idea that the past is inaccessible. While the man stands up for his wife against the Colonel, it is obvious that the man and woman both love Belle and the photo-engraver, respectively, and are hung up on the past—the man even says "I loved you, I love you." But the past is more difficult to change than his quick verb-tense change suggests. While the semicircular stage design is necessary to integrate the audience into the action, it also serves as a symbolically incomplete circle. The complete half can be seen as the present that the couple must circle around endlessly, while the missing half is the inaccessible past.
Note how the man and woman are truly talking to each other though they go through two intermediaries—Belle and the photo-engraver. Both project their regrets and insecurities to the other and respond accordingly. While the man reminisces about his youth with Belle, points out parts of her face that are no longer as attractive, and says they will not be able to recapture their lost romance, the woman pretends the photo-engraver has called her youthful-looking. Likewise, when the man says his wife has taken the place of his mother, she comments on the photo-engraver's remark about extended childbearing years. Most important, their discrepancy over the son, combined with the man's corresponding story about leaving his mother alone, while they sit with four empty chairs between them, exposes their true divide. What, exactly, has happened is not as crucial as the mutual feelings of abandonment—the woman has been abandoned and the man has abandoned. It makes sense, then, that the woman has also become her husband's surrogate mother, as she replaces the son who left them, while he gains a new mother.
Both examples, the unrequited loves and the familial problems, pertain to responsibility, which the son mentions as he leaves. While his example about the birds is odd, he may as well be referring to their lifelong irresponsibility, especially the man's, which we still witness. They regret the past, not taking responsibility for the path they have chosen, and they have to craft a fantasy- present in order to escape their real lives, another irresponsible gesture. As stated previously, the existentialist believe that only a responsible, committed life could be meaningful, and it looks more likely that the man's message will be his last-ditch effort to gain such meaning.
It is a remarkable achievement that Ionesco can create a palpable sense of excitement for the man's message as the rooms fills—with invisible people. Obviously, the chairs help set the mood, but the incessant action creates the sense of chaos and mass in the room. Ionesco calls his play a "tragic farce," and this section, above all, lives up to that billing. While the characters' scrambling to seat invisible guests on chairs is comical, the illusion is nonetheless poignant, and even disturbing.
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4.2 Analysis
After all the build-up, the message turns out to be incomprehensible. In the original production of the play, the blackboard was not even used, but the curtain fell as the Orator mumbled. Whatever message the man had, it is beyond human comprehension. The central tenet of existentialism is that man's condition in the universe is absurd, beyond human rationality, and the message certainly encompasses this. The only way to make meaning out of life was to dedicate oneself to a greater good. The man has seemingly done this, as he believes his life of suffering will translate into good once he shares his message with humanity. But this is not enough, as the Orator's garbled speech proves. So is Ionesco's brand of existentialism against any notion of redemption and we wonder whether we should read The Chairs as an overwhelmingly pessimistic play. In Ionesco's Rhinoceros, the main character, apathetic at the beginning, finally makes his life—and all of humanity's—significant when he decides to save humanity by fighting the overwhelming rhinoceros hordes. We question why the main character of the Rhinoceros succeed while the old man fails.
Though the Orator's message is cryptic, there is one clue we can cull from it: the words "Adieu papa" seem to emerge from the Orator's last scribbles. In other words, "Goodbye, Father." When the couple's son left them, he did not say this, but rather "It's you who are responsible." Even if this is not the link Ionesco intended, the man's lifelong irresponsibility is what has made him fail. He has never taking any blame for his failed relationships with friends or family. He has acted like a child and he did not even heed his wife's warning at the beginning of the play about falling into the water. In fact, even the double suicide is a form of irresponsibility. While the existentialists believed that the major way to combat meaninglessness was to accept that one would die, to commit oneself to this unpleasant notion, suicide is not the answer for them. Suicide is not a direct confrontation with death, as most of their literature attests to, but a way around death. Regardless of this view, the illusory world the couple has created around them is a deeper form of irresponsibility, a false attempt to make life meaningful that, in its escapism, actually makes life even more meaningless, since nothing they dream up really exists.
There is one final piece of irresponsibility in the play. For his final message, the man has bestowed the responsibility of communication on someone else—the Orator. He does not accept responsibility for conveying it himself, and his message becomes worthless. Ionesco could be attacking the oratorical actors who destroy his work and render it meaningless, as well as everyone else in the real theater whom the old man thanks. The crowd of invisible guests is the audience; the organizers are the producers and director; those who built the building and chairs are the crew; the newspapermen are the critics; and those who made the programs could even be considered the publishing house for Ionesco's play. On the other hand, Ionesco may be criticizing himself for ducking out of the theater like the old man and not directly delivering the message himself. This is a less likely answer, but it makes Ionesco a more sympathetic figure and gives the play an interesting slant.
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Rhinoceroses By
Eugene Ionesco Character List
Berenger
Berenger is the protagonist of the play, an Everyman slacker who finds neither his work in an office nor the culture around him fulfilling. Alienated, yet still confused as to why he has been displaced, he is unwilling to commit himself to anything in life but his love for Daisy. His friend Jean constantly reprimands the submissive Berenger for his uncouth appearance and apathetic attitudes. .
- Jean
Jean is Berenger's foil, a highly cultured, somewhat arrogant and angry young man who prides himself on his rationality. He urges Berenger to be more like him. His occasional lapses, however, expose cracks in his façade of efficiency. .
Logician -
The Logician is a highly rational man who appears only in the first act, but who is referred to several other times. He believes strictly in the laws of logic, though his attempts to prove anything often collapse. .
Daisy -
Daisy is Berenger's love interest. She, too, is fairly uncommitted to anything and does not mind the presence of the rhinoceroses. Nevertheless, she is the one other character of proportion in the play that has an emotional life. .
Botard
Botard is a senior member of Berenger's office. He is cynical and skeptical, and jealous of Dudard's rising stature. He refuses to believe at first the presence of the rhinos and seeks rational explanations for everything.
Dudard
Dudard is a co-worker of Berenger's and a rival for Daisy's affections. He prides himself on his intellect and rationality.
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Papillon
Papillon is the head of Berenger's office. He privileges work above his employees.
The Boeufs
Mr. Boeuf, another co-worker of Berenger's, appears off-stage only as a rhinoceros. His wife remains devoted to him despite his new form.
Townspeople -
The Old Gentleman, the Grocer, the Grocer's Wife, the Housewife, the Café Proprietor, and the Waitress appear in the first act. They are characterized largely by their trivial concerns, though the Old Gentleman is very interested in the Logician
Themes, Motifs, and Symbols
E.1 Themes
Will and Responsibility -
The transformation of Berenger from an apathetic, alcoholic, and ennui- ridden man into the savior of humanity constitutes the major theme of Rhinoceros, and the major existential struggle: one must commit oneself to a significant cause in order to give life meaning. Jean continually exhorts Berenger to exercise more will-power and not surrender to life's pressures, and other characters, such as Dudard, seem to do just that as they control their own destinies. Berenger does not have great conventional will-power, as demonstrated by his frequent recourse to alcohol and his tendency to dream (both daydreams and nightmares). However, he maintains a steadfast, latent sense of responsibility after Act One, often feeling guilty for the various rhinoceros-metamorphoses around him—in a sense, his initial apathy was the cause, helping promote a climate of indifference and irresponsibility. Furthermore, he shows early on that he at least cares about Daisy, the only evidence in the play, other than Mrs. Boeuf's devotion to Mr. Boeuf, of sincere love for another human. By Act Three, his powerful guilt and sense of responsibility indicates that Berenger practices the most selfless kind of love—unconditional love for all humanity, whereby he is concerned for the welfare even of those who have scorned him. This all-encompassing love is what gives his life meaning.
The supposedly strong characters, like Jean, fail the ultimate test of will- power, the rhino-epidemic, and their crumbling wills are foreshadowed by their subtler evasions of responsibility—Daisy, for instance, wants to live a guiltless life. Their idea of will borrows from Friedrich Nietzsche's concept of "the will to power." For them, will is a means to metamorphose into Nietzsche's "super-man," a powerful being beyond human morality. The savagery of the rhinos, and Jean's transformation
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and statements in Act Two, exemplify this desire for power. He becomes violent, claims humanism is dead, and tries to trample Berenger. The play's final irony is that Berenger becomes the true super-man, gathering his resources of will, built on a foundation of love for his fellow man, to take responsibility for humanity.
Logic and Absurdity -
Rhinoceros exposes the limitations of logic, and absurdity reigns as the dominating force in the universe. Self-proclaimed rational characters, such as the Logician, Botard, and Jean, either flounder in their proofs (the Logician, especially) or ridiculously rationalize their incorrect presumptions—consider Botard's accusation of a conspiracy in Act Two. The Logician's attempts to uncover how many rhinoceroses there were in the first act, and what breeds they were, results only in re-posing the original question. In Act One, Berenger calls Jean's ideas "nonsense," and this word resonates throughout Rhinoceros. The world is nonsensical, absurd, and defies the extent of logic. As Berenger says, if one were to read about the rhinoceros events in a newspaper, away from the action, one could be rational and detached, but in the midst of things one can't help getting involved. The balance between detached distance and intimate confusion divides the supposedly logical characters from Berenger. They maintain their logical distance until confronted with a real problem, when their logic implodes. Berenger concedes absurdity from the outset—"life is a dream," he says, alluding to the inexplicable randomness around him—and this enables him to understand the absurdity of the metamorphoses better, even though he never arrives at a logical "solution." Recognizing the world as absurd, Ionesco suggests, is the first step in cobbling together a meaningful life.
Fascism -
The "epidemic" of the rhinoceroses serves as a convenient allegory for the mass uprising of Nazism and fascism before and during World War II. Ionesco's main reason for writing Rhinoceros is not simply to criticize the horrors of Nazis, but to explore the mentality of those who so easily succumbed to Nazism. A universal consciousness that subverts individual free thought and will defines this mentality; in other words, people get rolled up in the snowball of general opinion around them, and they start thinking what others are thinking. In the play, people repeat ideas others have said earlier, or simultaneously say the same things. Once other people, especially authority figures, collapse in the play, the remaining humans find it even easier to justify why the metamorphoses are desirable. Ionesco is careful not to make his play a one-sided critique of the brutality of Nazism. The rhinos become more beautiful as the play progresses until they overshadow the ugliness of humanity, and the audience is forced to recognize that an impressionable individual might have similarly perceived the swelling ranks of Nazis as superior. In fact, Dudard's desire to join the "universal family" of the rhinos points to the notion of the rhinos as an Aryan master race, physically superior to the rest of humanity. Nevertheless, they are still morally
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repugnant, escalating their violence over the course of the play. Ionesco carefully traces an argument against John Stuart Mill's "harm principle," which states that individual freedom should be preserved so long as it does not harm anyone else. Ionesco demonstrates that passively allowing the rhinos to go on—or, allegorically, turning a blind eye to fascism, as individual citizens and entire countries did in the 1930s—is as harmful as direct violence.
E.2 Motifs
Theatre of the Absurd -
In the tradition of Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot, Jean-Paul Sartre's No Exit, and Harold Pinter's plays, Ionesco's drama combines abstract philosophical ideas with concrete humor. The various rationalizations that characters come up with to explain their previous errors delight us with their silliness, but they also suggest deeper ideas about logic and responsibility. As many of the plays from the Theatre of the Absurd go, Rhinoceros is conscious of itself as a play, as when Jean suggests Berenger sees one of Ionesco's plays, but more so in the ways that it forces the audience to recognize the production before them as a play and not as a diversion. A production with back-lit rhinoceros heads stakes no claim to the typical drama's attempts to suspend the audience's disbelief, but this is the point: Ionesco breaks the "fourth wall" of the theater (and numerous other walls and structures explode in the play) to make the audience leave the theater feeling that the absurdity they witnessed was somehow more real than a "realistic" play.
Bourgeois life
Ionesco makes a number of critiques of the emptiness of the bourgeois working world. The root of Berenger's apathy seems to spring from his boring job, and Act Two presents us with the drudgery of his office, its repetitive work, and its shallow relationships built to serve the corporation. Jean recommends that Berenger improve his cultural vocabulary, but Jean's appreciation for the avant- garde theater, for instance, is clearly only a surface interest or he would not succumb so easily to the rhinoceroses. Berenger's reliance upon alcohol is understandable—the ennui of daily life is too great not to escape. In fact, the escapism of alcohol is a trope for the escapism of the metamorphoses; both Berenger and the others feel they regain their lost identities in their respective escapes. The others, then, are similarly oppressed by their jobs (Jean feels it is something one must get used to), though Berenger seems to be the only one who has a deeper awareness of the way bourgeois life crushes his spirit.
E.3 Symbols
Rhinoceroses
The rhinoceroses are a blunt symbol of man's inherent savage nature but, to Ionesco's credit, the articulation of this idea deploys slowly throughout the play: the first rhino
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causes no apparent damage; the second one tramples a cat; later ones destroy more property and Jean-as-rhinoceros attacks Berenger. They represent both fascist tyranny and the absurdity of a universe that could produce such metamorphoses. These ideas crystallize into one question: how could humans be this savage, allowing the barbarity of World War II Nazism? Ionesco answers this in a variety of ways. He equates the epidemic of the metamorphoses with the ways the ideals of Nazism can infect the unconscious minds of individuals. Yet the rhinos become more beautiful and humans more ugly by the end of the play. They are beautiful, however, because of their brute strength and power; true beauty, as Berenger demonstrates when he finally decides to fight the rhinos and save humanity, lies in moral strength.
1.2 Analysis
Ionesco explodes a number of profound ideas on to the stage, most of which are situated in the existentialist philosophy of Soren Kierkegaard, Jean-Paul Sartre, and others. The concepts of free will and responsibility are introduced and defined here. Jean is a paragon of will, of having the power to shape oneself according to one's desires. Berenger is his opposite, an alcoholic slacker who cannot even be roused by the unusual appearance of a rhinoceros. Berenger evades responsibility and himself, as is most saliently demonstrated in his attitudes toward alcohol: he lies about ordering liquor and he drinks to escape himself. Yet responsibility is not such a clear-cut issue; while Berenger arrives late to meet Jean, so does Jean. The latter, however, finds a way to justify it.
Ionesco said he wrote the play as a response to the widespread conversion of supposedly free-thinking humans to fascist ideals before and during World War II. Jean's reference to himself as the "superior man" borrows from Friedrich Nietzsche's vision of a "super-man" who is beyond conventional human morality. This super-man, Nietzsche believed, would lead the world. (The concept of a man above morality was critiqued in Fyodor Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment.) Adolf Hitler exploited (and abused) Nietzsche's ideas heavily in convincing Germans that the Aryans were a master race whose destiny was to control the world. Ionesco's contribution to understanding how millions were swayed is focused in his dissection of a collective consciousness (later referred to in the play as "collective psychosis"). Ionesco posits the existence of a universal mentality that compromises the individual mind. These minds, as Berenger's does in this scene, evade responsibility and willful choice. They allow external ideas to enter without an internal check; as Jean says of Berenger, "There are certain things which enter the minds of even people without one." For Berenger, alcohol is his means for mental escapism, and the false sense of identity that alcohol confers upon him suggests why the ensuing rhinoceros-metamorphoses (and, by symbolic extension, conversions to fascism) are so seductive. Escaping oneself, or belonging to another group, Berenger implies, somehow allows the individual to feel as if he is more himself, a better, stronger, potential self. Still, the benefits of collective consciousness are given their due here; the newly unified community comes together to discuss the rhino.
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In a world in which the atrocities of fascism can take hold of human emotions, Ionesco classifies logic as absurd and inexplicable, beyond human rationality. The Logician is parodied for his comic missteps in proving even a simple syllogism; when the Old Gentleman asks if, according to the syllogism, his dog must be a cat, the Logician replies: "Logically, yes. But the contrary is also true." Ionesco further demonstrates the inapplicability of logic to human emotion as he cross-cuts dialogue between the Logician's proof and Berenger's fumbling attempts to provide some coherent reason for his unhappiness. Several key lines assail the inconsistency of logic. Berenger's claim that "Life is a dream" points to life as an absurd undertaking that follows the fractured logic of a dream. Moreover, it accords with his feeling that he leads an unconscious existence with no responsibility (for one has no conscious control over a dream). He later amplifies this doubt as he admits, "I sometimes wonder if I exist myself." His statement contradicts the well-known philosophical premise of 17th-century philosopher Rene Descartes: "I think, therefore I am." For Descartes, the ability to think is the only proof of existence. For Berenger, thought not only fails to certify existence, it even casts doubt upon existence. This doubt articulates the foundation of existentialist philosophy, the formula "existence precedes essence." This important dictum of Kierkegaard's states that humans are born ("existence") before they gain any soul or meaning in life ("essence"). As Berenger (and Ionesco) sees it, neither physical nor even mental existence is enough to count for true existence. Although he does not yet know it, he needs a willful life of responsibility committed to something significant (this will become apparent later in the play).
Ionesco makes plausible the eventual mass transformation into rhinoceroses through two specific stagecraft techniques in this first part. He subtly introduces the first rhino into the play, allowing the sound of the beast to amplify slowly. The off-stage presence of this first rhino piques the audience's interest as well and keeps its existence (or stage existence, at least) in doubt. Ionesco also plants the seeds of collective consciousness in this first scene through dialogue devices; during and after the rhino's appearance, the characters all exclaim the same things ("Oh, a rhinoceros!" or "Well, of all things!") at nearly the same time. Furthermore, two separate, simultaneous dialogues—between Jean and Berenger and between the Logician and the Old Gentleman—discuss similar ideas, sometimes even using the same exact language.
2.2 Analysis
The foundation of logic is parodied as the Logician's efforts do nothing to clarify the absurd world. Berenger unleashes a key word to trigger his fight with Jean: "nonsense." The world does not merely lack sense; it is nonsensical, illogical in every way. Yet, as the Logician's ridiculous inversions show (especially in his use of reductio ad absurdum, or pushing logic to absurd or contradictory limits), total illogic does not provide meaning either, as some readers might assume existentialist authors propose. Rather, Ionesco shows that even the most conventional use of logic can be flawed. Instead of trying to figure out what has caused (and what can remedy) the
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presence of the rhinos, the supposedly logical citizens are more concerned with how many horns the rhinos have.
The strength of Berenger's and Jean's respective wills are shaded here for ironic and foreshadowing purposes. As Jean points out, Berenger does care about at least one thing: Daisy. His love of her makes his decision to save humanity at the end of the play seem believable. Jean's slur about Berenger's willingness to surrender, then, is a tremendous irony, since by the end of the play it is Jean who has given-in to the rhinos. Nevertheless, for now Berenger remains a passive individual, eschewing his prior cultural development plan in favor of another escapist drink.
The escalation of violence and its relationship to fascism is also explored in greater depth. In the first part of the scene, the Logician and Jean bump into each other, and both men say "No harm done." In this section, a cat is trampled. Ionesco subtly examines John Stuart Mill's proposition of the "harm principle" in On Liberty. According to Mill, individual freedom should be preserved at all costs unless it harms someone else. While the first rhino caused no harm to anyone else (mirrored in the polite dialogue between Jean and the Logician), the second one does. Ionesco suggests that any mentality, fascism included, should be permitted so long as it does not violate the harm principle (the first rhino), but such mentalities inevitably do harm others (the second rhino).
As in part one of Act I, Ionesco utilizes parallel dialogue again to simulate collective consciousness, but the tone of Ionesco's play is more attention- grabbing in this section. He grounds Rhinoceros in absurdist comedy that examines profound ideas in a comic light. For instance, the Logician's proof examines the limits of logic and its inversions while pleasing the audience with its low comedy of misunderstanding. More obvious is one of Jean's suggestions to Berenger for cultural exercises—seeing one of Ionesco's plays. Breaking the "fourth wall" of the theater to address the audience directly forces the audience members to recognize the production before them as a play. Ionesco does not allow the audience to forget itself in the play. A new dramatic technique of postwar theater was for the actor to be aware of himself as an actor, to draw attention to the artifice of the play. This self-consciousness extended to entire productions, and in Rhinoceros, Ionesco clearly discards conventional reality, both in the absurdist subject matter and in the stagecraft that relies on imagination. The rhinos never appear on stage in full form, and when they do show up, it is as back-lit projections of rhino-heads. These non- realistic touches force the audience to recognize the play as a performed piece, but not as an escapist spectacle that shuts out the external world. In the same vein, Ionesco's self-referential joke helps the audience affirm its commitment to the play's ideas after they leave the theater. The collapse of the fourth wall (not to mention the fact that numerous stage walls actually fall in
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3.2 Analysis
Berenger's previous comments in Act One about his dreary office life come to fruition in this scene. Ionesco condemns the workplace with its insignificant busywork and gossip. Berenger and Dudard have a petty rivalry for Daisy's affections and Botard and Dudard compete for Papillon's good graces. Ionesco also denounces the privileging of work over people, such as Papillon's view of Boeuf's metamorphosis as a mere labor shortage. Ironically, "papillon" means "butterfly" in French, contrasting sharply with Papillon's indelicate nature. The alienating influences of the workplace help explain why Berenger shows up late, and why his stale bourgeois existence is wracked with ennui. However, he refuses a drink and decides to take advantage of the free afternoon to visit Jean, a sign that he is starting to lead a more committed, responsible life.
Rhinoceros is generally viewed as an indictment of man's intrinsic savagery, his latent capacity for evil. Ionesco highlights this here by actually humanizing the metamorphosis of Mr. Boeuf. His is the first transformation that is not anonymous and shows the rhino's (Mr. Boeuf's) "tender" trumpeting to his wife. "Boeuf" means "beef" in French, and Daisy calls the rhinoceros an "ugly animal," but here it seems as though transforming into a rhino does not totally banish his humanity. In fact, the more savage personalities belong to the men who crassly dispense pragmatic advice to the shocked Mrs. Boeuf, or to Botard, who jealously tries to assign responsibility for the rhino's existence to Dudard.
Botard hints at one of the play's major themes when he labels the appearance of rhinos as a "collective psychosis." His hyperbolic accusation of a conspiracy is not to be dismissed: those who join the herd now are considered traitors, while later those who don't are the renegades. As Ionesco gauges it in the play, morality shifts to accommodate any political movement; the majority of progress is always the good side, and the minority of resistance is always the bad side. At this point in the play, those who turn into rhinos are resisting humanity and are therefore, in Botard's eyes, bad. Yet Ionesco foreshadows Botard's future hypocritical transformation. Like Jean, Botard rationalizes his inconsistent behavior after the fact when he first denies the rhinos and then denies his previous denial.
Ionesco refrains still from showing the rhinoceros, drumming up excitement for a possible glimpse (and curiosity as to how the production will present the creatures on-stage). Other effects abound, however, as they did in the previous act, including the collapse of the staircase. As plays from the often-static Theatre of the Absurd go (see Beckett's Waiting for Godot), Rhinoceros exhibits a wealth of action and dynamic stagecraft.
the play) implies that there should be no "before" or "after" the play, but that the play is as much a part of their "real lives" as their post-theater dinner will be.
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4.2 Analysis
The most prominent feature of this scene is Jean's gradual transformation into a rhinoceros. Ionesco manages to make it plausible by having Jean disappear for moments into the bathroom, where he can alter his visage and body off-stage. His green pajamas serve a double use as a prop, foreshadowing his change in pigmentation and becoming a human nuisance to the emerging rhino. But the simplest of effects, and most powerful, is Jean's changing voice. The unique inflection of the individual voice is essential to humanity, and the subsequent loss of language seems nearly secondary to the ability to sound like a human.
Instead of parallel dialogue, a hallmark of the previous act, Ionesco deploys coincidence here as Jean and the old man share the same first name (not "Old Man," but "Jean"). This coincidence is further evidence of collective consciousness in that both men can be called Jean, and neither man distinguishes or affirms his human identity before turning into a rhino. The coincidence also attests to the increasing oddity of logic in the play. Berenger tries to make sense of the rhinos; he decides that it doesn't matter where the rhinos come from, but the "important thing, as I see it, is the fact that they're there at all, because…." He doesn't finish the sentence, which speaks volumes: the rhinoceroses are there both because there isn't a rational explanation, and also because absurd and apathetic humans don't take responsibility for making a life meaningful (or finishing a sentence, for that matter).
Jean's strength of will comes under fire in this scene, but he tries to appropriate his own meaning of will, one that constantly shifts. He claims that he never dreams, a sharp contrast to Berenger in Act One, who wondered if life is all a dream. Jean believes he is "master" of his own thoughts, but his mastery of his own body is in doubt. Just as he rationalized hypocritical behavior in Act One, Jean again makes excuses for his transformation to reclaim a sense of free will; he claims he simply "felt like" making a growling sound and that it indicates nothing. For him, will becomes a mark purely of physical power, not individual freedom. His call for a reduction of morality to the savage laws of nature works off of his prior belief in a Nietzschean super-man who can circumvent morality. This transformation is plausible; from the start, Jean's interest in culturing himself only seemed like a means to increase his power and respect, and not as an exploration of his humanity. Berenger, on the other hand, foreshadows his future status as the true super-man who saves the world with morality. He makes a willful decision to try and save Jean, though he flees at the end of the scene, maintaining the play's suspense over the inevitable question: will Berenger commit to something significant and remain human, or will he evade responsibility and become a rhinoceros?
Jean hints at the fascist underpinnings of the metamorphoses, alluding to Mr. Boeuf's Jekyll and Hyde-like "secret" life. Under bourgeois propriety, Ionesco implies, savagery lurks. It is Jean, who held up fascist ideals of human perfection and efficiency as a human, who turns into a far more savage rhino than Boeuf was. He even tries to convince Berenger that Berenger's voice is actually changing, exhibiting
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paranoia as Botard did in the previous scene when he charged conspiracy. Berenger says that the traditional view of the rhino as a solitary animal is outdated, suggesting a possible reason for Ionesco's choice of the rhino as his symbol of a fascist beast: humans, with their fear of individualistic thought, turn the otherwise solitary rhinos into faceless hordes. Berenger continues Ionesco's defense of the fascists' right to live so long as they do not harm anyone. However, Jean's horn does pierce Berenger, showing fascism's inevitable turn to violence.
5.2 Analysis
The strength of Berenger's will vacillates. Though he ends this section with a decisive statement, and earlier makes a strong declaration of free will (if one doesn't want to catch the disease, one won't), his resistance to alcohol continues to waver. Claiming his decision to drink is a premeditated one, he exposes a complex, circular dilemma: is the conscious decision to remove rational decision-making abilities (here, to choose consciously to escape into unconsciousness through drinking) a conscious choice after all? Extended to the extreme, this sentiment asks whether suicide is a viable form of confronting death. This was the ultimate preoccupation of existentialist philosophers, especially Martin Heidegger and Jean-Paul Sartre. Or is suicide a cowardly act that removes true commitment and recognition of absurdity, of confronting death while still alive? Dudard's accusation, that Berenger is trying to rationalize his cowardice, affirms the existential view that confrontation with death is a constant, lifelong struggle, not a temporary one like the momentary act of suicide.
Unlike Jean, who says he never dreams, Berenger concedes the occasional loss of control over thought in his dreams—yet he has a greater ability to exercise mental control while awake, as his staunch refusals to metamorphose indicate. His dream life versus his conscious life fits the existentialist formula "existence precedes essence"—he is an irrational, absurd, irresponsible being in his sleep (where he has only "existence"), but he controls his destiny in consciousness (where his "essence" emerges). His Act One statement that life is a dream helps to explain the surrounding metamorphoses; everyone else is living out an unconscious dream-life, an existence without essence. Nevertheless, Berenger's will crumbles slightly. When he drinks in this scene, the direct cause is his hearing the rhinos outside and acquiescing to the herd; the indirect cause is his own status as a victim of collective consciousness. His occasional tendency to a mass, rather than individual, consciousness is exposed when he and Dudard, while speaking through the closed door, parrot the dialogue from Berenger's similar visit to Jean. While Berenger does not speak in simultaneous dialogue, as characters in Act One often did, his paralleled dialogue is simply a delayed form of collective consciousness.
This scene introduces the metamorphoses as a "disease," and "rhinoceritis" becomes a central metaphor for fascism as a contagious, half-rational, half- absurd infection of mind and morality. Ionesco provides possible, even humane reasons for why rhinoceritis spreads so rapidly, refusing to settle on the generally acknowledged claim of human savagery. Berenger posits that those who have changed are "temporarily unbalanced." These are certainly not the words of a Nazi apologist, but
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Ionesco intimates that fascist appeal is linked less to permanent and corrupt human nature but to the provisional imbalance of a time. Likewise, many historians account for the rise of Nazism by pointing to the shattered world of a post-World War I Germany that was willing to submit to a strong leader who promised a return to glory.
As to why other countries, such as the US, failed to react swiftly to Nazi atrocities, Berenger explains that when one is not in the midst of conflict, it is easy to be a detached observer. Ironically, Dudard, the most productive, dutiful worker, tries to assuage Berenger's own sense of duty and guilt for the rhinos. Of course, Berenger has somewhat caused rhinoceritis. In his apathy towards life he contributes to the overall lack of will that makes this epidemic possible. Yet it is Berenger's original indifference, an indifference that grew out of his awareness of the absurd universe, that galvanizes his own metamorphosis into a being committed to free will. Dudard's assertion that Berenger lacks the "vocation" to become a rhino is a pun on Berenger's lack of will, which will prevent him from attaining the powerful status of the rhino, and a petty insult that criticizes Berenger's apathy towards his job (and boosts Dudard's ego as a reminder of his superior position in the office). Berenger's indifference to his job is probably the greatest immunization to the metamorphosis, as he recognizes the absurdity of his boring, insignificant job in an absurd, often insignificant world.
Here, the two characters seem to flip-flop a bit, as Dudard plays the existentialist and Berenger the realist. What we term the absurd, as Dudard observes, is a gray area. Dudard speaks of the impossibility of distinguishing between the normal and abnormal, but he denies philosophy's ability to answer this. Berenger agrees philosophy is of little help in resolution, but he believes that common sense can explain these issues. However, their underlying reasons reveal their true character. Dudard's belief in the superiority of the scientific and the theoretical over "mass opinion" is an ironic return to his regular detachment and surrender to forces beyond his control. He does not think they can solve the mystery of the rhinos, which would normally be an existentialist viewpoint. But in his refusal to try and think about it in a constructive way he foreshadows his eventual surrender to the mass opinion (by metamorphosis) that he denigrates. Berenger's view reaffirms human will and the ability to make meaning in an absurd universe, despite the difficulty in explaining certain phenomena. Still, both men ignore common sense in everyday life; neither makes the obvious conclusion as to why the workmen disappear after a few days.
Ionesco continues to rail against what he sees as an empty bourgeois, middle- class life. Berenger is flabbergasted at Papillon's metamorphoses only because Berenger notes that Papillon had such a good job to live for. His shock also exposes a contradiction in Berenger's character, pointing to the powerful brainwashing that capitalism can impose even on a person with a general awareness of the emptiness of the workplace. Moreover, the stagecraft helps amplify Ionesco's attitude. The physical similarity between Berenger's and Jean's rooms implies that bourgeois life is homogenous, and that collective consciousness is a predictable result. Both men evidently live alone, and both rooms seem little more than prisons, suitable for housing their occupants in between work-shifts
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6.2 Analysis
Berenger's and Daisy's dual desires to fight the rhinos and to surrender vacillate wildly in the first part of this action-packed section. He is inactive at the start, not hearing Daisy's knock at the door. This is the third delay in opening the door for someone else in the play (Jean for Berenger in Act Two, part two; Berenger for Dudard in the first part of Act Three), and each occasion seems to indicate a physical disconnection from humanity, which the occupant of the house is in no hurry to remedy. While Berenger is at first resistant to Dudard's and Daisy's idea of acclimating himself to the rhinos and to not worrying over it, he later lets Daisy coax him into believing that he should lead a guiltless life, and goes a step further in blaming guilt (and other emotions that show a lack of "purity," as Daisy says) as a cause of the metamorphoses. Daisy's reversals turn to an even more staccato rhythm; she alternates her devotion to Berenger and to the rhinos so quickly, the effect would be comic were the outcome not so grave.
Guilt and love are the dominant emotions in the finale, and Daisy's and Berenger's ideas of these emotions clash in profound ways. The "happy," guiltless life Daisy seeks detaches itself from humanity. The love she expresses for Berenger, then, is simply a love for another individual, not for all humanity; as Berenger expresses, "Happiness is such an egotistical thing!" Berenger is at first manipulated by Daisy into accepting this guiltless life. He greedily misinterprets her distinction between her interference in Dudard's life and his own, not comprehending Daisy's belief that love allows you to act on behalf of someone else. However, Berenger renews his guilt, later choosing to absorb the guilt for Daisy's own departure, even though she probably would have done it anyway. That he still feels concerned for someone who just abandoned him in the worst way shows that Berenger holds unconditional love not only for Daisy, but also for humanity. To love one human, Ionesco implies, is not enough for a life of significance; one must love and be willing to take responsibility for all humanity, and this allows Berenger to interfere on behalf of the world.
The metaphor of fascism blooms overtly at the end. The firemen have turned into an organized militia, showing that authority is just as susceptible to corruption as anyone else; Papillon's earlier transformation and the metamorphoses of the aristocracy and media drum the point home. Dudard's desire to belong to the "universal family" of rhinos suggests an underlying genetic component to the transformations, a movement to Aryan-style racial cleansing (as well as calling attention to the scarcity of family in Rhinoceros; none of the major characters seems to have any relatives whatsoever). Ionesco does not make his point in as one-sided a manner as a lesser dramatist might: the rhinos not only become more beautiful to Daisy, but to the audience as well. Their trumpeting is melodic to our ears, too, and we can understand why she would be seduced by the rhinos, especially when compared to the pictures of ugly humans alongside them. Yet Berenger's observation about the indirect nature of harm is Ionesco's final critique of John Stuart Mill's harm principle: "Sometimes one does harm without meaning to, or rather one allows it to go unchecked." Seemingly innocuous action can, in fact, be violent. Worse yet,
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remaining passive, without commitment or choices, can cause harm and makes the passive individual as culpable as the violent one.
The play ends with repetitions on the theme that the universe is absurd, and that logic cannot explain everything. Daisy makes the comment that one can predict things only after they have happened, but this is not even true. Berenger unsuccessfully attempts to justify Botard's absurd transformation (that it was a disguise, which copies Jean's earlier statement about Mr. Boeuf, and that it was a foreseeable collapse of Botard's false stubbornness, which echoes Dudard's earlier words). Both are, in fact, completely wrong; the true "disguise" is the human skin the savage characters were wearing all along, and Botard's stubbornness was not at all a pose. Botard may have held out initially because he was mulish, but once he was presented with proof of the rhinos in Act Two, his stubbornness did not relent, but switched sides to account for the rhinos. One can reasonably imagine that later on, when he realized he was one of the few humans left, Botard would have stubbornly insisted that being a rhino is right. Even those absurdities that can be somewhat rationalized—such as the metamorphoses as a result of collective consciousness—inspire new, unanswerable questions: Why rhinoceroses, for instance, and not bears, elephants, or other savage animals? Why do some of the rhinos have one horn, and some have two—is Ionesco suggesting there will later be division even among the rhinos? The racial distinction between Asiatic and African seems to suggest that there will be.
Oddly enough, the play, which emphasizes the absurdity and inapplicability of logic, accords perfectly to the logic of the Aristotelian three-act structure, with a character whose arc forms as great a transformation as those physical ones around him (an irony similar to the end of Franz Kafka's "The Metamorphosis," in which the daughter of the family is the one who has truly changed, not Gregor the insect). Some critics read ambiguity into the ending; perhaps Berenger's stand-off is yet another whimsical turn of his mind (his and Daisy's temporary inversion of character in this scene and other instances throughout reinforce this notion). However, everything leading up to Berenger's transformation suggests a slowly developing awareness of the need for a life of commitment. Berenger's name sounds like the French word "déranger," or "to disturb" (Berenger certainly is disturbed throughout the play, as is the logic of the universe; Ionesco uses a semi-autobiographical character named "Berenger" in several of his other plays). Backwards, his name is close to "régénérer," "to regenerate" (and his idea of restoring the human race with him and Daisy as Adam and Eve lends credence to this wordplay, as does his final decision to fight the dissolution of the human race). Whether or not one buys into these coincidences, it is clear Berenger eventually transforms from a disturbed individual into one who wants to regenerate humanity, and Ionesco closes the curtain with this decision because it appears final. The tidy wrap-up of Rhinoceros implies that perhaps only in art can absurdity be refined into logic.
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Murder in the Cathedral(1935)
By
T.S.Eliot
Key Literary Elements Setting The play is set in two locations, the Cathedral of Canterbury and the Archbishop's hall, as they existed in medieval England. The play opens at the point of Becket's arrival in Canterbury, at Christmas time, after seven years of sojourn in France. Major Characters Thomas Becket The Archbishop of Canterbury and the protagonist of the play. His character is basically drawn from historical sources during the later part of twelfth century. Becket was close to King Henry II, but differences in their attitudes toward power drew them apart. Henry II The king who is never presented on stage, but whose invisible presence towers over the entire proceedings of the play. He is omnipresent.
Minor Characters The Women of Canterbury in the Chorus They represent the voice of the common person. They sum up the past, bring the situation into the present, and express a lurking fear of Becket's doom, which the audience shares. The Three Priests
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They are genuinely worried about Becket's well being. They hold Becket in great respect and fear for his life. The Four Tempters The most important minor characters. They throw sidelights on Becket's character. They fail to tempt him with any of their proposals. The Four Knights Reginald Fitz Urse, Sir High de Morville, William de Traci and Richard Brito: they play the role of assassins of Becket, and Reginald Fitz Urse assumes the leader's role among them. The Messenger He breaks the news of Becket's arrival back home.
Conflict The conflict exists between the King and the Pope; that is between temporal power and spiritual power. Although the King of England and the Pope never appear on the stage, their forces clash throughout the play. Protagonist The protagonist is Thomas Becket, who represents the church and who resists Temptation. Antagonist The antagonist is the state (or King Henry II) whose casual remark that the priest should be taken out of his way brings about the death and ultimate martyrdom of Thomas Becket. Climax In the course of the play, the climax of the action occurs with the temptation by the four tempters who offer Becket various items ranging from money to unlimited power. Becket resists them all. The play really opens at the true point of climax when the whole city of Canterbury is rejoicing, but the peasant women of the Chorus have a strange intuition of death. The tension is accompanied by a feeling that death is unavoidable, and it is almost accepted by the Chorus and the priests. What is left is only the ritual of killing and the prayer thereafter.
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Outcome The play ends in tragedy with the murder of Thomas Becket; thus, the protagonist (Becket) is overcome by the antagonist (the state).
NOTE Murder in the Cathedral was written for a ritualistic presentation. Hence, the reader does not find elaborate treatment of these components of the plot. The whole play has an economy of scenes and action. It has the effect of unity of action on a single theme of how martyrdom takes place.
Themes Major Theme The major theme shows that it is a sin to seek Martyrdom. A martyr is born, per the will of God. A true martyr never wishes to be a martyr or acts to become one, but gives up his life to God with total surrender of his will. Thomas Becket becomes aware that the sole purpose of his life is to be God's servant. However, to serve God in order to gain the glory of martyrdom is an act against the will of God, a sinful act. Becket refuses to try and become a martyr. As he is attacked, he does not resist, nor is he excited; he simply accepts the murder. In this state of true acceptance of God's will lies his greatness. In becoming a martyr, Becket inspires his followers with strength and courage.
Minor Theme Life is filled with temptations: the temptation of the luxurious life, the temptation of subduing and using others, and the ultimate temptation of power. In his earlier life, Becket admits he was not always able to overcome temptation. But he has fully repented and put pride aside. Now seeking to do only the will of God, he finds great strength. In truth, overcoming temptation always takes strength of faith and character, but the rewards of heaven are higher than the rewards of earth. Mood
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The mood of the play is totally serious and somber, with a constant undercurrent of impending tragedy throughout in
The Glass Menagerie(1944) By
Tennesse Williams
Character List:
Amanda Wingfield: Once a Southern belle who was the darling of her small town's social scene, Amanda is now an abandoned wife and single mother living in a small apartment in St. Louis. She dreams of her past and of her daughter's future, but seems unwilling to recognize certain harsh realities of the present. She is a loving mother, but her demands can make life difficult for Laura and unbearable for Tom.
Laura Wingfield: Crippled from childhood, Laura walks with the aid of a leg brace. Laura is painfully shy, unable to face the world outside of the tiny Wingfield apartment. She spends her time polishing her collection of tiny glass animals, her "glass menagerie." Her presence is almost ghostly, and her inability to connect with others outside of her family makes her dependent on Tom and Amanda. Jim's nickname for her, "Blue Roses," suggests both her odd beauty and her isolation, as blue roses exist nowhere in the real world. She is in many ways like Rose, Tennessee Williams' real-life sister.
Tom Wingfield: Tom is an aspiring poet who works in the Continental Shoemakers warehouse. He is the narrator of the play: the action of the play is framed by Tom's memory. Tom loves his mother and sister, but he feels trapped at home. They are dependent on his wages, and as long as he stays with them he feels he can never have a life of his own. Nightly, he disappears to "go to the movies."
Jim O'Connor: The long-awaited gentleman caller. He is outgoing, enthusiastic, and believes in self-improvement. He kisses Laura and raises her hopes before revealing to her that he is engaged. Tom describes him as a person more connected to the real world than any of the other characters are, but Jim is also a symbol for the "expected something that we live for.
The Glass Menagerie was written in 1944, based on reworked material from one of Williams' short stories, "Portrait of a Girl in Glass," and his screenplay, The Gentleman Caller. In the weeks leading up to opening night (December 26, 1944 in Chicago), Williams had deep doubts about the production‹the theater did not expect the play to last more than a few nights, and the producers prepared a closing notice in response to the weak initial ticket sales. But two critics loved the show, and returned almost nightly to monitor the production. Meanwhile, they gave the play enthusiastic reviews and continued to praise it daily in their respective papers. By mid-January,
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tickets to the show were some of the hottest items in Chicago, nearly impossible to obtain. Later in 1945, the play opened in New York with similar success. On opening night in New York, the cast received an unbelievable twenty-five curtain calls.
Tennessee Williams did not express strong admiration for any early American playwrights; his greatest dramatic influence was the brilliant Russian playwright Anton Chekhov. Chekhov, with his elegant juxtaposition of the humorous and the tragic, his lonely characters, and his dark sensibilities, was a powerful inspiration for Tennessee Williams' work‹although Williams' plays are undeniably American in setting and character. The novelist D.H. Lawrence offered Williams a depiction of sexuality as a potent force of life; Lawrence is alluded to in The Glass Menagerie as one of the writers favored by Tom. The American poet Hart Crane was another important influence on Williams; with Crane's dramatic life, open homosexuality, and determination to create poetry that did not mimic European sensibilities, Williams found a great source of inspiration. Williams also belongs to the tradition of great Southern writers who have invigorated literary language with the lyricism of Southern English.
Like Eugene O'Neill, Tennessee Williams wanted to challenge some of the conventions of naturalistic theatre. Summer and Smoke (1948), Camino Real (1953), and The Glass Menagerie (1944), among others, provided some of the early testing ground for Williams' innovations. The Glass Menagerie uses music, screen projections, and lighting effects to create the haunting and dream-like atmosphere appropriate for a "memory play." Like Eugene O'Neill's Emperor Jones and Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman, Williams' play explores ways of using the stage to depict the interior life and memories of a character. Tom, as narrator, moves in and out of the action of the play. There are not realistic rules for the convention: we also see events that Tom did not directly witness. The screen projections seem heavy-handed, but at the time their use would have seemed to be a cutting-edge innovation. The projections use film-like effects and the power of photography (art forms that are much younger than drama) in a theatrical setting. In The Glass Menagerie, Williams' skillful use of the narrator and his creation of a dream-like, illusory atmosphere help to create a powerful representation of family, memory, and loss.
Short Summary:
The action of The Glass Menagerie takes place in the Wingfield family's apartment in St. Louis, 1937. The events of the play are framed by memory. Tom Wingfield, who usually smokes and stands on the fire escape as he delivers his monologues, is the play's narrator. The narrator addresses us from the undated and eternal present, although at the play's first production (1944-5), Tom's constant indirect references to the violence of the Second World War would have been powerfully current.
The action of the play centers on Tom, his mother Amanda, and his sister Laura. In 1937 they live together in a small apartment in St. Louis. Their father abandoned them years earlier, and Tom is now the family's breadwinner. He works at the Continental Shoemakers warehouse during the day, but he disappears nightly "to the movies." Amanda is a loving mother, but her meddling and nagging are hard to live with for
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Tom, who is a grown man and who is earning the wages that support their family. Laura is a frightened and terribly shy girl, with unbelievably weak nerves. She is also slightly lame in one leg, and she seldom leaves the apartment of her own volition. She busies herself caring for her "glass menagerie," a collection of delicate little glass animals.
Amanda dreams constantly of the long-ago days when she was a young Southern belle and the darling of her small town's social scene. She enrolled Laura in classes at Rubicam's Business College, hoping that a career in business would make Laura self-sufficient. She discovers that Laura stopped attending class a long time ago, because the speed tests on the typewriter terrified her. After the fiasco at Rubicam's Amanda gives up on a business career for Laura and puts all her hopes into finding a husband for her.
Amanda's relationship with Tom is difficult. Tom longs to be free‹like his father‹to abandon Amanda and Laura and set off into the world. He has stayed because of his responsibility for them, but his mother's nagging and his frail sister's idiosyncrasies make the apartment a depressing and oppressive place. Tom also hates his job. His only escape comes from his frequent visits to the movies, but his nightly disappearances anger and baffle Amanda. He fights with Amanda all the time, and the situation at home grows more unbearable.
Amanda, sensing that Tom wants to leave, tries to make a deal with him. If Tom and Amanda can find a husband for Laura, a man who can take care of her, then Tom will be free of his responsibility to them. Amanda asks Tom to bring home gentlemen callers to meet Laura. Tom brings home Jim O'Connor, a fellow employee at the warehouse. He is an outgoing and enthusiastic man on whom Laura had a terrible crush back in high school. Jim chats with Laura, growing increasingly flirtatious, until he finally kisses her. Then he admits that he has a fiancé and cannot call again. For fragile Laura, the news is devastating.
Amanda is furious, and after Jim leaves she accuses Tom of playing a cruel joke on them. Amanda and Tom have one final fight, and not long afterward Tom leaves for good. In his closing monologue, he admits that he cannot escape the memory of his sister. Though he abandoned her years ago, Laura still haunts him.
The Glass Menagerie is loosely autobiographical. The characters all have some basis in the real-life family of Tennessee Williams: Edwina is the hopeful and demanding Amanda, Rose is the frail and shy Laura (whose nickname, "Blue Roses," refers directly back to Williams' real-life sister), and distant and cold Cornelius is the faithless and absent father. Tom is Williams' surrogate. Williams actually worked in a shoe warehouse in St. Louis, and there actually was a disastrous evening with the only gentleman caller who ever came for Rose. Thomas was also Tennessee Williams' real name, and the name "Thomas" means twin‹making Tom the surrogate not only for Williams but also possibly for the audience. He is our eye into the Wingfields' situation. His dilemma forms a central conflict of the play, as he faces an agonizing choice between responsibility for his family and living his own life.
The play is replete with lyrical symbolism. The glass menagerie, in its fragility and delicate beauty, is a symbol for Laura. She is oddly beautiful and, like her glass
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pieces, easy to destroy. The fire escape is most closely linked to Tom's character and to the theme of escape. Laura stumbles on the escape, while Tom uses it to get out of the apartment and into the outside world. He goes down the fire escape one last time at the end of the play, and he stands on the landing during his monologues. His position there metaphorically illustrates his position between his family and the outside world, between his responsibility and the need to live his own life.
The play is non-naturalistic, playing with stage conventions and making use of special effects like music and slide projections. By writing a "memory play," Tennessee Williams freed himself from the restraints of naturalistic theatre. The theme of memory is important: for Amanda, memory is a kind of escape. For Tom, the older Tom who narrates the events of the play to the audience, memory is the thing that cannot be escaped: he is still haunted by memories of the sister whom he abandoned years ago.
Scene 1:
Analysis:
From the beginning, the figure of the narrator shows that Williams' play will not follow the conventions of realistic theatre. The narrator breaks the conceptual "fourth wall" of naturalistic drama by addressing the audience directly. Tom also tells us that he is going to give the audience truth disguised as illusion, making the audience conscious of the illusory quality of theatre. By playing with the theme of memory and its distortions, Williams is free to use music, monologues, and projected images to haunting effect. Tom, as narrator, tells the audience that the gentleman caller is a real person‹more real, in many ways, than any other character‹but he also tells the audience that the gentleman is a symbol for the "expected something that we live for," the thing for which we are always waiting and hoping. This naming of a character as both real entity and symbol is characteristic of Williams' work; both of these aspects of the gentleman caller are important to the overall impact of the play.
The allusion to Guernica and the turmoil in Spain, juxtaposed to the uneasy peace in America, establishes a tense atmosphere as the play's background. The Americans of the thirties lived in relative peace, but for the 1944-5 audience of the play's first production, the thirties would have been seen as the calm before the storm of World War II. The allusion to Guernica (bombed by Germany, ally of the fascist forces in Spain; the carnage was famously depicted in a painting by Pablo Picasso) serves as a reminder that before long war will be coming to everyone, the United States included. There is symmetry between the uneasy peace of the time period and the uneasy peace in the Wingfield house. Just as America stirs restlessly with the uneasy peace before the Second World War, Tom seethes with the need to escape his home and set out into the world‹as his father did before him. The fire escape, a visually prominent part of the set, is an important symbol for the imprisonment that Tom feels and the possibility of a way out. In his stage directions, Williams characteristically imbues the fire escape with symbolic weight, saying that the buildings are burning with the "implacable fires of human desperation." Tom addresses the audience from the fire escape, and his positioning there, standing alone between the outside world and the
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space of the apartment, points to the painful choice he makes later in the play. In order to escape, he must escape alone and leave his mother and sister behind.
Originally, the script called for the use of a projector, which, during each scene, showed images to emphasize certain motifs and symbols during the action. (The projector was not used in the first production, but some productions since have used the idea and the instructions for the device remain in the script.) For example, while Amanda is speaking, the script says that a projected image of Amanda as a young girl appears. These photographic images and projected text emphasize the symbolic elements of the play as well as the theme of memory; in the case of Amanda's image, we are given memory within memory, a memory framed by the larger memory of the play itself. The audience is therefore twice removed from the world of the image, contributing to the dream-like and ghostly atmosphere of the play. While the projected image gives added force to Amanda's words, showing the audience a visual representation alongside the images created by Amanda's speech, these visual images become symbolic of memory's paradoxical nature. On one hand, the visual image is real, right before our eyes, and full of evocative power; on the other hand, it is only a photograph from a distant past and is therefore frozen and lifeless.
Amanda is always returning mentally to this past, which is immaterial and far-removed from her current reality. Her reaction to Laura shows that she is strangely in denial about the nature of her own daughter. Laura is crippled, able to walk only slowly and with great effort, and emotionally she is terribly fragile. The contrast between the vivacious and talkative Amanda and her timid, soft-spoken daughter could not be stronger. Tom has a tender relationship with Laura; when Tom expresses frustration at the start of Amanda's story about her gentlemen callers, it is Laura who persuades Tom to humor their mother.
The relationship between Tom and Amanda is tense; in this scene, he seems to be struggling to tolerate her, and while Amanda is loving she is also demanding beyond reason. Her insistence that Laura stay put while Amanda plays "the darky" shows her extremely provincial Southern upbringing. In her youth she was wealthy enough to have servants, but now, with her husband gone, she is struggling to make ends meet. She wants to relive her past through Laura, transplanting the quaint life she had in Blue Mountain to the urban setting of St. Louis. Amanda seems oblivious to Tom's unhappiness and Laura's painful shyness.
Scene 2
Analysis:
This is the first scene where the audience sees Laura taking care of her glass menagerie. The glass menagerie is the most important symbol for Laura and her fragility. Her engagement with the tiny animals reveals how painfully afraid she is of interaction with other humans. The qualities of glass parallel Laura's characteristics: like the tiny glass animals, she is delicate, beautiful in her oddness, terribly fragile. The little collection, like Laura, in an entity that is locked completely in the realm of the home. The animals must be kept on a little shelf and polished; there is only one
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place where they belong. In a similar way, Laura is kept and cared for, dependent on her mother and brother for financial support. The Blue Roses are another important symbol of Laura. The image of blue roses is a beautiful one‹and it is the image that is on the screen at the start of Scene Two. But blue roses are also pure fantasy, non-existent in the real world. Laura, like a blue rose, is special, unique even, but she is also cut off from real life.
Her attempt to learn job skills at Rubicam's Business College was a terrible failure. She became physically ill and could not bear to continue going to class. Her subsequent deception and fear of her own mother's disappointment shows how oppressive Amanda can be; although Amanda is not in any way cruel, and in fact is very loving, her investment in her children and her need to live through them is a terrible burden for Tom and Laura.
Amanda's anxieties show the difficulty of their financial situation. She is sincerely fearful of what will become of Laura, now that Laura has given up any hope of a career. Amanda works, but the Wingfield family is dependent on Tom's wages. This dependency puts Tom in a difficult position, and we'll see more of that difficulty in Scene Three.
Scene 3:
Analysis:
The idea of a gentleman caller becomes Amanda's obsession and the great hope for the Wingfields to attain financial security. With a husband, Laura will be provided for and the two women will no longer be dependent on Tom. However, Amanda's ambition for Laura shows the level of her disconnection from real life and the fragility of her dreams. Even if Laura could find a husband, it is strange that Amanda should have so much faith that a husband for Laura would mean security for their family. After all, Amanda's own husband was faithless, and his decision to leave their family led to their current predicament.
The "Mr. Lawrence" Amanda refers to is D.H. Lawrence, one of the important influences on Tennessee Williams. The allusion to D.H. Lawrence tells us about Tom's needs. Lawrence's work was daring and provocative, especially for its time. His novels depicted sexuality as a powerful force, and Tom's interest in Lawrence's work suggests both Tom's literary ambitions and his frustration. Tom is trapped in the apartment, with no outlets at home for the ambitions or desires of a young man.
One of the play's important themes is the conflict between the desire to live one's own life and the responsibility for one's family. Tom's wages pay the bills, but Amanda continues to treat him as a child. She confiscates and returns his books, and during their argument she attempts to control their discussion as an adult controls an argument with a little boy.
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Tom's nightly disappearance "to the movies" has been played in different ways, depending on the production. While his later discussion of his frustration with movies suggests that he goes to the movies at least part of the time, some critics have argued that Tom might be spending his nights exploring the city's hidden gay world. The text does not give enough evidence to make a definitive argument either way. In his monologues to the audience, Tom does not give firm indication of where he used to spend his nights. Nothing in the text rules out the possibility that Tom spends his nights seeking out men for sexual encounters. He never really directly denies that he is going somewhere other than the movies, and with the audience he never addresses the question of whether or not her really goes to the movies. He also arrives home at times‹five in the morning, in one scene‹when it seems unlikely that a movie would just be ending. His anger at being questioned does not help to shed light on the matter: he would be angry if he was telling the truth about going to the movies, and he would be angry if he had something to hide. Critics who favor the sexual interpretation of Tom's nightly disappearances often cite Tennessee Williams' youth and his grappling with his own sexuality. The play is in many other respects autobiographical, and Tom is Williams' surrogate‹he even bears Tennessee Williams' real name. If Tom were gay, his frustration with home would be even greater. Tom would feel even more isolated and restless, unable to tell the truth to his mother and sister.
When Tom accidentally breaks some of the pieces in the glass menagerie, the incident foreshadows Laura's heartbreak later on in the play. The event emphasizes the collection's fragility, and so metaphorically we are reminded of Laura's fragility. Tom is the one responsible, and the pain of his position is made clear. As much as he would like to live his own life, his actions have a great effect on the well-being and security of his mother and sister. By being reckless, he destroys the pretend-world of his sister. Later on, he chooses to live his own life rather than live up to his responsibility for her security.
Scene 4:
Analysis:
Tom's fascination with the movies and the magician shows his need for fantasy and escapism. Tom is always dreaming of fantastic places far from St. Louis, and for now he escapes through the illusions offered by the movie house and the stage magician. He dreams of leaving home, but his responsibilities for his sister and his mother have so far kept him in the Wingfield apartment. What he sees at the magic show is directly connected to the theme of conflict between Tom's responsibility for his family and his need to live his own life. The magician's most impressive trick becomes a symbol for what Tom wishes he could do‹to make a clean, easy escape, without destroying the coffin or removing any nails. The use of the coffin as a symbol for Tom's predicament shows the depth of his unhappiness. He feels spiritually dead, despising his work and stifled by the atmosphere at home. In his talk with Amanda, he suggests that his work emasculates him, making it impossible for him to follow the instincts of a man. The magician is able to escape the coffin without the messiness of having to remove nails, which would damage the coffin. Tom can escape, but only at great cost. Metaphorically, he would have to "remove nails," causing great damage‹he would
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have to abandon his sister and mother and leave them to an uncertain fate. Tom is in awe of the magician because he does not have to choose; he can escape without causing any harm, a feat that might be impossible for Tom.
Laura's vulnerability is emphasized in that symbolic space most closely linked to Tom, the fire escape. Tom will later climb down the fire escape one final time, leaving the apartment forever. Laura stumbles on the fire escape, and the fall symbolizes her inability to fend for herself in the outside world.
The scene balances Tom's frustration with his home situation against the tenderness the Wingfields feel for each other. Laura is able to exhort Tom to apologize, and at the start of his conversation with Amanda, Tom's affection for his mother is clear. As their conversation continues, however, the old rifts seem inescapable. There is a moment of dramatic irony when Amanda tries to get Tom to eat and to promise that he will not become a drunkard; the audience knows, although Amanda does not, that Tom is probably horribly hung over and that he came home drunk only a few hours ago. This moment shows the greatness of the divide between mother and son; she knows nothing of his state, and so her attempts to care for him are met with irritability. Tension escalates gradually but steadily, suggesting that no peace between Tom and Amanda can ever be easy or long-lasting.
Amanda is still fixating on the idea of the gentleman caller. She proposes a swap; Tom's freedom in exchange for a husband for Laura. Amanda is still putting her security into the hands of men; perhaps she sees no alternative. Although her old husband's irresponsibility and Tom's increasing restlessness would seem to argue against the reliability of male providers, Amanda is still hoping to find an ideal husband for her daughter. This hope will prove to be misplaced. Even the gentleman caller, when he finally comes, will be careless with Laura.
Scene 5:
Analysis:
The first part of the scene uses the time setting to reinforce a sense of tension and expectation. The newspaper headline, "Franco Triumphs," gives the audience the first specific marker for the time of the play: 1937. In Tom's speech from the fire escape, the symbolic name of Paradise Dance Hall can be read in a number of ways. "Paradise" is an allusion to the lost Garden of Eden, and here the allusion paints the American thirties as a period of innocence before the turmoil of World War II. The dance hall, because it is being described as a memory, creates a sense of loss due to the passage of time. This loss of innocence occurs for the nation‹Tom tells us that the dancers could not have known what was coming, and he makes yet another allusion to the carnage of Guernica, which has by now become a symbol for the violence in which the entire world will soon be enmeshed. On a personal level, Paradise Dance Hall might symbolize more specific loss that Tom has experienced. For the older Tom narrating the play, the fragile world of his family is lost forever.
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But for the characters living through the action of the play, the Paradise Dance Hall symbolizes hope. This scene, with Amanda and Tom sitting on the fire escape, wishing on the moon and surrounded by the music and lights of the nearby dance hall, is lyrical and beautiful. The rainbow-colored lights and the lively music point to a world of leisure, ease, and good times. Paradise, from this perspective, is not a thing lost and receding into the past, but is rather a thing that might be gained in the future. Amanda's life story, as she tells it, includes both kinds of Paradise: she longs for the idyllic world of her youth and her seventeen gentleman callers, and she longs for a future fairy-tale ending for her daughter. Through the conventions of the stage, however, the dance hall is always just out of reach. The audience can hear the music, possibly see the lights, and hear characters' descriptions of the place, but the Paradise Dance Hall can only be suggested indirectly, as out of reach for the audience as "Paradise" is for Tom, Amanda, and Laura. With the narrator's added perspective and his remarks about the trouble that will engulf the world, we are made to see the illusory nature of the kind of "Paradise" represented by the dance hall.
Despite the lessons from Amanda's own unhappy marriage, Amanda imagines that her daughter will be the princess of a Cinderella story. Jim O'Connor, named in Tom's first monologue as a symbol for that special something that we all wait and live for, is supposed to be (in Amanda's dreams) the prince who rescues Laura and provides her with a happy ending. Amanda is imagining a fairy tale life for her daughter, and when she asks Laura to wish on the "little silver slipper of a moon," her description of the moon is an allusion to Cinderella. Amanda is ignoring the lessons from her own marriage and the obstacle of Laura's awkwardness.
Scene 6:
Analysis:
Amanda's expectations for this evening are very high. The apartment has been made over‹with great expense‹and she has worried Laura by making such a fuss over the evening. Amanda is vicariously reliving her youth, and her longing for that youth is made clear when she dresses in the old frock she wore as a young girl. The escapism of living in the past, however, can never last long for Amanda, since all stories of her glory days end with her married to the faithless Mr. Wingfield. Although Jim is charmed by Amanda, Tom is slightly embarrassed by her behavior. She is not acting her age.
Tom's plans to abandon Amanda and Laura are revealed. His intentions are a perverse alteration of the deal offered by Amanda: she wanted him to wait until Laura could find a husband. Tom has only provided a gentleman caller, and he is already planning to leave.
We know from Tom's description of Jim that he enjoys praise. He likes the company of people who admire him, and his interaction with Laura in Scene Seven will show how this love of admiration compromises his consideration of others.
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Scene 7:
Analysis:
Although a great deal depends on the actor's interpretation, Jim's enthusiasm is selfish and empty-headed. He shamelessly leads Laura on, not maliciously but also without any careful consideration. He enjoys her company because, like Tom, Laura remembers his glory days. His speeches praising self-improvement and night classes are symptomatic of the most unimaginative and vapid interpretation of the American dream‹culminating in his appalling praise of the lust for money and power as the cycle on which democracy is built. As Tom said in the opening of the play, Jim is more a part of the real world than anyone in the Wingfield family. He is fully a creature of the world and worldly pursuits. He knows what no one else does‹that he is engaged‹and he still gives Laura the kiss that raises her hopes before he tells her the truth.
Their different memories of school show how self-conscious Laura is. The sound of her brace mortified her back in high school, but Jim cannot remember it at all. Jim tries to convince Laura that she is worthwhile and unique. A more gracious interpretation of his character would argue that part of his motivation is a desire for Laura to see how beautiful she is.
The glass unicorn becomes a symbol for Laura. She, like the unicorn, is odd and unique. Both Laura and the unicorn are fragile: Jim "breaks" both of them. Laura's gift of the broken unicorn shows the extent of her affection for him. For Jim, the evening has been insignificant. But Laura has harbored a girlish crush on him for many years‹she even saved the program of the play in which he starred‹and the gift of the unicorn, an item that is a symbol of herself, shows how much she still likes him. It is the gift of an odd and painfully shy girl, for whom kissing Jim (probably her first kiss) was a climactic experience. For a brief moment, the Wingfield apartment was a place of dreams. Amanda experienced a return to her girlhood, Laura was able to show someone her glass menagerie, and the place was full of the music from Paradise Dance Hall. But the unicorn is broken, the music of "Paradise" gives way to the sad sounds of the Victrola, and even Amanda is left without defenses against reality. For the first time, she refers to Laura as "crippled," breaking her own rule, and she seems to acknowledge that Tom will soon leave them.
This scene has its share of rose imagery. The new floor lamp has a rose-colored shade; Laura herself is "Blue Roses." The rose-colored light makes Laura look beautiful; she is bathed in rose-colored light, she is "Blue Roses," and she is also, in many ways, the surrogate for Williams' sister‹whose name was Rose. Williams uses the rose as a motif for Laura to emphasize her delicateness and her beauty, as well as her worth. The fantastic blue color of the flower shows, however, that Laura is not a being of this world. Laura's association with a candle in the final moment stands in sharp contrast to a world "lit by lightning." The image of lighting suggests a hostile and overpowering world, and in the last scene a storm is brewing outside. Especially as a lone figure juxtaposed to the turmoil of the forties and the war to come, Laura seems hopelessly frail and vulnerable.
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Tom's closing speech is a great moment. The descending fourth wall puts a powerful but permeable barrier between Tom and his family. They are behind him, behind him in time and in the physical space of the stage, and they are inaudible. Yet he cannot seem to shake the memory of them, and they are clearly visible to the audience. Although he has never explicitly spoken of one of the play's most important themes‹the conflict between responsibility and the need to live his own life‹it is clear that he has not been able to fully shake the guilt from the decision that he made. The cost of escape has been the burden of memory. For Tom and the audience, it is difficult to forget the final image of frail Laura, illuminated by candlelight on a darkened stage, while the world outside of the apartment faces the beginnings of a great storm.
Chekhov's Influence on the Work of Tennessee Williams
The shape of American drama has been molded throughout the years by the advances of numerous craftsmen. Many contemporary playwrights herald the work of Anton Chekhov as some of the most influential to modern drama. Tennessee Williams has often been compared to Anton Chekhov. When asked about the influences in his life and work Tennessee Williams once said, "The Strongest influences in my life and my work are always whomever I love, Whomever I love and am with most of the time, or whomever I remember most vividly. I think that is true of everyone, don't you?" (Brainy Quote). Williams unquestionably found Chekhov's work to be memorable enough to incorporate some elements of Chekhov's style into his own plays. Through his innate sense of the human condition, Anton Chekhov served to influence the shaping of Tennessee Williams' characters in such plays as: The Glass Menagerie and A Streetcar Named Desire.
The newness of Chekhov was his portrayal of daily life and its encompassing crisis. He illustrated how the average person suffers, their imperfections, without making excuses for the characters. Interestingly, he managed to capture the way that life is a mixture of emotions. In his plays something could be awfully tragic whilst at the same time being amusing. In life like in Chekhov's work a situation that is awful would be amusing because it was ironic or because it had to be to make it through the situation. Chekhov saw this and allowed his characters to be real in this way. Characters in Chekhov's work told the story without Chekhov imposing his voice on the audience. This allowed characterization rather than plot to carry the drama.
In The Cherry Orchard the plot revolves around a woman and her family who are losing a cherry orchard that has been in the family for generations due to their lack of funds. The main character, Ranevsky, is unable to move past the problems of her history and deal with the current crisis. The plot follows her character through a very real and sincere problem and manages to combine the misery of her problem with the natural humor and irony of life. Seeing as The Glass Menagerie is a play of memories it is fitting to compare the character of Ranevsky in The Cherry Orchard to the characters in Williams' play, in particular Amanda is a reminiscent character. Streetcar Named Desire, whilst not being a play that focuses on the memories of the characters is similar to The Cherry Orchard in plot because it also has to do with
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losing a family estate and includes the use of wit and irony in a play that seems almost tragic.
There is a natural appeal to a writing style, such as Chekhov's where characters can be natural and still holds their entertainment appeal. "Williams himself acknowledged the influence of Chekhov [on his work] (...)" (Vannatta 79). Both playwrights share a similar attitude in regards to characterization, so much so that they face some of the same problems. There is breach between the character's feelings and their ability to verbalize these emotions. This crack can threaten to become a void, which will leave the audience lost (Stein 10). The hopelessness and the mediocrity of the characters in Williams' The Glass Menagerie as well as the characters in Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard can be summed up in this quote of Chekhov's on his plays, "Any Idiot can face a crisis-its day to day living that wears you out." (Brainy Quote).
In Williams' drama The Glass Menagerie the delivery of the actors is imperative. Realism is necessary in performance to avoid down-playing expressionist elements, much like the realism Chekhov needed from his actors to extract the essence of his meaning (Borny 101-117). To create this sense of naturalism in his writing, Williams drew from his life to create his fiction. Chekhov used this same fuel to add to his integrity as a writer. Chekhov had experiences being a physician that put him in contact with a myriad of individuals and social classes (Rayfield Preface xv and p.106).
The duality of the characters in The Glass Menagerie is a depiction of how personalities are in real life. Humans feel and act one way in an instance and another way a second later. Williams like Chekhov is capturing how humans can balance different feelings and personality traits at any one time2E People can juggle being forgiving and being angry, being hurt and laughing, being happy while crying. The beauty of the work of Chekhov and of Williams is that through their understanding of this fact they create depth to their characters that makes the more appealing to the audience.
Another famous work of Williams', A Streetcar Named Desire, bares a great resemblance to the substructure of The Cherry Orchard. Sentimentality and symbolism in Streetcar are like Chekhov's work because the staged action moves toward the conclusion negating a circuitous plot line, dealings with social themes, and the main characters are relatable human beings with recognizable problems but they are all escapists. The characters are meant to tell the story without the imposing voice of a narrator. Naturalism of actions and words, down to the natural gaps in conversation, are stressed to portray scenes in a graspable manner. (Gassner 75-77). Music is a unifying theme in both plays; it is used to carry the characters into their own dream worlds. It is used to relay themes, for instance, in Streetcar, "The love of Stanley for Stella describes precisely this rhythm of violence and reconciliation, and it exists beyond Blanche's ken. The jazz motif which alternates with polka music---in contrast to Blanche's affinity for the romantic waltz---establishes the primitive norm to which each character adapts or suffers a dissonant psychic shock." (Corrigan 84). The rhythm in each author's writing helps to propel the action. "The substructure of the story [Streetcar] has some resemblance to The Cherry Orchard, whose aristocrats were also unable to adjust to reality and were crushed by it." (Gassner 76). That sums
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up how the two plays are on parallel social bases and are born of Chekhov's perceived normal human forbearing.
The presence of Anton Chekhov's influence in Tennessee Williams' work is widely recognized not just in The Glass Menagerie and A Streetcar named Desire, but he held Chekhov as one of his inspirational heroes and lent his own twist on Chekhov's style throughout many of his plays. There are similarities to be drawn to that if Anton Chekhov, between Williams' characters, political/social beliefs, substructure of the stories, and symbolism. Williams saw in Chekhov an ability to truly understand and portray human nature through his revolutionary drama and wanted to emulate that unique talent. Chekhov was a master at understanding the human condition; he emphasized the human ability to be flexible and feeling on a multitude of levels. Chekhov was one of the first to pull away from the highly dramatic monologue style of acting but Williams recognized the fact that making your characters realistic and easily relatable would never be out of style.
A Streetcar Named Desire(1947) By
Tennesse Williams
Character List:
Blanche Dubois: No longer a young girl in her twenties, Blanche Dubois has suffered through the deaths of all of her loved ones, save Stella, and the loss of her old way of life. When Blanche was a teenager, she married a young boy whom she worshipped; the boy turned out to be depressive and homosexual, and not long after their marriage he committed suicide. While Stella left Belle Reve, the Dubois ancestral home, to try and make her own life, Blanche stayed behind and cared for a generation of dying relatives. She saw the deaths of the elder generation and the end of the Dubois family fortune. In her grief, Blanche looked for comfort in amorous encounters with near-strangers. Eventually, her reputation ruined and her job lost, she was forced to leave the town of Laurel. She has come to the Kowalski apartment seeking protection and shelter.
Stella Kowalski: Blanche's younger sister. About twenty-five years old and pregnant with her first child, Stella has made a new life for herself in New Orleans. She is madly in love with her husband Stanley; their relationship is in part founded on the most direct and primitive kind of desire. She is close to Blanche, but in the end she will betray her sister horribly by refusing to believe the truth.
Stanley Kowalski: Stella's husband. A man of solid, blue-color stock, Stanley Kowalski is direct, passionate, and often violent. He has no patience for Blanche and
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the illusions she cherishes. He is a controlling and domineering man; he demands subservience from his wife and feels that his authority is threatened by Blanche's arrival. He proves that he can be cold and calculating; in the end, he moves mercilessly to ensure Blanche's destruction.
Harold "Mitch" Mitchell: One of Stanley's friends. Mitch is as tough and "unrefined" as Stanley. He is an imposing physical specimen, massively built and powerful, but he is also a deeply sensitive and compassionate man. His mother is dying, and this impending loss affects him profoundly. He is attracted to Blanche from the start, and Blanche hopes that he will ask her to marry him. In the end, these hopes are dashed by Stanley's interference.
Eunice Hubbel: The owner of the apartment building, and Steve's wife. She is generally helpful, giving Stella and Blanche shelter after Stanley beats Stella. In the end, she advises Stella that in spite of Blanche's tragedy, life has to go on. In effect, she is advising Stella not to look too hard for the truth.
Steve Hubbel: Eunices's husband. Owner of the apartment building. One of the poker players. Steve has the finally line of the play. As Blanche is carted off to the asylum, he coldly deals another hand.
Pablo Gonzales: One of the poker players. He punctuates the poker games with dashes of Spanish.
Negro Woman: The Negro Woman seems to be one of the non-naturalistic characters; it seems that the actor playing this role is in fact playing a number of different Negro women, all minor characters. Emphasizing the non-naturalistic aspect of the character, in the original production of Streetcar, the "Negro Woman" was played by a male actor.
A Strange Man (The Doctor): The Doctor arrives at the end to bring Blanche on her "vacation." After the Nurse has pinned her, the Doctor succeeds in calming Blanche. She latches onto him, depending, now and always, "on the kindness of strangers."
A Strange Woman (The Nurse): The Nurse is a brutal and impersonal character, institutional and severe in an almost stylized fashion. She wrestles Blanche to the ground.
A Young Collector: The Young Collector comes to collect money for the paper. Blanche throws herself at him shamelessly.
A Mexican Woman: Sells flowers for the dead. She sells these flowers during the powerful scene when Blanche recounts her fall(s) from grace
During the incredibly successful run of The Glass Menagerie, theatre workmen taught Williams how to play poker. Williams was already beginning to work on a new story,
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about two Southern belles in a small apartment with a rough crowd of blue-collar men. A poker game played by the men was to be central to the action of the play; eventually, this story evolved into A Streetcar Named Desire.
Streetcar hit theaters in 1946. The play cemented William's reputation as one of the greatest American playwrights, winning him a New York's Critics Circle Award and a Pullitzer Prize. Among the play's greatest achievements is the depiction of the psychology of working class characters. In the plays of the period, depictions of working class life tended to be didactic, with a focus on social commentary or a kind of documentary drama. Williams' play sought to depict working-class characters as psychologically evolved entities; to some extent, Williams tries to portray these blue-collar characters on their own terms, without romanticizing them.
Tennessee Williams did not express strong admiration for any early American playwrights; his greatest dramatic influence was the brilliant Russian playwright Anton Chekhov. Chekhov, with his elegant juxtaposition of the humorous and the tragic, his lonely characters, and his dark sensibilities, was a powerful inspiration for Tennessee Williams' work. At the same time, Williams' plays are undeniably American in setting and character. Another important influence was the novelist D.H. Lawrence, who offered Williams a depiction of sexuality as a potent force of life; Lawrence is alluded to in The Glass Menagerie as one of the writers favored by Tom. The American poet Hart Crane was another important influence on Williams; in Crane's tragic life and death, open homosexuality, and determination to create poetry that did not mimic European sensibilities, Williams found endless inspiration. Williams also belongs to the tradition of great Southern writers who have invigorated literary language with the lyricism of Southern English.
Like Eugene O'Neill, Tennessee Williams wanted to challenge some of the conventions of naturalistic theatre. Summer and Smoke (1948), Camino Real (1953), and The Glass Menagerie (1944), among others, provided some of the early testing ground for Williams' innovations. The Glass Menagerie uses music, screen projections, and lighting effects to create the haunting and dream-like atmosphere appropriate for a "memory play." Like Eugene O'Neill's Emperor Jones and Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman, Williams' plays explores ways of using the stage to depict the interior life and memories of a character.
In Streetcar, stage effects are used to represent Blanche's decent into madness. The maddening polka music, jungle sound effects, and strange shadows help to represent the world as Blanche experiences it. These effects are a departure from the conventions of naturalistic drama, although in this respect Streetcar is not as innovative as The Glass Menagerie. Nevertheless, A Streetcar Named Desire uses these effects to create a highly subjective portrait of the play's central action. On stage, these effects powerfully evoke the terror and isolation of madness
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Endgame(1957) By
Samuel Beckett List of Characters
Hamm: A blind man who is no longer able to walk. He is in charge of the shelter where all four characters are trapped, and he has control over the food supply. He seems to be Clov's master, and is possibly also Clov's father. His parents are Nagg and Nell. Hamm is very childish and frequently demands that Clov perform little rituals for him such as looking out the windows and describing what he sees. Both Hamm and Clov are linked as a "pair", meaning that if one of them leaves, the other will die.
Clov: Clov serves at times as Hamm's menial, son, or beast. He and Hamm engage in many verbal games throughout the play. He is paired with Hamm because he can see and stand, whereas Hamm is blind and must sit. Clov constantly tells Hamm that he is leaving, but he never does.
Nagg: Hamm's father, Nagg lives in an ashcan. He is paired with his wife Nell, and he has to beg for food. Hamm bribes Nagg into listening to a story, but then refuses to pay up.
Nell: Hamm's mother, she also lives in an ashcan which is situated next to Nagg's can. Unfortunately, she cannot share any real physical contact with Nagg because their cans are too far apart. Nell is the only character who dies during the play.
Endgame was written by Beckett in 1957 and translated in English in 1958. There are several differences between the French original and the English translation, notably the title and the scene where Clov spots the young boy. The play falls into the category of Theater of the Absurd. It has been critiqued as a play where nothing happens once, as opposed to Waiting for Godot, a play where nothing happens twice. However, Endgame should be viewed instead as a much better version of Waiting for Godot. Many of the same themes exist in Endgame, but they are much denser and they do not require the two act repetition to get their point across. The one major difference between the two plays is that in Endgame the sense of despair is heightened by the fact that the characters are not waiting for anything (other than death, which is is pronounced in both plays).
When Beckett sent the manuscript of Endgame to Alan Schneider, he wrote in a letter that Endgame is "Rather difficult and elliptic, mostly depending on the power of the text to claw." The play is known to have been Beckett's favorite play and its condensed format likely contributed to his favoring it over Waiting for Godot
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Summary
The setting for Endgame is a bare room with two small windows situated high up on the back wall. This is a shelter for the four characters; the rest of the world is supposed to be dead. The right window looks out over the earth, and the left window looks out over the sea. Hamm is onstage, seated in chair, and covered with a sheet when the play opens. Clov enters and proceeds to set up a ladder so he can look out both windows. Once he has completed this ritual he leaves the room and goes to his kitchen.
Hamm wakes up wanting to play games. He whistles and Clov immediately appears. They discuss Hamm's eyes, which Clov has never looked at. Hamm asks Clov to put the sheet back over him, indicating that he wants to go to sleep. Clov refuses, and Hamm threatens not to feed him anymore. Clov says that then he will die.
Hamm finally asks Clov why he does not leave. Clov indicates that he is trying to leave, and that someday he will. Hamm then wants to know why Clov will not kill him. Their conversation is stunted by the fact that whenever one of them makes a statement, it is countered by the other person. The first speaker then agrees with the counter argument, meaning that the conversation immediately ends. Analysis
Endgame is the term used to describe an ending in chess where the outcome is already known. Chess masters often study endgames in order to guarantee themselves victory once they maneuver their opponent into a certain position. Beckett, an avid chess fan, saw the parallel between the chess endgame the final stages of life. He realized that death is the final outcome and that regardless of how a person plays the game, he or she will die. The imagery of chess is presented in the play through Clov and Hamm who are red and Nagg and Nell who are white.
The stage setting is important because it has been likened to a skull. The two windows on the back wall form the eye sockets of this skull, and the characters represent the brain and memory. Thus the entire stage serves as a metaphor for an aging mind.
This skull-like setting is complemented by several textual references to Dante's Inferno. For instance, Clov comments at one point that they are in a refuge between earth and sea, while Hamm observes, "That here we're down in a hole." The text later adds that the sun is sinking, "down among the dead," that they are beyond certain hills, and that beyond the walls, "is the...other hell." The implication of placing the characters in Dante's inferno is that they will be doomed to repeating the act of their crime for all eternity. In typical Beckettian fashion, the crime can be viewed as "life," meaning that they are doomed to repeat life forever.
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The subject of Endgame is whether Clov will leave Hamm. Their relationship, which alternates between slave/master and son/father, is also a mutually beneficial one. Hamm provides food and shelter, whereas Clov provides legs and eyesight. Part of the problem with Clov leaving is that doing so is an act of suicide. If he leaves Hamm, he will not have any food, and without someone to feed him, Hamm will die as well.
The relationship between Hamm and Clov is also confused by Hamm's biographical story. Told daily and seemingly without an end (because a biography can only truly be ended when the person is dead), the story seems to hint at the possibility that Clov might be the boy alluded to. This is supported in the text by Clov's comment, "And then he [the boy] would have grown up." Hamm responds enigmatically with, "Very likely."
Beckett highlights one theme in particular, that of "finishing". This theme is presented right in the opening moments, with Clov saying, "Finished, it's finished, nearly finished, it must be finished." This same theme is later echoed by Hamm. However, what soon becomes clear is that things remain unfinished; actually finishing something represents death.
The theme of finishing ties in with the daily rituals and games. These serve as a means of affirming life for the various characters; Clov knows he is still not dead as long as Hamm demands that he look out of the windows. Nagg and Nell do the same thing: Nagg asks Nell to kiss him as a way of affirming that he and she are still in the same position they were in the day before. Thus when both Nell and Clov ask, "Why this farce, day after day?," we realize that they do nonetheless perform the ritual in order to satisfy their own need to affirm their existence.
It is interesting and important that Nell dies. Although Hamm asks Clov to kill him, he is unable perform the act. Thus Nell is the only character able to escape this world. Her last word is "desert", which has several interesting implications. Clov interprets this to mean that he should go into the desert. This brings to mind Christ venturing into the desert for forty days of temptation by the devil; perhaps Nell has given Clov a hint as to how he can achieve salvation. However, Clov does not listen well enough, and we soon learn that he did not understand everything that she said to him.
One of the greatest fears that all the characters share is that of being reincarnated or resurrected after death. Thus they make an effort to kill all potential procreators such as the flea: "But humanity might start from there all over again! Catch him, for the love of God!" This is taken to the extreme in the form of trying to kill the the rat and later trying to kill the little boy.
The emergence of the boy at the end has been interpreted by many critics as a symbol of resurrection. Whether or not this is accurate, his appearance does cause Hamm to say, "It's the end, Clov, we've come to the end. I don't need you any more." However, Clov's eventual departure is thrown into doubt at the very end when Clov does not actually leave the stage, but rather remains standing in the doorway dressed to leave.
One of the things that Beckett said about Endgame is that it is "Rather difficult and elliptic, mostly depending on the power of the text to claw." He also pointed out that it is less hopeful than Waiting for Godot. As one critic noted, Waiting for Godot is a
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despairing play about hope, Endgame is a despairing play about despair. A further difference is that the ambiguous "thing" replaces Godot in terms of tormenting the characters. Hamm asks, "Do you not think this has gone on long enough?...This...this...thing." Endgame stands out as one of Beckett's best plays, and it happened to also be Beckett's favorite play.
Hamm's father, Nagg, lifts the cover of his bin and appears, his face white. Hamm immediately curses him, calling him, "Accursed progenitor!" Nagg wants his pap, but instead all he gets is a biscuit to gnaw on. Clov then "bottles" him by pushing him back down into his bin. Hamm wants Clov to sit on top of the bin, but Clov indicates that his legs are so bad that he cannot sit down.
Hamm then comments that nature has forgotten them. Clov argues that there is no more nature. When Hamm points out that they are aging, Clov comments that then nature has not forgotten them. This brief conversation is indicative of their constant wordplay. Hamm then asks if it is time for his pain-killer, but Clov tells him it is not yet time.
After Clov returns to his kitchen, Hamm leans back in his chair and tries to sleep. Nagg emerges again and knocks on Nell's bin. She emerges as well. Nagg asks her for a kiss, but they cannot reach each other because the bins are too far apart. They start to recall past events and remember losing their legs in the famous accident in Ardennes. They then complain that the sand in their bins does not get changed often enough. Nagg offers Nell a bit of the biscuit, but she refuses.
Hamm wakes up and tells them to be quiet. Nell asks if Nagg has anything else to say to her, and when he does not, she tells him she is going to leave him. He asks her to scratch him, but since she cannot reach him, she refuses. He then tries to tell her a joke about a tailor. She recalls the first time he ever told her the joke. Nagg soon starts to tell it.
The joke is about a man who orders a pair of trousers from a tailor. After waiting several days he returns, but they are not yet finished. Every time he goes back to get his trousers, the tailor gives him an excuse about why they are not yet finished. Finally the man explodes in rage and says, "In six days...God made the world...And you are not bloody well capable of making me a pair of trousers in three months!" The tailor replies, "But my dear Sir...look at the world...and look at my trousers!"
Hamm orders Nagg to be silent and whistles for Clov. He orders Clov to chuck the two bins into the sea. Clov goes over to Nell and feels her pulse, and after she utters the final word, "desert," he pushes he back into the bin. He then tells Hamm that Nell has no pulse. Hamm, after making sure both Nagg and Nell are back in their bins, asks for his pain-killer again. Again, Clov refuses to give it too him, saying it is too early.
Clov then pushes Hamm's chair around the room in a circular fashion. Hamm says, "Right round the world!" and wants Clov to "Hug the walls." Clov finally pushes the chair up against the wall and Hamm knocks on it. After declaring that the bricks are
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hollow, Hamm demands to be put back in his spot. He carefully, and comically, forces Clov to put his chair in the dead center of the stage.
Hamm then wants to know about the weather. He makes Clov get the ladder and look at the earth. Clov says he sees "Zero...zero...and zero." Hamm then demands that Clov look at the ocean. The only thing Clov sees is that sun has gone down and that it is gray outside.
Clov suddenly realizes that he has a flea. Hamm says, "But humanity might start from there all over again! Catch him, for the love of God!" Clov gets some flea powder and pours it down his pants until he is sure that he killed the flea. Hamm then decides that he wants to leave the shelter. He orders Clov to build him a raft so he can leave "tomorrow." He then asks for his pain-killer again, but again Clov refuses to give it to him.
Clov discusses leaving Hamm again, but as before he is not ready to go. Hamm reveals that he, "was a father to [Clov]." This comment makes their relationship unclear; is Clov a servant or Hamm's son? Hamm then demands his dog, which turns out to be a toy dog that is missing a leg. Hamm makes Clov hold the dog in a begging position so that he can pet him. He then orders Clov to get his gaff. Clov comments, "Do this, do that, and I do it. I never refuse. Why?"
Hamm takes the gaff and tries to push himself with it, but he soon gives up. Hamm relates a story of a madman who used to look at the world and only see ashes. He then asks Clov how he will know the difference between Clov leaving him or Clov dying in the kitchen. Clov indicates that if he dies, the place will stink. Hamm then points out that the place stinks already.
Hamm orders Clov to think of a solution. Clov decides to set the alarm clock as a sign that he has left. If Hamm hears the alarm, he will know that Clov is gone, whereas if there is no alarm, then Clov is dead. He quickly tests the alarm to make sure it is working. Hamm asks for his pain-killer, but Clov will not give it to him.
Hamm then says that it is time for his daily story. This is a semi-biographical story that Hamm invents a part of every day. Clov wakes up Nagg and Hamm bribes his father into listening to the story. The story consists of Hamm, a prosperous man with money and food, watching a man crawl towards him on his belly. The man petitions Hamm to save his little boy. He explains that everyone is dead in his hometown except for his little boy, whom he wants Hamm to save before the boy starves to death. Hamm gets extremely angry with the man for asking for food, but when he calms down he offers the man a job. The man accepts and then begs to have his child with him. Hamm ends the story at that spot.
Clov returns from the kitchen and informs Hamm that there is a rat in the kitchen. He has tried to kill it, but without success. Nagg then demands his sugar-plum, which is what Hamm promised him if he would listen to the story. Hamm insists that they pray first. After some silent prayer, Hamm comments, "The bastard! He doesn't exist!" Hamm then tells Nagg that there are no more sugar-plums. Nagg comments that having such an ungrateful son is "natural" given that he used to ignore Hamm's cries
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when Hamm called for him as a child. Nagg then knock on Nell's bin, but when she does not appear he disappears back into his own bin.
Hamm tries to touch the toy dog again, but is has fallen to the ground. Clov picks it up and gives it to Hamm before starting to clean up the floor. Hamm orders him to stop cleaning up and makes Clov drop all the things back onto the floor. Hamm then recounts the story he told to Nagg; Clov compliments him being able to continue the story.
Hamm has Clov check on Nagg and Nell. Clov says that it appears as if Nell is dead, whereas Nagg is merely crying in his bin. Wanting some light, Hamm has Clov push his chair to one of the windows. He does not feel any light and orders Clov to move him to the other window, the window that looks out towards the sea. Hamm finally gives up when Clov tells him there is no light.
Hamm then calls to Nagg. Clov goes over and speaks to Nagg, who refuses to come out of his bin. Clov soon leaves, and Hamm delivers a long soliloquy. He remarks that when he ends his story, he might start another one. At the end of his soliloquy he whistles for Clov, and is surprised when Clov appears with the alarm clock.
Clov indicates that he has not left yet. Hamm then asks for his pain-killer and is excited to learn that it is the right time for it. However, Clov cruelly tells him that there is no more pain-killer. Hamm is crushed to learn that he will have to suffer without any pain-killer, and in the meantime Clov hangs up the alarm clock.
Hamm then orders Clov to look at the earth again. Clov dutifully climbs the ladder, but accidentally looks out of the left window and sees the ocean. He first thinks that the land is under water before realizing that he is at that wrong window. He goes over to the other window and climbs up, but Hamm requires that he use the telescope. Clov climbs back down the ladder and searches for the telescope.
While Clov is searching, Hamm demands his dog. Clov angrily takes the dog and hits Hamm on the head with it before handing it to him. Clov finally finds the telescope and climbs the ladder with it. He looks around and surprisingly spots a small boy. Clov immediately picks up the gaff with the intention of killing the boy, but Hamm stops him. Clov is surprised, and asks, "No? A potential procreator?," indicating that the boy is a threat because he might reproduce.
Hamm tells Clov, "It's the end, Clov, we've come to the end. I don't need you any more." He then makes Clov leave the gaff. Clov hands Hamm the gaff and places the alarm clock on Nagg's bin. Hamm begs him to say something before leaving, and Clov eventually starts a speech that Hamm quickly cuts off.
Hamm then asks Clov for a last favor, but Clov has already left the room. Hamm starts to talk to himself, and while he speaks Clov silently returns, dressed for all weathers. Hamm continues to speak, and he soon whistles for Clov, who still does not move. Hamm then throws away the dog and tosses the whistle to the audience. His last act is to cover his face with his handkerchief and sit motionless on his chair.
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Endgame Analysis
Endgame is the term used to describe an ending in chess where the outcome is already known. Chess masters often study endgames in order to guarantee themselves victory once they maneuver their opponent into a certain position. Beckett, an avid chess fan, saw the parallel between the chess endgame the final stages of life. He realized that death is the final outcome and that regardless of how a person plays the game, he or she will die. The imagery of chess is presented in the play through Clov and Hamm who are red and Nagg and Nell who are white.
The stage setting is important because it has been likened to a skull. The two windows on the back wall form the eye sockets of this skull, and the characters represent the brain and memory. Thus the entire stage serves as a metaphor for an aging mind.
This skull-like setting is complemented by several textual references to Dante's Inferno. For instance, Clov comments at one point that they are in a refuge between earth and sea, while Hamm observes, "That here we're down in a hole." The text later adds that the sun is sinking, "down among the dead," that they are beyond certain hills, and that beyond the walls, "is the...other hell." The implication of placing the characters in Dante's inferno is that they will be doomed to repeating the act of their crime for all eternity. In typical Beckettian fashion, the crime can be viewed as "life," meaning that they are doomed to repeat life forever.
The subject of Endgame is whether Clov will leave Hamm. Their relationship, which alternates between slave/master and son/father, is also a mutually beneficial one. Hamm provides food and shelter, whereas Clov provides legs and eyesight. Part of the problem with Clov leaving is that doing so is an act of suicide. If he leaves Hamm, he will not have any food, and without someone to feed him, Hamm will die as well.
The relationship between Hamm and Clov is also confused by Hamm's biographical story. Told daily and seemingly without an end (because a biography can only truly be ended when the person is dead), the story seems to hint at the possibility that Clov might be the boy alluded to. This is supported in the text by Clov's comment, "And then he [the boy] would have grown up." Hamm responds enigmatically with, "Very likely."
Beckett highlights one theme in particular, that of "finishing". This theme is presented right in the opening moments, with Clov saying, "Finished, it's finished, nearly finished, it must be finished." This same theme is later echoed by Hamm. However, what soon becomes clear is that things remain unfinished; actually finishing something represents death.
The theme of finishing ties in with the daily rituals and games. These serve as a means of affirming life for the various characters; Clov knows he is still not dead as long as Hamm demands that he look out of the windows. Nagg and Nell do the same thing: Nagg asks Nell to kiss him as a way of affirming that he and she are still in the same position they were in the day before. Thus when both Nell and Clov ask, "Why this farce, day after day?," we realize that they do nonetheless perform the ritual in order to satisfy their own need to affirm their existence.
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It is interesting and important that Nell dies. Although Hamm asks Clov to kill him, he is unable perform the act. Thus Nell is the only character able to escape this world. Her last word is "desert", which has several interesting implications. Clov interprets this to mean that he should go into the desert. This brings to mind Christ venturing into the desert for forty days of temptation by the devil; perhaps Nell has given Clov a hint as to how he can achieve salvation. However, Clov does not listen well enough, and we soon learn that he did not understand everything that she said to him.
One of the greatest fears that all the characters share is that of being reincarnated or resurrected after death. Thus they make an effort to kill all potential procreators such as the flea: "But humanity might start from there all over again! Catch him, for the love of God!" This is taken to the extreme in the form of trying to kill the the rat and later trying to kill the little boy.
The emergence of the boy at the end has been interpreted by many critics as a symbol of resurrection. Whether or not this is accurate, his appearance does cause Hamm to say, "It's the end, Clov, we've come to the end. I don't need you any more." However, Clov's eventual departure is thrown into doubt at the very end when Clov does not actually leave the stage, but rather remains standing in the doorway dressed to leave.
One of the things that Beckett said about Endgame is that it is "Rather difficult and elliptic, mostly depending on the power of the text to claw." He also pointed out that it is less hopeful than Waiting for Godot. As one critic noted, Waiting for Godot is a despairing play about hope, Endgame is a despairing play about despair. A further difference is that the ambiguous "thing" replaces Godot in terms of tormenting the characters. Hamm asks, "Do you not think this has gone on long enough?...This...this...thing." Endgame stands out as one of Beckett's best plays, and it happened to also be Beckett's favorite play.
Analysis of the Setting in Endgame
The setting of Endgame is characteristic of a Beckett play; a décor reduced to the barest minimum. A naked stage, both a poetic symbol and a parody of traditional theater, with only two dust bins, a chair, and a backward painting to look at. High up on the walls we get an idea of the rest of Beckett's blank universe through to small windows looking out. "On these boards of disaster the characters play out their derisory role." (Fletcher, 48)
Traditional theater attempts to put a slice of life out onto the stage for the audience's enjoyment. The general idea is to fool the audience into thinking that they are looking at something that they have seen before. For example, a roach infested apartment or even a relatively simple office scene helps one relate to the characters before they speak. We know what to expect because we are familiar with the plight of the starving artist with his dinky little flat and we already expect the businessman to be under a great deal of stress. Beckett sets his text in a place we've never been, and God willing, a place that will never exist: a bunker of sorts, that resembles the inside of a skull with its neuroses bickering inside.
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When the curtain opens on a place like that, the only thing you can do is start preparing yourself for what could possibly dwell in such a setting. The gap between the world we live in and the one before us has been established before any of the characters open their mouths and it up to us as an audience to figure out where we are. As we find out, slowly but surely, we are at the end of the world. Comedian Lewis Black claims he saw the end of the world in Texas when he found a street with a Starbucks directly across from another Starbucks, but Beckett made the end of the world the type of place where the question, "what time is it?" evokes the answer, "The same as usual."
The action in this play, if one could call it that, is a Beckettian standard of people moving about the stage and talking for the sole purpose of quelling boredom. They talk and talk anticipating the arrival of death, and like Godot, the sweet release of death never comes (except for Nell who is the only one to ask the direct question, "Why this farce everyday?"). The only thing between these wretched characters and death is the mindless tedium of their lives. Clov knows as well as anyone else that there is nothing to see out on the horizon, but going to get the ladder, climbing up and down, and even dropping his spyglass on purpose helps to while away the hours of the day. What other possible reason other than warding off insanity would there be for telling the same joke over and over again. Not to mention recalling fondly the first time the joke was told before telling it. "The Beckettian hero is a sort of clown who uses words and performs gestures that are intended to be amusing, in order to pass the time. But unlike a real clown, he seeks not to amuse others, but to cheat his own boredom; he is acting, but for himself." (Fletcher, 58) This is the type of world where a slow-moving half-starved man pushing a crippled old man's chair around in a circle is considered the action sequence.
They have the same conversations over and over again, they muse about being forgotten by nature. It would seem that nature would have no part in the meaninglessness on stage, but they are confronted with the reality of nature continuing to age their bodies. Despite the absence of meaning they proceed with their monotonous lives. To offer explanation of this behavior Hamm says, "We do what we can," and Clov replies simply, "We shouldn't." Soon after, seemingly out of nowhere, Hamm asks in anguish, "What's happening, what's happening?" Clov refers to nature's persistence: "Something is taking its course." Clov then exits to the kitchen where he has maid plans to stare at the wall.
As if the bare stage was not enough to indicate that we are not witnessing real life, Clov looks to the auditorium and mentions seeing the audience. "A multitude...in transports...of joy." In that moment, Beckett tears down the fourth wall and a great deal of convention along with it. The suspension of disbelief requires that the audience give up their common sense to believe that they have been transported to another place and time. The audience pretends to be wherever the author has told them that they are and so the drama can unfold. When Clov spies the audience something special happens. This is no longer a play about four characters in a bunker, living their lives, waiting for the whole thing to take its course. Now it is a play about four actors, who are playing four characters in front of an audience. This is significant because in that instant Beckett achieves the level of absurdity for which he is worshiped by the performance artists of today. A play about people watching people wait to die, how absurd!
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Cat On A Hot Tin Roof(1955)
By
Tennessee Williams
Character List
Margaret -
The play's cat. Maggie's loneliness and Brick's refusal to make her his desire, has made her hard, nervous, and bitchy. The woman constantly posing in the mirror, Maggie holds the audiences transfixed. The exhilaration of the play lies in the force of the audience's identification with its gorgeous heroine, a woman desperate in her sense of loneliness, who is made all the more beautiful in her envy, longing, and dispossession..
Brick -
The favorite son and mourned lover. Brick embodies an almost archetypal masculinity. At the same time, the Brick before us is also an obviously broken man because of his repressed homosexual desire for his dead friend Skipper. .
Big Daddy -
Maggie's father. Affectionately dubbed by Maggie as an old-fashioned "Mississippi redneck," Daddy is a large, brash, and vulgar plantation millionaire who believes he has returned from the grave. Though his coming death has been quickly repressed, in some sense Daddy has confronted its possibility. In returning from "death's country,"
Daddy would force his son to face his own desire. .
Big Mama
Maggie's mother. Fat, breathless, sincere, earnest, crude, and bedecked in flashy gems, Mama is a woman embarrassingly dedicated to a man who despises her and in feeble denial of her husband's disgust. She considers Brick her "only son." .
Mae
A mean, agitated "monster of fertility" who schemes with her husband Gooper to secure Big Daddy's estate. Mae appears primarily responsible for the burlesques of familial love and devotion that she and the children stage before the grandparents.
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Gooper -
A successful corporate lawyer. Gooper is Daddy's eldest and least favored son. He deeply resents his parents' love for Brick, viciously relishes in Daddy's illness, and rather ruthlessly plots to secure control of the estate.
Reverend Tooker
A tactless, opportunistic, and hypocritical guest at Big Daddy's birthday party. As Williams indicates, his role is to embody the lie of conventional morality. Note especially in Act III his off-hand anecdote about the colors of his cheap chasuble fading into each other.
Doctor Baugh
The sober Baugh is Daddy's physician. He delivers Daddy's diagnosis to Big Mama and leaves her with a prescription of morphine.
The Children -
Mae and Gooper's children. They appear here as grotesque, demonic "no- necked monsters" who intermittently interrupt the action on-stage. Under Mae's direction, they offer up a burlesque image of familial love and devotion.
The servants
The plantation servants appear throughout the play. Note Williams's references to "Negro voices." In the birthday scene, they appear laughing at the edges of the stage, functioning to almost ornament the grotesque tableau.
Analysis of Major Characters
Maggie -
The play's cat, Maggie, is a hysterical, dissatisfied woman left prostrate before a brick of a man, Brick. Maggie's loneliness lies in Brick's refusal to recognize her desire. His refusal to make her his desire has made her hard, nervous, and bitter.
Imagined here as the woman constantly posing in the mirror, Maggie is perhaps the most fascinating character of the play. As Williams indicates, she holds the audiences transfixed. The exhilaration of the play lies in the force of the audience's identification with its gorgeous heroine, a woman desperate in her sense of lack,
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masochistically bound to a man who do not want her, and made all the more beautiful in her envy, longing, and dispossession.
Against the indifferent Brick, the frantic Maggie literally begins to fall to pieces. Throughout Act I, Maggie appears changing her clothes, posing before the mirror, preparing for the party. She appears at her most seductive and most vulnerable, utterly unable to lure her husband's desire. Indeed his gaze of disgust, freezing her in the mirror, precipitates her "hideous transformation" into "Maggie the Cat."
Maggie's dispossession also lies in her childlessness. Her childlessness calls her status as wife and woman into question. As a childless woman she is a woman who lacks. Without a child, moreover, her and Brick's place in Big Daddy's household is not assured.
Maggie is figured through a number of tropes of virginity. Earlier she sarcastically refers to herself as "Saint Maggie"; at one point Mae enters toting her Diana trophy; at the close of the play, Mae will joke that the only way she could have conceived of a child is immaculately. The desperate Maggie is subject to a miserable second virginity, a virginity that stands, in the logic of the play, against the grotesqueness of fertility. At the risk of being glib, we should note also that Maggie's trophy symbolizes her status as a "trophy wife."
Brick -
The favorite son and mourned lover, Brick possesses the charm of those who have given up and assumed a pose of indifference before the world. Brick embodies an almost archetypal masculinity, that of the self-possessed, self-contained, untouchable, and phallically intact man. Before this indifferent block, characters find themselves in the throes of desire (Maggie, Mama) or state of aggression (Daddy).
At the same time, Brick is an obviously broken man. Turning from his homosexual desire for his dead friend Skipper, Brick has depressively withdrawn from the world behind a screen of liquor. He is reduced to the daily, mechanical search for his click that gives him peace. Thus he would locate himself on the far side of the family drama.
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Brick's brokenness is materialized in his injury, a broken ankle incurred while jumping hurdles on the high school athletic field. In a sense, it is an injury incurred out of nostalgia for the early days of his friendship with Skipper, the time of what Maggie describes as their Greek legend. This injury, a wound in his otherwise intact masculinity, is also a figure for his castration, the unmanning implied in homosexual desire.
Brick is brought to judgment on his desire twice in the place: first by Maggie in Act I and then by Daddy in Act II. When Daddy approaches what has been tenuously repressed, Brick desperately attempts to dodge him, emptying his words of all significance. As he tells Daddy, their talks never materialize: nothing is said. When Daddy presses him, Brick reveals why he yearns for "solid quiet," why he would deny that their talks take place anywhere or refer to anything: they are painful. As Williams notes, Brick's horror at the thought of being identified with the litany of epithets that he recites ("Fairies") marks the extent of his internalization of the lie of conventional morality, the lie to which Mama pathetically clings and on which Maggie places her bets at the end of the play.
Big Daddy -
Affectionately dubbed by Maggie as an old-fashioned "Mississippi redneck," Daddy is a large, brash, and vulgar plantation millionaire who believes he has returned from the grave. He loves Brick dearly, favoring him as his rightful heir.
Though his coming death has been quickly repressed—as Freud notes, the unconscious can never know its own death—in some sense Daddy has confronted its possibility. His near-death is a limit experience. Daddy returns from death and dismisses the vanitas of his worldly possessions: a rich man cannot buy his life. After years with a woman he cannot stand, he is bent on acting on his desire in all its violence. Not only will he buy a beautiful woman, but he will smother her in minks, choke her with diamonds. Daddy is murderous in his fetishism. As he will tell Brick, there is little shocking on the other side of the moon, "death's country." Daddy's sojourn in "death's country" perhaps explains his reminiscence of his world travels and the child prostitute in particular, his encounter with that which civilization would repress at all costs. In returning from death's country, Daddy would force his son to face his own desire.
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Big Mama -
Fat, breathless, sincere, earnest, bedecked in flashy gems, and occasionally grotesque, Mama is a woman embarrassingly dedicated to a man who despises her and in denial of his disgust. She is sympathetic as an object of pity, affection, and indulgence. She also favors Brick, investing him with all her hopes for the future of the family. As she implores in Act IV, Brick must carry on the family line, he must provide Big Daddy with a grandson as similar to he as he is to Daddy himself.
Mama's moment of dignity comes upon the revelation of Daddy's cancer. Here she becomes a woman who, despite the humiliations, has stood by her man. The play is enamored and at the same time somewhat amused with this image of dogged feminine loyalty. Notice Williams's humorously catty irony: as the stage notes indicate, Mama in her dignity almost stops being fat.
Themes, Motifs, and Symbols
E.1 Themes
Manliness and Homosexuality -
Like many of Williams's works, Cat concerns itself with the elaboration of a certain fantasy of broken manliness, in this case a manliness left crippled by the homosexual desire it must keep in abeyance.
Brick is Cat's broken man. The favorite son and longed-for lover of a wealthy plantation family, he possesses the charm of those who have given up and assumed a pose of indifference before the world. Brick—a "brick" of a man—embodies an almost archetypal masculinity. Brick's "enviable coolness," however, is the coolness of repression, a repression that keeps his desires at bay. Brick is an alcoholic who cannot avow the desire in his relationship with his dead friend Skipper. Turning from his desire, he has depressively distanced himself from the world with a screen of liquor. He is reduced to the daily, mechanical search for his click that gives him peace.
Brick mourns his love for Skipper, a love imagined in almost mythic dimensions. For Brick, it is the only true and good thing in his life. His mourning is made all the more difficult by the desire he cannot avow. As Maggie notes, theirs is a love that dare not speak its name, a love that could not be satisfied or discussed.
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Thus Daddy, assuming the position of judge, will force Brick to confront this love. Brick's attempts at dodging him are crucial to the way the play imagines manliness. As Daddy approaches what has been tenuously repressed, Brick empties his words of all significance. As he tells Daddy, their talks never "materialize" and nothing is really said. When Daddy presses him, Brick reveals why he yearns for "solid quiet."
Ultimately the revelation of the desire in his friendship with Skipper cracks Brick's cool. His horror at the thought of being identified with the litany of epithets that he recites ("Fairies"), his disgust at the gossipmongers about him, only points to a fear that they might be true.
The Lie -
As Brick pronounces to Big Daddy, mendacity is the system in which men live. Mendacity here refers to the mores that keep what Williams's dubs the "inadmissible thing" that is repressed at all costs. The two primary objects of repression in Cat are Brick's homosexual desires and Daddy's imminent death. After the men are forced to confront these secrets, Mama will desperately invest all her future hopes in the dream of Brick becoming a family man. The responsibilities of fatherhood would somehow stop his drinking, the estate could go to the rightful heir, and the perpetuation of the family line through Brick is Daddy's immortality. The idyllic fantasy of the family restored, however, is yet another of the play's lies or Maggie's invention of a coming child.
The cat refers to a particular fantasy of femininity and feminine desire. The play's primary cat is Maggie, a typically hysterical, dissatisfied Williams heroine who prostrates herself before Brick. Maggie's loneliness has made her a "cat," hard, anxious, and bitter. The exhilaration of Williams's dramaturgy lies in the force of the audience's identification with this heroine, a woman desperate in her sense of lack, masochistically bound to man who does not want her, and made all the more beautiful in her envy, longing, and dispossession.
Maggie's dispossession also rests in her childlessness. Certainly her childlessness calls her status as "normal" wife and woman into question. Without a child, moreover, her and Brick's place in Big Daddy's household is not assured. The child functions entirely here to assure their bid as Daddy's rightful heirs.
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The Father and Son -
In Cat, the father and son appear in a decidedly narcissistic relation. Daddy's narcissistic love for Brick is clear. As Williams notes, Brick bears the charmingly masculine indifference Daddy must have in his youth. As Mama will note at the close of the play, Daddy wants above all that Brick provide him a grandson who is as much like his son as Brick is like himself. Brick is his rightful heir, his means of immortality.
The mirror relation between the men becomes especially clear Brick and Daddy will "show-down" over their respective secrets. Both Daddy's sojourn in "death's country" and Brick's being "almost not alive" in his drunkenness make them "accidentally truthful." Thus, unlike the characters about them, they present themselves as the only ones who have never lied to each other. Both stand on polar limits of the system of mendacity that is life, Brick being the drunkard and Daddy the dead man.
Father and son will come to double each other in their roles as revealer and recipient of the other's "inadmissible thing." Thus Daddy will force Brick to confront the desire in his friendship with Skipper and receive his death sentence in return. In matching the revelation of his repressed desire with that of Daddy's death, Brick turns things "upside down." Daddy comes to stand in the place he just occupied. The revelation is a violent act, robbing Daddy of his second life. As Brick the duality of the exchange that has just ensued: "You told me! I told you!"
Brick and Daddy's final struggle marks the reverse side of the narcissistic love between them, the aggressive logic of "either you go or I go" between those who mirror each other too closely.
The CHildren
Against the beautiful, childless couple, the image of the family, and the mother in particular, will appear hilariously grotesque. Mae and Gooper have spawned a litter of "no-necked monsters" fit for the county fair; Mae, the cotton carnival queen besmirched by proxy, is a "monster of fertility"; and the sounds of the screeching children continually invade the scene. This side of the family will continually stage burlesques of familial love and devotion, such as Daddy's birthday party in Act II.
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The Off-Stage Telephone -
Cat makes great use of off-stage sound, marking the presence of spies in the household. The telephone recurs a number of times. Initially Mama and Maggie's conversations rehearse the lie that keeps Big Daddy and Mama ignorant of the machinations afoot, the lie that Daddy will live. The telephone will then return at Brick and Big Daddy's showdown to provoke the revelation of what has remained inadmissible until then. Here a phone call, as if a call from the dead, evokes Skipper's final confession to his friend. Upon Brick's revelation of Daddy's cancer, the telephone communicates Daddy's unspoken protest: "no, no, you got it all wrong! Upside down! Are you crazy?"
The Exotic Lands -
Before confronting Brick on Skipper, Daddy takes a rather strange detour through his travels with Big Mama to Europe and North Africa. Daddy's memories of his travels introduce a motif familiar to Williams's readers: the Mediterranean/North Africa as a primal space, a space savagery, lawlessness, and sexual excess, all things that civilization would repress. These exotic locales and their inhabitants become ciphers for the desires that remain repressed at the home. It is not for nothing that later Brick tells of a fraternity pledge who flees to North Africa when the brothers discover that he is a sodomite.
E.2 Symbols
We should note the following symbolic objects in Cat. First, Brick and Maggie's bed—the place where, as Big Mama will subsequently observe, the rocks in their marriage lie—belongs to the plantation's original owners, Jack Straw and Peter Ochello. As Williams writes, the ghost of the men's love haunts the stage.
Second a gloriously grotesque console, combining a radio-phonograph, television, and liquor cabinet, towers over the room. As Williams notes, it serves as shrine to the "comforts and illusions" behind which we hide from the things the characters face. Notice the moments when Brick will turn on the radio, refresh his drink, thereby raising a screen between him and the household.
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Finally we should note Brick's phallic crutch. Its removal at the hands of Maggie and Big Daddy symbolize Brick's castration, a castration concomitant with the revelation of his unmanly homosexual desires. This crippling of the most masculine of men is crucial to Brick's "sexiness." The crutch's continuous restoration and removal—in a sort of game of "now he has it, now he doesn't"—appeals to the fetishistic one.
1.2 Analysis
Cat begins with a scenario familiar to Williams's readers, presenting a hysterical, dissatisfied woman who prostrates herself before a man.
Against the indifferent Brick, the frantic Maggie is the image of a woman falling to pieces. Note in particular how Williams emphasizes Maggie's relation to the image of femininity throughout Act I. Here she appears changing her clothes, posing before the mirror, and preparing herself for the party. She is at her most seductive and most vulnerable, utterly unable to lure her husband's desire. His gaze of disgust freezes her in the glass—note Williams's use of the pause here—and precipitates her "hideous transformation" into "Maggie the Cat."
As the woman in the mirror, Maggie becomes the most fascinating character of the play. Williams indicates that she holds the audiences transfixed. Her frustrated desire drives the act forward. Indeed, the exhilaration of Williams's dramaturgy so often lies in the force of the audience's identification with heroines like Maggie, women desperate in their sense of lack, women masochistically bound to men who do not want them for reasons, women who would appear all the more beautiful in their envy, longing, and dispossession. As she tells Brick, if he was to never make love to her again, she would stab herself in the heart.
Maggie's dispossession also lies not only in her husband's indifference but in her childlessness as well. Certainly her childlessness calls her status as wife, and "normal" woman, into question. Without a child, her and Brick's place in Big Daddy's household is not secure. This crisis is immediately precipitated by Daddy's imminent death. The child here functions entirely to assure their bid as Daddy's rightful heirs.
The question of childlessness underpins Maggie's bitter rivalry with her and Brick foils or doubles: Mae and Gooper. Within Cat then, fertility, the family, and, to some extent, the mother, will appear hilariously grotesque. Mae and Gooper have spawned a litter of "no-necked monsters" fit for the county fair.
In contrast to the frantic Maggie, Brick would locate himself on the far side of this family drama. On the brink of deliquescence, he possesses the charm of those who have given up and assumed a pose of indifference before the world. Brick
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embodies an almost archetypal masculinity. Before this "Brick," Maggie can only find herself in the throes of desire. As Maggie laments, Brick's enviable coolness made him the most wonderful lover. As we will see, it also casts aspersions on his sexuality.
Though enviably cool, Brick is also an obviously broken man, ruined by inadmissible desires. Note in particular how he stumbles through the play, continually dropping his crutches or losing them at the hands of others. As we will see, Brick's injury functions as a symbol of his unmanning or, more precisely, castration. Here it will enable Maggie to raise the question of the unmanly desires he keeps under wraps. Maggie's refusal to abide by the "laws of silence," her repression, begins to crack his wall.
The scene also introduces us to setting for the entire play, the bed-sitting room of Big Daddy's manor. Though all of Williams's stage notes merit careful consideration, we should be sure to mark the setting's explicitly symbolic elements. First the room formerly belonged to the plantation's original owners, Jack Straw and Peter Ochello, and Williams writes that the ghost of their love haunts the room. Brick and Maggie's bed, the place where, as Big Mama will observe, the rocks in their marriage lie, was originally theirs.
Second, a gloriously grotesque console, combining a radio-phonograph, television, and liquor cabinet, towers over the room. As Williams notes, it serves as shrine to the "comforts and illusions" behind which people hide from the things the characters face. Mark especially then the moments when Brick will go to the console and, for example, turn on the radio, refresh his drink, and onward, raising a screen between him and the world
2.2 Analysis
The second portion Act I stages Maggie's humiliation and her pathetically comic attempt to seduce Brick. Williams punctuates her clash with Brick with two interruptions: Mae's and Big Mama's. Note how he does so self-consciously and how Mae announces that intermission is over upon her exit. Though Act I unfolds primarily between Maggie and Brick, the audience is always made aware of the potential for such interruptions through, for example, off-stage noise and references in the dialogue. As Mama remarks, no one is to have privacy in her house.
Mae's entrance introduces us to the rivalry between the play's two cats. Mae brings with her a particularly symbolic object: Maggie's Diana trophy. Maggie is figured through a number of tropes of virginity. Earlier, she sarcastically refers to herself as "Saint Maggie"; at the close of the play, Mae will joke that the only way she could have conceived of a child is immaculately. The desperate Maggie is subject to a miserable second virginity, a virginity that again stands in the logic of the play against the grotesqueness of fertility. At the risk of being glib, we should note also that Maggie's trophy symbolizes her status as Brick's trophy wife.
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Upon Mae's exit, Maggie cracks under the weight of her desire. Though she continually attempts to return to more everyday conversation, she ultimately finds herself unable to bear her envy, longing, and the inhuman conditions of her marriage. She attempts to seduce her husband. Embarrassed for her, Brick fends her off like a lion-tamer. The dissatisfied Maggie collapses into hysterical laughter before her grinning husband—apparently the scene is all too familiar to them.
Maggie can only protest weakly at the injustice of Mama's decree that the rocks in their marriage lie with her. Maggie appears utterly alone and bound to a man who does not desire her. Her exceptionally poignant pose before the mirror and pleading attempt to make Brick jealous only leads him to dismiss her indifferently. Her rhetoric here is hardly innocent. We can summarize it as arguing: "other men want me, so you should too." The importance of the other man in the couple's relationship will become clear in the following scene.
Despite her plea, Brick, as Williams notes, stares at her still as if passing a ball to a teammate. Ultimately Maggie finds herself before the mirror anew, her image undergoing another hideous transformation, an estrangement or depersonalization: "I am Maggie the Cat!" she cries.
This scene is also Big Mama's introduction. Bedecked in flashy gems, Mama is the tragic embodiment of bad taste: fat, breathless, sincere, earnest, occasionally grotesque, and embarrassingly dedicated to a man who despises her. Here she functions, as at the close of the play, as the naïve bearer of the myths of marriage and family. Her investment in these myths will become clear in Act II. Unlike the poised and ironic Maggie, she is a woman bound a man who does not want her and in feeble denial of his disgust. She is sympathetic as an object of the audience's affectionate indulgence.
Finally, this scene also makes use of a device of which the play makes great use: the off-stage telephone. As noted above, the continuous interruption of off-stage voices mark the presence of spies in the household. Here the telephone conversation rehearses the lie that keep Big Daddy and Mama ignorant of the machinations afoot, the lie that Daddy will live.
3.2 Analysis
Having finishes dressing before her indifferent husband, Maggie finds herself with nothing to do. Finally she forces the secret between them. The desire between Brick and Skipper is something that the former cannot avow. Here, as if possessed by a will to bring this desire to light, Maggie breaks into a recitation to elaborate on the triangle they once shared. Her compelling revelation is one of the play's more melodramatic, if not soap operatic, moments. They are characterized by the emotional excess and high histrionics of the hysterical heroine.
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As Maggie's recitation makes clear, the only true love in Brick's life lay between he and his friend Skipper. Maggie sketches the triangle between the three of them. As she recalls, she accompanied the two football heroes for the benefit of the public—Maggie is nothing if not the trophy wife.
In contrast, Brick and Skipper's love assumes almost mythic dimensions: as Maggie relates that it was the stuff of Greek legend. For Brick, it remains the only true and good thing in his life. Note also the nostalgic nature of their love affair. For example, Brick's return to the high school athletic field is a turn to time lost.
As Maggie notes, theirs was a love that dare not speak its name, a love that could not be satisfied or discussed. Thus Maggie and Skipper abruptly found themselves aligned before the man they both want, a god inaccessible to them both. They made love to dream that Brick was theirs.
Finally Skipper's death shifts the triangle anew. Brick withdraws into mourning, abandoning the world in grief. His mourning is made all the more difficult by a desire he cannot avow. The dead man continues to intervene between husband and wife, and Maggie protests that she is alive in vain.
Sending Brick into a murderous and panicked rage, Maggie's revelation of the repressed finally shatters her husband's coolness. Brick would silence her at all costs. Crucially, his "unmanning" or castration—that is, the revelation of desires which call his masculinity into question—is symbolized and, at the level of the action at least, made possible by his injury. This unmanning will appear more clearly in his dialogue with Big Daddy in Act II.
What interrupts Brick's attack is Dixie's entrance, one of the play's many—to use Williams's terms—"incongruous" but "perfectly timed" interruptions from off-stage. Dixie returns us to Maggie's plight. This grotesque, monkey-like child embodies what Maggie lacks. As she jeers, Maggie is childless, saying that she probably cannot even have babies.
Here Maggie makes her sad, resolute pledge: to bear a child by a man who despises her. Maggie believes that her child would make good on her lack, assure her place in the family, and save her marriage. Thus Act I leaves us with a disaster that remains for a time in suspense. Donning her public face, Maggie turns to meet the family.
Before proceeding with Daddy's birthday party, however, we should also here how Maggie would serve as intermediary for the love between men in a different triangle, one involving Brick and Big Daddy. Here Maggie gives Daddy with a gift in
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Brick's name, a gift with which Brick will have nothing to do with. We will see this structure repeated in her gift of the child.
4.2 Analysis
Act II begins with the first meeting between Big Daddy and Brick of the play, a meeting quickly interrupted by Daddy's birthday festivities. Gooper, Mae, and Maggie's wrangling is thinly veiled at best; the grandchildren put on a burlesque of familial devotion; and Reverend Tooker tactlessly discusses death and memorial windows.
Daddy's coarse outburst disrupts the party chatter, moving rapidly to the primary action of Act II, the encounter of father and son. Believing that he has returned from the dead, Daddy rejects all the hypocritical, pandering crap about him and proceeds to set his son straight. Belligerently, Daddy interrogates Brick on his sex life and his drinking. He asks him why he will not sleep with Maggie.
As the interrogation progresses, the relationship between Brick's sexuality and his drinking will become clearer. In attempting to establish a certain intimacy with Brick, Daddy will call him to judgment and help him become his rightful heir. He will refuse Brick's attempts at flight, refuse to allow his repressions to keep things unspoken between them, and force Brick to recognize the desire he could not avow in his friendship with Skipper. What melodramatically impels this Act is the men's showdown over what remains inadmissible between them. The two men push progressively toward the inadmissible's revelation. Note here the use of the clock. Its chime marks a shift in the scene's rhythm, moving into the father-son dialogue that composes the rest of the act. As Maggie notes in Act I, Daddy is an old-fashioned "Mississippi redneck"—large, brash, and vulgar. His humor is decidedly grotesque, much to the amusement of Maggie. Maggie, as she muses in Act I, is genuinely fond of Daddy and the only other one present attuned to and amused by grotesquerie.
The primary butt of Daddy's jokes is Big Mama, who bears the brunt of his rage when she attempts to calm him. As he tells Mama, his colon has become spastic out of disgust from the lies and hypocrisy that define their life together. When Mama helpless laments that he has never believed she loved him, he can only murmur bitterly: "Wouldn't it be funny if that was true…"
Mama appears deep in denial, constantly insisting that Big Daddy does not mean what he says. Note how she almost willfully misapprehends Daddy's disgust with mendacity. At first glance, it appears that Daddy's remark calls Mama's love into question. Daddy, however, does not doubt Mama's almost embarrassingly dogged devotion. His disgust is with his own mendacity, the life he has spent with a woman he cannot stand.
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We should also mark Daddy's lecture carefully, a lecture Brick himself will come to repeat soon after. This lecture begins to elaborate the play's parallel loves, that of Brick and Maggie and Daddy and Mama. Put otherwise, Daddy is not only Brick's judge, but he is also his double. Daddy's narcissistic love for Brick is clear. As Williams notes, Brick bears the same charmingly masculine indifference Daddy must have in his youth. Brick is his would-be heir, his means of immortality. As Mama will note at the close of the play, Daddy wants above all that Brick provide him a grandson who is as much like his son as Brick is like himself. The mirror relationship between them will become clearer in the course of their dialogue progresses, in which Brick and Daddy will appear through various structures of rivalry.
5.2 Analysis
During the conversation, Daddy comes close to the topic that remains repressed between them, and refuses to allow Brick his flight. Before reaching the secrets that rest between them, Daddy takes advantage of the pause opened by the clock chimes to pursue a rather strange detour through his travels with Big Mama. Of particular note are the anecdotes of the screaming children in Barcelona and child prostitute in Morocco. Daddy's memories of his travels introduce a motif familiar to Williams's readers: the Mediterranean/North Africa as a primal space, a space savagery, lawlessness, and sexual excess, all that which civilization would repress. The most notorious example of this fantasy probably comes from Suddenly Last Summer, in which a wealthy Southerner who takes gay sex trips to the region is devoured by a band of street children. These exotic locales and their inhabitants become ciphers for the desires that remain repressed at the home. For example, later, Brick tells of a fraternity pledge who flees to North Africa when the brothers discover that he is a sodomite.
Two repressed ideas demanding revelation, what Williams calls "inadmissible things," structure this showdown between father and son. The inadmissible things are Daddy's imminent death and Brick's homosexual desire. The first is a point of dramatic irony throughout the scene, since Daddy believes he has returned from the grave. Though his coming death has been quickly repressed, as Freud notes, the unconscious can never know its own death, in some sense Daddy has confronted its possibility. As he tells Brick, what distinguishes man from beast is the terrifying apprehension of his own demise.
Daddy returns from death and dismisses the vanitas of his worldly possessions and understands that a rich man cannot buy his life. Instead he is bent on acting on his desire in all its violence. Not only will he buy a beautiful woman but smother her in minks, choke her with diamonds, but Daddy is murderous in his fetishism. Note the ironic intervention here of what Williams's terms the "perfectly timed" yet "incongruous" interruption: Mama's pitiable entrance at the very moment Daddy dreams of infidelity.
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As Daddy will tell Brick, there is little that shocks in "death's country." Daddy's sojourn in "death's country" perhaps recalls his reminiscence of his world travels and the child prostitute in particular. Daddy's encounter, "on the other side of the moon," with that civilization would be repressed at all costs. In returning from death's country, Daddy would force his son to face his own desire.
Desperately Brick attempts to dodge him, emptying his words of all significance. As he tells Daddy, their talks never materialize and nothing is said. When Daddy presses him, Brick reveals why he yearns for "solid quiet," and why he would deny that their talks take place anywhere or refer to anything: it is because they are "painful." Turning from his desire, Brick has abandoned the world behind a screen of liquor. He is reduced to the daily, mechanical search for his click that gives him peace.
Ultimately Brick attempts to flee to keep his cool. Daddy makes him stay, wrenching his crutch from under his leg, forcing him to feel pain. As in Act I, the screeching child functions to instantiate the revelation of the repressed. Here Daddy assumes terrifying proportions and the film version of this scene is particular striking in this respect. Daddy would make Brick face the desire that compromises him in his impenetrability, the desire that unmans him. Brick's second crippling at Daddy's hands symbolizes his castration. As we will see, Daddy's move is not only a call to judgment but narcissistically motivated as well: he is crippling his rival.
6.2 Analysis
With Brick at his feet, Daddy continues to demand the truth. Their bargain leads to Brick's own "recitative," his own account of what ensued between Maggie, Skipper, and himself.
First, however, Brick attempts another dodge, a feint that Daddy must elucidate. He attributes his drinking to his disgust for the mendacity. Daddy has every reason to suspect his son of passing the buck as he uttered the same lines a few moments earlier in his lecture to Big Mama. Brick's declaration is an example of empty speech, speech that would put its listener off the track of his desire. As we will see, Daddy will appear to make sense of Brick's proclamation of disgust at the end of his tale but in a way that strangely seems to refer to his own state of affairs.
Brick crumbles once again upon the second revelation of homosexual desire in his friendship with Skipper. In erupting violently at Daddy, Brick "doth protest too much." His horror at the thought of being identified with the litany of epithets that he recites, his disgust at the gossipmongers about him, only points to a fear that they might be true. Brick's desire is either utterly unspeakable or only in epithets
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("Fairies") that would ward off, but nevertheless reveal his guilt. The incongruous but perfectly timed interruption of Reverend Tooker marks the presence of a lie of conventional morality, a lie that Brick, the darling child of this conventional world, has repeated to lethal consequences.
Thus, even in admitting his love for Skipper, Brick would still make it the stuff of legend: good, true, and completely asexual. Though he had sex with Maggie, they were than two cats humping on a fence, and he and Skipper shared a higher love. In Brick's fantasy, Maggie is to blame for Skipper's ruin, and the conniving Maggie is the scapegoat. She planted the idea of sodomy in poor Skipper's head. She led him to sleep with her. She caused his death. Note here the ambiguity in Brick's confession of jealousy at Skipper and Maggie pairing off, and that it remains unclear which of the two he covets.
Daddy, however, will not allow his son to pass the buck. As discussed above, he has returned from "death's country" and has no qualms confronting Brick with his homosexual desire. Indeed, Daddy almost suggests that he understands his son all too well since he "knocked around" himself in the old days. In this respect his spastic colon seems somewhat over determined. Brick is heir to a tradition to perverse fathers, a tradition that begins from Straw and Ochello onward, a tradition from which the women are excluded, desperately wanting men who would have nothing to do with them. Brick's disgust for his "family history" is clear. Incidentally, it is not for nothing that the conservative film version of Cat replaces Straw and Ochello with a fondly remembered grandfather.
Already we have noted the narcissistic relation between Brick and Daddy. Williams underscores the strange face-off happening between them. As the stage notes indicate, in delivering his recitative, Brick has decided to match the revelation of his "inadmissible thing" with that of Daddy's.
Finally we should also note that Williams warns us against drawing "pat" conclusions, namely, that Brick's problem is that he is a repressed homosexual. Here Williams does not "back off" from homosexuality. The play is quite explicit—but cautions us from immediately fixing Brick as a closet case.
7.2 Analysis
Here Daddy finally forces Brick's confession and receives his own "inadmissible thing" in return. This showdown reveals the nature of the love between them.
Williams's precipitates Brick's revelation through a device introduced earlier, the off-stage telephone. Here the phone call is a call from the dead, evoking Skipper's final confession to his friend. As Brick confesses, he refused him. Thus Daddy delivers his final diagnosis, that Brick is disgusted with his own mendacity. He dug
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his friend's grave rather than face the truth, a truth that even now Brick would assign exclusively to Skipper.
While Daddy's diagnosis rings true, it also sounds suspiciously familiar. In some sense, it is almost one of those pat conclusions against which Williams warns in the stage notes. Though Daddy certainly plays judge here, he does not speak from an "objective" position, from the position according to which we can determine the "moral" of the play. His diagnosis is also implicated in the psychological drama unfolding before us. It does not speak from some place outside the play, commenting impartially on the action.
Thus note how Daddy's diagnosis strangely repeats his own remark to himself in Act II, where he murmurs in disgust over the mendacity in his staying with Big Mama for forty years. Here he projects this disgust onto his son:"You!" he cries accusingly. Already we have noted the numerous manifestations of Daddy's narcissistic investment in his son. Their final exchange makes explicit the men's mirror relation and particular through the complementary interplay of the "you"s and "me"s they find themselves screaming throughout this scene.
Thus Brick matches the revelation of his repressed desire with that of Daddy's death. Here the telephone almost embodies and voices Daddy's inner protest: "no, no, you got it all wrong! Upside down! Are you crazy?" The screeching child interrupts anew, both marking the violent revelation of the repressed and symbolizing Daddy's death itself. Daddy bellows in rage, denouncing the "lying dying liars" that surround him. The bawling child serves as another ventriloquism of his anguish.
Thus father and son figure as doubles in their roles as revealer and recipient of the other's inadmissible thing. Like Daddy's sojourn in "death's country," Brick's being "almost not alive" makes him "accidentally truthful." They present themselves as the only ones in the cast who have never lied to each other. Both stand on polar limits of the system of mendacity that is life. Note here how Brick's pronouncement on mendacity also echoes Daddy's, Brick being the drunkard and Daddy the dead man.
In telling Daddy of his death, Brick has staged a reversal, turned things "upside down," and now Daddy stands in the place he just occupied. It is a violent act, robbing Daddy of his second life. As Brick almost gratuitously declares upon his second exit, emphasizing the duality of the exchange that has just ensued: "You told me! I told you!"
As the stage notes indicate, their contest, a contest over exacting the revelation of the other's secret as well as the other's affirmation of the repressed, is symbolized by their struggle over Brick's phallic crutch. The crutch is a "weapon for which they were
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fighting for possession." No longer Brick's support, it appears as the means by which the men would do injury to each other.
Brick and Daddy's final struggle thus marks the reverse side of the narcissistic love between them, the aggressive logic of "either you go or I go" between those who mirror each other too closely. Note in this respect Daddy's desperate response of Brick's revelation. Brick will certainly outlive him and he will have to pay for his coffin.
8.2 Analysis
Act IV begins with the revelation of Daddy's cancer, a revelation that immediately splits the family into its respective camps. The good children, that is, the successful Gooper and fertile Mae, reveal themselves in their avarice, envy, and greed. Speaking in Big Daddy's name, Mama identifies Brick and Maggie as his rightful heirs.
The scene begins in dramatic irony, Mama still unaware of her husband's cancer. Especially poignant is how Mama marvels at how much Daddy ate at dinner. Note how Gooper looks to Daddy's certain suffering with "grim relish." When Gooper and the doctor begin to tell Mama, Mae, as always, performs a burlesque of the dutiful daughter-in-law. Her eagerness for the revelation is clear nevertheless. Mama pushes her aside.
The revelation of Daddy's cancer to Mama is the principle action of this scene. As noted above, Mama appears as a comic and touching figure, a naïve, sincere woman who does her femininity wrong in her tragically bad taste and notoriously crude manners. Devoted to a husband who has no interest in her, Mama is a woman who above all has stood by her man. The play is enamored and at the same time somewhat amused with this image of dogged feminine loyalty. The revelation of Daddy's cancer is Mama's dignified moment.
Upon the revelation, Mama reveals her investments immediately, calling for her only son and begging Maggie to help him get on his feet so he can take over the estate. Gooper and Mae spring into action, appearing at their most vicious, presenting themselves as the family's rightful heirs. Their sadism reveals itself. Gooper savors Daddy's suffering, wanting him drugged up and dead. He has always resented his parents' love for Brick and has moved to protect his interests. They present Mama with a will that she firmly rejects. As Gooper has warned, however, he knows how to protect his interests.
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Oblivious to Gooper, Mama flings herself awkwardly against the indifferent Brick, his coolness forcing another woman into helpless desire. Though she knows all too well what has been going on, Mama places all hopes in Brick, in his assumption of his duties as Daddy's rightful heir. Brick must become a family man: he must provide Big Daddy with a "grandson as much like his son as his son is like Big Daddy." We have already remarked upon the narcissism of Big Daddy's dream. Though not explicitly observed, it is clear that the perpetuation of the family line through Brick is Daddy's immortality.
Brick turns from Mama, unable to comfort her, leaving Maggie to assure her that he recognizes her plea. He appears utterly removed from the travesty before him, singing to himself softly, moving in and out of the room, turning the phonograph and drowning the others out, progressively withdrawing into his drunken haze. Brick's "almost deadness" makes it impossible for him to fulfill his filial duties and assume his place in the family li
9.2 Analysis
As noted above, Mama invests her hopes in Brick fulfilling Big Daddy's dream and becoming a family man. The responsibilities of fatherhood would somehow stop his drinking, and the estate could go to the rightful heir. The idyllic fantasy of the family restored, however, is yet another of the play's many lies. This lie belongs to Maggie, who invents the coming of a child.
In face of all she knows, Big Mama, clinging to her family, desperately fixates on her lie, running to Big Daddy to tell him his dream has been fulfilled. Its announcement and Maggie's attempt to realize it take place against the bellows of the dying Daddy. Mama second entrance for the morphine underlines the horrible agony that takes place in the adjoining rooms, an agony that takes place under Mae and Gooper's sadistic gaze.
In making this lie, Maggie would assuage the dying Big Daddy and assure her and Brick's place in the household. At best it would only temporarily keep Mae and Gooper at bay. Brick, moreover, appears as untouchable as ever. His decision to not protest Maggie's lie rests less in a desire to save Maggie's face than in his resignation. Brick is bent on finding his click alone. Having finally found it, he strolls peacefully from the room, leaving Maggie in her solitude. Note here the wonderfully maudlin image of Maggie clutching her pillow in misery.
Here Maggie becomes her most desperate, bribing her husband with liquor to conceive a child. Brick has nothing to say. He can only repeating sadly Big Daddy's bitter line—"Wouldn't it be funny if that was true?"—when Maggie professes that she loves him and that he wants his love. Brick remains a broken man, deep in mourning for his beloved Skipper, wracked with guilt over his friend's death and the
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unspeakable desire between them, disgusted by his inability to confront their love. He has withdrawn depressively from the world.
Earlier we noted Cat's affinities with conventional melodrama, a genre consisting of stock characters and soap operatic plots that hinge on romantic intrigue and end in the restoration of the happy home. Though making use of melodrama's high emotionalism, exhilarating histrionics, and other devices often considered to be in "bad taste," Cat's rather dismal ending, involving the total demystification of the family, makes its departure from this genre clear.
In this respect, subsequent Cats diverge sharply from its original version, particularly its reactionary cinematic adaptation. MGM's Cat shows a Brick reformed through a more extended, and rather trite, heart-to-heart with Big Daddy. The script of the version of Cat first premiered, which was revised in collaboration with director Elia Kazan, also leans toward a more conventional resolution, though hardly to the extent of its Hollywood counterpart.
A brief contrast of the play and film draw out the relative radicalism of Cat's denouement. Though in many ways Williams's text continues to assert itself in spite of the revisions. In the central dialogue between Brick and Daddy, Brick's drinking comes to rest not in his love for Skipper but in a vague, pop-psychological notion of "emotional immaturity," or a refusal to grow up. In turn, Brick teaches Daddy that he has spent his life invested in accumulating things and never loved people enough. Upon this conversation, he presents himself as Daddy's rightful heir and husband to Maggie anew, authoritatively ordering her upstairs so they can make love. Gooper restrains Mae and respectfully withdraws from the scene. Thus the restoration of family and marriage, sealed by the promise of a son, resolves the play. The lie of conventional mores is what makes the Hollywood ending possible.
Miss Julie By
Strindberg Character List
Note: Miss Julie features only three characters. The Count never appears onstage.
Miss Julie -
The play's twenty-five-year-old tragic heroine, she is doomed to a cruel demise. Fresh from a broken engagement—an engagement ruined because of her attempt to master her fiancé—Miss Julie has become "wild", making shameless advances to her valet,
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Jean. Miss Julie's behavior is supposed to signal sickness. Raised by a shockingly "feminist" mother, Julie is simultaneously disgusted by and drawn to men. Julie is sado-masochistic. She wants to enslave men, but she also desires her own fall.
Jean -
The other major character of the play, Jean is the manor's thirty-year old valet, chosen as Miss Julie's lover on Midsummer's Eve. Though initially coarse, he pretends to be gallant when seducing Miss Julie. His cruelty reveals itself after he has slept with her. Jean suffers from class envy. He simultaneously idealizes and degrades Julie. Eventually, he becomes a sadist, reveling in Julie's ruin.
Christine -
A relatively minor character, Christine is the manor's thirty-five year old cook and Jean's fiancé. She gossips with Jean about Miss Julie, and believes wholeheartedly in the class system.
Diana -
Miss Julie's dog, she is said to look like her mistress. Diana symbolizes Julie, for she has sex with a mongrel dog that belongs to the gatekeeper.
Serena -
Miss Julie's canary, she is beheaded by Jean. Her decapitation symbolizes the way Jean injures Julie
Analysis of Major Characters
Miss Julie -
Miss Julie is the play's twenty-five-year-old heroine. Fresh from a broken engagement—an engagement ruined because of her attempt literally to train her fiancé like a dog—Miss Julie has become "wild", making shameless advances to her valet, Jean, on Midsummer Eve. In his preface to the play, Strindberg discusses what motivates Miss Julie: "her mother's primary instincts, her father raising her incorrectly, her own nature, and the influence of her fiancé on her weak and degenerate brain." He also cites as influences the absence of her father, the fact that she has her period, the sensual dancing and flowers, and, finally, the man. Strindberg
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is interested in psychology, and this list is his diagnosis of what he considers Miss Julie's sickness. This symptoms of this sickness are similar to contemporaneous symptoms of the hysteric. Traditionally considered a female disease, hysteria in Strindberg's day was increasingly used to refer to a disturbance in female sexuality—namely, a woman's failure or refusal to accept her sexual desires.
Raised by a shockingly empowered mother who abhorred men, Julie is alternately disgusted by and drawn to men, horrified by sex and ready to play the lascivious coquette. Her hatred of men leads her to attempt to enslave them sadistically. Ultimately, however, the play is more invested in her masochism above all else. Julie desires her own fall. Strindberg partially blames her for her fate. Julie submits to Jean, who is partly a father figure, imploring him both to abuse and to save her. Julie slips into a "hypnoid state", a trance-like condition that people associated with hysterics. It can be argued that Miss Julie's profile and ultimate fate reveal Strindberg's notoriously misogynistic fantasies.
Jean -
Jean is the manor's thirty-year old valet, chosen as Miss Julie's lover on Midsummer's Eve, and the second major character in the play. He grew up working in the district and, although Miss Julie does not know this, he has known Miss Julie since she was a child. Initially Jean talks coarsely and disparagingly about Miss Jean with his fiancé, Christine. Later he plays the gallant while seducing of Miss Julie, honorably hesitating before her advances, telling a heart-rending tale of his childhood love for his mistress, recounting his longtime ambitions, and generally making her believe in his gentleness. Upon the consummation of their romance, when Jean finds that Miss Julie is penniless, he rejects her and confesses that he has deceived her, cruelly leaving her to her disgrace.
Jean dreams of grandeur, vaguely imagining someday opening a hotel in northern Italy and becoming a count like Miss Jean's father. However, he remains subjected to authority throughout the play. Indeed, the reminders of the Count—his boots, the speaking tube, Jean's livery, and, most importantly, the ringing bell—automatically reduce Jean to a lackey. Jean's relationship to Miss Julie is complicated by his class envy and misogyny. Jean at once elevates and scorns the object of his desire. This relationship is neatly summarized by a story in which young Jean had to flee an outhouse through the bottom and, emerging from his master's waste, came upon Julie strolling a terrace and fell in love at first sight. This story shows how Jean is mired in filth at the hands of his social betters. It also shows the simultaneous adulation and hatred Jean feels for Miss Julie. He worships her from afar, but then he sees her underside from the bottom of the outhouse.
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Imagining Julie in increasingly degrading fantasies, Jean stops being a cowed, reluctantly seduced servant to a sadist reveling in Julie's ruin. Despite the many power reversals between them, however, the end of the play joins them in their submission to the Count's authority, the authority of the father and master. Julie's hypnosis is paralleled by Jean's automatic response at the ringing of the Count's bell, and in the end Jean will only be able to command Julie by imagining that he is the Count commanding himself. The class and gender battles end with Julie's and Jean's submission to their absent sovereign.
Christine
A relatively minor character, Christine is the manor's thirty-five-year-old cook and Jean's fiancé. Sharing in Jean's gossip over Miss Julie's "wild" nature, she seems to be a pious and petty hypocrite. She clings fiercely to a sense of social hierarchy. Upon discovering that Julie and Jean have had sex, Christine decides to leave the house. Late in the play, she denies Miss Julie's plea for help. The fact that Jean did not live up to her social position trumps Christine's sense of human compassion
Themes, Motifs, and Symbols
E.1 Themes
The Degenerate Woman -
In his preface to the play, Strindberg describes his heroine, Miss Julie, as a woman with a "weak and degenerate brain." In the play, Jean comments on Julie's crazy behavior. Miss Julie, one of the first major exercises in naturalism and the naturalist character, becomes a case study of a woman who is supposedly, as Jean says, "sick." This sickness condemns her to ruin in one of the more misogynistic classic works of modern theater. Strindberg was interested in psychology, and the play spends time detailing Julie's pathologies. Two concepts from the psychology of Strindberg's day are relevant: hysteria and feminine masochism. Hysteria was historically considered a female disease, and in the late-nineteenth century was defined as an illness brought on when a woman failed or refused to accept her sexual desires and did not become a sexual object, as the psychologists put it. Strindberg probably meant for us to read Julie as a hysteric, for she is simultaneously disgusted and drawn to men, both nonsexual and seductive. Strindberg, in his fear of early European feminism, attributes Julie's problems to a mother who believes in the equality of the sexes and, indeed, hates men. He also blames an initially absent, ineffectual father. Julie inherits her mother's hatred of men, attempting to train her fiancé with a riding whip and fantasizing about the annihilation of the male sex.
Besides this sadism (pleasure in another's pain), the play is interested in Julie's masochism (pleasure in one's own pain), a masochism explicitly identified as feminine. When Julie proposes suicide, Jean declares that he could never follow
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through with a plan to kill himself, and says that the difference between the sexes is that men are not masochistic, as women are. Julie confesses her desire to fall, and her brazenly flirtatious behavior with Jean supposedly makes her ruin her own fault. She ends up submitting herself wholeheartedly to Jean's will—Jean standing in, as we discover in the final scene, for Julie's father, the Count—.
Class and Gender Conflict -
Miss Julie has two subordinates—a daughter and a servant—who are subject to each other's authority. Julie is Jean's superior in terms of class; Jean is Julie's superior in terms of morality, because Jean is a man and Julie is a "degenerate" woman. These differences structure most of the play's action. The play is conservative in sentiment. It keeps these superior and inferior positions in place, and ultimately submits both characters to the total authority of the Count, who is father and master. An uncountable number of power reversals occur along class and gender lines throughout the play. The difference between Jean and Julie is central to their attraction. Whereas Julie expresses a desire to fall from her social position, Jean expresses an idle desire to climb up from his social position. Jean hopes to better his social status by sleeping with Julie. When he discovers that she is penniless, however, he abandons his plans. By sleeping with Jean, Julie degrades herself and places herself beneath Jean's level. The power shifts again, however, when Julie reasserts her superior class, mocking Jean's name and family line.
As explained in the preface to the play, these battles reflect Strindberg's social Darwinist notions of evolutionary history and hierarchy. He writes, "I have added a little evolutionary history by making the weaker steal and repeat the words of the stronger." Jean and Julie borrow from each other when they talk about the vision of the hotel or the sheriff. The most explicit instance of mimicry, however, occurs in the final moments of the play, when Julie asks Jean to imitate her father, commanding him to send her to her suicide. The conflicts between Jean and Julie throughout the play recreate Julie's fundamental submission to the Count. Julie has authority over Jean partly because she is her father's daughter, and Jean has authority over Julie because he has the Count's power as a man.
Idealization and Degradation -
Strindberg's notorious misogyny is characterized by the simultaneous idealization and degradation of woman. To him, these opposite impulses are two sides of the same coin. Jean at once worships and scorns Miss Julie. Early in the play, he describes her as both crude and beautiful. In the story of the Turkish pavilion, young Jean must flee an outhouse through the bottom and, emerging from his master's waste, sees Julie. He falls in love with her on the spot, but then she raises her skirt to use the outhouse, and
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he sees her in a compromising position. On top of Jean's initial love comes revulsion. The image of Julie strolling amidst the roses is degraded by the image of her going to the bathroom.
Hypnotism -
The famous scene of hypnosis at the end of Miss Julie emerges from Strindberg's longtime interest in psychology and occult phenomena. Here, hypnotism stands for the absolute authority of the Count, the master and father, whose power feels all the more absolute for his absence. The play shows us the effects of his power—the ringing of the bell, the animation of the speaking tube, and, most importantly, the direction of the characters' action. Miss Julie asks Jean to hypnotize her, because she lacks the will to commit suicide. Jean lacks the will to command her, so he is to pretend that he is the Count giving himself an order. The magical power of Julie's father, sends Julie to her death. Though Julie is hypnotized, the Count's power exerts a hypnotic effect on Jean as well. The trappings of the Count's authority (his boots, the bell, etc.) reduce Jean to paralysis.
Animal Doubles -
Two pets appear in Miss Julie. Both function as doubles for the heroine. The first pet is Diana, Julie's dog, who is pregnant by the gatekeeper's mongrel. Diana's name is a joke, for the goddess Diana is the goddess of virgins. Her resemblance to her owner implies that Miss Julie is not good looking. The second pet is Serena the canary, who Jean decapitates on a chopping block after deciding that Miss Julie cannot take the bird with them on their journey. The decapitation of the bird is linked to the story of Saint John the Baptist, who was decapitated. Saint John's story can be read as an allegory of a castration staged by a conspiracy of women. Here the terms of the allegory are reversed: Serena (or Miss Julie, who Serena symbolizes) is submitted to the chopping block. The execution of Serena sends Julie into a rage. She restores the biblical story in her fantasy, imagining Jean (French for "John") and his "entire sex" swimming in blood.
The pantomime and ballet -
The play's numerous pantomimes function as pauses in action, interrupting the otherwise unbroken episode with slow, highly realistic interludes. Christine cleans the kitchen, curls her hair, and hums a tune; Jean scribbles a few calculations. Such injections of the banal are typical of the naturalistic theater. Also a sort of pantomime,
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the dance of the peasants operates differently, laying waste to the kitchen and disrupting a largely two-person play with a rowdy crowd. Many critics have identified this pagan festivity of the rumor-mongering crowd as symbolic of Miss Julie's ruin and prefigurative of German expressionism.
E.2 Symbols
Some objects symbolize the Count, suggesting him in his absence: his boots, Jean's livery, the speaking tube, and, most importantly, the ringing bell. Together, these objects symbolize the workings of the master's authority. Their effect on Jean in particular reveals the magical and irresistible nature of the Count's power. They also reduce Jean to a spineless, yes-man.
1.2 Analysis
The backdrop of Miss Julie is Midsummer Eve, a festival of pagan origins celebrated in Northern Europe. A number of critics have related the paganism of the festival to the lust of the protagonists. The pagan festival, a pause in regular provincial life, is an occasion for disguise and deception, the crossing of social boundaries, and rebellion against moral stricture. It is appropriate that Midsummer Eve is the setting of Miss Julie and Jean's liaison, an encounter that crosses class lines. The play's investment in Miss Julie's degeneracy and ruin is clear from the outset. The portrait we get of Miss Julie through gossip shows the major motifs that shadow her character. Strindberg's interest in contemporary psychology emerges in the first scene. His heroine is portrayed as sick, probably sick in the manner of female hysterics of Strindberg's day.
Jean introduces Miss Julie as a woman who dreams of dominating men, subjecting them like dogs to her sadistic will. Her fiancé rejects her because of her urges, and she must stay home with the servants in disgrace. The story of the training session is a fantasy of unmanning the unruly heroine. Her fiancé, a man with whom Jean clearly sympathizes, breaks her riding crop. The crop is a phallic symbol, and when her fiancé breaks it, he breaks Julie's masculine power. The play disapproves of Julie's impulse to wield power, and prefers her to abuse herself rather than others.
We are meant to associate Julie's dog with Julie herself. The dog has coupled with a mongrel, just as her sex-hungry mistress does not care about the class of the man she wants to seduce. As Jean's first lines indicate, Miss Julie is "wild," dancing scandalously with the peasants in the barn. Miss Julie is meant to stand for modern women in general. When Jean tells the story of her broken engagement, he says, "Well, that's a woman for you," which suggests that Julie's behavior is typical of a
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woman. Miss Julie is a case study of a degenerate woman who supposedly embodies all woman. This case study is Strindberg's famous experiment in the "naturalistic" character. To some extent, Strindbergian naturalism is inseparable from Strinbergian misogyny.
These misogynist fantasies primarily find voice through Jean. In these first scenes, a motif that will become appears in his speech: the simultaneous idealization and degradation of woman. Jean describes Julie and her mother as both proud and crude. Miss Julie is cruder than the average servant. The Countess's degraded nature manifests as the dirt on her sleeves. This is an image of filth typical to the play. Such images recur to indicate female degradation. Still, Jean is mesmerized by Julie, saying, "But she is beautiful! Magnificent! Ah, those shoulders—those—and so forth, and so forth!" Jean's conflicting feelings for Julie are complicated by his being not just a man relating to a woman, but a servant relating to a mistress. Much of Miss Julie comes from the servant's perspective, the servant positioned to see the undesirable sides of their supposedly superior masters. This degradation is not really about class subversion, but about misogyny. Jean's humiliation of Julie relies on an assertion of female degeneracy. In the context of this play, Jean is superior to Julie because he is a man, a superiority he can use to combat her superiority to him in terms of class.
2.2 Analysis
Miss Julie begins to play the coquette, intent on teasing and ridiculing Jean, but ostensibly not wanting anything else. Thus she feigns innocence when he alludes to the party nearby and the danger of gossip, mocks Jean for his presumption, and taunts him for thinking himself a Don Juan or Joseph. The reference to Joseph involves the story of Potiphar's wife, who attempted to seduce a young slave and cried rape when he refused her. By calling Jean Joseph, Julie aligns herself with Potiphar's wife. She is portrayed as a devious, fickle temptress. The stage directions note her slyly "changing tack." She pettily exerts her rank over Jean and displays jealousy toward his would-be fiancé. The misogyny of this characterization is hardly subtle. Strindberg makes his women characters misogynist, too; Christine attributes Julie's wild behavior to her menstrual cycle.
This sequence is meant to assure the audience that Julie is asking for her own ruin. She admits to a masochistic desire for her own ruin. As her dream suggests, she wants to "climb down." Already we begin to sense that Julie's fall is inevitable. In her dream, she goes "right down into the earth" to find peace. Such masochism is what makes her a difficult and fascinating character. We worry about her and wonder at her behavior, but cannot look away. Jean appears to be at the mercy of Julie's wiles, hesitant in his lust, and eager to maintain decorum and warn her of the consequences of flirtation. Jean's unheeded warnings further underline Julie's responsibility for her public ruin.
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Jean also engages in a show of "mock gallantry" at his mistress's request, speaking French, feigning sophistication in his speech, and staging a sentimental scene of seduction, even kissing her foot. Julie is delighted by Jean's performance and tells him he should have been an actor. Jean and Julie begin donning personas, playing at being master and servant. This scene does suggest that a real romance could build between Jean and Julie, and that they could complement each other. Their dreams complement each other; Julie yearns to "climb down" from her pillar, and Jean wishes to climb up to the next. In order for the complementary dreams to work together, Julie must degrade herself. In terms of dramaturgical form, this section of the play is notable for its use of pantomime. Christine's tasks introduce an aspect of "real time" into the play, important to Strindbergian naturalism. We watch this interlude while Jean and Julie dance offstage.
3.2 Analysis
The story of the outhouse changes Miss Julie from a seductive coquette to a sentimental listener. Jean's reminiscence has all the trappings of a fairy tale (the seven brothers and sisters, the forbidden garden, the bed of alder leaves, the servant who falls in love with his superior at first sight), and it artfully puts Julie under his spell. Strindberg makes it clear that Jean is deceiving Julie. He speaks in an exaggerated tone and lies about the peasants' song. The fairy tale reveals the nature of Jean's desire for Julie. Jean claims he fell in love at first sight, after running through an outhouse. This story simultaneously exalts and degrades Julie. The story can be divided by its two settings: the outhouse and the rose terrace. Consciously choosing to address Julie as a servant to a master, Jean attempts to produce pathos with the story of a servant-boy naively enthralled by the incarnation of even his superiors' lowest functions. The spatial metaphor suggests class differences. Forced to flee through the bottom of the outhouse, Jean is mired in the filth of his masters. Whether Jean offers this anecdote ironically, as an insult to Julie, is unclear. Indeed, Jean's trip through the bottom of the outhouse suggests that Miss Julie is as interested in degrading the figure of servant as it is in degrading the figure of the woman.
At times, Jean's story seems ironic, even mocking. He describes the outhouse in this way: "I had never seen a castle, never seen anything besides the church. But this was more beautiful. " Jean idealizes, probably sarcastically, the filthy outhouse. He may be mocking what he sees as Julie's typical upper class ability to see everything associated with her, even outhouses, as noble. Jean's comparison degrades churches and castles just as effectively as it mocks the foul outhouse. The juxtaposition of the outhouse with the clichéd image of the adored woman spotted on the balcony degrades the story of childhood romance. Once again, positions in space reflect positions in class. Jean lies in filth, while Julie strolls on the rose terrace. Thus, while the story shows Jean at his most abject, the joke is on Julie. Jean is not only the figure abused by his masters but the servant whose perspective allows him to see their undersides. Jean wonders why he cannot enter the Count's forbidden garden at the
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very moment when he sees the young Julie. The implication is that the way into the manor, the way up in the world, is between Julie's legs.
The peasants' ballet is another break in the primary action of the play. The peasants' lusty destruction of the kitchen parallels the disruption the off- stage events will cause. Jean and Julie's exit marks a major turning point in the play. By retiring offstage, the two keep the most scandalous event of their flirtation, sex, hidden from view. Similarly, in dialogue sexual matters are alluded to indirectly, through suggestive phrases, suspenseful pauses, and tense ellipses.
4.2 Analysis
After Julie and Jean have sex, their idyllic fantasy of Italian summers quickly becomes an ugly unmasking of Jean's intentions. Transformed from "mistress" (as in woman of the house) to "mistress" (as in concubine), Julie finds herself sinking in "awful filth." She wonders at her own behavior. Faced with Jean's accusation that she has acted like a beast and a whore, Julie is prostrate, masochistically imploring her servant to at once punish her and help her. She simultaneously hates and desires her lover. Julie's submission to Jean reflects Strindberg's notions of evolution. He suggests that Julie must fall to Jean, because women are men's evolutionary inferiors. This mythical conception of evolution is central to each of the characters' fates. As Strindberg notes in the preface to Miss Julie, he has "added a little evolutionary history [to the play] by making the weaker steal and repeat the words of the stronger." The play takes pleasure in Julie's humiliation. We find ourselves in a bind, too, because although we may find ourselves sympathizing with Julie, that sympathy is characteristic of the sadistic Jean. He pities Julie as we probably do.
Class conflict persist, a conflict also informed by Strindberg's understanding of evolutionary history. The play imagines servants imitating and aspiring to become their masters. Jean's dreams of being a Count himself one day reflect Strindberg's idea that strong people want to clamber up some evolutionary ladder. Though Jean abuses his mistress here, declaring that they now eat on the same platter, he remains aware of his lower status. Still, Julie has put herself at his mercy by sleeping with him. When she insults Jean, he can retort that whatever he is, she is worse, for she has slept with the man she insults. In his fantasies of Como, Jean initially imagines Miss Julie as a slave-mistress and then appears to mourn genuinely the loss of Julie as his idealized class superior. Though relations of power have reversed between Jean and Julie, fantasies of the class structure persist in the background. Jean's inferior class position will continually compromise his apparent mastery over the fallen Julie.
Jean, unable to fully command Julie, describes the effects of the Count's authority: "I've only got to see [the Count's] gloves lying on the table and I shrivel up. I only have to hear that bell ring and I shy like a frightened horse. I only have to look at his boots standing there so stiff and proud and I feel my spine bending." Jean is sent into instant submission by a physical reminder of his master's presence. The symbols of the Count unman Jean (he shrivels up), reduce him to a workhorse, and bend his
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spine. He reacts to the Count in what Strindberg likely means for us to see as a feminine manner.
5.2 Analysis
Strindberg's misogyny is apparent in Julie's continued humiliation. Her mother's feminist ideas are portrayed as unquestionably abhorrent and her treachery as a familiar story. Julie is supposedly lucky that the law does not arrest temptresses. Jean thinks Julie is sick, a diagnosis we are meant to agree with. This scene blames Miss Julie's illness on her family history, laying the blame at the feet of her mother. Strindberg was interested in psychology, and incorporated it into his literary and scholarly works. Miss Julie and the Countess are models of the hysteric, as popularly conceived of in the nineteenth century. When Strindberg wrote, hysteria was thought to be a female disease. The word "hysteria" is derived from the Greek word for womb (hustera). In antiquity and beyond, people believed in specious disorders and demon possession of the female reproductive system. In Strindberg's day, hysteria—though a hotly contested disease—increasingly came to refer not only to theories of innate degeneracy, but to sexual disturbances. Specifically, it was thought that women became hysterics when they failed or refused to accept their sexual desires. Physicians defined this as the failure to become a sexual object for a man.
Julie appears torn between her hatred and disgust for men, and an irresistible attraction to them. She attempts to enslave and even destroy men, but she submits to Jean. Her desperate plea for Jean to accompany her to her bedroom is meant to demonstrate her feminine masochism. Julie's paralysis is another symptom of her hysteria. After sleeping with Jean, she is portrayed as totally without will, unable to think for herself. The play explains Julie's state as a product of her mother's influence. The Countess suffered from a "masculinity complex" (a charge leveled against feminists, from Strindberg's day to the present), usurping her husband's authority and disastrously attempting to reverse gender roles on the estate. She raised Julie just like a boy, making her a mannish woman and teaching her to hate men. Julie became bent on revenging herself on men and bringing ruin to the paternal household. Her mother's influence has divided her from her supposedly appropriate desires.
Along with providing Julie's family history, this scene continues to develop the theme of class, particularly in relation to genealogy. At one point, teasing Julie with the threat of rejecting her hand in marriage, Jean declares his family line superior to his mistress's. "I don't have any ancestors at all!" he cries. "But I can become an ancestor myself." Jean fantasizes about making himself, free of all ties of kin, and breaking the bonds of his servitude.
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6.2 Analysis
This sequence functions as another unmasking. Miss Julie fantasizes about men's annihilation, and fantasy that shows her at her most violent, desperate, morbid, and monstrous. This fantasy is sparked by a scene of decapitation, a scene that links to Christine's mention of the execution of Saint John the Baptist. Unlike the biblical allegory, however, which imagines a man symbolically castrated by a conspiracy of women, the execution in Miss Julie is of a female bird that stands for her female mistress, which reverses the gender roles of the Saint John story. In Julie's story, the symbolic castration is of a woman already established as inappropriately masculine.
The story of Saint John's execution revolves around Salome, the daughter of Herodias and King Herod. King Herod had arrested John for his public invectives against the king's adultery and his urgings for the people to revolt. On his birthday feast, Herod, consumed with incestuous desire for his daughter, promises to grant Salome a wish if she performs the infamous dance of the seven veils on his behalf. She does so and, at the request of her mother, demands the head of the saint on a platter. John is executed, and Salome presents John's head to her mother. As elaborated by Freud and others, decapitation is often symbolic of castration. Thus the story of Salome has become a touchstone for fantasies of monstrous, castrating women. Both Julie and her mother are portrayed as wrathful, castrating, and monstrous women. Jean (French for "John") is the would-be victim of Julie. The decapitation of the bird, however, reverses the terms of the story.
Miss Julie's pet dog already stands in for Julie. The lusty dog is named Diana, ironically, for Diana is the virgin goddess. The canary, Serena, also stands in for Julie, which makes Julie the symbolic victim of this cruel execution. Julie screams for Jean to kill her too, making her identification with the bird obvious. The play inverts the gender dynamics of the biblical allegory, and the woman who would castrate becomes the castrated woman. This execution prompts Miss Julie's outburst of rage. This speech reveals the threats the degenerate Julie supposedly poses. She reveals her hatred of men in all its violence, saying she wants to see the blood and brains of all men, and would love to eat their hearts. Julie's revenge fantasy also involves the derision and destruction of the proper name, on which the family line depends. The name symbolizes the father's legacy, his dominance in the family, and his ownership of his wife and children. Jean's name becomes the sign of his inferior class position. Jean has no last name beyond his servile role (Doorkeeper or Floorsweeper); his line can only end in the orphanage, gutter, and jail. Jean cannot be a father, the ancestor of a new line; as a servant, he is a tarnished man.
Because last names symbolize male authority, Julie's comment that Jean bears her name on his buttons and collar robs Jean of his manhood. At the same time, however, the initials on Jean's buttons are not really Julie's. They are the initials of Julie's father, which symbolize his ownership of Julie and Julie's mother. Julie must borrow the tool of a man in order to show Jean her superiority. In the tirade's final
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reversal, Julie yearns for the destruction her father's name. She dreams of his death and the annihilation of his line.
7.2 Analysis
Strindberg suggests that the difference between men and women is that women are masochistic, and want to ruin themselves, while men are better equipped for evolution and want to survive. Although our first image of Julie is of a sadist, her sadism quickly becomes masochistic submission to an erstwhile servant. The play itself is sadistic in exacting her demise. Jean, speaking for the play, says he cannot promise her grace, but can assure her that she has moved from among the first to the very last. Though at one point Julie describes herself as "half woman and half man," we should not take her words at face value. Julie is not a figure of gender indeterminacy; rather, the play rather conventionally imagines her "half-ness" as consisting of her mother's emotions and her father's thoughts. Julie identifies with both male and female figures in the play. As she confesses, she has no self she can call her own. Part of Julie's pleasure in her pain comes from identification with the men around her. Julie's indecision over taking her life, for example, is analogous to her father unsuccessful suicide attempt. On one level, Julie sees herself as her mother's victim, just as her father was. Julie learned to hate men from her father, and to hate women from her mother. This scene links Julie's masochistic behavior to her hatred of women, a hatred her father implanted in her.
It occurs to Julie to have Jean hypnotize her, and when she asks him to play the count, it shows her desire to hurt herself, and Jean's mastery over Julie. She wants to play the servant to his master. Projecting herself across class lines, Julie identifies with the figure of the servant bowed before his master. She also transcends gender lines, wanting to imagine herself as a cowed man. A homoerotic element infuses the request. We have heard Jean say several times that he has thought of being a count someday. His performance as count falters, however. Julie successfully imagines herself the servant, but Jean's authority over her is incomplete. Julie wakes from hypnosis and interrupts their play-act. Jean finds himself in a near-hypnotic state of his own, reduced to impotence by the presence of the Count. He is paralyzed by seeing the Count's boots and hearing his voice. Though Jean ostensibly leads Julie to her death, it is clear that both characters are under a spell.
Jean and Julie are under the total influence of the Count. The innumerable power reversals between Jean and Julie are reduced to a joint submission to the Count, who is master and father. Jean would follow Julie in suicide himself if the Count commanded. The Count—disembodied, unseen, and unheard—is a figure of supreme, magical authority. The Count's authority demands Jean's return to servitude and Julie's death. The denouement of the play is sadistic, demanding that the heroine kill herself and claiming, through Jean, that it is the only way
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Chapter Three
Poetry
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Beowulf(1000)
About the Manuscript and the Poet of Beowulf:
Beowulf is the first surviving epic written in the English language. The single existing copy of the manuscript dates from the late tenth century, although some scholars believe it dates from the first part of the eleventh century. It is found in a large volume that features stories involving mythical creatures and people. Two different scribes copied the poem, most likely using an existing copy. Between 1066 and the Reformation, the whole volume remained in a monastic library until Sir Robert Cotton gained possession of it for his own extensive library. A fire consumed much of his library, and the volume containing Beowulf became badly charred. Today the manuscript still exists, though it is falling apart rapidly due to the charring in the fire.
We do not have any definite knowledge about the poet--indeed, we do not even know the date of the poem's composition. Through the study of Old English verse, most scholars believe that the poem was composed much earlier than the Cotton manuscript, between 650 and 800. Some words in Beowulf do not adhere to the scansion of Old English verse; however, using the older forms of the words, dating from the period given, causes the lines to scan correctly. Yet accurately dating the poem is a difficult enterprise since the poem has such a derivative quality. It is evident that the Beowulf poet wished to place his work within an even more ancient tradition. Beowulf directly uses many ancient stories that have been preserved in later texts, such as the legend of Sigemund and the account of the war at Finnesburh. In addition, the poem is written with the traditional epic diction, with whole phrases taken from the other bards who sang the legends incorporated.
Despite his borrowing from other sources, perhaps in large quantities, the Beowulf poet nonetheless manages to add his own specialized view of his characters' world. First and foremost, Beowulf's author is a Christian, and he makes the Christian world extremely visible. He alludes to Cain and the Flood; he shows the Christian God's influence upon the pagan world of the Danes. Yet he is obviously aware of his culture's pagan past and attempts to describe it in great detail through rituals, such as the elaborate Germanic sea-burials and the grand feasts in the mead-halls, and the ever-present belief in fate. Thus Beowulf's poet tries to recreate the past of his people for his people, almost with a nostalgic feeling for the bygone pagan days.
Short Summary of Beowulf:
The poem begins with a brief genealogy of the Danes. Scyld Shefing was the first great king of the Danes, known for his ability to conquer enemies. Scyld becomes the
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great-grandfather of Hrothgar, the king of the Danes during the events of Beowulf. Hrothgar, like his ancestors before him, is a good king, and he wishes to celebrate his reign by building a grand hall called Heorot. Once the hall is finished, Hrothgar holds a large feast. The revelry attracts the attentions of the monster Grendel, who decides to attack during the night. In the morning, Hrothgar and his thanes discover the bloodshed and mourn the lost warriors. This begins Grendel's assault upon the Danes.
Twelve years pass. Eventually the news of Grendel's aggression on the Danes reaches the Geats, another tribe. A Geat thane, Beowulf, decides to help the Danes; he sails to the land of the Danes with his best warriors. Upon their arrival, Hrothgar's thane Wulfgar judges the Geats worthy enough to speak with Hrothgar. Hrothgar remembers when he helped Beowulf's father Ecgtheow settle a feud; thus, he welcomes Beowulf's help gladly.
Heorot is filled once again for a large feast in honor of Beowulf. During the feast, a thane named Unferth tries to get into a boasting match with Beowulf by accusing him of losing a swimming contest. Beowulf tells the story of his heroic victory in the contest, and the company celebrates his courage. During the height of the celebration, the Danish queen Wealhtheow comes forth, bearing the mead-cup. She presents it first to Hrothgar, then to the rest of the hall, and finally to Beowulf. As he receives the cup, Beowulf tells Wealhtheow that he will kill Grendel or be killed in Heorot. This simple declaration moves Wealhtheow and the Danes, and the revelry continues. Finally, everyone retires. Before he leaves, Hrothgar promises to give Beowulf everything if he can defeat Grendel. Beowulf says that he will leave God to judge the outcome. He and his thanes sleep in the hall as they wait for Grendel.
Eventually Grendel arrives at Heorot as usual, hungry for flesh. Beowulf watches carefully as Grendel eats one of his men. When Grendel reaches for Beowulf, Beowulf grabs Grendel's arm and doesn't let go. Grendel writhes about in pain as Beowulf grips him. He thrashes about, causing the hall to nearly collapse. Soon Grendel tears away, leaving his arm in Beowulf's grasp. He slinks back to his lair in the moors and dies.
The Danes, meanwhile, consider Beowulf as the greatest hero in Danish history. Hrothgar's minstrel sings songs of Beowulf and other great characters of the past, including Sigemund (who slew a dragon) and Heremod (who ruled his kingdom unwisely and was punished). In Heorot, Grendel's arm is nailed to the wall as a trophy. Hrothgar says that Beowulf will never lack for riches, and Beowulf graciously thanks him. The horses and men of the Geats are all richly adorned, in keeping with Hrothgar's wishes.
Another party is held to celebrate Beowulf's victory. Hrothgar's minstrel tells another story at the feast, the story of the Frisian slaughter. An ancient Danish king had a daughter named Hildeburh; he married her to a king of the Frisians. While Hnaef, Hildeburh's brother, visited his sister, the Frisians attacked the Danes, killing Hnaef and Hildeburh's son in the process. Hengest, the next leader of the Danes, desired vengeance, and in the spring, the Danes attacked the Frisians, killing their leader and taking Hildeburh back to Denmark.
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After this story is told, Wealhtheow presents a necklace to Hrothgar while pleading with her brother-in-law Hrothulf to help her two young sons if they should ever need it. Next she presents many golden treasures to Beowulf, such as necklaces, cups, and rings. Soon the feast ends, and everyone sleeps peacefully.
In the night, Grendel's mother approaches the hall, wanting vengeance for her son. The warriors prepared for battle, leaving enough time for Grendel's mother to grab one of Hrothgar's counselors and run away. When Beowulf is summoned to the hall, he finds Hrothgar in mourning for his friend Aeschere. Hrothgar tells Beowulf where the creatures like Grendel live‹in a shadowy, fearful land within the moors.
Beowulf persuades Hrothgar to ride with him to the moors. When they reach the edge of the moors, Beowulf calls for his armor, takes a sword from Unferth, and dives into the lake. After a long time, Beowulf reaches the bottom of the lake, where Grendel's mother is waiting to attack. Beowulf swings his sword, but discovers that it cannot cut her, so he tosses it away. They then wrestle until Beowulf spies a large sword nearby. He grabs it by the hilt and swings‹killing Grendel's mother by slicing off her head. Still in a rage, Beowulf finds the dead Grendel in the lair and cuts off his head as a trophy.
As they wait, the Danes have given up all hope for Beowulf because he has been underwater for such a long time. They are shocked when Beowulf returns with Grendel's head and the hilt of the sword (which melted with the heat of Grendel's blood). They bear the hero and his booty back to Heorot, where another celebration takes place. Beowulf recounts his battle; Hrothgar praises him and gives him advice on being a king. A grand feast follows, and Beowulf is given more priceless treasures. The next morning, the Geats look forward to leaving Denmark. Before they leave, Beowulf promises aid for Hrothgar from the Danes. Hrothgar praises Beowulf and promises that their lands will have an alliance forever. As the Geats leave, Hrothgar finds himself wishing Beowulf would never leave.
The Geats return with much rejoicing to their homeland, where their king Hygelac and his queen Hygd greet them. In an aside, the narrator compares Hygd to the queen of the ancient Offa, who is not tamed until Offa comes to subjugate her. Beowulf tells his lord the events of his trip to Denmark. In the process, he tells another story that had previously been unmentioned. Hrothgar betrothed his daughter Freawaru to a prince of the Heathobards in order to settle an old feud. Beowulf speculates that someone will goad this Heathobard prince to take vengeance upon the Danes for all their past wrongs. Hygelac praises Beowulf for his bravery and gives him half the kingdom. They rule the kingdom together in peace and prosperity. Hygelac is killed in a battle soon after, so Beowulf becomes king of the Geats and rules the kingdom well.
In the fiftieth year of Beowulf's reign, a monster arises to terrorize the Geats. A treasure trove was left by an ancient civilization, which guarded it jealously until only one member of the race was left. After the last person's death, a fire-breathing dragon found the treasure and guarded it for three hundred years. One day, a slave stumbled upon the treasure and stole a cup as an offering to his lord. The dragon awakened to find something missing from his treasure, and began his rampage upon the Geats.
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One day, Beowulf learns that this dragon has destroyed his own great hall. This attack sends him into deep thought. Soon he orders a shield to use for battle, but not without a heavy heart at what may happen to him. He recalls Hygelac's death in battle and his own narrow escape from this battle. He recalls a number of battles he has seen as he travels to the dragon's lair with eleven of his thanes. The servant who stole the cup leads them to the lair.
As they wait to attack the dragon, Beowulf recounts the Geat royal family's plight, in which Hygelac's oldest brothers killed each other and left their father to die of a broken heart. Beowulf says he served Hygelac well, and a sword (named Naegling) that he won while serving Hygelac will help him save the kingdom once again. Beowulf leads the charge to the dragon's cave. The shield protects him from the dragon's flames, but his men flee in fear, leaving only one man behind. This man is Wiglaf, Beowulf's kinsman through Ecgtheow. Wiglaf becomes angry, but swears that he will stay by Beowulf's side.
Just then the dragon rushes up to them. Beowulf and the dragon swing at each other three times, finally landing mortal blows upon each other the last time. The dragon is beheaded, but Beowulf is bitten and has a mortal poison from the dragon flowing through his body as a result. Wiglaf bathes his lord's body as Beowulf speaks on the treasure. He says that Wiglaf should inherit it as his kinsman; then he dies.
After his death, the cowards return, to be severely chastised by Wiglaf. He sends a messenger to tell the people of their king's death. The messenger envisions the joy of the Geats' enemies upon hearing of the death of Beowulf. He also says that no man shall ever have the treasure for which Beowulf fought. Wiglaf and Beowulf's thanes toss the dragon's body into the sea. They place the treasure inside a mound with Beowulf's body and mourn for "the ablest of all world-kings."
Prologue and the Arrival ofG rendel, ll. 1-193:
Analysis:
The prologue recounts an age of glory for the Danes, yet it has a bitter tone. The "grand old days" of heroes has been replaced with an era of cowardice. From his description, we see that Scyld is a mighty king who can defeat anything. Compare this to his great- great- grandson Hrothgar, who is only fighting one enemy, yet allows the enemy to take over his kingdom completely without attempting to kill the monster himself. The narrator also foreshadows another weakness in the later Germanics. Beowulf of the Danes keeps his men faithful by paying them treasures; later in the poem, even treasure will not keep Beowulf of the Geats' men from leaving him to fight alone.
Heorot is Old English for "the hart," and indeed the splendor of the hall flees as a deer. The hall and the arrival of Grendel are likened to the story of the Creation and
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the Flood: a paradise is built, and the people enjoy its fruits until they are cursed with a disaster (even a family member of Cain is involved). Despite their knowledge of God and Christian ritual, the people turn to the pagan rituals: the Danes still expect the pagan gods to help them from the dire situation, and Grendel cannot be "bought off" with the traditional wergild, paid to an enemy to stop his attack.
Lines 194-709
Analysis:
We receive the first bit of character development of Beowulf in this part of the poem. We learn that he is beloved of his people, a faithful thane of Hygelac, and a prince in his own right (through his father Ecgtheow). He is respectful to everyone he encounters, from the lowly coast guard to King Hrothgar. Later, he even shows his respect for women in his gentle words to Wealhtheow. The rumor mill has told the Danish court that he is actually a good, strong warrior. Finally, Beowulf does believe in religion. He follows both the ancient Germanic practices and the Christian practices, as we see in his ability to leave it entirely in the hands of God and Wyrd (the Anglo-Saxon word for "fate"). In short, he seems like just the man for the job, and Hrothgar realizes it.
Of course, Beowulf still has to prove himself to the company of the Danes. Enter Unferth, the maker of discord. Unferth's job is to test the actual valor of the warrior and his ability to fend off a verbal attack. Beowulf not only answers the challenge (yes, he did win the contest), he also shows the extent of his bravery (he defeated the sea monsters) and discredits Unferth's truthtelling (Unferth is nothing but a drunk murderer who can't act). With his graceful and complete defense, Beowulf proves himself to be the consummate warrior, able to fight with words and swords equally well.
The boasting match between Unferth and Beowulf is the first in a series of told and retold stories within the poem. Throughout the poem, stories are told several times, with different details appearing with each retelling. This repetition of stories is very important. It reveals the oral nature of the culture‹people learn most legends and histories of their land through these stories. It makes the people learn morals by examples of people who did good or ill. Finally, the stories work as tools for foreshadowing, especially within the larger narrative. As we will learn, Beowulf's ability to swim for long distances and long periods will become very important in his defeat of Grendel's mother.
The characters also provide foreshadowing for each other in the poem. Hrothgar and Wulfgar have a very close relationship‹Wulfgar serves Hrothgar faithfully, while Hrothgar relies on Wulfgar for sound judgement. Later this will resemble the relationship between king Beowulf and his faithful thane Wiglaf. One can also compare the relationship between Beowulf as the young warrior and Hrothgar as the young-warrior-turned-old-powerless-king. Hrothgar almost certainly indicates Beowulf's fate at the same age‹powerless, needing to rely on other thanes to help him.
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Lines 710-915:
Analysis:
The Beowulf poet is fond of a good pun. Here he leaps on the chance to show off his different ways to work "holding" puns into this section. Grendel and Beowulf do more reaching, gripping, tearing with hands, and seizing in this portion of the poem than any other portion. All the references fall before the battle between Beowulf and Grendel‹so we may appreciate the way Beowulf "held to his promise" by ripping the monster's arm off.
Grendel's march and arrival at Heorot create a great sense of dramatic tension in the poem. First the poet sets the scene in dank darkness, then turns to the peaceful, slumbering warriors (except for one who remains awake). Grendel trods through the moors and darkness for ten tense lines, then suddenly bursts into full attack mode. The viewpoint shifts to Beowulf, who simply watches. During the battle, there is a great seesawing of viewpoint, from terrified Grendel to determined Beowulf to waiting warriors. The changing viewpoint allows us to savor the suspense of the moment and see the scene in different ways.
The symbolic light and darkness also figure heavily into the scene. The evil Grendel ambles over the dark moors in the dead of night; Beowulf waits by the lights in the hall. Dark Grendel gazes at the glinting gold on the hall. The battle that began in darkness is completed in the dawning of day. The tension between light (symbolizing good) and dark (symbolizing evil) returns again and again in the poem.
Some have wondered why Beowulf didn't run to action immediately when the monster enters. Why would he let two of his men meet such a terrible fate? Beowulf sees them as a necessary sacrifice. Again he uses the sense of a true warrior to act. Instead of rushing into battle blindly, Beowulf chooses to stand back and get a better idea of the enemy's strengths and weaknesses.
The scop sings as the men return to Heorot. Here the scop acts as a historian and places Beowulf into his song-annals as a man like the heroes of old. He uses the story of Sigemund as a teaching tool for Beowulf, who has the courage to defeat a dragon. Sigemund's story also serves as foreshadowing for Beowulf's future. Eventually Beowulf will come to fight a dragon, with only one thane by his side. The story of Heremod serves as a lesson to Beowulf, teaching him how not to rule a kingdom.
Lines 916-1250:
Analysis:
The poem begins its descent into darkness and death with this section. At first it seems that all is well in Denmark. The monster is gone, the hall is built again, and Hrothgar and his brother Hrothulf are celebrating, on good terms with each other. Yet
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it is an uneasy peace. As Heorot is repaired, the narrator tells us that death cannot be avoided. He feels that we should know that the brothers are not feuding at that time. At the height of the celebration, the minstrel sings a tragic tale that tells of the defeat of the ancient Danes. Wealhtheow gives a necklace that Beowulf's king Hygelac will wear when he falls. The section ends with "one beer drinker / ready and doomed [laying] down on bed." Things will become more and more difficult for the Danes and the Geats, leading to nothing but death. There have already been death-feasts (for Grendel and for the men dead by his hand); now there will be sleep-deaths (in this warrior sleeping and in the warriors before). Everything will eventually lead to ruin and death, despite the continuing parties.
We receive two different visions of women in this portion of Beowulf. Beowulf's mother can be seen as an allegory for the Virgin Mary, who was also "blessed in childbirth." Both women have borne great heroes who will save mankind (by bearing Beowulf and Jesus). Yet Beowulf's mother does not seem to have any other virtues other than being a childbearer.
Compare this to Wealhtheow's role at court. Wealhtheow has already been shown as the model of a good queen. She bears the cup of the mead-hall to serve her husband and guests. She also conforms to her name, which means "treasure-bearer," by assisting in the giving of gifts to Beowulf. She acts as a peace-weaver between her husband and brother-in-law, offering Hrothulf the right to care for her sons in their father's absence. Yet she refrains from saying that Hrothulf will inherit the kingdom, and shows enough courage to ask Hrothgar to protect the kingdom for her own sons. Thus we see her as a free-thinking woman who wants to protect her sons and her kingdom‹more than just a mother.
The story of the fight at Finnesburh is documented in what is known as the Finnesburh fragment, which tells us about one of the battles. Why should the minstrel tell the story at such an inopportune moment? It is his means of educating the people‹if the Danes are not careful, they will fall in such a manner again. As always, the story also foreshadows events that will be recounted in Beowulf's speech to his own lord, Hygelac.
Lines 1251-1649:
Analysis:
The need for repayment in some form is also a constant theme within the poem. The monsters of the poem all seek payment from life. Here Grendel's mother seeks vengeance for Grendel's death, wanting to take a life for his life. Grendel attacked Heorot because he wanted revenge for being shunned and despised. The humans think of repayment for life in monetary terms, with what is called "wergild." Beowulf is repaid for his dead man with treasures; Hrothgar cannot understand how to pay a fitting wergild to Grendel for all his lost men. The attack here is thus an attempt for Grendel's mother to retrieve the wergild on her son's life.
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Hrothgar and his men show their usual cowardice in this section. Instead of asking who has killed his beloved thane and resolving to do something about it, Hrothgar merely weeps over the dead body. The Danes and Geats both quake in fear at the sight of the creatures and Aeschere's head. Beowulf, meanwhile, acts bravely, asking Hrothgar to take him to the moors, simply diving into the water instead of hanging around talking.
This battle is not as easy for Beowulf as the first one was. We knew that he could swim for great distances‹we learned this in the Breca episode. Yet it takes more than Unferth's sword to defeat Grendel's mother. In fact, the battle is won when the giant sword magically appears. This represents Beowulf's decline even in the prime of his life‹from this point, the battles will get harder for him.
The battle can be seen as a Christian allegory. Beowulf swims to hell (the underground of the moors). It is a dark place. He does battle with the devil (Grendel's mother). Although he nearly loses, God grants him a sign that will help him win (the vision of the sword). Beowulf kills the devil, and light from heaven fills hell as a blessing. Beowulf then returns from the darkness of hell to reach the light of heaven. In this allegory, Beowulf represents Jesus' descent to hell and return to life in the Resurrection. Later the poet will compare Beowulf to Christ again.
Lines 1650-1887:
Analysis:
The story recounted on the hilt of the sword is that of Noah's Great Flood as recorded in Genesis. This reinforces the constant emphasis on water that has been shown throughout the poem. The Flood narrative has a special relevance here. We are reminded of the fate of all Cain's previous descendants in that great flood; again his descendants (Grendel and Grendel's mother) have met the same fate by dying in a watery grave. However, this curses the waters for men‹from this point, man's travel by water will be doomed, leading to war and death.
Unferth has cleaned up his act, as we have seen in the sections after the boasting contest. He has seen the awe of Grendel's hand; he has graciously given Beowulf a sword to defeat Grendel's mother. In this last meeting, Beowulf and Unferth can meet as equal warriors,as they have both done noble things.
Events useful for understanding the fall of the Danes and the Geats are set up here. Beowulf's offer of help for the Danes will be acknowledged, but the Geats will be powerless to stop the enemy. For now, this offer of help to the Danes is another part of the warrior code; one should give aid to those that have aided him.
Hrothgar's rule will be a guide for Beowulf's own rule as a king. Like Hrothgar, Beowulf will rule for fifty years and be venerated as a good king.
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Lines 1888-2199:
Analysis:
Some scholars have speculated that Beowulf's author was a servant of the real king Offa. They interpret the story of Offa's wife as the poet's attempt to show the power of the king. Offa's wife seems to be a human version of Grendel's mother, killing in a rage until a man is able to subdue her.
In Beowulf's version of events in Denmark, we learn the new story of Freawaru's betrothal to the Heathobard Prince. The parallels to the tale of Hildeburh are obvious‹a Danish princess is married to a rival country for peace, but war and death will be the result.
Beowulf plays the part of a minstrel here, the scop who teaches. Here he recounts the tale not only to tell Hygelac of the events in Denmark. He also shows his head for politics. The fact that he is able to clearly interpret the possible events of such a match attests to his talent for ruling. Hygelac apparently thinks so, too, as he gives him half the kingdom as a reward.
The rakish youth is a common trope literature. Beowulf follows the path that many other heroes have followed. When he was young, people thought he would be worthless, but as a man they praise him for his heroism.
Lines 2200-2537:
Analysis:
The Beowulf-as-Christ theme continues in this section. Beowulf as the Christ figure is betrayed by his disciple-thanes, who flee in terror at the first sign of danger to themselves. One disciple (in the form of Wiglaf) stays, though he also betrays the lord by being unable and too afraid to fight. After three blows
The warrior code is still extant, although only a few members of the warrior class follow it. Wiglaf remains at Beowulf's side for much the same reason that Beowulf came to help Hrothgar so long ago‹the kindness of the lord caused his family to have land and influence, and he must stay to return the favor. Beowulf, of course, plays the role of a proper king here. He charges forth, thinking only of defeating the monster to save his kingdom. At his death, his thoughts are also only of his people. He wishes to be buried on land to serve as a guide to his sailors. His dying breath is saved for naming the most fitting heir to his people.
The dying warrior being comforted by his comrade becomes a common trope as well. The image of Wiglaf holding the dying Beowulf brings forth later images of King Arthur being comforted by Sir Bedivere in later works.
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Lines 2820-3182:
Analysis:
We now see the aftermath of all the greed. Despite Beowulf's own greed that motivated him to fight for the treasure, however, it still makes him greater than the dragon, which moved "at sunset" and in darkness, as all the monsters did. The dragon is cursed again with burial at sea, just as Grendel and his mother were buried earlier in the poem.
Though Wiglaf is not quite the strong thane that Beowulf was, he is obviously learning, and in quite a hurry. He has enough presence of mind to berate the cowards for their weakness, and he knows that the people must quickly grieve for their lost lord, so that they may prepare for the war that is inevitable.
Again stories told within the text have relevance to the primary narrative. Like the civilization that owned the treasure before, the last surviving member of the Geats (Beowulf) will be buried with the permanent riches. The recurring enemies of the Geats and Danes, the Frisians and the Swedes, will return. In addition, the ruling class overlaps with the artistic class in the telling of these stories. The messenger and Wiglaf now have the task of telling these stories of the ancient feuds and heroes, since there is no longer a hall in which to sing and a great minstrel to sing the tale.
Finally, closure is achieved in the poem by having it end as it began--with a funeral scene. Certain elements are retained between the two funerals. The people still mourn, and the king meets death accompanied by a wealth of treasure. This time, however, Beowulf cannot be sent out to sea as Scyld Shefing was, because he is too earthly in his desire to see the wealth. In addition, the sea has been corrupted by the bodies of the monsters resting in its depths. Therefore, Beowulf must be buried on land, with the treasures of mankind surrounding his ashes, pointing the way for all men that should happen to sail over the sea. It is a fitting end to the warrior who worked to protect his people‹the chance for rest, though still ably serving a purpose.
Lines 2538-2819
Analysis:
The Beowulf-as-Christ theme continues in this section. Beowulf as the Christ figure is betrayed by his disciple-thanes, who flee in terror at the first sign of danger to themselves. One disciple (in the form of Wiglaf) stays, though he also betrays the lord by being unable and too afraid to fight. After three blows
The warrior code is still extant, although only a few members of the warrior class follow it. Wiglaf remains at Beowulf's side for much the same reason that Beowulf came to help Hrothgar so long ago‹the kindness of the lord caused his family to have land and influence, and he must stay to return the favor. Beowulf, of course, plays the role of a proper king here. He charges forth, thinking only of defeating the monster to save his kingdom. At his death, his thoughts are also only of his people. He wishes to be buried on land to serve as a guide to his sailors. His dying breath is saved for naming the most fitting heir to his people.
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The dying warrior being comforted by his comrade becomes a common trope as well. The image of Wiglaf holding the dying Beowulf brings forth later images of King Arthur being comforted by Sir Bedivere in later works.
Character List:
Scyld Shefing: He is known as one of the first great kings of the Danes. Upon his death he is given a remarkable burial at sea. Eventually he becomes the great-grandfather of Hrothgar, king during Grendel's attacks upon the Danes.
Beow (Beowulf): He is the son of Scyld Shefing, and a strong king in his own right. He is often confused with the hero of the poem.
Hrothgar: He is the King of the Danes at the time of Grendel's assaults. He builds the hall Heorot as a tribute to his people and his reign.
Heorot: This is the hall that Hrothgar builds in celebration of his reign. It is the site both of many happy festivals and many sorrowful funerals.
Grendel: This man-monster is a descendant of Cain. He attacks Heorot after hearing the sounds of revelry there. Beowulf eventually kills him, with his severed arm hung as a trophy in Heorot. His mother attempts to avenge his death.
Beowulf: He is a thane of the Geat king Hygelac and eventually becomes King of the Geats. The poem relates his heroic exploits over 50 years, including the fights with Grendel and his mother and with the treasure-guarding dragon.
Wulfgar: He is one of Hrothgar's faithful thanes. As the watchman for the Danes, he is the first to greet Beowulf and his thanes to the land of the Danes. He also deems the Geat visitors as people worthy enough to meet with Hrothgar.
Ecgtheow: He is Beowulf's father. He is a Waegmunding by birth and a Geat by marriage. When he was younger, Hrothgar helped him settle a feud with the Wylfingas.
Unferth: A thane of Hrothgar's, he taunts Beowulf in the hall about his swimming contest with Breca. However, Beowulf shames him in the boasting match. His name means "discord."
Wealhtheow: She is Hrothgar's queen and the mother of his two sons. Her name comes from the Anglo-Saxon words for "treasure bearer." She actually has the duty of presenting necklaces and mead-cups at court.
Sigemund: He is an ancient Germanic hero whose story is recounted after the fight with Grendel. He was known as the famous dragon slayer.
Heremod: He was an ancient Danish king who went from being a good king to a ruthlessly evil king. Hrothgar uses him as an example of bad kingship for Beowulf.
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Hildeburh: Her story in recounted during the second feast for Beowulf at Heorot. She is an ancient Danish princess who was married into the Frisian royalty. Her brother and her son were both killed in a war with the Frisians at Finnesburh.
Hrothulf: He is Hrothgar's younger brother. Wealhtheow calls upon him to protect her young sons if it should ever be necessary to do so.
Grendel's Mother: She is, of course, the mother of the man-monster Grendel. She comes to Heorot seeking vengeance for the death of her son. Beowulf kills her.
Aeschere: Apparently he is one of Hrothgar's important officials and faithful thanes. Grendel's mother kills him, and Hrothgar is inconsolable.
Hrunting: Unferth gives this sword to Beowulf to use in killing Grendel's mother. It is unable to cut her, however, so Beowulf discards it. Later he returns it to Unferth with his thanks
Hygelac: This King of the Geats is also Beowulf's uncle. Upon hearing Beowulf's courageous exploits, he gives Beowulf nearly half his kingdom.
Freawaru: She is the daughter of Hrothgar who is unmentioned until Beowulf tells Hygelac about her. Beowulf believes that her marriage to a Heathobard prince will do more harm than good for the Danes.
The Dragon: This is the third and last monster that Beowulf must defeat. After a Geat slave steals from his treasure, he goes on a rampage. Beowulf defeats him, but not before striking a mortal blow to him.
Naegling: Beowulf won this sword in a fight between the Geats and the Frisians. He uses it in the battle with the dragon.
Wiglaf: This is Beowulf's kinsman through Ecgtheow's family, the Waegmundings. He is the only thane of Beowulf's that stays with him during the battle with the dragon.
Christianity and Danish Paganism
The story of Beowulf shows the effect of the spread of Christianity in the early Danish paganistic society that values heroic deeds and bravery above all else. The mythical creatures that Beowulf kills with his supernatural strength make the story into an epic celebrating the life of a great hero. However, blending in among Beowulf's triumphs against the three key creatures, we also see Christian virtues being instilled upon the listeners. The good qualities of loyalty, humility, sacrifice for the good of others, and sympathy for those less fortunate are seen woven into the text as well as the negative consequences from greed and pride. The characters of Grendel,
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his mother, and the dragon are tools used by the author to teach values, but also to rejoice in the legendary success of Beowulf.
The menacing character of Grendel is introduced as horrible, but his humanistic side is shown as well. As a result, Grendel's character helps further the Christian influence on the book as well as paint Beowulf as a magnificent hero. Grendel is first described as "the creature of evil, grim and fierce, and was quickly ready, savage and cruel, and seized from the first thirty thanes." (Tuso, 3) Beowulf can be interpreted as a heroic epic when Grendel is seen as a ravenous monster because it makes Beowulf appear even more spectacular for defeating the horrendous monster. However, there is a strong Christian influence as well because Grendel is a descendent of Cain and is therefore rejected by God and must live in suffering. When Grendel appears, he is "wearing God's anger" which is the opposite of the thanes who celebrate god's grace in their victories in the hall Heorot. (Tuso, 13) The reader feels pity for Grendel when it understood that he hates Heorot because it is everything that he lacks. Grendel is even described as an "unhappy creature" while the thanes are regarded as living in "joy and blessed." (Tuso, 3) Heorot is a symbol of the victory of the thanes and it where they are merry, happy, social, and even play music, which particularly irks Grendel. Grendel's jealousy and pain resulting from being an outcast explain his violent reaction to the thanes. These are very human emotions and it seems like one of the first Christian values is being instilled here; sympathy for those less fortunate. Later on, when Grendel retreats to his lair to die, his weakness and human side is again seen.
Grendel is forced to flee because Beowulf mortally rips off his claw. The claw is a direct symbol of Beowulf's strength since it is from his hand to claw battle with Grendel. "The awful monster had lived to feel pain in his body, a huge wound in his shoulder was exposed, his sinews sprang apart, his bone locks broke. Glory in battle was given to Beowulf." (Tuso, 15) Beowulf is depicted as the great hero who gains victory over a supernatural being, Grendel. This story of the underdog is similar to the story in the Old Testament about David triumphing over the giant Goliath. When the claw is hung up in Heorot, Beowulf's bravery is celebrated and it is obvious that this quality is highly respected among the thanes.
However, the claw has a different meaning to Grendel's mother who sees it as an extreme sign of disrespect to her dead son and is enraged that it is hung for all to see as a trophy. The mother's rage and hurt is another human emotion, which eventually leads to her revenge on the thanes when she storms the hall to regain the claw. She is even described as having the "war terror of a wife" which associates her with human beings instead of monsters. (Tuso, 23) This causes the reader to feel a certain amount of sympathy towards her, a Christian value, even though she decapitates one of the favored thanes. However, she is later regarded as a "sea wolf" when Beowulf bravely goes after her, so that the reader can again celebrate Beowulf's bravery.
Beowulf's character can be read as haughty and his actions interpreted as purely selfish on a quest for glory and fame, but his bravery can also be read as the ultimate sacrifice. Another Christian virtue is self-sacrifice for the good of others. Beowulf risks his life when he fights Grendel hand to claw and later on dives into the dangerous mere alone. His trip down to the bottom of the mere is symbolically similar to a journey to hell. He travels downwards and on his way "many monsters attacked
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him in the water, many a sea-beast tore at his mail shirt with war tusks, strange creatures afflicted him." (Tuso, 27) These could be symbols of the types of creatures one would encounter through the passages to hell and Grendel's mother's lair is where the devil, or maybe one reincarnation of the devil resides.
Beowulf kills Grendel's mother even though the odds are against him since he is not on his own turf. Again, the theme of the lesser, good one triumphing over the evil one is seen here. Perhaps god's intervention takes place when Beowulf is in the lair as a "blaze brightened, light shone within just as from the sky heaven's candle shine's clear" appears to Beowulf as Grendel's mother falls dead. (Tuso, 28) However, pagan influence is seen as well in this passage when the sword used by Beowulf is examined. Giants, supernatural beings, made the sword and its hilt is "twisted and ornamented by snakes." (Tuso, 30) It is likely that Pagans worshipped animals as gods, so these animal symbols held special meaning for early Danish society. What is ironic about the sword is that its story tells of the last remaining Giants who were eventually slew by humans, but now it saves a human beings life who is killing off perhaps the last ogre. It seems as if it should have helped the mother, not Beowulf.
The characters of Grendel's mother and the dragon help the author express another important virtue; loyalty. For example, when Beowulf is in the mere, after nine hours Hrothgar's men give up on Beowulf, but his men remain steadfast even though they "are sick at heart." (Tuso, 28) Later on, loyalty is again seen when all of Beowulf's men flee except for Wiglaf during the battle with the dragon. Even though he is afraid, he also understands self-sacrifice and loyalty, so he willingly risks his life to save Beowulf's. After the other men, "crept to the wood, protected their lives," Wiglaf remained with a "heart surged with sorrows: nothing can ever set aside kinship in him who means well." (Tuso, 44) This strong Christian value is rewarded in the end when Beowulf chooses Wiglaf to be his successor.
Besides rewards, punishments are also given for those who make mistakes. For example, greediness is considered a punishable sin. Beowulf resists greediness when he chooses to bring Grendel's head back with him instead of the hordes of treasure. This action can also be interpreted as fame seeking and his deed does add to the epic quality of the poem since "four of them had trouble in carrying Grendel's head on spear-shafts to the gold hall" even though Beowulf, alone swam with the head to the top of the mere. (Tuso, 29) However, his action shows that he knows that he already has a considerable amount of money and he understands that money is only a tangible good. In early Danish society, fame and success was probably much more important than wealth. This is seen when Beowulf is chosen as king for his loyalty to the previous king and his heroic deeds. Greediness is punished when the reader sees that the dragon has wasted all of his life guarding treasure that he will never use and the reason for the dragon's attack on Beowulf's land is that another man wanted the treasure.
The last key creature, the dragon, is terrifyingly depicted, but lacking the humanistic qualities that Grendel and his mother possess. The reader does not feel sympathy for the dragon because the dragon is described as "the evil spirit" who "began to vomit flames, burn bright dwellings; blaze of fire rose to the horror of the men, the deadly flying thing would leave nothing alive." (Tuso, 41) The pagan influence is seen in the
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character of the dragon. The dragon is obviously a creature from past Danish myths and this one is even too strong for brave Beowulf to destroy alone.
The author employs the character of the dragon to show the irony among early Danish society and Beowulf's weakness; pride. Beowulf starts out the book as a hero and this lands him the kingship. However, in the end, when he is forced to choose between being a hero or a king, he chooses being a hero. Hrothgar warned Beowulf that his pride may get in the way in the future, but Beowulf forgets his good judgment when the dragon attacks. As Hrothgar foreshadowed years before, "Have no care for pride, great warrior. Now for a time there is glory in your might; yet is soon shall be sickness or sword that with diminish your strengthÖthen is shall be that death will overcome you, warrior." (Tuso, 31) He ends up leaving his kingdom in a time of need instead of being a responsible King and accepting that he has given up his role as a hero. In this instance, instead of risking his life as a self-sacrifice like he did as a hero, his real sacrifice would have been to remain king and forego a last chance at final glory and fame. However, Beowulf truly is a hero at heart, so he chooses the warrior path. In the end, he has a warrior's burial on a funeral pyre, instead of a more Christian type service. Beowulf's shortsightedness and quest for glory are clearly part of the pagan influence on the poem that molds it into the heroic epic that it is.
The poem beautifully celebrates the culture of the early Danes, while incorporating newer influences from Christianity. It is interesting in the end that Beowulf's heroism, a Danish attribute, triumphs over the Christian values of humility and self-sacrifice. Beowulf can be interpreted so many different ways, but it stands out almost as much as a historical document of the changing times as a great work of fiction.
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
(Late 14th century)
The Manuscript: Sir Gawain and the Green Knight exists in only one original manuscript, as the last of four poems in the MS. Cotton Nero A x. dating no later than 1400. The three poems preceding it are Pearl, Purity, and Patience, and all four are generally considered to have been written by the same anonymous poet, judging from similarities in style, dialect, and theme. The poems are also illustrated with crude drawings; in the case of Gawain, the illustrations show the various characters of the poem but are not necessarily in keeping with the poem's description of the characters. We have no further evidence of when or where the manuscript was written, although most scholars believe that the dialect indicates an origin in the northwest Midlands of England. The earliest record of this manuscript is in the catalogue of an sixteenth-
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century lord in Yorkshire, but we do not know how it got there, or how it fell into the hands of Sir Robert Cotton, after whom the manuscript has now been named.
Note on poetic meter: Gawain is typical of Middle English alliterative poems in that it is written in alliterative long lines, following the basic metrical principles of Old English verse. Each long line consists of two half-lines, each half with two stressed syllables and a varying number of unstressed syllables. Most importantly, the two half lines are connected by alliteration that is, repetition of the same consonant sound on at least two, often three, of the stressed syllables. For example, the poem begins: "Sithen the sege and the assaut was sesed at Troye" (line 1), with the "s" sound recurring five times within the single long line. The long lines do not rhyme with each other. However, they are organized in stanzas of fifteen to twenty-five lines, and each stanza concludes with a construction known as a "bob and wheel." This term refers to a group of five short lines, which do rhyme, to the pattern of ababa. If you are not reading Gawain in the original Middle English, the poetic structure may not be maintained in the translation. Some modern English translations keep the rhyme and meter strictly; others are only prose translations.
Character List:
Sir Gawain: The protagonist of the poem, Sir Gawain is the central figure whose fundamental character change forms the focus of the work. At the start of the poem he is an eager, optimistic, and loyal knight who undertakes the Green Knight's challenge to protect Arthur and preserve the reputation of Camelot. By the end, he has come to question the viability of the chivalric code and realize the weakness in his own human nature. Ultimately, it is his instinctive fear of mortality which comes in conflict the societal values he has learned and it is this conflict which leaves Gawain feeling troubled at the poem's close.
By all societal standards, Gawain is seen as the epitome of chivalry, as illustrated by his deferential speech to Arthur when he accepts the Green Knight's challenge: "My life would be least missed, / if we let out the truth. / Only as you are my uncle have I any honor, / For excepting your blood, I bear in my body slight virtue" (Gardner ll.555-7). Here he demonstrates the chivalric values of selfless loyalty to one's king and one's relative, and it is this strong sense of chivalry that serves as the catalyst for Gawain's adventure. Central to our understanding of Gawain's character is his shield, marked on the inner side by the image of the Virgin and on the other by the Pentangle. The Pentangle represents the five ways in which Gawain is seen as a flawless character who embodies Franchise, Fellowship, Cleanness, Courtesy, and Charity: "Like purified gold, Sir Gawain was known for his goodness, / All dross refined away, adorned with virtues" (Gardner ll. 634-5). And the image of the Virgin on the inside signifies the religious faith which Gawain uses as his inner protection.
Indeed, much of Gawain's virtue rests in his religious piety, from which he gains the strength to endure his ordeals. As he wanders through a desolate Waste Land, Gawain
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is the "servant of God" and finds his strength in talking to God (ll. 692-711). On the brink of despair, Gawain beseeches the Virgin Mary to guide him, and almost immediately stumbles upon the castle of Bertilak. In Fitt III, Gawain draws upon his Christian faith and chivalric loyalty to Bertilak to counter the sexual advances of Lady Bertilak: "And all that passed between them was music and bliss and delight./ŠBut the danger might have been great / Had Mary not watched her knight!" (Gardner ll.1766-70) His human sexual desire, coupled with the chivalric sense of duty to a lady, are formidable adversaries to his religious faith and chivalric loyalty to the lord but ultimately, it is his human fear of death that defeats his chivalric values when Gawain decides to keep the green girdle.
This failure is certainly understandable from a human perspective, and the Green Knight pardons Gawain after wounding him in an exchange stroke. But Gawain himself, so tied to a sense of chivalry and morality, dwells upon his moral failing. He at first blames the wily Morgan le Fay and Lady Bertilak in an unexpected misogynistic outburst (ll. 2407-2428), but ultimately can only come to blame himself his cowardice and covetousness -- for his failure. By the end, the experience has shattered Gawain's faith in himself and in a society which cannot see his moral failure. In this way, the poet uses Gawain's character to subtly question the validity of societal and chivalric values, and to question the strength of human nature when compared to the infallibility of Godliness.
The Green Knight/Bertilak de Hautdesert: As the other title character, the Green Knight functions mainly as a static foil to the dynamic character of Gawain. We see him in two different guises: first as the Green Knight who bursts into Arthur's court to issue a beheading challenge, and secondly as the generous, noble, though somewhat mischievous lord who hosts Gawain in the days before the New Year. It is not until Fitt IV, after the exchange stroke has been given, that we realize the Green Knight and the lord are one and the same. Thus, the character is shrouded in mystery and we know no more about him than the baffled Gawain does.
As the Green Knight, he represents an Otherworldly, natural force intruding into the refined circle of Camelot. His green color, enormous size, and apparent immortality indicate his Otherworldliness; he seems allied with Nature in all its furious, regenerative grandeur. Many critics here point out out his resemblance to the Green Man of Celtic/English legend, and certainly the Green Knight can be seen as a symbol of the fertility and magnitude of Nature, as opposed to Society. He mocks the reputation of Arthur's court, and in this sense can also be seen in opposition to the artificial constructions of society, its values, and its pretensions. In Fitt IV, he is very much the same figure, superhuman, supercilious, yet respectful of true courage. In this guise, the Green Knight is always a figure of awe and fear, clearly operating above the constructions and restrictions of the human world.
As Bertilak, he is not quite so formidable and easily fits the role of the generous, civilized host who treats Gawain with the respect befitting his reputation. However, he proposes an unusual pact to exchange each day's winnings with Gawain, and seems nonchalantly aware of the attraction between Gawain and his own wife. Again, there is the sense that the lord is operating above and beyond the rules of Gawain's world. This is all quite subtle, though, and is not fully realized until Fitt IV. In the hunting scenes, the vigorous Bertilak seems to function with an innate connection to the
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natural world, perhaps suggesting his true identity as the primal, visceral Green Knight.
Lady Bertilak: The only other character with a major role, Lady Bertilak's motives seem all too clear until the surprising explanation in Fitt IV that all her advances have been staged. A static character, she serves as a temptation for Gawain to break his chivalric duty to Lord Bertilak and his Christian duty to uphold his moral purity. And yet, she approaches him in such a way that challenges Gawain's chivalric sense of courtly love: would he not be dishonoring a noble lady by rejecting her requests for passion? The dialogue between Gawain and Lady Bertilak in these bedroom scenes is a fascinating study of careful diplomatic arguments around and about the topic of courtly love and chivalry. In a sense, Lady Bertilak triumphs by giving Gawain the green girdle which he does not relinquish to her husband. However, it is his fear of death more than his covetousness or his sense of chivalry that causes him to hide the girdle. And yet, at the end it is revealed that Lord and Lady Bertilak have been conspiring with each other to outwit Gawain in this game. Thus, just as Bertilak pursued beasts relentlessly in the hunting scenes, Lady Bertilak pursued Gawain relentlessly in the bedroom, pushing him to the limit of his moral capacity.
King Arthur: Arthur plays a small role in the poem, functioning primarily as the figurehead of Camelot, the epitome of chivalric society. However, the author does not perhaps portray Arthur in a thoroughly positive light. In Fitt I, the author suggests that the young Arthur, while gentle and noble, may perhaps be too immature in his need for entertaining adventures and marvels. He accepts the Green Knight's challenge only to protect the name of Camelot, when no one else volunteers; he lightly passes over Gawain's new, forbidding mission by turning to revelry at the end of Fitt I; and at the end of the poem he honors Gawain for his bravery without detecting the knight's moral unease. Does Arthur take these matters seriously enough? And if not, what does this say about the validity of his courtly society and its views toward serious moral issues?
Guinevere: Essentially a bit player in the poem, Guinevere, Arthur's queen, functions as the epitome of feminine courtliness. In Fitt I, she is the richly garbed vision of beauty; the author later describes Lady Bertilak as lovelier even than Guinevere to emphasize her entrancing beauty. At the poem's end, she too, is just as unaware as Arthur of Gawain's moral crisis. Perhaps we can see her as a symbol of the superficiality of courtly society.
Old Lady (Morgan le Fay): A rather strange character, she is the elderly noble lady in Bertilak's castle who befriends Gawain. Hideously ugly, she serves to emphasize Lady Bertilak's beauty while also demonstrating Gawain's virtue and courtesy toward even unattractive ladies. Nevertheless, Bertilak in Fitt IV reveals her to be the scheming Morgan le Fay, Arthur's jealous half-sister and traditional nemesis who engineered the entire beheading game so that Guinevere would be shocked to death. This sort of explanation often comes off as unsatisfactory and artificial to readers, and many view it as a cheap tack-on to an otherwise gripping and emotionally genuine story.
Gawain's guide to the Green Chapel: This servant is assigned by Bertilak to guide Gawain to the Green Chapel on New Year's Day. Though he only figures in a few
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stanzas at the end of Fitt III and the start of Fitt IV, he nevertheless serves two functions: 1) to again emphasize the respect that is shown to the highly-esteemed Gawain, and more importantly, 2) to heighten the sense of fear that the Green Knight incites. His descriptions of the Green Knight are truly terrifying and allow us to feel the fear that Gawain is experiencing and the threat to his mortality.
Main Themes:
Nature vs. Human Society: This is the central conflict which Gawain must deal with in his quest. He is forced to confront the forces of Nature both external and internal -- in the form of the Green Knight, the winter landscape, his own sexual desire, and ultimately, his own fear of death. Throughout, Gawain counters this with his own faith in God and in chivalric values. But in the end his natural fear of death overcomes his sense of human morality, causing him to accept the green girdle. And when Gawain returns to human society at the end of the poem, it is with a sense of unease, having realized the power of Nature in comparison to his human beliefs. Throughout the poem, we see natural settings and impulses constantly opposed to those of human society and civility. And while humans shy away from their inevitable death, it is Nature which can continue to restore and regenerate itself, as seen in the indestructible Green Knight and the passing and resurrection of the year.
The Futility of Human Constructions: The poem is full of detailed descriptions of human constructs, like armor, clothing, food, architecture, even the cutting of hunted deer. There is a ritualistic, overly technical sense to these descriptions, where the poet seems to be hinting at the superficiality of these human constructs and questioning their purpose. For example, the concept of Courtly Love is one such elaborate human construction, but in Fitt III, it is essentially parodied in the conversations between Gawain and Lady Bertilak. And Gawain's sumptuous armor, no matter how well-forged or polished, will be of little use to him when he receives the exchange stroke from the Green Knight. In comparison to the powerful descriptions of natural forces, these human constructions appear silly, excessive, and ultimately futile.
The Viability of Chivalric Values: Perhaps the most significant of these human constructions is chivalric code which forms such an essential part of medieval literature and of Gawain's belief system. Gawain is the very embodiment of chivalric values, yet his encounter with the seductive Lady Bertilak forces a crisis in the chivalric value system: should he honor the requests of the noble lady or remain faithful to his lord? Upon his return to Camelot, King Arthur does not even detect the moral crisis within Gawain. And most unexpectedly, the "test" of Gawain's chivalric values have been in fact a game engineered by Morgan le Fay for a less-than-noble purpose. Disillusioned, the once-idealistic Gawain finds that the code of chivalry which once formed his moral core has now been shaken.
Faith in God: In contrast to the questionable nature of the chivalric code, the poet upholds Christian faith as the ultimate, saving grace for humanity. Ever pious, Gawain continuously finds guidance in God: from the image of the Virgin Mary on the inside of his shield to his prayers while journeying alone, to his narrow escape
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from the adulterous temptations of Lady Bertilak. It is, in a sense, faith in God which enables mankind to negotiate between the dangers of human society and the dangers of the natural world. To affirm this, the poem concludes with a supplication to Jesus Christ, the Savior.
Celtic Pagan Sources and Christian overlay: Despite its Christian message, the poem has strong roots in Celtic pagan myth. There are many elements common to pre-Christian Celtic mythology, such as the waiting period of twelve months and a day, the Beheading Game, and the Temptation Game. The Green Knight himself is a strongly pagan character, similar to the Green Man or Wild Man of the Woods who symbolizes fertility in folklore. Gawain's journey can even be seen as the hero's archetypical encounter with the Otherworld, an essential theme in pagan belief. The Pentangle is often a pagan symbol; thus Gawain' s shield, with the Pentangle on one side and the Virgin Mary on the other, comes to represent the dual pagan/Christian nature of the poem.
Questioning the Romance: The poem contains many conventions of the medieval romance tradition, but in many ways it does not celebrate the genre. Many elements verge on parody; others seem deliberately excessive. The conversation between the seductive Lady Bertilak and the diplomatic Gawain satirizes the language of Courtly Love, the descriptions of armor and clothing can be over-the-top, and the poem does not conclude with the resolution of the typical romance. Instead, there is a sense of unease, as the poet concludes what seems to be a subtle questioning of the romance genre.
The Fall of Man and Loss of Innocence: Biblical parallels can be found in the appearance of Bertilak's castle (Paradise) and the role of his wife as temptress (Eve). Accordingly, Gawain loses his moral innocence when his value system is shattered by the end of the poem. Such an allegory emphasizes once more the poet's Christian message, and the relationship between mankind and the divine.
Fitt I
Summary:
The poem begins with a lengthy description which establishes the setting firmly in Arthurian Britain. The writer traces the history of Britain from the Trojan War, the founding of Rome by Aeneas, and through to the eventual founding of Britain by the legendary Felix Brutus. Britain is a land of great wonders and strife, but King Arthur has established a court of utmost nobility and chivalry, peopled with the bravest knights and fairest ladies. The poet will now proceed to relate a particularly extraordinary episode from King Arthur's court, which begins at a lavish New Year's celebration in Camelot.
A rich description of the celebration follows, where the poet carefully conveys luxurious details of decoration and attire. There is the incomparably beautiful Queen Guinevere, Arthur himself, and seated in honor around them, various noble knights and relatives of Arthur, including Sir Gawain . We learn that Arthur does not like to
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begin his feasts until he has heard a great tale or witnessed a great marvel. Indeed, in the midst of the feasting, a wondrous stranger bursts into the hall. The stranger is most remarkable because he is entirely green, and the poet devotes nearly 100 lines to a meticulous description of his appearance.
Giant-like with an enormous green beard, the stranger nevertheless carries an air of handsome civility, wearing sumptuous green and gold clothes and armor. His horse is equally decked in ornate green, and the knight himself holds a branch of holly in one hand and a formidable battle-axe in the other. He demands, somewhat arrogantly, to speak to the ruler of the company, while the court stares on in stunned silence. When Arthur finally speaks, the stranger explains that he has come to this famously valiant court to play a Christmas game. Whoever agrees to play this game will be allowed to strike the Green Knight on the spot, in the middle of the court; in exchange, the Green Knight will strike a return blow upon the volunteer a year and a day hence. None of the court volunteers as the game seems to imply certain death for whomever plays; the stranger ridicules them all for Camelot's supposed bravery. Eventually Arthur agrees to play the game, but as he is about to wield the great battle-axe, Gawain speaks. In polite and self-effacing language, Gawain begs to take up the boon instead, so the life of the king can be spared in place of a knight as weak and lowly as he. The court agrees to let Gawain play, and after restating the terms of the agreement to each other, the stranger gives the battle-axe to Gawain, then exposes his neck for the blow. Gawain cleaves off the stranger's head in one blow, but the stranger does not die, despite the abundant bloodshed. In fact, the body of the Green Knight picks up the severed head, which then addresses Gawain. The stranger charges Gawain to meet him at the Green Chapel next New Year's morning, so that he may receive his exchange blow.
After the stranger leaves, Arthur urges Guinevere to continue reveling, while he tells Gawain to hang up the stranger's battle-axe and forget about his new mission for the time being . The New Year's feast continues unaffected, but the poet ends the fitt by foreshadowing the dangerous adventures Gawain must face.
Fitt I
Analysis:
The conventions of the romance genre: Gawain appears to fit neatly into the genre of the medieval romance, a French poetic form which had great influence in England beginning in the middle of the twelfth century. The romance has several characteristics: a celebration of warrior society, a setting amidst the feudal nobility, close attention to details of pageantry, and most importantly an emphasis on the chivalric concept of courtly love. This last idea hinged on the relationship between the ideal hero the knight errant and the noble woman he loves. However, in the aristocratic society of chivalry, the most supreme kind of courtly love was for an unattainable woman, often the queen of a knight's lord. A knight's love for this lady would inspire him to braver deeds, just as, in the traditional Arthurian material, Sir Lancelot was driven to great accomplishments by his love for Queen Guinevere Thus, in a larger sense, the code of chivalry focused on the protection of the weak and fair elements of society by the loyal, self-sacrificing knight. But it also included a knight's
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fidelity to his court and king, and his respect for other warriors and the rules of combat.
It is important to consider Gawain in light of the conventions of the romance genre. All the characteristics of the romance are present, however, closer examination suggests a questioning of the values of chivalry and the typical romance. Does the poet really support these values, even when he writes in the style of the romance? Is there a not a greater irony to his description of conventional romance elements, or to the way the events unfold in the poem? Remember the poem was written sometime in the fourteenth century, at a time when the romance genre was already a dying form. Thus, the poet, while not exactly satirizing the romance, could certainly be expressing his doubts about the values and social institution of the chivalric court by playing within the bounds of the romance genre.
Fitt I and the Romance Genre: From the very beginning, Fitt I corresponds with expected conventions of the romance genre. Among these is the opening exposition which establishes the historical setting via a list of previous battles and legendary heroes. Many other romances and epics (another popular genre of the time) began this way, establishing a link with the legendary past and thereby legitimizing the unfolding content of the current narrative. When the poet focuses upon Arthur's court, this too is a romantic convention, for Arthur and his knights were already a popular topic of romances, serving as the ideal of chivalric loyalty and valor. Again, it is no surprise that the scene unfolds at a great New Year's feast, another romantic convention, for this provides the poet with a chance to display the chivalric society at its greatest and most vibrant. Notice how he describes Arthur and his knights in superlatives, as the most famous knights in Christendom and the handsomest of kings. Superlative mention is also made of Queen Guinevere, her beauty and nobility, with particular attention paid to the details of her dress and accoutrements. Finally, the poet emphasizes Arthur's wish for a great wonder or tale to entertain him at the feast, again an affirmation of the typical view of Camelot as a place of adventure and unparalleled bravery. In all these elements the historical opening, the Arthurian setting, the opulent feast, the superlative portrayal of Guinevere, the lavish attention to detail, and Arthur's desire for adventure in all of these, the poet acts clearly within the convention of the romance.
But perhaps it is not so simple, for as we have noted earlier, the poet seems to be questioning the values of the chivalric romance at the same time he uses the conventions. The historical opening hints at the darker side of British history, writing that war, misery and distress, have alternated with prosperity since the founding of Britain. Already, this is no glorifying portrayal of military values. Also, the superlative description of Camelot verges on the excessive. A poet this skilled in description would surely be able to exalt Arthur and his court in a less simplistic manner. But lines 36-40 are so unsophisticated in their utmost praise of Camelot that we cannot help but question the poet's genuine belief in its glory. Certainly this supposed "greatness" of Camelot is something we will want to consider at the end of the poem, when Gawain has returned to Arthur after his momentous adventure.
In similar ways, the poet's description of the lavishness and merriment at the New Year's feast suggests a certain decadence in Arthur's court. The description of Guinevere thus far is in keeping with romantic conventions of the exalted noble
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woman, but these portrayals of women will continue to evolve throughout the poem, calling into question the concept of courtly love. Meanwhile, in Line 86 the poet describes Arthur as restless, youthfully light-hearted and rather boyish ("so joly of his joyfnes, and sumquat childgered"). While this is certainly a young, attractive King Arthur, in the springtime of life, we get the sense that this Arthur is also somewhat immature, demanding great wonders as an entertainment before his feast, and not as events with serious outcomes and implications. Again, we should consider this at the end of the poem, when Arthur and the court react to the result of Gawain's quest.
For the meantime, Fitt I continues with more subtly ambiguous treatment of romantic conventions. Considerable detail is lavished on the stranger's physical appearance, down to the ornamental knots in the mane of his horse. When the stranger speaks, his half-mocking tone provides another chance to criticize the chivalric court. And surely, the initial silence of the court affirms his censure of Camelot's cowardice, despite its reputation of valor. Arthur responds nobly to the challenge, but the poet describes the wary king in not-so-flattering terms, at least in comparison to the magnificent and towering stranger. Gawain's speech, while deferential and self-effacing, is perhaps too deferential, perhaps hiding a criticism of the other cowardly court members as he begrudgingly accepts the challenge for his king? The repeated terms of agreement between the Green Knight and Gawain serve to reinforce the chivalric code of respect for the rules of combat. Yet for all their seriousness, Arthur at the end of the fitt lightly ignores the implications of Gawain's mission, urging for more revelry and suggesting again, the immature and decadent Camelot of this complicated romance. As the poem progresses and Gawain moves from Camelot to other settings, it will be important to view other romantic conventions as they appear and consider their commentary on the values of chivalry.
Links with Celtic mythology: Another way to view Gawain is to consider its relationship with Celtic mythology, something frequently present in Arthurian material. The Celts, the people who lived in the British Isles prior to the arrival of the Romans and the Anglo-Saxons, had a strong body of pagan belief, ritual practices, and stories surrounding those beliefs and practices. Many of the characters in these myths were gods and goddesses; many of their ritual practices and beliefs echoed motifs in their myths. As the Middle Ages progressed and Christianity grew more dominant, these motifs and characters were often preserved in the folklore and literature of the British Isles. Arthurian material is particularly notable for its ties to Celtic myth, for many of the characters and events in these stories resemble gods and motifs in the older myths. In Gawain, there is a constant sense of the Celtic, pagan cosmology underlying the events with the Green Knight and Gawain's quest. As the poem progresses, this becomes especially complicated when set against the obvious Christianity in the story: Christian belief and pagan ritual mingle in intricate ways in Gawain.
Fitt I and Celtic mythology: In Fitt I, this link with Celtic belief is most noticeable in two ways: in the Christmas/New Years setting of the scene and in the figure of the Green Knight. Celtic pagan belief considered the year to be an important cycle in both the human and natural worlds. The Celts designated a certain time of year as the end of the old year and the beginning of the new one. At this "limbo" time of year, strange, supernatural events were likely to happen and the human world was likely to come in contact with the Otherworld of mystical beings. At the same time, though, the
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year was made new and revelry often took place to celebrate the new year and release the excess of spiritual energy. Traditionally, this designated time of year took place around November 1 for the Celts, and was known as Samhain. However, with the influence of Christianity and more Continental beliefs, this limbo time was moved to the period between Christmas and New Year's day.
Gawain corresponds with this pattern, with the strange Green Knight bursting in upon King Arthur's court on New Year's day. In this way, he can be seen as an Otherworldly visitor to the human world, as a strange, unaccountable force of nature entering Camelot, the epitome of civilized society. The bizarre beheading game has been seen to represent the ritual slaying and renewal of the year. There are in fact direct parallels between the beheading game in Gawain and an eighth-century Irish myth, "Bricriu's Feast." In this tale, the Celtic hero Cuchulainn must behead an Otherworldly figure at a feast, with similar consequences the apparent immortality of the other figure and the challenge for an exchange stroke a year later. In both cases, the Beheading Game has a ritual, pagan significance, suggesting the regenerative quality of Nature and the turning of the year.
In Gawain, the Green Knight in fact designates the following New Year's day as the date for the exchange blow, thus emphasizing the significance of the year as a cycle of time. And renewal and regeneration are certainly implicit in the Green Knight's immortality, since the beheading has no effect on him. Another clue to his Otherworldly nature would be his green color. Green, as the dominant color in nature, here suggests the natural cycle of rebirth and renewal that is so essential to the concept of the year and, as well, to the character of the Green Knight.
Symbols in Fitt I: The Green Knight himself thus serves as an important symbol in the story. We have already established that he personifies the renewable, indestructible forces of nature, entering human society on New Year's Day. But his description merits a closer look, for the poet does not portray him solely as a figure of terror and foreignness. In fact, the Green Knight is a mixture of the familiar (the civil) and the foreign (the raw). He is opulently dressed and clearly noble, yet his green color and sheer size indicate he is not entirely of this world. Thus, the Green Knight functions as a liminal figure, mediating between the civilized world of chivalry and the unknown world of nature. As we will see later on, he not only signifies the ritual renewal of the natural cycle, but also calls into question the civilized structure of chivalric and Christian values which confront Gawain.
Several specific traits of the Green Knight should be noted in this light. First, he bears in one of his hands a branch of holly and in another a cruel battle-axe. This clearly symbolizes his dual function. On one level it indicates his civilized wish for peace, offset by his potential for destruction. On another level, it symbolizes his understanding of the rules of society, despite his innate link with the natural world.
We should also note the recurring colors of green and gold in the description of the Green Knight. Similar to the battle-axe and holly, the green obviously indicates his raw, natural character, yet the gold implies something different. Gold is, after all, often associated with wealth, royalty, and the ultimate level of society. In medieval times, it was seen as the desired end product of the meticulous process of alchemy, the final possible attainment for human beings. Thus, the gold here brings a note of
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civility and social greatness to the figure of the Green Knight, in addition to his Otherworldly nature. As the poem progresses, green and gold will continue to take on a greater significance, especially in relation to the character of Gawain himself.
Fitt II
Summary:
The second part of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight opens with a lush, detailed description of Nature and the passing of the year. After the Christmas feast and the Green Knight's challenge, the winter passes into a fair, green springtime and then a rich, joyful summer. But eventually harvest season approaches, the leaves fall, "and so the year descends into yesterdays, / And winter returns again as the world requires" (Gardner ll. 530-1). At this point of the year, Gawain remembers his agreement with the Green Knight and so, at a Michaelmas feast, sadly bids farewell to Arthur's court. Although Gawain pretends not to be bothered by the upcoming Quest, all the lords and ladies are silently sorrowful that a knight as worthy as Gawain must go to his doom by receiving the exchange blow from the Green Knight.
The next few stanzas are dedicated to a meticulous description of Gawain as he dons his ornate armor the next morning. Both he and his horse Gringolet are richly attired: Gawain's helmet, for example, has a priceless veil embroidered with parrots and turtledoves, and above that he wears a diamond-studded crown. But most important of all is his shield, which bears the emblem of the Pentangle, the five-pointed star. The poet pays particular attention to the Pentangle, the emblem of truth, known everywhere as "the endless knot." It is particularly suitable for Gawain because the five points of the star represent the five different ways in which Gawain, like purified gold, embodies faultless virtue. These five ways are in themselves five groups of five: 1) he is perfect in the five senses; 2) his five fingers are unfailing; 3) his faith is fixed firmly on the five wounds which Christ received on the cross; 4) he draws his strength from the five joys Mary had through Jesus; and 5) he embodies, better than any other living man, the five virtues. These virtues are Franchise, Fellowship, Cleanness, Courtesy, and above all, Charity.
On the inside of his shield is an image of the Virgin Mary, to which Gawain would look as a source of courage.
Once armed with his shield, Gawain rides away from Camelot, the court mourning that such a young, faultless knight should sacrifice his life as a result of a silly Christmas game. Gawain rides for months through a rough, unfriendly, and godless land. Often alone, Gawain has no friends but his horse and talks to no one but God. And no one he encounters knows of the Green Knight or the Green Chapel. Gawain battles with beasts and giants in his travels and struggles through a harsh, cold country which would have killed a weaker or more faithless man. On Christmas Eve, after toiling through a daunting wood, Gawain beseeches the Lord and Mary to guide him to some haven where he may attend mass and properly pray on Christmas morning. Almost immediately, Gawain stumbles upon a moated fortress, a beautiful castle with strong defences and intricate architectural flourishes. Awed and grateful, Gawain asks
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the porter of the castle for entrance and is greeted by a great, joyful, and eager company. He is welcomed by the lord of the castle, a massive, civilized, capable-looking man who sees to it that Gawain receives the best of care. Gawain is dressed in luxurious robes, and -- looking as refreshed and radiant as the spring -- he is brought to a lavish table and fed the best of wines and food. Eventually, his company learns that he is none other than Sir Gawain of Arthur's court, and they are delighted to have such an honored personage in their presence, the embodiment of good breeding and chivalry himself.
After dinner, the company attends the Christmastide mass, where Gawain meets the lady of the castle. She is incomparably beautiful, even lovelier than Guinevere, and she is accompanied by an ancient noble lady, whose utter ugliness enhances her own beauty. Gawain is pleased to meet her, and their companionship deepens the next morning at the Christmas Day feast. They are seated next to each other, while the ancient lady is given the highest seat, and the lord the next highest. A third day passes in revelry, and on the day of St. John, the guests of the castle leave to go home. Gawain thanks the lord and declares himself his servant, but regrets that he must leave the next morning to continue his quest. The lord, however, reveals that the Green Chapel is but two miles away, so Gawain must stay for the remaining three days and relax in bed. Jubilant, Gawain again declares himself the servant of the lord, ready to do his bidding. The lord decides that the next day, Gawain will stay in bed until attending high mass and dinner with the lady of the castle; in the meantime, the lord himself will rise at dawn to go hunting. He suggests one more thing: whatever he wins in the forest tomorrow will be given to Gawain, and in exchange, whatever Gawain wins in the castle during the day he must give to the lord. Gawain agrees to this bargain, and the lord calls for more wine and revelry to celebrate their game.
Fitt II
Analysis:
Description of Nature: The first two stanzas of Fitt II are notable for their lovely description of Nature and the passing of the seasons. The poet portrays Nature as an ever-changing world which sustains the human world and yet is not affected it, always continuing forward in its yearly cycle. Thus, as much as Gawain would like to avoid the impending meeting with the Green Knight, the year moves forward inexorably and the seasons push along to winter again: "A year turns all too soon, and all things change: / The opening and the closing are seldom the same" (Gardner ll. 499-500). The overall picture enhances the superior power of Nature in its creative and destructive aspects through springtime back to winter and the insignificance of human actions and emotions in comparison to the natural world.
The next description of Nature emphasizes this disparity even more, as the despondent Gawain, a solitary human figure, traverses a great and desolate wasteland in search of the Green Chapel. On his journey he encounters all the malevolent, destructive aspects of Nature: vicious beasts, cold rain, wild forests, ragged moss, treacherous bogs. Again, Nature is an overpowering world that belittles the individual human. The one thing that saves Gawain from destruction is his faith in God, and in a larger sense, it is only this religion which can guide and rescue the human from the
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dangerous world around him. Faith in God enables mankind to negotiate and survive the forces of Nature, both those natural forces outside and within him.
Imposing Form and Deconstructing the Romance: In contrast to this wild, untamed world of Nature, the Gawain-poet also presents us with the seemingly ordered and carefully crafted world of human society. We have already glimpsed this world in Fitt I, as epitomized by Arthur's lavish court, but in Fitt II, the poet digresses into long, somewhat technical descriptions of Gawain's armor, the architecture of the mysterious castle, and luxurious court within it. These detailed passages, with their technical language and excessive description, create a sense of extreme artifice in the human world. The embroidered fabrics, the skillfully cooked fish, the intricately ornamented castle, the expertly crafted armor these all stand in direct contrast to the ever-changing, primal world of Nature. On a larger level, these human constructions (armor, architecture, cuisine, etc) impose form on the natural world. They are a means by which humans control their own sphere within the larger world and establish a sense of order. By listing the technical details of these human productions, the poet opposes society, order, craftsmanship, and artifice against unbridled nature, wildness, fertility, and destructiveness.
But the Gawain-poet is not so simplistic in his portrayals of these two opposing worlds. He does not praise the civility of the human world over the wildness of Nature. In fact, his representation of human society is subtly complicated: he seems to be implying that perhaps human society is not as wonderful and ordered as it strives to be. Just as in Fitt I, with the descriptions of Arthur's court, the poet verges on the excessive. Is he merely glorifying the appearance of the castle, the armor, the banquet-hall, or does he ask if this is perhaps too much, too lavish, too superficial? In all these descriptions there is such an emphasis on externalities and sensuality appearances, the texture of the fabrics, the taste of the food that there seems to be a distancing from the spiritual. Indeed, doesn't Gawain appear to be closer to God when he toils alone through the forest than when he revels at a royal feast?
In questioning these constructions and forms, the poet eventually questions the romance genre itself. As we pointed out in Fitt I, the conventions of the romance include such lavish descriptions of feasts, armor, and clothing. But by subtly undermining these descriptions, perhaps the poet is deconstructing the romance and its reason for creating such constructions. Ultimately, what is the purpose of the romance genre: is it merely another false construction, a product of human society that eventually separates us from our spiritual selves and the natural world? The romance, like the excessive feasts and armor of the poem, perhaps strive to impose form on nature but in a way that only serves to confuse and superficialize the human soul.
Chivalric Values: Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is often noted for its complicated commentary on chivalric values, one of the most important conventions of the medieval romance and of medieval society. In Fitt II, we see Gawain as the idealistic knight, the very embodiment of chivalric values. The poet writes: "Like purified gold, Sir Gawain was known for his goodness, / All dross refined away, adorned with virtues/ ŠA man still undefiled, / And of all knights most gentle." (Gardner ll. 623-39) Here we have the metaphor of gold which appeared in Fitt I (see Symbols under Analysis for Fitt I); again, the allusion is to the medieval process of alchemy, in which
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gold was seen as the final, perfect product of a long, refining process the metallic symbol of divine transcendence. With such a metaphor, there is no question here that the poet intends to portray Gawain as the ultimate paragon of medieval virtue and chivalry. To emphasize this, he delves into a lengthy explanation of the pentangle on Gawain's shield, stressing how Gawain possesses, better than any other man, all the five points of Christian and chivalric perfection. (See Symbols below.)
Gawain is also notable because he believes so fully in these societal values. For him, there is no question as to whether or not he should set off on this quest, as unpleasant as it is. He volunteered to undertake the Green Knight's challenge from his sense of chivalric duty. He insists on keeping his side of the bargain, again, as part of his chivalric duty. The poet makes clear that Gawain is guided and protected entirely by his sense of morality, both Christian and chivalric, which is symbolized by the shield with Christian and chivalric symbols on it.
But is this enough protection for one as idealistic as young Gawain? As the poem progresses into Fitts III and IV, Gawain will be confronted with numerous challenges to his strong moral idealism. Thus far in Fitt II he has survived the natural perils of his journey largely as a result of his own Christian piety. But eventually he will encounter perils that come from other members of society and from within his own human nature. Will his unerring moral sense be enough to protect him from these more disguised forces? And are Christian and chivalric perfection enough to make a man whole? This ultimately is crux of the poem. Throughout, the writer questions the viability of societal values when pitted against human nature and societal imperfection.
Through his excessive descriptions of luxury and revelry, the poet has already implied the weaknesses and superficiality of human society. Gawain himself seems too perfect, too idealistic to survive unscathed in the less-than-perfect human world.
The Fall of Man and the Castle as Paradise: When describing this less-than-perfect human world, medieval writers frequently would allude to the Biblical story of the Fall of Man. According to the Bible, Man was intended by God to be a perfect creature, and the first man, Adam, originally lived in an untouched Paradise (the Garden of Eden), along with the first woman, Eve. They lived in a state of perfect, ignorant bliss, like children, and did not have to work to survive. But Eve was eventually tempted by Satan, became (sexually) curious, and convinced Adam to eat the forbidden fruit from the Tree of Knowledge. As punishment for their Original Sin, they were thrown from Paradise to earth, where mankind has since had to labor in order to survive. Hence, the Fall of Man, the ultimate metaphor for the loss of human innocence.
You may wonder what this Biblical story has to do with Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. The poem is certainly not an outright parallel, but there are many allusions and motifs. Gawain, like Adam and Eve in the beginning, exists as a purely faultless creature, even ignorant in his idealism. Perhaps he, too, will eventually lose his innocence and undergo a fall from the paradise of ignorant bliss. Paradise is perhaps also symbolized in the poem by the shining image of the castle, towering over the dark forest. Medieval literature and art was full of such images of Paradise; often it appeared as an oasis, a garden, or a castle amidst a threatening desert or wasteland. In
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Gawain, we clearly have this medieval convention, but perhaps this castle as welcoming and as luxurious as it first seems to Gawain is not the bastion of moral virtue and perfection that the original Eden was. This castle is a complicated symbol, for it appears to have all the trappings of a Paradise; it appears to Gawain immediately after he has prayed for salvation in the dark forest, and the descriptions of its architecture emphasize its strength and impregnability. But as we will see, there is much more to this castle and its inhabitants than simple appearances. And for Gawain, learning this lesson may be akin to falling from his original moral perfection.
Symbols in Fitt II: In the previous paragraphs, we have already explained the significance of the castle as a symbol: it seems to be the very symbol of salvation and Paradise for Gawain, harking back to a medieval convention of castles as Paradise. But perhaps it is not as morally pefect as the Biblical Paradise, and the excessive, technical descriptions of the castle's superficialities seem to imply this falseness.
One other symbol dominates Fitt II, and this may be the most important symbol in the poem: Gawain's two-sided shield. There are several things one can say about the shield. On one level it functions as both his form of physical protection and as his symbol of moral protection. Gawain as a character drives his strength from his belief in Christian and chivalric values, and the shield is the perfect representation of this, protecting him from physical dangers while serving as a reminder of his spiritual and moral beliefs. The Pentangle on the outside can be seen as a symbol of chivalric values; indeed the five virtues of Franchise, Fellowship, Cleanness, Courtesy, and Charity quickly summarize the chivalric code. The image of the Virgin Mary, on the other hand, obviously symbolizes Christian faith. Thus, Gawain displays his chivalric beliefs and behavior outwardly to the rest of society, but Christian faith -- as symbolized by the image of Mary on the inside of his shield Christian faith is his inner strength.
One further interpretation of the shield should be mentioned. Recall again the role that Celtic, pagan mythology plays in the poem. The Pentangle is often seen as a pagan, and not a Christian, symbol, so it is unusual that it should appear on Gawain's shield, with the image of Mary on the reverse side. The two-sided shield, with a pagan symbol on one side and a Christian symbol on the other, can thus represent the dual pagan-Christian nature of the story. Furthermore, the poet writes that the Pentangle is noteworthy because it is an "endless knot" it has no beginning and no end, and wherever you start, the beginning ultimately becomes the end. In this way, the Pentangle comes to resemble the yearly cycle which the poet described so beautifully at the start of Fitt II again, something endless with no beginning or end. Just as the circularity of the year testified to the superior, replenishing power of Nature, the endless Pentangle on Gawain's shield may also allude to the eternality of Nature and the need to balance this with a strong faith in religion.
Fitt III
Summary:
Part Three of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight covers the three days before Gawain must leave the lord's castle to meet the Green Knight on New Year's Day. On the first day, as planned, the lord arises early to go hunting. The poet describes in detail the
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hunting party as it moves through the winter forest, hounds and blaring horns in hot pursuit of deer. Then, almost drastically, the scene switches to the interior of the castle, to Gawain's bedroom where he still lies beneath the covers as the morning breaks. The lovely lady of the castle silently enters his bedroom and sits on his bed, watching Gawain. The knight is already awake, but he pretends to sleep, wary of the situation and the lady's intentions. Eventually, he "wakes up" and acts surprised to find the lady there.
A careful dialogue follows between Gawain and the lady, where he delicately and diplomatically evades and parries her sexual advances. First, the lady threatens flirtatiously to keep him prisoner; then praising his greatness as a knight, she assures Gawain that their situation is secret and offers her body to him. Gawain replies that he is "certainly honored" (Gardner l. 1247), but declares himself wholly unworthy for a lady as good as her. The lady denies this and replies that if she were to choose any husband, she would choose Gawain himself. Gawain tells her that she has done better already, subtly reminding her of her own husband, and their pleasant conversation continues until mid-morning. As she is about to leave him, she asks for a kiss, and Gawain, as befits the chivalrous knight, grants her that. The rest of the day Gawain spends at mass and then in the company of the two ladies of the castle.
In the meantime, the lord's hunting party has slaughtered a great number of deer by sunset, and they then begin the meticulous process of cutting and dividing the bodies of the game. Once this is done, they return home and Gawain commends the lord for his fine hunting. As promised, the lord gives the game to Gawain and Gawain, in exchange, gives the lord a sweet kiss he received that day, but refuses to reveal who it was won from, claiming that it was not part of the agreement. The two men revel for the rest of the evening and agree to continue their contract, by exchanging their winnings of the next day.
The second day begins with the hunting party out before dawn, frantically on the trail of an ancient, huge, and vicious boar. Both men and hounds are injured in the dogged pursuit of this savage beast. Meanwhile, Gawain welcomes the lady as she enters his bedchamber, as dogged as ever in her pursuit of him. More flirtatious conversation ensues: she reprimands him for forgetting to kiss her, he states that he does not like to take things by force, she says that he would hardly need force. Then she praises his reputation in Courtly Love and asks to be taught; he wisely replies that she already knows more in the art of love. In the end, Gawain evades the lady's amorous intentions, with only two kisses being exchanged. Outside, the hunt of the boar continues viciously, and the savage swine is eventually cornered in a pool of water. The lord boldly wades in the water alone to confront the beast and wins the battle by thrusting his sword into the boar's heart. Another complicated process divides the body of the boar, and the triumphant hunting party returns to the castle. Again, Gawain and the lord are joyously reunited; just as the lord gives the boar to Gawain, the younger knight bestows two kisses on him. For the rest of the night, there is much merriment and singing of carols, while the lady continues to dote adoringly on Gawain. The lord convinces Gawain to stay a third day, with the same contract of exchanging winnings. He intones ominously: "For I've tested you twice, my friend, and found you faithful, / But it's always the third strike that counts" (Gardner ll. 1677-8).
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The third day dawns with a description of its brilliant, wintry beauty, and the hunting dogs fall on the trail of a cunning fox, which constantly outwits and eludes the hunting party. Inside the castle, the lady enters Gawain's bedchamber while wearing a lovely and very revealing gown. She wakes him from his sorrowful slumber, as he dreads the impending day of doom at the Green Chapel. Relentless and charming as ever, she kisses him and asks if he is not promised to another lady elsewhere. Gawain denies this, and the lady begs him to leave her a token of remembrance. He has nothing to give her, but she in turn offers him a valuable ring of gold, which he kindly refuses. The lady then offers him a green silk tunic, which he at first refuses, but then she reveals that whoever wears the green girdle cannot be killed. Aware of his impending meeting with the Green Knight, Gawain accepts the girdle, which the lady begs to keep secret. After receiving a third kiss from her that morning, Gawain dresses, confesses his sins to a priest in preparation for his challenge the next day, and then spends the rest of the day in utter merriment. Meanwhile, after much dogged pursuit, the hunting party succeeds in stunning the wily fox, and the lord triumphantly captures the sly creature. That evening at the castle, Gawain gives the lord three kisses, who in turn gives him the lone product of the day's hard work, the "foul-smelling fox". But the party continues into the night and the lord assigns a servant to guide Gawain to the Green Chapel the next morning. Heavy-hearted, Gawain bids farewell to the people of the castle, all of whom are sad to see him go. That night, Gawain has trouble sleeping for fear of the next day's events.
Fitt III
Analysis:
In analyzing Fitt III of the poem, it is impossible not to ignore the careful structuring of the three days of events, each with their parallel scenes of drama, both outdoors and indoors. On all three days, the structure is very similar: the lord hunts outdoors, while indoors, Sir Gawain is being hunted by the lady. At the end of each day, these two separate and very different hunts are brought together by the exchange of winnings between Gawain and the lord. The poet clearly intends to parallel the lord's hunting of beasts with the lady's hunting of Gawain. The very masculine pursuit of animals is thus equated to the lady's very feminine sexual pursuit of this chivalric hero.
But much more remains to be said about this deliberate parallel of hunting episodes. In many ways, this parallel de-constructs the superficial constructions of society which the poet has, throughout the poem, subtly questioned. By equating the delicate, artfully crafted pursuit of the knight to the rough, primal pursuit of the beasts, the poet has effectively reduced to basics all that medieval society has built up as the ultimate in chivalric behavior. The lady for the most part pursues Gawain by using complex flirtations and societal conventions that recall his sense of duty to a noble lady; yet she is banking on a very basic human instinct lust. Their dialogue is complex, drawing upon many medieval attitudes to courtesy and humility. Yet what it all comes down to is something very primal, very (in a sense) uncivil and animalistic. Again, then, we get a sense of the falseness of societal constructions. As with the descriptions of luxurious clothes and architecture, the careful, diplomatic dialogue between Gawain and the lady is extremely complex. But ultimately, they are only used to mask
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the real nature of human lust another example of societal artifice imposing itself falsely upon nature.
Interestingly enough, though, Gawain uses this very sense of civility to fend off the dangers of lust. It is only through his diplomatic responses and references to social rules (her existing marriage to the lord, his refusal to use force, etc.) that he is able to extricate himself from a very complicated situation. Indeed, Gawain's conflict is a very complex one because in rejecting the lady's requests he runs the risk of offending a moral code which until this moment, had never posed a problem to him. Chivalric duty had always required service and deference to both one's lord and one's lady, but only now does Gawain's fervent belief in chivalry create a conundrum for him. On the one hand, he is tempted to give into the lady's advances by his own human nature and by her appeal to his sense of chivalry to a noble lady. On the other hand, he counters this with his sense of chivalry to a sworn lord and his strong Christian belief. As with the earlier trial in the dark forest, it is Gawain's sense of Christian righteousness which ultimately saves him. The poet writes: "But the danger might have been great / Had Mary not watched her knight!" (Gardner ll. 1769-70)
But Gawain does not entirely evade the lady's seductions. His acceptance of the green girdle may at the time seem small, but it has huge consequences by the end of the poem. Thus, it is something worth examining. By secretly accepting the girdle and refusing to give it away, Gawain violates the agreement he had with his lord thereby violating the chivalric code of honor that binds such contracts. It is not nearly as great a violation as adultery would have been, but it nevertheless shatters the code of chivalry which Gawain lives by. Thus, where the lady failed to seduce Gawain by appealing to his desire for sex, she succeeds by appealing to his desire to live. Both are basic animal instincts, and while Gawain can smother the one through his strong moral sense, he cannot ultimately ignore the other: the fear of death hangs too much on him. In this way, the idealistic Gawain finally allows himself to be guided by his own nature, and not by his sense of societal duty.
Gawain's fear of mortality is obviously linked to his impending meeting with the Green Knight, and this is where the poet so masterfully connects this story about Gawain in the castle with the larger framework of the first, more imposing story about Gawain and the Green Knight. Furthermore, the poet's careful cross-cutting between outdoors and indoors hunting scenes equates Gawain with the hunted beasts both are pursued, both are gripped by the fear of death. Hence while Gawain does not at the time connect the lady's advances with the Green Knight's return stroke, the magical, death-defying green girdle does it for him, causing him to break his ever-important code of chivalry because of his fear of death.
To push the hunting parallel further, the language used during the bedroom scenes often employs metaphors of fighting and fencing. For example, a polite Gawain at first says to the forward lady: "I surrender my arms at once and sue for kind treatment" (Gardner l.1035). Later, the poet writes: "But Sir Gawain remained, in his graceful way, en garde. / Š Even so, his mind would be drawn to the dark that he need not long await, / The stroke that must destroy him" (Gardner ll.1279-83) At the same time, Gawain, aware of the lady's advances and afraid of his impending doom, is equivalent to the deer that the lord is hunting right now both await their final stroke. The overall effect of these parallels is to equate the two scenes of the exposed,
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dangerous exterior forest and "sheltered," "safe" interior bedroom. Thus, the poet reduces the complicated, artificialized world of human society to the basic, primeval world of nature, and shows that the societal code is merely a pretense which sometimes cannot always hold up.
The Role of the Lady and Temptress and Healer: In Fitt III, the character of the lady until now a pleasant companion to Gawain takes a turn for the worse. She suddenly becomes a temptress, attempting to seduce Gawain into violating his sense of morality. In this way, the lady easily resembles archetypal female characters in earlier literature.
Medieval, Arthurian, and Celtic lore often had such female temptresses, all of whom existed to distract the knight errant from his moral task. The Lady in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight obviously fits this role, but we should also not forget the Biblical story of the Fall of Man which we discussed in our analysis of Fitt II. There we saw how the castle in the poem resembled popular medieval representations of Paradise, emerging miraculously from a dark wasteland. In Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, this "Paradise" is not all it seems to Gawain, for rather than bring him salvation, it now only provides him with further perils, in the guise of the predatory lady. Indeed, by appealing to Gawain's sexual desire, the lady becomes an Eve-figure in this false Paradise, tempting the hero to violate his moral agreement with his higher lord.
Another resemblance should be noted, and that is to the archetypal enchantress/healing women of Celtic myth. Folklore abounded with Otherworldly women who could cure wounded warriors and bring them back to health. The lady in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, strangely enough, offers Gawain a cure in the form of the green girdle. Its magical healing properties associate her with such archetypal female healers, yet it is this very girdle which lies at the root of Gawain's moral deception. Instead of curing him, it only taints him in a moral sense. Thus, the lady does not heal but instead wounds Gawain, and, just as with the false Paradise of the castle, nothing is as it seems.
Symbols: The most obvious symbol in Fitt III is the green girdle which Gawain secretly accepts from the lady. As discussed above, it is a deceptive object, for it claims to protect a man, but in this case has only caused Gawain to breach his moral code and (as we will see) ruin his sense of self. Although Gawain accepts it because of his fear of death, there are still all the trappings of romantic love: the lady unties it from her waist and wraps it around Gawain's. On the outside, it still appears as a love-token, thereby emphasizing the sense of deception when Gawain hides it from the lord. Also, of course, it is green, linking it immediately with the Green Knight whom Gawain must meet the next day. In a sense, it is a sort of a reverse-magic to that of the supernatural, indestructible knight or at least Gawain hopes so. Yet both the Green Knight and the green girdle seem to hark from a world of the magical, the otherworldly, the natural and fertile and indestructible. Again, there are pagan connotations with the obvious emphasis on fertility. We can even see the pagan, magical green girdle as representing everything that is not acceptable by chivalric and Christian standards: in keeping it, Gawain goes against his code of honesty, courage, and faith.
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Fitt IV
Summary:
The final, dreaded episode of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight the day of Gawain's exchange stroke opens ominously with a fierce winter storm that keeps Gawain up at night. Before dawn on New Year's Day, the knight is awake and getting dressed, garbing himself in rich, bejeweled clothes -- most importantly the green girdle which the lady had given him. With the servant accompanying him, Gawain mounts his horse Gringolet and leaves the castle, thinking fondly of the court and his host and hostess. Gawain and the servant travel through a somber, snow-covered landscape, and at the top of a hill, the servant stops and begs Gawain to reconsider his mission. He warns that the Green Knight is a horrible, cruel monster: huge, merciless, someone who kills for pure joy. The servant begs Gawain to run away; he would not tell anyone. But Gawain refuses to run, as that would prove himself a cowardly knight. Resigned, the servant leaves Gawain with the final directions to the Green Chapel, and the knight moves forward through a rough, ominous wood to an ancient cave. Gawain marvels at the deserted ugliness of the place, fearing that he might encounter the Devil himself in such a place.
Suddenly, Gawain hears the sound of a blade being sharpened on a grindstone, but the terrified knight resolves to continue and calls out for the Green Knight. He is answered and in due time, the Green Knight, huge and formidable as before, meets Gawain with a monstrous axe. He welcomes Gawain, praising him for maintaining his part of the agreement and asking him to remove his helmet, so the exchange stroke can be received. The horrified Gawain exposes his neck, but at the last moment, he flinches from the axe and the Green Knight stops to yell at the cowardly Gawain. Gawain promises not to move the next time, but the second attempt stops short as well, enraging Gawain. On the third stroke, the Green Knight splits the skin on Gawain's neck but that is all the injury done. An elated Gawain quickly leaps up to defend himself and remind the Green Knight that the agreement allowed for one stroke of the ax only.
The Green Knight explains his unusual behavior: he and the lord of the castle are one and the same man, and the two feinted ax strokes represent the first two days of the game, when Gawain faithfully gave everything he won that day to the King. But that third day, Gawain did conceal the sash from the King and as a result is punished by the slight scrape on his neck. The lord reveals that he arranged his wife's advances upon Gawain, but having seen the result, he is convinced that Gawain is the finest man alive, his one failure stemming understandably from his love of life. But Gawain is harsher on himself, cursing his cowardice and covetousness and rejecting the green sash which made him guilty. The Green Knight forgives Gawain, urges him to keep the sash as a token of their struggle, and invites him back to the castle to celebrate the New Year. Gawain declines, sends his wishes to the two noble ladies, and laments on four Biblical figures (Adam, Solomon, Samson, and David) who were all ruined by the wiles of a lovely woman. He agrees to keep the girdle to remind himself of the "fault and frailty of the foolish flesh" (Gardner l. 2425). To answer Gawain's question, the Green Knight reveals himself to be Bertilak de Hautdesert, servant to the sorceress Morgan le Fay. It was Morgan who engineered the entire game, sending Bertilak down to Camelot so that Guinevere would be shocked to death by the staged
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beheading. In fact, Morgan was the ancient noble lady at Hautdesert castle and is the scheming half-sister to Arthur, the kindg's traditional nemesis. Despite Bertilak's invitation, Gawain decides not to return to the castle for more merriment, and moves back to Camelot, traveling "through the wild woods of the world" with the green girdle on his shoulders. Once at the Arthur's court, Gawain is greeted with much cheering and joy from Arthur, Guinevere, and the others. He recounts his entire adventure, but is ashamed when he tells of his ultimate failing as a result of the green girdle. Nevertheless, Arthur and the courtiers, unaware of Gawain's shame, adopt the green baldric as a heraldic token in honor of Gawain. From there, the poet concludes in much the same way he opened the poem, praising Arthur, moving back through Brutus to the siege of Troy. The final two lines implore Jesus Christ for bliss.
Fitt IV
Analysis:
Description of the Natural World: Fitt IV is filled with some of the poet's most striking images of the desolate, wintry world of Nature. The first stanza alone describes a terrible storm on New Year's Eve, emphasizing Gawain's sense of dread as he fearfully anticipates the meeting with the Green Knight. This is a good example of pathetic fallacy, a literary device whereby the weather and the natural world echo the emotions of a character. Here, the night storm reflects Gawain's dread, but it also heightens the sense of an overpowering, superior force of Nature which mankind cannot possibly contend with. The effect is the same as the descriptions of Nature in Fitt II: the individual human is belittled when compared to the magnitude and power of the natural world. As Gawain and the servant approach the Green Chapel, there are more remarkable descriptions of Nature. Always, it is a cold, intimidating, barren world they are moving through; the bleak, dead surroundings heighten the bleakness of Gawain's task and seem to foreshadow his own doom.
The servant's frightened outburst at the end of the Green Chapel serves much the same purpose. Just as the poet described the terror of the natural world during the journey, the servant here describes the terror of the Green Knight. Here, too, is an overpowering, superior force that seems impossible to contend with. In this way, there is an implicit linking of Green Knight with Nature (see "The Green Knight Revealed" below). This, of course, has been the association all along since the poem's start, but here, nearing the suspenseful climax of the story, the extreme horror of the Green Knight and of Nature are magnified to dizzying proportions. It is the poet's clever way of building suspense, while also emphasizing the nobility and idealism of Gawain's character. For all his dread and all the warnings from other humans, Gawain will not abandon his chivalric duty to uphold the terms of the agreement. He remains courageous in the face of imminent death and a terrifying force of Nature.
The Futility of Human Constructions: Just as Fitt II had detailed descriptions of nature and armor, so too does Fitt IV. Stanzas 2 and 3 concentrate on Gawain's careful arming of himself on New Year's Day. It is very similar to previous descriptions of armor we have encountered before: in Fitt I with the Green Knight and in Fitt II with Gawain before setting off on his quest. But at this point in the story, the meticulously polished armor and clothing bear a particular irony for the reader and for Gawain. No matter how strong or how beautiful his armor is, it still will not save him from the
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impending blow of the Green Knight. Why, then, go through this ritualistic arming process, when it will ultimately prove futile?
The poet seems once more to be hinting at the futility of human constructions, with his ironic description of the elaborate, but ultimately useless armor. The poem thus far has been filled with such elaborate, technical descriptions of armor, castle architecture, the cutting of the hunted deer. All these are elements of medieval aristocratic life which are meant to enhance the sense of the noble and the refined in medieval society. But here finally, such an elaborate, ennobling social construction (the armor) is pitted against the finality of death, and it proves to be useless.
To go further, is the poet again implying the futility of human constructions like the romance genre and our moral code? The conventions of the romance have been mocked in a way: the grand armor is useless, the language of courtly love has been used not to ennoble but to deceive and seduce. And the greatest human construction of all the moral code which guides the faultless Gawain has crumbled under the natural, primal threat of death.
The Green Knight Revealed: The character of the Green Knight is key to understanding the theme of nature and human society in the poem. Recall again that in Fitt I he appeared as a liminal figure between the natural and the human worlds: with a civilized look to his armor and clothes, yet clearly Otherworldly. Here in Fitt IV, we realize that the Green Knight has been in the story all along, in the guise of Lord Bertilak, Gawain's host during the holidays. Certainly both we and Gawain are surprised, but what does this revelation say about the relationship between the natural and the human worlds?
Scholars such as Brian Stone have argued that the Green Knight is essentially a stand-in for the Devil, a trickster who changes identities, appears always invincible, and challenges humans to abandon their Christian and moral principles. Gawain, for example, is certainly tempted by the sensual luxuries of Bertilak's court and by the sexual advances of Bertilak's wife. Just as the Devil frequently makes bargains with hapless human beings in folktales and medieval stories, the Green Knight also makes bargains (two in fact) with Gawain. Gawain even comments that the Green Chapel seems like a place where one would meet Satan himself. And the description and name of the Green Chapel are in some ways a parody of the clean, welcoming, sanctuary of the Christian church, the House of God. Pacts with the Devil traditionally ended with the human giving up his soul, and one can even argue that by the end of the poem, Gawain does seem to have lost his soul or at least, the moral faith that guided his soul.
But it is possible to view the devilish role of the Green Knight as merely a medieval Christian overlay to a pagan figure, where the conflict between the human and the Otherworldly/natural has been transformed into a conflict between the Christian and the Satanic. Indeed, the Green Knight, in both his forms, seems to maintain an innate link with Nature. As Bertilak, he still carries a unique, instinctual natural-ness, as evidenced by his prowess and physicality during the hunts in Fitt III. With Bertilak ranging through the wild forests and Gawain in bed having a diplomatic, flirtatious conversation with Lady Bertilak, it seems there could be no greater polarity between the vigorous natural world and the guarded human world.
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If the natural vs. the human is the real conflict, then Nature would seem to have won out in this story, for the human constructions (as we have seen above) have proven to be futile and Gawain ultimately lets himself be guided by his own natural impulse to survive. But what confuses everything at the end is the revelation that none of this has been, in a sense, genuine, and that all of it has been a carefully engineered construction, planned by Morgan le Fay. In a sense, it isn't at all Nature or the "all-natural" Green Knight that Gawain has been contending with, but merely the machinations of another human being, driven by human jealousies and emotions, and dependent on constructions and artifices just as elaborate as those we have already encountered in the other human characters. In this light, Gawain's challenge hasn't been natural in the least, but instead the very definition of artificial.
Morgan le Fay, Gawain's "Misogynistic" Speech, and the Fall of Man: With the revelation of Morgan le Fay's villainy, nothing is as it seems, and the Green Knight, instead of the dynamic embodiment of Nature, ends up as the puppet of a relatively minor character in the story. Again, many critics have objected to the final explanation in Fitt IV, that it seems forced, doesn't "ring true," and that the poet was merely giving into the conventions of the larger Arthurian genre. Whether or not this is true, and whether Morgan's character really does play a vital role in a complex story or is merely a tack-on, the mention of her does cause Gawain's outburst in the eighteenth stanza, where he mentions Biblical figures who have been deceived by women. This speech is often labeled "misogynistic" (woman-hating) and out-of-character for Gawain. It may even reveal the underlying misogyny of the poet himself.
But Gawain's speech, drawing upon Biblical parables, relies upon his fervent faith in Christian morality. Shattered by the realization that everything has been a false game, he seems to be angrily lashing out at the weakening vices of "cowardice and covetousness" and the predatory women that prey upon such vices. Bertilak himself helps to draw the parallel between Morgan and the dangerous Biblical women when he talks of how Morgan gained her skills in sorcery by seducing Merlin. Needless to say, the same trope of the temptress lies (as we have seen) in the figures of Eve and Lady Bertilak. Only now, with Bertilak's explanation, do the lady's seductive actions seem to bear a more planned, but somehow more sinister motive to the entire game. But the basic motif remains the same: the temptress, the Paradise which is no longer, and the Fall from innocence. Here, Gawain's Fall comes with the realization that his entire quest has been an artifice, a mere game, and as a result, his moral belief in the world around him is shattered.
Gawain's Disillusionment: The final episode, where Gawain returns to Arthur's court, only serves to drive home his sense of disillusionment. Already, Gawain's trust in things has been weakened by the realization that he has been played all along by Sir Bertilak, Lady Bertilak, and Morgan le Fay all of whom appeared, at first, to be respectable, noble characters. But when he arrives at Arthur's court, their inability to see his moral failure ruins his moral conviction even more. Why is it that the noblest court in all of Britain cannot understand his moral dilemma and celebrates his cowardice as courage? The poem even ends with Gawain in a moral quagmire, bearing his green girdle as a mark of shame, while the rest of Camelot continues to celebrate and raises the green girdle in blind admiration of Gawain. It is a complex
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ending, and certainly not the conventional sense of resolution that is found in most romances.
Yet, as we have realized by now, the poet does not aim to simply re-create the romance genre and its chivalric code, but also to question it. Gawain's final disillusionment has been foreshadowed all along by the poet in his excessive, overly technical descriptions of romance conventions. If previous in Fitt I, we got the sense that Camelot's lords and ladies were a bit shallow and too decadent in their revelries, then our suspicions are confirmed here, when Gawain returns to this glowing world at the end of the poem. Arthur's court is still reveling, and yet, they do not have the moral seriousness to realize Gawain's dilemma. Perhaps this world this supposed epitome of human civility and chivalry does not glow as brightly as it once did for the idealistic knight.
Ultimately, the poem implies the loss of the importance of chivalric values, for as Gawain has learned, they do not always bring peace to the individual soul.
Narrative Structure and the Mythic Journey: Finally, it is important to note the narrative structure of the poem, the way in which the events of the poem are patterned and what these have to do with the themes. If we look closely, we can notice that the fitts seem to alternate in terms of similarity of events. For example, the first fitt takes place within a royal court, the second fitt is a perilous journey outdoors which ends at another royal court, the third fitt alternates between the setting of the royal court and the perilous outdoors, and the final fitt is again a journey outdoors that ends at the same, original court of Arthur. Notice, for one, that the poem's setting alternates between the outdoors (the natural world) and the royal court (the human world). Gawain begins safely in the human world, and is fully confident in the rules of chivalry and morality which supposedly guide human society. But after taking his perilous journey into the natural world and encountering many challenges (both natural and society), he returns to the human world not with a reaffirmed confidence in its safety and righteousness, but instead with a nagging uncertainty about the moral code he once believed so strongly.
This is quite different from the conventional narrative structure of conflict and restoration a structure which goes back as far as the Celtic myths which lie at the roots of the poem. Pre-Christian Celtic myths often had motifs of exchanges between the human world and the Otherworld, with the time period of a year and a day commonly used. A mythic interpretation of the poem would have the Green Knight as an Otherworldly lord and Gawain's journey from Camelot into a terrifying, strange land as the hero's archetypical descent into the Otherworld or Underworld. (Some examples of the Otherworld journey include Aeneas' descent into Hades in the Aeneid or more closely related to Sir Gawain and the Green Knight -- the Irish hero Cuchulainn's journey to the Otherworld in the Celtic myth "The Wasting Sickness of Cuchulainn.") In most cases, the hero undertakes the journey to right some previous wrong or restore balance to the natural order. In Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, the poem's symmetry would suggest that the natural order has been restored, as the New Year dawns brightly on Arthur's court, but this masks the fact that within Gawain's individual soul, the moral order has been uprooted.
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Conflicting Models of Courtesy in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
The medieval poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight depicts two different medieval models of courtesy - courtesy towards men and courtesy towards women. Defined by different members of the community, the two types of courtesy also necessitate different, sometimes contradictory conducts. The incompatibility of the two models of courtesy displayed in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight impedes complete restoration of the social order.
Regarding courtesy shown towards men, Dr. E.L. Skip Knox states, "Originally, courtesy meant the special consideration one knight showed to another." The courtesy that two men exchange is a mutual contract of loyalty that they define and practice. It involves trust, respect and, in some cases, allegiance. Gawain presents this type of courtesy not only to Arthur, his king, but also to Bercilak and even to the Green Knight.
The description of Gawain's pentangle and the virtues it symbolizes confirm the importance of courtesy to Gawain's character:
The fifth group of five the man respected, I hear, Was generosity and love of fellow-men above all;
His purity and courtesy were never lacking, And surpassing the others, compassion: these noble
Five were more deeply implanted in that man than any other. (Sir Gawain and the Green Knight ll. 651-655)
The pentacle is the embodiment of all the knightly virtues and it "[suits Gawain] extremely well." (SGGK l. 622) Gawain's peers see him as the ideal knight and, as such, he must preserve his courteous actions throughout the poem.
As a member of Arthur's court, Gawain owes a certain allegiance to Arthur. By taking up the Green Knight's challenge, Gawain helps to protect the king and also upholds the honor of Arthur's court, by verifying its reputation for bravery. Thus, because Gawain retains the benefits of belonging to Arthur's court, the principle of courtesy dictates that he defend it by defending Arthur.
The courtesy between Gawain and Bercilak is similar to that between Gawain and Arthur. It involves respect and loyalty. Mutual respect is evident when, upon his arrival at Bercilak's castle, Gawain is immediately treated to elegant, warm clothes and a sumptuous meal and then questioned about his identity. "Then he was tactfully questioned and asked by discreet enquiry addressed to that prince, so that he must politely admit he belonged to the court." (SGGK ll. 901-904) Only after Bercilak has shown courtesy in the form of hospitality does he require Gawain to reveal his identity. Loyalty between Bercilak and Gawain is manifest when Gawain, out of courtesy for his friend, refuses the advances of Lady Bercilak. Bercilak reciprocates this, as the Green Knight, by sparing Gawain's life.
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Like Bercilak and Arthur, Gawain also treats the Green Knight with courtesy, even though he is a terrible figure. The courtesy between them is based on an agreement that Gawain will seek out the Green Knight one year after their initial encounter. In this way, the courtesy is mutual. Gawain's honor and sense of duty lead him to keep his promise to the Green Knight, even though it probably means his death.
Thus, it can be seen that the courtesy displayed in male-male relationships in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight includes respect, loyalty and a degree of mutuality that serves to equalize the parties involved. Contrastingly, courtesy in the male-female relationships entails more of a one-sided interaction than the reciprocal rapport shared by courteous men.
So good a knight as Gawain is rightly reputed, In whom courtesy is so completely embodied,
Could not have spent so much time with a lady Without begging a kiss, to comply with politeness, By some hint or suggestion at the end of a remark. (Sir Gawain and the Green Knight ll. 1297-1301)
These lines, uttered by Bercilak's wife indicate the unbalanced courtesy between men and women in the poem. Here Lady Bercilak demands courtesy from Gawain in the form of a kiss. Rather than a joint effort to define courtesy, Lady Bercilak dictates what Gawain must do in order to be courteous. As Larry D. Benson argues, "In Sir Gawain [courtesy] is the most important aspect of the temptation"(44) After Gawain refuses Lady Bercilak's initial advances, she attacks his courtesy. There is no free exchange of courtesy, rather Lady Bercilak insists upon it and Gawain, because of his sense of knighthood, complies. " The knight reacted cautiously, in the most courteous of ways" (SGGK 1282) In a sense, Lady Bercilak forces Gawain to act according to her idea of courtesy. The author recapitulates Lady Bercilak's dominance in the temptation scene by having her enter Gawain's room (and not vice versa) and also through her playful lines about imprisoning Gawain while he surrenders. (SGGK ll. 1211-1216)
Lady Bercilak's assault on Gawain's courtesy emphasizes the tension that exists between male-male and male-female courtesy. It is in accepting the green girdle and fulfilling Lady Bercilak's model of courtesy that Gawain fails to comply with the courtesy that he and Bercilak share. The irreconcilable nature of the two courtesies hinders the re-integration of Gawain into the Arthurian court.
Although Gawain survives his encounter with the Green Knight, he does not emerge unscathed. He keeps the green girdle to eternally remind him of his transgression. He announces to Arthur, " This is the token of the dishonesty I was caught committing, and now I must wear it as long as I live, for a man may hide his misdeed, but never erase it." (SGGK ll. 2509-2511) The girdle, which symbolizes Gawain's breech of courtesy, has changed Gawain forever.
Gawain's newly marred character is unable to mesh with the subjects of Arthur's court. They "laugh loudly about [the reason he wears the belt]" (SGGK l. 2514) and adopt the custom themselves. Wearing a green belt becomes a point of honor for Gawain's fellow knights but remains a blemish for Gawain himself. The tension
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between the two models of courtesy causes a rift between Gawain and the social world in which he lives. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight embodies two complicated medieval ideals of courtesy. The intrinsic differences between them thwart Gawain's ability to remain courteous, in effect cutting him off from Arthur's court. Thus courtesy in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is not only insufficient to maintaining social order, but is, in fact, the cause of its decay.
The Fairie Queene(1590) By
E.Spenser Context
Edmund Spenser was born around 1552 in London, England. We know very little about his family, but he received a quality education and graduated with a Masters from Cambridge in 1576. He began writing poetry for publication at this time and was employed as a secretary, first to the Bishop of Kent and then to nobles in Queen Elizabeth's court. His first major work, The Shepheardes Calender, was published in 1579 and met with critical success; within a year he was at work on his greatest and longest work, The Faerie Queene. This poem occupied him for most of his life, though he published other poems in the interim.
The first three books of The Faerie Queen were published in 1590 and then republished with Books IV through VI in 1596. By this time, Spenser was already in his second marriage, which took place in Ireland, where he often traveled. Still at work on his voluminous poem, Spenser died on January 13, 1599, at Westminster.
Spenser only completed half of The Faerie Queene he planned. In a letter to Sir John Walter Raleigh, he explained the purpose and structure of the poem. It is an allegory, a story whose characters and events nearly all have a specific symbolic meaning. The poem's setting is a mythical "Faerie land," ruled by the Faerie Queene. Spenser sets forth in the letter that this "Queene" represents his own monarch, Queen Elizabeth.
Spenser intended to write 12 books of the Faerie Queene, all in the classical epic style; Spenser notes that his structure follows those of Homer and Virgil. Each Book concerns the story of a knight, representing a particular Christian virtue, as he or she would convey at the court of the Faerie Queene. Because only half of the poem was ever finished, the unifying scene at the Queene's court never occurs; instead, we are left with six books telling an incomplete story. Of these, the first and the third books are most often read and critically acclaimed.
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Though it takes place in a mythical land, The Faerie Queen was intended to relate to Spenser's England, most importantly in the area of religion. Spenser lived in post-Reformation England, which had recently replaced Roman Catholicism with Protestantism (specifically, Anglicanism) as the national religion. There were still many Catholics living in England, and, thus, religious protest was a part of Spenser's life. A devout Protestant and a devotee of the Protestant Queen Elizabeth, Spenser was particularly offended by the anti-Elizabethan propaganda that some Catholics circulated. Like most Protestants near the time of the Reformation, Spenser saw a Catholic Church full of corruption, and he determined that it was not only the wrong religion but the anti-religion. This sentiment is an important backdrop for the battles of The Faerie Queene, which often represent the "battles" between London and Rome.
Characters
Arthur -
The central hero of the poem, although he does not play the most significant role in its action. Arthur is in search of the Faerie Queene, whom he saw in a vision. The "real" Arthur was a king of the Britons in the 5th or 6th century A.D., but the little historical information we have about him is overwhelmed by his legend.
Faerie Queene (also known as Gloriana) -
Though she never appears in the poem, the Faerie Queene is the focus of the poem; her castle is the ultimate goal or destination of many of the poem’s characters. She represents Queen Elizabeth, among others, as discussed in the Commentary.
Redcrosse
The Redcrosse Knight is the hero of Book I; he stands for the virtue of Holiness. His real name is discovered to be George, and he ends up becoming St. George, the patron saint of England. On another level, though, he is the individual Christian fighting against evil--or the Protestant fighting the Catholic Church.
Una
Redcrosse's future wife, and the other major protagonist in Book I. She is meek, humble, and beautiful, but strong when it is necessary; she represents Truth, which Redcrosse must find in order to be a true Christian.
Duessa
The opposite of Una, she represents falsehood and nearly succeeds in getting Redcrosse to leave Una for good. She appears beautiful, but it is only skin-deep.
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Archimago
Next to Duessa, a major antagonist in Book I. Archimago is a sorcerer capable of changing his own appearance or that of others; in the end, his magic is proven weak and ineffective.
Britomart
The hero of Book III, the female warrior virgin, who represents Chastity. She is a skilled fighter and strong of heart, with an amazing capacity for calm thought in troublesome circumstances. Of course, she is chaste, but she also desires true Christian love. She searches for her future husband, Arthegall, whom she saw in a vision through a magic mirror.
Florimell
Another significant female character in Book III, Florimell represents Beauty. She is also chaste but constantly hounded by men who go mad with lust for her. She does love one knight, who seems to be the only character that does not love her.
Satyrane
Satyrane is the son of a human and a satyr (a half-human, half-goat creature). He is "nature's knight," the best a man can be through his own natural abilities without the enlightenment of Christianity and God's grace. He is significant in both Book I and Book III, generally as an aide to the protagonists
Summary
In The Faerie Queene, Spenser creates an allegory: The characters of his far-off, fanciful "Faerie Land" are meant to have a symbolic meaning in the real world. In Books I and III, the poet follows the journeys of two knights, Redcrosse and Britomart, and in doing so he examines the two virtues he considers most important to Christian life--Holiness and Chastity. Redcrosse, the knight of Holiness, is much like the Apostle Peter: In his eagerness to serve his Lord, he gets himself into unforeseen trouble that he is not yet virtuous enough to handle. His quest is to be united with Una, who signifies Truth--Holiness cannot be attained without knowledge of Christian truth. In his immature state, he mistakes falsehood for truth by following the deceitful witch Duessa. He pays for this mistake with suffering, but in the end, this suffering makes way for his recovery in the House of Holiness, aided by Faith, Hope, and Charity. With newfound strength and the grace of God, he is able to conquer the dragon that represents all the evil in the world.
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In a different manner, Britomart also progresses in her virtue of chastity. She already has the strength to resist lust, but she is not ready to accept love, the love she feels when she sees a vision of her future husband in a magic mirror. She learns to incorporate chaste resistance with active love, which is what Spenser sees as true Christian love: moderation. Whereas Redcrosse made his own mistakes (to show to us the consequences of an unholy life), it is not Britomart but the other characters in Book III who show the destructive power of an unchaste life. Spenser says in his Preface to the poem that his goal is to show how a virtuous man should live. The themes of Book I and Book III come together in the idea that our native virtue must be augmented or transformed if it is to become true Christian virtue. Spenser has a high regard for the natural qualities of creatures; he shows that the satyrs, the lion, and many human characters have an inborn inclination toward the good. And yet, he consistently shows their failure when faced with the worst evils. These evils can only be defeated by the Christian good.
High on Spenser's list of evils is the Catholic Church, and this enmity lends a political overtone to the poem, since the religious conflicts of the time were inextricably tied to politics. The poet is unashamed in his promotion of his beloved monarch, Queen Elizabeth; he takes considerable historical license in connecting her line with King Arthur. Spenser took a great pride in his country and in his Protestant faith. He took aim at very real corruption within the Catholic Church; such attacks were by no means unusual in his day, but his use of them in an epic poem raised his criticism above the level of the propagandists.
As a purely poetic work, The Faerie Queene was neither original nor always remarkable; Spenser depends heavily on his Italian romantic sources (Ariosto & Tasso), as well as medieval and classical works like The Romance of the Rose and The Aeneid. It is Spenser's blending of such diverse sources with a high-minded allegory that makes the poem unique and remarkable. He is able to take images from superficial romances, courtly love stories, and tragic epics alike, and give them real importance in the context of the poem. No image is let fall from Spenser's pen that does not have grave significance, and this gives The Faerie Queene the richness that has kept it high among the ranks of the greatest poetry in the English language.
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Commentary
Redcrosse is the hero of Book I, and in the beginning of Canto i, he is called the knight of Holinesse. He will go through great trials and fight fierce monsters throughout the Book, and this in itself is entertaining, as a story of a heroic "knight errant." However, the more important purpose of the Faerie Queene is its allegory, the meaning behind its characters and events. The story's setting, a fanciful "faerie land," only emphasizes how its allegory is meant for a land very close to home: Spenser's England. The title character, the Faerie Queene herself, is meant to represent Queen Elizabeth. Redcrosse represents the individual Christian, on the
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search for Holiness, who is armed with faith in Christ, the shield with the bloody cross. He is traveling with Una, whose name means "truth." For a Christian to be holy, he must have true faith, and so the plot of Book I mostly concerns the attempts of evildoers to separate Redcrosse from Una. Most of these villains are meant by Spenser to represent one thing in common: the Roman Catholic Church. The poet felt that, in the English Reformation, the people had defeated "false religion" (Catholicism) and embraced "true religion" (Protestantism/Anglicanism). Thus, Redcrosse must defeat villains who mimic the falsehood of the Roman Church.
The first of these is Error. When Redcrosse chokes the beast, Spenser writes, "Her vomit full of bookes and papers was (I.i.20)." These papers represent Roman Catholic propaganda that was put out in Spenser's time, against Queen Elizabeth and Anglicanism. The Christian (Redcrosse) may be able to defeat these obvious and disgusting errors, but before he is united to the truth he is still lost and can be easily deceived. This deceit is arranged by Archimago, whose name means "arch-image"--the Protestants accused the Catholics of idolatry because of their extensive use of images. The sorcerer is able, through deception and lust, to separate Redcrosse from Una--that is, to separate Holiness from Truth. Once separated, Holiness is susceptible to the opposite of truth, or falsehood. Redcrosse may able to defeat the strength of Sansfoy (literally "without faith" or "faithlessness") through his own native virtue, but he falls prey to the wiles of Falsehood herself--Duessa. Duessa also represents the Roman Church, both because she is "false faith," and because of her rich, purple and gold clothing, which, for Spenser, displays the greedy wealth and arrogant pomp of Rome. Much of the poet's imagery comes from a passage in the Book of Revelation, which describes the "whore of Babylon"--many Protestant readers took this Biblical passage to indicate the Catholic Church.
The Faerie Queene, however, also has many sources outside of the Bible. Spenser considers himself an epic poet in the classical tradition and so he borrows heavily from the great epics of antiquity: Homer's Iliad and Odyssey and Virgil's Aeneid. This is most evident at the opening of Book I, in which Spenser calls on one of the Muses to guide his poetry--Homer and Virgil established this form as the "proper" opening to an epic poem. The scene with the "human tree," in which a broken branch drips blood, likewise recalls a similar episode in the Aeneid. However, while these ancient poets mainly wrote to tell a story, we have already seen that Spenser has another purpose in mind. In the letter that introduces the Faerie Queene, he says that he followed Homer and Virgil and the Italian poets Ariosto and Tasso because they all have "ensampled a good governour and a vertuous man." Spenser intends to expand on this example by defining the characteristics of a good, virtuous, Christian man.
The lion, though it has no name, is also part of Spenser's allegory. As a part of brutish nature, it represents natural law, which may be violent at times but is sympathetic to Christian truth. According to Christian theology, natural law makes up part of God's divine law, and so the Christian is not an adversary of nature but acts in unison with it--thus, the lion naturally aids Una. However, it is no match for Sansloy ("without the
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law of god"), who operates outside the domain of divine law. The natural law, embodied in the lion and closely connected to Christian Truth, holds no sway over Sansloy. Not subject to the laws of nature or religion, he is capable of destroying the lion. The lion can, however, defeat the robber, who violates the natural law by stealing from others. (This also violates divine law, but Spenser would have held that man's own natural conscience forbids theft.) The two women who benefit from Kirkrapine ("church robber") represent monasticism; Abessa's name recalls "Abbess," the head of an abbey. Monasticism is a feature of the Catholic Church, and in Spenser's time, monasteries were often accused of taking donations to the poor for themselves. Abessa's deafness and dumbness, and Corceca's blindness, display Spenser's belief that monasteries (monks, friars, and nuns) are ignorant of the needs of the world as they live in seclusion.
The House of Pride is a collection of ancient and medieval thought about sin and evil. Christian theology holds that Pride is the greatest sin, from which all other vices come. Pride was the sin of Satan, which caused his fall from Heaven; thus, the Queen of Pride is associated with Lucifer by her name. The parade of the seven major vices, each with some prop or costume to indicate their nature (Pride holds a mirror, for she is vain), was a common feature of medieval morality plays--Spenser borrows it for this scene in Canto iv. The Queen, however, is not simply an allegory for Pride; she also has a political meaning. Spenser intentionally contrasts her with the true Queen, to whom the poem is dedicated: Queen Elizabeth. The poet notes that Lucifera "made her selfe a Queene, and crowned to be, / Yet rightfull kingdome she had none at all, / Ne heritage of native soveraintie / But did usurpe with wrong and tyrannie / Upon the scepter (I.iv.12)." This is in contrast to Elizabeth, who held her power lawfully, ruled with justice and "true religion," and was descended from a noble race (as Spenser will later establish).
Again, Spenser uses a variety of sources in constructing his imagery. The House of Pride, the poet writes, "Did on...weak foundation ever sit: / For on a sandie hill, that still did flit, / And fall away, it mounted was full hie (I.iv.5)." This recalls the Gospel of Matthew, in which Jesus says that those who do not follow His words "shall be likened to a foolish man who built his house on sand (Mt.7.26)." The house shall fall, as Redcrosse sees when he discovers the bodies of those ruined by pride. The details of the castle, though, such as the surrounding wall covered by gold foil (outward beauty hiding inner weakness) are borrowed from Orlando Furioso, by the Italian poet Arisoto, whom Spenser admired. Finally, in describing the descent into Hell by Duessa and Night, the poet borrows from Virgil, who in the Aeneid describes Aeneas' travel through Hell to meet his father. We must keep in mind that to a late medieval/early Renaissance audience, such borrowing from other authors without citation was not by any means considered plagiarism. In fact, it was taken to be the sign of a well-educated poet who could command different sources and integrate different styles. The medieval style was one of incorporation, not originality, and this carries on from Dante to Spenser to Milton.
The woodgods, although they live in the forest, watch over nature, and are instinctively kind to Una, are not representative of "pure" nature like the Lion was. Because they are creatures of Greek and Roman mythology, and because they
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worship Una like an idol, they represent the primitive, idolatrous beliefs of the ancients. They bow down to Una but do not realize the Christian truth that she represents, and this is Spenser's dismissal of the gods of the Greeks and Romans. Satyrane, because he is only part woodgod, still has the goodness of nature and can help Una. However, because he does not represent anything Christian he cannot defeat Sansloy; Spenser repeatedly maintains that nature's best cannot perform the deeds that a Christian warrior must accomplish. These deeds must be performed by Redcrosse, who has been weakened by his visit to the House of Pride. Although he had the instinctive good sense to flee from that castle (his conscience at work), he still does not recognize the falseness of Duessa. This failure leads him near to death in the dungeon of Orgoglio. The giant represents godless pride, which can overcome the weak Christian who is still separated from Truth.
Arthur then becomes identifiable as a Christ figure, because he helps Redcrosse rise up from his lowest state. The allegory is not that simple, however; later, Redcrosse himself will be likened to Christ, and Arthur has more diverse meanings within The Faerie Queene. On the first level, he is the hero of the whole poem; Spenser intended to have him appear briefly in each book, usually to save the day when things look hopeless. Beyond that, the character of King Arthur had deep significance for a 16th-century English audience. Arthurian legend was well developed by Spenser's time and had turned a semi-historical fifth-century king into a timeless hero. Arthur represents Britain's golden age. Spenser suggests that this age could, in a way, return to England in his time--by championing religion, instead of damsels in distress. This connection will be strengthened later in the book when the poet suggests a connection between Arthur and Queen Elizabeth.
The return of the Catholic Church as the main enemy of this Book is also emphasized in the battle outside Orgoglio's caste. Duessa rides out on a very strange beast, in a scene that, more than any other passage, is a direct parallel to the Book of Revelation. That book, which is supposed to be a prediction of the future of Christianity in the world, reads: "And I saw a woman sitting upon a scarlet-colored beast...having seven heads and ten horns. And the woman was clothed in purple and scarlet, and covered with gold...having in her hand a golden cup full of abominations (Rev.17.3-4)." The woman in the Biblical passage is known as the whore of Babylon, and Protestants traditionally associate her with the Catholic Church. Her "golden cup" pours out the filth that temporarily overcomes the squire. Thus, the battle outside the giant's castle firmly associates Duessa with the Roman Church. And yet, she is not the greatest evil in the poem; Una finally reveals Redcrosse's ultimate goal: to free her parents from the giant dragon. This beast represents all evil--the evil that Spenser claimed was in the Catholic Church and all other forms.
Spenser glorifies Queen Elizabeth by connecting her with the line of King Arthur in Canto ix. Arthur claims to have been born in western Wales, which connects him with the house of Tudor, Elizabeth's family. The history is vague enough that it cannot be disproved; there is just enough information that a connection can be guessed at. And so, in Spenser's mind, Elizabeth has the same secular power and religious authority that Arthur held. Of course, Arthur remains partly a Christ figure, as well. In the exchange of gifts, he gives Redcrosse a "few drops of liquor pure, / Of wondrous
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worth and vertue excellent, / That any wound could heal incontinent (I.ix.19)." This liquid probably represents the Eucharist, which for Protestants is the symbol of Christ giving his body and blood to the Apostles at the Last Supper. Redcrosse, for his part, gives Arthur "his Saveours testament" (I.ix.19)--that is, the New Testament, which tells of Christ's life on Earth. This foreshadows Redcrosse's eventual role as a Christ figure and, in fact, a more important one than Arthur.
First, though, he must deal with despair. We saw earlier that the lion could not conquer despair in the form of Sansjoy; here in its purest form, it almost defeats Redcrosse, except that he has the truth, Una, and the truth of God's mercy is greater than despair. This is one of the lessons that Redcrosse learns in the House of Holiness, which is an exact counterpart to the House of Pride from Canto iv.
Instead of Lucifera, there is Caelia ("Heavenly"); instead of a parade of vices, there is a multitude of virtues. The three daughters are Faith, Hope, and Charity--the three greatest virtues, according to St. Paul--and each one instructs Redcrosse in her own specialty. The seven physicians who tend to his body are the counterparts to the seven bodily vices of the House of Pride; however, they do not all correspond to a specific vice. Rather, they follow a pattern taken in Christ's words in the Gospel of Matthew: "For I was hungered, and ye gave me meat: I was thirsty, and ye gave me drink: I was a stranger, and ye took me in: Naked, and ye clothed me: I was sick, and ye visited me: I was in prison, and ye came unto me (Mt.25.35-36)." Thus, one of the seven provides food, another provides clothing, another visits the sick, etc. Spenser's emphasis here is that holiness is not simply a reaction to evil; it has its own positive source in Christ. This makes it greater than evil and gives Redcrosse the strength to ride into battle again.
The final battle between Redcrosse and the dragon brings the allegory of the entire first book to a climax and encompasses all the different levels of religious and political meaning that Spenser has put into the story. Redcrosse's victory represents three distinct events: Christ's victory over death and the devil in the Crucifixion and Resurrection, the triumph of the individual Christian over the temptation of sin, and the "defeat" of the Roman Catholic Church by the Church of England and all Protestantism. We have already seen much evidence establishing Redcrosse both as the Christian "Everyman" and as the champion of Protestants against Catholics. Here in Canto xi, he is also portrayed as a Christ figure, because he falls and triumphs on the third day and because the dragon he defeats is damnation; its mouth was "like the griesly mouth of hell (I.xi.12)." Just as Christ had to descend to Hell to defeat it, Redcrosse had to enter the hellish mouth of the dragon to finally kill it.
Redcrosse is not victorious alone, however; he is saved twice by very timely help. In this respect, he better represents the individual Christian in need of God's aid. The Well of Life he first falls into is Baptism, always symbolized by immersion in water. The Tree of Life is the Eucharist, the symbol of Christ's body and blood. Both well and tree represent the grace that God bestows on mankind through the sacraments, which help a Christian in danger of falling prey to sin. Redcrosse's lucky stumbling into these two places of healing almost seems too lucky; even in Faerie
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land, does Spenser really expect us to believe that a miraculous swell or tree simply pops up behind the hero when he is about to get killed? In fact, the poet emphasizes that this was no coincidence at all: "eternal God that chaunce did guide (I.xi.45)." Spenser's point is that no matter how well a Christian is equipped or prepared, he is no match for sin and death without the undeserved grace of God. Because Redcrosse is saved through such miraculous circumstances, we cannot give him full credit for the victory; all the glory is to God. Thus, Spenser's message about the Christian life is one of humility; we can never take the credit for God's victory.
Finally, Redcrosse is again established as the hero of Protestantism against Catholicism in the last Canto. Even though he has conquered the dragon, his marriage to Una must be delayed; his work is not yet finished. The knight must "Backe to return to that great Faerie Queene / And her to serve six yeares in warlike wize, / Gainst that proud Paynim king (I.xii.18)." This brings the allegory back from the general to the specific and back from the purely religious to the political. We know that the Faerie Queene represents Queen Elizabeth; thus, the "proud Paynim king" whom she is fighting must be either the pope or a Catholic king; either way, the enemy is the Roman Church. Spenser is bringing us back to his own time where, although England now is Protestant, the Catholic Church is still powerful. Redcrosse will be united with Una only when the battle against false religion is over--we see that Duessa is still working her evil ways in defeat. And the battle, of course, will not end until the end of the world, when Christ will reveal which religion is false and which is true.
As with Book I, Spenser begins Book III with a classical-style invocation of his Muse, Clio, and a humble criticism of his own poetry. However, in this book we will see how the poet is far more influenced by the Italian romantic epic than the classical epic. Homer and Virgil were extraordinary poets, but they were not most preoccupied with the subject of love; for this, Spenser finds Ariosto and Tasso much more useful. He imitates them in the character of Britomart, the warrior maiden; in the theme of battle fought to defend a maid's honor; and in the involvement of magical characters (like Merlin, whom we will see in the next Book). Of course, The Faerie Queene is also very different from the Italian romances; Spenser treats the trials of love with a high seriousness and makes it part of his ever-present allegory of Christian right and wrong. As a whole, the poem is more indebted to the Italian genre than anything else, but in the end its mood and the meaning under its surface are Spenser's own original creations.
Just as Redcrosse was (or became) the ideal personification of Holiness, Britomart is Chastity. She represents this by the purity of her love for Arthegall--which admits no lust--and by her resistance to those who would try to corrupt or dishonor true love, like the six knights and Malecasta. However, she also has other qualities, which show Spenser's view of chastity as a central and many-sided virtue. In modern times, we tend to see chastity simply as the avoidance of lust, but for Spenser it is something more positive. Britomart is strong in battle, which reflects the strength of will that chastity gives a person; in fact, her strength saves Redcrosse, which proves that chastity is essential to holiness. Outside of battle, though, she is weak and humble, showing the Christ-like sides of chastity. Of course, Britomart also shows
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some weakness in these first two cantos, when she is nearly ruined by the love of the strange knight in Merlin's mirror. This is due to her inexperience; just like Redcrosse, she is in some need of maturing.
Another similarity between Book I and Book III is the use of a House (castle) to represent a particular virtue or vice or a group of several. Here in Canto ii, we have the House of Joyeous (joyfulness), which does not seem like anything bad or immoral. We see, though, that the place has a most un-Christian joy: the joy of carelessness and the indulging of pleasures. Malecasta, appropriate to her name--which literally means "badly chaste"--is the opposite of Britomart, just as Duessa was the opposite of Una. Her "love" is nothing but physical desire; mistaking Britomart for a man, "her fickle hart conceived hasty fire...she was given all to fleshly lust, / And poured forth in sensuall delight (III.i.47-48)." Spenser makes fun of Malecasta's "fickle hart" by having her accidentally fall for another man--she is so fast, she doesn't even wait for a knight to get out of his (or her) armor.
It is a sign of Britomart's innocence that she does not immediately see Malecasta's desire for what it truly is. Likewise, her vision is clouded by the sight of Arthegall in her father's mirror; rather than rejoicing that she will have such a fine husband, she frets over the new feeling in her heart. She misinterprets it "Yet [she] thought it was not love, but some melancholy (III.ii.27)." Glauce, her nurse, tries to comfort her, saying, "For who with reason can you aye reprove, / To love the semblant pleasing most your mind, / And yield your heart, whence ye cannot remove (III.ii.40)." That is, love is in accord with reason, is not tainted by lust, and is fated anyway, so why resist it? Britomart resists because she cannot admit that any feeling so strong can still permit chastity; this negative view of the virtue is what she must change in the course of the Book.
Merlin's discourse on the history of the Britons takes up nearly all of Canto iii, certainly more than was required to convince Britomart that she should go after Arthegall. This is because its larger purpose is not to contribute to the poem's plot, nor even to the allegory. Spenser includes the long history to establish a direct connection between characters in The Faerie Queen--especially Arthur--and his sovereign, Queen Elizabeth. As much as the poet praises the Queen on her own merits, he also seeks to increase her stature and her place in history, by connecting her, in an unbroken chain, to the legendary heroes of Britain. Not only is she related to the great Arthur, but to the legendary founder of the Britons, Brute, and through him to the Trojans (this link will be brought up in detail in a later canto). This device of establishing ancestry has its roots in the New Testament--the Gospel of Matthew begins by tracing the line of Abraham through David to Christ. More applicable for Spenser is Virgil's connection in the Aeneid between Aeneas and Caesar Augustus--it is a secondary purpose of the poem to make that link, just as the justification of Elizabeth's rule is for The Faerie Queene. Of course, not all of Spenser's history can be proven; the earlier dates (pre-800) and people involve much speculation. Spenser's most important source is Geoffrey of Monmouth's History of the Kings of Britain, from which the legend of King Arthur first arose. Monmouth invented much of this "history", and so Spenser's
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interpretation may at certain points be a few levels removed from the truth. However, the important thing is that no one could disprove most of his history, and so by incorporating it into The Faerie Queene, Spenser helped to make it a more authoritative version. It was simpler, anyway, to view the history of British rule by the Britons as a single chain.
With the plot of the poem, however, Spenser moves farther and farther away from an unbroken chain in these cantos. The story of Britomart is supposed to form the central plot of the Book, and yet we see the subplots--like the pursuit of Florimell--taking over the story, even if they have little to do with Britomart. Spenser picks up and drops different plot lines almost indiscriminately--for example, we hear an extensive background of Marinell, but after he is wounded, he disappears and does not reenter the poem until a different book. If there is a flaw in Spenser's ability to create a complex world that draws on many sources, it is the confusion that sometimes confronts the reader at keeping track of all the characters and plotlines. We note that the poet himself became a bit confused--when he had the dwarf claim that Florimell left home after Marinell's death, he forgets that she was already seen on the run two cantos ago.
What these numerous subplots do add to the poem is an extension of its allegory, an extension best achieved by adding new characters. In Florimell, we have a woman who desires chastity but not in the same way as Britomart. She is not so much active as she is acted upon, as the object of men's desire. She is Beauty, the kind of beauty that will always inflame lust in men; since this is not balanced with active, forceful chastity (Britomart), Florimell becomes a much-abused character. Belphoebe has a better lot, and yet she, too, is lacking something when compared to Britomart. Belphoebe is chaste, and actively so, but she is static in her chastity. She is the limit of what chastity can be without leading to Christian love, which is why she is out in nature, unadorned, like the satyrs. It is the transition toward love within chastity that Spenser admires in Britomart.
The principal point of interest in these two cantos is the Garden of Adonis. This passage is the best example of Spenser's wide diversity of sources; he draws on everything from Homer to Chaucer to The Romance of the Rose in constructing this remarkable Paradise. The theme of an idyllic garden, of course, has its origin in the Garden of Eden--but as a part of the fanciful land of The Faerie Queene, the Garden of Adonis is not particularly grounded in Christian theology. The philosophical ideas expressed in the passage are mostly Platonic or neo-Platonic: the relation between form and matter, the reincarnation of beings, the cyclical nature of life. Of course, at the least reincarnation was incompatible with mainstream Christian thought in Spenser's time; the Garden is not so much an expression of the poet's beliefs as it is an elegant creation for its own sake.
There is no allegory here--in general, the meaning of the place is presented straightforwardly. The association of the Garden with Venus immediately gives it a mythical quality, and the poet treats the philosophical ideas as he has treated the classical myths: useful in creating an imaginative setting but only because the
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Christian truth is another layer deep. The Christian meaning of the Garden of Adonis naturally relates to the theme of Book III, chastity. The important element is the healthy sexuality of the place, where "each paramour his leman [lover] knowes, / Each bird his mate, ne any does envie / Their goodly meriment, and gay felicite (III.vi.41)." Spenser is by no means in favor of a sterile chastity when he champions that virtue; though those in the Garden may have too much pleasure, it is a productive pleasure, which keeps the wheel of life turning and does not promote jealousy or lust. We have seen, and will continue to see, many worse uses of sexuality in Book III, by way of contrast.
For example, in Canto vii, we see the continued misfortune of Florimell to be lusted after by each man she meets. She does not try to use her beauty for seduction, and yet upon seeing her, the old hag's son "cast to love her in his brutish mind; / No love, but brutish lust, that was so beastly tind (III.vii.15)." Spenser fully realizes the danger of beauty without a positive chastity and, perhaps, admits a generally lustful character in most men--we will see such incidents as these repeated. On the other hand, in the "giauntesse" Argante, we have the embodiment of the extremes to which a woman's sexual desire can go. Her great size allegorically represents the enormity of her pride and perversion: She has committed incest and even "suffred beasts her body to deflowre (III.vii.49)." While characters like Florimell and Belphoebe represent chastity missing an essential element, they are made to look holy by Argante, who represents the total rejection of chastity or even discretion. Thus, only true chastity can conquer the giantess; as the squire reveals, the knight who chased Argante off is actually a warrior maid like Britomart--Palladine is her name.
Florimell's woes continue in canto viii, which is almost entirely concerned with men who lust after and abuse her or her false counterpart, the creation of the old hag. The false Florimell does not seem to mind it much when she is taken by Braggadocchio--who, as his name suggests, is a braggart, long on words but short on actions--and then by a stronger knight. But the real Florimell is in misery as men continue trying to violate her, the fisherman with force and Proteus with persuasion, and turn violent when she refuses. While Spenser is certainly not giving her the best treatment, he is in a way sympathetic to her. She could have avoided all of this trouble by giving herself up to lust early on, but she persists for the sake of her virtue. She takes the high ground, which is why she is not persuaded by Proteus' shape shifting. The many forms he can assume represent changeable, impermanent physical life. Her Beauty, though physical, is made higher than earthly things because of her chastity and her love, and so it has nothing to do with a being as fickle as Proteus.
Malbecco is a very familiar character in literature: The old man who marries young and is then constantly suspicious of his youthful wife. Spenser very likely took the Malbecco-Hellenore-Paridell love triangle idea from The Miller's Tale in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. We can see this by the way Malbecco is mocked in the poem and kept in the dark---just like Chaucer's old carpenter. However, as Hellenore's name suggests, there is also a connection with Helen of Troy. Helen was the wife of a Greek king, and she was stolen by the Trojan Paris, which initiated the Trojan War. Paridell reinforces this connection by showing that he is descended from Paris; he plans to steal Hellenore just like his ancestor stole Helen.
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The discussion of Trojan ancestry also serves another purpose, outside of the poem's plot: to glorify the English nation and Queen Elizabeth. Spenser (and most in his day) would have considered the Trojans the greatest race of ancient times, since they founded Rome, the greatest empire of ancient times. Rome was, thus, called a "second Troy" (as Britomart mentions)--and Spenser links his people with antiquity by calling London a "third Troy." Through the mouths of Britomart and Paridell, he relates the legend that Britain was founded by Brute, a Trojan who fled Troy after he accidentally killed his father. Again, this is historical speculation on Spenser's part--no definitive records exist to prove or disprove the claim. The idea that the British Empire would be greater than Rome seems a bit forced, but it is essential for Spenser's justification of Queen Elizabeth as the greatest of all monarchs. In a more subtle way, this claim continues an argument of Book I--that the Church of England is destined to be greater than the Church of Rome.
Malbecco receives a fate that is appropriate for his jealousy and failure to love his wife: He loses both her and his money and so spends the rest of his life consumed by thoughts of jealousy. That is not all, however; Malbecco is an interesting circumstance of a man being transformed into an allegorical figure. After a time, he "is woxen so deformed, that he has quight / forgot he was a man, and Gealosie is hight [called] (III.xi.60)." He becomes jealousy itself, and, thus, he never really dies. We see the same circumstances in other characters but only after the fact: The huge perversions of Argante and Ollyphante have made them into giant beasts. Seeing the actual transformation within Malbecco shows Spenser's view that vices can consume a man. Malbecco "forgot he was a man"--he let a certain quality possess him and rob him of his identity. All at once, this lends a great deal more credibility to Spenser's allegorical characters; they are not merely symbols or pictures of an abstract ideal, but they are also a very real example of what can happen to a man who has no moderation. Certain physical qualities may be exaggerated, but in characters like Jealousy, we can see the destroyed spirit of a human being beneath the allegory.
These last three cantos bring the Book to a surprising conclusion, at least from the perspective of the plot. After the main character, Britomart, was absent from the story for several cantos, she finally returns to be central to the story in cantos xi & xii. And yet, the action of those two cantos concerns another subplot, the separation of Scudamore and Amoret. The main plot line, Britomart's quest to find Arthegall, is never resolved nor is it even advanced after the first half of the Book. This does not seem to concern Spenser much; what is more important is that the allegory is advanced. Previously, we have seen characters meant to contrast with Britomart--generally a weaker version of chastity (Florimell) or unchecked lust that seeks to remove chastity (Argante, the fisherman, etc).
However, none of these is the true enemy of Chastity as embodied in Britomart, because she is not merely concerned with preserving her maidenhood. Her Chastity is ordered toward Christian love, and so her true enemies are those that seek to destroy love, not just chastity. Her archenemy (in the Book) is Busirane, who (as we can predict from seeing the maske) intends to remove the heart of Amoret; she is wounded in the chest when Britomart finds her, just like the woman in the procession whose
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heart was then plucked out. The enchanter is no great physical challenge to Britomart, but his sinister intent, strengthened by his magic, is to remove Amoret's capacity to love by removing her heart. In this way, he is a great danger to a champion of Christian love.
Britomart's battle is not won by extraordinary might because her great virtue lies in moderation. She is capable of superlative physical acts but only because her chaste heart is neither too rash nor too timid. This is what allows her to pass through the fire; while Scudamore ran toward it "with greedy will, and envious desire," she passes through in calm confidence (III.xi.25). This is also the meaning of the strange signs she sees in the castle; over every door are written the words, "be bold" -- but over just one door, she sees, "be not too bold." Had she leapt to battle at the first sign of the maske or kept trying to force open the immovable door, she surely would have used up her strength. Instead, she is patient and spends two nights in the castle waiting alertly for the right moment. This patience, combined with powerful action at the appropriate time, gains her an easy victory and brings the allegory of love to a conclusion. True, it is disappointing that we do not see the end of Britomart's own quest; but Book III is more a collection of episodes than a continuous plot. While Britomart is its declared hero it is not necessary for her to reach her ultimate goal within the Book; having witnessed the quality of her patience, we know that she will in the end.
Women's Friendship and the Refusal of Lesbian
Desire in The Faerie Queene
RECENT FEMINIST CRITICISM OF Spenser's Faerie Queene has increasingly focused attention on the construction of gendered subjectivities throughout the epic romance, and especially within Book 3, the book of chastity. The difficulties of constructing or representing a heterosexual relation based on reciprocity (the Spenserian version of Lawrence Stone's "companionate marriage") has been of critical concern ever since the publication of C.S. Lewis's Allegory of Love. In contrast to the social constructionist views fashionable today, Lewis posited an innate or naturalized heterosexuality, one which is, of course, embattled and in need of mediation by a discourse of love which escapes the barren dead-ends of Petrarchism and idolatry.(1) Other critics have represented sexuality as a battle between the sexes: the dynastic marriage which Britomart's narrative aims at requires the overcoming of a sexual difference which, in a variety of ways throughout the epic, is posited as fundamentally antagonistic.(2) Recently, however, Spenser criticism has been increasingly influenced by discourses such as feminism, queer theory, post-structuralism, and psychoanalysis, the majority of whose practitioners refuse an essentialism which characterizes sexual difference and sexuality as invariable, natural, or "unwavering." But despite the sophistication of the various paradigms of gender construction which these critics cite, their efforts remain marked by a tendency to suture a specific
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sexuality onto a specific gender--in other words, to assume that the subjectivities constructed in The Faerie Queene, even in their moments of failure, are inevitably heterosexual. For example, Sheila Cavanagh's work on The Faerie Queene defines female sexuality as female heterosexuality--and slippages from the chaste ideal always remain heterosexual.(3) Lauren Silberman argues that the Malecasta episode--a potentially "lesbian" encounter--foregrounds the problem of gender identity and "the defamiliarization of heterosexual desire." But her brief reading of this episode, in which she convincingly argues that Ariosto's more explicit lesbianism is suppressed by Spenser, requires that she read Britomart's reaction to Malecasta's desire as "naive" and "ingenuous"--a reading which, as I will argue, neglects Britomart's complicit response to Malecasta's courtship.(4) Elizabeth Bellamy also notes how Book 3 is marked by its fears of unnatural sexual acts; despite her allusion to Glauce's fears of "endogamous and sodomitic sexuality" she notes Spenser's privileging of incest (via a series of concrete images and allusions) as that form of sexuality most inimical to Britomart's quest. But Bellamy once again imposes an understanding of sexuality in relation to sexual difference which elides an exploration proper of the dynamics of homoeroticism within the poem. For she sees androgyny (which she equates with Freud's bisexuality) as aphanisis, or the extinction of desire: sexual desire therefore becomes dependent upon sexual difference for its maintenance.(5)
Most feminist critics of Spenser have hitherto focused on incest or bestiality as the constitutive outside of the type of gendered sexuality which Book 3 tries to delineate. On the surface, it seems that too much or too little circulation of women is the primary threat to the maintenance of male sexual privilege. But this is to restrict feminist analysis to that which has been given in representation: the disposition of pre-constituted objects of exchange. It is not to query how those representations are generated or how they function. Queer theory has taught us that heterosexuality can no longer be treated as a given, and that the apparent absence of representations of non-reproductive sexualities is not a good indicator of their nonexistence. Given the success of this project, perhaps we should take another look at Spenser's exclusion, or perhaps even suppression, of female homoeroticism. For we miss something important about gender construction if we fail to ask why female homoeroticism is absent, since sexual desires and practices are integral to the construction and representation of gendered subjectivity.
Though The Faerie Queene might be evidence for what Valerie Traub has called the "insignificance" of lesbian desire in early modern England, many scholars have argued that "insignificance" does not means "nonexistence" (i.e., that lesbian pleasures or the representations thereof didn't exist), and have proffered increasingly ingenious readings which have disclosed sexual practices and desires that elude the parameters of reproductive heterosexuality. The project to map female homoeroticism in the early modern period has increasingly focused on female friendship as a privileged set of relations in which non-reproductive desires might be manifest.(6) But female friendship is a rare commodity within The Faerie Queene; as Dorothy Stephens has so astutely noted, "The Faerie Queene does not allow many such meetings between women to happen within its borders."(7) We might conclude that the lack of female friendship points to the absence of lesbian desire as well. But I would like to suggest that the lack of female friendship is an effect, rather than a cause, of the latter--that is, that Spenser suppresses friendship between women because of the possibility that such friendships might "devolve" into homoerotic
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attachments. This process is evident in Spenser's most sustained investigation of feminine subjectivity--the career of Britomart, which stretches across the three books of chastity, friendship, and justice. Within Britomart's narrative interpellation, friendship and its resulting identifications play an important role in the development of chastity. In order to give chaste desire a body within a poetics of the speaking picture, earlier in Britomart's career Spenser will run the risk of identification in order to produce a feminine subjectivity centered on the virtue of chastity. But when these identifications produce erotic possibilities which do not lead to dynastic marriage, Britomart's friendships become enmity, her identifications abjections, such that her career as the embodiment of chaste desire ends with her "hacking" and "hewing" Radigund's "dainty parts," a synecdoche for femininity itself.
1.
Within The Faerie Queene, examples of friendship usually involve men; in this, Spenser seems to have been a man of his time. Sixteenth-century celebrations of friendship as the highest form of human relation usually assumed that its participants were male; rarely was female friendship explicitly celebrated, at least until later in the seventeenth century. Beyond its idealization, friendship fulfilled many functions: it was a highly practical activity, a way of solidifying or mediating a whole series of relations (political, economic) which moderns (or postmoderns) conduct in a series of increasingly fragmented and specialized relations. Friendship was therefore central to the perpetuation and practice of early modern patriarchy, but scholars have also argued than it was an institution central to the articulation of early modern sexualities.(8) And even though writers, such as Montaigne and Spenser, who celebrated friendship often defined it as the opposite of "this other Greeke license" or "disorderly love, which the learned call paederastice," close and attentive readings by Jonathan Goldberg and Jeffrey Masten have demonstrated how these texts also disclose, at the rhetorical level, a sublimated erotics and discourse of desire.(9)
The early modern discourse of friendship often places friendship in explicit or implicit contrast to erotic love between men and women; and as many scholars have noted, the latter comes off badly. As Montaigne writes, friendship between men is superior to erotic love between man and woman since the latter is a sharper, and therefore shorter, fire; marriage precludes friendship since the continuance of marriage is "forced and constrained." But even more telling is his belief that women are simply incapable of true friendship: "the ordinary sufficiency of women, cannot answer this conference and communication, the nurse of this sacred bond: nor seeme their mindes strong enough to endure the pulling of a knot so hard, so fast, and durable."(10) Translator John Florio's choice of "ordinary sufficiency" is an odd one. The OED variously defines "sufficiency" as "The condition or quality of being sufficient for its purpose or for the end in view"; "a sufficient number or quantity of; enough"; "sufficient capacity to perform or undertake something"; "self-sufficient." How are women sufficient, especially given the inherent mental weakness to which the following sentence attests? Given that women's "ordinary sufficiency" (a sufficiency of the ordinary? a sufficiency that is ordinary?) renders them incapable of "conference and communication," we might speculate that women cannot engage in true friendship because they withstand desire. Their weakness lies, paradoxically, in their sufficiency, in their having enough.
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Women's exclusion highlights a paradox of early modern friendship: its placement within an economy of desire that eschews material need. Both Aristotle and Cicero assert that true friendship denies the importance of material benefits (monetary, professional, etc.).(11) But Cicero, in De Amicitia, is also at pains to refute those who would argue that all friendship is based on material need (and hence that helpless women and the poor are those most likely to engage in it). Friendship is based on desire, specifically, the desire for virtue, as opposed to material need. This celebration of friendship as beyond material goods leaves its mark on the description of friendship as an intersubjective relation. For Aristotle, since friendship between unequals must be regulated and measured (i.e., that the benefits are distributed proportionally), "true" friendship (i.e., friendship for the love of virtue) becomes impossible between unequals.(12) Cicero's elaboration of an "economy" of friendship highlights the problem for discourses of (male) friendship. What is "proper" to friendship, given its oft insatiable desire? Montaigne writes of how his will was seized and "plunged" into that of his friend, which was likewise plunged and lost in his own, "with a mutuall greedinesse."(13) The rhetoric of sexual violence and loss demonstrates the difficulty of establishing a regulated economy of such exchanges, and bespeaks the need to establish the similitude of the two partners to this exchange. Cicero therefore defines friendship as the desire of like for like: "And what if I also add, as I may fairly do, that nothing so allures and attracts anything to itself as likeness does to friendship? Then it surely will be granted as a fact that good men love and join to themselves other good men, in a union which is almost that of relationship and nature. For there is nothing more eager or more greedy than nature for what is like itself."(14) As Jeffrey Masten has shown, a similar valuation of similitude marks Montaigne's discourse of friendship: "Our mindes have jumped so unitedly together, they have with so fervent an affection considered of each other, and with like affection so discovered and sounded, even to the very bottome of each others heart and entrailes."(15) Consequently, the loss of will involved in this type of friendship leads not to treason, as Cicero feared, but to truth: "wherein men negotiate from the very centre of their hearts, and make no spare of anything, it is most requisite ... and perfectly true."(16) Similarly, as Jonathan Goldberg has pointed out, The Shepheardes Calendar is marked by a desire to produce a moment of identification uncontaminated by desire; E.K. attempts to create a "proper pederasty," one which promotes "the homeostasis of `similarity,' identifications within the self-same and proper."(17) True friendship fosters "propriety," as ethical behavior and as ownership.
This emphasis on the proper suggests why the discourse of friendship has difficulty incorporating women into its vision. As Helen Pringle has noted in an essay devoted to friendship in Greek political thought, ideal friendship requires a proper disposition towards the other; Greek political thought, especially that of Plato, imagines impropriety using the bodies of women and tyrants.(18) Tyrants are incapable of true friendship; moreover, they are "womanish" in their indulgence of appetite and the refusal of limits. As Pringle notes, the female body is used to figure the tyrant because of its imaginary status as permeable, penetrable, "leaky," to cite Gail Kern Paster's work on the female body in early modern culture.(19) The permeable female body relegates women to the material, as opposed to ideal, level; to the level of need, as opposed to desire. Women are "ordinary sufficient," which describes, in a way, a lack of lack: women have enough of, and are imprisoned within, the ordinary, and therefore are not open to the excentric if sublimated desire which stimulates true friendship. In "Of the force of the imagination," Montaigne explains the strange case
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of Marie Germane by arguing that, "[the imagination] is so continually annexed, and so forcibly fastened to this subject, that lest she should so often fall into the relapse of the same thought, and sharpnesse of desire, it is better one time for all, to incorporate this virile part unto wenches."(20) For Montaigne, female sexual desire (or need) is both too sharp and too material: a woman's sexual desire can only be satisfied by turning her into a man.
Heterosexual desire, given concrete form through the image of the leaky and penetrable female body, renders women incapable of friendship. One response to this problem was the elaboration of a different bodily imaginary, in order to render female friendship possible within this discourse. Chastity, as Laurie Shannon has argued, offers one such strategy. Shannon suggests that, within The Two Noble Kinsmen, Emilia, a captured Amazon, articulates a viable discourse of female friendship (counter to Montaigne) which is both chaste and homoerotic.(21) Chastity offers a way of representing female friendship because it removes women from an economy of heterosexual desire; it offers a potential restriction of circulation which allows women to experience that sublimation of sexual desire which seems so central to male friendship. It also offers, as Valerie Traub has argued, a chaste erotic play without phallic penetration.(22) Consequently, chastity generates an imaginary female body which resists penetration; one need think only of Elizabeth's numerous pictorial and discursive representations of her impermeable virgin body. But chastity also fails in this endeavor. Though Theseus's friendship with Pirithous remains central even after his marriage, Emilia celebrates hers when it has already been lost, which supports James Holstun's claim that one genre closely associated with the representation of lesbian eroticism in the early modern period is the elegy.(23)
But this imitation or refusal of the image assumes that the image's value has already been established, an assumption which Spenser would reject. For as many critics have noted, Spenser's allegorical images remain ambiguous, polysemous, even duplicitous, both for the heroes within the story and the readers consuming the story.(33) Reading is always an imperiled activity, for Britomart's identifications or rejections occur within, and as reactions to, courtship scenes in which she participates by virtue of her disguise. Puttenham defined allegory as the figure of dissimulation par excellence; and his designation of allegory as the "Courtly figure" should remind us that the early modern court was increasingly a space for performance and indeterminancy.(34) As Puttenham's treatise describes, the "courtly" figure is an example of the political and erotic practices supported by (as opposed to impeded by) indeterminacy.(35) As courtship, which presumes at the very least the woman's ability to say "no," increasingly disturbs the traffic in women, the indeterminacy and rhetorical manipulation which reflect sexual antagonism mandate the managing of misreading, as opposed to its outright banishment. The rhetoric of courtship will increasingly demand not the excoriation of indeterminacy, but its administration, often through the increasingly popular conduct books such as The Courtier and Spenser's The Faerie Queene. Representations of courtship therefore become privileged sites for exploring the relation between sexual difference, subjectivity, and imitation.
Britomart's career represents this opposition in miniature, since the various relations configured by the interplay of her disguise, her revelation of her true sex, and the perceptions of other characters implicate her within courtship, friendship, and later, violence (events which could be read as a parody of the battle between Cambel and
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Triamond). Britomart's disguise demonstrates, I think, how courtship as an eroticized indeterminacy is fundamental to, though displaced by, friendship as homosocial and heterosexual construct.(36) Her disguise, as I will demonstrate, is not merely a homage to one of Spenser's "sources," Ariosto; nor is it an effort to represent the anomalous effects which Elizabeth's presence on the throne generated for patriarchal ideology Britomart's cross-dressing will demonstrate how friendship, or identification, can provide a solution, provisional and increasingly unstable, to the erotic indeterminacy of courtship. Erroneous readings of Britomart's ostensible gender produce either desire (in the case of Malecasta), fear of rape (Amoret), or aggression (Artegall). In all these cases, the error is righted, the division between the visible (what Britomart appears to be) and the intelligible (what she really is) is resolved, producing in the first two cases identification, in the third, love and postponed marital union. Initially, it seems as if the indeterminacy occasioned by Britomart's disguise is resolved, therefore recuperating the rhetorical structure of allegory (exterior and interior, shell and kernel). But these resolutions are increasingly threatened, especially when Britomart's relation to Amoret produces erotic possibilities not sanctioned by the reproductive heterosexuality towards which Britomart strives. Eventually, both disguise (indeterminacy) and friendship (mimesis) are eschewed; Britomart herself becomes an exception.
From the very beginning, Britomart's chastity is configured in relation to a female body which is imagined as permeable, even wounded. This wound follows upon her first sight of Artegall, her future husband, in a mirror which is initially ascribed to Venus and is later found in Britomart's father's closet--emphasizing love's subordination to the father. Britomart's gaze into the mirror constitutes a moment when a symbolic mandate--her future role as Elizabeth's ancestor--has been conferred upon her. Yet Britomart's successful subjection "to loues cruell law" (3.2.38) remains in question, for she hysterically resists this interpellative moment; desire is implanted within her body from without, which suggests the incapacity of her originary innocence. Her growing feelings are represented as a disease which invades her body and as bait which she has swallowed unaware: "Sithens it has infixed faster hold / Within my bleeding bowels, and so sore / Now ranekleth in this same fraile fleshly mould, / That all mine entrailes flow with poysnous gore" (3.2.39). The mirror reveals to her a man encased in steel with only his face visible, "His manly face, that did his foes agrize [horrify]" (3.2.24). This resistance to interpellation or subjectivation opens up the possibility that haunts the epic: that Britomart might not become the subject of chastity but the subject of lust.(37) Glauce, in her efforts to absolve Britomart from guilt, contrasts her desire to that of women who lusted unlawfully, such as Myrrhe and Biblis, who loved their "natiue flesh," and Pasiphae, who loved a beast. These loves departed "From course of nature and of modestie" (3.2.41), and in so doing, constitute the outer limits of the field of Britomart's desire. Glauce's fears of the possible illegitimacy of Britomart's love for Artegall, as well as her wish to accomplish her desire, leads then to Merlin's cave in search of legitimization, where he inscribes her desire within a history culminating in, and perhaps ending with, Elizabeth. For the history which Merlin reveals to Britomart in canto 3 takes the form of a genealogical account of the royal families of Britain, in which as Claude Lefort has argued, the real of the monarch's body (the reproductive body) becomes, in a sense, the ground of history.(38) Merlin's narrative therefore bestows, retroactively, external, political validation for Britomart's apparently "private" feelings by inscribing
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an initially contingent and transgressive act (Britomart's look into the mirror) into a symbolic realm of "heauenly destiny, / Led with eternall prouidence" (3.3.24).(39)
At one level of analysis, then, Britomart's cross-dressing provides a resolution to the failure of an immediate relation with Artegall. Within this early modern mirror stage, Artegall constitutes for Britomart a threatening other; consequently, her relation to him oscillates between object-choice and identification. Artegall is placed in the position of ego ideal, the other in the mirror with whom the subject identifies in order to assume some mastery over a debilitating "infantile" state.(40) In other words, in order to stabilize her hysterical reaction to this concrete manifestation of the Other's desire (the mandate which the socio-symbolic order will impose upon her), Britomart identifies with Artegall at the level of imaginary resemblance, and therefore disguises herself as a knight. Identification is, after all, a sort of incorporation, and one which is, as Kaja Silverman has pointed out, profoundly implicated with one's bodily imago.(41) Thus, the traumatic implantation of sexuality is transposed into the aggressivity of the wandering knight, as when her "priuy griefe," her melancholic desire for Artegall, is suddenly transformed into rage against Marinell (3.4.12). But the identification with Artegall must be mediated by another woman, as if Britomart can only identify with a woman who identifies with men: for the armor which she wears actually belongs to Angela, the female nationalist hero for whom England is named.
The armor therefore provides a resolution, temporary, it is true, to the initial asymmetry of Britomart's (non)relation with Artegall. It also sets up, both subjectively and rhetorically, a deceptively simple lesson about "chaste desire." The armor supplements Britomart's wounded virginal body; as the visible sign of her identification with Artegall, it acts as a sort of defense against the desire emerging from within her. But it also symbolizes chastity: in a poetics of the speaking picture, the internal disposition to chastity requires a visible sign, a shield which will keep her vulnerable female body free from external attack.(42) Britomart's cross-dressing duplicates in its structure the traditional division of meaning in figural language: shell and kernel, exterior and interior, perceptible and intelligible.
But responses to Britomart's cross-dressing demonstrate that the act of penetrating the shell of exteriority (her disguise) to the kernel inside (her "true" sex) often fails. The text then explores how the failures of reading may generate sexual desires which otherwise seem unimaginable within this representational frame. This strategy is first announced in Britomart's encounter with Malecasta (3.1). The Petrarchan "law" which brings Britomart into Malecasta's court allows no escape; a contingent of bully knights forces every errant knight into a sexual relation to the Lady (Malecasta). If the errant knight wins, he becomes her servant; if he loses, she becomes his. Either way, Malecasta's law enforces the subject's interpellation by presenting him with a false choice. Britomart's position in this system is provisional, though, given her disguise (and her professed dedication to her male beloved). In other words, her disguise splits her identity into an interior and exterior so as to leave her outside of Malecasta's mandate. Once Britomart defeats the knights and enters into the castle, she becomes the object of Malecasta's lust, which is predicated upon the latter's mistaken belief that Britomart is "a fresh and lusty knight." As in many other literary texts of the period, an explicitly homoerotic possibility is proffered to the reader through the medium of disguise, thereby assuming the status of error within the parameters of a supposedly
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foundational heterosexuality. But the division between Britomart's apparent participation in Malecasta's court and the "inner truth" that she withholds begins to break down. Though Malecasta's desire is written in her countenance, Britomart dissembles it "with ignoraunce," and mistakes lust for love "by self-feeling of her feeble sexe" (3.1.54). I would argue that her supposed ignorance is actually complicity, for her recognition of Malecasta's desire and maintenance of her disguise sustain the other woman's desire. In other words, Britomart might not want Malecasta, but she wants to be the object of Malecasta's affections.
Why would Britomart take pleasure in Malecasta's desire? The text does not divulge her motivations, conscious or unconscious; her pleasure remains, for the most part, unintelligible within this discursive field. But the text does put this scene to work, by constructing an imaginary identification--Britomart's resemblance to Malecasta. Initially, Britomart identifies not with Malecasta herself but with the position she occupies within a structure: she identifies with Malecasta because Malecasta desires her as she desires Artegall. Spenser represses the possibility that Britomart identifies with Artegall as the object of love, emphasizing the gender-based ground that underwrites Britomart's sympathetic reaction to Malecasta. At the very least, Britomart tolerates Malecasta, and perhaps encourages her, through "self-feeling of her feeble sexe," a type of identification which suggests other ways in which they resemble one another. After all, Malecasta's name means "bad chastity"; like Queen Elizabeth, she is at the center of a Petrarchan court, and like Britomart, she actively pursues the knight she "loves." The text implicitly raises the question of an identification which is imaginary, based on an image: the subject identifies with the object because the object is like (potentially or actually) the subject. But identification proves unreliable, and the distinction between Britomart and Malecasta threatens to collapse. Their in-difference is marked by a confusion of pronouns in the first line of stanza 56: "Therewith a while she her flit fancy fed ..." (3.1.56; my emphasis). In stanza 55, "she" refers to Britomart; in the rest of stanza 56, "she" seems to refer to Malecasta. But at this transitional moment, "she" could refer either to Britomart or Malecasta, a rhetorical confusion which underwrites the former's resemblance to the latter. But the type of erotic relation which Malecasta's court represents must be rejected. Spenser's ambivalence regarding his own rhetorical strategies is made manifest here, for the text produces the resemblance between Britomart and Malecasta only to disavow it when it threatens to produce an erotic relation which turns chastity into its opposite.
Britomart's adventures with Amoret and Radigund expand upon this initial dialectic of identification and object-choice. Britomart first meets Amoret when she rescues her from the House of Busirane, whose masque enacts many of the narcissistic and aggressive Petrarchan images which haunt love throughout the book.(43) Britomart's rescue of Amoret and their subsequent adventures in Book 4 suggest why Spenser rejected his initial ending for Book 3. The 1590 edition of The Faerie Queene concluded with Amoret's reunion with Scudamour (captured in the image of the hermaphrodite), but the 1596 edition postpones the hermaphroditic image until Book 4, the book of friendship, where it is relocated to a more transcendent level--that of the veiled body of a sacred statue of Venus. This postponement allows an exploration of the possibilities of Britomart's relation to Amoret as they travel together. Like Malecasta, Amoret initially believes that Britomart is a man, though she responds to this belief with a "proper" fear for her chastity rather than lust. And the result of
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Amoret's misreading and Britomart's enigmatic "flirtation" is a "courtship" in which the threat of sexual violence is the subtext. As Dorothy Stephens points out, Britomart "maske[s] her wounded mind, both did and sayd / Full many things so doubtful I to be wayd" (4.1.7); as in her encounter with Malecasta, Britomart acts in such a way as to encourage Amoret's belief that she is a man.(46) From Amoret's perspective, Britomart's disguise proves impervious to a reading strategy which imagines the text or emblem as husk and kernel. In order "to hide her fained sex the better," Britomart "both did and sayd / Full many things so doubtfull to be wayd, / That well she [Amoret] wist not what by them to gesse" (4.1.7). "To hide her fained sex" suggests that disguise can no longer be construed as husk (masculinity) and kernel (femininity), since we can no longer know which sex is hidden or rained. Disguise conflates both exterior and interior, sensible and intelligible, much in the same way as Amoret's restoration to "perfect hole" did.
Britomart's dalliance, and the erotic indeterminacy prompted by her disguise, are finally resolved when she and Amoret arrive at a castle which, like Malecasta's, refuses the single knight: "The custome of that place was such, that hee / Which had no loue nor lemman there in store, / Should either winne him one, or lye without the dore" (4.1.9). Entrance into the castle requires that the knight already have a lady, or "win" one by taking away another's. In other words, heterosexual love rests on armed competition between knights for an apparently scarce commodity (women)--a thematic continued through the rest of Book 4. But Britomart's solution to the scarcity problem is ingenious and unique. When a single knight claims Amoret, Britomart informs him that he will have neither or both of them, a lack or an overabundance which subverts the castle's enforced monogamy. After trouncing him thoroughly and reaffirming her own claim to Amoret, she then offers herself to him as his lady Britomart's cross-dressing allows her to mediate between the young knight and Amoret, to adopt two gendered positions, each of which is determined by her relation to another. First, her identity as a (male) knight is determined by her relation to Amoret, which has been secured by her martial victory over her rival and affirmed by the court's seneschal. At the same time, the voluntary unveiling of her hair and the choice of her rival as her own knight confirms her position as a lady. Here, we see Spenser exploring an understanding of sexual difference as determined strictly by one's position in a series of relations, as opposed to an ontological state (the "self-feeling of her feeble sexe"). Identity is not secured through an imaginary identification, but rather by the position which one occupies in a social field.
After Britomart reveals her true sex, Amoret
More franke affection did to her afford, And to her bed, which she was wont forbeare,
Now freely drew, and found right safe assurance theare. Where all that night they of their loues did treat,
And hard aduentures twixt themselues alone, That each the other gan with passion great,
And griefull pittie priuately bemone.
(4.1.15-16)
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This time the process of identification is based on mutual sympathy for the other's loss, leading Britomart to identify with the representative of married chastity and preparing her for her battle with Artegall in canto 6. But this time, it is not "self-feeling of her feeble sexe" which provides the ground for such an identification. Whereas that quality promoted a kind of immediacy between Malecasta and Britomart which threatened to erase their differences, here the identification remains structural: it is grounded by the positions which Britomart and Amoret occupy in relation to Artegall and Scudamour, respectively. In this case, heterosexual bonds are assured priority over a potentially unruly friendship between women.
But even this apparently "innocent" identification evokes the possibility of an erotic relation which must be firmly dispelled by Glauce, Britomart's nurse. She informs Scudamour, who believes that Britomart is actually a man, that his jealousy of Britomart was misguided: "Fearing least she your loues away should woo, / Feared in vain, sith meanes ye see there wants theretoo" (4.6.30). Britomart's "want" renders her incapable of exercising a sexuality imagined to be phallic. But Spenser's second "banishment" of homoerotic possibility suggests that such a possibility does not simply arise through an error in judgment (the spectator's judgment) associated with cross-dressing: "Her [Britomart's] second care, though in another kind; / For vertues onely sake, which doth beget / True loue and faithful friendship, she by her [Amoret] did set" (4.6.46). Spenser's repeated assurance to the reader regarding Britomart and Amoret's friendship reveals the central problematic underlying the book of friendship as a whole: the libidinal investments of "true loue and faithfull friendship," which are captured in the image of the hermaphroditic union of marriage, may also lead to discordant erotic and/or aggressive relations which undo the virtuous concord Book 4 seeks to promote.(45) In the more "local" case of Britomart, identification with Amoret might give way to a perverse erotic relation which could seduce her away from her mandated position as Elizabeth's historical origin. Initially, it seems that identification resolves the problem of erotic indeterminacy. But Freud's work on identification repeatedly emphasizes how this particular psychic mechanism is locked into a peculiar dialectic with object-choice, in which each psychical mechanism can be transformed into the other. Diana Fuss therefore concludes, "For Freud, I would suggest, the real danger posed by the desire/identification co-dependency is not the potential for an excess of desire to collapse back into an identification, but the possibility for new forms of identifications to generate ever proliferating and socially unmanageable forms of desire."(46) Female friendship remains problematic because the erotic desire which it has replaced remains an active possibility, even if only in the mind of the beholder.
But the representational status of this relation remains problematic. Stephens has concluded that "Britomart daIlies more with Amoret than she ever does with Artegall, and it is tempting to say ... that she feigns only in order to flirt."(47) Stephens's qualification ("it is tempting to say") rhetorically marks the difficulty of interpreting this "dalliance" as evidence for an intentional lesbian desire (i.e., one which Britomart possesses, and one which inheres within her). Via another female character's misreading of Britomart's cross-dressing, a potentially sodomitical or "lesbian" scene emerges, but only in relation to a third party, an external reader (both within and without the text) who knows that these characters have read Britomart's disguise literally, as opposed to figuratively.(48) The split between Britomart's interior truth and her exterior appearance produces alternative erotic possibilities, just as a figural
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meaning can potentially abuse the literal meaning it references. For "lesbian" desire is articulated here as a general resistance to identification and hence identity. A lesbian spectacle briefly appears, but not a lesbian desire, at least not insofar as it could be attributed to an intentional subject within the text. That a triangulated relation is required--Britomart, Malecasta or Amoret, and an external reader--explains why a character such as Britomart occasions a subjective effect, but does not possess the type of subjectivity which we attribute to novelistic, "round" characters--and the type of subjectivity which underwrites an essentially modern understanding of sexual identity as an "orientation." On one level, then, Spenser's critics have not simply overlooked positive (and positivist) sexual identities; in general sodomitical sexualities are absent from The Faerie Queene. Spenser's epic therefore suggests a limit to certain projects of historical recovery, for reading the epic raises the problem of recognizing sodomitical sexualities (a term which would refer to any sexualities which did not occur within marriage, or would lead to marriage) as positivities--as visible queer identities. Only this approach can explain, I think, why sodomitical sexualities remain absent as visible positivities, and yet why these exclusions are repeatedly marked.
That the book of friendship is the most narratively aberrant suggests that the resolution of an indeterminacy associated with courtship in favor of mimetic, homosocial bonds remains tenuous. Romance is replaced by history; Bonfont is replaced by Malfont. Likewise, the focus shifts from the pleasurable, if risky, indeterminacy associated with Britomart's disguise to Artegall's ritual shaming and Radigund's usurpation of traditional gender roles.(49) Whereas one might characterize the manifestation of friendship within the sociopolitical realm as the installation of a concordant relation among equals, the manifestation of justice necessitates the installation and maintenance of the proper relations among unequals--the production of hierarchy in which each knows his or her proper place. Britomart's intervention into the maintenance and restoration of justice occurs when her beloved Artegall is defeated in battle by the Amazonian Radigund and then forced to wear women's clothing and spin (recalling the myth of Hercules and Omphale). Female friendship can never be at issue here, since Radigund and Britomart see themselves as rivals for Artegall's affections ("As when a Tygre and a Lionesse / Are met at spoyling of some hungry pray" [5.7.30]). Likewise, the situation refuses the erotic possibility; unlike Malecasta and Amoret, Radigund always knows that Britomart is, in fact, a woman. Even in as local a case as Britomart's disguise, Book 5 disavows the fictional possibility. Because Radigund is so clearly represented as a monstrous example of injustice (reinforced by her Amazonian label), Spenser does not set up, at the diegetic level, an explicitly positive identification between her and Britomart. And yet, no other character so much resembles Britomart: Radigund is a martial maid (though not cross-dressed); she defeats Artegall in battle--after he sees her face (4.5.11-13) in a description which explicitly parallels Artegall's first sight of Britomart in battle; and she falls in love with him. Structurally, then, Radigund and Britomart are placed in the same position through their desire for Artegall.
Thus, Spenser sets up what we might call a negative identification (an expulsion as opposed to incorporation) for Britomart in relation to Radigund: Radigund, who is most similar to Britomart, must nevertheless be completely rejected (even abjected) in order for Britomart to assume her socio-symbolic mandate--that acceptance of her role as subject of chastity which is marked by her disappointing (to us feminists)
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restoration of an explicitly patriarchal society.(50) Britomart's position vis-a-vis Radigund reveals the problematic construction of femininity within a textual moment attempting to promulgate an adherence to patriarchy. Relations between women have been rendered problematic since identification may devolve into desire. A female identification with the knightly ideal has, via its representation in Radigund, likewise become somewhat unsavory, raising the frightening image of the "woman on top."(51) At this point in the narrative, Britomart's position recalls, within a psychoanalytic paradigm, the position of the girl in relation to the terminus of the Oedipus complex; according to Catherine Millot, "For her [the little girl] there is no ideal feminine identification possible other than the phallic woman."(52) Britomart is placed in the scarcely viable position of rejecting femininity (or its images) with an almost misogynist violence in order to become its exemplar. Thus the display of an incredible violence against the female genitals, which become a synecdoche for femininity itself, in her battle with Radigund:
Ne either sought the others strokes to shun, But through great fury both their skill forgot,
And practicke vse in armes: ne spared not Their dainty parts, which nature had created So faire and tender, without staine or spot, For other vses, then they them translated;
Which they now hackt & hewd, as if such vse they hated ...
(5.7.29)(53)
Once an identification with a demonized "phallic woman" (i.e., Radigund) is rejected, once Britomart severs her rival's head, Britomart assumes her mandate (that of the chaste, subordinate, maternal woman) in ideological accord with the Elizabethan patriarchy she has restored:
During which space she there as Princes rained, And changing all that forme of common weale,
The liberty of women did repeale, Which they had long vsurpt; and them restoring To mens subiection, did true Iustice deale: That all they as a Goddesse her adoring,
Her wisdome did admire, and hearkned to her loring.
(5.7.42)
Like John Aylmer's 1559 defense of Queen Elizabeth, Spenser justifies Britomart's rule through an appeal to her absolute singularity, an expression of the sublime religiosity of God's will: "But vertuous women wisely vnderstand, / That they were borne to base humilitie, / Vnlesse the heauens them lift to lawfull soueraintie" (5.5.25). Imaginary identifications with other women have been rejected.(54) Britomart's "subjection to love's cruel law" has been secured through a symbolic identification: "symbolic identification [is] identification with the very place from where we are being observed, from where we look at ourselves so that we appear to ourselves likeable, worthy of love."(55) As the end point of Britomart's adventures in
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the epic, the Radigund episode demonstrates Britomart's successful interpellation by the symbolic order, secured when the final possible object of identification has been erased and Britomart stands alone. If, as Lacan has argued, the subject's freedom, indeed, its very existence as subject, depends upon the maintenance of a gap between itself and its identifications, Britomart's capitulation to patriarchy implies a subsumption into her virtue such that the narrative can no longer proceed with her.(56)
Vis-a-vis her relations with women, Britomart's career moves from courtship (based on misreading) to friendship to a violence legitimated by the harsh justice of Book 5. Female friendship, which should foster imitation, is a brief and uncertain affair. Like many of his contemporaries, Spenser was unable to imagine female friendship as a viable possibility The majority of relations between women within The Faerie Queene are marked by considerable social differences (usually, a lady and her maid); and frequently, these unequal relations are marred by jealousy and rivalry. Even Amoret and Belphebe's single encounter is cast as potential rivalry over Timias; only the reader knows that they are, in fact, sisters. Spenser's Neo-Platonism is partially to blame for this problem. In Colin Clouts Come Home Again, Colin Clout decisively rejects the sterile licentiousness of the court in favor of a Neo-Platonic unity. Love creates concord between opposites, thereby creating resemblance ("So being former foes, they wexed friends, / And gan by litle learne to love each other"(57)). But love is also based on resemblance, in which like searches for like in a fundamentally homosocial and specular relation. In searching for the greatest good, the lover therefore searches for the greatest beauty: "[Man] Chose for his love the fairest in his sight, / Like as himself was fairest by creation."(58) The female beloved therefore embodies the Good, that which is located outside any system of exchange (which demonstrates its external limit).(59) Spenser's model of heterosexuality therefore occludes any possibility of female friendship, based as it is on what Cavanagh calls "The Importance of Being Fairest."(60) If friendship must mediate between a difference which Spenser images as violence, his representations of women do not incorporate this difference. Women are either bound by a likeness which threatens in-difference;(61) or they are differentiated in terms of the exception. And as we have seen, the logic of the exception precludes the mimetic relation necessary for the inculcation of chastity as a positive virtue. Sixteenth-century discourses on chastity are riven by contradictions which render impossible any notion of chastity as positive; consequently, chastity actively interferes with women's implication within a series of intersubjective relations.
For Spenser, on the other hand, the representation of virtue (including chaste desire) requires identification (including active repudiation) with fragmented exemplars in order to produce it as a positive identity He therefore represents subjectivity within a rhetorical field: the intersubjective relations by which identity is secured are, in fact, cast as relations between reader and text or emblem. But because female identity is too much defined by an image of the body as leaky, and hence liable to improper exchanges; because femininity is the locus of a materiality which overwhelms the intelligible ideal, the intersubjective relations which foster female friendship prove unstable and threatening. Initially, it seems as if Britomart's disguise will stabilize the improper female body (by literally rendering it impermeable, like a man's). But the erotic possibilities which arise threaten this provisional solution. In Britomart's case, female friendship is liable to be judged (mistakenly) as "improper" (e.g., her
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friendship with Amoret), as much as it is liable to be "improper" (e.g., Britomart and Malecasta); and that inability to differentiate between these two possibilities is itself suggestive of the instability of female identity. The meanings attributed to her disguise prove unstable; disguise generates an excess of signification.
The example of Spenser's Faerie Queene therefore offers the following caveats to recent efforts to render sexual identities historically legible. First, Britomart's disguise suggests that contemporary efforts to pursue analyses of sexual identities separate from analyses of gender will be problematized by disguise plots which implicate each mode of subjectivity within the other. Disguise, we might say, is the vanishing point at which the difference between gender and sexuality is rendered obscure. Secondly, Spenser's example impresses upon me the need for a rhetoric of sexuality, an archaeology of those symbolic systems--here a rhetorical theory of allegory which inflects Britomart's disguise--which make possible or impossible the representation of sexual desires as underwriting social identities. In The Faerie Queene, rhetorical forms which privilege mimesis and seek to banish an improper indeterminacy generate what one might call a queerness which is neither secured by nor represented as a socio-sexual identity Though "thick descriptions" of the early modern period have unearthed much, their attention to the represented content of discursive practices has often been pursued to the detriment of the form. Archaeological research into early modern sexual identities should articulate the rhetorical field which shapes Spenser's socio-sexual imaginary Rather than refuse a close reading which has too often been associated with arid formalism, we should pursue an intensive reading of "the content of the form."
Paradise Lost(1667)
By
John Milton
John Milton was born on December 9, 1608, around the time Shakespeare began writing his romance plays (Cymbeline, The Winter's Tale, The Tempest) and John Smith established his colony at Jamestown. Milton's father was a scrivener and, perhaps more importantly, a devout Puritan, who had been disinherited by his Roman Catholic family when he turned Protestant. In April 1625, just after the accession of Charles I, he matriculated at Christ's College, Cambridge. During these years, Milton considered entering the ministry, but his poetic ambitions always seemed to take precedence over his ministerial aspirations.
Milton composed his early verse in Latin, in the fashion of a classically educated person. As soon as his third year at Cambridge, however, he expressed his desire to abandon such fashionable poetry in order to write in his native tongue. Unlike the learned classicists of his day, who imitated Greek and Latin versification, Milton
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sought to rehabilitate the English poetic tradition by establishing it as an extension or flowering of the classical tradition. He saw himself as a poet whose lineage extended, through the Romans, back to the Greeks. Like Homer and Virgil before him, Milton would be the epic poet of the English nation.
The poetic vocation to which Milton was heir is both nationalistic and religious in character. The epic poet chronicles the religious history of a people; he plays the role of prophet-historian. Hence, as Milton wrote in a letter to Charles Diodati, "the bard is sacred to the gods; he is their priest, and both his heart and lips mysteriously breathe the indwelling Jove." A sense of religiosity and patriotism drive Milton's work. On the one hand, he felt that he could best serve God by following his vocation as a poet. His poetry would, on the other hand, serve England by putting before it noble and religious ideas in the highest poetic form. In other words, Milton sought to write poetry which, if not directly or overtly didactic, would serve to teach delightfully. The body of work emerging from these twin impulses - one religious, the other political -witnesses his development as (or into) a Christian poet and a national bard. Finally, it is in Paradise Lost that Milton harmonizes his two voices as a poet and becomes the Christian singer, as it were, of epic English poems.
It should be noted, then, that in Paradise Lost Milton was not only justifying God's ways to humans in general; he was justifying His ways to the English people between 1640 and 1660. That is, he was telling them why they had failed to establish the good society by deposing the king, and why they had welcomed back the monarchy. Like Adam and Eve, they had failed through their own weaknesses, their own lack of faith, their own passions and greed,their own sin. God was not to blame for humanity's expulsion from Eden, nor was He to blame for the trials and corruption that befell England during the time of the Commonwealth under Oliver Cromwell. The failure of the Puritan revolution was tantamount, for Milton, to the people's failure to govern themselves according to the will of God, rather than of a royal despot. England had had the opportunity to become an instrument of God's plan, but ultimately failed to realize itself as the New Israel. Paradise Lost was more than a work of art. Indeed, it was a moral and political treatise, a poetic explanation for the course that English history had taken.
Milton began Paradise Lost in 1658 and finished in 1667. He wrote very little of the poem in his own hand, for he was blind throughout much of the project. Instead, Milton would dictate the poem to an amanuensis, who would read it back to him so that he could make necessary revisions. Milton's daughters later described their father being like a cow ready for milking, pacing about his room until the amanuensis arrived to "unburden" him of the verse he had stored in his mind.
Milton claimed to have dreamed much of Paradise Lost through the nighttime agency of angelic muses. Besides lending itself to mythologization, his blindness accounts for at least one troubling aspect of the poem: its occasional inconsistencies of plot. Because he could not read the poem back to himself, Milton had to rely on his memory of previous events in the narrative, which sometimes proved faulty.
Putting its infrequent (and certainly minor) plot defects aside, Paradise Lost is nothing short of a poetic masterpiece. Along with Shakespeare's plays, Milton's Paradise Lost
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is the most influential poem in English literature as well as being a basis for or prooftext of modern poetic theory.
Short Summary of Paradise Lost:
Milton's epic poem opens on the fiery lake of hell, where Satan and his army of fallen angels find themselves chained. Satan and his leutenant Beezlebub get up from the lake and yell to the others to rise and join them. Music plays and banners fly as the army of rebel angels comes to attention, tormented and defeated but faithful to their general. They create a great and terrible temple, perched on a volcano top, and Satan calls a council there to decide on their course of action.
The fallen angels give various suggestions. Finally, Beezlebub suggests that they take the battle to a new battlefield, a place called earth where, it is rumoured, God has created a new being called man. Man is not as powerful as the angels, but he is God's chosen favorite among his creations. Beezlebub suggests that they seek revenge against God by seducing man to their corrupted side. Satan volunteers to explore this new place himself and find out more about man so that he may corrupt him. His fallen army unanimously agrees by banging on their swords.
Satan takes off to the gates of hell, guarded by his daughter, Sin, and their horrible son, Death. Sin agrees to open the gates for her creator (and rapist), knowing that she will follow him and reign with him in whatever kingdom he conquers. Satan then travels through chaos, and finally arrives at earth, connected to heaven by a golden chain.
God witnesses all of this and points out Satan's journey to his Son. God tells his Son that, indeed, Satan will corrupt God's favorite creation, man. His Son offers to die a mortal death to bring man back into the grace and light of God. God agrees and tells how his Son will be born to a virgin. God then makes his Son the king of man, son of both man and God.
Meanwhile, Satan disguises himself as a handsome cherub in order to get by the angel Uriel who is guarding earth. Uriel is impressed that an angel would come all the way from heaven to witness God's creation, and points the Garden of Eden out to Satan. Satan makes his way into the Garden and is in awe at the beauty of Eden and of the handsome couple of Adam and Eve. For a moment, he deeply regrets his fall from grace. This feeling soon turns, however, to hatred.
Uriel, however, has realized that he has been fooled by Satan and tells the angel Gabriel as much. Gabriel finds Satan in the Garden and sends him away.
God, seeing how things are going, sends Raphael to warn Adam and Eve about Satan. Raphael goes down to the Garden and is invited for dinner by Adam and Eve. While there, he narrates how Satan came to fall and the subsequent battle that was held in heaven. Satan first sin was pride, when he took issue with the fact that he had to bow
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down to the Son. Satan was one of the top angels in heaven and did not understand why he should bow. Satan called a council and convinced many of the angels who were beneath him to join in fighting God.
A tremendous, cosmic three-day battle ensued between Satan's forces and God's forces. On the first day, Satan's forces were beaten back by the army led by the archangels Michael and Gabriel. On the second day, Satan seemed to gain ground by constructing artillery, literally cannons, and turning them against the good forces. On the third day, however, the Son faced Satan's army alone and they quickly retreat, falling through a hole in heaven's fabric and cascading down to hell.
This is the reason, Raphael explains, that God created man: to replace the empty space that the fallen angels have left in heaven. Raphael then tells of how God created man and all the universe in seven days. Adam himself remembers the moment he was created and, as well, how he came to ask God for a companion, Eve. Raphael leaves.
The next morning, Eve insists on working separately from Adam. Satan, in the form of serpent, finds her working alone and starts to flatter her. Eve asks where he learned to speak, and Satan shows her the Tree of Knowledge. Although Eve knows that this was the one tree God had forbidden that they eat from, she is told by Satan that this is only because God knows she will become a goddess herself. Eve eats the fruit and then decides to share it with Adam.
Adam, clearly, is upset that Eve disobeyed God, but he cannot imagine a life without her so he eats the apple as well. They both, then, satiate their new-born lust in the bushes and wake up ashamed, knowing now the difference from good and evil (and, therefore, being able to choose evil). They spend the afternoon blaming each other for their fall.
God sends the Son down to judge the two disobediant creatures. The Son condemns Eve, and all of womankind, to painful childbirths and submission to her husband. He condemns Adam to a life of a painful battle with nature and hard work at getting food from the ground. He condemns the serpent to always crawl on the ground on its belly, always at the heel of Eve's sons.
Satan, in the meantime, returns to hell victorious. On the way, he meets Sin and Death, who have built a bridge from hell to earth, to mankind, whom they will now reign over. When Satan arrives in hell, however, he finds his fallen compatriots not cheering as he had wished, but hissing. The reason behind the horrible hissing soon becomes clear: all of the fallen angels are being transformed into ugly monsters and terrible reptiles. Even Satan finds himself turning into a horrible snake.
Adam and Eve, after bitterly blaming each other, finally decide to turn to God and ask for forgiveness. God hears them and agrees with his Son that he will not lose mankind completely to Sin, Death and Satan. Instead, he will send his son as a man to earth to sacrifice himself and, in so doing, conquer the evil trinity.
Michael is sent by God to escort Adam and Eve out of the Garden. Before he does, however, he tells Adam what will become of mankind unitl the Son comes down to earth. The history of mankind (actually the history of the Jewish people as narrated in
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the Hebrew Bible) will be a series of falls from grace and acceptance back by God, from Noah and the Flood to the Babylonian exile of the Jewish people.
Adam is thankful that the Son will come down and right what he and Eve have done wrong. He holds Eve's hand as they are escorted out of the Garden.
Analysis:
Milton tells us that he is tackling the story told in Genesis of the Fall of Adam and the loss of the Garden of Eden. With it, Milton will also be exploring a cosmic battle in heaven between good and evil. Supernatural creatures, including Satan and the Judeo Christian God himself, will be mixing with humans and acting and reacting with humanlike feelings and emotions. As in other poetic epics such as Homer's Iliad and Ulysses, the Popul Vuh, and Gilgamesh, Milton is actually attempting to describe the nature of man by reflecting on who his gods are and what his origins are. By demonstrating the nature of the beings who created mankind, Milton is presenting his, or his culture's , views on what good and evil mean, what mankind's relationship is with the Absolute, what man's destiny is as an individual and as a species. The story, therefore, can be read as a simple narrative, with characters interacting with each other along a plot and various subplots. It can also, however, be extrapolated out to hold theological and religious messages, as well as political and social themes.
Milton introduces Book I with a simple summary of what his epic poem is about: the Fall of Adam and the loss of the Garden of Eden. He tells us that his heavenly muse is the same as that of Moses, that is, the spirit that combines the absolute with the literary. The voice is of a self-conscious narrator explaining his position. There is some background in the past tense, then suddenly the reader finds himself in the present tense on a fiery lake in hell. The quiet introduction, the backing into the story, then the verb change and plunge into the middle of the action, in medias res, creates a cinematic and exciting beginning.
On this lake we meet Satan, general and king of the fallen rebel angels.
Milton's portrait of Satan has fascinated critics since Paradise Lost's publication, leading some in the Romantic period to claim that Satan is, in fact, the heroic protagonist of the whole work. Certainly Milton's depiction of Satan has greatly influenced the devil's image in Western art and literature since the book's publication.
The reader first meets a stunned Satan chained down to a fiery lake of hell, surrounded by his coconspirators. In this first chapter, the reason for his downfall is that he thought himself equal to God. Hell, however, has not taught him humility, and, in fact, strengthens his revolve to never bow to the Almighty (Interestingly, the word "God" is not used in the chapters dealing with Hell and Satan).
Satan is often called a sympathetic character in Paradise Lost, despite being the source of all evil, and in the first chapter the reader is presented with some of Satan's frustration. Satan tells his army that they were tricked, that it wasn't until they were at battle that God showed the true extent of his almightiness. If they had been shown this
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force previously, not only would the rebel angels not have declared war on heaven, but Satan, also, would never have presumed that he himself was better than God. Now they have been irreversibly punished for all eternity, but, rather than feel sorry for themselves or repent, Satan pushes his army to be strong, to make "a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven."
Hell reflecting heaven and, later, earth reflecting both, will be a common theme throughout the work. Satan chooses twelve close friends: all of them drawn from pagan mythology or from foreign kings in the Hebrew Bible: to echo and mimic Christ's twelve apostles. Satan's angels build a large a glorious temple and call a council, both of which will be echoed in heaven. In fact, Satan uses the same architect as heaven, now called Mammon in hell.
Many of the structures and symbols are similar. In heaven and hell there is a king and a military hierarchy of angels. In most cases, however, they the reverse of each other. In Book I, we are shown that the most prominent thing about hell is its darkness, whereas heaven is full of luminous light. As well, the fallen angels, previously glorious and beautiful, are now ugly and disfigured.
These mirror, and therefore reverse, images of heaven and hell also work on a theological level. The darkness of hell symbolizes the distance Satan and his army are from the luminous light and grace of God. Simultaneously, the rebel angels pulled away from God by their actions and are forced away by God himself, outside of all the blessings and glory that come with God's light and into the pain and suffering that comes with distance away from him. The physical corruption and disfigurement that occurs to all the fallen angels is symbolic of the corruption which has occurred in their souls.
Hell itself is described as a belching unhealthy body, whose "womb" will be torn open to expose the "ribs" of metal ore that are necessary to build Satan's temple. Natural occurrences in hell, such as the metaphor of the eclipsed sun, are symbols of natural, and therefore spiritual, decay.
Psychological motivations also work in reverse in hell. Hell is punishment for turning away from the Good, but instead of learning his lesson, Satan becomes more stubborn and more proud. While heaven is a place where all are turned toward the good and toward pleasing and obeying God, Satan makes hell a place turned away from God and turned deliberately toward displeasing him. Whereas before falling from heaven, Satan was only guilty of presuming to be greater than God (pride), now Satan has, in fact, become a creator himself. He has created evil: the direction away from God.
Other critics have examined the political implications of Milton's hell. Like Dante's hell, the characters and institutions in Milton's hell are often subtle references to political issues in Milton's day. The Temple of Satan, for example, has been thought to symbolize St. Peter's Cathedral in Rome, the "capitol" of Roman Catholicism and home of the Pope. The comparison of the glory of hell to the light of an eclipsed sun was thought to be a veiled critique of the Sun King, King Charles, who reigned during Milton's time.
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A full understanding of the metaphors and images that Milton uses, however, would take more than a knowledge of his contemporary history or religious background. Describing Satan's kingdom, Milton takes from a myriad of sources, including Greek mythology and epic poetry, Egyptian and Canaanite religious traditions, the Hebrew Bible and Mishnaic texts, the New Testament and apocryphal texts, the Church Fathers, popular legends, and other theological texts.
It should be noted that, in the epic tradition, Milton is using poetry to tell his story, following most prominently the style of Homer. The work, therefore, can also be examined through the lens of poetry with an eye toward rhythm and sound. In the first sentence, Milton uses an alliteration to conduct what is referred to as a double discourse: "Of man's first disobedience, and the fruit of that forbidden tree..." Not only does the repeated "f" sound add to the aesthetic of the sentence, it connects the "f" words to present a different idea than the sentence itself is presenting. In this case, "first... fruits" are "forbidden." This double discourse, literally two sentences spoken at the same time, is repeated throughout Milton.
Book II:
Analysis:
With each of the demon's proposals to fight heaven, we see a reflection a number of different worldly concepts of good and evil, heaven and hell. Milton, with the devils, has his own idea of how good and evil is balanced and, with the devils, refute the others as impossible.
These constructs include: an eternal war between good and evil (seen in folk religions where evil spirits must be warded off by good spirits), evil's submission to good and hope of redemption (seen in new age concepts that all things are, in their essence, good), and the opposite yet equal kingdoms of good and evil (seen in Eastern religions with the Yin/Yang concepts). All these suggestions do not work for the devils, and, Milton is suggesting, they do not work theologically either.
First, there can be no all out, open warfare between heaven and hell, because it would be an exercise in futility. Despite the logic of Moloch's proposal, Heaven and goodness will always be more powerful than evil, there is no battle.
Second, evil will never go away. The fallen angels will always exist, they will never be forgiven, they will never be accepted back by God.
Finally, there can be no peace between heaven and earth, as Mammon suggests. Hell will exist, but it will not be an equal empire to heaven. Evil will exist, but it will not be equal to good. There is no yin/yan equality here. Evil, though the furthest from God, is still under God's reign.
The battlefield, as Beezlebub suggests, will be moved to the souls of mankind. The theory of the human soul as an eternal battlefield between good and evil forces reflects a common element of the theology of Milton's time. There, on a sort of
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neutral ground away from heaven and hell, evil angels can battle against good angels in a field which makes them nearly equal.
This particular concept we see reflected even today when cartoons are drawn of the devil and the good angel whispering into the left and right sides of a character's ear. Revenge of the fallen angels will be taken out against man, though Milton is suggesting that in the end good will win over.
The description of hell as a geographical place has physical properties that we find in our own world, and we will later find in the description of heaven. There are mountains, valleys, rivers, and seas. The difference between hell and earth, and especially hell and heaven, is that hell has the worst of nature. Milton emphasizes the awful, inescapable smells of hell, the raging "perpetual storms," the rivers with their "waves of torrent fire." By drawing hell as nature gone wrong, Milton also attempts to answer the age-old question of why, if God created this beautiful earth, does it sometimes seem to go against us. Why is there famine, flood, and fire that kill and destroy? Milton demonstrates that these events are nature perverted, nature not as it was intended to be. These events were caused by the creation of hell and evil after Satan's fall.
Contrast, however, the geography of hell with the geography of Chaos and Night. The Chaos is ruled over by "Rumour next and Chance, And Tumult and Confusion all embroiled." In Chaos there is true darkness. Milton compares the situation in Chaos to a nation embroiled in a civil war on a macro scale, to a man paralyzed by indecision and loss of reason on a micro scale. Hell, at least, is contained and is actually ruled by a some sort of law. There is a king and a temple, there are actual visible geographical locales. But in chaos there is no order, one can fall forever (as Satan almost did) in a dark ocean of nothingness. On the other hand, the Chaos is not evil. It is not a perversion of good or of nature. It is land where nothing holds. It is from this Chaos, as is told in the Genesis story, that heaven and earth are created, and where God creates light.
Finally, in this book we are introduced to the first of a number of parrallel trinities that Milton will compare and contrast. The unholy trinity introduced at the end of Book II consist of Satan, his consort/daughter Sin, and his only son, Death. Their relationship is based on lust: Satan raped his daughter Sin and they had Death. Death later raped his mother Sin and she gave birth to the hell hounds that now suround her. Note that Satan tries to kill his only son, Death, when he first approaches the gates of hell. This will contrast with the circumstances that will surround God sacrificing his only son in later books.
The personificaiton of concepts, in this case Death and Sin, was a common literary tool in Milton's time, seen most prominently in Spencer's "The Faerie Queene," which greatly influenced Milton's own work.
Book III: Analysis:
Milton introduces the character of God and Son with preparatory phrases of praise, almost a hymn, describing the nature of God and heaven. From stanzas 1-55, Milton uses the idea of light to represent this nature. Alternately, light is used to describe God
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himself, the first born Son, the immortality of God, the glory of God, grace, truth, wisdom, and physical light. Heaven is a place, then, full of light but much of it is an invisible light, i.e. the light of wisdom, that man cannot perceive in the same manner as physical light but which works in the same way.
The reader is introduced to the characters of God and his Son, watching Satan from the heavens. The Trinity of God, Son, and Holy Spirit (the one who is inspiring Milton to write) is juxtaposed against the evil Trinity of Satan, Death, and Sin, a relationship originating in lust. Milton relates love and goodness with reason and reason is clear in even a conversational sense in the holy trinity, between God and his Son. Corruption and evil, however, are tied to the irrational and thus to the unholy trinity. The raping of Sin by father and son, the battle between Satan and Death, all emphasis Milton's view on relationships based outside of God's grace.
Compare heaven's council with the one Satan had in hell. Heaven's council is a peaceful, rational conversation between God and his Son, both of whom seem to see and understand the same things. Decisions are made rationally given the circumstances that God's all-seeing eye can predict. Hell's council, on the other hand, argued and debated, their opinions clouded by the distance from goodness, which is here equivocated with reason. A path motivated by revenge, Milton is saying, is not one of right reason, and therefore is unpredictable.
Note, however, the reaction from the heavenly council when God asks if someone would volunteer to redeem man's moral crime. Just as it was when volunteers were asked for in hell to tempt man to fall, no one in heaven is willing to undertake the task of saving him. Finally, the Son volunteers which places him on a parallel with Satan. The implication is that, though God is all powerful, his Son and Satan are more on equal footing in that they can equally impact the destiny of man.
The concept of the Son of God conquering death comes from the Pauline letters in the New Testament, specifically First Corinthians. Because the Son of God cannot really die, his coming down from heaven and becoming fully human while at the same time fully God made it possible for him to experience death ,but then move through it to be resurrected. Through the resurrection, the theology goes, death no longer has the same grip it did before, it is not a permanent state merely a place that all men can now pass through.
Book III introduces the other settings of the epic as well, including heaven and earth, tied to each other with a golden chain and a passageway for angels to go down to earth and help with creation. Milton's universe is structured fairly simply: earth is in the middle, tied to heaven above it and a soon-to-be constructed bridge to hell leading below it. Between the earth and hell is Chaos. In concentric circles, or invisible globes surrounding earth, are the various orbits of the sun and moon, stars and planets around the earth (the earth is still in the middle).
Milton uses Limbo, or the Paradise of Fools, to make social criticism by demonstrating that examples of man's vanity that he saw in his era would find their end there. Thus, Limbo is full of indulgences and pardons, symbolic of the political machine behind the Catholic Church, as well as relics and beads, symbols of the superstitious nature of Catholic worshipers. Milton's point is that it is vain for man to
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think he can get into heaven by using these things. In fact, there is nothing man can do himself to get into heaven, he must rely completely on God's light. Those that use these religious trappings end up in a fake heaven, a Paradise of Fools.
Remembering always that Paradise Lost is a poem, note the structure of lines 56 through 79 as God looks down at his creation. God starts by seeing all the good things, including his creation of Adam and Eve. Then he pans over to hell and chaos, and finally to Satan himself flying toward Paradise. The paragraph gives equal time to nature as pure and nature as corrupted. Sentences in the middle of these two equal parts deal with love. Therefore, the subdialogue is that love is what divides corrupted nature from pure nature. This circular paragraph structure, with a discussion literally circulating around one theme (in this case love) is a poetic tool employed by Milton throughout the story.
Book IV:
Analysis:
In this chapter we are given more insight into the character of Eve and Satan. As Eve narrates her first waking moments after her own creation, we are immediately introduced to Eve's weakness, vanity. She awakes near a lake and sees an image of herself and thinks the images beautiful. Modern readers, especially coming from a feminist perspective, might view Eve's admiration of herself not as vanity or a weakness, but rather as a gesture of self-confidence and independence from man (especially as she finds her own image so much more beautiful than Adam's ).
This self confident independence, however, is quickly lost. It is quite clear Milton believes in the traditional patriarchal system, complete with the gender stereotypes of 17th century Europe. Milton views the hierarchy of Adam being submissive to God and Eve being submissive to Adam as a natural God-given order : "God is thy law, thou mine," Eve says, "to know no more is woman's happiest knowledge and her praise." Later, when both Raphael and Michael come to visit the pair in separate episodes with messages from God, Eve will leave the conversation and only Adam will hear the message. The implication, of course, is that it is men who are in contact with God, and women are to learn about God only through men.
Satan, as a character, has lost some of his original glamor and reader sympathy. It is clear in this book that Satan's argument for fighting against God is increasingly irrational. He clearly regrets his decision, the sight of so much light and beauty in the Garden of Eden and in the creatures of Adam and Eve seems to break his heart. He even admits, for the first time in the poem, that God loved him when Satan was serving him. Why then, does he continue? Satan's character in this book sums up Milton's view of evil from a psychological and theological viewpoint. Theologically, it is highly irrational, and therefore outside of the grace of God. Implicit in this irrationality, however, is that true evil is done with full conscienceness of what is being turned away from. Satan remembers heaven, he remembers what goodness is, he knows how to act good, and yet he refuses to do so. He has knowledge, but he uses it irrationally. Psychologically, of course, Satan is in increasing pain, especially when he comes close to beauty and God's light. He is no longer simply in physical pain
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when he is in the geographic location of hell, he is hell and brings this hell whereever he goes. His remorse is tangible.
Note the continuing micro to macro connection of Satan's interior state with his exterior state. Satan is physically becoming less and less of the great angel he was at the beginning of the epic. In this book he turns into a lesser angel, a cherub, then into actual beasts, lions and tigers, to get closer to Adam and Eve. Finally, he lowers himself to the level of a toad and then a snake to tempt Eve. When he retunrs to hell, his appearance will be monstrous. His physical disintegration is in line with his moral decay.
The description of Eden, and man's job in it, reflects Milton's theology on a broader level as well. Eden, as discussed before, is ordered, tame, domiciled nature. Still, Adam and Eve must wake every day and go to work. Their work, however, is pleasurable. It appears to consist, mostly, of trimming a few bushes, looking into each other's eyes, and praising God and his creation. It is easy work and Adam and Eve enjoy it.
In the same way, love, and, it is arguable, even sex has taken place in the Garden between Adam and Eve. But they a pure, uncorrupted love and love making. It is untainted by lust, the animal instincts, and free from ego. In the same way that the work in the Garden is a joy because Adam and Eve are in constant praise of God, love and love making in the garden are pure and a joy because the couple is practicing unselfish, rational love.
Milton again takes the characteristics of the macrocosms, in this case the ordered nature of the Garden, as a reflection of how the ethics of the microcosm should work, in this case the morality of man. In the same way that Eden is ordered, not prone to radical bursts of natural cataclysms (or even variable weather) but maintaining a steady growth under God's rule, man himself should order his passions with reason and keep them steady under God's eyes. If this is done, then mankind, like the Garden, will grow healthy and safe. Love and love making fit this same theology: ordered love making, unselfishly given, rational, unpassionate and without the animal instincts, will create a healthy and steady growing love.
Later, Eden, and creation at large, will become uncontrollable. Floods, fire, famine, harsh weather will all make man's life difficult. Animals will prey on other animals, violence will exist at all levels of nature, fear will be commonplace. In the same way, post-Fall man will have to deal with his nearly uncontrollable passions and corruption. But in this pre-Fall Eden and Adam, life is ordered, good, directed toward God.
Much is made of the astrology and astronomy in Milton as seen in the later end of this Book IV. Suffice it to say here that, theologically, it follows the same ordered/reason theme as the Garden and as Adam and Eve's love. The sun, moon, planets, and stars turn in an ordered manner, following a destined plan. God is actually Aristotle's unmoved mover, the first cause, who first pushes the outer "globe" of the cosmos to set all the other cosmos in motion. When Adam and Eve fall, the earth becomes difficult, Adam and Eve's relationship is corrupted, and the cosmos themselves become irrational.
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Turning to the poetic elements of the text, Milton's use of the epic simile is worth pointing out. An epic simile is one in which the image is not just referred to, but elaborated, perhaps forming a complete scene of incident itself. For instance, in line 159, Milton begins by talking about the wind, but goes on to liken it to ships sailing past the Cape of Hope. The description of the ships and the emotions of their passengers is then described for seven more lines. Milton uses this epic simile as a window into a smaller story, a window which takes one away from the immediacy of the story at hand and often brings one to another part of the world all together. Homer uses the epic simile as well-- in particular, in the intricate description of Achilles' shield in the Iliad.
Book V:
Analysis:
The concept of Satan's original disobedience stemming from pride, i.e. not wanting to bow down to the Son, is seen in many Jewish and Christian traditional myths (though it is not explicitly stated in the Hebrew Bible or New Testament). In a way, this only helps with our sympathy for the devil. After all, Satan was one of God's top angels, he had served God unfailingly to arrive at that position, and, in some traditions, was considered God's first and favorite angel. To make an angel who has worked so hard bow before someone else seems somehow unjust.
God as tyrant is an interesting paradox in Milton. It is clear that heaven is a monarchy, with no room for dissent. Interestingly, Satan's councils seem much more democratic in the sense that individuals other than Satan are allowed to stand and voice their sometimes opposing views. Milton's point, however, is that right actions (democracy, freedom) done irrationally (out of God's will) do not count as right. A tyranny ruled by reason and goodness is better than one ruled by passions and animal instincts. Although the councils of Satan's angels appear democratic now, it will soon become clear that they are led by lies and deception. Satan later will trick his cohorts into obeying his whims, reason and rational thinking will give way to decisions based on revenge and hate, and corruption will reign outside of God's ordering nature.
Along with the repeated theme of the Fall (Satan, mankind), Milton uses again and again the "coming down" of supernatural spirits/Gods/devils to intervene or meddle in the goings-on of earth and creation. Satan departs from his kingdom to come to earth, Raphael is sent by God to warn Adam. Later, Michael the archangel will come with his mission, and, finally, the Son himself is prophesied to come in the form of Jesus Christ.
Language in lines 388-390 correlates Eve, mother of mankind, with Mary, mother of God. Indeed, Eve's seed that is prophesied to crush out the serpent (read Satan) will be Jesus Christ. The language of these lines shares many words with the "Hail Mary" Christian prayer, not the least of which is the first line: "Hail, mother of mankind."
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Book VI:
Analysis:
Milton is making a political critique with his rather strange allusion to cannons and gunpowder. A new invention at the time of his writing, many of Milton's contemporaries actually did view the use of cannon and gunpowder as a weapon inspired by the devil. Perhaps analogous to nuclear warfare in our own time, the use of artillery was revolutionizing the way wars were won. They increased the efficiency of war, that is, they increased the amount of casualties possible in a small span of time. At the same time, they made war more impersonal. One no longer had to see the enemy to kill them. Because of this, society had to change, or completely lose, its concepts of the hero and of chivalry. In a sense, the use of artillery was somehow cheating, somehow taking away from the honor of war, and therefore originated from a less than honorable source.
Milton actually gives a rather poetic technical description of how the cannon works. The "other bore" is the touch-hole or cavity of the barrel. The "touch of fire" is where the cannon is lit, actually called a touch-powder.
There are no coincidences in Milton, every number, every reference to a star, nearly every word is a clue or key to another meaning. On a very superficial level we can see this in Milton's numerology. The third day of battle, of course, corresponds to the three days Jesus Christ was in the tomb in the Christian New Testament. Christians believe that when Christ was resurrected on the third day, raised from the dead, he defeated death. Death, we will remember, is Satan's son. So when the Son goes out on the third day to battle Satan and his army, Satan's defeat is a direct correlation with Jesus Christ's victory over death. It is notable that the Son battles the whole of Satan's army without any help from the God's angels. Likewise, Jesus Christ's crucifixion and death was faced without any help from angels.
The torn up hills of heaven are also put back in their place and nature resumes its order when the Son passes by on his chariot. Again, in a macrocosmic sense, the Son is ordering, making rational once again, what was chaos by his mere presence. So he will make mankind ordered, rational, and good when he comes the earth in the form of Jesus the Christ. In lines 723 -33, in fact, the Son is reciting exact phrases from Jesus' last supper.
Another Biblical allusion at this point is the simile of 856-857 comparing Satan's retreating army to a flock of sheep which will ultimately be driven off a cliff and fall. The story of the Jesus casting the devil into the Gaverene swine from the Gospel of Mark and then the swine running off a cliff is implied.
Turning to the poetic elements once again, it is interesting to note Milton's repeated use of certain words. "Fruit," "fall," "forbidden" are, of course, used quite often and not always in the most obvious contexts. Interestingly, Milton avoids using the word "original," though theologians continually use the word to refer to the fall of Adam and Eve. And the word "all" is used a tremedous number of times, 612 times to be
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exact, at the rate of about once every seventeen lines. This use of this word shows the absolutist nature of Milton's concept of purity and corruption. They are extremes in Milton's mind, and the possibility of all-goodness or all-evil is wholly possible.in his universe.
Analysis:
With a direct Biblical allusion, Raphael relates the story of creation. Here, Milton uses the order and, in some cases, word for word description used in the first and second chapter of Genesis, the first book of the Hebrew Bible.
Theologically, Raphael is giving God's reason for creating man, and man's universe, in the first place: in order to repopulate heaven. Man is designed to work his way to an angelic state by keeping correct, rational order to his passions, as discussed in Book IV.
Raphael story, and Adam's remembrances, will parallel with Michael's narration of the history of man after the Fall starting in book XI. The contrast between the two histories starts with the messengers who are narrating them. Raphael is a friend coming over for dinner. He is a soft, kindly angel who serves as a warning friend to Adam. Michael, on the other hand, traditionally a militant angel, comes in with full military regalia, as well as a squadron of angels behind him, to tell Adam the story as well as evict he and Eve from the Garden. Raphael is soft to Michael's hardness, Raphael is amiable to Michael's firmness. Raphael comes with gentle advice, Michael comes with strict enforcement of orders. The opposites stand as a pre-Fall/post-Fall contrast of the nature of interaction between God's emissaries and man.
Milton reminds us throughout the poem that he is writing an epic and tying himself to a grand tradition by calling for the muse before he begins writing many of the episodes. In this Book , Milton actually calls on the Holy Spirit to be his inspiration, setting up a competition with Homer and Vergil who called on pagan muses to be theirs. Milton has already admitted he believes he is tackling a much bigger subject than they did in their poems. In this case, however, Milton is backing his greatness, and his authroity to write, with the element of the Chrisitan trinity that has inspired the writers of the scriptures.
Book VII:
Analysis:
The creation of Eve foreshadows what will ultimately become the cause of Adam's fall: following the guidance of his own baser, more animalistic elements that are convinced by Eve's beauty. Adam tells Raphael of his concern for how he feels about Eve. Although he knows her to be a weaker creature by nature, Adam is sometimes fooled by her beauty in believing that she is "...wisest, virtuousest, discreetist, best."
Milton, who had three wives himself, is saying some pretty strong things about women in this passage. Basically, he places Adam, the male, not only at the head of the household, but naturally placed there because he is wiser, more virtuous, more discreet and best.
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As the theme of Fall is a recurring theme in the work, it is interesting to compare the various reasons for their disobedience: Satan falls because of his pride, Adam because of his love/seduction by Eve, Eve because of her vanity. As well, we have the theme of the trinity repeated in the three fallen species.
Despite Raphael's and Adam's rather misogynist conversation, the two hash out some valid points on love. The animalistic love that Raphael alludes to is, in modern terms, an objectification of Eve. Adam, after all, is responding to Eve's beauty, her shape, her outer physical nature. Raphael says this is for the animals. Man's love should be a rational love, based on person and respect for the living as opposed to corrupted lust.
Book VIII:
Analysis:
Milton is writing at the cusp of the Renaissance. The emerging sciences, arts, and literature point to a different sense of the individual than that of the dark ages. Milton was straddling the heavy hand of the church and religion of the Middle Ages and the humanism and individualism of the future, both in his personal philosophy and in his historical context. Milton was, in many ways, a humanist and believed in the value of human life as well as the rights and freedoms which are inherent in that life. However, Milton continually balanced this with the idea that true freedom can only be had if it is in line with the ordered, rational will of God.
Adam loves Eve and so, by joining her in eating the apple, sacrifices his own happiness for love. This, in itself is good act, motivated by love. A true humanist would say that Adam is acting freely and he has done a good thing. Milton, however, shows that even good acts are evil and corrupt if not done in line with God's will. Adam is disobeying God and no matter what he does outside of obedience, it will be bad.
William Blake said that "Milton was of the devil's party without knowing it." He was referring to what we have described before, namely, the rather sympathetic nature in which Milton seems to treat Satan. Indeed, Satan's rebelling against the all seeing tyranny of God would appear to be right in line with Milton's own political views that tyranny was wrong. However, just as with Adam in good works done in disobedience, Satan is wrong because he is acting outside the will of God, no matter his courage, bravery, or justification in rebelling against tyranny. Despite his humanism, therefore, Milton believes that no acts can be considered good if they are against God's law.
It is quite clear in this book that right after Adam took a bite of the apple, Adam and Eve had lustful, passionate sex. Referring back to Book IV, where it is inferred that they were having sex all along, one can see the difference in sex in pre-fall uncorrupted mankind and post-Fall irrational man. Pre-Fall Adam and Eve were guided by reason and order and so therefore all acts, even acts of love, brought him closer to God. Post-Fall Adam and Eve are using his animal appetites which brought him closer to animals than God. One can see in the language where post-Fall Adam grabs Eve's hand and pulls her to their bed, where before it was Eve who gently took Adam's hand.
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Continuing on Milton's use of numerology, we go a little deeper this time with the interesting fact that the pause before nature itself shudders in revulsion from Adam eating the apple occurs exactly on line 999 of Chapter IX. Line 10000 actually begins the storm. Although we may be unsure what Milton had in mind by these numbers matched with events, we can be sure that it was not incidental (and probably has something to do with numerology of ancient Mesopotamian religions).
Once again, Milton is showing the physical, macro results of a internal, micro moral decision. The earth, i.e., nature itself, shutters when Adam takes a bite of the apple. In this chapter and the next, the natural elements of earth will crumble and become corrupted in the sense in the sense that natural disasters, and violence between species, will become the norm. Earth will then become a mixture of the types of nature seen in both heaven and hell. It will, at times, be spectacularly beautiful, full of light and blooming in colors. It will also, however, have its dark times, be engulfed in floods and flames, and look more like an unordered hell.
The physical descriptions of Adam and Eve have changed as well. They no longer glow with joy, they are less angelic in their nature, and, within hours of eating the apple, they are prone to new, irrational emotions ranging from anger to deep depression. As well, they see each other differently as well. Specifically, they are more interested, and worried, about their genetalia than ever before. The reproductive organs suddenly take on a value (they are evil in that they lead to lust) which was hereto unheard of when Adam and Eve lacked knowledge.
For Milton, the interior state of the soul is displayed visibly in the physical. Sin is always visible.
Book IX:
Analysis:
With a direct Biblical allusion, Raphael relates the story of creation. Here, Milton uses the order and, in some cases, word for word description used in the first and second chapter of Genesis, the first book of the Hebrew Bible.
Theologically, Raphael is giving God's reason for creating man, and man's universe, in the first place: in order to repopulate heaven. Man is designed to work his way to an angelic state by keeping correct, rational order to his passions, as discussed in Book IV.
Raphael story, and Adam's remembrances, will parallel with Michael's narration of the history of man after the Fall starting in book XI. The contrast between the two histories starts with the messengers who are narrating them. Raphael is a friend coming over for dinner. He is a soft, kindly angel who serves as a warning friend to Adam. Michael, on the other hand, traditionally a militant angel, comes in with full military regalia, as well as a squadron of angels behind him, to tell Adam the story as well as evict he and Eve from the Garden. Raphael is soft to Michael's hardness, Raphael is amiable to Michael's firmness. Raphael comes with gentle advice, Michael
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comes with strict enforcement of orders. The opposites stand as a pre-Fall/post-Fall contrast of the nature of interaction between God's emissaries and man.
Milton reminds us throughout the poem that he is writing an epic and tying himself to a grand tradition by calling for the muse before he begins writing many of the episodes. In this Book , Milton actually calls on the Holy Spirit to be his inspiration, setting up a competition with Homer and Vergil who called on pagan muses to be theirs. Milton has already admitted he believes he is tackling a much bigger subject than they did in their poems. In this case, however, Milton is backing his greatness, and his authroity to write, with the element of the Chrisitan trinity that has inspired the writers of the scriptures.
Book X:
Analysis:
The major theme of Paradise Lost, is, of course, the idea of the Fall. The books opened immediately after the fall of Satan and will now close on the fall of mankind. Along the way, this fall theme appears again and again in smaller contexts, but always paralleling the idea of falling away from the goodness, the grace and light of God.
The many instances of the fall theme, therefore, parallel each other and we can ascertain their various meanings by comparing the reasons for the fall, the punishment for the turning away, and the reaction of the characters after the fall. Specifically, in Book X, one can now compare the way Adam and Eve deal with falling away from goodness to how Satan dealt with it.
By the end of the chapter, after the stinging immediacy of remorse and anger has quieted, the two decide that they will continue to do what they did before the fall: praise God. First, of course, they ask for forgiveness. Although what they have done will change their nature forever (literally) and they realize that they can never go back, still, they ask for God's forgiveness and ask to be brought back into goodness. Compare this reaction with Satan and the fallen angels' reaction. Satan, too, immediately is stung with remorse and there are many instances, specifically in the Garden of Eden, when Satan truly misses his previous form and his previous life. Still, this remorse and regret only makes Satan more angry and more bitter and urges him on to corrupt with enthusiasm.
Because of this, God's relationship with fallen mankind will be much different from God's relationship with Satan. God will continually be open to man's return, though not without some punishment. In fact, God will sacrifice his only Son to finally redeem man. Man remains God's favorite creation, and man's destiny remains a union with God finally in heaven.
Satan, on the other hand, will be forever shunned from the light of heaven. Satan's children, Death and Sin, will be overcome with the death of Jesus Christ and evil itself will cease at the end of the world (though Milton, for the most part, stays away from eschatological discussions).
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In yet another political jab, Milton refers to the bridge from hell to earth as the "wondrous art pontifical(314)." The word pontifical, of course, is used by Catholics to describe all things related to the pope, who is, in fact, the pontiff or bridge between God and man. Milton's irony is clear: the pope is actually the bridge to hell and the Roman Catholic Church is the quickest way to get there.
Analysis:
Many critics have argued that Milton implies that mankind was actually better off in the eyes of God and in the eyes of Adam and Eve having fallen. The opening of this chapter seems to enforce this view, as the prayers for forgiveness from Adam and Eve appear more sweet and valuable now that they can choose evil or good and now voluntarily choose good. There was only one thing they could do while they were in the pre-Fall garden and that was to eat from the Tree of Knowledge. Other than that, nearly everything they did was ordered and just. Now, they' re universe has opened up, in a phrase, and they see that they can be controlled by animal instincts constantly if they so choose. But they choose to repent and continue to praise God (and, by the way, they finally stop fighting when they decide to do this).
According to these critics, then, the Fall was not only a necessary thing, but it was a good thing, a fortunate or happy fall, for both God and the humans. Loving and praising God now becomes a rarer, more appreciated act.
The idea of the "happy fall" is reinforced by the fact that the Son of God would never have come to earth in the form of Jesus Christ without the Fall. The phrase, "thy seed shall bruise our foe," is repeated again and again in the final books of Paradise Lost. The phrase, we see now, is referring to the seed of Eve: who will be, down the line, the Son on earth, i.e. Jesus Christ: and how he will crush Satan and Death and Sin. The Fall of man makes his redemption through Christ possible.
The question that many critics and theologians ask is, "was mankind destined to fall?" For that matter, was Satan destined to fall? It is clear for Milton that God knew all along that man was going to fall, he told his Son long before it actually happened. Satan accuses God of creating him with a nature that was prone to pride, and, therefore, destined to fall. The idea of the "happy fall," perhaps, mitigates this accusation. God, indeed, predestined that Adam should fall so that he could show his love for mankind by sending his Son as sacrifice. Still, if Adam and Eve and Satan were all predestined to fall, are we, as well, destined to act by our natures in a way that God has already ordained?
Milton began his poem by saying that he meant to justify the ways of God to man. We see now that Milton actually meant that he intended to give a justification for God's actions, not just provide a narration or explanation of them. Is God, as a character,
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justified in this creation story? Or is he the all-seeing tyrant that Satan accuses him of being?
The question, in Milton's time, was personified in the battle between the Calivinists, who believed in predestination, and the Catholic Church, who believed man's free will gave him a constant choice between good and evil. Milton, in his epic, seems to take a fragile middle road between the two.
Book XII:
Analysis:
Why does Raphael recite the history of mankind, in the form of the Hebrew Bible, to Adam? The reason can be read in Adam's reaction to every turn of the story. Adam is pained by the fact that one of his sons will kill the other, that humans will again and again disappoint God because of what Adam and Eve have done. Corruption and violence will continue to be a part of human history from this time forward. Thus, the reciting of the story is a punishment for Adam, a demonstration of the consequences of his actions, the evil that he has wrought.
At the same time, there are many positive stories and heroes in Raphael's narrative: Enoch, Noah, Abraham, David and Joshua are all described as heroes who bring mankind back on track with God's will. The story culminates with Jesus Christ as the ultimate redemption. The story, therefore, also serves as comfort to Adam in order to show him that there will be members of his seed that will act honorable and bring the grace of God back onto mankind. Raphael's narrative ends with the resurrection of Jesus Christ and Adam is filled with the ultimate satisfaction.. Adam sees that the Fall was not just necessary, but it exemplifies God's glory and goodness even more so than creation by coming to conclusion in the story of Christ. The power of God to redeem and forgive mankind through the resurrection of Christ, turning an "evil thing to good," is an even more powerful act than when God separated darkness from light.
Raphael's narration, however, does more than just make Adam feel guilty/good about his decisions. It is actually a continuation of the basic theme that Milton established from the beginning, the theme of Fall and ascension, freedom and slavery, reason and animal appetites. The history of mankind is a series of falls from God's grace, a series of man acting irrationally (opposed to God's will) and therefore creating corruption. Man turns away, as in the Tower of Babylon, and then returns, in a continual cycle.
So it is with a bittersweet sense of loss mixed with glorious redemption that Adam and Eve, and the readers, leave the Garden. The final image of Adam and Eve walking hand in hand in search of a place in the post-Fall world is a reflection on the journey every man and woman must take in life. Milton balances the corruption of man with the hope of eternal life in grace to give us not a tragedy, but an epic reflection of the condition of humanhood
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The Creator and the Created: The Figure of the Doubtful Ploghman in John Milton's Paradise Lost
John Milton uses epic similes in Paradise Lost to accomplish many objectives. The most basic of these is to connect the past and the present, as the epic similes are often in present tense and involve a human figure that will not exist until after the time of Adam and Eve. There are several significant images in an epic simile found at the end of Book IV. A group of angels find Satan in the Garden of Eden, after he has escaped from Hell and located Adam and Eve, whom he is intent on destroying. As the angels surround Satan and create a crescent-shaped military formation, they are described as being ìas thick as when a field of Ceres ripe for harvest waving bends,î (IV.981). This would conclude an ordinary simile, but Milton goes on to describe the movement of the grain, and inserts the image of a ìcareful ploughman doubting stands lest on the threshing-floor his hopeful sheaves prove chaff.î This figure does not have a direct correlate in the tenor of the simile, but does serve several purposes. As an image of God, the simile explores the relationship between a creator and what is created, and the responsibility that each owes to the other. As a figure for human labor, the ploughman represents the potential for human production. Both interpretations highlight the role of choice in determining future events, outside of any original creative force. By examining the relationship between God and mankind, the potential for human creation, and the way that choice plays a role independent of the creator, the simile that includes the figure of the ploughman introduces the tenuous relationship between the creator and the creation.
The connection between the creator and the created is central to Paradise Lost. From early on God has stated that he made man ìsufficient to have stood, though free to fall,î (III.99). This introduces the matter of human choice because although humans were created by God, they are also distinct from him and responsible for their own actions. God recognizes this break between his role as the maker of mankind, and their role as humans with free will. Adam, on the other hand, believes that Eve was created from one of his ribs, and therefore feels that her creation resulted from a depletion of himself. He needs to have her near to complete him, and does not seem to recognize her own free will as a separate human. Rather than seeing Eve as separate from himself, Adam exerts his possession of her, as when he says he ìlentî a rib to her, and that he can ìclaim my other half,î (IV.4486-487). Adam does not recognize Eve as a separate creation but as an extension of himself, which leads him to feel a loss when they are apart. There are also examples of mistaking the creation for the creator, as when Eve begins worshipping the Tree of Knowledge, rather than God who has produced it. After eating the fruit she says, ìO sovran, virtuous, precious of all trees in Paradise,î (IX. 795-796). Rather than worshipping the creator through his works, Adam and Eve are both guilty of seeing the maker entirely separated from the creation. This becomes a crucial distinction when they are removed from the Garden of Eden and must learn to honor God through his works alone.
The ploughman in the simile represents different images of creators, including God as the ìdoubtingî creator of mankind. The ploughman has produced grain from the ground, just as God made man from clay, and both are now in the position of doubting
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the success of their creations. God and the ploughman are both separate from their creations, and neither can will that what they created fulfills its potential or grows to completion. While establishing a freedom of the created to partake in the fashioning of their own futures, this simile does not altogether disregard the dependency of the created on the creators. Just as Adam and Eve could not have made themselves, the field of grain is somewhat connected to the labor of the ploughman, creating a rather complicated attachment between the two. The ploughman worries that the grain will ìprove chaff.î The chaff refers to the outside of the grain, which must be discarded to release the fruitful core. God could also be said to doubt the harvest of the fruit of humanity. While he was able to create humans in his image and shape their physical selves, by endowing them with free will he has made it impossible to determine that their reason and morality come to fruition from within. There seems to come a point where the created must determine for themselves the future of their own development, and it is here that choice plays such a critical role.
The figure of the ploughman can also be seen as a human figure of creation, which has been placed in the middle of a supernatural battle. He is a figure of labor, an act that man is made to do after his fall. Again, this image of the future does not mean the fall was inevitable, but offers an image of what man might be like should they survive their transgression. This human figure is still at risk during this book because the fall has not yet occurred and God has not yet proven he will be merciful in his punishment; therefore, not only is the ploughman's harvest in doubt, but his existence is as well. The figure of human labor does serve as a suggestion that humans will be able to recuperate some of their grace even after they have sinned. God sentences mankind to labor as punishment for eating the fruit he had forbidden, but labor is also an opportunity to be a creative force. Unlike Satan, who seems focused only on destruction, the human ploughman remains a creator. Creation and creativity are important to Milton in the writing of this poem, and the human capacity to create is highlighted in this image. The statement that the ìploughman doubting standsî relates back to the idea that humans are ìsufficient to have stood, though free to fall.î Despite having fallen, the ploughman seems to represent the human capacity to find a new way of standing, gained perhaps through their new role as laborers and creators.
The placement of this simile is also essential to its understanding. In terms of the physical text, the image of the human ploughman is placed between the images of the angels and Satan. This serves as a reminder that the future of humans is what the battle really concerns. This also refers to the idea of choice and how free will automatically calls future events into doubt. Because the future is not pre-ordained by God, this battle, as well as the rest, are significant. The future of humans is as much in doubt as is the harvest of the grain, and it is the image of the doubting ploughman placed between the warring figures that connect the tenuous fates of these two harvests.
Finally, the ploughman as representative of Milton himself completes the image of both a creator and a postlapsarian human figure. Milton has created Paradise Lost, just as the ploughman planted and tended to his field of grain. Like other creators, Milton cannot ensure that the poem will be properly harvested. Milton uses epic similes like this one in part because he does not believe in being able to ìperfectlyî represent the acts of God, but must rely on comparisons and other images. By doing so, Milton cannot offer the readers the essence of what he is trying to convey, but only a
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comparative image of it. Therefore, Milton cannot ensure that the reader will be able to grasp the intended meaning behind his epic similes and Biblical expansions. This is not to say that the poem in itself is not incredible meaningful; only that the poem was not meant to stand alone, but to serve as some sort of creative elaboration on the Bible.
God, who may be the ultimate Creator, is described both as ìAuthor of all beingî (III.374) and as a ìSovran planterî (IV.691). These descriptions combine the images of creation, writing, and planting, as they pertain much to the same ideas of fertility, maturation, and the relationship between the source of creation and the end product of the creative force. Milton uses the simile of the doubting ploughman to address these questions of the relationship between the creator and the created. Satan has chosen to turn away from his creator and seeks to provide all things for himself. In Hell he says the fallen angels should ìseek our own good from ourselves, and from our own live to ourselves Ö free, and to none accountable,î (II.252-255). The image of the ploughman is placed in the middle of a battle between Satan, who has abandoned his creator, and the angels, who continue to follow and defend him. The battle is between two of God's creations, and the harvest in doubt is the existence of another. This image represents the role of free will, as the choices made by any of the parties involved, including the ploughman as a figure for man, can change future events. This suggests that as long as a creation has been endowed with free will, its continued survival is independent of its maker, and becomes the product of its own creative or destructive efforts
THE PILGRIM'S PROGRESS(1684)
By
John Bunyan
Key Literary Elements Setting The setting of this story is an unusual one, since the premise of the text is that everything takes place in a dream the author has while resting under a tree. The setting inside the dream is a unique world consisting of the City of Destruction and its surrounding landscape, and the Celestial City, where God resides. The entire text of both parts of The Pilgrim's Progress takes place on the road from the City of Destruction to the Gates of the Celestial City. Between these two points there are many mountains, valleys, caves, and roads through which the characters pass, all described in detail in the Chapter Summaries. The Pilgrim's Progress is an allegory. Historically, the text is not necessarily identified as having occurred in a certain year. But many of the symbolizing stories and features of the text strongly mirror events in the life of the author during the years in which it
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was written. There are mythical, dream-like creatures. There are supernatural forces. The terms fantasy, dreamscape, and mythical allegory best describe the setting for the work.
Conflict Protagonist In Part I, the protagonist is Christian. He is an ordinary pilgrim who has decided to seek salvation by making a journey to the Celestial City, where God dwells. Christian is imperfect, as all sinners are. He fails many times by taking wrong paths, forgetting his ways, and following poor advice. But through it all, his belief in the Lord and his conviction about the presence of the Celestial City does not deteriorate. He overcomes all obstacles in his path to reach the Celestial City and be admitted. In the second part, Christian's wife Christiana becomes the protagonist. Though in Part I she opposed her husband and tried to come between him and salvation, Part II shows her coming to the same decision to seek salvation. She decides to take her children and follow in the path her husband set. Her journey seems less difficult and strenuous than Christian's, but that could probably because of Great-heart, who guards her throughout. Still, like Christian, she is dedicated and perseveres through all obstacles. Antagonists There are several antagonistic characters in both the parts of the book, all of whom have the same goal: to keep the pilgrims from entering the Celestial City and attaining salvation. The antagonists take on many forms: discouraging neighbors, Apollyon, the Enchanted Ground, Flatterer, Hate-good and the villagers of Vanity, even Giant Despair. These antagonists try their level best to stop the pilgrims from reaching their journey's end, but faith and trust the pilgrims have in God eventually helps them reach their destination safely.
Climax Both Parts I and II are based on a series of climactic moments that are quickly followed by moments of peace. Still, Part I has a final climax that occurs in the Dark River, where Christian suffers from a devastating lack of faith. He nearly drowns, but is supported at the last moment by Hopeful. In Part II, Christiana suffers nothing as dramatic. Rather, she is constantly exceeding Christian in both
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faith and strength. When she reaches Beulah, she crosses the Dark River with ease. Her climax, then, is less dramatic. Outcome The outcome for Christian is that he is carried by Hopeful's faith. The two enter the gates of the Celestial City and are surrounded by the glory they have earned. The outcome for Christiana is that she, too, is taken into Heaven. But her children will stay behind and populate the world with young Christians who will lead the way for others to the Celestial City. A sidebar to Christian's journey is that Ignorance is carried to the gates of Hell. Good intentions and faith are not enough; rather, one must learn and persevere. Christian will live as an n example to other pilgrims. For Ignorance, this is a climax; for the author, the readership, and Christian, it is the sad outcome of misdirected beliefs.
PLOT (Synopsis) Both parts of the work are built on the premise that the author has had a dream that he is now relating. In Part I, the dream is of a man named Christian who lives in the City of Destruction. Christian has a great burden on his back. Evangelist advises Christian to seek his salvation in God, telling him that if he journeys to the Celestial City, he will know a glory greater than any he has ever had. Christian resolves to make this trip, despite the fact that his family and neighbors discourage him. Forsaking all that is dear to him, he sets out for the Wicket Gate, where the journey really begins. On the way, two neighbors named Pliable and Obstinate seek to discourage him. Christian is resolute. Then he encounters the Slough of Despond, where he nearly flounders. Moving on, he is almost persuaded to settle for the village of Morality. Mr. Worldly Wiseman nearly convinces Christian that easy Morality is just as good as hard-earned salvation. But Christian turns away. Finally, he arrives at the Wicket Gate, where he is told to follow the straight and narrow, albeit difficult path to the Celestial City. Christian meets the Interpreter, a man who shows him many visions and explains their meanings to him. After that, he comes to a Cross and Sepulchre, where his burden is miraculously lifted. He is given papers and armor and told to continue on the path till he reaches the Celestial City. Just beyond the Cross is Difficulty Hill. Christian meets Formalist and Hypocrisy, two men who are prone to taking shortcuts. Christian tells them salvation is not attained by short cuts. They
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do not listen, and eventually perish. Christian becomes weary and falls asleep, only to woken by an admonishing voice. When he wakes and goes on, he discovers he has left his rolls behind, at the place where he slept. He retrieves them and continues. At the top of Difficulty Hill, he sees the Palace Beautiful. There he meets four beautiful women named Discretion, Prudence, Piety, and Charity. They show him many glories, both within the palace and to come. They arm him for his journey, allow him to rest, and warn him to be careful on his way.
Back on the road, he faces the Valley of humiliation, where he fights and defeats a beast named Apollyon. Then he reaches the Valley of the Shadow of Death, where he becomes frightened. He meets a friend, Faithful, and the two support each other through the valley. They come to a town called Vanity Fair, where they are tempted with all manner of material things. They abstain, for which the townspeople resent them. They are arrested and put on trial before Judge Hate-good. Faithful is sentenced to death as a martyr for his faith. Christian manages to escape. Outside Vanity, Christian meets Hopeful, a refugee of the town. The two set out and are quickly kidnapped by the Giant Despair and held captive at the Doubting Castle. They remain imprisoned for some time, until Christian realizes he has the Key of Promise. He frees them both. At the Delectable Mountains, they meet shepherds who warn them they are almost in sight of the Celestial City, but there are still dangerous obstacles. The shepherds tell them to be careful of the Flatterer and the Enchanted Ground. They are nearly waylaid by Flatterer, but resist the pull of the Enchanted Ground. When they do reach the Country of Beulah, they rest and prepare to cross the Dark River and go through the gates. The River can only be crossed by faith, and Christian becomes suddenly weak- hearted. Hopeful keeps him afloat and they are admitted to glory. Almost as a side note, their one-time companion Ignorance arrives at the gates. He is a good-hearted boy who means well; but his lack of interest in theology is his downfall. He is turned away and sent to Hell. Thus ends Part I. In order to understand the spirit of religion in the time The Pilgrim's Progress was written, one must understand the Church of England and its rise to influence. In the early sixteenth century, Henry VIII broke with the Roman Catholic Church and set up his own church, the Church of England, for which he was the commander-in-chief. He supplanted the Pope as the chief religious authority, and mandated that all English citizens belong
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to his church, pay him tithes, and worship only in that church. After some time, the English populace grew annoyed with Henry VIII and his successors, seeing the many ways in which religious ideals had become corrupt and distilled. A great deal of these dissenters began to call for a restoration of purity in the church. When they studied the Scriptures, they became confused, seeing the nonconformity of the present church in relation to the Scripture. They felt that the original faith read about in the Bible and the Scriptures had been waylaid, and trampled by newer, corrupt faiths and practices. A need was felt to restore this old faith. They used the scriptures against the Church of England, pointing out the many ways the Church of England fell short of ideal. In response, Archbishop Parker of the Church of England, denounced these men, calling them Precisions, and later, Puritans. The Puritans held the church up to the highest ideal-that found in the Bible. When the Church of England fell short of this ideal, sometimes drastically, the Puritans cried out for a change. The Pilgrim's Progress is born out of this Puritan zeal. Bunyan, in belonging to a nonconformist church, was a member of the Puritan elite. He spent twelve years in prison for refusing to recognize the Church of England as his official religion. The later puritan ministers, like Bunyan, devoted their energies to teaching the essentials of Christianity.
The Puritans advocated and practiced the plain style, which contrasted strongly with the elegant metaphysical style of the humanists. Many absorbed the Puritan message in their own homes. Bunyan, in The Pilgrim's Progress, embraces simple language and straightforward allegory to teach the essentials of salvation. There is nothing sophisticated about the allegory; the very names of the characters epitomize their lifestyles. Still, for all its simplicity, The Pilgrim's Progress has enjoyed fantastic success. Within the first year of its publication, two complete editions sold out. The third edition, the last to be revised by the author, is regarded as the best of the first three.
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William Wordsworth(1770-1850)
Tintern Abbey
Summary
The full title of this poem is "Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey, on Revisiting the Banks of the Wye during a Tour. July 13, 1798." It opens with the speaker's declaration that five years have passed since he last visited this location, encountered its tranquil, rustic scenery, and heard the murmuring waters of the river. He recites the objects he sees again, and describes their effect upon him: the "steep and lofty cliffs" impress upon him "thoughts of more deep seclusion"; he leans against the dark sycamore tree and looks at the cottage-grounds and the orchard trees, whose fruit is still unripe. He sees the "wreaths of smoke" rising up from cottage chimneys between the trees, and imagines that they might rise from "vagrant dwellers in the houseless woods," or from the cave of a hermit in the deep forest.
The speaker then describes how his memory of these "beauteous forms" has worked upon him in his absence from them: when he was alone, or in crowded towns and cities, they provided him with "sensations sweet, / Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart." The memory of the woods and cottages offered "tranquil restoration" to his mind, and even affected him when he was not aware of the memory, influencing his deeds of kindness and love. He further credits the memory of the scene with offering him access to that mental and spiritual state in which the burden of the world is lightened, in which he becomes a "living soul" with a view into "the life of things." The speaker then says that his belief that the memory of the woods has affected him so strongly may be "vain"--but if it is, he has still turned to the memory often in times of "fretful stir."
Even in the present moment, the memory of his past experiences in these surroundings floats over his present view of them, and he feels bittersweet joy in reviving them. He thinks happily, too, that his present experience will provide many happy memories for future years. The speaker acknowledges that he is different now from how he was in those long-ago times, when, as a boy, he "bounded o'er the mountains" and through the streams. In those days, he says, nature made up his whole world: waterfalls, mountains, and woods gave shape to his passions, his appetites, and his love. That time is now past, he says, but he does not mourn it, for though he cannot resume his old relationship with nature, he has been amply compensated by a new set of more mature gifts; for instance, he can now "look on nature, not as in the hour / Of thoughtless youth; but hearing oftentimes / The still, sad music of humanity." And he can now sense the presence of something far more subtle, powerful, and fundamental in the light of the setting suns, the ocean, the air itself, and even in the mind of man; this energy seems to him "a motion and a spirit that impels /
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All thinking thoughts.... / And rolls through all things." For that reason, he says, he still loves nature, still loves mountains and pastures and woods, for they anchor his purest thoughts and guard the heart and soul of his "moral being."
The speaker says that even if he did not feel this way or understand these things, he would still be in good spirits on this day, for he is in the company of his "dear, dear (d) Sister," who is also his "dear, dear Friend," and in whose voice and manner he observes his former self, and beholds "what I was once." He offers a prayer to nature that he might continue to do so for a little while, knowing, as he says, that "Nature never did betray / The heart that loved her," but leads rather "from joy to joy." Nature's power over the mind that seeks her out is such that it renders that mind impervious to "evil tongues," "rash judgments," and "the sneers of selfish men," instilling instead a "cheerful faith" that the world is full of blessings. The speaker then encourages the moon to shine upon his sister, and the wind to blow against her, and he says to her that in later years, when she is sad or fearful, the memory of this experience will help to heal her. And if he himself is dead, she can remember the love with which he worshipped nature. In that case, too, she will remember what the woods meant to the speaker, the way in which, after so many years of absence, they became more dear to him--both for themselves and for the fact that she is in them.
Form
"Tintern Abbey" is composed in blank verse, which is a name used to describe unrhymed lines in iambic pentameter. Its style is therefore very fluid and natural; it reads as easily as if it were a prose piece. But of course the poetic structure is tightly constructed; Wordsworth's slight variations on the stresses of iambic rhythms is remarkable. Lines such as "Here, under this dark sycamore, and view" do not quite conform to the stress-patterns of the meter, but fit into it loosely, helping Wordsworth approximate the sounds of natural speech without grossly breaking his meter. Occasionally, divided lines are used to indicate a kind of paragraph break, when the poet changes subjects or shifts the focus of his discourse.
Commentary
The subject of "Tintern Abbey" is memory--specifically, childhood memories of communion with natural beauty. Both generally and specifically, this subject is hugely important in Wordsworth's work, reappearing in poems as late as the "Intimations of Immortality" ode. "Tintern Abbey" is the young Wordsworth's first great statement of his principle (great) theme: that the memory of pure communion with nature in childhood works upon the mind even in adulthood, when access to that pure communion has been lost, and that the maturity of mind present in adulthood offers compensation for the loss of that communion--specifically, the ability to "look on nature" and hear "human music"; that is, to see nature with an eye toward its relationship to human life. In his youth, the poet says, he was thoughtless in his unity with the woods and the river; now, five years since his last viewing of the scene, he is no longer thoughtless, but acutely aware of everything the scene has to offer him. Additionally, the presence of his sister gives him a view of himself as he imagines
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himself to have been as a youth. Happily, he knows that this current experience will provide both of them with future memories, just as his past experience has provided him with the memories that flicker across his present sight as he travels in the woods.
"Tintern Abbey" is a monologue, imaginatively spoken by a single speaker to himself, referencing the specific objects of its imaginary scene, and occasionally addressing others--once the spirit of nature, occasionally the speaker's sister. The language of the poem is striking for its simplicity and forthrightness; the young poet is in no way concerned with ostentation. He is instead concerned with speaking from the heart in a plainspoken manner. The poem's imagery is largely confined to the natural world in which he moves, though there are some castings-out for metaphors ranging from the nautical (the memory is "the anchor" of the poet's "purest thought") to the architectural (the mind is a "mansion" of memory).
The poem also has a subtle strain of religious sentiment; though the actual form of the Abbey does not appear in the poem, the idea of the abbey--of a place consecrated to the spirit--suffuses the scene, as though the forest and the fields were themselves the speaker's abbey. This idea is reinforced by the speaker's description of the power he feels in the setting sun and in the mind of man, which consciously links the ideas of God, nature, and the human mind--as they will be linked in Wordsworth's poetry for the rest of his life, from "It is a beauteous evening, calm and free" to the great summation of the Immortality Ode.
"Strange fits of passion have I known"
Summary
The speaker proclaims that he has been the victim of "strange fits of passion"; he says that he will describe one of these fits, but only if he can speak it "in the Lover's ear alone." Lucy, the girl he loved, was beautiful--"fresh as a rose in June"--and he traveled to her cottage one night beneath the moon. He stared at the moon as his horse neared the paths to Lucy's cottage. As they reached the orchard, the moon had begun to sink, nearing the point at which it would appear to the speaker to touch Lucy's house in the distance. As the horse plodded on, the speaker continued to stare at the moon. All at once, it dropped "behind the cottage roof." Suddenly, the speaker was overcome with a strange and passionate thought, and cried out to himself: "O mercy! If Lucy should be dead!"
Form
The stanzas of "Strange fits of passion have I known" fit an old, very simple ballad form, employed by Wordsworth to great effect as part of his project to render common speech and common stories in poems of simple rhythmic beauty. Each stanza is four lines long, each has alternating rhymed lines (an ABAB rhyme scheme),
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and each has alternating metrical lines of iambic tetrameter and iambic trimeter, respectively--which means that the first and third lines of the stanza have four accented syllables, and the second and fourth lines have only three.
Commentary
This direct, unadorned lyric is one of the most striking and effective of the many simple lyrics like it, written by Wordsworth in the mid to late 1790s and included in the first edition of Lyrical Ballads. This little poem, part of a sequence of short lyrics concerning the death of the speaker's beloved Lucy, actually shows extraordinary sophistication and mastery of technique. The sophistication lies in the poet's grasp of human feeling, chronicling the sort of inexplicable, half-fearful, morbid fantasy that strikes everyone from time to time but that, before Wordsworth, was not a subject poetry could easily incorporate. The technique lies in the poet's treatment of his theme: like a storyteller, Wordsworth dramatizes in the first stanza the act of reciting his tale, saying that he will whisper it, but only in the ear of a lover like himself. This act immediately puts the reader in a sympathetic position, and sets the actual events of the poem's story in the past, as opposed to the "present," in which the poet speaks his poem. This sets up the death-fantasy as a subject for observation and analysis--rather than simply portraying the events of the story, Wordsworth essentially says, "This happened to me, and isn't it strange that it did?" But of course it is not really strange; it happens to everyone; and this disjunction underscores the reader's automatic identification with the speaker of the poem.
Also like a storyteller, Wordsworth builds suspense leading up to the climax of his poem by tying his speaker's reverie to two inexorable forces: the slowly sinking moon, and the slowly plodding horse, which travels "hoof after hoof," just as the moon comes "near, and nearer still" to the house where Lucy lies. The recitation of the objects of the familiar landscape through which the speaker travels--the paths he loves, the orchard-plot, the roof of the house--heightens the unfamiliarity of the "strange fit of passion" into which the speaker is plunged by the setting moon.
Ode: Intimations of Immortality
Summary
In the first stanza, the speaker says wistfully that there was a time when all of nature seemed dreamlike to him, "apparelled in celestial light," and that that time is past; "the things I have seen I can see no more." In the second stanza, he says that he still sees the rainbow, and that the rose is still lovely; the moon looks around the sky with delight, and starlight and sunshine are each beautiful. Nonetheless the speaker feels that a glory has passed away from the earth.
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In the third stanza, the speaker says that, while listening to the birds sing in springtime and watching the young lambs leap and play, he was stricken with a thought of grief; but the sound of nearby waterfalls, the echoes of the mountains, and the gusting of the winds restored him to strength. He declares that his grief will no longer wrong the joy of the season, and that all the earth is happy. He exhorts a shepherd boy to shout and play around him. In the fourth stanza, he addresses nature's creatures, and says that his heart participates in their joyful festival. He says that it would be wrong to feel sad on such a beautiful May morning, while children play and laugh among the flowers. Nevertheless, a tree and a field that he looks upon make him think of "something that is gone," and a pansy at his feet does the same. He asks what has happened to "the visionary gleam": "Where is it now, the glory and the dream?"
In the fifth stanza, he proclaims that human life is merely "a sleep and a forgetting"--that human beings dwell in a purer, more glorious realm before they enter the earth. "Heaven," he says, "lies about us in our infancy!" As children, we still retain some memory of that place, which causes our experience of the earth to be suffused with its magic--but as the baby passes through boyhood and young adulthood and into manhood, he sees that magic die. In the sixth stanza, the speaker says that the pleasures unique to earth conspire to help the man forget the "glories" whence he came.
In the seventh stanza, the speaker beholds a six-year-old boy and imagines his life, and the love his mother and father feel for him. He sees the boy playing with some imitated fragment of adult life, "some little plan or chart," imitating "a wedding or a festival" or "a mourning or a funeral." The speaker imagines that all human life is a similar imitation. In the eighth stanza, the speaker addresses the child as though he were a mighty prophet of a lost truth, and rhetorically asks him why, when he has access to the glories of his origins, and to the pure experience of nature, he still hurries toward an adult life of custom and "earthly freight."
In the ninth stanza, the speaker experiences a surge of joy at the thought that his memories of childhood will always grant him a kind of access to that lost world of instinct, innocence , and exploration. In the tenth stanza, bolstered by this joy, he urges the birds to sing, and urges all creatures to participate in "the gladness of the May." He says that though he has lost some part of the glory of nature and of experience, he will take solace in "primal sympathy," in memory, and in the fact that the years bring a mature consciousness--"a philosophic mind." In the final stanza, the speaker says that this mind--which stems from a consciousness of mortality, as opposed to the child's feeling of immortality--enables him to love nature and natural beauty all the more, for each of nature's objects can stir him to thought, and even the simplest flower blowing in the wind can raise in him "thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears."
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Form
Wordsworth's Immortality Ode, as it is often called, is written in eleven variable ode stanzas with variable rhyme schemes, in iambic lines with anything from two to five stressed syllables. The rhymes occasionally alternate lines, occasionally fall in couplets, and occasionally occur within a single line (as in "But yet I know, where'er I go" in the second stanza).
Commentary
If "Tintern Abbey" is Wordsworth's first great statement about the action of childhood memories of nature upon the adult mind, the "Intimations of Immortality" ode is his mature masterpiece on the subject. The poem, whose full title is "Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood," makes explicit Wordsworth's belief that life on earth is a dim shadow of an earlier, purer existence, dimly recalled in childhood and then forgotten in the process of growing up. (In the fifth stanza, he writes, "Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting.../Not in entire forgetfulness, / And not in utter nakedness, /But trailing clouds of glory do we come / From God, who is our home....")
While one might disagree with the poem's metaphysical hypotheses, there is no arguing with the genius of language at work in this Ode. Wordsworth consciously sets his speaker's mind at odds with the atmosphere of joyous nature all around him, a rare move by a poet whose consciousness is so habitually in unity with nature. Understanding that his grief stems from his inability to experience the May morning as he would have in childhood, the speaker attempts to enter willfully into a state of cheerfulness; but he is able to find real happiness only when he realizes that "the philosophic mind" has given him the ability to understand nature in deeper, more human terms--as a source of metaphor and guidance for human life. This is very much the same pattern as "Tintern Abbey"'s, but whereas in the earlier poem Wordsworth made himself joyful, and referred to the "music of humanity" only briefly, in the later poem he explicitly proposes that this music is the remedy for his mature grief.
The structure of the Immortality Ode is also unique in Wordsworth's work; unlike his characteristically fluid, naturally spoken monologues, the Ode is written in a lilting, songlike cadence with frequent shifts in rhyme scheme and rhythm. Further, rather than progressively exploring a single idea from start to finish, the Ode jumps from idea to idea, always sticking close to the central scene, but frequently making surprising moves, as when the speaker begins to address the "Mighty Prophet" in the eighth stanza--only to reveal midway through his address that the mighty prophet is a six-year-old boy.
Wordsworth's linguistic strategies are extraordinarily sophisticated and complex in this Ode, as the poem's use of metaphor and image shifts from the register of lost childhood to the register of the philosophic mind. When the speaker is grieving, the
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main tactic of the poem is to offer joyous, pastoral nature images, frequently personified--the lambs dancing as to the tabor, the moon looking about her in the sky. But when the poet attains the philosophic mind and his fullest realization about memory and imagination, he begins to employ far more subtle descriptions of nature that, rather than jauntily imposing humanity upon natural objects, simply draw human characteristics out of their natural presences, referring back to human qualities from earlier in the poem.
So, in the final stanza, the brooks "fret" down their channels, just as the child's mother "fretted" him with kisses earlier in the poem; they trip lightly just as the speaker "tripped lightly" as a child; the Day is new-born, innocent, and bright, just as a child would be; the clouds "gather round the setting sun" and "take a sober coloring," just as mourners at a funeral (recalling the child's playing with some fragment from "a mourning or a funeral" earlier in the poem) might gather soberly around a grave. The effect is to illustrate how, in the process of imaginative creativity possible to the mature mind, the shapes of humanity can be found in nature and vice-versa. (Recall the "music of humanity" in "Tintern Abbey.") A flower can summon thoughts too deep for tears because a flower can embody the shape of human life, and it is the mind of maturity combined with the memory of childhood that enables the poet to make that vital and moving connection.
"The world is too much with us" Summary
Angrily, the speaker accuses the modern age of having lost its connection to nature and to everything meaningful: "Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers: / Little we see in Nature that is ours; / We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!" He says that even when the sea "bares her bosom to the moon" and the winds howl, humanity is still out of tune, and looks on uncaringly at the spectacle of the storm. The speaker wishes that he were a pagan raised according to a different vision of the world, so that, "standing on this pleasant lea," he might see images of ancient gods rising from the waves, a sight that would cheer him greatly. He imagines "Proteus rising from the sea," and Triton "blowing his wreathed horn."
Form
This poem is one of the many excellent sonnets Wordsworth wrote in the early 1800s. Sonnets are fourteen-line poetic inventions written in iambic pentameter. There are several varieties of sonnets; "The world is too much with us" takes the form of a Petrarchan sonnet, modeled after the work of Petrarch, an Italian poet of the early Renaissance. A Petrarchan sonnet is divided into two parts, an octave (the first eight lines of the poem) and a sestet (the final six lines). The rhyme scheme of a Petrarchan sonnet is somewhat variable; in this case, the octave follows a rhyme scheme of
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ABBAABBA, and the sestet follows a rhyme scheme of CDCDCD. In most Petrarchan sonnets, the octave proposes a question or an idea that the sestet answers, comments upon, or criticizes.
Commentary
"The world is too much with us" falls in line with a number of sonnets written by Wordsworth in the early 1800s that criticize or admonish what Wordsworth saw as the decadent material cynicism of the time. This relatively simple poem angrily states that human beings are too preoccupied with the material ("The world...getting and spending") and have lost touch with the spiritual and with nature. In the sestet, the speaker dramatically proposes an impossible personal solution to his problem--he wishes he could have been raised as a pagan, so he could still see ancient gods in the actions of nature and thereby gain spiritual solace. His thunderous "Great God!" indicates the extremity of his wish--in Christian England, one did not often wish to be a pagan.
On the whole, this sonnet offers an angry summation of the familiar Wordsworthian theme of communion with nature, and states precisely how far the early nineteenth century was from living out the Wordsworthian ideal. The sonnet is important for its rhetorical force (it shows Wordsworth's increasing confidence with language as an implement of dramatic power, sweeping the wind and the sea up like flowers in a bouquet), and for being representative of other poems in the Wordsworth canon--notably "London, 1802," in which the speaker dreams of bringing back the dead poet John Milton to save his decadent era.
"It is a beauteous evening, calm and free"
Summary
On a beautiful evening, the speaker thinks that the time is "quiet as a Nun," and as the sun sinks down on the horizon, "the gentleness of heaven broods o'er the sea." The sound of the ocean makes the speaker think that "the mighty Being is awake," and, with his eternal motion, raising an everlasting "sound like thunder." The speaker then addresses the young girl who walks with him by the sea, and tells her that though she appears untouched by the "solemn thought" that he himself is gripped by, her nature is still divine. He says that she worships in the "Temple's inner shrine" merely by being, and that "God is with thee when we know it not."
This poem is one of the many excellent sonnets Wordsworth wrote in the early 1800s. Sonnets are fourteen-line poetic inventions written in iambic pentameter.
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There are several varieties of sonnets; "The world is too much with us" takes the form of a Petrarchan sonnet, modeled after the work of Petrarch, an Italian poet of the early Renaissance. A Petrarchan sonnet is divided into two parts, an octave (the first eight lines of the poem) and a sestet (the final six lines). In this case, the octave follows a rhyme scheme of ABBAABBA, and the sestet follows a rhyme scheme of CDEDEC.
Commentary
This poem is one of the most personal and intimate in all of Wordsworth's writing, and its aura of heartfelt serenity is as genuine as anything in the Wordsworth canon. Shortly before he married Mary Hutchinson, Wordsworth returned to France to see his former mistress Annette Vallon, whom he would likely have married ten years earlier had the war between France and England not separated them. He returned to visit Annette to make arrangements for her and for their child, Caroline, who was now a ten-year-old girl. This poem is thought to have originated from a real moment in Wordsworth's life, when he walked on the beach with the daughter he had not known for a decade.
Unlike many of the other sonnets of 1802, "It is a beauteous evening" is not charged with either moral or political outrage; instead it is as tranquil as its theme. The main technique of the sonnet is to combine imagery depicting the natural scene with explicitly religious imagery--a technique also employed, although less directly, in "Tintern Abbey." The octave of the sonnet makes the first metaphorical comparisons, stating that the evening is a "holy time," and "quiet as a nun / Breathless with adoration." As the sun sets, "the mighty Being" moves over the waters, making a thunderous sound "everlastingly." In the sestet, the speaker turns to the young girl walking with him, and observes that unlike him, she is not touched by "solemn thought" (details also appearing in the Immortality Ode). But he declares that this fact does not make her "less divine"--childhood is inherently at one with nature, worshipping in the unconscious, inner temple of pure unity with the present moment and surroundings.
"London, 1802" Summary
The speaker addresses the soul of the dead poet John Milton, saying that he should be alive at this moment in history, for England needs him. England, the speaker says, is stagnant and selfish, and Milton could raise her up again. The speaker says that Milton could give England "manners, virtue, freedom, power," for his soul was like a star, his voice had a sound as pure as the sea, and he moved through the world with "cheerful godliness," laying upon himself the "lowest duties."
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Form
This poem is one of the many excellent sonnets Wordsworth wrote in the early 1800s. Sonnets are fourteen-line poetic inventions written in iambic pentameter. There are several varieties of sonnets; "The world is too much with us" takes the form of a Petrarchan sonnet, modeled after the work of Petrarch, an Italian poet of the early Renaissance. A Petrarchan sonnet is divided into two parts, an octave (the first eight lines of the poem) and a sestet (the final six lines). The Petrarchan sonnet can take a number of variable rhyme schemes; in this case, the octave (which typically proposes a question or an idea), follows a rhyme scheme of ABBAABBA, and the sestet (which typically answers the question or comments upon the idea) follows a rhyme scheme of BCCDBD.
Commentary
The speaker of this poem, which takes the form of a dramatic outburst, literally cries out to the soul of John Milton in anger and frustration. (The poem begins with the cry: "Milton!") In the octave, the speaker articulates his wish that Milton would return to earth, and lists the vices ruining the current era. Every venerable institution--the altar (representing religion), the sword (representing the military), the pen (representing literature), and the fireside (representing the home)--has lost touch with "inward happiness," which the speaker identifies as a specifically English birthright, just as Milton is a specifically English poet. (This is one of Wordsworth's few explicitly nationalistic verses--shades, perhaps, of the conservatism that took hold in his old age.)
In the sestet, the speaker describes Milton's character, explaining why he thinks Milton would be well suited to correct England's current waywardness. His soul was as bright as a star, and stood apart from the crowd: he did not need the approval or company of others in order to live his life as he pleased. His voice was as powerful and influential as the sea itself, and though he possessed a kind of moral perfection, he never ceased to act humbly. These virtues are precisely what Wordsworth saw as lacking in the English men and women of his day.
It is important to remember that for all its emphasis on feeling and passion, Wordsworth's poetry is equally concerned with goodness and morality. Unlike later Romantic rebels and sensualists, Wordsworth was concerned that his ideas communicate natural morality to his readers, and he did not oppose his philosophy to society. Wordsworth's ideal vision of life was such that he believed anyone could participate in it, and that everyone would be happier for doing so. The angry moral sonnets of 1802 come from this ethical impulse, and indicate how frustrating it was for Wordsworth to see his poems exerting more aesthetic influence than social or psychological influence.
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"I wandered lonely as a cloud" Summary
The speaker says that, wandering like a cloud floating above hills and valleys, he encountered a field of daffodils beside a lake. The dancing, fluttering flowers stretched endlessly along the shore, and though the waves of the lake danced beside the flowers, the daffodils outdid the water in glee. The speaker says that a poet could not help but be happy in such a joyful company of flowers. He says that he stared and stared, but did not realize what wealth the scene would bring him. For now, whenever he feels "vacant" or "pensive," the memory flashes upon "that inward eye / That is the bliss of solitude," and his heart fills with pleasure, "and dances with the daffodils."
Form
The four six-line stanzas of this poem follow a quatrain-couplet rhyme scheme: ABABCC. Each line is metered in iambic tetrameter.
Commentary
This simple poem, one of the loveliest and most famous in the Wordsworth canon, revisits the familiar subjects of nature and memory, this time with a particularly (simple) spare, musical eloquence. The plot is extremely simple, depicting the poet's wandering and his discovery of a field of daffodils by a lake, the memory of which pleases him and comforts him when he is lonely, bored, or restless. The characterization of the sudden occurrence of a memory--the daffodils "flash upon the inward eye / Which is the bliss of solitude"--is psychologically acute, but the poem's main brilliance lies in the reverse personification of its early stanzas. The speaker is metaphorically compared to a natural object, a cloud--"I wandered lonely as a cloud / That floats on high...", and the daffodils are continually personified as human beings, dancing and "tossing their heads" in "a crowd, a host." This technique implies an inherent unity between man and nature, making it one of Wordsworth's most basic and effective methods for instilling in the reader the feeling the poet so often describes himself as experiencing.
"The Solitary Reaper" Summary
The poet orders his listener to behold a "solitary Highland lass" reaping and singing by herself in a field. He says that anyone passing by should either stop here, or "gently pass" so as not to disturb her. As she "cuts and binds the grain" she "sings a melancholy strain," and the valley overflows with the beautiful, sad sound. The speaker says that the sound is more welcome than any chant of the nightingale to
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weary travelers in the desert, and that the cuckoo-bird in spring never sang with a voice so thrilling.
Impatient, the poet asks, "Will no one tell me what she sings?" He speculates that her song might be about "old, unhappy, far-off things, / And battles long ago," or that it might be humbler, a simple song about "matter of today." Whatever she sings about, he says, he listened "motionless and still," and as he traveled up the hill, he carried her song with him in his heart long after he could no longer hear it.
Form
The four eight-line stanzas of this poem are written in a tight iambic tetrameter. Each follows a rhyme scheme of ABABCCDD, though in the first and last stanzas the "A" rhyme is off (field/self and sang/work).
Commentary
Along with "I wandered lonely as a cloud," "The Solitary Reaper" is one of Wordsworth's most famous post-Lyrical Ballads lyrics. In "Tintern Abbey" Wordsworth said that he was able to look on nature and hear "human music"; in this poem, he writes specifically about real human music encountered in a beloved, rustic setting. The song of the young girl reaping in the fields is incomprehensible to him (a "Highland lass," she is likely singing in Scots), and what he appreciates is its tone, its expressive beauty, and the mood it creates within him, rather than its explicit content, at which he can only guess. To an extent, then, this poem ponders the limitations of language, as it does in the third stanza ("Will no one tell me what she sings?"). But what it really does is praise the beauty of music and its fluid expressive beauty, the "spontaneous overflow of powerful feeling" that Wordsworth identified at the heart of poetry.
By placing this praise and this beauty in a rustic, natural setting, and by and by establishing as its source a simple rustic girl, Wordsworth acts on the values of Lyrical Ballads. The poem's structure is simple--the first stanza sets the scene, the second offers two bird comparisons for the music, the third wonders about the content of the songs, and the fourth describes the effect of the songs on the speaker--and its language is natural and unforced. Additionally, the final two lines of the poem ("Its music in my heart I bore / Long after it was heard no more") return its focus to the familiar theme of memory, and the soothing effect of beautiful memories on human thoughts and feelings.
"The Solitary Reaper" anticipates Keats's two great meditations on art, the "Ode to a Nightingale," in which the speaker steeps himself in the music of a bird in the forest--Wordsworth even compares the reaper to a nightingale--and "Ode on a Grecian Urn," in which the speaker is unable to ascertain the stories behind the shapes
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on an urn. It also anticipates Keats's "Ode to Autumn" with the figure of an emblematic girl reaping in the fields.
P.B.Shelley(1792-1822)
The central thematic concerns of Shelley's poetry are largely the same themes that defined Romanticism, especially among the younger English poets of Shelley's era: beauty, the passions, nature, political liberty, creativity, and the sanctity of the imagination. What makes Shelley's treatment of these themes unique is his philosophical relationship to his subject matter—which was better developed and articulated than that of any other Romantic poet with the possible exception of Wordsworth—and his temperament, which was extraordinarily sensitive and responsive even for a Romantic poet, and which possessed an extraordinary capacity for joy, love, and hope. Shelley fervently believed in the possibility of realizing an ideal of human happiness as based on beauty, and his moments of darkness and despair (he had many, particularly in book-length poems such as the monumental Queen Mab) almost always stem from his disappointment at seeing that ideal sacrificed to human weakness.
Shelley's intense feelings about beauty and expression are documented in poems such as "Ode to the West Wind" and "To a Skylark," in which he invokes metaphors from nature to characterize his relationship to his art. The center of his aesthetic philosophy can be found in his important essay A Defence of Poetry, in which he argues that poetry brings about moral good. Poetry, Shelley argues, exercises and expands the imagination, and the imagination is the source of sympathy, compassion, and love, which rest on the ability to project oneself into the position of another person. He writes,
A man, to be greatly good, must imagine intensely and comprehensively; he must put himself in the place of another and of many others. The pains and pleasures of his species must become his own. The great instrument of moral good is the imagination; and poetry administers to the effect by acting upon the cause. Poetry enlarges the circumference of the imagination by replenishing it with thoughts of ever new delight, which have the power of attracting and assimilating to their own nature all other thoughts, and which form new intervals and interstices whose void forever craves fresh food. Poetry strengthens the faculty which is the organ of the moral nature of man, in the same manner as exercise strengthens a limb.
No other English poet of the early nineteenth century so emphasized the connection between beauty and goodness, or believed so avidly in the power of art's sensual pleasures to improve society. Byron's pose was one of amoral sensuousness, or of controversial rebelliousness; Keats believed in beauty and aesthetics for their own sake. But Shelley was able to believe that poetry makes people and society better; his poetry is suffused with this kind of inspired moral optimism, which he
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hoped would affect his readers sensuously, spiritually, and morally, all at the same time.
Hymn to Intellectual Beauty" Summary
The speaker says that the shadow of an invisible Power floats among human beings, occasionally visiting human hearts--manifested in summer winds, or moonbeams, or the memory of music, or anything that is precious for its mysterious grace. Addressing this Spirit of Beauty, the speaker asks where it has gone, and why it leaves the world so desolate when it goes--why human hearts can feel such hope and love when it is present, and such despair and hatred when it is gone. He asserts that religious and superstitious notions--"Demon, Ghost, and Heaven"--are nothing more than the attempts of mortal poets and wise men to explain and express their responses to the Spirit of Beauty, which alone, the speaker says, can give "grace and truth to life's unquiet dream." Love, Hope, and Self-Esteem come and go at the whim of the Spirit, and if it would only stay in the human heart forever, instead of coming and going unpredictably, man would be "immortal and omnipotent." The Spirit inspires lovers and nourishes thought; and the speaker implores the spirit to remain even after his life has ended, fearing that without it death will be "a dark reality."
The speaker recalls that when he was a boy, he "sought for ghosts," and traveled through caves and forests looking for "the departed dead"; but only when the Spirit's shadow fell across him--as he mused "deeply on the lot / Of life" outdoors in the spring--did he experience transcendence. At that moment, he says, "I shrieked, and clasped my hands in ecstasy!" He then vowed that he would dedicate his life to the Spirit of Beauty; now he asserts that he has kept his vow--every joy he has ever had has been linked to the hope that the "awful Loveliness" would free the world from slavery, and complete the articulation of his words.
The speaker observes that after noon the day becomes "more solemn and serene," and in autumn there is a "lustre in the sky" which cannot be found in summer. The speaker asks the Spirit, whose power descended upon his youth like that truth of nature, to supply "calm" to his "onward life"--the life of a man who worships the Spirit and every form that contains it, and who is bound by the spells of the Spirit to "fear himself, and love all humankind."
Form
Each of the seven long stanzas of the "Hymn to Intellectual Beauty" follows the same, highly regular scheme. Each line has an iambic rhythm; the first four lines of each stanza are written in pentameter, the fifth line in hexameter, the sixth, seventh, eighth, ninth, tenth, and eleventh lines in tetrameter, and the twelfth line in pentameter. (The syllable pattern for each stanza, then, is 555564444445.) Each stanza is rhymed ABBAACCBDDEE.
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Commentary
This lyric hymn, written in 1816, is Shelley's earliest focused attempt to incorporate the Romantic ideal of communion with nature into his own aesthetic philosophy. The "Intellectual Beauty" of the poem's title does not refer to the beauty of the mind or of the working intellect, but rather to the intellectual idea of beauty, abstracted in this poem to the "Spirit of Beauty," whose shadow comes and goes over human hearts. The poem is the poet's exploration both of the qualities of beauty (here it always resides in nature, for example), and of the qualities of the human being's response to it ("Love, Hope, and Self-esteem").
The poem's process is doubly figurative or associative, in that, once the poet abstracts the metaphor of the Spirit from the particulars of natural beauty, he then explains the workings of this Spirit by comparing it back to the very particulars of natural beauty from which it was abstracted in the first place: "Thy light alone, like mist o'er mountains driven"; "Love, Hope, and Self-esteem, like clouds depart..." This is an inspired technique, for it enables Shelley to illustrate the stunning experience of natural beauty time and again as the poem progresses, but to push the particulars into the background, so that the focus of the poem is always on the Spirit, the abstract intellectual ideal that the speaker claims to serve.
Of course Shelley's atheism is a famous part of his philosophical stance, so it may seem strange that he has written a hymn of any kind. He addresses that strangeness in the third stanza, when he declares that names such as "Demon, Ghost, and Heaven" are merely the record of attempts by sages to explain the effect of the Spirit of Beauty--but that the effect has never been explained by any "voice from some sublimer world." The Spirit of Beauty that the poet worships is not supernatural, it is a part of the world. It is not an independent entity; it is a responsive capability within the poet's own mind.
If the "Hymn to Intellectual Beauty" is not among Shelley's very greatest poems, it is only because its project falls short of the poet's extraordinary powers; simply drawing the abstract ideal of his own experience of beauty and declaring his fidelity to that ideal seems too simple a task for Shelley. His most important statements on natural beauty and on aesthetics will take into account a more complicated idea of his own connection to nature as an expressive artist and a poet, as we shall see in "To a Skylark" and "Ode to the West Wind." Nevertheless, the "Hymn" remains an important poem from the early period of Shelley's maturity. It shows him working to incorporate Wordsworthian ideas of nature, in some ways the most important theme of early Romanticism, into his own poetic project, and, by connecting his idea of beauty to his idea of human religion, making that theme explicitly his own.
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Ozymandias" Summary
The speaker recalls having met a traveler "from an antique land," who told him a story about the ruins of a statue in the desert of his native country. Two vast legs of stone stand without a body, and near them a massive, crumbling stone head lies "half sunk" in the sand. The traveler told the speaker that the frown and "sneer of cold command" on the statue's face indicate that the sculptor understood well the passions of the statue's subject, a man who sneered with contempt for those weaker than himself, yet fed his people because of something in his heart ("The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed"). On the pedestal of the statue appear the words: "My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: / Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!" But around the decaying ruin of the statue, nothing remains, only the "lone and level sands," which stretch out around it, far away.
Form
"Ozymandias" is a sonnet, a fourteen-line poem metered in iambic pentameter. The rhyme scheme is somewhat unusual for a sonnet of this era; it does not fit a conventional Petrarchan pattern, but instead interlinks the octave (a term for the first eight lines of a sonnet) with the sestet (a term for the last six lines), by gradually replacing old rhymes with new ones in the form ABABACDCEDEFEF.
Commentary
This sonnet from 1817 is probably Shelley's most famous and most anthologized poem--which is somewhat strange, considering that it is in many ways an atypical poem for Shelley, and that it touches little upon the most important themes in his oeuvre at large (beauty, expression, love, imagination). Still, "Ozymandias" is a masterful sonnet. Essentially it is devoted to a single metaphor: the shattered, ruined statue in the desert wasteland, with its arrogant, passionate face and monomaniacal inscription ("Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"). The once-great king's proud boast has been ironically disproved; Ozymandias's works have crumbled and disappeared, his civilization is gone, all has been turned to dust by the impersonal, indiscriminate, destructive power of history. The ruined statue is now merely a monument to one man's hubris, and a powerful statement about the insignificance of human beings to the passage of time. Ozymandias is first and foremost a metaphor for the ephemeral nature of political power, and in that sense the poem is Shelley's most outstanding political sonnet, trading the specific rage of a poem like "England in 1819" for the crushing impersonal metaphor of the statue. But Ozymandias symbolizes not only political power--the statue can be a metaphor for the pride and hubris of all of humanity, in any of its manifestations. It is significant that all that remains of Ozymandias is a work of art and a group of words; as Shakespeare does in the sonnets, Shelley demonstrates that art and language long outlast the other legacies of power.
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Of course, it is Shelley's brilliant poetic rendering of the story, and not the subject of the story itself, which makes the poem so memorable. Framing the sonnet as a story told to the speaker by "a traveller from an antique land" enables Shelley to add another level of obscurity to Ozymandias's position with regard to the reader--rather than seeing the statue with our own eyes, so to speak, we hear about it from someone who heard about it from someone who has seen it. Thus the ancient king is rendered even less commanding; the distancing of the narrative serves to undermine his power over us just as completely as has the passage of time. Shelley's description of the statue works to reconstruct, gradually, the figure of the "king of kings": first we see merely the "shattered visage," then the face itself, with its "frown / And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command"; then we are introduced to the figure of the sculptor, and are able to imagine the living man sculpting the living king, whose face wore the expression of the passions now inferable; then we are introduced to the king's people in the line, "the hand that mocked them and the heart that fed." The kingdom is now imaginatively complete, and we are introduced to the extraordinary, prideful boast of the king: "Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!" With that, the poet demolishes our imaginary picture of the king, and interposes centuries of ruin between it and us: "'Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!' / Nothing beside remains. Round the decay / Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare, / The lone and level sands stretch far away."
England in 1819" Summary
The speaker describes the state of England in 1819. The king is "old, mad, blind, despised, and dying." The princes are "the dregs of their dull race," and flow through public scorn like mud, unable to see, feel for, or know their people, clinging like leeches to their country until they "drop, blind in blood, without a blow." The English populace are "starved and stabbed" in untilled fields; the army is corrupted by "liberticide and prey"; the laws "tempt and slay"; religion is Christless and Godless, "a book sealed"; and the English Senate is like "Time's worst statute unrepealed." Each of these things, the speaker says, is like a grave from which "a glorious Phantom" may burst to illuminate "our tempestuous day."
Form
"England in 1819" is a sonnet, a fourteen-line poem metered in iambic pentameter. Like many of Shelley's sonnets, it does not fit the rhyming patterns one might expect from a nineteenth-century sonnet; instead, the traditional Petrarchan division between the first eight lines and the final six lines is disregarded, so that certain rhymes appear in both sections: ABABABCDCDCCDD. In fact, the rhyme scheme of this sonnet turns an accepted Petrarchan form upside-down, as does the thematic structure, at least to a certain extent: the first six lines deal with England's rulers, the king and the princes, and the final eight deal with everyone else. The sonnet's structure is out of joint, just as the sonnet proclaims England to be.
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Commentary
For all his commitment to romantic ideals of love and beauty, Shelley was also concerned with the real world: he was a fierce denouncer of political power and a passionate advocate for liberty. The result of his political commitment was a series of angry political poems condemning the arrogance of power, including "Ozymandias" and "England in 1819." Like Wordsworth's "London, 1802," "England in 1819" bitterly lists the flaws in England's social fabric: in order, King George is "old, mad, blind, despised, and dying"; the nobility ("princes") are insensible leeches draining their country dry; the people are oppressed, hungry, and hopeless, their fields untilled; the army is corrupt and dangerous to its own people; the laws are useless, religion has become morally degenerate, and Parliament ("A Senate") is "Time's worst statute unrepealed." The furious, violent metaphors Shelley employs throughout this list (nobles as leeches in muddy water, the army as a two-edged sword, religion as a sealed book, Parliament as an unjust law) leave no doubt about his feelings on the state of his nation. Then, surprisingly, the final couplet concludes with a note of passionate Shelleyean optimism: from these "graves" a "glorious Phantom" may "burst to illumine our tempestuous day." What this Phantom might be is not specified in the poem, but it seems to hint simultaneously at the Spirit of the "Hymn to Intellectual Beauty" and at the possibility of liberty won through revolution, as it was won in France. (It also recalls Wordsworth's invocation of the spirit of John Milton to save England in the older poet's poem, though that connection may be unintentional on Shelley's part; both Wordsworth and Shelley long for an apocalyptic deus ex machina to save their country, but Shelley is certainly not summoning John Milton.)
Ode to the West Wind" Summary
The speaker invokes the "wild West Wind" of autumn, which scatters the dead leaves and spreads seeds so that they may be nurtured by the spring, and asks that the wind, a "destroyer and preserver," hear him. The speaker calls the wind the "dirge / Of the dying year," and describes how it stirs up violent storms, and again implores it to hear him. The speaker says that the wind stirs the Mediterranean from "his summer dreams," and cleaves the Atlantic into choppy chasms, making the "sapless foliage" of the ocean tremble, and asks for a third time that it hear him.
The speaker says that if he were a dead leaf that the wind could bear, or a cloud it could carry, or a wave it could push, or even if he were, as a boy, "the comrade" of the wind's "wandering over heaven," then he would never have needed to pray to the wind and invoke its powers. He pleads with the wind to lift him "as a wave, a leaf, a cloud!"--for though he is like the wind at heart, untamable and proud--he is now chained and bowed with the weight of his hours upon the earth.
The speaker asks the wind to "make me thy lyre," to be his own Spirit, and to drive his thoughts across the universe, "like withered leaves, to quicken a new birth."
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He asks the wind, by the incantation of this verse, to scatter his words among mankind, to be the "trumpet of a prophecy." Speaking both in regard to the season and in regard to the effect upon mankind that he hopes his words to have, the speaker asks: "If winter comes, can spring be far behind?"
Form
Each of the seven parts of "Ode to the West Wind" contains five stanzas--four three-line stanzas and a two-line couplet, all metered in iambic pentameter. The rhyme scheme in each part follows a pattern known as terza rima, the three-line rhyme scheme employed by Dante in his Divine Comedy. In the three-line terza rima stanza, the first and third lines rhyme, and the middle line does not; then the end sound of that middle line is employed as the rhyme for the first and third lines in the next stanza. The final couplet rhymes with the middle line of the last three-line stanza. Thus each of the seven parts of "Ode to the West Wind" follows this scheme: ABA BCB CDC DED EE.
Commentary
The wispy, fluid terza rima of "Ode to the West Wind" finds Shelley taking a long thematic leap beyond the scope of "Hymn to Intellectual Beauty," and incorporating his own art into his meditation on beauty and the natural world. Shelley invokes the wind magically, describing its power and its role as both "destroyer and preserver," and asks the wind to sweep him out of his torpor "as a wave, a leaf, a cloud!" In the fifth section, the poet then takes a remarkable turn, transforming the wind into a metaphor for his own art, the expressive capacity that drives "dead thoughts" like "withered leaves" over the universe, to "quicken a new birth"--that is, to quicken the coming of the spring. Here the spring season is a metaphor for a "spring" of human consciousness, imagination, liberty, or morality--all the things Shelley hoped his art could help to bring about in the human mind. Shelley asks the wind to be his spirit, and in the same movement he makes it his metaphorical spirit, his poetic faculty, which will play him like a musical instrument, the way the wind strums the leaves of the trees. The thematic implication is significant: whereas the older generation of Romantic poets viewed nature as a source of truth and authentic experience, the younger generation largely viewed nature as a source of beauty and aesthetic experience. In this poem, Shelley explicitly links nature with art by finding powerful natural metaphors with which to express his ideas about the power, import, quality, and ultimate effect of aesthetic expression.
"The Indian Serenade" Summary
Addressing his beloved, the speaker says that he arises from "dreams of thee / In the first sweet sleep of night, / When the winds are breathing low, / And the stars are shining bright." He says that "a spirit in my feet" has led him--"who knows how?"--to his beloved's chamber-window. Outside, in the night, the "wandering airs" faint upon
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the stream, "the Champak odours fail / Like sweet thoughts in a dream," and the nightingale's complaint" dies upon her heart--as the speaker says he must die upon his beloved's heart. Overwhelmed with emotion, he falls to the ground ("I die, I faint, I fail!"), and implores his beloved to lift him from the grass, and to rain kisses upon his lips and eyelids. He says that his cheek is cold and white, and his heart is loud and fast: he pleads, "Oh! press it to thine own again, / Where it will break at last."
Form
The trancelike, enchanting rhythm of this lovely lyric results from the poet's use of a loose pattern of regular dimeters that employ variously trochaic, anapestic, and iambic stresses. The rhyme scheme is tighter than the poem's rhythm, forming a consistent ABCBADCD pattern in each of the three stanzas.
Commentary
This charming short lyric is one of Shelley's finest, simplest, and most exemplary love poems. It tells a simple story of a speaker who wakes, walks through the beautiful Indian night to his beloved's window, then falls to the ground, fainting and overcome with emotion. The lush sensual language of the poem evokes an atmosphere of nineteenth-century exoticism and Orientalism, with the "Champak odours" failing as "The wandering airs they faint / On the dark, the silent stream," as "the winds are breathing low, / And the stars are shining bright." The poet employs a subtle tension between the speaker's world of inner feeling and the beautiful outside world; this tension serves to motivate the poem, as the inner dream gives way to the journey, imbuing "a spirit in my feet"; then the outer world becomes a mold or model for the speaker's inner feeling ("The nightingale's complaint / It dies upon her heart, / As I must die on thine..."), and at that moment the speaker is overwhelmed by his powerful emotions, which overcome his body: "My cheek is cold and white, alas! / My heart beats loud and fast..."
In this sense "The Indian Serenade" mixes the sensuous, rapturous aestheticism of a certain kind of Romantic love poem (of Keats, for example) with the transcendental emotionalism of another kind of Romantic love poem (often represented by Coleridge). The beautiful landscape of fainting airs and low-breathing winds acts upon the poet's agitated, dreamy emotions to overwhelm him in both the aesthetic and emotional realm--both the physical, outer world and the spiritual, inner world--and his body is helpless to resist the resultant thunderclap: "I die! I faint! I fail!"
To a Skylark" Summary
The speaker, addressing a skylark, says that it is a "blithe Spirit" rather than a bird, for its song comes from Heaven, and from its full heart pours "profuse strains of
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unpremeditated art." The skylark flies higher and higher, "like a cloud of fire" in the blue sky, singing as it flies. In the "golden lightning" of the sun, it floats and runs, like "an unbodied joy." As the skylark flies higher and higher, the speaker loses sight of it, but is still able to hear its "shrill delight," which comes down as keenly as moonbeams in the "white dawn," which can be felt even when they are not seen. The earth and air ring with the skylark's voice, just as Heaven overflows with moonbeams when the moon shines out from behind "a lonely cloud."
The speaker says that no one knows what the skylark is, for it is unique: even "rainbow clouds" do not rain as brightly as the shower of melody that pours from the skylark. The bird is "like a poet hidden / In the light of thought," able to make the world experience "sympathy with hopes and fears it heeded not." It is like a lonely maiden in a palace tower, who uses her song to soothe her lovelorn soul. It is like a golden glow-worm, scattering light among the flowers and grass in which it is hidden. It is like a rose embowered in its own green leaves, whose scent is blown by the wind until the bees are faint with "too much sweet." The skylark's song surpasses "all that ever was, / Joyous and clear and fresh," whether the rain falling on the "twinkling grass" or the flowers the rain awakens.
Calling the skylark "Sprite or Bird," the speaker asks it to tell him its "sweet thoughts," for he has never heard anyone or anything call up "a flood of rapture so divine." Compared to the skylark's, any music would seem lacking. What objects, the speaker asks, are "the fountains of thy happy strain?" Is it fields, waves, mountains, the sky, the plain, or "love of thine own kind" or "ignorance or pain"? Pain and languor, the speaker says, "never came near" the skylark: it loves, but has never known "love's sad satiety." Of death, the skylark must know "things more true and deep" than mortals could dream; otherwise, the speaker asks, "how could thy notes flow in such a crystal stream?"
For mortals, the experience of happiness is bound inextricably with the experience of sadness: dwelling upon memories and hopes for the future, mortal men "pine for what is not"; their laughter is "fraught" with "some pain"; their "sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought." But, the speaker says, even if men could "scorn / Hate and pride and fear," and were born without the capacity to weep, he still does not know how they could ever approximate the joy expressed by the skylark. Calling the bird a "scorner of the ground," he says that its music is better than all music and all poetry. He asks the bird to teach him "half the gladness / That thy brain must know," for then he would overflow with "harmonious madness," and his song would be so beautiful that the world would listen to him, even as he is now listening to the skylark.
Form
The eccentric, songlike, five-line stanzas of "To a Skylark"--all twenty-one of them--follow the same pattern: the first four lines are metered in trochaic trimeter, the
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fifth in iambic hexameter (a line which can also be called an Alexandrine). The rhyme scheme of each stanza is extremely simple: ABABB.
Commentary
If the West Wind was Shelley's first convincing attempt to articulate an aesthetic philosophy through metaphors of nature, the skylark is his greatest natural metaphor for pure poetic expression, the "harmonious madness" of pure inspiration. The skylark's song issues from a state of purified existence, a Wordsworthian notion of complete unity with Heaven through nature; its song is motivated by the joy of that uncomplicated purity of being, and is unmixed with any hint of melancholy or of the bittersweet, as human joy so often is. The skylark's unimpeded song rains down upon the world, surpassing every other beauty, inspiring metaphor and making the speaker believe that the bird is not a mortal bird at all, but a "Spirit," a "sprite," a "poet hidden / In the light of thought."
In that sense, the skylark is almost an exact twin of the bird in Keats's "Ode to a Nightingale"; both represent pure expression through their songs, and like the skylark, the nightingale "wast not born for death." But while the nightingale is a bird of darkness, invisible in the shadowy forest glades, the skylark is a bird of daylight, invisible in the deep bright blue of the sky. The nightingale inspires Keats to feel "a drowsy numbness" of happiness that is also like pain, and that makes him think of death; the skylark inspires Shelley to feel a frantic, rapturous joy that has no part of pain. To Keats, human joy and sadness are inextricably linked, as he explains at length in the final stanza of the "Ode on Melancholy." But the skylark sings free of all human error and complexity, and while listening to his song, the poet feels free of those things, too.
Structurally and linguistically, this poem is almost unique among Shelley's works; its strange form of stanza, with four compact lines and one very long line, and its lilting, songlike diction ("profuse strains of unpremeditated art") work to create the effect of spontaneous poetic expression flowing musically and naturally from the poet's mind. Structurally, each stanza tends to make a single, quick point about the skylark, or to look at it in a sudden, brief new light; still, the poem does flow, and gradually advances the mini-narrative of the speaker watching the skylark flying higher and higher into the sky, and envying its untrammeled inspiration--which, if he were to capture it in words, would cause the world to listen.
Lord Alfred Tennyson(1809-1822) The English poet Alfred Tennyson was born in Sommersby, England on August 6, 1809, twenty years after the start of the French Revolution and toward the end of the Napoleonic Wars. He was the fourth of twelve children born to George and Elizabeth Tennyson. His father, a church reverend, supervised his sons' private education,
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though his heavy drinking impeded his ability to fulfill his duties. His mother was an avid supporter of the Evangelical movement, which aimed to replace nominal Christianity with a genuine, personal religion. The young Alfred demonstrated an early flair for poetry, composing a full-length verse drama at the age of fourteen. In 1827, when he was eighteen, he and his brother Charles published an anonymous collection entitled Poems by Two Brothers, receiving a few vague complimentary reviews.
That same year, Tennyson left home to study at Trinity College, Cambridge, under the supervision of William Whewell, the great nineteenth-century scientist, philosopher, and theologian. University life exposed him to the most urgent political issue in his day--the question of Parliamentary Reform, which ultimately culminated in the English Reform Bill of 1832. Although Tennyson believed that reform was long overdue, he felt that it must be undertaken cautiously and gradually; his university poems show little interest in politics.
Tennyson soon became friendly with a group of undergraduates calling themselves the "Apostles," which met to discuss literary issues. The group was led by Arthur Henry Hallam, who soon became Tennyson's closest friend. Tennyson and Hallam toured Europe together while still undergraduates, and Hallam later became engaged to the poet's sister Emily. In 1830, Tennyson published Poems, Chiefly Lyrical, to Hallam's great praise. However, within the larger critical world, this work, along with Tennyson's 1832 volume including "The Lady of Shalott" and "The Lotos-Eaters," met with hostile disparagement; the young poet read his reviews with dismay.
In 1833, no longer able to afford college tuition, Tennyson was living back at home with his family when he received the most devastating blow of his entire life: he learned that his dear friend Hallam had died suddenly of fever while traveling abroad. His tremendous grief at the news permeated much of Tennyson's later poetry, including the great elegy "In Memoriam." This poem represents the poet's struggles not only with the news of his best friend's death, but also with the new developments in astronomy, biology, and geology that were diminishing man's stature on the scale of evolutionary time; although Darwin's Origin of Species did not appear until 1859, notions of evolution were already in circulation, articulated in Charles Lyell's Principles of Geology (1830-33) and Robert Chambers's Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (1844).
Tennyson first began to achieve critical success with the publication of his Poems in 1842, a work that include "Ulysses," "Tithonus," and other famous short lyrics about mythical and philosophical subjects. At the time of publication, England had seen the death of Coleridge, Shelley, Byron, Keats, and indeed all of the great Romantic poets except Wordsworth; Tennyson thus filled a lacuna in the English literary scene. In 1845, he began receiving a small government pension for his poetry. In 1850, Wordsworth, who had been Britain's Poet Laureate, died at the age of 80; upon the publication of "In Memoriam," Tennyson was named to succeed him in this honor. With this title he became the most popular poet in Victorian England and could
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finally afford to marry Emily Sellwood, whom he had loved since 1836. The marriage began sadly--the couple's first son was stillborn in 1851--but the couple soon found happiness: in 1853 they were able to move to a secluded country house on the Isle of Wight, where they raised two sons named Hallam and Lionel.
Tennyson continued to write and to gain popularity. His later poetry primarily followed a narrative rather than lyrical style; as the novel began to emerge as the most popular literary form, poets began searching for new ways of telling stories in verse. For example, in Tennyson's poem "Maud," a speaker tells his story in a sequence of short lyrics in varying meters; Tennyson described the work as an experimental "monodrama." Not only were his later verses concerned with dramatic fiction, they also examined current national political drama. As Poet Laureate, Tennyson represented the literary voice of the nation and, as such, he made occasional pronouncements on political affairs. For example, "The Charge of the Light Brigade" (1854) described a disastrous battle in the Crimean War and praised the heroism of the British soldiers there. In 1859, Tennyson published the first four Idylls of the King, a group of twelve blank-verse narrative poems tracing the story of the legendary King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. This collection, dedicated to Prince Albert, enjoyed much popularity among the royal family, who saw Arthur's lengthy reign as a representation of Queen Victoria's 64-year rule (1837-1901).
In 1884, the Royals granted Tennyson a baronetcy; he was now known as Alfred, Lord Tennyson. He dedicated most of the last fifteen years of his life to writing a series of full-length dramas in blank verse, which, however, failed to excite any particular interest. In 1892, at the age of 83, he died of heart failure and was buried among his illustrious literary predecessors at Westminster Abbey. Although Tennyson was the most popular poet in England in his own day, he was often the target of mockery by his immediate successors, the Edwardians and Georgians of the early twentieth century. Today, however, many critics consider Tennyson to be the greatest poet of the Victorian Age; and he stands as one of the major innovators of lyric and metrical form in all of English poetry.
Analysis and Themes
Tennyson's poetic output covers a breadth difficult to comprehend in a single system of thematics: his various works treat issues of political and historical concern, as well as scientific matters, classical mythology, and deeply personal thoughts and feelings. Tennyson is both a poet of penetrating introspection and a poet of the people; he plumbs the depths of his own consciousness while also giving voice to the national consciousness of Victorian society.
As a child, Tennyson was influenced profoundly by the poetry of Byron and Scott, and his earliest poems reflect the lyric intensity and meditative expressiveness of his Romantic forebears. These early poems demonstrate his ability to link external scenery to interior states of mind. However, unlike the Romantics, whose nature
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poems present a scene that raises an emotional or psychological problem, Tennyson uses nature as a psychological category. In "Mariana," for example, he uses Keatsian descriptions of the natural world to describe a woman's state of mind; he conveys via his natural setting the consciousness of a woman waiting vainly for her lover, and her increasing hopelessness.
Not only is Tennyson a poet of the natural and psychological landscape, he also attends frequently to the past, and historical events. "The Lady of Shalott" and the poems within Idylls of the King take place in medieval England and capture a world of knights in shining a rmor and their damsels in distress. In addition to treating the history of his nation, Tennyson also explores the mythological past, as articulated in classical works of Homer, Virgil, and Dante. His "Ulysses" and "The Lotos-Eaters" draw upon actual incidents in Homer's Odyssey. Likewise, his ode "To Virgil" abounds with allusions to incidents in the great poet's Aeneid, especially the fall of Troy. Tennyson thus looked both to historical and mythological pasts as repositories for his poetry.
Tennyson's personal past, too, figures prominently in his work. The sudden death of his closest friend Arthur Henry Hallam when Tennyson was just 24 dealt a great emotional blow to the young poet, who spent the next ten years writing over a hundred poems dedicated to his departed friend, later collected and published as "In Memoriam" in 1850. This lengthy work describes Tennyson's memories of the time he spent with Hallam, including their Cambridge days, when Hallam would read poetry aloud to his friends: thus Tennyson writes, "O bliss, when all in circle drawn / About him, heart and ear were fed / To hear him, as he lay and read / The Tuscan poets on the lawn!" Tennyson grapples with the tremendous grief he feels after the loss of such a dear friend, concluding famously that "'Tis better to have loved and lost / Than never to have loved at all."
"In Memoriam" also reflects Tennyson's struggle with the Victorians' growing awareness of another sort of past: the vast expanse of geological time and evolutionary history. The new discoveries in biology, astronomy, and geology implied a view of humanity that much distressed many Victorians, including Tennyson. In Maud,, for example, he describes the stars as "cold fires, yet with power to burn and brand/ His nothingness into man"; unlike the Romantics, he possessed a painful awareness of the brutality and indifference of "Nature red in tooth and claw." Although Tennyson associated evolution with progress, he also worried that the notion seemed to contradict the Biblical story of creation and long-held assumptions about man's place in the world. Nonetheless, in "In Memoriam," he insists that we must keep our faith despite the latest discoveries of science: he writes, "Strong Son of God, immortal Love / Whom we, that have not seen they face, / By faith, and faith alone, embrace / Believing where we cannot prove." At the end of the poem, he concludes that God's eternal plan includes purposive biological development; thus he reassures his Victorian readers that the new science does not mean the end of the old faith.
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Tennyson also spoke to his Victorian contemporaries about issues of urgent social and political concern. In "The Princess" he addresses the relations between the sexes and argues for women's rights in higher education. In "The Charge of the Light Brigade," he speaks out in favor of a controversial diplomatic maneuver, the disastrous charge on the Russian army by British troops in the Crimean War. Thus, for all his love of the past, Tennyson also maintained a lively interest in the developments of his day, remaining deeply committed to reforming the society in which he lived and to which he gave voice.
Mariana This poem begins with the description of an abandoned farmhouse, or grange, in which the flower-pots are covered in overgrown moss and an ornamental pear tree hangs from rusty nails on the wall. The sheds stand abandoned and broken, and the straw ("thatch") covering the roof of the farmhouse is worn and full of weeds. A woman, presumably standing in the vicinity of the farmhouse, is described in a four-line refrain that recurs--with slight modifications--as the last lines of each of the poem's stanzas: "She only said, 'My life is dreary / He cometh not,' she said; / She said, 'I am aweary, aweary, / I would that I were dead!'"
The woman's tears fall with the dew in the evening and then fall again in the morning, before the dew has dispersed. In both the morning and the evening, she is unable to look to the "sweet heaven." At night, when the bats have come and gone, and the sky is dark, she opens her window curtain and looks out at the expanse of land. She comments that "The night is dreary" and repeats her death-wish refrain.
In the middle of the night, the woman wakes up to the sound of the crow, and stays up until the cock calls out an hour before dawn. She hears the lowing of the oxen and seemingly walks in her sleep until the cold winds of the morning come. She repeats the death-wish refrain exactly as in the first stanza, except that this time it is "the day" and not "my life" that is dreary.
Within a stone's throw from the wall lies an artificial passage for water filled with black waters and lumps of moss. A silver-green poplar tree shakes back and forth and serves as the only break in an otherwise flat, level, gray landscape. The woman repeats the refrain of the first stanza.
When the moon lies low at night, the woman looks to her white window curtain, where she sees the shadow of the poplar swaying in the wind. But when the moon is very low and the winds exceptionally strong, the shadow of the poplar falls not on the curtain but on her bed and across her forehead. The woman says that "the night is dreary" and wishes once again that she were dead.
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During the day, the doors creak on their hinges, the fly sings in the window pane, and the mouse cries out or peers from behind the lining of the wall. The farmhouse is haunted by old faces, old footsteps, and old voices, and the woman repeats the refrain exactly as it appears in the first and fourth stanzas.
The woman is confused and disturbed by the sounds of the sparrow chirping on the roof, the clock ticking slowly, and the wind blowing through the poplar. Most of all, she hates the early evening hour when the sun begins to set and a sunbeam lies across her bed chamber. The woman recites an emphatic variation on the death-wish refrain; now it is not "the day," or even her "life" that is dreary; rather, we read: "Then said she, 'I am very dreary, / He will not come,' she said; / She wept, "I am aweary, aweary,/ Oh God, that I were dead!'"
Form
"Mariana" takes the form of seven twelve-line stanzas, each of which is divided into three four-line rhyme units according to the pattern ABAB CDDC EFEF. The lines ending in E and F remain essentially the same in every stanza and thus serve as a bewitching, chant-like refrain throughout the poem. All of the poem's lines fall into iambic tetrameter, with the exception of the trimeter of the tenth and twelfth lines.
Commentary
The subject of this poem is drawn from a line in Shakespeare's play Measure for Measure: "Mariana in the moated grange." This line describes a young woman waiting for her lover Angelo, who has abandoned her upon the loss of her dowry. Just as the epigraph from Shakespeare contains no verb, the poem, too, lacks all action or narrative movement. Instead, the entire poem serves as an extended visual depiction of melancholy isolation.
One of the most important symbols in the poem is the poplar tree described in the fourth and fifth stanzas. On one level, the poplar can be interpreted as a sort of phallic symbol: it provides the only break in an otherwise flat and even landscape ("For leagues no other tree did mark / the level waste" [lines 43-44]); and the shadow of the poplar falls on Mariana's bed when she is lovesick at night, suggesting her sexual hunger for the absent lover. On another level, however, the poplar is an important image from classical mythology: in his Metamorphoses, Ovid describes how Oenone, deserted by Paris, addresses the poplar on which Paris has carved his promise not to desert her. Thus the poplar has come to stand as a classic symbol of the renegade lover and his broken promise.
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The first, fourth, and sixth stanzas can be grouped together, not only because they all share the exact same refrain, but also because they are the only stanzas that take place in the daytime. In themselves, each of these stanzas portrays an unending present without any sense of the passage of time or the play of light and darkness. These stanzas alternate with the descriptions of forlorn and restless nights in which Mariana neither sleeps nor wakes but inhabits a dreamy, in-between state: Mariana cries in the morning and evening alike (lines 13-14) and awakens in the middle of the night (lines 25-26); sleeping and waking meld. The effect of this alternation between flat day and sleepless night is to create a sense of a tormented, confused time, unordered by patterns of natural cycles of life.
Even though the poem as a whole involves no action or progression, it nonetheless reaches a sort of climax in the final stanza. This stanza begins with a triple subject (chirrup, ticking, sound), which creates a mounting intensity as the verb is pushed farther back into the sentence. The predicate, "did all confound / Her sense" (lines 76-77), is enjambed over two lines, thereby enacting the very confounding of sense that it describes: both Mariana's mind and the logic of the sentence become confused, for at first it seems that the object of "confound" is "all." This predicate is then followed by a caesura and then the sudden, active force of the climactic superlative phrase "but most she loathed." At this point, the setting shifts again to the early evening as the recurrent cycle of day and night once more enacts Mariana's alternating hope and disappointment. The stanza ends with a dramatic yet subtle shift in the refrain from "He cometh not" to the decisive and peremptory "He will not come."
The refrain of the poem functions like an incantation, which contributes to the atmosphere of enchantment. The abandoned grange seems to be under a spell or curse; Mariana is locked in a state of perpetual, introverted brooding. Her consciousness paces a cell of melancholy; she can perceive the world only through her dejection. Thus, all of the poet's descriptions of the physical world serve as primarily psychological categories; it is not the grange, but the person, who has been abandoned--so, too, has this woman's mind been abandoned by her sense. This is an example of the "pathetic fallacy." Coined by the nineteenth-century writer John Ruskin, this phrase refers to our tendency to attribute our emotional and psychological states to the natural world. Thus, because Mariana is so forlorn, her farmhouse, too, although obviously incapable of emotion, seems dejected, depressed; when the narrator describes her walls he is seeing not the indifferent white of the paint, but rather focuses on the dark shadows there. While Ruskin considered the excessive use of the fallacy to be the mark of an inferior poet, later poets (such as T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound) would use the pathetic fallacy liberally and to great effect. Arguably, Tennyson here also uses the method to create great emotional force.
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The Lotos Eaters Odysseus tells his mariners to have courage, assuring them that they will soon reach the shore of their home. In the afternoon, they reach a land "in which it seemed always afternoon" because of the languid and peaceful atmosphere. The mariners sight this "land of streams" with its gleaming river flowing to the sea, its three snow-capped mountaintops, and its shadowy pine growing in the vale.
The mariners are greeted by the "mild-eyed melancholy Lotos-eaters," whose dark faces appear pale against the rosy sunset. These Lotos-eaters come bearing the flower and fruit of the lotos, which they offer to Odysseus's mariners. Those who eat the lotos feel as if they have fallen into a deep sleep; they sit down upon the yellow sand of the island and can hardly perceive their fellow mariners speaking to them, hearing only the music of their heartbeat in their ears. Although it has been sweet to dream of their homes in Ithaca, the lotos makes them weary of wandering, preferring to linger here. One who has eaten of the lotos fruit proclaims that he will "return no more," and all of the mariners begin to sing about this resolution to remain in the land of the Lotos-eaters.
The rest of the poem consists of the eight numbered stanzas of the mariners' choric song, expressing their resolution to stay forever. First, they praise the sweet and soporific music of the land of the Lotos-eaters, comparing this music to petals, dew, granite, and tired eyelids. In the second stanza, they question why man is the only creature in nature who must toil. They argue that everything else in nature is able to rest and stay still, but man is tossed from one sorrow to another. Man's inner spirit tells him that tranquility and calmness offer the only joy, and yet he is fated to toil and wander his whole life.
In the third stanza, the mariners declare that everything in nature is allotted a lifespan in which to bloom and fade. As examples of other living things that die, they cite the "folded leaf, which eventually turns yellow and drifts to the earth, as well as the "full-juiced apple," which ultimately falls to the ground, and the flower, which ripens and fades. Next, in the fourth stanza, the mariners question the purpose of a life of labor, since nothing is cumulative and thus all our accomplishments lead nowhere. They question "what...will last," proclaiming that everything in life is fleeting and therefore futile. The mariners also express their desire for "long rest or death," either of which will free them from a life of endless labor.
The fifth stanza echoes the first stanza's positive appeal to luxurious self-indulgence; the mariners declare how sweet it is to live a life of continuous dreaming. They paint a picture of what it might be like to do nothing all day except sleep, dream, eat lotos, and watch the waves on the beach. Such an existence would enable them peacefully to remember all those individuals they once knew who are now either buried ("heaped over with a mound of grass") or cremated ("two handfuls of white dust, shut in an urn of brass!").
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In the sixth stanza, the mariners reason that their families have probably forgotten them anyway, and their homes fallen apart, so they might as well stay in the land of the Lotos-eaters and "let what is broken so remain." Although they have fond memories of their wives and sons, surely by now, after ten years of fighting in Troy, their sons have inherited their property; it will merely cause unnecessary confusion and disturbances for them to return now. Their hearts are worn out from fighting wars and navigating the seas by means of the constellations, and thus they prefer the relaxing death-like existence of the Land of the Lotos to the confusion that a return home would create.
In the seventh stanza, as in the first and fifth, the mariners bask in the pleasant sights and sounds of the island. They imagine how sweet it would be to lie on beds of flowers while watching the river flow and listening to the echoes in the caves. Finally, the poem closes with the mariners' vow to spend the rest of their lives relaxing and reclining in the "hollow Lotos land." They compare the life of abandon, which they will enjoy in Lotos land, to the carefree existence of the Gods, who could not care less about the famines, plagues, earthquakes, and other natural disasters that plague human beings on earth. These Gods simply smile upon men, who till the earth and harvest crops until they either suffer in hell or dwell in the "Elysian valleys" of heaven. Since they have concluded that "slumber is more sweet than toil," the mariners resolve to stop wandering the seas and to settle instead in the land of the Lotos-eaters.
Form
This poem is divided into two parts: the first is a descriptive narrative (lines 1-45), and the second is a song of eight numbered stanzas of varying length (lines 46-173). The first part of the poem is written in nine-line Spenserian stanzas, so called because they were employed by Spenser in The Faerie Queene. The rhyme scheme of the Spenserian stanza is a closely interlinked ABABBCBCC, with the first eight lines in iambic pentameter and the final line an Alexandrine (or line of six iambic feet). The choric song follows a far looser structure: both the line-length and the rhyme scheme vary widely among the eight stanzas.
Commentary
This poem is based on the story of Odysseus's mariners described in scroll IX of Homer's Odyssey. Homer writes about a storm that blows the great hero's mariners off course as they attempt to journey back from Troy to their homes in Ithaca. They come to a land where people do nothing but eat lotos (the Greek for our English "lotus"), a flower so delicious that some of his men, upon tasting it, lose all desire to return to Ithaca and long only to remain in the Land of the Lotos. Odysseus must drag his men away so that they can resume their journey home. In this poem, Tennyson powerfully evokes the mariners' yearning to settle into a life of peacefulness, rest, and even death.
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The poem draws not only on Homer's Odyssey, but also on the biblical Garden of Eden in the Book of Genesis. In the Bible, a "life of toil" is Adam's punishment for partaking of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge: after succumbing to the temptation of the fruit, Adam is condemned to labor by the sweat of his brow. Yet in this poem, fruit (the lotos) provides a release from the life of labor, suggesting an inversion of the biblical story.
Tennyson provides a tempting and seductive vision of a life free from toil. His description of the Lotos Land rivals the images of pleasure in Milton's "L'Allegro" and Marvell's "The Garden." Yet his lush descriptive passages are accompanied by persuasive rhetoric; nearly every stanza of the choric song presents a different argument to justify the mariners' resolution to remain in the Lotos Land. For example, in the second stanza of the song the mariners express the irony of the fact that man, who is the pinnacle and apex of creation, is the only creature made to toil and labor all the days of his life. This stanza may also be read as a pointed inversion and overturning of Coleridge's "Work without Hope," in which the speaker laments that "all nature seems at work" while he alone remains unoccupied.
Although the taste of the lotos and the vision of life it offers is seductive, the poem suggests that the mariners may be deceiving themselves in succumbing to the hypnotic power of the flower. Partaking of the lotos involves abandoning external reality and living instead in a world of appearances, where everything "seems" to be but nothing actually is: the Lotos Land emerges as "a land where all things always seemed the same" (line 24). Indeed, the word "seems" recurs throughout the poem, and can be found in all but one of the opening five stanzas, suggesting that the Lotos Land is not so much a "land of streams" as a "land of seems." In addition, in the final stanza of the choric song, the poem describes the Lotos Land as a "hollow" land with "hollow" caves, indicating that the vision of the sailors is somehow empty and insubstantial.
The reader, too, is left with ambivalent feelings about the mariners' argument for lassitude. Although the thought of life without toil is certainly tempting, it is also deeply unsettling. The reader's discomfort with this notion arises in part from the knowledge of the broader context of the poem: Odysseus will ultimately drag his men away from the Lotos Land disapprovingly; moreover, his injunction to have "courage" opens--and then overshadows--the whole poem with a sense of moral opprobrium. The sailors' case for lassitude is further undermined morally by their complaint that it is unpleasant "to war with evil" (line 94); are they too lazy to do what is right? By choosing the Lotos Land, the mariners are abandoning the sources of substantive meaning in life and the potential for heroic accomplishment. Thus in this poem Tennyson forces us to consider the ambiguous appeal of a life without toil: although all of us share the longing for a carefree and relaxed existence, few people could truly be happy without any challenges to overcome, without the fire of aspiration and the struggle to make the world a better place.
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The Lady of Shalott
Part I: The poem begins with a description of a river and a road that pass through long fields of barley and rye before reaching the town of Camelot. The people of the town travel along the road and look toward an island called Shalott, which lies further down the river. The island of Shalott contains several plants and flowers, including lilies, aspens, and willows. On the island, a woman known as the Lady of Shalott is imprisoned within a building made of "four gray walls and four gray towers."
Both "heavy barges" and light open boats sail along the edge of the river to Camelot. But has anyone seen or heard of the lady who lives on the island in the river? Only the reapers who harvest the barley hear the echo of her singing. At night, the tired reaper listens to her singing and whispers that he hears her: "'Tis the fairy Lady of Shalott."
Part II: The Lady of Shalott weaves a magic, colorful web. She has heard a voice whisper that a curse will befall her if she looks down to Camelot, and she does not know what this curse would be. Thus, she concentrates solely on her weaving, never lifting her eyes.
However, as she weaves, a mirror hangs before her. In the mirror, she sees "shadows of the world," including the highway road, which also passes through the fields, the eddies in the river, and the peasants of the town. Occasionally, she also sees a group of damsels, an abbot (church official), a young shepherd, or a page dressed in crimson. She sometimes sights a pair of knights riding by, though she has no loyal knight of her own to court her. Nonetheless, she enjoys her solitary weaving, though she expresses frustration with the world of shadows when she glimpses a funeral procession or a pair of newlyweds in the mirror.
Part III: A knight in brass armor ("brazen greaves") comes riding through the fields of barley beside Shalott; the sun shines on his armor and makes it sparkle. As he rides, the gems on his horse's bridle glitter like a constellation of stars, and the bells on the bridle ring. The knight hangs a bugle from his sash, and his armor makes ringing noises as he gallops alongside the remote island of Shalott.
In the "blue, unclouded weather," the jewels on the knight's saddle shine, making him look like a meteor in the purple sky. His forehead glows in the sunlight, and his black curly hair flows out from under his helmet. As he passes by the river, his image flashes into the Lady of Shalott's mirror and he sings out "tirra lirra." Upon seeing and hearing this knight, the Lady stops weaving her web and abandons her loom. The web flies out from the loom, and the mirror cracks, and the Lady announces the arrival of her doom: "The curse is come upon me."
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Part IV: As the sky breaks out in rain and storm, the Lady of Shalott descends from her tower and finds a boat. She writes the words "The Lady of Shalott" around the boat's bow and looks downstream to Camelot like a prophet foreseeing his own misfortunes. In the evening, she lies down in the boat, and the stream carries her to Camelot.
The Lady of Shalott wears a snowy white robe and sings her last song as she sails down to Camelot. She sings until her blood freezes, her eyes darken, and she dies. When her boat sails silently into Camelot, all the knights, lords, and ladies of Camelot emerge from their halls to behold the sight. They read her name on the bow and "cross...themselves for fear." Only the great knight Lancelot is bold enough to push aside the crowd, look closely at the dead maiden, and remark "She has a lovely face; God in his mercy lend her grace."
Form
The poem is divided into four numbered parts with discrete, isometric (equally-long) stanzas. The first two parts contain four stanzas each, while the last two parts contain five. Each of the four parts ends at the moment when description yields to directly quoted speech: this speech first takes the form of the reaper's whispering identification, then of the Lady's half-sick lament, then of the Lady's pronouncement of her doom, and finally, of Lancelot's blessing. Each stanza contains nine lines with the rhyme scheme AAAABCCCB. The "B" always stands for "Camelot" in the fifth line and for "Shalott" in the ninth. The "A" and "C" lines are always in tetrameter, while the "B" lines are in trimeter. In addition, the syntax is line-bound: most phrases do not extend past the length of a single line.
Commentary
Originally written in 1832, this poem was later revised, and published in its final form in 1842. Tennyson claimed that he had based it on an old Italian romance, though the poem also bears much similarity to the story of the Maid of Astolat in Malory's Morte d'Arthur. As in Malory's account, Tennyson's lyric includes references to the Arthurian legend; moreover, "Shalott" seems quite close to Malory's "Astolat."
Much of the poem's charm stems from its sense of mystery and elusiveness; of course, these aspects also complicate the task of analysis. That said, most scholars understand "The Lady of Shalott" to be about the conflict between art and life. The Lady, who weaves her magic web and sings her song in a remote tower, can be seen to represent the contemplative artist isolated from the bustle and activity of daily life. The moment she sets her art aside to gaze down on the real world, a curse befalls her and she meets her tragic death. The poem thus captures the conflict between an artist's
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desire for social involvement and his/her doubts about whether such a commitment is viable for someone dedicated to art. The poem may also express a more personal dilemma for Tennyson as a specific artist: while he felt an obligation to seek subject matter outside the world of his own mind and his own immediate experiences--to comment on politics, history, or a more general humanity--he also feared that this expansion into broader territories might destroy his poetry's magic.
Part I and Part IV of this poem deal with the Lady of Shalott as she appears to the outside world, whereas Part II and Part III describe the world from the Lady's perspective. In Part I, Tennyson portrays the Lady as secluded from the rest of the world by both water and the height of her tower. We are not told how she spends her time or what she thinks about; thus we, too, like everyone in the poem, are denied access to the interiority of her world. Interestingly, the only people who know that she exists are those whose occupations are most diametrically opposite her own: the reapers who toil in physical labor rather than by sitting and crafting works of beauty.
Part II describes the Lady's experience of imprisonment from her own perspective. We learn that her alienation results from a mysterious curse: she is not allowed to look out on Camelot, so all her knowledge of the world must come from the reflections and shadows in her mirror. (It was common for weavers to use mirrors to see the progress of their tapestries from the side that would eventually be displayed to the viewer.) Tennyson notes that often she sees a funeral or a wedding, a disjunction that suggests the interchangeability, and hence the conflation, of love and death for the Lady: indeed, when she later falls in love with Lancelot, she will simultaneously bring upon her own death.
Whereas Part II makes reference to all the different types of people that the Lady sees through her mirror, including the knights who "come riding two and two" (line 61), Part III focuses on one particular knight who captures the Lady's attention: Sir Lancelot. This dazzling knight is the hero of the King Arthur stories, famous for his illicit affair with the beautiful Queen Guinevere. He is described in an array of colors: he is a "red-cross knight"; his shield "sparkled on the yellow field"; he wears a "silver bugle"; he passes through "blue unclouded weather" and the "purple night," and he has "coal-black curls." He is also adorned in a "gemmy bridle" and other bejeweled garments, which sparkle in the light. Yet in spite of the rich visual details that Tennyson provides, it is the sound and not the sight of Lancelot that causes the Lady of Shalott to transgress her set boundaries: only when she hears him sing "Tirra lirra" does she leave her web and seal her doom. The intensification of the Lady's experiences in this part of the poem is marked by the shift from the static, descriptive present tense of Parts I and II to the dynamic, active past of Parts III and IV.
In Part IV, all the lush color of the previous section gives way to "pale yellow" and "darkened" eyes, and the brilliance of the sunlight is replaced by a "low sky raining." The moment the Lady sets her art aside to look upon Lancelot, she is seized with death. The end of her artistic isolation thus leads to the end of creativity: "Out flew her web and floated wide" (line 114). She also loses her mirror, which had been her only access to the outside world: "The mirror cracked from side to side" (line 115).
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Her turn to the outside world thus leaves her bereft both of her art object and of the instrument of her craft--and of her very life. Yet perhaps the greatest curse of all is that although she surrenders herself to the sight of Lancelot, she dies completely unappreciated by him. The poem ends with the tragic triviality of Lancelot's response to her tremendous passion: all he has to say about her is that "she has a lovely face" (line 169). Having abandoned her artistry, the Lady of Shalott becomes herself an art object; no longer can she offer her creativity, but merely a "dead-pale" beauty (line 157).
Ulysses
Ulysses (Odysseus) declares that there is little point in his staying home "by this still hearth" with his old wife, doling out rewards and punishments for the unnamed masses who live in his kingdom.
Still speaking to himself he proclaims that he "cannot rest from travel" but feels compelled to live to the fullest and swallow every last drop of life. He has enjoyed all his experiences as a sailor who travels the seas, and he considers himself a symbol for everyone who wanders and roams the earth. His travels have exposed him to many different types of people and ways of living. They have also exposed him to the "delight of battle" while fighting the Trojan War with his men. Ulysses declares that his travels and encounters have shaped who he is: "I am a part of all that I have met," he asserts. And it is only when he is traveling that the "margin" of the globe that he has not yet traversed shrink and fade, and cease to goad him.
Ulysses declares that it is boring to stay in one place, and that to remain stationary is to rust rather than to shine; to stay in one place is to pretend that all there is to life is the simple act of breathing, whereas he knows that in fact life contains much novelty, and he longs to encounter this. His spirit yearns constantly for new experiences that will broaden his horizons; he wishes "to follow knowledge like a sinking star" and forever grow in wisdom and in learning.
Ulysses now speaks to an unidentified audience concerning his son Telemachus, who will act as his successor while the great hero resumes his travels: he says, "This is my son, mine own Telemachus, to whom I leave the scepter and the isle." He speaks highly but also patronizingly of his son's capabilities as a ruler, praising his prudence, dedication, and devotion to the gods. Telemachus will do his work of governing the island while Ulysses will do his work of traveling the seas: "He works his work, I mine."
In the final stanza, Ulysses addresses the mariners with whom he has worked, traveled, and weathered life's storms over many years. He declares that although he and they are old, they still have the potential to do something noble and honorable before "the long day wanes." He encourages them to make use of their old age
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because "'tis not too late to seek a newer world." He declares that his goal is to sail onward "beyond the sunset" until his death. Perhaps, he suggests, they may even reach the "Happy Isles," or the paradise of perpetual summer described in Greek mythology where great heroes like the warrior Achilles were believed to have been taken after their deaths. Although Ulysses and his mariners are not as strong as they were in youth, they are "strong in will" and are sustained by their resolve to push onward relentlessly: "To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield."
Form
This poem is written as a dramatic monologue: the entire poem is spoken by a single character, whose identity is revealed by his own words. The lines are in blank verse, or unrhymed iambic pentameter, which serves to impart a fluid and natural quality to Ulysses's speech. Many of the lines are enjambed, which means that a thought does not end with the line-break; the sentences often end in the middle, rather than the end, of the lines. The use of enjambment is appropriate in a poem about pushing forward "beyond the utmost bound of human thought." Finally, the poem is divided into four paragraph-like sections, each of which comprises a distinct thematic unit of the poem.
Commentary
In this poem, written in 1833 and revised for publication in 1842, Tennyson reworks the figure of Ulysses by drawing on the ancient hero of Homer's Odyssey ("Ulysses" is the Roman form of the Greek "Odysseus") and the medieval hero of Dante's Inferno. Homer's Ulysses, as described in Scroll XI of the Odyssey, learns from a prophecy that he will take a final sea voyage after killing the suitors of his wife Penelope. The details of this sea voyage are described by Dante in Canto XXVI of the Inferno: Ulysses finds himself restless in Ithaca and driven by "the longing I had to gain experience of the world." Dante's Ulysses is a tragic figure who dies while sailing too far in an insatiable thirst for knowledge. Tennyson combines these two accounts by having Ulysses make his speech shortly after returning to Ithaca and resuming his administrative responsibilities, and shortly before embarking on his final voyage.
However, this poem also concerns the poet's own personal journey, for it was composed in the first few weeks after Tennyson learned of the death of his dear college friend Arthur Henry Hallam in 1833. Like In Memoriam, then, this poem is also an elegy for a deeply cherished friend. Ulysses, who symbolizes the grieving poet, proclaims his resolution to push onward in spite of the awareness that "death closes all" (line 51). As Tennyson himself stated, the poem expresses his own "need of going forward and braving the struggle of life" after the loss of his beloved Hallam.
The poem's final line, "to strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield," came to serve as a motto for the poet's Victorian contemporaries: the poem's hero longs to flee the tedium of daily life "among these barren crags" (line 2) and to enter a mythical
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dimension "beyond the sunset, and the baths of all the western stars" (lines 60-61); as such, he was a model of individual self-assertion and the Romantic rebellion against bourgeois conformity. Thus for Tennyson's immediate audience, the figure of Ulysses held not only mythological meaning, but stood as an important contemporary cultural icon as well.
"Ulysses," like many of Tennyson's other poems, deals with the desire to reach beyond the limits of one's field of vision and the mundane details of everyday life. Ulysses is the antithesis of the mariners in "The Lotos-Eaters," who proclaim "we will no longer roam" and desire only to relax amidst the Lotos fields. In contrast, Ulysses "cannot rest from travel" and longs to roam the globe (line 6). Like the Lady of Shallot, who longs for the worldly experiences she has been denied, Ulysses hungers to explore the untraveled world.
As in all dramatic monologues, here the character of the speaker emerges almost unintentionally from his own words. Ulysses' incompetence as a ruler is evidenced by his preference for potential quests rather than his present responsibilities. He devotes a full 26 lines to his own egotistical proclamation of his zeal for the wandering life, and another 26 lines to the exhortation of his mariners to roam the seas with him. However, he offers only 11 lines of lukewarm praise to his son concerning the governance of the kingdom in his absence, and a mere two words about his "aged wife" Penelope. Thus, the speaker's own words betray his abdication of responsibility and his specificity of purpose.
Tithonus The woods in the forests grow old and their leaves fall to the ground. Man is born, works the earth, and then dies and is buried underground. Yet the speaker, Tithonus, is cursed to live forever. Tithonus tells Aurora, goddess of the dawn, that he grows old slowly in her arms like a "white-hair'd shadow" roaming in the east.
Tithonus laments that while he is now a "gray shadow" he was once a beautiful man chosen as Aurora's lover. He remembers that he long ago asked Aurora to grant him eternal life: "Give me immortality!" Aurora granted his wish generously, like a rich philanthropist who has so much money that he gives charity without thinking twice. However, the Hours, the goddesses who accompany Aurora, were angry that Tithonus was able to resist death, so they took their revenge by battering him until he grew old and withered. Now, though he cannot die, he remains forever old; and he must dwell in the presence of Aurora, who renews herself each morning and is thus forever young. Tithonus appeals to Aurora to take back the gift of immortality while the "silver star" of Venus rises in the morning. He now realizes the ruin in desiring to be different from all the rest of mankind and in living beyond the "goal of ordinance," the normal human lifespan.
Just before the sun rises, Tithonus catches sight of the "dark world" where he was born a mortal. He witnesses the coming of Aurora, the dawn: her cheek begins to
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turn red and her eyes grow so bright that they overpower the light of the stars. Aurora's team of horses awakes and converts the twilight into fire. The poet now addresses Aurora, telling her that she always grows beautiful and then leaves before she can answer his request. He questions why she must "scare" him with her tearful look of silent regret; her look makes him fear that an old saying might be true--that "The Gods themselves cannot recall their gifts."
Tithonus sighs and remembers his youth long ago, when he would watch the arrival of the dawn and feel his whole body come alive as he lay down and enjoyed the kisses of another. This lover from his youth used to whisper to him "wild and sweet" melodies, like the music of Apollo's lyre, which accompanied the construction of Ilion (Troy).
Tithonus asks Aurora not to keep him imprisoned in the east where she rises anew each morning, because his eternal old age contrasts so painfully with her eternal renewal. He cringes cold and wrinkled, whereas she rises each morning to warm "happy men that have the power to die" and men who are already dead in their burial mounds ("grassy barrows"). Tithonus asks Aurora to release him and let him die. This way, she can see his grave when she rises and he, buried in the earth, will be able to forget the emptiness of his present state, and her return "on silver wheels" that stings him each morning.
Form
This poem is a dramatic monologue: the entire text is spoken by a single character whose words reveal his identity. The lines take the form of blank verse (unrhymed iambic pentameter). The poem as a whole falls into seven paragraph-like sections of varying length, each of which forms a thematic unit unto itself.
Commentary
Like Ulysses, Tithonus is a figure from Greek mythology whom Tennyson takes as a speaker in one of his dramatic monologues (see the section on "Ulysses"). According to myth, Tithonus is the brother of Priam, King of Troy, and was loved by Aurora, the immortal goddess of the dawn, who had a habit of carrying off the beautiful young men whom she fancied. Aurora abducted Tithonus and asked Zeus to grant him immortality, which Zeus did. However, she forgot to ask that he also grant eternal youth, so Tithonus soon became a decrepit old man who could not die. Aurora finally transformed him into a grasshopper to relieve him of his sad existence. In this poem, Tennyson slightly alters the mythological story: here, it is Tithonus, not Aurora, who asks for immortality, and it is Aurora, not Zeus, who confers this gift upon him. The source of suffering in the poem is not Aurora's forgetfulness in formulating her request to Zeus, but rather the goddesses referred to as "strong Hours" who resent Tithonus's immortality and subject him to the ravages of time.
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Tennyson wrote the first version of this poem as "Tithon" in 1833, and then completed the final version for publication in 1859 in the Cornhill Magazine edited by William Makepeace Thackeray. The 1833 version contained several significant differences from the version we know today: the poem began not with a repetition but with the lament "Ay me! ay me! The woods decay and fall"; the "swan,"which here dies after many summers was not a swan but a "rose"; and immortality was described as "fatal" rather than "cruel."
The 1833 poem was initially conceived as a pendant, or companion poem, to "Ulysses." "Ulysses" alludes to the danger that fulfillment may bring--"It may be that the gulfs will wash us down"; "Tithonus" represents the realization of this danger. For the character of Tithonus achieves that which Ulysses longs for and finds himself bitterly disappointed: Ulysses wanted to sail "beyond the sunset" because he sensed "how dull it is to pause"; Tithonus, in contrast, questions why any man should want "to pass beyond the goal of ordinance where all should pause" (lines 30-31). "Tithonus" thus serves as an appropriate thematic follow-up to "Ulysses."
This poem was one of a set of four works (also including "Morte d'Arthur," "Ulysses," and "Tiresias") that Tennyson wrote shortly after Arthur Henry Hallam's death in 1833. Whereas Hallam was granted youth without immortality, Tithonus is granted immortality without youth. Tennyson developed the idea for a poem about these themes of age and mortality after hearing a remark by Emily Sellwood, Tennyson's fiancée: Sellwood lamented that unlike the Hallams, "None of the Tennysons ever die." Appropriately, in depicting the futility of eternal life without youth, Tennyson drew upon a timeless figure: the figure of Tithonus is eternally old because he lives on forever as an old man in the popular imagination.
The Epic Summary
This poem describes a gathering of four friends on Christmas Eve: a parson (member of the clergy) named Holmes, a poet named Everard Hall, their host Francis Allen (Frank), and the narrator. After they finish gambling and dismiss the women who were in attendance, they sit around the half-empty bowl of wine and discuss how Christmas is no longer taken seriously as a religious holiday: "All the old honor had from Christmas gone." The narrator is exhausted and soon "f[a]ll[s] in a doze." While "half-asleep," he listens to the parson criticize the new science of geology and the internal divisions within the church, which have contributed to "the general decay of faith."
When the poet awakes, he hears the parson lament that there is nothing to depend on in modern times. The host, Francis Allen, suggests that poetry might replace religion as the new source of faith and inspiration. However, upon hearing Frank's
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tribute to him, the poet Hall remarks sarcastically that he looks for inspiration to the bowl of wine! The narrator, now fully awake, responds that they all remember Hall's fondness for alcohol from their college days. However, he added, they also remember his talent for writing verse, and wonder "What came of that?" Before the poet can answer, Frank relates that the poet burnt the twelve books of the epic he had written about King Arthur because he thought that his poetry had nothing new to say. Rushing to his own defense, Hall explains that there was no point in writing poetry that was merely an echo of old times; just as nature cannot restore extinct animals such as the mastodon, the poet should not attempt verse in the classical style that will merely read as "faint Homeric echoes."
Frank informs his friends that he actually salvaged the eleventh of the twelve books in the poet's Arthurian epic, pulling it from the fire before it could burn. The narrator requests that the poet now read aloud from his book, because he remembers the respect Hall enjoyed when they were freshmen in college. Hall reluctantly agrees to share his work with his friends.
After Hall finishes reading, the last light flickers and dies out--but the host and the narrator remain so enraptured by the poet's words that they cannot move. The narrator explains that he is not sure whether "it was the tone in which he read" that made Hall's writing so powerful, or whether the success of his writing can be attributed to "some modern touches here and there," which he added to the classical story. They sit until the cock crows, heralding the arrival of Christmas. The narrator goes to bed and dreams of Arthur: "And so to bed, where yet in sleep I seemed to sail with Arthur." He dreams of a boat carrying Arthur back to the present like a modern gentleman as all the people gather around him to welcome him as the harbinger of peace. Then, the narrator hears the sound of "a hundred bells" and wakes to the church bells on Christmas Morning.
Form
This poem serves as a frame for the twelfth and final book in Tennyson's Idylls of the King: the first 51 lines precede the idyll and then lines 324-354 follow it. Its lines are in blank verse, which is a name for unrhymed iambic pentameter. Blank verse, the most common form of counted unrhymed lines, matches the cadences of spoken language more closely than any other form (rather than free-form), and is thus appropriate for a poem chronicling a conversation among four friends. (The entire Idylls of the King, too, is written in blank verse.)
Commentary
In 1833, Tennyson proposed to write a long epic about King Arthur, the legendary British leader who resisted the Anglo-Saxon invaders of sixth-century England. By 1838, he had completed one of the twelve books, entitled "Morte d'Arthur," which chronicled the king's death ("morte"). He published this single book in 1842 within the framework of this poem, "The Epic," which consists of 51 lines
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that precede "Morte d'Arthur" and thirty lines that follow it. "The Epic" provides a modern context for the Arthurian story by casting it as a manuscript read aloud by a poet to three of his friends following their Christmas-Eve revelry. After Tennyson completed all twelve books of Idylls of the King in 1869, he discarded this framing poem and retitled "Morte d'Arthur" as "The Passing of Arthur."
Like "The Lady of Shalott," Tennyson's epic poem has its origins in the story of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table, written by Sir Thomas Malory in 1485. Malory himself had adapted the Arthur story from a variety of 12th-century French romances. However, the literary context of this poem extends back even further, because, as the poet Everard Hall remarks, "These twelve books of mine / Were faint Homeric echoes" (lines 38-39). Like Homer's Odyssey and Virgil's Aeneid, Tennyson's Idylls is a long epic in twelve books chronicling the adventures of a hero. Further, several of the images and references in Tennyson's poem can be traced back to classical sources, and even the term "idyll," which Tennyson used to describe each of the twelve books, refers to a classical genre of poetry consisting of brief but artful representations of contemporary life. The final image in "The Epic," in which King Arthur sails downstream in a boat until he reaches a waiting crow, which greets him with cheers of "Arthur is come again" (line 347), corresponds to the formula for ending a classical pastoral elegy, in which people gather to lament a death and express faith in the peace-bringing deification of the departed hero. This image also bears a striking resemblance to the final lines of "The Lady of Shalott," in which the lady sails down in her boat to Camelot and is heralded by the people of the town.
However, like "Ulysses," this poem does not stem exclusively from mythology, but also has roots in Tennyson's personal history: his King Arthur is also modelled after his dear friend Arthur Henry Hallam, who died the same year that Tennyson began writing "The Epic." For the rest of Tennyson's life, he retained in his mind an idealized image of his friend, and Arthur's famous characteristics evoke this image: Arthur is renowned for his physical adroitness, insight, penetrating honesty, wisdom, innocence, and nobility of spirit, all of which virtues Tennyson attributed to his departed friend in various other writings. Moreover, the dissolution of the Round Table alludes to the shock of Hallam's death to his peers in Cambridge, and the closing image in the poem, in which the poet awakes to hear "the clear church bells ring in the Christmas morn," (line 354) references the Christmas bells of Section CVI of "In Memoriam," the poet's elegy for Hallam. In addition, Tennyson's poem has some of the same "modern touches here and there" that his poem's narrator attributes to the poem-within-the-poem (line 329); he uses the Arthurian cycle as a medium for the discussion of contemporary problems, namely the decay of ethical principles that he perceived in commercial, political, and social life.
As in many of Tennyson's poems, this work exhibits a great concern with the scientific developments of his day; the parson mentions geology as one of the sources of the decline in faith in contemporary times (line 16). The science of geology, which suddenly extended the history of the earth back millions of years beyond the standard biblical account, had been formulated by Charles Lyell in his Principles of Geology (1830-33). Lyell drew on evidence from fossils found beneath the surface of the earth,
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and Tennyson's characters, too, rely on fossils as evidence for their arguments. Thus they say, "Why take the style of those heroic times? For nature brings not back the mastodon" (lines 35-36): the poet Hall, in arguing that artists must not simply "remodel models," cites as evidence the fact that nature never brings back extinct species such as the mastodon, known only by its fossilized remains. Ironically, then, the poet draws upon fossils as evidence while lamenting the new science that does just this.
Tears,Ideal Tears
The speaker sings of the baseless and inexplicable tears that rise in his heart and pour forth from his eyes when he looks out on the fields in autumn and thinks of the past.
This past, ("the days that are no more") is described as fresh and strange. It is as fresh as the first beam of sunlight that sparkles on the sail of a boat bringing the dead back from the underworld, and it is sad as the last red beam of sunlight that shines on a boat that carries the dead down to this underworld.
The speaker then refers to the past as not "fresh," but "sad" and strange. As such, it resembles the song of the birds on early summer mornings as it sounds to a dead person, who lies watching the "glimmering square" of sunlight as it appears through a square window.
In the final stanza, the speaker declares the past to be dear, sweet, deep, and wild. It is as dear as the memory of the kisses of one who is now dead, and it is as sweet as those kisses that we imagine ourselves bestowing on lovers who actually have loyalties to others. So, too, is the past as deep as "first love" and as wild as the regret that usually follows this experience. The speaker concludes that the past is a "Death in Life."
Form
This poem is written in blank verse, or unrhymed iambic pentameter. It consists of four five-line stanzas, each of which closes with the words "the days that are no more."
Commentary
"Tears, Idle Tears" is part of a larger poem called "The Princess," published in 1847. Tennyson wrote "The Princess" to discuss the relationship between the sexes and to provide an argument for women's rights in higher education. However, the
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work as a whole does not present a single argument or tell a coherent story. Rather, like so much of Tennyson's poetry, it evokes complex emotions and moods through a mastery of language. "Tears, Idle Tears," a particularly evocative section, is one of several interludes of song in the midst of the poem.
In the opening stanza, the poet describes his tears as "idle," suggesting that they are caused by no immediate, identifiable grief. However, his tears are simultaneously the product of a "divine despair," suggesting that they do indeed have a source: they "rise in the heart" and stem from a profoundly deep and universal cause. This paradox is complicated by the difficulty of understanding the phrase "divine despair": Is it God who is despairing, or is the despair itself divine? And how can despair be divine if Christian doctrine considers it a sin?
The speaker states that he cries these tears while "looking on the happy autumn-fields." At first, it seems strange that looking at something happy would elicit tears, but the fact that these are fields of autumn suggests that they bear the memories of a spring and summer that have vanished, leaving the poet with nothing to look forward to except the dark and cold of winter. Tennyson explained that the idea for this poem came to him when he was at Tintern Abbey, not far from Hallam's burial place. "Tintern Abbey" is also the title and subject of a famous poem by William Wordsworth. (See the "Tintern Abbey" section in the SparkNote on Wordsworth's Poetry.) Wordsworth's poem, too, reflects on the passage of time and the loss of the joys of youth. However, whereas Tennyson laments "the days that are no more" and describes the past as a "Death in Life," Wordsworth explicitly states that although the past is no more, he has been compensated for its loss with "other gifts.
Thus, although both Wordsworth and Tennyson write poems set at Tintern Abbey about the passage of time, Wordsworth's poem takes on a tone of contentment, whereas Tennyson's languishes in a tone of lament.
"Tears, Idle Tears" is structured by a pattern of unusual adjectives used to describe the memory of the past. In the second stanza, these adjectives are a chiastic "fresh...sad...sad...fresh"; the memory of the birth of friendship is "fresh," whereas the loss of these friends is "sad"; thus when the "days that are no more" are described as both "sad" and "fresh," these words have been preemptively loaded with meaning and connotation: our sense of the "sad" and "fresh" past evokes these blossomed and withered friendships. This stanza's image of the boat sailing to and from the underworld recalls Virgil's image of the boatman Charon, who ferries the dead to Hades.
In the third stanza, the memory of the past is described as "sad...strange...sad...strange." The "sad" adjective is introduced in the image of a man on his deathbed who is awake for his very last morning. However, "strangeness" enters in, too, for it is strange to the dying man that as his life is ending, a new day is beginning. To a person hearing the birds' song and knowing he will never hear it
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again, the twittering will be imbued with an unprecedented significance--the dying man will hear certain melancholy tones for the first time, although, strangely and paradoxically, it is his last.
The final stanza contains a wave of adjectives that rush over us--now no longer confined within a neat chiasmic structure--as the poem reaches its last, climactic lament: "dear...sweet...deep...deep...wild." The repetition of the word "deep" recalls the "depth of some divine despair," which is the source of the tears in the first stanza. However, the speaker is also "wild with all regret" in thinking of the irreclaimable days gone by. The image of a "Death in Life" recalls the dead friends of the second stanza who are like submerged memories that rise to the surface only to sink down once again. This "Death in Life" also recalls the experience of dying in the midst of the rebirth of life in the morning, described in the third stanza. The poet's climactic exclamation in the final line thus represents a culmination of the images developed in the previous stanzas.
In Memorian Summary
Prologue:
The poem begins as a tribute to and invocation of the "Strong Son of God." Since man, never having seen God's face, has no proof of His existence, he can only reach God through faith. The poet attributes the sun and moon ("these orbs or light and shade") to God, and acknowledges Him as the creator of life and death in both man and animals. Man cannot understand why he was created, but he must believe that he was not made simply to die.
The Son of God seems both human and divine. Man has control of his own will, but this is only so that he might exert himself to do God's will. All of man's constructed systems of religion and philosophy seem solid but are merely temporal, in comparison to the eternal God; and yet while man can have knowledge of these systems, he cannot have knowledge of God. The speaker expresses the hope that "knowledge [will] grow from more to more," but this should also be accompanied by a reverence for that which we cannot know.
The speaker asks that God help foolish people to see His light. He repeatedly asks for God to forgive his grief for "thy [God's] creature, whom I found so fair." The speaker has faith that this departed fair friend lives on in God, and asks God to make his friend wise.
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XXVII:
Here the speaker states that he feels no jealousy for the man who is captured and does not know what it means to feel true rage, or for the bird that is born with in a cage and has never spent time outside in the "summer woods." Likewise, he feels no envy for beasts that have no sense of the passage of time and no conscience to check their behavior. He also does not envy those who have never felt pain ("the heart that never plighted troth") or those who complacently enjoy a leisure that they do not rightfully deserve. Even when he is in the greatest pain, he still realizes that "'Tis better to have loved and lost / Than never to have loved at all."
LVI:
After having asserted in Section LV that Nature cares only for the survival of species ("so careful of the type") and not for the survival of individual lives, the speaker now questions whether Nature even cares for the species. He quotes a personified, feminine Nature asserting that she does not attend to the survival of the species, but arbitrarily bestows life or death on all creatures. For Nature, the notion of the "spirit" does not refer to any divine, unearthly element, but rather to the simple act of breathing.
The poet questions whether Man, who prays and trusts in God's love in spite of the evidence of Nature's brutality ("Nature, red in tooth and claw"), will eventually be reduced to dust or end up preserved like fossils in rock: "And he, shall he, Man...Be blown about the desert dust, Or sealed within the iron hills?" The thought of this evokes a notion of the human condition as monstrous, and more terrifying to contemplate than the fate of prehistoric "dragons of the prime." The speaker declares that life is futile and longs for his departed friend's voice to soothe him and mitigate the effect of Nature's callousness.
Form
"In Memoriam" consists of 131 smaller poems of varying length. Each short poem is comprised of isometric stanzas. The stanzas are iambic tetrameter quatrains with the rhyme scheme ABBA, a form that has since become known as the "In Memoriam Stanza." (Of course, Tennyson did not invent the form--it appears in earlier works such as Shakespeare's "The Phoenix and the Turtle"--but he did produce an enduring and memorable example of it.) With the ABBA rhyme scheme, the poem resolves itself in each quatrain; it cannot propel itself forward: each stanza seems complete, closed. Thus to move from one stanza to the next is a motion that does not come automatically to us by virtue of the rhyme scheme; rather, we must will it ourselves; this force of will symbolizes the poet's difficulty in moving on after the loss of his beloved friend Arthur Henry Hallam.
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Commentary
Tennyson wrote "In Memoriam" after he learned that his beloved friend Arthur Henry Hallam had died suddenly and unexpectedly of a fever at the age of 22. Hallam was not only the poet's closest friend and confidante, but also the fiance of his sister. After learning of Hallam's death, Tennyson was overwhelmed with doubts about the meaning of life and the significance of man's existence. He composed the short poems that comprise "In Memoriam" over the course of seventeen years (1833-1849) with no intention of weaving them together, though he ultimately published them as a single lengthy poem in 1850.
T.S. Eliot called this poem "the most unapproachable of all his [Tennyson's] poems," and indeed, the sheer length of this work encumbers one's ability to read and study it. Moreover, the poem contains no single unifying theme, and its ideas do not unfold in any particular order. It is loosely organized around three Christmas sections (28, 78, and 104), each of which marks another year that the poet must endure after the loss of Hallam. The climax of the poem is generally considered to be Section 95, which is based on a mystical trance Tennyson had in which he communed with the dead spirit of Hallam late at night on the lawn at his home at Somersby.
"In Memoriam" was intended as an elegy, or a poem in memory and praise of one who has died. As such, it contains all of the elements of a traditional pastoral elegy such as Milton's "Lycidas," including ceremonial mourning for the dead, praise of his virtues, and consolation for his loss. Moreover, all statements by the speaker can be understood as personal statements by the poet himself. Like most elegies, the "In Memoriam" poem begins with expressions of sorrow and grief, followed by the poet's recollection of a happy past spent with the individual he is now mourning. These fond recollections lead the poet to question the powers in the universe that could allow a good person to die, which gives way to more general reflections on the meaning of life. Eventually, the poet's attitude shifts from grief to resignation. Finally, in the climax, he realizes that his friend is not lost forever but survives in another, higher form. The poem closes with a celebration of this transcendent survival.
"In Memoriam" ends with a an epithalamion, or wedding poem, celebrating the marriage of Tennyson's sister Cecilia to Edmund Lushington in 1842. The poet suggests that their marriage will lead to the birth of a child who will serve as a closer link between Tennyson's generation and the "crowning race." This birth also represents new life after the death of Hallam, and hints at a greater, cosmic purpose, which Tennyson vaguely describes as "One far-off divine event / To which the whole creation moves."
Not just an elegy and an epithalamion, the poem is also a deeply philosophical reflection on religion, science, and the promise of immortality. Tennyson was deeply troubled by the proliferation of scientific knowledge about the origins of life and human progress: while he was writing this poem, Sir Charles Lyell published his
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Principles of Geology, which undermined the biblical creation story, and Robert Chambers published his early evolutionary tract, Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation. In "In Memoriam," Tennyson insisted that we hold fast to our faith in a higher power in spite of our inability to prove God's existence: "Believing where we cannot prove." He reflects early evolutionary theories in his faith that man, through a process lasting millions of years, is developing into something greater. In the end, Tennyson replaces the doctrine of the immortality of the soul with the immortality of mankind through evolution, thereby achieving a synthesis between his profound religious faith and the new scientific ideas of his day.
The Charge of the Light Bridge
Summary
The poem tells the story of a brigade consisting of 600 soldiers who rode on horseback into the "valley of death" for half a league (about one and a half miles). They were obeying a command to charge the enemy forces that had been seizing their guns.
Not a single soldier was discouraged or distressed by the command to charge forward, even though all the soldiers realized that their commander had made a terrible mistake: "Someone had blundered." The role of the soldier is to obey and "not to make reply...not to reason why," so they followed orders and rode into the "valley of death."
The 600 soldiers were assaulted by the shots of shells of canons in front and on both sides of them. Still, they rode courageously forward toward their own deaths: "Into the jaws of Death / Into the mouth of hell / Rode the six hundred."
The soldiers struck the enemy gunners with their unsheathed swords ("sabres bare") and charged at the enemy army while the rest of the world looked on in wonder. They rode into the artillery smoke and broke through the enemy line, destroying their Cossack and Russian opponents. Then they rode back from the offensive, but they had lost many men so they were "not the six hundred" any more.
Canons behind and on both sides of the soldiers now assaulted them with shots and shells. As the brigade rode "back from the mouth of hell," soldiers and horses collapsed; few remained to make the journey back.
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The world marvelled at the courage of the soldiers; indeed, their glory is undying: the poem states these noble 600 men remain worthy of honor and tribute today.
Form
This poem is comprised of six numbered stanzas varying in length from six to twelve lines. Each line is in dimeter, which means it has two stressed syllables; moreover, each stressed syllable is followed by two unstressed syllables, making the rhythm dactylic. The use of "falling" rhythm, in which the stress is on the first beat of each metrical unit, and then "falls off" for the rest of the length of the meter, is appropriate in a poem about the devastating fall of the British brigade.
The rhyme scheme varies with each stanza. Often, Tennyson uses the same rhyme (and occasionally even the same final word) for several consecutive lines: "Flashed all their sabres bare / Flashed as they turned in air / Sab'ring the gunners there." The poem also makes use of anaphora, in which the same word is repeated at the beginning of several consecutive lines: "Cannon to right of them / Cannon to left of them / Cannon in front of them." Here the method creates a sense of unrelenting assault; at each line our eyes meet the word "cannon," just as the soldiers meet their flying shells at each turn.
Commentary
"The Charge of the Light Brigade" recalls a disastrous historical military engagement that took place during the initial phase of the Crimean War fought between Turkey and Russia (1854-56). Under the command of Lord Raglan, British forces entered the war in September 1854 to prevent the Russians from obtaining control of the important sea routes through the Dardanelles. From the beginning, the war was plagued by a series of misunderstandings and tactical blunders, one of which serves as the subject of this poem: on October 25, 1854, as the Russians were seizing guns from British soldiers, Lord Raglan sent desperate orders to his Light Cavalry Brigade to fend off the Russians. Finally, one of his orders was acted upon, and the brigade began charging--but in the wrong direction! Over 650 men rushed forward, and well over 100 died within the next few minutes. As a result of the battle, Britain lost possession of the majority of its forward defenses and the only metaled road in the area.
In the 21st century, the British involvement in the Crimean War is dismissed as an instance of military incompetence; we remember it only for the heroism displayed in it by Florence Nightingale, the famous nurse. However, for Tennyson and most of his contemporaries, the war seemed necessary and just. He wrote this poem as a celebration of the heroic soldiers in the Light Brigade who fell in service to their
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commander and their cause. The poem glorifies war and courage, even in cases of complete inefficiency and waste.
Unlike the medieval and mythical subject of "The Lady of Shalott" or the deeply personal grief of "Tears, Idle Tears," this poem instead deals with an important political development in Tennyson's day. As such, it is part of a sequence of political and military poems that Tennyson wrote after he became Poet Laureate of England in 1850, including "Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington" (1852) and "Riflemen, Form" (1859). These poems reflect Tennyson's emerging national consciousness and his sense of compulsion to express his political views.
This poem is effective largely because of the way it conveys the movement and sound of the charge via a strong, repetitive falling meter: "Half a league, half a league / Half a league onward." The plodding pace of the repetitions seems to subsume all individual impulsiveness in ponderous collective action. The poem does not speak of individual troops but rather of "the six hundred" and then "all that was left of them." Even Lord Raglan, who played such an important role in the battle, is only vaguely referred to in the line "someone had blundered." Interestingly, Tennyson omitted this critical and somewhat subversive line in the 1855 version of this poem, but the writer John Ruskin later convinced him to restore it for the sake of the poem's artistry. Although it underwent several revisions following its initial publication in 1854, the poem as it stands today is a moving tribute to courage and heroism in the face of devastating defeat.
The Crossing Bar
Summary
The speaker heralds the setting of the sun and the rise of the evening star, and hears that he is being called. He hopes that the ocean will not make the mournful sound of waves beating against a sand bar when he sets out to sea. Rather, he wishes for a tide that is so full that it cannot contain sound or foam and therefore seems asleep when all that has been carried from the boundless depths of the ocean returns back out to the depths.
The speaker announces the close of the day and the evening bell, which will be followed by darkness. He hopes that no one will cry when he departs, because although he may be carried beyond the limits of time and space as we know them, he retains the hope that he will look upon the face of his "Pilot" when he has crossed the sand bar.
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Form
This poem consists of four quatrain stanzas rhyming ABAB. The first and third lines of each stanza are always a couple of beats longer than the second and fourth lines, although the line lengths vary among the stanzas.
Commentary
Tennyson wrote "Crossing the Bar" in 1889, three years before he died. The poem describes his placid and accepting attitude toward death. Although he followed this work with subsequent poems, he requested that "Crossing the Bar" appear as the final poem in all collections of his work.
Tennyson uses the metaphor of a sand bar to describe the barrier between life and death. A sandbar is a ridge of sand built up by currents along a shore. In order to reach the shore, the waves must crash against the sandbar, creating a sound that Tennyson describes as the "moaning of the bar." The bar is one of several images of liminality in Tennyson's poetry: in "Ulysses," the hero desires "to sail beyond the sunset"; in "Tithonus", the main character finds himself at the "quiet limit of the world," and regrets that he has asked to "pass beyond the goal of ordinance."
The other important image in the poem is one of "crossing," suggesting Christian connotations: "crossing" refers both to "crossing over" into the next world, and to the act of "crossing" oneself in the classic Catholic gesture of religious faith and devotion. The religious significance of crossing was clearly familiar to Tennyson, for in an earlier poem of his, the knights and lords of Camelot "crossed themselves for fear" when they saw the Lady of Shalott lying dead in her boat. The cross was also where Jesus died; now as Tennyson himself dies, he evokes the image again. So, too, does he hope to complement this metaphorical link with a spiritual one: he hopes that he will "see [his] Pilot face to face."
The ABAB rhyme scheme of the poem echoes the stanzas' thematic patterning: the first and third stanzas are linked to one another as are the second and fourth. Both the first and third stanzas begin with two symbols of the onset of night: "sunset and evening star" and "twilight and evening bell." The second line of each of these stanzas begins with "and," conjoining another item that does not fit together as straightforwardly as the first two: "one clear call for me" and "after that the dark!" Each of these lines is followed by an exclamation point, as the poet expresses alarm at realizing what death will entail. These stanzas then conclude with a wish that is stated metaphorically in the first stanza: "may there be no moaning of the bar / When I put out to sea"; and more literally in the third stanza: "And may there be no sadness of farewell / When I embark." Yet the wish is the same in both stanzas: the poet does not want his relatives and friends to cry for him after he dies. Neither of these stanzas concludes with a period, suggesting that each is intimately linked to the one that follows.
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The second and fourth stanzas are linked because they both begin with a qualifier: "but" in the second stanza, and "for though" in the fourth. In addition, the second lines of both stanzas connote excess, whether it be a tide "too full for sound and foam" or the "far" distance that the poet will be transported in death.
The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock(1915) By
T.S.Eliot
T.S. Eliot started writing "Prufrock Among the Women" in 1909 as a graduate student at Harvard. He revised it over the next couple of years, changing the title to "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" along the way. First published in the Chicago magazine Poetry in June 1915, "Prufrock" later headlined Eliot's first book of poetry, Prufrock and Other Observations (1917). The collection established Eliot's reputation as a Modernist poet to be reckoned with, and "Prufrock" detailed many of the techniques and themes
Eliot would expand with "The Waste Land" and later works: vocal fragmentation and allusiveness, a precision of imagery borrowed from the 19th-century French Symbolists, a condemnation of the sterility of the modern world, and a dry, self-conscious wit.
The poem is very much a young man's work, though its speaker, through dramatic monologue, is a presumably middle-aged man. The farcical "J. Alfred Prufrock" name echoes Eliot's style at the time of signing his name "T. Stearns Eliot," and we can assume that Eliot shared at least some of Prufrock's anxieties over women, though he clearly satirizes Prufrock's neuroses (and, thus, his own) at points in the poem. However, this remains a dangerous assumption, as Eliot famously maintained in his essay "Tradition and the Individual Talent" that the "progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality."
Major Themes:
Prufrockian paralysis: Paralysis, the incapacity to act, has been the Achilles heel of many famous, mostly male, literary characters. Shakespeare's Hamlet is the paragon of paralysis; unable to sort through his waffling, anxious mind, Hamlet makes a decisive action only at the end of "Hamlet." Eliot parodically updates Hamlet's paralysis to the modern world in "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock." Parodically, because Prufrock's paralysis is not over murder and the state of a corrupt kingdom, but whether he should "dare to eat a peach" (122) in front of high-society women.
Indeed, Prufrock's paralysis revolves around his social and sexual anxieties, the two usually tied together. Eliot intended Prufrock's name to resound of a "prude" in a
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"frock," and the hero's emasculation shows up in a number of physical areas: "his arms and legs are thin" (44) and, notably, "his hair is growing thin" (41). The rest of the poem is a catalogue of Prufrock's inability to act; he does not, "after tea and cakes and ices, / Have the strength to force the moment to its crisis" (79-80).
The original title of the poem was "Prufrock Among the Women," and Prufrock, as a balding, weak, neurotic, effete intellectual, is both baffled and intimidated by women. Perhaps the central image of his anxiety is his being "pinned and wriggling on the wall" (58) under the unflinching gaze of women (exacerbated since the women's eyes, much like their "Arms that are braceleted and white and bare" [63], seem eerily disconnected from their bodies). At least here the women seem to be paying attention to him, however hostile they may be. By the end of the poem, Prufrock feels ostracized from the society of women, the "mermaids singing, each to each. / I do not think that they will sing to me" (124-125). Interestingly, Prufrock's obsession with his bald spot rears its ugly head here; the beautiful, vain mermaids comb the "white hair of the waves blown back" (127). As hair is a symbol of virility, Eliot suggests that Prufrock's paralysis is deeply rooted in psychosexual anxiety.
Yet Prufrock admits he is not even "Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be; / Am an attendant lordŠ / Almost, at times, the Fool" (111-112, 119). At best he is the doddering Polonius from "Hamlet," or a generic clown. He is a modern tragic hero, which is to say he is a mock-hero whose concerns are pathetic yet still real. The final six lines of the poem comprise a sestet that somewhat echoes the Petrarchan sonnet, yet Prufrock, unlike Petrarch, does not have an ideal, unrequited love like Laura; he has a very real anxiety about all women.
Temporal repetition and anxiety: Prufrock's paralysis (see Prufrockian paralysis, above) roots itself in the poem's structure. Eliot deploys several refrains, such as "In the room the women come and go / Talking of Michelangelo" (13-14, 35-36) and "And would it have been worth it, after all" (87, 99), to underscore Prufrock's tendency to get stuck on a problem. Just when we believe Prufrock has waded through the "hundred visions and revisions" (33) and come to a conclusion, he echoes a line from the beginning of the stanza. For instance, the double "'at all'" from the woman's "'That is not it at all, / That is not what I meant, at all'" (109-110) provides the answer for Prufrock's original question of "And would it have been worth it, after all" (no, evidently).
The refrains and echoes indicate Prufrock's entrapment in the present tense, but Eliot notes his hero's other temporal afflictions. The swinging rhythm of the poem - at times rhymed for long stretches, often not - hints at a confusing, chaotic sense of time within Prufrock's head. The confusion establishes itself in the "And would it have been worth it, after all" line. By using the perfect conditional tense, Prufrock deludes himself into thinking he has made a decision and is now reviewing it.
This delusion only masks Prufrock's greater anxiety about the future and aging. Already characterized as having lost the luster of youth (and pathetically trying to approximate the bohemian style of rolling his trousers), the only thing Prufrock marches toward decisively is death. The poem's epigraph from Dante's Inferno casts a deathly pallor over the proceedings, and Prufrock seems already in his own nightmarish afterlife. The two allusions to Andrew Marvell's poem "To His Coy
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Mistress" ironically comment on Prufrock's attitude toward life. In the poem, the speaker urges his lady to have sex with him while they are still young and alive. Prufrock's allusions, however - "And indeed there will be time" (23) and "Would it have been worth while, / Š To have squeezed the universe into a ball" (90, 92) - reinforce his fixation on paralysis rather than sex. He deludes himself into thinking he has plenty of time left, and thus does not need to act; death looms, though, however much he wants to deny it. Sex, of course, reproduces new life while death ends it; Prufrock is somewhere in the middle, gradually advancing on the latter.
Fragmentation: One of the key terms in Modernist literature, fragmentation is the accumulation of numerous and varied - often to chaotic effect - signs (words, images, sounds). James Joyce's Ulysses, with fragments as obscure as specific letters that course meaningfully throughout the novel, is possibly the defining fragmented Modernist work. But it is so successful because the Modernists also believed that meaning could be made out of these fragments. To quote from Eliot's "The Wasteland," possibly the defining Modernist poem: "These fragments I have shored against my ruins" (431). From the ruins of fragments, some coherence can be established; only this gives the chaos of modern life hope.
Prufrock concerns itself with fragmentation, yet it does not quite have the hopefulness of "The Wasteland" (it should be noted that many readers do not see this optimism behind the finale of "The Wasteland"). The city Prufrock lives in is itself fragmented, a scattered collection of "Streets that follow like a tedious argument" (8) above which "lonely men in shirt-sleeves" (72) lean out of their isolated windows. The population is fragmented, lost and alone; even the sterile skyline resembles a "patient etherized upon a table" (3).
Eliot achieves much of this fragmentation through his exquisite imagery. Whether it is the subliminal comparison between the fog "that rubs its muzzle on the windowpanes" (16) and feline movement, a self-conscious dissection of how women's eyes have Prufrock "pinned and wriggling on the wall" (58), or Prufrock's self-debasement as a "pair of ragged claws" (73), the images in "Prufrock" are specific and symbolic. Eliot takes a cue from the 19th-century French Symbolists - Charles Baudelaire, Arthur Rimbaud, Stephene Mallarme, and particularly Jules Laforgue - who believed that life should be represented in literature through symbolic, and not realistic, forms. Eliot uses what he has referred to as the "objective correlative," in which he grafts emotional meaning onto otherwise concrete objects, such as the cat, an insect specimen (the pin), and the crab's claws. His intent behind these fragmented images is, as he has argued in his essay "Tradition and the Individual Talent," that the "progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality." Out of the fragmented images we come away with a coherent analysis of Prufrock-the-character, not of Eliot-the-poet.
Augmenting our appreciation of the fragmented Prufrock is insight into his mind and voice. His mind is perhaps more easily represented; all over the place, interrupted by self-interrogation and self-consciousness, looping back on itself, Prufrock's train of thought is deeply fragmented. But his voice is Eliot's greater achievement, one that sows the seeds for "The Wasteland." What is Prufrock's voice, poetically speaking? It is difficult to answer because it is a combination of so many historic poetic voices. The poem comes in the form of a dramatic monologue, a form that is usually fit for a
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resonant speaking voice (and one that extinguishes the personality of the poet, too). But "Prufrock" has a chorus of fragmented voices - the epigraph to Dante, the frequent allusions to the Bible, Shakespeare, and many poetic predecessors - which deny the existence of a solo voice. This, then, is Prufrock's voice: a fragmentation of voices past and present that somehow harmonize. In "The Wasteland," Eliot would go on to write a poem whose vocal origins are hugely varied and hidden, much like Joyce's Ulysses.
Debasement and Hell: The opening image of the evening "spread out against the sky / Like a patient etherized upon a table" (2-3) hints that what is lower down will be much worse. The epigraph from Dante's Inferno, a work in which the hero descends into the nine successive levels of Hell, also suggests this lowering of height and expectations. Indeed, Prufrock sweeps the reader on a generally downward ride - from the skyline to street life, down stairs during a party, even to the sea floor. Prufrock consistently feels worse about himself in these situations - the reference to "Scuttling across the floors of silent seas" (74) is the ultimate in self-pitying - but they have more resonance when we consider the Dante epigraph. Prufrock is descending into his own Hell, and he brings the reader along with him for safety - just as Guido da Montefeltro tells Dante his story in Hell only because he thinks Dante will never resurface and tell others about it. Fittingly, Prufrock switches from his first-person singular narration to first-person plural in the last stanza: "We have lingered in the chambers of the sea / By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown / Till human voices wake us, and we drown" (129-131). For his final plunge, Prufrock wants to make sure that we, his Dantesque listener, accompany him into his self-pitying Hell.
Annotations:
Annotations from B.C. Southam's A Student's Guide to the Selected Poems of T.S. Eliot and The Norton Anthology of English Literature.
Title: Orginal title: "Prufrock Among the Women." "J. Alfred Prufrock" parallels Eliot's signature - "T. Stearns Eliot" - at the time of writing (1909-1911).
Epigraph: Lines are from Dante's Inferno, spoken by the character of Count Guido da Montefeltro. Dante meets the punished Guido (a false counselor) in the Eighth chasm of Hell, where Guido is imprisoned in a flame. Guido says he is speaking freely to Dante about his evil life only because he thinks Dante is dead and cannot return to earth to report it. Translated from the original Italian: "If I thought that my reply would be to someone who would ever return to the world, this flame would stay without further movement; but as no one has ever returned alive from this depth, if what I hear is true, I answer you without fear of infamy."
spread out (2): This metaphor occurs many times in Henri Bergson's Time and Free Will (1889) to bolster the idea of "duration." While at Harvard, Eliot frequently referred to this book in his writings about Bergson.
In the room the women come and go...Michelangelo (13-14, 35-36): French Symbolist (and heavy influence on Eliot) Jules Laforgue has a similar line about the masters of the Sienne school. Eliot parodies Laforgue but creates a realistic scene of intellectual gossip. Michelangelo: Renaissance Italian sculptor, painter, and poet.
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Fog (15): According to Eliot, the smoke from the factories of his hometown St. Louis.
And indeed there will be time (23): Cf. "Had we but world enough and time," from Metaphysical poet Andrew Marvell's "To His Coy Mistress." The speaker of the poem argues to his "coy mistress" that they could take their time in courtship games only if they were immortal; ironically, Prufrock deludes himself into thinking there will be time to court his lady or ladies.
works and days of hands (29): "Works and Days" is a poem about the farming year by Greek poet Hesiod (8th century B.C.). The ironic divide is between utilitarian farm labor and the "works and days of hands" in empty social gestures.
dying fall (52): In Shakespeare's "Twelfth Night" Duke Orsino asks for an encore of melancholy music: "That strain again! It had a dying fall" (1.1.4).
sprawling on a pin (57): Insect specimens are pinned into place for scientific study. Prufrock's comparison to an animal of some kind is the second of three in the poem (the first is the cat in the third stanza, the third is the crab claws [73-74]).
butt-ends (60): The ends of smoked cigarettes.
Arms that are braceleted white and bare (63): Cf. "A bracelet of bright hair about the bone" in John Donne's "The Relic." Eliot admires the line in his essay "The Metaphysical Poets" (1921).
a pair of ragged claws (73): Self-pitying remark that he would have been better as a crab at the bottom of the ocean. Cf. "Hamlet" 2.2.205-206, Hamlet mocks the unwitting and aging Polonius, saying that Polonius could become young like Hamlet only if he somehow went back in time: "for you yourself, sir, should be old as I am, if, like a crab, you could go backward."
Though I have seen my head...brought in upon a platter (82): Matthew 14:3-11, Mark 6:17-29 in the Bible; the death of John the Baptist. A dancing girl named Salome requested the head of John the Baptist on a silver platter from King Herod. Prufrock's observation of his "(grown slightly bald)" head parodies the event and gives it the flavor of mock-heroism found throughout the poem.
To have squeezed the universe into a ball (92): Cf. Andrew Marvell "To His Coy Mistress" (41-44): "Let us roll all our strength and all / Our sweetness up into one ball, / And tear our pleasures with rough strife / Thorough the iron gates of life." The imagery is suggestive of phallic penetration of the hymen.
Lazarus (94): Luke 16:19-31 in the Bible. In the parable, Lazarus, a beggar, went to Heaven, while Dives, a rich man, went to Hell. Dives wanted to warn his brothers about Hell and appeased to Abraham (unsuccessfully) for Lazarus to be sent back to tell them. The parable is perhaps suggestive of the Dante-Guido da Montefeltro allusion in the epigraph; both concern themselves with the possibility of returning from the afterlife.
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Prince Hamlet (111): Shakespeare's most famous character, from "Hamlet." Hamlet, like Prufrock, is indecisive and anxious about future consequences. Prufrock echoes Hamlet's famous "to be or not to be" (3.1.66) at the end of this line ("nor was meant to be"), a line that is about wondering whether it is worth existing ("to exist or not to exist") and couches itself in the passive tense ("to be").
attendant lord (112): Prufrock does not believe he is a hero, like Hamlet, but an "attendant lord" (in this case, the implication is doddering father Polonius from "Hamlet"), a mere auxiliary character.
To swell a progress (113): An Elizabethan state journey made by a royal or noble person. Elizabethan plays sometimes showed full-blown "progresses" crossing the stage.
Full of high sentence (117): Older meanings: "opinions," "sententiousness."
Fool (119): Standard character in Elizabethan drama, such as a court jester who entertains the nobility and speaks wise nonsense (the Fool in "King Lear" is perhaps the best example).
I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled. / Shall I part my hair behind? (121-122): At the time, both styles were considered bohemian; the middle-aged Prufrock pathetically wonders if he can reverse his aging by embracing such youthful fashions.
Lines 1-36 Summary:
J. Alfred Prufrock, a presumably middle-aged, intellectual, indecisive man, invites the reader along with him through the modern city. He describes the street scene and notes a social gathering of women discussing Renaissance artist Michelangelo. He describes yellow smoke and fog outside the house of the gathering, and keeps insisting that there will be time to do many things in the social world.
Analysis:
The title of the poem is Eliot's first hint that this is not a traditional love poem at all. "J. Alfred Prufrock" is a farcical name, and Eliot wanted the subliminal connotation of a "prude" in a "frock." (The original title was "Prufrock Among the Women.") This emasculation contributes to a number of themes Eliot will explore revolving around paralysis and heroism, but the name also has personal meaning for Eliot. He wrote the poem in 1909 while a graduate student at Harvard (though he revised it over the next few years, eventually publishing it in 1915 and in book form in 1917), and at the time he signed his name as "T. Stearns Eliot."
While it would appear, then, that T. Stearns Eliot was using J. Alfred Prufrock as an alter ego to explore his own emotions, this is not the case. Superficial differences
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aside - Eliot was a young man in 1909, while Prufrock is balding and probably middle-aged - Eliot disdained poetry that focused on the poet himself. He wrote in his essay "Tradition and the Individual Talent" that the "progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality." He crystallized his ideas about how to achieve this extinction of personality in another essay, "Hamlet and His Problems": "The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an 'objective correlative'; in other words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events, which shall be the formula of that particular emotion." Simply put, the objective correlative - a tangible, concrete thing - assumes the emotional significance in a work of art; Eliot largely does away with abstract emotional ruminations. The examples and ramifications of the objective correlative in "Prufrock" will be discussed later.
Eliot first achieves the extinction of his personality by setting "Prufrock" in the poetic form of a dramatic monologue. In this form, the speaker addresses another person and the reader plays the part of the silent listener; often the dramatic monologue is freighted with irony, as the speaker is partially unaware of what he reveals. Robert Browning, the undisputed master of the dramatic monologue, exploited this possibility in his most famous dramatic monologue, "My Last Duchess"; the reader learns much about the Duke that he has not intended to expose.
The dramatic monologue fell out of fashion in 20th-century Modernism after its 19th-century Victorian invention. Eliot was a great believer in the historical value of art; in "Tradition and the Individual Talent," he argued that "the poet must develop or procure the consciousness of the past," especially the literary past. The epigraph is a quotation from Dante's Inferno (27.61-66), and translates: "If I thought that my reply would be to one who would ever return to the world, this flame would stay without further movement; but since none has ever returned alive from this depth, if what I hear is true, I answer you without fear of infamy." The speaker, Guido da Montefeltro, imprisoned in a flame in Hell, relates his shameful, evil life to Dante only because he thinks Dante will never go back to earth and repeat it.
Before we analyze the Dante quote, it is important to note that Eliot's brand of Modernist poetry sought to revive the literary past, as he argued for in "Tradition and the Individual Talent." His poetry, including "Prufrock," is peppered with allusions to the Greeks, Shakespeare, the Metaphysicals, and more. Eliot does not neglect the modern, however; it is often front and center, usually with unfavorable comparisons to the past.
The unpleasant modern world is where "Prufrock" begins. Prufrock, much like da Montefeltro in The Inferno, is confined to Hell; Prufrock's, however, is on earth, in a lonely, alienating city. The images of the city are sterile and deathly; the night sky looks "Like a patient etherized upon a table" (3), while down below barren "half-deserted streets" (4) reveal "one-night cheap hotels / And sawdust restaurants" (6-7). The use of enjambment, the running over of lines, further conveys the labyrinthine spatiality of the city. Although Eliot does not explore the sterility of the modern world as deeply here as he does in "The Wasteland" (1922), the images are undeniably bleak and empty. Often overlooked in the opening salvo is that Prufrock's imagery progresses from the general to the specific and, tellingly, from the elevated to the low. We go from a general look at the skyline to the streets to a hotel room to sawdust-
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covered floors in restaurants. This debasement continues throughout the poem, both literally in the verticality of the images and figuratively in their emotional associations for Prufrock.
Indeed, emotional associations are key, since Eliot deploys the objective correlative technique throughout the poem rather than dwell abstractly on Prufrock's feelings. The above images all speak to some part of Prufrock's personality. The etherized patient, for instance, reflects his paralysis (his inability to act) while the images of the city depict a certain lost loneliness. The objective correlative switches to the "yellow fog that rubs its back upon the windowpanes" (14) in the second stanza. Although Eliot said the fog was suggestive of the factory smoke from his hometown St. Louis, the associations with a cat are obvious. Though Eliot was arguably the greatest lover of cats ever to write poetry (he wrote a number of poems on them, and the musical "Cats" is based on Eliot's work), here the feline correlation seems undesirable.
The fog/cat seems to be looking in on the roomful of fashionable women "talking of Michelangelo" (13). Unable to enter, it lingers pathetically on the outside of the house, and we can imagine Prufrock avoiding, yet desiring, physical contact in much the same way (albeit with far less agility). Eliot again uses an image of physical debasement to explore Prufrock's self-pitying state; the cat goes down from the high windowpanes to the "corners of the evening" (17) to the "pools that stand in drains" (18), lets soot from the high chimneys fall on its back (since it is lower down than the chimneys), then leaps from the terrace to the ground. While Eliot appreciated the dignity of cats, this particular soot-blackened cat does not seem so dignified. Rather, the cat appears weak, non-confrontational, and afraid to enter the house. Moreover, Prufrock's prude-in-a-frock effeminacy emerges through the cat, as felines generally have feminine associations.
Regardless of what one takes from these images, the bewildering collage points to another technique Eliot and the Modernists pioneered: fragmentation. The Modernists felt their writing should mirror their fractured and chaotic world. Fragmentation seems to imply a disordered lack of meaning, but the Modernists resisted this instinct and suggested that meaning could be excavated from the ruins. Just as we can make sense of the seemingly chaotic combination of a 14th-century Dante allusion and a 20th-century dramatic monologue, we can draw meaning from the rapid-fire metropolitan montage Prufrock paints.
Images and allusions are not the only fragmented features of "Prufrock." The rhythm of the lines is deliberately irregular. At times in unrhymed free verse, Eliot occasionally rhymes for long stretches (lines 4-12) and then not at all; his rhyme scheme itself seems like the confusing "Streets that follow like a tedious argument" (8). He also twice uses the refrain of "In the room the women come and go / Talking of Michelangelo" (13-14, 35-36), and often begins lines with the word "And" (7, 23, 29 32, 33). As the word found in three of these lines implies - "time" (23, 29, 32) - the repetitions have something to do with Prufrock's relationship with time.
Prufrock indecisively cycles around even the smallest of concerns: "And time yet for a hundred indecisions, / And for a hundred visions and revisions, / Before the taking of a toast and tea" (32-34). He seems rooted in the present tense and this, according to Eliot and most Modernists, is an unhealthy approach to time. The opening image of
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the evening "spread out" (2) against the sky is an allusion to a metaphor frequently used in turn-of-the-century French philosopher Henri Bergson's work Time and Free Will (1889). Bergson was a great influence on Eliot; the latter attended the philosopher's lectures in Paris in 1910 and was influenced by his theories on consciousness. In Time and Free Will, Bergson argues that time is a single, continuous, and flowing "durée," or duration, rather than a succession of discrete steps with distinct tenses.
The only way to achieve this mental sense of duration, Bergson maintains, is through direct intuition rather than indirect analysis. While much New Age philosophy and theory has hijacked this idea - that one should feel rather than think is an appealing concept - the damaging effects to Prufrock are evident. He is clearly a thinker, not a feeler, and his indecisive thoughts contribute directly to his paralysis, perhaps the most important theme in the poem. As the image of the cat unable to penetrate the house suggests, Prufrock cannot make a decision and act on it. Instead of a flowing duration that integrates all of time, he is imprisoned in the present.
Prufrock's anxiety is rooted in the social world. Not only is he afraid to confront the woman talking of Michelangelo (whose most famous sculpture, David, is the epitome of masculine beauty, a daunting prospect for the flaccid Prufrock), he seems intimidated by the social posturing he must engage in:
There will be time, there will be time To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet; There will be time to murder and create, And time for all the works and days of hands That lift and drop a question on your plate; (26-29) The "works and days of hands" is a reference to 8th-century B.C. Greek poet Hesiod's poem about the farming year, "Works and Days." Prufrock seems to resent the divergence between the blistered hands of hard-working farmers and the smooth ones of social players, just as he dislikes the masks people wear in the social arena ("To prepare a faceŠ"). His social anxiety assumes more importance in the middle part of the poem.
Lines 37-86 Summary:
Prufrock agonizes over his social actions, worrying over how others will see him. He thinks about women's arms and perfume, but does not know how to act. He walks through the streets and watches lonely men leaning out their windows. The day passes at a social engagement but he cannot muster the strength to act, and he admits that he is afraid.
Analysis:
Prufrock's social paralysis is diagnosed in these six stanzas. The smallest action - descending stairs - is occasion for magnified self-scrutiny and the fear that he will "Disturb the universe" (46). He continues asking himself questions about how to comport himself, but admits he will reverse these decisions soon. His inaction is
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constantly tied to the social world: "Should I, after tea and cakes and ices, / Have the strength to force the moment to its crisis?" (79-80) The somewhat silly rhyme here underscores the absurdity of Prufrock's concerns.
Yet Eliot fleshes out Prufrock's character and makes his worries, however trivial, human. Prufrock twice refers to his balding head, describes his plain, middle-aged clothing, and draws us into his point-of-view of the social world. His eye is specific in its observation: "Arms that are braceleted and white and bare / (But in the lamplight, downed with light brown hair!)" (63-64) Although the first line is an allusion to the line "A bracelet of bright hair about the bone" from John Donne's poem "The Relic," a line Eliot admires for its sharp contrast in his essay "The Metaphysical Poets" (1921), the specificity of Prufrock's eye shows more the influence of the 19th-century French Symbolists, such as Charles Baudelaire, Arthur Rimbaud, Stephene Mallarme, and particularly Jules Laforgue. (In fact, Eliot's repeating line about Michelangelo is a somewhat parodic nod to a similar line by Laforgue about the masters of the Sienne school.) The Symbolists butted heads with the Realist movement, believing life could be represented only by symbols, however confusing or chaotic. Eliot's objective correlative serves a similar purpose, expressing Prufrock's emotional life through concrete, oft-elusive symbols.
As detailed as Prufrock's eye is, he feels the effects of the penetrating social gaze far more deeply:
And I have known the eyes already, known them all - The eyes that fix you in a formulated phase,
And when I am formulated, sprawling on a pin, When I am pinned and wriggling on the wall
(55-58)
"Sprawling on a pin" refers to the practice of pinning insect specimens for study, suggesting Prufrock feels similarly scrutinized, but the key here is Prufrock's
discussion of eyes. As with his catalogue of the "Arms that are braceleted and white and bare," Prufrock isolates the body part from the rest of the body. Detached, the eyes multiply in power; they dominate both the room and the bodies of those who
look at Prufrock.
Anxiety is foremost a concern with the future, and Prufrock continues to show his inability to advance in time. Of the six stanzas here, four begin with "And" (37, 55, 62, 75) while five lines at the end of different stanzas do (61, 68-69, 85-86), suggesting a repetitive, inescapable present tense. His mental logic conforms to a similar pattern; the "sprawling on a pin" lines make tiny steps forward ("And when..."/"When I am..."/"Then how..." [57-59]) rather than large leaps. Prufrock's refrain "And indeed there will be time" (23, 37) is an allusion to Metaphysical poet Andrew Marvell's "To His Coy Mistress" ("Had we but world enough, and time" [1]), in which the speaker urges his lady to speed up their courtship. As with most of Eliot's allusions in "Prufrock," the Marvell reference is ironic. Rather than hurrying his lady, Prufrock makes excuses for himself; he assures himself there will be time to act, although his repetitive, paralytic nature has so far belied that. The line also contains a possible pun; "indeed" can be read as "in deed," another reference to Prufrock's inability to act (to do a deed). A further irony unfolds in Prufrock's use of the word
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"presume." While the Latinate root of "presume" means "to anticipate," something Prufrock spends much time doing, its main English meaning is "to undertake without leave or clear justification," a boldness Prufrock surely lacks.
Not only is Prufrock paralyzed in the present, but he seems to have a disordered sense of time. He describes the "evenings, mornings, afternoons" (50), and the odd order gives us pause. While it primarily describes a cycle from night to the next day, reinforcing the idea of repetition, its abrupt switch from "evenings" to "mornings" echoes Eliot's images of vertical descent present in the first three stanzas. He resumes the vertical descent motif in this section of the poem as well; Prufrock descends the stairs, and as he watches smoke rising from pipes and lonely men "leaning out windows" (72) just below, he feels he "should have been a pair of ragged claws / Scuttling across the floors of silent seas" (73-74). This final alliterative image of debasement (the third animal association for Prufrock after the cat and insect connections) paints a pathetic portrait of Prufrock, but the suggestion of a crab is perhaps an allusion to Shakespeare's "Hamlet," in which Hamlet mocks Polonius (Eliot later explicitly references "Hamlet," making this more plausible): "for yourself, sir, should be old as I am, if, like a crab, you could go backward" (2.2.205-206).
Perhaps, then, Prufrock's propensity to move backwards and downwards is suggestive of his nearness to death, of his backpedaling down into Hell. The Dante epigraph casts a deathly pallor over the entire poem, and Prufrock himself sees "the eternal Footman hold my coat, and snicker" (85). While he says in the next line "in short, I was afraid" (86) in reference to his fear of social action, he may also be referring to this deathly figure awaiting him.
Lines 87-131 Summary:
Prufrock wonders if, after various social gestures, it would have been worthwhile to act decisively if it resulted in a woman's rejection of him. He thinks he is not a Prince Hamlet figure, but a secondary character in life. Worried over growing old, he adopts the fashions of youth. By the beach, he sees images of mermaids singing and swimming.
Analysis:
The movement in the final section of the poem swings from fairly concrete, realistic scenes from the social world - "After the cups, the marmalade, the teaŠAfter the novels, and the teacups, after the skirts that trail along the floor" (88, 102) - to fantastic images of mermaids "riding seaward on the waves / Combing the white hair of the waves blown back" (126-127). Eliot's objective correlative grows more vague; what exactly does Prufrock feel here? Perhaps Prufrock himself is unsure: "It is impossible to say just what I mean! / But as if a magic lantern threw the nerves in patterns on a screen" (104-105). His own inarticulacy results in the magic lantern's wild kaleidoscopic imagery of teacups and mermaids; aside from desperation and loneliness, confusion is one of the objective correlative's main emotional associations.
But Prufrock shows a wise self-regard when he admits he is
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not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be; Am an attendant lord, one that will do To swell a progress, start a scene or two, Advise the prince; no doubt, an easy tool, Deferential, glad to be of use, Politic, cautious, and meticulous; (111-116) Hamlet, Shakespeare's famous tragic hero from the play of the same name, is literature's other great indecisive man. Hamlet waffles between wanting to kill his stepfather and holding off for a variety of reasons. The allusion, then, is somewhat ironic, since Prufrock is not even as decisive as Hamlet is. Instead, he is more like the doddering Polonius of Hamlet (the "for you yourself, sir" quote from Hamlet 2.2.205-206, if the "ragged claws" [73] line alludes to it, is spoken by Hamlet to Polonius), or the conventional Shakespearean "Fool" (119). Prufrock is the second-in-command at best, and he comes off as a mock-hero; even the absence of an "I" preceding "Am an attendant lord" bespeaks his lack of ego. The numerous caesurae (pauses) from commas and semicolons in the stanza underscore Prufrock's stagnation and paralysis.
The only thing in Prufrock's life not paralyzed is time; it marches on, and Prufrock laments "I grow old . . . I grow old . . . / I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled" (121). The rolled trouser, a popular bohemian style at the time, is a pathetic attempt to ward off death. While he continues to be anxious about the future, Prufrock now seems to regard the future, paradoxically, from a future standpoint. His refrain of "And would it have been worth it, after all" (87, 99) places his actions in the perfect conditional tense. It is as though he is reviewing actions he has yet to take. Either time has accelerated his aging process, or this look to the past is a way for Prufrock to delude himself into thinking he has made some decisive progress in life.
Previously, Prufrock wondered if he should "dare / Disturb the universe" (45-46) and squeeze "the universe into a ball" (92). The latter is a reference to Marvell's "To His Coy Mistress": "Let us roll all our strength and all / Our sweetness up into one ball, / And tear our pleasures with rough strife / Thorough the iron gates of life" (41-44). Marvell urges his lady to engage in sex with him, as death draws ever closer and their time is running out.
Prufrock, on the other hand, knows he is going to die soon but he still cannot even "dare to eat a peach" (122). While Eliot's main intent is to trivialize Prufrock's anxieties - a simple piece of fruit confounds him - the peach has a few other possible meanings. First, it is the Chinese symbol for marriage and immortality, two things Prufrock desires. Moreover, the peach, through shape and texture, has long been a symbol for female genitalia. Prufrock's anxiety about eating a peach, then, has much to do with his feelings of sexual inadequacy, his worry that his balding head and thin physique earn him the scorn of women.
Accordingly, Prufrock immediately switches his attention to the mermaids "singing, each to each" (124) - the society of women who ignore him. The elusive images perhaps have more cohesion than on first glance:
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I have seen them riding seaward on the waves Combing the white hair of the waves blown back When the wind blows the water white and black. (126-128) Prufrock has just wondered "Shall I part my hair behind?" (122), and previously he has agonized over his bald spot, turned his keen eye to the women's arms "downed with light brown hair!" (64), and agonized over eating a fuzzy peach. Mermaids are conventionally depicted combing their hair with a mirror, so as symbols of vanity and lush beauty - "wreathed with seaweed red and brown" (130), they possess even more artificial hair - they threaten Prufrock (whose thinning hair is perhaps now a salt-and-pepper mixture of "white and black" and no longer "red and brown").
When Prufrock finishes the poem by pronouncing "We have lingered in the chambers of the seaŠTill human voices wake us, and we drown" (129, 131), he completes the vertical descent Eliot has been deploying throughout the poem. He has plunged into his own Dantesque underworld and, through the "We" pronoun, forces us to accompany him - hoping, like da Montefeltro from the epigraph, that we will not be able to return to the mermaids on top and shame him by repeating his story.
The concluding two three-line stanzas act as a sestet (six lines). Although the rhyme scheme differs (here it is abbcdd), Petrarchan sonnets complement the opening octet (first eight lines) with a sestet. This is Eliot's final mock-allusion to yet another Renaissance artist (after Dante and Michelangelo). Petrarch unrequitedly mooned after his love, Laura, but Prufrock, whose name sounds much like Petrarch's, does not even have an unattainable ideal love. He has unattainable, frustrated, paralyzed desire for all women who reject him; they are all inaccessible, and any reminder of the social world ("human voices") drowns him - and, he hopes, his reader-as-Dante - deeper in his watery Hell
Lines 1-36 Summary:
J. Alfred Prufrock, a presumably middle-aged, intellectual, indecisive man, invites the reader along with him through the modern city. He describes the street scene and notes a social gathering of women discussing Renaissance artist Michelangelo. He describes yellow smoke and fog outside the house of the gathering, and keeps insisting that there will be time to do many things in the social world.
Analysis
The title of the poem is Eliot's first hint that this is not a traditional love poem at all. "J. Alfred Prufrock" is a farcical name, and Eliot wanted the subliminal connotation of a "prude" in a "frock." (The original title was "Prufrock Among the Women.") This emasculation contributes to a number of themes Eliot will explore revolving around paralysis and heroism, but the name also has personal meaning for Eliot. He wrote the poem in 1909 while a graduate student at Harvard (though he revised it over the next few years, eventually publishing it in 1915 and in book form in 1917), and at the time he signed his name as "T. Stearns Eliot."
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While it would appear, then, that T. Stearns Eliot was using J. Alfred Prufrock as an alter ego to explore his own emotions, this is not the case. Superficial differences aside - Eliot was a young man in 1909, while Prufrock is balding and probably middle-aged - Eliot disdained poetry that focused on the poet himself. He wrote in his essay "Tradition and the Individual Talent" that the "progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality." He crystallized his ideas about how to achieve this extinction of personality in another essay, "Hamlet and His Problems": "The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an 'objective correlative'; in other words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events, which shall be the formula of that particular emotion." Simply put, the objective correlative - a tangible, concrete thing - assumes the emotional significance in a work of art; Eliot largely does away with abstract emotional ruminations. The examples and ramifications of the objective correlative in "Prufrock" will be discussed later.
Eliot first achieves the extinction of his personality by setting "Prufrock" in the poetic form of a dramatic monologue. In this form, the speaker addresses another person and the reader plays the part of the silent listener; often the dramatic monologue is freighted with irony, as the speaker is partially unaware of what he reveals. Robert Browning, the undisputed master of the dramatic monologue, exploited this possibility in his most famous dramatic monologue, "My Last Duchess"; the reader learns much about the Duke that he has not intended to expose.
The dramatic monologue fell out of fashion in 20th-century Modernism after its 19th-century Victorian invention. Eliot was a great believer in the historical value of art; in "Tradition and the Individual Talent," he argued that "the poet must develop or procure the consciousness of the past," especially the literary past. The epigraph is a quotation from Dante's Inferno (27.61-66), and translates: "If I thought that my reply would be to one who would ever return to the world, this flame would stay without further movement; but since none has ever returned alive from this depth, if what I hear is true, I answer you without fear of infamy." The speaker, Guido da Montefeltro, imprisoned in a flame in Hell, relates his shameful, evil life to Dante only because he thinks Dante will never go back to earth and repeat it.
Before we analyze the Dante quote, it is important to note that Eliot's brand of Modernist poetry sought to revive the literary past, as he argued for in "Tradition and the Individual Talent." His poetry, including "Prufrock," is peppered with allusions to the Greeks, Shakespeare, the Metaphysicals, and more. Eliot does not neglect the modern, however; it is often front and center, usually with unfavorable comparisons to the past.
The unpleasant modern world is where "Prufrock" begins. Prufrock, much like da Montefeltro in The Inferno, is confined to Hell; Prufrock's, however, is on earth, in a lonely, alienating city. The images of the city are sterile and deathly; the night sky looks "Like a patient etherized upon a table" (3), while down below barren "half-deserted streets" (4) reveal "one-night cheap hotels / And sawdust restaurants" (6-7). The use of enjambment, the running over of lines, further conveys the labyrinthine spatiality of the city. Although Eliot does not explore the sterility of the modern world as deeply here as he does in "The Wasteland" (1922), the images are undeniably bleak and empty. Often overlooked in the opening salvo is that Prufrock's imagery
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progresses from the general to the specific and, tellingly, from the elevated to the low. We go from a general look at the skyline to the streets to a hotel room to sawdust-covered floors in restaurants. This debasement continues throughout the poem, both literally in the verticality of the images and figuratively in their emotional associations for Prufrock.
Indeed, emotional associations are key, since Eliot deploys the objective correlative technique throughout the poem rather than dwell abstractly on Prufrock's feelings. The above images all speak to some part of Prufrock's personality. The etherized patient, for instance, reflects his paralysis (his inability to act) while the images of the city depict a certain lost loneliness. The objective correlative switches to the "yellow fog that rubs its back upon the windowpanes" (14) in the second stanza. Although Eliot said the fog was suggestive of the factory smoke from his hometown St. Louis, the associations with a cat are obvious. Though Eliot was arguably the greatest lover of cats ever to write poetry (he wrote a number of poems on them, and the musical "Cats" is based on Eliot's work), here the feline correlation seems undesirable.
The fog/cat seems to be looking in on the roomful of fashionable women "talking of Michelangelo" (13). Unable to enter, it lingers pathetically on the outside of the house, and we can imagine Prufrock avoiding, yet desiring, physical contact in much the same way (albeit with far less agility). Eliot again uses an image of physical debasement to explore Prufrock's self-pitying state; the cat goes down from the high windowpanes to the "corners of the evening" (17) to the "pools that stand in drains" (18), lets soot from the high chimneys fall on its back (since it is lower down than the chimneys), then leaps from the terrace to the ground. While Eliot appreciated the dignity of cats, this particular soot-blackened cat does not seem so dignified. Rather, the cat appears weak, non-confrontational, and afraid to enter the house. Moreover, Prufrock's prude-in-a-frock effeminacy emerges through the cat, as felines generally have feminine associations.
Regardless of what one takes from these images, the bewildering collage points to another technique Eliot and the Modernists pioneered: fragmentation. The Modernists felt their writing should mirror their fractured and chaotic world. Fragmentation seems to imply a disordered lack of meaning, but the Modernists resisted this instinct and suggested that meaning could be excavated from the ruins. Just as we can make sense of the seemingly chaotic combination of a 14th-century Dante allusion and a 20th-century dramatic monologue, we can draw meaning from the rapid-fire metropolitan montage Prufrock paints.
Images and allusions are not the only fragmented features of "Prufrock." The rhythm of the lines is deliberately irregular. At times in unrhymed free verse, Eliot occasionally rhymes for long stretches (lines 4-12) and then not at all; his rhyme scheme itself seems like the confusing "Streets that follow like a tedious argument" (8). He also twice uses the refrain of "In the room the women come and go / Talking of Michelangelo" (13-14, 35-36), and often begins lines with the word "And" (7, 23, 29 32, 33). As the word found in three of these lines implies - "time" (23, 29, 32) - the repetitions have something to do with Prufrock's relationship with time.
Prufrock indecisively cycles around even the smallest of concerns: "And time yet for a hundred indecisions, / And for a hundred visions and revisions, / Before the taking
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of a toast and tea" (32-34). He seems rooted in the present tense and this, according to Eliot and most Modernists, is an unhealthy approach to time. The opening image of the evening "spread out" (2) against the sky is an allusion to a metaphor frequently used in turn-of-the-century French philosopher Henri Bergson's work Time and Free Will (1889). Bergson was a great influence on Eliot; the latter attended the philosopher's lectures in Paris in 1910 and was influenced by his theories on consciousness. In Time and Free Will, Bergson argues that time is a single, continuous, and flowing "durée," or duration, rather than a succession of discrete steps with distinct tenses.
The only way to achieve this mental sense of duration, Bergson maintains, is through direct intuition rather than indirect analysis. While much New Age philosophy and theory has hijacked this idea - that one should feel rather than think is an appealing concept - the damaging effects to Prufrock are evident. He is clearly a thinker, not a feeler, and his indecisive thoughts contribute directly to his paralysis, perhaps the most important theme in the poem. As the image of the cat unable to penetrate the house suggests, Prufrock cannot make a decision and act on it. Instead of a flowing duration that integrates all of time, he is imprisoned in the present.
Prufrock's anxiety is rooted in the social world. Not only is he afraid to confront the woman talking of Michelangelo (whose most famous sculpture, David, is the epitome of masculine beauty, a daunting prospect for the flaccid Prufrock), he seems intimidated by the social posturing he must engage in:
There will be time, there will be time To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet; There will be time to murder and create, And time for all the works and days of hands That lift and drop a question on your plate; (26-29) The "works and days of hands" is a reference to 8th-century B.C. Greek poet Hesiod's poem about the farming year, "Works and Days." Prufrock seems to resent the divergence between the blistered hands of hard-working farmers and the smooth ones of social players, just as he dislikes the masks people wear in the social arena ("To prepare a faceŠ"). His social anxiety assumes more importance in the middle part of Lines 37-86 Summary:
Prufrock agonizes over his social actions, worrying over how others will see him. He thinks about women's arms and perfume, but does not know how to act. He walks through the streets and watches lonely men leaning out their windows. The day passes at a social engagement but he cannot muster the strength to act, and he admits that he is afraid.
Analysis:
Prufrock's social paralysis is diagnosed in these six stanzas. The smallest action - descending stairs - is occasion for magnified self-scrutiny and the fear that he will "Disturb the universe" (46). He continues asking himself questions about how to comport himself, but admits he will reverse these decisions soon. His inaction is
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constantly tied to the social world: "Should I, after tea and cakes and ices, / Have the strength to force the moment to its crisis?" (79-80) The somewhat silly rhyme here underscores the absurdity of Prufrock's concerns.
Yet Eliot fleshes out Prufrock's character and makes his worries, however trivial, human. Prufrock twice refers to his balding head, describes his plain, middle-aged clothing, and draws us into his point-of-view of the social world. His eye is specific in its observation: "Arms that are braceleted and white and bare / (But in the lamplight, downed with light brown hair!)" (63-64) Although the first line is an allusion to the line "A bracelet of bright hair about the bone" from John Donne's poem "The Relic," a line Eliot admires for its sharp contrast in his essay "The Metaphysical Poets" (1921), the specificity of Prufrock's eye shows more the influence of the 19th-century French Symbolists, such as Charles Baudelaire, Arthur Rimbaud, Stephene Mallarme, and particularly Jules Laforgue. (In fact, Eliot's repeating line about Michelangelo is a somewhat parodic nod to a similar line by Laforgue about the masters of the Sienne school.) The Symbolists butted heads with the Realist movement, believing life could be represented only by symbols, however confusing or chaotic. Eliot's objective correlative serves a similar purpose, expressing Prufrock's emotional life through concrete, oft-elusive symbols.
As detailed as Prufrock's eye is, he feels the effects of the penetrating social gaze far more deeply:
And I have known the eyes already, known them all - The eyes that fix you in a formulated phase, And when I am formulated, sprawling on a pin, When I am pinned and wriggling on the wall (55-58) "Sprawling on a pin" refers to the practice of pinning insect specimens for study, suggesting Prufrock feels similarly scrutinized, but the key here is Prufrock's discussion of eyes. As with his catalogue of the "Arms that are braceleted and white and bare," Prufrock isolates the body part from the rest of the body. Detached, the eyes multiply in power; they dominate both the room and the bodies of those who look at Prufrock.
Anxiety is foremost a concern with the future, and Prufrock continues to show his inability to advance in time. Of the six stanzas here, four begin with "And" (37, 55, 62, 75) while five lines at the end of different stanzas do (61, 68-69, 85-86), suggesting a repetitive, inescapable present tense. His mental logic conforms to a similar pattern; the "sprawling on a pin" lines make tiny steps forward ("And when..."/"When I am..."/"Then how..." [57-59]) rather than large leaps. Prufrock's refrain "And indeed there will be time" (23, 37) is an allusion to Metaphysical poet Andrew Marvell's "To His Coy Mistress" ("Had we but world enough, and time" [1]), in which the speaker urges his lady to speed up their courtship. As with most of Eliot's allusions in "Prufrock," the Marvell reference is ironic. Rather than hurrying his lady, Prufrock makes excuses for himself; he assures himself there will be time to act, although his repetitive, paralytic nature has so far belied that. The line also contains a possible pun; "indeed" can be read as "in deed," another reference to Prufrock's inability to act (to do a deed). A further irony unfolds in Prufrock's use of the word
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"presume." While the Latinate root of "presume" means "to anticipate," something Prufrock spends much time doing, its main English meaning is "to undertake without leave or clear justification," a boldness Prufrock surely lacks.
Not only is Prufrock paralyzed in the present, but he seems to have a disordered sense of time. He describes the "evenings, mornings, afternoons" (50), and the odd order gives us pause. While it primarily describes a cycle from night to the next day, reinforcing the idea of repetition, its abrupt switch from "evenings" to "mornings" echoes Eliot's images of vertical descent present in the first three stanzas. He resumes the vertical descent motif in this section of the poem as well; Prufrock descends the stairs, and as he watches smoke rising from pipes and lonely men "leaning out windows" (72) just below, he feels he "should have been a pair of ragged claws / Scuttling across the floors of silent seas" (73-74). This final alliterative image of debasement (the third animal association for Prufrock after the cat and insect connections) paints a pathetic portrait of Prufrock, but the suggestion of a crab is perhaps an allusion to Shakespeare's "Hamlet," in which Hamlet mocks Polonius (Eliot later explicitly references "Hamlet," making this more plausible): "for yourself, sir, should be old as I am, if, like a crab, you could go backward" (2.2.205-206).
Perhaps, then, Prufrock's propensity to move backwards and downwards is suggestive of his nearness to death, of his backpedaling down into Hell. The Dante epigraph casts a deathly pallor over the entire poem, and Prufrock himself sees "the eternal Footman hold my coat, and snicker" (85). While he says in the next line "in short, I was afraid" (86) in reference to his fear of social action, he may also be referring to this deathly figure awaiting him.
The Sterility and Communion in T.S. Eliot and Gerard Manley Hopkins
Twenty some years after the death of Gerard Manley Hopkins, T.S. Eliot began where Hopkins had left off. In one of his earliest poems, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock", Eliot picked up the hopelessness - hopelessness motivated by a sense of isolation - that had pervaded Hopkins later poetry. Both poets battled with their faith in their own importance. Both poets felt at a distance from the world, and as a result felt ineffectual and impotent to impact the world around them. This hopelessness is reflected in their jagged images and verse. With Eliot it is particularly pronounced in his early poem "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock", while the same hopelessness is seen in Hopkins' later poetry; the so called "terrible sonnets". But, fortunately, for the poets, these times of hopelessness were not unending. Eliot escaped the hopelessness in his later life, as is particulalry evident in The Four Quartets. Hopkins only dealt with the hopelessness in his later life, and in his earlier poetry such as "The Windhover" and "The Grandeur of God", Hopkins is in great communion with the world. The period of skepticism was tempered by a time of great hope for each poet, a period that stemmed from their sense of communion with the world around them.
From the beginning of his beginning‹"The Love Song of J .Alfred Prufrock" - Eliot is at odd with the worlds around him. He contrasts himself with his surroundings in the first lines of "The Love Song of J .Alfred Prufrock":
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Let us go then, you and I When the evening is spread out against the sky Like a patient etherized upon a table; Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets, The muttering retreats Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels (1-6) The opening two lines put the sky into motion; has it expand outwards. But in the third line, in contrast to this quick development and movement of his surroundings, Eliot is 'etherized upon a table.' He is 'etherized', motionless, in contrast to the expanding sky. After the third line Eliot immediately returns to the movement of the world around him: the retreats that mutter, and the nights that restlessly move. This stanza aptly captures the sense that Eliot is paralyzed in the face of the quickly moving world, a sense that pervades the rest of the poem.
The people around him are part of the speedy surroundings from which he is isolated. The contrast between himself, and the people around him is apparent when he tries to put into words the apparent thoughts of those around him:
And indeed there will be time To wonder, 'Do I dare?' and, 'Do I dare?" Time to turn back and descend the stair, With a bald spot in the middle of my hair- (They will say: 'How his hair is growing thin!') My morning coat, my collar mounting firmly to the chin, My necktie rich and modest, but asserted by a simple pin- (They will say: 'But how his arms and legs are thin!') (37-44) Eliot imagines the people quickly thinking and judging him, and Eliot's recreation of these people's thoughts grows ever more intense from the four foot first line to the eight foot last lines. This quickly growing space between line breaks serves as a clear direction for crescendo. In the beginning of this stanza he mentions that there will be time to wonder, to ask questions such as 'Do I dare?' But there does not appear to be time for thinking in the midst of the racing thoughts of the world around him. This suspicion is confirmed when Eliot demonstrates the speed of his own thinking in the next lines where, in 2 pondering 3 beat lines he wonders:
Do I dare Disturb the universe? (45-6) This point when he does come to 'wonder' brings the verse to a skidding halt. His ruminations all come as a sharp decrescendo from his perception of the flow of the thoughts and movement in the world around him. The speed of his own thinking in relation to the world around him (the first part of this stanza) marks his isolation from the furiously moving world.
This isolation is heightened by the animation and activity of everything around him. The universe is "squeezed . . . into a ball to roll"(92) and a lantern "threw the nerves in patterns on a screen" (105). In the most memorable personification, yellow fog "rubs its back upon the windowpanes," and "licked its tongue into the corners of the
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evening" (15-6). The flux and activity of everything around him acts to paralyze Eliot. This is explained in the stanza that where Eliot begins by mentioning that "[I] Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons" (50) (By stating these three long time spans so quickly, and in the past tense, Eliot elucidates how quickly the time is flying past.) He gives the speeding times of day, eyes, and says, "I have known the eyes already, known them all - / The eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase" (55-6). The paralysis into which the quickly moving time formulates him is never more vividly captured than when he says that the capturing eye has made him like a quieted butterfly in a preservative case, "sprawling on a pin" (57).
The movement of the world around him has rendered Eliot impotent because the activity and flux of the world makes his own decisions worthless. Eliot's desire to have some impact on his surroundings is apparent when he slowly asks whether he will "dare to disturb the universe". But, the activity of his surroundings quickly sweeps over his question. He is unable to make this decision because, as he explains, "in a minute there is time/ For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse" (47-8). His decisions are futile because of the understanding that any decision that he makes can easily be reversed in the next moment.
This futility is reflected by his constant repetition of words and phrases. In "A Game of Chess" from The Wasteland Eliot talks about a place "where the dead men lost their bones," (116) a place where not even death is dead enough, because then the dead lose even their physical claim to life (i.e. their bones). This description is a response to the words of a woman who chatters away: "'My nerves are bad to-night. Yes, Bad. Stay with me./ 'Speak to me. Why do you never speak. Speak./ 'What are you thinking of? What thinking? What?"(111-3). Eliot's description of the place as deader than dead immediately follows this woman's short monologue. The description is a reaction to the lifelessness of the woman's words. She says nothing, and repeats this nothing over and over again. Her inability to say anything is an inability to create, i.e. sterility. Eliot obliquely uses the same technique in "Prufrock" to define his own sterility. In the same way that the woman in "A Game of Chess" repeats the same questions over and over, when he imagines himself asking a question he thinks that he will ask, "'Do I dare?' and, Do I dare?'" (38). Later, in three consecutive stanzas he begins by asking "For I have known them all already, known them all‹" (49) (with slight differences in each stanza) and closes each stanza by asking "So how should I presume" (54) (with slight changes). This technique is particularly effective in "Prufrock" because his own inability to say anything new is contrasted to the constant barrage of new images in his surroundings. In the body of each of these stanzas Eliot describes a different aspect of the world around him, while he is still and asking the same question over and over again.
In the last stanzas of "Prufrock" Eliot elucidates and qualifies the depths of his isolation and impotence. Through a theatrical metaphor he returns to the question of whether he will "disturb the universe". He acknowledges he is "not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be" (111); recognizing that he is no lead player, but, as consolation, he tells himself that he can at least be an 'attendant lord' that will help to 'swell the progress' (113). Upon further consideration, though, even this thought of impact on the world around him is stripped as he says that he would probably be 'almost ridiculous' and in the last line resigns to the fact that he would probably only be 'the Fool' (119).
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At this point he has realized the fallacy of his self-aggrandizing idea that he could impact the world. But he then comes to question whether he even has power over his own life. He begins by granting that,
I grow old . . . I grow old . . . I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled. (120-1) thereby allowing himself the power to decide to 'roll his trousers'. But even this momentary glimpse of confidence is shattered when in the next line he asks:
Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach? (122) At this point he wonders if he does have the power to do such benign things as rolling his trousers, and eating peaches. In these 3 stanzas he has taken himself from a consideration of himself on the grandest scale, as Hamlet, to himself on the most pitiful scale. At the end he questions even his power to impact himself. His impotence grows ever more personal, and therefore ever more complete. By the end he has come to see the scale at which he is isolated from his surroundings, and resignedly laments:
I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each. I do not think that they will sing to me. (124-5) He closes the poem with this slow realization of the sad truth of his situation: that he is not part of his surroundings. He is, to take the argument back to the beginning, a patient on the table, aware that life is going on around him, but unable to take part in that life.
While Eliot's early poetry, such as "Prufrock", concludes with this somber tone of depression, Hopkins, in his early poetry, harps on the joy that the world around him brings. In the sonnet "Spring", Hopkins discusses a few marvels of the natural world. He mentions the thrush's eggs and a peartree, and in the end asks, "What is all this juice and all this joy?" (9). With the 'and' Hopkins paratactically places the juices or beauty of nature as parallel and simultaneous with his own joy. And Hopkins sees beauty everywhere; as he mentions in "God's Grandeur", "nature is never spent" (9).
He is most interested in the dappled beauty of nature. In his discussion of the topic in his poem "Pied Beauty", he says, "Glory be to God for dappled things." In the beginning of this poem Hopkins lays down some specific images that reflect this quality:
For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow; For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim; Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches wings; (2-4) These descriptions of the speckled trout and chestnut leaves provide examples of such dappled beauty. By using the word 'dappled' Hopkins draws attention to the irregularity of the coloration of each of these objects. The sprung rhythm that Hopkins uses in most of his early poems discussing nature, is a fitting poetic form for recreating the 'dappled' coloring of nature. Sprung rhythm brings the stress down irregularly. Each stress can be seen as a glint of light in the midst of the darker moments of slack around them. When the stresses are irregular the aural sensation
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becomes more like the irregularity of the coloring of nature. As Hopkins explains in the preface to these poems, "Two licenses are natural to Sprung Rhythm. The one is rests, as in music . . . The other is hangers or outrides, that is one, two or three slack syllables." Because of all these irregularities the reader must focus particular attention on the sonic details of the poem.
Hopkins' placement of the sonic elements of his poem as equal to the textual elements is displayed in the first line of "As Kingfishers Catch Fire". There he says, "As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame;" (1). The textual simile mirrors the brightness of the bird to the brightness of the insect. But in this line Hopkins also creates a sonic simile, as the two hard k sounds in the first clause are mirrored in the two hard d sounds in the second clause. The sonic metaphor can be seen as merely amplifying the textual metaphor, but it seems that the textual metaphor can just as easily be seen as amplifying the sonic metaphor. In this double metaphor Hopkins' places great weight on the auditory element of his poem. This is in accordance with his use of sprung rhythm, which he said "is the rhythm of all but the most monotonously regular music, so that in words of choruses and refrains and in songs written closely to music it arises." In this introduction Hopkins discusses only the auditory value of sprung rhythm, and does not once mention the value of sprung rhythm for more accurately capturing a textual detail. The particular concern that Hopkins displayed for the auditory part of his poems is reflected in the double metaphor.
His line breaks show Hopkins' willingness to subordinate the textual details to the aural atmosphere created. From "The Windhover":
I caught this morning morning's minion, king- dom of daylight's dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing In his ecstasy! No line break until this fifth line provides a break. Hopkins carries phrases over the line breaks, in the second line even breaking up a single word over a line break. This elimination of the tradition point of rest gives the verse an added fluidity. The first line break is especially apparent in its singular concern for sound. By breaking up the word 'kingdom' Hopkins dulls the immediate textual impact of the word. But the vowel sound of 'king' amplifies the vowel sound of 'minion', and the placing of the syllable 'dom' in the second line contributes to the alliteration there. In his willingness to dull the textual impact in the interest of the sonic impact Hopkins shows his willingness to subordinate the textual meaning of the word to the fluidity and lyrical quality of the poem.
Through meter, word choice, and line breaks Hopkins places more emphasis on the lyrical and auditory quality of the poem, and takes emphasis off of the textual meaning of words. As Eliot found 40 years later, the most effective way to capture divisiveness in nature is to present jagged points. When Eliot wanted to convey his isolation from the world he poetically phrased himself as a jagged element, at odds with the quickly moving world around him. The jaggedness of Eliot's early poetry reflects that all is not at peace in the world. This shifts the emphasis away from the
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specific and places it on the more holistic quality of sonic fluidity, and thereby avoids any saliency, or jaggedness.
It should be noted that Hopkins found the same activity and animation of the world around him that Eliot did in his early poetry. While in "Prufrock" this motion of the world was the very cause of Eliot's isolation, Hopkins relies upon the constant movement for the fluidity of his prose.
But these happy days did not remain for Hopkins. In his later life he moved into a period where he wrote the so called 'terrible-sonnets'. After the dappled colors of his early poems, in sonnet 67 he says he has seen "the fell of dark" (1). His acute vision, that brought the dappled beauty of the world is gone, and in its stead, in sonnet 69 he casts "for comfort I can no more get/ By groping round my comfortless, than blind/ Eyes in their dark can day or this can find" (5-7).
Gone with this light is the aural fluidity of his early poems. In one of the most dark poems, "Carrion Comfort", instead of the sonorous alliteration of the earlier poetry, there are hard clashing words. The first words are, "Not, I'll not." The short vowel sound of 'not', and the hard consonants on either side of the 'o', are at odds with the long vowel sound of 'I'll'. These first words set up the almost cacophonous aural experience that "Carrion Comfort' is. The poem goes on:
Not, I'll not, carrion comfort, Despair, not feast on thee, Not untwist, - slack they may be‹these last strands of man (1-2) Each phrase seems an independent phrase at odds with those surrounding. The phrase 'carrion comfort' has little sonic similarity to the phrase 'not feast on thee'. The alliteration that littered the early poetry, and that took the emphasis off of specific words is gone. Instead Hopkins places extreme emphasis on specific words. The word 'Despair', which is so significant in describing this new state, is set off from the surrounding verse with commas. The word 'Despair' is also emphasized by its lack of auditory similarity with the words around it.
Hopkins de-emphasis of words in his early poetry is especially apparent when considered next to this later poetry where specific words - not the sonic elements - are the core of the poem. To emphasize words in these later poems he often repeats especially telling words. In sonnet 67 the following lines show this technique:
And my lament Is cries countless, cries like dead letters sent To dearest him that lives alas! away. The repetition of 'cries' gives a very specific sense of Hopkins' emotional state. In this excerpt Hopkins once again sets apart a significant word: 'away' is removed by placing punctuation marks on either side of it. This particular point of emphasis brings Hopkins feelings in line with what Eliot was feeling in his particularly despairing poems. Hopkins, as a Jesuit priest, had found communion with the world through God in his early poetry. In "Hurrahing in Harvest", he had said, "I walk, I lift up heart, eyes,/ Down all that glory in the heavens to glean our Saviour". Whereas he found a connection with God, and hence with the world in his early poetry, in sonnet 67, one
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of the 'terrible sonnets' he emphasizes that God is 'away'. He moves even closer to Eliot when, in sonnet 66 he moans that "To seem the stranger lies my lot, my life/ Among strangers. Father and mother dear, Brothers and sisters are in Christ not mood" This sense of isolation brings him to the point where, in sonnet 74 he calls himself 'time's eunuch'. This direct use of the idea of sterility brings Hopkins into almost perfect alignment with the Eliot who was 'formulated', and 'sprawling on a pin'; so ineffectual that he cannot even decide whether he will eat a peach.
But while Hopkins climbed onto the etherizing table in his later life, Eliot, in his own later life, climbed off the table to partake in the world. The Four Quartets represent the apex of his new hopeful view that is in accordance with Hopkins' early poetry. Eliot's seascape in "The Dry Salvage", one of The Four Quartets, demonstrates his new, more fluid and integrated view of the world:
the sea is all about us; The sea is the land's edge also This new image of the land merging with the shore should be contrasted to that coast presented in "Sweeney Erect," one of his earlier poems. There he said,
Paint me a cavernous waste shore Cast in the unstilled Cyclades, Paint me the bold anfractuous rocks Faced by the snarled and yelping seas. In this earlier vision the sea and the land are wildly separated and violently at odds with each other. This is a sharp contrast to the border that exists in the "The Dry Salvage"; a border which has really ceased to be a border at all. In his earlier poems he saw insurmountable borders between everything‹particularly between himself and the rest of the world. The revised view of a border that Eliot displays in "The Dry Salvages" is reflective of his changing perception of his isolation from the world.
In the later poems Eliot does away with the jagged line breaks and constantly fluctuating meter that bespoke of Eliot's division from the world in "Prufrock". In the beginning of 'Marina', a poem that led to the hopefulness of The Four Quartets, Eliot returns to the 'anfractuous' meter seen in "Prufrock":
Those who sharpen the tooth of the dog, meaning Death Those who glitter with the glory of the hummingbird, meaning Death Those who sit in the sty of contentment, meaning Death Those who suffer the ecstasy of the animals, meaning Death Are becoming unsubstantial, reduced by a wind, A breath of pine, and the woodsong fog By this grace dissolved in place In the beginning of this stanza the arresting line breaks and repetition of words recalls
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the topics of sterility, and isolation of his earlier poems. In 'Marina' he uses this anfractuous form to discuss death, an idea akin to those gloomy ideas discussed in his early poetry. But Eliot quickly moves on, and, in much more regular meter, says that all that was in this stanza of anfractuous images and meter - the essence of his early poetry - is 'becoming unsubstantial'. Fresh images of life - 'the breath of pine' and the 'grace' of this natural scene - renders the anfractuous meter and gloomy images unsubstantial.
He rarely uses jagged meter in The Four Quartets, but when he does, whereas in "The Love Song of J .Alfred Prufrock" it was used to display his isolation from the world, in 'The Dry Salvage' he uses it to reinforce the communion of the world:
The more delicate algae and the sea anemone. It tosses up our losses, the torn seine, The shattered lobsterpot, the broken oar And the gear of foreign dead men. The sea has many voices, Many gods and many voices. The salt is on the briar rose, The fog is in the fir trees. The sea howl And the sea yelp In "Prufrock" Eliot used such quick changes in meter to place elements at odd with each other. His own slow question "Do I dare/ Disturb the universe?" was in contrast to the racing lines that came before because he was at odds with the people described before. In this excerpt from the "Dry Salvages", however, the metrical change is used to emphasize how the salt and the fog and the howl are all really one; are part of the 'many voices'. The term 'many voices' harks back to the 'lobsterpot' and the 'broken oar', and calls forward to the salt and the fog, thereby placing all of these elements in a unified category. By placing the salt and the fog metrically apart Eliot allows the reader to connect these elements to the elements that came before.
It is vital to also notice his revised use of fog in the two passages mentioned so far. In the first passage Eliot speaks of the 'woodsong fog,' while in the second passage he remarks that the 'fog is in the fir trees'. In both of these two poems the fog is mentioned in passing, as a static element of the landscape, not an active part itself. The fog 'is' here, whereas in "Prufrock" the fog "rubs its back upon the windowpanes," and "licked its tongue into the corners of the evening." Both Eliot's revised use of the word 'fog' and his revised use of jagged meter are indicative of the calm and peace that has settled over Eliot's later poetry.
This shift to calm brings him to comment on the communion of the world numerous times in The Four Quartets. In the closing moments of the dry salvages he celebrates a world where music is "heard so deeply/ That it is not heard at all, but you are the music/ While the music lasts." This startlingly beautiful image could just as easily be describing Hopkins early poetry where the world is taken into the mind, and there transfigured into music, as Hopkins had mentioned in his preface. This complete union is elaborated upon when Eliot remarks that, "Here the impossible union/ Of spheres of existence is actual."
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Dry, Allusive, and Ambiguous: A Close Reading of "The Wasteland"
T.S. Eliot peppers "The Wasteland," his apocalyptic poem, with images of modern aridity and inarticulacy that contrast with fertile allusions to previous times. Eliot's language details a brittle era, rife with wars physical and sexual, spiritually broken, culturally decaying, dry and dusty. His references to the Fisher King and mythical vegetation rituals imply that the 20th-century world is in need of a Quester to irrigate the land. "The Wasteland" refuses to provide a simple solution; the properties of the language serve to make for an ambiguous narrative and conclusion, one as confusing and fragmented as Eliot's era itself.
Eliot wastes no time drawing out the first irony of the poem. In the first lines of "The Burial of the Dead," the speaker comments on Jesus' crucifixion and Chaucer while using brutal sounds to relate his spiritual coldness in a warm environment. In "The General Prologue" to The Canterbury Tales, Chaucer poetically writes "Whan that April with his showres soote/ The droughte of March hath perced to the roote,/ And bathed every veine in swich licour,/ Of which vertu engrendred is the flowr" (Norton Anthology to English Literature, sixth edition, vol. 1, p.81). For "The Wasteland's" speaker, "April is the cruellest month, breeding/ Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing/ Memory and desire, stirring/ Dull roots with spring rain" (Norton Anthology of Poetry, fourth edition, p.1236, lines 1-4). The harsh "c's" and muted "d's" throughout point to the speaker's disenchantment with a world full of paradoxes and dichotomies. The "mixing" of "Memory and desire" only hurts him, as do all the verbs, which Eliot places at the ends of their lines to intensify their importance and action in an otherwise dead land.
The speaker continues his rants against the world and shows a personality at odds with normal conceptions of happiness. "Winter kept us warm" he says, as the delayed alliteration pairs up an unlikely couple (5). The speaker turns back time, and possibly changes identity, by reminiscing her childhood. Nostalgia is an essential component of "The Wasteland"; here, it relates a young girl's escapist techniques of reading in the mountains and flying "south for the winter" like a bird, while later Eliot imposes literary and historical significance upon the poem's allusions (18). Central to these allusion are images of the death of spirituality.
In the second stanza, Eliot moves into a new motif, that of stones and broken idols. He questions what became of his landscape: "What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow/ Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,/ You cannot say, or guess, for you know only/ A heap of broken images" (19-23). The roots, which were previously dull, now clutch in a sexually perverse image, and stem from a "stony rubbish" which is to be repeated later as a figure of dryness. The "Son of man," noted by Eliot as Ezekiel, lives in a pagan era of "broken images," and parallels modern man in "know[ing] only" such a corrupt time. Eliot develops the metaphor of stone as an object with "no sound of water. Only/ There is shadow under this red rock" (24-5). He again places "only" at the end of a line to draw the reader's attention to it, forcing his audience to consider its relation to the poem's character. Indeed, the speaker next
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addresses: "(Come in under the shadow of this red rock),/ And I will show you something different from either/ Your shadow at morning striding behind you/ Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you" (26-9). In "The Hollow Men," another meditation on broken spirituality, several stanzas use the word "between" to reflect its travelers paralyzed state between life and death: "Between the conception/ And the creation/ Between the emotion/ And the response/ Falls the Shadow" ("The Hollow Men," V.). Using this as a reference point, "The Wasteland's" next line explicitly suggests the inevitability of death: "I will show you fear in a handful of dust" (30).
That oncoming death is ironically compared to Wagner's romantic opera, "Tristan und Isolde," and further distances the speaker from any emotional attachment. Wagner's sailor song shows love's dominance over distance‹"Fresh blows the wind/ toward home"‹and even though the "hyacinth girl," a love-object in the form of a vegetation ritual, has "arms full, andŠhair wet," the speaker confesses "I could not/ Speak, and my eyes failed, I was neither/ Living nor dead, and I knew nothing" (footnote 8, 38-40). The girl's fertility and moisture fails on the nihilistic speaker who straddles between life and death, who struggles to see and to communicate. The theme of sight and communication continues in the next stanza with Madam Sosostris, a "famous clairvoyante" (43).
"Sosostris" itself is a word of speech; the two instances of "os" in her name suggest the Latin word for "mouth." She commands her audience to regain his sight: "(ŒThose are pearls that were his eyes. Look!'") (48). One of her cards is a "one-eyed merchant" who "carries [something] on his back which" she is "forbidden to see" (53-4). This lack of depth perception, both the one-eyed man's and hers, leads her to issue the ironic command "Fear death by water" (55). Yet is it ironic, that one should fear a death that seemingly drenches the exsiccative landscape, or has even the Grail that the speaker searches for, water, failed him? Sosostris concludes with a vision of "crowds of people, walking round in a ring" (56). This ritual, devoid of any motion or meaning and similar to the children's recitation and encircling of the prickly pear in "The Hollow Men," favors the latter, that even a Fisher King or some other Quester is unable to help the land.
Eliot shifts into less abstract terms as he describes London, the "Unreal City/ Under the brown fog of a winter dawn" as a land of the marching dead. Again using irony to magnify the barrenness of the land, Eliot describes the crowd that "flowed over London Bridge, so many/ I had not thought death had undone so many./ Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled" (62-4). These breathless lives of exhalations only become the object of the speaker's sarcastic wrath: "'Stetson!/ ŒYou who were with me in the ships at Mylae!/ ŒThat corpse you planted last year in your garden,/ ŒHas it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year?/ ŒOr has the sudden frost disturbed its bed?" (69-73). "Stetson," by association of his name and to the capitalist-driven battle at Mylae, ties modern commercialism to the death of rituals, in this case that of a corpse instead of vegetation. Jesse Weston, in "The Golden Bough," states that broken lands in need of a Quest fall under two categories: those where the infertility is precedent to the Quest, and those where it is caused by a Hero's failure to answer the call. Until this point, Eliot has refrained from fingering man as the root of the waste land's problem, but in his description of vapid London, he seems to blame man's own declining value system for his dying landscape.
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Along with man's flawed values comes a flawed sense of communication. In "A Game of Chess," a queen-like woman sits in furniture that fits her magnificent yet empty existence: "The Chair she sat in, like a burnished throne,/ Glowed on the marble, where the glass/ŠDoubled the flamesŠ/ Reflecting light upon the table as/ The glitter of her jewels rose to meet it" (77-8, 82-4). The rich, seductive prose that lavishes words like "burnished," "glowed," and "glitter" onto the woman's possessions implies that her worth is as false as her "strange synthetic perfumes,/ Unguent, powdered, or liquid‹troubled, confused/ And drowned the sense of odours; stirred by the air" (87-89). The "ed" or "id" endings, as in "powdered," "troubled," and "drowned," connotes a passivity, as if the world is inflicting is troubles and confusions on the woman. In this midst, the "odours" now resemble the landscape from the first stanza as they, too, are stirred by the outside (as is the smoke from the candles, "Stirring the pattern on the coffered ceiling") (93). A conversation between the woman and her husband is enacted: "'My nerves are bad to-night. Yes, bad. Stay with me./ ŒSpeak to me. Why do you never speak. Speak./ ŒWhat are you thinking of? What thinking? What?/ ŒI never know what you are thinking. Think'" (111-4). The flat, short sentences that withhold even the barest emotion in their questions and statement overtly shift the poem into the theme of inarticulacy between the sexes. A nihilistic component comes out their abysmal comments: "'You know nothing? Do you see nothing? Do you remember/ Nothing?'" (121-2) The separation of "Nothing" is no accident, and allows Eliot to finish with his aristocratic duelists and explore a working-class example of desperate communication.
Eliot uses colloquial slang to relate a one-sided conversation in a pub. This bustling scene at first seems like a reminder of how humans can communicate, and Eliot leads the reader to this suspicion by using the word "said" twice in the first two lines: "When Lil's husband got demobbed, I said‹/ I didn't mince my words, I said to her myself" (139-40). She is intermittently interrupted by the bartender, whose call to "HURRY UP PLEASE IT'S TIME" carries ominous implications of death and comes at more rapid intervals. The woman tells of an abortion, and humanity's infertility that dominates its need to avoid loneliness is summed up in her question "What you get married for if you don't want children?" (164)
That loneliness returns Eliot to the bleak landscape in "The Fire Sermon." Personification aids the comparisons between human and environmental death: "the last fingers of leaf/ Clutch and sink into the wet bank" (173-4). The Fisher King makes an appearance here, but in the middle of a corrupted ritual: "A rat crept softly through the vegetation/ Dragging its slimy belly on the bank/ While I was fishing in the dull canal" (187-9). The snake-like rat is reminiscent of man's Edenic fall, another example of man's bringing this "dull" plague on himself. Further accusations are made against man for his robotic nature: "the human engine waits/ Like a taxi throbbing waiting" (216-7). Tiresias, explained by Eliot as the joining of both sexes, is recalled again to witness the sexually grotesque meeting between a man and woman. The man's connections to a conqueror or colonizer comes through as he "assaults her at once;/ Exploring hands encounter no defence" (239-40). Following this encounter, "The Wasteland" becomes far less poetic; its lines shorten and make no effort at lyricism: "The river sweats/ Oil and tar/ The barges drift/ With the turning tide" (266-9).
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The climax of the poem call on a series of images of water. In "Death by Water," Madame Osostris's admonition, Eliot laments the passing of Phlebas the Phoenician, when "A current under sea/ Picked his bones in whispers. As he rose and fell/ He passed the stages of his age and youth/ Entering the whirlpool" (315-8). Indeed, the genitive form of "os" is "ossis," meaning bones, and the clairvoyante's morbid vision has come to fruition in this nostalgic look at a man "who was once as handsome and tall as you" (321). In the final section, "What the Thunder Said," rocks and stones dominate: "After the agony in stony places/ŠHere is no water but only rock/ Rock and no water and the sandy road/ŠWhich are mountains of rock without water/ŠAmongst the rock one cannot stop or think/ŠIf there were only water amongst the rock" (324, 331-2, 334, 336, 338). The alternating lines that include "rock" layer an image of dryness without salvation in the narrative. Where once Marie felt free in the mountains, now "There is not even solitude in the mountains" (343). The speaker feels there must be an intruder that has caused this: "Who is the third who walks always beside you?/..I do not know whether a man or woman/ ‹But who is that on the other side of you?" (360, 365-6). Eliot again points to the "Falling towers" of "the city over the mountains" that "Cracks and reforms and bursts in the violet air" as the source of the problem.
The desolate air is interrupted by "a damp gust/ Bringing rain," and the poem plants the translated words of "be restrained," "give alms," and "have compassion" much like the bartender shouted his closing call. The speaker concludes "The sea was calm, your heart would have responded/ Gaily, when invited, beating obedient/ To controlling hands" (421-3). Though the sea, which once separated lovers, is now a peaceful, wet arena for a gay heart, Eliot's word choice‹"beating obedient/ To controlling hands"‹suggests a more sinister intent. Perhaps the struggle is now gone, and with that a drugged complacence. Death still looms; the Fisher King takes over the role of speaker: "I sat upon the shore/ Fishing, with the arid plain behind me/ Shall I at least set my lands in order?" (424-6). This is an allusion to a Biblical quote that gives an ambiguous view of death: "Set thine house in order: for thou shalt die, and not live." Is the Fisher King merely tying up the loose ends before the world ends with a whimper, or is he permanently fixing his land? The final three words‹"Shantih shantih shantih"‹with their lengthy spaces and meaning ("The Peace which passeth understanding") hints that we will die first, then understand our folly, or that a peaceful death will supersede any hope of learning from our mistakes. In any case, the invocation of a spiritual chant returns the poem full circle, restoring the idea that a broken spirituality is the dull root of our wasted land.
The cryptic allusions to more fertile times has placed "The Wasteland" at the head of 20th-century alienation poetry. Eliot himself passed it off as a "personal and wholly insignificant grouse against life," written during a hospitalized stay in the midst of the Lost Generation's spiritual decay. Though he contended that the function of the poet's mind is to present ideas and to withhold personal interaction, it is difficult to read "The Wasteland" without questioning authorial intent. Is the Fisher King in the last stanza, written in the first person, possibly the poet himself, come to rescue us in Nietzschean Über-Mensch form? Though he would certainly argue against the validity of such a self-enlarging statement (or maybe not), Eliot must have written "The Wasteland" with some hopes that it would somehow end his land's drought. In this sense, then, the writer is a type of Fisher King, and the new ritual is not vegetable harvesting, but writing.
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The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" is one of the most influential poems of the twentieth century (Williams 49). It is certainly not a love song like any that had been written before. The second and third lines shock the reader because of their unusual imagery that would be out of place in a traditional love poem, describing the setting sunlit sky as looking "like a patient etherised upon a table" (Eliot 3). This "etherised" outside world is the key to understanding all of Prufrock's views. He is afraid of the increasingly industrialized and impersonal city surrounding him, and he is unsure of what to do and afraid to commit to any particular choice of action (Mays 112). Paralysis is the main theme of "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock."
Eliot composed "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" during a period beginning in 1909, and ending with the culmination of his first published book, Prufrock and Other Observations, which was published in 1917 (Scofield 46). The changes he made over several years may account for the fragmentation of the poem, but the main theme of paralysis was ever present, and would continue to be a major theme of Eliot's for much of his career (Scofield 46). Originally, the poem was titled "Prufrock Among The Women", which was later adapted and used in "Sweeny Among The Nightingales", and of course parodied E. B. Browning's "Bianca Among the Nightingales" (Loucks 1). Eliot chose to use the more ironic title, of "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" instead, echoing the form of his name that Eliot himself was using at the time, that of T. Stearns Eliot (Southam 1).
In 1909, Eliot completed his undergraduate studies at Harvard, and wrote what would be relatively unchanged in its final edition, the beginning of "Prufrock", lines 1-14. The following year, Eliot traveled abroad to attend lectures at the Sorbonne, hearing Bergson at the Collège de France, and taking private lessons with Alain-Fournier. When he returned home a year later to read for his doctorate, he continued taking classes in Indic Philology, Sanskrit and Indian Philosophy, as well as Greek and Latin. He completed "Prufrock" as well as "Portrait of a Lady", "Preludes", and "Rhapsody on a Windy Night" (Moody xv).
After completing his doctorate, Eliot traveled to Great Britain to study at Oxford and met Ezra Pound. In June of 1915, at the suggestion of Pound, Eliot published "Prufrock" in Poetry magazine (Eliot Facsimile ix).
In 1917, Prufrock and Other Observations was published in Britain. Pound persuaded Alfred Knopf to publish it in America, which Knopf did after Pound's agreement to have someone write a paper about his poetry. Pound chose Eliot to write this paper about him, which he did, but removed Eliot's name from the draft, saying, "I want to boom Eliot and one cant [sic] have too obvious a ping-pong match at that sort of thing" (Eliot Facsimile xii).
"The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" is a dramatic poem by genre, because obviously Eliot himself was neither growing bald nor old when he began writing the poem at the age of twenty-one (Scofield vii). The Prufrock character is perhaps a middle-aged man, going through his mid-life crisis and examining the choices he's made in his life. Most of all, he takes a look at his regrets, and his failure with women. The main tone of the poem is that of weary, ironic self-deprecation (Mays 110). Prufrock makes innumerable references to his growing bald, one of the more clever is the image of the grim reaper holding his coat for him so he can leave this
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world, and snickering at his bald spot (Rosenthal 79). He attempts to make himself feel young again, by rolling his trousers and parting his hair in a style that young people wear, but he knows that it is no use; he is growing old (Hammond 1). Prufrock's fear of growing old contributed to his paralysis.
As evidenced by the title of the book in which it was first collected, Prufrock wasn't as much a persona of the poet but an "observation." The poem begins with an invitation by Prufrock to join him in his travels through a city that is growing increasingly modern, while Prufrock himself is afraid, or unable, to change with it. His description of the way he sees his environment can elucidate much about the character himself. He describes "cheap hotels," restaurants with sawdust on the floor, and frightening streets "that follow like a tedious argument / Of insidious intent" (Eliot 3). The fog creeps up on the street as if it were a cat. The yellow lamplight obscures more than it illuminates. If he is afraid of the modern world that awaits him, why does he wish to enter it? To Prufrock, this world offers him "an overwhelming question" (Eliot 3). It is unclear whether or not he is physically traveling through the city, or whether he is describing the city so that the reader, his sole companion, may understand the environment that causes him such distress. The "you" that is mentioned in the opening line is most likely intended to be the reader. The epigraph preceding the poem, which is from Dante's Inferno 27.61-66. suggests this. The lines are spoken by Guido da Montefeltro, who is a false counselor concealed within a flame, to Dante, who has entered Hell and is not expected to leave. The lines are translated:
'If I thought my answer were given / to anyone who would ever return to the world, / this flame would stand still without moving any further. / But since never from this abyss / has anyone ever returned alive, if what I hear is true, / without fear of infamy I answer you' (Ferguson 1230)
In light of this, it is apparent that we are like Dante and Prufrock is Montefeltro, and that his confessions are meant to be heard by only us. Since we aren't able to escape the industrialized impersonal world any more than Prufrock is, he is safe to expose himself to us as fully as he is able.
The fragmentation of the images in the poem also shed some light on Prufrock's fears. He rarely says what he means, if he is even sure of it himself. Instead, like the magic lantern throwing "patterns on a screen," the poem "Prufrock" is like a set of slides, showing us Prufrock's failures and experiences he's collected (Jeff 1). Prufrock moves from streets to woman talking to images of woman and mythological creatures. There is no congruity in the poem.
The name "Prufrock" never appears in the poem, and instead the character asks himself if he should perhaps say he is Lazarus, and makes sure to mention that he is not Prince Hamlet (Eliot 6-7).
Prufrock is different than Hamlet in several ways. Hamlet, unlike Prufrock, is a man of action. He doesn't ask himself questions like "Do I Dare?" because the thought of whether he dare or not never occurs to him (Hammond 1). Hamlet is also very young and sure of himself, while Prufrock is neither of these. Hamlet and Prufrock do share, however, in attempting to express the "inexpressibly horrible" (Rosenthal 83).
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Prufrock is a character obsessed with time, most likely because his is running out. He continually tells himself "there will be time" in order to rationalize his lack of action. To this point he has "measured out his life with coffee spoons" to make a futile attempt to hang on to every moment that passes, even if he doesn't do anything with the moments that he's been given (Eliot 4). Prufrock is most likely middle aged, and going through his mid-life crisis, which Prufrock alludes to in line 80 by asking himself if he has "the strength to force the moment to its crisis?" (Eliot 6).
Prufrock wants to act and at first asks himself grandiose questions such as whether he "dare disturb the universe." By the end of the poem, he is unsure if he has the will to do something less spectacular, like daring to "eat a peach" (Eliot 4-7). He asks us if he dares, to which the answer is invariably no.
The poetic form of "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" is an interesting one. As much as he breaks the traditions of the Romantic poets by introducing nightmarish imagery about the outside world, Eliot also breaks tradition in the unusual rhyme and meter of the poem. "Prufrock" is not written as free verse as is usually assumed, but:
tightly metrical blank verse with the five-stress lines frequently broken into two and three feet or one and four feet, these scattered about the poem, and with scattered rhyme throughout, and the standard blank verse resolving device (as in Shakespeare's scenes) of a terminal rhymed couplet. (Williams 49)
By the end of the poem, Prufrock is imaging mermaids, or man's ideal vision of women sitting on the beach, but even in his imagination they do not sing to him. When he is awakened from his daydream by a human voice, it is apparent that even in his fantasies Prufrock is paralyzed and non-active (Eliot 7). Paralysis is the key theme that runs through "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.
The Waste Land(1922)
By
T.S.Eliot
Section I: "The Burial of the Dead"Form
Like "Prufrock," this section of The Waste Land can be seen as a modified dramatic monologue. The four speakers in this section are frantic in their need to speak, to find an audience, but they find themselves surrounded by dead people and thwarted by outside circumstances, like wars. Because the sections are so short and the situations so confusing, the effect is not one of an overwhelming impression of a single character; instead, the reader is left with the feeling of being trapped in a crowd, unable to find a familiar face.
Also like "Prufrock," The Waste Land employs only partial rhyme schemes and short bursts of structure. These are meant to reference--but also rework-- the literary
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past, achieving simultaneously a stabilizing and a defamiliarizing effect. The world of The Waste Land has some parallels to an earlier time, but it cannot be approached in the same way. The inclusion of fragments in languages other than English further complicates matters. The reader is not expected to be able to translate these immediately; rather, they are reminders of the cosmopolitan nature of twentieth-century Europe and of mankind's fate after the Tower of Babel: We will never be able to perfectly comprehend one another.
Commentary
Not only is The Waste Land Eliot's greatest work, but it may be--along with Joyce's Ulysses--the greatest work of all modernist literature. Most of the poem was written in 1921, and it first appeared in print in 1922. As the poem's dedication indicates, Eliot received a great deal of guidance from Ezra Pound, who encouraged him to cut large sections of the planned work and to break up the rhyme scheme. Recent scholarship suggests that Eliot's wife, Vivien, also had a significant role in the poem's final form. A long work divided into five sections, The Waste Land takes on the degraded mess that Eliot considered modern culture to constitute, particularly after the first World War had ravaged Europe. A sign of the pessimism with which Eliot approaches his subject is the poem's epigraph, taken from the Satyricon, in which the Sibyl (a woman with prophetic powers who ages but never dies) looks at the future and proclaims that she only wants to die. The Sibyl's predicament mirrors what Eliot sees as his own: He lives in a culture that has decayed and withered but will not expire, and he is forced to live with reminders of its former glory. Thus, the underlying plot of The Waste Land, inasmuch as it can be said to have one, revolves around Eliot's reading of two extraordinarily influential contemporary cultural/anthropological texts, Jessie Weston's From Ritual to Romance and Sir James Frazier's The Golden Bough. Both of these works focus on the persistence of ancient fertility rituals in modern thought and religion; of particular interest to both authors is the story of the Fisher King, who has been wounded in the genitals and whose lack of potency is the cause of his country becoming a desiccated "waste land." Heal the Fisher King, the legend says, and the land will regain its fertility. According to Weston and Frazier, healing the Fisher King has been the subject of mythic tales from ancient Egypt to Arthurian England. Eliot picks up on the figure of the Fisher King legend's wasteland as an appropriate description of the state of modern society. The important difference, of course, is that in Eliot's world there is no way to heal the Fisher King; perhaps there is no Fisher King at all. The legend's imperfect integration into a modern meditation highlights the lack of a unifying narrative (like religion or mythology) in the modern world.
Eliot's poem, like the anthropological texts that inspired it, draws on a vast range of sources. Eliot provided copious footnotes with the publication of The Waste Land in book form; these are an excellent source for tracking down the origins of a reference. Many of the references are from the Bible: at the time of the poem's writing Eliot was just beginning to develop an interest in Christianity that would reach its apex in the Four Quartets. The overall range of allusions in The Waste Land, though, suggests no overarching paradigm but rather a grab bag of broken fragments that must somehow be pieced together to form a coherent whole. While Eliot employs a
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deliberately difficult style and seems often to find the most obscure reference possible, he means to do more than just frustrate his reader and display his own intelligence: He intends to provide a mimetic account of life in the confusing world of the twentieth century.
The Waste Land opens with a reference to Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. In this case, though, April is not the happy month of pilgrimages and storytelling. It is instead the time when the land should be regenerating after a long winter. Regeneration, though, is painful, for it brings back reminders of a more fertile and happier past. In the modern world, winter, the time of forgetfulness and numbness, is indeed preferable. Marie's childhood recollections are also painful: the simple world of cousins, sledding, and coffee in the park has been replaced by a complex set of emotional and political consequences resulting from the war. The topic of memory, particularly when it involves remembering the dead, is of critical importance in The Waste Land. Memory creates a confrontation of the past with the present, a juxtaposition that points out just how badly things have decayed. Marie reads for most of the night: ostracized by politics, she is unable to do much else. To read is also to remember a better past, which could produce a coherent literary culture.
The second episode contains a troubled religious proposition. The speaker describes a true wasteland of "stony rubbish"; in it, he says, man can recognize only "[a] heap of broken images." Yet the scene seems to offer salvation: shade and a vision of something new and different. The vision consists only of nothingness--a handful of dust--which is so profound as to be frightening; yet truth also resides here: No longer a religious phenomenon achieved through Christ, truth is represented by a mere void. The speaker remembers a female figure from his past, with whom he has apparently had some sort of romantic involvement. In contrast to the present setting in the desert, his memories are lush, full of water and blooming flowers. The vibrancy of the earlier scene, though, leads the speaker to a revelation of the nothingness he now offers to show the reader. Again memory serves to contrast the past with the present, but here it also serves to explode the idea of coherence in either place. In the episode from the past, the "nothingness" is more clearly a sexual failure, a moment of impotence. Despite the overall fecundity and joy of the moment, no reconciliation, and, therefore, no action, is possible. This in turn leads directly to the desert waste of the present. In the final line of the episode attention turns from the desert to the sea. Here, the sea is not a locus for the fear of nothingness, and neither is it the locus for a philosophical interpretation of nothingness; rather, it is the site of true, essential nothingness itself. The line comes from a section of Tristan und Isolde where Tristan waits for Isolde to come heal him. She is supposedly coming by ship but fails to arrive. The ocean is truly empty, devoid of the possibility of healing or revelation.
The third episode explores Eliot's fascination with transformation. The tarot reader Madame Sosostris conducts the most outrageous form of "reading" possible, transforming a series of vague symbols into predictions, many of which will come true in succeeding sections of the poem. Eliot transforms the traditional tarot pack to serve his purposes. The drowned sailor makes reference to the ultimate work of magic and transformation in English literature, Shakespeare's The Tempest ("Those are
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pearls that were his eyes" is a quote from one of Ariel's songs). Transformation in The Tempest, though, is the result of the highest art of humankind. Here, transformation is associated with fraud, vulgarity, and cheap mysticism. That Madame Sosostris will prove to be right in her predictions of death and transformation is a direct commentary on the failed religious mysticism and prophecy of the preceding desert section.
The final episode of the first section allows Eliot finally to establish the true wasteland of the poem, the modern city. Eliot's London references Baudelaire's Paris ("Unreal City"), Dickens's London ("the brown fog of a winter dawn") and Dante's hell ("the flowing crowd of the dead"). The city is desolate and depopulated, inhabited only by ghosts from the past. Stetson, the apparition the speaker recognizes, is a fallen war comrade. The speaker pesters him with a series of ghoulish questions about a corpse buried in his garden: again, with the garden, we return to the theme of regeneration and fertility. This encounter can be read as a quest for a meaning behind the tremendous slaughter of the first World War; however, it can also be read as an exercise in ultimate futility: as we see in Stetson's failure to respond to the speaker's inquiries, the dead offer few answers. The great respective weights of history, tradition, and the poet's dead predecessors combine to create an oppressive burden.
Section II: "A Game of Chess
Form
The first part of the section is largely in unrhymed iambic pentameter lines, or blank verse. As the section proceeds, the lines become increasingly irregular in length and meter, giving the feeling of disintegration, of things falling apart. As the woman of the first half begins to give voice to her paranoid thoughts, things do fall apart, at least formally: We read lines of dialogue, then a snippet from a nonsense song. The last four lines of the first half rhyme, although they are irregular in meter, suggesting at least a partial return to stability.
The second half of the section is a dialogue interrupted by the barman's refrain. Rather than following an organized structure of rhyme and meter, this section constitutes a loose series of phrases connected by "I said(s)" and "she said(s)." This is perhaps the most poetically experimental section of the entire poem. Eliot is writing in a lower-class vernacular here that resists poetic treatment. This section refutes the prevalent claim that iambic pentameter mirrors normal English speech patterns: Line length and stresses are consistently irregular. Yet the section sounds like poetry: the repeated use of "I said" and the grounding provided by the barman's chorus allow the woman's speech to flow elegantly, despite her rough phrasing and the coarse content of her story.
Commentary
The two women of this section of the poem represent the two sides of modern sexuality: while one side of this sexuality is a dry, barren interchange inseparable
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from neurosis and self-destruction, the other side of this sexuality is a rampant fecundity associated with a lack of culture and rapid aging. The first woman is associated by allusion with Cleopatra, Dido, and even Keats's Lamia, by virtue of the lushness of language surrounding her (although Eliot would never have acknowledged Keats as an influence). She is a frustrated, overly emotional but not terribly intellectual figure, oddly sinister, surrounded by "strange synthetic perfumes" and smoking candles. She can be seen as a counterpart to the title character of Eliot's earlier "Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," with whom she shares both a physical setting and a profound sense of isolation. Her association with Dido and Cleopatra, two women who committed suicide out of frustrated love, suggests her fundamental irrationality. Unlike the two queens of myth, however, this woman will never become a cultural touchstone. Her despair is pathetic, rather than moving, as she demands that her lover stay with her and tell her his thoughts. The lover, who seems to be associated with the narrator of this part of the poem, can think only of drowning (again, in a reference to The Tempest) and rats among dead men's bones. The woman is explicitly compared to Philomela, a character out of Ovid's Metamorphoses who is raped by her brother-in-law the king, who then cuts her tongue out to keep her quiet. She manages to tell her sister, who helps her avenge herself by murdering the king's son and feeding him to the king. The sisters are then changed into birds, Philomela into a nightingale. This comparison suggests something essentially disappointing about the woman, that she is unable to communicate her interior self to the world. The woman and her surroundings, although aesthetically pleasing, are ultimately sterile and meaningless, as suggested by the nonsense song that she sings (which manages to debase even Shakespeare).
The second scene in this section further diminishes the possibility that sex can bring regeneration--either cultural or personal. This section is remarkably free of the cultural allusions that dominate the rest of the poem; instead, it relies on vernacular speech to make its point. Notice that Eliot is using a British vernacular: By this point he had moved to England permanently and had become a confirmed Anglophile. Although Eliot is able to produce startlingly beautiful poetry from the rough speech of the women in the bar, he nevertheless presents their conversation as further reason for pessimism. Their friend Lil has done everything the right way--married, supported her soldier husband, borne children--yet she is being punished by her body. Interestingly, this section ends with a line echoing Ophelia's suicide speech in Hamlet; this links Lil to the woman in the first section of the poem, who has also been compared to famous female suicides. The comparison between the two is not meant to suggest equality between them or to propose that the first woman's exaggerated sense of high culture is in any way equivalent to the second woman's lack of it; rather, Eliot means to suggest that neither woman's form of sexuality is regenerative.
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از ھمین نویسنده:
Lion King.1انتشارات سیب سرخ Guide to English Literature.2 انتشارات سیب سرخ
Guide to English Literature.3)دوم (چاپانتشارات رھنما Oral Translation.4انتشارات رھنما
Preparation for M.A. (E.L.L.).5انتشارات رھنما A Touch with English.6رات رھنماانتشا انتشارات پردازش (دو جلد).مجموعھ سواالت کارشناسی ارشد زبان و ادبیات انگلیسی7 انتشارات پردازش .خالصھ مباحث اساسی کارشناسی ارشد زبان و ادبیات انگلیسی 8 انتشارات بھزاد ردانگی .پدران غایب وپسران گمشده در جستجوی ھویت م9
انتشارات دانشگاه ازاد اسالمی واحد جیرفت .ترجمھ فنون و صناعات ادبی 10 انتشارات دانشگاه ازاد اسالمی واحد جیرفت .عشق و مرگ دراثار شکسپیر11 انتشارات بھزاد یرانپست مدرنیسم و فرایند جھانی شدن ادبیات ا.12
انتشارات دانشگاه ازاد اسالمی واحد جیرفت .نقد عملی ادبیات انگلیسی13 .دیکشنری فارسی بھ انگلیسی و انگلیسی بھ فارسی کشاورزی14
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