Short Stories for Students : Presenting Analysis, Context & Criticism on Commonly Studied Short Stories, Volume 1

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Table of Contents Quest Foreword ' 'An Adventure in Reading'' by Nancy Rosenberger

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Introduction

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Literary Chronology

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Acknowledgments

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Araby by James Joyce

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The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County by Mark Twain

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Children of the Sea by Edwidge Danticat

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The Devil and Tom Walker by Washington Irving

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The Eatonville Anthology by Zora Neale Hurston

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The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

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I Stand Here Ironing by Tillie Olsen

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The Short, Happy Life of Francis Macomber

The Jilting of Granny Weatherall by Katherine Anne Porter

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King of the Bingo Game b y Ralph Ellison

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The Lottery b y Shirley Jackson The Most Dangerous Game by Richard Connell

by Ray Bradbury

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Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been? by Joyce Carol Gates 257

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The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Oilman .

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Young Goodman Brown

The Secret Sharer by Joseph Conrad

There Will Come Soft Rains Through the Tunnel by Doris Lessing

The Secret Life of Walter Mitty by James Thurber

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The Open Window bySaki

by Ernest Hemingway

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by Nathaniel Hawthorne

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Glossary of Literary Terms

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Cumulative Author/Title Index

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Nationality/Ethnicity Index

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Subject/Theme Index

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An Adventure in Reading Sitting on top of my desk is a Pueblo storytelling doll. Her legs stick straight out before her and around her neck and flowing down into her lap are wide-eyed children. Her mouth is open as though she were telling the Zuni tale of the young husband who followed his wife to the Land of the Dead, a story strangely like the Greek myth of Orpheus and Euridice, as both teach the dangers of youthful impatience. Although the Pueblo doll was created in New Mexico, she symbolizes a universal human activity. The pharaohs listened intently to tales of the goddess Isis, who traveled to foreign lands to rescue the dismembered body of her husband Osiris. Biblical narratives thrill the reader with stories like that of mortal combat between David and the giant Goliath. Greek and Roman myths immortalize the struggles of the wandering warriors Odysseus and Aeneas. In the Middle Ages, kings, queens and courtiers sat spellbound in drafty halls as troubadours sang of tragic lovers and pious pilgrims. Around the world and down through the ages, myths, folktales, and legends have spoken to us about the human condition and our place in the world of nature and of spirit. Despite its ancient beginnings, however, there is no rigid criteria to which a story must adhere. It is one of the most protean literary forms. Though many scholars credit the nineteenth-century Romantic writers Edgar

Allan Poe and Nathaniel Hawthorne with creating the modern short story, the form refuses to be frozen by a list of essential characteristics. Perhaps this is one of the reasons William Faulkner called it the "most demanding form after poetry.'' Jack London felt it should be ' 'concrete, to the point, with snap and go and life, crisp and crackling and interesting." Eudora Welty wrote that each story should reveal something new yet also contain something "as old as time." Below are some of the qualities you may observe as you explore the works discussed in Short Stories for Students. These characteristics also demonstrate some of the ways the short story differs from the novel: 1. Because time is compressed or accelerated, unity in plot, character development, tone, or mood is essential. 2. The author has chosen to focus on one character, event, or conflict within a limited time. 3. Poe wrote that careful craftsmanship serves unity by ensuring that every word must contribute to the story's design. 4. Poe also believed that reading should take place in one sitting so that the story's unity is not lost. 5. A character is revealed through a series of incidents or a conflict. The short story generally stops when it has achieved this purpose. A novel develops a character throughout its many chapters.

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Now that we have briefly explored the history of the short story and heard from a few of its creators, let us consider the role of the reader. Readers are not empty vessels that wait, lids raised, to receive a teacher's or a critic's interpretation. They bring their unique life experiences to the story. With these associations, the best readers also bring their attention (a word that means "leaning towards' '), their reading skills, and, most importantly, their imagination to a reading of a story. My students always challenged me to discuss, analyze, interpret, and evaluate the stories we read without destroying the thrill of being beamed up into another world. For years I grappled with one response after the other to this challenge. Then one day I read an article by a botanist who had explored the beauty of flowers by x-raying them. His illustrations showed the rose and the lily in their external beauty, and his x-rays presented the wonders of their construction. I brought the article to class, where we discussed the benefits of examining the internal design of flowers, relationships, current events, and short stories.

A short story, however, is not a fossil to admire. Readers must ask questions, guess at the answers, predict what will happen next, then read to discover. They and the author form a partnership that brings the story to life. Awareness of this partnership keeps the original excitement alive through discussion, analysis, interpretation, and evaluation. Literary explorations allow the reader to admire the authors' craftsmanship as well as their artistry. In fact, original appreciation may be enhanced by this x-ray vision. The final step is to appreciate once again the story in its entirety—to put the pieces back together. Now it is your turn. Form a partnership with your author. During or following your adventure in reading, enter into a dialogue with the published scholars featured in Short Stories for Students. Through this dialogue with experts you will revise, enrich, and/or confirm your original observations and interpretations. During this adventure, I hope you will feel the same awe that illuminates the faces of the listeners that surround the neck of my Pueblo storyteller.

Nancy Rosenberger Conestoga High School Berwyn, Pennsylvania

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Introduction Purpose of the Book The purpose of Short Stories for Students (SSfS) is to provide readers with a guide to understanding, enjoying, and studying short stories by giving them easy access to information about the work. Part of Gale's "For Students" Literature line, SSfS is specifically designed to meet the curricular needs of high school and undergraduate college students and their teachers, as well as the interests of general readers and researchers considering specific short fiction. While each volume contains entries on "classic" stories frequently studied in classrooms, there are also entries containing hard-to-find information on contemporary stories, including works by multicultural, international, and women writers. The information covered in each entry includes an introduction to the story and the story's author; a plot summary, to help readers unravel and understand the events in the work; descriptions of important characters, including explanation of a given character's role in the narrative as well as discussion about that character's relationship to other characters in the story; analysis of important themes in the story; and an explanation of important literary techniques and movements as they are demonstrated in the work. In addition to this material, which helps the readers analyze the story itself, students are also provided with important information on the literary and historical background informing each work.

This includes a historical context essay, a box comparing the time or place the story was written to modern Western culture, a critical overview essay, and excerpts from critical essays on the story or author. A unique feature of SSfS is a specially commissioned overview essay on each story by an academic expert, targeted toward the student reader. To further aid the student in studying and enjoying each story, information on media adaptations is provided, as well as reading suggestions for works of fiction and nonfiction on similar themes and topics. Classroom aids include ideas for research papers and lists of critical sources that provide additional material on the work.

Selection Criteria The titles for each volume of SSfS were selected by surveying numerous sources on teaching literature and analyzing course curricula for various school districts. Some of the sources surveyed include: literature anthologies, Reading Lists for CollegeBound Students: The Books Most Recommended by America's Top Colleges; Teaching the Short Story: A Guide to Using Stories from Around the World, by the National Council of Teachers of English (NTCE); and "A Study of High School Literature Anthologies," conducted by Arthur Applebee at the Center for the Learning and Teaching of Literature and sponsored by the National Endowment for the Arts and the Office of Educational Research and Improvement.

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Input was also solicited from our expert advisory board, as well as educators from various areas. From these discussions, it was determined that each volume should have a mix of "classic" stories (those works commonly taught in literature classes) and contemporary stories for which information is often hard to find. Because of the interest in expanding the canon of literature, an emphasis was also placed on including works by international, multicultural, and women authors. Our advisory board members—current high-school teachers— helped pare down the list for each volume. Works not selected for the present volume were noted as possibilities for future volumes. As always, the editor welcomes suggestions for titles to be included in future volumes.

How Each Entry Is Organized Each entry, or chapter, in SS/S focuses on one story. Each entry heading lists the title of the story, the author's name, and the date of the story's publication. The following elements are contained in each entry: Introduction: a brief overview of the story which provides information about its first appearance, its literary standing, any controversies surrounding the work, and major conflicts or themes within the work.

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rate subhead, and is easily accessed through the boldface entries in the Subject/Theme Index. Style: this section addresses important style elements of the story, such as setting, point of view, and narration; important literary devices used, such as imagery, foreshadowing, symbolism; and, if applicable, genres to which the work might have belonged, such as Gothicism or Romanticism. Literary terms are explained within the entry, but can also be found in the Glossary of Literary Terms. Historical and Cultural Context: This section outlines the social, political, and cultural climate in which the author lived and the work was created. This section may include descriptions of related historical events, pertinent aspects of daily life in the culture, and the artistic and literary sensibilities of the time in which the work was written. If the story is historical in nature, information regarding the time in which the story is set is also included. Long sections are broken down with helpful subheads.

Author Biography: this section includes basic facts about the author's life, and focuses on events and times in the author's life that may have inspired the story in question.

Critical Overview: this section provides background on the critical reputation of the author and the story, including bannings or any other public controversies surrounding the work. For older works, this section may include a history of how story was first received and how perceptions of it may have changed over the years; for more recent works, direct quotes from early reviews may also be included.

Plot Summary: a description of the events in the story, with interpretation of how these events help articulate the story's themes.

Sources: an alphabetical list of critical material quoted in the entry, with bibliographical information.

Characters: an alphabetical listing of the characters who appear in the story. Each character name is followed by a brief to an extensive description of the character's role in the story, as well as discussion of the character's actions, relationships, and possible motivation.

For Further Study: an alphabetical list of other critical sources which may prove useful for the student. Includes full bibliographical information and a brief annotation. Criticism: an essay commissioned by SSfS which specifically deals with the story and is written specifically for the student audience, as well as excerpts from previously published criticism on the work.

Characters are listed alphabetically by last name. If a character is unnamed—for instance, the narrator in "The Eatonville Anthology"—the character is listed as ' 'The Narrator'' and alphabetized as ' 'Narrator." If a character's first name is the only one given, the name will appear alphabetically by that name.

In addition, each entry contains the following highlighted sections, if applicable, set separate from the main text:

Themes: a thorough overview of how the topics, themes, and issues are addressed within the story. Each theme discussed appears in a sepa-

Media Adaptations: where applicable, a list of film and television adaptations of the story, including source information. The list also in-

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eludes stage adaptations, audio recordings, musical adaptations, etc.

available), maps, and/or photos of key historical events.

Compare and Contrast Box: an "at-a-glance" comparison of the cultural and historical differences between the author's time and culture and late twentieth-century Western culture. This box includes pertinent parallels between the major scientific, political, and cultural movements of the time or place the story was written, the time or place the story was set (if a historical work), and modern Western culture. Works written after the mid-1970s may not have this box.

When writing papers, students who quote directly from any volume of SSfS may use the following general forms to document their source. These examples are based on ML A style; teachers may request that students adhere to a different style, thus, the following examples may be adapted as needed.

What Do I Read Next?: a list of works that might complement the featured story or serve as a contrast to it. This includes works by the same author and others, works of fiction and nonfiction, and works from various genres, cultures, and eras. Study Questions: a list of potential study questions or research topics dealing with the story. This section includes questions related to other disciplines the student may be studying, such as American history, world history, science, math, government, business, geography, economics, psychology, etc.

Other Features SSfS includes "An Adventure in Reading," a foreword by Nancy Rosenberger, chair of the English department at Conestoga High School in Berwyn, Pennsylvania. This essay provides an enlightening look at how readers interact with literature and how Short Stories for Students can help students enrich their own reading experiences. A Cumulative Author/Title Index lists the authors and titles covered in each volume of the SSfS series. A Cumulative Nationality/Ethnicity Index breaks down the authors and titles covered in each volume of the SSfS series by nationality and ethnicity. A Subject/Theme Index, specific to each volume, provides easy reference for users who may be studying a particular subject or theme rather than a single work. Significant subjects from events to broad themes are included, and the entries pointing to the specific theme discussions in each entry are indicated in boldface. Entries may include illustrations, including an author portrait, stills from film adaptations (when

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Citing Short Stories for Students

When citing text from SSfS that is not attributed to a particular author (for example, the Themes, Style, Historical Context sections, etc.) the following format may be used: ' 'The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County." Short Stories for Students. Ed. Kathleen Wilson. Vol. 1. Detroit: Gale, 1997. 19-20.

When quoting the specially commissioned essay from SSfS (usually the first essay under the Criticism subhead), the following format may be used: Korb, Rena. Essay on "Children of the Sea." Short Stories for Students. Ed. Kathleen Wilson. Vol. 1. Detroit: Gale, 1997. 42.

When quoting a journal essay that is reprinted in a volume of Short Stories for Students, the following form may be used: Schmidt, Paul. "The Deadpan on Simon Wheeler." The Southwest Review XLI, No. 3 (Summer, 1956), 270-77; excerpted and reprinted in Short Stories for Students, Vol. 1, ed. Kathleen Wilson (Detroit: Gale, 1997), pp. 29-31.

When quoting material from a book that is reprinted in a volume of SSfS, the following form may be used: Bell-Villada, Gene H. "The Master of Short Forms," in Garcia Marquez: The Man and His Work (University of North Caroline Press, 1990); excerpted and reprinted in Short Stories for Students, Vol. 1, ed. Kathleen Wilson (Detroit: Gale, 1997), pp. 90-1.

We Welcome Your Suggestions The editor of Short Stories for Students welcomes your comments and ideas. Readers who wish to suggest short stories to appear in future volumes, or who have other suggestions, are cordially invited to contact the editor. You may write to the editor at: Editor, Short Stories for Students Gale Research 835 Penobscot Bldg. 645 Griswold St. Detroit, MI 48226-4094

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Literary Chronology 1776: The signing of the Declaration of Independence signals the end of the American Revolution.

1860: Charlotte Perkins Oilman is born in Hartford, Connecticut, on July 3.

1783: Washington Irving is born in New York City on April 3.

1861: The U.S. Civil War begins when Confederate forces capture Fort Sumter in South Carolina.

1789: The French Revolution, marked by the violent Reign of Terror, shifts the balance of power in France.

1864: Nathaniel Hawthorne dies on May 19, 1864, at Plymouth, New Hampshire, and is buried on May 23, 1864, at Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, in Concord, Massachusetts.

1804: Nathaniel Hawthorne is born in Salem, Massachusetts, on July 4. 1824: "The Devil and Tom Walker" by Washington Irving is published. 1835: "Young Goodman Brown" by Nathaniel Hawthorne is published. 1835: Mark Twain is born Samuel Langhorne Clemens on November 30, 1835, to John Marshall and Jane Lampton Clemens, in Florida, Missouri. 1850: Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, the story of a woman who must wear a scarlet letter "A" because she committed adultery, is published. 1857: Joseph Conrad is born Jozef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski on December 3, to Apollo and Evelina Bobrowska Korzeniowski, near Berdichev in the Ukraine. 1859: Washington Irving dies on November 28.

1865: The U.S. Civil War ends; Abraham Lincoln is assassinated. 1865: "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County" by Mark Twain is published. 1870: Saki is born Hugh Hector Munro in Akyab, Burma, to British parents on December 18. 1882: James Joyce is born in Dublin, Ireland, on February 2. 1884: Mark Twain establishes the Charles L. Webster Publishing Co. in order to secure greater control over his books. 1884: Mark Twain begins The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Tom Sawyer's Comrade in the summer of 1876 while he is at Quarry Farm, near Elmira, New York, and finishes it in the summer of 1883. The novel is published February 18,1885. 1890: Katherine Anne Porter is born Callie Russell Porter in Indian Creek, Texas, on May 15.

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1892:' 'The Yellow Wallpaper'' by Charlotte Perkins Oilman is published. 1893: Richard Connell is born in New York state on October 17. 1894: James Thurber is born in Columbus, Ohio, on December 8. 1899: Ernest Hemingway is born on July 21, 1899, in Oak Park, Illinois. 1902: Joseph Conrad completes Heart of Darkness in February, 1899, and it is published in 1902. 1903: Zora Neale Hurston is born in Eatonville, Florida, on January 7, some sources say.

1920: Ray Bradbury is born on August 22,1920, in Waukegan, Illinois. 1922: James Joyce's Ulysses, considered by many to be the most important novel of the twentieth century, is published and quickly ignites a scandal for its unusual style and content. 1924: "The Most Dangerous Game" by Richard Connell is published.

1909: "The Secret Sharer" by Joseph Conrad is published.

1924: Joseph Conrad dies of a heart attack on August 3, 1924, at Oswalds, Bishopsbourne, near Canterbury. He is buried at Canterbury.

1910: Mark Twain dies of angina pectoris on April 21, 1910, in Redding, Connecticut.

1926: "The Eatonville Anthology" by Zora Neale Hurston is published.

1912: The

1928: Gabriel Garcia Marquez is born on March 6, 1928, in Aracataca, Colombia.

Titanic sinks on her maiden voyage.

1913: Tillie Olsen is born is born in Omaha, Nebraska, on January 14, some sources say. 1914: Ralph Ellison is born March 1, 1914 in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. 1914: With the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand of Austria, long-festering tensions in Europe erupt into the what becomes known as the Great War. 1914: "Araby" by James Joyce is published in the collection Dubliners after years of disputes with editors and publishers. 1914: "The Open Window" by Saki is published. 1916: Saki dies in the trenches of France during battle on November 14.

1929: The stock market crash in October signals the beginning of a worldwide economic depression. 1929: ' 'The Jilting of Granny Weatherall'' by Katherine Anne Porter is published. 1929: Ernest Hemingway's^ Farewell to Arms, the story of an American ambulance driver and his desire for an English nurse during World War I, is published. 1935: Charlotte Perkins Oilman commits suicide after being diagnosed with a terminal illness on August 17. 1936:' "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber'' by Ernest Hemingway is published.

1918: World War I, the most deadly war in history, ends with the signing of the Treaty of Versailles.

1937: Their Eyes Were Watching God, one of Zora Neale Hurston's most acclaimed works, is published,

1918: Willa Gather's My Antonia, her novel about prairie life, is published.

1938: Joyce Carol Gates is born in Millersport, New York, on June 16.

1919: Shirley Jackson is born in San Francisco, California, on December 14.

1939: World War II begins when Nazi Germany, led by Adolf Hitler, invades Poland; England and France declare war in response.

1919: Doris Lessing is born in Kermansha, Persia, on October 22, of British parents. 1920: The 18th Amendment, outlawing the sale, manufacture, or transportation of alcohol— known as Prohibition—goes into effect. This law led to the creation of "speakeasies"—ille-

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gal bars—and an increase in organized crime, both reflected in F. Scott Fitzgerald's novel The Great Gatsby. Prohibition is eventually repealed in 1933.

1939: ' 'The Secret Life of Walter Mitty'' by James Thurber is published. 1940: For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway is published. The book proves to be one of his most popular novels.

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1941: James Joyce dies in Zurich, Switzerland, on January 13.

1962: Ship of Fools, Katherine Anne Porter's most famous work, is published.

1944: "King of the Bingo Game" by Ralph Ellison is published.

1963: President John F. Kennedy is assassinated in Dallas, Texas, on November 22.

1945: World War II ends in August with the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan. 1948:' 'The Lottery'' by Shirley Jackson is published. 1949: Richard Connell dies of a heart attack in Beverly Hills, California, on November 22. 1950: Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin sets off the "Red Scare" that leads to government hearings and blacklisting of suspected communists. 1951: "There Will Come Soft Rains" by Ray Bradbury is published. 1952: Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man is published. 1953: Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man wins the National Book Award, which honors American books of the highest literary merit. 1953: Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury's first novel, an expanded version of an earlier story, is published. 1954: Ernest Hemingway receives the Nobel Prize in Literature. 1955: "Through the Tunnel" by Doris Lessing is published. 1960: Zora Neale Hurston dies in Florida on January 28.

1965: Shirley Jackson dies of heart failure on August 8. 1966: ' 'Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?" by Joyce Carol Gates is published. 1967: "The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World'' by Gabriel Garcia Marquez is first published in English. 1969: Edwidge Danticat is born in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, on January 19. 1969: Neil Armstrong becomes the first person to walk on the moon on July 21. 1969: them, an award-winning novel by Joyce Carol Gates, is published. 1970: One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez is published in English. 1972: President Nixon resigns following the Watergate scandal. 1980: Katherine Anne Porter dies in College Park, Maryland, on September 18. 1982: Gabriel Garcia Marquez receives the Nobel Prize in Literature.

1961: Ernest Hemingway commits suicide on July 2, 1961, in Ketchum, Idaho.

1990: Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev's policy of glasnost results in the fracturing of the Iron Curtain. By December the Soviet flag is lowered from the Kremlin.

1961: "I Stand Here Ironing" by Tillie Olsen is published.

1993: "Children of the Sea" by Edwidge Danticat is published.

1962: The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing is published.

1994: Ralph Ellison dies of cancer on April 16, 1994, in New York City.

1961: James Thurber dies on November 2.

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Acknowledgments The editors wish to thank the copyright holders of the excerpted criticism included in this volume and the permissions managers of many book and magazine publishing companies for assisting us in securing reproduction rights. We are also grateful to the staffs of the Detroit Public Library, the Library of Congress, the University of Detroit Mercy Library, Wayne State University Purdy/Kresge Library Complex, and the University of Michigan Libraries for making their resources available to us. Following is a list of the copyright holders who have granted us permission to reproduce material in this volume of SSFS. Every effort has been made to trace copyright, but if omissions have been made, please let us know. COPYRIGHTED EXCERPTS IN SSFS, VOLUME 1, WERE REPRODUCED FROM THE FOLLOWING PERIODICALS: American Literature, v. XXVIII, November, 1956. Copyright © 1956 Duke University Press, Durham, NC. Reproduced with permission.—The Antioch Review, v. XXV, Fall, 1965. Copyright © 1965 by The Antioch Review Inc. Reproduced by permission of the Editors.—Belles Lettres: A Review of Books by Women, v. 10, Summer, 1995. Reproduced by permission.—The Boston Globe, July 19,1995. © 1995 Globe Newspaper Co. Reproduced courtesy of The Boston Globe,— CLA Journal, v. XX, September, 1976; v. XXXVII, June, 1994. Copyright 1976, 1994 by The College Lan-

guage Association. Both used by permission of The College Language Association.—College English, v. 23, May, 1962 for ' 'Point of View in The Secret Sharer' " by Charles G. Hoffmann. Copyright © 1967 by the National Council of Teachers of English. Reproduced by permission of the publisher and the author.—Conradiana, v. XVIII, 1986 for "Shared Secret or Secret Sharing in Joseph Conrad's The Secret Sharer' " by Mary Ann Dazey. Reproduced with permission of Texas Tech University Press and the author.—Doris Lessing Newsletter, v. 9, Spring, 1985. © 1985 by Brooklyn College, The City University of New York. Reproduced by permission.—English Journal, v. 56, December, 1967 for "The Architecture of Walter Mitty's Secret Life" by Carl Sundell. Copyright© 1967 by the National Council of Teachers of English. Reproduced by permission of the publisher and the author.—Essays in Literature, v. XV, Fall, 1988. Copyright 1988 by Western Illinois University. Reproduced by permission.—The Explicator, v. XII, March, 1954; v. 32, May, 1974; v. 42, Summer, 1984; v. 48, Summer, 1990. Copyright 1954, 1974, 1984, 1990 by Helen Dwight Reid Educational Foundation. All reproduced with permission of the Helen Dwight Reid Educational Foundation, published by Heldref Publications, 1319 18th Street, NW, Washington, DC 20036-1802.—The Georgia Review, v. XXVIII, Summer, 1974. Copyright, 1974, by the University of Georgia. Reproduced by permission.—The Hemingway Review, v. II, Spring,

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1983; v. XI, Fall, 1991. Copyright 1983, 1991 by The Ernest Hemingway Foundation. Both reproduced by permission of the publisher.—James Joyce Quarterly, v. 7, Summer, 1970. Copyright, 1970, The University of Tulsa. Reproduced by permission.—Journal of American Culture, v. 15, Summer, 1992.Copyright© 1992 by Ray B.Browne. Reproduced by permission.—The Journal of General Education, v. 28, Spring, 1976. Copyright 1976 by The Pennsylvania State University Press, University Park, PA. Reproduced by permission.— The Journal of Narrative Technique, v. 5, January, 1975 for " 'Don't You Know Who I Am': The Grotesque in Oates's 'Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?' " Copyright ©1975 by The Journal of Narrative Technique. Reproduced by permission of the publisher and the author.—Kentucky Romance Quarterly, v. 26,1979. Copyright © 1979 Helen Dwight Reid Educational Foundation. Reproduced with permission of the Helen D wight Reid Educational Foundation, published by Heldref Publications, 1319 18th Street, NW, Washington, DC 20036-1802.—Literature/Film Quarterly, v. 10, 1982. Reproduced by permission.—Mark Twain Journal, v. XX, Winter, 1979-80. Reproduced by permission.—MELUS, v. 12, Fall, 1985. Copyright, MELUS, The Society for the Study of MultiEthnic Literature of the United States, 1985. Reproduced by permission.—The Nathaniel Hawthorne Journal, 1973 for "The Woe That Is Madness: Goodman Brown and the Face of the Fire" by RobertE. Morsberger. Copyright© 1973 by Bruccoli Clark Publishers, Inc. Reproduced by permission of the author.—New York Folklore Quarterly, v. XXIV, December, 1968. Copyright 1968 by the New York Folklore Society. Reproduced by permission.—Renascence, v. XXI, Autumn, 1968. © copyright 1968, Marquette University Press. Reproduced by permission.—The Southern Literary Journal, v. 25, Spring, 1994. Copyright 1994 by the Department of English, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Reproduced by permission.— Southwest Review, v. XLI, Summer, 1956. © 1956 Southern Methodist University. Reproduced by permission.—Studies in Short Fiction, \. 18, Summer, 1981; v. 22, Spring, 1985; v. 26, Fall, 1989. Copyright 1981, 1985, 1989 by Newberry College. All reproduced by permission.—The USF Language Quarterly, v. XV, Spring-Summer, 1977. Reproduced by permission COPYRIGHTED EXCERPTS IN SSFS, VOLUME 1, WERE REPRODUCED FROM THE FOLLOWING BOOKS:

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Bell-Villada, Gene H. From Garcia Marquez: The Man and His Work. The University of North CarolinaPress, 1990.© 1990The University ofNorth Carolina Press. All rights reserved. Used by permission of the publisher.—Bus, Heiner. From ' 'The Establishment of Community in Zora Neale Hurston's 'The Eatonville Anthology' (1926) and Roland Hinojosa's 'Estampas del vallee' (1973)," in European Perspective on Hispanic Literature of the United States. Edited by Genvieve Fabre. Arte Publico Press, 1988. Copyright © 1988 by Arte Publico Press. Reproduced by permission.—Jackson, Shirley. From "Biography of a Story," in Come Along with Me. Edited by Stanley Edgar Hyman. VikingPress, 1968. Copyright 1948,1952, © 1960 by Shirley Jackson. Reproduced by permission of the Literary Estate of Shirley Jackson. In North America and the Philippines by permission of Viking Penguin, a division of Penguin Books USA Inc.—Wagner-Martin, Linda. From "Oilman's The Yellow Wallpaper': A Centenary," in Charlotte Perkins Oilman: The Woman and Her Work. Edited by Sheryl L Meyering. UMI Research Press, 1989. Copyright © 1989 Sheryl L. Meyering. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of the author. PHOTOGRAPHS AND ILLUSTRATIONS APPEARING IN SSFS, VOLUME 1, WERE RECEIVED FROM THE FOLLOWING SOURCES: Bingo game, photograph. Corbis-Bettmann. Reproduced by permission. Bradbury, Ray, photograph. Archive Photos, Inc. Reproduced by permission. Clemens, Samuel, photograph. AP/Wide World Photos. Reproduced by permission. Conrad, Joseph, photograph. Archive Photos. Reproduced by permission. Danticat, Edwidge, photograph. Copyright © 1994 Nancy Crampton. Reproduced by permission. Ellison, Ralph, photograph. AP/Wide World Photos. Reproduced by permission. Marquez, Gabriel Garcia, photograph. AP/Wide World Photos. Reproduced by permission. Oilman, Charlotte Perkins, portrait. Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe College. Reproduced by permission. The Scarlet Letter, movie still. M-G-M. Courtesy of the Kobal Collection. Reproduced by permission. Haitian refugees, photograph. AP/Wide World Inc. Reproduced by permission. Hawthorne, Nathaniel, photograph. The Library of Congress. Hemingway, Ernest, photograph by A. E. Hotchner. Reproduced by permission. Hemingway, Ernest, photograph. Archive Photos. Reproduced by permission. Hurston,

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Zora Neale, photograph by Carl Van Vechten. The Library of Congress. Jackson, Shirley, photograph. AP/Wide World Photos. Reproduced by permission. Joyce, James, photograph. AP/Wide World Photos. Reproduced by permission. The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, photograph. Corbis-Bettmann. Reproduced by permission. The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, movie still. Archive Photos. Reproduced by permission. Lessing, Doris, photograph. © Jerry Bauer. Reproduced by permission.

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The Most Dangerous Game In the World, photograph. Springer/Corbis-Bettmann Film Archive. Reproduced by permission. Olsen, Tillie, photograph by Miriam Berkley. Photo © Miriam Berkley. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission. Porter, Katherine Anne, photograph. AP/Wide World Photos. Reproduced by permission. Smooth Talk, movie still. Archive Photos. Reproduced by permission. Thurber, James, photograph. AP/Wide World Photos. Reproduced by permission.

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Araby ' 'Araby'' is one of fifteen short stories that together make up James Joyce's collection, Dubliners. Although Joyce wrote the stories between 1904 and 1906, they were not published until 1914. Dubliners paints a portrait of life in Dublin, Ireland, at the turn of the twentieth century. Its stories are arranged in an order reflecting the development of a child into a grown man. The first three stories are told from the point of view of a young boy, the next three from the point of view of an adolescent, and so on. "Araby" is the last story of the first set, and is told from the perspective of a boy just on the verge of adolescence. The story takes its title from a real festival which came to Dublin in 1894 when Joyce was twelve years old.

James Joyce

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Joyce is one of the most famous writers of the Modernist period of literature, which runs roughly from 1900 to the end of World War II. Modernist works often include characters who are spiritually lost and themes that reflect a cynicism toward institutions the writer had been taught to respect, such as government and religion. Much of the literature of this period is experimental; Joyce's writing reflects this in the use of dashes instead of quotation marks to indicate that a character is speaking. Joyce had a very difficult time getting Dubliners published. It took him over ten years to find a publisher who was willing to risk publishing the stories because of their unconventional style and

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themes. Once he found a publisher, he fought very hard with the editors to keep the stories the way he had written them. Years later, these stories are heralded not only for their portrayal of life in Dublin at the turn of the century, but also as the beginning of the career of one of the most brilliant Englishlanguage writers of the twentieth century.

Author Biography James Joyce was born on February 2, 1882, the oldest often children born to John and Mary Joyce. Joyce's father, even though he was a good-natured man, was a drinker who wasted the family's resources. The Joyce family moved constantly, and Joyce became familiar with the sight of a pawnbroker's redemption slips and eviction notices. In spite of his family's lack of money, Joyce was sent to Clongowes Wood College—a Jesuit Catholic boarding school—when he was six years old. Upon arrival, Joyce was asked his age, to which he replied, "Half-past six," which became his nickname for the rest of that year. Later, he went to another Jesuit school, Belvedere College, where he began to show his brilliance as a writer, winning several national competitions. Joyce spent the money he received from these competitions very quickly, celebrating with his large family at dinners in restaurants and redeeming some of his mother's possessions from the pawnbroker. Joyce was always painfully aware that he, being the oldest son, was given a good education and other privileges that his younger brothers and sisters could not receive. When Joyce went to University College in Dublin, he began to rebel against his Catholic upbringing. Although successful in academic life, he found the unsophisticated narrowness of Irish politics and the arts stifling. After graduation, he met Nora Barnacle from Galway, Ireland, who would become his lifelong companion. Joyce was opposed to the institution of marriage, and he knew that he and Nora could not live together in Dublin without being married. So, after his mother's death in 1904, Joyce and Nora left Ireland to live the rest of their lives in continental Europe: first in Pola, in the former Yugoslavia; then Trieste, Italy, where their children Giorgio and Lucia were born; then Zurich, Switzerland, during the First World War; and finally, Paris. It was only after he left Ireland that Joyce was able to begin writing about his native

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country, and the stories in Dubliners, including "Araby," were written in his first years away, although they were not published until 1914. During these years on the continent, Joyce supported his family by teaching English and holding a variety of other jobs, including managing an English theater troupe and working at a bank. He continued to write, but experienced only scattered commercial success. With the publication of his novel Ulysses in 1922, however, he reached a level of financial stability that enabled him to begin writing full-time. In the following years, his already poor eyesight got progressively worse, and he underwent several eye operations. Also during this period, Joyce's daughter suffered a nervous breakdown and was hospitalized in a sanitarium in Zurich. In 1931, after 27 years of living together, Joyce and Nora were finally married. They were afraid that after Joyce died, Nora would be left with no rights to his estate. Joyce died on January 13, 1941, following surgery for an ulcer. He was 58 years old.

Plot Summary "Araby" opens on North Richmond street in Dublin, where "an uninhabited house of two storeys stood at the blind end, detached from its neighbours in a square ground." The narrator, who remains unnamed throughout the story, lives with his aunt and uncle. He describes his block, then discusses the former tenant who lived in his house: a priest who recently died in the back room. This priest has a library that attracts the young narrator, and he is particularly interested in three titles: a Sir Walter Scott romance, a religious tract, and a police agent's memoirs. The narrator talks about being a part of the group of boys who play in the street. He then introduces Mangan's sister, a girl who captivates his imagination even though he rarely, if ever, speaks with her. He does stare at her from his window and follow her on the street, however, often thinking of her ' 'even in places the most hostile to romance." While in the marketplace on Saturday nights, for example, he uses her image to guide him through the thronging crowd who yell their sales pitches and sing patriotic Irish ballads. He becomes misty-eyed just at the thought of her and retreats to the priest's dark room in order to deprive himself of other senses and think only of her.

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Finally, Mangan's sister speaks to him. She asks if he will be attending a church-sponsored fair that is coming soon to Dublin—a bazaar called Araby. He is tongue-tied and cannot answer, but when she tells him that she cannot go because of a retreat that week in her convent, he promises to go and bring her a gift from the bazaar. From then on he can only think of the time when he will be at the fair; he is haunted by ' 'the syllables of the word Araby.'' On the night he is supposed to attend the fair, his uncle is late returning home and he must wait to get money from him. He gets very anxious, and his aunt tells him that he may have to miss the bazaar, but his uncle does come home, apologetic that he had forgotten. After asking the boy if he knows a poem entitled "The Arab's Farewell to His Steed," the uncle bids the boy farewell. The boy takes a coin from his uncle and catches a train to the fair. Araby is closing down as he arrives and he timidly walks through the center of the bazaar. As he looks at the few stalls that are still open, he overhears a conversation between an English shop-girl and two young men. Their talk is nothing but idle gossip. The shop-girl pauses reluctantly to ask the boy if he wishes to buy anything, but he declines. As he walks slowly out of the hall amid the darkening of the lights, he thinks that he is a "creature driven and derided by vanity" and his "eyes burned with anguish and anger."

James Joyce

hand the narrator describes her romantically, he also describes her in reverential terms which call to mind the Virgin Mary. This dual image description of Mangan' s sister represents the religious and romantic confusion of the narrator.

Characters Mrs. Mercer Mangan Mangan is the same age and in the same class at the Christian Brothers school as the narrator, and so he and the narrator often play together after school. His older sister is the object of the narrator's confused feelings.

Mrs. Mercer is the pawnbroker's widow who waits at the house for the narrator's uncle, perhaps to collect money that he owes her. Joyce includes her character to show that the uncle is unreliable in the payment of his debts.

Narrator Mangan's Sister Mangan is one of the narrator's chums who lives down the street. His older sister becomes the object of the narrator's schoolboy crush. Mangan's sister has no idea how the narrator feels about her, however, so when they discuss Araby, the bazaar coming to town, she is only being polite and friendly. She says she would like to go to the bazaar but cannot because she has to attend a school retreat that weekend. The narrator promises to buy her something at the bazaar if he goes, but it is unlikely that she takes this promise seriously. While on the one

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The narrator of this story is a young, sensitive boy who confuses a romantic crush and religious enthusiasm. All of the conflict in this story happens inside his mind. It is unlikely that the object of his crush, Mangan's sister, is aware of his feelings for her, nor is anybody else in this boy's small world. B ecause the boy' s thoughts only reveal a part of the story, a careful reader must put together clues that the author gives. For example, the narrator mentions that the former tenant of the house he shares with his aunt and uncle was a priest, a representative of the Catholic church, who left behind three books which

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Media Adaptations The Dead, a film based on one of the stories in Dubliners, was directed by John Huston (starring his daughter, Anjelica) and produced by Vestron Pictures in 1987.

became important to the narrator. One is a romantic adventure by Sir Walter Scott; one is a religious pamphlet written by a Protestant; and the third is the exciting memoirs of a French policeman and master of disguise. These three books are not what a person would expect a Catholic priest to have in his library. So if this priest has non-religious literature in his library, then how devout can an average churchgoer be expected to be? This turns out to be the case for the narrator, who confuses religious idealism with romance. The boy confuses the religious and secular worlds when he describes himself at the market with his aunt. He bears the chalice—the Communion cup—through a "throng of foes." He also describes Mangan's sister in terms often associated with the Virgin Mary. For the narrator, then, an ordinary grocery-shopping trip becomes a religious crusade, and a pretty girl down the street becomes a substitute for the Mother of God. The boy fuses together religious devotion for the Virgin Mary with his own romantic longing. Joyce is famous for creating characters who undergo an epiphany—a sudden moment of insight—and the narrator of "Araby" is one of his best examples. At the end of the story, the boy overhears a trite conversation between an English girl working at the bazaar and two young men, and he suddenly realizes that he has been confusing things. It dawns on him that the bazaar, which he thought would be so exotic and exciting, is really only a commercialized place to buy things. Furthermore, he now realizes that Mangan's sister is just a girl who will not care whether he fulfills his promise to buy her something at the bazaar. His conversation with Mangan's sister, during which he promised he

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would buy her something, was really only small talk—as meaningless as the one between the English girl and her companions. He leaves Araby feeling ashamed and upset. This epiphany signals a change in the narrator—from an innocent, idealistic boy to an adolescent dealing with harsh realities.

Narrator's Aunt The narrator's aunt, who is a mother figure in the story, takes the narrator with her to do the marketing. When it seems as though the uncle has forgotten his promise to the narrator that he could go to the bazaar, she warns the boy that he may have to ' 'put off' the bazaar ' 'for this night of Our Lord.'' While this statement makes her seem strict in a religious sense, she also exhibits empathy for the boy's plight. She pleads his case when the uncle forgets about the boy's plans to go to Araby.

Narrator's Uncle The narrator's uncle seems self-centered and very unreliable. When the narrator reminds him that he wants to go to the bazaar, he replies,' 'Yes, boy, I know." But on the Saturday evening of the bazaar, he has forgotten, which causes the narrator to arrive at the bazaar very late. When the uncle finally shows up, he has been drinking, and as the boy leaves for the bazaar he begins reciting the opening lines of the poem, "The Arab's Farewell to his Steed." Joyce's characterization of the uncle bears resemblance to his own father, who liked to drink and was often in debt. Joyce's inclusion of Mrs. Mercer, the pawnbroker's widow who waits for the uncle to return, suggests that the uncle owes money.

Themes A sensitive boy confuses a romantic crush and religious enthusiasm. He goes to Araby, a bazaar with an exotic, Oriental theme, in order to buy a souvenir for the object of his crush. The boy arrives late, however, and when he overhears a shallow conversation a female clerk is having with her male friends and sees the bazaar is closing down, he realizes that he has allowed his imagination to carry him away. He leaves without a souvenir, feeling foolish and angry with himself.

Alienation and Loneliness The narrator never shares any of his feelings concerning Mangan's sister with anyone. He iso-

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lates himself from his friends, who seem terribly young to him once his crush begins, and from his family, who seem caught up in their own world. Mangan's sister is also completely unaware of the narrator's feelings for her. Consequently, when he suddenly realizes how foolish he has been, his anger at himself is intensified by his alienation from everyone and the resulting feeling of isolation.

Change and Transformation The narrator experiences emotional growth— changing from an innocent young boy to a disillusioned adolescent—in the flash of an instant. This insight occurs through what Joyce called an ' 'epiphany," which is a moment of intense insight and selfunderstanding. Although the narrator suddenly understands that he has allowed his feelings to get carried away, this understanding makes him neither happy nor satisfied. If anything, he is very angry at himself for acting foolishly. This realization marks the beginning of his maturation from a child into an adult.

God and Religion At the beginning of the story, the narrator sees himself as a religious hero and sees Mangan's sister as the living embodiment of the Virgin Mary. He has not yet learned how to separate the religious teachings of his school with the reality of his secular life. Part of his understanding at the end of the story involves his finally separating those two aspects of his life. He realizes that the church-sponsored bazaar is just a place to buy trinkets, that Mangan's sister is just a girl, and that he. himself is justaboy. It is not clear at the end of the story what impact the narrator's epiphany will have on his religious beliefs. Joyce's own disillusionment with Catholicism, however, lends credence to the possibility of the boy adopting a cynical attitude toward his religion.

Style Through the use of a first person narrative, Joyce communicates the confused thoughts and dreams of his young male protagonist. Joyce uses this familiarity with the narrator's feelings to evoke in readers a response similar to the boy's "epiphany"—a sudden moment of insight and understanding—at the turning point of the story.

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Topics for Further Study Joyce once said that in Dubliners he intended "to write a chapter of the moral history of Ireland, because Dublin seemed to him to be at the "centre of paralysis." What do you think he meant by that? If you were to write a chapter of the moral history of your country, which city would you choose to be at the center? Why? A recurring theme in many of the stories in Dubliners is a longing for escape expressed through fantasies of flight to someplace Eastern and exotic. What place represents the unknown to you? Research this place and discuss whether it is truly exotic and mysterious or just different. Catholicism figures prominently in much of Joyce's work. Compare the influence of the Catholic Church in Ireland at the turn of the century and today. Would the themes of religious confusion and doubt in "Araby" create controversy in modern-day Ireland?

Point of View The first-person point of view in "Araby" means that readers see everything through the eyes of the narrator and know what he feels and thinks. If the narrator is confused about his feelings, then it is up to the readers to figure out how the narrator really feels and why he feels that way, using only the clues given by the author. For example, when the narrator first describes Mangan's sister, he says that "her figure [is] defined by the light from the half-opened door.'' In other words, she is lit from behind, giving her an unearthly "glow," like an angel or supernatural being such as the Virgin Mary. Readers are left to interpret the meaning behind the narrator's words, because the boy is not sophisticated enough to understand his own longings.

Symbolism The symbolism Joyce includes also helps readers to fully understand all of the story's complexities. The former tenant of the narrator's house, the

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Catholic priest, could be said to represent the entire Catholic church. By extension, the books left in his room—which include non-religious and nonCatholic reading—represent a feeling of ambiguity toward religion in general and Catholicism in particular. The bazaar, Araby, represents the East—a part of the world that is exotic and mysterious to the Irish boy. It could also represent commercialism, since it is really just a fundraiser used to get people to spend money on the church. Mrs. Mercer, the pawnbroker's widow, represents the uncle's debt and irresponsibility; she too could represent greed and materialism. To the narrator, Mangan's sister is a symbol of purity and feminine perfection. These qualities are often associated with the Virgin Mary, who also symbolizes the Catholic church. While the boy is at Araby, the various, and often contrasting, meanings of these symbols converge to produce his epiphany.

Stream of Consciousness Joyce is famous for using a stream-of-consciousness technique for storytelling. Although stream of consciousness does not figure prominently in "Araby," a reader can see the beginnings of Joyce's use of this technique, which he used extensively in his subsequent novels, Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. A major feature of stream-ofconsciousness storytelling is that the narration takes place inside the mind of main characters and follows their thoughts as they occur to them, whether those thoughts are complete sentences or not. Although this story uses complete sentences for its storytelling, the narration takes place inside the boy's mind. Another feature of stream-of-consciousness narration is that the narrator's thoughts are not explained for the reader. This is true of "Araby" as well, especially during and after the boy's epiphany.

Historical Context While Dublin, Ireland, has seen change since the turn of the twentieth century, when Joyce wrote "Araby," many of the conditions present then remain today. In 1904, all of Ireland was under British control, which the Irish resented bitterly. The nationalist group, Sinn Fein (part of which later became the Irish Republican Army—the IRA), had not yet formed, but Irish politics were nonetheless vibrant and controversial. The question of Irish

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independence from Britain was one of primary importance to every citizen. Ireland's major religion, Roman Catholicism, dominated Irish culture. Many families sent their children to schools run by Jesuit priests (like the one the narrator in ' 'Araby'' attends) and convent schools run by nuns (like the one Mangan's sister attends). Folklore, fairy tales, and homespun stories—told and retold for generations—provided a common form of family entertainment. Many turn-of-thecentury stereotypes about the Irish came from their cultural traditions. Some common ones included large families, drunkenness, poverty, and imaginative storytelling. The large families seen in Ireland at the turn of the century stemmed largely from the Catholic religion. Divorce went against church doctrine, and abortion and birth control were considered mortal sins. It was also a mortal sin for husbands and wives to refuse to engage in sexual relations to prevent having more children. As a consequence, it was not unusual for Irish Catholic families at the turn of the century to be quite large. While the modern Catholic church does not exercise quite as much influence, these issues still figure strongly in Irish culture today. There were no televisions or radios for entertainment at the turn of the century. Many homes had no electricity and were heated only by a central fireplace. Therefore, the custom of story telling after dinner (or "tea") was one common form of entertainment. In light of these living conditions, it is clear why an event like the bazaar in "Araby" could cause such great expectations. The stereotype of the drunken Irishman arose partly in response to the poverty experienced by the majority of people in Ireland after the Great Potato Famine of the 1840s. Beer was cheap and often more sanitary than the water. The Irish were also famous for their whiskey, which many still claim to be the finest in the world. The local public house— or pub—was the central gathering place of the village, and also served as a small hotel for weary travelers. People were certain to find warm hospitality, good beer and mutton stew, and good stories around the hearth to lift their spirits there. In the evening, the men would gather at the pub to drink, talk of politics or sports, and hear music. Unfortunately, this led to many men wasting their families's meager resources, thereby reinforcing the stereotype of the drunk, irresponsible Irishman. The narrator's uncle in "Araby," who keeps the narrator

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and the pawnbroker's widow waiting before coming home drunk, fits this mold. In larger cities like Dublin and Belfast, many Irish cultural stereotypes have disappeared as Ireland has become modernized. In many parts of Ireland, though, poverty still exists and the pub is still the town's social center.

Critical Overview Joyce had a hard time getting Dubliners published. Although he wrote the stories between 1904 and 1906, and some of them were published in magazines, the entire collection was not published in book form until 1914. The book was first accepted for publication by the Grant Richards publishing company in 1906, but after a long controversy and many arguments between Joyce and the editors over changes the company wanted to make to the stories, they withdrew their offer to publish. The second company that accepted the manuscript for publication in 1909 was Maunsel and Company, a Dublin publisher. This company had second thoughts about publishing the work as well, and in 1912 they destroyed the proofs that Joyce had corrected. This left Joyce extremely bitter. Finally, in 1914, Grant Richards, the company that originally accepted the manuscript for publication again agreed to publish Joyce's work. This troubled road to publication influenced the early reviews and criticism of Dubliners. According to Robert Scholes and A. Walton Litz, the editors of the 1996 edition of Dubliners published by Viking Press, these stories were mostly dismissed by early critics as Joyce's "apprentice" work, or given a secondary place as "skillful but depressing 'slices' of Dublin life." Dubliners was published four months after the publication of Joyce's next work, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Its reception was overshadowed by excitement and attention given to both Portrait and early chapters of Ulysses, which Joyce was publishing in magazines around the same time. Many readers during this time found Portrait —a revealing story of a troubled young man searching for his place in life—far more interesting than the stories in Dubliners. For many years Joyce's prob-

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Front cover of the Araby festival program.

lems with publishers and printers were discussed more frequently than the stories themselves. Early reviews of Dubliners set the pattern for subsequent critical discussion. Many critics protested against the sordid incidents related in some of the stories and the overall pessimistic tone of the collection. These critics complained that these stories lacked a "point," and that they were merely anecdotes or sketches without any definite structure. At least two reviewers found the longer stories the least satisfactory because Joyce did not sustain a "mood" in them as he did in the shorter pieces. The turning point in Dubliners criticism came in the 1940s and 1950s, when critics began to find in Joyce's work interesting and novel connections between such elements as tone, atmosphere and action. While some critics still focus on these stories as evidence of the young Joyce developing his distinctive style, or emphasize that Joyce provides a truthful, skillful depiction of life in Dublin at the turn of the century, the criticism now encompasses a wide range of interpretations and appreciation. Most critics now agree that Dubliners stands on its own merits as a great work by one of the most important writers of the twentieth century.

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his work have become common currency in English literature. In "Araby," a story of a young boy's disillusionment, Joyce explores questions of nationality, religion, popular culture, art, and relationships between the sexes. None of these themes can be adequately explored in a short essay; however, a brief exposition of the most important themes of "Araby" indicates the marvelous complexity of Joyce's insight.

Back cover of the Araby festival program.

Criticism Greg Barnhisel Greg Barnhisel is an educator and Assistant Director of the Undergraduate Writing Center at the University of Texas at Austin. In the following essay, he explores the major themes in ' 'Araby,'' including nationality, religion, and relationships between the sexes. In his early story "Araby," James Joyce prefigures many, if not all, of the themes which later became the focus of his writing. Joyce, often considered the greatest English-language novelist of the twentieth century, published few books in his lifetime. Chamber Music, a book of poems, appeared in 1907; Dubliners, a collection of short stories from which "Araby" is taken, was published in 1914; and hi first novel, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, came out in the same year. The book for which Joyce is most famous, Ulysses, appeared in 192 and was quickly banned. Finally, in 1939, Joyce published Finnegans Wake. Notwithstanding his small output, Joyce's work has been highly influential, and many of the themes and details he uses in

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"Araby" is narrated by a young boy who is, like most of Joyce's characters, a native of Dublin, Ireland. Since the conflict in the story occurs primarily within the boy's consciousness, Joyce's choice of first-person narration is crucial. The protagonist, as with most of Joyce's main characters, is a sensitive boy, searching for principles with which to make sense of the chaos and banality of the world. We know immediately that Catholicism has served as one of these principles; he attends a Christian Brothers school and at home is attracted to the library of a former tenant of his family, a priest. His identification with Catholicism is more than casual. On Saturday evenings, when the boy goes ' 'marketing' ' with his aunt he sees the crowds in the market as a ' 'throng of foes" and himself as a religious hero who "bears his chalice" through the crowd. The narrator's dedication to Catholicism, however, does not run as deep as he might believe. In fact, he channels the emotional devotion that his religion requires towards questionable recipients. Readers learn first that the priest's library contains three books especially important to the protagonist: a romantic novel, a religious tract written by a Protestant, and the memoirs of a French police agent and master of disguise. If this priest does not maintain a sufficiently pious library, how can this boy be expected to properly practice his religion? More importantly, the boy takes the Catholic idea of devotion to the Virgin Mary and finds a realworld substitute for the Mother of God. We learn that he is especially fascinated by the older sister of one of his schoolmates. In the narrator's first description of Mangan's sister she is lit from behind, like a saint. "[H]er figure defined by the light from the half-opened door... . Every morning I lay on the floor in the front parlour watching her door," the narrator tells us, presenting an image of himself as a prostrate worshipper. Furthermore, he relates that' 'her image accompanied [him] even in places the most hostile to romance." Although the boy explains his feelings for Mangan's sister as romantic, his confusion between her and the Virgin Mary

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Compare &

Contrast 1906: The Abbey Theatre forms in Dublin as part of a push by notable literary figures such as W. B. Yeats to influence a cultural renaissance in Ireland. Today: Irish theater and Irish playwrights, including Neil Jordan (The Crying Game) achieve critical acclaim and popular success all over the world. 1906: Irish nationalist group, Sinn Fein (Gaelic for "We Ourselves") forms with the goal to achieve Irish independence from England, which rules all of Ireland. Today: Although the majority of Ireland became

are easily discernible:' 'Her name sprang to my lips at moments in strange prayers and praises of which I myself did not understand." The boy is as rapturous as if he had seen a vision of the Mother of God herself. And when the girl finally speaks to him, he cannot respond coherently: "When she addressed the first words to me I was so confused that I did not know what to answer." Joyce also makes the nonreligious, and even sexual, elements of the boy's devotion to Mangan's sister clear throughout the story. Her dress, her hair, and her "brown figure" are "always in [the narrator's] eye," and when he finally speaks to her, the same light that once made her glow like a saint now catches ' 'the white border of a petticoat, just visible as she stood at ease." The boy melds religious devotion for the Virgin with his own romantic longing, and the combined force is powerful. When Mangan's sister asks him if he will be attending Araby, a church bazaar to be held soon, he is caught by surprise: "I forgot whether I answered yes or no." She tells him she must attend a retreat and cannot attend the fair. As his eyes fix upon the silver bracelet she twists on her wrist, he resolves to go and bring her back something that could compare with that bracelet. Here, the narrator ventures dangerously close to idolatry and the pre-Christian

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a sovereign nation in 1948, Northern Ireland, which consists of six counties, is still under English rule. English troops occupy Northern Ireland, and the IRA (Irish Republican Army) continues its terrorist attacks. 1899: W. B. Yeats publishes The Wind Among the Reeds, a poetry collection that incorporates ancient Irish-Gaelic myths and cultural traditions into its subject matter. Today: Irish poet Seamus Heaney, who mines Ireland's cultural and physical landscapes for his subject matter, wins the 1995 Nobel Prize for Literature.

tradition of offerings to the gods. In a punning reference to this, he relates that because of his recent distraction in class, his schoolmaster ' 'hoped I was not beginning to idle." The shift from the boy's initially religious longings to more worldly concerns is accentuated by images of Araby that reverberate in his mind, taking on a very unreligious cast: ' "The syllables of the word 'Araby' were called to me through the silence in which my soul luxuriated and cast an Eastern enchantment over me." This is a very ominous sentence; the boy's religious leanings are being completely overthrown by the lure of the mysterious, and possibly sensual, bazaar. The sensuality that he wished to obliterate earlier ("All my senses seemed to desire to veil themselves," he tells us when he is in the priest's room, thinking of Mangan's sister) is now the very thing that he wants to indulge. The fact that Araby suggests a nonChristian culture is also significant here, for in his dedication to Mangan's sister the boy is willing to forsake the safe and familiar world of Catholic Ireland for what he believes to be the exotic and decadent East. As he stands in the upper-story room of his house, he looks upon his old playmates from above as they play in the street, and then looks up on the house across to where Mangan and his sister

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What Do I Read Next? Dubliners is the complete collection of 15 short stories by James Joyce, all loosely connected as each one describes people living in Dublin, Ireland, at the turn of the century. A Portrait of the Artist as a YoungMan. This first novel by Joyce describes the early life of Stephen Dedalus, a sensitive, intelligent young man struggling to understand life and his role in it. Ireland: A Terrible Beauty (1975). A collection of photographs by Jill Uris, accompanied by text written by her husband, author Leon Uris. This book not only gives an overview of the history of the Emerald Isle, but also shows off the beauty of the island in many exquisite photographs. Ireland: Art into History (1994). This book, edited by Brian P. Kennedy and Raymond Gillespie, traces the history of Ireland through its art, from prehistoric times to the present. It

live. He feels himself chosen, like Sir Galahad (a noble knight from the legend of King Arthur) and prepares himself for his quest. After withstanding the peril of the drunken uncle and the aunt who hints he might have to ' 'put off [his] bazaar for this night of Our Lord," the protagonist is finally ready to embark upon his quest. His excitement is palpable as he rushes towards the festival, trying to get there before it closes. As he approaches the darkening hall, his once-clear purpose is now muddy: he "rememberfs] with difficulty why [he] had come." The futility and purposelessness of his project begins to dawn upon him as he hears an English shop-girl and two young English gentlemen chatting: "O, I never said such a thing!"

presents both art and history, without being too academic. The Common Chord: Stories and Tales (1947), by Frank O'Connor, is a collection of short stories from this famous Irish writer. Written from the point of view of a young boy, O'Connor's stories are funny, truthful, and many times touched with an edge of sadness. The Commitments (1988) and Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha (1993), both by Irishman Roddy Doyle, are novels set in contemporary working-class Ireland. The Commitments describes the efforts of Jimmy Rabbitte to start a band which covers American soul songs of the 1960s by such greats as Otis Redding and Sam Cooke. Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha gives the reader a look at life through the eyes of a ten-year-old boy in modern-day Ireland.

"O, there's a. ..fib!"

One of the recurring themes in Joyce's stories is the "epiphany," a Greek word meaning "revelation." In one of the drafts of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Joyce's character Stephen Dedalus is preoccupied by epiphanies: "By epiphany he meant a sudden spiritual manifestation, whether in the vulgarity of speech or of gesture of in a memorable phrase or the mind itself. He believed that it was for the man of letters to record these epiphanies with extreme care, seeing that they themselves are the most delicate and evanescent of moments." Joyce, like his fictional counterpart Stephen, saw the epiphany as a crucial building-block of fiction, because it was the moment at which a character understands that the illusions under which he or she has been operating are false and misleading.

"O, but you did!" "O, but I didn't!" "Didn't she say that?" "Yes. I heard her."

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At this point in "Araby," the narrator experiences an epiphany. As the protagonist nears the end of his quest and is about to buy a gift for Mangan's sister, he changes his mind. As he leaves the hall

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where the bazaar is closing down, the narrator says: "[glazing up into the darkness I saw myself as a creature driven and derided by vanity; and my eyes burned with anguish and anger." Somehow, the overheard conversation between the English shopgirl and her friends has changed his outlook. Here at the end of the story, the various symbols Joyce employs converge. The light in which the narrator has always seen Mangan's sister now meets the darkness of the hall as the bazaar shuts down. Our narrator begins to see Mangan' s sister not as the image of the Virgin, but as a mundane English shopgirl engaging in idle conversation. His quest, he now realizes, was misconceived in the first place, and he now recognizes the mistake of joining his religious fervor with his romantic passion for Mangan's sister. Although he does not say, it seems clear that the protagonist will fully reject both. The story, like much of his work, is taken almost directly from Joyce's own life. Like the narrator of this story, Joyce lived on North Richmond Street in Dublin and attended the Christian Brothers' School. The aunt and the uncle of "Araby" bear some resemblance to Joyce's own parents. Even Araby is factual: advertisements survive that date the bazaar to May, 1894. In Joyce's later fiction, characters almost identical to the narrator in "Araby" recur; the most prominent is Stephen Dedalus, the hero of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and one of the main characters in Ulysses. Both wrestle with a similar predicament—they must free themselves from the "nets" of their society, family, and religion in order to be entirely self-determined. Although many of the characters in Dubliners prefigure Joyce's later characters, the boy in "Araby" seems closest to being a younger version of Stephen Dedalus/James Joyce. He goes through almost the same struggle as Joyce shows Stephen fighting in Portrait. In the words of the critic Harry Stone, in The Antioch Review, "'Araby' is a portrait of the artist as a young boy." Source: Greg Barnhisel, for Short Stones for Students, Gale Research, 1997.

John Freimarck In the following essay, Freimarck suggests that "Araby" has a "Grail Quest" story pattern, and uses this classification to examine the boy's quest for the idealized girl, Mangan's sister. (In medieval English legend The Grail was a cup Jesus drank from at the Last Supper that was later used to collect

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he protagonist, as with most of Joyce's main characters, is a sensitive boy, searching for principles with which to make sense of the chaos and banality of the world."

drops of his blood at the Crucifixion. Many of King Arthur's noblest knights went on a "Quest" in search of The Grail and its magical powers.) The story of a young boy journeying to Araby in hope of winning the favor of an idealized girl immediately raises echoes of the Grail Quest storypattern. Indeed, several actions and images in "Araby" common to basic versions of the Quest suggest this theme stimulated Joyce's imagination in ordering his modern material, and of course the reader who recognizes them is tempted to look for clues. Yet even in the case of Joyce such a reader can rest assured that it is not as important to scrutinize what goes into a story as to assess what comes out. In "Araby" a boy ignores the reality of his bleak, winter surroundings and allows the word 'araby' to suggest the exciting summer world of Romance. But, if it is a land of spices he dreams of, classical writers note that the richest part of Araby was infested with snakes. The very title of the story is the first of several images promising the apocalyptic world of romance, but containing the demonic. In a world hostile to romance, Mangan's sister is the object of the boy's "confused adoration." By the time his lady speaks, his naive crush has lead to the heroic bearing of her image like a chalice through market streets, and worship in a chapel-like room where the boy presses his hands together and murmurs "O love! O love!" Hearing she longs to go to Araby, but cannot, he promises to return with a gift if he should make the trip. Imprisoned on the other side of the railing before the house, turning the silver bracelet' 'round and round her wrist," the girl is the supplicant woman. The quest and marriage theme is strengthened when ' 'she held one of the

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great jars [grails] that stood like eastern guards [the cherub at the East wall of Eden?] at either side of the The very title of the dark entrance to the stall and murmured: 'No, thank you'." The wrong answer has been given and the story is the first of several boy asks no questions. The lights go out. When the knight does not ask the correct question in the castle images promising the it disappears and he wakes up at the edge of a cliff apocalyptic world of romance, by the ocean, or in a manure wagon being driven but containing the demonic." through a town where people insult him because of his failure to heal the land. Here the boy realizes his journey is over and feels humiliated. His failure brings an increase in knowledge, which, continuing the story's ironic counterpoint to Romance, does not bring hope or felicity. [railing] spikes, bowing her head towards me." In some versions of the Quest, the knight may marry or To press these parallels further is possible, but sleep with the maiden who carries the grail or to do so would be to pass the point of diminishing bleeding lance. In any case, no favor is lightly critical returns. The problem is one of perspective given; the journey preempts his thoughts and the which, in Dubliners, involves always keeping in everyday world is denied: "I had hardly any pamind the fact that the main impact of the story is on tience with the serious work of life." the naturalistic level, the faithfulness to the detail of Irish family life. It may be more to this level that The boy's confusion is something he causes Joyce's notion of paralysis really refers than to any himself. The girl's brown dress suggests she may other. The continual wonder is how Joyce can not be the true lady, and the boy's love is itself introduce so intricate and faithful a Quest storysuspect. The image he conjures up includes the pattern and yet subdue it to the naturalistic one we border of her slip; and lying on the floor, prostrating read at face value. The myth element enriches the himself before her, peeking under the drawn shade, story, but we are never really on the quest for the the boy is a voyeur. He is already doomed to failure grail—we are in Dublin all the time with the because he does not have the chaste mind and body psychologically accurate story of the growth of a essential to the quest. This is emphasized shortly romantic boy awakening to his sexuality, idealizing before he leaves for the bazaar. After going upstairs Mangan's sister and encountering frustration in (a position of relative height) he receives the tradithe process. tional vision, seeing "nothing but the brown figure cast by my imagination," a figure complete with the Source: John Freimarck, "'Araby': A Quest for Meaning," in James Joyce Quarterly, Vol. 7, no. 4, Summer, 1970, petticoat showing. Not only is the vision imagined, pp. 366-8. rather than beheld, but it is not even pure. Finally the boy begins his journey, leaving the house to the strains of "The Arab's Farewell to his Steed." The deserted train takes the place of a horse, passing through the waste land of "ruinous houses'' and crossing the body of water, a river, on its way to Araby. Araby, the building with the "magical name," is likened to a church; this, and the attendant at the door link it to the magic castle which the knight approaches in the evening. Inside, the young boy examines vases and flowered tea-sets, grail-like containers. Approaching the two men and the woman he is deterred by their attitude and the trivia of their conversation. In the grail castle the knight's success depends on his asking the right question concerning the grail which is carried past him. The woman questions the boy: ' 'I looked humbly at the

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Harry Stone Stone is an educator, editor, and Charles Dickens scholar. In the following excerpted essay, he discusses some of the autobiographical elements of ' 'Araby,'' which include Joyce's childhood in Dublin, Ireland, and how the exoticism of the real-life Araby festival, with its Far Eastern overtones, impacted the young Joyce. Stone also discusses the poet James Mangan 's influence on Joyce's framing of the narrator's adoration of (the character of) Mangan's sister. For ' 'Araby" preserves a central episode in Joyce's life, an episode he will endlessly recapitulate. The boy in "Araby," like the youthful Joyce himself, must begin to free himself from the nets and trammels of society. That beginning involves painful

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farewells and disturbing dislocations. The boy must dream "no more of enchanted days." He must forego the shimmering mirage of childhood, begin to see things as they really are. But to see things as they really are is only a prelude. Far in the distance lies his appointed (but as yet unimagined) task: to encounter the reality of experience and forge the uncreated conscience of his race. The whole of that struggle, of course, is set forth in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. "Araby" is the identical struggle at an earlier stage; "Araby" is a portrait of the artist as a young boy. The autobiographical nexus of "Araby" is not confined to the struggle raging in the boy's mind, though that conflict—an epitome of Joyce's first painful effort to see—is central and controls all else. Many of the details of the story are also rooted in Joyce's life. The narrator of "Araby" —the narrator is the boy of the story now grown up— lived, like Joyce, on North Richmond Street. North Richmond Street is blind, with a detached twostory house at the blind end, and down the street, as the opening paragraph informs us, the Christian Brothers' school. Like Joyce, the boy attended this school, and again like Joyce he found it dull and stultifying. Furthermore, the boy's surrogate parents, his aunt and uncle, are a version of Joyce's parents: the aunt, with her forbearance and her unexamined piety, is like his mother; the uncle, with his irregular hours, his irresponsibility, his love of recitation, and his drunkenness, is like his father. The title and the central action of the story are also autobiographical. From May fourteenth to nineteenth, 1894, while the Joyce family was living on North Richmond Street and Joyce was twelve, Araby came to Dublin. Araby was a bazaar, and the program of the bazaar, advertising the fair as a "Grand Oriental Fete," featured the name "Araby" in huge exotic letters, while the design as well as the detail of the program conveyed an ill-assorted blend of pseudo-Eastern romanticism and blatant commercialism. For one shilling, as the program put it, one could visit "Araby in Dublin" and at the same time aid the Jervis Street Hospita Other literary prototypes also contribute to ' 'Araby." In ' 'Araby" as in Joyce's life, Mangan is an important name. In life Mangan was one of Joyce's favorite Romantic poets, a little-known Irish poet who pretended that many of his poems were translations from the Arabic although he was totally ignorant of that language. Joyce championed him in a paper delivered as a Pateresque [Walter

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Joyce has succeeded, here, in taking the raw, rather humdrum, unpromising facts of his own life and transforming them into abiding patterns of beauty and illumination."

Pater was a nineteenth-century English essayist and critic] twenty-year-old before the Literary and Historical Society of University College, Dublin, and championed him again five years later, in a lecture at the Universita Popolare in Trieste, as ' 'the most significant poet of the modern Celtic world, and one of the most inspired singers that ever used the lyric form in any country." In "Araby" Mangan is the boy's friend, but, what is more important, Mangan's sister is the adored girl. In each lecture Joyce discussed Mangan's poetry in words which could serve as an epigraph for the boy's mute, chivalric love for Mangan's sister and for his subsequent disillusionment and self-disdain. In the latter lecture, Joyce described the female persona that Mangan is constantly adoring: This figure which he adores recalls the spiritual yearnings and the imaginary loves of the Middle Ages, and Mangan has placed his lady in a world full of melody, of lights and perfumes, a world that grows fatally to frame every face that the eyes of a poet have gazed on with love. There is only one chivalrous idea, only one male devotion, that lights up the faces of Vittoria Colonna, Laura, and Beatrice, just as the bitter disillusion and the self-disdain that end the chapter are one and the same.

And one of Joyce's favorite poems by Mangan—a poem whose influence recurs in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Ulysses, and —is "Dark Rosaleen," a love paean to a girl who represents Ireland (Dark Rosaleen is a poetic name for Ireland), physical love, and romantic adoration. In "Araby" Joyce took Mangan's idealized girl as an embodiment of the artist's, especially the Irish artist's, relationship to his beloved, and then, combining the image of the girl with other resonating literary associations, wrote his own story of dawning, worshipful love

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These and other ambiguously worded ironies had already been sounded by the three opening sentences of "Araby." Joyce begins by telling us that North Richmond Street is blind. That North Richmond Street is a dead end is a simple statement of fact; but that the street is blind, especially since this feature is given significant emphasis in the opening phrases of the story, suggests that blindness plays a role thematically. It suggests, as we later come to understand, that the boy also is blind, that he has reached a dead end in his life. Finally, we are told that the houses of North Richmond Street ' 'conscious of decent lives within them, gazed at one another with brown imperturbable faces.'' These words, too, are ironic. For the boy will shortly discover that his own consciousness of a decent life within has been a mirage; the imperturbable surface of North Richmond Street (and of the boy's life) will soon be perturbed. In these opening paragraphs Joyce touches all the themes he will later develop: self-deluding blindness, self-inflating romanticism, decayed religion, mammonism, the coming into man's inheritance, and the gulf between appearance and reality. But these paragraphs do more: they link what could have been the idiosyncratic story of the boy, his problems and distortions, to the problems and distortions of Catholicism and of Ireland as a whole. In other words, the opening paragraphs (and one or two other sections) prevent us from believing that the fault is solely in the boy and not, to some extent at least, in the world that surrounds him, and still more fundamentally, in the nature of man himself. The boy, of course, contributes intricately to his own deception. His growing fascination for Mangan's sister is made to convey his blindness and his warring consciousness. Joyce suggests these confusions by the most artful images, symbolisms, and parallelisms. The picture of Mangan's sister which first sinks unforgettably into the boy's receptive mind is of the girl calling and waiting at her doorstep in the dusk, "her figure defined by the light from the half-opened door," while he plays in the twilight and then stands ' 'by the railings looking at her.'' ' 'Her dress,'' he remembered,' 'swung as she moved her body and the soft rope of her hair tossed from side to side." This highly evocative, carefully staged, and carefully lit scene—it will recur throughout the story with slight but significant variations—gathers meaning as its many details take on definition and thematic importance. That importance was central

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to Joyce, and versions of the scene occur often in his writings. As his Mangan essay (1902) indicates, he had early chosen the adored female as an emblem of man's vanity, an emblem of false vision and selfdelusion followed by insight and self-disdain. The female who appears in ' 'Araby'' (she appears again and again in his other writings) is such an emblem. The prototypical situation in all these appearances is of a male gazing at a female in a dim, veiled light. There are other features: the male usually looks up at the female; he often finds her standing half obscured near the top of some stairs and by a railing; he frequently notices her hair, her skirts, and her underclothes. But though the scene varies from appearance to appearance, the consequences are always the same. The male superimposes his own idealized vision upon this shadowy figure, only to have disillusioning reality (which has been there unregarded all the time) assert itself and devastate him. Joyce found this scene—with its shifting aureola of religious adoration, sexual beckoning, and blurred vision—infinitely suggestive, and he utilized it for major effect.... Araby—the very word connotes the nature of the boy's confusion. It is a word redolent of the lush East, of distant lands, Levantine riches, romantic entertainments, mysterious magic, "Grand Oriental Fetes." The boy immerses himself in this incensefilled dream world. He tells us that' 'the syllables of the word Araby were called to me through the silence in which my soul luxuriated and cast an Eastern enchantment over me.'' That enchantment, or to put it another way, Near Eastern imagery (usually in conjunction with female opulence or romantic wish fulfillment), always excited Joyce. It reappears strongly in Ulysses in a highly intricate counterpoint, which is sometimes serious (Molly's Moorish attributes) and sometimes mocking (Bloom's dream of a Messianic Near Eastern oasis). But the boy in "Araby" always interprets these associations, no matter how disparate or how ambiguous they are, in one way: as correlatives of a baroquely beatific way of living. Yet the real, brickand-mortar Araby in the boy's life is a bazaar, a market, a place where money and goods are exchanged. The boy is blind to this reality lurking beneath his enchanted dream. To the boy, his lady's silver bracelet is only part of her Eastern finery; his journey to a bazaar to buy her an offering is part of a romantic quest. But from this point on in the story the masquerading pretenses of the boy—and of his church, his land, his rules, and his love—are rapidly underlined and brought into a conjunction which

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will pierce his perfervid dream world and put an end to "enchanted days...." Joyce has succeeded, here, in taking the raw, rather humdrum, unpromising facts of his own life and transforming them into abiding patterns of beauty and illumination. He has taken a universal experience—a more or less ordinary experience of insight, disillusionment, and growth—and given it an extraordinary application and import. The experience becomes a criticism of a nation, a religion, a civilization, a way of existing; it becomes a grappling hook with which we can scale our own wellguarded citadels of self-delusion. Joyce does all this in six or seven pages. He manages this feat by endowing the simple phrases and actions of' 'Araby" with multiple meanings that deepen and enlarge what he is saying. The image of Mangan's sister is acase in point. Joyce takes this shadowy image, this dark scene which fascinated and obsessed him and which he returned to again and again, and shapes it to his purposes. He projects this image so carefully, touches it so delicately and skillfully with directive associations and connotations, that it conveys simultaneously, in one simple seamless whole, all the warring meanings he wishes it to hold—all the warring meanings it held for him. The pose of the harlot is also the pose of the Virgin; the revered Lady of Romance (kin to Vittoria Colonna, Laura, Beatrice, Levana, Dark Rosaleen, and the beloved of any artist) is also Ireland and at the same time a vulgar English shopgirl. One need not belabor the point. These meanings are conveyed not merely by the juxtapositions and evocations of the chief images— of Mangan's dark sister and the English shopgirl, for example—but by the reiterated patterns, allusions, and actions which bind the whole work together: the dead priest's charitableness, Mrs. Mercer's used stamps, the fall of money on the salver;

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Araby, Eastern enchantment, the knightly quest for a chivalric token; the swaying dress, the veiled senses, the prayerful murmur, ' 'O love! O love! Scarcely a line, an evocation, on object—the central apple tree, the heretical book of devotions by Abednego Seller, "The Arab's Farewell to His Steed," the blind street—but adds its harmony to the whole and extends and clarifies the story's meaning. Source: Harry Stone, "'Araby' and the Writings of James Joyce," in TheAntioch Review, Vol. XXV, no. 3, Fall, 1965, pp. 375^45.

Sources Scholes, Robert and A. Walton Litz, editors. Dubliners: Text, Criticism, and Notes, Penguin, 1996.

Further Reading apRoberts, R. P.' 'The Palimpsest of Criticism; or, Through a Glass Eye Darkly," in The Antioch Review, Vol. XXVI, 1966-67, pp. 469-89. apRoberts's sarcastic attack on what he sees as Harry Stone's excessively reaching reading of "Araby." Where Stone holds that "Araby" must be seen in light of Joyce's other writing, apRoberts insists that it is self-contained. Brown, Homer Obed. James Joyce's Early Fiction, Archon, 1975. A study of the methods of Joyce's early fiction (primarily Dubliners) and the themes the work explores. Levin, Harry. James Joyce, New Directions, 1960. A general discussion of Joyce's work and his techniques, written in 1941, the year of Joyce's death.

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The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County Mark Twain

1865

Mark Twain's "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County'' was first published in the November 18,1865, edition of The New York Saturday Press, under the title ' 'Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog." The story, which has also been published as ' 'The Notorious Jumping Frog of Calaveras County," is set in a gold-mining camp in Calaveras County, California, and has its origins in the folklore of the Gold Rush era. It was one of Twain's earliest writings, and helped establish his reputation as a humorist. He eventually included it as the title story in his first collection of tales. "Jumping Frog" was originally told in epistolary form—that is, as a letter—though some reprints of the tale have since omitted this letterframe convention. In the story, Twain recounts his visit, made at the request of a friend back East, to an old man named Simon Wheeler in a California mining camp. Wheeler tells Twain a colorful story about another miner, Jim Smiley. According to Wheeler, Smiley loved to make bets; he would bet on nearly anything. Wheeler relates some of Smiley's more famous gambling escapades, one of which concerns a pet frog. Critics frequently cite this story as an example of a tall tale and note Twain's use of humor and exaggeration. They also emphasize the tale's satirical focus on storytelling and existing cultural differences between the western and eastern regions of the United States.

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Author Biography Mark Twain was born Samuel Langhorne Clemens in 1835 in Florida, Missouri. He spent much of his childhood in Hannibal, Missouri, a town located on the Mississippi River. He never finished school and instead became an apprentice to a printer at the age of 12. In the 1850s, he worked as a boat pilot and later briefly served in the Confederate Army during the Civil War. During this time he submitted his first journalism pieces, using the pseudonym Thomas Jefferson Snodgrass. He then traveled west and found work as a miner and a reporter. It was at this time that he first began to publish work under the name Mark Twain and establish himself as a sketchwriter and humorist. "Mark Twain" was a reference to his riverboat days; it was a term that the men who worked on the boats used to indicate the depth of the water. Twain's first sketch to win widespread acclaim was the 1865 short story,' "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County," which first appeared in the The New York Saturday Press. It later appeared as the title story in his first collection, The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County, and Other Sketches in 1867. At the time this book was published, Twain began traveling abroad and often sent his satirical and humorous observations home for publication in American journals. Many of these pieces were later collected and published in 1869 as The Innocents Abroad; or, The New Pilgrim's Progress. Around this time, Twain also wrote pieces for the Sacramento Union newspaper, often employing the letter-writing and reporting techniques he used in "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County." Incorporating memories of his boyhood and life on the Mississippi, Twain published his children's book The Adventures of Tom Sawyer in 1876. Twain published the sequel to this American classic of American boyhood, the critically acclaimed and equally popular The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, in 1884. Like much of his work, Huck Finn made use of vernacular language and dialect, and emphasized the inherent injustice of American society. In the late 1800s, Twain suffered various financial and personal losses, and his satirical wit and often pessimistic outlook became overwhelmingly apparent in such classics as A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, Pudd'nhead Wilson, and "The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg." When Twain died in Redding, Connecticut, in 1910, he

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Plot Summary ' 'The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County" has an "as-told-to" framework. A talkative man named Simon Wheeler relates to Mark Twain (the narrator) the story of a gambler named Jim Smiley and the amazing animals Smiley used in his schemes. Twain has gone to see Wheeler at the urging of a friend back East who is in search of information about a boyhood companion named Leonidas W. Smiley. Leonidas W. Smiley had supposedly become a minister and gone to a western mining settlement called Angel's Camp. The narrator notes he has come to believe there is no such person as Leonidas W. Smiley, and that the inquiry was designed to provide Wheeler with an excuse to talk about Jim Smiley. The narrator finds Wheeler in a run-down tavern in Angel's Camp and politely asks about Leonidas W. Smiley. The name means nothing to Wheeler, but he thinks almost immediately of Jim Smiley and begins filling his visitor with tales of this bizarre character. Jim Smiley, according to Wheeler, was a man who would bet on anything.' 'Why, if there was two birds setting on a fence, he would bet you which one would fly first," Wheeler says. Wheeler recalls that Smiley had a slow, sickly horse that would surprise everyone by winning races, and Smiley frequently won money with that horse. Smiley's bulldog pup, named Andrew Jackson after the strong-willed U.S. president, also had an amazing talent. Andrew Jackson the dog was not very impressive in appearance, but remarkably tenacious when there was a bet riding on him. He would let another dog beat him savagely until the largest and final bet of the fight was on, then take one of his opponent's hind legs in his mouth and hold on until the other dog simply gave up. He continued winning in this manner until he went up against a dog with no hind legs. Unable to use his favorite tactic, Andrew Jackson became so disheartened that he just slunk off and died, Wheeler tells Twain. Wheeler continues with a story about how Smiley once caught a frog and trained it to jump. The frog, named after famed nineteenth-century American politician Daniel Webster, developed incredible jumping ability. Smiley won many bets

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inclination" to hear this story, the narrator makes his escape.

Characters Andrew Jackson

Mark Twain

with Dan'l Webster and took great pride in him, Wheeler says. One day Smiley boasted to a stranger in the camp that Dan'l Webster could outjump any frog in Calaveras County, and he offered to bet forty dollars to prove it. The stranger had no frog to pit against Smiley's, so Smiley left Dan'l Webster with him and went to find another frog in a nearby swamp. While Smiley was gone, the stranger spooned buckshot into Dan'l Webster's mouth until the frog was weighted down. Smiley returned with the second frog and the jumping contest began, but Dan'l Webster could not move. After the stranger took his money and his leave, Smiley noticed that something appeared to be wrong with Dan'l. He lifted the frog, realized how heavy it was, and turned it upside down until it belched out the shot. He then chased after the visitor, but never caught him, Wheeler relates. At this point in the tale, someone outside the tavern calls Wheeler's name, and Wheeler steps out after urging the narrator to wait for him to return. By this time, however, the narrator believes he will obtain no useful information from Wheeler, and he gets up to leave. As he reaches the door, Wheeler comes back and starts to tell him about Jim Smiley's one-eyed, no-tailed cow. "Lacking both time and

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Jim Smiley's bull-pup, Andrew Jackson, was used by Jim in various bets. The dog is described as a good dog that does not look like much, and other dogs often seemed to get the better of him in fights. The narrator notes, however, that Andrew Jackson never seemed to be bothered by these temporary setbacks because once a bet was involved, his behavior would change. As the stakes in the bets were raised, Andrew Jackson would bite the other dog in the hind leg and stay there, hanging on, until the owner of his opponent would give in and forfeit the fight. In this way, Jim's bull-pup would win his fights. Andrew Jackson died when Jim arranged for him to fight a dog that did not have any hind legs. The narrator implies that Andrew Jackson was a proud dog and died of embarrassment. Like the former President of the United States with whom he shares his name, Andrew Jackson is described as being determined and strong-willed.

The Fifteen-Minute Nag The Fifteen-Minute Nag is the name given to Jim Smiley's horse. An old and rather sickly animal, The Fifteen-Minute Nag was used by Jim in many of his bets. The horse suffered from various ailments and did not look as if she could win a horse race. Nevertheless, Jim would frequently put her in races. Although she would start out slow, in the last leg of the race, the nag always seemed to get excited and typically found the energy to win the race.

Jim Smiley Jim Smiley is the focus of Simon Wheeler's tale. A resident of Calaveras County's Angel's Camp in either 1849 or 1850, Jim is primarily known for his love for betting and will bet on almost anything—no matter how ridiculous. He has even bet on whether people will recover from an illness and on which of two birds will fly away first. It is said Jim would even make a poor bet just so that he could make a bet. Jim was considered a lucky man, however, and frequently won his bets. Jim has several pets: an old horse, a bull-pup named An-

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drew Jackson, cats, chickens, and a frog named Dan'l Webster, who is the "celebrated frog" mentioned in the title of this story. Jim uses these animals' abilities as the basis for many of his bets. He is tricked by the Stranger at the tale's end, which contrasts with the visitor Twain being tricked by the local, Simon Wheeler.

The Stranger The Stranger is a con artist. He states that Dan'l Webster isn't the prized jumper that Jim says he is and bets that any other frog could beat Dan'l in a jumping contest. While Jim searches for another frog, the stranger feeds Dan'l Webster quail shot to make him too heavy to jump and thereby swindles Jim out of his money. This situation—the Stranger duping the local (Jim Smiley)—contrasts with Simon Wheeler, the local, who dupes Twain, the visitor.

Mark Twain Mark Twain is the author and narrator of the story, as well as one of its characters. He is portrayed as the butt of a joke, the joke being having to listen to the fantastic tales of a garrulous old man named Simon Wheeler. Twain allegedly was asked by a friend to find out about an acquaintance of that friend. Twain thinks that this was merely a trick, however, and is subsequently frustrated by his entire experience with Wheeler. Coming across as an impatient, condescending man unwilling to listen to Wheeler, he sneaks away when he gets the chance. Twain speaks in perfect English and may be viewed as a symbol of the snobbery associated with the eastern United States during the nineteenth century.

Daniel Webster See Dan'l Webster

Dan'l Webster Dan'l Webster is the "notorious jumping frog of Calaveras County." He is caught by Jim Smiley and trained by him to jump high, far, and on command. When jumping, he does somersaults and is described by the narrator as "whirling in the air like a doughnut." Despite his jumping prowess, he is described as being modest and straightforward. He is often used in Jim's bets and is the victim of the Stranger's prank. According to Jim, Dan'l Webster can out-jump any frog in Calaveras County. He shares his name with the famous nineteenth-century American statesman and orator.

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Media Adaptations Director John Sturges's The Best Man Wins was distributed by Columbia in 1948. This film version of "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County'' starred Edgar Buchanan and Anna Lee. Learning Garden Films released an animated version of "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County" in 1987.

Simon Wheeler Simon Wheeler is an elderly resident of the Western mining operation known as Angel's Camp. A fat, balding man whom Twain finds in a bar, Simon is described condescendingly as possessing ' 'an expression of winning gentleness and simplicity." He remembers when much of the camp was being built and provides the actual story of the infamous betting man named Jim Smiley and his "notorious jumping frog." Though he seems comfortable with his role as storyteller, Simon seems oblivious to the fact that he is boring his listener, Mark Twain, and is seemingly unaware of the fantastic nature of his tale. For his part, Twain asserts that although Simon speaks for a very long time and with a lack of enthusiasm and emotion, he speaks sincerely and takes his stories seriously. Critics note, however, that Simon is well aware of his narrative abilities and is not as naive as he seems. Despite his supposed lack of sophistication, he immediately sizes up the cultured Easterner Twain and dupes him into hearing this fantastic tale.

Themes A cultured Easterner relates his recent visit to a talkative old man at a western mining camp. Rather than providing information that the Easterner is looking for, the old man keeps him waiting while he spins a tale about a betting man and his pet frog.

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Topics for Further Study Twain's story was first written as a letter, a style referred to as epistolary. Other examples of epistolary works are Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897) and Alice Walker's The Color Purple (1982). Discuss how the epistolary form impacts the narrative and the reader's interest in a work. Research what life—particularly life in a mining camp—was like in California at the time Twain wrote this tale. Tall tales and folk tales traditionally have been used to present nontraditional ideas about society. Examine the social and political messages found in Joel Chandler Harris's "Br'er Rabbit" stories, and compare them to this story. Compare Twain's use of satire with that of Jonathan Swift in his "A Modest Proposal" (1729). What and who do these stories satirize? Compare this tale to Twain's other travel sketches or humorous writings. Discuss their similarities and differences.

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He speaks in monotone, supposedly having no knowledge of the techniques a good storyteller uses to keep an audience's attention. An uneducated man, Wheeler tells his story in the popular genre of the tall tale, rather than in one of the more accepted classic genres taught in eastern schools. He also speaks in the vernacular; that is, in common language, which contains idiomatic expressions, slang, and improper grammar and syntax. Wheeler's use of vernacular language reinforces the idea that the West was populated by crude barbarians who had little education or knowledge of good speech. In stark contrast to Simon Wheeler, the narrator, Mark Twain, comes across as well-educated with refined tastes. This Mark Twain is a storyteller also, but in the passages that precede and follow Wheeler's tale, Twain speaks in proper English. It is obvious he has been educated in the finer points of grammar and syntax. Twain, however, also comes across as a snob. He is annoyed by Wheeler's diction and, because he finds Wheeler's quaint stories fantastic, he thinks they lack value. Indeed, when Wheeler is called away, Twain sneaks off, unwilling to listen any longer. Twain does not consider Wheeler to be an effective storyteller because the old man does not use the conventions that Twain prefers. He does not realize, however, that Wheeler is actually capitalizing on the stereotype of the uneducated Westerner. For instance, although Twain finds Wheeler's voice monotonous, it makes him believe Wheeler speaks with straightforward earnestness. Wheeler craftily balances the absurdity of his tale with the gravity with which he speaks to keep Twain in the listener's seat.

Culture Clash ' "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County," highlights various aspects of late nineteenth-century American society and culture through the retelling of a tall tale. Central to the story is the idea of conflicting cultures, particularly the clash between the settled, eastern portion of the United States and the still-developing West. At the time Twain wrote the story, the East and its inhabitants had a reputation for being civilized, cultured, and advanced. The West, on the other hand, was still being settled and was considered to be populated by a less-educated and less-refined group of people. By extension, Westerners were thought by Easterners to be naive and easily duped. Twain presents these ideas in his story in various ways. Simon Wheeler, for instance, symbolizes the American Westerner—a garrulous old man who tells tales that are farfetched and highly improbable.

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Deception Deception is an integral part of "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County'' and occurs on many levels. In the opening paragraph Mark Twain, the narrator, voices his suspicion that he has been duped by a friend who orchestrated this ' 'chance'' encounter with Simon Wheeler. His friend asked him to inquire about a childhood friend named Leonidas Smiley, knowing full well that Twain would instead be subjected to fabulous stories about the famous betting man of Angel's Camp— Jim Smiley. His friend additionally knew that Twain would be bored and frustrated by the entire experience. Wheeler likewise dupes Twain. He tells him the fantastic and improbable story of Jim—rather than Leonidas—Smiley with a grave demeanor that masks the genuine humor of his tale. By using this mask, Wheeler initially fools the snobby Easterner

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and convinces him that he will be told a serious story. Another instance of deception involves Jim Smiley's bet with the Stranger, who wagers that Dan'l Webster is not the best jumper in Calaveras County. Not only does the Stranger deceive Jim Smiley by pretending to be gullible, he cheats by stuffing Dan'l Webster with gunshot to weigh him down.

American Society When first published, ' "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County" provided relevant and incisive commentary about ninteenth-century American society. While portraying Easterners as educated and refined and Westerners as uneducated and gullible on the surface, Twain upset these stereotypes on a deeper level. He depicted the Easterner (Mark Twain) as a snob and someone who could easily be duped, while portraying the Westerner (Simon Wheeler) as somewhat of a schemer who, despite his lack of formal training, tells highly original tales. The names of Jim Smiley's pets also had relevance for Twain's American audience. Daniel Webster was the name of a famous American statesman known for his speaking abilities. Andrew Jackson, a former president of the United States and war hero known for his determination and strong will, was a strong believer in democracy and the rights of the "common" people. In these and other descriptions found in the story, Twain provided a more complicated and multifaceted view of Americans. "Jumping Frog" asserted that Americans could simultaneously be resourceful, innovative, practical, and determined, as well as shortsighted, narrow-minded, and gullible.

Style Structure The frame tale structure of "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County" is one of its most important parts. In a frame tale, one story appears in—that is, it is framed by—another story. In "Jumping Frog" the outer tale focuses on Mark Twain and his meeting with the talkative old storyteller, Simon Wheeler. This meeting occurs at the request of a friend of Twain's, identified in some versions of the tale as A. Ward, who supposedly wants to find out about an old acquaintance named Leonidas Smiley. Twain reveals, however, that he suspects his friend's request was merely a practical joke designed to waste his time. Twain's suspicions

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about the meeting and his descriptions of Wheeler appear in the few paragraphs that open and close the entire story. Twain speaks in the first person in these passages. Because this portion of the tale first appeared in the form of a letter, the entire story also can be considered an epistolary tale. The inner tale is the one Wheeler tells about Jim Smiley, his betting ways, and his run-in with the Stranger. Wheeler's stories seem largely exaggerated, and can be viewed as examples of a tall tale. Wheeler tells his tale in a third-person narrative voice.

Setting ' The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County" takes place in the mid-to-late nineteenth century, shortly after the California Gold Rush of 1849. Mark Twain's experience with Simon Wheeler and Wheeler's stories about Jim Smiley both occur in Angel's Camp, a mining camp located in Calaveras County, California. Wheeler tells Twain his stories in a local bar, the type of place where stories are often shared.

Satire Satire is an essential component o f ' 'The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County." Satire is a technique that involves the manipulation of stereotypes and the use of exaggeration to point out the folly of a person or situation. In "Jumping Frog'' Twain pokes fun at several things, including the tall tale genre, the American West, and the American East. Instead of merely using the tall tale for humorous effect, Twain also uses it to challenge various stereotypes held by many Americans at the time. According to these stereotypes, individuals living in the western United States were often uneducated, gullible fools. By contrast, Americans living in the eastern part of the United States were supposed to be well-educated, sophisticated, and cultured. In a satirical twist, Twain's sophisticated Easterner actually comes across as an impatient and self-absorbed snob who gets fooled by both his friend and the garrulous Wheeler. Likewise, Wheeler is ultimately revealed to be not a rube, but a goodnatured and experienced storyteller whose deadpan delivery is merely a front used to fool his supposedly sophisticated listener.

Tall Tale A tall tale features exaggerated, fabulous events. Characters in tall tales are often considered ' 'larger than life," meaning they exhibit extraordinary quali-

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ties. Simon Wheeler's stories about Jim Smiley and his pets feature many such exaggerations, and thus fall into the tall tale category. For example, Wheeler describes Smiley as a man who will make a bet on anything, even something as mundane as which of two birds will fly off a fence first. Smiley's frog, Dan'l Webster, practically flies through the air when jumping and uses his legs like a cat to scratch himself. Finally, Andrew Jackson, Smiley's dog, will hold on to another dog—his preferred technique for fighting—for as long as a year to win a fight.

Anthropomorphism Twain gives the animals in "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County'' human traits, a technique called anthropomorphism. Andrew Jackson, Jim Smiley's dog, is described as proud, ornery, and determined. He likes to fight and likes to win his battles. When he fights a dog that he can't beat, he eventually dies from the humiliation. Both Andrew Jackson and the frog named Dan'l Webster are described as gifted. Dan'l Webster is additionally described as being modest and straightforward.

Diction Authors frequently use dialect and vernacular language to establish the setting of their tales, as well as their characters' identities. In "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County," Twain uses language to highlight the differences between his characters. For example, when Twain speaks, he uses grammatically proper English. Simon Wheeler, however, tells his tale in the vernacular, or common-day language, of the American West. Wheeler ignores many grammatical rules, and speaks with an "accent" of sorts. He says "feller" instead of "fellow," "reg'lar" instead of "regular," and even "Dan'l" for "Daniel."

Historical Context America in the Mid to Late Nineteenth Century ' The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County" was first published in 1865, when Mark

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Twain was living in the American Southwest, which was still in the process of being settled. The Industrial Revolution had brought machinery and factories to the eastern United States, but most of the country, particularly areas west of the Mississippi River, still relied on the land for economic development. Much of the land in the West was devoted to cattle, and the U.S. government was involved in battles and embroilments with various Native American tribes in order to obtain more land. The West's growing population was influenced by both the Homestead Act of 1862, which promised free farms to families, and by the discovery of gold in California in 1848. As a result of this discovery, mining towns and camps, such as Angel's Camp where Twain sets "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County," were established throughout California and the western United States. Despite the increasing growth out West, there was still a great divide between the eastern and western parts of the United States. The West was thought to be wild and woolly, and populated by rough, uneducated pioneers. Easterners, on the other hand, were assumed to be more educated, polite, cultured, and sophisticated—in a word, "genteel." Although trains and steam boats were popular modes of transportation, the transcontinental railroad had not yet been completed. This made travel between the two regions difficult, and this fact added to the sense of separation between them.

Literature in the United States At the time Twain wrote "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County," distinctly American literature was still in its infancy. Henry James was beginning an acclaimed literary career and influencing the development of the modern novel form. Representing the cultured East, James often wrote of transplanted Americans in Europe and the tradition-bound Europeans who looked down on them for lacking sophistication. In direct contrast to James, Twain was busy forging an American identity in literature—based on the rugged and independent individuals who lived outside the East. Twain's writing style forsook eloquence to focus on addressing situations unique to the United States and Americans. Classics such as Huckleberry Finn featured familiar American characters and settings, while commenting on the growing nation's social issues.

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E. W. Kemble's original illustration for Twain's "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County.''

Critical Overview ' 'The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County" was a popular success upon its first publication in The New York Saturday Press in 1865. Some of its success can be attributed to Twain's use of popular storytelling conventions and references to contemporary figures. For example, Twain adopted the humorous tall tale of the American Southwest, a popular genre at the time, to tell this story. Furthermore, this tale already was an established piece of American folklore that Twain modified and enhanced; early versions of the tale focused on a jumping grasshopper, not a frog. Twain added to the popularity of his "Jumping Frog" by reciting it at lectures and performances he gave across the United States. Because of its popularity, when Twain published his first collection of stories, he made "Jumping Frog" the title piece. The letter-writing structure initially used in this tale was popular at that time and also contributed to the story's success. In the tale, Twain also made allusions to recent figures in contemporary American history. For example, Jim Smiley's dog, Andrew Jackson, shares

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his name with a former president of the United States, while Smiley's frog, Dan'l Webster, shares his name with a renowned statesman and politician of the nineteenth century. The letter that frames the original story was addressed to "A. Ward," whom many individuals believed to be Artemus Ward, another popular humor writer of the time. These references and conventions made the tale more accessible and thus popular with Twain's contemporaries. Although "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County" was initially admired for its humor and as an example of a tall tale, it also became known for its satirical portrait of the American East. Although one of Twain's earliest and most successful pieces—a piece that established him as a sketchwriter and humorist—this story also has much in common with his later works, which critics frequently note for their biting comments about American society and human nature. Furthermore, it is noted that by portraying himself as a fool, Twain could get away with more outrageous and possibly offensive comments. For example, he could feature a Westerner (Wheeler) duping an Easterner (Twain)—a situation that reversed the popular

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Compare & Contrast 1865: People from around the United States and Mexico continue to flock to California in search of prosperity after the Gold Rush of 1849. Today: The state of California, led by Governor Pete Wilson, passes strict legislation designed to discourage illegal immigration. 1864: Congress passes a bill to protect California's Yosemite Valley, designating it the first public scenic reserve in the United States. Today: Environmentalists and big business fight

stereotypes of the day—without offending Eastern audiences. It must be noted, however, that Twain allowed Jim Smiley, a Westerner, to be duped when he lets his guard down. More recent interpretations of the story, by critics such as Lawrence R. Smith, have focused on the symbolism attached to the names used in the story. In Mark Twain Journal, Smith asserts that Twain's use of names offers insights into American society. "Smiley," for instance, is considered an optimistic name. The dog Andrew Jackson shares his name with the seventh president of the United States, a brave man of' 'common stock'' known for his strong will. Jackson was also known as a proponent of the idea of democracy—a philosophy Twain highly valued—which is shared by all U.S. citizens regardless of their geographic location. In the case of the two men named Smiley, "Leonidas," the name associated with Twain's Eastern friend, is a more sophisticated and potentially snobbish name. These qualities, sophistication and snobbery, were sometimes associated with the society of the eastern United States. "Jim," on the other hand, is a more popular and common name, just as frontiersmen were generally considered more "common" and less sophisticated. Critics believe, therefore, that ' The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County" provides a symbolic commentary on the melting pot of American society and the positive and negative qualities of all Americans.

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over whether to protect dwindling forests in the Pacific Northwest. 1861: A Western Union telegraph line opens between New York and San Francisco, making communication between the eastern and western United States easier. Today: Internet services provide a cheap and virtually limitless form of long distance communication, bridging disparate peoples and cultures in the process.

Criticism Trudy Ring Trudy Ring is a frequent writer, editor, and reporter on literary subjects. In the following essay, she discusses Twain's use of the frame narrative, satiric elements, and the significance of the character names in "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County.'' ' 'The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County' ' appears at first glance to be a simple, humorous story, but actually is a complex satire of American literature, social conventions, and politics. Like the land around the mining settlement of Angel's Camp, it has riches under the surface, and the patient and careful reader can tap into this vein. Inspired by an anecdote Mark Twain heard while traveling in the western United States, the sketch was published in various forms and under various titles, including ' 'Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog" and "The Notorious Jumping Frog of Calaveras County," but the basic story remains the same in all versions. The narrator, apparently from the eastern part of the nation, finds himself in a western mining camp listening to a rustic character tell stories about a habitual gambler named Jim Smiley and the animals that were the subject of Smiley's bets.

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What Do I Read Next? Charles W. Chesnutt's The Conjure Woman (1899) uses the tall tale and frame narrative forms to examine life in the American South of the nineteenth century. BretHarte's "The Outcasts of Poker Flat" (1869) and "The Luck of Roaring Camp" (1868) offer portraits of life in mining camps and on the American frontier. In the title story of the 1993 collection One Good Story, That One, Native American writer Thomas King satirizes the importance of storytelling in anthropological studies and the conflicts that

The story's structure was familiar to American readers in the nineteenth century. Many writers of the era penned "frame stories," commonly set in the southwestern United States, showing supposedly sophisticated and cultured Easterners encountering less polished characters on the frontiers of the expanding nation. The rough Westerners would tell tales that were often preposterous, and the Easterners' account of, and reaction to, these stories provided a ' 'frame'' for them. ' 'Writers often capitalized on the juxtaposition of literate traveler and colloquial rustic, exaggerating their differences of manners and speech to suggest cultural absurdities in one or the other or both," critic Paul Baender explained in Modern Philology. ' 'Some writers also contrived little contests between the traveler and the rustic in which the rustic deceived the traveler with a tall tale." In "Jumping Frog," as several scholars have pointed out, Twain has used the conventions of these stories but also has gone beyond them, creating something fresh and unusual. Baender contended that "Jumping Frog" resembles southwestern frame stories but does not actually fit into this category.' 'Simon Wheeler sees no class or regional pretensions in the narrator and has none of his own . . . the tale follows . . . not as a regional outgrowth,

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occur between white society and Native Americans. In this tale, the narrator hoodwinks his white audience by telling how, supposedly according to his tribe's beliefs, the world was created. Mark Twain's success as a satirist and sketchwriter was further established by his 1869 book The Innocents Abroad; or, The New Pilgrim's Progress, in which he wrote of his experiences and observations while travelling through the Middle East and Europe with a group of well-to-do Americans.

but as a fabulous history even for the region," Baender asserted. The contrast between the narrator and Wheeler serves primarily to "direct us to the humor that follows," he argued. Paul Schmidt put forth a somewhat different view of Twain's use of the frame-story device. Schmidt noted in Southwest Review that in earlier southwestern frame stories and their predecessors— ' 'local color'' stories focusing on quirky, unsophisticated characters in various parts of the United States—the story's narrator tended to be identified with the author and to be condescending toward the rustics he or she encountered. As the southwestern frame story genre developed, authors found this condescending attitude conflicting with sincere admiration for the people of the frontier. Twain resolved this conflict, according to Schmidt, by separating his own point of view from that of the narrator and by making fun of the narrator's pomposity and pretension. Twain's accomplishment, Schmidt commented, is ' 'much more than the simple addition of another character to his satiric targets"; the author has managed to satirize "the entire point of view of the local colorist'' and ' 'the genteel version of the Enlightened traveler and belle esprit, a representative nineteenth-century American rich in official and accepted attitudes."

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There is much in the story to support this view. The narrator has an exaggerated and rather ridiculous formality in his manner of speaking. He reports that he went to see Simon Wheeler "in compliance with the request of a friend of mine''; he ' 'hereunto appendfs] the result." He assures Wheeler that he "would feel under many obligations to him" for any information Wheeler could provide about Rev. Leonidas W. Smiley. The narrator obviously is annoyed by Wheeler's "interminable narrative," but maintains an attitude of pained tolerance, all the time letting us know he considers himself superior to Wheeler. Wheeler, the narrator says, "had an expression of winning gentleness and simplicity" and told his tale with ' 'impressive earnestness and sincerity . . . far from his imagining that there was anything ridiculous or funny about his story, he regarded it as a really important matter." Wheeler, however, possesses knowledge the narrator does not, and his story, suggested critic Lawrence R. Smith in Mark Twain Journal, contains details ' 'directed precisely at the ignorance of the narrator." For instance, Smith pointed out, Wheeler's portrait of the frog, with references to its chin and the nape of its neck (both hard to find on a frog),' 'could only be acceptable to a man who had never seen one, or at least had not looked at one very carefully." The narrator, though, is so convinced of his own superiority that he fails to realize Wheeler is playing with him, and he also fails to see anything of value in Wheeler's story. Critics have found a variety of valuable points in Wheeler's narrative. To Schmidt, it is the importance of cooperation in a community over unrestrained competition among individuals; the relaxed and cheerful Wheeler represents community values, while Jim Smiley disturbs the community with his competitiveness and pays the price for it when his frog loses the jumping contest. To Smith, Smiley is a more positive character, to be praised for his optimism and energy, who grows as a person when his frog is defeated; he learns not to be so naive and gullible. Either way, Wheeler's tale can be interpreted as a commentary that ambitious, individualistic types would benefit from taking a hard look at themselves, maintaining the admirable aspects of their personalities, and being willing to change the rest. Both through the story of Jim Smiley and the framing story of Wheeler and the narrator, Twain satirizes certain American ideas of the nature of success and how to achieve it, while he also satirizes authors who have condescended to their "rustic" characters."

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Twain aims his barbed wit at some other targets, too. As Smith noted, Twain was known to be skeptical of organized religion, so it is significant that his narrator is looking for information about a minister; the clergy becomes associated with the narrator's smug attitudes. A minister figures in Simon Wheeler's tale, too; he mentions that Jim Smiley would attend Parson Walker's camp meetings for the purpose of making bets. Smiley's apparent lack of respect for religion is a way of deflating the pomposity of some religious people. The names of the bulldog pup and the frog have satirical significance, too, but here the jokes become more complicated. The dog's namesake, President Andrew Jackson, had a public image as the champion of the common people and symbolized the belief that anyone, no matter how humble his origins, could, by talent and hard work, rise to the top of society. Wheeler ascribes just such talent to the dog, saying the animal "would have made a name for hisself if he'd lived, for the stuff was in him and he had genius . . . he hadn't no opportunities to speak of, and it don't stand to reason that a dog could make such a fight as he could under them circumstances if he hadn't no talent." Smith thought the symbolism of the name appropriate and called the dog ' 'the embodiment of Jacksonian democracy.'' But another scholar, S. J. Krause, has argued in American Quarterly that Jackson actually considered himself superior to the so-called common people, that his stubbornness was not altogether admirable, and that he had a penchant for gambling. The story of the dog, therefore, is a means of subtly ridiculing Jackson, according to Krause. The frog is named after Daniel Webster, who distinguished himself as a U.S. congressman, senator, and Secretary of State. Krause has noted, though, that Webster was a political pragmatist, changing his stances when necessary—in other words, flip-flopping, just like the frog. Also important is the fact that just as the frog cannot jump in the final contest detailed in the story, Webster failed to make the ultimate leap in politics—he never became president. It takes some knowledge of history to appreciate Twain's humor here, but this knowledge allows the reader to understand and enjoy the story on yet another level. The names of other characters are meaningful, as well, and this is something upon which numerous critics have commented. "Simon Wheeler" suggests both "Simple Simon" of the nursery rhyme and a not-so-simple "wheeler-dealer." This is appropriate because Simon does appear, at least in the narrator's opinion, to be simple, both in the

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sense of being uncomplicated and in the sense of being not very bright; but, in reality, he is rather complex and crafty. In regard to the two Smileys, the simplicity of the name "Jim" contrasts with the pretense of "Leonidas." And "Smiley" has a connotation of optimism. These names, along with other aspects of the story, led one scholar, Paul Smith, to make an interpretation in Satire Newsletter that seems a bit farfetched, but is sufficiently interesting to merit the attention of anyone studying the story. Smith saw ' 'Jumping Frog'' as a retelling of the great legends of pilgrims on a quest for knowledge and spiritual salvation. These pilgrims usually traveled from east to west, from a settled and familiar place to a land where there was much to be discovered. Smith saw the story's nameless narrator as one of these pilgrims. Leonidas W. Smiley, according to Smith, represents the legendary Fisher-King, wounded, impotent, and lost in the Waste Land. Leonidas was the name of the king of ancient Sparta, and a minister is, in a phrase used in the Bible, a fisher of men. The name Smiley, Smith added, "suggests that in him the hopes of the land are invested and in his rejuvenation rests the chance to turn the waste land into the smiling land it once was." Simon Wheeler is, in Smith's view, an enchanter and a spinner of tales; his tale holds the clue to Leonidas W. Smiley's disappearance. If the letters "o" and "s" are dropped from "Leonidas," the remaining letters can be rearranged into "Daniel," and the "W" stands for "Webster." The king, therefore, has been turned into a frog, just as in the original Fisher-King tale, Smith asserted. And because Daniel Webster, the man, was a politician, the transformation symbolizes how practical politics have replaced religious idealism in American life. A further sign of the nation's decay is that the minister's last name has been taken over by a compulsive gambler. It may seem a bit much to find religious allegory in the humorous tale of a gambler and his frog, but Smith contended that "however much a humorist Mark Twain was, he was aware of this tale's tragic significance." Smith's interpretation, whether one finds it valid or not, is yet another indication of the riches that readers can mine from "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County." Source: Trudy Ring, for Short Stories for Students, Gale Research, 1997.

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Many writers of the era penned 'frame stories,1 commonly set in the southwestern United States, showing supposedly sophisticated and cultured Easterners encountering less polished characters on the frontiers of the expanding nation,"

Lawrence R. Smith Smith is an educator, editor, and poet. In the following essay, he discusses how Simon Wheeler is a "vernacular" hero with many qualities of a ' 'trickster,'' and how the story is a satiric piece of literature, rather than simply a clever tale. Mark Twain's "Jumping Frog" has been at the center of a critical controversy in recent years. This controversy focuses on one major question. Is the story satiric, with Simon Wheeler as a deadpan trickster making fun of the narrator, or is it simply a wild yarn told by a mindless yokel? Interpretations and claims for the story have varied widely. Some have argued that the ' 'Jumping Frog'' is the summation of Twain's faith in frontier democracy, while others have held that it is no more than an amusing story, told in an "exquisitely absurd" manner. A close examination of the structure and the component parts of the story itself, rather than argumentation in the abstract realms of cultural history and philosophy, indicates that the ' 'Jumping Frog" is a great deal more than a yarn well told. Furthermore, it is more than a simple celebration of "vernacular" heroes and frontier democracy. Twain not only transcends the tradition of the Southwestern humorous frame story, from which the ' 'Jumping Frog" is derived, he also passes beyond any narrow ideological statement. He has attempted to create a work that is broad and all-encompassing in its scope. In the encounter between the narrator and Simon Wheeler, Twain sets up a confrontation between the false and the true. As it happens, this is

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the classic confrontation between the "Whig gentleman" and the "vernacular" character. However, even this factor is not as vital to the meaning of the story as the larger conflict between the false and the true. It is Twain's main purpose to define and explore just what is true and valuable about Simon Wheeler and the qualities he represents. Relatively little time is spent in the deflation of the pretentious narrator; most of the story concerns Jim Smiley, his animals, and the stranger. It is here that Twain, through Simon Wheeler, creates an American heroic ideal. This ideal cannot be defined by such limiting terms as "vernacular," "frontier," "rural," or "western." The names of Smiley's two heroic animals, Andrew Jackson and Daniel Webster, reinforce the broadness and lack of regionality in Twain's vision. Yankee shrewdness and the East, conveyed by recalling the legendary Daniel Webster, are as much a part of the ideal Twain is defining as the frontier democracy represented by Andrew Jackson. Moreover, even the idealistic amalgam created by the Webster and Jackson images, and even the ideals represented by the optimistic gambler himself, are tempered by Smiley's deception at the hands of the stranger. What results from the whole tale is a synthesis of the best American traits: shrewdness, a spirit of enterprise and aspiration in Jim Smiley and his animals, and in the stranger the skeptical pragmatism necessary to keep the other characteristics within a useful and realistic framework. Simon Wheeler, as an American Homer, sings the praises of these heroes and the ideals they embody. Even if the narrator could never recognize these men or the traits for which they stand as heroic, Twain certainly does. The ' 'Jumping Frog'' could be described as the ultimate example of a genre of Southwestern humor, both in its complexity and in its sophistication. The tradition of a rural character duping and deflating the pretentious, smug city gentleman has been multiplied into an ingenious system of layers: a trick within a trick within a trick. Simon Wheeler tells the story of Jim Smiley, a trickster himself, being tricked by a stranger, and at the same time Wheeler makes a fool of the frame narrator. Twain is ripening the narrative "I" for his deflation from the moment the story begins. The ' 'gentleman'' obviously considers himself well-bred and eloquent, but such elaborate constructions as "In compliance with the request of a friend of mine" and "I hereunto append the result'' characterize the man as a prig. His attempts at stylistic flourish are pretentious; he is the stereotyped "genteel traveller"

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which Twain ridiculed throughout his career. It is noteworthy that the false quality of the narrator's style is immediately connected with the clergy, when we find that he is looking for a Rev. Leonidas W. Smiley. The fact that he has an inflated selfimage is further reinforced by the two stilted phrases associated with the mention of the clergyman:' 'a cherished companion of his boyhood" and "a young minister of the Gospel." Twain could have easily contrasted the genteel and the vernacular simply by stressing the difference between the names, ' 'Leonidas'' and ' 'Jim," but he chose to exaggerate the disparity by making the fictitious ' 'Leonidas'' a clergyman. Twain's lifelong association of the clergy, Protestant or Catholic, with the most foolish pretense and hypocrisy hardly needs comment. The narrator's attitude is also conveyed by his obvious condescension for Simon Wheeler, whom he describes as "good-natured," "garrulous," full of "winning gentleness and simplicity," "tranquil," "fat and bald-headed." In other words, Wheeler is depicted as the stereotyped yokel as seen through the eyes of polite urban society: homely, lazy, mindless, and most important, harmless good fun. However, even before the tale begins, Twain hints that this superior attitude may not be justified. Old Wheeler's influence soon renders the narrator a helpless captive: ' 'he backed me into a corner and blocked me there with a chair." The old timer is far from tranquil and passive. His irresistible presence is reminiscent of [Samuel Taylor] Coleridge's ancient mariner's hold over the unwary wedding guest. The narrator further displays his lack of perception and his misapplied condescension in evaluating the yarn and Simon Wheeler's narrative manner. He calls the Jim Smiley story insignificant, "monstrous," "queer," and yet its implications, both for him and for American society as a whole, are monumental. He also finds the unemotional delivery of the old timer amusing, in fact, "exquisitely absurd." However, this only indicates that he has not recognized the traditional deadpan delivery of the rural character, and thus is properly ripe for being taken in. It should also be noticed that the narrator only thinks the manner of the telling ' 'absurd," not the tale itself, and thus is unaware that Simon Wheeler is making fun of his ignorance of country life. The old miner's attribution of impossible characteristics to Daniel Webster the frog, and nevertheless convincing the narrator that they are normal, becomes his masterpiece of satirical oneupmanship.

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Twain demonstrates Wheeler's awareness and his satirical nature at the beginning of the yarn. These qualities had to be established before the significance of the Jim Smiley story could be perceived. Simon Wheeler seems to fit the narrator's condescending characterization as he starts his tale with a digression, and continues with a long-winded list of examples of Jim Smiley's willingness to bet. However, he does not wait long before he launches his first barb. When we hear that Jim Smiley went to Parson Walker's ' 'camp meetings" regularly in order to bet, we are puzzled. Does he bet on the length of the sermon, the number of conversions, or the number of furtive defections? Yet the ambiguity works well, because any interpretation is at the expense of Parson Walker and the clergy in general. It is only as Wheeler continues with the story of the straddlebug that we realize that Parson Walker has been included in a long list of animals, hierarchically arranged by size and importance, with the good parson only slightly above the bugs. Smiley's bet that Mrs. Walker will not recover from her grave illness, after the Parson's pious platitudes "thank the Lord for his inf nit mercy" and "with the blessing of Prov'dence," only reinforces the mockery. At first glance this satiric jab at the clergy may seem gratuitous, but one has only to remember that the pretentious interloper, the narrator, is searching for a/?ev. Leonidas W. Smiley. Furthermore, the narrator has been more than a little vain and pompous about his pious attitude toward the "young minister of the Gospel." The "simple" Simon Wheeler has already turned the tables on the man who had been so confident about his superiority. The old timer could hardly help being aware that jokes at the expense of the clergy, especially the sardonic joke about the death of the Parson's wife, would be highly unacceptable to the listener, who considers himself polite and well-bred. There should be no question as to whether this is Wheeler's humor or Twain's, because the mouthpiece for the author's satire is clearly aware of what he is doing.... Source: Lawrence R. Smith, "Mark Twain's 'Jumping Frog': Towards an American Heroic Ideal," in Mark Twain Journal, Volume XX, No. 1, Winter, 1979, pp. 15-17.

Paul Schmidt In the following excerpted essay, Schmidt asserts that the satire in ' 'The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County'' is pointed at the narrator (Mark Twain) rather than Simon Wheeler, who emerges as the superior character that Twain supposes himself to be.

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he tradition of a rural character duping and deflating the pretentious, smug city gentleman has been multiplied into an ingenious system of layers: a trick within a trick within a trick."

In the encounter between Mark Twain and Simon Wheeler which frames the story of' 'The Notorious Jumping Frog of Calaveras County" we are, apparently, expected to agree with the narrator, Mark Twain, that the ' 'good natured, garrulous'' miner is a comic butt. Wheeler tells his story, according to Mark Twain, like a simpleton: He never smiled, he never frowned, he never changed his voice from the gentle-flowing key to which he tuned his initial sentence, he never betrayed the slightest suspicion of enthusiasm; but all through the interminable narrative there ran a vein of impressive earnestness and sincerity....

His blank seriousness, his vernacular language, and the seeming naivete with which his story personifies the frog, the asthmatic mare, and the bull pup would appear at first glance to be ample specification of provincial idiocy. Actually, of course, none of us is misled by this characterization, for we sense the play involved. The Westerner, Wheeler, is engaged in his traditional role of taking in the pompous Easterner. We are, indeed, so familiar with the devices of American humor that we are likely to underestimate how much Clemens accomplishes with them—deadpan, tall tale, and all the rest. To plunge below the innocently smiling surface of the story is to realize that we are engaged in a complex comic business and one which turns upon issues of great scope and vitality. That business is traditionally described as burlesque, the reduction of the high to the low. The butt of this humor is the narrator himself,' 'Mark Twain,'' and what he represents. With his ostentatious formality, his pretentious language, and, above all, his preconceptions as to what this western miner is, he

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If Wheeler is a seed dolt, he is so only from the point of view of the genteel 'Mark Twain,' the point of view which is Clemens' ultimate object of satire in this story."

is obviously not to be identified with the author at all. He has been "commissioned," he says, to ask about a friend's "cherished companion," a companion who is a "minister of the Gospel," and if Wheeler will help him out he promises to be ' 'under many obligations." Punctilio jealously guards the distance between this eastern visitor and his Calaveras County host; a jaundiced patronage is apparent in his mention of Wheeler's shabby surroundings—a ' 'dilapidated tavern'' in a' 'decayed mining camp." "Mark Twain" is, in short, the type genteel, ripe with overbearing sophistication. If Wheeler is a seedy dolt, he is so only from the point of view of the genteel' 'Mark Twain," the point of view which is Clemens' ultimate object of satire in this story. This deliberate management of point of view is both an outgrowth of the traditions of southwestern humor in which Clemens worked and a sharp and distinctive departure from them. In earlier southwestern sketches and stories the frame and narration in the first person were standard equipment, but in the frame the author was, in contrast with Clemens here, fully identified with the narrator, and this author-narrator was serenely convinced of his refined superiority to the vernacular-speaking characters who appeared in the story proper. The narrator described the low life of the Crackers, Suckers, and Buckeyes with a condescension ranging from the amused tolerance of A. B. Longstreet's Georgia Scenes to the contempt of Johnson J. Hooper's stories of the rascal Simon Suggs. The function of the frame, with its elegant diction and elevated taste, was to disinfect the author from contamination by the vernacular life he presented. This narrative attitude derives in large outline from the Enlightenment celebration of the picturesque and its nineteenth-century heir, the local-

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color story, wherein the author is typically posed as an aristocrat edified by pastoral reflections on the lower classes, indulgent with rural antics, or, if the humble scene is pathetic, Olympian in pity. (Hawthorne's Town Pump sketches are conceived in this manner.) When such condescension is taken over into southwestern humorous sketches it collides head-on with the author's genuine admiration for the low characters in the story within the frame. Thus the sophistication which T. B. Thorpe adopts in the frame of "The Big Bear of Arkansas" is belied by the burlesque of sophistication in the story proper. Where the author moves into closer sympathy with vernacular speech and character, as George Washington Harris does in his Sut Lovingood sketches, the frame and the lofty narrator tend to disappear. In "The Jumping Frog" Clemens hit upon a brilliant resolution of this confusion. Not only does he sharply dissever the point of view of his narrator, ' 'Mark Twain," from his own; he goes even farther and takes on this sophisticated narrator with his local-colorist assumptions as an object of satire. This technical innovation with its accompanying insight accounts for much of the high distinction of this story and of Clemens' humor generally. It involves much more than the simple addition of another character to his satiric targets; when he takes on the moralizing narrator, what falls within the purview of his burlesque is nothing less than the entire point of view of the local-colorist. Clemens has moved his sights up from the simple dandy, or shyster, or circuit rider, who had figured in American humor from its beginnings, and leveled them on the genteel version of the Enlightened traveler and belle esprit a representative nineteenth-century American rich in official and accepted attitudes. In Clemens' earliest published sketch, "The Dandy Frightening the Squatter," the genteel butt has only the crudest of pretensions—fancy dress and a few mannerisms; he is an oversimplified dude.' The Jumping Frog'' gives us a more searching view. In the "Mark Twain" of this story a whole culture gone to seed in gentility is brought into the balance. With his unctuous formality of speech, his invidious amusement, and with the whole range of reference into which he proposes to fit Wheeler, he is consciously realized to his very fingertips and riddled with satire. He struts in front of Wheeler with an insufferably patronizing air and, perhaps as a consequence of this egotism, with an almost paranoiac distrust of others. He had, he says, a "lurking suspicion" that he must be on guard against the effronteries of the western vernacular.

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He is prepared to find Wheeler's story "interminable" and "ridiculous." ("Hostility," as [Rainer Maria] Rilke says,' 'is our first response.'') He sees Wheeler's manner and story as an "infamous" attempt which "blockades" him in the corner and bores him "to death." This ' 'Mark Twain'' is more than a mere snob. The assumptions which govern his reception of Wheeler are those of an eastern traveler in the West, the assumptions which make up the complicated Enlightenment case of Civilization versus Nature, England and the Continent versus America, Boston versus the West. It is the paradoxical view of a refined (or jaded) culture pitted against a boorish (or naively noble) nature. As an inhabitant of the Wild West, Wheeler is viewed by "Mark Twain" as a reversion proper to the American frontier. In response to the pulls of this primitive environment the Westerner is expected to become a rude, uncultivated barbarian. Hence Wheeler is presented as maundering through his idiotic tale, unable to hold his ' 'simple'' mind up to the refined level of his genteel visitor. Harriet Martineau had been shocked at the vulgarity of western table manners, Charles Dickens had been disgusted that the residents along the Mississippi River fought like bloodthirsty savages, and now ' 'Mark Twain'' is sure that Simon Wheeler is a fool. Once we see the narrator and this genteel localcolorist view of the Westerner as the target of Clemens' satire, the ostensible values of the story are reversed in characteristic burlesque fashion. Far from being a "good natured, garrulous old" idiot, as ' 'Mark Twain'' would lead us to suppose, Wheeler emerges as the initiator of the satire—the teller of the tall tale. He deliberately assumes the role of an unconscious barbarian as a play upon his visitor's preconceptions and with the intention of turning the tables on him. Contrary to ''Mark Twain's'' picture of him as "far from imagining that there was anything ridiculous or funny about his story," Wheeler is fully aware that his manner is comic and that he is clowning when he treats the frog in his story like a prima donna. He poses as stupid in order to ridicule what his genteel auditor, "Mark Twain," projects on the vernacular Westerner, in order to show how ridiculously inappropriate the stereotype of the western barbarian is and how wrong the genteel values are which led to its imposition. The purpose of Wheeler's "impressive earnestness"—the tradi-

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tional pokerface—becomes clear: it prevents his giving away his hand, his satire on the genteel ' 'Mark Twain,'' and the role of outlandish stupidity he is assuming. His pose of "sincerity" and the story he tells are consciously designed, as both Clemens and Wheeler are aware, to take in his presumptuous listener. "Mark Twain" is the unconscious character in the frame, and he is the comic b u t t . . . . Source: Paul Schmidt, "The Deadpan on Simon Wheeler," in The Southwest Review, Vol. XLI, No. 3, Summer, 1956, pp. 270-77.

Sources Baender, Paul. "The 'Jumping Frog' as a Comedian's First Virtue," Modern Philology Vol. LX, no. 3, February, 1963, pp. 192-200. Krause, S. J.' 'The Art and Satire of Twain's 'Jumping Frog' Story," American Quarterly, Vol. XVI, no. 4, Winter, 1964, pp. 562-76. Smith, Paul.' 'The Infernal Reminiscence: Mythic Patterns in Mark Twain's The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County,"' Satire Newsletter, Vol. 1, no. 2, Spring, 1964, pp. 41-44.

Further Reading Cuff, Roger P. "Mark Twain's Use of California Folklore in His Jumping Frog Story," Journal of American Folklore, Vol. 65, April, 1952, pp. 155-9. Cuff traces Twain's use of the folklore of the California Gold Rush in "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County." Lewis, Oscar. The Origin of' 'The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County," Book Club of California, 1931, 27 p. Lewis outlines the history of this story, "from its origins in the mining-camps of the Sierra foothills during the early days of the Gold Rush to the time Mark Twain gave it world-wide fame." Morrissey, Frank R. "The Ancestor of the 'Jumping Frog,'" The Bookman, Vol. LIII, no. 2, April, 1921, pp. 143-5. Morrissey recounts a tale about a man and his trained grasshopper, claiming that it is a prototype for Twain's story about Jim Smiley and Dan'l Webster.

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Children of the Sea Edwidge Danticat 1993

First published in the October, 1993, issue of Short Fiction by Women under the title "From the Ocean Floor,'' ' 'Children of the Sea'' was also included in Edwidge Danticat's 1995 short story collection Krik? Krak! The story of a young couple separated by political strife in Haiti, it received positive attention from critics as did the book, and the author quickly gained a reputation as one of the most promising writers in the United States. The tragic story, which concerns a doomed fate of a young couple, concerns many of the issues Danticat addresses in her other stories and in her novel, Breath, Eyes, Memory, which was published in 1994. A native of Haiti, Danticat writes almost exclusively about the country's people, particularly its women, who during the 1980s suffered at the hands of a dictator, Papa Doc Duvalier, as well as from poverty and violence. The story was inspired by the author's conversations with "boat people," as the refugees are sometimes known, who had made their way to Providence, Massachusetts. "Children of the Sea'' has been commended for the way in which it blends political concerns with the emotional lives of the characters, thereby putting a human face on the suffering that many Westerners have only read about in the newspapers. Written in the alternating viewpoints of the young man and woman, the reader experiences the situation from both characters' perspectives. Through this technique, Danticat demonstrates the danger inherent in any choice a Haitian makes, whether it involves standing up to the gov-

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ernment and trying to gain political asylum in the United States, or complying with the regime's demands even if it means betraying others through silence.

Author Biography Brought up in Haiti, the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere, Edwidge Danticat has had firsthand experience with many of the harrowing events she relates in her stories. Danticat was born in Port-au-Prince, Haiti's capital city, on January 19,1969. Four years later her parents immigrated to the United States, leaving their young daughter behind. She rejoined them in 1981, and the family settled in Brooklyn, New York. She felt somewhat like an outsider at school, and she took refuge in her isolation by writing about her homeland. As a teenager, she began writing the novel Breath, Eyes, Memory, which became her first published work in 1994. Danticat's parents wanted their daughter to become a nurse and sent her to a specialized high school in New York City, but by the time she graduated she had decided to concentrate on writing. She attended Barnard College in New York City, receiving her B.A. in 1990, and followed up with an M.F.A. in creative writing from Brown University in 1993. Breath, Eyes, Memory served as her master's thesis and was received warmly by the critics. Krik? Krak.', the collection of short stories which includes ' 'Children of the Sea'' appeared in 1995 to similar acclaim. The collection was nominated for the National Book Award, and the author was named one of the best young American novelists by Granta magazine the following year. In her short career, Danticat has been praised for her lyrical prose and has been compared to Alice Walker, the author of The Color Purple. Due to the fact that Danticat's writing has thus far focused on the experiences of Haitians and Haitian-Americans, some have begun to see her as a spokesperson for that community. It is a role that makes the young author uncomfortable. As she told New York Times reporter Garry Pierre-Pierre, "I don't really see myself as the voice for the Haitian-American experience. There are many. I'm just one." Danticat lives in New York where she teaches creative writing at New York University.

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Plot Summary The story opens with an unnamed narrator, a young Haitian revolutionary, thinking of his girlfriend. He is on a small boat that has set sail for Miami, Florida. He is going into exile because he is wanted by the Haitian government. These details are disclosed by the young woman, who is the second narrator of the story. While her lover has left the country, she remains behind with her mother and father. The man and woman tell their stories through a series of letters. Though they cannot mail these letters, they are writing to appease their loneliness while they are away from one another. When they are reunited, they will feel as if they have not been apart. In Haiti the young man, a university student, was a member of a youth federation that protested the dictator and called for a new government. He fled the country when the secret police, known as the Tonton Macoutes, cracked down on his group. The other members have been killed by the army, and even more students were shot while demonstrating for the return of their friends' bodies. One woman, Madan Roger, a neighbor of the young woman's family, returned with only_the head of her son.

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The young man speaks of the difficulties of life aboard the ship: the vomiting, the temperature changes, the lack of privacy, the shortage of food. He dreams that he has died and gone to heaven, only heaven is at the bottom of the sea. The young woman is also in heaven, but her father continues to keep them apart. The young woman's father does not approve of their relationship, thinking that the young man was not good enough. Now that the young man is gone, the father is still afraid that his daughter's connection with the revolutionaries will endanger their lives. One night soldiers beat Madan Roger in order to coerce her into naming her son's associates. The young woman and her mother think the father should go to Madan Roger's aid. But the father knows he can do nothing for his neighbor, and that it is impossible even to protect his own family. The father only wants to move to Ville Rose, which he thinks will be ' 'civilization'' compared to Port-au-Prince, a crowded and impoverished city. On board the ship a young teenager named Celianne gives birth to a dead baby. The passengers gossip about her, saying her parents kicked her out for having an affair, but the truth is much worse. One night the secret police came to her house and forced her brother, a revolutionary, to have sex with their mother. The soldiers then raped Celianne and arrested her brother. She cut her face with a razor so no one would know who she was, and then she escaped on the boat. Because the boat is leaking, the passengers are forced to throw their belongings overboard but Celianne will not throw her baby into the water In Ville Rose, the young woman's family decides to be honest with each other. The young woman tells her father of her love for the young man. Her mother tells her that the Tonton Macoutes had intended to arrest her because of her involvement with a member of the youth federation. But when the father hears of the plan, he bribes them with all the money he has as well as the family's house and land. The young woman does not know how to thank her father. On the radio, she hears her lover passed his university exams. On board the ship everything is tossed overboard. Celianne throws her baby into the sea and then jumps in herself. The young man is forced to throw away his notebook. Before doing so, he writes the last page which contains his final thoughts. He knows he is about to join the ' 'children of the sea," those who have escaped slavery to live in a world away from the earth and sky, and away from

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all the violence. He knows that even in death he will always remember his girlfriend. Right after the young woman thanks her father for saving her life, a black butterfly tells her the news about the boat. She hears on the radio that the soldiers are killing more people in Port-au-Prince, and she realizes that she cannot stay safely in Ville Rose forever. She sits under the banyan tree, which her mother tells her is holy, surrounded by black butterflies. She knows that the boat that sank off the coast of the Bahamas was her lover's. From where she sits the sea is hidden by the mountains, but she knows it will always be there, endless, like her love for him.

Characters Celianne Celianne is a young woman of fifteen who is on the boat with the first narrator. She is pregnant, rarely eats, and ' 'stares in space all the time and rubs her stomach." Celianne has been raped and impregnated by the soldiers who had come to her house to arrest her brother. During the voyage she gives birth to a girl who is stillborn. The child's silence underscores the symbolism of her mother's silence, which indicates that spiritually, Celianne is already dead. When she throws the baby's body into the sea, she jumps in after it and drowns.

Male narrator The male narrator's words are the first in the story. The reader never learns his name, but he reveals his circumstance to the reader through his writings. He is at sea after having fled his homeland, and he has left behind the woman he loves. As the story unfolds, more is learned about the young man from the other narrator in the story. He has left Haiti because he was a member of the "Radio Six," a group of young people who opposed the Haitian government and broadcast anti-government radio programs. He spends the entire duration of the story on a leaky boat escaping from Haiti to Florida. The young man's story is incomplete. The reader never learns his fate because he is forced to throw his diary, which contains his half of the story, overboard. The second narrator, the woman he has left behind, learns that another boat of refugees has been lost at sea. This strongly suggests that he has drowned.

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Female narrator The second narrator is a young woman who lives with her family in Haiti. She has been romantically involved with the young man on the boat, and as the story progresses she comes to understand how much she loves him. Her feelings are repressed because to love him would be dangerous and arouse the opposition of her father. She reveals little else about herself, but her presence in Haiti allows the reader to witness the tragedy inflicted upon the Haitian people by the dictatorial government. The fact that she simply relates these horrors with little emotion or reflection indicates how oppressed the country's people are. Many of them have been numbed into submission. Near the end of the story, however, the narrator tells her father that she loves the young man, proof that the political situation has failed to suppress the human spirit completely. "I think he should know this about me," she writes, ' 'that I have loved someone besides only my mother and father in my life." This realization indicates her psychological growth. At the end of the story, after fleeing the city for the relative safety of Ville Rose she realizes that the young man she loves has died at sea in his attempt to escape.

Topics for Further Study Find some other examples of epistolary novels and stories. Do you think diaries fit into this category? In ' 'Children of the Sea'' and other epistolary works, do you think the format heightens or detracts from the work's meaning? Investigate the role that the United States has played in Haitian politics during the 1980s and 1990s. What has been the United States's foreign policy regarding the country and what has been done to enforce it? Do you think the U.S. government has acted appropriately? Research what happens to refugees from Haiti and other Caribbean countries when they come to the United States. Where do many of them decide to live? Why do you suppose they choose to settle where they do?

Narrator's father The young woman's father is primarily concerned with the safety of his family. While the Tontons Macoutes threaten the neighbors and his wife urges him to intervene, he forces her to remain quiet. When he finds that his daughter has audiotapes of her boyfriend's anti-government radio programs, he loses his temper with her because he fears for her safety. He leads his family to Ville Rose, where they are safer than in the city. Although he is opposed to his daughter's involvement with the young man, he respects the young man's convictions. The father represents the actions and beliefs of the majority of the Haitian people. He wants to cause no trouble, not because he supports or believes in the government, but because he is afraid his family may be tortured or killed by the regime.

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Injustice prevails back home for the female narrator as well. The soldiers of Haiti rampage through the country, taking revenge on all the people who had opposed their authority during the short-lived Aristide administration. What they perceive as justice, however, is violent revenge that is

"Children of the Sea" follows two Haitian narrators in the tumultuous days following the coup that deposed President Aristide.

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One of the most important themes in ' 'Children of the Sea" is justice. From the reader's perspective, the overwhelming injustice of the narrators' situation is highlighted by the events the author chooses to recount in the story. A totalitarian dictator has made his country an unbearable place to live. People are killed for disagreeing, for speaking publicly, and for trying to protect their families. Even when the young man is forced to flee for his life on a boat, injustice prevails. His fellow passengers are so bent upon survival that for them, the only question of "justice" is whether they should throw the sick people off the boat to save themselves. The harsh conditions on the boat seem no better than the world they had left behind. The story's emotional power stems from its unrelenting portrayal of injustice that the reader understands to be more or less real.

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manifested in murder, rape, and incest. The young woman's father, no matter how strong his convictions, realizes that he cannot do little to prevail over the soldiers' sense of "justice," thus adding to the plight of the people by failing to come to the aid of his neighbor. Injustice is so pervasive and overwhelming in the society, that most have stopped assessing it and can do no more than try to save themselves.

Politics ' 'Children of the Sea,'' though in many ways a love story, is essentially an example of political writing. The characters' situations are forced upon them by the political situation of their country. Even simple acts, like the woman's parents having supported Aristide while he was in power, now put them in danger. In this way, Danticat uses storytelling to protest the injustice of a totalitarian regime. She wants readers to identify with her characters and be urged to feel outrage for the injustice they suffer. She also demonstrates how politics can become the most important factor in a person's life: politics can separate you from the ones you love, they can determine where you live, how your parents act toward you, and whether you live or die.

Violence and Cruelty The cruelty and vengeance of the military government of Haiti forms the backdrop of ' 'Children of the Sea." The Tonton Macoutes, the private army of the Duvalier regime that specialized in torture, public terror, and oppression, run wild in the streets after Aristide, the democratically elected president of Haiti, is forced out in a military coup. Aristide supporters are hunted down and killed, and members of a protest group known as the "Youth Federation'' are particularly in danger, though they have committed no violent acts themselves. However, no one is safe, as the second narrator informs us when she discusses the soldiers' violent practices and the bodies that lie in the streets. The soldiers rape Celianne, a cruel act that begets more violence when Celianne disfigures herself, then again when she commits suicide. On the boat, the cruelty that has forced the refugees to flee again manifests itself when they consider getting rid of the weaker people on the boat. Violence results in more violence, Danticat shows. By comparing the refugees, soon to drown, to the African slaves hundreds of years ago, themselves forced from their homeland through violence and cruelty, Danticat connects the horrific

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acts of the past to those of the present. Like the sea, which is "endless," and like the young woman's love for the drowned man, violence is shown also to be timeless.

Human Rights Related to the themes of violence and politics is the issue of human rights. The Western concept of human rights includes the right to free speech, to organize, to believe in democracy and religion, and not to live in fear from the government, among other things. The list of rights violated by the Tonton Macoutes in ' 'Children of the Sea'' encompasses almost every conceivable outrage. Their repression results in a culture of fear and powerlessness among the Haitians, where even the young woman's declaration of love for a political activist is in itself a political act. The Haitian people's right to protest, to be safe in their own homes, and to speak freely has been eliminated in the face of the Tonton Macoutes' cruelty. Less apparent in the story, but providing an ominous undertone, is the realization that had the boat actually reached Miami, the refugees most likely would not have been granted political asylum by the United States, an act that some would also consider a violation of human rights.

Style Point of View and Narration "Children of the Sea" is narrated in the first person by two distinct voices. The first belongs to a young man who is fleeing Haiti on a leaky boat. The second voice is that of the man's lover, a young woman who remains in Haiti with her family. The story is written in the form of letters from each of the characters to the other, a style known as ' 'epistolary," which is derived from the ancient Greek word meaning "message" or "letter." To underscore the danger of their respective situations, neither of the characters refers to each other by name. To do so would jeopardize their lives even more. Through their letters, which cannot be mailed, the reader learns of the characters' deepest thoughts, the ones they are afraid to voice. The characters' personalities are revealed by how they write and what they choose to write about. The man on the boat is primarily concerned with his current predicament and writes about the people around him and the experience of being at sea. The woman, conversely, remains in Port-au-Prince and

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tends to reminisce about the past more, since her situation is not as dire. Through her memories, the reader learns many of the background details of the story. The difference in their personalities is shown by the way each of them discusses their relationship. The young man speaks naturally about their intimacy; the woman is more shy and hesitating. This difference may also represent the cultural attitudes of their country.

Setting The two settings in the story, the middle of the sea and the island of Haiti, underscore the conflict in the story—that a couple in love has been separated by political upheaval. Across this distance there is no connection between the two main characters. Their separation has been absolute, though they try to bridge the gap with letters. But even these letters will never be read by the other person. Thus, the distance between the two lovers heightens the feeling of pathos (a sense of suffering) that permeates the story.

Symbolism ' 'Children of the Sea'' relies on a number of symbols for its narrative power; most notably is the sea itself. The man dreams of the sea as heaven. When the people of the boat drown, they join the hundreds of other slaves who have died and become "children of the sea." They are martyrs of a sort, and in the Christian tradition martyrs—those who die for their beliefs—go to heaven. Another symbol is Celianne's stillborn baby. Conceived by violence it is born dead, symbolizing that fact that cruelty does not beget life. The baby could also represent the crushed Aristide democracy, which was quelled by the military coup almost from the moment it began. In another symbolic interpretation, the dead child could also be said to represent the young couple's doomed relationship. Their love has forged an alliance between them, but political strife has torn them apart, effectively aborting their chance for happiness together. In an instance of foreshadowing, Celianne drowns herself when forced to abandon her dead child. This hints at the impending tragedy in which the rest of the passengers will drown. Again, this action symbolizes that the violence inflicted upon Celianne by the Tonton Macoutes has not only resulted in the death of her child, but also her own death. Not only does cruelty not beget life, Danticat demonstrates, it frequently begets more cruelty.

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At the end of the story the woman sits under a banyan tree, itself a symbol of holiness, and is surrounded by butterflies. Though they are black, a color that frequently represents death, the butterflies may also represent a bittersweet hope of eventual freedom. Love is endless, the young woman realizes, like the sea. But the sea, like love, is hidden from view by the mountains. She and others, symbolically then, will need to move mountains to see heaven—the sea—with their own eyes. The woman at this point, after publicly declaring her love for the man to her parents, represents the country's best hope for the restoration of justice.

Historical Context Haiti: The Early Years Although Danticat had been living in the United States for fourteen years by the time ' 'Children of the Sea" was first published, the story draws upon her experience of having spent her early years in Haiti. With generations of experience in poverty, dictatorship, and oppression, Haiti's population knows hardship well. ' 'Children of the Sea'' takes place in the turbulent mid-1980s, when the longstanding Duvalier dictatorship was toppled, and people's brief hopes for democracy were dashed by the military government which succeeded the dictator. Haiti shares a large island in the Caribbean Sea with the Dominican Republic. In 1492, Christopher Columbus landed on this island, which he named Hispaniola, and found what he believed was an earthly paradise. In the seventeeth century, the French and the Spanish divided the island between them. Spain received the eastern half, which later became the Dominican Republic, and France took the western half. The French landowners used many Africans as slaves on their plantations, which produced sugar, indigo, coffee, and cotton. In the 1790s, a black ex-slave named Toussaint Louverture led a revolution, and by 1801 the country had gained its independence and was the world's first black republic.

Papa Doc and the Tonton Macoutes However, for the next two centuries the country suffered from extreme poverty and misrule, and it was even occupied by United States Marines for twenty years in the early twentieth century. In 1957 a man named Francois Duvalier took power and ruled for fourteen years. Duvalier was known as

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Compare & Contrast 1980s: Before the fall of communism, the United States largely bases its foreign policy on a country's relationship with the Soviet Union. Especially in Latin America, the U.S. government supports corrupt dictatorships in Guatemala, Chile, and the Dominican Republic, simply because they are not communist.

Haiti in the 1980s: The country's infant mortality rate is 124 per thousand. United States in the 1980s: The country's infant mortality rate is 31 per thousand.

1990s: Communism is no longer viewed as a threat to Western-style democracy, and American foreign policy reflects this shift. Dictators like Manuel Noriega of Panama are deposed because of their involvement in drug trafficking,

Haiti in the 1980s: The average life expectancy is 48 years.

"Papa Doc" because he had practiced medicine before going into politics. He was a brutal ruler who jailed or killed his opponents and stole money from ordinary Haitians and from the international aid funds that gave money to the country. The United States government supported Duvalier because he was not a communist.

his family and friends had been accustomed. While the people of Haiti starved, Jean-Claude and his wife entertained lavishly and spent much time out of the country on vacations in Europe or the United States. Those who protested the unequal distribution of wealth were killed by the Tonton Macoutes. As a result of Haiti's poverty and violence, many Haitians began to leave the country and look for a better life in the Bahamas, Jamaica, or the United States.

Papa Doc had his own private army called the Tonton Macoutes, whose responsibility was to keep an eye on dissenters. The name comes from the Creole term meaning "Uncle Knapsack." Creole, a combination of French and African dialects, is the language spoken by the people of Haiti. "Uncle Knapsack'' refers to a monster in Haitian folklore who steals children from their parents and hides them in his knapsack. The Tonton Macoutes wanted the people of Haiti to fear them, so they chose a name that would inspire horror in anyone familiar with the folk tale. There was good reason to fear the Tonton Macoutes, for they would often kill people or burn their houses for no reason other than to remind people that they were in charge.

Baby Doc and Revolution After Papa Doc died in 1971, his son JeanClaude (known as Baby Doc) assumed power. Baby Doc maintained control over the country and continued to live the rich and lavish lifestyle to which

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and democratically elected leaders like Aristide are restored to power.

United States in the 1980s: The average life expectancy is 72 years.

In 1985, however, things began to fall apart for Duvalier. During a student demonstration in the impoverished city of Gonaives, the Tonton Macoutes shot into the crowd, killing four teenagers. This angered the people greatly, and demonstrations soon began all across the country. Radio stations, some affiliated with the Catholic Church and some illegal, broadcast anti-government programs. As Duvalier intensified the repression, the United States withdrew its support. Duvalier fled to France in January, 1986, and the army assumed power. The Haitian people were ecstatic. The army officers who took over, though, were less than the embodiment of democracy. Many of them had been close to Duvalier and were more interested in assuming power themselves than in improving conditions in the country. The Tonton Macoutes were officially disbanded, but many of

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them continued to terrorize the country. Thousands of Haitians began to leave the country, fleeing to Miami on small boats. Many of these refugees died at sea.

Aristide and the Refugees In 1990 the country was again racked by antigovernment demonstrations, and the military government was forced to hold elections. Jean-Bertrand Aristide, a priest who had worked extensively with Haiti's poor, was elected president. However, he only served eight months before the military overthrew him and forced him to flee to the United States. The Haitian exodus, temporarily stemmed by public enthusiasm for Aristide, returned in full force. The United States told Haiti that all refugees would be "repatriated," or sent back to Haiti, but the desperate people continued to come. Many people felt that America's refusal to accept Haitian refugees was hypocritical. They held that the United States welcomed refugees from Cuba because they were being saved from communism. Conditions in Haiti were just as bad or worse than in Cuba, the Haitians claimed, and they should be granted political amnesty as well, or they would surely die. After much public pressure, President Clinton sent troops to Haiti in 1994 to restore President Aristide to office. The military leaders who ran Haiti left the country and Aristide returned in October. Although Haiti continues to be the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere, there is much hope among Haitians that real democracy will soon improve their lives. Outside of Haiti, too, the question of justice is raised. In addition to the repression in their country, Haitian refugees are not welcomed in any country. The United States, well-known as a haven for refuge-seekers, turns the Haitians back at sea while they welcome Cubans. In the Bahamas, a woman tells the first narrator in ' 'Children of the Sea," "they treat Haitians like dogs. To them, we are not human .. . even though we had the same African fathers who probably crossed these same seas together."

Critical Overview The collection Krik? Krak!, in which "Children of the Sea'' appeared, garnered impressive reviews by critics. The title of the book comes from the Haitian

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tradition of the storyteller who asks the audience ' 'Krik?'' to see if anyone wants to hear a story. The reply, "Krak!" indicates that audience's enthusiasm and willingness to listen. In many reviews, "Children of the Sea" has been singled out as one of Danticat's most poignant and effective stories. Like most of her work, it concerns the lives of ordinary Haitians and bears witness to the tragedies she witnessed firsthand as a child living in the country. Danticat tells Renee Shea in Poets and Writers that the story is about the "need to be remembered." Some of the refugees Danticat had spoken with following their arrival in the United States, particularly the women, "feared that no one would know they had been alive, no one would speak of them'' had they drowned in the sea during their voyage. Joanne Omang in Washington Post Book World calls the story "virtually flawless" and states that "All the island's troubles are braided seemlessly into these letters." Likewise, Kimberly Hebert calls it Krik? Krak!' s ' 'most powerful story'' in a review for Quarterly Black Review. Shea writes in Belles Lettres that the story is "stunning in the power of both the tale and language." She elaborates that Danticat changed the title to emphasize the Middle Passage of the slave ships and quotes the author: "That journey from Haiti in the 1980s is like a new middle passage. . . . I often think that if my ancestors are at the bottom of the sea, then I too am a part of that."

Criticism Rena Korb Rena Korb has a master's degree in English literature and creative writing and has written for a wide variety of educational publishers. In the following essay, she discusses the imagery in ' 'Children of the Sea." At the age of twenty-six, young for a writer, Edwidge Danticat has many honors credited to her name. Aside from publishing two books, the novel Breath, Eyes, Memory and a collection of short stories, Krik? Krak!, she has also received much critical acknowledgment. Her novel earned her recognition by the New York Times as one of the ' 'thirty young artists to watch," and it was nominated for a National Book Award in 1995. Krik? Krak! drew as many rave reviews; Publishers Weekly

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writes that it "confirm[s] Danticat's reputation as a remarkably gifted writer." Danticat, who emigrated from Haiti to the United States when she was twelve years old, writes about life in her country and its people. The Haiti that emerges from Danticat's fiction is the one in which she grew up, a country under the rule of dictators Francois "Papa Doc" Duvalier and his son Jean-Claude, known as "Baby Doc." The Duvaliers governed Haiti by dint of oppression and cruelty. Their brutal secret police—the Tonton Macoutes—committed many atrocities against the Haitian people. The Duvalier regime was not overthrown until 1986, but the political situation suffered upheaval until well into the 1990s. Haitian writers from the mid-1940s on have often found themselves, like Danticat, far from home. Given the restrictive and violent dictatorship that has controlled Haiti and its people, many Haitian writers have not been allowed to express themselves freely in their own country. Danticat, even though she lives in the United States, has stated that she doubted not only her ability to write, but she also had the feeling that it might be a dangerous profession. A strong part of the culture, however, is its tradition of storytelling. The title of Danticat's

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collection bears witness to her rich heritage of storytelling and is explained in the epigram: ' 'We tell the stories so that the young ones will know what came before them. They say Krik? We say Krak! Our stories are kept in our hearts." Danticat follows in another tradition: that of writers from other cultures living in the United States who give voice to the sorrows and the joys that have shaped their experiences. The works of Jamaica Kincaid, who was born in Antigua, highlight the anger that West Africans feel about their past enslavement. Toni Morrison, though born in the United States, explores the issue of oppression through the institution of slavery. Perhaps most similar to Danticat's writings are those of Julia Alvarez, whose family fled from the Trujillo dictatorship and the Dominican Republic. Alvarez, like Danticat, revisits her homeland in her work and describes the horrors of living under a regime of terror and examines how the bonds of family are perhaps strengthened by such circumstances. Some of the power of Danticat's fiction lies in its shocking subject matter; she often depicts violent death, incest, rape, and extreme poverty. Danticat fills her stories with characters who exist within a painful external world. Like Haitian writers who

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What Do I Read Next? Breath, Eyes, Memory (1994), Danticat's novel about four generations of Haitian women as they struggle in their homeland and in the United States. Told through the eyes of Sophie Caco, the novel has been commended for its lyrical prose which counterpoints its dire subject matter. How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents (1991) by Julia Alvarez, a native of the Dominican Republic. Four young sisters arrive in the United States from the Dominican Republic and become increasingly Americanized as they grow up. Now adults, each one comes to term with her heritage and learns to integrate it with her identity. Reef (1995) by Romesh Gunesekera, a coming-

have come before her, Danticat battles against the despair of the past and the pain of exile while also describing a culture in which people learn, love, and laugh. Despite growing up in a society which often seeks to silence women, Danticat has found her voice. She has found a way to tell the stories of her country's men and women and in a modern voice that brings attention to the problems of the past. "Children of the Sea," the first story in the collection Krik? Krakf, tells of young lovers separated by the political situation. He is a revolutionary who has been forced to flee Haiti on a small, rickety boat or risk his life at the hands of Duvalier's secret police. The young woman he wants to marry remains with her family in Haiti where she continues to witness the ever-present horrors. The hero of the story, who is never given a name, epitomizes the choice that so many Haitians have faced over the years: exile or imprisonment. The heroine, also nameless, exemplifies the people who stay behind but must pay the price of silence. The story is in the epistolary style, which means that it is written as a series of letters between the two main characters. Though they cannot send these letters, their telling of stories in the ' 'Krik? Krak!''

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of-age novel also praised for its lyricism despite its stark political backdrop. A poor houseboy on the island of Ceylon, soon to become Sri Lanka, learns to appreciate the simplicity of life. Brown Girl, Brownstones (1959) by Paule Marshall, an author whose influence Danticat has praised. A girl whose parents are from Barbados struggles amidst the poverty of Brooklyn to find her identity. The Comedians by Graham Greene, a novel about the Duvalier regime and its attack dogs, the Tonton Macoutes, which was banned in Haiti immediately upon publication.

method lessens the pain of separation for them. ' 'When we see each other again, it will seem like we lost no time," one of them writes. Expressing their stories through writing rather than speaking also symbolizes their political oppression, since their separation is caused by their inability to speak freely in Haiti. The exchange of ideas must be secretive. The Haitians understand this and break their code of silence only when secrecy loses its power to affect change. The mother tells her daughter ' 'sometimes you have to choose between your father and the man you love'' after the young man has gone into exile. Conversely, Madan Roger holds on to her secret and never reveals the names of her dead son's associates to the secret police. The young woman, while not hiding her relationship with the young man, does not tell her father of their love until the issue has become moot. Even when she does speak the truth, her father does not acknowledge the secret: "he looked me straight in the eye and said nothing to me . . . papa just turned his face away like he was rejecting my very birth." The young man is the only person who cannot keep his thoughts to himself. His involvement with a revolutionary group, ' 'the Radio Six," provided him with a forum where "we could talk about what we wanted from government,

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the restrictive and violent dictatorship that has controlled Haiti and its people, many Haitian writers have not been allowed to express themselves freely in their own country,"

what we wanted for the future of our country." Though he escaped from Haiti, he will die because of his boldness. The young woman's father is the person who best understands the importance of secrecy. He wants his daughter to get rid of her radio show tapes because they would incriminate her. When Madan Roger is attacked by the secret police, he refuses to go to her aid because he knows he cannot protect anyone. While he is presented as a man too willing to submit to the injustices of Duvalier's regime— ' 'you can let them kill somebody because you are afraid, they are the law. it is their right,'' he says — he does have a reason for being so paralyzed. The mother tells the daughter that the Tonton Macoutes were ' 'going to peg [her] as a member of the youth federation and then take [her] away." To save his daughter's life, the father bribed them with the family's money, home, and property. Her lover, unable to keep secrets, sacrifices himself to his beliefs. But her father, who keeps even this a secret, "gave everything he had" to save someone else. While the father is willing to find a way to live in Haiti, the young man, though he does not "want to be a martyr," cannot keep his feelings to himself. The young woman is torn by the polar opposites the two men represent. At first she feels frustration at her lack of self-determination and her separation from her lover; then she takes out this frustration on her father instead of on the true culprit, Duvalier. After she learns of her lover's death, however, she gets ready to take on a more active role in her future as she acknowledges "i don't know what's going to happen, but i cannot see staying here forever." A young pregnant girl traveling on the same boat as the revolutionary further represents the dilemma of secrecy. The other passengers speculate

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that Celianne was thrown out by her parents for having an affair, but the truth is far worse. Her baby is the result of being raped by the Tonton Macoutes. Immediately afterward, Celianne ' 'cut her face with a razor so that no one would know who she was"; her desire to keep her secret is so strong that she is even willing to destroy her identity. Like the young woman's father, Celianne keeps silent about her experiences, allowing the people of Haiti to cast blame on her rather than on the oppressive regime. But unlike the young man, she did nothing to bring her fate upon herself; even though she was innocent, she pays the cost of keeping her secret with her life. The only alternatives for Haitians, represented by Celianne and the revolutionary, both can lead to death. In the face of such options, it makes more sense to give up the secrets in hopes of creating a society in which such secrets will no longer exist. As the lives of Haitians play themselves out against this backdrop of secrecy, it is fitting that the hidden world of the sea becomes the only place where the lovers can be together, at least spiritually. For the young man, the sea increasingly welcomes him. While he had first imagined he was "going to start having nightmares once we get deep at sea," he instead dreams of dying and going to heaven and heaven is at the bottom of the sea. By the time the ship is about to sink, however, he knows he will "live life eternal, among the children of the deep blue sea, those who have escaped the chains of slavery." With these words he draws the link between Haitians under Duvalier's regime and the Africans who were forced from their homeland centuries ago. His speeches have hinted at this connection—"Yes, I am finally an African" because the sun has darkened his skin, the passengers go to the bathroom ' 'the same way they did on those slave ships years ago"—but only when he has finally given himself to the idea of death does he accept that he has been "chosen" for this destiny because it is the only way to escape oppression. The sea is a vast, open space, and though it is far away from the young woman, they both know the sea is "endless like my love for you." Source: Rena Korb, for Short Stories for Students, Gale Research, 1997.

Jordana Hart Hart comments on the Influence of Haiti on Danticat's fiction, mentioning "Children of the Sea." More than anything else, the storytelling of the young Haitian-American writer Edwidge Danticat

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has given the world honest and loving portraits of Haitian people, both on the island and in the United States. She has smashed the numbing stereotypes created by a barrage of media accounts of Haitian poverty, misery and death. Danticat's debut novel, Breath, Eyes, Memory, garnered international acclaim last year. In her new book, a collection of nine short stories called Krik? Krak!, she draws on her experience growing up in dictatorial Haiti as well as stories of Creole culture and myth. Danticat, 26, a teller of stories in the truest sense, takes us heart-pounding into a breathtaking Haiti, whose culture and people are so often diminished, even disfigured, in the writings of those who do not know and love the island. Of course, Danticat cannot avoid placing her tales within the brutal world of the tonton macoutes, Haiti's former thuggish soldiers, and the oppressive political system that until recently pushed tens of thousands of Haitians to flee the island by vessel— often only to meet their death or internment in a Florida camp. It is the details of everyday life, however, the depth of her characters and Danticat's own love and respect for her culture that make her stories at once disturbing yet beguiling. Like her first novel, these stories are mostly told from the perspective of women: her mother, whom she follows unseen along a New York City street only to find out she is a 'day woman,' a nanny caring for a white child; a young wife deeply in love with her husband, who kills himself by jumping out of a hot-air balloon because he's despondent that he cannot raise his family out of poverty. Danticat tells a couple of her best stories in two voices. The first one, "Children of the Sea," is told by a young woman and also by a politically active young man, her would-be lover, who is fleeing Haiti with 36 other "deserting souls" in a rickety boat. He writes to her about the experience in a journal: Once you have been at sea a couple of days, it smells like every fish you have ever eaten, every crab you have ever caught, every jelly fish that has ever bitten your leg. I am so tired of the smell. I am also tired of the way people on this boat are starting to stink. The pregnant girl, Celianne, I don't know how she takes it. She stares into space all the time and rubs her stomach.

With such detail, Danticat manages to place us in the midst of this terrifying voyage—the middle

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passage to the United States we have read about so often in news accounts—as the boat takes on water and the people are forced to throw even their most cherished belongings overboard to lighten the load. Celianne clutches her still-born infant to her chest, he says, refusing to give her up to the sea god, Agwe. In "New York Day Women," Danticat recounts with humor the intergenerational and cultural gaps that have developed between the older Haitian mother and her Americanized daughter, Suzette. The account is set off in unusual paragraphs, some only a sentence and statement long, as Suzette recalls her mother's quirks. "My mother . . . sews lace collars on my company Softball T-shirts when she does my laundry," Suzette recounts. "Why, you can't look like a lady when you play Softball?"—obviously a retort from her mother.

In "Nineteen Thirty-Seven," a story wrapped in haunting folklore about winged women who escape a Dominican massacre, a girl visits her mother in a Port-au-Prince prison, jailed for life for being a "lougarou, witch, criminal." The mother has been wrongly accused of killing a child with witchcraft. Before the prisoners go to sleep, the guards force them to throw cups of cold water on one another so that their bodies cannot generate enough heat to grow ' 'those wings of flames, fly away in the middle of the night, slip into the slumber of innocent children and steal their breath." In the storytelling tradition of Haiti, the children ask ' 'Krik?'' urging the stories to begin, and the elders reply ' 'Krak!'' and tell the fables ' 'so that the young ones will know what came before them." This is very much what Danticat, as a child and now as a writer, has done. Source: Jordana Hart, "Danticat's Stories Pulse with Haitian Heartbeat," in The Boston Globe, July 19, 1995, p. 70.

Edwidge Danticat with Renee H. Shea In the following interview, Danticat discusses the stories in her collection Krik! Krak!, including ' 'Children of the Sea.'' This epigraph sets the stage and tone for the nine stories of the heart by Haitian-born Edwidge Danticat in her recent collection entitled Krik? Krak! In these tales of the politics and people of Haiti, past and present, on their island home and in newly formed immigrant communities, she lures us not simply to

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read but to participate in the tradition of Krik? Krak! that she remembers from childhood: "Krik? Krak! is call-response but also it's this feeling that you're not merely an observer—you're part of the story. Someone says, 'Krik?' and as loud as you can you say, 'Krak!' You urge the person to tell the story by your enthusiasm to hear it." So compelling are these stories, filled with the myth and poetry of Haiti, that as one ends, it is hard not to call out a resounding, "Krak!" to keep the momentum of Danticat's storytelling going. Taken individually, several stories are stunning in the power of both the tale and language. ' 'Children of the Sea'' is told as a dialogue between two young lovers—one on a boat bound for Miami, the other reporting from Haiti on the horrors wrought by the TonTon Macoutes. The young man reports the desperate life of himself and the "thirty-six other deserting souls on this little boat" and the story-within-the-story of Celianne. Pregnant after a gang rape by the TonTon Macoutes, Celianne fled her accusing family, and when she gives birth aboard the boat to a still-born child, she refuses to give it up. Finally forced to throw the baby overboard, she follows by jumping into the sea. The young woman's story of her family's struggle in Haiti, the increasing violence, and the lengths her father finally goes to protect her are counterpoint. The nightmarish reality of the TonTon Macoutes is challenged by the fierce love of the two young people; the unnamed he wonders,' 'Maybe the sea is endless. Like my love for you," and she exclaims, ' 'i love you until my hair shivers at the thought of anything happening to you." The vividness of their "letters" belies the reality that only we can hear both voices. Will he survive? Will she? Will their written records? What will survive is memory, a collective spirit that the young man speculates may be ' 'life eternal, among the children of the deep blue sea, those who have escaped the chains of slavery to form a world beneath the heavens and the blood-drenched earth where you live." Danticat changed the original title of this story, "From the Ocean Floor," to "Children of the Sea'' to emphasize the link to the Middle Passage: "It's a very powerful image—from the ocean floor. No one knows how many people were lost on The Middle Passage. There are no records or graves— and the ocean floor is where our fossils are. That journey from Haiti in the 1980s is like a new middle

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passage. Not to romanticize it, but the comforting thing about death is that somehow all these people will meet. I often think that if my ancestors are at the bottom of the sea, then I too am part of that. So we are all children of the sea. There are no museums, no graves, really no place to visit—there's a timelessness about it"... ' 'It's so important for people to read things that somehow mirror their own experience. I remember when I was in junior high school and read Paule Marshall. Brown Girl, Brownstones was the first book that was similar to what we were going through. My father always had a desire to own property. He wanted to buy a house. We had to have something concrete, a piece of the country, a piece of the land—like the people in this novel: they wanted to have a brownstone. I had three brothers, and I'm the only girl. In most of my adolescence, that was okay, but I had to be in the kitchen with my mother, learning how to cook. Marshall's essay on 'kitchen poets' describes something very similar to when my mother's sisters would come over—their talking, the way they said things, their faces. It was so beautiful! I used to resent being in the kitchen with them because I wanted to be with the boys, but then I read Marshall's essay. She talks about doing her homework on the kitchen table while the women were talking about home, what was happening there, what they're doing—and just sort of soaking it in. She called it 'kitchen poetry.' After reading that, I didn't resent so much being in the kitchen. I felt like part of a sisterhood, and I remember feeling then that I didn't necessarily have to rebel."... Taken together, the stories in Krik? Krak! have a continuity derived from recurrent themes and motifs, yet they are more profoundly bound by a spiritual vision where "the warm sea air" and "the laughter of children'' coexist with the painful history of slavery and more recent violence: ' 'My idea was to have a progression. The first story would be '1937' and the last, historically, 'Caroline's Wedding.' We also go from Haiti to the New York stories. My editor and I chose them with that idea in mind. Just naturally from writing the stories over several years, some of the characters recurred, so that came together too. But we ended up with a different order because my editor thought that "Children of the Sea' is a story that's easy to get into; also, it has 'krik? krak!' in it, which introduces the idea of why to write the stories. The book was put together with the idea of the stories flowing together and complementing one another."

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Such interconnections, resonances, echoes, and blending are best described by Danticat's own image of braids in the final selection, ' 'Epilogue: Women Like Us,'' a poetic coda to the nine stories: "When you write, it's like braiding your hair. Taking a handful of coarse unruly strands and attempting to bring them unity. Your fingers have still not perfected the task. Some of the braids are long, others are short. Some are thick, others are thin. Some are heavy. Others are light. Like the diverse women in your family. Those whose fables and metaphors, whose similes and soliloquies, whose diction and je ne sais quoi daily slip into your survival soup, by way of their fingers." Recurring characters are one connection: the main character of "Between the Pool and the Gardenias" is the goddaughter of Lili from "A Wall of Fire Rising'' and the granddaughter of Defile, the alleged lougarou in "1937." When asked if not knowing Haitian myths and folklore makes it difficult to appreciate her work, Danticat calls on yet another connection in response: "I think more of the depths of emotion. The stories deal with humanity and what we all go through. Different people will walk away learning different things; there'll be differences even among people from Haiti." Generations of women strengthen these connections. Even death cannot break the line, as she writes in the Epilogue: ' "The women in your family have never lost touch with one another. Death is a path we all take to meet on the other side. What goddesses have joined, let no one cast asunder. With every step you take, there is an army of women watching over you. We are never any farther than the sweat on your brows or the dust on your toes." An image that recurs throughout Danticat's work is the butterfly as symbol of both continuing life and transformation. In "Dream of the Butterflies," a poetic vignette published in The Caribbean Writer in 1991, violence is juxtaposed with tenderness, danger with safety, and, finally, sheer hatred with pure love. She sees the redemptive butterfly as suggesting that hope triumphs even in the face of terrible loss: "There aren't that many legends in Haiti about butterflies, but I'm fascinated by the idea of transformation. I think in some ways we all think we could go from a caterpillar to a butterfly—that whole metamorphosis is a metaphor for life, especially a life of poverty or struggle because you hope

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that this is temporary and that one way or another, you'll get wings. It's the Christian ideal we grew up with that people are willing to suffer very much if that means one day they'll get their wings and fly. Haiti has such beautiful butterflies in all different colors." The most uncanny connections seem to assert themselves in the life of this author who bears witness: ' The year I wrote 'Children of the Sea' there were so many boating accidents; whole families would be wiped out. One woman I had read about was Marie Micheline, whose mother and daughter were on the boat with her. They all died." Danticat dedicated the original publication of this story as follows: ' 'In ancestral kinship, I offer this piece to Marie Micheline Marole, her daughters, and her granddaughters—three generations of women lost at sea." Coincidentally—or maybe not—another ' 'Marie Micheline'' played a key role in Danticat's life: "My cousin Marie Micheline taught me to read. I started school when I was three, and she would read to me when I came home. In 1987, when I was in France, there was a shooting outside her house—where her children were. She had a seizure and died. Since I was away from her, my parents didn't tell me right away. They were afraid I might have a reaction. But around that same time, I was having nightmares; somehow I knew. ' 'Marie Micheline was very dear to me. When I read about this woman who drowned, I was so struck that they had the same name."

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In Krik? Krak!, Danticat serves a "survival soup" of characters struggling to find a place of peace, a sliver of happiness, a glimmer of a brighter future amid terrorism and political chaos. Ultimately, it is in these stories that they find a moment of grace, stories that Danticat believes give people "a sense of the things that I have inherited." It's a rich inheritance—and one, we can be thankful, she generously shares. Source: Edwidge Danticat with Renee H. Shea, an interview in Belles Lettres: A Review of Books by Women, Vol. 10, No. 3, Summer, 1995, pp. 12-15.

Sources Hebert, Kimberly. "A Testament to Survival," in Quarterly Black Review, June, 1995, p. 6. Omang, Joanne. A review of Krik? Krak! in Washington Post Book World, May 14, 1995, p. 4. Pierre-Pierre, Garry. An interview in The New York Times, January 26, 1995, pp. Cl, C8.

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Shea, Renee H.' Traveling Worlds with Edwidge Danticat,'' in Poets and Writers, Vol. 25, No. 1, January-February, 1997, pp. 42-51.

Further Reading Ferguson, James. Papa Doc, Baby Doc. Haiti and the Duvaliers. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987. A good brief overview of Haitian history, concentrating on the Duvalier years (1957-1985). Perusse, Roland I. Haitian Democracy Restored 1991-1995. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1995. A detailed play-by-play account of the events following Aristide's election in 1990, leading up to the restoration of his government in 1995. Danticat, Edwidge, and Renee H. Shea.' The Dangerous Job of Edwidge Danticat," in Callaloo, Vol. 19, no. 2, Spring, pp. 382-89. Focuses on Danticat's first novel, Breath, Eyes, Memory. The author talks about some of the ideas behind her fiction, particularly the concept of' 'mother'' as it refers to a language and a person's homeland.

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The Devil and Tom Walker The Devil and Tom Walker was first published in 1824 as part of Washington Irving's collection of short stories Tales of a Traveller. The story was included in Part IV of the book, also known as the "Money-Diggers" series of stories. Gentleman Geoffrey Crayon, a fictional character created by the author, narrates the tale. He never refers to himself by name, however, but he states that the story has been a legend of the New England area for roughly a hundred years. Though the story has been widely read and enjoyed since its first appearance, the book Tales of a Traveller was poorly received by critics who complained that its writing was weak and unoriginal. The short story was a relatively new form of fiction at the time, and many of its conventions were still being defined by such writers as Edgar Allan Poe and Nathaniel Hawthorne. Some critics have given this as a reason for the artistic failure of many of the collection's stories.

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Despite this negative reception, the story about an unpleasant man who sells his soul to the devil in exchange for wealth is one of the works for which Irving is best remembered. Commonly referred to as a "comic New England Faust," the story bears many similarities to the German folktale of Faust, a man who trades his soul to the devil for a number of things, including love and money. Irving had travelled widely in Germany by the time he wrote ' "The Devil and Tom Walker,'' and it can be assumed that he was familiar with German Romantic writer Johann Goethe's version of the tale which was pub-

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lished in Goethe's novel Faust. More so than European versions of the tale, Irving instills the tale with the moral ideals common to New England in the early nineteenth century. In an area settled by Quakers and Puritans, religious piety was of utmost importance to citizens, and the lesson of Tom Walker's ruin illustrated the sorrow that would befall unscrupulous sinners. Some have said that the "Devil and Tom Walker'' was a well-known folktale in the New England area at the time, and Irving's retelling of it is a straightforward rendition of how he may have heard it from the region's Dutch inhabitants.

Author Biography Washington Irving is known as one of the first American authors to gain international recognition for his work. He is also a founder of the short story form. His first book, published in 1808, was Salmagundi; or, The Whim-Whams and Opinions of Launcelot Langstaff, Esq., and Others and was comprised of a variety of satiric pieces. His most famous early success was in 1809 with the publication of A History of New York from the Beginning of the World to the End of the Dutch Dynasty, which is the fictional history of the Knickerbocker family as told by the character of Diedrich Knickerbocker in the days when New York City was a colony of the Netherlands. Although Irving was renowned in his lifetime for his historical and biographical works, it was through his short stories, the most famous being "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow," "Rip Van Winkle" and "The Devil and Tom Walker," that he most strongly influenced American writing. He was born April 13, 1783, to William and Sarah Irving, prosperous New York City merchants. He had a relatively basic education, but he loved to read and write. When he was 19 years old, Irving began writing under the name of Jonathan Oldstyle for a newspaper owned by his brother. The young writer loved to travel, and in 1815 he moved to England to work in his family's export business. When the company failed, he began to write fulltime. The result of this decision was a compilation of impressions, thoughts, and descriptions of his travels entitled The Sketch Book, which he published under the pseudonym of Geoffrey Crayon. Of the 32 stories in the collection, twenty are about life in England, and four are about America. From this collection came two of Irving's most popular tales,

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"Rip Van Winkle" and "A Legend of Sleepy Hollow," both of which became immediate classics. Irving believed that in order for an American writer to become successful, he or she had to imitate the literature of the British. In The Sketch Book and other stories, Irving successfully mixed logic and sentiment along with elements of the natural and supernatural worlds. The book was a great success in both Great Britain and the United States, and the resulting profits enabled Irving to devote himself whole-heartedly to writing. Irving remained abroad for more than a decade after this initial publishing success. While in Germany, he became enthralled with the country's rich folklore. Spurred by the copious notes he took after long conversations with the people there, he wrote Tales of a Traveller, a book that attempted to gather together various elements of German folk tales. Today, the work is not known as one of Irving's strongest, but it does contain one of his most famous stories, The Devil and Tom Walker. In 1826, Irving traveled to Spain where he spent several years. He studied Spanish and became fluent in the language. In 1828, his Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus was published, a work of nonfiction in which Irving discusses with particular interest Columbus's conquest of the island of Granada. The following year, Irving was appointed secretary to the American embassy in London. During this time, Irving was awarded an honorary doctorate degree from Oxford University in England, proof that he had attained an exalted status within the British literary community. In 1832, he returned to the United States and travelled as far as Oklahoma, writing about it for people back East. At that time, the West was still undeveloped and Irving's account of the area in A Tour on the Prairies was the first glimpse of the American wilderness that many people had. In 1836, Irving settled on a small estate he named "Sunnyside" in Tarrytown, New York, close to the village of Sleepy Hollow he had written about in The Sketch Book. For over twenty years he lived there with his extended family while concentrating on his writing, which included a biography of British writer Oliver Goldsmith and a five-volume set on the life of George Washington. On November 28, 1859, shortly after completing his biography of Washington, Irving died and was buried nearby.

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Plot Summary In "The Devil and Tom Walker," set in New England in the early 1700s, a narrator relates a story he has heard about a local man's dealings with the devil. The narrator never claims that the stories are true, only that they are widely believed. According to local legend, a treasure is buried in a dark grove on an inlet outside of Boston. It is said that Kidd the Pirate left it there under a gigantic tree and that the devil himself "presided at the hiding of the money, and took it under his guardianship. '' Since the pirate Kidd was hanged, no one has disturbed the treasure or challenged the devil's right to it. In the year 1727 a local man, the notorious miser Tom Walker, finds himself in the dark grove alone at dusk while taking a short cut back to his house. Tom is well known among the townspeople for his pitiful horse, his loud wife, and the couple's miserly habits in which they "conspired to cheat each other." Unaware that treasure lay nearby, Tom stops to rest against a tree outside the remains of an Indian fort. Despite local legends of the evil goingson at the site, Tom ' 'was not a man to be troubled with any fears of the kind.'' After absentmindedly digging up an old skull, Tom is suddenly reprimanded by a gruff voice. The voice belongs to a man who is blackened by soot and grime and who introduces himself as the black woodman. Soon enough, Tom realizes that he is in the company of the devil himself. After a brief conversation, "Old Scratch," as Tom calls him, offers Tom the treasure in exchange for a few conditions. He declines. Back home, he tells his wife what transpired in the woods, and she is outraged that he passed up the opportunity for them to gain great wealth in exchange for his soul. She takes it upon herself to seek out the devil and strike a bargain on her own. After several trips to the fort in the woods, she becomes frustrated by the devil's unwillingness to appear to her. One day, she gathers the couple's few possessions of value in her apron and heads off for the woods. She never returns. Eventually, Tom wanders to the woods to find out what happened to her and discovers her apron hanging from a tree. It contains her heart and liver. Hoof-prints and clumps of hair at the base of the tree hint at a fierce struggle. "Old Scratch must have had a tough time of it!" he remarks. Neverthe-

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less, the next time the devil appears to Tom, he is eager to strike a deal now that he will not have to share anything with his wife. Balking at the devil's suggestion of becoming a slave-trader, Tom decides that he will become a usurer, or a moneylender, since gaining the treasure is contingent upon being employed in the devil's service. Tom immediately sets up shop in a "counting house" in Boston and attains great wealth by cheating people out of their money and charging them outrageous interest. He builds a luxurious house but refuses to spend money to furnish it properly. He buys an expensive carriage but fails to maintain it, and his horses he only begrudgingly feeds. When Tom grows old, he begins to worry about the terms of his deal with the devil and suddenly becomes a "violent church-goer" in an effort to cheat the devil out of receiving his soul. He reads the bible obsessively and prays loudly and long in church each week. Among the townspeople, "Tom's zeal became as notorious as his riches." Nevertheless, one morning the devil conies calling and instantly whisks Tom away on a black horse in the midst of a thunderstorm to the Indian fort in the woods, never to be seen again. Town officials charged with settling Tom's estate discover his

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bonds and money reduced to cinders, and soon enough his house burns to the ground as well.

Characters The Devil See Old Scratch

Old Scratch Old Scratch is the guise for the Devil, who appears in ' 'The Devil and Tom Walker'' as a darkskinned man. Readers are told, however, that he is neither Indian (Native American) nor white. He has deep red eyes, wears a red sash, and carries his axe on his shoulder. He is the one who tempts Tom Walker with the proposition of wealth and who ultimately condemns him to ride a horse through the swamp where they made their bargain. The Devil's actions are similar to those he exhibits in other stories in which he is a featured character. In the Faust legend, as retold by Johann Goethe from German folklore, the Devil also strikes a deal with a man who desires wealth. It is the Devil's usual place in literature to tempt other characters, often by providing some hapless character a deal' 'too good to refuse." In "The Devil and Daniel Webster," written by Stephen Vincent Benet almost a century after Irving's story, a farmer who is down on his luck sells his soul to the Devil in exchange for seven years' prosperity. In Benet's tale, the Devil is also known as Scratch. In "Tom Walker," Old Scratch personifies temptation, which has existed ostensibly since the Garden of Eden, providing a colorful and dramatic way to present a character's conflict between choosing good and evil.

Tom Walker Tom Walker is considered one of Washington Irving's least likeable characters. As described by Geoffrey Crayon, he is eccentric and miserly. The only thing that initially prevents him from striking a deal with Old Scratch (also known as the Devil) is his loathing for his wife. Walker states that he might have felt compelled to sell his soul to the Devil if it would not have pleased his wife so much. After confiding to his wife that Old Scratch would help him become rich beyond his wildest dreams, he decides against this partnership because Old Scratch

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wanted Tom to become a slave-trader. After his wife disappears and he finds her liver and heart wrapped up in her apron, Tom gives in to Old Scratch and accepts a job not as a slave-trader, but as a usurer, someone who lends money at outrageous interest rates. He becomes quite successful. He is still blunt, brusque, and unforgiving. His newfound wealth has not changed his basic attitudes, he still treats everyone with disrespect. When Old Scratch approaches Walker to collect on his own promise, Walker realizes that he must pay up and be responsible for his own promissory note. Only then does Walker become pious and churchgoing to prove to the Devil that he has seen the light. Unfortunately, his religious conversion has not helped him one bit because he is critical of everyone in the church, quick to judge them, and refuses to see the error of his ways. But Walker has achieved his wealth through greed, and as a result he becomes a prisoner of his own doing. Tom Walker is considered the ' 'New England Faust" by some critics, a reference to the tale of soul-selling Faust by the German writer Johann Goethe. The primary difference between the two tales, however, was that Walker craved only money, whereas Faust craved a number of things, including love. At the time Irving wrote the story he was living in Germany and had become enthralled with folktales of the region, particularly with the Faust legend. Some critics have suggested that if "The Devil and Tom Walker'' is interpreted as an allegory, then the character of Tom Walker represents the evolving business ethic of the young, industrial United States.

Tom's Wife Tom's wife is a tall "termagant" woman, one who is fierce of temper, loud of tongue and strong of arm. She is as equally miserly as her husband, and they both plan ways to cheat each other. She has a minor role in the story, but her death sets the action in motion. When she finds out that her husband has declined the offer from Old Scratch, she takes it upon herself to go into the forest and bargain on her own behalf. The only time Tom ever confides in his wife is when he tells her of the deal set forth by Old Scratch and how he turned it down. Her greedy side overcomes her and they quarrel constantly about it. But, "the more she talked, the more resolute was Tom not to be damned to please her." She ventures out to the swamp to bargain with Old Scratch and

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when she doesn't return, Tom goes in search of her. When he finds her heart and liver wrapped up in her apron, he suddenly feels liberated and immediately goes off to bargain with the Devil. Her greedy ways helped aid Tom in his decision to go back and visit Old Scratch; however, this time he is going of his own free will. In a way, Mrs. Walker helped him to keep his distance from the Devil because of her constant nagging and his need to go against her wishes.

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Topics for Further Study Discuss the relationship between Tom Walker and his wife. Do you feel that they deserve each other? Do you feel that they both get what they deserve? It has been said that Tom Walker is a New England version of Faust legend. Research the different versions of Faust and see whether or not the character of Tom Walker resembles Faust.

Themes Greed Greed is one of the most important themes of ' 'The Devil and Tom Walker'' Tom is approached by Old Scratch and offered wealth beyond his wildest dreams. Initially, Tom is so greedy that he declines because he would have to share the fortune with his wife. Eventually, however, Tom is duped by the false kindness of Old Scratch and blinded by his own greed. As Irving writes, Tom "was not a man to stick at trifles when money was in view." Once established as a moneylender in Boston, Tom is described ironically as a "universal friend of the needy," even though "In proportion to the distress of the applicant was the hardness of his terms." Though he becomes wealthy, Tom still remains parsimonious: he refuses to furnish his mansion or feed his horses properly. Still, he denies his greed. When accused by a customer of taking advantage of his misfortune, Tom answers ' The devil take me if I have made a farthing!" Of course, immediately Old Scratch appears at the door. Irving's moral is clear:' 'Such was the end of Tom Walker and his illgotten wealth. Let all griping money-brokers lay this story to heart."

Hypocrisy Hypocrisy is evident throughout "The Devil and Tom Walker." When agreeing to the terms of the deal, Tom refuses to become a slave-trade because he claims to have a conscience. Yet has no problem becoming a moneylender who will profit by impoverishing others through unscrupulous business practices. In a further example of hypocrisy, Tom insists on keeping his deals with customers, which drive them to ruin, but then he conspires to cheat the devil on the terms of their own deal. Thus,

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his public display of religious fervor has nothing to do with his belief in God but is rather an attempt to save himself from hell. In his final moment of hypocrisy, Tom denies that he has made a penny from an ' 'unlucky land-speculator for whom he had professed the greatest friendship." When the devil comes knocking, Irving makes it clear that Tom's hypocrisy has caught up with him.

Moral Corruption Though Tom Walker is presented as an individual who has always been morally corrupt, the action of "The Devil and Tom Walker" presents how moral corruption breeds more moral corruption, escalating to the greatest corruption of all, a pact with the devil. Described at the beginning of the story as a "meagre, miserly fellow," Tom's ' 'house and its inmates had altogether a bad name." For one with few morals, becoming a corrupt moneylender presents no crises of character. In acquiring great wealth, Tom feels that the ends justify the means. Selling his soul to the devil presents a crisis to Tom only when he pauses to consider the afterlife. His conversion to religion, made specifically for the sake of his own personal interest rather than his faith in God, is a further act of moral corruption. Nevertheless, Tom cannot escape his fate, and Irving makes it clear the consequences of such "illgotten wealth." Though the narrator refers to the

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tale as a "story," he also states that "the truth of it is not to be doubted."

Style Point of View This story is narrated by Geoffrey Crayon, a fictional character created by Irving who appears in a number of the author's works. The story's status of' 'legend'' or ' 'tall tale'' is enhanced by Crayon's comments and the fact that he places the year it takes place, 1727, nearly a hundred years before the date he is writing Tales of a Traveller. Crayon refers to the rumors of treasure near Boston as "old stories" and states that the fate of Tom's wife "is one of those facts which have become confounded by a variety of historians." Through this secondhand narration, Irving shows that the tale has a long, local history, a primary characteristic of a folktale. Furthermore, the narrator states that' 'the story has resolved itself into a proverb, and is the origin of that popular saying, so prevalent in New England, of 'The Devil and Tom Walker.'" Such firstperson narration adds to the feeling the reader has of being told a story in the oral tradition, the way most folktales are handed down from generation to generation.

Allegory Many folktales are allegories. In an allegory, characters and actions are symbolic of larger conditions of human nature. In "The Devil and Tom Walker," the character of Old Scratch personifies evil or temptation. The murky woods full of quagmires in which Tom meets the devil are symbolic of his conscience, which, clouded by his greed, falls easily to the devil's temptation. Tom Walker, an unscrupulous moneylender, makes a pact with the devil and only later professes religious beliefs. Through these actions, Tom represents religious hypocrisy, which Irving shows will be punished.

Setting Irving sought to spearhead the establishment of literature that was uniquely American. To that end, he set "The Devil and Tom Walker" in the New England area near Boston. In the early eighteenth century, this was one of the largest and mostestablished metropolitan areas in the growing United States. Irving describes the landscape of bluffs and swamps that were familiar to the area's inhabi-

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tants and made the site of Tom's meeting with the devil an old Indian fort that had been a stronghold during a war with the Europeans, providing a further uniquely American context. Furthermore, the New England setting highlights Irving's interest in Tom's morality. The region was populated by Puritans, Quakers, and Anabaptists, all strict Christian orders that were highly concerned with church members' moral consciousness. The murky morass in which Tom meets Old Scratch is also symbolic of Tom's character. Through this setting, Irving suggests that if one's heart is full of mud and quicksand, one is likely to encounter and succumb to temptation.

Historical Context A Young America At the time Irving wrote "The Devil and Tom Walker" in 1824, the United States was a new and growing country. As the land was populated by various groups of European immigrants, a uniquely American culture slowly formed as the traditions of many different groups merged and new traditions, brought on by circumstances, emerged. In literature, writers such as Washington Irving, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe, James Fenimore Cooper, and Ralph Waldo Emerson published works that embodied the concepts of freedom, religious piety, and independence that characterized the country. By 1800, New York City was the largest city in the United States, but most of the West remained wild and unexplored. In 1826 the American Temperance Society was founded, giving a voice to those who were intolerant of alcohol consumption of any sort. In 1828, Andrew Jackson, a man known for his efforts to displace many Native American tribes, causing their widespread starvation and death, was elected president. New arrivals to the country, however, were uplifted by America's perceived spirit of Romanticism and humanitarianism. Irving embraced this feeling of Romanticism in his fiction, writing long descriptive passages about landscapes and relating the stories of hardworking immigrants who carved out a good living for their families. In the North, these ideas came to include the belief that slavery was immoral, and tension between the North and South over this and other issues began to rise. Much of the literature of this period, like the novels by James Fenimore Cooper, were romantic tales of the adventures of common men, often concluding with strong morals outlining Puritan ideals of good and evil. "The Devil and Tom Walker," in which

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Contrast 1727: Religion is central to the lives of New England citizens. At the Salem Witch Trials, less than forty years before, twenty people accused of consorting with the devil are executed. In the Puritan tradition, the concepts of sin and penance guide many behaviors. These beliefs regarding good and evil form the basis of many communities' laws. 1824: Religion continues to dominate daily life, though the Puritan tradition has lost much influence as less strict forms of Christianity, like Unitarianism, gain membership. Popularized by poet and essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson, Unitarianism espouses a blend of philosophy, spirituality, and practicality. The church is based in the town of Concord, Massachusetts.

Tom Walker, a corrupt individual who gets his comeuppance at the hands of the devil, typifies literature of this era.

Critical Overview Though the "The Devil and Tom Walker" has become one of Irving's most famous stories, it received a lackluster response when it was published in Tales of a Traveller in 1824. Barrel Abel remarks in American Literature: Colonial and Early National Writing that this collection of Irving's stories was "one of his poorest... . a batch of hackwork pieced together" in an attempt to use "the German materials he had been accumulating." One of the original reviews, quotes Abel, attacked Irving personally, calling him "indisputably feeble, unoriginal and timorous." Irving was hurt by these accusations, particularly because they came from British writers, for whom he had great esteem and whose style he had tried to emulate. In retrospect, Eugene Current-Garcia says in Studies in Short Fiction that the story "foreshadows the best of

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Today: A majority of people living in the United States belong to a house of worship. Though Christianity claims the largest number of followers, millions of Americans are Jewish, Hindu, Muslim, or Buddhist. 1780s: Wolfgang Mozart writes Don Giovanni, an opera about a promiscuous man who is confronted by the devil. 1832: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe publishes his tale of temptation and the devil, Faust. Today: The devil continues to be a popular character in literature, appearing recently in Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses and John Updike's The Witches ofEastwick.

Hawthorne's fictional exposure of Yankee shrewdness and Puritan hypocrisy." Current-Garcia also credits Irving for helping to develop the genre of the short story: "If he did not actually invent the short story, he had indeed set the pattern for the artistic recreation of common experience in short fictional form." By the mid-twentieth century, with the critics' adverse reaction to Tales of a Travellerlong faded, opinion had solidly changed in Irving's favor. William Hedges wrote in Washington Irving: An American Study 1802-1832 that "The Devil and Tom Walker" is one of Irving's best works.

Criticism Elisabeth Piedmont-Marton Elisabeth Piedmont-Morton is an educator and the coordinator of the undergraduate writing center at the University of Texas at Austin. In the following essay, she discusses the conventions of the narrative sketch as practiced by Washington Irving in ' 'The Devil and Tom Walker.''

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What Do I Read Next? A History of New York, Irving's 1809 novel in which Dutchman Diedrich Knickerbocker recounts the settling of New York by the Dutch, in a comic and highly inaccurate manner. The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent, is comprised of 32 short stories, many of which deal with England. The collection includes two of Irving's most celebrated works: "Rip Van Winkle" and "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow." Moby Dick, Herman Melville's 1851 epic of the seafaring Captain Ahab's quest to conquer the great white whale, Moby Dick. So single-minded is Ahab's goal that he fails to realize that he is being ruined by greed and deceit. The Pardoner's Tale, Geoffrey Chaucer's tale that explores ' 'the curse of avarice and cupidity." Three bandits attempt to become wealthy through deceitful means, but each of them attempts to usurp the others' gold. In the final analysis, all three are destroyed by their own

"The Devil and Tom Walker" was published in 1824 in Washington Irving's Tales of a Traveller. It is widely recognized as the best story in the book and the third best of all his tales (after ' 'Rip Van Winkle" and "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.") Having established an international literary reputation, Irving had committed himself to a career as a professional man of letters, and the mixed critical reception that Tales of a Traveller received stung him badly. Modern readers of stories in this volume are often struck by the folk or fairy-tale quality of the narratives and by Irving's evocation of an older American landscape rich in symbolic texture. Irving's career and work is best understood in the context of the enormous cultural and ideological changes transforming the new nation at the time. By the 1820s, the United States had concluded its second war with Britain, Lewis and Clark had already explored the West, and the population grew

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greed. This story is the basis for the movie, Treasure of the Sierra Madre. ' 'Young Goodman Brown'' by Nathaniel Hawthorne, first published in 1835. An allegorical tale of a pious Puritan New England man who encounters his fellow townspeople engaged in the black mass. Hawthorne was a contemporary of Irving's, and both writers were concerned with creating an American literature that featured the tenets of New England Puritanism. ' "The Devil and Daniel Webster'' a short story by Steven Vincent Benet first published in 1937. A New England folktale that won an O. Henry Memorial Award, the story concerns a poor farmer strikes a deal with the devil, who appears as a lawyer. In an attempt to back out of the deal after obtaining prosperity, the farmer hires Daniel Webster to defend him in a court trial presided over by Nathaniel Hawthorne.

from a little over five million to nine-and-a-half million in the years 1800-1820. Still, 97 percent of Americans lived in rural communities. The country was poised for great change: By 1850 the population reached 21 million and the proportion of urban dwellers increased sharply. During these turbulent years, inventions that spurred industrial growth, like the steamboat, the cotton gin, the telegraph, and eventually the railroad, dramatically shaped Americans' sense of themselves. Irving was not an unqualified believer in the popular notions of progress and expansion. He consciously chose British literary models and spent most of his life living outside of the United States because he believed that the only hope for American culture was to attach itself to the traditions of Britain. Tales of a Traveller was written and published in England, where Irving enjoyed a large audience and had cultivated a reputation for charm

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and civility. His literary depictions of the New World tend to find value in times past when American culture was more closely tied to the values of the Old World. One of the reasons that Irving had such a large readership was that his writing harkened back to an older time, before materialism and commercialism became leading forces in the newly emerging American society. Nevertheless, as many readers of "The Devil and Tom Walker" are well aware, Irving's fictional America is hardly a new Eden, unspoiled and uncorrupt. Rather, the fictional landscape of the "The Devil and Tom Walker" seems haunted by events of the past and infused by Irving's occasionally biting satire. ' 'The Devil and Tom Walker'' is written in the genre that Irving practically invented—the fictional sketch. One of his innovations was the fictional narrator, in this case Geoffrey Crayon, who views events and reports local legends with good-natured skepticism. The device of the narrator serves several purposes for Irving. First, it allows him to distance himself from his readers. Many critics suggest that he started to rely on this mechanism when he sensed that his reading public was dwindling. Second, the intervention of Crayon permits Irving to tell fantastic stories without having to attest to their truth. According to Donald Ringe in his essay "Irving's Use of the Gothic Mode," this device allowed Irving, a man who subscribed to the dominant realistic philosophies of the day, to present "ghosts and goblins as actual beings" without having to explain them as natural phenomena. As readers, by extension, we do not have to believe that Tom Walker actually consorted with the devil, only that the legend says he did. Irving's use of these gothic themes within the framework of the fictional sketch raises another issue, however. Irving's satirical purposes makes less important the question whether the devil, the pirate Kidd, or the treasure are real. In an allegory like "The Devil and Tom Walker" the fantastic elements are "real" in the sense that they represent something else. The comedy of satire works because of the different ways readers can interpret the story. For example, Irving and his ideal readers— those in on the joke—get to poke fun at the fictional audience for this story, those who actually believe that Tom Walker met the devil in the woods, made a deal with him, and later was carried off to his fate in a carriage driven by black horses. The narrator is a kind of intermediary between audiences, sometimes gullible ("Such, according to this most authentic old story, was all that was to be found of Tom's

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The fictional landscape of the 'The Devil and Tom Walker1 seems haunted by events of the past and infused by Irving's occasionally biting satire."

wife") and sometimes judgmental ("Like most short cuts, it was an ill-chosen route"). By setting the story in New England, Irving is invoking the young country's colonial past. The description of the dark forest with its dark history of an Indian massacre hardly portrays a people proudly connected to their own noble heritage. Instead, Irving seems to suggest that this is a community content to bury and forget old atrocities, and, more broadly, that the nation eager to bury its own history is doomed to be haunted by it. The woods in this tale also invoke the Puritan's sense that the wilderness is the habitat of all sorts of evil. Readers will recognize the similarity to the dark wood of Nathaniel Hawthorne's "Young Goodman Brown," for example. Tom's short cut is, of course, a quicker route through the woods, but it also represents what Irving sees as the American tendency toward quick fixes and quick profits. Irving's allegory in "The Devil and Tom Walker" is very broadly drawn. In fact, many readers agree with Mary Weatherspoon Bowden in her book Washington Irving when she says that' 'occasionally [his] allegory gets in the way of the story." The example that Bowden points out is that neither the pirate Kidd nor the treasure, not having any allegorical work to do, ever reappear after the first paragraph. After the pirate and the treasure are dispensed with, however, what remains is a stinging indictment of what Irving believes to be the state of economics and politics in the United States. Source: Elisabeth Piedmont-Marlon, for Short Stories for Students, Gale Research, 1997.

Charles G. Zug III In the following essay, Zug talks about the aspects of common folklore that Irving incorporat-

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ed into ' 'The Devil and Tom Walker,'' particularly those he gathered in his travels to Germany. Although it is unquestionably one of Washington Irving's finest tales, "The Devil and Tom Walker" has never attracted much critical attention. First published in 1824 in Part IV of Tales of a Traveller, the tale recounts the fate of an avaricious New Englander, who sells his soul to the Devil in return for Captain Kidd's treasure, and is finally carted off to Hell after a long and profitable career as a usurer in colonial Boston. For the most part, critics have been content to note that the tale is "a sort of comic New England Faust,'' or that i t ' 'is redolent of the American soil." In other words, the consensus is that the tale has certain Germanic overtones but is indigenous to the young American republic in which Irving grew up. No one, however, has really attempted to examine the possible sources for this work or note the complex manner in which Irving has interwoven numerous motifs from American and German folklore.... At the outset, it is significant that no source has ever been discovered for "The Devil and Tom Walker." Most commonly, critics cite the Faust theme as the basis for the tale, but this is rather inaccurate, for Tom Walker is in no sense a scholar who desires to extend the limits of human knowledge. In actuality, it is not the Faust theme but the well-known motif M211, Man sells soul to devil, that lies at the heart of the tale. This, however, is only one of numerous folk motifs used, and taken by itself, it provides little insight into the source or structure of the tale. The problem here is that unlike "Rip Van Winkle," which is largely patterned on a complete tale, "The Devil and Tom Walker" is based on a series of folk motifs gathered by Irving from a wide variety of sources. It is important at this point to understand the exact distinction between a tale and a motif. The former is a complete and independent narrative which consists of one or more motifs traditionally associated with each other, while the latter is ' 'the smallest element in a tale having a power to persist in tradition." Generally, motifs fall into one of three categories: "the actors in a tale," "items in the background of the action," and most commonly, "single incidents." Although based on folklore like "Rip Van Winkle," "The Devil and Tom Walker" is thus a much more complex and original work, for instead of starting with a fully developed plot, Irving began with a series of plot elements and fused them into a new and harmonious whole. That he was highly skilled in assembling

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these traditional motifs is evidenced by the number of critics who have accepted "The Devil and Tom Walker'' as a rewritten version of a folktale that he had heard or read. To fully understand Irving's increasingly sophisticated use of folklore, it is necessary to briefly consider some of Irving's activities between the publication of The Sketchbook in 1819 and the writing of "The Devil and Tom Walker" in 1824. The key event here appears to have been the yearlong tour through Germany in 1822 and 1823. Prior to this journey, Irving had shown an increasing interest in German lore and literature, and had been encouraged by Sir Walter Scott' 'to study the fascinating history of folklore." However, Irving's contact with German folklore at this time was limited to the few works over which he struggled to learn the German language and a number of English publications which were ' Translated or adapted from the popular literature of Germany." The trip to Germany in 1822 gave Irving a new opportunity: a chance to investigate and gather up German folklore at first-hand. As he wrote to Thomas Storrow at the beginning of the tour, "I mean to get into the confidence of every old woman I meet with in Germany and get from her, her wonderful budget of stories." In other words, Irving was out to collect folklore in its purest state, directly from oral transmission. Stanley Williams notes this shift in Irving's attitude, commenting that' 'he now formed a resolution that folklore should not merely entertain the knight-errant but should earn his lordship's bread and butter. He would really follow that impulse felt at Abbotsford in 1817 and create his volume of German legends. The tour now became a hunt for gnomes, pixies, and phantom armies; and he extended the journal into a saving bank for this species of coin." That the hunt was clearly successful is revealed by the numerous legends and scraps of lore that may be found in the letters and journals written during the German tour. At Salzburg, for example, Irving noted that ' 'the mountain regions are full of fable and elfin story, and I had some wonderful tales told me." In his journal, he even wrote out seven local legends from this region, all of them concerned with the imposing figure of Untersberg Mountain. Walter Reichart points out that none of these legends appears to have a literary source, "so that it seems likely that Irving actually heard them from some of the inhabitants." Since Irving had little time or ability for reading German during his travels, this conclusion is almost inescapable. In addition, the letters and journals abound

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with fragments of and brief references to wellknown tales and motifs, such as ' 'the Emperor and his army shut up in the enchanted mountain'' and "the Black Huntsman and the enchanted Bullets." Altogether, it appears that Irving rapidly enlarged his working knowledge of German folklore, and there are numerous entries indicating that he also enjoyed retelling the tales to his friends. The German experience thus served not only to increase his "savings bank" of potential source materials, but more important, to teach him the technique of combining and recombining these materials so as to form new tales. It is exactly this shift in emphasis, from written to oral sources, from the tale to the motif, and from the mere materials to the actual mechanics of folklore, that is reflected in "The Devil and Tom Walker." As such, this tale suggests that a re-evaluation of Irving's later use of folklore is very much needed. As the following analysis reveals, Irving's use of folklore after his German tour was somewhat less ' 'slavish'' than most critics have been willing to admit.. . . In conjunction with the prevalence of German motifs, it is important to note that practically the entire plot is made up of elements from folklore. In fact the only nontraditional portions of the plot are the two sections which I have labeled the domestic and financial subplots. The tale opens with three American motifs built around the legend of Captain Kidd. Immediately following is the domestic subplot, which is reminiscent of the marital situation in "Rip Van Winkle" and serves to develop the mutual enmity between Tom and his wife. Merely to infuriate her, Tom obstinately refuses to close his pact with the Devil. She, therefore, runs off with the family silverware to make her own bargain, and is apparently carried off by the Devil after an heroic struggle. After this humorous interlude, Irving immediately returns to the main plot of folk motifs, and it is not until after the pact is actually completed that he inserts the financial subplot. This section describes the state of affairs in colonial Boston, neatly delineating the avarice and religious hypocrisy of the inhabitants. With the uttering of the oath, Irving again returns to the main plot, and the tale moves swiftly to a close. Taken as a whole, the plot thus consists of a central chain of folk motifs into which two realistic subplots have been inserted. . .. Irving's choice of the Kidd legends as a framework for ' The Devil and Tom Walker'' was a good one, for it placed the tale in a distinctly American setting. Willard Hallam Bonner, who has made an extensive study of Kidd, notes that' 'the composite

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Irving certainly never intended 'The Devil and Tom Yfalker' to be taken as a folktale. His purpose was to produce an entertaining, fast-moving story based largely on German folk motifs and firmly rooted in an American locale."

legend surrounding him is Saxon North America's first full-bodied legend." However, this legend is a limited one, in that it generally contains only a few, often recurring motifs. There is first a widespread belief that Kidd did bury his treasure, either along the southern New England coast or up the Hudson River. In addition, there is the belief that the treasure is guarded either by a slain sailor or worse, by ' 'the Earl of Hell himself, at whose command Kidd 'buried his Bible in the sand.'" As noted in the earlier plot outline, Irving used these American motifs at the beginning of the tale, although he shifted the place of burial to the Boston region. With the introduction of the domestic subplot, which follows immediately, Irving moved away from the Kidd legends and began using German motifs which concerned the Devil. Apparently it was the Kidd stories heard from Colonel Aspinwall that gave Irving the initial inspiration and got the tale underway. Once started, Irving inserted the two realistic subplots and used the figure of the Devil, first mentioned in the American legend, as the means of transition to the numerous German materials.... Irving certainly never intended ' "The Devil and Tom Walker'' to be taken as a folktale. His purpose was to produce an entertaining, fast-moving story based largely on German folk motifs and firmly rooted in an American locale. In this he was eminently successful, and ' 'The Devil and Tom Walker" deserves to be ranked with "Rip Van Winkle" and "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" as one of his best tales. Stanley Williams has pointed out that the major flaw in Tales of a Traveller was Irving's failure ' 'to draw bravely from that wonderful stock

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of German legend in his notebooks and in his mind." While this analysis is true for most of these tales, it is clearly not applicable to "The Devil and Tom Walker," where the carefully assembled chain of German motifs provides the backbone for a unique and vigorous plot structure. Still a second valid criticism of the Tales of a Traveller is that Irving did not succeed "in transplanting German legends into American settings where the native landscape could reflect the spirit of the tale." Once again, "The Devil and Tom Walker" proves the exception, for Irving skillfully introduced the German materials through the use of the native Kidd legends, using the figure of the Devil as the unifying force for all of the motifs. By adding the two realistic subplots, a few brief character sketches, and some local history and legend, Irving succeeded in developing a truly American atmosphere. As William L. Hedge has observed, Irving was able ' 'to bring certain aspects of Puritanism into dramatic focus by connecting Yankee shrewdness and Puritan respectability." As previously noted, this satire on the avarice and hypocrisy of colonial Boston is skillfully integrated with the folklore Irving used, and the final motif, Devil's money becomes ashes, is so well chosen that it serves as a fitting epilogue to the tale. Once the construction of ' "The Devil and Tom Walker'' is laid bare, it becomes evident that Irving, at least after his German tour, was no "slavish" imitator but rather a highly skilled manipulator of both American and German folklore. In avoiding the stock Gothic machinery and a distant, foreign setting for an American locale, and in assembling a chain of folk motifs that was distinctly his own invention, he created a vigorous tale that is still very much alive and meaningful today. This is not to assert that Irving possessed a first-rank imagination, as his successors Poe and Hawthorne did. Instead, as his contemporary Coleridge might have observed, Irving was endowed with a mechanical rather than an organic imagination. In this sense, he is not unlike the medieval French author Chretien de Troyes, who drew so heavily on traditional materials yet left his own stamp on them. Like Chretien, Irving knew and understood the traditional storyteller's skill in relating folk motifs and so, in tales such as "The Devil and Tom Walker," he was able to recombine and reshape such motifs into new and significant forms. Source: Charles G. Zug III,' The Construction of 'The Devil and Tom Walker': A Study of Irving's Later Use of Folk-

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lore," in New York Folklore Quarterly, Vol. XXIV, No. 4, December, 1968, pp. 243-60.

James J. Lynch In the following excerpt of a longer article, Lynch talks about the devil as a character in literature, including his appearance in ' 'The Devil and Tom Walker," one the devil's first appearances in American literature. In the spring of 1951, when the emotionalism of the MacArthur controversy was at its highest, a mob of people in one of our western towns hanged Secretary of State Acheson in effigy. If this act had taken place about one hundred seventy years ago, there probably would have been one difference—the figure of the devil would also have had a part in the ceremony. We learn from contemporary accounts of the Revolution that when Benedict Arnold's treason became known his effigy was burned and hanged throughout the towns of America, invariably with an image of the devil thrusting him into hell with a pitchfork. Even as late as 1828, the school board of Lancaster, Ohio, declared the railroad a device of the devil. And when Irving's "The Devil and Tom Walker'' appeared, a contemporary critic of 1825 wrote: "If Mr. Irving believes in the existence of Tom Walker's master we can scarcely conceive how he can so earnestly jest about him; at all events, we would counsel him to beware lest his own spells should prove fatal to him." Irving, Hawthorne, and Poe, therefore, being fairly close to the times when the devil had some status, could be expected as romantic writers to use the devil as one of their characters. The devil as a character is, of course, a manifestation of romantic writing concerning the supernatural. It is obvious, however, that he is not to be associated only with the so-called romantic period, for he has appeared throughout our literature from the writings of Cotton Mather to Whittaker Chambers' article on the history of the devil in Life magazine of February 2, 1948.... A biographer of Irving stated that ' "The Devil and Tom Walker'' may possibly be called ' 'a sort of comic New England Faust, for during 1822 and 1823 Irving had read and reread Goethe." Calling him a New England Faust might be a clever way of referring to Irving's devil, but another critic analyzes more accurately when he states that the story ' 'owes very little to foreign influences. Though he is interested in popular legend, and shows sympathy

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with the Romantic movement of Europe, Irving's story is redolent of American soil." Irving's devil is of the pure New England variety—and he could hardly have been thinking of Goethe's regal Mephistopheles when he wrote his story. Irving places his humorous tale in Massachusetts history during the office of Governor Belcher (1730-1741). Tom Walker, at no point a serious figure, finds himself following an ' 'ill chosen route through a swamp thickly grown with the great gloomy pines and hemlocks which made it dark at noonday.'' After setting the atmosphere in much the same way that Hawthorne did later, Irving recounts the legend of the ' 'Old Indian Fort'' of which the common people had a bad opinion ' 'since the Indian wars when it was asserted that the savages held incantations here and made sacrifices to the evil spirit." After this reference to the superstition of the early New England folk, the devil suddenly appears unannounced—a technique used by most devilwriters. Tom had just uncovered a skull when a gruff voice says, "Let that skull alone!" Irving describes the devil in accordance with his common title in New England, "The Black Man." ' 'You are commonly called Old Scratch," Tom remarks calmly enough to the devil. "The same at your service," the devil replies. Irving explains that Tom ' 'had lived so long with a termagant wife, that he did not even fear the devil.'' The outcome of this meeting is that the devil promises Captain Kidd's buried treasure if Tom will sell his soul. Returning to his wife, Tom tells her of the devil's offer. But when she urges him to enter into the contract, he refuses in order to irritate her with his perversity. The wife then sets out to make a deal with "Old Scratch," and Irving comments, "Though a female scold is generally considered a match for the devil, yet in this instance she appears to have had the worst of it." This remark is reminiscent of the imported English ballad ' 'The Farmer's Curst Wife," wherein the wife is taken off to hell by the devil and then brought back to the farmer because she is too unpleasant even for the devil. But Tom's wife is never seen again, and when Tom goes to the swamp, he sees signs of a fierce struggle. "Egad," he says to himself, "Old Scratch must have had a tough time of it!" Feeling gratitude to the devil for carrying off his wife, Tom then decides to do business with him. But the devil is crafty, and after some delay Tom again meets "the black woodsman," who now affects indifference while casually humming a tune.

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Though he is interested in popular legend, and shows sympathy with the Romantic movement of Europe, Irving's story is redolent of American soil."

If one were to imagine an actor taking this devil's part, Charles Laughton might well be an appropriate choice. The contract is eventually made between them. The devil tries to make the condition that Tom enter the slave trade, but Tom refuses, agreeing, however, to open a usury business in Boston. There are two explanations as to why Irving mentioned the slave trade here: that he was repelled by a barbarous practice that the devil fosters with primary interest, and/or that he wanted to achieve suspense by putting into the reader's mind the idea that Tom might escape that fulfillment of the contract because of a momentary humane feeling. Using Kidd's treasure to build up a fortune in making loans and then foreclosing, Tom, as he grows older and more conscious of the terms of the contract, becomes a religious zealot, carrying the Bible at all times in order to ward off the devil. Irving refers to the legend that Tom buried his horse upside down because when the world would be turned upside down on the last day he would be able to give the devil a run for it. But according to Irving, if he did this, it was of no help to him, ' 'at least so says the authentic old legend." Tom is caught off guard without his Bible while he is foreclosing a mortgage, and is seized during a storm and carried off in the direction of the swamp and the Old Indian Fort, never to be seen again. Irving concludes the legendary story: Let all griping money-brokers lay this story to heart. The truth of it is not to be doubted. The very hole under the oak trees, whence he dug Kidd's money, is to be seen to this day; and the neighboring swamp and old Indian fort are often haunted nights by a figure on horseback, in morning-gown and white cap, which is doubtless the troubled spirit of the usurer. In fact, the story has resolved itself into a proverb, and is the

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origin of the popular saying, so prevalent throughout New England, of "The Devil and Tom Walker."

Hedges, William L. Washington Irving: An American Study, 1802-1832, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1965, 231-233.

Irving would be interested to know that the popular saying to which he refers continued to be used until the twentieth century....

Ringe, Donald A. "Irving's Use of the Gothic Mode," in Critical Essays on Washington Irving, edited by Donald A. Ringe, G. K. Hall, 1990, pp. 202-17.

Source: James J. Lynch, "The Devil in the Writings of Irving, Hawthorne, and Poe," in the New York Folklore Quarterly, Volume VIII, No. 1, Spring, 1952, pp. 111-31.

Further Reading Sources Abel, Darrel.' The Rise of a National Literature,'' American Literature: Colonial and Early National Writing. New York: Barren's Educational Series, 1963, pp. 268-340. Bowden, Mary Weatherspoon. Washington Irving, Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1981. Current-Garcia, Eugene. ' 'Irving Sets the Pattern: Notes on Professionalism and the Art of the Short Story," in Studies in Short Fiction, Vol. X, No. 4, Fall, 1973, pp. 327-41.

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Rubin-Dorsky, Jeffrey. "Washington Irving and the Genesis of the Fictional Sketch," in Critical Essays on Washington Irving, edited by Ralph M. Aderman, G. K. Hall, 1990, pp. 217-35. Demonstrates Irving's pioneering work in developing the sketch genre of literary writing. Woodress, James.' 'Washington Irving,'' in Reference Guide to Short Fiction, edited by Noelle Watson, St. James Press, 1994, pp. 262-65. A biographical and bibliographical sketch on Washington Irving.

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The Eatonville Anthology First published in the fall of 1926 in the Messenger magazine, "The Eatonville Anthology" is one of Zora Neale Hurston's most important and interesting short stories because of its design, content, and use of authentic dialect. Hurston's collection of vignettes in "The Eatonville Anthology" do not conform to the narrative pattern that most readers expect from a work of short fiction. Hurston's story is a collection of short profiles and anecdotes about a cast of characters who inhabit a small African-American community in central Florida during the early decades of the twentieth century. Together these individual voices are a powerful portrayal of black culture at a time when blacks were largely subsumed by the dominant white culture.

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When "The Eatonville Anthology" was published, its design would have been familiar to readers of Edgar Lee Masters' Spoon River Anthology (1915), which was the first of its kind in American literature. Masters' Anthology is a collection of poetic monologues, or epigrams, by former inhabitants of an area in central Illinois. Hurston makes a direct literary allusion to Masters' work with her use of the word "anthology" in the title of her narrative and by composing the chapters of brief, dialectfilled stories about residents of a small Florida town that exists on the outskirts of Orlando. Hurston's "Anthology" is recognized as an important early twentieth-century work for its blend of authentic folklore and fiction.

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Author Biography Zora Neale Hurston was born in 1903 in Eatonville, Florida, according to some sources. Others place her birth as early as January 7, 1891, but her headstone reads 1901-1960. She was the seventh of eight children born to John Hurston, a Baptist preacher, carpenter, and town mayor, and his wife, Lucy, a former schoolteacher. To the young Hurston, rural Eatonville was ' 'a city of five lakes, three croquet courts, 300 brown skins, 300 good swimmers, plenty of guavas, two schools and no jailhouse." It also was an area rich in the black folk traditions and history that permeates Hurston's literature. Hurston left her job as a wardrobe girl in Florida for a job as an actress in a traveling lightopera troupe. Eventually she found herself in Baltimore, Maryland. Determined to complete her education, she attended Morgan Academy in 1917 and 1918, and then went on to Howard University in Washington, D.C., where her first story was published in the campus literary magazine in 1921. Hurston continued to write and publish while she studied anthropology at Barnard College in New York City from 1925 to 1927. She did her field anthropology work with the renowned Dr. Frank Boas at Columbia University in 1926 and returned to Florida in 1927 to collect folklore.' 'The Eatonville Anthology," published in 1926, recorded much of the folklore and tradition that existed in her hometown of Eatonville. The story reflected her interest in anthropology and in preserving bits of the past for future generations. Hurston was briefly married twice. Her first marriage was to fellow anthropology student Herbert Sheen in 1927, and her second marriage was to Albert Prince III in 1939. Both marriages failed because Hurston was more attached to her work and her independence than to either husband. This independence was reflected in the risks that she took as a writer, especially her renowned use of authentic African-American dialect in her fiction and her intent to break' 'that old silly rule about Negroes not writing about white people." In her first novel, Jonah's Gourd Vine (1934), Hurston combined her knowledge of "Negro folklore' ' with biblical themes. Next, in Mules and Men, Hurston included many folktales that the tellers call "lies," which contain hidden social and philosophical messages. These messages were an impor-

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tant part of the culture surrounding Hurston's hometown. Critics maintain that Hurston's novel Their Eyes Were Watching God, published in 1937, is her best work. In addition to these and many other literary and anthropological works, Hurston also worked for a short while on the wholly AfricanAmerican play Mule-Bone with Langston Hughes. Although Hurston was a prolific writer, by the mid-1940s her career had begun to wane. Poverty and ill health plagued Hurston until her death in the St. Lucia County Welfare Home in Florida on January 28, 1960. The burial was delayed ten days while friends raised $600 to pay for a funeral. Thirteen years passed before writer Alice Walker traveled to Florida to put a headstone on Hurston's grave. Walker began a crusade to secure Hurston a place in the annals of literary history. The lightgray marker in the Garden of the Heavenly Rest, a segregated cemetery in Fort Pierce, reads: "Zora Neale Hurston: A Genius of the South. Novelist. Folklorist. Anthropologist."

Plot Summary Hurston's "The Eatonville Anthology" is comprised of fourteen short sketches which offer humorous commentary on lives of residents in Eatonville, Florida. Several characters, such as Joe Clarke, owner of the general store and Eatonville's mayor and postmaster, and Elijah Moseley, appear in a number of the segments while many other characters appear only once. In the first segment entitled "The Pleading Woman," Mrs. Tony Roberts begs for food for her family. First she begs for meat from Mr. Clarke who is annoyed, because he knows that her husband is a good provider and she does not need to beg. She then visits various homes until she has collected everything she wants for the day. Apparently, Mrs. Roberts is never satisfied with what she is given. The narrator explains that the next day her begging continues. In "Turpentine Love," Jim Merchant's love for his wife endures, explains the narrator, despite the fact that she has had all her teeth out. When they were courting, the fact that she was "subject to fits... didn't cool his love" either. One Sunday Mrs. Merchant's mother tries to stop one of her daughter's fits by giving her a dose of turpentine

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and accidentally spills some in her eye. Somehow this cures her fits, and she never has another one. In the untitled Segment III, Becky Moore has "eleven children of assorted colors and sizes." The narrator pokes fun at Becky, claiming that the fact that Becky's children are fatherless is completely the men's fault, since she "has never stopped any of the fathers of her children from proposing." Segment IV, "Tippy," focuses on "the most interesting member" of Sykes Jones's family, the dog. Tippy has been sentenced to death several times for a variety of food theft crimes. Despite these threats, he manages to remain skinny, alive, and friendly. In Segment V, "The Way of a Man with a Train," Old Man Anderson lives in the country and has no interest in seeing a train. "Patronage and ridicule" finally force him to drive his horse and wagon into the woods beside the railroad to wait for a train. He secures his horse far from the tracks where it will be safe. When the train finally comes "thundering over the trestle spurting smoke," Old Man Anderson becomes so frightened that he drives away, damaging his wagon extensively. Segment VI is entitled "Coon Taylor." Coon Taylor is said to have never done any real stealing, except for chickens, watermelons, and muskmelons. No one has ever managed to catch Coon stealing, but Joe Clarke decides to try. During the first attempt, Joe falls asleep and Coon ends up inadvertently cracking a melon on Joe's head. However, Clarke later catches Coon thieving during sugar cane season and makes him sit down and eat all the cane he has stolen. Joe also banishes Coon from the town for three months. "Village Fiction," Segment VII, features Joe Lindsay, Lum Boger, and Brazzle, three residents who compete for the title of town liar. A tall tale is recounted in this section, entitled "Exhibit A," and it is unclear who actually tells this lie. The unspecified storyteller claims to have witnessed a doctor cut up a woman in Orlando one day, remove all her organs, wash them, dry them, and put them back. The phrasing of the section makes it difficult to know who is actually telling the lie. Segment VIII is another example of a "village fiction" concerning a character named Sewell. According to Elijah Moseley, Sewell moves so often that every time he enters his backyard, the chickens expect another move and ' 'lie down and cross their legs, ready to be tied up again."

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Segment IX concerns Mrs. Clarke, Joe Clarke's wife. Clarke yells at her and beats her whenever she makes a mistake working in the store. In church on Sunday Mrs. Clarke closes her eyes and' 'shakes the hand of fellowship with everybody in the Church . . . but somehow always misses her husband." Segment X describes the behavior of another woman in church, Mrs. McDuffy. Her husband also beats her at home, because he does not like her shouting in church. Mrs. McDuffy tells Elijah Moseley that she cannot stop shouting, but Mr. McDuffy tells Elijah that she shouts because she knows Mr. McDuffy dislikes it. "Double-Shuffle," Segment XI, concerns the kind of dancing people did in the ' 'good old days'' in Eatonville before World War I and before the age of the fox trot. The grand march of Eatonville, unlike the grand march performed by whites "still has a kick .. . [and is] too much for some of the young folks." Segment XII,' 'The Head of the Nail," features Daisy Taylor, the town vamp. Daisy torments the timid Mrs. Laura Grooms about her alleged affair with Laura's husband. The teasing occurs one Saturday night when the town gathers on the post office

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porch in its customary fashion "to tell stories and treat the ladies." Laura Grooms surprises everyone by beating Daisy with an ax handle because Daisy refuses to stop taunting. The beating is so thorough that Daisy falls into a ditch. Defeated, Daisy leaves Eatonville for Orlando.

involved in many of the affairs of the community. It is revealed later in Section VI that Clarke is also the town mayor, postmaster, and has several other duties. His wife, who refers to him as ''Jody,'' is the main character of Section IX.

"Pants and Cal'line," Segment XIII, is the story of Mitchell Potts who cheats on his wife and buys his mistress shoes. Unlike Laura Grooms, Mitch's wife Cal'line is known to ' 'do anything she had a mind to." This sketch ends inconclusively, with Mitch "smiling sheepishly" as he passes the porch sitters on his way to visit Miss Pheeny, and Cal'line following two minutes behind him, "silently, unsmilingly," carrying an axe.

Mrs. Clarke

The final segment of "The Eatonville Anthology," Segment XIV, recounts a version of the Brer Rabbit tale, when ' 'animals used to talk just like people." In this version of the story, "dogs and rabbits was the best of friends—even tho' both of them was stuck on the same gal which was Miss Nancy Coon." Miss Nancy likes both Mr. Dog and Mr. Rabbit, but she seems to be favoring Mr. Dog who has the sweeter singing voice. Mr. Rabbit cannot sing at all, but promises his friend that he can help him sing even sweeter if Mr. Dog will stick out his tongue. Instead of helping, Mr. Rabbit splits Mr. Dog's tongue with a knife, and "the dog has been mad at the rabbit ever since."

Characters Old Man Anderson Old Man Anderson is a farmer who lives outside the city limits of Eatonville and only comes to the town two or three times a year. He has never seen a train and the townspeople look down on him because he has no interest in seeing the train go through the nearby town of Maitland. Observing the train is a big event for Eatonville residents, and Anderson finally gives in to their ridicule. When he travels into Maitland the sound of the train scares him so badly that he drives his horse and wagon deep into the forest without ever seeing the train at all.

Mr. Clarke Mr. Clarke is one of the shopkeepers in ' "The Eatonville Anthology." He appears in several other sections of the story in addition to his part in Section I. He and his wife own one of the main stores in Eatonville (perhaps the general store) and he is

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Mrs. Clarke helps her husband, Joe Clarke, run their store in Eatonville. Section IX describes her behavior in church every Sunday and her relationship with Mr. Clarke. The narrator describes a fairly volatile relationship with Mr. Clarke reprimanding his wife for her mistakes and sometimes beating her.

Jody See Mr. Clarke

Joe See Mr. Clarke

Sykes Jones Sykes Jones is the owner of a dog named Tippy. Tippy is the main focus of Section IV, rather than Sykes. Tippy has a reputation around Eatonville as a scrounger of food and various residents have tried to get rid of the dog by feeding him strychnine, bluestone, and other poisons. The dog survives however, and remains skinny despite the food he steals.

Joe Lindsay Joe Lindsay is one of the town liars and a subject of Section VII. It is said that he is "the largest manufacturer of prevarications in Eatonville" by another resident, Lum Boger. In other words, he is the biggest liar in town. Another character, Brazzle, regards himself as the biggest liar in town. A description of one of the character's lies is briefly recounted in Section VII. The phrasing of the two short paragraphs in this section, entitled ' 'Exhibit A," makes it unclear who actually tells this lie.

Lizzimore Lizzimore is a blind guitar player who played at the Methodist church during ' 'Double-Shuffles'' in Eatonville in "the good old days before the war." The "Double-Shuffles" are the focus of Section XI. They are dances that were very popular with the townspeople, and are part of the tradition and lore of the town. Attended by the Clarkes, Moseleys, and numerous others, the dances are events remembered by everyone.

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Mrs. McDuffy Mrs. McDuffy is another resident of Eatonville, and her behavior in church is the focus of Section X. The narrator describes her shouting in church and her husband's aversion to such behavior. He beats her at home for her shouting and does not understand her need to yell. Like the relationship of Mr. and Mrs. Clarke, the relationship between Mr. and Mrs. McDuffy includes beatings that seem to be an accepted part of life in Eatonville.

Jim Merchant Jim Merchant and his wife are the subjects of the second section of "Anthology." He is a minor character in relation to the rest of the story. Section II recounts his first meeting with his wife, who has ' 'fits." Her cure is brought about by spilling turpentine into one of her eyes.

Becky Moore Becky Moore is the unwed mother of eleven children who have been sired by a variety of men. Other mothers in Eatonville will not let their kids play with the Moore children. According to the narrator, Becky believes that the fathers of her children are to blame for her unwed status. The other mothers are apparently afraid their children will adopt Becky's beliefs or will become like the missing fathers and not take responsibility for their own offspring.

Media Adaptations Zora Is My Name! is based on the life of Zora Neale Hurston, and stars Ruby Dee and Louis Gossett, Jr. Originally aired as a part of PBS's American Playhouse series, this 90-minute production is available for purchase through PBS Home Video, Karol Video, Facets Multimedia, Inc.

an axe and follows Mitch through the town on his way to Delphine's. This section ends with no resolution to this conflict, and critics maintain that part of this section was lost during publication. However, Cal'line's character and strength are amply developed throughout this section of "Eatonville."

Brer Rabbit See Brother Rabbit

Brother Rabbit

Narrator The narrator of "The Eatonville Anthology" represents the community of Eatonville as a single voice. The special feature of this voice is the way in which it presents each citizen or incident with a tone of approval and acceptance as a separate part of the whole town. None is subjected to negative judgment or criticism. In this way, the character of the community is preserved and reflected positively in the light and role of each of its citizens.

The Pleading Woman See Mrs. Tony Roberts

Brother Rabbit is a character in Section XIV of ' The Eatonville Anthology.'' This final section is a retelling of the Brer Rabbit story and contains other animal characters such as Miss Nancy Coon and Mr. Dog. In this Eatonville version of the story, competition between Mr. Dog and Brother Rabbit to win the favor of Miss Coon results in dogs and rabbits becoming enemies because of the trick Brer Rabbit plays on Mr. Dog. Convinced that the rabbit is going to help him learn how to sing sweetly, Mr. Dog sticks out his tongue to receive a gift from Brother Rabbit. Brother Rabbit then splits Mr. Dog's tongue with a knife and runs away.

Cal'line Potts Cal'line Potts is the main character in Section XIII. The narrator describes her as a fiercely independent person, who ' 'kept the town in an uproar of laughter." Her husband, Mitchell, "takes up" with another woman named Delphine, also known as Mis' Pheeny. When Cal'line catches Mitch all dressed up for an evening with the other woman, she grabs

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Mrs. Tony Roberts Mrs. Tony Roberts is the main character of the first section of "The Eatonville Anthology." She goes about the town of Eatonville whining, begging, and pleading with shopkeepers for free merchandise or for goods at a discount. According to the narrator of the story, Mr. Roberts gives her enough money to

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support their family, and her whining seems to be a bargaining tool in her dealings with the shopkeepers.

response of the community. In general, the people of the town are amused and entertained by the eccentric characters being described.

Sewell

The vignettes in Hurston's "The Eatonville Anthology'' collectively reflect the powerful sense of community found in areas where certain cultural groups fight for existence within a larger dominant culture. The African-American, Latin-American, and Asian-American cultures are examples of the many cultural systems that subsist within the dominant Anglo-European culture of the United States. Often the need for community is emphasized by both the culture itself and the individual's need to develop a sense of safety and self-identity. Community is more than a shared genetic code in ' 'Anthology"; it is a bond among people who share common life experiences. The people in Eatonville draw together because they acknowledge shared experiences, and they preserve those experiences through stories. By doing so, the community is assured of its continuity, and members of the village are assured a sense of safety and belonging. Preservation of their community is especially important because it exists within the context of a larger dominant culture.

Sewell is the town hermit. Section VIII recounts his frequent moves and his relationship with his chickens, who have ' 'gotten accustomed to his relocations." Sewell is another example of a character around which Eatonville residents have made up stories and myths.

Coon Taylor Coon Taylor is the subject of Section VI. He is a thief who steals frequently from Joe Clarke's gardens. On one occasion, Clarke has fallen asleep in his melon patch while waiting for Coon to show up. When Coon bursts open a melon on what he thinks is a tree stump, it turns out to be Joe's head. In another episode, Clarke catches Coon in his sugar cane patch and makes Coon leave town for three months.

Daisy Taylor Daisy Taylor is the town vamp. She is a flirt who comes to the town post office to socialize with the men who gather there. After a series of flirtations with different men, Daisy focuses on Mr. Albert Grooms, who is married. One Saturday evening, Daisy boasts of her supposed relationship with Albert in front of his wife, Laura. After encouragement from another resident, Laura takes an axe handle and beats Daisy senseless. Readers are apt to be sympathetic toward Mrs. Grooms because of Daisy's taunting, and the beaten Daisy flees Eatonville at the conclusion of this section.

Preservation of Culture Storytelling guarantees that a social system endures. A community and its people can be remembered and its customs preserved through the telling of stories. The individual stories in "The Eatonville Anthology" demonstrate how the citizens of a small, rural community are connected in spirit and culture. As a whole, the stories present a coherent picture of the lives, language, and social structure of Eatonville in the early 1920s.

The Art of Storytelling

Themes Community Many of the fourteen profiles in "The Eatonville Anthology" open with a statement on the outstanding quality of the character they feature. This statement typically defines the character's social status in the community. Whenever this introduction focuses on a negative quality, the narrator defends the character's negative trait with a modification or explanation. With this strategy the narrator signals acceptance of each individual and describes the

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Storytelling is an integral part of community life in Hurston's Eatonville. Literary scholars and critics alike have come to understand that not only is the act of telling a story an art, but it is also an inherent part of the modern African-American tradition. The oral tradition of storytelling usually reflects the lack of a system of concrete signs for the spoken word. Sometimes the language itself does not have an alphabet or other concrete images for communication; at other times, the people using the language do not have access to these symbols. In the case of African-American slaves, most never learned to write. Thus, their initial decades in the United States were recorded and preserved largely through oral traditions.

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The term "storytelling" also refers to exaggerations or outright lies that are told to emphasize a point. Several of the stories in "The Eatonville Anthology'' play with the other implied meanings of the word "storytelling." By providing examples of local myths and exaggerated tales, the "stories'' of' 'Anthology'' capture the people and character of the town. The woman who begs for food when she is able to afford it, the thieving dog Tippy, and the talltale about the old man and his first encounter with a train are all examples of tales and personalities that have been embellished by the local townspeople.

Style Point of View "The Eatonville Anthology" is an excellent example of those literary texts in which the narrative exists primarily to demonstrate forms of traditional oral narration. The work consists of fourteen parts based loosely on folktales, jokes, and the author's childhood memories. The thirteenth piece appears unfinished, whether by authorial intent or publishing error. Although each of these stories is itself a separate tale, the impression given is that the narrator is a member of the community and is conveying a running history of Eatonville. The sense that this history has been an accepted part of the town's culture for many years is also conveyed in the text. Despite this, the final narrative impression is that of a third-person, objective observer.

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Topics for Further Study Community is a consistent theme in the works of Zora Neale Hurston and the primary bond among the smaller stories contained in ' "The Eatonville Anthology." How does the image of a front porch act as a symbol of the social concept of community? Cite specific incidents from the story that prove this connection. How does the narrator's viewpoint direct the reader's understanding and approval of the citizens presented in "The Eatonville Anthology" ? Discuss specific examples. Hurston has been hailed as a "local colorist." What elements found in "The Eatonville Anthology" are specific to the rural area of central Florida where Eatonville is located? What descriptive details contribute to the reader's understanding of the location? Do the characters' speech patterns contribute to the story's presentation of local color? If so, how? How is the issue of race perceived in Eatonville? How does myth differ from folklore? Which African-American myths or folktales are most recognizable in this work? Discuss the significance of these tales within the context of this story.

Structure "The Eatonville Anthology" is broken into fourteen separate stories. Originally, an anthology was a collection of short poems. Today an anthology consists of any collection of poems, stories, songs, or excerpts, which are chosen by a compiler, usually an editor. In this case, the narrator functions as the editor because he or she has chosen which stories to tell.

the models for Hurston's factual and fictitious tales in the ' 'Anthology.'' In addition to the recognizable Florida landscape and landmarks that fill the stories, Hurston contributes realistic voices to her narrative by reproducing as precisely as possible the sounds of the spoken dialect used in this 1920s AfricanAmerican rural community.

Local Color The term "local color" refers to the way a writer exploits the speech, dress, mannerisms, habits of thought, and topography specific to a certain geographical region in an attempt to portray a community as realistically as possible. The Florida community of Eatonville and its townspeople were

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Signifying as a Literary Device "Signifying" is a literary device of great interest to Henry Louis Gates, Jr., a renowned critic and scholar. His complete investigation and explanation of this literary phenomenon is found in his seminal text, The Signifying Monkey: A Theory ofAfrican-

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American Literary Criticism. The concept of signifying has been defined by Rita Hooks as ' 'rhetorical games played out in the black vernacular tradition.'' Signifying has also been called "playing the dozens"—a contest in which people insult each other to gain an upper hand—and "specifying." Signifying combines all three levels of storytelling; relating a story, exaggerating, and downright lying, into a complex narrative design. The storyteller consciously manipulates the narrative and the audience and "signifies on" them by tricking the audience with different levels of meaning. Signifying is often used to rectify an imbalance of power. By writing about the community of Eatonville, Hurston is not simply relating local legends and folktales, but also preserving history. The Eatonville residents play the dozens with each other and exaggerate tales about their neighbors. For example, Mr. McDuffy insults his wife by telling her "there's no sense in her shouting, as big a devil as she is." He also says that ' 'his fist was just as hard as her head." Section VII of ' 'Anthology'' describes several residents of the town who are great liars. One resident contends, for example, that he witnessed a doctor remove all the organs of a patient and then reinstall them without any harm to her at all. These exchanges of insults and exaggerations run throughout the story, and Hurston uses the characters who signify on each other to make a larger point. Her interest in anthropology—the study of human beings, social relations, and culture—is reflected in ' 'The Eatonville Anthology." Hurston's combination of AfricanAmerican folklore, anthropological concerns, and childhood memories in "Anthology" enables the story to record history, study a culture, and comment on relations between people all at the same time. By disguising such a study within the form of simple stories, Hurston has employed the literary device of signifying in "Anthology" to great effect.

Historical Context Cultural Pride The period of the 1920s was marked by a boom in economic prosperity followed by a stock market crash in 1929 and a depression lasting well into the next decade. "The Eatonville Anthology," published in 1926, describes a black community in the South and touches little upon affairs outside of the community. Mentioning the World War in Section XI gives readers some historical context, but the

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main focus of the story is on Eatonville and its residents. Racial conflicts, economic hardships, and other issues are not major themes in the story. The story captures the traditions and lore of Eatonville's people in its brief sketches, and Hurston's pride in her African-American heritage is clearly evident. Her use of dialect in the story, and her description of customs and folklore provide readers with a piece of Eatonville's history.

The Great Migration During the period of 1910-1950, many blacks moved from the agricultural South to the industrial North in an effort to secure jobs. This "Great Migration'' was opposed by the white power structure in the South. Needing the labor that black sharecroppers provided, states such as Alabama and Mississippi attempted to prevent blacks from leaving. However, cities such as Detroit, New York, and Chicago received hundreds of thousands of black immigrants who migrated North in hopes of finding economic prosperity and less oppressive conditions than those existing in the South. Harlem became a haven for many blacks fleeing the South, and the city experienced a cultural awakening known as the "Harlem Renaissance."

Harlem Renaissance The Harlem Renaissance was the first intellectual and artistic movement that brought AfricanAmerican writers and artists to the attention of the entire nation. Critics mark the defining event of the Harlem Renaissance as the 1925 publication of The New Negro: An Interpretation, an anthology edited by Alain Locke. The major force of the movement was generated from a large group of black artists who lived in New York during the 1920s. This gathering of artists and intellectuals led to an outburst of literary, artistic, and musical work that began to receive widespread recognition and critical appraisal. African-American writers in this group included: Langston Hughes, poet, novelist, and playwright; Jean Toomer, author of the distinguished collection of poetry and poetic prose entitled Cane; the poets Countee Cullen and Claude McKay; the novelists Eric Waldron and Zora Neale Hurston; and the poet and novelist Arna Bon temps, who was to become the historian of the movement.

Folklore and Tradition After graduating from Barnard College in New York City, Hurston returned to Eatonville to study

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Compare &

Contrast 1920s: In 1920, Marcus Garvey organizes the first Universal Negro Improvement Association which opens with 25,000 delegates in attendance, and Garvey begins to promote his "back to Africa" movement.

remarks to her eight years earlier while he served on the Equal Opportunity Commission. Sexual harassment in the workplace becomes a focus of national attention.

1990s: On October 16, 1995, Louis Farrakhan organizes the Million Man March in Washington, D.C. Hundreds of thousands of men gather on the Mall in a demonstration of unity, pride and brotherhood.

1920s: The National Woman's party meets in Seneca Falls, New York, in 1922 and endorses an Equal Rights Amendment drafted by founder Alice Paul.

1920: Women's suffrage is proclaimed in effect August 26 following Tennessee's ratification of the nineteenth amendment. 1990s: In 1991 Anita Hill charges that Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas made indecent

1990s: Though the Equal Rights Amendment was never ratified, women such as Loida N. Lewis, the chairperson and CEO of Beatrice International, a company with $2.1 billion in revenues, continue to assume important roles in business, politics, and culture.

her townspeople. As an anthropologist, she treasured the myths, legends, and folklore that combined to create the unique African-American culture. Hurston's cultural pride and anthropological interests fused in her fiction. She recorded the voice of her native townspeople in an authentic manner, effectively capturing the mood, speech patterns, attitudes, and customs of Eatonville. Today, one of the most noted features of Hurston's fiction is her use of the African-American dialect in the speech of her characters. The movement toward declaring and preserving black pride and identity that began in the 1920s continues to grow.

"The Eatonville Anthology" has attracted critical attention for a variety of reasons. Initially, critics examined this story in relation to other anthologies such as Spoon River Anthology by Edgar Lee Masters and Winesburg, Ohio by Sherwood Anderson. In his essay entitled ' 'The Establishment of Community in Zora Neale Hurston's 'The Eatonville Anthology' and Rolando Hinojosa's 'Estampas del valle'," critic Heiner Bus sees similarities between the works of such mainstream male writers and Hurston's story. The need for community and identity is felt particularly by minorities who live within a larger mainstream society, claims Bus. He writes: ' The trust in the power of the word as a tool to overcome powerlessness, forced muteness, is a first step towards identity and visibility as a group."

Critical Overview

Robert Hemenway discusses the significance of ' 'The Eatonville Anthology'' in his book Zora Neale Hurston: A Literary Biography. He calls the story Hurston's "most effective attempt at representing the original tale-telling context [and] the best written representation of her oral art." Hemenway further praises "The Eatonville Anthology" for its festive mood, which conjures the image of Hurston telling stories at a party. Integrat-

After suffering many years in obscurity, Hurston's work began to garner more critical attention in 1973. In that year, noted African-American author Alice Walker travelled to Alabama to find and mark Hurston's grave. This event marked the beginning of a renewed interest in Hurston's work.

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ing her interest in anthropology into her fiction, Hurston incorporated traditional African-American folklore into her tales of Eatonville. As a source of local color, "The Eatonville Anthology" is a treasure of African-American dialect and central Florida rural geography. Critic Geneva Cobb-Moore discusses this aspect of the story in her essay "Zora Neale Hurston as Local Colorist." Cobb-Moore writes: "Florida's rich topography, the Eatonville community, and Joe Clarke's store porch are permanent features in Hurston's local colorist works." The critic elaborates on Hurston's significance, noting that literary critics ' 'have come to acknowledge the national or even universal dimensions and implications of regional literature and see it as echoing certain moral and historical truths about our humanity."

Criticism Judy Sobeloff Judy Sobeloff is an instructor at the University of Michigan and the winner of the PEN Northwest Fellowship writing residency award. In the following essay, Sobeloff discusses the themes, origins, and construction of Hurston's story "The Eatonville Anthology.'' A major figure of the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s, Zora Neale Hurston published more books in her lifetime than any other African-American woman, spoke at major universities and received honorary doctorates, and was described in the New York Herald Tribune as being one of the nation's top writers. Her 1937 novel Their Eyes Were Watching God is widely considered a masterpiece today, and one of the most important works of fiction ever written by an African-American woman. Alice Walker insists in the foreword to Hurston's biography: "There is no book more important to me than this one." Yet Hurston died in poverty in 1960, and was buried in an unmarked grave. In an essay published in 1972, biographer Robert Hemenway describes her as ' 'one of the most significant unread authors in America." The following year, however, Walker traveled to Florida to find and honor Hurston's grave. According to scholars Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Sieglinde Lemke in the ' 'Introduction' ' to The Complete Stories a rising black femi-

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nist movement "seized upon [Hurston] as the canonical black foremother." This recognition thus restored Hurston's place in the American literary landscape. Hurston was notable as a novelist, short story writer, critic, and also as the country's most important collector of African-American folklore. Born and raised in the small, all-black community of Eatonville, Florida, she had a lifelong interest in anthropology and returned to Eatonville after graduating from Barnard College in New York City to study her townspeople. She frequently used material she gathered in her anthropological work in her fiction. "The Eatonville Anthology" is based on real people and real events of Eatonville, and Hemenway considers it to be Hurston's most successful attempt to "fuse folklore and fiction." While Hurston achieved success during her lifetime, she could be controversial and provocative as well. Her writing might be considered "politically incorrect" by some. Hurston's use of dialect and stereotypes in her writing has received praise from critics, but she has also been faulted for portraying African Americans negatively. Hurston's views on race relations were also controversial. She told at least one reporter that she opposed desegregation, though as Walker pointed out, a woman from an allblack town where blacks held all positions of power could quite reasonably see little to be gained from integrating with whites. Hurston's writing differed sharply from other women writers of the Harlem Renaissance. It frequently rejected upper middle-class values, it employed African-American dialect, and her female characters were interested in sex. Critic P. Gabrielle Foreman holds in her essay in Black American Literature Forum that Hurston was unlike other black women writers such as Jessie Redmon Fauset and Nella Larsen. Foreman feels that these writers ' 'composed books, draped among other things, with women who don heavy silks and satins and who adorn their satiny yellow skin with pretty party dresses described in detail." Hurston wrote of characters whose response to life was visceral, and who lived according to the rituals of their own communities. Hurston frequently had to struggle to make a living in the latter part of her life. After interest in black literature and art waned at the end of the Harlem Renaissance, Hurston ceased to write about the people and customs of Eatonville. She turned

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What Do I Read Next? Their Eyes Were Watching God, Hurston's most celebrated novel, first published in 1937. A classic of African-American Literature, it tells the story of Janie Crawford's evolving selfhood through three marriages. The Bluest Eye, written by Toni Morrison and published in 1970, is the story of Pecola Breedlove, an eleven-year-old black girl who believes she is ugly and longs for blue eyes. Her obsession with blue eyes turns to insanity after her father rapes her and she gives birth to a premature baby who later dies. The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of AfricanAmerican Literary Criticism (1988) by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. is a study in which Gates explores the relationship between the African and African-American vernacular traditions and black literature. Gates explains a new critical approach located within this tradition that allows the black voice to speak for itself.

toward a more conservative choice of material: her last published novel, Seraph on the Suwanee, concerned the lives of white characters, a radical change in subject matter for Hurston. Her book after that, which she had been toiling over when she died, was a biography of the Roman ruler Herod the Great, the rebuilder of Jerusalem's Great Temple. Hurston's "The Eatonville Anthology," first published in The Messenger magazine in three installments in 1926, has attracted attention for a variety of reasons. Critic Heiner Bus examines "The Eatonville Anthology" in his essay "The Establishment of Community in Zora Neale Hurston's 'The Eatonville Anthology' and Rolando Hinojosa's 'Estampas del valle'." Bus discusses Hurston's story in the context of other well-known works about American small-town life, such as Edgar Lee Masters' Spoon River Anthology (1915), Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio (1919), Sinclair Lewis' Main Street (1920), and Thornton

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Zora Neale Hurston: A Literary Biography (1980), by Robert E. Hemenway, is the story of Hurston and her extremely colorful life and career. It features a foreword by Alice Walker and contains extensive notes and bibliography. In addition to the details of Hurston's life, this text is a good source for information on the Harlem Renaissance. The Power of the Porch: The Storyteller's Craft in Zora Neale Hurston, Gloria Naylor, and Randall Kenan by Trudier Harris, a professor of English at the University of North Carolina, discusses how Southern literature is celebrated. Harris asserts that Hurston, Naylor, and Kenan skillfully use storytelling techniques to define their audiences, reach out and draw them in, and fill them with anticipation. Harris gives Hurston special recognition as a woman writing during the Harlem Renaissance and discusses how her various roles as an anthropologist, folklorist, and novelist impact her work.

Wilder's Our Town (1938), all of which were written by white men. Bus sees similarities between the works of mainstream and minority authors but believes that themes like community and continuity, certainly prevalent in ' "The Eatonville Anthology," (in segment XI, Double-Shuffle, for example), have "special connotations in the work of ethnic writers." The need for community and identity is particularly felt by minorities who live within a larger mainstream society. Bus writes: "The trust in the power of the word as a tool to overcome powerlessness, forced muteness, is a first step towards identity and visibility as a group." Hurston's portrayal of Eatonville gives her community visibility and power. Hurston's remarkable ear for dialect and use of authentic detail captures the words of her townspeople just as they would have spoken them. Hemenway sees the significance of "The Eatonville Anthology" as "Hurston's most effec-

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Hurston incorporated pieces of traditional AfricanAmerican folklore into 'The Eatonville Anthology,1 and one of the most interesting aspects of the story is the way she later used bits of it again and again in her other works."

live attempt at representing the original tale-telling context [and] the best written representation of her oral art." He further observes that ' 'The Eatonville Anthology" is the "literary equivalent of Hurston's memorable performances at parties. The reader has the impression of sitting in a corner listening to anecdotes." Some of the events described in "Anthology" actually occurred in Eatonville—for example, the thieving dog Tippy and Mrs. Tony Roberts, the pleading woman, among others, were real according to Hemenway. Other events in the story are based on "folktales or jokes known not only to Hurston but to many other traditional storytellers." Hemenway continues: "Joe Lindsay, the greatest liar in the village, tells a tale so common that folklorists have classified it as Type 660: The Three Doctors."' Heiner Bus comments on Hurston's use of the Brer Rabbit tale in a footnote to his essay, noting that the Brer Rabbit story appears in both the Funk & Wagnalls Standard Dictionary of Folklore, Mythology, and Legend and in The Book of Negro Folklore. According to his interpretation,' 'projecting human behavior into the animal world signifies . . . an effort to conjure up imperial power in a situation of oppression." Hurston incorporated pieces of traditional African-American folklore into "The Eatonville Anthology,' ' and one of the most interesting aspects of the story is the way she later used bits of it again and again in her other works. Alice Walker observes: "Everything she experienced in Eatonville she eventually put into her books. Indeed, one gets the feeling that she tried over and over again with the

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same material until she felt she had gotten it right." For example, the real mayor of Eatonville, Joe Clarke, appears in "The Eatonville Anthology" and also turns up later in Their Eyes Were Watching God, as Mayor Jody Starks. Segment IX of "Eatonville" which focuses on Joe's unhappy "softlooking, middle-aged'' wife becomes the seed for Jody and Janie's relationship in the novel Their Eyes Were Watching God. Bus observes that Daisy Taylor, of segment XII, reappears in an unpublished play Hurston wrote with Langston Hughes entitled Mule Bone: A Comedy of Negro Life. The Brer Rabbit segment appears again in Hurston's collection of folklore, Mules and Men. Critic JoAnne Cornwell sees Brazzle's mule of segment VII in ' 'Anthology'' in the mule belonging to Matt Bonner in Their Eyes and pleading Mrs. Roberts, of segment I, still pleading in the form of Mrs. Robbins, also in Their Eyes. Hemenway reports that the events of segment II, Turpentine Love, are repeated in Seraph in the Suwanee, except with white characters instead of blacks. He also points out the events described in ' 'Pants and Cal'line'' are based on Hurston's Aunt Cal'line and her Uncle Jim in her autobiography, Dust Tracks on a Road, with one notable difference. The difference highlights a further reason ' 'The Eatonville Anthology" is important to study: the story was overlooked (or treated carelessly) in much the same way Hurston herself was overlooked in the latter part of her life. According to Hemenway, a "printing mishap" caused "Pants and Cal'line," (Segment XIII) to "go incomplete'' when the printer or editor apparently lost part of the story. In the real-life incident that is the basis for this section, Hurston's aunt tracked down her husband at the home of one of his mistresses and returned home with his pants slung over an axe. In ' "The Eatonville Anthology," the axe that Cal'line is mysteriously carrying on her way to Delphine's is never explained. The reader never learns the outcome of the confrontation, nor is the significance of the "Pants" of the title ever explained. According to Hemenway, ' 'the error does nothing more than indicate some of the loose editorial practices of the understaffed, underpaid, overworked Messenger office," the Messenger being the ' 'only radical Negro magazine in America'' at that time. The omission was not intentional, but nonetheless, as Andrew Crosland points out, "The Eatonville Anthology" has been reprinted in several anthologies, due to "the Hurston revival," but without the explanation necessary to understand the story.

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Hurston's talents were recognized and applauded during the Harlem Renaissance, then largely forgotten for years. Studying "The Eatonville Anthology" will further the reader's understanding and appreciation of the town that gave rise to this story and the larger works that grew out of it as well. Source: Judy Sobeloff, for Short Stories for Students, Gale Research, 1997.

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y capturing the reality, the vivacity and the cultural wealth of the Eatonville community, Hurston immortalizes folk

Geneva Cobb-Moore In the following article, Cobb-Moore analyzes Hurston 's writing as an example o f ' 'local color,'' stories that represent the everyday life of a particular region, in this case, Eatonville, Florida. Since Zora Neale Hurston's death in 1960, an impressive number of artists and scholars have rescued her from an undeserved obscurity, best symbolized by her burial in an unmarked grave in a segregated potter's field. They have restored to her in death the fame and following that eluded her in life. Hurston's rescue began in 1973 when Alice Walker flew to Florida and visited Lee-Peek Mortuary in Fort Pierce to locate the cemetery where Hurston is buried. Finding what she believed was the grave, Walker then had a monument erected for the site. In 1977, Robert Hemenway published her biography, Zora Neale Hurston, to national acclaim. Both Walker and Hemenway pay respect to a writer whom Barbara Christian in Black Women Novelists and Henry Louis Gates in ' 'A Negro Way of Saying" correctly assert is the literary model for the contemporary African-American female writer who writes realistic fiction of black women seeking self-fulfillment and self-empowerment. Since Mary Helen Washington's lament in Black-Eyed Susans (1975) about Hurston's neglect in literature and women's studies courses across America, Hurston's most popular novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), has become a perennial classroom favorite. There is an annual Zora Neale Hurston Festival in Hurston's hometown, Eatonville, Florida, which N. Y. Nathiri, one of Hurston's most devoted loyalists, coordinates. In 1991, Nathiri edited an informational book, Zora!, on Hurston and Eatonville, containing memories of the writer by relatives and friends. From those who misunderstood her, like Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison, who thought her "black-minstrel" characters were created to humor a patronizing white audience, to those who loved her, like Alice Walker, Mary Ellen Washington, and Barbara Christian, who thought her a controversial but brilliant feminist, Zora Neale Hurston has stirred

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the emotions of critics and devotees in a variety of ways and has been called alternately minstrel, novelist, anthropologist, voodoo priestess, feminist, and folklorist. I think her real significance as writerfolklorist is best summarized by her biographer, Robert Hemenway, who writes: Zora was concerned less with the tactics of racial uplift than with the unexamined prejudice of American social science. She became a folklorist at a time when white sociologists were obsessed with what they thought was pathology in black behavior, when white psychologists spoke of the deviance in black mental health, and when the discipline of anthropology used a research model that identified black people as suffering from cultural deprivation. Hurston's folklore collections refuted these stereotypes by celebrating the distinctiveness of traditional black culture, and her scholarship is now recognized by revisionist scientists questioning the racial assumptions of modern cultural theory.

Because the Eatonville townspeople were the models of Hurston's factual and fictive folksy, cultural richness, I find that she emerges most clearly as something that no critic, to my knowledge, has yet remarked upon: local colorist. Local color as a genre and technique emerged after the Civil War in 1868 with Bret Harte's "fresh pictures of California mining camps," although in its nineteenth-century manifestations local color often painted a rather shallow, genteel picture of life. But the concept has undergone considerable changes because of writers like Mark Twain, William Faulkner, Eudora Welty, and Zora Neale Hurston. Critics now acknowledge the national or even universal dimensions and implications of regional literature and see it as echoing certain moral and historical truths about our humanity....

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Florida's rich topography, the Eatonville community, and Joe Clarke's store porch are permanent features in Hurston's local colorist works. Eatonville is at the heart of her upbringing, from living in this all-black town to attending an all-black school to being an inheritor of an all-black oral tradition, revived gloriously and hilariously on a local entrepreneur' s front porch where people gathered to bask and bake in a hot Florida sun. When Hurston writes in "How It Feels to be Colored Me" that she is not "tragically colored" and does not belong to the "sobbing school of Negrohood who hold[s] that Nature somehow has given them a ... dirty deal," we look to the proud racial heritage of the Eatonville community to understand and appreciate her racial pride. This was no easy feat in the Jim Crow decades of the 1920s, 30s and 40s when African-Americans were made to feel their apartness from the rest of humanity by ubiquitous signs that read ' 'For Whites'' and "For Coloreds." Hurston's attitude and her emergence as a local colorist was bolstered by Columbia University anthropologist and scholar Franz Boas, a German emigre, who encouraged Hurston as a Barnard College student to develop the anthropological tools required to enable her to return to Eatonville and collect, record, and examine the rich folk material passed around matter-offactly on Clarke's store porch. It was Boas who questioned the theory of Anglo-Saxon superiority in the twentieth century, stating it "is hardly possible to predict what would be the achievement of the Negro if he were able to live with Whites on absolutely equal terms." Hurston's return to the South and to Florida was essential to her development as scholar of local culture and to her legacy as a precursor of Afrocentric scholars. Boas and Hurston knew that unlike black Northerners, black Southerners retained distinct Africanisms due to the rigidity of a Southern antebellum and post-bellum racial system that kept whites and blacks separated, culturally as well as physically. In Mules and Men Hurston writes: ' 'I hurried back to Eatonville because I knew that the town was full of material and that I could get it without hurt, harm or danger . . . As I crossed the Maitland-Eatonville township line I could see a group on the store porch. I was delighted." Many of the folktales Hurston retells are a curious blend of the townspeople's healthy racial ethnocentrism, rooted and nurtured in a region that appears lovely but primeval, and their hilarious

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racial stereotyping. Consider the tale of Gold, a bold woman who enters the male-dominated sanctuary of Joe Clarke's porch and tells the tale of how God "gave out color": ... one day He said, 'Tomorrow morning, at seven o'clock sharp, I aim to give out color. Everybody be here on time. I got plenty of creating to do tomorrow, and I want to give out this color and get it over wid. Everybody be' round de throne at seven o'clock tomorrow morning. So next morning at seven o'clock, God was sitting on His throne with His big crown on His head and seven suns circling around His head. Great multitudes was standing around the throne waiting to get their color. God sat up there and looked east, and He looked west, and He looked north and He looked Australia, and blazing worlds were falling off His teeth. So He looked over to His left and moved His hands over a crowd, and said, 'You's yellow people'.... He looked at another crowd... and said, 'You's red folks!'.... He looked towards the center and moved His hand over another crowd and said, 'You's white folks!'... Then God looked way over to the right and said, 'Look here, Gabriel, I miss a lot of multitudes from around the throne this morning'.... Gabriel run off and started to hunting around. Way after while, he found the missing multitudes lying around on the grass by the Sea of Life, fast asleep. So Gabriel woke them up and told them.... Old Maker is might wore out from waiting. Fool with Him and He won't give out no more color!... they all jumped up and went running towards the throne, hollering, 'Give us our color! We want our color! We got just as much right to color as anybody else'.... [they were] pushing and shoving.... God said, 'Here! Here! Git back! Git back!'... they misunderstood Him, and thought He said, 'Git black!' So they just got black, and kept the thing-a-going!....

A favorite Hurston remark to be found in almost all of her fiction is "the porch laughed" or "the porch was boiling now." The use of metonymy stresses the communal gathering on Joe Clarke's store porch and the townspeople's enjoyment. The tall-tales had, also, the distinction of breaking the monopoly of daily tedium while encouraging the socialization of men and women who were miraculously transformed on the porch into griots, poets, and philosophers. Hurston makes the reader cognizant of a congenial, group-like ethos of Eatonville society. The people were one. According to Levine, even this communal oneness is rooted deeply in the early African-American experience and its slave legacy. Levine argues that "in the midst of the brutalities and injustices of the Antebellum and post-bellum racial systems, black men and women were able to find the means to sustain a far greater degree of self-pride and group cohesion than the system they lived under ever intended for them to be able to do.'' Joe Clarke's store porch was not only a

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place for entertainment and cultural exchanges, it was, too, a safe haven, sheltering locals from a larger hostile environment while creating the illusion (or perhaps the reality) that no other world existed or mattered.... Finally, Zora Neale Hurston develops a distinctive African-American female voice in literature. It is a voice deeply rooted in the African-American experience from Africa to America. As a local colorist, Hurston presents an intimate portrayal of lives changed and yet strangely unchanged by the experiences of the African Diaspora. By capturing the reality, the vivacity and the cultural wealth of the Eatonville community, Hurston immortalizes folk characters and their spirited survival and expands the meaning of local color. She proves once and for all that while physical bodies can be restricted, the imagination is always free. Source: Geneva Cobb-Moore, "Zora Neale Hurston as Local Colorist," in The Southern Literary Journal, Vol. 25, No. 2, Spring, 1994, pp. 25-34.

Andrew Crosland In the following excerpt, Crosland alerts readers of "The Eatonville Anthology" to editorial errors in one of the story's sections, which Hurston never corrected due to the story's lack of attention in her lifetime. Several times during Zora Neale Hurston's career, the printed texts of her works did not reflect her exact intentions. These textual corruptions hurt her reputation as a creative artist. Unfortunately, the textual problems that recurred during her lifetime have also haunted the posthumous revival of her reputation begun by Alice Walker in 1975. Zora Neale Hurston first published "The Eatonville Anthology" serially in the 1926 September, October, and November issues of the Messenger. The work consists of fourteen parts variously based on folk tales, jokes, or Hurston's childhood memories. This composite communicates the black ethos which nurtured the author in her early years. The thirteenth piece in "The Eatonville Anthology," published at the end of the segment appearing in the October Messenger, treats a confrontation between Sister Cal'line Potts and her roaming husband Mitchell. She spots him sneaking away to visit his girlfriend with a gift of new shoes.

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The betrayed wife picks up an axe and stalks him, much to the amusement of the idlers at Clark's store who watch both pass. Then the story ends abruptly. Sister Cal'line and Mitchell are mentioned nowhere else in the "Anthology," and their fate is never disclosed. Readers are further perplexed by the title of this piece,' 'Pants and Cal'line," because the story contains no reference to pants. Robert Hemenway, Hurston's biographer, offers an explanation. He says that "a printing mishap caused . .. "Pants and Cal'line" to go incomplete, the printer or editor apparently losing part of the story." ' The Eatonville Anthology" was not reprinted during Hurston's lifetime, so she had no opportunity to publish a corrected text. She did, however, tell the story again in her 1942 autobiography, Dust Tracks on a Road. This version is about Hurston's Aunt Caroline and Uncle Jim. In it, Caroline follows Jim to his girlfriend's house, breaks in using the axe, and chases away her husband, who is in his underwear. She follows him home, her axe draped with his pants and a pair of new shoes. This telling of the story provides a satisfactory ending for "Pants and Cal'line" and explains the title. Hurston died in poverty and obscurity in 1960, her literary reputation at its nadir. In 1975, Alice Walker published' 'In Search of Zora Neale Hurston" in Ms., beginning a revival of Hurston's literary reputation. Four years later, Walker edited a collection of Hurston's work titled / Love Myself When I Am Laughing ... and Then When I Am Looking Mean and Impressive. This book reprints the corrupted text of "The Eatonville Anthology" as well as the excerpt from which tells the story again. The two pieces are not printed side-by-side, end no editorial note links them. Yet the alert reader should be able to determine what is missing from the "Anthology."

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The Hurston revival is apparently successful, and a growing numberofworksby andabouther are making their wayinto print. ' 'TheEatonville Anthology" has been included in TheNorton Bookof American Short Stories (1988)and in TheNorton Anthologyof American Literature (1989).... Source: Andrew Crosland, "TheText of Zora NealeHurston: A Caution," in CIA Journal, Vol.XXXVII, No. 4, June, 1994, pp. 420-21.

Heiner Bus In the following essay, Bus discusses Eatonville Anthology "as anexample of apresentation of a stable communityinwhich change is not desirable. Sucha workismore correctly readas an exampleof storytelling,not drama.

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and Rolando Hinojosa's 'Estampas del valle' European PerspectivesonHispanic Literature oftheUnited States, edited by Genvieve Fabre, Arte Publico 1988, pp. 66-81.

(19 Press,

Sources "Conjure Into Being: Zora Neale Hurston's "Their Were Watching God'," on Rita Hooks' homepage, Petersboro Junior College, http://splavc.spjc.cc.fl.us/hooks/ Zorasig.html, 1997.

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Cornwell, JoAnne. "Searching for Zora in Alice's Garden: Rites of Passage inHurston's Their Eyes WereWatchingGod and Walker's TheThird Lifeof GrangeCopeland, " in Walker and Zora Neale Hurston: TheCommon Bond, edited by Lillie P. Howard, Greenwood Press, 1993, pp. 97-107 Foreman, P. Gabrielle. "LookingBack from Zora, orTalking Out Both Sides My Mouth for Those WhoHave Two Ears, "in Black American Literature Forum,Volume 24, no. 4, 1990, pp. 649-666. Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. and Sieglinde Lemke. "Introduction," in The Complete Stories, by Zora Neale Hurston, HarperCollins, 1995, pp.ix-xxiii. Hemenway, Robert E. Zora Neale Hurston: A Literary Biography, University ofIllinois, 1980.

Source: Heiner Bus, Zora Neale Hurston's

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"TheEstablishment of Community in The Eatonville Anthology'

Walker, Alice. "Foreword," in ILove Myself WhenI Am Laughing ... And Then Again When I AmLooking Mean and Impressive: A Zora Neale Hurston Reader, Feminist (1926)1979. Press,

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The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World Gabriel Garcia Marquez began writing fiction as a young journalist in Bogota, Colombia, in the late 1940s. His masterpiece, Cien anos de soledad (One Hundred Years of Solitude), received worldwide critical acclaim when it was published, first in Spanish in 1967 and then in translation after 1970. Many of his short stories were written before this novel, but were not published collectively until 1972 or later. Thus, readers and critics were already familiar with his style when they read ' "The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World," one of the short stories published in Leaf Storm and Other Stories in 1972.

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Garcia Marquez, considered by many to be Colombia's foremost writer, has gained much of his recognition by writing stories that operate on a mythical, almost allegorical, level.' 'The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World'' takes this type of storytelling into a realm of the fantastic that seems to have no connection to a particular time or place. Nevertheless, Garcia Marquez has been influenced by his upbringing in a coastal Colombian village during the turbulent 1930s. While drawing direct parallels between specific locations and time periods is possible, the nature of Garcia Marquez's work is such that readers can understand his characters not only as inhabitants of a local village but, simultaneously, as universal examples of the human race as well. "The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World'' has always interested critics, both those who interpret the story as a comment on Colombian

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history or politics and those who seek more global applications for the lessons the story imparts. Many post-modern writers have shown interest in Garcia Marquez's work as well. They include Chilean writer Isabelle Allende and American writer Toni Morrison, both of whom have adapted Garcia Marquez's magic realism approach in their own works.

Author Biography Born in 1928, Gabriel Jose Garcia Marquez spent the first eight years of his life in the small Colombian village of Aracataca. His grandmother cultivated his imagination with fantastic stories of Colombian history and myth. Her influence, combined with the superstitions and myths of the townspeople, provided the writer with a rich background from which he created his fiction. Upon returning to Aracataca some years later, Garcia Marquez found the town suffering from many years of economic and social decline. A sense of nostalgia for his first home spurred his sense of history and his desire to preserve the great myths and stories of his childhood. Garcia Marquez attended the University of Bogota. In 1948 it closed down due to civil warfare, and he transferred to the University of Cartegena and entered the journalism field. He eventually left school to pursue this career full time, publishing short pieces of fiction in addition to news stories. His first novella, La hojarasca was published in 1955. It was translated into English in 1972 as the title piece in Leaf Storm and Other Stories, which included the translation of' The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World." Meanwhile, Garcia Marquez's journalism had become increasingly political. After writing a series of articles exposing the carrying of contraband cargo by the Colombian navy, he moved to Europe to avoid the wrath of the government. Most of Garcia Marquez's short stories were written in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Many of these were collected and published in 1972 under such titles as Ojos de perro azul (Eyes of a Blue Dog), and La incredible y triste historia de la Candida Erendira y de su abuela desalmada (The Incredible and Sad Story of Poor Erendira and Her Heartless Grandmother). Critics generally considered these works unconventional because of their

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use of such experimental techniques as multiple narrators, shifting points of view, and fantastic events. Another collection, Los funerales de la Mama Grande (The Funeral of Big Mama), found an enthusiastic audience who admired its use of archetypal, mythical characters who function in timeless, often nameless, places. Garcia Marquez remains best known, however, for his many novels. He achieved worldwide fame for his 1967 masterpiece Cien anos de soledad (One Hundred Years of Solitude), which tells the history of the fictional village of Macondo, based on the real history of Aracataca. After living in Paris, and then returning to Colombia, Garcia Marquez settled in Mexico, where he now resides. He is widely considered Colombia's foremost writer. In 1982 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature, an indication of his worldwide reputation.

Plot Summary "The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World" begins when the children of a small coastal village see an unfamiliar bulge in the sea. When it washes up on the beach they realize it is a drowned man. For the rest of the afternoon they play with the corpse until another villager sees them and tells the rest of the villagers. The men of the village then carry the body to the nearest house, remarking that he weighs almost as much as a horse. He is also taller than other men and barely fits in the house. The tiny village sits on the cliff of a sparsely vegetated cape. The villagers twenty or so houses have stone courtyards in which no flowers grow. That evening the men travel to neighboring villages to see if any of them will claim the dead stranger. While they are gone the women of the village care for the drowned man, noticing that the vegetation growing on him comes from distant oceans and that his clothes are tattered. He also seems proud. Not until they finish cleaning the body do the women see how awesome a man he is. He is the most supreme example of a man they have ever seen—the tallest, strongest, most virile, and best built. He is so large that nothing in the village will fit him: not a bed, a table, nor a set of clothes. The women decide to make him pants from a sail and a shirt from fine bridal linen so they can bury him

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with dignity. As they sew, they begin to create a fantasy about the man. They think that if such a man lived among them, doors would be wider, ceilings higher, floors and bedsteads stronger, and his wife would be the happiest woman. The man could call fish out of the sea and make flowers grow on the dry cliffs. Even now, because of him, the wind is steadier than ever and the sea more restless. The women secretly compare him to their own men, who suddenly seem the weakest, meanest, and most useless people. They name him Esteban, further personalizing him. They realize that he will have to be dragged along the ground to be buried in the sea. That is when they realize how unhappy he must have been with his body while he was alive. He would have been forever ducking under doorways and hitting his head on the ceiling. When visiting people, he would have had to stand in order not to break his guests' furniture, and he would have never known if people were being polite to him simply because they feared his size. When the women cover his face with a handkerchief he looks so irrevocably dead—and so much like their own men would look—that they cry for him, and he becomes the most destitute, most peaceful, and most obliging man on earth. The men return at dawn with the news that Esteban is not from any of the neighboring villages, and the women rejoice that he belongs to them. The men want to throw the body into the sea and get rid of the intruder, but the more they hurry, the more excuses the women come up with to keep him. One of the men finally expresses anger that the women are making such a fuss over a stranger, and the women remove the handkerchief covering Esteban's face. With one look, the men can see Esteban's shame at his size and for disrupting them. The villagers, now united, hold a splendid funeral for Esteban. The village is filled with flowers and neighbors who have heard of the drowned man. Saddened at having to lose him, the villagers choose a family for him and make everyone his kin. Their sadness is so powerful that sailors at sea who hear their weeping run off course. After Esteban is gone, they know there will always be one missing among them. The villagers now see the barrenness of their village and their lives. After the funeral, they decide to change things: they will build bigger houses so Esteban's memory will have no trouble visiting; they will paint their homes to honor his memory; and they will plant flowers on the cliffs so that in the

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future passengers on ocean liners will smell the aroma and the captains of the ships will point to their roses and say: "That's Esteban's village."

Characters Esteban Although he is a stranger—and a dead stranger at that—Esteban plays a central role in the villagers' lives. He does not speak, yet his face and his body speak for him, telling the villagers how sorry he is to be such a bother, large and cumbersome as he is. They intuit that he is kind and considerate, yet authoritative enough to command the fish to jump into his boat when he is fishing. The women of the village find him ' 'speaking'' to them in other ways, making them compare their husbands to his splendid size and handsome features. His presence in the village forces them to examine their lives and to work together to beautify their village. Esteban exists, then, not in the body of the dead man the village children have found on the beach, but in the minds of the villagers themselves, who are inspired to better their lives.

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The Villagers The inhabitants of this tiny fishing village struggle daily in a harsh climate. Their strip of land is so narrow that there is not even enough room to bury their dead. The village is so small that the drowned man is immediately identified as a stranger, since ' 'they simply had to look at one another to see that they were all there." No one in the village is named, increasing the sense that they live and act as a group. The women respond to Esteban with care, then admiration, then longing, and finally, ownership. The men respond at first with irritation and jealousy, but gradually they too begin to feel compassion and pity. The solidarity of the villagers is borne out by the way that all of them take responsibility for Esteban just as all of them will eventually take responsibility for beautifying their village after he is gone. Garcia Marquez used the village of Aracataca and its people as loose models for this story, which also reflects his socialistic beliefs.

Themes When a large drowned man washes up on the beach of a tiny fishing village, his presence inspires the villagers to create fantastic stories about him and to improve their own lives as well.

Myth and the Human Condition ' 'The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World'' illustrates the collective human tendency to create myths. The form of the story makes clear that the "long ago and far away" setting of the story takes precedence over a reading of the story that places the village in an exact location or time period. Myths often center around heroic figures whose special powers or deeds create an ideal that members of that society may attempt to live up to. Esteban becomes such an ideal for the villagers, who are so inspired by him that they plant beautiful gardens and improve their homes "so that Esteban's memory could go everywhere without bumping into beams." Thus, this once dirty and diminished drowned man inspires an entire village to strive for something better and more beautiful. Such myths last through time and across cultures, as demonstrated at the end of the story when it is predicted that captains of passenger ships will identify "Esteban's village" for curious passengers. That the human imagination seeks explanations for the unknown is the focus of the tale. Much of the

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story involves village women creating stories about Esteban's life and what it would be like to share it with him: "They thought that if that magnificent man had lived in the village, his house would have had the widest doors, the highest ceiling, and the strongest floor, his bedstead would have been made from a midship frame held together by iron bolts, and his wife would have been the happiest woman." Through their imagination Esteban is first admirable, then lovable, and finally cherished by all. He becomes representative of the whole village, and at his funeral they choose relatives for him in such a way ' 'that through him all the inhabitants of the village became kinsmen." This act highlights another aspect of the human condition: the need to reach out to others and become connected in some way. By casting Esteban back into the sea from which he came, the villagers recognize the ocean as a bond, a connection between other people and other lands, including the faraway land from which the drowned man originated.

Beauty and Aesthetics The importance of the drowned man to the village is in direct proportion to the villagers' perception of his beauty. When he first washes onto the beach, covered with seaweed and grime, the children of the village think of him as no more than a novel plaything. It is only after the women of the village begin to clean him off that they appreciate his strength and beauty. They are so amazed at his physical being that "there was no room for him in their imagination." But soon they do use their imaginations, attributing to him not only pride and authority, but also obliging tenderness and consideration. Esteban's beauty gains him a sympathetic viewpoint in their imaginations. His beauty and size contrast with not only their men—who by comparison are "the weakest, meanest, and most useless creatures on earth"—but with the village itself. Their hastily constructed homes and empty courtyards on a tiny, bare strip of land reflect the villagers themselves, who have little understanding of or imagination for things outside of their own subsistence. Esteban, by bringing beauty into the village, initiates a permanent change of character for the villagers. Their willingness to reach out to Esteban and claim him as one of their own in order to ' 'lose'' him at the funeral has created a sense that there is something more for them than life and death: there is beauty, something entirely extraordinary. Thus the story of Esteban becomes, for the villagers, the story about the power of beauty to enter and change their lives.

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Style The arrival of a large drowned man on their shores inspires the imagination of the inhabitants of a tiny fishing village.

Point of View The simplicity with which "The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World" is told conceals a rather complex narrative technique. The villagers, finding a drowned man on their beach, begin to admire and then love him as they prepare him for proper burial. The third-person narrator, however, only describes the man through the eyes of the villagers. It is their conceptualization of the drowned man, not any objective viewpoint, that the reader receives. Furthermore, the point of view shifts away from the villagers at certain times in the narrative, such as when the imaginary hostess worries about her chair and he ' 'never knowing perhaps that the ones who said don't go, Esteban, at least wait till the coffee's ready, were the ones who later on would whisper the big boob finally left, how nice, the handsome fool has gone." This complex approach to narration provides cues not only about Esteban, but about the villagers themselves as they view him in the context of their own lives.

Setting The setting of the story is also more complex than it first seems. Because no exact location is named and the villagers appear to be isolated from the outside world, the village has the feel of a faraway land. The village does not have modern technology; they use a primitive, wheelless sled to convey Esteban to his funeral. Thus the story occupies a timeless, prehistoric era. Nevertheless, the seaside village is very similar to the coastal areas near Garcia Marquez's childhood home, and the ocean liners mentioned at the end of the story verify that this is an actual location in the present day which can be reached. The village, then, exists both as a faraway, mythical place, and as an actual locale. It represents something magic or mythical, but also something real.

Magic Realism Although the term was first used to refer to a modern type of painting in the 1920s, magic realism later became associated with a particular type of fiction, especially that written by Latin Americans in the 1950s and 1960s. Magic realist fiction incorporates both fantastic events and realistic details.

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Topics for Further Study Research La Violencia, Colombia's fifteen-year period of civil strife, and consider ways in which ' "The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World'' might be a comment on the events occurring in Colombia at this time. Look for information on the following religious and mythological figures in the story and analyze their significance to the work: St. Stephen, Estevanico, Jonah, Zeus, Quetzalcoatl. Read a chapter of Homer's Odyssey and look for points of similarity between Homer's tale and the events of this story. Explore the psychology of totemism and determine what Esteban has come to symbolize for the villagers.

The arrival of a "Wednesday dead body" on the shore of a fishing village is not necessarily a magical event. What brings the story into the realm of the fabulous is the reaction of the villagers, whose response to his arrival is anything but ordinary. That a dead man can have so much influence on a village full of people who seem used to finding drowning victims on their beach creates a sense that this event is something extraordinary. The mythical namelessness of the village and the historically vague setting add to this perception. At the same time, details such as the ocean liner at the end of the story ground it firmly in a real place and time. Thus the story is neither fantasy, nor reality, but a combination of the two. The impulse behind magic realism is often attributed to several factors, including the superstition of Latin America's indigenous populations. In the case of Garcia Marquez, credit is also given to the influence of his maternal grandmother, a storyteller whose magical tales affected Garcia Marquez's imagination very early in life.

Allusion Allusion in literature occurs when an aspect in a story implies or makes an indirect reference to

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something outside of the story. Garcia Marquez is well-known for his ability to blend native South American legends with European myths and stories. Even in a story as short as "The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World'' one can find allusions to the biblical story of Jonah (through the children's assumption that the form washing ashore is a beached whale), Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels (in which a shipwrecked man washes ashore in a country full of tiny people), and even the Greek god Zeus, whose sexual prowess highlights many Greek myths. More obvious allusions include the notion that Esteban connotes the ancient god Quetzalcoatl, who in Aztec myth emphasizes peacefulness and self-sacrifice when he comes from the sea. Like Esteban, Quetzalcoatl leaves via the sea, promising a return that leaves a lasting expectation in those he leaves behind. Esteban's name alludes to two historical figures: St. Stephen, the first Christian martyr, whose name is the English translation of Esteban; and Estevanico, an African who explored parts of the New World in the 1500s. Garcia Marquez also makes an allusion to the Greek warrior Odysseus, whose adventures are chronicled in Homer's Odyssey. Odysseus's seafaring adventures include a voyage past the Sirens, whose irresistible singing could not be heard by any man without him abandoning his destination and turning toward them. The women's crying at Esteban's funeral has a similar effect: "Some sailors who heard the weeping from a distance went off course and people heard of one who had himself tied to the mainmast, remembering ancient fables about sirens." The abundant allusions in the story suggest that the various cultures that Garcia Marquez refers to are more closely related than is often imagined. Every culture has its saints and its heroes; "The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World'' demonstrates the process through which these figures become important in their respective cultures.

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together in society) with their Spanish conquerors. Consequently, much of the Colombian population consists of mestizos—people of both native Colombian and Spanish origin. A former part of the Spanish colonial empire named New Granada that gained its freedom from Spain in 1810, Colombia suffered from several civil wars throughout the nineteenth century. By the mid-1800s Liberals and Conservatives comprised the opposing political groups that would subject Colombia to frequent and bloody revolutions. Severe fighting reached its height between 1899 and 1903, a period known as the War of a Thousand Days. During this time there was a continuing separation between wealthy elite landowners, often of European descent, and freed slaves and indigenous populations whose lands had been confiscated and redistributed. Meanwhile, Colombia was struggling to grow its export trade, which consisted largely of coffee, petroleum, and bananas, under Conservative leadership.

Social Policies The Depression of the 1930s meant severe economic hardship for Colombia due to its growing dependence on exporting goods whose worth plummeted on the world market. The Conservative government in power at this time was replaced by Liberal president Alfonso Lopez, whose biggest reform was a move to redistribute land from wealthy landowners who were not using their land productively to peasant "squatters" who depended on their plots for subsistence. The Depression also meant an increase in domestic industry, since competition with imported goods was significantly reduced. Assisting Colombia's poorest residents has been an ongoing concern for Colombian government, particularly during Liberal administrations.

La Violencia

Historical Context Political Background During the period of European imperialism following Columbus's arrival in the New World, Colombia's indigenous tribes could offer little resistance to Spanish conquest. For the most part, these tribes amalgamated (intermarried and lived

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Opposition between the Liberal and Conservative parties in Colombia has been extremely hostile and violent. This confrontation escalated during the period between 1948 and 1962 known as La Violencia. Although initially sparked by the assassination of Liberal leader Jorge Eliecer Gaitan, much of the following fifteen years of fighting was caused by existing hostilities between the two parties. Some 200,000 people lost their lives in the fighting, much of which involved extreme acts of cruelty to the victims.

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Contrast 1940s: Garcia Marquez composes several short stories that blend realistic elements with the fantastic. This style, known as magic realism, becomes popular among Hispanic writers. 1990s: Como agua para chocolate, a magic realist novel by Mexican writer Laura Esquivel, is translated into English as Like Water for Chocolate. The novel becomes a best-seller and spawns a popular film version. Colombia, 1950s: Colombia is in the midst of La Violencia, a fifteen-year period of violence in which over 200,000 people are murdered. Colombia, 1990s: Cocaine kingpin Pablo Escobar

La Violencia involved a wide spectrum of Colombians's concerns. Peasants who had improved their land under the 1930s land reform found that they were required to pay exorbitant legal fees to gain title in some areas of the country. Guerilla leaders, increasingly the sons of small farmers and merchants, were able to gain peasant support as they ambushed and retaliated against each other in longstanding feuds regarding family relationships, political party (which is inherited in Colombia), and government ties. Migrating groups of peasants looking for work in other areas joined the fray. The government abdicated control in many areas, leading to multiple bids for power by local groups in many towns and cities. It was during La Violencia that president Laureano Gomez, a Conservative, instituted a fascist government in an attempt to regain control. He was overthrown by the military and populist president General Gustave Rojas Pinilla, who in turn was driven from office by the military. Finally, the National Front, a coalition of Liberals and Conservatives, arranged a truce. Garcia Marquez covered many of these events as a journalist before treating them in his fictional works. La Violencia has been one of the most fictionalized events in Colombia's history.

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Gavira turns himself in to Colombian authorities to avoid facing trial in the United States. The lucrative cocaine trade has resulted in hundreds of murders within the past years, including the assassinations of top officials. Colombia, 1950s: Colombia's largest exports are fishing, forestry, and petroleum products. Coffee is the number one cash crop. Colombia, today: Coffee continues to be the country's leading legal export. Millions work in the fields harvesting coffee beans for as little as $1.50 per day.

The 1960s Colombia continued its struggle for economic development in the 1960s; intervention by the United States increased Colombia's dependence on outside assistance, but did little to help the economy. The 1960s were a period of high unemployment, low coffee export prices, and economic stagnation. Under Conservative president Guillermo Leon Valencia, union workers received a forty percent wage increase and inflation skyrocketed. Deflationary pricing resulted in high unemployment. Government policy later improved, however, and by the late 1960s Colombia's economy was growing again. During this time, migration to the cities continued, and by 1970 over half of Columbia's population consisted of urban residents.

Colombia Today Because so much of Colombia's development was distributed unevenly, there remains a large gap between economic classes. Approximately 20 percent of Colombia's population lives below the poverty level, many of them in slums on the outskirts of Colombia's urban areas. Fear of military intervention in the government, violence, and acts of terrorism still exist. A large drug-trafficking problem continues to plague the nation as well. Nevertheless,

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the decades after La Violencia have seen Colombia become one of the most urbanized and modernized countries in Latin America.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez and History Although little of Colombia's history makes its way into ' 'The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World," the history of Colombia is an important part of Garcia Marquez's work. The isolation of the village, the mythical sense of time portrayed, and the anonymity of the characters make the absence of history so obvious that one begins to question why Garcia Marquez has chosen deliberately to omit this information. This omission technique can be found in other works of magic realism as well. One explanation for its use, according to critics, is to protect the author, particularly if he or she is writing something controversial in countries where freedom of speech is curtailed by the government. By making the story "about" something other than one's own country, the writer can safely express controversial viewpoints. Another possibility is that Garcia Marquez avoids a specific history to make the characters and the action representative of all people, not just those of a particular place. Nevertheless, the kindness and love the villagers show to the drowned man, when read against the background of Colombian history, contrasts sharply with the violence and cruelty that belongs to much of Colombia's past.

Critical Overview Although Garcia Marquez wrote ' "The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World" several years before it and other short stories were published in English in 1972, most readers of English at that time knew only of his most famous work, One Hundred Years of Solitude. Many early reviewers were somewhat disappointed in the sparse, short stories. They contained neither the grand historic sweep of One Hundred Years nor the complex character development that wins reader affection through increased familiarity. John Sturrock in the New York Times Book Review considered the stories "makeweights," "the ambitious but as yet uncertain and over-abstract tales of a writer too young to recognize that even the most imaginative fiction needs to be filled with things as well as strange thoughts." Some reviewers expressed distaste for the Garcia Marquez's style. John Leonard in the New York Times called them ' 'rather typical examples of postwar existen-

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tialist futzing around." Leonard went on to say that ' 'humor is not permitted in such fiction, nor rounded characters, society, politics, history." Not all reviewers shared these opinions. Some found much to admire in Garcia Marquez's short stories, including not only his unique style and his social agenda but also his insistence that fantastic things are real. Alfred Kazin, in the New York Times Book Review, described the pressures of literary achievement and social responsibility that keep Garcia Marquez on the artistic side of propaganda. Kazin saw ' 'The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World" as a manifestation of the author's vision of the natural world as a place of both myth and reality. Other critics found humor in the story, pointing out the naming of Esteban as an especially wry observation on human nature. Garcia Marquez has amassed a considerable reputation since translations of his work first appeared. With the 1982 Nobel Prize in literature to his credit, he has gained increased critical respect as well.' 'The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World'' is no longer dismissed as ' 'A Story for Children"— as some subtitles refer to the story—though it certainly works on a literal level as a children's story. More recently, critics have begun to examine the larger implications of particular aspects of the story, including the naming of Esteban, the changes he brings to the village, and the character of the villagers themselves. In later criticism, the focus has been on Garcia Marquez's particular narrative techniques rather than the plot of the story itself. Kathleen McNerney discussed Garcia Marquez's characteristically shifting point of view in Understanding Garcia Marquez. Often within the same paragraph, McNerney purported, readers receive not only the villagers's point of view, but they also see Esteban through the eyes of a hostess and as Esteban sees himself, abashed and ashamed in the tiny homes of his neighbors. In Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Raymond Williams examined the role of the reader in the story. Not only can readers find humor in their assumed superiority over the odd, superstitious villagers, but the notion of imagination becomes prevalent as well because, just as the villagers analyze the drowned man, readers analyze the villagers. Readers cannot accept the story as real, but it still exists, just as the inexplicable dead man cannot be ignored by the villagers. In that acceptance comes an understanding of the limitless imagination. Esteban's appearance changes the town, said Marta Frosch in

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a Books Abroad article, but only because the town has recreated him as a human being whose abilities and shortcomings are imagined for him. Critics have cited similarities between Garcia Marquez's work and that of a number of acclaimed twentieth-century writers in an attempt to locate possible influences. "The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World'' has been compared by many to the work of Franz Kafka, which contains a similar sparse quality of unreality. Ernest Hemingway is also known for providing spare details that carry more weight than they appear to at first. Like Garcia Marquez, William Faulkner has memorialized his place of residence in his literary works. Perhaps the largest influence on Garcia Marquez, however, is the Cuban writer Alejo Carpentier, whose 1949 novel El reino de este mundo (The Kingdom of This World) influenced many of Latin America's magic realist writers. Nevertheless, Garcia Marquez retains his own narrative style, and his own approach to reality. His work asks the reader to examine his or her beliefs and morals, to understand the choices of others, and to learn from the experience.

Criticism Rena Korb Rena Korb has a master's degree in English literature and creative writing and has written for a wide variety of educational publishers. In the following essay, she discusses Marquez's use of magic realism in "The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World." When Gabriel Garcia Marquez published his novel One Hundred Years of Solitude in 1967, both the author and the writing technique he used, magic realism, were catapulted into the international spotlight. Magic realism (the term was first used in 1925 by a German art critic, and about twenty-five years later, it was rediscovered by a Caribbean writer) explores the overlap between fantasy and reality and thus reveals the mysterious elements hidden in day-to-day life. As a literary style, it was born in Latin America where writers such as Garcia Marquez, who were raised hearing tales of mystical folklore, were open to viewing the world through a more imaginative, less rigid lens than "realistic" writers. Magic realism creates a different type of background for the events of the day to play themselves out against, one in which the inhabitants are accept-

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ing of extraordinary occurrences and thus forge amongst themselves a new set of shared beliefs. Combining elements of the fantastic and magical, the mythic, the imaginative, and the religious, magic realism expands human perceptions of reality. Much of the power of magic realism derives from the way it blends the fantastic and the everyday by depicting incredible events, supporting them with realistic details, and chronicling everything in a matter-of-fact tone. According to Morton P. Levitt in "The Meticulous Modernist Fictions of Garcia Marquez," Garcia Marquez, who was a journalist, says that his style derives from his grandmother, who ' 'told things that sounded supernatural and fantastic, but she told them with complete naturalness." Garcia Marquez grew up in a small town that had little to offer except for a sense of the past, according to Levitt: "like so many Latin American towns [it] lived on remembrances, myth, solitude and nostalgia." Garcia Marquez presents this multiple reality in his stories; one reality is that of the fantastic, but another reality is the author's (and the reader's) complete acceptance of the fantastic. Garcia Marquez's use of tone shows the events he narrates to be credible—things that could happen at any time. The fantastic becomes utterly natural. In addition to One Hundred Years of Solitude, Garcia Marquez's short story "The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World'' highlights his talents at using magic realism to draw the reader into a world unlike one in which most people dwell. Since its first publication in a collection of short stories in 1972, the work has won attention and drawn praise from critics based far from Garcia Marquez's native Colombia, including reviewers for Time and John Updike writing for The New Yorker. Alfred Kazin, in a review of Leaf Storm and Other Stories in Critical Essays on Gabriel Garcia Marquez, refers to ' 'The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World'' as one of the author's "beautiful early stories" in which his vision "expresses itself with perfect charm," and V.S. Pritchett notes in New Statesman that the story "easily leaps into the comical and exuberant." In the story, Garcia Marquez presents a tiny coastal town filled with people who seem unremarkable in any way except in their ability to accept the fantastic and thus enrich their own lives. At the story's beginning, the emptiness of the villagers's lives can be seen in their surroundings. The town is built on a stony cliff upon which nothing grows.

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What Do I Read Next? "A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings" is another story by Garcia Marquez that features a stranger's arrival in a seaside village. One Hundred Years of Solitude, translated by Gregory Rabassa in 1970, is Garcia Marquez's landmark magic realism novel about a marvelous village, Macondo, and its equally wondrous founding family.

Jonathan Swift's 1726 novel, Gulliver's Travels, is the story of a man washed ashore on foreign lands. The reception Gulliver receives in this satirical comment on human nature is quite different from the love given to Esteban in Garcia Marquez's story,

One of the most important influences on Garcia Marquez, Alejo Carpentier's 1949 novel, The Kingdom of this World, is a magic realist look at

The Old Man and the Sea, written in 1952 by Ernest Hemingway, is a classic story of human nature explored through the metaphor of fishing.

Their homes, which are spread out on a "desertlike cape," have "stone courtyards with no flowers." The villagers have very little space in which to cultivate themselves. Even the dead must be tossed out, over the side of the cliffs.

touched by Esteban, in the mothers's fears that' 'the wind would carry off their children." Their calm acceptance of the phenomenal, however, is most clearly apparent when they regard Esteban. He weighs almost as much as a horse ' 'and they said to each other that maybe . . . the water had gotten into his bones." He hardly fits inside the house, and "they thought that maybe the ability to keep on growing after death was part of the nature of certain drowned men." These comments on the nature of his size are not rationalizations; the villagers are not bothered by his size, they simply do not need to explain his physical state. Their comments are spoken as asides, noting unimportant yet interesting details.

Because the villagers naturally accept the fantastic, an enormous drowned man who washes upon their shore does not frighten them nor do they reject him. Instead of being freakish for his size, he is ' 'the tallest, strongest, most virile and best built man they had ever seen." The drowned man, whom they come to call Esteban, has more ideal qualities than just the physical. He is compassionate, recognizing the anxiety that his size causes and possessing the awful knowledge that "the lady of the house looked for her most resistant chair and begged him, frightened to death, sit here." He feels shame at being such a bother to the villagers; had he known he was going to drown, ' 'he would have looked for a more discreet place." While others might have turned on him for his unusual characteristics, the villagers not only show him kindness but actually embrace him. He becomes their model and they will better their village and their lives in his honor. The villagers live in a land where mystical things can happen and where intuition and magic count for more than strict reality. Their partiality for the imaginative is apparent even before they are

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Because the villagers do not spend their time wondering how Esteban came to exist, they can concentrate on what is important: the man. Looking in his face they see that' 'he did not have the lonely look of other drowned men who came out of the sea or that haggard, needy look of men who drowned in rivers." When they realize that he will have to be dragged to his funeral (no one can carry him), they understand the shame and awkwardness his size caused him in life. Not only do they understand how Esteban feels, but they begin to understand a bit more about their own lives. As the women sit up all night, sewing an outfit for Esteban,' 'it seemed to them that the wind had never been so steady nor the sea so restless... and they supposed that the change

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had something to do with the dead man." Already their lives, fed by the "calm and bountiful" sea, are changing. The lives of the villagers will continue to change over the next twenty-four hours and on into the future. To honor Esteban's memory, the villagers will build larger homes so that he can pass through freely without shame at his size. They will paint the houses bright colors and ' 'break their backs digging for springs among the stones and planting flowers on the cliffs." In the future, passengers on great oceanliners will smell the villagers's gardens and be told "that's Esteban's village." What Esteban's visit has made them realize is how terribly empty their lives had been. Though they knew that "they were no longer present, that they would never be," by making their home a place good enough for Esteban, they are enriching themselves as well. The use of another element of magic realism helps justify the monumental effect Esteban had: the mythic. In the personage of Esteban are shades of heroes from different cultures and time periods. His very name, Spanish for Stephen, invokes St. Stephen, the first Christian martyr. Esteban also may recall Estevanico (a diminutive form of the name), an African slave who explored Florida and the Southwest United States in the 1500s. He was the first African many Indians had ever seen, and they thought he might be a god and gave him many gifts. As with Esteban, his appearance led him to be revered as something more than an ordinary man; just as the villagers would strive "to make Esteban's memory eternal," legends were passed down for generations, right until the present day, about Estevanico. Esteban also unites the village and himself through a connection to different myths and mythical figures. The village women become as powerful as figures of Greek mythology when "sailors who heard [their] weeping . . . went off course and people heard of one who had himself tied to the mainmast, remembering ancient fables about sirens." This allusion to Homer's Odyssey also brings to mind that epic's hero, Odysseus, who, during his ten-year voyage, washed up on the shore of several islands and effected sometimes radical changes on their inhabitants. Esteban is also tied to the ancient Aztec god Quetzalcoatl who arrived from the sea. He had a civilizing effect on the Aztec people, leading them from the sacrifice of others to selfsacrifice in order to achieve their goals. Because of his close tie with the sea, his statue in the Aztec

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In the personage of Esteban are shades of heroes from different cultures and time periods."

capital showed him covered in snail shells and flowers, much like Esteban, who washed up on shore "covered with a crust of mud and scales." The defeated Quetzalcoatl left his people, again by the sea, but according to legend he returns periodically to bring about change and revolution. Esteban could very well be the villagers's personal Quetzalcoatl. If all these references need to be interpreted in order to understand the story, what then is to be made of the subtitle ("A Tale for Children'') which sometimes accompanies the story? Perhaps it is not really necessary to know how the story works, only that it does work. It can exist as a fairy tale without drawing criticism for its lack of reality. As a children's story, it is allowed to simply entertain. The story may best be seen as presenting the multiple realities that are inherent to magic realism. Just as the villagers have to be open to possibilities in order to reap the benefits of Esteban's visit, so must readers suspend their disbelief. Source: Rena Korb, for Short Stories for Students, Gale Research, 1997.

Gene H. Bell-Villada Bell-Villada is an educator, critic, and biographer. In the following essay, he discusses Garcia Marquez's short fiction, including "The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World,'' which he calls a ' 'folklore science-fiction.'' Had Garcia Marquez never put any of his novels to paper, his shorter fiction would have still gained him some niche in literary history. Already in 1967 the Uruguayan writer Mario Benedetti was to observe that "some of the stories gathered in Big Mama's Funeral can be considered among the most perfect instances of the genre ever written in Latin America." We might venture yet further and say that those pieces, along with the novella No One Writes to the Colonel and the stories collected in

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Garcia Marquez the socialist well knows that the imagination and its dreams are as crucial a force in political life as is economic fact,"

Innocent Erendira, put Garcia Marquez in the company of such acknowledged masters of short fiction as [Anton] Chekhov, [Thomas] Mann, [James] Joyce, [John] Cheever, or Grace Paley. The author cites [Ernest] Hemingway as the chief influence on his own story writing. The admission is borne out by the pieces themselves, with their spare, minimal prose that captures life's little disturbances and moments of solitude, evokes major emotion in a snatch of dialogue or in the slightest of gestures. Garcia Marquez remarked in 1950 that "the North Americans . . . are writing today's best short stories," and Hemingway in this regard served him as much as mentor as did [William] Faulkner and [Virginia] Woolf for his longer works. Particularly influential was Hemingway's "iceberg" theory of the short story—often cited by Garcia Marquez—whereby the author makes visible only one-seventh of what is to be communicated, the other six-sevenths lying implicitly beneath the narrative's surface. The stories offer pleasures of a sort different from those we know from One Hundred Years of Solitude. They are miracles not of mythic sweep but of understatement, conjuring up as they do the subtle, small-scale, mostly interpersonal upsets and triumphs of common village folk—the sleepy priests, pool-hall souses, provincial wheeler-dealers, troubled but stouthearted women, and the abandoned, the mismatched, or the bereaved. In later pieces, Garcia Marquez will emerge with his visionary side full-grown and include fantastical materials—a wizened angel or a ghost ship. But there is a key element never absent from the Colombian author's stories, be they "magical" or realistic: the climate of his world. Every one of these short pieces has at least a reference either to the intense daytime heat or the tropical rain and its effects on characters' lives

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(their slowness in midafternoon, their ill health in rainy season). The consummate craft of the narratives should also be noted: Garcia Marquez typically spends weeks or even months on a single short story, feeling pleased when completing just two lines in a d a y . . . . In "The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World,'' the only entity with a name is the eponymous cadaver, whom the villagers choose to call ' 'Esteban." (The Catholic church's first martyr, we may recall, was St. Stephen.) When his tall, strong, broad-shouldered, lifeless body is washed ashore near a seafaring hamlet of "twenty-odd houses," the irruption from another, remote, unknown world excites the romantic, myth-producing imaginations of the sad and isolated townsfolk. He strikes them as proud, "the most virile and best-built man they had ever seen," and from there they infer for him the power to stop the winds and call fish from the sea. The women in particular fantasize about him, alive and polite as a fellow villager in their lives, and inasmuch as it is they who prepare his corpse for sea burial, they grow particularly attached to their ideas and images of him. The males by contrast get to feeling jealous and look forward to his being returned at last to the deep. If the women's collective role in this story shows mythmaking's more specifically erotic side, in the ritual ocean burial the affective bonds are extended and "all the inhabitants of the village became kinsmen." Hints at Odysseus's adventure of the sirens help place the incident of Esteban within a larger ancestral continuum of seafaring fable. Through these intimations of a greater and more beautiful cosmos the villagers are reminded of "the desolation of their streets" and (by extension) of their lives. And so we probably can trust the omniscient narrator's prediction that the inhabitants, in response, will thence beautify and make fertile their hamlet, and give it some fame as "Esteban's village." In some of his best long narratives Garcia Marquez forged a kind of fantastical history; here we see him experimenting in turn with a fantastical anthropology, as it were, a "folklore science-fiction" that speculates on the humbler origins and organizational powers of a commonly created and shared popular myth. Garcfa Marquez the socialist well knows that the imagination and its dreams are as crucial a force in political life as is economic fact. Source: Gene H. Bell-Villada, "The Master of Short Forms," in his Garcia Marquez: The Man and His Work University of North Carolina Press, 1990, pp. 119-36.

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Mary E. Davis In the following excerpted essay, Davis talks about the environment of some of Garcia Marquez 's short stories, and how he uses ' 'a heroic figure to revolutionize mundane reality.'' Since the publication in 1972 of Gabriel Garcia Marquez' penultimate collection of short stories [Leaf Storm and Other Stories], critics have been hard pressed to analyze the enigmatic, fabulous tales that make up the group. Several stories are developed from the tension between the sea and the land, the latter almost always being a boring place inhabited by citizens of limited imagination. In several cases, unusual apparitions from the sea provoke traumatic explosions of imagination in one or many of the inhabitants of an otherwise staid region. . . . As a whole, the stories create a fabulous environment, and the Caribbean becomes as prodigious a sea as the Mediterranean was for Homer. Gradually the land areas around it become permeated with beings from other times and other civilizations. The original inhabitants are disturbed by the heroic characters, and at the end of the story, nothing is as it was before. Forced to see themselves and their world as they are, some natives seize the opportunity to change, so that their world begins to adjust itself to the heroic demands of the travelers from other realms. One of the most enigmatic stories in the collection, ' 'El ahogado mas hermoso del mundo'' [' 'The Handsomest Man in the World"], illustrates the manner in which Garcia Marquez utilizes a heroic figure to revolutionize mundane reality. To achieve the appropriate reaction from the reader to the disparate elements in the story, Garcia M&rquez creates a constant tension between a small fishing village and the sea which borders it. The tension heightens as the story progresses, and it remains unresolved at the open-ended conclusion. The meaning of the story must be developed in the mind of the reader, for it is not readily apparent from the various elements of the plot. As the story progresses, both the nature of the village and that of the drowned man who washes up on a nearby beach are gradually revealed. The village is small, and its few inhabitants live in houses rapidly constructed of boards. In this village devoid of beauty, patios are filled with rocks rather than with flowers. The physical poverty of the village functions as an objective correlative of the

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A constant feature of Garcia Marquez' style has been his fusion of Greek, Spanish, and American literary models and mythology."

capacity of soul of its natives. There is hope, however, for the village does contain children, who welcome the drowned man to their village as one of their own. As the drowned man first appears, floating in the sea, the children on the beach pretend that he might be an enemy ship or a whale. When at last he washes ashore, he turns out to be a dead man, all covered with marine animals and residue from shipwrecks. The children play "funeral" with him all afternoon, burying him in the sand, then digging him up again. Eventually an adult notices their unusual toy, gives a shout of alarm, and the men carry the drowned man to the nearest house. The men react quite differently to the dead man. Although they do not doubt he is a man, they refuse to accept him as one of them. Worried that he may be from their village, they look from man to man and realize that they are complete. The rest of the story illustrates how ironic is Garcia Marquez' use of "complete" in this village. The men do notice the Homeric size of the stranger. He is heavy as a horse and will not fit into any house in the village. Leaving the body sprawled on the beach, the men leave to investigate his identity in nearby villages. The women clean the body and, as they see the face for the first time, they are, literally, breathless. The drowned man is the most perfect being they have ever seen, and their poor imagination cannot accommodate him. They proceed, in a scene reminding the reader of the remotest, matriarchal period of man's past, to surround him in a circle on the beach. As the usually calm sea roars and seems anxious, the women sew clumsy garments for the drowned man. Fantasizing about his sexual prowess, the women indulge in a series of mental voyages: "Andaban extraviadas por esos dedalos de fantasia...."

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Since the women have exercised their imagination rarely in the past, they must proceed from the known (their village) to the miraculous (the drowned man's effect on the village). They imagine how their village would have to become if a being as fabulous as the ahogado were to live there. They compare their boring lives with husbands who fish every night to the spectacular possibilities provided by such a splendid man ("el mejor armado que habian visto jamas"). The drowned man would have magical powers to call fish from the water, cause water to gush from rocks, and to plant flowers even in a rock wall. Not content with an anonymous dead man, the women name him Stephen. After he has been dressed, curiously enough, as a huge baby, and given a martyr's name, the sea calms, as though satisfied. The women take their second mental voyage, speculating about the personality of Stephen. Because of his size, he would have been uncomfortable in their village. The women realize how innately hostile the group is to anything different, and they fear he would have been considered ' 'el bobo grande'' or "el tonto hermoso." By this time Stephen has assumed so much personality that he hardly seems dead, and the women cover his face so that the rising sun will not bother him. Returning from a frustrating night, the men do not understand the fascination of the huge body for their wives. They jealously fear comparison with him and only want to throw him back into the sea with an anchor tied to his ankles. After they see Stephen's face, however, his beauty convinces them of the sincerity of his manner of being (which Garcia Marquez ironically twists into ' 'modo deestar.") The funeral rites for Stephen are resplendent with flowers. The village elects honorary parents and other relatives for Stephen, so that through this ritual everyone is now related to everyone else. After his body is returned to the sea, Stephen's memory causes the village to rebuild houses, plant roses, and paint with bright colors. Even more important, the villagers now realize that they are incomplete and always will be. The faculty of soul which they had so dreadfully lacked has begun to develop, however, and imagination, stimulated by so powerful a trauma as Stephen's visit, can hardly be prevented from expanding.... The women attribute to the giant the personality of dignified arrogance, a characteristic which reminds one of Zeus and almost all the Greek

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heroes. The highly charged eroticism provoked by Stephen's size is also reminiscent of the amorous adventures of Zeus, as well as of the sexual trials of Odysseus. The women's thoughts revolve around the Homeric size of Stephen's (hypothetical) bed, and Garcia Marquez slyly directs the reader's memory back to the close of the Odyssey, as Penelope uses the characteristics of Odysseus' bed to ascertain the identity of the stranger who claims to be her husband.... Stephen's godlike qualities are constantly reinforced by his relationship to the sea. The Caribbean usually is calm in the area of the village, but on the Tuesday night the women spend sewing around Stephen on the beach, they notice that the sea had never seemed so distressed. The empathy between Stephen and the anxious sea becomes prophetic. Stephen is a product of the sea, whether he is a man or a god, and the sea that produced him will receive him again. The cyclical nature of this relationship reveals itself in Stephen's strange clothes. The women find it difficult to construct clothing large enough for the giant, so that his apparel is amazingly like that of a baby (a' 'sietemesino''). It is as if the brief period in the village provides Stephen with a chance to reincarnate himself before he returns to the sea for another voyage.... The funeral ceremony provides Garcia Marquez with the last ritual in the story. The flowers and the wailing of the women give a peculiarly primitive aspect to the funeral, reiterating that grandness within simplicity that marks Beowulf's funeral and the many leave-takings in the Iliad. The storyteller ironically twists the llanto into an alluring melody, as he relates that''Algunos marineros que oyeron el llanto a la distancia perdieron la certeza del rumbo, y se supo de uno que se hizo amarrar al palo mayor, recordando antiguas fabulas de sirenas." This last allusion connects Stephen's funeral to Odysseus' trial with Circe and, simultaneously, suggests the power of art to transform reality, to create beauty from sadness. A constant feature of Garcia Marquez' style has been his fusion of Greek, Spanish, and American literary models and mythology. The most exotic aspects of Stephen's visit to the village correlate with the widely disseminated myth of Quetzalcoatl, the pre-Columbian god worshiped by several tribes of Central America and Mexico. Like Stephen, Quetzalcoatl arrived from the sea and brought a new civilizing influence upon the various forms of cul-

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ture which he encountered. A new vision of beauty, of human relationships, and of time itself derived from Quetzalcoatl's emphasis upon self-sacrifice rather than the commonly accepted sacrifice of others. Indigenous resistance to Quetzalcoatl's revolutionary influence took the form of a magician, who, in the course of his epic struggle against the peaceful god, was able to make dead bodies incredibly heavy. Stephen, it will be remembered, seemed impossibly heavy to the men who carried his body from the shore. Within Aztec mythology, Quetzalcoatl is at times called Ehecatl, the lord of the wind; it is therefore not surprising that the wind should rage and the sea be troubled on the night of Stephen's appearance. . .. In his combination of Homeric and modern aspects of Odysseus' personality with pre-Columbian heroic constructs, Garcia Marquez creates still another embodiment of the archetype of man's refusal to accept reality as it is. His villagers, incited by a lively dead man, completely change from within, and their new self is reflected in their village, famous for the legend of Stephen, the martyr whose death stimulates new life. Source: Mary E. Davis, "The Voyage Beyond the Map: 'El Ahogado Mas Hermoso Del Mundo,' " in Kentucky Romance Quarterly, Vol. 26, No. 1, 1979, pp. 25-33.

Sources Frosch, Marta Morello. "The Common Wonders of Garcia Marquez's Recent Fiction," Books Abroad, Vol. 47, No. 3, 1973, pp. 496-501. Kazin, Alfred. Review in The New York Times Book Review, February 20, 1972, pp. 1, 14, 16. Kazin, Alfred. Review of Leaf Storm and Other Stories, in Critical Essays on Gabriel Garcia Marquez, edited by George R. McMurray, G. K. Hall & Co., 1987, pp. 26-29. McNerney, Kathleen. Understanding Garcia Marquez, University of South Carolina Press, 1989, pp. 121-2. Pritchett, V. S. "A Ruined Arcady: 'Leaf Storm and Other Stories,'"New Statesman, February 9, 1973, p. 200.

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Sturrock, John. "Shorter Marquez," The New York Times Book Review, July 16, 1978, p. 3. Williams, Raymond L. Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Twayne Publishers, 1984, pp. 96-8.

Further Reading Byk, John. "From Fact to Fiction: Gabriel Garcia Marquez and the Short Story," in Mid-American Review, Vol. VI, No. 2, 1986, pp. 111-16. Discusses the progression of Garcia Marquez's short stories from his early, traditional style, to his later, fully developed style of magical realism. The Cambridge History of Latin America, Volume III, edited by Leslie Bethel, Cambridge University Press, 1991. Covers the history of Latin America since 1930 from a political and economic perspective. Epstein, Joseph. "How Good is Gabriel Garcia Marquez?," in Commentary, May, 1983, pp. 59-65. Epstein calls ' The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World" "charming" and admires the writer's considerable talent for making readers see things in novel ways. Levitt, Morton P. "From Realism to Magic Realism: The Meticulous Modernist Fictions of Garcia Marquez," in Gabriel Garcia Marquez, edited by Harold Bloom, Chelsea House, 1989, pp. 227-42. Levitt discusses magic realism as a literary technique, provides examples of it in Garcia Marquez's work, and shows Garcia Marquez's relationship to it through quotations from the author. McMurray, George R. Introduction to Critical Essays on Gabriel Garcia Marquez, edited by George R. McMurray, G. K. Hall, 1987, pp. 1-23. McMurray discusses the history of Garcia Marquez's publications and gives an overview of critical reception to his work. Review in The Times Literary Supplement, September 29, 1927, p. 1140. The reviewer finds Garcia Marquez a "storyteller" rather than a "short-story writer," and goes on to discuss the peculiarity of his fantastic approach to drab reality.

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Tillie Olsen's story "I Stand Here Ironing" recounts a poor working woman's ambivalence about her parenting skills and her eldest daughter's future. Published in Olsen's first collection of stories, Tell Me a Riddle, in 1961, this first-person story contains many autobiographical elements. Central to the plot is the metaphor of a mother ironing her daughter's dress as she mentally attempts to ' 'iron'' out her uneasy relationship with her daughter through a stream-of-consciousness monologue. The narrator, a middle-aged mother of five, as Olsen was when she wrote the story, is the type of woman whose story was seldom heard at that time: that of a working-class mother who must hold down a job and care for children at the same time. "Her father left me before she was a year old,'' the mother says, a circumstance that mirrored Olsen's predicament as a young mother. The story was heralded by the emerging women's movement of the early 1960s as an example of the difficulty of some women's lives and as a portrayal of the self-doubt many mothers suffer when they know their children are not receiving all the attention they deserve. Love or longing is not enough, Olsen says; everything must be weighed against forces that are beyond one's control. Though the story is not overtly political, it presents the type of economic condition that inspired Olsen to become active in left-wing labor causes at a young age.' 'I Stand Here Ironing," an unromantic portrait of motherhood, is perhaps the most frequently anthologized of Olsen's stories.

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Author Biography Tillie Olsen was born in 1913 in Omaha, Nebraska, to Russian Jewish immigrants whose political activities had forced them to leave their homeland in 1905. During her childhood, Olsen's father was the state secretary of the Socialist Party, and she likewise became politically active at an early age by joining the Young Communist League. After high school, she worked menial jobs until she was jailed in Kansas City for attempting to organize packinghouse workers into a union. By 1933, Olsen had moved to California where she resumed her union activities and began writing articles for left-wing publications. She had one daughter from her first marriage to a man who promptly abandoned his young family. In 1936 she married Jack Olsen and spent the next twenty years raising three daughters while working full time as a factory worker and a secretary. Most of her short fiction dates to the 1950s, when her youngest child entered school and she was awarded a creative writing fellowship at Stanford University. Critical acclaim followed the publication of Tell Me a Riddle in 1961, the same year the title story won the O. Henry Award for best short story. The works in the collection revolve around a central theme: how external forces undermine the ambitions of individuals. For example, in "I Stand Here Ironing'' a mother laments the fact that her young daughter's creative talent will be squandered because of the family's limited income. The awardwinning title story, "Tell Me a Riddle," concerns David and Eva, a Jewish immigrant couple married for forty-seven years, and the compromises and disappointments Eva has endured to satisfy her family. The book quickly became a favorite among participants in the fledgling women's movement. Olsen's only novel, Yonnondio, was published in 1974, though it takes place in the 1930s. The novel is narrated by six-year-old Mazie Holbrook who tells of the harsh life of her impoverished family. The socialist concepts of the exploited proletariat and capitalism's damaging effects on family life are prominent in the novel, echoing the author's lifelong activism in leftist causes. In 1978, Olsen published a book called Silences which contains two long essays; one on the silenced voices of women writers, the other concerning how writers confront periods of silence in their own lives. Though the book received less attention than

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Olsen's fiction, it augments the small body of work for which she has received much praise. Olsen has lectured at many universities, including the University of California at Los Angeles, and has served as writer-in-residence at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In addition to receiving several honorary degrees, her stories, including "I Stand Here Ironing," have appeared in more than one hundred anthologies.

Plot Summary Olsen's "I Stand Here Ironing" is a monologue, a speech delivered by a narrator with whom the reader comes to identify. In the first few lines the narrator explains what she is doing—ironing—and what she is responding to—a request that she meet with a school official about her daughter, now nineteen years old. The occasion prompts her to recall her daughter's childhood and the effect she had on the girl as her mother. All the while she continues to iron, drawing parallels for herself and the reader between telling the story and ironing the wrinkles from a dress. At the outset the mother confesses her powerlessness over her daughter, asking "You think because I am her mother I have a key, or that in some way you could use me as a key?" She is worried that if she is asked to recall those early days of parenting she ' 'will become engulfed with all I did or did not do, with what should have been and what cannot be helped." Despite these fears, the mother begins at the beginning: "She was a beautiful baby." Gradually the mother reveals the details of her daughter Emily's childhood, and a pattern of poverty and abandonment emerges. She was only nineteen herself when Emily was born. Her husband abandoned her, and she had no access to welfare or other services. Eventually she was forced to "bring her to [the father's] family and leave her." Emily was two years old before her mother could afford to come and pick her up. The little girl dutifully attended nursery school with ' 'never a direct protest, never rebellion." As she recollects these days, the mother wonders about the long term effects of that kind of obedience: ' 'what was the cost, the cost to her of such goodness?''

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and had entered the talent show and had won: ' 'suddenly she was Somebody, and as imprisoned in her difference as she had been in anonymity." This memory returns the narrator to the beginning of her train of thought. What is she supposed to do with a talent like that, "the control, the command, the convulsing and deadly clowning, the spell, then the roaring, stamping audience, unwilling to let this rare and precious laughter out of their lives"? Emily herself interrupts her mother's thoughts at this point, dismissing her mother's anxieties with a quick kiss and teasing her for spending so much time ironing. Emily has no concern for the future, especially tomorrow's exams. Her mother, however, has ' 'been dredging the past, and all that compounds a human being is so heavy and meaningful," she "cannot endure it."

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The narrator recalls how different Emily was from her siblings; she did not smile or laugh easily. The narrator had loved her as much as the others but had not yet learned to show it. Even with a "new daddy" the somber child's troubles were not over. She developed a terrible case of measles that isolated her from her mother and siblings and caused her to be sent to a convalescent home in the country. She did not get better; instead she became even thinner and sadder. The mother vividly recalls the scene during their brief visits: ' 'The parents stand below shrieking up to be heard, and between them the invisible wall: 'Not to be Contaminated by Parental Germs or Physical Affection.'" After eight months of convalescence, Emily returned home thin, frail, and resistant to physical affection. Her adolescence provided little relief. Her mother remembers her as ' 'thin and dark and foreign-looking at a time when every girl was supposed to look or thought she should look like a chubby blonde replica of Shirley Temple. "But one day in the midst of' 'that terrible world of youthful competition, of preening and parading, of constant measuring of yourself against every other, of envy," Emily called her mother from school, weeping with joy and fear. She had taken her mother's advice

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Finally, Emily's mother takes stock of Emily's life and confesses ' 'I will never total it all." But she does total it all, reducing her rambling monologue to one terse paragraph. Finally she decides on a course of action: "let her be," and adds only the hope that Emily will come to know "that she is more than this dress on the ironing board, helpless before the iron." In other words, that she is more than the sum of her experiences.

Characters Emily Nineteen-year-old Emily is the eldest child of the narrator. Her mother regrets much about Emily's upbringing, saying: ' 'She was a child seldom smiled at." Her father deserted the family less than a year after her birth, during the worst of the Depression. While her mother struggled to make ends meet, young Emily was handed over to a variety of temporary caretakers. As young girl, Emily was considered homely—"thin and dark and foreignlooking at a time when every little girl was supposed to look or thought she should look a chubby blonde replica of Shirley Temple''—and she became shy and passive. After her mother's second marriage, Emily was eclipsed by her younger, more selfassured half-sister Susan. To her mother's surprise, Emily has developed a talent for comedic acting—a "deadly clowning"—which wins her an audience, but she seems to lack motivation. At the end of the story, Emily chooses to sleep through her exams and quips that "in a couple of years when we'll all be atom-dead they won't matter a bit." Though her

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mother is convinced that "all that is in her will not bloom,'' she expresses hope that Emily may nevertheless know ' 'that she is more than this dress on the ironing board, helpless before the iron."

Narrator The narrator in "I Stand Here Ironing'' is never described physically nor referred to by name. Her identity is revealed through the explanation she gives of her relationship with her eldest daughter, Emily. The narrator has endured a great deal of hardship in her life. She was deserted at age nineteen by her first husband, less than a year after Emily's birth, during the worst of the Depression. Money has always been short, and the necessity of working long hours made it impossible for her to be sufficiently attentive to her daughter. She remarried and had more children, to whom she feels she has been a better mother. She seems to regret much about how her first daughter was raised and feels that, as a result of her shortcomings as a mother, "all that is in [Emily] will not bloom." Readers have had varying reactions to the narrator's final resolution about her daughter—to "let her be." While some see passive resignation in this statement, others see it in a more positive light as an acknowledgement of her daughter's independence and ability to "find her own way."

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Topics for Further Study Olsen has a long history of political activism, and she was once jailed for trying to organize blue-collar workers to join a union. Explain how "I Stand Here Ironing" echoes Olsen's leftist politics, even though it contains no overt political statements. What do you think Olsen believes is a more important influence in a person's life—the role of nature, or the role of nurture? Give some examples of Emily's character traits that her mother thinks are due to nature and some she believes are due to nurture. Many psychologists believe that birth order influences personality. Research this idea and find out what some studies have found to be common traits among firstborn children. How is Emily's behavior representative of oldest children, and how is it different?

Susan Susan is Emily's younger half-sister. According to their mother, Susan is a better student than Emily, as well as better looking and more popular: Emily's "younger sister seemed all that she was not." Emily is competitive with Susan and feels slighted when their mother is more attentive to Susan. The mother feels that because Susan was raised in a more nurturing environment than Emily, it was inevitable that Susan would outshine her older half-sister.

Themes In Olsen's "I Stand Here Ironing," an unnamed narrator reflects on her somewhat distant relationship with her eldest daughter. It is a story about the search—by both mother and daughter—for individual identity despite the limitations imposed by a history of poverty and other social constraints. While it examines the difficulties a mother and daughter have in finding identities separate from

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one another and independent from social expectations about women, it raises questions about the nature of intimacy itself.

The Search for Identity The issue of the boundary between the individual identities of the mother and daughter is raised early in the story. The narrator seems disturbed by the idea of being asked to help someone understand her daughter:' 'You think because I am her mother I have a key, or that in some way you could use me as a key? She has lived for nineteen years. There is all that life that has happened outside of me, beyond me." Yet, even as the narrator questions "what good" her insights into her daughter are, she also lays claim to a special knowledge of her daughter, more complete than that of any hypothetical questioner: ' 'You did not know her all those years she was considered homely." The story presents the identities of both mother and daughter as incomplete, still in the process of ' 'becoming." The adolescent daughter is still strug-

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gling to find independence, and her guilt-ridden mother is still working through her assessment of her role. The shy daughter appears to have talent as an actress, much to the surprise of her mother who is prompted to wonder,' 'Was this Emily?'' The daughter becomes "Somebody," it seems, by pretending on stage to be someone else. Yet, even in the apparent freedom Emily achieves through acting, she is still "imprisoned" by the public nature of acting and by the people in her audience whose applause "wouldn't let [her] go." Her mother feels at a loss for how to nurture this talent in her daughter, and readers are left wondering whether Emily's gift will end up being left unexpressed— "clogged and clotted" inside of her. The mother's desire to define herself also seems unfulfilled in the end. She concludes that the task of "dredging the past" and sifting through "all that compounds a human being'' is too much for her. Convinced that she will never be able to "total it all," she resolves not to heed the request that she "come in and talk" to the school official. Her thoughts about her daughter and about her own role as a mother remain private, communicated only to the reader.

Limitations and Opportunities A deep sense of deprivation pervades ' 'I Stand Here Ironing." The mother describes numerous limitations she has had to confront: poverty, abandonment by her first husband, housework, and motherhood itself. The many hardships in her life seem to compound one another and even impair her ability to tell the story: ' 'And when is there time to remember, to sift, to weigh, to estimate, to total? I will start and there will be an interruption and I will have to gather it all together again." The limited resources of the mother limit the daughter as well. The mother feels helpless to encourage her daughter's budding talent as an actress. The mother seems to blame her own youth and distractedness for the fact that' 'little will come'' of her daughter's potential.

Apathy Both daughter and mother appear to be apathetic at the end of the story: the daughter toward her future, the mother toward her own perceived failures. The daughter decides to sleep late despite having exams the next morning because "in a couple of years when we'll all be atom-dead they won't matter a bit." The mother, exhausted from ' 'dredging the past," resolves to "[l]et her be." Yet the story also presents evidence that there is at least

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a desire to overcome this apathy. The image of the mother's iron, which frames the story, provides an interesting emblem of this desire. In the first sentence, the iron, along with the narrator's thoughts, "moves tormented back and forth." In the last sentence, she articulates her hope that her daughter will be able to break free and learn ' 'that she is more than this dress on the ironing board, helpless before the iron."

Style Olsen's "I Stand Here Ironing" tells the story of a mother's relationship with her eldest daughter in a stark and dramatic fashion that has impressed critics and fellow writers with its originality and accessibility. The story is told entirely in the voice of the mother, but nonetheless manages to convey a dynamic relationship between two believable characters without resorting to cliche and sentimentality.

Structure and Point of View The story is told through the interior monologue of an unnamed mother as she irons her daughter Emily's dress. The catalyst for the monologue appears to be a request from an unspecified source, perhaps a school guidance counselor, for help in understanding the narrator's troubled daughter. The monologue consists of the narrator's fantasies, presented in a stream-of-consciousness manner, about what she might say in response to such a request. Such a narrative structure not only provides a dramatic context to draw the reader's attention, but it also serves to quickly establish the story's confrontational tone and introduce the narrator's repressed, frustrated character. Olsen's challenge is announced in the very first sentence, with the unusual appearance of the second person pronoun: "what you asked me moves tormented back and forth with the iron." The narrator begins questioning the validity of her own perspective on her daughter's psyche early in the story and wonders whether what she has to say "matters or ... explains anything." In addition to the insights the narrator shares with readers directly, her character is also revealed indirectly through the occasional interruptions of her monologue, which are caused by pressing demands from her daily life: ' 'Ronnie is calling. He is wet and I change him." In the end, the central

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paradox in the character of the narrator is also illustrated through the story's dramatic narrative "frame": she in fact has many insights into herself and her daughter, but she chooses not to express them either to her daughter or to whomever asked her to "come in and talk."

Language and Imagery In "I Stand Here Ironing," Olsen attempts to portray experiences and characters not typically given expression in literature. Perhaps her most admirable technical accomplishments lie in her ability to use language and imagery to believably portray the voice and thoughts of an intelligent but overburdened mother. Olsen intersperses the story with run-on sentences and expressive coinages, such as "I think of our others in their three- and four-year oldness." These techniques evoke the difficulty the narrator has answering unanswerable questions and imposing order upon the chaos that has been her daily life. Simple images from the world familiar to the narrator are used to express complex emotions. The most notable of these is the act of ironing referred to in the story's title. Associated with the social role of women, ironing—a back-and-forth motion that results in the elimination of wrinkles—becomes a symbol for the imperfections and frustrated desires of the narrator. One passage suggests that this also represents a less sentimental and more realistic image of motherhood: Emily muses that if she were to paint her mother's portrait, the pose Whistler had used in painting his mother's portrait—seated in a chair—wouldn't do. "I'd have to paint mine standing over an ironing board," she says. The act of ironing epitomizes the endless tasks that have beset the narrator. She expresses the hope that her daughter can transcend such frustration, rise above her circumstances and learn "that she is more than the dress on the ironing board, helpless before the iron."

Historical Context The Great Depression The narrator of "I Stand Here Ironing" describes her daughter as "a child of her age, of depression, of war, of fear." Though the story was published in 1961, it too has been seen as having ties to the Depression era and to the socially conscious literature of the thirties. Regardless of whether Olsen's work in 1961 bears much resemblance to

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writings from the 1930s, the Great Depression remained very much a part of the American psyche long after the decade was over. Even during the more prosperous 1950s and 1960s, many people still remembered the severe deprivations caused by the country's disastrous economic collapse in the 1930s and lived in fear of repeating the experience. Differences in values present in those old enough to remember the Depression years and values held by children too young to remember those years have been cited as a major cause of the ' 'generation gap'' that came to characterize America in the 1960s. Many people who lived through the Depression, including Olsen, were radicalized by their experience and joined communist and socialist movements. The United States government began massive efforts to provide relief to the poor through programs like the Work Projects Administration (WPA). Writers from the period such as John Steinbeck, Katherine Anne Porter, and Richard Wright hoped to inspire reform by creating literature that depicted the plight of the poor in a realistic manner.

The Eisenhower Era The relatively prosperous 1950s were characterized by a growing conservatism and mistrust of radical intellectuals. Having won World War II after dropping an atomic bomb on Japan, the United States began its Cold War standoff with the Soviet Union. Many people felt it was important to root out radicals living in the United States and to neutralize the "threat" these people were believed to represent. Thus began the infamous House Unamerican Activities Committee (HUAC) hearings, a series of public "trials" of suspected American Communists conducted by members of the U.S. Congress, most notably Senator Joseph McCarthy. The HUAC hearings have since come to represent one of the darkest moments in American history. Before Senator McCarthy was exposed for falsifying evidence and otherwise violating the civil rights of those he accused, the lives and reputations of hundreds of innocent people were ruined. The 1950s also saw a rapid expansion of the middle class and the rise to prominence of the suburban lifestyle. Some have seen it as an era of rigid conformism. For many of the women who had worked outside the home during World War II, the role of housewife into which they were recast seemed particularly oppressive. The repressed frustration and anger of suburban, middle-class housewives contributed much to the new ' 'women's liberation'' and feminist movements of the 1960s, particularly

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Compare &

Contrast 1963: Betty Friedan publishes The Feminine Mystique, the first notable publication of the modern women's movement, in which Friedan outlines the position of women as second-class citizens in contemporary life. 1994: Mary Pipher publishes Reviving Ophelia, in which she illustrates how adolescent girls are forced to conform to strict societal conventions that are often at odds with a girl's true emerging identity. 1960: 39 percent of married American women work outside the home.

following the publication of Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique.

Critical Overview The four stories which Olsen wrote during the 1950s and then published as Tell Me a Riddle in 1961 are the only short stories she has published. Besides these stories, her published work totals one novel and a number of essays. Nonetheless, Olsen's four short stories have had an impressive impact on the literary world since their first appearance. They have been reprinted in countless anthologies, and Olsen has been heralded as an early champion of a new feminist movement in literature. In The New York Times Book Review, prominent contemporary novelist Margaret Atwood describes the importance of Olsen and her work, particularly to women: ' 'Few writers have gained such wide respect based on such a small body of published work.... Among women writers in the United States, 'respect' is too pale a word: 'reverence' is more like it." When Olsen published her volume of stories upon completion of her studies at the Stanford University Creative Writing Program, her work was

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1995: 61 percent of married American women work outside the home. 1964: President Lyndon B. Johnson declares a "national war on poverty" and creates the Office of Economic Opportunity, which coordinates programs such as Job Corps and Head Start. Head Start provides low-income, at-risk children with early education and nurturing. 1994: A Republican-dominated Congress, led by House Speaker Newt Gingrich, declares a national war on welfare and suggests a return to the use of orphanages.

immediately well-received by critics. Initially, her stories were often seen as beautifully crafted but bleak in outlook. In a 1961 review in The Commonweal, for example, Richard M. Elman describes "I Stand Here Ironing,'' in his view the most excellent of Olsen's stories, as "a catalogue of the failure of intimacy." A 1963 essay by William Van O'Connor in Studies in Short Fiction also seems to find nothing but despair in a story which features a daughter who imagines that nothing matters because we will all soon be killed by atomic bombs and a mother who wants to believe that there is "still enough to live by," but is unable to convince her daughter. Subsequent critics, perhaps informed by more feminist sensibilities, have seen more optimistic elements in the story. For example, Elizabeth Fisher, editor of Aphra, The Feminist Literary Magazine, suggests in a 1972 essay in The Nation that "I Stand Here Ironing'' is ' 'also a hopeful story of how children survive, sometimes even making strength, or talent, out of the deprivations they've endured.'' Joanne S. Frye, in a 1981 Studies in Short Fiction essay, argues that Emily, despite her quip about everyone being "atom-dead" soon, "does not, in fact, succumb to that despairing view; rather, she is asserting her own right to choice as she lightly

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claims her wish to sleep late in the morning." Frye goes on to argue that the mother, despite her despair over being unable to "total it all," does finally manage to "recenter her thoughts," and ultimately triumphs as a parent in her acknowledgement of her daughter's independence. Frye reads the mother's final resolution—"Let her be"—as an indication that the mother "trust[s] the power of each to 'find her way' even in the face of powerful external constraints on individual control." Olsen's work has also inspired a great deal of critical analysis which takes a biographical approach, perhaps because the author has been so candid about how circumstances in her life have affected her writing. Olsen, an acclaimed critic and lecturer in her own right, has acknowledged that the demands of her marriage and four children have distracted her from writing and limited her literary output. Many of Olsen's fellow writers and critics have expressed admiration for her ability to overcome these obstacles. Women writers, in particular, have seen her as a role model. Many critics have pointed to the obvious parallels between Olsen's life and that of the narrator in ' 'I Stand Here Ironing." Olsen, too, was abandoned by her first husband during the Depression after giving birth to one child and later had more children with a second husband. Critics have found metaphors in Olsen's story for her own literary career and for the process of writing in general. Just as Olsen's literary career has been interrupted by the heavy demands placed on a working mother, so the narrator has been distracted from providing the kind of nurturing she would have liked to for her eldest child. The narrator is also interrupted from telling her story and from finding its "total." Critics have suggested that the mother-narrator and her account of the special challenges she has faced through motherhood parallel the unique challenges faced by women writers.

Criticism Elisabeth Piedmont-Morton Elisabeth Piedmont-Marlon is the coordinator of the Undergraduate Writing Center at the University of Texas at Austin. In the following essay, she explores the autobiographical elements in ' 7 Stand

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Here Ironing," and discusses Olsen's inclusion of poor and underrepresented people and their situations in her work. "I Stand Here Ironing" is the first story in Tillie Olsen's awarding-winning collection, Tell Me a Riddle, which was first published in 1961 when Olsen was in her late forties. In this story, which is considered her most autobiographical, Olsen breaks new literary ground in creating the voice of the mother-narrator and in crafting a narrative structure that mirrors as well as describes female experience. Like the four other stories in the collection,' 'I Stand Here Ironing" portrays the "aching hardships of poverty and the themes of exile or exclusion." This story, according to critics Mickey Pearlman and Abby Werlock in Tillie Olsen, "presents us with the inexorable riddle of human existence: it paradoxically comprises not merely the endurance of poverty, bigotry, illness, and pain but the ultimate ability to transcend these." Olsen is one of those authors whose life is so integral to her writing that any reading of her fiction is greatly enriched by comparisons between her life experiences and the fictional lives she creates. Olsen's critics, and Olsen herself in numerous speeches and interviews, have identified the three consuming passions of her life: politics, writing, and mothering. Her remarkable contribution to literature and to the advancement of women's causes, is her insistence that all three of these are connected: that motherhood always has a political dimension, and that politics cannot be separated from families, for example. What she also recognizes, however, is that the material conditions of women's lives prevent them from engaging in all three of these issues simultaneously; that political activism may disqualify one from motherhood; or that motherhood may consume the time and energy needed for writing. Twenty years separated Olsen's initial convictions that "she must write," and her first publications. In a 1971 speech, she explained that she "raised four children without household help... [and] worked outside the home in everyday jobs as well." She further stated that during "the years when I should have been writing, my hands and being were at other (inescapable) tasks." Alice Walker once praised Olsen for rescuing the lives of forgotten and invisible people, and other critics have agreed that Olsen's work has preserved the histories of people who have traditionally been

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What Do I Read Next? "Tell Me a Riddle" (1961) is Tillie Olsen's award-winning story about the sacrifices a Jewish immigrant couple has had to make in order for their marriage to survive.

ment with modern society as she struggles to raise her children against the backdrop of the city's dangerous steel mills.

The Second Sex (1949) by French writer Simone de Beauvoir. A landmark book that outlines the biological, historical, and social origins of women's oppression. Recognized as one of the books that helped launch the feminist movement.

"Blues Ain't No Mocking Bird" (1972) a short story published in Toni Cade Bambara's collection Gorilla, My Love. An impoverished African-American family attracts the attention of a film crew gathering footage for a project on the county food-stamp program. Despite the protests of a grandmother and her husband, the men trespass on the family's property and refuse to stop filming the family's humble living quarters.

The Dollmaker (1954) by Harriette Arnow. A novel about a poor, Southern, working-class family that moves to Detroit during World War II. Chronicles the mother's growing disillusion-

underrepresented in literature. Olsen's career proves her conviction that ' 'literature can be made out of the lives of despised people." Walker also gave Olsen credit for her pioneering efforts to portray the lives of the poor, the working class, females, and non-whites well before these subjects received widespread attention. Critics have lauded "I Stand Here Ironing" for articulating a strong female voice, especially in the mother-narrator's reflections on her life as a mother and a worker. The story is one of the best examples in literature—and certainly one of the first—to offer readers a glimpse into the lives of working-class women and families from a woman's perspective. The dedication to her book of essays, Silences, reads in part: "For our silenced people, century after century after their being consumed in the hard everyday essential work of maintaining human life. Their art, which still they made— as their other contributions—anonymous; refused respect, recognition; lost." "I Stand Here Ironing" appears to be straightforward and simple on the first reading, but a closer study reveals a sophisticated narrative structure and a rich pattern of imagery. Olsen frequently mentioned in interviews that she was especially proud of the story's first sentence, and wished she could duplicate its directness and economy: ' 'I stand here

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ironing, and what you asked me moves tormented back and forth with the iron." The apparent simplicity of this sentence belies the complexity of the narrative situation. Readers are introduced to a woman who appears to be addressing them directly. While it quickly becomes clear that the "you" of the first sentence is in fact some school official, readers are drawn into the narrative and soon come to occupy the position of sympathetic listener. The mother revisits the nineteen years of her daughters life, but the narrative remains anchored in the present because of the act of ironing. Like most women with children, her story is constantly interrupted by other demands and she is accustomed to ' 'engaging in her private thoughts while simultaneously carrying on with household tasks and family interactions." In fact, as her story reveals, her life has been interrupted by childbirth, desertion, poverty, numerous jobs, childcare, remarriage, frequent relocations, and five children. The pace and shape of this narrative is as familiar to the mother-narrator as is the act of ironing. The mother's ironing not only keeps us attuned to the immediacy of her experiences, it provides the central metaphor for the story. Like Alice Walker's use of quilting in "Everyday Use," Olsen's ironing metaphor resonates both inside and outside the

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I fictional boundaries of the story. On one level, the ironing metaphor is significant because it belongs almost exclusively to the domestic world of women. Not only is ironing women's work, but more often than not women iron for other people. On a more figurative level, mothering is also an act of ironing, of smoothing out problems, of making things right and ordered. But as the story of her first child's difficult upbringing unfolds, the iron begins to take on another, more sinister array of qualities. It is helpful here to recall another aspect of the author's personal life that bears on the story. Olsen spent many of her working years in factories, and as a young girl worked as a tie presser, laboring long hours with hot and dangerous equipment under deplorable working conditions. She has dedicated her life to fighting for social change and the rights of the oppressed, especially workers. She also was an active socialist in the 1930s and even spent time in jail for her role in a factory strike. With these things in mind, the attentive reader listens to the mother struggling with "dredging the past," knowing she will "never total it all." The iron comes to represent, then, the pressures of outside forces and the accidents of history into which we are born, such as poverty, divorce, illness, and prejudice. After she asks a total of thirteen questions, critics have noted, ranging from ' 'how could I have known?" to "what was the cost?" the narrator suddenly pauses (we can imagine her lifting the iron from the board). She concludes that "all that compounds a human being is so heavy and meaningful in me, I cannot endure it tonight." The adjective heavy focuses our attention on the iron, which has not literally grown heavier, though the narrator may be fatigued. But on a figurative level, it has become heavier, taken on weight and significance as it has come to represent the pressures of outside forces on individuals in general and on Emily in particular. The mother's conclusion to "let her be" is not an abdication of her parental rights; rather it is a recognition that her powers as a mother cannot control the oppressive forces of the outside world. She ends her monologue with a prayer-like hope that her daughter will come to know ' 'that she is more than this dress on the ironing board, helpless before the iron." This ending suggests that the narrator comes to this resolution not despite the fact that her life allows her time for introspection only while working, but because of the work. The twin process of ironing and thinking out loud about the past do not

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en's critics, and Olsen herself in numerous speeches and interviews, have identified the three consuming passions of her life: politics, writing, and mothering."

simply move "tormented back and forth," but progress, from questions to answers, from unknown to known. Olsen's narrator learns something in the act of ironing, and the iron itself has been a crucial part of that process, leading her to a fuller understanding of her motherhood through its insistent metaphorical meanings. Source: Elisabeth Piedmont-Marlon, for Short Stories for Students, Gale Research, 1997.

Rose Kamel In the following excerpted essay, Kamel discusses "I Stand Here Ironing" and its theme of women whose potential for creativity, growth, and opportunity has been denied them due to their race, sex, religion, and socio-economic status. In 1954 . . . Olsen published the brilliant short story ' 'I Stand Here Ironing,'' having served a prolonged apprenticeship during which "there was a conscious storing, snatched reading, beginnings of writing" and always "the secret rootlets of reconnaissance." This reconnaissance involved not only obsessive reading but internalizing the lives of women writers, especially writers who were also mothers. Their emergence is evidence of changing circumstances making possible for them what (with rarest exception) was not possible in the generations of women before. I hope and I fear for what will result. I hope (and believe) that complex new richness will come into literature; I fear because almost certainly their work will be impeded, lessened, partial. For the fundamental situation remains unchanged. Unlike men writers who marry, most will not have the societal equivalent of a wife—nor (in a society hostile to growing life) anyone but themselves to mother their children....

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The mother has remarried, but material comforts, an emotionally secure middle-class existence, cannot assuage her loneliness."

"I Stand Here Ironing" depicts a nameless mother-narrator, who, having received a phone call from her daughter Emily's high-school guidance counselor that Emily is an underachiever, pushes an iron to and fro across the board on which Emily's dress lies shapeless and wrinkled. The narrator begins "dredging the past and all that compounds a human being." Her thoughts flow with the rhythm of the iron as she attempts to grasp the "rootlet of reconnaissance" to explain why it was that her oldest child was one "seldom smiled at." What would appear as understandable reasons—the Depression, the nineteen-year old mother, who at her daughter's present age worked at menial jobs during the day and at household chores at night, the iron necessity that made her place Emily in a series of foster homes, the desertion of her first husband, bearing and rearing four other children of a second marriage, all clamoring for attention—should account for Emily's chronic sorrow; but somehow they do not. Necessity dominating the mother's life could have tempered Emily, but the reader soon perceives that there may be another reason why Emily and the mother-narrator are silenced counterparts. The mother has remarried, but material comforts, an emotionally secure middle-class existence, cannot assuage her loneliness. Never having experienced the celebratory rituals of working-class communality, middle-class anomie distances her from other women. Her entire adult life has been interrupted by child care described by Olsen quoting [Sally Bingham in Silences]: My work "writing" is reduced to five or six hours a week, always subject to interruptions and cancellations ... I don't believe there is a solution to the problem, or at least I don't believe there is one which recognizes the emotional complexities involved. A life without children is, I believe, an impoverished life for most women; yet life with children imposes de-

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mands that consume energy and imagination at the same time, cannot be delegated—even supposing there were a delegate available.

In "I Stand Here Ironing," characteristic stylistic clues embedded in the occasionally inverted syntax, run-on sentences interspersed with fragments, repetitions, alliterative parallels, an incantatory rhythm evoke the narrator's longing not only for a lost child but for a lost language whereby she can order the chaotic dailiness of a working mother's experience. She was a beautiful baby. The first and only one of our five that was beautiful at birth. You do not guess how new and uneasy her tenancy in her now-loveliness. You did not know her all those years she was thought homely, or see her pouring over her baby pictures, making me tell her over and over how beautiful she had been—and would be, I would tell her—and was now to the seeing eye. But the seeing eyes were few or non-existent. Including mine.... Ronnie is calling. He is wet and I change him. It is rare there is such a cry now. That time of motherhood is almost behind me when the ear is not one's own but must always be racked and listening for the child to cry, the child call. We sit for awhile and I hold him, looking out over the city spread in charcoal with its soft aisles of light. "Shoogily," he breathes and curls closer. I carry him back to bed, asleep. Shoogily. A funny word, a family word, inherited from Emily, invented by her to say: comfort.

Emily's word play appears rooted in Yiddish (shoogily—meshugah) and there is something archetypically talmudic in her fascination with riddles (for which a younger sibling gets recognition) ' 'that was my riddle, Mother, I told it to Susan...," foreshadowing the leitmotif Olsen will orchestrate in "Tell Me a Riddle." When language inventiveness fails to mitigate against Emily's lack of achievement at school, when she tries and fails to authenticate herself, she escapes into another's role. Desperate for attention, identity, she responds to the mother's suggestion that she try out for a high school play— [Olsen notes in Silences that] "not to have an audience is a kind of death"— and becomes a comic crowd pleaser to the sound of thunderous applause. Thus, Emily finally commands some attention and affection and to a limited extent a control of life's randomness. Nonetheless, only articulation through language can free her from oppression. Silenced at home she lacks and will probably continue to lack centrality. The story ends with the mother still ironing out the wrinkles in Emily's dress; like Emily she is "helpless before the iron," aware that this Sisyphuslike ritual cannot atone for the past, nor can she

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ultimately answer the riddle Emily poses within and without the family constellation. Certainly the chains of necessity should have justified the mother's past relationship with her eldest child. We were poor and could not afford for her the soil of easy growth. I was a young mother. I was a distracted mother. There were the other children pushing up, demanding. Her younger sister seemed all that she was not. There were many years that she did not want me to touch her. She kept too much to herself,... My wisdom came too late. She has much to her and probably nothing will come of it. She is a child of her age, of depression, of war, of fear. Source: Rose Kamel, "Literary Foremothers and Writers' Silences: Tillie Olsen's Autobiographical Fiction," in MEWS, Vol. 12, no. 3, Fall, 1985, pp. 55-72.

Joanne S. Frye In the following essay, Frye asserts that motherhood is presented in Olsen's "I Stand Here Ironing" as a metaphor for the individual's search for selfhood and as a literary experience. Motherhood as literary metaphor has long been a cliche for the creative process: the artist gives birth to a work of art which takes on a life of its own. Motherhood as literary experience has only rarely existed at all, except as perceived by a resentful or adoring son who is working through his own identity in separation from the power of a nurturant and/or threatening past. The uniqueness of Tillie Olsen's "I Stand Here Ironing" lies in its fusion of motherhood as both metaphor and experience: it shows us motherhood bared, stripped of romantic distortion, and reinfused with the power of genuine metaphorical insight into the problems of selfhood in the modern world. The story seems at first to be a simple meditation of a mother reconstructing her daughter's past in an attempt to explain present behavior. In its pretense of silent dialogue with the school's guidance counselor—a mental occupation to accompany the physical occupation of ironing—it creates the impression of literal transcription of a mother's thought processes in the isolation of performing household tasks: "I stand here ironing, and what you asked me moves tormented back and forth with the iron." Indeed, this surface level provides the narrative thread for our insights into both Emily and her mother. The mother's first person narrative

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he narrative structure creates a powerful sense of immediacy and an unfamiliar literary experience."

moves chronologically through a personal past which is gauged and anchored by occasional intrusions of the present: "I put the iron down"; "Ronnie is calling. He is wet and I change him"; "She is coming. She runs up the stairs two at a time with her light graceful step, and I know she is happy tonight. Whatever it was that occasioned your call did not happen today."... The story is very fundamentally structured through the mother's present selfhood. It is her reality with which we are centrally concerned, her perception of the process of individuation to which the story gives us access. Her concerns with sorting through Emily's past are her concerns with defining the patterns of her own motherhood and of the limitations on her capacity to care for and support the growth of another human being. As she rethinks the past, she frames her perceptions through such interjections as ' 'I did not know then what I know now'' and ' 'What in me demanded that goodness in her?"—gauges taken from the present self to try to assess her own past behavior. But throughout, she is assessing the larger pattern of interaction between her own needs and constraints and her daughter's needs and constraints. When she defines the hostilities between Emily and her sister Susan—"that terrible balancing of hurts and needs"—she asserts her own recognition not only of an extreme sibling rivalry but also of the inevitable conflict in the separate self-definitions of parent and child. Gauging the hurts and needs of one human being against the hurts and needs of another: this is the pattern of parenthood. But more, it is the pattern of a responsible self living in relationship. The story's immediate reality continually opens onto such larger patterns of human awareness. Ostensibly an answer to the school counselor, the mother's interior monologue becomes a meditation on human existence, on the interplay among exter-

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nal contingencies, individual needs, and individual responsibilities. The narrative structure creates a powerful sense of immediacy and an unfamiliar literary experience. But it also generates a unique capacity for metaphorical insight into the knowledge that each individual—like both the mother and the daughter—can act only from the context of immediate personal limitations but must nonetheless act through a sense of individual responsibility. The narrator sets the context for this general concern by first defining the separateness of mother and daughter:' 'You think because I am her mother I have a key, or that in some way you could use me as a key? She has lived for nineteen years. There is all that life that has happened outside of me, beyond me." Almost defensively, she cites too the difficulties of finding time and being always—as mothers are—susceptible to interruption. But in identifying an even greater difficulty in the focus of her parental responsibility, she highlights the thematic concern with guilt and responsibility: "Or I will become engulfed with all I did or did not do, with what should have been and what cannot be helped." She is, in other words, setting out to assess her own responsibility, her own failure, and finally her need to reaffirm her own autonomy as a separate human being who cannot be defined solely through her parental role. When she identifies the patterns of isolation and alienation between herself and her daughter, she is further probing the awareness of her own separateness and the implicit separation between any two selfhoods. The convalescent home to which she sent Emily as a child is premised on establishing an "invisible wall" between visiting parents and their children on the balconies above. But, in fact, that wall is only an extreme instance of an inevitable separateness, of all the life that is lived ' 'outside of me, beyond me." Even in her memory of deeply caring conversations with her daughter, the mother can only claim to provide an occasional external eye, a person who can begin to narrate for the daughter the continuity of the daughter's own past and emergent selfhood but who must stand outside that selfhood separated by her own experiences and her own needs.... The tension in Emily's personality—which has continually been defined as light and glimmering yet rigid and withheld—comes to a final focus in the self-mocking humor of her allusion to the most

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powerful cultural constraint on human behavior: nothing individual matters because "in a couple years we'll all be atom-dead." But Emily does not, in fact, succumb to that despairing view; rather she is asserting her own right to choice as she lightly claims her wish to sleep late in the morning. Though the mother feels more heavily the horror of this judgment, she feels its weight most clearly in relation to the complexity of individual personhood and responsibility: "because I have been dredging the past, and all that compounds a human being is so heavy and meaningful in me, I cannot endure it tonight." And when she goes on from her despairing inability to "total it all" to the story's conclusion, she recenters her thoughts on the tenuous balance between the powerful cultural constraints and the need to affirm the autonomy of the self in the face of those constraints: ' 'Let her be. So all that is in her will not bloom—but in how many does it? There is still enough left to live by. Only help her to know—help make it so there is cause for her to know—that she is more than this dress on the ironing board, helpless before the iron." Her efforts, then,' 'to gather together, to try and make coherent" are both inevitably doomed to failure and finally successful. There cannot be— either for parent or for story-teller—a final coherence, a final access to defined personality, or a full sense of individual control. There is only the enriched understanding of the separateness of all people—even parents from children—and the necessity to perceive and foster the value of each person's autonomous selfhood. Though that selfhood is always limited by the forces of external constraints, it is nonetheless defined and activated by the recognition of the "seal" each person sets on surrounding people and the acceptance of responsibility for one's own actions and capacities. At best, we can share in the efforts to resist the fatalism of life lived helplessly "before the iron"—never denying the power of the iron but never yielding to the iron in final helplessness either. We must trust the power of each to ' 'find her way'' even in the face of powerful external constraints on individual control. The metaphor of the iron and the rhythm of the ironing establish a tightly coherent framework for the narrative probing of a mother-daughter relationship. But the fuller metaphorical structure of the story lies in the expansion of the metaphorical power of that relationship itself. Without ever relinquishing the immediate reality of motherhood and

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the probing of parental responsibility, Tillie Olsen has taken that reality and developed its peculiar complexity into a powerful and complex statement on the experience of responsible selfhood in the modern world. In doing so she has neither trivialized nor romanticized the experience of motherhood; she has indicated the wealth of experience yet to be explored in the narrative possibilities of experiences, like motherhood, which have rarely been granted serious literary consideration.... Source: Joanne S. Frye, '"I Stand Here Ironing': Motherhood as Experience and Metaphor," in Studies in Short Fiction, Vol. 18, no. 3, Summer, 1981, pp. 287-92.

Sources

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Fisher, Elizabeth. "The Passion of Tillie Olsen," in The Nation, April 10, 1972, pp. 472-4. O'Connor, William Van.' 'The Short Stories of Tillie Olsen,'' in Studies in Short Fiction, Vol. 1, no. 1, Fall, 1963, pp. 21-25. Pearlman, Mickey and Abby Werlock. Tillie Olsen, edited by Warren French, Twayne, 1991.

Further Reading Faulkner, Mara. Protest and Possibility in the Writing of Tillie Olsen, University Press of Virginia, 1993, pp. 1-34. Faulkner examines the political aspects of Olsen's work and its representation of the lives of people outside of the literary mainstream.

Atwood, Margaret. "Obstacle Course," in The New York Times Book Review, July 30,1978.

Frye, Joanne S. Tillie Olsen: A Study of the Short Fiction, Twayne, 1995, pp. 3-36. Explores Olsen's works and their connections to her life as well as the lives of her readers.

Elman, Richard M. "The Many Forms Which Loss Can Take," in Commonweal, Vol. LXXV, no. 11, December 8, 1961, pp. 295-6.

Orr, Elaine Neil. Tillie Olsen and a Feminist Spiritual Vision, University Press of Mississippi, 1987, 193 p. Examines Olsen's works within a feminist context.

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The Jilting of Granny Weatherall Katherine Anne Porter

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Katherine Anne Porter's story, "The Jilting of Granny Weatherall'' was first published in transition magazine in February, 1929. The story, concerning a dying woman's memory of being left at the altar on her wedding day and her current fear of being jilted in a similar manner by God, was subsequently collected in Porter's first published book, Flowering Judas. She has said that the character of Granny Weatherall was based on her own grandmother and that the story was the first of many of her works to be inspired by her Texas roots. Porter's often fragile health may have also influenced the story. In 1918, she nearly died of influenza; funeral arrangements had been made and her obituary written. In her autobiography, Porter stated that the experience made her different from others: "I had what the Christians call the 'beatific vision,' and the Greeks called the 'happy day,' the happy vision just before death." Such experience may have led her to explore that moment of death in her fiction, a moment in which Granny Weatherall feels that her body is ' 'a deeper mass of shadow in an endless darkness and this darkness would curl around the light and swallow it up." Nevertheless, the story has remained popular since its publication for the complexities and ambiguities inherent in its stream-ofconsciousness narrative and for its carefully drawn portrait of a Southern matriarch confronting the sum total of her life.

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Author Biography Katherine Anne Porter was born in Indian Creek, Texas, in 1890. Her mother died when she was two, and her family moved to Austin where she and her four siblings were raised by their paternal grandmother. When she was eleven, Porter's grandmother died and she was sent to convent schools, first in Texas, and then in Louisiana. At sixteen she ran away from the school's stifling environment and got married—her first of four trips to the altar. The union ended in divorce three years later, and Porter, who called herself a "roving spirit," found work in various cities as it pleased her. First she moved to Chicago, where she was a journalist and movie extra; then Denver, Colorado, where she worked as a drama critic for the Rocky Mountain News; and then New York City. At this time, when she was only twenty-eight, she suffered a near-fatal attack of influenza that caused her hair to turn white. The permanent effect became one of her trademarks and also the basis for her novella Pale Horse, Pale Rider. In 1920 she moved to Mexico and became involved in a coup attempt to overthrow the president. The social situation of Mexico became the basis for her first published story, "Maria Concepcion," and for many years, Porter claimed she understood Mexico more than any other place she had lived. Flowering Judas, her first collection of fiction, was published in 1930 and was comprised of stories that had previously appeared in various literary magazines. Porter's well-known story "The Jilting of Granny Weatherall" was included in this collection. The book earned her a Guggenheim fellowship which afforded her the means to travel through Europe extensively. On a cruise to Germany in 1932 she met Adolf Hitler and Hermann Goering, who along with the other diverse passengers inspired her only novel, Ship of Fools. She stayed in Germany for a year before travelling to Paris where she lived for four years, becoming one of the many expatriate American writers in the city, whose booksellers and publishers created a hospitable climate for the literary community before World War II. Back in the United States in 1936, Porter lectured and served as a writer-in-residence at many universities. With the success of Ship of Fools in 1962, Porter retired from academic life and continued to write from her home in College Park, Maryland. Her last book, The Never-Ending Wrong was inspired by the Sacco and Vanzetti murder trial, in which two Italian political radicals were executed

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despite widespread belief of their innocence. Porter died of a cerebral hemorrhage in 1980 at the age of ninety.

Plot Summary The setting for ' The Jilting of Granny Weatherall'' is the bedroom where Granny Weatherall is dying, though most of the action occurs in Granny's head. Told as a stream-of-consciousness monologue, "The Jilting of Granny Weatherall" is the story of the last day in the eighty-year-old woman's life. In her final hours with her surviving children around her bed, Granny Weatherall reconsiders her life and ponders her impending death. Almost against her will, her thoughts return to an incident that occurred more than sixty years earlier: She was left standing alone at the altar when her fiance George jilted her. Porter gradually reveals the details of the jilting through Granny Weatherall "s fragmented recollections. In Granny Weatherall's semi-conscious state, the past mingles with the present and people and objects take on new forms and identities. After the doctor leaves her alone, Granny Weatherall takes stock of her life, taking pleasure in the thought' 'that a person could spread out the plan of life and tuck the edges in orderly." But it is not long before she finds "death in her mind and it felt clammy and unfamiliar." The presence of death in her thoughts causes her to recall an earlier time when she thought she was dying and how she had spent too much time preparing for it. This time she considers "all the food she had cooked, and all the clothes she had cut and sewed, and all the gardens she had made"' and declares herself satisfied. She imagines asking her late husband, "Well, I didn't do so badly, did I?" Like an unwelcome guest, the memory of the day when she was jilted interrupts Granny Weatherall's reflections. As she rests against her pillow she is transported back to the day when ' 'she has put on the white veil and set out the white cake for a man" who never arrived. Although "for sixty years she had prayed against remembering him," she decides now as her children hover around her that she wants to settle things with George, the truant bridegroom. What she wants is to even their accounts, to tell him ' 'I got my husband just the same and my children and my house just like any other woman." The memory of that day ' 'when the cake was not cut, but thrown out and wasted'' is so powerful that sixty years later she seems to relive the moment. Her memory recalls when ' 'the whole

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wedding day when she was twenty. She eventually married another man, had a family, and convinced herself that she had put the pain of being ' 'jilted'' behind her. However, she kept letters from George in her attic all her life, and sixty years later his memory still has the power to upset her.

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bottom dropped out of the world, and there she was blind and sweating with nothing under her feet and the walls falling away." The border between past and present, living and dead, becomes even more blurred in the final pages of the story and the final minutes of Granny Weatherall's life. While the priest gives her last rights, Granny slips closer to death and the sights and sounds in the room mingle with her memories. When she grasps her son's thumb, she realizes this is the moment of death. As ' 'the blue light from Cornelia's lampshade drew into a tiny point in the center of her brain," Granny asks God for "asign," some reassurance about the afterlife. But ' 'for the second time there was no sign." Granny Weatherall is jilted once again in a betrayal that is so monumental that it makes the first incident seem insignificant. ' 'She could not remember any other sorrow because this grief wiped them all away."

Characters George George is the man who jilted Granny Weatherall, abandoning her at the altar on what was to be their

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Hapsy is the youngest and apparently the favorite of Granny Weatherall's daughters—"the one she had truly wanted." Yet Hapsy also seems to cause her mother the greatest disappointment. Granny Weatherall asks for Hapsy five times during the story, but Hapsy never comes to her mother's deathbed. In her delirious state of mind, Granny mistakes her other daughters, Cornelia and Lydia, for Hapsy. At one point, Granny seems to confuse even herself with Hapsy, as a memory of Hapsy holding a baby comes back to her: Granny ' 'seemed to herself to be Hapsy also, and the baby on Hapsy's arm was Hapsy and himself and herself, all at once, and there was no surprise in the meeting." Some critics have interpreted this memory of Hapsy as the sign of salvation that Granny seems to be looking for throughout the story.

John John is the man whom Granny Weatherall married and with whom she had children. He has been dead for a long time, and though Granny still feels close to him, she is also aware of having gone through many changes since she lived with him.

Ellen Weatherall See Granny Weatherall

Granny Weatherall Ellen Weatherall is a strong-willed eightyyear-old woman on her deathbed. Having raised a large family, she still desires to play an active role in her own affairs and those of her children. Bedridden in her daughter Cornelia's house, she is often snappish and rude as she slips in and out of lucidity during visits from members of her family, a doctor, and a priest. Readers learn that some twenty years earlier, feeling old at age sixty, she had made what she had thought would be her final visits to her children and grandchildren: "She had spent so much time preparing for death there was no need for bringing it up again." As death approaches this time, however, memories of loss and disappointment resurface and remain unresolved.

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As a young woman, Ellen Weatherall was jilted, abandoned at the altar by a fiance named George. She overcame this setback and eventually married another man. Yet, on her deathbed, remembering these defining moments in her life brings back feelings of self-doubt and regret. Granny Weatherall feels ' 'jilted'' once again at the end of the story—perhaps because her favorite daughter, Hapsy, has not shown up at her bedside, and perhaps also because she has become aware of a more profound absence in her spiritual life.

Themes A portrait of an eighty-year-old woman on her deathbed,' "The Jilting of Granny Weatherall" is an exploration of the human mind as it struggles to come to terms with loss and mortality. Porter offers no clear resolution to these fundamental issues, but instead interweaves themes of betrayal, religion, death, and memory in a moving and poetic character study.

Betrayal The titles of both the story and the anthology (Flowering Judas) in which it first appeared suggest the idea of betrayal, a central theme underlying many of Porter's stories. Judas was the disciple who betrayed Christ with a kiss. At the heart of "The Jilting of Granny Weatherall" are Granny's memories of her betrayal by George, the fiance who abandoned her at the altar some sixty years earlier. This is just one of a series of betrayals experienced by Granny, who also feels ' 'jilted'' by her daughter Hapsy for whom she calls out in vain several times in the story.

God and Religion Many readers have suggested that the ultimate betrayal of Granny involves God and that the story is primarily a portrait of a woman at the end of her life facing a devastating spiritual crisis. When Father Connolly comes to visit Granny Weatherall on her deathbed, she is cordial to him. It is stated that Granny "felt easy about her soul." Yet, his arrival seems to trigger Granny's most vivid and painful memories of the day sixty years earlier when she was left by her fiance. The final paragraph appears

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Media Adaptations Collected Stories: K. A. Porter is available on audiocassette, published by Audio Partners, read by Siobhan McKenna, 170 minutes. The Jilting of Granny Weatherall was produced by PBS in 1980 for the American Short Story Series. The adaptation stars Geraldine Fitzgerald, Lois Smith, and William Swetland; hosted by Henry Fonda, 57 minutes; available on videocassette from Monterey Home Video and Karol Video.

to include a reference to the Biblical parable of the "foolish brides," in which Christ is compared to a bridegroom. Seen in this light, the ultimate jilting of Granny is her reluctance to acknowledge her own weaknesses and accept some form of spiritual salvation. Just as Granny was left alone with the priest on her wedding day as a twenty-year-old, at age eighty she faces death alone, accompanied only by a priest who seems unable to offer her sufficient comfort.

Death and the Cycle of Life Early in the story, the suggestion is made that Granny Weatherall considers herself to be already at peace with her mortality. Some twenty years earlier she had made "farewell trips" to see all her loved ones:' 'She had spent so much time preparing for death there was no need for bringing it up again." However, death proves to be not so easily dismissed and seems "clammy and unfamiliar" now that it is truly imminent for her. Granny Weatherall struggles against death, and though she lacks the strength to get out of bed, denies even being ill. She tries to dismiss her doctor and imagines herself the next day ' 'rolling up her sleeves putting the whole place to rights again." The final image in the story—of Granny blowing out a candle—evokes the notion that her life is coming to an end. Yet, there is no sense of closure to Granny's life, no sense that the conflicts raised in her memories have been resolved. The final realization in the

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Topics for Further Study If the story were told in third-person through the eyes of a narrator who was not Granny Weatherall, how would it be different? Do you think that if it had been written from a different point of view that it would still be a good story? Discuss the symbolism of Granny Weatherall's name. Think of some other names from literary works that have symbolic meanings. Do such tactics help you understand a story or novel better? Research the phenomenon of the near-death experience. How do some people's accounts of what they believe to be death compare with Granny Weatherall's? How are they similar, and how are they different?

experienced in being ' 'jilted. "She values occasional moments for reflection when she is able to ' 'spread out the plan of life and tuck in the edges orderly." She also finds comfort in remembering her late husband John and is confident that he would still understand her despite all the changes she has gone through since his death—' 'She wouldn't have to explain anything!" On the other hand, Granny's reminiscences also seem to reopen old emotional wounds and bring back painful experiences she thought she had put behind her. Her memory of the other man in her life, George, seems to undermine her sense of order and self-worth and to create a kind of debris she has had difficulty throwing out. She is made "uneasy" by the thought of her children discovering the box of letters from George which she has kept in her attic all these years. At one point, she even fantasizes about going to the absurd length of instructing her daughter to find George and ' 'be sure to tell him I forgot him."

Style story is that "there was no bottom to death, she couldn't come to the end of it." As death approaches, many of Granny Weatherall's reflections on her life concern her role as a mother and caretaker. Besides the memories of being ' 'jilted'' early on in her efforts to find a mate, she thinks mostly of her children. In one passage, she remembers her favorite daughter, Hapsy, who has herself apparently become a mother. The identities of mother, daughter, and grandchild all seem to merge in Granny's mind. Death and birth also become hard to distinguish as Granny, in pain on her deathbed, in a memory relives the pain of giving birth to Hapsy. She finally welcomes the presence of a doctor as she cries out ambiguously, ' 'my time has come."

Memory Memory is a double-edged sword in this story where the central character moves back and forth between the present reality and the remembered past. On the one hand, Granny Weatherall's memories are a source of strength for her; she seems to take pride in remembering her life's accomplishments, particularly in overcoming the setback she

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Early in her career, Porter came to be admired as an innovative and masterful stylist. In ' 'The Jilting of Granny Weatherall," she uses experimental, modernist narrative techniques in creating a moving and believable portrait of an eighty-year-old woman on her deathbed.

Stream-of-Consciousness Narration One of the most striking stylistic aspects of "The Jilting of Granny Weatherall" is its unusual narrative perspective. Though the story is written in the third person, its narrative point of view is extremely close to that of the central character, Granny Weatherall. The story is told through stream-of-consciousness. Granny's thoughts are presented in a spontaneous fashion, as if readers had access to her thoughts at the moment each one occurs to her. Porter conveys what it is like to be an eighty-year-old woman whose mind tends to wander by enabling readers to experience some of the same confusion Granny feels. Since Granny sometimes mistakes one daughter for another, for example, the characters in the story sometimes dissolve and become other characters. Because Granny's awareness slips back and forth between her present reality and her remembered past, events in

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Symbolism and Allusion The disjointed way in which the story is told gives it a poetic, dreamlike quality and enables its author to juxtapose certain recurring motifs and images. Much of Granny's reminiscing about the past seems to be triggered by people and events in her present. The untidiness of the room in her daughter's house where she is lying, for example, reminds Granny of her own housekeeping, which reminds her of the box of letters in her attic that she has been intending to go through and of the man, George, who wrote some of those letters. As certain images appear and reappear throughout the story, they take on more associations with the events of Granny's life and acquire multi-layered, symbolic significance. The dust Granny worries about as it gathers on the objects around her, for example, could be seen as representing the disorder in Granny's life and the painful memories she has tried unsuccessfully to sweep away. The layers of meaning within some of the recurring images in the story are multiplied since they allude to motifs from the Bible. As the story's title suggests, the most significant of these are those associated with Granny's "jilting." The story returns to Granny's abortive wedding day most vividly, perhaps, when her daughter Cornelia announces that a priest has come to visit. His arrival seems to trigger Granny's memories of the day when "the bottom dropped out of the world" and she found herself being supported by the arms of a man offering to kill the fiance who had failed to show up. It appears that Granny, on her deathbed, is once again left alone waiting in vain for the arrival of a loved one—in this case her daughter Hapsy—with only the inadequate comfort offered to her by a priest. Parallels between Granny's situation and that of the "foolish brides" in the biblical parable in which Christ is compared to a bridegroom are suggested in the story's last paragraph: "Again no bridegroom and the priest in the house." The symbols and allusions in the story are constructed so that they can be interpreted in a variety of ways. Granny can be judged as a woman who, like the "foolish brides," has not accepted Christ and for whom death therefore represents a spiritual and physical collapse. Another interpretation views the closing reference to the biblical parable as a product of Granny's own imagination as she reflects on her life and judges herself. The

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subtlety of Porter's art lies in the fact that she offers no definitive answer to questions of interpretation. Porter leaves readers with a portrait of a woman facing death who is confronting the unanswerable questions of life.

Historical Context Porter once wrote that her stories grew primarily out of her passion for the feelings and motivations of individual people, claiming "I have never known an uninteresting human being, and I have never known two alike." For her, however, fascination with the individual did not preclude an interest in broader social and historical issues. Unique individuals were, in her view, the very building blocks of history—"these beings without which, one by one, all the 'broad movements of history' could never take place." The central character in "The Jilting of Granny Weatherall," is someone who seems curiously removed from the time and place in which she lives—unable herself even to distinguish past from present. Yet, for Porter, individuals like Granny Weatherall provide the vehicle for an exploration of the broader social and historical forces of her time.

Progress and Social Fragmentation First published in 1929, "The Jilting of Granny Weatherall" appeared at the end of a period of relative prosperity in America and the beginning of what was to become the Great Depression. Emerging victorious at the end of the first World War, America in the 1920s was poised to undergo rapid economic growth and social progress. For women in particular, many new opportunities and roles were available. The decade began with the ratification of the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which for the first time gave women the right to vote. During the war, when many young men had left to fight in Europe, more women had entered the traditionally male worlds of work and higher education. In fields ranging from fashion to politics to literature, a new generation of women were expressing themselves with new levels of confidence. The general prosperity of the 1920s, however, was not enjoyed by every segment of the population. Much of the economic growth, as well as the experimentation with social norms, was concentrated in large cities and industrial centers. The country was in many ways becoming more fragmented, as

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Compare
Contrast 1929: Most people died at home, surrounded by family members.

the American workforce according to the U.S. Board of Labor Statistics.

Today: Most deaths occur in a hospital setting, and death is often prolonged by drugs and other medical devices.

1920s: Most doctors make house visits to sick patients.

1920s: Only 23 percent of the American workforce is comprised of women according to Historical Statistics of the U.S. Today: In 1994, women made up 46 percent of

economic disparities and social distances between the urban Northeast and the rural South and Midwest deepened. Intergenerational conflicts were also heightened as the young seemed to adapt to changes more quickly than their elders. In the South, racially motivated murders occurred at the highest rate since the Reconstruction period immediately following the Civil War. A variety of radical movements including Anarchists, Socialists and Black Nationalists gained notoriety in calling for fundamental reforms, and such groups would gain more momentum in the coming years after the stock market crash in 1929 and the subsequent Great Depression.

Intellectuals Abroad Many writers and thinkers of Porter's generation felt the need to leave their native country before they could write about it. Despite the United States' new economic and military prominence, European cities were still considered to be the most important centers of cultural activity. Like most of America's leading writers from this period—including Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway and many others—Porter travelled extensively and lived abroad for much of her lifetime. Yet, despite the relative isolation in which they lived and worked, many of these writers sought to convey something quintessentially American through their stories. Porter was joined by other young writers, like Sherwood Anderson and William Faulkner, in

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Today: Doctors who make housecalls see an average of 8 to 12 home patients a year—less than one percent of the average practitioner's patients.

using settings and dialects identified with particular regions of the country. On the other hand, while these American writers wanted to tell stories about farmers, small town folks and other characters living what could be called "traditional" lifestyles, they were also interested in exploring "non-traditional" ways of telling stories and in describing experiences that seemed new and contemporary. One of the strongest influences on these American writers was the literary and intellectual movement known as modernism. A large and diverse movement which originated in Europe and affected virtually every field of artistic endeavor, the modernists sought to develop radically new techniques and forms of expression, which they felt were required to convey the rapidly changing experiences of life in the 20th century. Modernist experiments in literature included "stream-ofconsciousness" writing and the use of absurd or surreal imagery. Porter's work quickly won support and admiration within this closely knit international community of intellectuals, though Porter would not have a very wide reading audience among the general public until much later in her career.

Critical Overview ' 'The Jilting of Granny Weatherall'' was included in the first collection of Porter's stories, Flowering

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Judas, which was published in 1930. Though the first print run of the book was fairly small, critical response was overwhelmingly positive. Virtually overnight, Porter won a reputation within an influential circle of writers and critics as one of America's finest writers. Reviewers noted that her work was mature and exhibited similarities to the writing of Ernest Hemingway, a fellow American expatriate. Critics praised Porter's technical skill and her ability to approach each story in a new way. Often noted were her rich characterizations, whose personalities seem to determine the narrative form Porter chose. Edmund Wilson, one of the United States's most influential literary critics at that time considered Porter's stories with female protagonists, like "The Jilting of Granny Weatherall," her strongest and most interesting. He suggested that the author's ability to convey the intricacies of a woman's character made her stories unique. Robert Penn Warren and Allen Tate, both renowned poets from the South, were also important literary allies for Porter. Warren, in particular, wrote extensively on Porter and stressed, among other things, the way her stories captured the culture and ethos of the American Southwest and Mexico, areas where Porter had lived for many years. Other critics discussed her use of religious imagery to elucidate her characters' psychological states, evidence of which can be found in "The Jilting of Granny Weatherall." More recently, focus on Porter's works has centered on her feminist perspective, the aspect of her writing so admired by Edmund Wilson. Barbara Harrell Carson, for example, has pointed to the refusal of many of Porter's female characters to accept their assigned social roles. The conflict between social roles and a woman's acceptance in society is at the heart of Granny Weatherall's deathbed reminiscence in "The Jilting of Granny Weatherall."

Criticism Elisabeth Piedmont-Marion Elisabeth Piedmont-Marton is the coordinator of the Undergraduate Writing Center at the University of Texas at Austin. In the following essay, Piedmont-Marton examines the narrative structure and themes of the story "The Jilting of Granny Weatherall.''

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In her essay "The Eye of the Story," fellow southern writer and critic Eudora Welty observes that "most good stories are about the interior of our lives, but Katherine Anne Porter's stories take place there; they surface only at her choosing." "The Jilting of Granny Weatherall" is certainly one of these interior stories, as Porter uses Ellen Weatherall' s fragile state of mind as a narrative device to connect past and present and the living and the dead. While "The Jilting of Granny Weatherall" is told by a third person narrator, readers are drawn into the mind of Ellen Weatherall and come to see the events of the story from her perspective. Readers laugh along with her, for example, when she teases the doctor about his youth. Gradually, however, Ellen's grasp of reality slips off its moorings and she begins to journey back into her past. Readers are able to travel along with Ellen Weatherall as her memories slip in and out of the present time during the course of the story. This narrative technique, called stream-of-consciousness, allows the writer to abandon the ordinary constraints of time and space, and invites the reader to enter into the consciousness of the character. Porter's descriptive prose brilliantly portrays the way Granny Weatherall's mind wanders from the sound of whispered voices to remembered breezes, from the feeling of being in one room one moment, to the memory of another room long ago. Important events in Granny Weatherall's life are recounted in fragmented recollections, and readers become privy to these memories in the course of the story. In Eudora Welly's words, "The presence of death hovering about Granny Weatherall she [Porter] makes as real and brings us near as Granny's own familiar room that stands about her bed realer, nearer, for we recognize not only death's presence but the character death has come in for Granny Weatherall." As readers we become the unseen observers in the room, sympathizing with Granny's point of view. The woman who "weathered all," for whom life has been "a tough pull," struggles first to suppress and then to address the worst moment of her life. This moment occurred on the day when George jilted her at the altar. Granny Weatherall is a woman who likes to take care of details and to make plans, and in exchange she expects certain results. She still believes that her death is not imminent. She thanks God that ' 'there was always a little margin over for peace: then a person could spread out the plan of life and tuck in the edges neatly." But as her conscious control falters, she remembers the day when her faith in order was shattered:' 'the d a y . . . a

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What Do I Read Next? "Flowering Judas" (1930) a short story by Porter in which an idealistic young woman is betrayed by the group of Mexican revolutionaries when she fails to see them for who they really are. "A Rose for Emily" (1931) by William Faulkner, a short story about the death of an eccentric Southern woman. "The Death of Ivan Ilych" (1886) by Leo Tol-

whirl of smoke rose and covered it, crept up and over into the bright field where everything was planted so carefully in orderly rows." In this passage the smoke symbolizes confusion and doubt overwhelming her best laid plans, which are symbolized by the neat rows. These images of light and dark, clarity and confusion, recur in various forms throughout the story and foreshadow the final scene when darkness defeats Granny Weatherall's careful calculations. Although Granny Weatherall apparently takes pleasure in recollecting the accomplishments of her life: the children born and raised; the hard work taken on and completed; the "edges tucked in orderly''; she cannot keep the clouds of doubt out of her mind. John Edward Hardy discusses her doubt in his book Katherine Anne Porter. Hardy writes: ' 'the pleasure of her recollections . . . is gradually undercut by a recurrent, terrifying sense of something lost, or missed, something that she can never quite define, something so important that the lack of it makes all that she had as nothing." Granny herself reveals what it is she had feared all her life: ' 'For sixty years she had prayed against remembering him and against losing her soul in the deep pit of hell, and now the two things were mingled in one and the thought of him was a smoky cloud from hell that moved and crept in her head.'' There is dramatic irony in that she does not fully understand the connection between these two events, her death and her jilting.

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stoy, a novella in which a dying Everyman tries to justify his actions and beliefs during his life.

' 'A Worn Path " (1941) by Eudora Welty, a story in which an aging African-American woman persistently continues on a difficult trek into the town of Natchez, Mississippi, in order to obtain medicine for her sick grandson.

Granny Weatherall believes that her prayers and her exemplary life will ensure that she will never again feel like she did on the day she was jilted. She remembers that day as a time when ' '[t]he whole bottom dropped out of the world, and there she was blind and sweating with nothing under her feet and the walls falling away." She has spent a great deal of her dying hours coming to terms with her jilting, deciding that she wanted George to be told that she had forgotten him, measuring the husband and children she had despite him against his abandonment of her. In her final moments, however, she is jilted again. She asks God for a sign, and "For the second time there is no sign." Several important elements in the story converge at this climactic moment, just as the light in Granny Weatherall's consciousness narrows to a tiny point. First, the images of light and dark that have occurred throughout the story are used for full dramatic effect in this scene. "Granny lay curled down within herself, amazed and watchful, staring at the point of light that was herself; her body was now only a deeper mass of shadow in an endless darkness and this darkness would curl around the light and swallow it up." The darkness and obscurity of doubt and betrayal finally completely obscure the light of certainty and faith. Secondly, this scene reveals another meaning of the title. Just as Granny herself had thought that being left at the altar was the worst thing that could have happened to her, as readers we have believed until now that the jilting in

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the story refers to that horrible day sixty years ago. Several critics have pointed out however, that in this second jilting, the absent bridegroom is not the hapless George, but the Christ of Matthew 25: 1-13 in the New Testament. Porter's suggestion is not that the good and dutiful Granny Weatherall is betrayed by her God. It is rather that she has betrayed, or fooled, herself, into believing that the universe was an orderly place where you were rewarded for ''tucking in the edges'' neatly. Ellen Weatherall's characteristic response is outrage, "Oh, no, there's nothing more cruel than this I'll never forgive it." Eudora Welty argues that outrage is Porter's "cool instrument," and that ' 'she uses it to show what monstrosities of feeling come about not from the lack the existence of love but from love's repudiation, betrayal." The final irony for Granny Weatherall is that in death she is finally free of the haunting memory of the day she was jilted. The sorrow of her final jilting is so great that "she could not remember any other because this grief wiped them all away." "The Jilting of Granny Weatherall" first appeared in Katherine Anne Porter's volume of stories, Flowering Judas, published in 1930. Critics have pointed to a number of echoes of other literature, or allusions, in Porter's story. Granny Weatherall's daughter Cornelia is similar to Cordelia in Shakespeare's tragedy, King Lear, whose unconditional love for her father is taken for granted. More striking are the resemblances of "Weatherall" to Henry James's story ' The Beast in Jungle." Like Granny Weatherall, the main character in James's story is terrified of an unnamed emptiness, of having life mean nothing in the end. The name of the house where the story begins, Wetherend, recalls Porter's character's name, and the description of May Bartram's neat household is strikingly similar to the way Granny Weatherall describes her own habits: "The perfection of household care, of high polish and finish, always reigned in her rooms, but they now looked as if everything had been wound up, tucked in, put away." Finally, students of American poetry cannot help but be reminded when reading the final scene of "The Jilting of Granny Weatherall," of two Emily Dickinson poems. Hardy discusses this aspect of the story in his 'book as well. Porter's description of Granny's imaginary trip is reminiscent of lines in poem #7/2. "Granny stepped up in the cart very lightly and reached for the reins, but a man sat beside her and she knew him by his hands,

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The woman who 'weathered alli' for whom life has been 'a tough pull,' struggles first to suppress and then to address the worst moment of her life. This moment occurred on the day when George jilted her at the altar."

driving the cart." In these words are the clear echoes of the opening lines of Dickinson's poem: ' 'Because I could not stop for Death / He kindly stopped for me / The Carriage held but just Ourselves / And Immortality." Later, in the description of Granny Weatherall's last moments, we find the that Porter pays homage to another Dickinson poem concerning death and dying, #465: "With Blue—uncertain stumbling Buzz— / Between the light—and me— / And then the Windows failed—and then / I could not see to see." Porter's description of Granny Weatherall's death is remarkably similar: ' 'The blue light from Cornelia's lampshade drew into a tiny point in the center of her brain, it flickered and winked like an eye, quietly it fluttered and dwindled." Source: Elisabeth Piedmont-Marlon, for Short Stories for Students, Gale Research, 1997.

Barbara Laman In the following essay, Laman discusses some of the ambiguities in "The Jilting of Granny Weatherall" which have resulted in varying interpretations by critics, particularly insights into the character ofHapsy. The ambiguities in Katherine Ann Porter's "The Jilting of Granny Weatherall" have provided fertile ground for widely different interpretations. Most critics, however, agree that Granny dies without a sign from God that her soul will be received into heaven. I would like to present evidence to the contrary: Granny does indeed get a sign, but one

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regardless of whether or not Granny calls for it, and the only reason Granny fails to perceive Hapsy as the sign is that, through her Catholic upbringing, she has been led to expect something entirely different,"

that she does not recognize. Her mistake is that she expects to receive this sign from Christ, when it is not Christ whom she should expect, but her own daughter Hapsy. Hapsy is an elusive character. Even her paternity has been questioned. David and Madeline Barnes, for example, in ' 'The Secret Sin of Granny Weatherall," claim that Hapsy is George's child. Their conclusion contradicts evidence that Hapsy is Ellen's last child, born "forty years ago when [she] pulled through milklegs," a disease that Laurence Becker points out is related to childbirth. Charles Allen symbolically identifies Hapsy with George; Joseph Wiesenfarth argues that Hapsy, like George, never shows up; and John Hardy associates her with the "Blessed Mother" and merges "images of Hapsy's baby [with] the infant Jesus." The significance of Hapsy, however, lies not in her paternity, nor in her similarity to George or the Virgin Mary, but in the fact that she was Ellen's favorite child and that she died while giving birth to her own child. Granny has demonstrated all her life that she is an independent and pragmatic woman who does what needs to be done with or without a man. Mostly, she appears better off without a man. Although George had the ability to pitch ' 'her soul in the deep pit of hell," and John died and left her alone to fence in ' 'a hundred acres . . . digging the post holes herself," only Christ can utterly destroy her by not showing up at her deathbed: ' "There is nothing more cruel than this—I'll never forgive it." Merrill Skaggs calls Ellen Weatherall the female Romantic [whose] indomitable soul... dies unconquered . . . . Recognizing the endless betrayals

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of God, lovers and a universe that can randomly "snuff out a dream," she can choose her own last moment, when she is ready for it, and can thus in her own time and in her own way, acting on her own impulse, embrace the dark.

Skaggs's valiant effort to elevate Granny to the position of feminist paragon fails to recognize that her blowing out the light is but a last-minute effort to gain autonomy over her own destiny, and that it comes as a result of her refusal to be humiliated once again. Granny's last act (and indeed her entire life after John's death) contradicts her own theories that only by submission to a man and by being a mother can a woman achieve happiness and health: "A woman needed milk in her to have her full health," she says after giving birth to Hapsy. Her attitude toward George sixty years later proves not only that she did not forget the jilting, but that she has led a happy life, with a man and children, in spite of it:' 'I want [George] to know I had my husband just the same and my children and my house like any other woman. A good house too and a good husband that I loved and fine children out of him." Because of her beliefs, Granny fails to realize the power of the feminine spirit. Her primary mistake consists not of blowing out her own light but of asking for a sign from the wrong person. Although normally quite aware of the proper channels through which requests to God are to be made—she had, after all, a ' 'secret comfortable understanding with a few favorite saints who cleared a straight road to God for her"—on her deathbed she forgets the hierarchies and calls directly to "God [to] give a sign." Confusing her approaching death with birth, Granny remembers telling John to ' 'get the doctor now, no more talk, my time has come. When this one was born it should be the last. The last. It should have been born first, for it was the one she truly wanted" (my emphasis). Her several references to wanting Hapsy indicate that this last labor will result in the birth of Hapsy. That Hapsy gives birth to her own child is demonstrated by Ellen's command to John to "get the doctor now, Hapsy's time has come" (my emphasis). Clearly, the first time that has come (to give birth) refers to Ellen; the second to Hapsy. That Hapsy's child died with her, probably during childbirth, is evidenced by the fact that Granny, close to death, sees Hapsy and her child during what looks strikingly like an out-ofbody experience, from which Cornelia calls her back.

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Hapsy has been waiting for Granny for a long time, certainly not fewer than twenty years. If Hapsy died giving birth, then John died after her, inasmuch as Granny asks him to call the doctor for Hapsy's confinement, and John died relatively young. When Granny goes ' 'through a great many rooms'' to find her daughter with the baby on her arm, Granny seemed to herself to be Hapsy also, and the baby on Hapsy' s arm was Hapsy and himself and herself, all at once, and there was no surprise in the meeting . . . Hapsy came up close and said, "I thought you'd never come," and looked at her very searchingly and said, "You haven't changed a bit."

Hapsy's words to her mother are formulaic, addressed to a traveler returning from a journey. If we take them literally, however, then Hapsy sees only her mother's immortal and unchanging soul, which has gone "a long way back" to find Hapsy, and which now mingles with the souls of Hapsy and her baby in a threefold unity that fulfills Granny's wish because all along it has been ' 'Hapsy she really wanted." This is the sign Granny asks for, and as it appears before she asks for it, Granny fails to recognize it for what it is. Granny confuses her outof-body experience with reality. She forgets that she had to go a long way back to find Hapsy, and, when she does, she thinks Cornelia can converse with her too: ' 'Cornelia, tell Hapsy to take off her cap. I can't see her plain." Indeed, as if to force Granny toward insight, right before she asks for the sign from God, the very recent memory of Hapsy pops into her mind. And Hapsy repeats her earlier phrase, as if to call her mother home: You'll see Hapsy again. What about her? "I thought you'd never come." Granny made a long journey outward, looking for Hapsy. What if I don't find her? What then?

Instead of accepting her now inevitable death and trusting Hapsy to wait for her, Granny engages in a futile contest with an absent male god. However, her apparent loss of faith and her doubts as to whether she will find Hapsy again are of little consequence. Because Hapsy spoke to Granny long before Granny realized that she was about to die, it appears to make no difference what she believes. The sign appears regardless of whether or not Granny calls for it, and the only reason Granny fails to perceive Hapsy as the sign is that, through her Catholic upbringing, she has been led to expect something entirely different. Source: Barbara Laman, "Porter's 'The Jilting of Granny Weatherall'," in Explicator, Vol. 48, No. 4, Summer, 1990, pp. 279-81.

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Daniel R. Barnes and Madeline T. Barnes In the following essay, Barnes and Barnes theorize that Granny Weatherall's strong lament of the past is due to the fact that she became pregnant out of wedlock before she was jilted. As one of Katherine Anne Porter's most brilliant technical accomplishments,' 'The Jilting of Granny Weatherall" has evoked a number of critical responses in recent years. Most commentators admit to a certain ambiguity in the story, brought about largely by Miss Porter's skilful exploitation of the stream-of-consciousness—almost to its ultimate limits of complexity; none, so far as we have been able to discover, has adequately treated the matter of Granny's "sin" and its importance to an understanding of the story. Indeed, most are inclined to dismiss it as at best a venial violation, a natural occasion for concern on one's deathbed, but of little moral relevance otherwise. There is in the story, however, evidence to show that Granny's concern for the state of her soul is genuine and closely connected with her memories of George, the man who had jilted her so many years before: For sixty years she had prayed against remembering him and against losing her soul in the deep pit of hell, and now the two things were mingled in one and the thought of him was a smoky cloud from hell that moved and crept in her head when she had just got rid of Doctor Harry and was trying to rest a minute.

While most critics have either assumed or implied that Granny's sin is little more than the "wounded vanity'' she herself speaks of, her injured pride in being left waiting at the altar, "the fear that she has not withstood the shame gracefully," yet a more careful reading will, we think, reveal the true source of Granny's fear of' 'losing her soul'': there is more than one indication that her jilting was attented by one further complication—pregnancy—and that Granny' s sense of guilt for her premarital transgression has continued to plague her all those years. The evidence for such a reading manifests itself principally through the associative pattern of her stream-of-consciousness: in passing successively from consciousnes to semi-conciouness and back again (and this is almost without exception the pattern of Miss Porter's extended paragraphs), Granny herself provides the necessary clues to the unravelling of the mystery.

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we accept Hapsy as Granny's child by George, saved from illegitimacy by Granny's acceptance of John's marriage proposal, we may better understand some of the puzzling references elsewhere in the story."

To begin with, in her present semi-conscious state she confuses the purpose of Father Connolly's visit to her bedside: "Mother, Father Connolly's here." ' 'I went to Holy Communion only last week. Tell him I'm not so sinful as all that." "Father just wants to speak to you." He could speak as much as he pleased. It was like him to drop in and inquire about her soul as if it were a teething baby.... (our italics).

The comparison is an apt one, as we shall shortly see; yet we also learn that' 'Granny felt easy about her soul,'' that she had a ' 'secret comfortable understanding with a few favorite saints who cleared a straight road to God for her." Her pact with them was made, furthermore, on "the day when the wedding cake was not cut," the day that John came to her rescue: He had cursed like a sailor's parrot and said, "I'll kill him for you." Don't lay a hand on him, for my sake leave something to God. "Now, Ellen, you must believe what I tell you "

' 'So there was nothing, nothing to worry about any more''.... Her confidence in this ' 'secret comfortable understanding" does, by the end of the story, undergo a severe shock; indeed, her passage from extreme self-confidence to frustrating agnosticism marks the theme of the story as a whole. If she misinterprets the reason for Father Connolly's presence, she also indicates a similar mistaken notion about Doctor Harry. In a single telling paragraph which presents her train of thought from conscious to semi-conscious level, Granny silently answers Cornelia's solicitation: "Is there anything I can do for you?''

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Yes, she had changed her mind after sixty years and she would like to see George. I want you to find George. Find him and be sure to tell him I forgot him. I want him to know I had my husband just the same and my children and my house like any other woman. A good house too and a good husband that I loved and fine children out of him. Better than I hoped for even. Tell him I was given back everything he took away and more. Oh, no, oh, God, no, there was something else besides the house and the man and the children. Oh, surely they were not all? What was it? Something not given back.... Her breath crowded down under her ribs and grew into a monstrous frightening shape with cutting edges; it bore up into her head, and the agony was unbelievable: Yes, John, get the doctor now, no more talk, my time has come.

Granny confuses her present pain with the pangs of labor and associates it quite naturally with the ' 'time'' of her delivery. Part of this may no doubt be explained by her failure to understand why Doctor Harry has come—she associates ' 'Doctor'' here, as she has elsewhere in the story, with childbirth and thus resolves her confusion by assuming that the doctor has come to deliver her of her latest baby. The importance of the passage lies in the fact that it reveals to the reader, once again, her mind's preoccupation with thoughts of a baby. But perhaps even more important, these thoughts may be traced back by association to the question which had triggered them in her mind: the "Something not given back" by George—her chastity. This train of thought continues to dominate Granny: ' 'When this one was born it should be the last. The last. It should have been born first, for it was the one she had truly wanted." The passage may be viewed as ironic: Granny's "time has come" (i.e., she is about to die), and this labor will, in fact, be her last. That the last-born (Death) ' 'should have been born first, for it was the one she had truly wanted'' may well allude to her wish to die at the birth of her first child. In any case, the text supports both the literal and ironic readings with consistency. Whatever else it may suggest, this passage carries with it the hint that Granny's firstborn may well have been unwanted—at least for a time. Eventually, this same child became the apple of Granny's eye and, as the text seems to indicate, a fated child. We are speaking, of course, of the elusive Hapsy. Hapsy (perhaps a diminutive form of Hap=Fate?) is clearly Granny's favorite among her children: It was Hapsy she really wanted. She had to go a long way back through a great many rooms to find Hapsy standing with a baby on her arm. She seemed to herself to be Hapsy also, and the baby on Hapsy's arm

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was Hapsy and himself and herself, all at once, and there was no surprise in the meeting.

It seems clear from the story that Hapsy has been long dead, for Granny converses with her only during her lapses into semi-consciousness. Time is inextricably confused in Granny's mind; she waits expectantly for Hapsy to come to her bedside, but each time she catches a glimpse of her in the mist of her imagination, each time she attempts to answer Hapsy, Cornelia intrudes, bringing her back to the world of reality. There is, moreover, the suggestion that Granny shares true empathy with Hapsy, for Hapsy appears to have given birth to a child with only her stepfather John and Granny in attendance: ' 'John, get the doctor now, Hapsy's time has come." Even in the passage in question there is no indication of Hapsy's having a husband—she is alone with "a baby on her arm"—and if Granny "seemed herself to be Hapsy also, and the baby on Hapsy's arm was Hapsy," so too many Hapsy be a mirror image of her mother, re-enacting her mother's sin with but one difference: she has no John to rescue her in her moment of need. If we accept Hapsy as Granny's child by George, saved from illegitimacy by Granny's acceptance of John's marriage proposal, we may better understand some of the puzzling references elsewhere in the story. For one thing, her reminiscence of that fateful day when George failed to appear takes on a more pointed significance:' 'She tried to remember. No, I swear he never harmed me but in that. He never harmed me but in that . . . and what if he did?'' What, indeed, if he had harmed her more than simply by jilting her? What if he had left her alone and expecting his child? John had saved her from the shame, after all. From the shame, but not from the guilt. For despite her understandable pride in how well she has succeeded in raising the children, in maintaining the farm all these years, in ' 'weathering all" (as her name clearly suggests), Granny continues to be haunted by the memory, not simply of George, but of her own transgression with him. Her conscious confidence in heaven is, then, so much bravado and rationalization; it is only in her moments of semiconsciousness that the reader is able to perceive Granny's agonizing guilt, guilt which she has carried with her for sixty years, unable to expunge it wholly from her mind. To be sure, it is this same guilt which finally humanizes her for the reader and makes of her something more than a quaint carica-

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ture. It is this guilt which has led her do penance— by ministering to the nuns, making altar-cloths for the church, and the like. But perhaps most important of all, it is this which validates her grief, justifies her horror at not seeing any sign of her salvation at the moment of death: For the second time there was no sign. Again no bridegroom and the priest in the house. She could not remember any other sorrow because this grief wiped them all away. Oh, no, there's nothing more cruel than this—I'll never forgive it. She stretched herself with a deep breath and blew out the light. Source: Daniel R. Barnes and Madeline T. Barnes, "The Secret Sin of Granny Weatherall," in Renascence, Vol. XXI, No. 1, Autumn, 1968, pp. 162-65.

Sources Carson, Barbara Harrell. Essay in The Authority of Experience: Essays in Feminist Criticism, edited by Arlyn Diamond and Lee R. Edwards, The University of Massachusetts Press, 1977, pp. 239-56. Hardy, John Edward. Katherine Anne Porter, Ungar, 1987. Hendrick, George, and Willene Hendrick. Katherine Anne Porter, Twayne Publishers, 1988, pp. 1-73. Warren, Robert Penn, editor and author of introduction. Katherine Anne Porter: A Collection of Critical Essays, Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1979, pp. 1-19. Welty, Eudora. "The Eye of the Story," Katherine Anne Porter: A Collection of Critical Essays, edited by Robert Penn Warren, Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1979, pp. 72-80. Wilson, Edmund. "Katherine Anne Porter," in The New Yorker, Vol. XX, September 30, 1944, pp. 72-4.

Further Reading Allen, Charles A. "Katherine Anne Porter: Psychology as Art," Southwest Review, Vol. 41, 1956, pp. 223-30. An essay in which Allen identifies Hapsy with George symbolically. Unrue, Darlene Harbour. Understanding Katherine Anne Porter, University of South Carolina, 1988. A good place to begin researching Porter's life and career, Unrue's book makes connections between various stories and between Porter's life and work. Wiesenfarth, Joseph. "Internal Oposition in Porter's 'Granny Weatherall'," Critique, Vol. 11,1969, pp. 47-55. Wiesenfarth argues in his essay that Hapsy, like George, never shows up at Granny's deathbed in the story.

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King of the Bingo Game Ralph Ellison

1944

Ralph Ellison's "King of the Bingo Game" was first published in the literary journal Tomorrow in November, 1944. The story is customarily examined as a prototype for Ellison's novel, Invisible Man, but the work was intended to stand on its own. The theme of alienation has been treated by many authors, but in "King of the Bingo Game," Ellison examines the specific alienation felt by blacks in the United States. The protagonist of the story, the Bingo King, is alone in the world and his isolation is further highlighted by the potential death of his wife, Laura, who is seriously ill. Structurally, the story is complex, combining harsh realism with a dreamy surrealism in a way that approximates the mind of the Bingo King. The story also provides an interesting examination of a segment of the American population often ignored: the working-class blacks of the day who were new to urban life. The Bingo King is not an idealized character; Ellison gives him characteristics such as a backwoods cluelessness and inner yearnings he has trouble understanding and articulating. The story's conflict centers around one of the oldest themes in literature: a person's helplessness before the hand of fate and the individual's irrepressible desire to overcome that helplessness. In "King of the Bingo Game" Ellison provides an examination of this relationship with fate, and more specifically, a black man's confrontation with fate.

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Author Biography Born in Oklahoma City on March 1, 1914, Ralph Ellison was raised in a cultural atmosphere that encouraged self-fulfillment. He was awarded a scholarship by the state of Oklahoma in 1933 to attend Booker T. Washington's prestigious Tuskegee Institute in Alabama. Ellison later expressed negative feelings about the scholarship, because he felt that the program was a way for Oklahoma to prevent black students from enrolling in its state universities. At Tuskegee, Ellison studied music, but he never graduated. In the summer of 1936, he went to New York City, where he met Alain Locke, the first black Rhodes Scholar and leader of the Harlem Renaissance arts movement, and Langston Hughes, renowned poet and author. Ellison never returned for his senior year of school. In New York City, Ellison familiarized himself with Harlem while he looked for opportunities for a career in the arts. In 1938, after several financially difficult years, he joined the Federal Writers' Project, part of the Works Progress Administration which provided jobs for unemployed writers, editors, and research workers during the depression. With the confidence that this job gave him, he soon began to publish stories in magazines. "King of the Bingo Game'' appeared in the left-leaning political journal Tomorrow in 1944. After returning from wartime service in the merchant marine, Ellison was invited to spend time in Waitsfield, Vermont, where he began to form ideas for what was to become his most important work, the novel Invisible Man. The novel appeared in 1952, won the National Book Award, and quickly became recognized as a seminal American work defining race relations in America from a black perspective. Twelve years later, Ellison published a collection of essays and interviews, Shadow and Act. In the intervening time, he had been celebrated, accoladed, and awarded numerous grants, fellowships, and honors. He collected honorary degrees from, among other schools, Harvard, Williams, and Tuskegee. From the time of the publication of Invisible Man to his death, Ellison was working on a second novel. In 1967 a fire destroyed 350 pages of the manuscript, and the novel has never been published. Ellison died of cancer in 1994, and since then the New Yorker has published two of his early stories.

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Plot Summary "King of the Bingo Game" opens with a man sitting in a movie theater watching a movie he has already seen. He is hungry, and he can smell the peanuts that the woman in front of him is eating. Readers are able to access his thoughts as he envisions being in the South where he could ask the woman for a peanut and she would give him one. He also thinks the same thing about a pair of men who are on his right, drinking wine. He is broke and his wife, Laura, is sick and dying. Watching the movie, he thinks about how the characters in the movie are able to escape their predicaments, but he is not. He also thinks of what would happen if the woman in the movie were to take off her clothes. He falls asleep and dreams that he is back in the South, where he lived when he was a boy. He dreams that a train is bearing down on him. Although he jumps off the tracks, the train follows him onto the highway and down the street. He wakes up screaming, and an old man next to him gives him a drink of whiskey. As the movie ends, a bingo game begins. The protagonist has brought five cards with him; he worries that the bingo-caller would not like this if he knew, but he needs to get money for a

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doctor for his wife and he needs the extra chances. Although he becomes flustered trying to keep up with the numbers being called, he ends up getting bingo, and has a chance to spin the bingo wheel in order to win the day's jackpot. Initially afraid that he has marked the wrong numbers, he is reassured as the authorities confirm his victory. While on the stage, the bingo caller, a white man, begins to make fun of the Bingo King, talking "jive" and sneering at his rural upbringing. The protagonist must push a button in order to make the bingo wheel spin; if the wheel stops on doublezero, he will win the jackpot of $36.90. Confident that he has the right strategy, he pushes the button. ' 'There was a whirl of lights, and in a second he realized with finality that though he wanted to, he could not stop." He keeps his finger on the button and the wheel spins faster. The audience begins to get impatient and starts yelling at him to get down, but he cannot. He feels that he has control, and he thinks that this experience "is God!" The bingo caller puts his hand on the Bingo King's shoulder, but he brushes it away violently, a deplorable action considering his upbringing in the South. As the Bingo King remains on the stage, he refuses the bingo caller's demand for him to finish. He looks out on ' 'all the Negroes down there'' in the audience and feels that ' 'most of the time he was ashamed of what Negroes did himself. Well, let them be ashamed for something this time." He feels powerful. As the wheel continues to spin, he feels in control; he is "the-man-who-pressed-the-buttonwho-held-the-prize- who- was-the-King-of-Bingo.'' Still on the stage, the man's nose begins to bleed and he starts to think of running away with his wife, running down the subway tracks. As the crowd sings mocking songs at him, he thinks,' Til do what I got to do." Finally, the crowd begins to applaud. The Bingo King does not let go of the button even as two men in uniform approach him. He runs from them from one side of the stage to another, tries to avoid them, but finally they wrestle him to the ground. As they take the button away from him, the numbers land on double zero. "You see," he tells them, trying to explain that he is a winner, and he believes he "would receive what all the winners received." However, as the story closes, the only thing that he receives is the "dull pain exploding in his head" from the blow the police give him.

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Characters The Bingo Caller The bingo caller is the man who calls out the bingo numbers and who acts as the master of ceremonies. When the Bingo King wins the chance to spin the wheel, the caller introduces him and makes fun of his rural upbringing. At first the caller is amused by the King's refusal to relinquish the button, but then he gets angry at the King's demand to remain in control. The caller represents the lowlevel forces of authority: he does not make the rules, but he must enforce them.

The Bingo King The Bingo King, the protagonist of the story, remains unnamed throughout. As the story opens, he is watching a movie for the fourth time, enjoying a scene in which a woman is tied down to a bed. However, his mind is also troubled by thoughts of his sick wife. The Bingo King is originally from the South, and as he sits in the movie theater he thinks about the difference between his home, where "folks stuck together . . . they didn't even have to know you," and how it contrasts with the everyone-forhimself mentality of the Northern city in which he now lives. When he wins the chance to spin the bingo wheel, however, he overcomes his Southern reticence and naivete. Seeing the opportunity to control his fate at last, he refuses to let go of the button that spins the wheel. All of the frustrations and hardships of his life flash before him as the wheel spins, and while he continues to push the button he feels that he can suspend time. However, the real world finally intrudes upon him when he receives a literal kick in the head, jolting him back to reality as the story ends.

Laura Laura is the Bingo King's wife. She is suffering from an unspecified serious ailment, and the Bingo King needs money to pay the doctor. She only appears in the story in the Bingo King's thoughts.

Themes Fate and Determinism In "King of the Bingo Game," Ellison explores the relationship between man and fate. The

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bingo wheel represents the ' 'Wheel of Fortune,'' an ancient image used to depict man's position among the fates. The concept of the wheel attempts to explain how a person can be fortunate and prosperous one day and destitute the next by positing that people are on a wheel, moving up and down unpredictably. This concept holds that any person who is experiencing difficulties should persevere because eventually that position will reverse. For the Bingo King, though, the Wheel is a joke that does not fulfill its assigned role. The Bingo King has been perpetually on the bottom. When the story opens, he is almost penniless, he is new to an unfamiliar and unfriendly city, and his wife is dying. He attempts to stack the odds in his favor by buying five bingo cards, but when that plan succeeds he is confronted by another difficult problem: how to make the bingo wheel stop on the double zero he needs in order to win the jackpot. When he actually starts to spin the wheel, though, the Bingo King has a flash of understanding. Unless he continues to spin the wheel, thereby suspending its final judgment, he will again end up on the bottom: ' 'high and dry, dry and high on this hard high slippery hill and Laura dead." Consequently, he decides to take control of his own fate by continuing to spin the wheel, deferring any judgement or decision momentarily. For the time that he continues to press the button, he is able to stand outside time and be the one being that is not subject to Fortune's whims:' "This is God! This is the really truly God!!" he exults. However, Fate's enforcers—the bingo caller and the police—are finally able to wrestle the button away from him, and in that instant he returns to his accustomed place at the bottom of the wheel. At the end of the story, he receives his accustomed justice: "as he warmed in the justice of the man's tight smile he did not see the man's slow wink, nor see the bow-legged man behind him step clear of the swiftly descending curtain and set himself for a blow. He only felt the dull pain exploding in his skull."

Race Although the story's theme is certainly applicable to all, Ellison makes it clear that he is focusing on how the "Wheel of Fortune" affects black Americans in particular. The Bingo King is by no means an Everyman: he belongs to a historically oppressed social group, and even within his own social group he is a member of a less fortunate minority. Ellison immediately injects the racial theme

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Topics for Further Study Research the "Great Migration" of African Americans from the South to the large Northern cities in the 1930s and 1940s. How does the character of the Bingo King represent those immigrants? What was the racial makeup of New York City in the 1940s? Where did most black residents of the city live? Investigate the differences between the treatment of African Americans in the Northern areas of the country as compared to the practices in the South during this period. Bingo and other forms of gambling have surged in popularity in recent years. Why do you think this is so? Are people's hopes for winning based on the same hopes that drive the Bingo King's behavior?

into the story when the Bingo King watches the movie surrounded by black men who imagine themselves in a room with the bound white woman. Sex between black men and white women was greatly feared by whites in the South and considered a terrible transgression. Even the whispered fantasies of the Bingo King's neighbors must be terrifying to him: people were lynched in the Bingo King's home of North Carolina for lesser transgressions than whispering. The way the Bingo King's neighbors talk about undermining this fundamental rule of white society foreshadows the King's own rebellion against the laws of fate. Ellison underscores the way the Bingo King is alienated from his own race as well. When he stands on stage, the emcee asks the Bingo King where he is from. "Down South," the King answers. The emcee then subtly ridicules his rural accent and downhome ways which are different from the hard cynical ways of the audience, who call' 'Let that fool up there!" when he gets his bingo. However, the Bingo King gets his revenge (if only in his own mind) as he stands on the stage, overcoming Fate. "All the Negroes down there were just ashamed because he

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was black like them. Most of the time he was ashamed at what Negroes did himself. Well, let them be ashamed for something this time. Like him." In a further ironic twist at the conclusion of the story, the Bingo King receives precisely the same brutal treatment that any other member of his race would experience.

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ment for himself by refusing to relinquish the button. As he returns to the real world, away from the suspended reality of the spinning bingo wheel, he bitterly tells the men surrounding him, "You see." "It's O.K." But as one of the men smiles at him, another readies to kick him in the head. Though he has overcome fate and taken control of his destiny in the world of the bingo game, and though the wheel of fortune brings the Bingo King up to the top, at the end of the story he finds himself at a point even lower than where he began.

Narration and Point of View

Symbolism

"King of the Bingo Game" utilizes a thirdperson narrator who is inside the consciousness of the Bingo King. The narrator relates the Bingo King's thoughts and his memories. At first, the narration is relentlessly realistic, and almost naturalistic in its depiction of the mind of a poor, downtrodden, yet still-hopeful man. The introduction of his sick wife into the narrative gives the story a melodramatic tone.

The main symbol in the story is the bingo wheel. That wheel represents not only the capricious nature of Fortune or Fate, but also the futility of the hopes of the black people in the audience, once the Bingo King strikes 00 and still loses. However, many of the smaller items in the story also have symbolic value. The bag of peanuts eaten by the woman in front of the Bingo King represents all that he desires but cannot have: money; pleasure; a better life; the feelings of' 'sticking together'' that he remembers from the South. Their smell' 'stabbed him like a knife." The whiskey that the man in the theater gives to the Bingo King recurs in a symbolic way when the King is on stage and the audience sings ' 'Shoot the liquor to him, Jim boy!'' Whiskey or liquor here symbolizes the release from daily existence that is both welcome and extremely dangerous. To the men in the audience, the Bingo King simply seems drunk, while in his own mind, he is transcending the bonds of everyday reality.

However, as the story continues, the realism lessens and the narration approximates the consciousness of the Bingo King, becoming a mouthpiece for him as he is taken over by the power of the bingo wheel. "This is God! This is the really truly God!" the narrator tells us. "He was reborn. For as long as he pressed the button he was The-manwho-pressed-the-button-who-held-the-prize-whowas-the-King-of-Bingo." But as the story ends, the narrative voice recedes, and as the power of the wheel is separated from the Bingo King by the authorities, the realistic narration that was present in the beginning of the story returns.

Irony Ellison uses irony, a characteristic modernist device, throughout the story. It is ironic, for instance, that the number the Bingo King needs to hit in order to win the jackpot is double zero; "zero" being what American blacks felt they had received from the established white society. It is also ironic that the Bingo King's freedom from circumstances is attained through playing the numbers. The hope peddled by numbers runners drained significant amounts of money and hope from the poor people who bought chances. The fact that the ' 'jackpot'' is only $36.90 is also ironic; such a small amount of money would barely begin to bring the Bingo King out of poverty. Deeper irony resides in other parts of the story. The Bingo King ensures an even harsher punish-

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Historical Context Race in the South Ralph Ellison was born in Oklahoma City, and during his childhood he encountered opposition from the city's white establishment. His mother was persecuted for her political activities on behalf of the Socialist Party. Oklahoma's governor during Ellison's early years was the white supremacist "Alfalfa Bill" Murray. Murray established a very unfriendly atmosphere for blacks in Oklahoma, and the state saw at least one serious race riot during that period. Although Oklahoma is not a part of the South proper and was still Indian territory during the Civil War, the state has absorbed a Southern cultural heritage from its neighbors Texas and Arkansas. Part of this heritage included Jim Crow laws, the system of de jure and de facto (meaning

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unwritten but enforced) racial segregation laws that persisted until the 1960s. Ellison believed an effort was made by the state to ensure that black students would not attend Oklahoma state universities by offering scholarships to promising students for study out of state. Ellison received such an offer and accepted it. He attended the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, the most renowned black school in the country. While travelling by freight train to Alabama, Ellison was forced off the train in Decatur, Alabama. Decatur was the town in which the Scottsboro Boys were being prosecuted for the alleged rape of two white women aboard a freight train. Fearing the worst, Ellison fled and managed to escape. As a result of the brutal conditions in the South, millions of blacks moved to the cities of the North in the period 1910-1950. This "Great Migration" was opposed by the white power structure in agricultural states such as Mississippi and Alabama. Needing the labor that black sharecroppers provided, the states and localities attempted to stop blacks from leaving. However, cities such as Chicago, Detroit, Pittsburgh, and New York each absorbed hundreds of thousands of immigrants. Though these immigrants were not treated well in the North

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either, they provided a labor pool from which the cities of the North became industrial powerhouses. Ellison's character, the Bingo King, is one such Southern immigrant.

Race in New York City In 1936 Ellison moved to New York City and therefore avoided much of the brutal racial oppression that occurred in the 1940s and 1950s in the South. Ellison's early neighborhood, Harlem, had by the 1920s become a haven for blacks coming north from Florida, Georgia, the Carolinas, and Virginia. However, although the North did not have the Jim Crow laws that characterized the South, it was by no means a land of equality. Blacks in the North suffered from limited educational and economic opportunities. They were the ' 'last hired and the first fired'' for most jobs. Harlem was often a rude shock to poor blacks fleeing the South. Expecting a friendly reception in a proudly black city, they were greeted by crime, poverty, and the New York attitude that disdains newcomers and country people. However difficult life was in Harlem, it was regarded as better than life in the South, and for this reason many of the leaders of African-American

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Contrast 1944: Many Southern black Americans move North in what is known as the "Great Migration" in an attempt to secure jobs.

1996: The Supreme Court holds that Congressional districts drawn specifically to ensure a racial majority are unconstitutional.

1996: 915,900 immigrants enter the country, according to U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service, and countless others sneak in illegally.

1943: A race riot occurs in Harlem on August 1.

1944: In Smith v. Allwright, the Supreme Court rules that an American cannot be denied the right to vote because of his or her race. Southern states continue to prevent blacks from voting, however, using methods such as literacy tests and poll taxes.

1991: A jury acquits white Los Angeles policemen of the beating of black citizen Rodney King, triggering the worst violence and looting in U.S. history with over fifty deaths and fifty square miles of Los Angeles property devastated.

culture flocked to the city. In the 1920s the neighborhood enjoyed a cultural high point called the Harlem Renaissance. Writers such as Langston Hughes (one of Ellison's first friends in New York) and Zora Neale Hurston, musicians such as Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong, and many other artistic and intellectual figures made Harlem and New York a haven for African-American culture.

very little critical attention in comparison to the large body of criticism that has grown up around his novel Invisible Man. For years the stories were difficult to find; they appeared in small magazines and few were anthologized. Consequently, criticism of "King of the Bingo Game" tends to focus more on the story's relationship to Invisible Man than on the story's position in Ellison's short story oeuvre.

Although New York was often difficult and daunting, Ellison remained there for most of his life and taught for a decade at New York University. Ellison became a fixture in the city's intellectual and cultural life and cultivated long-term friendships with many of its most important writers. The city of New York is a dominant image in his novel Invisible Man. The conclusion of the novel finds the protagonist living in Harlem, a situation that mirrors the choice of many artists and writers to move to this cultural center during the Harlem Renaissance.

As a precursor to Invisible Man, however, ' 'King of the Bingo Game'' demands attention. The Bingo King, like the protagonist of Ellison's novel, remains unnamed. He is alienated from his surroundings, and he combines the existential anxieties of the traditional modernist hero with the specific experiences of blacks in America, experiences which only heighten his alienation. Leonard J. Deutsch asserts that the story ' 'seems a rehearsal for Invisible Man in that it features a nameless character who, despite the absurdity of his situation, tries desperately to manipulate his fate and forge his own identity."

Critical Overview Because a collection of Ellison's short stories has not yet been published, these works have received

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Like James Baldwin and unlike Richard Wright, Ellison claimed a place for himself not as a black American writer, but simply as a writer. Like both of those writers, he examined the plight of the African American in a country that was hostile to his very existence. For Ellison, this hostility serves

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to deepen the already profound difficulties all people have in establishing an identity. Yet Ellison also felt that the black American experience endowed writers with a special perspective from which to view the historical developments of the century. Ellison discussed this feeling with author John Hersey during an interview presented in Ralph Ellison: A Collection of Critical Essays. Commenting on the black author's position in society, Ellison said: "Although we were outside the social compact, we were existentially right in the middle of the social drama. Thus we saw things, and we understood the difference between ideal assertions and cruel realities." Critical opinion on ' 'King of the Bingo Game'' generally springs from these principles. Willi Real points out the movement from realism to surrealism in his essay covering Ellison's story included in The Black American Short Story in the 20th Century. Real believes that Ellison is ironically modeling the Bingo King's "development towards ego-identity," and demonstrates the Bingo King's "disintegrating personality." The story is a "total defeat" for the protagonist, and Real quotes Ellison's comment on this: ' 'The nature of society is such that we are prevented from knowing who we are." Pearl I. Saunders' article in the CIA Journal agrees with Real's assessment of the story. For her, Ellison's intention was "to elucidate the complex struggle of the black American for personhood, for positive identity, and for recognition." She agrees that the story results in a defeat for the protagonist but outlines the development of the protagonist's life before the bingo game in greater detail.' 'With a false belief in deterministic fate, he revolts against the absurdity of existence and strives towards authenticity," only to find that revolt blocked by the forces of society, which are personified by the bingo caller and the police. Examining its symbols, she sees the story as that of the universal search for identity seen through the particularly difficult experiences of the African American. Saunders writes: "The bingo game is suggestive of the chances Blacks take; the nameless protagonist is representative of the unauthentic selfhood created by a repressive society; the bingo wheel is symbolic of the Black American's destiny in an existentialist tradition enforced by a white majority." ' 'Much of the rhetorical and political energy of white society went toward proving to itself that we were not human and that we had no sense of the refinement of human values," Ellison told Hersey,

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referring to black Americans. "But this in itself pressured you, motivated you, to make even finer distinctions, both as to personality and value. You had to, because your life depended on it and your sense of your own humanity demanded that you do so. You had to identify those values which were human and preserving of your life and interests as against those which were inhuman and destructive." The Bingo King fails in this; he is unable to make the right choices and to preserve his own selfinterest. In the process, he sees his own identity slip away along with the fate that he controlled while he held the button.

Criticism Greg Barnhisel Greg Barnhisel is a writer and editor at the University of Texas at Austin. In the following essay, he addresses the narrative structure of ' 'King of the Bingo Game.'' Barnhisel also discusses themes within the story and Ellison's feelings about being a black writer in America. Ralph Ellison struggled through much of his career with his role as a black American writer. Alternately patronized and exalted in his early career, by the 1960s the militant tone of the black intellectual world deemed him irrelevant. Activists of the civilrights movement preferred the militancy and anger of works like Black Boy, (written by Richard Wright, one of Ellison's mentors) over Ellison's moderate stance. Ellison never felt comfortable with what he saw as the limitations of the genre of "Negro literature." "I am a human being, and not just the black successor to Richard Wright," he wrote, ' 'and there are ways of celebrating my experience more complex than terms like 'protest' can suggest." Ellison was educated in the two most important "schools" for black intellectuals and artists of the time. He attended Alabama's Tuskegee Institute, the college founded by Booker T. Washington; and lived in Harlem during the Harlem Renaissance, a period which produced an explosion of critically acclaimed literary and artistic works that originated with black artists living there. He also felt the strong influence of the late nineteenth century's most important black American thinkers: Washington, who argued for tolerance and patience in racial

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What Do I Read Next? Invisible Man, Ellison's only published novel, is one of the acknowledged classics of twentiethcentury fiction. Published in 1952 and modeled on Ellison himself, the novel portrays a young black man in search of his own identity. The short story "Sonny's Blues," (1957) by Ellison's contemporary, James Baldwin, tells the story of two African-American brothers in New York City. One, a high school teacher, has accommodated himself to living in white society,

matters; and W. E. B. DuBois, who urged a more confrontational stance. In 1952, Ellison published Invisible Man, which won the National Book Award and has since gained recognition as one of the most important American novels of the twentieth century. The novel, modeled after Fedor Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground, tells the story of a young black man who leaves his small town to attend a school much like Tuskegee, then moves on to New York where he falls in with a radical group. Ellison's protagonist does not see militancy as a legitimate solution, and at the end of the book he remains as alienated from his surroundings as he was in his segregated hometown. In this, Ellison is closer to modernist writers such as James Joyce and Virginia Woolf than he is to writers such as Wright. "King of the Bingo Game," from 1944, is in many ways a precursor to Invisible Man. As in the later novel, the story's unnamed protagonist does not feel connected to any of the other characters in the story (although he is dedicated to his sick wife Laura, who does not appear except in his thoughts). He seeks to turn his marginality into a mechanism by which he can control his own fate. This marginality is symbolized by his own particular personal situation, his identity as a rural Southerner in the urban North, and his identity as a black man in a white-dominated society. The topics of alienation and control were written about extensively by phi-

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while the other, a jazz musician with a heroin problem, channels his frustrations and his ' 'blues'' into his music. Published in 1940, Richard Wright's Native Son, is a much angrier and more pessimistic story than "Sonny's Blues" or Invisible Man. The novel draws a portrait of Bigger Thomas, a young black man driven to violence by the oppressive nature of white society.

losopher Friedrich Nietzsche. The presence of these themes within "King of the Bingo Game" demonstrates the influence Nietzsche had on Ellison. The story is almost perfectly divided in half. The themes, events, characterization, and even the style of the narration abruptly shift at the halfway point. This is not to say that the story is not unified; each half comments on its counterpart, and complements the other. In the first half of the story, we meet our unnamed protagonist. He is sitting in a movie theater, watching a movie, and feeling the pangs of hunger as he smells the roasted peanuts that the woman in front of him is eating. Throughout this half of the story, the protagonist is passive and has no control over his surroundings. He is also vaguely dissatisfied: '"If this was down South,' he thought, 'all I'd have to do is lean over and say, 'Lady, gimme a few of those peanuts, please ma'am,' and she'd pass me the bag and never think nothing of it . . . Folks down South stuck together that way." We see immediately that he does not feel at home. The solidarity of the oppressed which black people shared in the South is lost here, and the (relative) freedom from the Jim Crow segregation laws is cold comfort to our hungry hero. As he watches the movie, the protagonist thinks to himself that' They had it all fixed. Everything is fixed." He already knows what is going to happen,

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not only in the movie but in his own life. He dreams of what might happen if the events in the film were somehow altered. The protagonist's daydream about the white woman removing her clothes implicitly suggests a violation of one of the most crucial elements of Jim Crow laws, the prohibition against any sexual relationship between whites and blacks. But obviously, this does not happen, and the protagonist is trapped in his fate. He is poor and unemployed, his wife is dying and he cannot afford a doctor, and he cannot count on the even superficial friendliness that he would have found among Southerners. The story begins to shift as the protagonist' 'felt for his bingo cards, smiling." The curtain rises, suggesting the suspension of reality which the stage symbolizes, and the bingo game begins. The protagonist has improved his odds on winning by buying five cards, and although he has difficulty keeping up with the caller's numbers (much as he cannot keep up, financially, with the demands of his wife's illness), he ends up winning. The fact that he ' 'stumbled up the aisle'' and that the audience refers to him as "fool" indicates to us that this minor victory is not yet enough to save him. As the authorities check his number, he is still at the mercy of forces beyond his control, and he remains so as the bingo caller makes fun of his accent and upbringing. However, as he takes the button from the bingo caller and prepares to try to win the jackpot, his outlook changes. "He steeled himself; the fear had left, and he felt a profound sense of promise, as if he were about to be repaid for all the things he'd suffered in his life." In the second half of the story, the protagonist is transformed: he finally has power, not only over his own fate, but over the entire audience. The wheel spins and spins and he watches it, both frightened and enthralled by the unfamiliar thrill of being in control. "He and only he could determine whether or not [the jackpot] was to be his. Not even the man with the microphone could do anything about it now. He felt drunk." The protagonist is drunk with power. The power that the button gives him allows him to step beyond the limitations on his actions imposed by his race, class, and origins. As the spectators watch him, impatiently yelling at him to hurry up and finish, he looks down on them from the stage, both figuratively and literally: "Those folks did not understand what had happened to him. . . . He watched the wheel whirling past the numbers and experienced a burst of exaltation: This is God!"

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In the second half of the story, the protagonist is transformed: he finally has power, not only over his own fate, but over the entire audience."

And as if God was on his side, the protagonist defies a white authority figure, an act of defiance that he would never have dared to commit before. The bingo caller's "hand fell on his shoulder . . . He brushed the hand violently away. 'Leave me alone, man. I know what I'm doing."' In the face of the potential jackpot, all men are equal. The protagonist even takes his newfound equality a step further as the wheel continues to spin madly. The crowd yells at him to come down from the stage, but by now he has transcended not only his race but his humanity. "He was a long thin black wire that was being stretched and wound upon the bingo wheel; wound until he wanted to scream; wound, but this time himself controlling the winding." With his hand upon the button, he has somehow tapped into the power of the Fates that control the universe. The spinning wheel as the arbiter of fate is one of the oldest images in Western literature. Ancient Roman literature often refers to the Wheel of Fortune, and in the The Consolation of Philosophy, the Roman statesman Boethius meditates on how the spinning wheel, which once placed him in high and prestigious positions, now has overseen his death penalty from the imperial government. Chaucer, in Troilus and Criseyde, also uses the concept of the wheel of fortune to explain people's seemingly inexplicable shifting fates. In Ellison's ' 'King of the Bingo Game," the hero clearly has spent most of his life on the bottom of the wheel, and his initial victory at bingo indicates to readers familiar with this image that he will now have the pleasure of fortune's favor. The bitter irony of the story lies in the fact that the protagonist's triumph is momentary. Confronted by the spinning wheel of Fate, he seeks not to trust in the wheel's wisdom, but rather to control it.

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The wheel, in the story, is indeed God: it determines the fates of the bingo victors. The protagonist's fault here is another one with an ancient heritage; he suffers from hubris, the belief that one is superior to fate and the gods. By the end of the story, the crowd which he previously commanded is mocking him, stomping and singing derisive rhymes, and the authorities are called. He runs away from them in circles, looking to the audience like an actor in a slapstick sketch, and finally is knocked down and kicked in the head as the audience applauds. Another parallel for Ellison's story is the Gospel narrative of Jesus before the mob. At first encouraging and eager, the crowd quickly turns ugly and before long sides with the authorities who oppress them. Both the crowd and the protagonist here are black and the authorities are white; in the Christ story, Jesus and the mob are Jewish and the authorities are Roman. In both cases, the individual who is chosen feels separated and alienated from what should be his people. As in much of Ellison's writing, "King of the Bingo Game'' weaves together communal themes of racial oppression and individual themes of alienation. Ellison's refusal to indicate which of the two is more fundamental to his characters' predicaments condemned him to a marginal place both among the modernist writers (who valued the theme of individual alienation above all) and the radical black writers of the Harlem Renaissance and the 1960s (who felt that racism was the most important topic to explore). However, it is precisely that indeterminacy that helps Ellison capture the complexity of the dynamic between self and society. Source: Greg Barnhisel, for Short Stories for Students, Gale Research, 1997.

Diane Long Hoeveler Diane Long Hoeveler is the author of several books and numerous articles and reviews. In the following essay, Hoeveler discusses the game imagery in "King of the Bingo Game," describing how certain symbols represent the futility and repression many African Americans feel. ... Game imagery in Black literature utilizes two major motifs: language as game and the image of gaming itself as an expression of the difficulties that face Blacks struggling toward authentic identity in an alien and alienating culture....

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The focus of this paper, however, is on the second major motif: the image of game playing and the theories surrounding games as an expression of both the futility and the special challenges posed to Black culture in contemporary America. Central to this motif is the notion that Blacks are the victims not only of an unfair and discriminatory social situation, but also they are, like all human beings, the victims of fate and chance. Whereas Blacks seem to be playing a game of double jeopardy with the ' 'deck stacked against them," Ellison implies in "King of the Bingo Game, that Blacks must break the vicious cycle of despair and delusion in order to achieve selfhood and respect. The urge to escape into a fantasy realm, the realization that one has nothing to lose, the fear that one can never win because the odds are hopeless, all of these gaming motifs function throughout Black literature, but most blatantly in Ellison's early short story, "King of the Bingo Game." In his adaptation of the nameless and alienated hero's dilemma, Ellison depicts a man's transformation from paranoid weakness to a commitment to responsible action. At the beginning of the story the hero is filled with self-hatred and anxiety about his inadequacies as a man trying to survive in a northern urban environment. By playing the bingo game the hero learns that salvation is not something handed to you; it is a goal that one must strive for all one's life. There can be no easy or quick fixes for anyone, least of all Blacks, and to hope for one is to waste one's time and efforts on a mirage. Ellison's short story subtly condemns those aspects of Black culture that would seek to offer Blacks the promise of sudden riches without hard work and diligent responsibility. The numbers game, whose odds of winning are over 75,000 to 1, is a panacea, an illusion held out to Blacks, just as is the bingo game. More cruelly, however, the numbers game drains poor Blacks of the money they do have. By betting on an illusory future, they lose their chances to take responsibility for the present. By choosing to play the game, they actually forfeit their hold on life, on the realities that must be faced if they are to achieve their potential. Ellison's story, then, is dominated by the bingo game and the wheel of numbers, both games relying on the placement of numbers in a "winning" sequence. The players, though, have no control over those numbers, while the winning sequence is a purely arbitrary result of chance. The application of these two facts to the realities of Black life is, of course, rather blatant. Ellison's challenge as an

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artist lies in transforming this blatant game imagery into a powerful expression of futility, despair, and ultimately transformation. . .. As game-theorist Anatol Rapoport has pointed out, the nonzero-sum, non-negotiable games like bingo and the numbers wheel are nuclear conflict games in which each ' 'player assumes that the other is individually rational, but both can rationalize a strategy which is not collectively rational." He develops this theory by stating that these sort of games raise the ' 'possibility that the player may be acting rationally and yet the system in which he operates remains utterly crazy in relation to some larger context." Thus, Ellison's protagonist attempts to play the bingo game in such a way that he can rationally circumvent the operations of chance. He does this by playing five bingo cards at once in order to increase his odds of winning. But his victory, which he thinks will somehow enable him to save his dying wife's life, is fleeting, for he wins the bingo game only to find that he has to play another game in order to actually win the jackpot.... In order to win the eveniag^s jackpot, a paltry $36.90, the hero has to spin the^wheelso that it stops at the double zero, an appropriate symbol for the emptiness of both the game he is playing and his current prospects. At this point the hero realizes that since the birth of his parents and his own birth he had always been handed the "unlucky cards and numbers" in life. As he presses the button that controls the wheel, he becomes filled with "a profound sense of promise, as though he were about to be repaid for all the things he's suffered all his life." The game has assumed for him religious significance, for it must somehow redeem the injustices that real life has inflicted on him. Therefore, he cannot let go of the button because he knows that it "held his fate" and "as long as he pressed the button, he could control the jackpot." The originator of modern game theory, John Von Neumann, has observed that all games are based on the premise that the game has a "stop rule," an ending that is built into and logically proceeds from the rules of the game. He compares this stop rule to a brick wall erected at the end of the universe, and his imagery is appropriate for the circumstances of Ellison's protagonist. Although the master of ceremonies urges him to let go of the control button, the hero cannot. He is mesmerized by "watching the wheel whirling past the numbers." He experiences for the first time a sense of

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power and control over his own destiny. He has replaced the domain of fate and chance with his own power and he ' 'experienced a burst of exaltation: This is God! This is the really truly God! He said it aloud, "This is God!'" The hero has, unfortunately, fallen into the trap of playing the game and believing it. One is reminded of the vet, a character who advises Ellison's hero in Invisible Man to play the game without believing it. But the king of the bingo game thinks he has undergone a spiritual transformation at this point. He tries to scream his message to the audience; he tries "to tell them the most wonderful secret in the world," that they can momentarily escape the tyranny of fate and chance and take those powers into their own hands. The emcee, functioning as the voice of white society and perhaps its white God, insists that the hero stop pressing the button. Their conversation reveals that the rationality required for two-player games has broken down. Instead while both think they are playing a game, they are actually discussing issues of free will, destiny, and salvation. . . . But the hero cannot release his grip on the button, for it is his final link with the past. If he releases the control he returns to his old identity as a believer in life as a game. As long as he holds the button he has no identity. He realizes that' 'he didn't need that old name; he was reborn.. .as long as he pressed the button he was The-man-who-pressedthe-button-who-held-the-prize-who-was-the-Kingof-Bingo." This moment of epiphany, of selfordained godhood, however, is rudely shattered when two men in uniform approach to remove the hero from the stage. He makes a desperate dash to avoid them and "discovers by running in a circle before the wheel he could keep the cord from tightening." This is the final phase of the series of

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games that the hero has played. At this point he becomes a wheel himself, imitating its movement by going nowhere. As the uniformed men wrench the button from his hand,' 'the wheel spins slowly to a stop. Without surprise he saw it rest at doublezero." He has won the game, but nothing else. Ellison deflates this moment of the story specifically to show that the game means nothing in itself; it is simply a means to an end and that end is selfknowledge. At this point the hero recognizes that the wheel is an image, just as games are games and not life. By seeing the bingo wheel as an image, a fictional expression of the powerlessness of Blacks, the hero is able to escape its power over his life and dreams. He realizes that he has given fate and chance, the key elements in any game, power over him by admitting their inexorable ability both to crush and to save him. Ellison takes a qualifiedly optimistic view by insisting on the openness of the universe in opposition to the closed world of games. The hero leaves the stage with a new, albeit muted, attitude of confidence: "Well, let 'em laugh. I'll do what I gotta do." We have seen that in many ways Ellison's utilization of game imagery corresponds to recent commentators on game theory like Piaget, Caillois, Huizinga, and Rapoport. But there is another purpose in using gaming in both this story and in Invisible Man, in which that nameless hero also finds himself involved in a number of games and is associated with dolls, masks, and machines. Ellison, in an interview with John Hersey, remarked that human beings cannot be treated the way Blacks have been "Without developing a very intense sense of the precariousness of all human life, not to mention the frailty and arbitrariness of human institutions." This frailty and arbitrariness can best be represented in art by the image of games, those make-believe simulations of real life with rules that are as arbitrary and yet as binding as are the rules that govern society. Source: Diane Long Hoeveler,' 'Game Theory and Ellison's 'King of the Bingo Game'," in The Journal of American Culture, Vol. 15, No. 2, Summer, 1992, pp. 39^12.

Pearl I. Sounders In the following essay, Sounders describes some of the symbols in "King of the Bingo Game," such as the double zero and the other instances of invisibility, which help to create the theme of "powerlessness of Blacks in America.''

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Ralph Ellison's short story, "King of the Bingo Game," recounts the experiences of an unnamed black man who struggles to survive to be recognized in an environment that insists on catering to his invisibility. This nameless man lashes out against the restrictive and stultifying aspects of his victimized black life style. Faced with a dying wife, Laura, who needs adequate medical care, he engages in a bingo game held at a moviehouse, hoping to win money to defray the medical expenses. Subsequently, he receives the winning bingo card. However, in order to win the jackpot of $36.90, the bingo wheel must stop between the double zero, symbolic of his invisibility. The wheel becomes the interpreter of his destiny. Realizing the meaninglessness of his life, he deliriously revolts against his fate. No longer fate's scapegoat, he proclaims himself the King of the Bingo Game. For the first time in his life, he has control of his destiny; he has temporarily become the determiner of his fate. But fear grasps him; so he is indecisive toward the testing of his moment of control or power by allowing the wheel to stop. He knows that as long as he presses the button, he can control the jackpot. But when the cord is finally extricated, the wheel ironically registers between the double zero. However, the unlucky man finds that he is not allowed to win the jackpot or the game. To elucidate the complex struggle of the black American for personhood, for positive identity, and for recognition, Ellison employs the bingo game to depict life as a risk and a gamble, the nameless protagonist to reflect the social invisibility Blacks experience daily, and the bingo wheel to exemplify the powerlessness of Blacks in America. Ralph Ellison relates the unnamed protagonist's life to a bingo game, a game of chance. This man is faced with the dilemma of a dying wife who needs proper medical care, but he has insufficient money to defray incurred expenses. Overcome with desperation, he surrenders his humanity to risk his luck, viewing this decision as the price for a painful reality. He has to take the chance of winning the jackpot for his loved one's life and for his own destiny. Since Ellison's hero is filled with selfloathing over his own inadequacies, he feels that "he doesn't have much of a chance. For Laura, though, he has to have faith." The existentialist hero's vulnerability and capacity to be easily victimized is illustrated in the dream of his childhood: He is a boy again walking along a railroad trestle down South, and seeing the train coming, and running back as fast as he can go, and hearing the whistle blowing, and getting off the trestle to solid ground,...

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K i n g looking back and seeing with terror that the train has left the track and is following him right down the middle of the street, and all the white people laughing as he runs screaming.

This dream revealing the high social invisibility, humility, and alienation the nameless man experiences, is the basis for his defeated attitude toward life that' 'everything is fixed." Ironically, the man's attitude is refocused after he wins the bingo game. With a false belief in deterministic fate, he revolts against the absurdity of his existence and strives toward authenticity. The hero, "feeling a profound sense of promise, as though he is about to be repaid for all he has suffered all his life," proclaims himself king of the bingo game. Perhaps now he can gain freedom, continuation of love, and individuality, and a positive self-image; he is no longer life's scapegoat, but a real person. Certainly, the bingo game is symbolic of the black hero's experiences in white America, because his experiences require a certain amount of risk and determination. Even with certain advantages the chances of obtaining visibility are very rare. Ellison demonstrates this point when he describes the futile efforts of the protagonist to win at the bingo game by using five cards, instead of just one: "Well, not everyone plays the bingo game; and even with five cards he doesn't have much of a chance." In his frenzy, as the self-proclaimed Bingo King releases the cord controlling the wheel, it registers a double zero, symbolic of and similar to the rewards received by Blacks for their efforts, generally nothing. In addition, Ellison's symbolic employment of an unnamed protagonist represents the namelessness, the invisibility, or lack of identity experienced by the black American. Ellison appropriately places his hero in a darkened theatre, which Edward Guereschi fittingly calls a ' 'modern psychic confessional," to reveal his concept of self and others. "Well, I ain't crazy. I'm just broke cause I got no birth certificate to get a job, and Laura 'bout to die 'cause we got no money for a doctor. But I ain't crazy." This "confessional" not only engenders a self-analysis, but it allows him to rationalize his relationship with others. He is surrounded by indifferent and unfriendly people who treat him as though he were an apparition, a non-existent being, the epitome of invisibility. As his stomach growls from hunger, people around him eat and drink; they never extend their generosity to him. He thinks that If this was down South . . . all I'd have to do is to lean over and say, ' 'Lady, gimme a few of those peanuts,

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Obviously, Ellison's emphasis on symbols in the 'King of the Bingo flame' reflects the suppression of Blacks in an indifferent white America."

please ma'am," and she'd pass me the bag and never think nothing of it. Or he could ask the fellows for a drink in the same way. Folks down South stuck together that way; they didn't even have to know you. But up here it is different. Ask somebody for something, and they'll think you are crazy.

The anxiety and alienation engendered by these roles explain the protagonist's defeated attitude toward life. Moreover, on having control of the bingo wheel, he rebels against "the unlucky cards and numbers of his days," and he assumes the stance of a metaphysical rebel, when he cries out: "This is God!" Ellison's hero now has temporarily shed his sense of powerlessness, and he emerges from a restrained and insignificant role to one filled with efficacity. Now, in control of his destiny, he can attest to his uniqueness and aliveness. He realizes that his destiny has always been guided by hatred; hatred of self and of his race, caused by the repressiveness of a white controlled and white dominated society. He stood pressing the button, the voices of the crowd reaching him like sounds in distant streets. Let them yell. All the Negroes down there were just ashamed because he was black like them. He smiled inwardly, knowing how it was. Most of the time he was ashamed of what Negroes did himself.

Having exchanged his birthright for pottage, a mere $36.90 jackpot, he realized that somehow he had forgotten his own n a m e . . . . That name had been given him by the white man who had owned his grandfather a long lost time ago down South.

The unnamed man feels that King of the Bingo Game is a better title and reflects a more positive identity than the one given him by the white man. Holding onto the buttons as if it were his life, he screams, "I can't give it up." Immediately, the destiny of his black heritage becomes a reality as the

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button iswrested awayand the wheel''spins slowly to a stop ... at double zero." In this moment defeat, it becomes quite apparent that his luck has expired; he hasfailed in hisattempt to win the jackpot, that whichhe hassoldhissoul for, and he establishes a bonafideselfhood in the gamelife. of

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registers thewinningdouble zero. Ironically, even of though hewins the game according to the rules, he loses hisindividuality.Hecomes full toawareness a of his place in the gameoflife. Obviously, Ellison's emphasis on symbols in the ' 'King of theBingo Game'' reflects the suppression ofBlacks in anindifferent white America.The bingo game is suggestiveof thechances Blacks take; the namelessprotagonist is representative of the unauthentic selfhood createdby a repressive society; thebingo wheel is symbolic of the Black American's destinyin anexistentialist tradition enforced by awhite majority.

Undoubtedly,themost important symbol Ellison employs is thebingo wheel, representative life's of destiny and the "system"that decidesthe fate of Blacks. As theprotagonist pressesthe button of the bingo wheel, he realizesthat his whole life is determined by the bingo wheel;not only that which will happen now that he is last at before it, but allthat has gone before, sincehis birth, and his mother's birth and the birth of his father. It has always been there, eventhough he has notbeen aware of it, handing out theunlucky cards and numbers of his days.

The Bingo King feels thatthewheel symbolis ic of his destiny, becauseitdetermines whether Laura lives or dies.If hecannot control it and win thejackpot,hewouldbepenniless; therefore, Laura would not receiveadequate medical care and would eventually die. Likewise,ifBlacks cannot influence the "system," sothatitalso worksto their advantage, then they alsowould metaphorically die.He is enslaved by anunderstanding that makes his black heritage something more thanmere a acceptanceof circumstances, becauseheknows that as long as he presses the button, he cancontrolthe jackpot,his life. By holding untohisdestiny, thecord to the wheel, he controls theexistentialist universal need for identity and self-reliance. Edward Guereschi feels that thebingo wheel representsthe wheelof fortune to the Bingo King,who possessesand is possessed by it. He asserts that thewheelis an ironic symbol of psychic enlightenment.The wheel suggests, to the protagonist, a glittering enlargement of life.

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Source: Pearl I.Saunders, "Symbolism Ralph in Ellison's 'King of theBingo Game',"in CLA Journal, Vol.XX, No. 1, September, 1976, pp. 35-9.

Patricia Chaffee In the following essay, Chaffee discusses the symbolism ofthe'slippery ' stage''and 'slipthe ' pery brink''thatthenarrator of' of 'King the Bingo Game''feels himselfto be on,which is indicative of his mental condition.

Gazing at the glistening wheel(the protagonist) is overcome by the twin desire to regard it as the interpreter of his fate, as well as to ascribe to it his ... despair. As a symbol of destiny, defining his submission, thewheel is in deed the harbingerbitter of truth.

Furthermore, Guereschi feels that because of the great impact thewheel has on theprotagonist, he fears to put hisfortune to the test of reality by allowing the wheel tospin to ahalt. Instead, he remains frozen, pressing thebutton mechanism that leads surrealistically to his subconscious.

The nameless man'sdestiny becomes reality a as the cord istorn away from him,and the wheel

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Source: PatriciaChaffee, "Slippery Ground: Ralph Ellison's Bingo Player," in Negro American Literature Forum, Vol. 10, No.1, Spring, 1976, pp. 23-4.

Sources Deutsch, Leonard J. "Ralph Ellison," in Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vol. 2: American Novelists since World War11, Gale Research, Inc., 1988. Herman, David J. "Ellison's 'King of the Bingo Game': Finding Naturalism's Trapdoor,"in English Language Notes, Vol. XXIX, no. 1, September, 1991, pp 71- 3. Hersey, John, editor. Ralph Ellison:A Collection of Critical Essays, Prentice-Hall, 1974. Real, Willi. "King of the Bingo Game," in The Black American Short Story in the 20th Century, edited by Peter Bruck, B. R. Grimer, 1977.

Further Reading Contemporary Literary Criticism, Gale 54, 1989, pp. 104^19. A presentation of several critical Ellison's work. O'Meally, Robert G.The Craft of Ellison, Harvard Press, 1980. Presents a discussion of Ellison's author.

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The Lottery First published in TheNew Yorkeron June 26,1948, ' 'The Lottery" is considered one of the most haunting and shocking short stories of modern American fiction and is one of the most frequently anthologized. The story takes place on a June morning in the town square of a small village. Amidst laughter and gossip, families draw slips of paper from a ballot box until housewife Tessie Hutchinson receives a slip with a black mark on it. The villagers then stone her to death as a ritual sacrifice despite her protests about the unfairness of the drawing. The impact of this unexpected ending is intensified by Shirley Jackson's detached narrative style, the civility with which the cruelty is carried out by the villagers, and the serene setting in which the story takes place. After publishing the story, The New Yorker received hundreds of letters and telephone calls from readers expressing disgust, consternation, and curiosity, and Jackson herself received letters concerning ' "The Lottery" until the time of her death. Most critics view the story as a modern-day parable or fable which addresses a variety of themes, including the dark side of human nature, the subjugation of women, the danger of ritualized behavior, and the potential for cruelty when the individual submits to the tyranny of the status quo.

Shirley Jackson

1948

Author Biography Born December 14, 1919, into an affluent family in San Francisco, California, Jackson wanted to be a

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writer from an early age. She wrote poetry and kept journals throughout her childhood, and these writings have revealed her interest in the supernatural and superstition. When she was fourteen, Jackson's family moved from California to New York, and in 1935 Jackson began college at the University of Rochester but withdrew for a year to teach herself to write. She tried to write at least a thousand words a day and established a disciplined writing routine she kept for the rest of her life. Jackson completed her bachelor of arts degree at Syracuse University in 1940. As a student, Jackson regularly published fiction and nonfiction in campus magazines. Additionally, her editorials denounced prejudice at Syracuse, particularly against Jews and blacks. Shortly after graduation, Jackson shocked her Protestant family by marrying Stanley Edgar Hyman, a left-wing Jew and fellow student from Syracuse University who later became an eminent literary critic. Living in New York City, Jackson worked briefly as a clerical worker and continued to publish short fiction regularly. In 1945 the couple moved to the village of North Bennington in Vermont, where Jackson lived for the rest of her writing career. It is in North Bennington where she wrote "The Lottery," and Jackson has admitted that the village served as a model for the setting of the story. The diversity of Jackson's popular stories in such periodicals as The New Yorker, Good Housekeeping, The Hudson Review, Woman's Day, and The Yale Review thwarted the efforts of most critics to neatly categorize her work. Jackson joined the teaching staff at the Bread Loaf Writer's Conference in 1964; she won the Edgar Allan Poe Award in 1961 and the Syracuse University Arents Pioneer Medal for Outstanding Achievement in 1965. Jackson died of heart failure on August 8, 1965.

Plot Summary ' "The Lottery'' by Shirley Jackson opens on a warm June day in a town of about 300 people and describes an annual event in the town, a tradition that is apparently widespread among surrounding villages as well. Children arrive in the town square first and engage in "boisterous play." Some of the boys create a "great pile of stones in one corner of the square." When the men of the village arrive they stand away from the stones, joke quietly, and smile in-

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stead of laugh. The women arrive next. As they join their husbands, they call to their children. One mother's voice carries no weight, and it is her husband that commands Bobby Martin's attention. The event for which they gather is a lottery conducted by Mr. Summers, a neatly dressed, jovial business man with a wife but no children. Although many traditional customs associated with the lottery seemed to have been lost over time, Mr. Summers still has "a great deal of fussing to be done" before he declares the lottery open. He has created lists of households, their heads, and their members. He and Mr. Graves, the postmaster, have spent the previous night making up slips of paper to be placed in a shabby black box that has been used for the lottery for as long as Mr. Summers can remember. As Mr. Summers is about to begin the drawing, Tessie Hutchinson hurries to join the crowd. She had forgotten that today was the lottery and remembered while she was washing dishes. She speaks briefly with Mrs. Delacroix about her forgetfulness and makes her way to stand beside her husband. Mr. Summers then begins to call off the names of each family in the village. As the household name is called the male head of the family steps up to Mr. Summers and draws a slip of paper from the box. All are told not to look at the slip until after the last name has been called. During the time it takes to complete the drawing, Mr. Adams notes that some towns have started to talk about doing away with the lottery. Old Man Warner, participating in his seventy-seventh lottery, snorts at the idea and says that would only cause trouble. After the last name has been drawn there is a long pause before Mr. Summers tells the men to look at their slips of paper. When Tessie Hutchinson realizes that her husband holds the marked slip, she cries out that the process was not fair. The reader learns at this moment that the lottery does not offer a reward or prize in the traditional sense. Tessie claims her husband had to rush to choose the slip of paper and that her daughter and son-in-law should be included in the next round. Her husband tells her to be quiet as Mr. Graves puts only five slips of paper into the box, one for each family member who lives in the Hutchinson household. The Hutchinson children pick first followed by Bill and then Tessie. The two older children look at their slips and rejoice. Mr. Hutchinson looks at his and shows the blank paper to Mr. Summers. It is then clear that Tessie has drawn the unfortunate slip and Mr. Summers asks the townspeople to complete

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the lottery quickly. They begin to gather up stones and throw them at Tessie.

Characters Mr. Adams Mr. Adams is one of the men of the village. While he seems to be one of the few who questions the lottery when he mentions that another village is thinking about giving up the ritual, he stands at the front of the crowd when the stoning of Tessie begins.

Mrs. Adams Along with Tessie Hutchinson, Mrs. Adams seems to be one of the few women of the village who questions the lottery. She tells Old Man Warner that "some places have already quit lotteries."

Mrs. Delacroix An acquaintance of Tessie Hutchinson's, Mrs. Delacroix is the first person Tessie speaks to when she arrives late at the lottery. When Tessie protests the method of drawing, it is Mrs. Delacroix who says, "Be a good sport, Tessie." Mrs. Delacroix, however, is among the most active participants when the stoning begins, grabbing a stone so heavy she cannot lift it. Some critics suggest that Mrs. Delacroix represents the duality of human nature: she is pleasant and friendly on the outside but underneath she posesses a degree of savagery.

Shirley Jackson

Mrs. Graves Mrs. Graves is one of the female villagers, and she seems to accept the lottery without question. When Tessie complains about the method of the drawing, she snaps, "All of us took the same chance." She is also at the front of the crowd when the stoning begins.

Mrs. Janey Dunbar

Bill Hutchinson

Janey Dunbar is the one woman at the lottery who has to draw for her family because her husband is at home with a broken leg. When Mr. Summers asks her if she has an older son who can do it for her, she says no and then, regretfully, "Guess I gotta fill in for the old man this year." She seems to accept the patriarchal system with complacency, but when the stoning begins she picks up only small stones and then says she cannot run and will "catch up." This is one of the few hopeful and seemingly compassionate actions in the story.

Bill Hutchinson is Tessie Hutchinson's husband. When Tessie questions the method of drawing, he says, "Shut up, Tessie"; he also forces the slip of paper with the black spot on it out of her hand and holds it up in front of the crowd. Bill's control over Tessie highlights the patriarchal system of the village. His unquestioning acceptance of the results of the lottery, despite the victim being his wife, emphasizes the brutality the villagers are willing to carry out in the name of tradition.

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Mr. Graves Mr. Graves is the village's postmaster, the second most powerful official in the community. He helps Joe Summers administer the lottery and, like Summers, represents tradition and the status quo.

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A middle-aged housewife and mother of four children, Tessie Hutchinson "wins" the lottery and is stoned to death by her fellow villagers. Tessie arrives late at the event, stating that she forgot what day it was. She questions Joe Summers, the admin-

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addition to representing tradition—he continually stresses the importance of ritual to the survival of the village—his character is said to symbolize the evils of capitalism and social stratification.

Media Adaptations ' 'The Lottery'' was recorded by Shirley Jackson for Folkway Records in 1963. The Lottery and Other Stories was recorded by actress Maureen Stapleton for Caedmon in 1976. A dramatization of The Lottery was videotaped by Encyclopedia Britannica Education Corporation in 1969. Also available is a videotaped discussion of the story by James Durbin. Both are available from Britannica Films. The Lottery was filmed by the Landsburg Company/Picture Entertainment and aired on NBC in September, 1996. The movie was written by Anthony Spinner, directed by Daniel Sackheim, and starred Dan Cortese, Veronica Cartwright, and M. Emmet Walsh.

Old Man Warner The oldest man in the village, Old Man Warner has participated in the lottery seventy-seven times. When Mr. Adams remarks to him that another village is thinking about giving up the lottery, Old Man Warner replies,' 'Pack of crazy fools." Resistent to change and representing the old social order, he goes on to insist how important the event is to the survival of the village. When Tessie draws the paper with the black mark on it, Old Man Warner is in the front of the crowd spurring on the others to stone her.

Themes "The Lottery" focuses on Tessie Hutchinson, a woman who is stoned to death by members of her village.

Violence and Cruelty istrator of the lottery, about the fairness of the drawing after her family draws the unlucky slip. She also questions the tradition of married daughters drawing with their husband's family. When she draws the paper with the black mark on it, Tessie does not show it to the crowd; instead her husband Bill forces it from her hand and holds it up. Tessie's last words as she is being stoned are,' 'It isn't fair, it isn't right." By challenging the results of the lottery, Tessie represents one of the few voices of rebellion in a village controlled by tradition and complacency. Her low status as a woman has also led many critics to state that Tessie's fate illustrates the authority of men over women.

Violence is a major theme in "The Lottery." While the stoning is a cruel and brutal act, Jackson enhances its emotional impact by setting the story in a seemingly civilized and peaceful society. This suggests that horrifying acts of violence can take place anywhere at anytime, and they can be committed by the most ordinary people. Jackson also addresses the psychology behind mass cruelty by presenting a community whose citizens refuse to stand as individuals and oppose the lottery and who instead unquestioningly take part in the killing of an innocent and accepted member of their village with no apparent grief or remorse.

Custom and Tradition Mr. Martin Mr. Martin is a grocer who holds the lottery box while the slips of paper are drawn by the villagers.

Joe Summers Joe Summers is a revered member of the community, the village's most powerful and wealthy man, and the administrator of the lottery. He has no children and his wife is described as "a scold." In

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Another theme of "The Lottery" concerns the blind following of tradition and the negative consequences of such an action. The people of the village continue to take part in the lottery even though they cannot remember certain aspects of the ritual, such as the "tuneless chant" and the "ritual salute," simply because the event has been held for so long that these aspects have been lost to time. Jackson highlights the theme of tradition through symbolism. For example, the black box from which the

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slips of paper are drawn represents the villagers' inability to change. The box is very old and in bad shape, but when it is suggested that the people make a new box, the subject is "allowed to fade off without any thing's being done." Further emphasizing the long history of both the box and the ritual, the narrator notes: "There was a story that the present box had been made with some pieces of the box that had preceded it, the one that had been constructed when the first people settled down to make a village here." Old Man Warner, the oldest man in the village, also represents the theme of tradition. When Mr. and Mrs. Adams suggest to Warner that some other villages have already given up the lottery or are thinking about doing so, he replies with, "Next thing you know, they'll be wanting to go back to living in caves . . . . There's always been a lottery."

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Topics for Further Study Relate ' "The Lottery'' to psychological explanations of scapegoatism. Discuss the significance of Tessie Hutchinson as victim from a feminist perspective. Research the 1692 witch trials of Salem, Massachusetts, and compare the events surrounding them to those in "The Lottery."

Victim and Victimization Victimization, or the act of oppressing, harming, or killing an individual or group, is also addressed in "The Lottery." The villagers believe, based on ancient custom, that someone has to be sacrificed for the good of the village even if that person has not done anything wrong. Jackson highlights humankind's capacity to victimize others by having friends and family participate in Tessie's killing. For example, even though Mrs. Delacroix is kind and friendly to Tessie at the beginning of the story, she rushes to stone her "with a stone so large she had to pick it up with both hands" after Tessie's name is drawn. It is also considered significant that a woman is chosen as the story's victim. Some critics maintain that Jackson's depiction of a ' 'normal" town that victimizes a woman fits logically with the traditional patriarchal type of society in which men have power and authority over women that has been accepted as "normal" in much of the world.

Sex Roles Some recent reviewers of "The Lottery" tend to classify the story as feminist literature. They maintain that Jackson highlights the negative aspects of patriarchal societies through her telling of the lottery ritual. In the story, men draw for their family, and women are treated as possessions or subordinates. For example, when Tessie dares to question the method of drawing, her husband tells her to shut up. Some critics have also noted that the method of the ritual itself helps guarantee the traditional role of women as mothers in the village. Fritz

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Oehlschlaeger states in Essays in Literature that ' 'the nature of the process by which the victim is selected gives each woman a very clear incentive to produce the largest possible family."

Style Setting Jackson establishes the setting of "The Lottery" at the beginning of the story. It takes place on the morning of June 27th, a sunny and pleasant summer day, in the village square of a town of about three hundred people. The setting is described as tranquil and peaceful, with children playing and adults talking about everyday concerns. This seemingly normal and happy setting contrasts greatly with the brutal reality of the lottery. Few clues are given to a specific time and place in the story, a technique used to emphasize the fact that such brutality can take place in any time or in any place.

Narration Jackson's narrative technique, the way she recounts the events in the story, is often described as detached and objective. Told from a third-person point of view, the narrator is not a participant in the story. The objective tone of the narrative, meaning the story is told without excessive emotionalism or description, helps to impart the ordinariness of the barbaric act.

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Symbolism Jackson uses symbolism, a literary technique in which an object, person, or concept represents something else, throughout' 'The Lottery.'' For example, the story takes place on June 27, near the summer solstice, one of the two days in a year when the earth is farthest from the sun. Many prehistoric rituals took place on the summer solstice, so by setting the lottery at this time, Jackson draws similarities to such ancient rituals. Another symbol in the story is the black box. Although it is old and shabby, the villagers are unwilling or unable to replace it, just as they are unwilling to stop participating in the lottery. Many critics have also argued that Jackson uses name symbology extensively in the story. For example, Mr. Summers's name is said to represent joviality while Mr. Graves's name represents tragedy. Delacroix, which in French means "of the cross,'' suggests sacrifice because of its reference to Jesus Christ's death on the cross.

Irony Jackson also uses irony, the recognition of a reality different from appearance, extensively in ' 'The Lottery.'' It is ironic that the story takes place in a tranquil and peaceful setting because what actually occurs is brutal and violent. It is also ironic that the events of the story are related in a matter-offact and objective way since the story as a whole seeks to elicit profound emotions and question morality.

Parable "The Lottery" is often characterized as a parable, a story that presents a moral lesson through characters who represent abstract ideas. While no extensive character development takes place in the story, the shocking ending prompts readers to think about the moral implications of the lottery and how such issues relate to society as a whole. Certain characters represent certain ideas in the tale: Old Man Warner represents tradition and ritual, Mr. Summers represents joviality, Mr. Graves represents tragedy, and so forth. Jackson does not interject into the story any ethical commentary, but rather challenges readers to find their own meaning.

Gothicism Gothic literature typically features such elements as horror, the supernatural, suspense, and violence. While "The Lottery" is not graphic in its description of Tessie's killing, it is considered an example of the Gothic genre because of the feeling

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of horror it generates in the reader. Because of Jackson's use of suspense, readers do not understand the full ramifications of the lottery until the end of the story. Readers could, in fact, think that it is a good thing to "win" the lottery. While some critics have faulted this technique, suggesting that Jackson deliberately misleads her readers, others have noted that it is a very effective means of highlighting the brutality of the story. Robert B. Heilman, for example, wrote in Modern Short Stories: A Critical Anthology: "Suddenly, in the midst of this ordinary, matter-of-fact environment, there occurs a terrifying cruel action."

Historical Context ' "The Lottery" was published in 1948, shortly after the end of World War II, but Jackson set the story in an indeterminate time and place. Many critics, however, have maintained that Jackson modeled the village after North Bennington, Vermont, where she and her husband lived after their marriage in 1940. After the story was published, some of Jackson's friends and acquaintances also suggested that many of its characters were modeled after people who lived in North Bennington. Jackson herself, who throughout her life said little about the meaning behind or the circumstances surrounding the story, noted: "I hoped by setting a particularly brutal ancient rite in the present and in my own village, to shock the story's readers with a graphic dramatization of the pointless violence and general humanity in their own lives." Some critics have suggested that "The Lottery" is representative of the social, political, and cultural climate of the time it was written. In 1948 the world was still trying to confront the brutal realities of World War II, the Holocaust, and the atomic bomb. The Holocaust, in particular, revealed that society is capable of mass genocide if they believe it to be in the name of the common good. Jackson's husband, literary critic Stanley Edgar Hyman, once wrote about the influence of world events on Jackson's fiction: "Her fierce visions of dissociations and madness, of alienation and withdrawal, of cruelty and terror, have been taken to be personal, even neurotic fantasies. Quite the reverse: They are a sensitive and faithful anatomy of our times, fitting symbols for our distressing world of the concentration camp and the bomb."

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Contrast 1948: A Hollywood blacklist is compiled in 1947 and several figures in the entertainment industry are accused of being Communists.

Today: The Berlin Wall, which was built in 1961, falls in 1989; East and West Germany reunite in 1990.

Today: Although all U.S. citizens are able to freely choose their political affiliations, few deviate from major political party lines. Ross Perot and the Labor Reform Party only garnered 8.5 percent of the vote in the 1996 presidential election according to an ABC news report.

1948: Birth control pioneer Margaret Sanger founds the International Planned Parenthood Federation, ushering in an era in which women are able to take more control over their own bodies.

1948: The Soviet Union occupies East Germany and blocks traffic between West Germany and Berlin.

Today: Birth control methods such as oral contraceptives and the Norplant implant are legal and widely used in the United States.

The spread of Communism was also a major concern in 1948. Communists took over in Czechoslovakia, the Soviet occupation force in Germany set up a blockade between Berlin and West Germany, and tensions rose between the democratic Republic of South Korea and Communist-led North Korea. Additionally, the term "Cold War" was coined by President Truman's advisor Bernard Baruch to describe the increasing hostilities between East and West. In the U.S. Congress, the House Un-American Activities Committee investigated Alger Hiss, a State Department official accused of supplying the Soviet Union with classified documents. Two years later in 1950, Senator Joseph McCarthy started a Communist "witch hunt" that continued for the next four years. Also in 1950, the McCarran Act (Control of Communists Act) was passed by congress to severely restrict suspected Communists. A few years earlier in 1947, many figures in the American entertainment industry were accused of having Communist Party affiliations. That year the Hollywood blacklist, which included some 300 writers, directors, and actors, was compiled. Such popular figures as Charlie Chaplin, Lee Grant, and Arthur Miller were accused of being Communists.

which women were expected to stay at home and raise the children. Recent critics have interpreted "The Lottery" from a feminist perspective, suggesting that Jackson was commenting on the role of women in American society at the time the story was written. Peter Kosenko, for example, stated in The New Orleans Review in 1985 that in "The Lottery," the women "have a distinctly subordinate position in the socio-economic hierarchy of the village."

The United States during the late 1940s and 1950s was largely a patriarchal society, one in

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Critical Overview When "The Lottery" was first published in The New Yorker on June 26, 1948, it generated more mail than any other story published in the magazine up until that time. According to Jackson, three main themes dominated the letters: "bewilderment, speculation, and plain old-fashioned abuse." Since then, critical opinion has been both ambivalent and diverse, with critics agreeing only that the story's meaning cannot be determined with exactitude. Early reviewers such as Heilman praised the emotional impact of the story's ending but suggested that Jackson took liberties with plot by suddenly interjecting into a seemingly ordinary environment the horrifying reality of the lottery. Cleanth Brooks

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and Robert Penn Warren also suggested unease with the story's structure when they wrote in Understanding Fiction that Jackson ' 'has preferred to give no key to her parable but to leave its meaning to our inference." Despite such comments, however, these critics applauded Jackson's focus on scapegoatism, victimization, and other themes relevant to contemporary society. Helen E. Nebeker summed up the ambivalence evident in early criticism when she wrote in American Literature in 1974 that' 'beneath the praise of these critics frequently runs a current of uneasiness, a sense of having been defrauded in some way by the development of the story as a whole." While critics continued to concede that it was Jackson's intention to avoid specific meaning in ' 'The Lottery," some nonetheless faulted what they considered the story's flatly drawn characters, unrevealing dialogue, and detached narrative style. They contended that because Jackson did not provide many details about the villagers, readers are unable to identify with or feel emotionally attached to the characters. Others, however, argued that' "The Lottery" is a modern-day parable, a story intended to teach a lesson, and that the qualities disparaged by some critics are consistent with that type of literature. More recent critics have commented on the relationships between men and women in the story. Fritz Oehlschlaeger, for example, stated in Essays in Literature that the story is a "depiction of a patriarchal society's way of controlling female sexuality." Others have read it from a Marxist perspective in which the consequences of class stratification are a primary focus. These critics have suggested that such village officials as Mr. Summers and Mr. Graves represent the upper class because of their power and money, while such characters as Bill Hutchinson and Mr. Adams represent the working class. Writing in The New Orleans Review, Peter Kosenko stated that' 'the lottery's rules of participation reflect and codify a rigid social hierarchy based upon an inequitable division of labor." "The Lottery" has also been read as a psychological horror story because of its focus on the willingness of people to engage collectively in abhorrent behavior. Although critical opinion continues to be mixed, "The Lottery" remains one of the most widely anthologized short stories of the modern era. The majority of commentators argue that because of its parable-like structure, Jackson is able to address a variety of timeless issues with contemporary meaning thereby stirring her readers to reflective thought and debate.

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Criticism Jennifer Hicks Jennifer Hicks is a writing instructor and director of Academic Support and Writing Assessment at Massachusetts Bay Community College in Wellesley, MA. In the following essay, Hicks provides an introduction to Shirley Jackson's story, ' 'The Lottery. '' Hicks focuses on the crafting of the story, the controversy surrounding its publication, and the possible meaning within the text. Although Shirley Jackson wrote many books, children's stories and humorous pieces, she is most remembered for her story "The Lottery." In "The Lottery'' Jackson portrays the average citizens of an average village taking part in an annual sacrifice of one of their own residents. When the story was published in the New Yorker magazine in 1948, reader response was tremendous. People were horrified by the story and wrote to express their disgust that a tale containing a pointless, arbitrary, violent sacrifice had been allowed to be published. Some also called to see where the town was so that they could go and watch the lottery. It is this last behavior, the need to feel a part of the gruesomeness that exists in American society, that Jackson so skillfully depicts in "The Lottery." Take for instance the recent fascination with television talk shows. On these programs we learn more than we want to about dysfunctional families, dysfunctional individuals, murder and mayhem. Even our print media proclaims our atrocities toward one another each day on their front pages. Yet Jackson wrote "The Lottery" in 1948—before gang violence, teen suicides, the threat of nuclear war, and handgun crimes reached epidemic proportions. Was Jackson looking into the future of the American society? It has been noted that Jackson saw herself as a psychic even as a young girl. She had read more than her fair share of books dealing with witchcraft and the occult and wrote about the Salem witch trials. But, perhaps more than having clairvoyant powers, Jackson had an ability to see our present in our past. She understood that barbaric rituals once used to sustain the community in a harsh environment were often continued to enact a sense of unity and history within the community, even if they were no longer necessary. Geoffrey Wolff, in an article in The New Leader, sees the communal bond as coming from a sort

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of democratic misconduct. He writes, ' 'The story seems perfectly true. A sense of community is won at a price, and communal guilt and fear are seen as more binding than communal love." Certainly Jackson's story could be true. From the exactness of the June 27th date in the first line to the myriad details of the environment and its inhabitants, one can picture herself or himself in similar surroundings. Most of us have "stood together . . . [and] greeted one another and exchanged bits of gossip" before joining the rest of our family at a social gathering. Jackson even lets us know the habits of Mr. Summers and how he "was very good at all this, in his clean white shirt and blue jeans." We know the conversations of "planting and rain, tractors and taxes" of the men and the mundane housekeeping details of the women. Through these details Jackson allows us to identify with the town's lottery day, and to feel as if we are a part of their community. We also see the fear of the townspeople. We see it in the way the summer vacation's "liberty sat uneasily on most'' of the schoolchildren, and again in the uneasy hesitation before Mr. Martin and his son Baxter volunteer to help Mr. Summers stir the papers. The fear becomes more noticeable during the drawing when people were "wetting their lips, not looking around'' and holding ' 'the small folded papers in their large hands, turning them over and over nervously." The fear is blatantly apparent once the Hutchinson family had been chosen and Nancy's friends "breathed heavily as she went forward." But, what we do not see is a sense of guilt in the townspeople to which Wolfe refers. Instead, we see Mr. Summers teaching Davy, the youngest of the Hutchinsons, how to participate in the ritual. We see the exuberantly grateful behavior of Nancy and Bill Jr., the other Hutchinson children, as they ' 'both beamed and laughed, turning around to the crowd and holding their slips of paper above their heads." They are certainly old enough to know that one from their family will be chosen as the sacrificial lamb, yet they show no remorse or guilt that it is not them. We even see that someone gives ' 'little Davy Hutchinson a few pebbles" with which he can stone his mother. Perhaps then, the sense of guilt may be felt more by the reader of the story. The narrative technique used by Jackson helps the reader identify early on with the townspeople. When the story ends, the reader is then angered and feels that she or he has participated in the stoning through his or her identification with the characters. It is the scapegoating of Tess Hutchinson that appalls us in the same way we are appalled by the

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What Do I Read Next? The short story "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas" by Ursula K. Le Guin was published in her 1975 collection The Wind's Twelve Quarters. It focuses on the city of Omelas, whose citizens must decide how high a price they are willing to pay for happiness. Irish writer Jonathan Swift's essay "A Modest Proposal" was first published in 1729. In it he uses satire to propose a horrifying solution, cannibalism, to the problem of hunger that existed in Ireland at that time. Elias Canetti's nonfiction work Crowds and Power (1962) examines the origins, behavior, and significance of crowds as forces in society. The Crucible (1953) by Arthur Miller is a fictionalized dramatization of the hysteria that led to the witch trials in Salem, Massachusetts, in 1692, during which twenty people were killed for being witches. James Frazer's 1890 nonfiction work The Golden Bough is a collection of anthropological information on folklore, myth, and ritual in which he examines the basis for human social behavior.

atrocities we witness on the nightly news. Lenemaja Friedman writes in her book entitled Shirley Jackson that ' 'the lottery may be symbolic of any of a number of social ills that mankind blindly perpetuates." Perhaps it is because Jackson has managed to identify with those who do the scapegoating that so much has been written about the story. Each critic tries to see something new and tie the story to his or her views of the world. Peter Kosenko, for instance, writes an extensive analysis in New Orleans Review in which he suggests that' The Lottery'' serves as an analogy of an "essentially capitalist" social order and ideology. This theory can be seen as viable if one studies the economic and political structures of Marxism and capitalism. On the other hand, critics with more

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In 'The Lottery' Jackson portrays the average citizens of an average village taking part in an annual sacrifice of one of their own residents,"

of a sociological bent, such as Carol Cleveland, view the story as a fable. In her essay in And Then There Were Nine ... More Women of Mystery, Cleveland says Jackson depicts American society as ' 'acting collectively and purposefully, like a slightly preoccupied lynch mob." With this interpretation, greed and corruption become collective characteristics of a society. Still others, wielding a historical perspective, tie the theme of "The Lottery" to the Bible or the Salem witch trials. In particular these critics often mention Jesus' proclamation ' 'let those of you without sin cast the first stone," or the fact that Jackson jokingly claimed that she was the only practicing witch in New England. Others examine the story from a feminist perspective. They criticize the patriarchal nature of the village and point out that the goal of the sacrifice was ' 'to contain the potentially disruptive force of an awakened female sexuality," as Fritz Oehlschlaeger states in Essays in Literature. How then is one to really understand this powerful story? Perhaps on the most basic level, it can be viewed as a story of man's inhumanity toward man which permeates even the most outwardly looking pleasant places. Jackson, who lived for a time in Bennington, Vermont, said after the publication o f ' 'The Lottery'' that she used the town and its inhabitants as models for the story. Yet Bennington was and still is a well-to-do town in southwestern Vermont. It boasts affluent families and convenient access to New York, Massachusetts, and New Hampshire. Scores of tourists travel its roads in the fall, gazing at autumn leaves against a backdrop of beautiful Green Mountains. Bennington was not evil. From where then does the pervasive evil come? Jackson takes pains in her story to let the reader understand that the yearly stoning was a longstanding ritual. She mentions that the "original paraphernalia for the lottery had been lost long ago," and ' 'so much of the ritual had been forgotten

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or discarded." Although a ritual is any activity that is followed on a regular basis, we most often think of them as ceremonial, religious activities. In fact, Jackson points us in this direction when Old Man Warner states, "There used to be a saying about Lottery in June, corn be heavy soon." This statement reminds readers of what they have learned about ancient sacrifices made in the name of various gods. It has been almost two thousand years since the Christians were sacrificed to the lions in Rome; but some cultures still believe that sacrifices made to the gods will provide them with healthy crops. Although several critics have noted the lack of religion in any of Jackson's work, one is left to wonder whether Jackson is condemning the hypocrisy of present day religions which espouse the "Golden Rule." Certainly, after reading the story, one wonders where current day religious principles are in this small pastoral community. How is it that an entire village can so complacently stone to death one of its own each year? More importantly, how can so many towns participate in the same ritual? Although Mrs. Adams offers some hope when she says that' 'some places have already quit lotteries,'' Old Man Warner makes it clear that to do so would be the same as "wanting to go back to living in caves." The fact that only men inhabit positions of responsibility in the town and the fact that only men are allowed to draw during the household choosing phase of the lottery overshadows Mrs. Adams's statement. The way the men of the village say "Glad to see your mother's got a man to do it," further emphasizes the patriarchal nature of the village, and the hopeful optimism of Mrs. Adams's remark is buried within the town's demand for tradition and ritual. Source: Jennifer Hicks, for Short Stories for Students, Gale Research, 1997.

Fritz Oehlschlaeger In the excerpt below, Oehlschlaeger views Jackson 's design of the lottery process in ' 'The Lottery'' as a key to the story's meaning: the lottery's ' 'primary social consequence involves women's turning over the control of their fertility to men." In a 1979 article Richard H. Williams notes what he takes to be a "flaw" in the two-stage process by which the victim is selected in Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery." Readers of the story will recall that the first round of the drawing determines a household from which the victim is to be drawn; the

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second round, the single victim from within that household. Williams points out that under such a system ' 'individuals who are members of smaller families are more likely to be chosen as the sacrificial victim," and he then proposes a new plan that would keep the two-stage process but have the same effect as simply "selecting one individual at random from the village" ["A Critique of the Sampling Plan Used in Shirley Jackson's The Lottery,'" Journal of Modem Literature]. But perhaps instead of correcting the story's "flaws," we should look at the lottery as Jackson designs it for a key to its meaning. The nature of the process by which the victim is selected gives each woman a very clear incentive to produce the largest possible family. Each child she has gives her a better chance of surviving if the marked paper falls to her household in the first round. What I am suggesting, then, is that one way the story can be seen is as the depiction of a patriarchal society's way of controlling female sexuality. Helen Nebeker has argued that the story presents a ritual that has outlived the fertility function it once had in an earlier mythoriented time. Such an argument overlooks the real and continuing function of the lottery as it is organized. That function remains the encouraging of fertility within marriage, along with the patriarchal domination that accompanies it. A conflict between male authority and female resistance is subtly evident throughout "The Lottery." Early in the story, the boys make a "great pile of stones in one corner of the square,'' while the girls stand aside ' 'talking among themselves, looking over their shoulders at the boys." Later, as the Hutchinsons file up to draw their papers from the box, it is a girl who whispers, "I hope it's not Nancy." This girl's expression of a purely personal feeling is perceived by Old Man Warner as a threat to the social order, as is indicated by his bitterly exclaiming, "It's not the way it used to be," when presumably everyone subordinated personal feelings to the social demands of the ritual. It is also a woman, Mrs. Adams, who presents the story's most significant challenge to the lottery. When at one point her husband Mr. Adams remarks that' 'over in the North village they're talking of giving up the lottery," Old Man Warner gives vent to a tirade on the folly of departing from what has always served its purpose. Mr. Adams makes no response, but his wife does, pointing out to the Old Man that "some places have already quit lotteries," an oblique but nevertheless real gesture of resistance. That Jackson wants us to read Mrs. Adams's statement as a

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A very important similarity between Massachusetts at the time of the witchcraft hysteria and the village of Jackson's story lies in the relations of power between men and women."

gesture of resistance is reinforced by what she does with the Adamses at the end of the story. Mr. Adams is at the front of the crowd of villagers as they set upon Tessie Hutchinson. No mention, however, is made of Mrs. Adams's being involved in the stoning. There is a strong pattern of detail in the story, then, suggesting that those who are most discomfited by, or resistant to, the lottery are women. On the other hand, men control the lottery. Mr. Summers and Mr. Graves are its official priestly administrators, and when they need help, they inquire whether any of the "fellows" might want to give a hand. The lottery is arranged by families and households, women being assigned to the households of their husbands, who draw for them in the initial round. That the society is a heavily patriarchal one is suggested in many other ways as well. As the people gather at the outset of the story, the women stand "by their husbands," and Jackson sharply distinguishes female from male authority: when Mrs. Martin calls her son Bobby, he "ducked under his mother's grasping hand and ran, laughing, back to the pile of stones," but when "his father spoke up sharply," Bobby "came quickly and took his place between his father and his oldest brother." Later when Mrs. Hutchinson complains that the draw has been unfair, her husband tersely and authoritatively commands her, "Shut up, Tessie." And when it becomes clear that Tessie has drawn the marked paper, Bill "forced the slip of paper out of her hand" and "held it up" for the crowd to see. The details Jackson chooses to describe the administrator of the lottery, Mr. Summers, and his wife further clarify the nature of male power and female submission in the lottery's community. Mr. Summers is given his position because people feel "sorry for him" as one who "had no children" and whose

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"wife was a scold." The woman who is without children is dismissed as a "scold," a challenge to male authority. The childless man, on the other hand, is elevated to a place of special responsibility and even sanctity.... Jackson had a clear precedent in New England history of ritual, collective murder in which women responded to the pressures of male authority by betraying one another: the trial and execution of the Salem witches. Some years after she wrote "The Lottery,'' Jackson wrote about the witchcraft hysteria in a book for adolescents called The Witchcraft of Salem Village. Some of the similarities between that book and the story are so close as to suggest that the witch trials may have been in Jackson's mind when she was writing "The Lottery." The description of people gathering for the first day's examination of the witches, for instance, closely parallels the opening of "The Lottery": "By early morning, almost the entire population of the village was assembled, the grownups talking anxiously and quietly together, the children running off down the road and back again, with wild excited shouts." As the lottery is conducted by a pair of men, so the witch examinations are presided over by a pair of magistrates, one of whom, Hathorne, is clearly, like Mr. Summers, in control. In addition, Jackson's explanation of how the delusion began could apply equally well to the reasons behind the lottery's continuing hold on its people. Discussing the role of Mr. Paris, minister in Salem village and father of one of the children believed to be afflicted by the witches, Jackson remarks:' 'No one dared to leave the only protection offered the people—the protection of Mr. Paris and their church. Eventually they came to believe that if they worked together wholeheartedly and without mercy they could root out the evil already growing among them." These lines reiterate the central, terrifying import of'"The Lottery'': that people can be brought to work together wholeheartedly and without mercy if they believe that their protection depends upon it. A very important similarity between Massachusetts at the time of the witchcraft hysteria and the village of Jackson's story lies in the relations of power between men and women. As in Jackson's village, all power in the witchcraft trials lay with men: Mr. Paris; Magistrates Hathorne and Corwin; Deputy Governor Thomas Danforth; Judges James Russell, Isaac Addington, Major Samuel Appleton, and Captain Samuel Sewall. The "afflicted" in the

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trial were girls, who, like Tessie Hutchinson, responded to the pressure of male authority by betraying others of their own sex. Although Jackson does not include specific demographic information about the witches in her book on Salem, it is worth adding that Tessie Hutchinson conforms rather well to the profile of women found to be witches. Carol Karlsen has shown that the group most vulnerable to accusations of witchcraft included women between the ages of forty and sixty, or past the prime childbearing years. Accused women in this age group were also more likely to be executed than younger women suspected of witchcraft. The ages of Tessie's four children indicate that she is past the years of her peak fertility. Jackson does not give us all these ages specifically, but we do know that Tessie has a daughter old enough to be married, a son whose ' 'overlarge'' feet and order in the lottery mark him as an adolescent, a twelve-year-old daughter Nancy, and a boy so young that he must be helped to draw his piece of paper. Tessie is, then, both a woman approaching middle age and one who has had recent difficulty in conceiving children, as the age gap between Nancy and little Dave indicates. I am not arguing that there is collusion between the men who administer the lottery and Bill Hutchinson to eliminate Tessie because she has passed the peak years of childbearing. What I am suggesting, however, is this: that given the purpose of fertility within marriage that the design of the lottery unquestionably fosters, Tessie is an extremely appropriate victim. It might be objected to my line of argument that the lottery also apparently has male victims. But such is obviously a necessary part of the process by which it retains its hold over the people who participate in it. A lottery that killed only women over forty could hardly expect to retain popular support for long, at least in part because it would lose its mystery. The lottery must appear to be fair, and it must give the villagers the sense of being narrowly spared by a mysterious power and thus justified. Still I would insist that we cannot discount Tessie's charge that the lottery is not fair. On one level, as John H. Williams has pointed out, the lottery is indeed unfair; its two-stage design means that the selection of a victim is not a purely random process. Moreover, we cannot deny Tessie's charge by saying that all the operations of the lottery appear to be fairly handled, for an obviously flawed lottery would neither mystify the villagers nor interest the reader. Neither can we argue for its fairness by saying that no one, other than Tessie, comments on any unfair-

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ness, for obviously everyonehas avery strong stake in believing it was conducted fairly.In short,if the lottery is unfair, it is reasonable to assume that its lack of fairness wouldbeevident onlyto thevictim. A reading of the story in the several contextsI have supplied heredramatically underscoreswhat is evident from the designof the lottery itself: that its primary social consequence involves women's turning over the control of their fertilitytomen. Jackson depicts a society in which authority ismale, potential resistance female. As in the historyofAnne Hutchison and The Scarlet Letter, women in ' 'The Lottery'' represent thepersonal, theconviction that, as Michael Colacurcio has said of HesterPrynne, life is more than "the sum of its legally regulated outward works." The young girl's simple hope that the victim not be herfriend Nancyis theforce that would destroy the lottery, as Old Man Warner recognizes. Suppressionof the personalisfuncthe tion of the lottery, whichit accomplishes primarily by causing womento submit controloftheir sexuality to men of secular and priestly authority.The design of the lotteryis withoutflaw; it serves perfectly the patriarchal purposeofdenying women consciousnessby insisting that they remain part of nature, part of the fertile earthitself.... Source: Fritz Oehlschlaeger, "The Stoning of Mistress Hutchinson: Meaning and Contextin 'The Lottery',"in Essays in Literature, Vol. XV, No. 2, Fall,1988, pp.

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One of the most terrifying aspects of publishing stories and books is the realization that they are going to be read, and read by strangers."

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Shirley Jackson The essay below is an edited versionof a lecture on 'The ' Lottery'' thatwasoriginally delivered by Jackson in 1960.The lecturewas later published as "Biography of a Story," in Come Along with Me in 1968.In it, Jackson talks about how she came to write'The ' Lottery,'' and the reaction the story received whenit was firstpublished in The New Yorker.

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with that ' 'solemn and public banishment ofevil spirits" [The Golden Bough] toappease theforces of the new year, to insure fertility. Primitive man,it seems, could not distinguish naturalfrom moral Source: Shirley Jackson, "On theMorningofJune 28,1948, phenomena: the forces of the seasons had to be and 'The Lottery',"in TheStoryand ItsWriter:AnIntroduction to Short Fiction, editedby AnnCharters,St.Martin's placated. Similarly, the men of "The Lottery" Press, 1983, pp. 1192-95. (suburbanite and rural) cannot distinguish natural from social phenomena: anybody criticizingthe social order works againstthenatural Tightnessof Seymour Lainhoff things. The evidence: on thepublic square, afterthe In the following short essay, Lainhoff comchildren have assembled, the men come—"Soon ments on the scapegoat theme in'The ' Lottery.'' the men began to gather, surveying theirownchildren, speaking of planting and rain, tractorsand Shirley Jackson's provocative "The Lottery" is a taxes." Old Man Warner says: "Listening to the young folks, nothing's good enoughforthem. Next story in which anthropology providesthe chief thing you know, they'll be wantingto gobackto symbol. Frazer'sTheScapegoat (The Golden Bough, living in caves, nobody work, live thatway for a Part VI, 3rd ed., 1913)makesitclear thatthelottery while. Used to be a sayingabout 'Lottery inJune, is Miss Jackson's modern representation of the corn be heavy soon."' primitive annual scapegoat rite.Thestory imagines that, in some typical American community,therite still flourishes.

The lottery is conducted by Mr. Summers, "who had time and energy to devote to civic activities. He was a roundfaced jovial man and he The story begins on the morningofJune27. ran the coal business,andpeople were sorryfor him (Frazer: the riteoften occurred at thetimeof the because he had no children and his wife was a summer solstice.) The first to gather at thesquare scold." Summers is the appropriate leader of the where the lottery is to be held are thechildren. rite, as his name would indicate, as his jobwould School recently over, they taketotheirnew liberty too, the providingoffuel, but who ismore barren, uneasily, gathering together quietlyat firstbefore more unhappy, more willing ' shift 'to theburden of breaking into boisterous play, their talk "still of thehis pains and sorrows to another,whowill suffer classroom and the teacher, of books and reprithem in his stead" [The Golden Bough]! mands." (Frazer: the rite wascommonly preceded The other characters are typical:Old ManWarnor followed by a period of general license, during er, the reactionary advocate of the lottery; Mr. which ordinary restraints were thrown asideand Hutchinson, thetypical citizen, dislikingthelottery, offenses went unpunished.) but accepting it as inevitable; Mrs. Delacroix,the The scapegoat rite had a double purpose: touneasy outsider, the mostfriendly to the destined exorcise the evils of the old yearby transferring victim before the lottery and themost ferociousin them to some inanimate or animate objects,and her attack afterwards.

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The theme of the story: beneath our civilized surface, patterns of savage behavior are at work. The theme is mirrored in the gruesome unfolding of the lottery rite. However, Miss Jackson is optimistic: some villages have abandoned the lottery; and the children, unlike their elders, preserve an uncontaminated affection for one another. Source: Seymour Lainhoff, "Jackson's 'The Lottery'," in Explicator, Vol. XII, No. 5, 1954, p. 34.

Further Reading

Sources

Allen, Barbara. "A Folkloristic Look at Shirley Jackson's 'The Lottery,'" Tennessee Folklore Society Bulletin, Vol. XLVI, no. 4, December, 1980, pp. 119- 24. Allen analyzes the elements of folklore and ritual in ' The Lottery," contending that Jackson successfully uses them to reveal various kinds of social behavior.

Brooks, Cleanth, and Robert Penn Warren. "Shirley Jackson: The Lottery,'" in Understanding Fiction, AppletonCentury-Crofts, 1959, pp. 72-6.

Contemporary Literary Criticism, Vol. 60, Gale Research, 1990, pp. 209-238. Collection of previously published criticism on Jackson's works.

Cleveland, Carol. "Shirley Jackson," in And Then There Were Nine ... More Women of Mystery, edited by Jane S. Bakerman, Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1985, pp. 199-219. Heilman, Robert B. "Shirley Jackson, The Lottery': Comment," in Modern Short Stories: A Critical Anthology, Harcourt, Brace, 1950, pp. 384-85. Hyman, Stanley Edgar. "Shirley Jackson: 1919-1965,"S
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Nebeker, Helen E. '"The Lottery': Symbolic Tour de Force," American Literature, Vol. 46, no. 1, March, 1974, pp. 100-07.

Friedman, Lenemaja. Shirley Jackson, Twayne, 1975. Friedman takes an in-depth look at Jackson's life, stories, and novels, and concludes that Jackson is a unique writer who belongs to no particular school of writing. Gibson, James M. "An Old Testament Analogue for The Lottery,'" Journal of Modern Literature, Vol. 11, no. 1, March, 1984, pp. 193-95. Gibson identifies the similarities between the biblical story of Joshua 7:10-26 and "The Lottery," noting that while the biblical story emphasizes the supernatural triumph of good over evil, Jackson's story reveals a "chillingly impersonal world of gray amorality."

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The Most Dangerous Game "The Most Dangerous Game," an adventure tale that pits two notorious hunters against one another in a life-and-death competition, is the story for which Richard Connell is best remembered. First published in 1924, the story has been frequently anthologized as a classic example of a suspenseful narrative loaded with action. Connell's story raises questions about the nature of violence and cruelty and the ethics of hunting for sport.

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"The Most Dangerous Game" gained favorable recognition upon its initial publication in 1924, winning the prestigious O. Henry Memorial Award for short fiction. Its popularity was further established when the first film version of the story was produced in 1932. Alternately known as The Most Dangerous Game and The Hounds of Zaroff, the film tampered notably with Connell's plot, particularly in the introduction of a female character. The story's theme, that of the hunter becoming the hunted, has become a popular one in other books and films since Connell's version appeared.

Author Biography Richard Connell was a prolific writer in the first several decades of the twentieth century. He was born October 17,1893, in a New York state community near the Hudson River, not far from Theodore Roosevelt's homestead. He started his writing ca-

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reer early, working as a reporter for the Poughkeepsie News-Press while still in high school. He spent a year at Georgetown College (now University) in Washington, D.C. while working as a secretary for his father, who was a member of Congress. When his father died in 1912, Connell moved back East to attend Harvard University. There he exercised his interest in writing by serving as an editor for both the Daily Crimson and the Lampoon, a precursor to the popular National Lampoon satire magazine. Around this time he also worked as a reporter for the New York American newspaper and served in World War I. Throughout his career, Connell variously wrote novels, plays, short stories, and screenplays for Hollywood movies. Among the screenplays he wrote are Seven Faces and Brother Orchid, a mob tale starring Edward G. Robinson and Humphrey Bogart. Most of Connell's fiction was published in the 1920s and 1930s, including the novels Mad Lover, Playboy, and What Ho! He was a prolific fiction writer. His stories, more than 300 in all, were frequently published in such popular magazines as The Saturday Evening Post and Colliers. Many of these were later published in collections, including The Sin of Monsieur Petipon in 1922, Apes and Angels in 1924, and Ironies in 1930. Some of these collections met with mixed reviews from critics. In 1925, a reviewer for the New York Times commented that his collection of stories titled Variety ' 'ranks, though high, in the great army of the second-rate." "The Most Dangerous Game," however, has remained popular since its initial publication. One of its strengths is its finely crafted action, which provides a type of suspense and adventure rare in short fiction. Connell died of a heart attack in Beverly Hills, California, on November 22, 1949.

Plot Summary The celebrated hunter Sanger Rainsford, while aboard a yacht cruising in the Caribbean, falls into the sea. While swimming desperately for shore, he hears the anguished cries of an animal being hunted; it is an animal he does not recognize. Rainsford makes it to land and after sleeping on the beach, he begins to look for people on the island. He finds evidence of the hunt he overheard and wonders, upon finding empty cartridges, why anyone would use a small gun to hunt what was, according to the evidence,

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obviously a large animal. Rainsford then follows the hunter's footprints to the solitary house on the island. The mansion looms above him like something out of a Gothic novel and inside is a similarly Gothic character as well: Ivan, a gigantic, mute man. Ivan is about to shoot Rainsford when the entry of another man stops him. The second man, General Zaroff, is far more civilized looking than Ivan and has exquisite manners. He apologizes for Ivan and gives Rainsford clean clothes and dinner. While the men are eating, Zaroff reveals his passion for the hunt. He tells Rainsford he hunts "big game" on the island—game he has imported. Hunting had ceased to be a challenge to Zaroff, so he decided to hunt a new animal, one that could reason. Rainsford realizes with horror that Zaroff actually hunts humans and wonders what happens if a man refuses to be hunted. He finds there is no refusing Zaroff, for either a man goes on the hunt or he is turned over to the brutish Ivan. Zaroff never loses. Although Rainsford passes the night in comfortable quarters, he has trouble sleeping. As he finally dozes off, he hears a pistol shot in the jungle. The next day Rainsford demands to leave the island. Zaroff protests that they have not gone hunting yet, then informs Rainsford that he, in fact, is to be hunted. Zaroff tells him that if he survives three days in the jungle, he will be returned to the mainland, but he must tell no one of Zaroff s hunt. With no real choice, Rainsford accepts his supplies from Ivan and leaves the chateau. He has a threehour head start and is determined to outsmart Zaroff. He doubles back on his trail numerous times until he feels that even Zaroff cannot follow his path. Then he hides in a tree for rest. Zaroff, however, comes right to him but chooses not to look up in the tree and find him. Rainsford realizes Zaroff is playing a game of cat and mouse with him. After Zaroff has walked off, Rainsford steels his nerve and moves on. Rainsford decides to set a trap for Zaroff. If Zaroff trips it, a dead tree will fall on him. Soon Zaroff's foot sets off the trap, but he leaps back and only his shoulder is injured. He congratulates Rainsford and tells him he is returning to the chateau to get his wound looked at but will be back. Rainsford flees through the forest. He comes to a patch of quicksand known as Death Swamp where he builds another trap. He fashions a pit with sharp stakes inside and a mat of forest weeds and branches to cover the opening. One of Zaroff's dogs springs the trap, however, and ruins Rainsford's plan.

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At daybreak, Rainsford hears a fear-inspiring sound: the baying of Zaroff s hounds. He makes another attempt to save his life. He attaches a knife to a flexible sapling, hoping it will harm Zaroff as he follows the trail. But this too fails; it only kills Ivan. In a fit of desperation, Rainsford looks to his only escape—jumping off the cliff into the sea which waits far below. He takes this chance. That night General Zaroff is back in his mansion. He is annoyed with the thought of having to replace Ivan and he is slightly irked because one of his prey has escaped. He goes up to bed and switches on the light. A man is hiding behind the curtains. It is Rainsford. Zaroff congratulates him on winning the game, but Rainsford informs him that they are still playing. That night, Rainsford sleeps with immense enjoyment in Zaroff s comfortable bed.

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Media Adaptations "The Most Dangerous Game" was filmed by RKO in 1932. It was directed by Ernest B. Schoedsack and Irving Pichel and produced by David O. Selznick and Meriam C. Cooper. It starred Joel McCrea as Rainsford, Leslie Banks as General Zaroff, and co-starred Fay Wray and Robert Armstrong. Also known as The Most Dangerous Game in the World and The Hounds of Zaroff. 65 minutes, available on video.

Characters Ivan Ivan is the deaf and dumb assistant to General Zaroff. He is extremely large and seems to enjoy torturing and murdering helpless captives. Indeed, Zaroff uses the threat of turning his huntees over to Ivan if they will not comply with his desire to hunt them; the huntees invariably choose to be hunted rather than face the brutal Ivan. Ivan, like Zaroff, is a Cossack—a Russian who served as a soldier to the Russian Czar in the early 1900s. Ivan dies as the result of one of Rainsford's traps.

Sanger Rainsford After hearing gunshots in the darkness, Sanger Rainsford falls off a yacht into the Caribbean Sea. "It was not the first time he had been in a tight place," however. Rainsford is an American hunter of world renown, and is immediately recognized by General Zaroff as the author of a book on hunting snow leopards in Tibet. While he shares both an interest in hunting and a refined nature with Zaroff, Rainsford believes Zaroff s sport to be brutal and Zaroff himself to be a murderer. As the object of the hunt, Rainsford constantly attempts to preserve his "nerve" and uses his knowledge of hunting and trapping to elude Zaroff. Rainsford becomes terrified, however, as Zaroff outwits him (but allows him to live) and toys with him as if he were a mouse. Having already killed Zaroff s assistant, Ivan, and one of Zaroff s dogs, Rainsford surprises Zaroff in his bedroom. Rainsford refuses to end the game

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there, however, and kills Zaroff. Rainsford then spends a comfortable night in Zaroff s bed, which raises the question of whether he will simply replace the evil Zaroff.

General Zaroff General Zaroff greets the stranded Rainsford by sparing his life, but later hunts him and attempts to kill him. Zaroff is distinguished by a ' 'cultivated voice," fine clothes, the "singularly handsome" features of an aristocrat—and an obsession for hunting human beings. He has established a "palatial chateau" in which he lives like royalty with his servant Ivan, his hunting dogs, and his stock of prey—the poor sailors unlucky enough to end up on the island. Zaroff s decoy lights indicate ' 'a channel . . . where there is none" and cause ships to crash into the rocks off the coast of his island. He captures the shipwrecked sailors and forces them to play his game or be tortured and killed by Ivan. Zaroff toys with Rainsford, declining to murder him three times to prolong the game. To him, the life and death struggle is little more than a game and, while insulting Rainsford's morality, he asserts that his embrace of human killing for sport is very modern, even civilized. Zaroff, like Ivan, is a Cossack and ' 'like all his race, a bit of a savage''; yet he also claims a past as a high-ranking officer for the former Tsar of Russia. Zaroff s refined manners, and poised and delicate speech contrast with his brutal passion.

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Themes Rainsford, a noted hunter, falls off a ship and swims to a foreboding island. He finds there the evil General Zaroff who, with the help of his brutish assistant, hunts humans for sport. After three days of fighting for his life in the jungle while Zaroff hunts him, Rainsford surprises Zaroff and kills him. At the story's end, it is not clear if Rainsford will leave the island or take Zaroff s place.

Violence and Cruelty Essentially an action-packed thriller, Richard Connell's "The Most Dangerous Game" builds around explosions of violence. The violence of his malicious host, General Zaroff, initially shocks Rainsford, but as he fights to stay alive he becomes caught up in Zaroff's game. Zaroff attempts to justify his violence with "civilized"' arguments. He poses as a modern rationalist and argues against ' 'romantic ideas about the value of human life'' and then scolds Rainsford for being "extraordinarily droll'' in his response. Zaroff continually defends his murderous desires as the sophisticated and rational extension of hunting animals. Issues of violence and cruelty in ' 'The Most Dangerous Game'' exist not only on a literal level but on a symbolic level as well. As Connell directs the reader to sympathize with Rainsford, the reader feels what it is like to be a hunted animal. Zaroff shows off his animal heads and after describing his new prey, he refers to his "new collection of heads," which are supposedly human. This comparison of decapitated heads opens up parallels between the murder of humans and the murder of animals. If hunting humans for kicks is murder, Connell asks, then how does this differ from hunting animals? The story also stimulates an array of questions surrounding the nature of violence. Zaroff seems to enjoy violence intensely and thoroughly. Rainsford himself is a hunter of considerable fame. Indeed, Connell structures the entire story around violence and implicates readers through their involvement in the story. Just as the story is ostensibly about a man who enjoys killing, the story's success rests on the reader's capacity to enjoy the violence of the plot. As stressed in the title, the reader receives the vicarious experience of risk and danger. Connell mixes violence and cruelty with pleasure to engage the reader and make a statement at the same time.

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Revenge The conclusion of' 'The Most Dangerous Game'' inspires many questions, including: Has Rainsford become a murderer just like General Zaroff? How has he changed, and why? Although he won the game, and General Zaroff appeared ready to set him free, Rainsford still killed Zaroff. Zaroff s murder, therefore, is not self defense, as it would have been before Rainsford won the game. It is either an act of revenge or a killing for sport. When he first learns of Zaroff s sport, Rainsford is horrified. Yet, during the game he kills the dog and Ivan and does not indicate remorse. Connell thus opens up the possibility that playing the game changes Rainsford. He does not set the other "prey" free as soon as he murders Zaroff. Does he intend to free them, or does his pleasant night's rest indicate a desire to stay on the island? Will he merely replace General Zaroff? Sparing Zaroff could have brought the opportunity for authorities to prosecute Zaroff for his crimes, but Rainsford resorted to the violence he initially abhorred.

Style Setting "The Most Dangerous Game," a gripping tale that pits man versus man in a South American jungle, includes elements that recall several literary genres, including Gothic, action-adventure, and horror. In "The Most Dangerous Game," Richard Connell provides an ominous setting typical of the Gothic genre. Horrible sounds and dismal sights fill the background of this story, and the details become more frightening and typical of both the horror and action-adventure genres as the story progresses. When he falls off the yacht, Rainsford immediately finds himself in the "blood warm waters of the Caribbean sea"—an indication of worse things to come. He fights through the surf, listening to gunshots and the screams of dying animals he later finds out were humans. Rainsford passes over rocks that he could have "shattered against" only to leave ' 'the enemy, the sea'' for ' 'knit webs of weeds and trees." The environment is consistently malicious, dangerous, and unyielding. At first, Rainsford believes the "lofty structure with pointed towers plunging upwards into the gloom" is a "mirage." The house is not a literal

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mirage, but its civilized facade is soon shattered in the ensuing violence. Rainsford encounters many of the foreboding indicators of a haunted mansion: the "tall spiked gate," the "heavy knocker" on the door gate that creaks, and the gigantic scale of the rooms decorated as if in "feudal times." The table large enough for "two score men," and the ominous "mounted heads of many animals—lions, tigers, elephants, moose, bears; larger or more perfect than Rainsford had ever seen" add to the fearful, medieval horror setting. The wild jungle outside, complete with a "Death Swamp," echoes the adventure genre. Connell sets the "game" in a dangerous wilderness of quicksand, wild seas, fallen trees, mud and sand, and rocky cliffs.

Point of View ' "The Most Dangerous Game'' features an omniscient third-person narrator. The narrator describes things from Rainsford's perspective for most of the story but breaks away toward the end to follow General Zaroff back to his "great paneled dining hall," to his library, and then to his bedroom. A possible reason for this shift in perspective may be that Connell wants to illustrate how the hunter, Zaroff, has become the hunted.

Structure Connell structures "The Most Dangerous Game" tightly and concisely to complement the story's action. He writes with an often abbreviated style that rapidly moves the reader along through the plot. Twists and turns proceed with little description; this emphasizes those moments when the narrative slows down and tension is generated. The story features a classic device of the horror genre: the moment in which time slows down, and a second seems like an hour. Many words are used to describe a short interval of time, so the reader's experience of time slows down and the moment acquires a greater importance in relation to the remainder of the text. Examples of this include when Rainsworth falls in the water and when he waits for the general in the tree. In contrast, Connell takes a different approach at the end of the story. Having stretched out intense moments throughout the story, including the involved description of General Zaroff s return, Connell quickly describes the final confrontation. He grants it only a few paragraphs of sparse dialogue before ending the scene abruptly with "He had never slept in a better bed." By describing none of the final battle, Connell stretches the suspense as far

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Topics for rurther Study How does the author make the reader sympathize with Rainsford? How could Connell have written the story to have readers identify instead with General Zaroff? After the hunt, do you think Rainsford will become more like General Zaroff? Why or why not? When General Zaroff explains his love of hunting to Rainsford, he makes several racist statements. Do you think he does so because of the era in which he lives? Do you think Zaroff's racism reflects the author's own beliefs?

as he can. He waits until the last two words of the story to reveal the survivor with: "Rainsford decided."

Historical Context American Interest in Central America and the Caribbean By 1924, the year' 'The Most Dangerous Game'' was published, the United States was firmly committed to Latin American politics. Military concerns and economic interests, including banking, investments, and the exploitation of natural resources, tied American interests to Latin America and resulted in expansionist legislation. The Platt Amendment of 1901 provided for American intervention in Cuba in case an unstable new government failed to protect life, liberty and property; this was written into Cuba's constitution. In 1905 President Roosevelt urged European nations to keep out of Latin America. He believed the United States was the only nation that should interfere in their politics. This paternal, interventionist attitude was typical of much of the United States's Latin American foreign policy. Such policy, highlighted by the construction of the Panama Canal, created solely for the sake of

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A scene from the film version o/The Most Dangerous Game.

American shipping and naval power, would continue to influence Latin American politics for decades to come. Latin Americans have consistently wavered between supporting American foreign policy and rejecting it as intrusive, meddlesome, and overpowering. Indeed, America's and other first-world nations' continuous economic exploitation of Caribbean and Latin American countries has resulted in a crippling dependence on international trade. By often terrifying, scandalous means, Western companies have controlled the economies of relatively underdeveloped nations like Jamaica, thereby insuring their dependence on foreign trade. The economies of such countries have often become entirely dependent on the corporations that have exploited them, which has frequently resulted in mass poverty. The wrecking of native economies and their growing dependence on international conglomerations has spurred the coining of the term, "banana republics." Into these turbulent and contested Caribbean waters, Rainsford falls.

Big Game Hunting in South America In Connell's era, big-game hunting in South America was done mainly by outfitted safari. The

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most desired species were jaguar, puma, ocelot, red deer, and buffalo. The jaguar, the most powerful and most feared carnivore in South America, was a prized trophy. It attains a length of eight feet and can weigh up to four hundred pounds. The great cat was hunted primarily with hounds in the forests of Venezuela, Columbia, Peru, Bolivia and Paraguay. In this story, Rainsford and his companions are preparing to hunt jaguar.

Roosevelt and Hunting Like General Zaroff in Connell's story, President Theodore Roosevelt, who would later found the National Parks System in the United States, was an insatiable hunter. He traveled all over the globe to hunt. On safari in Africa, Roosevelt and his son killed 512 animals, including 17 lions, 11 elephants, 20 rhinoceroses, 9 giraffes, 8 hippopotamuses and 29 zebras. In the story, Zaroff describes similar hunting trips. Whereas Zaroff's most dangerous game was the human, Roosevelt considered the American grizzly bear the most threatening—he was nearly mauled by one while hunting in Wyoming. As a youth, Connell lived near Roosevelt in rural New York in an area near the Hudson River known for its pristine wilderness.

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Compare & Contrast 1920s: Big game hunting in African and South American countries is popular with wealthy Europeans and Americans. In 1909, Theodore Roosevelt and his son kill 512 animals on an African safari. Today: Most big game hunting in Africa and South America is illegal due to dwindling animal populations. The number of tourists visiting these areas, however, has reached record highs. 1920s: American foreign policy favors intervention in the governmental affairs of Caribbean nations. Today: Despite decades of economic embargoes and other tactics on the part of the United States, Cuba remains controlled by Fidel Castro's communist forces. The United States regularly re-

Bigotry in America In "The Most Dangerous Game," Zaroff s comments regarding ethnic types reflect the sentiments of anti-immigrant advocates of the time. Zaroff describes his hunting of men to Rainsford and justifies it by saying, "I hunt the scum of the earth-sailors from tramp ships—Lascars, blacks, Chinese, whites, mongrels—a thoroughbred horse or hound is worth more than a score of them.'' In the 1920s, this attitude was not uncommon among Connell's American audience. Americans whose families had immigrated only decades earlier frequently launched vitriolic attacks against immigrants who were perceived to be inundating the work force and lowering the American standard of living. One writer of the period, Kenneth Roberts, warned that unrestricted immigration would create ' 'a hybrid race of people as worthless and futile as the good-for-nothing mongrels of Central America and Southeastern Europe." Federal dictates began restricting the entrance of immigrants into America. In 1921, Congress set strict quotas for each European country, and the National Origins Act of 1924 reassigned quotas that gave privilege to British,

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stricts refugees from Cuba and other povertystricken and unstable countries from entering the United States. 1920s: The Soviet Union, led by Vladimir Lenin, is established in the aftermath of the Russian Civil War. Private ownership of property and Christianity are banned, and the Cossacks— military forces loyal to the Tzar—are killed or deported. Economic conditions, however, fail to improve on a wide scale. Today: The Soviet Union has been dissolved and the Russian president is elected by popular vote. Democratic and capitalistic economic reforms have failed to stem the widespread poverty, inflation, and lack of goods and services that affect the majority of the people.

German, and Scandinavian immigrants over Italians, Poles, and Slavs. The 1924 regulations completely restricted the immigration of Asians, Africans, and Hispanics.

Critical Overview Connell's ' 'The Most Dangerous Game'' has thrilled readers since its first publication. In 1924, the year of its release, Connell was awarded the prestigious O. Henry Memorial Award for short fiction. Readers and critics alike have consistently appreciated and enjoyed this story, even as many of Connell's other stories, novels, and collections have fallen out of print. Critics initially praised the story as an excellent action-adventure tale, a tightly told story that moves quickly through a nail-biting plot. Connell has been praised for the fluidity of his simple writing style and his ability to entertain. In 1925, a reviewer for the Saturday Review of Literature found his stories ' 'easy to read, all displaying facility and versatility." The striking originality of

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the central idea of "The Most Dangerous Game" —the hunting of humans—has continued to fascinate readers, as reflected in the multiple movie versions of the story and the many collections in which it has been anthologized. Movies and novels indebted to Connell's story include The Running Man, a futuristic tale in which convicts bet their lives—they are hunted on a televised game show— to gain their freedom. Critics have also noted that the escapist qualities of "The Most Dangerous Game" have a tendency to overshadow Connell's fine writing.

Criticism Rena Korb Rena Korb has a master's degree in English literature and creative writing and has written for a wide variety of educational publishers. In the following essay, she discusses various elements of ' 'The Most Dangerous Game,'' including its setting, its Gothic-like description, and the competition between the two main characters. Richard Connell's short story "The Most Dangerous Game" is fairly well known to American audiences even if his name is not. Connell began writing professionally in 1919 and continued to do so until his death thirty years later. He was a prolific writer, and his more than 300 short stories appeared in such respected American magazines as the Saturday Evening Post and Colliers, and were translated into foreign languages. He was a commercial success, publishing in a span of 15 years four novels and four short-story collections. The Saturday Review of Literature, commenting on Variety, the collection of stories in which "The Most Dangerous Game" was reprinted, found the stories "easy to read, [with] all displaying facility and versatility." Several of Connell's early stories were wellreceived critically—"A Friend of Napoleon" and ' 'The Most Dangerous Game'' won the O. Henry Memorial Award for short fiction in 1923 and 1924, respectively. Yet after these first critical successes and despite his ongoing commercial success, Connell never earned much acclaim from his peers. The New York Times said of Connell that "the very tricks which have given him a large and remunerative public have continued to rob him of the critical

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rewards which come to a man of his talents if he devote them to a shrewder and more critical study of the contemporary scene." Connell began working as a screenwriter in Hollywood in the 1930s. Soon, he was devoting the great majority of his time to that genre and, after 1937, he published no further novels or story collections. Many of his short stories, however, were made into popular movies; "The Most Dangerous Game" was first filmed in 1932. Both the story's action and its ability to function as escapist entertainment are preserved in the film. These elements of the story in particular explain why it has been adapted many times since that first production. With only two main characters and a straightforward narrative,' The Most Dangerous Game'' is basically a spare story. This does not mean, however, that is a simplistic one. Connell's careful work turns a plot that could be deemed unrealistic into a story that compels the reader to breathlessly share Rainsford's life-or-death struggle. One of the qualities of the story that makes the reader aware of its deliberate structure is the opening scene, which uses violent imagery in its language while chronicling the violent events happening off in the distance. Rainsford, while safely aboard the yacht, hears an abrupt sound and then three shots of a gun: this is his introduction to General Zaroff s hunt. As he falls from the boat's railing, he again hears the "cry [that] was pinched off short as the blood-warm waters of the Caribbean Sea closed over his head." Rainsford, now steeped in a metaphorical pool of blood, again hears the cry: ' 'an extremity of anguish and terror.'' The sea has become a place of violence, and the island, which represents his only chance for safety, promises more of the same. When Rainsford reaches land, the narrative turns from the more subtle indications of what awaits him to blatant symbols all readers can recognize from horror books and movies. Rainsford's desire to find safety and civilization is so great that he does not fully comprehend the oddity of the island, including the evidence that a hunter has shot a "fairly large animal. ..with a light gun." He doesn't notice what is obvious to the reader: that the island is a place of true Gothic terror. In the "bleak darkness'' he comes upon a ' 'palatial chateau'' with "pointed towers plunging upwards into the gloom." The mansion is "set on a high bluff and on three sides of it cliffs dived down to where the sea licked greedy lips in the shadows." There is a "tall spiked"

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What Do I Read Next? Moby Dick (1851), Herman Melville's classic adventure novel of a sea captain who hunts his nemesis, the great white whale, Moby Dick. Heart of Darkness (1902) by Joseph Conrad. A novella about a man, Marlow, who enters the Belgian Congo in order to find Mr. Kurtz, a Western man who has succumbed to the dark forces of the jungle, built a fortress, and generated fear among the natives for his violent, messianic ways. "The Bear" (1935) by William Faulkner. A

gate at the front of the house, and a large door ' 'with a leering gargoyle for a knocker.'' This is the typical haunted house, with an evil madman lurking inside, as well as dark secrets and a brutish henchman. Once Rainsford enters General Zaroff s home, the narration becomes subtle again, and it takes Rainsford some time to understand the nature of Zaroff s hunt. The reader, as before, picks up on authorial clues. Zaroff declares that Ivan is ' 'like all his race, a bit of a savage," then confirms that both he and Ivan are Cossacks as ' 'his smile show[s] red lips and pointed teeth." During dinner, Zaroff studies Rainsford,' 'appraising him narrowly.'' Zaroff is an obvious predator, toying with Rainsford like a cat plays with a mouse before finishing it off. Once Rainsford discovers that Zaroff hunts humans, Zaroff begins exhibiting more predator-like behavior. When Rainsford asks how he gets his victims, Zaroff demonstrates a button that causes lights to flash far out at sea: "They indicate a channel. . .where there's none." After the ships crash against the rocks, Zaroff simply collects the men who have washed up on the shore. Zaroff also demonstrates the predatory trait that will dominate his hunt with Rainsford: his delight in keeping his prey dangling until the moment of the kill. Because of the pleasure this brings him, he allows Rainsford to think he is safe, showing him a

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short story in which Ian McCaslin is initiated into adulthood through the annual hunt of Old Ben, an elusive black bear. The Snow Leopard, by Peter Matthiessen, published in 1978. A National Book Award-winning account of the author's journey with zoologist George Schaller to the Tibetan Plateau in the Himalayan mountains in search of the elusive snow leopard. His journey leads him to the center of Tibetan Buddhism, Crystal Mountain.

comfortable bed to sleep in and giving him silk pajamas. Though his decision to hunt Rainsford seems to be a spontaneous decision—"General Zaroff's face suddenly brightened," and he says "This is really an inspiration" —his mind is clearly set on the idea the night before. He had already told Rainsford how he starts the ' 'game'': by suggesting to one of his "pupils"—who he has physically trained for the hunt—that they go hunting. Only moments later he says to Rainsford, ' Tomorrow, you'll feel like a new man, I'll wager. Then we'll hunt, eh? I've one rather promising prospect—''' Ironically, Zaroff s belief in his invincibility as a hunter weakens him and causes his defeat. Though Zaroff wants to hunt humans because they have the attributes of an ideal quarry— ' 'courage, cunning, and above all, [the ability] to reason" —he underrates these very abilities. He sees them only as necessary to enhance his fun, not as something that could cause a prey to actually escape him. Three times Zaroff chooses not to kill Rainsford, but save him "for another day's sport," taunting him all the while. This cat-and-mouse method, however, comes at a high price. Each time Rainsford fights back, he causes greater damage: first he injures Zaroff; then he kills one of Zaroff s dogs; and finally, right before he escapes from Zaroff by jumping into the ocean, he kills Ivan.

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Connell's careful work

discusses ' 'The Most Dangerous Game,'' within the context of the adventure genre. He also explores the similarities and differences between the story's two main characters and what they represent.

turns a plot that could be deemed unrealistic into a story that compels the reader to breathlessly share Rainsford's life-or-death struggle."

Zaroff also loses to Rainsford because of their differing perceptions of the rules of the game, and in their differing beliefs as to whether or not the hunt is a game. Zaroff thinks it is; Rainsford doesn't. They both know that Rainsford is playing for his life, but that is the only point on which they agree. Zaroff responds to Rainsford's attempts to trap him as if they were puzzles set out for his amusement. He doesn't recognize that Rainsford is actually trying to kill him and instead delights in identifying the traps— "Not many men know how to make a Malay man-catcher. Luckily for me, I too have hunted in Malacca'' —and in seeing which of the men has earned a point— "Again you score," he tells Rainsford. Because it is a game, played according to specific rules, Zaroff would expect Rainsford to adhere to the bargain and return to civilization but never speak of the hunt that takes place on the island. He is such "a gentleman and a sportsman" that he can conceive of no other ending should Rainsford not die at Zaroff s own hands. But Zaroff never realizes that the game Rainsford plays is far more serious and has equally high stakes for both of the men involved. Thus Zaroff s words when he finds Rainsford in his bedroom— ' 'You have won the game" —no longer have any clearly defined meaning. Rainsford, who will triumph, instills in the game rules with a whole new significance. He remains a ' 'beast at bay'' until the almost unfathomable occurs: the prey kills the predator. Source: Rena Korb, for Short Stories for Students, Gale Research, 1997.

David Kippen David Kippen is an educator and specialist on British colonial literature and twentieth-century South African fiction. In the following essay, he

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As is the case with most authors who make their mark (and livelihood) in the genre of adventure fiction, Richard Connell (1893-1949) deals in easily recognizable stereotypes rather than fully-developed, introspective characters. His primary interest is in crafting fast-paced stories of manly deeds, not [Henry] Jamesian studies of interior life. This being the case, it is not surprising that most of his fiction has disappeared from sight, replaced by more modern treatments of more modern stereotypes. One story, however,' 'The Most Dangerous Game," has escaped this oblivion. What is it that kept this particular story from disappearing? Despite its apparent weakness in character development and often wooden dialogue, the story has two great strengths, both of which contribute in equal measure to its long-term success. The story is an extremely successful example of the adventure genre, and the stereotypes Connell uses to create the dynamic balance from which its action springs evoke allegories which remain relevant today. If, as Poe writes in his review of Hawthorne's Twice Told Tales, the principal identifying attribute of the short story is that it may be read in a single sitting, a good example of the form will necessarily provide a study in economy. As a subset of the short story form, the "short adventure story" genre demands even more economy. Not only is there no space for tangents, there is no room for introspective brooding, either. The action is the story, the story the action. Success in this genre depends entirely upon sustaining a level of suspense that makes the always surprising (and yet always eagerly anticipated) outcome gratifying. Taken together, these demands for economy and action insist that a good example of the short adventure story will necessarily have tremendous internal continuity. That is, the story will push toward its final outcome at every level and everything not related to that outcome will be eliminated. With this in mind, one can begin to examine some of the structural devices Connell uses to such great formal success. If the story is internally consistent, one should expect that even its title would have a strong connection to its outcome. The title of "The Most Dangerous Game'' represents a microcosm of the entire story's action. Though this may not be entirely obvious at the outset, a closer look makes the

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title's apt, formal, elegance clear. "Game" is both something played and something hunted. The most dangerous game (to play) is therefore (to hunt) man. Read this way, the title is suggestive, but not yet robust enough to support the development of the tight, well-built story Connell crafted. Had he stopped here, Connell would have described Zaroff s island before the arrival of Rainsford. In General Zaroff s world, there exists a hierarchy of dangerous game animals, with the Cape Buffalo at the top. But Zaroff is too good a hunter for this game, and even the Cape Buffalo is overmatched.'' [T]he ideal quarry," Zaroff explains, ".. .must have courage, cunning, and, above all, it must be able to reason." Once the ability to reason enters the equation, necessitating a turn to man as quarry, Zaroff discovers that all men are not equally endowed with the skills necessary to be—or play—the game. He also discovers that a hierarchy of dangerous game men exists, with Spanish sailors at the base and only ' 'the occasional tartar'' at the peak. Until the arrival of Sanger Rainsford, this is a static system: Zaroff still has not lost. This title, however, has still more to yield. The double-entendre suggests that the story will be a parable of the divided self: if man is the most dangerous game, the most dangerous "game man" is the one most like the hunter—that is, like the self. The primary opposition between General Zaroff, a refined but amoral Cossack, and Sanger Rainsford, an equally refined but slightly more moral New Yorker, therefore, has less to do with which individual will win the game than with the dramatic possibilities of pitting a younger version of the "great white hunter" against his older self. On the other hand, Zaroff and Rainsford are simultaneously more than opposite sides of the same self, for they represent ideologies in opposition. If the premise behind the title provides the course upon which the contest between younger and older self will be run, their ideological conflict provides the impetus for both to participate in the game. This final point may be somewhat obscure. Assume that Rainsford was persuaded by Zaroff s arguments to join in the next day's hunt. Rainsford's collaboration would have undermined the story's plot, muddying the waters enormously. In order to arrive at approximately the same outcome— Rainsford deciding ' 'he had never slept on a better bed" after dispatching Zaroff—Connell would have had to craft an interior self of sufficient complexity to allow Rainsford to participate in the hunt,

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While their similarities are compelling, it is the degree and kind of Rainsford and Zaroff's differences—differences of both culture and ideology— that drive the story's plot."

repent of his participation, and provide retribution. His retribution would still have had the same moral component—otherwise he would be morally indistinguishable from Zaroff—but the fact of his own participation in a manhunt would make Rainsford's moral position shaky. (This scenario is less implausible than it might at first seem. Recall that at the story's end Rainsford is completely untroubled by having hunted and killed Zaroff. However much the reader's desire to see Zaroff punished may vindicate the specific act of killing him, Rainsford has nonetheless played Zaroff s game of' 'outdoor chess'' to the end and is, by all appearances, quite content with the outcome.) Given the above, one can be certain of several things. First, that Rainsford's internal reversals would both take time in the telling and demand other internal context to be effective; the story would therefore be considerably longer. This change in length and focus would violate the genre restrictions I discussed earlier. The second consequence would be that Rainsford's sleep would not be untroubled. This sounds like a minor point but turns out to be rather significant, indicating out of necessity that the story has become a journey from extroverted innocence to introspective experience. Finally, had Rainsford joined the hunt, the parable of the divided self underpinning Connell's plot would no longer fit. In the adventure genre, though one may struggle with character, character is destiny. The younger self may slay the older self, but only in order to make room for the younger self in the older self s abode. Rainsford's refusal to hunt men is therefore as essential to the plot's denouement (outcome) as is his proven ability as a hunter of animals. The final structural device to examine, then, before looking at the story's allegorical dimensions,

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is the dynamic balance of similarity and difference separating and uniting Zaroff and Rainsford. The reader is provided with little contextual information about Rainsford, beyond that he is on his way to hunt jaguar in Brazil and that both Whitney and Zaroff seem to respect his prowess as a hunter. But Rainsford's skill is evidenced more strongly by Whitney's spoken admiration for Rainsford's almost superhuman marksmanship ("I've seen you pick off a moose moving in the brown fall brush at four hundred yards") and Zaroff s immediate recognition of Rainsford as the author of a treatise ' 'about hunting snow leopards in Tibet'' than by his ingenuity while pursued. Indeed, though he does manage to win at the conclusion, Rainsford's failure to outwit Zaroff in practice forces Rainsford to borrow heavily against this demonstrated experience as a hunter in the eyes of the reader. Similarly, Zaroff's conventional background as a hunter is offstage but his zeal for sport is kept beyond question. (Though the largest, most perfect trophies Rainsford has ever seen hang in the dining hall, the reader never actually enters the trophy room.) These similarities in interest would not be sufficient to argue for any deep similarity between the men by themselves but, as Connell is at great pains to point out, the similarities do not end here. Not only are Zaroff and Rainsford consummate hunters, they are consummate aesthetes as well. Having stripped off his clothes after falling off the boat, Rainsford has no possessions with which to demonstrate his wealth, but Connell overcomes this minor obstacle by creating in Rainsford a man with no visible means of or need for support, who has no career beyond traveling the world in search of game. Beyond this, Sanger is able to recognize subtle marks of the General's enormous wealth that would escape a poorer man, from being able to identify his borrowed evening suit as "from a London tailor who ordinarily cut and sewed for none below the rank of duke," to recognizing that "the table appointments were of the finest—the linen, the crystal, the silver." The similarities do not end with matters of taste or profession, or even with how well-matched Zaroff and Rainsford are in the field; they extend even to matters of size. It is not coincidental, given that Rainsford will end the story in the deposed General's bed that the General's clothes fit Rainsford well. In the real world, the combined weight of these facts would be written off to coincidence, but there is no room in this genre for the tangential possibilities coincidence implies. One must conclude that Zaroff and Rainsford are, for the

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purposes of the story, different editions of the same figure. While their similarities are compelling, it is the degree and kind of Rainsford and Zaroff s differences—differences of both culture and ideology— that drive the story's plot. Given Zaroff s criticism of Rainsford's unwillingness to hunt as "naive and.. .mid-Victorian" it is not particularly surprising that one of the ideological oppositions Connell exploits is between Victorianism and Modernism. What is somewhat surprising is that of the two, Zaroff is clearly the Victorian. The description of Zaroff s chateau makes it sound more like a castle—the sort of mid-Victorian monstrosity one would encounter in Gothic fiction, with its high, pointed towers, tall spiked gate, leering gargoyle, and baronial hall suggesting feudal times. And Zaroff s person, with his blood-red lips, Draculalike teeth, and precise, deliberate accent mirrors his home. Zaroff cites Rainsford's "experiences in the war—" but, Rainsford cuts him off "—do not make me condone cold-blooded murder." Zaroff here represents the old Europe while "Sanger Rainsford of New York'' represents the America of 1924: newly confident in the aftermath of the First World War that it is Europe's equal in might, but not immune to individual suffering. Slightly less stressed, but nonetheless present, is the conflict between American self-reliance and Europe's rigid class systems, or between serfdom and self-reliance. Zaroff's servant Ivan is the incarnation of serfdom: huge, strong, completely obedient, and dumb. By contrast, Rainsford's companion Whitney seems quite clearly to be a hunting partner, an equal. There is one stereotype heretofore not discussed in this essay beyond an occasional allusion, a stereotype Connell invokes with sufficient originality and force to keep his story read: the "Great White Hunter." Though the story is set in the Caribbean, this fact seems arbitrary—a plausible stop between New York and somewhere in the Amazon basin. The literary setting—the setting that forms the backdrop from which both the parable of the self divided against itself emerges—is the same Victorian vision of Africa [Joseph] Conrad describes in Heart of Darkness. The air is "like moist black velvet''; the island so ' 'God-forsaken'' that even cannibals would not live there. (Cannibals? On the Caribbean?) Like Marlow, Conrad's protagonist, Whitney's sentences often trail off into silence, saying more by what remains unsaid: ' 'It's rather a mystery—"; "Some superstition—"; "Even Captain Nielsen—." Evil has become "a

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tangible thing—with wave lengths just as sound and light have." This is not to say Connell is derivative of Conrad—their stories are in entirely different genres—but rather, that Connell invokes a cliched—perhaps stereotypical is a better word— version of Conrad's Victorian vision of Africa. But as soon as Sanger falls overboard, this language gives way to a more robust, more journalistic prose, stylistically nearer to Hemingway than Conrad. This is a fine point but not a minor one; it holds a key to what may be the story's saving original attribute: the juxtaposition of two historically distinct versions of the "Great White Hunter." Connell describes a contest between the Great White Hunter of his youth—he was born three years after Conrad's journey up the Congo and six years before the publication of Heart of Darkness—and the same figure in 1924. Throughout the story, in prose and image, these two languages mirror the conflict between the respective visions of Africa of the eras they describe. Thus, almost by coincidence, his is a contest setting two dramatically different visions of Africa against each other—the vision behind the scramble for Africa set against the era of great game hunters. Prior to 1876, Europe's most substantial direct and indirect holdings in sub-Saharan Africa consisted of what became modern South Africa. But between 1876 and 1912, the map of Africa was redrawn. In a series of territorial and diplomatic maneuvers that came to be known as ' 'the scramble for Africa," the territory-hungry countries of Europe (Belgium, Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Portugal and Spain) divided up among themselves the entire African continent, creating arbitrary and artificial boundaries, and leaving only Abyssinia (Ethiopia) and Liberia independent of direct European control. Though the scramble was a barbaric, selfish affair, by the mid-twenties a combination of factors had made a more sentimental, less mercantile view of the era and its conquests possible (e.g., the recent horrors of the European war on one hand and increased settlement and tourism in Africa on the other.) By 1924, the dominant Victorian metaphor for Africa as a place of barbarism and darkness was giving way to the Modern vision of Africa as both a place to test one's manhood and a place of openness and beauty. What this suggests, perhaps, is that an aesthetic of the hunt is at stake, one in which hunters like Denys Finch-Hatton, whom Isak Dinesen (nee Karen Blixen) memorialized in Out of Africa, and Ernest Hemingway provide the prototypes for Rainsford, while Zaroff finds his closest

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analog in a combination of figures like Conrad's immortal Kurtz and the historical Henry M. Stanley. Source: David Kippen, for Short Stories for Students, Gale Research, 1997.

Jim Welsh In the following essay, Welsh compares the film version of ' 'The Most Dangerous Game'' to Connell's story, citing many of the differences between the two, particularly the changes Hollywood made to the story to take advantage of the sets and actors they had at their disposal. Richard Connell's story "The Most Dangerous Game," offering a tightly-knit narrative of adventure and melodramatic suspense, would seem a likely vehicle for cinematic adaptation. Of the two main characters, one is ordinary, the other bizarre. The story does not involve much complexity of consciousness; rather, it succeeds as escapist entertainment, and it is therefore well-suited for the Hollywood treatment that was to be made within eight years of its writing. The story was first published in 1924; in 1932 it was produced as a motion picture for RKO by David O. Selznick and Miriam C. Cooper, directed by Ernest B. Schoedsack and Irving Pichel from a screenplay prepared by James Ashmore Creelman. This movie has been much praised for its tight editing and effective camera-work, perhaps with some justification if one considers the hunt and chase that dominates the last thirty minutes. The screenplay makes a few situational changes and invents additional characters, also creating the need for additional dialogue. Like the story, the film begins on board ship, with the characters discussing big-game hunting and a mysterious island off in the distance. The device for getting Rainsford off the ship and on to the island is different, however, since in the story Rainsford loses his balance and falls into the sea, while in the film the yacht is misled by the false channel markers that General Zaroff later mentions in the story. The shipwreck in the movie provides additional excitement during the first ten minutes, the turmoil and confusion of the sinking yacht, the attack by sharks of the survivors, and Rainsford's escape to safety. This is a tolerable extrapolation, awkwardly extended, perhaps, but tolerable. ("Oh, it got me!" says one poor wretch as a shark consumes the submerged portion of his body.) The changes that mark the next sequences are not so tolerable, however, when Rainsford finds his

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The film deliberately elaborates the bizarre and the grotesque, partly, one supposes, in keeping with the movie trends of the times."

way to Zaroff s estate. The film was made at the same time King Kong was being shot, the story goes, and attempted to use many of the same actors. Of course, Fay Wray was one of the ' 'stars'' of King Kong, and obviously there is no role for her in Connell's story, so the filmmakers invented one. The invention makes Count Zaroff seem more sinister and more perverse than he might seem in the original story, since apparently the man's sexual appetite can only be aroused after he has satisfied his bloodlust through his murderous hunt—a bizarre aphrodisiac, to say the least. "Only after the kill does man know the true ecstasy of love," the movie character asserts. The film deliberately elaborates the bizarre and the grotesque, partly, one supposes, in keeping with the movie trends of the times. During the early 1930s Universal Studios began two successful horror cycles— Dracula and Frankenstein —and the Gothic design of "The Most Dangerous Game" seems to imitate Universal trends. Count (not General) Zaroff is played by Leslie Banks, who affects a heavy Slavic accent that calls Count Dracula to mind, as do his evil servants, the mute Cossack Ivan and the Tartar who serves as his manservant. The Count appears to be mad: he clutches his forehead frequently, remembering the wound caused by a dangerous Cape buffalo, his eyes staring insanely as the camera zooms to a close-up, emphasized by the never subtle music of Max Steiner. In the story Connell is at pains to describe the "amenities" of civilization the General preserves at his island hideaway. All the movie can do is to show the Count carefully dressed in his evening suit, sipping champagne and playing a Max Steiner ditty on the grand piano, a piece that sounds like Tchaikovsky copulating musically with Cole Porter, to the advantage of neither. When the movie Rainsford, played by Joel McCrea, arrives in the Count's drawing room, he is

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introduced to two other shipwreck victims, Eve and Martin Trowbridge. Fay Wray is therefore given a brother, a vulgar lush played stupidly for comedy by Robert Armstrong, who makes such a pest of himself that the Count understandably decides to take him hunting before the night is over. The Count says nothing to Rainsford to explain the sport he has "invented," but Eve has been on the island long enough to know that something is amiss. Two other survivors who arrived with her and her brother have since disappeared. She leads Rainsford to the Count's trophy room, where they discover the awful truth about their predicament. The Count then discovers them, and the hunt is on. It makes dramatic (as well as box-office) sense to involve Fay Wray in the hunt. For one thing, her body becomes the stakes of the game, winner take all if Zaroff is victorious. More important, however, by having the woman with him in the jungle, Rainsford is given a logical excuse for articulating his thoughts. He is therefore able to explain for her benefit (and the audience's) what he intends by the traps he rigs. The difficulty, of course, is that a woman would tend to slow the man down, making his capture all the more easy for the Count. The film is just over an hour long, and, in my opinion, the expository business that dominates the first half-hour is embarrassingly awkward by today's standards. No one could listen with pleasure to the drunken dialogue that has been written for Eve's brother, and even Joel McCrea as Rainsford is not too interesting a character when he speaks. Being spared bad dialogue, Noble Johnson looks right for the part of mute Ivan, scowling wonderfully. Leslie Banks is certainly well-spoken enough as the Count, but he none the less appears to be a stagey villain, as when his face is lit from below in two clumsy cutaways in the trophy room. The action of the hunt is effectively filmed and edited, however, and suspense is built through alternating techniques, depending first on a series of crosscutting shots between pursuer and pursued, then, when the dogs are called, a series of low-angle shots of the dogs racing towards and jumping over the camera at ground level, alternating with another pull-back tracking shot of the obsessed Count running toward the camera. Finally, Rainsford and Eve are trapped, cornered. Rainsford kills one hunting dog with his knife and struggles with another until a shot from the Count's rifle drops man and dog into the sea far below, leaving Fay Wray the captive of the sexually aroused Count.

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As in the story, Rainsford reappears at the Count's estate after his leap into the sea, but what is suggested by a single line in the story ("On guard, Rainsford. . .") is expanded in the film to an unforgettably bad fight sequence involving Rainsford, the Count, and two servants, followed by Rainsford's escape with Eve in a motor launch, action worthy of a serial cliff-hanger, and about as artful. The Count, mortally wounded, attempts to shoot an arrow from his Tartar bow at the escaping launch, loses his strength, and falls to his death to the dogs below. This final sequence is unbelievably campy, and yet it is perfectly typical of what might contemptuously be called the Hollywood treatment. In his "complete" ' guide to TV Movies, Leonard Maltin gives the movie a high, three-star rating, probably be-

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cause of the much-admired chase sequence. The movie has been ridiculously over-rated, but, as an adaptation, I cannot think of a more revealing negative example. Source: Jim WelshWelsh, Jim. "Hollywood Plays the Most Dangerous Game," in Literature/Film Quarterly, Vol. 10, no. 2,1982, pp. 134-6.

Sources A review of Variety in New York Times, March 29,1925, p. 8. A review of Variety in Saturday Review of Literature, August 8, 1925.

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The Open Window Saki

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"The Open Window" is Saki's most popular short story. It was first collected in Beasts and SuperBeasts in 1914. Saki's wit is at the height of its power in this story of a spontaneous practical joke played upon a visiting stranger. The practical joke recurs in many of Saki's stories, but "The Open Window'' is perhaps his most successful and best known example of the type. Saki dramatizes here the conflict between reality and imagination, demonstrating how difficult it can be to distinguish between them. Not only does the unfortunate Mr. Nuttel fall victim to the story's joke, but so does the reader. The reader is at first inclined to laugh at Nuttel for being so gullible. However, the reader, too, has been taken in by Saki's story and must come to the realization that he or she is also inclined to believe a well-told and interesting tale.

Author Biography Saki, whose real name was Hector Hugh Munro, was born at the height of English Imperialism in Akyab, Burma, on December 18, 1870, to British parents, Charles Augustus and Mary Frances Munro. His father was a colonel in the British military. Following the death of his mother, he was sent back to Devon, England, where he lived with his grandmother and aunts. In 1887, his father returned to England after retiring and subsequently traveled

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throughout Europe with his children. Saki returned briefly to Burma in 1893 as a police functionary but returned to England due to his poor health. He turned to writing and became a foreign correspondent, traveling in Eastern Europe and France, from 1902 to 1909, writing for The Morning Post. With illustrator Francis Carruthers Gould, Saki collaborated on a successful series of political cartoons. His unusual pseudonym comes from the name of a character in Edward Fitzgerald's translation of The Rubaiyat, a long poem by twelfth-century Persian writer Omar Khayyam. Saki is most widely known as a satirist of the English ruling classes, and his best known short story is "The Open Window." He is also famous for the character Reginald, who appears in a number of his short stories. However, though he is primarily known for his short fiction, including the volumes Reginald (1904), Reginald in Russia (1910) and Beasts and Super-Beasts (1914), he was also a novelist and playwright and the author of two works of nonfiction, including the historical The Rise of the Russian Empire. When World War I began, Saki joined the British military as an enlisted man, though due to his high social rank and education, he could have enlisted as an officer or worked for military intelligence. Indeed, he refused several offers of commission. He died in action in France on November 14, 1916.

Plot Summary Framton Nuttel has presented himself at the Sappleton house to pay a visit. He is in the country undergoing a rest cure for his nerves and is calling on Mrs. Sappleton at the request of his sister. Though she does not know Mrs. Sappleton well, she worries that her brother will suffer if he keeps himself in total seclusion, as he is likely to do. Fifteen-year-old Vera keeps Nuttel company while they wait for her aunt. After a short silence, Vera asks if Nuttel knows many people in the area. Nuttel replies in the negative, admitting that of Mrs. Sappleton he only knows her name and address. Vera then informs him that her aunt's "great tragedy" happened after his sister was acquainted with her. Vera indicates the large window that opened on to the lawn. Exactly three years ago, Vera recounts, Mrs. Sappleton's husband and two younger brothers

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walked through the window to go on a day's hunt. They never came back. They were drowned in a bog, and their bodies were never found. Mrs. Sappleton thinks they will come back some day, along with their spaniel, so she keeps the window open. She still talks of them often to her niece, repeating the words of one of her brother's favorite songs, "Bertie, why do you bound?" Vera herself admits to sometimes believing the men will all come back through that window. She then breaks off her narration with a shudder. At that moment, Mrs. Sappleton enters the room, apologizing for keeping him waiting and hoping that Vera has been amusing him. Mrs. Sappleton excuses the open window, explaining that her husband and brothers will be home soon, and she continues to talk on quite cheerfully about shooting. Nuttel finds this conversation gruesome and attempts to change the subject by talking about his rest cure, a topic which bores Mrs. Sappleton tremendously. But she suddenly brightens up, crying ''Here they are at last!'' Nuttel turns to Vera to extend his sympathy, but Vera is staring out through the open window with a look of horror in her eyes. Nuttel turns around to the window and sees Mrs. Sappleton's husband and

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brothers walking across the lawn, a spaniel following them, and hears a voice singing ' 'Bertie, why do you bound?'' Nuttel grabs his hat and walking stick and flees from the house. Mr. Sappleton comes through the window and greets his wife. Mrs. Sappleton muses over Nuttel's departure that was so sudden it was if he had seen a ghost. Vera says that she believes it was the spaniel that frightened him; she tells her aunt and uncle that Nuttel is terrified of dogs ever since being hunted into a cemetery in India by wild dogs and having to spend the night in a newly dug grave. As Saki remarks at story's end, making up stories that add a bit of excitement to life,' 'romance at short notice," is Vera's specialty.

Characters Framton Nuttel's sister Framton Nuttel's sister once spent time in the same town to which Framton has come for relaxation. She has given him a number of letters of introduction with which he is to make himself known to a number of people in the town. Mrs. Sappleton is the recipient of such a letter, and it is this that brings Nuttel to her home.

Mr. Framton Nuttel Mr. Framton Nuttel suffers from an undisclosed nervous ailment and comes to the country in hope that its atmosphere will be conducive to a cure. He brings a letter of introduction to Mrs. Sappleton in order to make her acquaintance for his stay in her village. While he waits for Mrs. Sappleton to appear, her niece keeps him company and tells him a story about why a window in the room has been left open. He believes her story, that the window remains open in hopes that Mrs. Sappleton's husband and brother, who the niece says are long dead, will one day return. Later, when Nuttel looks out the window and sees figures approaching who match the descriptions of the long-dead hunters in the niece's story, he suffers a mental breakdown and flees the house.

Ronnie Ronnie is Mrs. Sappleton's younger brother, who, with Mr. Sappleton, has been away on a hunting expedition.

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Mr. Sappleton Mr. Sappleton is Mrs. Sappleton's husband. He has been away during most of the story on a hunting expedition with Mrs. Sappleton's younger brother, Ronnie.

Mrs. Sappleton Readers are first led to believe that Mrs. Sappleton is a widow, keeping vigil for her departed husband and brother, who have disappeared during a hunting trip. She lives with her young niece.

Vera Vera is the niece of Mrs. Sappleton, the woman to whom Framton Nuttel plans to give a letter of introduction. She is a teller of tales, a young woman whose forte is "romance at short notice." She is an exquisite and intuitive actress, equally skilled at deceit and its concealment. While Nuttel waits with her for Mrs. Sappleton to appear, Vera relates an elaborate story surrounding a window in the room that has been left open. It is this story, of the death of some relatives who went hunting long ago, that eventually causes Framton Nuttel's breakdown. She tells Nuttel that the window is left open as a sign of her aunt's hope that the dead hunters will one day come home and provides a detailed description of the men, their behavior and attire. After Nuttel flees upon seeing these men return, just as Vera has described them, Vera invents a story explaining his departure as well. Saki refers to Vera as "selfpossessed," which literally means that she has selfcontrol and poise. In the context of this story, it is clear that this is the quality that allows her to lie so well—Vera's self-possession allows her to maintain a cool head and calm believability while relating the most outlandish of tales.

Themes Though it is a remarkably short piece of fiction, ' "The Open Window'' explores a number of important themes. Mr. Nuttel comes to the country in an attempt to cure his nervous condition. He pays a visit to the home of Mrs. Sappleton in order to introduce himself, and before he gets to meet the matron of the house, he is intercepted by her niece, who regales him with an artful piece of fiction that, in the end, only makes his nervous condition worse.

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Appearances and Reality It is no surprise that Mrs. Sappleton's niece tells a story that is easy to believe. She begins with an object in plain view, an open window, and proceeds from there. The window is obviously open, but for the reasons for its being open the reader is completely at the mercy of Mrs. Sappleton's niece, at least while she tells her story. The open window becomes a symbol within this story-within-a-story, and its appearance becomes its reality. When Mr. Nuttel (and the reader) are presented with a contrary reality at the end of the story, the result is a tension between appearance and reality that needs to be resolved: Which is real? Can they both be real?

Deception Were it not for deception, this story could not happen. The action and irony of the story revolve around the apparent deception that Mrs. Sappleton's niece practices. It remains to be seen, however, whether this deception is a harmless prank or the result of a sinister disposition. If the niece's deception is cruel, then the reader must question the motives behind the deception practiced by all tellers of stories, including Saki himself.

Media Adaptations Richard Patterson directed a film adaptation of "The Open Window" in 1971. Produced by the American Film Institute, it is a 12-minute short. In 1980, The Open Window/Child's Play offered video interpretations of two of Saki's short stories. It is 28 minutes long and available in VHS format from Monterey Home Video. "The Open Window" was also adapted for video in 1990, available in VHS format from Pyramid Films & Video.

narrative is that of Mr. Nuttel's arrival at Mrs. Sappleton's house for the purpose of introducing himself to her. Within this narrative frame is the second story, that told by Mrs. Sappleton's niece.

Sanity and Insanity ' The Open Window'' shows just how fine the line can be between sanity and insanity. Mr. Nuttel's susceptibility to deceit is no different from that of the reader of the story. Yet Mr. Nuttel is insane, and the reader, presumably, is not. In order to maintain this distinction, Saki forces his reader to consider the nature of insanity and its causes.

Style "The Open Window" is the story of a deception, perpetrated on an unsuspecting, and constitutionally nervous man, by a young lady whose motivations for lying remain unclear.

Structure The most remarkable of Saki's devices in ' The Open Window" is his construction of the story's narrative. The structure of the story is actually that of a story-within-a-story. The larger "frame"

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Symbolism The most important symbol in "The Open Window" is the open window itself. When Mrs. Sappleton's niece tells Mr. Nuttel the story of the lost hunters, the open window comes to symbolize Mrs. Sappleton's anguish and heartbreak at the loss of her husband and younger brother. When the truth is later revealed, the open window no longer symbolizes anguish but the very deceit itself. Saki uses the symbol ironically by having the open window, an object one might expect would imply honesty, as a symbol of deceit.

Narration "The Open Window" is a third-person narrative, meaning that its action is presented by a narrator who is not himself involved in the story. This allows a narrator to portray events from a variety of points of view, conveying what all of the characters are doing and what they are feeling or thinking. For most of the story, until he runs from the house, the reader shares Mr. Nuttel's point of view. Like Mr. Nuttel, the reader is at the mercy of

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Topics for Further Study What different things does the open window in the story symbolize to the characters? Give some other examples of symbols that mean different things to different people. Has the country provided Mr. Nuttel with a respite from his nervous condition? What does this say about the nature of his nervous condition? When and how do readers know that Mrs. Sappleton's niece has been lying? Once it is revealed that she has been lying, can you find anything earlier in the story that, in retrospect, might seem like a clue to her deception? Try to formulate a theory about why Mrs. Sappleton's niece would behave in this way. Is she sinister? Bored? Both?

Vera's story. The reader remains, however, after Mr. Nuttel has fled and thus learns that Vera's story was nothing but a tall tale.

Tall Tale Vera's story is essentially a tall tale. Tall tales are often found in folklore and legend and describe people or events in an exaggerated manner. Good examples are the story of John Henry and his hammer, and the story of Paul Bunyan and Babe the Blue Ox. Vera exaggerates the significance of the open window by making it the centerpiece of a fabricated tale of tragic loss.

Historical Context Saki does not specify when his story takes place, but it is obvious that the story is set in Edwardian England, the period of time early in the 20th century when King Edward VII ruled England. During this time, England was at the peak of its colonial power and its people enjoyed wealth and confidence because of their nation's status in the world. The

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wealthy leisure class was perhaps overly confident, not seeing that political trends in Europe, including military treaties between the various major powers, would lead to World War I and the resulting destruction of their comfortable way of life. It is this complacency that Saki often mocks in his stories. ' "The Open Window'' is set at the country estate of a typical upper-class family of the time. Wealthy Edwardian families often had country homes such as this one. Mr. Nuttel, suffering from an undisclosed nervous illness, has been encouraged to seek refuge in the country. Such a rest in the country— where it was believed that a slower pace of life, fresh air, and quiet could cure those suffering from nervous disorders—was a typical method of treatment among the English before the rise of modern psychology. The formal nature of Nuttal's visit is typical of the wealthy classes of the Edwardian age. His use of a letter of introduction so as to meet people in his new community was a common practice among the upper class of the time.

Critical Overview Saki has been known for decades as a master of the short story form. In his "Introduction" to The Penguin Complete Saki, Noel Coward finds that Saki's tales "are dated only by the fact that they evoke an atmosphere and describe a society which vanished in the baleful summer of 1914." Saki may belong to a particular time, and his pen may have been stopped in the trenches of World War I, but his stories have a broad appeal that continues to this day. His story "The Open Window" is one of the most frequently anthologized stories in the English language. Biographies and critical assessments of Saki's stories often treat "The Open Window" very succinctly. One reason for the comparative lack of critical attention paid to this tale, as compared to that paid to other stories whose influence has extended so far, may be its brevity. That is, critics may find it difficult to write a lengthy analysis of something that is itself only a few pages long. Nevertheless, several critics have made interesting, if brief, observations about the story and about Saki's writing in general that contribute to one of the most enduring controversies surrounding "The Open Window": whether the reader should consider Vera's storytelling an act of malice. An unsigned review in The Spectator of Beasts and Super-Beasts, the volume of short stories in which ' "The Open Window" appeared, says of the volume that "[a]s a

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Compare & Contrast 1910s: A rest in the country is often recommended for those city-dwellers suffering from nervous disorders. Today: Though many people take vacations to relieve stress, the "rest" cure is an antiquated treatment for nerves. Commonly, doctors prescribe medication. 1910s: In polite society, letters of introduction were a common means by which to make oneself known in a new place. Letters of this kind served to guarantee that a move to a new home did not isolate someone from the community.

handbook of the gentle art of dealing faithfully with social nuisances... [it] is quite unique." One might consider Framton Nuttel just such a nuisance, whom Vera dispatches with great delight and efficiency. The same reviewer, however, criticizes Saki, calling him "not an immoral, but for the most part a non-moral writer, with a freakish wit which leads him at times into inhumanity." Vera's treatment of Nuttel can be read as an instance of such ' 'inhumanity." The reviewer concludes of Saki that "we like him best when he is least malicious." Though this review does not refer to Vera specifically as an example of such malice, John Daniel Stahl suggests as much in his 1977 essay "Saki's Enfant Terrible in 'The Open Window'." In one of the few critical essays to address this story at length, Stahl examines Vera's status as a precocious child who is bored with the adults around her. He writes that' 'we have in The Open Window' a powerful, clever child in opposition to a weak, neurotic, suggestible adult." He concludes that "Vera not only rejects but completely—and one might say, maliciously—dominates the feeble representative of adult life who crosses her path." In 1978, Miriam Quen Cheikin wrote ' 'Saki: Practical Jokes as a Clue to Comedy," in which she examines the variety of ways in which Saki utilizes practical jokes in his fiction. She characterizes Vera's storytelling as a practical joke, belonging to a category of practical jokes ' 'made up

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Today: Most people meet by chance in school or at work rather than through the pre-arranged situations, although dating services and personal ads are common. 1910s: Hunting is a popular sport among the English wealthy classes in the Edwardian Age. Today: Hunting is a popular sport among all social classes and it is seldom used solely as a means of obtaining food.

of conspiracies that drum up sheer fun." It is not necessarily true that Vera is malicious, then, but she is, perhaps, simply bored. Nevertheless, just as the text supports various interpretations of the veracity of Vera's tale, so too does the text support various interpretations of Vera's motive for telling it.

Criticism Rena Korb Rena Korb has a master's degree in English literature and creative writing and has written for a wide variety of educational publishers. In the following essay, she examines "The Open Window" as an example of Saki's wit and skillful social satire. H.H. Munro, writing under the name of Saki, was first introduced to the London literary scene in 1899, and only a year later, he was becoming wellknown as a witty social critic. This reputation has stayed with him until the present-day, more than eighty years after his untimely 1916 death on the battlefields of World War I. Saki took his pseudonym from a reference in the poetry of Omar Khayyam's Rubaiyat, which was translated into English in the 1850s. It is perhaps ironic that Saki should have drawn his name from this book of

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What Do I Read Next? For more of Saki's fiction, consult The Penguin Complete Saki, published by Penguin Books in 1982, originally published by Doubleday in 1976. The volume includes not only Saki's short fiction but his novels and plays as well. E. M. Forster was a contemporary of Saki's and, like Saki, is known for his satirical portrayals of the English middle- and upper-classes. His "The Story of a Panic," published in The Celestial Omnibus, is a good example of his work. Like Saki, O. Henry is a master of irony and the

poetry which so captivated the attention of the generation ready to take charge of England in the Edwardian Age, for a main thrust of Saki's work was to make fun of the elite who inhabited Edwardian England. Saki's reputation as a master of the short story, earned during his own lifetime, places him in a class along with Guy de Maupassant and O. Henry. But even though his fiction has drawn commentary from such notables as Graham Greene and V.S. Pritchett, in general, little critical attention has been paid to it. Some readers simply believe that Saki's work exists for the readers, not the critics, that its "exquisite lightness.. .offers no grasp for the solemnities of earnest criticism." Other readers find Saki to be merely an entertainer, at worst, one who draws light and overly contrived plots. These readers point to Saki's reliance on convenient literary tricks, such as the surprise ending found in "The Open Window," but they overlook that an able writer is necessary to make it credible. The majority of critics who do interest themselves with an analysis of Saki's fiction focus on the funny side of his work, seeing him as a humorist or a comic writer. Alternately, he has been seen as a satirist, one who conveys a critical attitude toward British society of his time. This is not surprising considering that Westminister Alice, the series of

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surprise ending. His short story "The Gift of the Magi" is famous for its ironic surprise ending. P. G. Wodehouse's many humorous stories of English upper-class life include those collected in The World of Jeeves. Another tall tale, like that told by Mrs. Sappleton's niece, is found in Mark Twain's story "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County," published in 1865.

sketches that brought Saki fame, was filled with biting political humor—' 'combustible'' according to Saki's editor. Critics have also discussed the practical joke, which is Saki's most often-used comic device. As the practical joke is such a childish prank, it has generally been seen as representing Saki's own "lost childhood." From the age of two, Saki grew up in a household comprised of his grandmother and two unmarried aunts—his father being away in India—who ruled strictly and impersonally. Of the relationship between Saki's rearing and the fiction he creates around the practical jokes played by children, Greene has said, "It is tempting. . .to see in Saki the boy who never grew up, avenging himself on his aunts." Almost all serious Saki critics have pointed to the cruel nature of Saki's characters, finding in Saki "the casual heartlessness of childhood." Not all Saki's stories have been subject to this intense scrutiny, and "The Open Window," one of Saki's best-loved stories, perhaps best exemplifies that "indolent, delightfully amusing world where nothing is ever solved, nothing altered, a world in short extremely like our own." "The Open Window" centers around a practical joke played by fifteen-year-old Vera on a pompous man, Framton Nuttel, who is undergoing a "nerve cure." The girl fabricates a tale of the tragic disappearance of her uncle and cousins, exactly three years ago, and of

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her aunt, who nevertheless faithfully (thus insanely) awaits their return each day. The "ghosts" come home, and Nuttel makes a ' 'headlong retreat'' from this ' 'haunted'' house. It is only after Nuttel is thus disposed of that the reader finds out that Vera made the story up, in fact, that "Romance at short notice was her specialty." The story exhibits none of Saki's typical satire, a point upon which even those most arduous proponents in the Saki as satirist camp agree; for in order to have satire, a story must arouse in the reader a desire to reform a situation along with contempt for those who create these wrongdoings.

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Mattel's uncertainty in even the most benign of social situations, evidenced by his endeavours 'to say the correct something,' stands in stark contrast to Vera's control of the situation."

What is more at debate in "The Open Window" is the level of cruelty or maliciousness on the part of Vera in playing the joke. In answering that question, an examination of Vera and Nuttel is necessary, a feat made more difficult, however, by the brevity of the story. Yet, even in the space of scarcely 1,200 words, the personality of Nuttel, the "jokee," seems clear enough from the opening paragraphs. He is neurotic and of a self-imposed delicate psychological nature, hence his need to undergo a ' 'nerve cure." Coupled with these limitations is a weak and suggestible will. He has come to the Sappleton house, not at his own instigation but at the command of his sister, who was worried that he would "bury [himself] down there and not speak to a living soul." Once there, he bemoans the ' 'unfortunate coincidence that he should have paid his visit on this tragic anniversary," never questioning that very coincidence or that his hostess hardly presents the picture of a delusional widow as she "rattled on cheerfully about the shooting and the scarcity of birds, and the prospects for duck in the winter." Nuttel is a bore, as well, going on in detail about his rest cure, being one of those people who "laboured under the tolerably wide-spread delusion that total strangers and chance acquaintances are hungry for the least detail of one's ailments and infirmities." If the import of these characteristics do not add up to a person who deserves to be the butt of a practical joke, the reader only needs to consider his ridiculous name.

Nuttel's uncertainty in even the most benign of social situations, evidenced by his endeavours "to say the correct something," stands in stark contrast to Vera's control of the situation. After quickly assessing Nuttel's character, that he would make no mention of the "ghastly topic" to her aunt, she fabricates a story to fool him. The concrete details she includes—one brother's habit of singing "Bertie, why do you bound?" and her aunt's expectation of their return someday—all of which will take place, seem to confirm her ghost story. In her retelling of the tragic day, she is even clever enough to allow her "child's voice" to lose "its self-possessed note and [become] falteringly human." Saki was also one of the few writers of his day to use elements of the supernatural, and appropriately, Vera embellishes her tale by telling Nuttel of her "creepy feeling that they will all walk in through that window' '; when her very live uncle and cousins return, she "[stares] out through the open window with dazed horror in her eyes."

The intent of Vera plays a more crucial role in determining the nature of the practical joke. Clearly, she can have no seriously malicious purpose, for the joke has no forethought; Vera simply seized upon the opportunity of Nuttel's unexpected arrival on her aunt's doorstep. Nuttel and his awkwardness must have seemed like too much fun to pass up to this "very self-possessed young lady of fifteen," and her quick reaction and creation of the ghost story show an ultra-active intelligence and imagi-

Vera not only fools Nuttel, but she also fools her aunt, who wonders at Nuttel's hasty departure made "without a word of good-bye or apology." Vera's answer to her aunt would seem even more unbelievable than the story told to Nuttel: that he was afraid of her uncle's spaniel because Nuttel ' 'was once hunted into a cemetery on the banks of the Ganges by a pack of pariah dogs, and had to spend the night in a newly dug grave." Perhaps the gullible Mrs. Sappleton actually deserves Vera's

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nation. The reader also is not privy to how much time Nuttel and Vera have spent together before the story begins. She could very well have discerned his self-absorption and decided he deserved to have such a trick played on him, a point upon which most readers would agree with her!

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pitying fashion of calling her "[PJoor dear aunt," the same way Nuttel deserves to have the joke played on him. Though she is not the butt of the joke, Mrs. Sappleton surely has been bested by her niece, never realizing just how ' 'amusing'' Vera can truly be. In her manipulation of both of the adults, Vera demonstrates Saki's view that "children have no power worth the name except their lies and retreats into fantasy." The successful ending of "The Open Window" depends on its surprise but also on the reader's belief, along with Nuttel's, that Vera is telling the truth. To ensure that Vera's story will fool Nuttel, Saki makes use of many of the stereotypes and popularly held beliefs of his day. He exaggerates the unimaginative, staid world of adults, whereas Vera, like all of his children, is presented as the sole creator, the purveyor of fantasy and fun. That Vera emerges as the winner in this battle shows Saki's own defense of "the glories of a fanciful concoction against stale reality." Saki also uses the notion that girls were the more truthful sex and gives her a name that suggests truthfulness to make her tale less suspect. It is ironic that Saki used this stereotype to such effect even when he too believed that girls were less creative. He paid her a high compliment in making her an accomplished liar. Saki must have found in Vera an effective character/trickster. A girl of the same name is the central figure in "The Lull," a story written ten months after' 'The Open Window.'' A now sixteenyear-old Vera spins a fantasy of a broken reservoir to keep a politician in need of relaxation from dwelling on politics. But' 'The Lull'' differs greatly from "The Open Window." Not only does it have more farcical elements, including pigs and a rooster running around the politician's bedroom, but in this story the reader is privy to the hoax. "The Open Window" demonstrates a far more sophisticated joke, propelling it to the heights of a classic. Not only does it depict the age-old battle between those in power, adults, and those who must submit, children, while unexpectedly turning the usual order of this relationship completely around. It also gives a realistic setting for the unveiling of pure fantasy. That Vera's story, blending elements of the realistic and the supernatural, is so believable attests to Saki's power as a writer. In addition to these theoretical and literary elements,' 'The Open Window'' surely draws a good deal of its effectiveness from the knowledge in every reader that he or she has the potential to fall prey to such a clever girl and thus become another foolish Framton Nuttel.

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Source: Rena Korb, for Short Stories for Students, Gale Research, 1997.

Thomas March Thomas March is a scholar specializing in 20th-century British fiction. In the following essay, he examines Saki's use of irony. Hugh Hector Munro, who wrote under the pseudonym Saki, is well known not only as a master of the short story form, but also for the irony with which his stories are imbued. "The Open Window," Saki's most frequently anthologized story, is an excellent example of Saki's use of irony. The events of the story itself are ironic in their own right. However, Saki increases the ironic amplitude of the story by making the reader a victim of the very same hoax that Vera perpetrates on Mr. Nuttel. Crucial to the success of this effect is the story's narrative structure. Saki employs a frame narrative in "The Open Window"; that is, he provides not just one narrative, but a narrative within another, larger narrative that places the inner narrative in context. If Vera's story of the lost hunters were the only story available, one could read it as either a ghost story or as a fanciful tale. But because Saki allows the reader access to the story surrounding the telling of this secondary tale, such a reading is not possible. When Vera lies to her aunt about Mr. Nuttel, and when Mrs. Sappleton does not react with horror or surprise at the return of her husband and brother, it becomes clear that Vera's story is a fabrication and that the hunters returning are not ghosts, but living, breathing men. Thus, Nuttel's horror becomes laughable, and the reader's initial reaction is to identify with Vera, deriding Nuttel for his gullibility and enjoying a laugh at his expense. What remains unclear, however, is Vera's motivation in telling the story. As a precocious, or as Saki characterizes her, ' 'prepossessing'' child, she may be bored with the life of the parlor; her playful treatment of Nuttel might be rebellion against that boredom. Certainly, Vera has little or no respect for Nuttel, but it is more accurate to say that Vera does not consider Nuttel. For Vera, Nuttel is simply an audience, something with which to entertain herself; and precisely because she is a precocious child, she entertains herself in this creative, though perhaps unfortunate way, rather than by means of the conventional polite and flavorless discourse that might be expected of less enterprising girls her age. Furthermore, Vera does not know that Nuttel suffers from a nervous condition that will make the

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punch line of Vera's joke—the return of the purportedly dead hunters through the open window— tragic rather than amusing. Because she cannot have anticipated or intended the tragic result of her deceit, one cannot ascribe malicious intent to her. Though Vera may be innocent, Saki most certainly is not. Unlike Vera, Saki, as the narrator's voice, is aware of Nuttel's nervous condition and also of the effect that Vera's "punchline" will have on Nuttel's fragile psyche. He allows Vera to "interrupt" his narrative, as it were, with her own story, knowing full well what consequences it will have. The reader, at this point, is at Saki's mercy, unaware that Vera's story is a fabrication. The reader is, in essence, no different from Framton Nuttel, receiving Vera's story as though it were the truth, tricked into suspending disbelief in her story by the trust already placed in the narrator Saki. When the hunters return, visible through the open window, the reader's reaction is the same as that of Framton Nuttel; that is, the initial impression is that something eerie and supernatural is afoot. The suspicion of deceit may be present, but it is as yet unverifiable. However, when Saki returns as the story's narrator, ending Vera's reign, the truth becomes obvious. Framton Nuttel makes a hasty, anxious exit, but the reader remains, still guided by Saki, and this makes all the difference. Nuttel's only source for the truth (since he does not wait long enough to meet Mrs. Sappleton, who could easily have remedied matters) is Vera. The reader, however, has two sources of information, Vera and the narrator Saki, with Saki the primary source; after all, it is only through Saki that the reader has access to Vera's tale in the first place. When Saki returns as narrator, he provides the information the reader needs to identify Vera's story as the hoax that it is. When Saki shows Vera telling her aunt a story to explain Mr. Nuttel's sudden disappearance, the falsehood of that story identifies Vera as a young woman prone to making up stories and implies the falsehood of her previous story. The final line of the story, "Romance at short notice was her specialty," removes any remaining trust in Vera's reliability. The irony of Vera's story is that, in spite of its being false, it has caused Framton Nuttel to suffer a mental breakdown; had he managed to remain for only a few more minutes, he would have learned the truth and, perhaps, shared with Mrs. Sappleton in a polite laugh with, or scolding of, Vera. The reader, perceiving this irony, derides Nuttel for his weak-

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The reader who derides Nuttel must realize at the same time that he or she has also been susceptible to Vera's lie."

ness and foolishness, shared either in the goodnatured laugh that Vera has at Nuttel's expense or in Vera's mean-spiritedness, depending on how that particular reader chooses to characterize the girl's highly suspicious motives. Saki's re-entrance as narrator at the moment of Nuttel's departure allows the reader to differentiate him or herself from Nuttel. But Framton Nuttel is not the only one who has been taken in by Vera's tale. The reader who derides Nuttel must realize at the same time that he or she has also been susceptible to Vera's lie. In fact, Nuttel may have, in his nervous condition, a better excuse for his gullibility; that is, anxious and distracted, Nuttel clings eagerly to the distraction that Vera's story provides. Though the reader is rescued by Saki from a reaction of horror akin to Nuttel's, the initial belief in Vera's tale is no different. But this intervention by Saki to provide a postscript, as it were, to Vera's story, simultaneously provides not only the evidence necessary to determine that Vera has managed to fool Nuttel and the reader but a reinforcement of the reader's luxurious position of being able to scoff at Nuttel's gullibility. This is the greatest irony of Saki's narrative. Saki forces the reader to recognize his or her own vulnerability, but by allowing the reader to remain in the drawing room, the reader can dispute that he or she was fooled in the first place. After all, the reader does not run away from the text, one presumes, as Framton Nuttel runs from the house; Saki does not allow it. Saki sacrifices Nuttel's dignity in order that the reader's dignity may remain intact—even if the reader has been taken in by Vera, he or she can claim to have seen it coming all along. And if the reader is, with Nuttel, the audience to the story, Saki is allied with Vera. Each is a teller of tales, each acting from suspicious motives. For Saki the narrator, like Vera, can be seen to be malicious or playful. In Saki: A Life, A. J. Langguth takes special notice of the story's final line, quoted above, com-

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menting that "the sentence, with adjustment for gender, might have served for his [Saki's] epitaph.'' Each is a lover of "romance," of story-telling, but each with a different effect. Whereas Vera has left Nuttel to his torment, Saki rescues the reader from a similar shame. Source: Thomas March, for Short Stories for Students, Gale Research, 1997.

John Daniel Stahl In the following essay, Stahl discusses the image of the rebellious child in ' 'The Open Window.'' "The Open Window" is H. H. Munro's most frequently anthologized story, yet it has been almost entirely neglected by critics. It is a very brief story (only about 1200 words) and has the cameo quality and brisk wit so characteristic of Saki. A hasty reading of the story may confirm the opinion of those who, like A. A. Milne, believe that Saki is merely an entertainer. He is often considered a technically facile artisan whose plots, O. Henrylike, suffer from over-contrivance and whose elegance of expression is like a glaze on a thin and rather fragile pot.

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is a story with all the marks of a child's wishfulfilling daydream; it is an expression of the fantasy of a child able to control the adult world—a world which is unattractive or even contemptible. Vera, a girl of fifteen, entertains a guest, Framton Nuttel, a stranger who has just arrived for a nerve cure, for a few minutes before her aunt, Mrs. Sappleton, descends. In the brief time the niece is alone with the guest, she tells him about the aunt's tragedy: the deaths of the latter's husband and two brothers in a bog during a hunt, and her subsequent superstition that her husband and brothers will return through the open window as was once their habit. When the aunt appears and clearly expects someone to cross the fields and enter through the open window the guest is alarmed; when three figures that exactly fit the niece's description of the 'dead' trio actually appear, he panics and flees. When Mr. Sappleton inquires about the stranger who fled so precipitously, the niece invents a credible impromptu explanation.

Robert Drake, on the other hand, has argued for the deeper significance of Saki's work, distinguishing between the ironic and the humorous stories. In the ironic stories the unwillingness of a central character to face undesired aspects of reality (such as the supernatural, the bestial, Evil) is contradicted by events which humiliate or destroy the character concerned through a direct confrontation with the undesired reality. In the humorous stories (the distinction between the two kinds being one of degree, according to Drake), a Bergsonian 'norm'—often represented by respectable, stuffy members of Society—is ridiculed by contrast with a seemingly cruel or amoral 'beyond-norm' which takes the shape of a character like Reginald or Clovis. Children, Drake says, also act as 'beyond-norm' in Saki's stories. The 'beyond-norm,' as Drake indicates, is closer to a true norm than the 'norm.'

Though on one level strictly realistic—the story could happen in every detail—the extreme purposeful opposition of child and adult gives the story an intensified, hallucinatory atmosphere. Vera, at fifteen, has the articulacy of an adult but the role of an adolescent child, as the story emphasizes by calling her both "young lady" and "child." Vera's romance is almost supernaturally clever. She, the child, is vastly superior in every way to Mr. Framton Nuttel (note the nutty name, so characteristic for Saki), the adult whom she has chosen as her adversary. Vera must make several crucial judgments on which the outcome of her romance rests. She must determine that Nuttel is the sort of man too fastidious to mention or even hint at the 'tragedy' to Mrs. Sappleton, and that he will be suggestible and superstitious enough to interpret the events that follow in the light in which Vera has represented them. She must discover how much Nuttel knows about the family and the vicinity in order to safeguard herself against discovery; his ignorance is of course a prerequisite for her scheme. Her judgments are all correct.

An imaginative child faced with an adult world of dull limitation such as Saki frequently satirized will escape into a world of phantasy, a pattern not rare in Edwardian literature—see E. M. Forster's "The Celestial Omnibus," for example. As Roger Fry once wrote, "The daydreams of a child are filled with extravagant romances in which he always is the invincible hero.'' ' "The Open Window''

Vera's two fantasies for the benefit of the audience are brilliant and expertly told. She is adept at deception. She combines in her tale circumstances such as Ronnie's habit of singing, "Bertie, why do you bound?," and her aunt's accustomed expectation of her husband and brothers, which will seem to confirm the truth of what she has told Nuttel; she speaks with pity and a touch of susceptibility:"

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'Poor aunt . . . poor dear aunt . . . Do you know, sometimes on still quiet evenings like this, I almost get a creepy feeling that they will all walk in through that window—''' Not only her words but her actions as well convey what she desires to convey. At the fitting moment in her tale of the three lost hunters her voice ' 'lost its self-possessed note and became falteringly human." When she has said just enough to suggest the uncanny, she breaks off'' with a little shudder.'' When the hunters appear on the lawn, "The child was staring out through the open window with dazed horror in her eyes." She also knows when not to be dramatic; she presents her explanation of Nuttel's hasty departure with that calm finesse which convinces by its lack of insistence, and adds a note of sympathy, "enough to make anyone lose their nerve," which is a perfect camouflage for invention. Vera is in fact in total control of the events of the story. By contrast, Framton Nuttel, the central adult figure, is being controlled. He is the victim of Vera's 'romance', but he does not arouse sympathy. The first few paragraphs of the story subtly reveal that he is dominated by his sister; he doubts the efficacy of his nerve cure and regrets having to visit strangers, yet is apparently too feeble-willed to object. He is a hypochondriac and a bore: he "laboured under the tolerable wide-spread delusion that total strangers and chance acquaintances are hungry for the least detail of one's ailments and infirmities, their cause and cure." As Janet Overmyer writes [in her essay "Turn Down an Empty Glass," Texas Quarterly, Autumn 1964], "Saki is impatient with the foibles of bores, cowards, the idle, the useless rich, those lacking a sense of humor . . . He gives them such names as Ada Spelvexit, Hortensia Bavvel, Sir James Beanquest, Demosthenes Platterbaff, and Sir Wilfred Pigeoncote—and one might add, Framton Nuttel— . . . the ridiculous names and the absence of characterization in depth tend so to dehumanize them that the reader will not sympathize with them and the satire can then scathe more effectively." So we have in ' The Open Window'' a powerful, clever child in opposition to a weak, neurotic, suggestible adult. On first reading, the story may well appear to be a tale of the supernatural; at the latest by the last line that impression has been replaced by an amazed recognition of the truth of the statement, "Romance at short notice was her specialty." But the story has not become more

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realistic by an elimination of the supernatural; it has merely become more fantastic in another sense: it has taken on the quality of a daydream, a fantasy. The intensity of the story is also increased by the contrast between its content and its tone; the events of the plot, the deception and the intimation of supernatural horror are reminiscent of Poe (e.g., "The Cask of Amontillado") but the tone of the story does not emphasize the Gothic element for its own sake. Like Vera in presenting her inventions, the narrator presents unostentatiously and economically just what is necessary for his effect. At times, in fact, author and central character bear such similarities to each other that they merge; we as readers may be less likely to be frightened by the figures on the lawn, but if we are unacquainted with the ways of Saki's imagination, Vera's story on first reading has the same capacity to fool us as it does for Nuttel. Vera's romance is a clever practical joke of the highest caliber—without wires, strings, or mechanical contraptions. If, once we are initiated, the story appeals to us, if we laugh or feel any satisfaction at Framton Nuttel's hasty exodus, we are most likely participating in a fantasy that is peculiar to the mind of a child, and particularly a frustrated child, who is powerless to resist the encroachments or dictates of a cruel or boring adult world. According to Janet Overmyer, children in Saki's stories often are ' 'cruel to adults because the entire adult world is against them, and they are helpless to resist. They must therefore snatch their revenge whenever the opportunity arises." The impulse behind practical jokes often arises from urges against authority or the established order of things. The wishful fantasy of a child desiring to play havoc with adults is widespread. In one of Jack Harkaway's stories (a series of 'penny dreadfuls' for boys that began in 1871, the year after Munro's birth, and continued up to the end of the Victorian era) an episode occurs which bears some relation to intrigue of Vera's kind. Here, as quoted by E. S. Turner [in Boys Will Be Boys]: Fighting apart, there was little to do at Pomona House school except to rag as graceless a set of pedagogues as ever gathered under one roof. Jack, being a ventriloquist, had a head and shoulders start over the others. By causing Mr. Mole to say 'Frogs!' and 'Waterloo!' to M. Bolivant, the French master, he succeeded in making these excitable gentlemen fight in front of the class. Then the Head, Mr. Crawcour, entered and the fun really started: 'What is this?' exclaimed Mr. Crawcour. 'Mr. Mole with his fists clenched and Mr. Bolivant on his back. Disgraceful! How can you expect boys to be orderly

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when they have such a bad example? Gentlemen, I am ashamed of you!' 'Shut up', said Jack making his voice come from the senior master....

Such practical joking is, like ' The Open Window," an entertaining fantasy but it is also symptomatic of a fascination with the domination of the adult world by a preternaturally powerful child. That extraordinary children have a peculiar attraction and meaning for Saki is immediately evident on reading a cross-section of his stories. Munro's own early life has provided grounds for comparison with Thackeray, Kipling, and Dickens, writers "who never [shook] off the burden of their childhood." Munro was born in Burma, taken to England after his mother's death, when he was around two years old, and was raised by a household of women at Broadgate Villa in Pilton, North Devon. Drake writes of his childhood home: ' 'This establishment was presided over during [Hector's father] Major Munro's nearly perpetual absence in the East by his mother and his two sisters, Charlotte ('Aunt Tom') and Augusta, fierce spinster ladies who ruled with an authoritarian hand and whom Saki depicted again and again in his stories with a mixture of hatred and affection." Greene emphasizes Munro's unhappy childhood in relation to his writings, and Drake, with some reservations, makes the point too: ' 'It is tempting... to see in Saki the boy who never grew up, avenging himself on his aunts and possibly his sisters." .. . "The Open Window" certainly supports S. P. B. Mais' claim, made in 1920 [in Books and Their Writers], that "Munro's understanding of children can only be explained by the fact that he was in many ways a child himself; his sketches betray a harshness, a love of practical jokes . . . a lack of mellow geniality that hint very strongly at the child in the man." Framton Nuttel unquestionably belongs to the vapid adult world of the Gurtleberrys, but unlike Mrs. Gurtleberry's niece, Vera of "The

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Open Window'' has not acquiesced to this world. Vera's practical joke is of a kind with the moonlight hen-stealing raid, which remains after all only the fantasy of Mrs. Gurtleberry's niece. Vera not only rejects but completely—and one might say, maliciously—dominates the feeble representative of adult life who crosses her path.... Source: John Daniel Stahl, "Saki's Enfant Terrible in The Open Window'," in The USFLanguage Quarterly, Vol. XV, nos. 3-4, Spring-Summer, 1977, pp. 5-8.

Sources Coward, Noel. "Introduction," The Penguin Complete Saki London: Penguin Books, 1982. Reprint of the 1976 edition by Doubleday & Company. Review entitled "Fiction: 'Beasts and Super-Beasts'," in The SpectatorVoL 113, no. 4489, July 11, 1914, pp. 60-1.

Further Reading Cheikin, Miriam Quen. Review in English Literature in Transition Vol. 21, no. 2, 1978, pp. 121-31. A review refuting the consensus that Saki focused on childish themes, devices, and cruelties, and supporting the author as a practical joker. Langguth, A.J. Saki: A Life of Hector Hugh Munro New York: Simon and Schuster, 1981, 366 p. A biography containing anecdotes and analyses of Saki's fiction. Spears, George James. The Satire of Saki: A Study in the Satiric An of Hector H. Munro. New York: Exposition Press, 1963. Spears addresses the novels, plays, short stories, and political satire of Saki. He begins with a short chapter entitled "The Satiric Tradition" that provides an introduction to the context within which he reads Saki's work.

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The Secret Life of Walter Mitty James Thurber is one of America's best known humorists, and ' The Secret Life of Walter Mitty'' is his best known story. The story was first published in 1939 in the New Yorker magazine to great acclaim. It was reprinted in Thurber's 1942 collection, My World—And Welcome To It and in Reader's Digest in 1943. The story's main character is a middle-aged, middle-class man who escapes from the routine drudgery of his suburban life into fantasies of heroic conquest. Upon the story's publication, Walter Mitty became an archetypal American figure. Today, people still describe a certain kind of neurotic, daydreaming man as a "Walter Mitty type." In 1947, Hollywood released a movie of the same title, starring Danny Kaye and Virginia Mayo.

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Although his humorous stories, sketches, and illustrations were well-known during his lifetime, Thurber has received little scholarly attention. Some critics dismissed his work as little more than formulaic and whimsical. More recently, critics have become attentive to Thurber's literary prowess, such as his use of wordplay and attention to narrative form. They have also discussed the darker themes of his work which lurk underneath the hilarity. Others, referring to his tendency to portray domineering women, like Mrs. Mitty, and unhappy, ineffectual men, like Walter, fault his treatment of women and views of marriage.

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Author Biography James Thurber was a prolific writer and artist who published over twenty books of stories, biographies, drawings, sketches, essays, poetry, fables and cartoons. During the 1920s and 1930s, Thurber wrote for the popular and influential literary magazine, The New Yorker. His work for the magazine established his reputation as a comic with a sophisticated sensibility who largely wrote about upper middleclass intellectuals. Much of his work focused on the milieu of East Coast society. Thurber was born in Columbus, Ohio, in 1894, and some of his writing, such as his "mock" memoirs, My Life and Hard Times, treat his experiences as a boy growing up in Ohio. After attending Ohio State University, he worked as a newspaper reporter in Ohio, France, and New York before j oining the staff of the The New Yorker in 1927 .Asa writer and editor at The New Yorker, Thurber worked with the versatile writer E. B. White, who wrote the well-known children's favorite Charlotte's Web and other works. White's literary skill influenced Thurber's craft. Thurber wrote fifteen drafts of "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty," a story of five pages, before he submitted it for publication. Thurber gained recognition for his work from Williams College and Yale University, which awarded him honorary degrees, and his drawings were exhibited in international art shows. Regarded primarily as a humorist, Thurber's reputation as a serious writer has suffered somewhat. Critical attention has focused largely on the comic aspect of his writing and not on the deeper themes and social satire present in his work. Thurber married twice. His first marriage to Althea Adams lasted thirteen years and produced a daughter. After they divorced, he married Helen Wismer. In the 1940s, Thurber began losing his vision. Eventually, he went completely blind. In his later years, depressed by his health and by the anticommunist movement of the 1950s, which he opposed, Thurber's writing became more pessimistic. He died in 1961.

Plot Summary As "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty" begins, a military officer orders an airplane crew to proceed with a flight through a dangerous storm. The crew

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members are scared but are buoyed by their commander's confidence, and they express their faith in him. Suddenly, the setting switches to an ordinary highway, where Walter Mitty and his wife are driving into a city to run errands. The scene on the airplane is revealed to be one of Mitty's many fantasies. Mitty's wife observes that he seems tense, and when he drops her off in front of a hair styling salon, she reminds him to go buy overshoes and advises him to put on his gloves. He drives away toward a parking lot and loses himself in another fantasy. In this daydream he is a brilliant doctor, called upon to perform an operation on a prominent banker. His thoughts are interrupted by the attendant at the parking lot, where Mitty is trying to enter through the exit lane. He has trouble backing out to get into the proper lane, and the attendant has to take the wheel. Mitty walks away, resentful of the attendant's skill and self-assurance. Next, Mitty finds a shoe store and buys overshoes. He is trying to remember what else his wife wanted him to buy when he hears a newsboy shouting about a trial, which sends Mitty into another daydream. Mitty is on the witness stand in a courtroom. He identifies a gun as his own and reveals that he is a skillful marksman. His testimony causes a disturbance in the courtroom. An attractive young woman falls into his arms; the district attorney strikes her and Mitty punches him. This time Mitty brings himself out of his reverie by remembering what he was supposed to buy. ' 'Puppy biscuit," he says aloud, leading a woman on the street to laugh and tell her friend, ' "That man said 'Puppy biscuit' to himself." Mitty then goes to a grocery store for the dog biscuits and makes his way to the hotel lobby where he has arranged to meet his wife. He sits in a chair and picks up a magazine that carries a story about airborne warfare. He begins to daydream again, seeing himself as a heroic bomber pilot about to go on a dangerous mission. He is brave and lighthearted as he prepares to risk his life. He returns to the real world when his wife claps him on the shoulder. She is full of questions, and he explains to her that he was thinking. ' 'Does it ever occur to you that I am sometimes thinking?" he says. She replies that she plans to take his temperature when they get home. They leave the hotel and walk toward the parking lot. She darts into a drugstore for one last purchase, and Mitty remains on the street as it begins to rain. He lights a cigarette and

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imagines himself smoking it in front of a firing squad. He tosses the cigarette away and faces the guns courageously—"Walter Mitty the Undefeated, inscrutable to the last."

Characters Mrs. Mitty Mrs. Mitty is Walter's dominating wife. She nags him to buy galoshes, to put on his gloves, and to drive more slowly. When she asks Walter why he did not put on his overshoes before leaving the store, he responds with irritation: "I was thinking,. . .does it ever occur to you that I am sometimes thinking?'' But while Mrs. Mitty may appear overly controlling and condescending, Walter is incompetent and refuses to shoulder adult responsibility. Mrs. Mitty is Walter's link to reality; she prevents accidents and helps Walter avoid losing his grasp of everyday life.

Walter Mitty Walter Mitty is a daydreamer who imagines himself the hero of his fantasies as a navy pilot commander, doctor, sharpshooter, bomber pilot, and noble victim of a firing squad. Mitty is married to a woman who treats him more like a child than a husband. This is due to his immature tendency to escape into fantasies rather than live in the real world. He is constantly being upbraided by policemen, parking lot attendants, and his wife for his erratic, distracted behavior. Thurber's characterization of this neurotic man whose wife dominates him, who cannot fix his own car, and who lives in dreams has become an archetypal figure of the ineffectual, weak-willed, bumbling male in American culture.

Themes Walter Mitty is an ordinary character who fills his mind with fantasies in which he plays the hero, saves lives, navigates enemy territory, and proves his masculinity.

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Success and Failure The theme of success and failure is examined through Mitty's inability to live a fulfilling external life, which causes him to retreat to an internal life full of images of conquest. Walter Mitty is neither exciting nor successful in his everyday life. In fact, the world Mitty lives in seems hellish to him. His wife's nagging voice awakens him from one dream. Like his wife, parking lot attendants and policemen admonish him, and women at the grocery store laugh at him. A bumbling, ineffectual man scorned by others, he feels humiliated by the knowing grins of garage mechanics who know he cannot take the chains off his car's tires. To avoid their sneers, he imagines taking the car into the garage with his arm in a sling so ' 'they'll see I couldn't possibly take the chains off myself." The failures of his everyday life are countered by the extraordinary successes he plays out in his fantasy life. Mitty is always the stunning hero of his dreams: he flies a plane through horrendous weather and saves the crew; he saves a millionaire banker with his dexterity and common-sense in surgery; he stuns a courtroom with tales of his sharpshooting; and he fearlessly faces a firing squad. Although he always forgets what his wife wants him to pick up at

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Media Adaptations In 1947, Samuel Goldwyn Studios produced a well-regarded movie-length version of Thurber's story, titled The Secret Life of Walter Mitty. The movie stars Danny Kaye and Virginia Mayo and is available through RKO distributors and on video. Radio Yesteryear Audio released a book-ontape titled The Secret Life of Walter Mitty: And You Could Look It Up, in August, 1988.

daydreams. All of his fantasies center around feats of traditionally masculine prowess, and many of them involve violence. He can hit a target three hundred feet away with his left hand, fix sophisticated machinery with a common fountain pen, and walk bravely into battle in his fantasy worlds. Thurber's exploration of sex roles in modern America can be understood in various ways: Thurber might be suggesting that men have become weak and ineffectual and women overly aggressive, or he may be pointing to a lack of opportunities for men to perform meaningful, heroic action in modern, suburban, middle-class America.

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the store and he waits for her in the wrong part of the hotel lobby, Walter is alert, courageous and at the center of attention in his dreams. Thurber suggests that this ordinary man who hates the reality of middle-class life and his own shortcomings prefers to live in his imagination.

Gender Roles Walter's failures in life and his successes in dreams are closely connected with gender roles. Everyday life for him consists of being ridiculed by women, such as the one who hears him mutter ' 'puppy biscuit'' on the street and his wife who nags him. Among women, Walter is subservient and the object of derision. Among men, Walter fails to meet traditional expectations of masculinity. He is embarrassed by his mechanical ineptitude: when he tries to remove the chains from his tires, he ends up winding them around the axles, and he has to send for a towtruck. The mechanic who arrives is described as "young" and "grinning." The description implies that the man, younger and more virile, is laughing at Walter's ignorance of cars and makes Walter feel emasculated, or less of a man. Walter resolves that the next time he takes the car to the shop to have the chains removed, he will cover his shame by wearing his right arm in a sling. Walter compensates for his failure to fulfill conventional expectations of masculinity in his

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In ' "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty,'' Thurber tells the story of Walter Mitty, a man who lives in a dream world to escape from the routines and humiliations he suffers in everyday life. The action takes place over the course of a single day, during which Walter Mitty and his wife go on their weekly shopping trip. Walter slips into his daydreams, only to be awakened when he has made an error in judgment, such as speeding or driving on the wrong side of the road. Thurber has carefully constructed the story's narrative to connect Mitty's "secret life" with his external life. In the first dream sequence, Walter is a naval commander who sails his hydroplane at full speed to avoid a hurricane. The dream abruptly ends when his wife admonishes him for driving too quickly, implying that Walter's dream led to his speeding. The second dream begins when his wife notes that he is tense, and asks him to see a doctor. Hearing the name of the doctor sends Walter Mitty into dreaming that he is a famous surgeon who assists in saving the life of a wealthy patient, a banker named Wellington MacMillan. Each of the dreams, then, begins with some detail from Walter's everyday life. Walter transforms insignificant comments, sounds or objects into major props in his heroic conquests. The same details from reality force him out of his dream world. Significantly, the story opens and closes in the middle of dream sequences, as if to emphasize their priority over

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reality for Walter. It is left to the reader to consider the importance of the last scene, in which Walter bravely faces a firing squad without a blindfold. Thurber's narrative proficiency is such that he actually writes six stories within one. None of the mininarratives have decisive conclusions: each of the dream sequences, like the entire story, is an abbreviated short story with no clear beginning or end.

Point of View Linked to his use of narration, Thurber uses an unusual point of view in ' 'The Secret Life of Walter Mitty.'' The story is told in the third-person, but the reader has access to Mitty's thoughts. The dream sequences complicate this third-person limited point of view. During these sections of the story, readers are inside of Walter's fantasy. His conscious thoughts are on display. He wonders what he was supposed to buy at the store. Readers also have access to another level of Mitty's consciousness during the dream sequences. Here, Walter's thoughts are projected into narrative action. Thurber shifts from one level of awareness to another without confusing the reader.

Topics for Further Study Consider stereotypes of masculinity in society today. How are these stereotypes enacted in Walter Mitty's dreams? How do these stereotypes differ from his everyday behavior? Do you think Thurber's characterization of Mrs. Mitty is sexist? What sort of picture of marriage emerges in the story, and how does that picture compare with what is considered a "typical" marriage in American society today? List the details which connect Walter's fantasies and his reality together. Analyze the significance of these details to the story's overall theme. Investigate American society during the end of the depression and the beginning of World War II. Do you think Thurber accurately portrays middle-class life during that time in ' The Secret Life of Walter Mitty"? Why or why not?

Wordplay Thurber has been praised for his use of extravagant wordplay and literary allusions. Noted primarily for his light sketches and humorous line drawings, Thurber did not receive a great deal of serious critical appraisal during his career. However, later critics have commented on his bitter political and social commentary and the latent, darker themes in his work. Through his use of humor and wit, Thurber was able to explore the conflicts and neurotic tensions of modern life. Mitty's misuse of words such as "coreopsis" and "obstreosis" in "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty" is a typical example of how Thurber employed speech to great effect. Humorous distortions of medical terms, technological advancements, and items of warfare make Mitty's portrayal accurate, lifelike, and believable. During his courtroom daydream, Mitty is called upon to identify a gun known as a "Webley-Vickers 50.80." This is another instance where Thurber twists words to enrich the depiction of Mitty's character. Carl M. Lindner asserts that this distortion of a brand-name (probably Smith and Wesson—a well known gun manufacturer) demonstrates Mitty's "ignorance of the heroic experience" and amuses readers at the

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same time. Thurber used such distortions of speech and reality to effectively depict the absurdities of the human condition.

Historical Context War Fantasies "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty" was first published in 1939, the year World War II bega German troops invaded Poland, the Germans and the Soviets signed a Nazi-Soviet nonagression pact, and Germany and Italy formed the Pact of Steel Alliance. While the Axis powers were consolidating, Britain and France declared war on Germany. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt declared U.S. neutrality in the war, but the United States entered the war in 1941 when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. Roosevelt, at the suggestion of Albert Ein-

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Compare &

Contrast 1930: The New Yorker magazine typifies east Coast intellectualism and many popular writers of the day publish stories and articles in it that exemplify an urban sense of sophistication and humor.

orthopedic surgeons pay annual malpractice premiums ranging from $33,000 to $117,000. The large number of medical malpractice suits in U.S. courts points to a growing cynicism Americans feel towards medicine and technology.

1997: Under the editorship of the controversial Tina Brown, the New Yorker struggles to maintain its reputation, yet circulation is up over recent years to 860,000.

1940s: During World War II, many women enter jobs vacated by men who have joined the war effort.

1939: The theme of the 1939-40 New York World's Fair is "The World of Tomorrow," which highlights Americans' belief in emerging science and technology as a cure-all. Today: Forbes magazine reports that in 1994

stein, ordered a U.S. effort to build an atomic bomb. In Spain, the forces of fascist Francisco Franco captured Madrid, ending the Spanish Civil War. While Walter Mitty, a middle-aged man, dreams of being a captain in the First World War, the dream is triggered by his reading an article intimating World War II in Liberty magazine entitled,' 'Can Germany Conquer the World Through the Air?'' The articles contain ' 'pictures of bombing planes and of ruined streets." In the late 1930s and early 1940s, American men like Walter Mitty had to confront their fears of and desires for proving their manhood in battle.

Today: Although efforts to pass an Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution failed in 1982, women such as Katharine Graham, publisher and CEO of the Washington Post, demonstrate women's increasing roles in political, social and cultural arenas.

show the influence of the poet Wallace Stevens, whose book of verse, The Man with the Blue Guitar was published in 1937. Towards the end of the story, Walter comments that "things close in," which, according to Carl M. Lindner, represents the suffocating effects of modern life on "the Romantic individual." That the world was changing due to technological, economic, and social developments (think of Walter's problems fixing his car, for example) is reflected in the opening of the 1939-40 New York World's Fair, whose theme was "The World of Tomorrow."

Modernism Thurber's use of wordplay and exploration of the absurdity of modern life has been noted for its affinities with modernist writing. Modernists played with conventional narrative form and dialogue, attempting to approximate subjective thought and experience. Thurber's narrative technique has been compared to the writings of William Faulkner, whose novels Absalom, Absalom! and Light in August were published in the 1930s. Thurber's playful use of words and themes of absurdity also

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Critical Overview "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty" is Thurber's best-known short story. Walter Mitty has become a well-known character in American fiction. The tenth edition of the Merriam Webster Collegiate Dictionary defines a "Walter Mitty" as "a commonplace unadventurous person who seeks escape

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Danny Kaye as Walter Mitty.

from reality through daydreaming." Walter Mitty, the average, ineffectual American is a recurring character-type in Thurber's fiction. Critics refer to this type of character as the "Thurber male." However, critics are divided on how to interpret this Thurberian character. On the one hand, Richard C. Tobias's The Art of James Thurber views Thurber as a cerebral comic writer, whose protagonists defeat humdrum reality with their imaginations. On the other hand, Walter Blair and Hamlin Hill discuss Thurber's bleak comic sensibility in their book, America's Humor. Characters like Mitty, Blair argues, let their neurotic fears defeat them, and are

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unable to cope with the world. In The Georgia Review, Carl M. Lindner sees Walter Mitty as the latest in a line of American male heroes, such as Rip Van Winkle and Tom Sawyer. Like these archetypal comic figures, Mitty chooses to escape society rather than confront it. Refusing to accept adult responsibility, Lindner argues, these figures of masculinity regress to boyish behavior. Critics disagree about Thurber's portrayal of women as well. Commentators such as Blair and Hill consider him a misogynist—a person who hates women. Viewing Mrs. Mitty as the one responsible for Walter's loss of independence and his

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Danny Kaye in The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, 7947.

inability to function, such critics believe Thurber was opposed to strong, empowered female characters. Tobias, on the other hand, praises Thurber's assertive female characters. Critics who analyze Thurber's stories as lightly comic and triumphant are more likely to regard favorably his depictions of women; those who concentrate on his darker themes point to his negative portrayals of women. Another issue which recurs in critical discussion is Thurber's view of modern life and his technique in portraying it. His writing has been compared to that of modernist writers such as William Faulkner, James Joyce and T. S. Eliot. His use of wordplay, integration of different narrative consciousnesses, and treatment of the absurdity of modern life connect Thurber's fiction to modernism. Robert Morseberger, in his monograph, James Thurber, characterizes Thurber as a Romantic writer, one who opposes technological advances and rationality and believes in the mind's ability to provide an escape from the destructive forces of society. In an essay in the English Journal, Carl Sundell discusses the "architectural design" of "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty." He notes that Thurber addresses four of the five major types of conflict found in fiction: Man vs. Man, Man vs.

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Society, Man vs. Self and Man vs. Nature. Sundell compares Thurber's ability to elicit the sympathy of the reader in "Mitty" to J. D. Salinger's portrayal of Holden Caulfield, the protagonist in the novel Catcher in the Rye. He notes that, like Holden, Walter seems to be on the verge of a nervous breakdown. Unlike the adolescent Caulfield, though, Walter is an adult, and thus his chronic daydreaming merits less sympathy from the reader.

Criticism Trudy Ring Trudy Ring is a reporter, editor, and frequent writer on literary subjects. In the following essay, Ring provides an introduction to ' 'The Secret Life of Walter Mitty,'' comments on the universal appeal of the main character, and examines the themes presented in Thurber's story. Walter Mitty is one of literature's great dreamers. He spends much of his time escaping into fantasies in which he is brilliant and heroic, and his life is dramatic and adventurous. The enduring popularity of' 'The Secret Life of Walter Mitty'' is undoubted-

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What Do I Read Next? James Thurber's 1933 My Life and Hard Times is a semi-fictional autobiography full of comically exaggerated incidents from his life. T. S. Eliot's 1917 modernist poem, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, explores the emptiness of modern life through its depiction of Alfred Prufrock, who struggles with the nature of his existence. Critic Peter DeVries referred to James Thurber as a "comic Prufrock," noting Thurber's ability to capture human weaknesses, and to balance tragedy and comedy in his work, all elements found in the Prufrock poem. Mark Twain's 1885 novel, The Adventures of

ly due in great part to readers' ability to identify with Mitty; after all, most of us find our lives at times mundane and unsatisfying, and use daydreams to enter a more interesting world.

Huckleberry Finn, is a classic of American humor. The novel about a young boy who chooses to escape his home rather than be ' 'civilized'' is Twain's most popular work. John Updike's Rabbit, Run, published in 1960, is the story of blue-collar Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom, who runs away from adult relationships. David Riesman's sociological study of the modern condition and the American individual, The Lonely Crowd: A Study of the Changing American Character, provides historical and social insights into the problems of twentieth-century life.

Mitty is, of course, an extreme case when it comes to daydreaming. In the single afternoon covered by the story's action, he imagines he is a prominent surgeon operating on a millionaire; a skilled marksman providing testimony in a sensational trial; a courageous warrior of the air (twice); and a condemned man bravely facing a firing squad.

dants. When he remembers that he is supposed to buy puppy biscuit, he says the words aloud, leading a passer-by to laugh and remark to her companion, ' 'That man said 'Puppy biscuit' to himself." Even a revolving door seems to mock him; it makes a ' 'faintly derisive'' noise when pushed. Mitty's mental meanderings also have something to do with asserting his manhood, at least a stereotypical idea of manhood. He fantasizes about excelling at what are considered "masculine" pursuits having to do with guns and bombs; in reality, he has trouble taking the chains off his car's tires.

Numerous critics have pointed to Mitty as a prime example of modern man, trapped in a world that is full of dull responsibilities and offers few possibilities for adventure—or, at least, offers these possibilities only to the few. Mitty dreams of flying planes in hazardous conditions and causing scenes in courtrooms, but his life consists of buying overshoes and waiting for his wife to have her hair done. In his fantasies, not only is his life exciting, but his imagined persona is heroic and resourceful as well. In his daydreams he is a figure larger than life, unflappable and in control of every situation; in reality he is a character critics have dubbed the ' 'little man," ineffectual and somewhat ridiculous. He inspires feelings of superiority in garage atten-

Scholar Carl M. Lindner asserts in an essay in The Georgia Review that the forces that induce Mitty to daydream include the development of urban, industrial society. When the United States was a young country, with an untamed frontier, there were far more opportunities for heroic action—or, at least, there seemed to be, Lindner notes. Also, literature and legend immortalized many frontier heroes, whether fictional creations such as James Fenimore Cooper's Natty Bumppo or real historical figures such as Davy Crockett (whose accomplishments were heavily exaggerated, so that he now seems almost like a fictional character). ' 'With the frontier gone, and physical and psychological space limited, the typical male is reduced to

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Mitty dreams of flying planes in hazardous conditions and causing scenes in courtrooms, but his life consists of buying overshoes

visit to a doctor, notes that she intends to check his temperature when they return home, and reminds him to wear his gloves and buy overshoes. The fact that she would have to remind him of these things is a sign that she is indeed more competent than he, and is constantly concerned about his well being. Another indication of her competence is that she notices when he is driving too fast. She also seems not to understand his need for escapism; he wonders if she realizes that he is sometimes thinking.

and waiting for his wife to have her hair done,"

fantasy-visions as outlets for that action which is now denied him," Lindner states. Whether Mitty actually would become a hero if possibilities for action were available to him is open to question; he appears to lack capability as well as opportunity. Some critics have contended Mitty's inability to deal with life is the natural result of the modern world's stresses on the individual. In James Thurber's vision, this world is "Hell for the Romantic individual," comments Lindner. However, in the estimation of another critic, Ann Ferguson Mann, Mitty has merely abdicated responsibility for his life. In her essay in Studies in Short Fiction, Mann writes:' 'What Thurber's story can show us, while it delights us with its clever humor, is that what traps the Walter Mittys of this world and insures that they will remain 'little men' is their own limited view of themselves and others." Mann's view diverges from a widely held assertion that holds Mitty's wife responsible for his predicament as well as blaming contemporary society. In his stories and cartoons, Thurber often portrayed women, especially wives, as dominating and menacing creatures, breaking the spirit of the men in their lives. Critic Norris Yates gives an interpretation of Thurber's viewpoint in his book entitled American Humorist: Conscience of the Twentieth Century. Yates writes: "Thurber feels that the male animal is unduly repressed by his environment, an environment which contains another animal, his wife, who both abets and conceals her ruthlessness by means of more resolution, solicitude for her mate, and competence in the small matters of everyday living than he shows." Certainly, this description fits Mrs. Mitty in some ways. She obviously worries about Walter's health and welfare; she observes that he is nervous, suggests a

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Mann makes a rather convincing argument in that Mrs. Mitty's actions can be seen as quite understandable and even praiseworthy. ' 'No critics and few readers of the story have tried to imagine the difficulties of living with Walter Mitty," Mann comments. Indeed, the story contains ample evidence that Mitty would try a mate's patience. He has trouble remembering the errands he is supposed to run. He rebels at the idea of dressing properly for winter. He is an inept driver. And he slides into his fantasies with little provocation. It has fallen to Mrs. Mitty (Thurber gives her no first name) to manage the details of Walter's life. "She is there to keep him from driving too fast, to get him to wear gloves and overshoes, to take him to the doctor, but, most importantly, to free him from all the practical responsibilities of living so that he can pursue his real career—his fantasy life," notes Mann. "It is not inconceivable that Mitty, the architect of so many intricate fantasies, unconsciously chose for himself a wife like Mrs. Mitty." This rather positive view of Mrs. Mitty is not only at odds with that held by many other critics, but also might surprise Thurber, given that much of his work contained negative portraits of women. Late in his career, however, Thurber contended he was not a misogynist. Yates points to a statement Thurber wrote in 1953: "If I have sometimes seemed to make fun of Woman, I assure you it has been only for the purpose of egging her on." Additionally, stories can be interpreted in many ways, not limited to what the author may have intended. In the end, it is possible to sympathize with both Walter and Mrs. Mitty. It is understandable that he would want to find in his fantasies what he lacks in life; it is also easy to see that she would have to be the more responsible member of the couple, and that she would sometimes have to play the unpopular role of disciplinarian. He needs someone to take care of him; perhaps she needs to take care of someone. Therefore, each fulfills a need for the other. Readers may be able to identify with Mrs.

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Mitty to some extent. This is limited, however, because she is rather sketchily drawn, because her role in the story is secondary to Walter's, and because dreamers are generally more appealing than are earthbound, practical people. Walter remains the story's primary audience-identification figure.

tion is the reason the story continues to appeal to readers year after year. Source: Trudy Ring, for Short Stories for Students, Gale Research, 1997.

Carl M. Lindner In the following essay, Lindner suggests that the character of Walter Mitty in Thurber's short story is an example of the underground American hero, one who embodies the conflict between the individual and society.

Readers are able to identify with Mitty not only because of the fact that he fantasizes, but also because of the content of his fantasies. The content is familiar, as it is drawn from American popular culture. His military scenarios are full of cliches from war films. The courtroom scene could be from a low-budget 1940s mystery movie or a paperback crime novel. The firing-squad ending could come from a movie, too. And the medical fantasy is pure soap opera. Some critics have pointed out that the daydream sequences show Thurber's skill as a parodist—a skill he also displayed in Fables For Our Time and other works. Consider these lines from Mitty's dream of being a naval aviator, flying through a severe storm: "The crew . . . looked at each other and grinned. 'The Old Man'll get us through,' they said to one another. 'The Old Man ain' t afraid of hell."' Or these from the trial fantasy: "Pandemonium broke loose in the courtroom. A woman's scream rose above the bedlam and suddenly a lovely, dark-haired girl was in Mitty's arms. The District Attorney struck at her savagely. Without rising from his chair, Mitty let the man have it on the point of the chin. 'You miserable cur!' . . . " Thurber takes material that is familiar to the audience and makes it hilarious through exaggeration. The fantasy scenes also contain humor based on made-up and misused words; for instance, Mitty imagines himself to be a doctor dealing with diseases called obstreosis and streptothricosis (both fabricated words), as well as coreopsis (really a genus of herb). Several critics interpret the cliched content and twisted vocabulary of Mitty's daydreams as revealing the limitations of his experience. Lindner notes that Mitty's "concocted overdramatizations" are based on "what he has read rather than what he has done" because, after all, Mitty has not done much in his life. As for Mitty's erroneous use of words, Lindner asserts, ' 'While Thurber deliberately places these wrong-way signposts to reveal Mitty's ignorance of the heroic experience Mitty remains oblivious of his blunders as he succeeds in fashioning his own reality."

Mitty's closest literary forerunner is Rip Van Winkle, the "good-bad boy" of American fiction. Like Rip, Mitty has a wife who embodies the authority of a society in which the husband cannot function. Mitty's world is routine, trivial, and fraught with pigeon-holes; it persecutes the individual, strips his life of romance, and dictates what his actions (if not his thoughts) should be. The husband is often reduced to the status of a naughty child (as demonstrated by a prepubertal mentality); and he attempts to escape rather than confront a world symbolized by a wife who, more often than not, seems to be a mother-figure rather than a partner. Because of the threat which the wife-mother poses to the American male psyche, Rip must go hunting, Deerslayer cannot marry and dwell in the town, and Huck seeks the river rather than be sivilized.

Undoubtedly, we all would like to fashion our own reality; we all are, to some extent, Walter Mittys. More than anything, that point of identifica-

Huck's boyhood companion, Tom Sawyer, is not only one of the most popular characters in American fiction, he is one of the most successful at

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James Thurber has long been recognized as one of America's leading modern humorists. His stories, sketches, and cartoons are engaging, often leading to chuckles of wry reminiscence. But when he created' "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty,'' Thurber wrought better than he knew, for he had touched upon one of the major themes in American literature—the conflict between individual and society. Mitty's forerunners are readily observable in native folklore and fiction. On one side Mitty is a descendant of Rip Van Winkle and Tom Sawyer. On the other side he dream-wishes qualities customarily exhibited by the legendary frontier hero. Yet, while Thurber's story derives from American cultural tradition, it presents the quest for identity in an unmistakably modern context. In what may be the final scene in an unfolding tapestry of heroic situations, Mitty struggles to achieve a measure of selfrespect, but finds himself restricted to the pathways of retreat and wish-fulfillment.

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In what may be the final scene in an unfolding tapestry of heroic situations, Mitty struggles to achieve a measure of self-respect, but finds himself restricted to the pathways of retreat and wish-fulfillment,"

circumventing authority-figures. He manages to do this in the real world, thus distinguishing himself from Rip and Mitty. But if he succeeds, it may be because the pressure is not as great; after all, he is only a boy, not subject to the strain of a day-to-day relationship with its attendant responsibilities. Society does not weigh heavily upon Tom's boyish shoulders, and his pranks and practical jokes permit him to squirm free from the little discomfort he experiences. Because Tom's freedom is never seriously threatened, his rebellion (a conventional one at that) remains on an adolescent level. What Mitty and Tom do share, however, is an imagination based on book-adventures. Like Tom, Mitty romanticizes and inflates situations, and this goes far to explain why Mitty's mind will not (indeed, can not) grapple with the world about him. Because his imagination depends upon what he has read rather than what he has done, Mitty lives a vicarious existence. And, conversely, Mitty's misuse of words and concocted over-dramatizations betoken his unwillingness to dwell in a dimension which cannot feed his imaginative faculties. Given his routine external life, how could it be otherwise? Only in Mitty's world could an eight-engine hydroplane leave the water. The banker, Wellington McMillan (note the initials), falls prey to ' 'coreopsis'' during his operation—but "coreopsis" denotes a genus of plants. Captain Mitty, the courageous flier, mistakenly refers to the "Jerries" as the "Archies." And the Webley-Vickers 50-80, with which the one-armed defendant is so proficient (along with every other "known make of gun") is probably a Smith and Wesson. A dual purpose is evident here, for while Thurber deliberately places these wrongway signposts to reveal Mitty's ignorance of the

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heroic experience Mitty remains oblivious of his blunders as he succeeds in fashioning his own reality. Simultaneously it is a sad and amusing show. Mitty's visions, however, are more than mere adolescent fantasies with their theatricality and simplistic crises; they are surprisingly true to what Lawrence in Studies in Classic American Literature defined as the fundamental American male psyche: ' 'The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer." Lawrence went on to elaborate: "A man who keeps his moral integrity hard and intact. An isolate, almost selfless, stoic, enduring man, who lives by death, by killing, but who is pure white." (Mitty's "white" heroes are always officers and gentlemen—a "pure" aristocracy indeed.) It must be noted that nearly all of Mitty's visions deal with violence, and even the one exception dramatizes a matter of life and death. This kind of situation allows the ultimate in symbolic action in which the questions of self can be answered and personal values defined. One can speculate whether Mitty's visions of crises and correspondingly heroic responses are so familiar because they are inherent in the national unconscious or because they recur with such frequency in the national literature. The speculative game is one of chicken and egg; the undeniable fact suggests serious and alarming possibilities concerning the American male mentality in a time when football and military force provide over-simplified moral and physical confrontations. This quality of self-reliance, so directly traceable to the American past, is manifested by Mitty's dream-self to a considerable degree. In both the frontier literature and that of the New England Romantic tradition, the hero always defined himself through actions which dramatically delineated his inner self and established his identity, as Daniel Hoffman points out in Form and Fable in American Fiction. A youthful culture naturally produced heroes with youthful qualities, most notably an unshaken self-confidence which framed their belief that they could always adapt to the world, no matter what the world might prove to be. This kind of unqualified optimism in one's ability (one side of the Romantic coin) reveals itself most clearly in Cooper's Natty Bumppo, Emerson's "Self-Reliance" and Thoreau's exploits in Walden. It is this swaggering self-assertion and a conviction regarding the control of one's destiny which characterize at once the American hero and Mitty's alter ego. (One need only recall how Mitty substitutes the fountain pen for the faulty piston in the failing anaesthetizer, how he strikes the villainous District

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Attorney from a sitting position with his one good arm in the chivalrous defense of a Byronic heroine, and how he prepares to fly, alone and weary, on a vital mission against the "Archies.") Like Davy Crockett, Mike Fink, and Natty Bumppo, the dreamMitty can out-shoot, out-fight, and out-do any and all opposition. But the man who can surmount catastrophes, man-made or natural, exists today only in the mind of a bewildered and hen-pecked protagonist. Whether the potential for heroic action was greater in the past, or whether there were indeed giants in those days, Mitty, like Miniver Cheevy, can only think about it. ' The greatest pistol shot in the world" is reduced to ordering puppy-biscuit, to fetching and carrying for his wife, and he has difficulty even recalling the name of the product.... In the continuing battle with society, the individual resorts increasingly to escapism rather than to direct opposition. Rip sleeps away the time in order to avoid the wear and tear of prolonged and ineffectual confrontation. Mitty attempts a series of little sleeps, only to be awakened before each climax. Inevitably and ironically, the relentlessly real world determines both the origin and the premature conclusion of each fantasy. With the repeated stifling of each psychological orgasm, Mitty's predicament becomes more frustrated and with increasing desperation he returns to his dream-world to seek release. His triumphs, projected upon an internal terrain, are the more tantalizing because they are so fleeting and so abruptly terminated. There is no satisfaction at having beaten the system, for even his inward retreat provides no real haven. What becomes more evident as the story progresses is the vision of the contemporary world as Hell for the Romantic individual. Mitty is recalled from his first vision when this word tolls, and the word is immediately followed by his wife's voice, admonishing him not to drive so fast. The dreamer is repeatedly forced to return to a world he neither desires nor understands. It is a world peopled with a host of authority-figures who plague the beleaguered Mitty like demons—doctors, bankers, district attorneys, mechanics, parking-lot attendants, and policemen—all of whom sound very much like Mrs. Mitty. (Notice how Mitty mistakes the voice and tone of the policeman for his wife's orders to keep his gloves on.) Mitty is the man who is constantly forced to backtrack by wife and/or society. Even a lowly parking-lot attendant assumes authority over him, telling him to "Back it up, Mac!" Mitty's spiritual and physical location are linked when the attendant informs him "Wrong lane, Mac." Our

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hero remembers how ' 'once he had tried to take his chains off" but was forced to ask a grinning mechanic for help. And so, significantly, it is "an old copy of Liberty '' that he peruses while awaiting his wife's return. When she rebukes him for hiding, Mitty can only resignedly muse to himself, "Things close in." These three words circumscribe much of the contemporary American male's feelings toward adult responsibilities. Small wonder that he returns to boyhood methods of dealing with a world which confuses him—and small wonder that he conceives his wife as threat and stifler of his inner self. . .. The heroic mold has generally been cast by a juvenile imagination in America. Certainly the folk heroes were inflated to larger-than-life proportions. And the Romantic imagination would naturally have seized upon the frontier as a natural landscape whereon heroic deeds of a corresponding size and nature could be performed. But in Thurber's modern man only a dim memory of a heroic past remains, nurtured on puerile fantasies propagated by films and pulp fiction. With the frontier gone, and space and privacy at a premium, there is only one place where Mitty can hope to fulfill himself—in a world of self-projection. And even here he cannot totally escape, for the real world apprizes him of its presence by shattering each delusion before it can be climaxed. As a result of being perpetually interrupted at crucial moments in these fantasies, it seems only proper that Mitty's final role should be that of the condemned man about to be executed by a faceless firing squad for reasons not explicitly given. This vision is a marvelously telling projection of Mitty's place in the world as he feels it. How fitting it is that the story ends, as it began, with a day-dream and that, to the external world (his wife, among others), Walter Mitty wears that' 'faint, fleeting smile'' and remains "inscrutable to the last." Source: Carl M. Lindner, "Thurber's Walter Mitty—The Underground American Hero," in The Georgia Review, Vol. XXVIII, No. 2, Summer, 1974 pp. 283-89.

Carl Sundett In the following essay, Sundell discusses various conflicts in ' 'The Secret Life of Walter Mitty.'' Any unit of literature which attempts to deal with the appreciation of the short story, either for pleasure or for the recognition of the principles involved in creative writing, would do well to include in its

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table of contents Thurber's "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty." Long recognized for its entertainment value, Thurber's most popular short story is rarely subjected to the careful scrutiny so deserving of a perfect architectural design. As is the case with so much literary criticism, my own notes on "The Secret Life" are not so much a result of private musings as the fruit of a dialogue involving students and myself engaged in observing, through sample pieces, the structural elements of this genre. I read ' The Secret Life'' to a group of highly sensitive and alert young people. The subsequent discussion was more rewarding than I had anticipated. We began by referring to the five major types of conflict recurrently treated in fiction. Man Man Man Man Man

vs Man vs Society vs Self vs Nature vs God (or Conscience)

It soon became evident to us that Thurber's story is highly charged with the various types of conflict. The Man vs Man conflict is illustrated in Mitty's several encounters with the walk-on characters who remind him of his alienation from the real world. During their drive to the beauty parlor, Walter's nagging wife jolts him out of his first fantasy with her chattering censure of his heavy accelerator foot. She then commands him to purchase a pair of rubbers (there is snow on the ground) and several other items. Minutes later, Mrs. Mitty discharged at her destination, Walter stops for a red light, lingers when it turns green, and receives the snappy order of a policeman to "Pick it up, brother!" He drives around for a while, is engulfed in the second dream, and emerges from it at the sharp rebuke of a parking lot attendant. ' 'Back it up, Mack. Look out for that Buick." Our hero has just entered the lot on a lane marked "Exit Only." This embarrassment reminds Walter of a similar one. He recalls, with much chagrin, the occasion on which he attempted to remove the chains from his tires and only succeeded in tangling them in the axle. He'd had to send for the "grinning young garageman" to unwind them. He resolves, the next time, to "wear my right arm in a sling and they'll see I couldn't possibly take the chains off myself." This incident reveals in Walter a low level of mechanical coordination, a fact important to remember later in the discussion.

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Walter forgets an item on his wife's shopping list. On the heels of his third fantasy, he remembers and mutters out loud "Puppy biscuit." A passing woman ridicules him by exclaiming to her companion: ' 'Puppy biscuit. That man said 'Puppy biscuit' to himself." Walter's fifth and final Man vs Man conflict occurs when, sitting in a chair in a hotel lobby, Mrs. Mitty shocks him out of his fourth reverie by chiding him for awaiting her arrival in an obscure part of the lobby. The Man vs Nature conflict is exemplified in two of the dream sequences. In the first dream Walter, now the heroic Commander of a Navy hydroplane, pulls his crew through a raging hurricane. In the second dream he is a distinguished surgeon requested to assist in an operation on a dying millionaire. During the operation the new anesthetizer gives way. Walter's quick thinking saves the day when he replaces a faulty piston with a fountain pen, calculates the substitute as worth ten minutes, and successfully completes the operation himself. Here the two aspects of nature against which Mitty is struggling are Time and Death. The Man vs Society conflict also appears in two dreams. In the third dream Mitty is being examined on the witness stand by the District Attorney. He is cleared of suspicion in a murder charge by virtue of having his right arm in a sling. Gallant protector of womankind that he is, Walter sacrifices himself for the real female culprit by insisting that he could have shot Gregory Fitzhurst at 300 feet with his left hand! Here Mitty consciously pits himself against the state (Society) manifests his resentment against the real world (of individuals who daily browbeat him) by socking the District Attorney on the jaw. Again, in the last dream, Mitty stands before a firing squad (the explosive pressure of society against him for being the kind of dreamer that he is), refuses the blindfold, carelessly lights a last cigarette, and calmly awaits his vengeful martyrdom. The Man vs Self conflict is more implicitly than explicitly stated in the thread of the story. Walter Mitty is a man who has come to recognize himself as somewhat of a nobody. No man likes that kind of recognition. Some men accept it and make a healthy adjustment to the fact. Walter refuses this course and takes refuge in a private world in which all external reality is a periphery and he is its unchallenged center. He does not like what he is, his selfhood, and so he chooses to become, in his mind, the various heroic personalities that he can never be in reality.

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My students and I could not find any definite occasion for the Man vs God (Conscience) conflict in ' The Secret Life." I find it remarkable, however, that Thurber could have packed so much of the other four types into five pages. Possibly this explains, in large measure, the success of the story. I used Stephen Minot's Three Genres as source material for teaching the structural elements of the short story. Minot explains two types of characterization, the vertical and horizontal. When a writer draws his characters vertically, they undergo some kind of upward or downward movement; in other words, they develop upward, reach some kind of awakening or epiphany, and consequently improve in character, or else move downward and are degraded. Horizontal characterization, however, moves the character scene by scene through the story without any basic alteration in personality, attitude, or value; that is, the character remains on the same plane throughout the story. (Clifton Fadiman would call this incidental characterization.) Vertical characterization is usually restricted to main characters (for cathartic purposes, I suppose) and horizontal characterization to minor figures. What struck me as peculiar about Thurber's story, and I was able to elicit the same response from my students, was the unique manner in which "The Secret Life," centering exclusively on one main character, manages to fuse both vertical and horizontal development in that character. Walter Mitty does not undergo any basic change in personality throughout the story. "The Secret Life" begins with him dreaming and ends with him dreaming. He is, in fact, a chronic daydreamer, and he never awakens to the mental disease which afflicts him. His wife suggests that he see a psychiatrist, but he will not recognize the need. He will probably continue driving recklessly and being a menace to those about him for the rest of his life. One might conclude, then, that that character is developed horizontally, an apparent violation of protagonist delineation. However Thurber has brilliantly contrived a visible (if artificial) sense of vertical characterization through the elevation of the real Walter Mitty to his five heroic dream figures. Thurber uses the see-saw device. The five dreams are interrupted by five brief periods of lucidity (or vice versa, if you prefer). Five times Walter experiences (and by identification so does the reader) the radical transformation from dull, bumbling, uncoordinated simpleton to sparkling genius, pompous adventurer, and dauntless martyr. Witness the fusion, or confusion, of vertical and horizontal characterization.

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Insofar as every man daydreams, though not to Mitty's extent, Thurber arouses the sympathetic concern of the reader for his protagonist's cause. But exactly what is Walter Mitty's cause? The young reader tends to ignore the more profound vision of Thurber's story and concentrates rather on the high dramatic tension of the dream narratives and the comic relief of Walter's embarrassing confrontations with reality. The young reader identifies with Walter as he does with Holden Caulfield. The reason is plain; Walter, like most adolescents, is a chronic daydreamer, just as Holden provides for every adolescent the catharsis of a series of crises typical of young people. But the adult reader easily perceives the neurotic character of Holden's odyssey. Indeed, his narrative is written from the hospital room where he is recovering from a mental breakdown. Walter Mitty is headed for one. I suggested to my students the gradual mental disintegration of Mitty. Their initial reaction, of course, was hostile. They liked Walter Mitty and sided with him against his opponents, both real and imaginary. I approached the difficulty by examining the expository information supplied about Walter's past. Of particular importance is the citation of his inability to remove the chains from his tires without tangling them in the axle. All of the boys in my class admitted that this was a test of simple muscular and mechanical coordination and that Walter failed it. I asked them why he had failed it. Only one knew. He reasoned that Walter probably had not had much training as a boy in simple mechanical tasks. The same boy, after a little prodding, was able to see the consequence of this lack. Walter, upon reaching manhood, had not the equipment for mechanical coordination possessed by most men. If a man cannot reach the real world through his hands, in what direction does his Gestalt usually move? His center of activity would become mental, I think, rather than physical. Chesterton could not successfully tie a string around a box. He compensated for this physical deficiency by projecting his active center onto the world of literary imagination. The difference between Chesterton and Mitty is that the former channeled his imagination outward upon the world and turned it topsyturvy with his artist's wand, while the latter focused his imagination inward upon himself and is about to reform the world therein, according to his own egocentric fancy. Walter obviously has an antipathy for the real world. Society seems to reject him, not as a despicable outcast, but in curt little ways which, piled one

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Society seems to reject him, not as a despicable outcast, but in curt little ways which, piled one on another in the daily struggle, have reached crystallization in Walter's mind as veritable slings and arrows of external reality."

on another in the daily struggle, have reached crystallization in Walter's mind as veritable slings and arrows of external reality. He flees from the imagined enemy by entering his dream world every few minutes. There the situation is reversed. There he is the man who can do anything and does everything. But Walter's flights of fancy have reached the danger point. Notice his disregard for the real world during his dreams. He ignores the safe speed limit, the red light turned green, and unknowingly enters a lane marked "Exit Only." Notice, too, that he purchases his rubbers but instead of putting them on before leaving the store he has them wrapped in a box, apparently oblivious to the elements outside. Thurber accentuates Walter's confusion of his public and secret life by making him borrow objects from the real world and use them as props in his dreams. The resolution to wear his arm in a sling next time he brings his car to the garage for removal of tire chains is carried into the courtroom scene where he is exonerated for complicity in a homicide because of his injured arm. Again, waiting for his wife in the hotel lobby, Mitty scans newspaper photos of German bombed cities; in the following dream he is Captain Mitty, ace pilot of World War II fame. Young people read "The Secret Life" and revel in its adventurous exploits and comic irony. Thurber certainly meant that kind of an apprecia-

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tion. But I think it was to his credit, as it was to Salinger's, that beneath the narrative there runs the thread of a tragic envelopment which is touchingly pathetic. We do not know for sure, but it is not hard to suspect that one day the public and secret life of Walter Mitty will merge and for him become indistinguishable. The charm of his personality is that he has not learned to face reality (and we delight in escaping reality with him). He is wrapped in childlike subjectivity. But the tragedy of the man is that he will almost surely grow down and be locked, maybe once and for all, in the dark, secret, and lower depths. Source: Carl Sundell, "The Architecture of Walter Mitty's Secret Life," in English Journal, Vol. 56, No. 9, December, 1967, pp. 1284-87.

Sources Blair, Walter and Hill, Hamlin. America's Humor: From Poor Richard to Doonesbury. Oxford University Press, 1978. Mann, Ann Ferguson. "Taking Care of Walter Mitty," in Studies in Short Fiction, Vol. 19, Fall, 1982, pp. 351-57. Morseberger, Robert E. James Thurber, Twayne, 1988. Tobias, Richard Clark. The Art of James Thurber, Ohio State University Press, 1969. Yates, Morris. "James Thurber's Little Man and Liberal Citizen,'' in Thurber: A Collection of Critical Essays, edited by Charles S. Holmes, Prentice-Hall, 1974, pp. 28-36.

Further Reading De Vries, Peter. "James Thurber: The Comic Prufrock," in Thurber: A Collection of Critical Essays, edited by Charles S. Holmes, Prentice-Hall, 1974. Elias, Robert H. ' 'James Thurber: The Primitive, the Innocent, and the Individual," in Thurber: A Collection of Critical Essays, edited by Charles S. Holmes, Prentice-Hall, 1974, pp. 87-100. Elias explores how Thurber's heroes, including Walter Mitty, preserve their individuality in a hostile world.

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The Secret Sharer Joseph Conrad's "The Secret Sharer" was written in only two weeks in 1909. This story and two others make up the book Twixt Land and Sea which was first published in 1912. Conrad considered three other titles for his story about identity: "The Second Self," "The Secret Self," and "The Other Self." The tale is based on a true story about a murder on the ship Cutty Sark in 1880 by a sailor with a wicked reputation. The murderer jumped ship and was captured; he was eventually acquitted of murder but found guilty of manslaughter. Conrad's story varies from the real tale in that the real crime was deliberate and committed by a vicious man. In the fictional version, Leggatt is attempting to save his ship from a sailor who will not obey orders. "The Secret Sharer" is considered to be both a psychological and autobiographical piece of writing, and is largely considered one of Conrad's finest short works.

Joseph Conrad

1909

Author Biography Joseph Conrad was born Jozef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski on December 3, 1857, in Berdichev, Poland. Conrad's parents were exiled to Northern Russia in 1862 and both of them died before Conrad was eleven. He was then supported and raised by

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various relatives, including his maternal uncle, Tadeusz Bobrowski, a prosperous lawyer who provided financial aid until Conrad was in his thirties. Conrad received sporadic and irregular schooling and was often ill. He joined the British merchant marines in 1878 and traveled to Africa, Australia, India, and the Orient. These experiences would later aid and inform his writing. Due to poor health, Conrad was forced to retire from the merchant marines, and in 1894 he began a career as a writer. It was not until 1913, with the publication of Chance, that Conrad became an acclaimed writer.

Soon, however, his mood is shattered by a startling discovery. Pausing to pull up a ladder he believes someone carelessly left over the side, he is astonished to see "something elongated and pale floating very close to the ladder." The shape turns out to be "the naked body of a man," clutching the bottom rung of the ladder with one hand. The two men begin a whispered conversation, which establishes the "mysterious communication" between them that drives the remainder of the plot.

Most of Conrad's stories were inspired by his experiences at sea: Lord Jim was a story that he had heard about the ship the Jeddah; The Nigger of the Narcissus was based on his adventures from Bombay to England; "The Secret Sharer" was taken from an actual incident aboard the Cutty Sark in 1880; and Heart of Darkness, Conrad's most famous work, is a fictional account of the author's own experience in the Belgian Congo. On August 3, 1924, Joseph Conrad died at the age of 66 and was buried in Canterbury, England.

The mysterious swimming man introduces himself as Leggatt and explains that he has escaped from the Sephora because he has been imprisoned awaiting trial for killing a man. Later, Leggatt further explains that the man he killed had refused to follow orders in the midst of an awful storm and that his actions may have saved the ship and the rest of the crew. Because the young captain believes the fugitive's story, and because he sees so much of himself in Leggatt, he decides to hide him in his quarters.

Plot Summary "The Secret Sharer," one of Polish-born Conrad's more widely read sea stories, is a psychological tale narrated by a young ship captain who finds himself harboring a fugitive from another ship. As the story opens, the narrator has just taken command of his first ship, which is anchored in the Gulf of Siam. The captain reveals the extent of his insecurity at the beginning of this long voyage, comparing himself to the ship itself: "we seemed to be measuring our fitness for a long and arduous enterprise, the appointed task of both our existences to be carried out." Recognizing that this journey will be the opportunity he needs to test himself, he assumes an uneasy command of a considerably older and more experienced crew. Much to the astonishment of his crew, the captain decides to take a five-hour watch himself the first night while they remain at anchor waiting for enough wind to begin sailing. Although another ship, the Sephora is anchored not far away, the

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captain revels in the solitude and peacefulness of walking the decks alone.

The two men are bound together by the secret they share, and the captain becomes an accomplice to Leggatt's crime because he must deceive his own crew in order to hide the fugitive. The relationship becomes more complicated when the old captain from the Sephora boards the ship to search for and inquire about the missing man. Though he escapes detection, Leggatt now knows that he will not be treated justly if he surrenders, declaring, ' 'It would never do for me to come to life again." And so the two sharers of the secret devise a plan to allow Leggatt to escape to land, though he is doomed to a life of wandering. The untested young captain commands his crew to sail dangerously close to land in order to allow Leggatt to slip out undetected. He is fully aware that he is risking not just his career but also the safety of his ship and crew. Telling his crew he is looking for "land wind," he takes the ship so close that "the great black mass [is] brooding over [the] very mastheads." Finally he gives the order to turn away, but he is so unfamiliar with the feel of the ship that he cannot tell in the dark if he is successful. At last he sees a marker drifting astern and he knows that he has successfully avoided losing his ship. He also knows that Leggatt has slipped away undetected; the marker is the captain's own white hat that he thrust upon Leggatt before he left him.

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Characters Captain Archbold Captain Archbold is thecaptainof theSephora. He is searching for Leggatt,fugitive a sailorwho killed a man on the Sephora and is wantedfor manslaughter. When Archbold attemptstocapture Leggatt aboard the nameless ship,heknows that Leggatt is there, but cannot proveit. It ishere that the young captain shows justhowshrewdandclever he can be. Archbold actsas akindofcomic reliefin the story, illustrating thatin some cases, thosein charge can be incompetent.

The Captain The captain is the nameless leader aboard a nameless ship who befriends the sailor Leggatt. Leggatt has just escaped from another shipand is wanted for manslaughter.Thecaptainisvery insecure with beingin chargeand isunsure of hisstatus on board ship. The crewhasbeen togetherforsome time and the captain,a stranger, despite official his position has not proven himself to thecrew.The captain isonly 27-years old,ayoungman to be in charge of men who areolder andmuch more experienced than himself. The captain identifies with Leggatt, and through this identificationheachieves a greater self-definition.The exact natureof the connection between the captainandLeggatt, however, is not clear. Leggatthas killeda man and is fleeing to escape punishment,but he mayhave committed this act in order to savehis fellow crewmembersfrom danger. Through Leggatt,the captain becomes a stronger and more aggressive leader, but he also shows signsofinstability.The captain helps Leggatt toescapebydrivinghisship dangerously close to the islandofKoh-ring, after which he steers his ship backoncourse.

Leggatt Leggatt is afugitive sailor who iswantedfor manslaughter. Leggatthas escapedbyjumping ship (the Sephora) and ends up onboardthecaptain's ship. Leggatt is a very forcefulandstraightforward man, who looks similar to thecaptain. Leggatt acts as a double for the captain,and it isthrough Leggatt that the captain achieves a degreeof self-definition. The captain helps Leggatt hide fromArchboldand ultimately helps him escapebynavigating hisship dangerously close to the islandof Koh-ring.For some critics, Leggatt represents thedarker sideof human nature. Thus, by his identification with Leggatt, the captain isexamininghis owndark side.

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Themes Initiation and Self-Definition The captain in ' The Secret Sharer''undergoes a process of initiation and self-definition. When confronted withthe dutiesandresponsibilitiesof a captain, he is not only overwhelmedbutalsoimpressed withall theresponsibilities thathe hastaken on. He is constantly lookingforreassurance from his crew that he is doing fine. He learns from Leggatt that in order to be agood leader,he has to be more aggressive, more intuitive,andmore direct. Conrad's captainis exploring various ways inwhich to define himself; he must cometoterms withhis aggressiveness or elserisk fallinginto insanity.

Mirror Image The captain andLeggatt act asmirror imagesof each other, or as each others' doppelgangers, as "the other" is sometimes called inliterature. They both have titles that command respect, they bothare young, and they both are fromthe same background. According to Lionel Trilling, "the two young men are virtually thesame person."When these characters first meet, thecaptain says, "He appealed to me as if our experienceshadbeenas

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Media Adaptations ' 'The Secret Sharer'' was adapted for film and produced by Encyclopaedia Brittanica Educational Corp. in 1973. The movie Face to Face is an adaptation of two short stories, ' The Secret Sharer'' and Stephen Crane's "The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky." The movie was released in 1952 and stars James Mason, Gene Lockhart, Michael Pate, Albert Sharpe, Sean McClory and Alec Harford.

identical as our clothes." Leggatt can be seen as one side of the captain's identity—aggressive and dangerous. Conrad uses this mirror-image to explore different sides of the captain's identity.

Symbiotic Relationship The captain and Leggatt have a symbiotic relationship. That is, each is quite different from the other, but they have a mutually beneficial relationship. Leggatt receives from the captain shelter and refuge from those chasing him. The captain even helps him escape. Through Leggatt, the captain gains insight and knowledge. Leggatt acts as the captain's double, allowing him to explore darker facets of his own identity. For Leggatt, this relationship is more practical; the captain helps him to evade capture. For the captain the value of the symbiotic relationship is less tangible; it is an opportunity for self-exploration.

Style Point of View The narrator of "The Secret Sharer" is the captain. Typical of Conrad, the story revolves around this character's reflection on past experience in order to understand himself better. Because of the thematic focus of the story, that of a man in search

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of identity and understanding, the narrator is often seen as unreliable; that is, because of his preoccupations, he is not always perceiving events in a clear and non-judgemental way. The captain remains nameless throughout the story, suggesting that he be viewed as a representation of the rite of passage each person must experience.

Style and Structure Conrad's style is seemingly simple: the story revolves around only a few events. However, the meaning of the story is complicated and ambiguous. Though the story is ostensibly about a murder, an escaped sailor and the relationship between two men who appear to mirror each other, it becomes clear that the story is actually about one man's search for self. The precise relationship between Leggatt and the captain is never fully defined, perhaps a comment by the author that the search for one's true nature can never be complete. Though it appears that the narrator is relating a simple story in a straightforward fashion, beneath this is the complicated journey toward self-realization. The structure o f ' The Secret Sharer'' also reflects its thematic focus. The story is apparently the straightforward reminiscence of the captain, relating the events that took place some years before. This is complicated, however, by the interjected stories of Leggatt, who serves as the captain's mirror image.

Historical Context Life on the High Seas Many of Conrad's works, including "The Secret Sharer," were inspired by the author's journeys as a seaman. In 1890 Conrad went to work in the Congo. Before this time, Africa had largely been ignored by Europe, but the end of the 1800s brought a surge of interest in the continent, which experienced great changes as it became the site of rapid colonization. The 1870s sparked intense rivalry among Belgium, Germany, the United States, and older colonial powers, especially Great Britain, to create world empires. The scramble for control of Africa stirred heated debate about relations with the continent's natives. Stimulated by the abolitionist movements of the 1800s, Europeans began to pon-

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der with increasing frequency the differences—if any—between African slaves and themselves. Conrad shared a stance taken by others in Great Britain, namely that Belgium's King Leopold was doing no more than ripping off riches from Africa. By contrast, many Britons felt that they were working for the betterment of the natives in Africa. They believed that they were replacing savage customs with more civilized ways. Real life atrocities in the African Congo greatly influenced Conrad.

Critical Overview "The Secret Sharer" is considered one of Conrad's best works. It was written in two weeks, nearly ten years after Conrad's most famous work, Heart of Darkness. This story is based on a true incident that happened aboard the Cutty Sark in 1880. Critics view the story as typical of Conrad: the theme of self-discovery, the psychological depth of character, precise and evocative details. Like Conrad's other works, the story is largely a psychological portrait and is semi-autobiographical. Critics have differed greatly in their interpretations of specific details and actions in "The Secret Sharer," some interpreting Leggatt as symbolizing a "dark side" of human nature, others focusing on the story as a rite of passage. Ultimately, most critics view the story as representing the quest for self, which is both tragic and complicated.

Criticism Elisabeth Piedmont-Marlon Elisabeth Piedmont-Marlon is an instructor at University of Texas Extension and the coordinator of the Undergraduate Writing Center at the University of Texas at Austin. In the following essay, she discusses the theme of self-discovery in "The Secret Sharer.''

In "The Secret Sharer," Conrad tells the story of two simultaneous journeys: the literal sea journey,

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Topics for Further Study Research Conrad's concept of the dark side of man and how he uses this theme in various works. How is the concept of a dark side of human nature treated in other disciplines, for example, in psychology or philosophy? Discuss how Leggatt and the captain are related. Is Leggatt a double for the captain? What does the captain learn from Leggatt? Does Leggatt learn anything from the captain? Compare the relationship between Leggatt and the captain in ' The Secret Sharer'' to the relationship between Kurtz and Mariow in Conrad's novella, Heart of Darkness.

and the young captain's journey toward self discovery. That his ship barely gets underway in the final pages of the story is an indication of which of the two journeys Conrad found most interesting. The young captain of the unnamed ship, who has just taken command of the vessel, and who, in his own words, is "somewhat of a stranger" to himself is given the opportunity and incentive to embark on his own journey toward self-knowledge. Conrad uses a double for the captain, to force him to look into his "self" from the outside, and to journey through his own darker side towards a greater understanding of himself. Only after completing this journey will the young captain be capable of leading his skeptical crew on a literal journey. The opening paragraph of the story suggests that the captain's path to self-knowledge will not be well marked. The adjectives with which the narrator describe his surroundings give clues to his sense of strangeness and dislocation: "mysterious," "halfsubmerged," "incomprehensible," and "crazy of aspect." The young man feels as though he is without all his familiar landmarks. He then takes his first tentative steps toward commanding his crew by rashly dismissing the night watch and walking the decks alone. Earlier in the evening he has wondered

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Contrast 1900s: Writers such as Conrad and Henry James write stylized stories emphasizing introspective and highly self-conscious, albeit often unreliable, narrators. 1990s: This tradition is continued today in such writers as V. S. Naipaul, who is often compared to Conrad. Naipaul is considered a psychological and social realist. 1900s: The late 1800s sees the rise of the science of psychology, and Sigmund Freud popularizes the concept of the unconscious and the practice of psychoanalysis. Human behavior is thought to stem from unconscious thoughts and conflicts.

if he ' 'should turn out faithful to that ideal conception of one's own personality every man sets up for himself secretly," indicating that he recognizes that the voyage will test and solidify his sense of self, and revealing an unusual degree of self-consciousness. Of course, the journey he has in mind is the literal sort, and he cannot anticipate what awaits him on the bottom rung of the ship's ladder. When the captain leans over the side and sees the white shape by the hull, the appearance of the seemingly headless body alongside the ship gives literal form to the captain's self-consciousness. He feels ' 'painfully '' that he is a stranger among men, and that his actions might have made him "appear eccentric." That the captain first perceives the body of Leggatt as headless is significant as well; it suggests that immediately their identities are fused by the captain figuratively placing his head on the other's body. Their "mysterious communication" is sealed when the captain notices that "the selfpossession of that man had somehow induced a corresponding state'' in himself. After Leggatt reveals the reasons for his fugitive status, after he shares his secret, the captain regards the visitor and thinks: "It was, in the night, as though I had been faced by my own reflection in the depths of a sombre and immense mirror."

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1990s: Psychology is an established discipline, although Freud's theories are largely considered unscientific. Modern theories seek to explain human behavior in terms of organic and physical causes. 1900s: Life on the high seas is dangerous but highly romanticized as an opportunity for adventure to working-class men. 1990s: The mystique of a sea-faring life has largely disappeared with the advent of affordable air travel and luxury cruises that are available to many.

The remainder of the first part of the story illuminates the ways in which the two young men share traits and experiences in common, how each man reflects himself back to the other. They are both about the same age and have attended the same training school, Conway, which establishes a kind of fraternity between them. Each of them also feels alienated from the crew of his ship. Conrad emphasizes these similarities, perhaps to the point of excess, by stressing the imagery of doubling. They are both dressed in identical clothing; Leggatt wears the captain's spare "sleeping suit," a designation that suggests the unconscious, the sleeping self inside the waking or conscious self. The captain speculates that anyone looking into his cabin "would have been treated to the uncanny sight of a double captain busy talking in whispers with his other self." After several days of secretly sharing his cabin with Leggatt, and of sharing Leggatt's secret, the captain begins to succumb to the pressures: "I was constantly watching myself, my secret self... . It was very much like being mad, only it was worse because one was aware of it." It becomes clear that soon both young men will have to take some action. The sense of urgency intensifies when suspicious old captain Archbold of the Sephora questions the captain and reveals that he will have to report

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What Do I Read Next? Heart of Darkness (1902), a tale of a man sent into the Belgian Congo to track the elusive and maniacal Mr. Kurtz, is considered Conrad's best work, and one of the twentieth century's most important novellas. The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym (1838), Edgar Allan Poe's novella of a rite of passage for a young man and his love of the sea. ' 'William Wilson," also by Edgar Allan Poe, is a

Leggatt's disappearance as a suicide. The grizzled cynicism of old Archbold is in stark contrast to the young captain's untested innocence, and Archbold's stubborn attachment to following the rules makes the captain's risk-taking appear even more brash. In the second part of the story, Conrad dramatizes the mirroring, or complementary, aspects of the relationship between the two young men rather than their similarities. This shift in emphasis suggests that the self-reflexive phase of the narrator's journey toward self-discovery may be coming to an end. The biggest difference between the two men is that while Leggatt has killed a man in order to avoid shipwreck, the captain is willing to risk shipwreck in order to save the life of one man (Leggatt). Furthermore, the young captain is hoping the experiences of his first command will make him more a member of the community of the ship and will enable him to make a name for himself on the seas and land. Leggatt, however, seeks to escape the censure of the group and the rule of the sea and knows that his existence from now on will be anonymous, that he is doomed to wander the earth without roots and that he will likely never regain his career as an officer.' 'It will never do for me to come to life again," he says. After the two of them decide on a plan that will allow Leggatt to escape to the Koh-ring, the nearby island that they presume to be the most habitable,

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story about a man's double. A man is persecuted throughout his life by a man with the same name, who may or may not be real. "The Double" by Russian writer Fyodor Dostoyevsky is another story concerning a man's double. The Rime of the Ancient Manner (1798), Samuel Taylor Coleridge's poem about an ancient seafarer and his experiences with the supernatural.

the story becomes more suspenseful. Conrad poses two questions as the story draws to a conclusion: Will Leggatt get away safely? and, will the young captain avoid losing the ship and his crew's confidence in the tricky maneuvering near the rocky coastline? The narrative focus remains, however, on the psychological dimension of the story. The events provide precisely the kind of crucible, or severe test, the young captain had been seeking in which to forge his identity. He is aware that he has gained all he can from looking into his "other self" and now he must move from contemplation to action. He must establish the same kind of ' 'mysterious communication" with his ship and crew that he had established with Leggatt. Before he even gives the orders to sail toward land he mutters to himself: ' 'I realized suddenly that all my future, the only future for which I was fit, would perhaps go irretrievably to pieces in any mishap to my first command." His realization of the risks he is about to undertake is made all the more palpable because he must witness his ' 'other self' literally throw away his future as he slips out of the port into the dark water, in a symbolic reversal of the manner in which he happened to come aboard the ship in the first place. Of course, the captain does manage to avoid losing his ship and crew on the reef. In the process he achieves ' 'the silent knowledge and mute affection, the perfect communion of a seaman with his first command." But the manner in which the

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captain achieves this goal leaves the reader to resolve some difficult moral issues. We are left to wonder, for example, if the captain's newfound confidence in his command was justly achieved. He seems to take credit for planning to use the hat as a saving marker, when in fact it was an accident since he had intended for the hat to be used to protect Leggatt from the sun. This tendency looks a great deal like pride, an excess of which would almost certainly turn his crew against him in the future. Furthermore, though the captain is correct in believing that he will only be able to plumb the limits of his character in the throes of a crisis, is he justified in creating a dangerous situation just so he can test his courage and skill? Ultimately, Conrad poses a question of a more psychological nature. Is it possible to journey to the dark side of the self, which surely the narrator did, symbolized by his identification with the fugitive killer Leggatt, and emerge wiser but otherwise unchanged by the experience? In other words, is such self-knowledge gained at too high a price? Has the narrator become too much like the killer, as his willingness to risk the lives of his crew on the Koh-ring might suggest? Source: Elisabeth Piedmont-Marlon, for Short Stories for Students, Gale Research, 1997.

Mary Ann Dazey In the following short essay, Dazey analyzes the title of "The Secret Sharer" as a clue into the deeper meaning of the story.

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hidden or concealed or even unknown: two friends share a secret (hidden information), the Coke formula is a trade secret (concealed information), or the secret of happiness eludes us (unknown information). A strong brief can be made for Leggatt's being the sharer if this reading is accepted. Leggatt confides in the Captain that he has murdered a man and has jumped ship to avoid punishment, and this information, imparted in secret, is never revealed to the rest of the crew. Interpreting the word secret as a nominal, however, presents an even more cogent argument for the Captain's being the sharer, for it is he who receives the confidential information. When a landowner and a tenant enter into an agreement that the tenant pay as rent instead of money a part of his crop, it is the tenant who is called the sharecropper, not the landowner. When investors purchase shares in a corporation, it is they who become shareholders, not the corporation. If the nominal coupling secret sharer follows this lexical pattern in the English language, the Captain is the secret sharer. Interpreting the word secret as a nominal in the compound secret sharer presents difficulty because of the rarity of its occurrence in written English. In oral English the shift in stress from sharer to secret would immediately alert a listener to the compound; in written English the alternate meaning is indicated by spelling the two words together (as in crosswalk), by using a hyphen between the two words (as in cross-examination), by capitalizing the words (as in Cross Village), or by relying upon the reader's familiarity with the phrase (as in cross fire). No native speaker of English would read any of these examples of cross as meaning ill-tempered, cranky, or irritable, a meaning frequently supplied when the word cross is employed as an adjectival modifier in a common noun phrase (as in a cross infant). The lack of conditioning to reading the phrase secret sharer without topographical direction as a nominal compound makes interpreting secret as an adjectival the traditional choice of readers.

The ambiguity in Joseph Conrad's title Heart of Darkness is readily apparent because the nouns heart and darkness commonly suggest a variety of denotations and have a wide range in their levels of abstraction. The ambiguity in the title of his short story "The Secret Sharer," is more subtle but equally intriguing. Although the story concerns two characters, the Captain and his physical double Leggatt, whom he pulls from the South China Sea and saves from death, the title is not "The Secret Sharers." The referent of the singular noun sharer is, thus, ambiguous. A second ambiguity derives from the fact that the word secret can be read in the familiar pattern as an adjective modifier in the phrase secret sharer or, in the less traditional form, as a nominal in the two-member compound secret sharer (as in peace maker or aft lover).

When the word secret is interpreted as an adjectival in the title phrase, the sharer becomes hidden or concealed person, a person kept out of sight. However, the connotations of the adjectival secret range from the mysterious to the underhanded: this variety occurs in such common phrases as a secret staircase, secret password, secret society, secret drawer, secret lovers, secret meetings, secret treaty, secret war, and secret business dealings.

When the word secret is interpreted as a nominal in the compound, it means information that is

In this short story, Conrad is employing the adjectival secret to describe a mysterious, almost

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mystical, relationship between the two characters. The story is told from the Captain's point of view; and as narrator, he tells of his growing fondness for and dependence upon this stranger that he has pulled from the sea. As they spend more and more time alone together, the Captain begins to think of Leggatt as "the secret sharer of my life," "my secret self," and finally as "the secret sharer of my cabin and of my thoughts." The fact that the title phrase secret sharer is applied only to Leggatt should resolve the ambiguity of the referent; however, connotations such as mysterious, esoteric, and mystical prohibit such a simple solution. Although the Captain sees his double as the "secret sharer," the reader understands that he is seeing himself as the secret sharer as well. Shortly after the Captain has rescued Leggatt and before Leggatt has confessed to murder, the strange relationship between the two strangers develops. The Captain thinks,' 'A mysterious communication was established already between us two— in the face of that silent, darkened tropical sea." Leggatt's sharing his secret does not change anything. As the Captain sees the other man dressed in clothes identical to his own, he says, "I saw it all going on as though I were myself inside that other self inside that other sleeping suit." The Captain repeatedly refers to Leggatt as "my second self," "my double," "my secret double," and "my other self." When the word secret is an adjectival in the phrase secret sharer and means simply to be hidden or concealed, it applies equally well to the Captain as it does to Leggatt. The Captain's need for concealment is just as great as is Leggatt's, once the Captain has taken Leggatt aboard his ship and hidden him in his cabin. The Captain knows that had the crew learned that the murderer of another seaman was being offered sanctuary aboard their ship, they would have certainly mutinied. He observes that the fear of discovery ' 'hung like a sword over our heads." To attempt to discover the one secret sharer when secret is an adjectival modifier by determining which of the two men shared the most is to ignore Conrad's masterful choice of the word sharer. What is possessed is not shared until it is jointly possessed, nor is what is given away always shared. In the case of the Captain and Leggatt, each shares all that he has even at the risk of forfeiting his own life. An analysis of the phrase the secret sharer when the word secret functions only as an adjectival

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he events provide precisely the kind of crucible, or severe test, the young captain had been seeking in which to forge his identity. He is aware that he has gained all he can from looking into his 'other self and now he must move from contemplation to action."

fails to support the fact that Leggatt, not the Captain, is the referent even though he alone is described by the Captain as "the secret sharer" in the story. The ambiguity remains. Either the Captain or Leggatt can be identified as the sharer of the secret or as the concealed or hidden sharer. Source: Mary Ann Dazey, ' 'Shared Secret or Secret Sharing in Joseph Conrad's 'The Secret Sharer'," in Conradiana, Volume XVIII, No. 3, 1986, pp. 201-3.

Charles G. Hoffmann In the following essay, Hoffmann analyzes the narrative point of view in ' 'The Secret Sharer,'' stating that it ' 'creates both the psychological and thematic bases" for the captain's identification with Leggatt. Much attention has been given to the psychological and thematic identification of the captain with Leggatt in Conrad's "The Secret Sharer," but too little attention has been paid to the point of view which creates both the psychological and thematic bases for the identification. On the immediate narrative level the story is told in the first person by the captain himself, but on the psychological and thematic level Conrad sought to objectify the subjectivity of the first person point of view by introducing Leggatt, the captain's "double." If Leggatt, as the captain's other self, is examined in relation to

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The ambiguity remains. Either the Captain or Leggatt can be identified as the sharer of the secret or as the concealed or hidden sharer,"

Conrad's narrative technique, then the point of view will provide us with a clearer understanding of "The Secret Sharer." There are three aspects of point of view in ' 'The Secret Sharer," corresponding to the thematic structure of the story: the first fourth of the story establishes the subjective point of view which shows the captain a stranger to himself, a man dependent on subjective impressions and moods; the long middle section creates the objectification of self through identification with Leggatt which leads to selfrecognition; and the final fourth of the narrative provides an actual test of the captain's mastery of his ship and his self. In the beginning the captain is as yet untried by the sea. His thoughts are landbound: the fishing-stakes are like bamboo fences, the barren islets are like stone walls, towers and blockhouses, and even the sea itself seems an extension of the land. This land-consciousness is created by the subjective point of view, for what is significant about the descriptive details is the subjective impression they make on the captain's consciousness; the scene described is not an objective narrative description, but a portrayal of a state of mind. The narrator's psychological sense of isolation in his role as captain is intensified by his impressions as he stands physically alone on the deck of the ship: "There was not a sound in her—and around us nothing moved, nothing lived...." He is alone with his self and his ship, but he is a stranger to both. For a moment he feels a mystical communion with his ship, but because he lacks knowledge of himself as a captain, the moment is lost. This moment of communion is illusory because it is as yet only a subjective impression easily broken by staring stars and disturbing sounds. Significantly, at the end of the story the stillness, in a parallel impression, precedes the moment of his crisis as captain, but

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because he has achieved self-knowledge through Leggatt, the communion he feels with his ship is real, not illusory; self-confidently he meets the test and becomes in reality master of his ship. Once the ship is under way, the captain shakes off his land-self and attributes his strangeness to the ship's being land-locked. The land is now associated in his mind with unrest and doubt, and he rejoices ' 'in the great security of the sea as compared with the unrest of the land...." His self-confidence is an illusion based not on knowledge of himself as a captain, but on a subjective mood of complacency "that the sea was not likely to keep any special surprises expressly for my discomfiture." It is at this very moment of self-delusion that the reality of his responsibility as captain breaks in: the side-ladder had not been hauled in; a small matter it would seem, but "exactitude in small matters is the very soul of discipline." The incident of the ladder causes the captain to return to his mood of self-doubt. Significantly, it is by this ladder that Leggatt gains entrance to the ship. Leggatt's appearance is not the dramatic beginning of the story for which the rest has been a mere preparatory introduction. The narrator's conflict is essentially a psychological struggle within himself, which is subjectively dramatized in the first part before Leggatt's appearance. Leggatt, both in his identity as the captain's "double" and in his own story, is the objective dramatization of the captain's secret self. The captain does not recognize his other self immediately; his first impression is that he has seen a headless corpse. What is significant about his reaction is the shock it gives to his illusion about the security of the sea. The cigar, associated with his complacent sense of well-being, drops out of his mouth and falls into the sea, for the sea has presented him with a special surprise. Leggatt is the sea come to test the captain as a man, just as at the end it is the land which comes to test him as a captain. That Leggatt is associated with the sea is reinforced by the imagery in contrast to the earlier land-imagery of the captain's consciousness: he is "like a resting swimmer"; he appears "fish-like" and is "mute as a fish"; and even after their first words are exchanged the captain's impression is that Leggatt seems to have ' 'risen from the bottom of the sea (it was certainly the nearest land to the ship)" rather than from the shore which

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marks the boundary of the sea. It is only after exchanging personal identities that a psychological state of identification is established: "The selfpossession of that man had somehow induced a corresponding state in myself." Through a series of links Virginia Woolf in Mrs. Dalloway creates a "double" for Clarissa Dalloway so that Septimus Warren Smith's death becomes metaphorically Clarissa's "death." Similarly, through a series of details—similarity of physical appearance and age, the sleeping suit, and their ties with Conway—Conrad establishes this psychological state of identification between the captain and Leggatt so that Leggatt's moral crisis becomes metaphorically the captain's moral crisis. It is the point of view which is at the crux of the captain's identification with Leggatt and his personal crisis. To know his secret self the captain must achieve self-knowledge, but to attain self-knowledge the captain must go through an objective test of self. He has a subjective concept of himself as man and captain, but he is as yet uninitiated, a stranger to himself and to his ship. Without Leggatt's crisis to serve as an outward reflection of his inner self, his conception of himself would remain subjective and even self-deluded as is Captain Archbold's in his insistence that he gave the command that saved the Sephora. Captain Archbold in his judgment of Leggatt's "crime" is that aspect of self that has to do only with factual, legal evidence, corresponding to Captain Vere's statement in Melville's Billy Budd, "The prisoner's deed. With that alone we have to do." But Captain Archbold lacks self-knowledge and thus lacks understanding; he does not understand his own failure in the crisis of his ship, and therefore cannot comprehend Leggatt's crisis. The narrator-captain in his judgment of Leggatt is that aspect of self that has to do with private conscience, corresponding to Captain Vere's personal understanding of the moral justification for Billy Budd's crime. By an understanding identification with Leggatt's crisis, he is able to view himself objectively. Leggatt serves the same function in relation to point of view, as Kurtz in The Heart of Darkness, presenting the captain with an objective insight into himself as Kurtz's story did for Marlow. Like Leggatt the captain is judged by his outward actions; it is this discrepancy between outward appearance and inner reality that is objectified by Leggatt's story. Leggatt's appearance tests the nar-

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Conrad establishes this psychological state of identification between the captain and Leggatt so that Leggatt's moral crisis becomes metaphorically the captain's moral crisis."

rator's conscience as a man; he is not found wanting. But as captain, he is yet untried by the sea though he is already judged by his officers. He is judged a failure as a captain by his chief mate. The mate's preconception makes him certain that the captain has lost his ship. ' 'She will never get out. You have done it, sir. I knew it'd end in something like this." In a parallel to the situation on the Sephora the mate panics at the very moment of crisis just as the captain of the Sephora did; the captain symbolically repeats Leggatt's act of violence; and he takes command of the ship to save it just as Leggatt acted to save the Sephora. This crisis, the last part of the three-part thematic structure, is the test of the narrator's mastery of the ship, but he could have avoided the test altogether. Partly he is motivated by a desire to give Leggatt the best possible chance to reach shore, but basically he is motivated by the need to take command of his ship, having too long hidden himself from her. He stakes his whole future on his ability to master the ship and achieve "the way of silent knowledge and mute affection, the perfect communion of a seaman with his first command." He will achieve this communion by meeting and conquering the challenge of the land. It is significant that the hat he gave Leggatt is the saving mark for his eyes, dividing land from sea in contrast to the merging of land and sea at the beginning of the story. This is no conscious gesture on Leggatt's part: ' 'It must have fallen off his head . .. and he didn't bother." The hat is the symbol of the captain's humanity, "the expression of my

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sudden pity for his mere flesh." It is the symbol of his mastery of the sea and the ship—' 'it was saving the ship, by serving me for a mark to help out the ignorance of my strangeness." Simultaneously he is no longer a stranger to himself nor to his ship. As the captain gains mastery of his ship, Leggatt lowers himself into the sea. Even before, as Leggatt prepares to leave, the captain forgets him, for his "double" is no longer needed. Leggatt has served his role of providing the captain with an objective insight into himself; the land-self of the captain has left the ship, for his sea-self, his secret self, is now known to him, and the land, symbolizing doubt and danger, is vanquished. The white hat marks the spot and the moment of self-knowledge. Conversely, Leggatt has lost his identity; for him there is no more possible life on the sea with which his life has been identified. He will swim ashore and become ' 'a fugitive and a vagabond on the earth." What the captain has given Leggatt in return for his own selfknowledge is the freedom to find a new destiny and a new identity on land; the alternatives for Leggatt had been imprisonment, which he scorned, or death by drowning as he swam without purpose, which he would have chosen if the captain had not given him his second chance. It is no easy choice to find a new destiny; it is his "punishment." The captain has discovered his self at the very gateway of Erebus and is saved from "death"; Leggatt must "die" metaphorically before he can re-discover himself. Conrad achieved in "The Secret Sharer" the objectification of what otherwise would be a purely subjective, psychological state of mind by extending the first person point of view into the realm of the third person while retaining the advantage of introspective dramatic monologue. Without destroying the consistency of point of view so necessary to the psychological truth of the story, Conrad has successfully portrayed the objective truth of the captain's secret self, which, just as Leggatt is never seen by any one else, can never really be known except to himself. It is the externalization of point of

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view through the device of the second self that enabled Conrad to show the development of the captain from self-doubt to self-realization, from self-ignorance to self-knowledge. Source: Charles G. Hoffmann, "Point of View in 'The Secret Sharer'," in College English, Vol. 23, No. 8, May, 1962, pp. 651-54.

Sources Lionel Trilling. The Experience of Literature, Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1967.

Further Reading Baines, Jocelyn. Joseph Conrad: A Critical Biography, McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1960. Baines provides a comprehensive overview of all of Conrad's writings. Dowden, Wilfred S. Joseph Conrad: The Imaged Style, Vanderbilt University Press, 1970. Dowden explores how Conrad's style differs in each of his major works. Gillon, Adam. Joseph Conrad: Rite of Passage, Twayne Publishers, 1982, pp. 153-159. Includes guides to each of Conrad's major works. Graver, Lawrence. Conrad's Short Fiction, University of California Press, 1969. Graver examines all of Conrad's short fiction and claims that "The Secret Sharer" is a "widely acclaimed . . . psychological masterpiece and the subject of more fanciful interpretations than any of Conrad's other stories." Lothe, Jakob. "'The Secret Sharer': Economical Personal Narrative," in Conrad's Narrative Method, Clarendon Press, 1989, pp. 57-71. Contains a useful introduction to Conrad's life and work as well as a carefully argued chapter on "The Secret Sharer."

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The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber Ernest Hemingway first published ' 'The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber'' in the September, 1936, issue of Cosmopolitan magazine. Later, it was among the stories collected in Hemingway's The Fifth Column and the First Forty-Nine Stories. The reception of Hemingway's fiction has always been intertwined with the understanding of Hemingway as a figure. Hemingway was the consummate sportsman; few others in American history, with the possible exception of Teddy Roosevelt, have come to symbolize with such consistency the spirit of the outdoorsman. Yet Hemingway's characters add an interesting and telling dimension to this myth. Their solitude is almost always interrupted, and their ruggedness almost always complemented by sensitivity and aesthetic sensibility. Because ' "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber'' does not represent this Hemingway norm, it stands apart from the author's other short fiction. Its hero, Francis Macomber, is anything but the consummate sportsman. He is inept and somewhat cowardly, but Hemingway portrays him with sympathy, revealing the anxiety and tragedy that such narrow definitions of manhood can produce. The juxtaposition of Francis Macomber and his nemesis, Robert Wilson, clearly underscores this tension, as does Macomber's struggle to win the favor of his perpetually jaded wife, Margot. Margot's final act has been the source of great debate among critics for decades, and it is difficult, upon reading and rereading the story, to determine any one simple explanation for her ac-

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tions. The story is based upon an actual scandal that had taken place in Kenya involving a wife, a love affair, and the wife's implication in the death of her husband, which was suppressed in the media and covered up by the British government.

Author Biography Ernest Hemingway is one of the most famous American writers of the twentieth century. His rugged lifestyle and terse, penetrating prose have inspired generations of imitators. As much as for his writing, he is known for his adventurous personality and love of the outdoors. He was an avid fisherman and hunter, a firsthand witness of many wars, and a bullfighting aficionado. He was born in 1899 in Oak Park, Illinois, where he was raised. His childhood experiences in the woods of Michigan, where his family owned a summer home, contributed to several of his most famous stories which feature the character Nick Adams. After graduating from high school in 1917, where he had contributed a weekly column to the school newspaper and contributed fiction to the school's magazine, he went to work for the Kansas City Star. Many attribute his terse writing style to his experience as a journalist. Hemingway was an ambulance driver in Italy during World War I and received shrapnel wounds on his legs. He married for the first time in 1921— the first of four trips to the altar—and returned to Europe to begin his career as a writer of fiction. For the next forty years, he published numerous short stories and novels, among the most famous of which are the short stories ' 'Hills Like White Elephants,'' and ' 'The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber,'' and the novels The Sun Also Rises (1926) and For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940). A memoir of sorts was published in 1964 as A Moveable Feast, in which he related many of his early experiences in Paris during the 1920s when the city was a haven for American expatriate artists and writers. Hemingway and his cohorts, F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, James Joyce and Ford Madox Ford among them, are sometimes called the ' 'Lost Generation'' because of their cynical view of life forged in the modernist era between the world wars. Though primarily known as a writer of fiction, he continued throughout his life to function as a journalist, covering several wars, including the GrecoTurkish War in 1920 and the Spanish Civil War from 1937-38. In 1944, he served as a reporter and

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paramilitary aide during the liberation of France. In 1953 he was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for his novel The OldMan and the Sea. He was awarded the 1954 Nobel Prize in Literature but did not attend the ceremony to accept the prize. In 1960, after suffering a mental breakdown, he entered the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, to undergo electroshock therapy. He committed suicide in 1961 in Ketchum, Idaho.

Plot Summary "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber" opens with Francis Macomber, his wife, Margaret (known as Margot), and Robert Wilson preparing for lunch at their camp in Africa. The Macombers are a wealthy and socially prominent American couple in Africa on a safari. Wilson is a professional hunter, paid to guide their adventures. The three begin discussing the morning's hunt. This topic appears to cause them some discomfort, and soon the source of their discomfort is revealed: while stalking a lion, Francis Macomber panicked and ran. He is embarrassed about it, and Wilson tries to reassure him. Wilson actually has little respect for Macomber, but hides this fact. Margot, however, makes several sarcastic references to the incident. Later that afternoon Francis and Wilson go hunting again, and Francis shows skill in shooting an impala. He is still ashamed of having shown cowardice when confronting the lion, though. That night he lies on his cot remembering the lion hunt, and the story's action flashes back to that morning. Francis had been bothered by the lion's roar the night before, and at breakfast he confesses that he is nervous. The trio set out in their car and stop when they spot a lion. Macomber gets out of the car, still frightened, but he fires three shots, two of which find their mark. The lion bounds away, and Macomber and Wilson follow him, although Macomber is reluctant to kill the beast. Wilson volunteers to take the lead. As they draw near to the lion, the animal charges and Macomber runs in terror. Wilson shoots and kills the lion. After the men return to the car, Margot kisses Wilson. Macomber perceives that his wife has lost all respect for him. This signals new trouble in their marriage; they have known trouble previously, but their marriage has endured for eleven years despite their problems.' They had a sound basis of union,'' Hemingway writes. ' 'Margot was too beautiful for

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Macomber to divorce her and Macomber had too much money for Margot ever to leave him." Macomber finally falls asleep. When he awakens from a nightmare about the lion, he realizes that Margot's cot is empty. She returns after a couple of hours, and it is apparent that Margot, who has a history of infidelity, has been with Wilson. At breakfast it is equally obvious to Wilson that Macomber knows this. Wilson feels no remorse, however; he believes Macomber has driven Margot to him. After breakfast the Macombers and Wilson set out to hunt buffalo. Francis Macomber's anger at Wilson blots out any fear he might have felt, and Macomber goes after the buffalo enthusiastically. He kills the biggest of the three that the hunters encounter, and finishes off another one that Wilson has wounded. The experience thrills Macomber and instills a new confidence in him. Margot points out, however, that the hunters have pursued the buffalo from their car, something that is not only unsportsmanlike but illegal. Her remarks fail to dampen her husband's spirits, though. Wilson admires Macomber's new strength and guesses that he will no longer tolerate Margot's infidelity. Margot appears to feel threatened by the change in her husband. Before they have much time for contemplation, they must go after the third buffalo, which has been wounded. Wilson outlines for Macomber the best shot with which to kill the buffalo. The animal comes charging out of the bush and Macomber stands firm, shooting, until the buffalo is nearly upon him. At that instant Macomber is shot in the head by his wife and killed instantly. According to the narrator, she "shot at the buffalo . . . as it seemed about to gore Macomber and had hit her husband." Wilson thinks, though, that Macomber was Margot's target all along. The story ends with Margot sobbing as Wilson assures her the outside world will believe her husband's death was an accident, but he lets her know that he believes it was murder.

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more comfortable shooting from the car than stalking his prey on foot. His humiliation at being cuckolded prompts him to an act of foolish bravery that reveals in its outcome his wife's lack of faith in him. His marriage to Margot is not a happy one, but Hemingway tells us that' 'Macomber had too much money for Margot ever to leave him." After he flees from a lion that he has wounded, his wife sleeps with their guide, Robert Wilson. Hemingway's statement that Macomber "was dressed in the same sort of safari clothes that Wilson wore except that his were new" illustrates the essential difference between these two men. Wilson is what Macomber pretends to be—a hunter and, at least in the eyes of Margot Macomber, a man. Macomber tries to rectify this by standing his ground before a charging buffalo. Just as he takes aim, however, he is felled by a gunshot from his wife.

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Characters Francis Macomber Francis Macomber is a man of enough wealth that he can afford a private, guided hunting trip in Africa. He is a man of questionable courage who is

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Margaret Macomber's love for her husband is debatable at best. She seems much more interested in flirting with their guide, Robert Wilson, than in encouraging her husband. In fact, she is brazen and unabashed about her sexual dalliance with Wilson and taunts her husband with it. Hemingway writes that she is "an extremely handsome and well-kept

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Media Adaptations Hemingway's ' 'The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber" was adapted as a film in 1947 as The Macomber Affair. Produced by Award Productions and directed by Zoltan Korda, it starred Gregory Peck, Joan Bennett and Robert Preston.

woman." The phrase "well-kept" is particularly revealing in its multiple meanings. On one hand, Margot is fashionable and presents herself well. Furthermore, she is "kept" by her husband in a state of luxurious affluence. Ironically, she is not ' 'well-kept'' by her husband at all, as she freely and unapologetically commits adultery. Her marriage to Francis Macomber is obviously not a happy one, but, as Hemingway writes,' 'Margot was too beautiful for Macomber to divorce her." She is critical, abrasive and petulant. She shoots and kills her husband just as he is standing his ground in a moment of danger, but the reader is left to consider whether this final act is one of concern that arises from love or pity, or of convenience that arises from hate and disdain. That Margot is spoiled is certain. Whether she is a cold-blooded murderer has been the subject of critical debate for decades.

Margot See Margaret Macomber

Robert Wilson Robert Wilson is the Macombers' guide during their hunting expedition, a man Hemingway refers to as "the white hunter." His two most striking character traits are symbolized by his ' 'very red face and extremely cold blue eyes." His red face indicates that he is sanguine and bold, his skin sunburned by his constant exposure to the elements of nature. He is also focused, cool, and analytical, even while facing the extreme danger of the hunt. When Macomber wounds a lion but does not kill it, Wilson insists that they go into the brush to find and kill it, in spite of the dangers presented by tracking a

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wounded, and therefore crazed, lion. He is the epitome of a manhood that Francis Macomber lacks but Margaret Macomber desires. After Wilson sleeps with her and realizes that Mr. Macomber is aware of this transgression, he thinks to himself, "Let him keep her where she belongs. It's his own fault." His contempt for his employer does not keep him from accepting his money, however. His purpose is to provide Macomber with the illusion of being a great sportsman himself, a master over nature like Wilson. Nevertheless, it is Wilson who remains in control of the hunt, a fact demonstrated when it is revealed that Wilson is the only one who can speak to the Macombers in their own language.

Themes "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber" explores a number of important themes. Francis Macomber and his wife are on a hunting expedition in Africa. Their guide is Robert Wilson. Macomber is eager to impress his wife, whom he sees as attracted to Wilson. However, Macomber is not the same kind of man Wilson is. He is not a hunter by trade or by nature, and his struggle to overcome this difference results in his death.

Courage and Cowardice It is perhaps misleading to characterize two of the important themes of this work as ' 'courage'' and "cowardice." Certainly, these are both major themes of the story, but Hemingway invites the reader to consider whether courage is confused with bravado, and reasonable fear with cowardice. Depending upon one's point of view, Francis Macomber's fear of the lion makes him a coward or it makes him a reasonable man. The story inspires an examination of whether it takes more courage to face down the lion or to walk away.

Fate and Chance If Margot Macomber's shooting of her husband is an accident, then a central theme of the work becomes fate or chance. The question becomes one of how accidental an accident of this kind can be. In other words, the story asks whether it is really fate or chance-considering that Margot Macomber is inexperienced with a gun and an unskilled shot.

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Guilt and Innocence Intimately connected with the theme of fate and chance is guilt and innocence. The reader must decide if Margaret Macomber shot her husband on purpose or if it was indeed an accident. If she has not shot him on purpose, then the act becomes a matter of chance or fate. If her action was intentional, however, then she is guilty of murder. The end of the story dramatizes this ambiguity; Wilson teases her about the "accident," implying that, though she protests her innocence, he himself does not believe her.

Survival in the Wilderness A lesser theme in the work is that of survival in the wilderness. The Macombers, wealthy urban people, would not be able to survive alone in the wilderness, so they hire a guide to help them with their hunt. Ironically, the presence of a guide does not protect Francis Macomber but compels him to assume a persona of bravado that leads him to his death. Macomber struggles with his position within the wilderness, wondering if it is more honorable to be like Wilson or to heed his instinct for selfpreservation by fleeing from wounded animals.

Gender Roles Linked to Macomber's idea of survival is the notion of manhood. What kind of men are Macomber and Wilson, and why does one survive while the other dies? The story examines whether masculinity is a function of courage or of appearance. If Margot favors Wilson, does that make him more masculine than Macomber? Complicating this question is the fact that Margot becomes uneasy when her husband becomes aggressive during the hunt. Macomber's assertion of traditional bravado on the safari does not result in Margot's increased admiration for him, though she is attracted to Wilson's show of courage. Something else, then, must influence masculinity if Margot's interest is seen as a barometer for that trait. Margot herself represents some conflicting ideas about femininity. Though she is described in typically feminine terms, the act of violence she commits which ends her husband's life can be construed as a "masculine" trait.

Conflict In the characters of Robert Wilson and Francis Macomber, Hemingway presents two different versions of the conflict of man against nature. Wilson

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Topics for Further Study Do you think Margot shot her husband on purpose? Could she have meant to do it, yet still done it by accident? Think of a time when you or someone you know did something ' 'accidentally on purpose." In ' 'The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber,'' what does it mean to be "masculine"? What does it mean to be "feminine"? Have these concepts changed since the era in which the story was written? What kind of people were able to go on hunting expeditions like this in the 1930s? How might some of these factors impacted Wilson's perception of the Macombers?

has learned to live with and even conquer nature, while Macomber has difficulty doing either and is, in the end, conquered by nature in the form of a charging buffalo whose ferocity provokes Margot's fatal gunshot. This difference leads to another conflict, that of man against man, or Macomber versus Wilson. Macomber wants to be more like Wilson to gain Margot's respect and admiration. Wilson, though he is hired by Macomber, is Macomber's antagonist, ready and willing to use his virility to entice Macomber's wife into bed. Another essential conflict in this story is exemplified by the imperfect marriage of the Macombers, in which Margot seems perpetually dissatisfied and Francis unable to live up to her expectations of him.

Style ' The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber'' is set in the African savanna, to which Mr. and Mrs. Macomber have come on a hunting expedition, led by Robert Wilson. The hunting expedition ends in tragedy when Mr. Macomber stands his ground before a charging buffalo and is shot by his wife.

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Symbolism A great deal of symbolism contributes to the meaning of this story. The dichotomy of camp and savanna serves as a symbol of the differences that exist between Macomber and Robert Wilson. To leave the camp is to leave the world of comfort and luxury that the Macombers normally enjoy. The savanna represents Wilson's world, the wild, savage force of nature. The lion and the buffalo, representations of nature itself in all its brutal force, also come to symbolize the differences in courage and manhood that exist between Macomber and Wilson. Similarly, the guns themselves operate as symbols of manhood.

Point of View The story is told in third-person point of view, meaning that it is related by a narrator who is not a part of the action of the story. This point of view allows the author to describe events in an objective manner. For example, Hemingway can simultaneously present Margot's insistence on her innocence and Wilson's belief that she is not innocent. It is the author's third-person narrative point of view, where the narrator does not always know what is going on in the minds of the characters he presents, that allows this ambiguity. No one but Margot Macomber can be certain of her guilt or innocence, and the narrator, who does not have access to this information, does not settle the debate.

Irony Irony is an essential element of this story. The most obvious and striking example of irony is the title itself. Certainly, Macomber's life is "short," but is i t ' 'happy'' ? It is also ironic that his wife, the very person who should protect him, is the cause of his death. Furthermore, the fact that it may have been her impulse to protect Macomber which destroys him makes the climax of the story ironic. Hemingway uses irony to provide enough ambiguity in the narrative for the outcome of the story to be unclear.

1930s. In the midst of the Great Depression, the fact that the Macombers can afford to take a luxury vacation takes on great significance. It hints that they are far removed from the realities of their day, which include poverty, economic instability, and general misery. In a time in which one quarter of all men were unemployed, gender roles took on great significance. A man without a job often questioned his masculinity, particularly if he was not able to care for his wife and children. Though the Macombers are childless and need not worry about where their next meal is coming from, this fixation on masculinity is still evident in Macomber's character. In an era before modern feminism took hold, the ideas of what constituted a real man or a real woman were often those based on tradition. Men were brave, couragous, and chivalric. Women, in turn, were feminine, refined, and deferential to men. One notable exception to this stereotype of feminity in the 1930s is the idea of the "femme fatale," a woman who schemes her way to riches and fame no matter what it takes. Her dangerousness stems from the fact that though her appearance is outwardly feminine, her instincts are often very masculine. Often romanticized, this woman can be found in many books and films of the era, especially the pulp fiction novels of Cornell Woolrich, Dashiell Hammett, and Raymond Chandler, whose detective novels often featured beautiful and conniving women who tempted the likes of detectives Sam Spade and Philip Marlow. Writing more mainstream literature, Hemingway also utilized this feminine stereotype, particularly in the character of Margot Macomber. She does not love her husband and has been unfaithful. Nevertheless, he is too rich for her to leave him. One then can interpret her scheme to kill him, becoming a rich widow in the process, as the action of a femme fatale. Hemingway, whose works frequently comment on the notion of masculinity, saw himself as a paragon of manliness through his propsenity for hunting, fishing, and bull fighting. By creating characters in this image, Hemingway transfers to the page his own gender stereotypes, which many have come to view in recent years as archetypal and not very realistic.

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Though Hemingway does not specify when "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber" takes place, it can be assumed to be contemporary of the era in which the story was written, the mid-

' 'The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber'' is widely regarded as one of Hemingway's finest pieces of short fiction. Not only has it been admired

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Compare & Contrast 1930s: Big game hunting is a popular sport for Europeans in Africa.

middle class. Airplanes have replaced oceanliners, making the trip more affordable and much quicker.

1990s: Many big game animals are endangered and live in wildlife preserves. Hunting is severely restricted, and harsh penalties are imposed for poaching.

1930s: The United States endures the Great Depression. In 1936,38 percent of families make less than $1,000 per year, when the Bureau of Labor Statistics identifies the poverty level as $1,330.

1930s: Leisure travel, particularly overseas, is available primarily to the very rich, who can afford the cost as well as the time it takes to get there and back. 1990s: Intercontinental travel is common for the

1997: The United States, after suffering a comparatively mild recession during the late 1980s and early 1990s, enjoys a long period of growth and economic recovery.

for its artistry, but it has also been praised for the insights it gives into the mind of its author. For instance, Kathleen Morgan and Luis A. Losada write in ' Tracking the Wounded Buffalo: Authorial Knowledge and the Shooting of Francis Macomber'' in The Hemingway Review that the story contains evidence of Hemingway's hunting acumen. They point to his use of hunting jargon and his understanding of the logistics of a charging buffalo to theorize that the narrative's ambiguities stem from a highly realistic and ballistically accurate situation. Critics more concerned with the literary aspects of the story often choose to focus on the characters of Wilson and Margot rather than Macomber. Margot, particularly, has been branded a murderer by many critics. Edmund Wilson, for example, in his 1941 essay, "Hemingway: Gauge of Morale," writes that Macomber ' 'saves his soul at the last minute, and then is actually shot down by his woman, who does not want him to have a soul." However, Nina Baym, in her essay "Actually, I Felt Sorry For the Lion," argues that readers should shift the blame for the story's tragic events from Margot to Wilson. Baym does not think that Margot meant to kill her husband, stating instead that "Wilson killed them a l l . . . . [he] has hunted on behalf of his clients, and he has also hunted them, that is, they have been his prey." In Baym's opinion, Wilson feeds on men's machismo and women's vanity.

H. H. Bell, Jr. in his essay for The Explicator makes the observation that' 'Hemingway is inclined to view Margot Macomber throughout the entire story as something akin to a lioness. In speaking of her, he employs such words as 'hard,' 'cruel,' and 'predatory.'" For Bell, it seems, Wilson's presence and role in the story are highly symbolic. He writes that' 'the reader is permitted to see Robert Wilson as the complete hunter, as a man who lives by one code and one code only, and who applies this code to both animals and people simply because he knows no other way to live and be honest with himself and with his moral philosophy. Moreover, it is Wilson who thus adds the hunter's code to the Hemingway code in the story and finally blends the action and the theme of the work in a way that Hemingway rarely does." Warren Beck, in his essay "The Shorter Happy Life of Mrs. Macomber—1955," writes that readers too frequently see Margot from Wilson's perspective. He writes that "Wilson's assumption that Mrs. Macomber murdered her husband has been rather generally accepted by readers." He optimistically characterizes Margot's final act as one in which "she wished and tried to save her husband, with that access of recognition and penitence and hope in which love can renew itself." Finally, K. G. Johnston of The Hemingway Review provides a reasoned argument for Margot's innocence in the death of her husband, though she is,

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Johnson admits, "no angel." Johnson comments: "Mrs. Macomber, the narrator tell us, 'had shot at the buffalo.' . . . Commentaries have generally ignored or minimized the importance of this vital information and its source." Whether or not Margot intended to kill her husband or acted to protect him, it is Francis Macomber who is dead and whose failure or triumph is of primary importance in the story. As Frank O'Connor ironically notes in his 1963 essay "A Clean, Well Lighted Place," "The title leaves us with the comforting assurance that the triumph is still Macomber's, for, in spite of his sticky end, he had at last learned the only way of keeping his wife out of other men's beds."

Criticism Trudy Ring Ring is an editor, journalist, and frequent writer on literary subjects. In the following essay, she discusses how the interpretation of "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber'' hinges on one's interpretation of Wilson. "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber," first published in 1936, remains noteworthy for several reasons. It is particularly well known for the debate it has generated concerning its characters and their motivations. It also is significant as an exploration of themes that appear frequently in Ernest Hemingway's fiction and as a superior example of the art of short-story writing. Many critics and readers have debated whether Margot Macomber kills her husband intentionally or accidentally. How one answers this question depends largely on how negatively or positively one views the story's three primary characters. Numerous scholars have held up Margot Macomber as an example of one of Hemingway's most hateful female characters—as a dominating woman who undermines her husband's masculinity, and who is so threatened when he starts to become a real man that she kills him. These critics commonly hold that the change in Francis after he kills the buffalo is a positive one and that Robert Wilson is the story's voice of morality, the person who exemplifies Hemingway's "code" of proper conduct. Some others, however, have put forth a more sympathetic, even feminist, view of Margot, a more complicated view of Francis, and a highly negative view of Wilson.

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These critics usually consider Margot's killing of her husband an obvious accident. That "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber" has generated such debate is due in great part to its complexity. On the surface, the story appears to be simple. Its action takes place over just twenty-four hours, and its pace is swift. Macomber first fails and then succeeds in hunting, grows in self-respect, but has his life ended just when it begins to be happy. But the story's omniscient narrator reveals the thoughts and feelings of Wilson, Francis, Margot (to a lesser extent), and even the lion, and Hemingway's carefully crafted dialogue offers further insights into each character. The sum of this is that the story is not as simple as it seems. How one interprets the story depends greatly on one's opinion of Wilson. The narrator discloses Wilson's thoughts more often than those of the other characters, and many readers take Wilson to be the spokesman for Hemingway. Wilson lives an active, outdoor life in which physical courage is important—and this way of life, and this type of courage, were much admired by Hemingway, a biggame hunter himself. Wilson believes in a code of conduct in which one must not shrink from danger and must bear one's sufferings or disappointments without complaint; this is Hemingway's code, which comes up often in his writings. Wilson disdains the soft life lived by wealthy Americans such as Francis Macomber and dislikes women who dominate men; these factors, he thinks, have made Macomber less than a whole man. Hemingway, although he certainly counted strong, independent women among his lovers, friends, and fictional characters, appears to have believed that the proper relationship between the sexes is one in which the man has the upper hand. Another view of Wilson, though, is either that his standards are faulty or that he does not live up to them. He and Macomber chase after the buffalo in the car rather than on foot even though it gives them an unfair advantage over the animals, and Wilson could lose his license if this infraction of hunting rules became known; but Wilson rationalizes this by saying that riding in a car over the rough terrain is more dangerous than walking or running over it. Furthermore, Wilson punishes his African aides by illegal whippings; he bullies the Macombers; and he is not troubled by the morality of affairs with married women—he sees no reason to turn down Margot's overtures, as he believes she sleeps with him because Francis is not man enough to ' 'keep her

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Ernest Hemingway on a safari in Africa in 1937.

where she belongs." Critic Virgil Hutton asserts in The Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway: Critical Essays, that Hemingway does not intend for Wilson to be considered a hero. Instead, Hutton says, Wilson is an object of satire—a symbol of British imperialism, with its arrogant assumption of the right to rule the world, and ' 'an unwitting hypocrite who harshly judges others on the basis of various strict and false codes that he himself does not follow." Whatever one thinks of Wilson, the change in Francis Macomber comes when he becomes like Wilson. The question is whether this is, as Carlos Baker puts it in Hemingway: The Writer as Artist, rising toward a standard of manhood, or adopting a not very admirable set of values that depend on breaking the rules of hunting and lording it over his wife and other people. Yet another interpretation of Macomber's metamorphosis, though, comes from scholar Warren Beck, who suggests in "The Shorter, Happy Life of Mrs. Macomber,'' that Macomber is emulating what is admirable in Wilson, such as physical courage, but will reject what is not admirable, such as emotional detachment. Macomber, Beck asserts, will not try to suppress his wife, but will try to build a stronger partnership with her—something that will create a challenge to her as well. The

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view of Margot Macomber also depends on the extent to which one sees Wilson's opinion of her as valid. Wilson hates her outspokenness and sarcasm, and blames her for Francis's weakness. Perhaps, though, Wilson resents the degree to which she sees through him. Snatches of dialogue can be read as Margot's questioning of Wilson's values. She tells him he is "lovely" at hunting, "That is, if blowing things' heads off is lovely." She chides Wilson and Francis for their car-chase of the buffalo: "It seemed very unfair to me." Her virulent verbal attacks on her husband are hard to justify, but the omniscient narrator points out that neither she nor Francis is wholly to blame for their troubled marriage: "She had done the best she could for many years back and the way they were together now was no one person's fault." Feminist scholar Nina Baym offers the opinion in New Critical Approaches to the Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway that Margot exercises no real power over Francis; like the lion, she is thought of as dangerous, but is in fact helpless because men hold the power in the world. The story's narrator tells us that Margot is "very afraid of something" after Francis gains such confidence from killing the first buffalo; perhaps she is not afraid of Francis becoming a so-called ' 'real man," but afraid of him becoming the kind of man who

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What Do I Read Next? Hemingway's 1926 novel, The Sun Also Rises, like "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber," provides an examination of malefemale relationships.

which spawned the men's movement of the late 1980s and early 1990s, encouraging men to bond together and return to their "masculine" roots.

Hemingway' s story ' 'Hills Like White Elephants'' also explores a dysfunctional relationship between a man and a woman.

One of Hemingway's predecessors, Stephen Crane, wrote The Red Badge of Courage (1895), a Civil War novel that has come to be known as a classic representation of the kind of masculine courage that many of Hemingway's works exemplify.

' The Bear'' by William Faulkner, written in the 1930s, is another hunting story that deals with the theme of nature. It takes place in the American South and outlines the complicated family roots of hero Ike McCaslin. The "macho" tradition is given a new and interesting twist in Robert Ely's book Iron John,

will find it easy to oppress her. Or, if one accepts Beck's opinion of the change in Francis, perhaps what Margot really fears is the emotional evolution necessary to maintain a solid relationship. Those who see Wilson as a heroic figure judge Margot guilty of her husband's murder. Hemingway biographer Jeffrey Meyers, who calls Margot "the real villain" of the story, points out that Hemingway once gave an interview in which he endorsed the Margot-as-murderer interpretation. Others note that Hemingway made varied statements about the story, and that his all-knowing narrator says explicitly that Margot' 'had shot at the buffalo." They also argue that if Margot wanted her husband to die, she merely could have let the buffalo kill him. Beck, who definitely considers Margot's gunshot an attempt to save Francis, sees her as trying to raise herself morally and to atone for her infidelities and other cruelties toward him. Wilson, Beck asserts, is unable to understand Margot's complexity—to see that she does sometimes try to be supportive of her husband, that her cruelty is a defense mechanism, or that she has been frustrated in her efforts to improve their marriage. Wilson also cannot believe, Beck says, that Margot

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For a gender studies exploration of Hemingway's fiction, see Hemingway's Gender: Rereading the Hemingway Text, published by Yale University Press in 1994.

is capable of trying to become a better person than she is. The story also is useful for its delineation of the Hemingway code—or, in the alternate view, a satire of the code—and for its portrait of an individual going through a life-changing experience. Many of Hemingway's stories deal with such experiences. However, even though there is much physical action in his stories, the life-changing events usually do not take the form of such action; Francis Macomber's story is exceptional in this regard. This situation, though, also lends itself to debate. Macomber is a man from an industrialized society, accustomed to the comforts of wealth; he is placed in a situation where he must deal with the natural—some would say "primitive"—world. Does Macomber's becoming a brave and accomplished hunter show him learning to deal with this natural world where physical courage is all that matters? Would he have been able to translate his physical courage into moral courage, and is the real tragedy of the story the fact that he was denied this opportunity? Or did he merely figure out how to use technology and wealth to destroy nature? After all, he would not be able to kill animals without his

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advanced weapons and the expert guidance of Wilson, who commands a large fee for his services. The peek into the lion's thoughts gives rise to a consideration of the morality of hunting, as does the narrator's comment that Macomber "had not thought how the lion felt." This appears to be a call, at the very least, for the hunter to show some respect for the hunted, and perhaps Macomber's subsequent nightmare of "the bloody-headed lion standing over him" shows him beginning to feel such respect. A hunter who respects and understands his prey could become a more skillful hunter; on the other hand, he could become a more humane individual and give up shooting animals. The fact that one can find all these points for discussion is evidence that "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber" is, quite simply, a wonderfully well-written story. It is evident that Hemingway chose each word carefully, even though the same words can be interpreted in various ways. For instance, the description of Wilson's eyes as "cold" and "flat" indicates that he is not an emotional person. Is this lack of emotion something positive, showing that Wilson has the strength to withstand life's pains and sorrows, as one who lives up to the Hemingway code? Or is it something negative, showing that Wilson has taken the code too far and lost all compassion for his fellow human beings? Hemingway's craft also shows in his delineation of the story's action. The lion hunt and the buffalo hunt proceed in similar fashion; because something shocking—Francis's act of cowardice—happens at the end of the lion hunt, the reader expects something shocking to happen at the end of the buffalo hunt. The suspense generated by this expectation keeps the reader turning pages, and even after many readings, it's still possible to be shocked by Francis Macomber's death, which is, memorably, shown from Francis's point of view: "He felt a sudden white-hot, blinding flash explode inside his head and that was all he ever felt." The story's use of flashback is another technique that holds the reader's interest. The opening, with the Macombers and Wilson at lunch and discussing the morning's lion hunt, makes the reader want to know more about the hunt, as does the portrait of Macomber becoming fearful at the lion's roar the night before. Noteworthy, too, is the vivid portrayal of each hunt; during the pursuit of the buffalo, one can almost feel the motion as Hemingway describes the Macomber car "rocking swayingly over the uneven ground, drawing up on the steady, plunging, heavy-necked, straight-moving gallop of the bull." This also

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Wilson believes in a code of conduct in which one must not shrink from danger and must bear one's sufferings or disappointments without complaint; this is Hemingway's code, which comes up often in his writings."

underlines the advantage the car gives the hunters over the buffalo. All told, the story's many nuances and complications make it subject to a variety of interpretations, which are likely to cause debate for many years to come. Moreover, it is still highly entertaining. ' 'The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber'' is one of those stories that becomes richer with each reading. Source: Trudy Ring, for Short Stories for Students, Gale Research, 1997.

Kathleen Morgan and Luis A. Losada In the following essay, the authors outline Hemingway's knowledge of big game hunting and how he applied those principals to develop the plot of' 'The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber.'' While ' 'The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber'' has long been acclaimed as one of Hemingway's most successful artistic achievements, criticism about the actual shooting of Macomber has focused primarily on whether or not it was an accident, and the implications of this for the understanding of the story and characters, especially Wilson and Mrs. Macomber. Emphasis on this question has diverted attention from the technical merits of the sequence of events Hemingway devised for Macomber's death. This sequence not only exhibits the vivid realism, sensory evocation and viewpoint manipulation characteristic of the rest of the story, but also depends heavily for its success on Hemingway's practicing his credo of "writing what I know about," in this case big game hunting and shooting.

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i Hemingway creates an account that accurately depicts the way the big game hunter, the 'surgeon' with the 'solid instead of a scalpel,' attacks his quarry,"

The story-books which show pictures of him charging with his head dipped are incorrect as he nearly always holds his nose straight out when advancing, so the brain shot is almost impossible, unless one can get the bullet up the nasal orifice, which I advise tyros not to attempt. The best spot is at the base of the throat, and solid bullets are best, as one needs ample penetration in such a solid-bodied animal.

The verbal parallels with Wilson's advice about ammunition, posture of the buffalo, and possible targets are obvious and suggest that the hunter's words may well have their origins in Lyell's text as much as in Hemingway's own experience. In the subsequent description of the charge of the buffalo we read:

As they begin the final tracking of the wounded buffalo, Wilson asks Macomber, "Have you any solids left? '' After the gunbearer produces the cartridges, Wilson gives instructions concerning the disposal of the various rifles within the party and then advises Macomber what to expect: ' 'When a buff comes he comes with his head high and thrust straight out. The boss of the horns covers any sort of brain shot. The only shot is straight into the nose. The only other shot is into his chest or, if you're to one side, into the neck or shoulders. After they've been hit once they take a lot of killing. Don't try anything fancy. Take the easiest shot there is."

On several occasions Wilson is called a "professional," and delivers instructions on one or another point about hunting. But here it is the wealth of particulars that reinforces our apprehension of Wilson. This is a favorite device of Hemingway: it may be Nick instructing Marjorie on the proper preparation of a bait fish, Santiago butchering a tuna or dolphin fish, or Nick making a pancake. In each case it is the accumulation of details pertinent to the task or action that convinces the reader of the character's expertise. Thus the specific information about the type of ammunition, the disposition of the guns, the anatomy and posture of a charging buffalo, and the effective shots fixes the figure of Wilson in our minds as one who knows his craft well. Such a presentation of a character requires a well informed author. Hemingway's knowledge of tracking a wounded cape buffalo came partly from his own experience which he had already recorded when he wrote Wilson's remarks. In addition, Hemingway throughout his life read a great deal about hunting in Africa, and this interest is clearly reflected in the books he owned. Particularly relevant here is a passage about the cape buffalo from a 1929 work of Denis D. Lyell that Hemingway owned in duplicate at Key West and later took to Cuba:

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. . . the bull coming, nose o u t . . . head straight out, coming in a charge.. .boss of the horns . . . shot again at the wide nostrils . . . the horns . . . on-coming head, nose o u t . . . .

Hemingway echoes the words and phrases he had Wilson use in the preceding passage. Repetition is, of course, a ubiquitous feature of Hemingway's style that often serves, as in this case, to reinforce a vivid description; here, however, it also contributes verisimilitude. The reader readily accepts the truth of the omniscient narrator's description because it recalls in detail what the expert has just said about how a buffalo charges. At the same time the reader's view of the action is that of the amateur hunter, Macomber. This is accomplished by the narrator's shifting from Wilson and Macomber ("they saw") to Macomber alone ("and Macomber.. .saw"), and then providing a succession of parts of the buffalo's head that Macomber ' 'could see." This focus on progressively smaller details, "huge boss of horns.. .wide nostrils.. .little wicked eyes," as they become seen by the shooter reifies the motion of the approaching target for the reader. Hemingway uses much the same technique, although with greater detail, in El Sordo's shooting of the captain. Both passages end with characteristics of the approaching targets' eyes ("little wicked" and "pale blue.. .that don't focus") only visible up close; however, in contrast to the deliberate pace of El Sordo's noting a variety of things about the captain's appearance as he walks toward him, here the rapidity of the oncoming buffalo is vivified by the few features of the head concentrated on by the hunter. Such concentration is an authentic hunter's view. Some fifteen years after writing his Macomber story, Hemingway contributed the Foreword to Francois Sommer's book about African game

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hunting. In it he stressed the importance of anatomy and underscored this by likening the hunter to "a surgeon except that he will be armed with the lightning rapier of the long reaching solid instead of a scalpel." So Wilson specifies the "chest .. . neck . . . shoulders'' as possible targets, but it is the nose shot he emphasizes. During the shooting at the charging buffalo three separate references focus attention on the physical feature most significant for both hunters, the nose, their target. Then the narrator says Wilson "ducked to one side to get in a shoulder shot," while Macomber "shot for the nose" to the end. Thus by repeatedly describing their targets anatomically, Hemingway creates an account that accurately depicts the way the big game hunter, the "surgeon" with the "solid instead of a scalpel," attacks his quarry. Macomber also meets a hunter's death. A contemporary professional notes that all too many hunters have succumbed to bystanders shooting at animals attacking them. One famous incident provides a partial parallel to Macomber's death. In 1920 two amateur hunters named Colquhoun and Hunter were following a couple of cape buffalo they had wounded: As Hunter melted from sight into the bush beyond the clearing, Colquhoun realized that somehow they had walked almost smack into the middle of the herd. As it dawned on him, he saw a charging bull bearing down on Hunter through the patches of bush. Before he could react there was the tearing crash of a shot. The native carrying Hunter's extra rifle fired, missing the buffalo but driving a bullet through Hunter's lower back, breaking the farmer's spine.

Thus although Philip Percival said that he did not know of any client who had shot her husband as Mrs. Macomber did, there is nothing uncommon about the general contour of events that Hemingway invented; moreover, it is the informed details meticulously provided that render the shooting of Macomber especially credible. One such particular is that Mrs. Macomber shot her husband with a 6.5 Mannlicher. As Davidson notes, this is a light gun not suited for shooting buffalo. It is appropriate, therefore, that the Mannlicher is ordered left behind in the car' 'with the Memsahib'' by Wilson. Thus its presence there for the denouement is in accord with standard hunting practice. Another particular is the surgical precision of the narrator's description of where Macomber was shot:' 'about two inches up and a little to one side of the base of his skull." Such graphic description is a

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hallmark of Hemingway's pictorial prose, but here it also rivets the reader's attention on Macomber's head, and his head is the detail most significant for the shooting. One of Hemingway's most perceptive critics, Carlos Baker, observes that Macomber was kneeling when he was shot. This is not stated in the text, nor does Baker explain his observation. Wilson is described as "kneeling," and one might assume that Macomber, the amateur, would be likely to imitate the professional; however, Hemingway has not left Macomber's position to conjecture. As the buffalo closed in, the narrator says Macomber was "aiming carefully" and "his rifle" was "almost level with the on-coming head." (Because one aims a rifle carefully by sighting along the barrel, it becomes apparent that Macomber's head is at about the same height as the buffalo's. A mature bull cape buffalo stands up to five feet at its apogee, the shoulder, and the center of its large head is approximately four feet above the ground. That the buffalo is a mature bull is stated by Wilson, and also indicated by his noting the spread of the horns: "A good fifty inches or better. Better." Most important here is that Macomber's great physical stature has been emphasized in the story. The narrator calls our attention to it three times, beginning with "very tall." Thus the detail about the level of his rifle makes it clear that Macomber was not standing. In addition, as Hemingway had described in Green Hills of Africa, there are three positions other than standing that a big game hunter may assume, kneeling, sitting and prone. The latter two obviously will not be assumed by a hunter facing a charging buffalo. Thus the writer who knew what he was writing about succeeds in letting the reader know, without saying so, that Macomber was kneeling. The final important detail the narrator supplies concerns the distance of Macomber from the buffalo when he was shot. We are told that Mrs. Macomber shot when the buffalo "seemed about to gore Macomber," and then we learn: Francis Macomber lay now, face down, not two yards from where the buffalo lay on his side...

Macomber's head, then, was not only level with the buffalo's, but also not very far from it. Thus that Macomber was shot in the head when his wife' 'shot at the buffalo'' is realistic. This applies whether one believes that the shooting was an accident, or that Mrs. Macomber's aim was deflected by a subconscious motive. In the former case, the margin for

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error is small; in the latter, the deflection need only be slight. In either case, it is Hemingway's detailed and informed narrative reflecting his own knowledge that establishes the credibility of the death he invented for Macomber. As he himself said: Invention is the finest thing but you cannot invent anything that would not actually happen. Source: Kathleen Morgan and Luis A. Losada, "Tracking the Wounded Buffalo: Authorial Knowledge and the Shooting of Francis Macomber," in The Hemingway Review, Vol. XI, No. 1, Fall, 1991 1991, pp. 25-8.

K. G. Johnston In the following essay, Johnston analyzes the character of Margot Macomber in "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber," pointing out evidence that paints her as more complicated than a one-dimensional villain. Margot Macomber deserves her day in court of appeals. She so aroused the emotions and prejudices of her critics that, in a manner of speaking, they rushed her to trial, before the smoke and dust had settled, in a ' 'drumhead court'' on the field of battle. Without a thorough examination of the evidence, or of the motives of her chief accuser, they found her guilty as charged—guilty, or, at the very least, not innocent, of the murder of her husband, Francis Macomber. Margot, of course, is no angel. And she is guilty—of infidelity; and of accepting the adolescent touchstone of manhood—standing firm before an onrushing wounded lion or buffalo—so heartily embraced by the white hunter, her husband, and Hemingway himself. She is attracted to men of courage and command. Francis Macomber's lack of command and, thus, of manliness is revealed in the opening scene of "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber." The inglorious lion hunt is over. It is lunch time now, and Macomber offers his wife and the white hunter, Robert Wilson, a choice of lime juice or lemon squash (lemonade). But both, first Wilson, and then Margot, reject his drink suggestions and choose gimlets instead. '' 'I suppose it's the thing to do,' Macomber agreed. Tell him to make three gimlets.'" However, even before Macomber's capitulation, "the mess boy had started them already." Clearly, Wilson's is the commanding voice. Macomber will achieve both courage and command by story's end. But in the early and middle stages of the story, he literally takes a back seat to

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Wilson. On the morning of the lion hunt, Macomber sits in the front seat of the car beside the driver. On the return trip, however, after his public display of cowardice, he sits in the back, while Wilson, who stood his ground before the charge of the wounded lion, sits in the front, in the seat of authority. Later, en route to the buffalo hunt, Macomber is again seen sitting in the back. But after his "coming of age," he and Wilson are pictured as hanging onto the sides of the car, like equals. Macomber even commands his wife to shut up during the interlude in the buffalo hunt. The narrator is omniscient, a point of view rarely employed by Hemingway in his short fiction. The all-seeing, all-knowing narrator even shares with us the thoughts and the vision of the wounded lion. An awareness of the omniscience of the narrator is crucial to the discussion of Margot Macomber's intentions and motivations in the fatal scene. Mrs. Macomber, the narrator tells us, ' 'had shot at the buffalo with the 6.5 Mannlicher as it seemed about to gore Macomber and had hit her husband about two inches up and a little to one side of the base of the skull" (italics mine). Yet commentaries have generally ignored or minimized the importance of this vital information and its source. Mrs. Macomber's action is seldom seen as an attempt to save her husband's life. Rather, the prevailing critical view is that she deliberately—or at best, ' 'accidentally on purpose"—murdered him. Carlos Baker refers to Margot Macomber as "easily the most unscrupulous of Hemingway's fictional females," and he characterizes her as "the horrible example" of the deadly female, someone "who is really and literally deadly." He speaks of Wilson as ' 'the judge who presides, after the murder, over the further fortunes of Margot Macomber." Joseph DeFalco stops short of accusing Margot of cold-blooded murder: "When Macomber finally achieves his manhood by demonstrating his courage, his wife recognizes the change as an omen of her own demise and 'accidentally' shoots him." Philip Young both acknowledges and circumvents the story's omniscient narrator with his Freudian view of the situation: When [Macomber] attains this manhood he regains the ithyphallic authority he had lost and his wife, now panicky herself in her new role, must destroy him literally.... When he becomes a man, and she can no longer rule him in the Lawrencian sense, she sends a bullet to the base of his skull. . . . The climax of the story has come, and Macomber's wife, recognizing the hero's new life as a man, cannot tolerate a long denouement. When her husband goes

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in after the wounded buffalo she—ostensibly and "intentionally" aiming for the beast in order to save Francis—kills him. Aiming at the buffalo, as Hemingway specified, she shot her husband "by mistake on purpose," as wise children put it—or, for adults, in a monumental "Freudian slip." When Wilson accuses her of murder she does not deny i t . . . .

Leslie A. Fiedler, however, does not pull his Freudian punches; he accuses Mrs. Macomber of murder and sheds new light on her motivation—and on Hemingway's as well: When Hemingway's bitches are Americans, they are hopeless and unmitigated bitches; symbols of Home and Mother as remembered by the boy who could never forgive Mama for having wantonly destroyed Papa's Indian collection! Mrs. Macomber, who, in "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber," kills her husband for having alienated the affections of the guide with whom she is having one of her spiteful little affairs, is a prime example of the type.

Wilson's role in shaping our response to the fatal scene should not be overlooked. It is Wilson who firmly plants the murder motive in the reader's mind. His own motivation for doing so warrants examination. At first Wilson appears to accept the fact that Macomber's death is accidental: he orders one of the gun bearers to fetch the other ' 'that he may witness the manner of the accident." And, apparently without irony, he tells the tearful widow, "Of course it was an accident. . . . I know that." But moments later, immediately after he mentions Nairobi, he accuses her of murder: "Why didn't you poison him? That's what they do in England." Nairobi, it appears, is the trigger word that reminds him of his own need for a defense, and for some leverage on this woman, who soon will be called upon to testify at the inquest there. By word and action, Wilson has left himself vulnerable. He had confessed to Mrs. Macomber earlier that their carchase of the buffalo was illegal and had asked her not to mention it to anyone. ' 'What would happen if they heard about it in Nairobi?'' "I'd lose my license for one thing. Other unpleasantnesses," Wilson said, taking a drink from the flask. "I'd be out of business." "Really?" "Yes, really." "Well," said Macomber, and he smiled for the first time all day. "Now she has something on you."

Wilson has much to gain by making Mrs. Macomber believe that the death of her husband could be construed as murder. He is counting on this woman, whom he earlier characterized as "not stupid," to

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Margot Macomber deserves her day in court of appeals. She so aroused the emotions and prejudices of her critics that, in a manner of speaking, they rushed her to trial, before the smoke and dust had settled, in & 'drumhead court1 on the field of battle,"

recognize that each could put the other "out of business" by his or her testimony at the inquest. The murder accusation may be seen as his bid for their mutual silence on certain incriminating matters. The cross-examination of Wilson's motives and the testimony of the unimpeachable narrator constitute a solid defense of Mrs. Macomber against the charge of murder. But there is a considerable body of circumstantial evidence, too, that strengthens her case. She is moved to tears by her husband's cowardly disgrace and by his death. Heretofore, he has not been man enough to command her fidelity; the kiss that she bestows on Wilson after the lion episode and her sharing his double cot that night are her tribute to a man of courage. When her husband comes of age, though she is visibly frightened by the change, she pays him tribute, too, with a small but revealing gesture: she hands the whisky flask to Macomber, not to Wilson, during the lull in the buffalo hunt. (Macomber, one recalls, drank water during the lion-hunt interlude, but now he takes a man's drink.) But Margot's greatest tribute to her husband—and the most telling piece of circumstantial evidence—is her risking the shot at the wounded buffalo. From her vantage point it appears that the charging beast will gore her husband to death. As it turns out, the buffalo is felled ' 'not two yards'' from Macomber's body. If she wanted Macomber killed, inaction would seem the wisest and safest course. But instead she risks all—marriage, money, reputation, freedom—by firing to save her husband, who has finally become the sort of man she has been desperately seeking all along.

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e approaches her and 'kills' her by killing her spirit; by breaking down her overbearing pride; by shattering her unlimited confidence; and by changing her from a woman who is in

As Hemingway sees it, one very important aspect of the code of the professional hunter is that he must be willing to go into any cover, however unpleasant the experience may be, in order to pursue and kill a wounded animal. He must do this for two reasons. First, he must do it in order to put the creature out of his misery; and second, and more important, he must do it in order to prevent an unsuspecting party from stumbling upon him and being mauled or perhaps killed as a result.

control of the situation to a woman who is so humbled that she pleads for mercy."

Margot, whose name means "pearl," has paid a great price for her belated show of fidelity. Because of her desperate decision, she stands judged, by many a reader and critic, a murderess. Even her creator feeds the dark suspicions: ' This is a simple story in a way," writes Hemingway in his essay ' 'The Art of the Short Story''' 'because the woman, who I knew very well in real life but then invented out of, to make the woman for this story, is a bitch for the full course and doesn't change." Be that as it may. But a careful examination of the story's evidence leads one to this considered verdict: in the final stages of the buffalo hunt, Margot Macomber is "guilty" only of trying to save her husband's life. Source: K. G.Johnston, "In Defense of the Unhappy Margot Macomber," in The Hemingway Review, Vol. II, No. 2, Spring, 1983, pp. 44-7.

H. H. Bell, Jr. In the following brief essay, Bell argues that the character of Wilson in ' 'The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber" is a man who lives by the moral code of the hunter, which explains his actions towards Margot at the end of the story. Ernest Hemingway's story "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber'' is often taught in both high school and college classrooms because it is a good story, one that appeals at one and the same time to the Hemingway scholar as well as to youth in general. As widely read and as widely taught as it is, though, it is often misunderstood and misinterpreted by both teachers and students alike with regard to

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With all of the foregoing in mind, the reader's attention is called to the fact that Hemingway is inclined to view Margot Macomber throughout the entire story as something akin to a lioness. In speaking of her, he early employs such words as "hard," "cruel," and "predatory." He even says at one point that she is ' 'simply enamelled with that American female cruelty." The reader must also remind himself that along with the prospect of losing control of her husband—and even of losing him entirely—when he achieves his manhood in the buffalo hunt, Margot receives a deep wound, psychological though it may be. Knowing that Macomber will leave her, and likewise knowing that her looks are no longer good enough to get another husband as rich as he, she, not entirely without malice and not entirely without forethought, shot and killed him while trying to make it appear that she was shooting at the buffalo in order to protect and to save her husband! She is, at this point, if the reader please, a wounded lioness in the brush. She is a lioness who has killed one man, and in her frame of mind is very dangerous to other men. Wilson perceives this, and, professional hunter that he is, he treats her the same way he would treat any other wounded lioness. In other words, he applies the code of the professional hunter on the human level. He approaches her and "kills" her by killing her spirit; by breaking down her overbearing pride; by shattering her unlimited confidence; and by changing her from a woman who is in control of the situation to a woman who is so humbled that she pleads for mercy. She is rendered quite harmless, and the section of the brush which she occupies now and in the future is and will be safe for others to travel through. There will be no more men's lives ruined as Macomber's was—at least not by her. Wilson accomplishes all this with words alone— with what may be said to be five verbal shots at the

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very end of the story. As he forces Margot to face the fact that she has done a dastardly thing, she imperiously and repeatedly orders him to stop treating her thus; however, Wilson continues to bore in on her over and over again until she no longer orders him to stop but pleads with him to stop, saying, "Oh, please stop it. Please, please stop it." To this the hunter replies, "That's better. Please is much better. Now I'll stop." Thus the reader is permitted to see Robert Wilson as the complete hunter, as a man who lives by one code and one code only, and who applies this code to both animals and people simply because he knows no other way to live and be honest with himself and with his moral philosophy. Moreover, it is Wilson who thus adds the hunter's code to the Hemingway code in the story and finally blends the action and the theme of the work in a way that Hemingway rarely does. Source: H. H. Bell, Jr., "Hemingway's 'The Short, Happy Life of Francis Macomber,'" in Explicator, Vol. 32, No. 9, May, 1974, item 78.

Sources Baker, Carlos. "Dangerous Game," in his Hemingway: The Writer As Artist, 4th edition, Princeton University Press, 1972, 186-191. Baym, Nina. "Actually, I Felt Sorry For the Lion," in New Critical Approaches to the Short Stories of Ernest Heming-

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way, edited by Jackson J. Benson, Duke University Press, 1990, pp. 112-20. Beck, Warren. "The Shorter, Happy Life of Mrs. Macomber— 1955," Modern Fiction Studies, Vol. 21, Autumn, 1975. Hutton, Virgil. "The Short Happy Life of Macomber," in The Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway: Critical Essays, edited by Jackson J. Benson, Duke University Press, 1975, pp. 239-50. Meyers, Jeffrey. Hemingway: A Biography, Harper & Row, 1985. O'Connor, Frank. "A Clean, Well Lighted Place," in The Lonely Voice: A Study of the Short Story, World Publishing, 1963, pp. 156-69. Wilson, Edmund. "Hemingway: Gauge of Morale," in The Wound and the Bow: Seven Studies in Literature, Farrar, Straus, 1978.

Further Reading Hart, James D., editor. "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber," in The Oxford Companion to American Literature, 5th edition, Oxford University Press, 1983. p. 689. This volume is an excellent guide to American literature, providing detailed entries on authors, major works, major characters, and aesthetic categories. Howell, John M., editor. Hemingway's African Stories: The Stories, Their Sources, Their Critics, Scribner's, 1969. This volume provides historical and biographical information surrounding the inspiration for Hemingway's African stories, namely "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber" and "The Snows of Kilimanjaro."

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There Will Come Soft Rains Ray Bradbury

1951

"There Will Come Soft Rains" is one of Ray Bradbury's most famous stories. Also known as "August 2026: There Will Come Soft Rains," the story was written and published in Bradbury's highly acclaimed collection of stories, The Martian Chronicles, in 1951. Written in an era in which many people were concerned about the devastating effects of nuclear weapons, the story depicts a world in which human beings have been destroyed by nuclear force. The central irony of the story is the fact that humans have been destroyed rather than saved by their own technology. The atomic bombings of Nagasaki and Hiroshima, Japan, were recent memories in 1951, and many readers and critics found Bradbury' s images of a desolate planet haunting and cautionary. In a further moral lesson, Bradbury shows how human technology is able to withstand the demise of its maker, yet is ultimately destroyed by nature, a force which prevails over all others. The story, which happens in the future but takes its title from a poem by a nineteenth-century writer, is a prime example of how science fiction literature can encompass moral and philosophical concerns.

Author Biography Ray Bradbury was born August 22, 1920, in Waukegan, Illinois, where he spent his early years.

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During the depression, his father, a power lineman, moved the family to Los Angeles in his search for work. Bradbury graduated from Los Angeles High School in 1938. The following year he began publishing a science fiction magazine called Futuria Fantasia with a couple of his friends. While expanding his connections in the literary world of science fiction, he worked as a newsboy, and several years later, without the benefit of a college education, he became a full-time writer and was soon winning awards for his short fiction. Many of his early stories were published in the legendary pulp magazine Weird Tales. His first book, Dark Carnival, was published in 1947 and contained many of these works. That same year he married Marguerite McClure, with whom he eventually had four daughters. Influenced early on by genre writers like Edgar Allan Poe and H. G. Wells, Bradbury was one of the first writers to combine the concepts of science fiction with a sophisticated prose style. Though his early writing leaned towards futurism and fantasy, in 1950 he published The Martian Chronicles, a loosely connected group of stories which included "There Will Come Soft Rains," which quickly established him as one of the foremost authors of science fiction. Though the novel takes place on Mars in the future, it explores themes that were important in the post-World War II era, including racism, censorship, technology, and nuclear war. Other critically acclaimed works followed, including the semi-autobiographical Dandelion Wine, a collection of stories called The Illustrated Man, and Fahrenheit 451. The latter book was originally published as a short story about a society that outlaws books because they encourage individuality. The novel expanded this idea and critics soon regarded it as one of the landmark books about censorship and dystopian society. Fahrenheit 451 became a movie in 1966 directed by Francois Truffaut and starring Oskar Werner and Julie Christie. Many of Bradbury's other stories have been adapted for television as episodes of The Twilight Zone, Alfred Hitchcock Presents, and The Ray Bradbury Theater. Bradbury himself has written many of these screenplays, and he even adapted his novel Something Wicked This Way Comes for Disney in 1973. A prolific writer, Bradbury has also published many collections of poetry and edited numerous fiction anthologies. Even his detractors admit that Bradbury has helped make science fiction a more respected liter-

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ary genre, often by depicting the future in realistic terms and presenting issues important in contemporary society. Among his many awards are two O. Henry prizes for short stories, an Academy Award nomination for his short film "Icarus Montgolfier Wright," and a World Fantasy Award for lifetime achievement. Bradbury continues to live in Los Angeles where he enjoys painting and collecting Mexican artifacts when not writing.

Plot Summary The story opens with a clock announcing that it is time to wake up and a hint of premonition that perhaps no one will. In the kitchen, the stove cooks breakfast and a voice from the ceiling announces the setting: Allendale, California, on August 4, 2026. The automated house prepares itself for the day, but its inhabitants have not responded to several wake up calls, breakfast, the weather box, or the waiting car. The robotic mice finish cleaning the house, and it is revealed that the family who lived in the house—two parents, a daughter and son— have died. They are now "five spots of paint" against a house covered with a "thin charcoal layer." The city is in rubble and the "radioactive glow" emitted in the area indicates that an atomic blast has wiped out Allendale, if not the world. The family dog returns to the house and is let in by the front door which recognizes the dog's whine. He is alive but injured from the bomb. Covered with mud he enters the house, and the robotic cleaning mice are annoyed that they will need to clean up after him. The narrator explains that all dust and debris is cleaned by the mice and fed into an incinerator which sits "like evil Baal," a reference to the heathen god of the Old Testament and Satan's chief lieutenant in Paradise Lost by Dante. Within an hour the dog is dead, presumably from radiation poisoning. Afternoon settles in and the house continues its routine. A card table is set up, drinks are poured, the nursery transforms into a jungle scene. The stove prepares a dinner that will not be eaten and a faceless voice begins to read a poem by Sara Teasdale, an American poet who killed herself in 1933. The poem tells of a soft rain that falls while nature circles, shimmers, and sings, amidst a war that

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The house is computerized and hasbeen programmed toproceed withitsroutine without the interventionof ahuman being.Thecomputer wakes the house'sinhabitants upfrom their sleep, it cooks the family's meals, cleansthehouse,and even sets up the card tablefor theregular bridge game. The house is efficient, dependable, andwell-programmed. This isironic, though, because without the people there, all these functionsserve no purpose. Themeals gouneaten, thereis no one to play the card game,and no onelistens when the computer reads the poemfrom whichthestory takesit name, "There Will Come Soft Rains,"bySara Teasdale. Thus, thehousedutiful is butalso rigid and unchanging. The house isalso characterized by the ''cleaning mice," who aresomewhat annoyedby the mess made by thedog. Thisanimal arrives at the house sick with radiation poisoningandtracks mud into the house. The agonyof thedyingdog is not acknowledgedby thecleaning mice; they express only annoyance when forcedtocleanup itsmess. This is also ironic because itdemonstratesthe inability of thehousetosympathize and its sense of exasperation, normally human emotions. neither birds norfrogs care aboutpeople die.

sven if all the

At the poem'send, awind comesup,spillsa bottle, and starts a firethat quickly engulfs the house. Mechanical miceandfaucets cometo the rescue, but the fire prevails. The voices within the house beginto die and thehouse implodes.All that remains is "smoke and silence."Dawn appears, and one last, lone mechanical voice announces the new day: August5, 2026.

When thewindblowsatree branch through a kitchen window andknocks over a bottleof cleaning fluid, thehouse also imitates human behavior by attempting to save itself fromthe fire.Bradbury makes the house seem likeit isexperiencingthe human instinctforself-preservation. This is another instance ofirony, since this ' 'instinct'' fails to preserve thehouse's "life," andexposes its"human' ' behavioras animitation only. Thus, ultimately the house representstheinability of technology to replace humans,and theinferiority oftechnology when confrontedbynature.

Characters The House "There Will ComeSoft Rains"is an unusual story in thatitcontainsnohuman characters. However, because of itsanthropomorphic characteristics—its ability to act on itsown—the house itself is a character.Itcontinues function to even after the world aroundit hasbeen destroyed. Although not specifically statedin thestory,it isimplied that all human life on earthhasbeen obliterated. All that remain are shadowy silhouettes of figures burned into the sideof thehouseby theblast of the bomb.

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Themes Bradbury's tale, devoidofhuman characters and concerned with failed technology, presents several themes that explorethedark sideof thesymbiotic relationship between peopleandtheir inventions.

Individual vs. Machine Although the tragedyinthis storyhasalready taken place by thetime thestory opens,it is actually the conflict between human beingsand thema-

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chines they create that is at the heart of this story. In Bradbury's view, people put too much faith in the machines they invent. People have the power to create devices that can destroy themselves, but they have not enacted any measures to prevent this from happening. Bradbury believes that technology is a very wondrous—yet also very dangerous—thing. He illustrates technology's marvels: a house that can clean itself and take care of its inhabitants. On the other hand, technology has also transformed the house's family into nothing but carbon shadows. By writing a story with no human interaction, Bradbury demonstrates the sterility of a world without people. The computerized house has no feelings—it cannot love and it cannot hate—it can only be programmed. Likewise, the nuclear bomb that killed the family had no inherent emotions; it simply did what it was created to do. In this world of "morally neutral" technology, Bradbury proposes that humankind is destroyed by its own hubris, or self-confidence. Once a machine's creator is dispensed with, like the house's family, the machine is empty and meaningless.

Nature vs. Science Despite the horror inflicted by science upon the earth in "There Will Come Soft Rains," nature is shown to be an even more powerful force. Humans have created a bomb that destroys them all and a house that is incapable of being destroyed by the bomb. But fire, a force of nature, is able to destroy the house. In the end, the earth, though damaged, still exists. By describing this continuity, Bradbury points out his belief: that the earth was around long before humankind and it will be around long after. From this perspective, the folly of inventing machines that will overrule nature is exposed. Nothing is more powerful than nature, so humans are doomed to destroying only lesser powers, such as themselves.

Death and Fear By setting the story in a time of human extinction, Bradbury plays upon people's fear of death. He imagines the world without humans, telling readers that they have been reduced to shadow outlines on buildings. For those who have seen photographs of the atomic destruction that ended World War II, they are vivid and horrifying images. An ominous realization this brings about is the fact that even without people, the world will continue. Nature is indifferent to human existence, Bradbury proposes. This realization should instill a healthy fear in people and

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Media Adaptations The Martian Chronicles was adapted as a film for television in 1979, starring Rock Hudson, Bernadette Peters, Roddy McDowell, and Darin McGavin. Directed by Michael Anderson and produced by U.S.A. Fries Entertainment, it is available through Fries Home Video. "There Will Come Soft Rains" was adapted as a graphic story for the comic book Weird Fantasy, Vol. 1, No. 17, October, 1996.

trigger their instinct for self-preservation. If people realize the tenuousness of their existence, Bradbury seems to say, perhaps they will take precautions to insure they are not eradicated, least of all by their own technology. The fear of dying is closely related to fear of killing. Bradbury, like many people during the 1950s and early 1960s, feared that if political leaders no longer feared killing their enemies, then human existence is doomed. This lack of fear was the philosophy behind nuclear proliferation and the concept of mutually assured destruction, which states that nuclear war will not happen if a country is guaranteed to be destroyed by the country it attacks. Thus, moral regard for others' lives would not be a factor in the decision to annihilate millions of people. It is only the thought of being killed themselves that prevents leaders from making a single phone call that could launch thousands of nuclear missiles.

Style Irony Bradbury uses irony to great effect in the story. Irony in this case means presenting an outcome of a situation that is the opposite of what one would

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Topics for Further Study Find out about the house that Microsoft founder and billionaire Bill Gates built in the Seattle, Washington area. What will computers do for that house? How is it similar to the house described in "There Will Come Soft Rains"? Research nuclear technology. Is it possible that a bomb could destroy all human life on the planet? How accurate is Bradbury's description of the effects of the bomb, especially the idea that the blast could be so intense that it would burn the images of the people into the side of the house? Find out what critics have said about Sara Teasdale's poem,' 'There Will Come Soft Rains." Why do you think Bradbury chose this particular poem as the title for his story?

expect. Thus, it is ironic that the same technology which created a house that can cook and clean is also the technology which destroyed all the people on the planet. Furthermore, it is ironic that such a sophisticated example of technology, the computerized house, can be destroyed by nature, represented by the tree limb which crashes through the window and starts the fire. Another irony involves the symbolism of the poem that the computer reads to the empty house. "There Will Come Soft Rains," by Sara Teasdale, was written as a critical response to World War I. After all the wars are over, she says, the earth will continue despite all human efforts to prevent it. Though Teasdale could not have envisioned the devastation of nuclear war, her poem is still relevant. Even a world which has been poisoned for thousands of years with radiation and can support no human life will continue to exist. That the house reads this apocalyptic vision that has already come to pass is the irony of the situation. Humans have been able to foresee their annihilation, and now nothing but their prophecies of it remain. The inherent contradiction that forms the irony of the story can also be said to be paradox. A paradox is a

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situation which seems to contradict itself. Thus, technology that was designed to protect people— i.e. nuclear weapons—has actually killed them.

Simile Bradbury uses similes, comparisons of unlike situations or things, to enhance the imagery of his prose. For instance, he states that the "nerves" of the house were "revealed as if a surgeon had torn the skin off to let the red veins and capillaries quiver in the scalded air." Thus, by giving the house nerves, he compares it to a living organism, one that is badly damaged. Besides creating a vivid image, this simile also relates the idea that the house can feel. The ability to feel is a human characteristic. Ascribing human characteristics to inanimate objects is a literary device known as anthropomorphism. By describing the house in human terms, the author hopes the reader will identify with it, and thus feel empathy for the idea that it is the last working object on earth. It has lost its purpose—to serve others— because the others are no longer there. Though the house is an object with no emotions, the reader who identifies with it may feel loneliness and be able to imagine the pain of having one's skin torn off. In this way, Bradbury is able to evoke emotion in the reader, the mark of a successful narrative. In another simile, the fire "[feeds] upon Picassos and Matisses in the upper halls, like delicacies." The simile of priceless paintings being compared to food serves to anthropomorphize the fire. By eating the paintings, the fire is given a human characteristic. In a story with no human characters, the devices of similes and anthropomorphism give the reader something with which to identify.

Historical Context Aftermath of World War II Bradbury wrote "There Will Come Soft Rains" in the early 1950s. The memory of World War II was fresh in peoples' minds, particularly the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan, in August, 1945, which brought the war to an end. Though the Allies had won, an increasing tension arose between the United States and the U.S.S.R., and soon a nuclear buildup known as the Cold War began. President Dwight Eisenhower, a war hero, warned of the rising military-industrial complex it

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Compare & Contrast 1951: The first thermonuclear device is detonated by the United States in the mid-Pacific. The island atoll of Eniwetok is obliterated by the blast. Few precautions are taken to protect nearby inhabitants from radiation poisoning. 1997: A significant percentage of the United States's electricity is generated by nuclear power plants, despite several near meltdowns in the last few decades, including mishaps at Three Mile Island, Pennsylvania, and Monroe, Michigan. 1951: The world's first commercial computer, the Univac, is produced by Remington Rand. The machine fills an entire room and requires several experts to run it.

took to support the Cold War. In the United States' quest to eradicate communism from the globe, beginning with the Soviet Union, a disproportionate part of the country's resources and economic power needed to be focused on the weapons stockpile. The focus on preparedness for war, critics said, would result in governmental neglect of other important issues, like education, welfare, and economic growth. Nevertheless, few citizens were concerned about these issues as the 1950s dawned; jobs were plentiful and people were now able to afford goods that had been cost-prohibitive before the war, such as automobiles and televisions. But the threat of nuclear war filtered into everyday life. People built bomb shelters in their basements, and children participated in bomb drills at school in which they learned to protect themselves from a nuclear blast by crawling under their desks and placing their hands on their heads.

Anticommunist Fervor This fear of communism raged out of control during the 1950s, and it was represented most graphically by the Senate Committee on Unamerican Activities, which was organized and spearheaded by Senator Joseph McCarthy. This committee in-

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vestigated and persecuted many prominent Americans who were suspected of believing in communism. This paranoia, followed by a fanatical attempt to flush out democracy's traitors and eradicate them, became known as McCarthyism. Many writers and artists were taken to court, accused of being communists, and were ' 'blacklisted," meaning they were not able to gain work. Thus, many lives and careers were ruined. When not focused on the "red menace" of communism, the country turned its attention toward the future. Spawned by the pre-war interest in futurism and modernism as displayed by corporate America at the 1939 World's Fair in New York City, people's imaginations were sparked by the thought of transcontinental highways, labor-saving devices like washing machines and robots, and the possibility of space travel. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) was formed to make space travel a reality. But the U.S.S.R. beat the Americans into space with the launching of Sputnik in 1956, further promoting anti-Soviet feeling in the United States. Government leaders sought to intensify the race by stating that they intended to land a man on the moon before the century was over. The nation's interest in science

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fiction movies and comic books reflected this fascination with the future.

Criticism Jennifer Hicks

Critical Overview Despite the popularity of writers like H. G. Wells and Jules Verne, science fiction was not wellregarded by critics at the time ' 'There Will Come Soft Rains" was published in the early 1950s. Though science fiction movies and books abounded, most received little or no critical attention. Bradbury was an exception to this trend, and indeed his popularity has given rise to the permanent acceptance of science fiction. Little criticism has focused specifically on the story ' 'There Will Come Soft Rains," however, The Martian Chronicles, the collection in which it appeared, has been the subject of numerous articles. Edward J. Gallagher calls it "one of those acknowledged science fiction masterpieces," in the book Ray Bradbury. William F. Touponce talks about Bradbury's work in general, praising it for ' 'its rich imaginative vision, and . . . for the way in which it links up with the larger literary movements of the twentieth century, surrealism and existentialism." Specifically regarding The Martian Chronicles, Touponce expresses admiration for its themes, which "[express] the guilt of the twentieth century's destruction of exotic and primitive civilizations." However, Bradbury's detractors complain that his style suffers for the sake of his ideas. Kent Forrester, in an article titled ' The Dangers of Being Earnest: Ray Bradbury and The Martian Chronicles,'" says that "the stories are weakened" by Bradbury's fervent belief in his ideas, "unless we are as enthusiastic about his ideas as he is." He claims that Bradbury ' 'sometimes stops his narration to lecture us." In spite of this criticism, however, Forrester also thinks that Bradbury's visions of the future are "aesthetically pleasing and richly imaginative," and that these qualities "compensate" for "other artistic lapses." Bradbury, in an interview published in Science Fiction Voices #2, answers his critics by declaring that he does not care what they think.' 'Every writer in the science fiction world is a different kind of writer.... I'm an idea writer.... The Martian Chronicles is a metaphor for a way of viewing the universe, of viewing our planet and the other planets. It works because it rings a bell of truth."

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Jennifer Hicks is director of the Academic Support and Writing Assessment program at Massachusetts Bay Community College. In the following essay, she discusses the imagery in Bradbury's story. John J. McLaughlin wrote that' 'much of the bulk of [Bradbury's] fiction has been concerned with a single theme—the loss of human values to the machine." Nowhere is this more apparent than in Bradbury's collection of stories The Martian Chronicles. In this collection, as Edward Gallagher has pointed out, Bradbury has ' 'dealt with the initial... attempts to successfully establish a footing on Mars," chronicled "the rise and fall of the Mars colony," and "linger[ed] on the possible regeneration of the human race after the devastating atomic war." Bradbury's story "There Will Come Soft Rains" appears in this last section. Yet, in this particular story there is not one single human character, it takes place in Allendale, California, not on Mars, machines are plentiful, and regeneration seems very close to impossible. The story portrays the life, or inner workings, of a house, standing "alone in a city of rubble and ashes." The inhabitants of the house, "their images burned on wood in one titanic instant," have been eradicated by what one assumes is an atomic blast that makes the "ruined city give off a radioactive glow which could be seen for miles." The impersonal house, equipped with more technological conveniences than one could imagine, continues about its routine, oblivious to the devastation around it. The voice-clock sings, announces time and the daily schedule; the robot mice dart to do their cleaning; the nursery hour and jungle patterns continue as if someone were there to enjoy it. The only live being in the house is the ' 'dog, once huge and fleshy, but now gone to bone and covered with sores," who enters mid-story. Here the reader is struck by Bradbury's ability to place images next to each other that bring us up short. Rather than feeling compassion or sympathy for the animal, the robot mice whir around busily, ' 'angry at having to pick up mud, angry at the inconvenience." We are reminded that the rodent cleaners are mechanical, that feelings—those highly prized human emotions—do not exist in machines.

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Later in the story, as the house burns and "trie[s] to save itself," mechanical rain and "blind robot faces," attempt to quench the fire as they were programmed to do. The flurry of activity and the growing fire create a ' 'scene of manic confusion, yet unity." Each of the technological pieces in the story do their work as people have designed them to do, but all are active at once; even the voice in the library continues to read the poem by Sara Teasdale, the American poet known for her lyrics of love who killed herself in 1933. The attempts of the machines are unsuccessful. The house is reduced to ' 'smoke and silence," similar to the town which surrounds it. Clearly, technology has lost, but so too has humanity. With the exception of one last mechanical voice, both people and machines have met with doom. But, the story closes as "dawn show[s] faintly in the east," leaving the reader with a bare modicum of hope that not all is lost. Sidney Finkelstein wrote that Bradbury should be congratulated for his ability to ' 'show [his] deep honesty [and] courage in making so implicit and unmistakable a criticism of the destructive forces he sees about his own land." Certainly Bradbury has pictured a place so awful, so replete with destruction, that as readers we want no part of it. We can imagine easily that Bradbury is responding not only to his authorial need to show us how similar our decline can be to the decline of Mars after being settled by earthlings, but also to his horror over the atomic bombing in Hiroshima five years before this story was published. A Catholic priest, present when the bomb exploded wrote of the event: ' 'the crux of the matter is whether total war in its present form is justifiable, even when it serves a just purpose. Does it not have material and spiritual evil as its consequences which far exceed whatever good that might result?" One can imagine Bradbury echoing those words as he mourns the loss of human values to the ease that the machines create. Many critics deplore Bradbury's lack of real scientific knowledge, yet they credit him with making science fiction a credible literary form because of his ability to create powerful images. Some of these same critics consider Bradbury's work to be surrealistic, a part of a literary tradition that tries to create new images through a startling juxtaposition of seemingly unrelated images. As an artistic, philosophical, and literary movement begun in the 1920s, surrealism requires that one suspends his or her logical reason in order to see a reality beyond the surface reality. To accomplish this, Bradbury masterfully weaves in imagery, usually in the form of

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What Do I Read Next? "The Veldt," a story included in Bradbury's collection The Illustrated Man, tells of a brother and sister who have the power to go anywhere in the world through their nursery's electronic screen. Like in "Soft Rains," the results of this technology can be deadly. I, Robot (1950) by Isaac Asimov is one of the author's earliest collections of science fiction stories written according to his ' 'Three Laws of Robotics," which state that a robot may not harm humans, must obey orders, and must protect its own existence. "The Fall of the House of Usher" (1839) by Edgar Allan Poe. In this classic horror tale, Roderick Usher insists that his house seeks to destroy him as the hapless narrator witnesses both the house's and Usher's disintegration. On the Beach (1957) by Nevil Shute, a novel in which survivors of a nuclear holocaust await their doom on an Australian beach.

metaphors or similes which compare two unlike things using the words "like" or "as." Critic Sarah-Warner Pell acclaims Bradbury's imagery for two reasons. She says that its success is found in the fact that ' 'the meaning or associative value [of the simile or metaphor] is the same or nearly the same for all of us," and that the images "relate to common experiences of mankind." The images that predominate through ' 'There Will Come Soft Rains'' absolutely qualify for those reasons. If we remember that the 1950s was a time when nuclear war and technological progress were feared and air raid drills prepared school children for the worst, the images Bradbury creates in the story are certainly "tied" images that evoke similar meanings to all of us. To substantiate this we need do no more than look at several of the images in ' 'There Will Come Soft Rains." In fact, when we look at the images he uses, we can also discern a pattern that

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Bradbury's lack of real scientific knowledge, yet they credit him with making science fiction a credible literary form because of his ability to create powerful images,"

indicates his preference for nature and beauty over technology and war. Many of the images in "There Will Come Soft Rains" contain references to nature, but the comparisons are almost always done in a negative way. This is how Bradbury juxtaposes his images to give us a sense of the surreal, to help us see that the superficial reality of technology as beneficial is in fact, something else. The stove that cooks by itself, a miracle we all might want, unfortunately creates "toast that was like stone," quite unlike the delicately browned, crunchy-outside-and-soft-inside toast a person would make for herself. So, too, the compulsive cleaning mice that clean up the dog's mud and carcass ' 'hummed out as softly as blown gray leaves in an electrical wind." Although they do clean and thus save the humans the trouble, they are compared to gray leaves and gray is a color often associated with death. We can see further evidence of Bradbury's concern that technology will displace humanity and beauty when the wall reaches out to the tables and folds them "like great butterflies." Again, although a house that can provide for all the needs of it occupants is a wishful thought, we see that beauty in such an environment is compromised. The fire that' 'feeds upon Picassos and Matisses . . . like delicacies" and the nerves of the house that are ' 'revealed as if a surgeon had torn the skin off to let the red veins and capillaries quiver in the scalded air" do not conjure up pleasant visions. On the contrary, beautiful works of human art are destroyed with apparent pleasure. Even the art of the surgeon is diminished when the Hippocratic oath to prevent and treat disease is ignored. In addition, the gorgeously changing nursery that could provide hours of amusement to the young sounds like na-

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ture, but carries a strong menace with its sounds of a ' 'great matted yellow hive of bees . . . [and] the lazy bumble of a purring lion." Technology and beauty are at war. There are however, images that contain no reference to nature. Yet these are predominately negative also. In these we see machinery being compared to humans whose values have gone awry. We see a house that has an ' 'old-maidenly preoccupation with self-protection which bordered on a mechanical paranoia." Bradbury further paints a picture of the same house and we see i t ' 'as an altar with ten thousand attendants . . . but the gods had gone away, and the ritual of the religion continued senselessly, uselessly." There are even dinner dishes ' 'manipulated like magic tricks." Although magic has the power to enthrall us all, Bradbury startles us by reminding us of the manipulative powers some people hold. "There Will Come Soft Rains" is a simple story. The chronology is clear; the sentences are simple; the ease of reading is hard to surpass. However, the intensity of the images and the repugnance of the setting make Bradbury's message indisputable. As Richard Donovan puts it, "Bradbury's fear is that man's mechanical aptitudes, his incredible ability to pry into the secrets of the physical universe, may be his fatal flaw." Source: Jennifer Hicks, for Short Stories for Students, Gale Research, 1997.

Robert Peltier Robert Peltier is an English instructor at Trinity College and has published works of both fiction and nonfiction. In the following essay, he discusses the subversion of nature in Bradbury's story. Ray Bradbury's "There Will Come Soft Rains" contains echoes of a theme that has reverberated through the literature of the last 175 years, from Mary Shelley's Frankenstein to Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Birthmark to Robert Louis Stevenson's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and, more recently in the myriad novels, stories, and films about various forms of technology that have turned on their masters: Man is not God and only gets into trouble when he tries to play God. Shelley's Dr. Frankenstein creates life itself, but the creature he creates is condemned to a monstrous and soulless existence, finally turning to murder when the good doctor, having seen that he is not an all-knowing God and fearing the (further)

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unanticipated consequences of his actions, declines to create a mate for him. Hawthorne's scientist, Aylmer, believes he must remove a "birthmark" from his beloved's cheek in order to make her perfect. His inability to recognize the conundrum of nature, that what appears to man to be imperfection is actually part of a greater plan unknowable by mere mortals, leads to his beloved's destruction. Dr. Jekyll, in trying to create pure good, does not have the scientific or moral sense to realize that a by-product of that good is necessarily pure evil. He may manipulate good and evil, but he cannot rid the world of it. Ray Bradbury, writing in the middle of the twentieth century, does not suggest that we are going against God's will so much as nature's. We live in a humanist and, at times, cynical era, where belief in an all-powerful and beneficent being is widely considered naive and unsophisticated, but nature is regarded as material and undeniable. It feeds us, gives us air to breathe and water to drink. We repay nature by exploiting it for what are often superficial luxuries. Nature would be, some say, better off without us. Bradbury seems to agree, and he makes evident who would benefit from humankind's continued existence: the false and evil god "Baal" who sits in a ' 'dark corner of the cellar'' as the mechanical and soulless mice make offerings to it of dirt and scraps of decayed dog. This false idol epitomizes the emptiness of the lives of those now gone from this place. Baal, being a false god, is yet another creation of humankind, another mockery of nature's creations. And so are all the other mechanical monsters. They are all flawed creations which cause humankind's destruction, both in a literal sense (the atomic bombs that destroy the world) and in a metaphorical sense (the mechanized home, drained of the natural juices of life). In Bradbury's story, there are no people left, and so we are free to enter this house and look around at what they have left behind, speculate on what kind of life they led, what they considered important. By leaving this story unpopulated, we are invited into the remnants of this world and asked to render judgments on those creators who considered themselves equal to, or perhaps a cut above, the elemental forces of nature. The very fact that there are no people says much about the destructive

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By leaving this story unpopulated, we are invited into the remnants of this world and asked to render judgments on those creators who considered themselves equal to, or perhaps a cut above, the elemental forces of nature."

power of their creations, but those smaller, seemingly innocuous mechanical (and perhaps electronic) creations seem even more monstrous as they mockingly, mindlessly perform their tasks which once provided a life of ease—and false security— to their former masters. Humankind has passed away on this planet, and soon humankind's inventions will also die. Of course, Bradbury is really asking us to make judgments about our own lives and the monsters we create to make our lives easier, to entertain us, and to make us feel safe in a world where we are destroying nature with our greed and arrogance. It is a testament to this story's timelessness that it speaks perhaps even more urgently to us today, as we are more and more distanced from each other and from nature. We have "relationships" in cyberspace but are cut off from real human or natural contact. We live vicarious lives through our television sets— often violent and amoral lives. We fax messages, or send them electronically in a memorandum format, unable even to explore the depth of feeling that letters once conveyed. Technology races ahead, outpacing our ability to understand its implications as we are led into a less human, less humane future. Yet there is a strange kind of optimism here, an optimism that speaks not to us, but to nature itself. It seems to say that our self-destruction is itself natural, that human beings are a small blip on evolution's radar screen. The title of the story, taken from the poem quoted within it, suggests that if humankind were gone, nature would not only endure, but it would also not even notice our disappearance: "Not one would mind, neither bird nor

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tree / If mankind perished utterly; / And Spring herself, when she woke at dawn / Would scarcely know that we were gone." So there is a paradox here: humankind is a part of nature, not its master, and therefore we must not attempt to change nature. Yet we are constructed by nature in such a way that this attempt issues from our very essence. Therefore, our destruction is inevitable and natural. Again, the absence of people in the story leads us to look at the world through nature's eyes, not our own, and to become self-aware and critical of our participation in the world. What kind of world did humanity create while it was extant? Here Bradbury's deft touch is most evident. We can see how this empty world was empty even before the great destruction, with mechanical mice vacuuming and a sing-song clock telling us time (it is worth thinking about time, its fearsome, inevitable pace being announced in fairytale rhyming meter in a vain attempt to trivialize its passage). As we grow further and further away from nature, our lives become more and more shallow. Instead of reading poetry—perhaps our last connection to deeper, philosophical thought—it is read to us by an electronic voice. Instead of going out to play in nature, our children watch it projected upon nursery walls. This dull, mechanical world was empty long before the people were taken from it. But they are gone now as nature, in the form of humankind, has rid itself of humankind. In the end, in a parody of humankind's atomic inferno, the house is consumed by fire, and the machines, madly trying to douse the fire are mere mechanical echoes of those human beings who thought that, not only could they control an ever increasing arsenal of doomsday weapons, but those weapons were a necessary deterrent to their own use. The house tries to give warning as voices wail: ' 'Fire, fire, run, run, like a tragic nursery rhyme, a dozen voices, high, low, like children dying in a forest, alone, alone." These voices are as useless as the human voices might have been before the attack. Their creators, thinking that these mechanical voices would protect them, did not heed the voice of nature nor even the human voices of art and literature that might have brought them more in touch with the natural. The "Picassos and Matisses," consigned to the upper halls (where they were passed by daily, rather than placed in a room where one could sit and contemplate them), did not "humanize" their owners anymore than the mechanical recitation of poetry caused them to consider more than the pretty rhyme and

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meter. If it had, if people had paid attention to such things (like Bradbury's story itself, one would assume), then humankind would not have dissolved in its own nuclear oven, for it is the artist who is closest to nature and, perhaps, to God. Bradbury, in his book Zen and the Art of Writing, asserts ' 'how rare the motion picture, the novel, the poem, the story, the painting, or the play which deals with the greatest problem of our time, man and his fabulous tools, man and his mechanical children, man and his amoral robots which lead him, strangely and inexplicably, into immorality." This story is a partial response to that deficiency. We continue to create without regard to what we are creating, without regard to either moral or practical implications (beyond the basic profit motive). We clone sheep, alter DNA, run genetic tests on fetuses, build weapons of mass destruction, eradicate smallpox from the face of the earth, invent a vaccine for polio, send rockets into space, and on and on and we call it all progress. There should be a philosophical basis for differentiating what can enhance our lives and what can only make them empty and mechanical. That basis may be art. That basis may be stories like this one, but—considering that we have become more, not less, dependent upon mechanical comforts, and we have become less literate and less philosophical—perhaps art is not enough. Source: Robert Peltier, for Short Stories for Students, Gale Research, 1997.

Kent Forrester In the following essay, Forrester discusses The Martian Chronicles, the Ray Bradbury collection which includes the story "There Will Come Soft Rains." He states that Bradbury's fiction is often overwhelmed by the author's exuberant sentimentality. I read my first Ray Bradbury story when I was about ten, and it was love at first sight: prose as rich as the cream filling of the Twinkies I loved, creatures bizarre enough to please a ten year old palate, machinery and rockets abundant enough to satisfy a boy living in those pre-Romantic 1950s. I drifted away from science fiction and Bradbury about fifteen years ago. But I never forgot Bradbury's stories. I remembered the blue triangle baby in "Tomorrow's Child," the writhing pictures on the skin of the Illustrated Man, the Martian's crystal homes in The Martian Chronicles. When my interest in science fiction was reawakened about three

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years ago, I especially relished the thought of rereading Bradbury's stories, whose images had stuck in my memory for over a decade. However, when I reread Bradbury, I found disquieting elements that I hadn't noticed when I was younger. There was, for instance, a shrill devotion to ideas at the expense of his narratives. Few people love their ideas as much as Ray Bradbury loves his. He overstates them in newspaper interviews, he forces them into the mouths of his heroes, who then try to harangue us into right reason, and he sometimes stops his narration to lecture us. I'm reminded of Wells, who eventually became more fond of his role as lecturer-moralist than of his role as a storyteller. Bradbury once estimated that he had turned out almost three million words of fiction before he made his first sale. Those three million words taught Bradbury how to handle prose rhythms and lush description, but they didn't teach him cold-blooded revision. Never has an author asked so much of his readers. Bradbury's nostalgia for a golden age, his hatred of "glitter-eyed psychiatrists, clever sociologists, resentful educationalists, antiseptic parents," and his anti-materialistic biases occasionally seduce him into artistic lapses. Once an advocate of Technocracy, Bradbury has turned on his previous love with a passion. In "—And the Moon Be Still as Bright," for instance, the sensitive Jeff Spender likes wood instead of chemical fires, castigates Americans because they love Chicago plumbing too much, quotes Byron, and knows that "living is life." All well and good. However, when Spender shoots to death six fellow crew members because they are materialistic philistines, Bradbury continues to justify Spender's behavior. "How would you feel," Spender asks rhetorically, "if a Martian vomited stale liquor on the White House floor?" Moreover, Captain Wilder, Bradbury's spokesman for the via media, sides with the mass murderer. Wilder secretly hopes that Spender will escape, he almost shoots Parkhill in the back when that entrepreneur charges after Spender, and he demands of his men that Spender be shot "cleanly." Finally, Wilder gives Spender a hero's funeral when he buries him in a Martian sarcophagus. The last we see of Spender is his "peaceful face." It would seem that readers who are not blinded by Spender's noble sentiments would be fed up with

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him by the time he kills six people. Bradbury asks too much of us when he comes just short of justifying Spender's behavior on the grounds that he doesn't want to see the golden houses and tile floors desecrated. That is, Bradbury put sullied flesh on an idea and then asked us to admire the flesh along with the idea. Bradbury's ideas are so violently drawn in The Martian Chronicles that the stories are weakened unless we are as enthusiastic about his ideas as he is. Bradbury can't resist, for instance, forcing his characters onto soap boxes, where they spend their time lecturing us on Rousseauan primitivism, the pleasures of the imagination, and the crassness of American society. At least a fourth of "—And the Moon Be Still as Bright" consists of Spender's lectures on ecology and aesthetics; and Stendahl in "Usher II" and Dad in the ' 'Million Year Picnic'' are as preachy as Spender. Bradbury lacks either the inclination or the skill to weave these sentiments into his plot. In an article in Extrapolations, Robert Reilly, infatuated by Bradbury's "neo-humanism," suggests that the Martians of The Martian Chronicles are well-defined and consistent when he calls them a "courteous," "reserved" and gentle race. And it is true that in the fourth expedition Wilder calls the Martians a ' 'graceful, beautiful, and philosophical people." Later, in the story "The Off Season," we see the Martians behaving as kindly as Wilder tells us they behave when, after Sam Parkhill murders a few of them, they turn their cheeks and give Sam Parkhill their land. Yet these same Martians, under the exigencies of Bradbury's plots, are quite a different people. When Bradbury needs the first Earth expedition murdered, he uses a Martian, one of those ' 'gentle'' creatures, as the murderer ("Ylla"). Ylla's husband, who lives in that crystal-pillared house built

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by a race that knows how to blend' 'religion, art, and science," becomes a cold-blooded killer when his jealousy is aroused. The second expedition is wiped out by a Martian psychologist who thinks they are Martian madmen, and we find out that there are an incredible number of Martian madmen among a population that is supposed to be so reasonable and philosophical. Finally, the seventeen members of the third expedition are murdered in their beds by these Martians that we are told by Bradbury to admire. Under the influence of Bradbury's plots, the Martians kill. Under the influence of his "neohumanism," we are told that the Martians are cleaner and nicer than we are. Bradbury also occasionally becomes so enamored with his prose that he forgets to ask himself if his descriptions fit his stories. For instance, the conclusion to "The Third Expedition" contains the kind of evocative tableau—with its brass band, coffins, and mourners—that Bradbury is so fond of. However, it is so implausible that it should jar any reader who is not completely caught up in Bradbury's prose. Never have the Martians been pictured as whimsical humorists, yet here they are participating in an American burial after they have killed the American visitors. The "mayor" makes a speech, the "mourners" cry, and the brass band plays ' 'Columbia, the Gem of the Ocean." What are we to think of all this? Until this time, the Martians have shown no sentimental attachment to humans, no traces of whimsy, and no interest in psycho-drama. Yet there they are, still dressed in Earth clothes and Earth faces, forced to act in an implausible scene because the author loves to describe a nostalgic burial and is unable to stop his pen. As an isolated tableau, the burial scene is a masterpiece. It has the power of pleasing our taste for the unexpected and sensational. But the scene doesn't satisfy our need for a well- made plot and internal consistency. That Bradbury is writing fantasy science fiction is no excuse. The world that a fantasy author creates— like the worlds created by medieval theologians— must be internally consistent. But enough of this. Despite their literary "flaws," I remembered Bradbury's stories, when I had forgotten most of the others. So I reexamined his stories in a search for [what] made his stories memorable. My first discovery was that I—perhaps we—can forgive an author his shortcomings if he can make up for them in other ways. Daniel Defoe didn't know when to stop a story, but we easily forgive him. We remember Crusoe's island adventures and forget his boring overland trip back to

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England from Portugal. We can forgive Alexander Pope his personal attacks on his various enemies because of his sustained inventiveness and cleverness. So despite his shortcomings, Bradbury's strengths make his books memorable. Although his prose is occasionally overcooked it is still, in small chunks, superior to any other prose in science fiction. It is prose, like good poetry, that sticks in the mind. Let me point to a single example out of The Martian Chronicles. It's hard to forget those dormant robots waiting in the cellar in ' 'Usher II," because Bradbury's prose rhythms are appropriate to the action and because he is master of the small, sensuous detail that captures our imagination: Full grown without memory, the robots waited. In green silks the color of forest pools, in silks the color of frog and fern, they waited. In yellow hair the color of sun and sand, the robots waited. Oiled, with tube bones cut from bronze and sunk in gelatin, the robots lay. In coffins for the not dead and not alive, in planked boxes, the Metronomes waited to be set in motion. There was a smell of lubrication and lathed brass And now there was a vast screaming of yanked nails. Now there was a lifting of lids.

Bradbury has more to offer than prose: his imagination is inventive and vivid. I don't agree with Danon Knight that Bradbury has a "mediocre' ' imagination. Bradbury does not work like Hal Clement, whose controlled visions construct coherent extraterrestrial environments and then people them with believable and appropriate creatures. Bradbury's mind creates the outlandish (stealing a cup of gold from the sun, blue triangle babies, etc.); and when his prose is working, he carries it off. His visions of the Martians and their environment in The Martian Chronicles may be contradictory, but they are aesthetically pleasing and richly imaginative. Crystal homes, blue-sailed sandships, coffined robots, singing books, rockets that turn the winter landscape into summer—these details go a long way toward compensating for other artistic lapses. Let me list a few images out of Bradbury's stories and see if you don't remember the same ones I remember: the scurrying metal mice in "There Will Come Soft Rains" who are used as miniature vacuum cleaners, and who continue to work feverishly as their house burns down; the mechanical coffin in "Wake for the Living" that embalms the brother and then digs his grave and covers it behind him; the children's nursery in The Veldt, with electronic walls that fill the room with the smells and sounds of African lions; the crushed butterfly on the

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boots of the time traveler in ' 'A Sound of Thunder." And always the running children in tennis shoes, the rockets belching flames, the old-fashioned burials. But most of all, Bradbury deserves our praise for those stories that deal with, in Damon Knight's words, our "fundamental prerational fears and longings and desires." Bradbury knows, as all good writers know, how to touch that residue of ancient images that we carry around with us: lost Edens (which come in the form of small American towns of the 1920s), new green beginnings for the pioneers on Mars, nostalgia for universally lost childhoods, the fear of the wicked that this way comes. Bradbury—thank goodness—never tires of touching these strings. Do these strengths of Bradbury overcome his weaknesses? I think they do. In that one thing that is, to my mind, important to most science fiction—an artist's ability to engage us in that world of oiled robots, strange beings, time paradoxes, other worlds, and bizarre futures—Bradbury is very good. And that's why I remembered Ray Bradbury.

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Bradbury, Ray and Jeffrey M. Elliot.' 'Ray Bradbury: Poet of Fantastic Fiction," in Science Fiction Voices #2, The Borgo Press, 1979, pp. 20-9. Finkelstein, Sidney. "World of Science Fiction," in Masses and Mainstream, Vol 8, April, 1955, pp. 48-57. Gallagher, Edward J. "The Thematic Structure of The Martian Chronicles'," in Ray Bradbury, edited by Martin Harry Greenberg and Joseph D. Olander, Taplinger Publishing Co., 1980, pp. 55-82. McLaughlin, John J. "Science Fiction Theatre," in The Nation, Vol. 200, No. 4, January 25, 1965, pp. 92-4. Pell, Sarah-Warner J. "Style Is the Man: Imagery in Bradbury's Fiction," in Ray Bradbury, edited by Martin Harry Greenberg and Joseph D. Olander, Taplinger Publishing Co., 1980, pp. 186-94. Touponce, William F. "Some Aspects of Surrealism in the Work of Ray Bradbury," in Extrapolation, Vol. 25, No. 3, Fall. 1984, pp. 228-38.B

Further Reading

Source: Kent Forrester, "The Dangers of Being Earnest: Ray Bradbury and The Martian Chronicles,'' in The Journal of General Education, Vol. 28, No. 1, Spring, 1976, pp. 50-54.

Everman, Welch D. "August 2026: There Will Come Soft Rains," in Reference Guide to Short Fiction, edited by Noelle Watson, St. James Press, 1990, pp. 627-28. A literary analysis of the story.

Sources

Magill, Frank N. "Ray Bradbury," in Critical Survey of Short Fiction, Salem Press, Vol. 1, 1988, pp. 209-309. Multi-volume reference that contains biographical information as well as general literary analysis. "There Will Come Soft Rains" is not covered specifically, but the influence of Bradbury's past on his view of the future is explored.

Bradbury, Ray. ZenandtheArtofWriting, CapraPress, 1973.

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Through the Tunnel Doris Lessing

1955

"Through the Tunnel" was first published in the New Yorker on August 6, 1955, and two years later it was reprinted in Doris Lessing's collection of short stories, The Habit of Loving. The story's eleven-year-old protagonist, Jerry, is caught in the difficult position of being neither a child nor an adult. On a winter holiday with his mother in a foreign country, he encounters some older boys swimming. When they disappear by swimming through a tiny underwater passageway to the other side of a large rock in the ocean, he feels left out and rejected. Jerry makes it his goal to find the passageway and swim through it, even though it means staying underwater so long that he could drown. By achieving this goal, he attains a form of independence from his mother. "Through the Tunnel" is unlike most of Lessing's fiction. Though some of her early stories concern the trials and tribulations of growing up, most of Lessing's works, like The Golden Notebook, concern the confusing and often contradictory roles of women in society. However, the story does illustrate one of Lessing's most common themes: an individual confronting preconceived assumptions about life in an attempt to achieve wholeness.

Author Biography Doris Lessing was born October 22, 1919, in the country of Persia, which is now Iran. Her parents

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were English, and while Lessing was still young, they moved to Rhodesia, a region of South Africa which was then ruled by the British and has since been divided into the countries of Zimbabwe and Zambia. Her parents' attempts at establishing a farm there were not successful and the family struggled with poverty for many years. Lessing was schooled in a Roman Catholic convent but quit at age 14 due to recurring eye problems. At the age of 20, Lessing married a civil servant, Frank Wisdom, with whom she had two children. In 1943 the couple divorced and two years later she married Gottfried Lessing, a German Marxist activist. Their son Peter was born in 1947. Much of Lessing's early fiction takes place in Rhodesia, even though she did not begin writing until moving to London, England, in 1949, following the end of her second marriage. Struck by the racial injustice she witnessed in Africa, many of her early books, including The Grass Is Singing and African Stories concern apartheid, Africa's legalized practice of racial discrimination. Her strong belief in human rights led her to join the Communist Party in the 1940s, though she later repudiated the Party's beliefs. Gradually, her fiction came to focus more on the emancipation of modern women, and her most well-known characters are portraits of women who seek liberation from confining societal expectations. Though known primarily for her novels, Lessing has been one of the century's top practitioners of the short story form, publishing such acclaimed collections as The Habit of Loving and Collected Stories I: To Room Nineteen. Her most famous work is the novel The Golden Notebook. The book is an experimental novel which can be read on many levels. The protagonist, Anna Freeman Wulf, attempts to integrate the experiences of her life, and thus herself, through four notebooks, which are juxtaposed with the novel that Wulf is writing. Many critics have written about this complex novel, and it is widely regarded as Lessing's masterpiece. In 1954 it won the Somerset Maugham Award, and the French translation was awarded the Prix Medicis Award in 1976. Toward the late 1970s, Lessing became disenchanted with her realist works, even though she was considered by many critics to be one of the English language's most talented practitioners of realist fiction writing. She began writing a ' 'space fiction'' series called Canopus in Argos: Archives. The series concerns three different races of people who

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have found a way to produce immortal beings. Many critics have noted that Lessing's science fiction evokes the overall feeling of a world on the edge of an apocalypse. More recently, Lessing has published an autobiography, Under My Skin: Volume One of My Autobiography, to 1949, which was awarded the James Tait Black Memorial Book Prize for Biography and the Los Angeles Times Book Award for Biography. Through her long and varied career, Lessing has cultivated a reputation as being one of literature's foremost voices on feminism, racism, and other social issues.

Plot Summary In Lessing's "Through the Tunnel," Jerry, a young English boy, and his mother are vacationing at a beach they have come to many times in years past. Though the beach's location is not given, it is implied to be in a country that is foreign to them both. Each tries to please the other and not to impose too many demands. The mother, who is a widow, is ' 'determined to be neither possessive nor lacking in devotion," and Jerry, in turn, acts from an "unfailing impulse of contrition—a sort of chivalry." On the second morning, however, Jerry lets it slip that he would like to explore a ' 'wild and rocky bay" he has glimpsed from the path. His conscientious mother sends him on his way with what she hopes is a casual air, and Jerry leaves behind the crowded ' 'safe beach'' where he has always played. A strong swimmer, Jerry plunges in and goes so far out that he can see his mother only as a small yellow speck back on the other beach. Looking back to shore, Jerry sees some boys strip off their clothes and go running down to the rocks, and he swims over toward them but keeps his distance. The boys are "of that coast; all of them were burned smooth dark brown and speaking a language he did not understand. To be with them, of them was a craving that filled his whole body." He watches the boys, who are older and bigger than he is, until finally one waves at him and Jerry swims eagerly over. As soon as they realize he is a foreigner, though, they forget about him, but he is happy just to be among them. Jerry joins them in diving off a high point into the water for a while, and then the biggest boy dives in and does not come up. ' 'One moment, the morn-

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through, until finally "he shot his feet out forward and they met no obstacle." Jerry is determined to be able to swim through the tunnel, and begins immediately a practice of learning to control his breathing. He lies "effortlessly on the bottom of the sea'' with a big rock in his arms and counts. That night his nose begins bleeding badly, and he spends the next two days exercising his lungs "as if everything, the whole of his life, all that he would become, depended upon it." When his nose bleeds again, his mother insists that he rest with her on the beach. He does so for a day, but then the next morning he goes off to the bay by himself without asking, "before his mother could consider the complicated rights and wrongs of the matter." He again practices holding his breath under water, and he experiences a "curious, most unchildlike persistence'' while studying the tunnel.

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ing seemed full of chattering boys; the next, the air and the surface of the water were empty. But through the heavy blue, dark shapes could be seen moving and groping." Jerry dives down, too, and sees a ' 'black wall of rock looming at him." When the boys come up one by one on the other side of the rock, he ' 'understood that they had swum through some gap or hole in it.... [But] he could see nothing through the stinging salt water but the blank rock." Jerry feels failure and shame, yelling at them first in English and then in nonsensical French, the ' 'pleading grin on his face like a scar that he could never remove." The boys dive into the water all around him, and he panics when none surface. Only when his count reaches 160 do the boys surface on the other side of the rock, and as soon as they come up, they leave. Believing they are leaving to get away from him, he "cries himself out." When Jerry sees his mother that afternoon at the villa, he demands that she buy him goggles immediately. With the goggles he can suddenly see, as if he had ' 'fish eyes that showed everything clear and delicate and wavering in the bright water." He descends again and again desperately trying to find the opening in the rock that the older boys had swum

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When his mother announces they are to leave in four days, Jerry vows to succeed in his quest even if it kills him. His nose bleeds so badly he becomes dizzy, and he worries that the same might happen in the tunnel, that he really might die there, trapped. He resolves to wait until the following summer, when he will be bigger and stronger, but then an impulse overtakes him and he feels that he must make his attempt immediately—now or never.' 'He was trembling with fear that he would not go; and he was trembling with horror at the long, long tunnel under the rock, under the sea." Once inside the tunnel he begins counting, swimming cautiously, feeling both victory and panic. "He must go on into the blackness ahead, or he would drown. His head was swelling, his lungs cracking.... He was no longer quite conscious." Even when he surfaces, he fears "he would sink now and drown; he could not swim the few feet back to the rock." When he finally pulls himself onto the rock and tears off his goggles, they are filled with blood. He rests and then sees the local boys diving half a mile away, but he is no longer interested in them. He wants "nothing but to get back home and lie down." His mother is concerned at his "strained" appearance when he returns to the villa, but consoles herself remembering that "he can swim like a fish." He blurts out that he can stay under water for "two minutes—three minutes, at least," and she replies in her usual moderate way, cautioning him that he "shouldn't overdo it." Jerry has succeeded

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in his quest—it is "no longer of the least importance to go to the bay."

Characters Jerry Jerry is an eleven-year old English boy on vacation with his mother on a beach they have frequented in the past. Jerry's mother is a widow and is sometimes overprotective, sometimes not protective enough, of her son. Jerry attempts to make friends with some older boys on the beach, but they ignore him after discovering he is childish. Jerry is jealous of the older boys—he watches them as they swim through a rock in which there is a narrow underwater gap. In an attempt to become equal to them, he begins to persistently practice holding his breath so that he too may swim through the rock. He is determined to be able to hold his breath for a sufficient time so he can accomplish this feat. For Jerry, without a father and rapidly approaching adulthood, this challenge represents his coming of age, and with his success also comes independence from his often overprotective mother.

Mother The mother is an anxious widow who takes her son, Jerry, on vacation. Her pale arms indicate that she is unused to outdoor activity, and she seems uncomfortable throughout the entire story. She worries about being too possessive, or not protective enough. She buys her son goggles and lets him play where he wants, until he comes back with a bleeding nose or pale from swimming underwater and she forces him to stay with her on the ' 'safe beach'' for a day. Jerry leaves the next day and risks his life while the mother rests on the tourists' portion of the shore. She and Jerry are alternately distant and extremely close, and the tension between her authority and her son's freedom cuts through the entire story. She is a widow and must take care of her son by herself. Her anxieties over Jerry's freedom and protection may indicate the difficulties inherent in raising her son without a father figure.

Themes In Lessing's story, the eleven year-old Jerry braves an underwater tunnel while he and his mother are on vacation. The tunnel evolves, into an enormous

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Topics for Further Study Why does Jerry not tell his mother the reason why he wants water goggles? How does his silence on this matter contrast with his interactions with his mother at the beginning of the story? Do you think that Jerry's determination in achieving his goal is healthy? Why or why not? By the end of the story, how has Jerry changed? How does Lessing describe the boy's behavior in the beginning of the story in comparison to his behavior at the end?

challenge for Jerry, as he deals with his loneliness and his attempts at separating from his mother.

Rites of Passage Jerry's beach vacation becomes the site of an intense personal challenge. Jerry must leave his mother at the shore, the shore Jerry sees as ' 'a place for small children, a place where his mother might lie safe in the sun." He leaves the safety of this nursery-like beach and journeys to the treacherous "wild and rocky" bay and the underwater tunnel. An eleven year-old nearing puberty, Jerry is fatherless and approaching adulthood as the sole male of the family. Throughout the story, the interchanges between him and his mother heighten the tension of the story, but Jerry, except for the one day on the safe beach, independently controls most of the action. Like most traditional rites of passage into adulthood, Jerry must venture into the wild, braving the elements and dangers of the world by himself. When he successfully completes his swim, he returns to his mother and proudly declares that he ' 'can stay underwater for two minutes—three minutes at least." This statement belies the danger he has faced and insures the secrecy of his personal rite.

Individualism Jerry's ability to hold his breath may also be understood as a symbolic assertion of his indepen-

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dence. Jerry trains until he does not require air for minutes at a time. Breaking away from his mother allows Jerry to explore and challenge himself. He learns to swim through the dangerous tunnel by himself, without any assistance from the local boys, which establishes his independence. The young boy, who at first whines for attention later hides his bloody nose from his mother so that only he will know how dangerous his play has been. Jerry establishes his maturity through his diligence, daring, and patience and expresses it in a conventional masculine form: through physical challenge.

Alienation and Loneliness This tension between independence and dependence parallels the stress of alienation and loneliness in the story. At first, Jerry is so desperately lonely that his desire to play with the local boys is a "craving that fill[s] his whole body." Although they beckon him closer, he is separated by language, age, and nationality. The boys eventually shun him in light of his immature antics. Jerry seems desperate for attention, yet he leaves the beach where his mother and the other tourists can be found. His loneliness is partially self-imposed. Throughout the story Jerry disdains his mother and yearns for male companionship, suggesting that he may be searching for a father figure to compensate for his deceased father's absence. Jerry fights against his loneliness, the loneliness that brings him to the tunnel, but he also embraces it by swimming to the loneliest place imaginable—the dark tunnel— by himself.

Style Point of View "Through the Tunnel" is written in thirdperson limited point of view. The narrator describes the feelings of both Jerry and his mother but does not penetrate the thoughts of the local boys. This separation associates the reader more closely with the white tourists who are unfamiliar with the area. By telling the story from the perspective of the English tourists, Lessing heightens the sense of distance between the main characters and the locals Jerry encounters. It also allows the reader to associate more closely with Jerry as he braves the frightening tunnel.

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Setting Lessing's depiction of the setting is characterized by a few vivid concrete details and many evocative emotional descriptions. At first, she describes the bay as "wild and rocky," then as "wild" and "wild-looking" in contrast to the "safe beach." The bay's wildness explains both the mother's concern and the boy's excitement. Later, as Jerry nears the bay, the reader is introduced to the bay as Jerry views it. Introducing the setting through Jerry's perspective primes the reader for the intense swim through the tunnel.

Imagery In "Through the Tunnel" there is a dynamic tension between the domestic and the wild; between risk and safety. This tension emerges in the first paragraph of the story, when the "wild and rocky bay" is contrasted with the "safe beach." Repeatedly this difference is stressed, as Jerry leaves the safety of his mother's beach bags and pale skin for jagged rocks. Jerry himself is an intermediate figure between wildness and safety. He risks his life, but does so while wearing swimming goggles, which are symbolic of both his inexperience and his need for protection.

Historical Context "Through the Tunnel" was first published by the New Yorker magazine in 1955. Lessing had moved from British-controlled Rhodesia in South Africa in 1949. Six years later, little had changed. Apartheid, a legal system of racial segregation structured every aspect of life for both black and white people there, and racism exploded violently in the United States, Europe and many other parts of the globe. White tourists like those in the story were able to afford vacations, while the native black population of many countries, victims of racist economic exploitation, could generally never afford to take such vacations. In the context of this racist structure, the interaction between Jerry and the ' 'smooth dark brown'' boys takes on greater significance. Jerry is bested by ' 'natives,'' an event that contradicts the entire structure of colonial racist supremacy. The British and French, among other nations, justified their colonization of Africa and other nations with a wide variety of scientific and social science that supposedly proved the inferiority of people with darker

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Compare & Contrast 1949: In the aftermath of World War II, millions of young wives worldwide are widowed. Many raise their children alone. Today: Out-of-wedlock births in the United States rise to 31 percent in 1994. Many of these children will be raised without a father figure present. 1950s: Coming-of-age novels, also known as bildungsromans are popular. One of the most popular is J. D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye. Today: Coming-of-age novels are less popular

with young readers than paperback series that emphasize the adventures of adolescents, like R. L. Stine's Goosebumps series. 1948: The National Party in South Africa institutes apartheid—an often violent policy of segregation and political and economic discrimination. Today: Apartheid ends in 1994. Nelson Mandela, after being released from his 27-year imprisonment, is elected president of South Africa in the first elections open to all citizens of the country.

skin. For decades, European and American scientists and anthropologists had been travelling into Africa to study "primitive man." African societies were not respected as contemporary, viable ways of life, but as throwbacks to an earlier time. All of these assumptions were part of a worldview that allowed white colonists to justify their brutality and economic exploitation of black nations.

her son is thus fraught with undercurrents of anxiety that reach far beyond the details of the story.

In 1957, the single mother was a suspicious figure in the United States, as well as in Europe. Authors like Phillip Wylie, who wrote Generation of Vipers, and organizations like the Boy Scouts warned against the feminization of men. Such people believed that domineering, obsessive mothers were destroying men's virility and independence. In movies like The Manchurian Candidate, powerful mothers were portrayed as demonic communists bent on ruining the world. Because mothers were obsessive in protecting their children, these critics argued, men were being emasculated. Groups like the Boy Scouts and summer wilderness camps boomed as parents sought to "toughen up" their children. Many social scientists argued that boys required a strong father to grow up healthy. Thus, when Jerry's mother, "a widow," worries about being ' 'neither possessive nor lacking in devotion,'' she is confronting a dilemma that many women faced at this time. The widow's relationship with

Lessing published "Through the Tunnel" in her 1957 collection, The Habit of Loving. The collection received praise for both its political commitment and its often brutal honesty. Lessing has frequently been lauded for her feminist sensibility and political approach to subjects like apartheid, but she has consistently denied that she is a political or feminist writer. Resistant to categorization, she finds such labels limiting and has actively sought to diversify her identity as a writer, experimenting and expanding into other genres like science fiction and Jung-inspired "inner space fiction." Nobel Prize-winning author Nadine Gordimer has praised Lessing's experimentation with form and plotlessness. Lessing's career has also been distinguished by her lifetime commitment to the short story. Whereas many successful writers turn solely to the more lucrative and more commonly respected form of the novel, Lessing has consistently excelled at both novels and short stories. Critics have often

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Critical Overview

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commented on the symbiotic relationship between her short stories and her novels. "Through the Tunnel" has generally been identified as one of Lessing's African stories, and one of several she has written that allude to the racial tensions underlying tourism. The story has often been noted in relation to Lessing's many stories on female rites of passage into womanhood. While many of Lessing's stories and novels depict women entering adulthood, her concentration on young Jerry's rite of passage in "Through the Tunnel" is atypical and an interesting contrast to her female characters who seem to have a much more complicated induction into adulthood. Writer Joan Didion, in The White Album, writes that Lessing "registers], in a torrent of fiction that increasingly seems conceived in a stubborn rage against the very idea of fiction, every tremor along her emotional fault system." Such intense impressions and praise of Lessing's work are not uncommon. To many, her honesty strains to transcend artifice,' 'the very idea of fiction.'' Many appreciate her ability to convey raw, vivid emotions and truths through the most carefully crafted prose. While Lessing's writings during the 1970s and 1980s received sometimes mixed reviews, earlier pieces like "Through the Tunnel" continue to be enjoyed and respected by critics and popular audiences alike.

Criticism Judy Sobeloff Sobeloff is a lecturer and instructor at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. In the following essay, she discusses how ' 'Through the Tunnel"fits in with Lessing's other works, particularly her African stories. Doris Lessing is known for being a writer whose work affects people. She tackles political issues but refuses to limit herself to being a political writer, and is equally acclaimed for her essays, fiction, and even science fiction dealing with interests ranging from nature to the status of women. ' "Through the Tunnel," which is ultimately a story about a boy growing up, seems at first glance to stand apart from her usual concerns. Lessing was born in what is now Iran in 1919 to a German father and British mother, and then moved with her family to Southern Rhodesia (now

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Zimbabwe) in 1924. She embraced Communism and immigrated to England in 1949. Then she returned to Africa in 1956, but was labelled a "prohibited immigrant" because of her political views, and returned to England shortly thereafter. She then quit the Communist Party in protest of Stalin's atrocities. Just as Lessing has divided her time between living in England and Africa, her stories have been classified as either "British" or "African," the latter having been published together in a volume called African Stories. "Through the Tunnel" appeared in Lessing's collection The Habit of Loving, which was published in 1957, shortly after her return to England. "Through the Tunnel," which presumably takes place in the south of France, is one of her British stories, though Lessing never overtly identifies its location and it has many of the characteristics of her African stories. In her preface to African Stories, Lessing writes of the need for African writers to be able to write non-politically.' 'Writers brought up in Africa have many advantages—being at the centre of a modern battlefield; part of a society in rapid, dramatic change. But in a long run it can also be a handicap: to wake up every morning with one's eyes on a fresh evidence of inhumanity; to be reminded twenty times a day of injustice, and always the same brand of it, can be limiting. There are other things in living besides injustice, even for the victims of it." In "Through the Tunnel," as in other of her British stories, Lessing allows herself to look away from the turmoil of South Africa. As Lessing says later in the same preface,' 'Africa gives you the knowledge that man is a small creature, among other creatures, in a large landscape," and it is this aspect of the African experience that Lessing seems to focus on in "Through the Tunnel," as Jerry, the boy, struggles for survival in an indifferent sea. Lessing "lays bare the really important problems that face us today: survival, and beyond that, the potential of the human spirit," according to critic Mary Ann Singleton. Certainly this applies to Jerry, who strives to fulfill his human potential and ends up fighting for his life in the tunnel. Jerry's struggle is that of an individual trying to find his place in the world, and is thus about survival and the human spirit in an emotional, personal sense rather than in the larger sense of human extinction. He wants to be accepted by older boys and to leave behind the safe beach of his childhood where his mother watched over him. Jerry wants this so badly

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What Do I Read Next? "The Rocking-Horse Winner" (1933), by D. H. Lawrence. In an effort to gain his mother's love, a young boy rides his rocking horse into delirium attempting to divine the winners of horse races. Reef (1994) a novel by Romesh Gunesekera. An orphaned boy becomes a cook for a wealthy single man on the island of Sri Lanka and takes solace in the discipline of housework. The rising political unrest of the country coincides with the boy's coming of age, and he is ultimately forced to flee his native land for England.

that ultimately he is willing to risk his life to demonstrate that he is ready. The personal aspect of a story can be as important as the political, and for that reason ' Through the Tunnel'' has been included in anthologies such as Great Stories from the World of Sports and Breath of Danger: Fifty Tales of Peril and Fear by Masters of the Short Story. South African writer Nadine Gordimer also sees the human potential theme in ' 'Through the Tunnel," but with a slightly different emphasis. In her review of The Habit Of Loving, Gordimer highlights ' 'the habit of loving and needing love, of seeking acceptance through achievement, like the boy in 'Through the Tunnel.'" Gordimer would disagree with critic Clare Hanson, who, apparently viewing Lessing primarily as a political writer, says in her essay ' 'Doris Lessing in Pursuit of English, or, No Small. Personal Voice," that "critics agree we read [Lessing] for content not style." Gordimer sees "Through the Tunnel" as a story "of great beauty and the style that comes of itself from a synthesis of theme and the background in terms of which it is worked out." According to critic Mona Knapp in her book Doris Lessing, nearly all the British stories focus on "a modern European individual. These protagonists are steeped in civilization and culture, thus in radically different circumstances from their solitary African counterparts, but they share with them the

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"Flavours of Exile," another of Lessing's stories written in the 1950s, in which a young girl seeks to belong to her adopted African homeland while her mother longs for the familiarity of her English past.

"A Worn Path" by Eudora Welty (1941). An elderly African-American woman perseveres on a long trek into town, encountering many obstacles in order to obtain medication for her grandson.

fight against existential, if not demographic, isolation. . . . Each protagonist comes into conflict with a given collective force, and wrests from the ensuing battle her or his identity and self-definition." Young Jerry can be viewed as a ' 'modern European individual, wresting his self-definition from his battle with the tunnel." He is not of this place. Unlike the French boys, he is not adapted to the sea and must buy goggles before he is able to see underwater. Moreover, he ends up altering the environment in order to make it through the tunnel: the white sand under the water is "littered now by stones he had brought down from the upper air.'' As soon as he achieves his goal he wants "nothing but to get back home and lie down." On the other hand, Jerry's actions fit in with the characteristics of the African stories as well. According to Knapp, what is common to all 30 African stories is the theme of the "individual's collision with an oppressive environment. While the young may emerge temporarily unscathed from this skirmish, the adults, whose strength is already eroded by poverty and hardship, are nearly always doomed." While Jerry's "collision" with the ocean is voluntary, the aquatic environment can still be viewed as "oppressive" to the extent that Jerry's determination to conquer it puts him at risk of dying and determines the course of his activities throughout his stay, bloody noses and all. Not only that, but it

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Jerry's struggle is that of an individual trying to find his place in the world, and is thus about survival and the human spirit in an emotional, personal sense rather than in the larger sense of human extinction."

also distances him from his widowed mother who tries not to interfere with his life. Likewise, as a widow, her strength can be seen as having been somewhat' 'eroded by hardship." It is interesting to note that Jerry swims out twice to check that she is safely on the beach, while she never checks on him; maybe she knows that he must go off and face certain challenges and that he is doing so on her behalf, too. Most of the African stories focus on the lives of the white settlers with the natives in the background. Knapp notes that many of these stories are told from the point of view of a white child,' 'who is at one with the teeming veld and nature itself. The child's eyes focus on three major subject groups: the color bar and native custom, the social hierarchy among the settlers, and, most important, the basic workings of life and death within unadulterated nature." While there is no overt "color bar" guiding the interactions between Jerry and the older boys as he watches them diving, he is a paleskinned intruder, intent upon observing "native custom," while they are "of that coast... burned smooth dark brown and speaking a language he did not understand." Similarly, the wild sea teeming with fish can be viewed as analogous to the African veld; Jerry is not quite one with it—hence the fierceness of his struggles—but that is what he is striving to become. That he loses interest as soon as he achieves his aim demonstrates that he is more a child of the city than of nature. One story included in African Stories that is an example of a white child at one with the veld and which has many striking parallels to ' "Through the Tunnel" is "A Sunrise on the Veld." The boys in

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the two stories seem to be so similar that the country each story is set in seems to be the primary difference between them. The boy in "A Sunrise on the Veld," a white settler, pushes himself physically and mentally as Jerry does, training himself to wake at half-past-four every morning, delighting in controlling his brain and ' 'every part'' of himself. ' 'He had once stayed awake three nights running, to prove that he could, and then worked all day, refusing even to admit that he was tired." Upon waking, he walks outside with his shoes in his hands to avoid waking his parents, pushing past pain as Jerry does in order to achieve his freedom: "his hands were numbed . . . and his legs began to ache with cold." This boy wakes to go hunting out on the veld; he feels there is "nothing he couldn't do, nothing!" Like Jerry this boy confronts the possibility of death, and gains the ' 'knowledge of fatality, of what has to be." He comes upon an injured buck; seeing its carcass devoured by black ants, he realizes that he may, on any given morning, have caused similar anguish to an animal that he has shot and not followed. Jerry inflicts no cruelty, but he does worry his mother and risk his life needlessly. Singleton writes of Lessing's protagonists who encounter the veld that they are not' 'separated from creation as a whole but [take] part in the cyclical repetition of life and death.... If the result is the loss of Eden, it is the gain of full humanity with consciousness, and its corollary, responsibility. It is Milton's Adam and Eve leaving the Garden." Both Jerry and the boy in "A Sunrise on the Veld" gain maturity from their encounters with mortality, and this helps explain why afterwards Jerry is entirely ready to leave. Source: Judy Sobeloff, for Short Stories for Students, Gale Research, 1997.

Karen Holleran Holleran is an adjunct instructor at Robert Morris College and a frequent writer on literary subjects. In the following essay, she discusses the major themes o f ' 'Through the Tunnel.'' Doris Lessing's-"Through the Tunnel" examines the experience of "rite d'passage" for Jerry, a young English boy. This story tells of a young man's determination to prove to himself that he can do the impossible, which is to swim down where the older boys swim and emerge a man, so to speak. Parallel to this, Lessing also explores the total isolation that the reader and Jerry experiences, as he struggles to find his own identity.

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The reader learns the protagonist is Jerry, an 11-year old, only child, with a widowed mother. Initially, he feels unsure and isolated and he becomes even more so with the emergence of the group of boys, who frequent the beach. Not only do they make him feel unwelcome at first, but they already have a clique formed and are not very enthusiastic about welcoming another member. Despite his feelings of isolation and the feeling that he is being judged, he wants more than anything to be a part of the group: ' To be with them, of them, was a craving that filled his whole body." According to Jerry, even the slightest acceptance would satisfy his craving for camaraderie. When they see him and identify Jerry as a stranger, they ' 'proceed to forget him." Despite the boys' aloofness towards Jerry, "he was happy" because "he was with them." Jerry realizes that this whole "friendship" will be short-lived, but for the present he has friends and an identity as a part of a group. As the boys begin to dive, Jerry decides to join in. Each time he dives, he feels ' 'proud of himself.'' However, when the diving becomes quite challenging, Jerry is not sure what to do, so he does what every normal 11-year old kid would do—he begins to make faces and show off with the hopes of winning their approval again. This is the act of a scared child who feels that if he can get them to laugh, they will forget all about his failed attempts at the "diving game." As he begins to make faces and clown around, he is met not with the boys' approval, but with their disapproval. They are not laughing; instead, they begin to swim and ignore him. Again, we see a situation where Jerry seems totally isolated. It also shows that despite the number of people around him, he is still alone. It appears that the only time Jerry is sure of himself is when his mother is around. Even then, he appears to tolerate and get around her eccentric and nurturing ways. He says that the way to deal with his mother is through "contrition." Despite his toleration of her, he still relies on her though she tries not make him feel like a "mama's boy." As often as he tries to avoid her, she is still his safety zone as he looks to her for silent strength on the beach. This is where we see Jerry, the boy. Here is a young boy, who appears to want to have friends so badly that he is willing to act childish with the hopes of gaining their acceptance. It seems that he truly wants to fit in; he just does not know how. They are the "older" boys and one can surmise these are truly teenagers.

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Jerry finally achieves his goal, there is no fanfare, no applause, just a quiet celebration within himself knowing that he succeeded."

That these teenagers do not accept him forces Jerry into a ritualistic pattern to gain not only confidence in himself, but discipline and maturity as well. Usually, when a child takes an interest or strives for some sort of transformation, be it spiritual or physical, most likely that child will have the support of a parent, relative or friend to ease some of the confusion, answer questions, or just listen to their concerns. For Jerry, there is no one. He does discover that no matter how badly he wants to ' 'fit in," in the end, it is up to him. He must find a way to transform into an adult by himself. This moment occurs when Jerry is sitting on a rock and the boys are swimming around him and scaring him by "flying down past him." As he counts how long they are under the water, he becomes more and more scared until they surface and walk right past him. He concurs, "They were leaving to get away from him. He cried openly, fists in his eyes. There was no one to see him, and he cried himself out." Finally, he decides to go find his mother. He is still aware of his mother's presence. As he feels her presence, he begins practicing the dive the older boys did, and his determination is greater than ever. The only problem is that he is going from child to adult to child again. He is as determined as an adult, but going about his transformation as a child. When he finally dives down far enough, the salt overpowers his eyes, so he surfaces and goes to find his mother. Jerry is now approaching a very great transformation. We also see that the mother is completely blind to her son's struggles and transformation. As Lessing writes, [the mother] ' 'was determined to be neither possessive nor lacking in devotion." She has a very realistic and stoic attitude toward her only child; however, we find she is in a situation where there appears not to be any males present in either the

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mother's life or the son's life, where a strong role model should be present. For him, he journeys through life alone, just as his rite d'passage is experienced—alone. His acceptance into adulthood is a painful, but meaningful experience, as he never does gain acceptance with the older boys. However, it never does matter once his mission is finished, because their existence becomes inconsequential. He finally knows what it is like to be a man. Once he purchases the goggles, he assumes a whole new identity,' 'Now he could see." As Jerry realizes,' 'It was as if he had eyes of a different kind —fish eyes that showed everything clear and delicate and wavering in the bright water." Even his swim takes on symbolic meaning. He swims past the "myriads of minute fish" and sees where he needs to go in order to accomplish his mission. This goal is not going to be an easy one. He first has to get ready to attempt this feat; he cannot just swim through the gap like a child. He has to learn control. The reader begins to see a very different Jerry emerge. A child would jump in and go through the tunnel blindly; however, once he obtains the goggles and sees things in a different light and studies where he is headed, he begins to develop into a mature teenager. One thing he does is gain control. He "exercised his lungs as if everything, the whole of his life, all that he would become depended on it," knowing that without this control, he would be dealing with a futile attempt at developing an identity. The only problem with this whole mission is that it appears to be self-imposed with pain. He deals with nosebleeds, exhaustion, and dizziness. All to prove to himself that he can do something the older boys can already do. His goal has to wait until he can gain control over his own lungs and body. Children usually show little or no patience in waiting for something they really want. Here, Jerry develops ' 'A curious, most unchildlike persistence, a controlled impatience." This is where the transformation is taking effect. He practices without any type of support from anyone; this is something he finds he must do on his own. As he attempts to dive through the tunnel, he realizes that he is still scared, but he also realizes ' 'this was the moment when he would try." For Jerry, his goggles seem to present him with a kind of hidden strength and new insight into maturity. As he proceeds with the challenge to himself, he emerges victorious and understands, ' 'He was at the end of what he could do." The only thing left was to go

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back home and rejoice in the fact that he achieved something he never thought he could do, despite all odds. When Jerry tells his mother what he has done that morning, he does not explain all the details, but tells her only of his achievement of holding his breath under water. She appears to humor him and the mother-mode switches on as she cautions him on "overdoing it." As an adult now, Jerry has not only learned how to hold his breath, but also how to hold his temper and how to understand what is truly important, as opposed to what is truly nothing more than a mother's reaction. When Jerry finally achieves his goal, there is no fanfare, no applause, just a quiet celebration within himself knowing that he succeeded. Source: Karen Holleran, "Through the Tunnel: The Search for Identity and Acceptance,'' for Short Stories for Students, Gale Research, 1997.

Clare Hanson Though the following essay does not discuss "Through the Tunnel" explicitly, Hanson does discuss Lessing's approach to short fiction, which she characterizes as the ' 'free story,'' in which the narrative is not especially driven by plot or guided to a conclusion by the author. These stylistic aspects are both present in "Through the Tunnel." Lessing's short fiction falls into the general category of the "free story," a term coined by Elizabeth Bowen to describe the kind of fiction that she and writers such as V. S. Pritchett were writing in the years immediately following the modernist period. The free story has been the dominant type of short story or fiction produced in this country over the last fifty years and has been much favoured by novelists who have also been attracted to the short form. The freedom of the free story consists primarily in its potential for plotlessness, or narrative inconclusiveness. Elizabeth Bowen has made the point that the short story, "free from the longueurs of the novel is also exempt from the novel's conclusiveness—too often forced and false." Nadine Gordimer has also written persuasively of her short fiction, stressing the way in which the "new" convention of plotlessness (for it is of course a convention) implies a particular epistemological stance on the part of the author: the form reflects and imposes limits on the quality and quantity of knowledge available to him or her: Each of us has a thousand lives and a novel gives a character only one. For the sake of the form. The

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novelist may juggle about with chronology and throw narrative overboard; all the time his characters have the reader by the hand, there is a consistency of relationship throughout the experience that cannot and does not convey the quality of human life, where contact is more like the flash of fire-flies, in and out, now here, now there, in darkness. Short story writers see by the light of the flash; theirs is the art of the only thing one can be sure of—the present moment. Ideally, they have learned to do without explanation of what went before, and what happens beyond this point.

The form of the free story thus offers a freedom which may or may not eventually act as a constraint. It is a form sharply marked off from the traditional short story—the "plotty story"—on the one hand, and the more radical modernist and postmodernist short fiction on the other. The free story, for example, retains a concept of character in some respects like the one that obtains in the realistic novel: character is seen as relatively consistent through time, which is not the case in modernist short fiction. The free story is also unlike modernist and postmodernist fiction in being much involved with the contingent and specific: it tends to be marked and stamped by a particular climate and atmosphere. Like the novel in England over the period 1930 to 1960, the free story has been much occupied with social change and has been responsive to social settings and pressures. This characteristic may be ascribed in part to the impact of the Second World War, which affected civilian life in ways in which the First World War did not. Doris Lessing left Rhodesia in 1949, and most of her English short fictions were written in the period 1950-1970. Many of her early stories deal with the disruption and chaos caused by the Second World War and in subject matter and technique overlap with the contemporary short fictions of Elizabeth Bowen, V. S. Pritchett, and William Sansom. Like these writers, Lessing is closely involved with social issues. Yet there is something striking, even jarring, in the tone she employs in the examination of such issues. The prevailing tone is one of irony and distance: Lessing rarely writes of English character or setting without the use of imaginary, or real, quotation marks. It may be that this stance of ironic detachment stems from Lessing's position as an exile, but the question seems to run deeper than that, since the sense of distance is often equally present in the African stories. By adopting an endlessly ironic stance, Lessing does more than reveal her own inability to identify successfully with specific types of English men or women: she creates a sense of alienation and detachment from

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Lessing is closely involved with social issues. Yet there is something striking, even jarring, in the tone she employs in the examination of such issues."

all forms of society so far known. This quality of alienation seems to point forward to Lessing's later fiction. In the earlier stories she has a Swiftean ability, not to defamiliarize, but to create a sense of critical alienation from social or conventional forms and mores. Specifically Lessing achieves her effects through a self-conscious manipulation of codes of language and behaviour. She plays endlessly with different linguistic codes and available discourses; her work is more experimental in this respect than is sometimes recognized. So in "Not a Very Nice Story" (first collated in 1972) she catches, through an exaggerated use of a particular linguistic register, the middle-class "decency," and complacency, of her four main characters: This was the peak of their lives; the long tedium of the war was over; the men were still in their early thirties, the women in their twenties. They were feeling as if at last their real lives were starting. They were all goodlooking. The men were of the same type; jokes had been made about that already. They were both dark, largely built, with the authority of doctors, "comfortable" as the wives said. And the women were pretty. They soon established (like showing each other their passports, or references of decency and reliability) that they shared views on life—tough, but rewarding; God—dead; children—to be brought up with the right blend of permissiveness and discipline; society—to be cured by common sense and mild firmness but without extremes of any sort.

In "The Temptation of Jack Orkney" (first published in 1972) the eponymous hero is placed for us by his self-conscious use of an ironic code, a language, or style, which he himself deprecates but cannot transcend: It had been a long time since he had actually organized something political; others had been happy to organize him—his name, his presence, his approval. But an emotional telephone call from an old friend, Walter

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Renting, before seven that morning, appealing that they "all" should make a demonstration of some sort about the refugees—the nine million refugees of Bangladesh this time— and the information that he was the only person available to do the organizing, had returned him to a politically active past.

The effect of these layers of irony is to undercut the characters, to make us feel that they are no more than puppets, creatures of convention. In practice, such a view of human nature is one which we tend to hold temporarily, as we see the communal, the social elements of "character" exposed as in a sudden flash of light: we then relax back into our habitual sense of the reality of a person's human/ humane identity and individuality. It is this kind of dialectical movement which is reflected in the structure of Lessing's short fictions, in which there is a continual interplay between a socially and genetically deterministic view of human nature, and a sense of transcendent individuality. The form of the free story is especially well suited to the rendering of such ambivalence, and I would suggest that this is why Lessing has been more successful in presenting character as she sees it—produced somewhere between the individual and the social—in the form of short fiction rather than the novel, pace Lukacs' and her own statements about the dialectical possibilities of the novel form. In the early story "Notes for a Case History" (1963) Lessing seems initially to make out a complete case for social determinism, describing the childhood of Maureen Watson as seen by "the social viewer," or in contemporary terms probably the social worker: Maureen Watson, conceived by chance on an unexpected granted-at-the-last-minute leave, at the height of the worst war in history, infant support of a mother only occasionally upheld (the chances of war deciding) by a husband she had met in a bomb shelter during an air raid: poor baby, born into a historical upheaval which destroyed forty million and might very well have destroyed her.

But this little "report"—and again, we note, Lessing is playing with social and linguistic codes—is inset into a text which continues: As for Maureen, her memories and the reminiscences of her parents made her dismiss the whole thing as boring and nothing to do with her.

Immediately we are brought up against the notion of her, the self which Maureen feels herself to possess independently of environment and conditioning. Ironically, Maureen tries to find her self through identification with ready-made social stereotypes, emulating specific social models in order to free

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herself from her background. Slowly, she drags herself up out of her social class by dint of careful attention to the advice given by fashion magazines, attention to her voice (her accent), and later through more sophisticated self-education via a trip to Italy and subsequent visits to art galleries. Quietly, in her lunch hour, she went off to the National Gallery and to the Tate. There she looked, critical and respectful, at pictures, memorizing their subjects, or main colours, learning names. When invited out, she asked to be taken to "foreign" films, and when she got back home wrote down the names of the director and the stars. She looked at the book page of the Express (she made her parents buy it instead of the Mirror) and sometimes bought a recommended book, if it was a best seller.

Her progress is measured by the social status of boyfriends, exactly monitored by Lessing. Eventually she becomes engaged to her male counterpart, an apprentice architect—"she knew, by putting herself in his place, that he was looking for a wife with a little money or a house of her own, if he couldn't get a lady." But at the moment when she must finally commit herself to an existence with Stanley, her sense of self reasserts itself. Her doubts about Stanley surface through an encounter with Tony, a young accountant, also from her own background, who reflects something in Maureen herself when he laughs good-humouredly at her attempts to escape from her class. When Maureen finally rebels against the false values she has imposed on herself, she tells herself that she is doing it "for Tony"; however, the most striking thing about the scene is its feminist content and implications, the way in which Maureen acts as and for herself. Lessing uses a demasking device which occurs repeatedly in her fiction, as Maureen literally strips herself of her painfully acquired sexual and social identity: At four Stanley was expected, and at 3:55 Maureen descended to the living room. She wore: a faded pink dress from three summers before; her mother's cretonne overall used for housework; and a piece of cloth tied round her hair that might very well have been a duster. At any rate, it was a faded gray. She had put on a pair of her mother's old shoes. She could not be called plain; but she looked like her own faded elder sister, dressed for a hard day's spring cleaning.

The fiction ends in defeat: we are made to feel, in this case, the impossible weight of social and external forces with which the individual has to contend. However, the possibility of transcendence through (and perhaps of) the self is intermittently suggested in this early fiction: the mock brusqueness of the title itself suggests this.

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"Not a Very Nice Story," a fiction from Lessing's middle period, brings to the fore questions about the relationship between the novel and the short form in Lessing's work. It requires us to consider the possibility of telling this particular story in novel form. The plot is so rich, and extends over such a long period of time, that it seems to demand novel treatment, and in consequence we begin to construct a notional novel from it. Yet Lessing's adoption of the short form here is undeniably apt and strategic. It allows her to foreground certain issues, as we read off the actual, and scanty, information that we are given against the "novel" that we wish to construct. The techniques of summary and sketch, which seem at first so inappropriate to the material, in practice makes us reconsider the ways in which we usually process and code such material. Lessing invites us to share her impatience with conventional (and social) forms and the level of judgement and awareness that their use implies: For ten years the marriages had prospered side by side. The Joneses had produced three children, the Smiths two. The young doctors worked hard, as doctors do. In the two comfortable gardened houses, the two attractive young wives worked hard as wives and mothers do. And all that time the marriages were being assessed by very different standards, which had nothing to do with those trivial and inelegant acts of sex—which continued whenever circumstances allowed, quite often, though neither guilty partner searched for occasions—all that time the four people continued to take their emotional pulses, as was their training: the marriages were satisfactory; no, not so satisfactory; yes, very good again.

In "Not a Very Nice Story," as in "Notes for a Case History," the tone of the title points to one of the fiction's major preoccupations. Lessing suggests, in effect, that most of our complex social forms and processes can be reduced to very basic feelings and desires, and that until we recognise this, there can be no possibility of transcendence of such feelings. In "Not a Very Nice Story" the possibility of transcendence awaits the women in the story. They have lived with lies about themselves and their relationships with their husbands for years, lies of which both they and the husbands have sometimes been aware, sometimes not. As the fiction moves to its close, each of the women is granted a vision of a husbandless future, a vision which is undeniably bleak, but which nonetheless seems to hold a potential for greater freedom and self-knowledge. Through the consciousness of Althea, in particular, Lessing seems to be moving towards a recognition of the importance of those

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areas of dream and vision which will dominate her later fiction: Sometimes Althea would see that room without its centre, without Frederick. She and Muriel were alone in the room with the children. Yes, that is how it would all end, two aging women, with the children— who would soon have grown up and gone. Between one blink of an eye and another, a man could vanish as Henry had done. In the long evenings when Frederick was at the clinic, or on call, and it was as if the whole house and its occupants waited for him to come back, then Althea could not stop herself from looking across the livingroom at Muriel in the thought: Coming events cast their shadow before. Can't youfeel i f ! . . . But this is our future, Althea would think. Their future, hers and Muriel's, was each other. She knew it. But it was neurotic to think like this and she must try to suppress it.

The reality and force of such a dream seems greater when it occurs in a structurally indeterminate, freefloating story, rather than in a novel tied in any way to the conventions of social realism. "The Temptation of Jack Orkney," the concluding story in the Collected Stories (1978; the story was first published in 1972) is a latter-day Faustian tale in which Jack Orkney is tempted to sell his radical, committed soul in order to abandon himself to the reality of a dream. The fiction starts from the crisis of his father's death, which sparks off the feelings of disenchantment and alienation which sustain the fiction; it also seems to stand as a portent, pointing to the possibility of a transcendence specifically associated with death and disintegration. This idea circles the story: so Jack's father is described in these terms near its close: During that night he could feel his face falling into the lines and folds of his father's face—at the time, that is, when his father had been an elderly, rather than an old, man. His father's old man's face had been open and sweet, but before achieving that goodness—like the inn at the end of a road which you have no alternative but to use?—he had had the face of a Roman, heavy-lidded, sceptical, obdurate, facing into the dark: the man whose pride and strength had to come from a conscious ability to suffer, in silence, the journey into negation.

Jack Orkney's disenchantment with his world is no simple matter and raises considerable narrative difficulties. Lessing's project is to expose Jack Orkney's "false consciousness" by accumulating his reactions and responses to what he perceives as the

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false consciousness of others. This makes for great difficulties of tone, not just because the narrator is required to move smoothly or coherently from one discordant discourse to the next but also because the narrative can by definition come to rest at no stable point of view. The narrator must recognize that ' 'his" own view is as false, as culturally determined and contingent as that of any of the "character's": again, such a relativistic viewpoint is, I suggest, more easily accommodated in the form of the free (inconclusive) story rather than in the novel. The territory which Jack Orkney occupies at the close of the fiction is analogous to that occupied by the narrator of Memoirs of a Survivor. The freestanding world of dream does not conflict with "reality," does not seem discrepant. Jack Orkney's world of dream is coterminous with the visionary world of Memoirs it waters the arid plains of his life like a swift, deep, fast-flowing stream: He had once been a man whose sleep had been— nothing, nonexistent, he had slept like a small child. Now, in spite of everything, although he knew that fear could lie in wait there, his sleep had become another country, lying just behind his daytime one. Into that country he went nightly, with an alert, even if ironical, interest: the irony was due to his habits of obedience to his past—for a gift had been made to him. Behind the face of the sceptical world was another, which no conscious decision of his could stop him exploring.

Lessing characteristically ends her free story here, in an open-ended way. Such indeterminacy affirms the reader's freedom for further exploration after the novella's formal close.

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Source: Clare Hanson, "Free Stories: The Shorter Fiction of Doris Lessing,'' in The Doris Lessing Newsletter, Vol. 9, No. 1, Spring, 1985, pp. 7-8,14.

Sources Didion, Joan. The Nicolson, 1979.

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Gordimer, Nadine. A review of The Habit of Loving, in Africa South, Vol. 2, July-September, 1958, pp. 124-26. Hanson, Clare. "Doris Lessing in Pursuit of English, or, No Small, Personal Voice," in In Pursuit of Doris Lessing, edited by Claire Sprague, Macmillan, 1990, pp. 61-73. Knapp, Mona. Doris Lessing, Frederick Ungar, 1984. Lessing, Doris. Preface to African Schuster, 1981.

Stories, Simon &

Singleton, Mary Ann. The City and the Veld, Bucknell University Press, 1977.

Further Reading Brewster, Dorothy. Doris Lessing, Twayne, 1965. Biography that traces the major plots and themes in Lessing's early fiction. Thorpe, Michael. "The Grass Is Singing and Other African Stories," in his Doris Lessing, British Council for Longman Group, 1973. Surveys the themes of Lessing's African stories.

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Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been? Joyce Carol Gates was inspired to write "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?" after reading an account in Life magazine of a charismatic but insecure young man who had enticed and then killed several girls in Tucson, Arizona, during the early 1960s. Transformed into fiction, this story was first published by the literary journal Epoch in 1966 and was included in Gates' s 1970 short story collection The Wheel of Love. Critical acclaim was so swift and certain that as early as 1972, critic Walter Sullivan noted that it was "one of her most widely reprinted stories and justly so." Along with the story's frequent appearance in textbooks and anthologies, Gates herself republished it in 1974 as the title story for Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?: Stories of Young America. This collection's subtitle points to Gates's ongoing interest in adolescence, especially the psychological and social turmoil that arises during this difficult period. Her preoccupation with these topics, along with her keen sense of the special pressures facing teenagers in contemporary society, is evident in "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?''

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This story is seen by many as one of Gates's best and in the words of scholar G. F. Waller, it is "one of the masterpieces of the genre." Gates's realism often garners such praise; critics and readers alike have commended the presentation of the story's central character, Connie, as a typical teenager who may be disliked, pitied, or even identified with. A similar believability is instilled in Arnold Friend's

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manipulative stream of conversation and its psychological effects on a vulnerable teenager. Critics also praise the story for its evocative language, its use of symbols, and an ambiguous conclusion which allows for several interpretations of the story's meaning. In 1988, a film version of the story was released entitled Smooth Talk.

Author Biography Joyce Carol Dates was born in 1938. As a child growing up in Lockport, New York, her preparation for her future career began early. Before she could even write, she used pictures to convey stories. At the age of fifteen she submitted her first novel to a publisher, but the book was rejected for being ' 'too dark" since it dealt with a drug addict who is reformed by caring for a black stallion. Such "dark" themes are common to Gates's work, including the frequently anthologized story, "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?" Gates completed her college education at Syracuse University in 1960 and earned a master's degree in English at the University of Wisconsin a year later. Newly married, Gates and her husband, Ray Smith, moved to Texas so he could continue his own schooling. Although by this time Gates had published many stories, she did not think of herself as a professional writer until, by chance, she came across favorable mention of one of her stories in a prestigious anthology, Best American Short Stories. This marked a turning point in her life. Her first published collection of short stories quickly followed in 1963, and her first novel, With Shuddering Fall, was published in 1964. Since then, Gates's reputation for writing outstanding novels, stories, poetry, plays, and essays has been matched by her reputation for prolificacy—she publishes a new title at least once a year, and often more than that. In 1962 Gates moved to Detroit where she lived for the next sixteen years while teaching at area universities. The influence of Detroit on Gates' writing led to one of her earliest and greatest successes. Her novel them, in which she explores the conditions that led to the 1967 race riots through the experiences of one fictional family, won the National Book Award in 1970. In this phase of her career, Gates turned most often in her writing to everyday characters, which she often placed in situations that were both psychologically and socially terrifying. ' 'Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?,"

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first published in 1966 before it was included in Gates' 1970 collection The Wheel of Love, dates from this period. A professor of English at Princeton University since 1978 and co-founder of the literary journal The Ontario Review, Gates continues her prolific literary output while teaching courses in writing. In the years since "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?,'' her choice of subject matter has broadened to include mystery novels (several written under the pseudonym of Rosamond Smith) and historical fiction, which critics have commended along with the gripping realistic narratives for which she is best known.

Plot Summary Connie is a fifteen-year-old teenager growing up in suburbia in the 1960s. She is preoccupied with typical teenage concerns: her looks and popular music. She argues with her mother, makes fun of her older, plainer sister, and hangs out with her friends in restaurants, movie theaters, and shopping malls. During these summertime social ventures, she and her friends try to attract the attention of the older high-school boys. One evening, while on a date, Connie notices a boy with black hair and a gold "jalopy"—a beat-up sports car—staring at her. One Sunday while her parents and sister attend a family barbecue, Connie, contemptuous of family gatherings, elects to stay home and wash her hair. As she sits in the backyard letting her hair dry, she thinks about the boy she had been with the night before. Later, while listening to the radio inside the house, she hears a car coming up the driveway. Thinking that her family would not be home so soon, she goes to the window and sees that it is not her parents' car, but a gold jalopy that she does not remember having seen before. Her heart pounds, her fingers straighten her hair, and when the horn taps several times, she goes to the side door to meet the visitor. There are two men in the car, and Connie watches them from the screen door. She now recognizes the driver as the one who had stared at her at the restaurant. He asks "I ain't late, am I?" as if they had a date. Connie makes small talk with him while deciding whether or not she likes him. He

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introduces himself as Arnold Friend, the other boy as Ellie, and he shows off his car, which is painted with words, pictures, and numbers. He invites her to go for a ride. Arnold Friend seems to know many things about Connie: her name, who her friends are, and the fact that her family is gone for the afternoon. Connie notices that an expression painted on his car—' 'man the flying saucers''—is outdated; it was popular the year before. She also realizes that, although he wears the right clothes and talks like all the kids, he seems older and out of place. His hair appears to be a wig, he wears lifts in his boots, and his face looks as if it is caked with makeup. Though he claims to be eighteen, Connie suspects that he is at least thirty. When Arnold's friend Ellie turns around, Connie sees he looks like a forty-year-old baby. Connie realizes something is wrong and tells them to go away. Arnold refuses to leave without her. Connie threatens that her father will return, but Arnold knows that he will be at the barbecue all afternoon—he even knows where it is and what Connie's sister is wearing. His conversation becomes more intimate. He calls her "lover" and talks about having sex with her and holding her so tightly she will not be able to get away. Connie becomes frightened and backs away from the door. She threatens to call the police, but Arnold, who has pledged not to come in the house, threatens to come in after her if she touches the phone. When she says that her father is coming back to get her, Arnold knows she is lying. Ellie asks if he should pull out the phone lines. Arnold tells Ellie to shut up and urges Connie to come outside. He threatens to harm her whole family if she does not cooperate. When Ellie again asks him about the phone, Arnold becomes irritated and lists off a series of slang phrases from different decades, trying to find the one that is current. He continues to threaten Connie's family and implies that he has killed one of the neighbors. Connie asks what he is going to do with her and he says he has a few things in mind, but that she will learn to like him. In fear, Connie stumbles her way to the phone but is unable to dial; she simply screams into the receiver. When she stops, Arnold is standing by the door. Her fear is replaced by emptiness, and she understands that she will leave the house and never return. She approaches the screen door and watches herself opening it, feeling as if she no longer inhabits her own body. She walks out into the sunlight

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where Arnold waits, assuming a mocking gesture of welcome.

Characters Connie Fifteen-year-old Connie exhibits the confusing, often superficial behavior typical of a teenage girl facing the difficult transition from girlhood to womanhood. She is rebellious, vain, self-centered, and deceitful. She is caught between her roles as a daughter, friend, sister, and object of sexual desire, uncertain of which one represents the real her: ' 'Everything about her had two sides to it, one for home and one for anywhere that was not home." She is deeply romantic, as shown by her awareness of popular song lyrics, but she is interested more in the concept of having a boyfriend than the boyfriend himself. She sees the boys who exhibit interest in her primarily as conquests who "dissolved into a single face that was not even a face but an idea." All of these traits make her vulnerable to Arnold Friend's manipulation. At first she is flattered by his attentions, unable to realize that he is in fact a menacing

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Media Adaptations "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?" was adapted as a film, Smooth Talk, directed by Joyce Chopra and starring Laura Dern, Treat Williams, and Mary Kay Place. It was originally produced in 1985 for the ' 'American Playhouse Series" on the Public Broadcasting System and is available from Live Home Video and Vestron Video.

force. Connie's superficiality leads her into a situation in which she becomes powerless over the forces to which she is naively attracted. A more complex reading of Connie's character, one that includes a glimmer of hope for reaching beyond her own self-centeredness, can be found in an article by Joyce Carol Gates. In speaking of the ending to the story, Gates points out that Connie is "capable of an unexpected gesture of heroism" when she believes her compliance with Arnold will prevent him from harming her family.

Connie's Mother Connie's mother frequently nags her youngest daughter and often makes comparisons between her and June, her well-behaved oldest daughter. However, she also feels a closeness with Connie that makes them "sometimes, over coffee . . . almost friends." Connie's mother "had been pretty once too," and therefore may prefer Connie (or so her daughter believes) to the more matronly looking June. The mother is uneasy with her daughter's behavior, most likely because she realizes that Connie's actions and manner of dress are more promiscuous than that befitting a fifteen-year-old girl. But when the mother tries to discipline her daughter, Connie believes the conflict stems from her mother's resentment of her youth and beauty. Nevertheless, the mother tries her best to trust her daughter, and that trust is interpreted by Connie as "simplicity" because she thinks her mother believes her lies about "where she's going" and

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"where she's been." Nevertheless, the mother has managed to form a deep connection with her daughter. Near the end of the story, Connie "[cries] for her mother" and thinks "I'm not going to see my mother again," demonstrating that Connie's rejection of her mother is a product of teenage defiance.

Arnold Friend Initially portrayed as "a boy with shaggy black hair, in a convertible jalopy painted gold" who notices Connie at the drive-in restaurant, Arnold Friend assumes many identities throughout the story. He is the sweet-talking suitor, whose appearance Connie approves of because of his "familiar face." He is also a potential rapist and murderer who uses psychological manipulation to appeal to Connie's vanity and her need to be liked by men. Perhaps the most terrifying thing about Arnold Friend is that he blends elements of romance—' 'I took a special interest in you, such a pretty girl"— and violence—"We ain't leaving until you come with us"—in order to appeal to a young woman unsure of who she is. Arnold Friend's name is a dark joke, alternately A. Friend, or without too much transformation, A. Fiend. Many critics have suggested that Arnold Friend is the devil in disguise. He has trouble balancing on his small feet—hooves?— and the make-up on his face makes him look younger than he really his. He tells Connie that he's eighteen, although she estimates that he must be at least thirty. He calls an ' 'X'' he draws in the air' 'his sign," and knows that Connie's family is away for the afternoon at a family barbecue and recites their whereabouts in astonishing detail.

June Connie's responsible older sister, June, is twenty-four years old, works as a secretary at Connie's high school, and lives at home with her parents. Described as "plain and chunky and steady," she conforms where Connie rebels, serving as the standard to which Connie's own behavior is always compared and found wanting. Connie believes she is better than her sister because she is more beautiful.

Ellie Oscar Arnold's brown-haired, red-faced cohort, Ellie Oscar initially seems to be a silent and harmless hanger-on, content to listen to his transistor radio as Arnold speaks with Connie. Later, he becomes a more ominous figure with a violent potential, as he offers to ' 'pull out the phone'' and prevent Connie

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from calling for help, then produces a weapon, prompting Arnold's order to "put that away." Connie's changing perception of Ellie mirrors her changing perspective on Arnold. Furthermore, Ellie's status as loyal follower and accomplice demonstrates Arnold's power to fascinate.

Themes The tale of an insecure, romantic teenage girl drawn into a situation of foreboding violence,' 'Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?" presents several themes that arise from the interaction of sharply drawn characters engaged in psychological manipulation.

Appearances and Reality Connie prides herself as a skilled flirt who has never been in a situation she could not handle. She feels confident when Arnold Friend arrives at her door while she is alone in the house: ' 'Who the hell do you think you are?" she asks. Mistaking him for the type of boy she frequently attracts, she thinks she recognizes him from the sound of his car's horn, his clothing and physical appearance, and the line of banter with which he attempts to lure her into his car. Both Arnold and Connie contribute to these erroneous first impressions. Arnold assumes a role as a teenage Romeo although he is much older, and Connie accepts his facade because of her fondness for the ' 'trashy daydreams'' her mother accuses her of subscribing to. Because the story is told from Connie's perspective (although she is not the narrator), readers see the gradual dismantling of these first impressions through her eyes. She realizes that Arnold's hair may be a wig, that his tan is the result of makeup, and that his boots ' 'must have been stuffed with something so that he would seem taller." Though the veracity of these observations is never proven, they reveal Connie's realization that Arnold is not what he seems. His romantic words are not original but taken from popular songs, and his manner is that of "a hero in a movie." Nothing about Arnold Friend is genuine, except his violent intentions and his skills of psychological and physical intimidation. By the story's end, Connie realizes that she is not the confident flirt she thought, but a powerless pawn in the hands of a dangerous individual.

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Topics for Further Study Read the 1966 Life magazine article, "The Pied Piper of Tucson," which inspired Oates's story, and compare the fictional and journalistic interpretations of the same event. How does each writer try to shape the reader's opinion through presentation of individuals, setting, and events? What role does popular music of the 1960s play in "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?" Does music continue to influence young people today in a similar manner? Research the crime of acquaintance or date rape, focusing on its presentation in the media, the stories of its victims, and its status in the American legal system. In the 1960s, when the story was written, who would most likely have been blamed for Connie's fate? Who would be blamed if the same thing happened today?

Identity and the Search for Self Connie is vulnerable to Arnold Friend's manipulations because she has no clear identity of her own. As a teenager, she is neither a child nor a woman. Connie attempts to establish her identity by testing the boundaries her parents set for her, assuming a different persona at home than she does with her friends, and seeking validation of her attractiveness from the boys at the drive-in restaurant. Connie identifies her worth as a person with her physical beauty, a factor that causes her to disparage her sister, fight with her mother, and engage in the "habit of craning her neck to glance into mirrors or checking other people's faces to make sure her own was all right." Connie's behavior is typical among teenagers searching for identity. Though Connie's encounter with Arnold Friend is extreme, Gates devised the situation to illustrate how an unstable identity can make an adolescent—especially a girl—susceptible to exploitation by someone who knows how to feed a vain, unsteady ego for his own interests and desires. Connie is practiced in acting out the stereo-

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type of being a pretty girl. By the time Arnold asks her, ' 'What else is there for a girl like you but to be sweet and pretty and give in?'' she feels she can do nothing but comply. Trusting in her incomplete identity to the end, she is led to ruin.

Victim and Victimization Connie's unstable identity provides her with a mentality that makes her a perfect victim for Arnold's sexual, perhaps even murderous, designs. In the presence of a true villain, Connie's propensity for flirtation becomes a fatal character trait. Unfamiliar with the logic and reasoning that comes from having a strong, centered identity, she becomes prone to Arnold's psychological manipulation, and thus a willing victim. Connie believes that because Arnold looks and acts like other boys she has known—those she believes she has handled so adeptly in the past—she has nothing to fear from him. She is drawn in by his flattery, intrigued by his claims that he has ' 'found out all about'' her. By the time his violent intentions become apparent, Arnold has gained a psychological hold over Connie that he maintains with a blend of threats, romantic language, and a hypnotic tone that Connie perceives as an "incantation." He strips her of the little selfhood she possesses by telling her who she is: a nice girl who is sweet and pretty and does what he says. By the time she surrenders to Arnold, he has so undermined her sense of personal will that she perceives that her body is no longer her own.

formed from a flirt into a victim. Arnold Friend is presented only as he appears to Connie; the reader learns nothing of his unspoken thoughts. This narrative "detachment" makes him less human and more ominous than if the narrator provided details that would allow the reader to identify with him. Maintaining the third-person narrative voice instead of telling the story in Connie's own words, however, allows Gates to use descriptive language that Connie would presumably not. It is through this language that much of the mood, imagery, and symbolism of the story emerges.

Setting References to popular music and slang date the events in "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been" to the same period when Gates wrote the story in the mid-1960s. Gates sketches in few details of the town, which is meant to be a typical suburban landscape that includes familiar sights such as a shopping plaza and drive-in restaurant. This setting is further described in the reference to the newness and style of the three-year-old "asbestos 'ranch house'" Connie lives in. Such an innocuous setting is incongruous with the violence suggested in the story, and the contrast serves to heighten the reader's uneasiness. The lack of specific description of the setting serves to universalize the story's themes, which suggest that Connie's lack of identity is a legacy of modem suburban culture. Though the actual location of the story is irrelevant, the reference to the radio show Connie listens to, the "XYZ Sunday Jamboree," may be a reference to radio station WXYZ in Detroit, Michigan, the area in which Gates lived at the time the story was written.

Style Structure Point of View

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The first line of "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?"—"Her name was Connie "— signals that it is being told by a thirdperson narrator. This narrative voice stays closely aligned to Connie's point of view. The reader learns what her thoughts are, but the narrator provides no additional information or judgment of the situation. For instance, Connie's harsh appraisals of her sister and mother are discussed: "now [her mother's] looks were gone and that was why she was always after Connie," but it is clear that this assessment is Connie's and not the narrator's.

The structure of' 'Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?'' follows a familiar pattern. The first few pages of exposition acquaint the reader with Connie and her family, providing details about her character and lifestyle. The rising action begins when Arnold Friend pulls into the driveway and instigates a conversation with Connie. Her character, which has been carefully outlined, begins to interact with another force. This force presents a conflict for Connie: should she succumb to Arnold, or try to save herself? At the climax of the story, Connie's will is overtaken by Arnold and she acquiesces to his evil desires.

Observing the story's events through a narrator who presents things as Connie sees them allows the reader to identify with her terror as she is trans-

The most unusual aspect of the story's structure, perhaps, is its lack of resolution. The action abruptly ends as Connie walks towards Arnold. The

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Laura Dern and Treat Williams in Smooth Talk, the 1985 film version of "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?"

fact that the reader does not find out Connie's fate further heightens the story's mood of violence, in which horror is suggested, but never shown. The only hint of the action's resolution is in the foreshadowing statements made by Arnold when he says he wants to "come inside you where it's all secret" and show Connie "what love is like," statements that hint at rape. Similarly, Connie laments that' 'I'm not going to see my mother again'' or "sleep in my bed again," comments that suggest her murder. However, the lack of a stated resolution has been a point of major discussion in critical essays on the story, with some proposing that Connie is killed and others proposing that she is not. Some critics look outside the story, to Dates's factual source in the Arizona murderer she had read about in Life magazine, to find evidence of Connie's certain death. An additional interpretation of the story's resolution is provided by critic Larry Rubin, who interprets the entire encounter with Arnold as Connie's dream. By this reasoning, the story's unstated resolution involves Connie's awakening from one of her ' 'trashy daydreams." The ambiguity of the resolution heightens the narrative's lingering mood of horror by prolonging suspense beyond its ending.

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Symbolism and Imagery Many critics have interpreted Arnold Friend as a symbol of some larger idea or force, such as the devil, death, or sexuality. Connie, also, has been said to represent many things: Eve, troubled youth, or spiritually unenlightened humanity. Such interpretations can be validated by Dates's initial title for the story, "Death and the Maiden," which she explains was chosen to suggest "an allegory of the fatal attractions of death (or the devil)" for a young woman who is ' 'seduced by her own vanity." Dates also points out, though, that as she revised the story her interest shifted toward a more realistic, rather than allegorical, treatment of her character and situation. Several images are used to give readers insight into Connie's perspective in the story. These images frequently relate to popular music, which serves as a background throughout the entire story and takes on a near-sacred religious function for Connie since ' 'none of them bothered with church.'' ' 'Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been" is subtitled ' 'For Bob Dylan,'' and at least one critic has noticed the similarity between Arnold's car and the "magic swirling ship" that Dylan wrote about in his 1960s

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song ' 'Mr. Tambourine Man.'' Connie believes that life and love will be ' 'the way it was in movies and promised in songs." This belief in the simplistic thoughts of popular music makes her unable to discern Arnold Friend's true nature until it is too late to escape. Arnold, too, relies on song lyrics to seduce Connie. In a "half-sung sigh" he calls her "My sweet little blue-eyed girl," a possible reference to the Van Morrison song "Brown-Eyed Girl." Connie, in fact, has brown eyes, and the misstatement is further evidence that Arnold is not what he seems.

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A Transforming American Society

Historical Context

Other dramatic changes in American culture provide an additional backdrop to Oates's story. Gates has frequently been praised for her nearly photographic portrayals of the social milieu in which each piece of her fiction is set. ' 'Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?" is no different; in its few pages readers can grasp many factors at work in America during the late 1960s, particularly those affecting young people. These include the haphazard growth of American suburbs, and the resulting loss of community cohesiveness; changes in family bonds, evident in Connie's lenient mother and a father who "didn't bother talking much" to his family; sexual permissiveness; and a youth subculture that obtained its identity through music and other popular art forms.

The Women's Movement

The Youth Subculture

Interest in women's equal rights was a subject of great controversy during the early years of Oates's career leading up to "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?" The 1960s and early 1970s marked the escalation of the women's movement. Economic shifts meant that more women worked outside the home, and Congress passed the Equal Rights Amendment, resulting in many political battles during the long ratification process, which it ultimately failed. Many men and women reconsidered the traditional balance of power in their relationships, families, and the workplace. The Equal Pay Act was passed in 1963, which made it illegal to pay men and women different wages for the same work. In 1973 the Supreme Court ruled in Roe v. Wade that a woman's right to privacy allowed for legal abortion in the first trimester of a pregnancy.

Young Americans increasingly suspected that the American dream their parents had embraced might be either unattainable and/or undesirable. The post-World War II baby boom generation had altered the face of the country, and they began to raise their voices on both political and social issues. Opinion over the United States's involvement in the Vietnam War heightened the conflict between generations, and the anti-war sentiment among young people reached its peak in the late 1960s. In Chicago, hundreds of anti-war demonstrators protested at the 1968 Democratic national convention; many were beaten by police. Over 250,000 gathered for a November, 1969, march on the nation's capital to declare their opposition to the war. Tension mounted to such an extent that many college campuses closed down early in the spring of 1970 to prevent further unrest after four students were shot and killed by members of the National Guard during an anti-war rally at Ohio's Kent State University.

Although relations between the sexes had been a perennial topic in literature before this period, the 1960s saw a rise in the number of works that attempted to illustrate the oppression of women by a male-dominated society. Gates is one among a number of writers who has devoted attention to the psychological and cultural processes that promote conflicts, even violence, between men and women. ' 'Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?'' has often been viewed by critics as a story with feminist themes, as Gates explores the pressures on young women to equate their self-worth with physical beauty. Furthermore, she demonstrates how men can emotionally exploit women and present a real, physical danger to them by preying upon their misguided notions of self-worth.

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This mood of protest and disillusionment, along with the energy and idealism that often inspired it, filtered into the era's music. Many songs glamorized drugs and sex. Multi-act music festivals such as Woodstock provided an opportunity for young people to gather en masse and espouse peace and love through ' 'turning on, tuning in, and dropping out." Critics who have attempted to explain Oates's allusions to popular music in "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?" do not always agree on the interpretation of her references. However, many observe that the music listened to by the story's characters bears much in common with the style popular just before Gates wrote the story in

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Compare & Contrast 1970: The U.S. Census Bureau reports that 87 percent of American homes are headed by married couples. 1990s: With an ascending divorce rate, an increase in out-of-wedlock births, and rising average age for marriage, the number of twoparent families drops to 55.3 percent by 1990. 1970: 37,990 rapes are reported in the United States during the year. 1990s: 109,060 reports of rape are recorded during 1992. This number, almost three times the 1970 figure, is only partly offset by a 28 percent rise in the country's population during the same period. 1970: 89.3 percent of children born in the United States during 1970 are born to married parents. Having children outside marriage carries a social stigma for the mother. Some critics suspect that when Connie's mother asks her daughter,' 'What's this about the Pettinger girl?," she is alluding to a rumor that a schoolmate of Connie's may be pregnant.

1966. Expectations of innocent romance are partly what blinds Connie to Arnold's intentions, and Arnold speaks in phrases reminiscent of popular romantic songs. For these reasons, critics often argue that Gates endorses the shift from music that ignores reality to music that embraces it. This endorsement is signaled in her dedication of the story to Bob Dylan, who for many personified the mood of political consciousness in music.

Critical Overview Gates's novel about urban life and murder, them, had won the 1970 National Book Award, so it was no surprise that her next collection of short stories,

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1990s: The percentage of children born into households with two parents married to each other drops to 70 percent, according to 1991 figures. 1970: 28 is the median age of United States citizens, a drop from the 1950 figure of 30, as a result of the post-World War II baby boom. 1990s As of 1990, the median age in the United States reaches 33, as birth rates decline and people live longer due to advances in health care. This median age is projected to reach 39 by the year 2010. 1970: Based on records of homicides during 1970, 1900 white females in every 100,000 are victims of murder, with a slightly lower figure for black females. 1990s: As of 1991, 3200 females in every 100,000 were victims of murder. Among all gender and racial groups, murders among black females have risen the most dramatically since 1970 (from 1400 to 2400 in every 100,000).

The Wheel of Love, which appeared later that year, received much attention. The book was widely reviewed, and "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?'' was often identified as one of its greatest successes. Some critics were disturbed by the violence that marked the entire collection-a common criticism leveled against many of Oates's works—and by the extreme situations and emotions experienced by a central character in nearly every story. "Joyce Carol Gates," Robert Emmet Long wrote in Saturday Review, "is not really interested in people, only in mental states." Others recognized that disturbing readers was precisely Oates's aim. A reviewer for the Virginia Quarterly Review wrote that Gates had accomplished a goal "to record and communicate what do seem to be dominant tenors of life today," though shocking they might be.

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Though such reviews point to the common threads of subject, theme, and characterization that relate ' 'Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?" to other stories in the collection, it is the story's convergence of these qualities that led some critics to single it out for special note. Richard Oilman, writing in the New York Times Book Review praised the story as one that' 'createfs] a verbal excitement, a sense of language used not for the expression of previously attained insights or perceptions but for new imaginative reality." Echoing this sentiment, Walter Sullivan commended the story for its "imagery of life's deceptions and perils'' and its ability to evoke terror through realism. The story began appearing in anthologies and textbooks, and Oates herself reprinted the story in her 1974 collection, Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?: Stories of Young America. Since then, the story has been frequently scrutinized by scholars, who often attempt to trace its sources; identify its patterns of symbols, images, and allusions; assess its psychological accuracy; and determine its relationship to Oates's work as a whole. In placing Oates's work in a wider literary context, many critics note the author's debt to such ' 'Southern gothic'' writers as William Faulkner and Flannery O'Connor for her tendency to place believable characters in realistic settings and then subject them to psychological horror. Tom Quirk, in searching for information regarding the factual origins of the story, wrote in Studies in Short Fiction of the parallels between Oates's story and a 1966 Life magazine article on a Tucson, Arizona, serial murderer. Oates has since confirmed Quirk's theory but asserted that her story is more fiction than fact because "I do recall deliberately not reading the full article because I didn't want to be distracted by too much detail." Other critics concentrate on defining the symbolism of the story. Oates's allusions to music, and especially the story's dedication to singer Bob Dylan, have attracted much debate as writers attempt to determine Oates's position on the role of popular music in young people's lives and in American culture as a whole. Similarly, biblical references in the story draw critics' attention to the character Arnold Friend, who has often been described as an embodiment of Satan-or even of Christ. Several writers take to heart Arnold Friend's claim that the numbers painted on his car are a "secret code." They most often attempt to crack this code by turning to the Bible to find specific verses that

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correspond with the numbers in the story and that seem to apply to the story's situation and themes. In analyzing the psychological aspects of ' 'Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?,'' critics discuss topics related to teenage sexuality, emotional intimidation, and the process of identity formation. They also examine the psychological principles that underlie Connie's relationship with her mother and sister, as well as her rebellion, selfcenteredness, insecurity, and sexual experimentation. Whether these critics perceive Connie's experience as an actual event or as a dream, a theory advanced in Larry Rubin's article on the story, they praise Oates's grasp of adolescent psychology. However, critics often differ in their interpretation of the story's ending. For some, Connie has moved from illusion to reality and from adolescence to adulthood when she gains enough insight to see Arnold and the world around her more accurately. Others assert that the story ends in psychological tragedy rather than triumph, because all Connie has learned is to deny her own will and submit to the desires of others. Finally, as Oates's writing career has progressed, scholars have gained a greater understanding of ' 'Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?'' by tracing the relationship between this story and other fiction and nonfiction in her massive body of work. Elements common to much of Oates's work appear in the story, including a skepticism regarding modern American culture, the disintegration of the family, and the illusory nature of the American dream. The story's exploration of male and female relationships, as well as issues of power and violence, have been ongoing interests throughout Oates's career.

Criticism Rena Korb Rena Korb has a master's degree in English literature and creative writing and has written for a wide variety of educational publishers. In the following essay, she discusses the presence of evil in "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been," stating that Arnold may not be the devil, but he is most certainly allied with him. Since Joyce Carol Oates's phenomenal appearance on the literary scene in the mid-1960s, she has certainly been one of America's most prolific and

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What Do I Read Next? William Faulkner's novel, Sanctuary (1931), describes horrifying acts and their results in the American South, and probes themes of individual and social evil, disillusionment, and the possibility of achieving justice in an unjust world. Daphne Du Maurier's classic gothic novel Rebecca (1938) presents a tale of the psychological manipulation of a young bride by her wealthy, troubled husband, Max de Winter. The narrator's insecurity and constant comparisons to her husband's deceased first wife, Rebecca, lead to inaccurate perceptions that give way to surprising truths in the novel's suspenseful conclusion. The Member of the Wedding, Carson McCullers's 1946 novel of emotional conflicts and the difficult transition into adulthood. Its twelve-yearold female protagonist Frankie Addams wishes to be called F. Jasmine Addams and mistakenly believes she will be accompanying her older brother on his honeymoon. McCullers's deft use of perspective allows readers to understand and sympathize with Frankie, while gaining insights into her situation that she herself is incapable of achieving.

A Good Man Is Hard to Find (1955) makes it clear why Oates's style, subject matter, and themes are often traced to O'Connor's influence. The title story, concerning a family's ominous encounter with a man nicknamed "The Misfit," presents an interesting comparison to "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?'' Susan Brownmiller's groundbreaking 1975 study Against Our Wills: Men, Women, and Rape is considered a landmark feminist exploration of the history and psychology of men's power and domination over women. Many of the short stories collected in Heat and Other Stories by Joyce Carol Gates (1991) touch on the issue of parent and child relationships. Oates's characteristic violence appears in several of the stories. In others, the subject is the emotional extremes inherent in everyday life, as in the mother-daughter trip to the mall portrayed in "Shopping."

Flannery O'Connor's collection of short stories

The mind of the serial killer is the focus of Joyce Carol Oates's Zombie (1995), told in a series of diary entries kept by the troubled Quentin P as he attempts to achieve his goal of creating a zombie from one of his victims.

talked-about writers. The author of more than twenty novels and numerous volumes of short stories, poems, plays, and essays, she has drawn the attention of readers and critics alike. Whatever one's opinion of Oates's work may be, it is not possible to ignore her importance as a writer, particularly one who chronicles life in twentieth-century America. Gates has been compared to Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Honore de Balzac, and William Faulkner for her efforts to portray an entire culture of people. It is not surprising that she has been compared to these greats, for Oates also tries to explain some of the mysteries of life, believing that a ' 'writer's job, ideally, is to act as the conscience of his race."

In her essays on D.H. Lawrence and W.B. Yeats, Oates has expressed her interest in "the richness of pain and chaos." Certainly, these elements are apparent in Oates's own writing, and many critics have commented on the bleak nature of her fiction and on the many unpleasant things that happen to her characters. Oates has noted, "People frequently misunderstand serious art because it is often violent and unattractive. I wish the world were a prettier place, but I wouldn't be honest as a writer if I ignored the actual conditions around me." These words apply particularly well to one of her best-known stories, which was based on the case of an Arizona serial killer who preyed on teenage girls. The prize-winning ' 'Where Are You Going, Where

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Have You Been?" depicts fifteen-year-old Connie, a "typical" American girl, who is seduced into what we assume will be her rape and murder. Gates mirrors reality in this horrifying portrayal, stinting only on the physical details while deftly exploring Connie's mental terror. As with much of Gates's fiction, "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?" uses the technique of psychological realism, funneling the narrative through Connie's consciousness, along with elements of gothic horror, to chilling effect. The story has been subject to differing interpretations by various critics. It has been seen as an inverted fairy tale in which Connie is joined not with Prince Charming but with the Prince of Darkness. These readers have pointed out similarities between Arnold Friend and the devil: his disguise, his supernatural knowledge of the whereabouts of Connie's family, his ability to lure Connie to him against her will, even his very name, which is by no coincidence close to ' 'Arch Fiend.'' Others see it as a tale of initiation into evil, with the end depicting Connie's acceptance of the depraved American culture. Here Connie inhabits a world of moral impoverishment in which only the false and tawdry are revered. The loss of Connie to Arnold Friend is thus not only the story of one girl's fatal misperception of appearances but also a representation of a loss of innocence. There are still others who read the story as a feminist allegory which suggests that young women of today, like the generations that have come before them, are headed into sexual bondage. When Connie, the innocent female, walks out of the house to meet what may be her demise, she also represents the spiritual death of women at the moment they give up their independence to the desire of the sexually threatening male. In addition to reading ' 'Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?'' for its critical interpretation, it can also be enjoyed as a finely crafted story. Gates's control over her narrative is clearly evident as she introduces a protagonist who is familiar enough to earn the reader's empathy, yet still able to surprise. Connie, despite her shallowness, is ultimately likeable. She is suffering, not from a malicious desire to be cruel, but merely from romantic delusions in her search for a "sweet, gentle" love ' 'the way it was in movies and promised in songs.'' Connie's behavior, when she is in the public eye, testifies to this need: her voice is "high-pitched and nervous''; her face ' 'pleased and expectant'' as she

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enters the drive-in; while sitting at the counter her shoulders are "rigid with excitement." Whereas Connie is proud of herself for mingling in the world of older teenagers and for fooling her "simple" mother, the reader sees the danger she can encounter in being places where she does not belong. Thus when Arnold, the boy at the drive-in who warns Connie, "Gonna get you, babe," shows up at her house, the terror builds inexorably. Gates, however, does not point to a simplistic reading of the story as Connie's adolescent dream turned into a nightmare. ' 'Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?'' invites multiple readings, and Gates emphasizes throughout the story the importance and duplicity of identity. Nothing in the story is what it seems. Connie's parents, though they appear quite typical, provide no moral guidance. Her mother is not really concerned with Connie's habits and lifestyle but argues with her daughter' 'over something of little value to either of them." Connie's father is distant and "didn't bother talking much" so, like the father of Connie's friend, he can hardly ask the crucial questions to keep his daughter secure: ' 'Where are you going?'' or "Where have you been?" The very place that Connie and her friends revere as a sanctuary, the drive-in restaurant, is described as a ' 'sacred building," which is in reality "fly-infested." Everything about Connie—her clothing, her walk, her mouth, her laugh—also testifies to these two sides. Connie, however, only values outward appearances; she is always "checking other people's faces to make sure her own was all right." Connie's identity stems from a rigid belief in physical beauty—' 'she knew she was pretty and that was everything"—and she even thinks her mother prefers her to her plainer older sister solely because of her looks. Since Connie so values appearances, she holds others to these shallow standards and uses what she sees on the surface as her criteria by which to judge them. This superficial view of the world leads her to embrace the drive-in restaurant, "where older kids hung out" and where Arnold Friend marks her with his "X." Then, because at first she "liked the way he was dressed," she does not immediately urge Arnold Friend to leave her driveway, and she stays talking with him, thus allowing him the time to create a physical space of psychological terror from which she cannot escape. In contrast to Connie, who has one identity for home and one for "anywhere that was not home," Arnold has the ability to take on whatever role he

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feels will woo her away from home. When Arnold arrives at Connie's house, she fixes her hair before approaching the screen door, demonstrating her belief that she will be judged by her looks. Her query ' "Who the hell do you think you are?''' does not relate any suspicion but is simply adolescent disinterest, a teenager's way of being "careful to show no interest or pleasure'' while leaving herself time to decide if she likes him. Arnold reacts in kind, talking in a "fast, bright monotone." Despite his affected teenage talk, however, his disguise starts to show through. The crazy wig, the lifts in his boots, the face with "plastered make-up" all make it apparent that he is only pretending to be 18 as he begins to speak more frankly about his desires. He thus takes on another role, that of the sexual psychopath who uses his knowledge of a person's weaknesses to bring his victims to him. Arnold makes himself acceptable to Connie through that which she values, superficial appearance, and then uses his own depraved power to keep her with him. Connie, of course, does not recognize the story's demonic elements when the reader does. These references quickly add up: her utterances o f ' 'hell'' and "Christ" when Arnold shows up; his supernatural awareness of the details of Connie's life, particularly his ability to "see" the family barbecue; his vampiric inability to enter Connie's house. What is important in these references is not whether Arnold is, in fact, the devil, but that he is so closely linked to the master of evil. The similarities between Arnold and the devil testify to his nature and his capacity to harm Connie. In the face of Connie's increasing terror, Arnold grows stronger. He cuts off her future path of escape when he says, "I'll hold you so tight you won't think you have to try and get away . . . because you'll know you can't," leaving her to see the futility in trying to get away. He shows her how fragile her world is, that the lock on the screen door cannot protect her. Her home is ' 'nothing but a cardboard box I can knock down any time." Arnold shows her the weaknesses in the things she thought represented security and safety. Arnold is successful because he is able to get past Connie's "at-home" personality—cynical, distant, superior—with his false show of allegiance. Unfortunately for Connie, by the time she ignores the superficial and concerns herself with what lies underneath Arnold's teenage mask, it is too late. When Connie leaves the house for the last time, she has lost her own identity to Arnold's desires. She is filled only with "emptiness." Even her body is no longer hers. As she pushes open the

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screen door it seems as if "she were back safe somewhere in the other doorway, watching this body and this head of long hair." And as Arnold, who certainly will reveal the more violent natures of his personality after he drives off with his prize, waits for her, he steals away any last vestige of her personality by singing '' 'My sweet little blue-eyed girl,'" taking no notice that Connie's eyes are actually brown. He has stripped her down, leaving nothing but a shell, a body that he will abuse and then discard. Soon, in addition to losing her identity, Connie will probably lose her life to Arnold. It is interesting to note that the film version of this story, Smooth Talk, does not remain true to Gates's ending. Instead of Connie succumbing to the pernicious allure of Arnold, the film-version Connie rejects Arnold and returns to her family. Gates, while praising the film, "wished, perhaps, for a different ending . . . but I suppose that the ending I wrote was simply not translatable; or palatable." It is more likely that the ending was changed to pacify the viewing public, for in "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?" Gates certainly achieves what critic Alfred Kazin calls a ' 'sweetly brutal sense of what American experience is really like." Source: Rena Korb, for Short Stories for Students, Gale Research, 1997.

Mike Tierce and John Michael Crafton In the following essay, Tierce and Crafton seek to reinterpret previous critical characterizations of Arnold Friend as a satanic figure and instead draw parallels between him and folksinger Bob Dylan. The critical reception of Joyce Carol Gates' "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?'' reveals a consistent pattern for reducing the text to a manageable, univocal reading. Generally, this pattern in-

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volves two assumptions: Arnold must symbolize Satan and Connie must be raped and murdered. No critic has yet questioned Joyce Wegs' assertion that "Arnold is clearly a symbolic Satan." Marie Urbanski argues that Arnold's "feet resemble the devil's cloven hoofs," Joan Winslow calls the story "an encounter with the devil," Tom Quirk maintains the story describes a "demoniac character," and Christina Marsden Gillis refers to ' 'the satanic visitor's incantation." Wegs' assertion that Arnold is "a criminal with plans to rape and probably murder Connie" is also accepted at face value. Gillis assumes that Arnold ' 'leads his victim... to a quick and violent sexual assault," and Quirk refers to "the rape and subsequent murder of Connie." Even though Gretchen Schulz and R. J. R. Rockwood correctly claim that the portrait of Arnold ' 'is created in the mind of Connie . . . and that it exists there only,'' they still persist in having Arnold as a demon and Connie as doomed: "But we know that he is still the Wolf, and that he still intends to 'gobble up' this 'little girl' as soon as he gets the chance. Connie is not going to live happily ever after. Indeed, it would seem that she is not going to live at all." While all of these critics insist on seeing satanic traces in Arnold, they refuse, on the other hand, to see that these traces are only part of a much more complex, more dynamic symbol. There are indeed diabolic shades to Arnold, but just as Blake and Shelley could see in Milton's Satan a positive, attractive symbol of the poet, the rebellious embodiment of creative energy, so we should also be sensitive to Arnold's multifaceted and creative nature. Within the frame of the story, the fiction of Arnold burns in the day as the embodiment of poetic energy. The story is dedicated to Bob Dylan, the troubadour, the artist. Friend is the artist, the actor, the rhetorician, the teacher, all symbolized by Connie's overheated imagination. We should not assume that Arnold is completely evil because she is afraid of him. Her limited perceptions remind us of Blake's questioner in "The Tyger" who begins to perceive the frightening element of the experiential world but also is rather duped into his fear by his own limitations. Like the figure in Blake, Connie is the framer, the story creator—and the diabolic traces in her fiction frighten her not because they are the manifestations of an outside evil but because they are the symbolic extrapolations of her own psyche. If the adamant insistence that Arnold Friend is Satan is rejected, then who is this intriguing myste-

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rious visitor? In Enter Mysterious Stranger: American Cloistral Fiction Roy Male asserts that many mysterious intruders throughout American literature ' 'are almost always potential saviors, destroyers, or ambiguous combinations of both, and their initial entrance, however much it may be displaced toward realism, amounts to the entrance of God or the devil on a machine.'' And if Arnold Friend is not satanic, then his arrival could be that of a savior. This possibility moreover is suggested by Connie's whispering ' 'Christ. Christ'' when Arnold first arrives in his golden "machine." Not only is "33" part of Arnold's "secret code" of numbers, but his sign, an ' 'X'' that seems to hover in the air, is also one of the symbols for Christ. Because music is closely associated with religion—' 'the music was always in the background, like music at a church service"—it also adds a religious element to Arnold's arrival. The key question then is who is this musical messiah, and the key to the answer is the dedication ' 'For Bob Dylan''—the element of the story so unsatisfactorily accounted for by our predecessors. Not only does the description of Arnold Friend also fit Bob Dylan—a type of rock-and-roll messiah—but three of Dylan's songs (popular when the story was written) are very similar to the story itself. In the mid-sixties Bob Dylan's followers perceived him to be a messiah. According to his biographer, Dylan was "a rock-and-roll king." It is no wonder then that Arnold speaks with "the voice of the man on the radio," the disc jockey whose name, Bobby King, is a reference to "Bobby" Dylan, the "king" of rock-and-roll. Dylan was more than just a "friend" to his listeners; he was "Christ revisited," "the prophet leading [his followers] into [a new] Consciousness." In fact, "people were making him an idol;.. . thousands of men and women, young and old, felt their lives entwined with his because they saw him as a mystic, a messiah who would lead them to salvation." That Gates consciously associates Arnold Friend with Bob Dylan is clearly suggested by the similarities of their physical descriptions. Arnold's "shaggy, shabby black hair that looked crazy as a wig," his "long and hawklike nose," his unshavened face, his "big and white" teeth, his lashes, "thick and black as if painted with a black tarlike material'' and his size ("only an inch or so taller than Connie'' are all characteristic of Bob Dylan. Even Arnold's "fast, bright monotone voice" is suggestive of Dylan, especially since he speaks "in a simple

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lilting voice, exactly as if he were reciting the words to a song." Dylan then provides a physical model for Arnold's appearance and a historical referent for Arnold's existence. Yet more profoundly, the myth of Dylan's being organized or somehow controlled by his music is reflected by Connie, Arnold, and Ellie being organized or perhaps even unified by the almost mystical music heard throughout the story. Connie, for example, notices the way Arnold ' 'tapped one fist against another in homage to the perpetual music behind him." Since this "perpetual music" is the one thing that Connie can ' 'depend upon," it even becomes her breath of life; she is ' 'bathed in a glow of slow-pulsed joy that seemed to rise mysteriously out of the music itself, . . . breathed in and breathed out with each gentle rise of her chest." Paying ' 'close attention'' to the words and singing along with the songs played on the "XYZ Sunday Jamboree," Connie spends her Sunday afternoon worshiping "the music that made everything so good." And when her two visitors arrive,' 'the same program . . . playing inside the house" is also playing on Ellie Oscar's radio. In fact, "the music from [Connie's] radio and [Ellie's] blend together." Ellie is so closely associated with the radio that without it pressed up against his ear, he grimaces "as if ... the air was too much for him." Both Ellie's and Arnold's existences seem to depend completely on the "perpetual music"; consequently, Gates appears to be suggesting that they are not literally present. They are instead part of Connie's musically induced fantasy—another of her socalled "trashy daydreams." . .. The reference to "Mister Tambourine Man" implies another connection between the story and Dylan. A few of his song lyrics are very similar to the story itself. Dates herself suggests that part of the story's inspiration was ' 'hearing for some weeks Dylan's song 'It's All Over Now, Baby Blue.'" Such lines as "you must leave now," "something calls for you," "the vagabond who's rapping at your door," and "go start anew" are suggestive of the impending change awaiting Connie. Two other Dylan songs are equally as applicable though. The following lines from "Like a Rolling Stone"—the second most popular song of 1965 (the story was first published in 1966)—are also very similar to Connie's situation at the end of the story: You used to be so amused At Napoleon in rags and the language that he used Go to him now, he calls you, you can't refuse

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When you got nothing, you got nothing to lose You're invisible now, you got no secrets to conceal.

But Dylan's "Mr. Tambourine Man"—the number ten song in 1965—is even more similar. The following stanza establishes the notion of using music to rouse one's imagination into a blissful fantasy world: Take me on a trip upon your magic swirlin' ship, My senses have been stripped, My hands can't feel to grip, My toes too numb to step, Wait only for my boot heels to be wanderin'. I'm ready to go anywhere, I'm ready for to fade Into my own parade. Cast your dancin' spell my way, I promise to go under it. Hey, Mister Tambourine Man, play a song for me, I'm not sleepy and there ain't no place I'm going to. Hey, Mister Tambourine Man, play a song for me. In the jingle, jangle morning I'll come followin' you.

Arnold Friend's car—complete with the phrase "MAN THE FLYING SAUCERS"—is just such "a magic swirlin' ship." Arnold is the personification of popular music, particularly Bob Dylan's music; and as such, Connie's interaction with him is a musically induced fantasy, a kind of "magic carpet ride'' in "a convertible jalopy painted gold." Rising out of Connie's radio, Arnold Friend/Bob Dylan is a magical, musical messiah; he persuades Connie to abandon her father's house. As a manifestation of her own desires, he frees her from the limitations of a fifteen-year-old girl, assisting her maturation by stripping her of her childlike vision. Source: Mike Tierce and John Michael Crafton, "Connie's Tambourine Man: A New Reading of Arnold Friend," in

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Larry Rubin Rubin is a critic, professor of English, and an award-winning poet. In the following essay, he comments on Joyce M. Wegs's characterization of Arnold Friend as the devil in "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?," but also suggests that the story is nothing but Connie's dream. In a recent essay Joyce M. Wegs brilliantly establishes the satanic identity of the sinister Arnold Friend, young Connie's abductor and probable rapist-murderer in Joyce Carol Dates's widely anthologized short story ' 'Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?" On another level, the psychological level, she points out that Arnold is "the incarnation of Connie's unconscious erotic desires and dreams, but in uncontrollable nightmare form.'' I would go a step further and suggest that, on still another level, the whole terrifying episode involving Arnold Friend is itself a dream—a fantasy that Connie falls into on a sleepy Sunday afternoon when she is left alone in the house and decides to spend the entire day drying her hair. For those of her readers who don't believe in devils, Gates has made the willing suspension of disbelief somewhat easier by imparting to her story a dreamlike, unreal atmosphere that makes it possible for the reader to view Connie's scary encounter with Arnold as a dream-vision or "daymare"—one in which Connie's intense desire for total sexual experience runs headlong into her innate fear of such experience. We must remember that Connie is only fifteen; and the collision is gorgeous. First of all, for all the talk of sex and boys in the story, we have no clear evidence that Connie is not still a virgin. Sophisticated, yes—but only in the most superficial ways, involving the heightening of her physical charms. Even the brief time Connie spends with a boy named Eddie in an alley seems, in context, more in keeping with smooching or even heavy petting than with triple-x sex. Indeed, her horror at Arnold Friend's direct solicitation ("I'll come inside you where it's all secret and you'll give in to me and you'll love me—") would appear to be owing to her basic lack of full sexual experience. In the repeated references to rock music in the shopping center she frequents and on the radio, both in Arnold's car and her own house, we find a powerful source of erotic suggestion and of Connie's intensi-

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fied teen-age hungers, true; but nowhere are we given to feel that she is a fully experienced woman. Rather, we experience her as a somewhat childish and silly narcissistic adolescent, one who feels put down by her more mature older sister (a librarian, and a perfect foil to Connie in her primness) and by her mother, who accuses her of "trashy daydreams." Actually, the trashy daydream involving Arnold may, in a sense, have a certain sobering effect on her frivolousness. Like Dante's dream-vision of Hell, it might improve the situation. But such speculation begs the question, which is, Is it all a daydream? The first clue that we get that it is comes even before the Arnold Friend episode, when Gates tells us: ' 'But all the boys fell back and dissolved into a single face that was not even a face but an idea, a feeling, mixed up with the urgent insistent pounding of the music and the humid night air of July." As we shall see, that music provides a key link between her daydreams and their materialization in Arnold Friend. But first we have another important clue, in Connie's languid dreaminess when she is left alone in the house on that fateful, hot summer afternoon:' 'Connie sat with her eyes closed in the sun, dreaming and dazed with the warmth about her as if this were a kind of love, the caresses of love.... She shook her head as if to get awake." Because it is so hot she goes inside and, sitting on the edge of her bed, listens for an hour and a half to rock songs on the radio, ' 'bathed in a glow of slow-pulsed joy that seemed to rise mysteriously out of the music itself and lay languidly about the airless little room, breathed in and out with each gentle rise and fall of her chest.'' At this point Gates starts a new paragraph to tell us that' 'After a while she heard a car coming up the drive'' This is Arnold driving up, just when the author has described certain physiological sounds and motions that sound suspiciously like those of sleep. If Arnold is indeed the devil—and he may well be, on the level so perspicaciously analyzed by Joyce Wegs—he is certainly a comical one, with his wig, incompletely made-up face, stuffed boots, and stumbling gait. In the threat he represents to Connie, of course, he is indeed a figure of evil, but with all this fakery, what Gates seems to be showing us is the absurd emptiness and falseness of sexual fulfillment. Connie fears she will be destroyed by Arnold, and the critics (like Wegs) have concentrated on the immediate level of physical death; what makes the story so rich, it seems to me, is the possibility of seeing her pending destruction as a moral phenomenon. Her compulsive sex drive will

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Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been? destroy her, Gates seems to tell us, but not simply physically (which, if that were all there were to it, would make the story merely a luscious gumdrop for gothic horror fans). It is the potential destruction of Connie as a person, on a humanistic level, that is the real source of power in this story, and it is through the protagonist's daydream of fearful sexual fulfillment that this horror is conveyed. The fact that Connie recognizes the sensual music being broadcast on Arnold's car radio as being the same as that emanating from her own in the house provides another strong clue to his real nature—that of a dream-like projection of her erotic fantasies. His music and hers, Oates tells us, blend perfectly, and indeed Arnold's voice is perceived by Connie as being the same as that of the disc jockey on the radio. Thus the protagonist's inner state of consciousness is being given physical form by her imagination. We should recall that Connie's initial response to her first view of Arnold the night before, in the shopping center, was one of intense sexual excitement; now she discovers how dangerous that excitement can be to her survival as a person. Instinctively she recoils; but the conflict between excitement and desire, on the one hand, and fear, on the other, leaves her will paralyzed, and she cannot even dial the phone for help. Such physical paralysis in the face of oncoming danger is a phenomenon familiar to all dreamers, like being unable to run from the monster because your legs won't respond to your will. Finally, the rather un-devil-like tribute that Arnold pays Connie as she finally succumbs to his threats against her family and goes out of the house to him—"... you're better than them [her family] because not a one of them would have done this for you'' —is exactly what poor, unappreciated Connie wants to hear. She is making a noble sacrifice, and in her dream she gives herself full credit for it. The episode with Arnold Friend, then, may be viewed as the vehicle for fulfillment of Connie's deep-rooted desire for ultimate sexual gratification, a fearsome business which, for the uninitiated female, may involve destruction of the person. Unsophisticated as she is, Connie's subconscious is aware of this danger, and her dream conveys this conflict. Thus, Oates's achievement in this story lies in her ability to convey all these subtleties while still creating the illusion of a real-life experience. Source: Larry Rubin, "Gates's 'Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?," in Explicator, Vol. 42, No. 4, Summer, 1984, pp. 57-60.

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Joyce M. Wegs In the following essay, Wegs concentrates on the "grotesque" factors in Oates's "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been," citing them as the reason the story fills the reader with fear even though it takes place in familiar surroundings. Joyce Carol Oates's ability to absorb and then to transmit in her fiction the terror which is often a part of living in America today has been frequently noted and admired. For instance, Walter Sullivan praises her skill by noting that' 'horror resides in the transformation of what we know best, the intimate and comfortable details of our lives made suddenly threatening." Although he does not identify it as such, Sullivan's comment aptly describes a classic instance of a grotesque intrusion: a familiar world suddenly appears alien. Oates frequently evokes the grotesque in her fiction, drawing upon both its traditional or demonic and its contemporary or psychological manifestations. In the prize-winning short story, ' 'Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?," Oates utilizes the grotesque in many of its forms to achieve a highly skillful integration of the multiple levels of the story and, in so doing, to suggest a transcendent reality which reaches beyond surface realism to evoke the simultaneous mystery and reality of the contradiction of the human heart. Full of puzzling and perverse longings, the heart persists in mixing lust and love, life and death, good and evil. Oates's teenage protagonist, Connie, discovers that her dream love-god also wears the face of lust, evil and death. Centering the narrative on the world of popular teenage music and culture, Oates depicts the tawdry world of drive-in restaurants and shopping plazas blaring with music with a careful eye for authentic surface detail. However, her use of popular music as a thematic referent is typical also of her frequent illumination of the illusions and grotesquely false values which may arise from excessive devotion to such aspects of popular culture as rock music, movies, and romance magazines. In all of her fiction as in this story, she frequently employs a debased religious imagery to suggest the gods which modern society has substituted for conventional religion. Oates delineates the moral poverty of Connie, her fifteen-year-old protagonist, by imaging a typical evening Connie spends at a drive-in restaurant as a grotesquely parodied religious pilgrimage. Left by her friend's father to stroll at the shopping center or go to a movie, Connie and her girlfriend immediately cross the highway to the restaurant frequented by

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older teenagers. A grotesque parody of a church, the building is bottle-shaped and has a grinning boy holding a hamburger aloft on top of it. Unconscious of any ludicrousness, Connie and her friend enter it as if going into a ' 'sacred building'' which will give them "what haven and blessing they yearned for." It is the music which is ' 'always in the background, like music at a church service'' that has invested this "bright-lit, fly-infested" place with such significance. Indeed, throughout the story the music is given an almost mystical character, for it evokes in Connie a mysterious pleasure, a "glow of slowpulsed joy that seemed to rise mysteriously out of the music itself." Although the story undoubtedly has a moral dimension, Gates does not take a judgmental attitude toward Connie. In fact, much of the terror of the story comes from the recognition that there must be thousands of Connies. By carefully including telltale phrases, Gates demonstrates in an understated fashion why Connies exist. Connie's parents, who seem quite typical, have disqualified themselves as moral guides for her. At first reading, the reader may believe Connie's mother to be concerned about her daughter's habits, views, and friends; but basically their arguments are little more than a ' 'pretense of exasperation, a sense that they ... [are] tugging and struggling over something of little value to either of them." Connie herself is uncertain of her mother's motives for constantly picking at her; she alternates between a view that her mother's harping proceeds from jealousy of Connie's good looks now that her own have faded and a feeling that her mother really prefers her over he plain older sister June because she is prettier. In other words, to Connie and her mother, real value lies in beauty. Connie's father plays a small role in her life, but by paralleling repeated phrases, Gates suggests that this is precisely the problem. Because he does not ' 'bother talking much'' to his family, he can hardly ask the crucial parental questions, ' 'Where are you going?" or "Where have you been?" The moral indifference of the entire adult society is underscored by Gates' parallel description of the father of Connie's friend, who also "never ... [bothers] to ask'' what they did when he picks up the pair at the end of one of their evenings out. Similarly, on Sunday morning, "none of them bothered with church," not even that supposed paragon, June. Since her elders do not bother about her, Connie is left defenseless against the temptations represented by Arnold Friend. A repeated key phrase emphasizes her helplessness. As she walks through the

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parking lot of the restaurant with Eddie, she can not "help but" look about happily, full of joy in a life characterized by casual pickups and constant music. When she sees Arnold in a nearby car, she looks away, but her instinctive flirtatiousness triumphs and she can not ' 'help but'' look back. Later, like Lot's wife leaving Sodom and Gomorrah, she cannot ' 'help but look back'' at the plaza and drive-in as her friend's father drives them home. In Connie's case, the consequences of the actions she can not seem to help are less biblically swift to occur and can not be simply labeled divine retribution. Since music is Connie's religion, its values are hers also. Gates does not include the lyrics to any popular songs here, for any observer of contemporary America could surely discern the obvious link between Connie's high esteem for romantic love and youthful beauty and the lyrics of scores of hit tunes. The superficiality of Connie's values becomes terrifyingly apparent when Arnold Friend, the external embodiment of the teenage ideal celebrated in popular songs, appears at Connie's home in the country one Sunday afternoon when she is home alone, listening to music and drying her hair. It is no accident that Arnold's clothes, car, speech, and taste in music reflect current teenage chic almost exactly, for they constitute part of a careful disguise intended to reflect Arnold's self-image as an accomplished youthful lover. Suspense mounts in the story as the reader realizes along with Connie that Arnold is not a teenager and is really thirty or more. Each part of his disguise is gradually revealed to be grotesquely distorted in some way. His shaggy black hair, "crazy as a wig," is evidently really a wig. The mask-like appearance of his face has been created by applying a thick coat of makeup; however, he has carelessly omitted his throat. Even his eyelashes appear to be made-up, but with some tarlike material. In his clothing, his disguise appears more successful, for Connie approves of the way he dresses, as ' 'all of them dressed," in tight jeans, boots, and pullover. When he walks, however, Connie realizes that the runty Arnold, conscious that the ideal teenage dream lover is tall, has stuffed his boots; the result is, however, that he can hardly walk and staggers ludicrously. Attempting to bow, he almost falls. Similarly, the gold jalopy covered with teenage slang phrases seems authentic until Connie notices that one of them is no longer in vogue. Even his speech is not his own, for it recalls lines borrowed from disc jockeys, teenage slang, and lines from popular songs. Arnold's strange companion, Ellie

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Oscar, is just as grotesque as Arnold. Almost totally absorbed in listening to music and interrupting this activity only to offer threatening assistance to Arnold, Ellie is no youth either; he has the "face of a forty-year-old baby." Although Arnold has worked out his disguise with great care, he soon loses all subtlety in letting Connie know of his evil intentions; he is not simply crazy but a criminal with plans to rape and probably to murder Connie.

However, Arnold is far more than a grotesque portrait of a psychopathic killer masquerading as a teenager; he also has all the traditional sinister traits of that arch-deceiver and source of grotesque terror, the devil. As is usual with Satan, he is in disguise; the distortions in his appearance and behavior suggest not only that his identity is faked but also hint at his real self. Equating Arnold and Satan is not simply a gratuitous connection designed to exploit traditional demonic terror, for the early pages of the story explicitly prepare for this linking by portraying popular music and its values as Connie's perverted version of religion. When Arnold comes up the drive, her first glance makes Connie believe that a teenage boy with his jalopy, the central figure of her religion, has arrived; therefore, she murmurs "Christ, Christ" as she wonders about how her newly-washed hair looks. When the car—a parodied golden chariot?—stops, a horn sounds ' 'as if this were a signal Connie knew." On one level, the horn honks to announce the "second coming" of Arnold, a demonic Day of Judgment. Although Connie never specifically recognizes Arnold as Satan, her first comment to him both hints at his infernal origins and faithfully reproduces teenage idiom: "Who the hell do you think you are?" (emphasis mine). When he introduces himself, his name too hints at his identity, for "friend" is uncomfortably close to "fiend"; his initials could well stand for Arch Fiend. The frightened Connie sees Arnold as "only half real": he "had driven up her driveway all right but had come from nowhere before that and belonged nowhere." Especially supernatural is his mysterious knowledge about her, her family, and her friends. At one point, he even seems to be able to see all the way to the barbecue which Connie's family is attending and to get a clear vision of what all the guests are doing. Typical of his ambiguous roles is his hint that he had something to do with the death of the old woman who lived down the road. It is never clear whether Arnold has killed her, has simply heard of her death, or knows about it in his devil role of having come to

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Dedicated to contemporary balladeer Bob Dylan, this story in a sense represents Dates' updated prose version of a ballad in which a demon lover carries away his helpless victim."

take her away to hell. Although Arnold has come to take Connie away, in his traditional role as evil spirit, he may not cross a threshold uninvited; he repeatedly mentions that he is not going to come in after Connie, and he never does. Instead, he lures Connie out to him. Part of his success may be attributed to his black magic in having put his sign on her—X for victim. Because the devil is not a mortal being, existing as he does in all ages, it is not surprising that he slips in remembering what slang terms are in vogue. Similarly, his foolish attempt at a bow may result from a mixup in temporal concepts of the ideal lover. In addition, his clumsy bow may be due to the fact that it must be difficult to manipulate boots if one has cloven feet!... Gates encourages the reader to took for multiple levels in this story and to consider Arnold and Connie at more than face value by her repeated emphasis on the question of identity. The opening of the story introduces the concept to which both Connie and her mother seem to subscribe—being pretty means being someone. In fact, her mother's acid questions as she sees Connie at her favorite activity of mirror-gazing—"Who are you? You think you're so pretty?"—also introduce the converse of this idea, namely, that those who lack physical beauty have no identity. As does almost everything in the story, everything about Connie has "two sides to it." However, Connie's nature, one for at home and one for ' 'anywhere that was not home," is simple in comparison to that of Arnold. Connie's puzzled questions at first query what role Arnold thinks he is playing: "Who the hell do you think you are?" Then she realizes that he sees himself all too literally as the man of her dreams, and she becomes more concerned about knowing his real identity. By the time that Arnold asks,

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' 'Don't you know who I am?'' Connie realizes that it is no longer a simple question of whether he is a "jerk" or someone worth her attention but of just how crazy he is. By the end she knows him to be a murderer, for she realizes that she will never see her family again. However, only the reader sees Arnold's Satan identity. Connie's gradual realization of Arnold's identity brings with it a recognition of the actual significance of physical beauty: Arnold is indeed someone to be concerned about, even if he is no handsome youth. At the conclusion Connie has lost all identity except that of victim, for Arnold's half-sung sigh about her blue eyes ignores the reality of her brown ones. In Arnold's view, Connie's personal identity is totally unimportant. Dedicated to contemporary balladeer Bob Dylan, this story in a sense represents Gates' updated prose version of a ballad in which a demon lover carries away his helpless victim. By adding modern psychological insights, she succeeds in revealing the complex nature of the victim of a grotesque intrusion by an alien force; on one level, the victim actually welcomes and invites this demonic visitation. Like Bob Dylan, she grafts onto the ballad tradition a moral commentary which explores but does not solve the problems of the evils of our contemporary society; an analogous Dylan ballad is his "It's a Hard Rain's a Gonna' Fall." Even the title records not only the ritual parental questions but also suggests that there is a moral connection between the two questions: where Connie goes is related to where she has been. Gates does not judge Connie in making this link, however; Connie is clearly not in complete control over where she has been. The forces of her society, her family, and her self combine to make her fate inescapable. Source: Joyce M. Wegs, '"Don't You Know Who I Am?': The Grotesque in Oates's 'Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?'," in The Journal of Narrative Technique, Vol. 5, No. 1, January, 1975, pp. 66-72.

Sources Oilman, Richard. Review of The Wheel of Love, in New York Times Book Review, October 25, 1970, p. 4. Long, Robert Emmet. Review of Wheel of Love, in Saturday Review, October 24, 1970, p. 36.

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Oates, Joyce Carol. '"Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?' and Smooth Talk: Short Story into Film," in (Woman) Writer: Occasions and Opportunities, Dutton, 1988, pp. 316-21. Quirk, Tom. "A Source for 'Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?'" Studies in Short Fiction, Vol. 18, no. 4, Fall, 1981, pp. 413-19. Review of Wheel of Love, in Virginia Quarterly Review, Vol. 47, no. 1, Winter, 1971, p. xv. Sullivan, Walter. "The Artificial Demon: Joyce Carol Oates and the Dimensions of the Real," The Hollins Critic, Vol. 9, no. 4, December, 1972, pp. 1-12. Waller, G. F. Dreaming America: Obsession and Transcendence in the Fiction of Joyce Carol Oates, Louisiana State University Press, 1979.

Further Reading Clemons, Walter.' 'Joyce Carol Dates: Love and Violence," in Conversations with Joyce Carol Oates, edited by Lee Milazzo, University Press of Mississippi, 1989, pp. 32-41. Clemens discusses Oates as a chronicler of the way people live in the contemporary world. Creighton, Joanne V. Joyce Carol Oates, Twayne, 1979,173 p. Creighton analyzes the complete body of Oates's fiction through 1979. Johnson, Greg. Understanding Joyce Carol Oates, University of South Carolina Press, 1987, 224 p. Johnson presents analyses of Oates's fiction. Moser, Don. "The Pied Piper of Tucson," Life, March 4, 1966, pp. 18-24 and 80-90C. This journalistic treatment of an Arizona mass murderer provides many parallels to Oates's story, and she has since confirmed that her inspiration for ' 'Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?'' came from reading this article and from Moser's presentation of the charismatic killer Charles Schmid. Myers, George. "Oates Writes Out of 'Fascination,' Not Zeal," in Conversations with Joyce Carol Oates, edited by Lee Milazzo, University Press of Mississippi, 1989, pp. 181-85. Oates talks about her work as a reader, writer, and critic. Wagner, Linda W. "Joyce Carol Oates: The Changing Shapes of Her Realities," an introduction to Critical Essays on Joyce Carol Oates, G.K. Hall & Co., 1979, 180 p. Overall appraisal of Oates's work and discussion of the author's effect on the American literary scene.

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The Yellow Wallpaper "The Yellow Wallpaper," first published in 1892 in the New England Magazine, is largely considered Charlotte Perkins Oilman's best work of short fiction. The story is a first-person account of a young mother's mental deterioration and is based on Oilman's own experiences with postpartum depression. Like Oilman, the unnamed protagonist of the story is advised, based on medical theories of the time, to abstain from any and all physical activity and intellectual stimulation. She is not allowed to read, write, or even see her new baby. To carry out this treatments, the woman's husband takes her to a country house where she is kept in a former nursery decorated with yellow wallpaper.

Charlotte Perkins Qilman 1892

Oilman initially had difficulties getting "The Yellow Wallpaper'' published. Horace Scudder of The Atlantic refused to print it, stating ' 'I could not forgive myself if I made others as miserable as I have made myself!" Eventually, "The Yellow Wallpaper' ' began to win converts, and American writer William Dean Howells included it in his The Great Modem American Stories: An Anthology in 1920. Early reviewers generally classified "The Yellow Wallpaper" as a horror story, with most commenting on Oilman's use of Gothic conventions. It was not until Elaine R. Hedges's afterward to a 1973 edition of the story that ' The Yellow Wallpaper'' began receiving scholarly attention. Most modern commentators now interpret the story as a feminist indictment of society's subjugation of women and

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praise its compelling characterization, complex symbolism, and thematic depth.

Author Biography Charlotte Perkins Oilman was born in 1860 in Hartford, Connecticut, to Frederick Beecher Perkins, a noted librarian and magazine editor, and his wife, Mary Fritch Perkins. Although Oilman's father frequently left the family for long periods during her childhood and eventually divorced his wife in 1869, he directed Oilman's early education, emphasizing study in the sciences and history. During his absences, Perkins left his wife and children with his relatives. This brought Oilman into frequent contact with her independent and reform-minded greataunts: Harriet Beecher Stowe, an abolitionist and author of Uncle Tom's Cabin; Catherine Beecher, the prominent advocate of ' 'domestic feminism''; and Isabella Beecher Hooker, an ardent suffragist. Their influence—and the example of her mother's own self-reliance—were instrumental in developing Oilman's feminist convictions and desire to effect social reform. Early in her life, Oilman displayed the independence she later advocated for women: she insisted on remuneration for her household chores, and later she paid her mother room and board while supporting herself as a teacher and as a commercial artist. At twenty-four, she married Charles Walter Stetson, who was also an artist. Following the birth of their daughter in 1884, Oilman suffered a severe depression. She consulted the noted neurologist S. Weir Mitchell, who prescribed his "rest-cure": complete bed rest and limited intellectual activity. Oilman credited this experience with driving her ' 'near the borderline of utter mental ruin.'' The restcure served as the basis for Oilman's best known work,' "The Yellow Wallpaper.'' She removed herself from Mitchell's care, and later, attributing her emotional problems in part to the confines of marriage, left her husband. After her separation, Oilman moved to California, where she helped edit feminist publications, assisted in the planning of the California Women's Congresses of 1894 and 1895, and was instrumental in founding the Women's Peace Party. She spent several years lecturing in the United States and England on women's rights and on labor reform, and in 1898 she published Women and Economics: A Study of the Economic Relation between Men and

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Women as a Factor in Social Evolution. In 1900, she married George Houghton Oilman, who was supportive of her intense involvement in social reform. From 1909 through 1916 Oilman published a monthly journal, The Forerunner, for which she wrote nearly all of the copy. In 1935, having learned that she was suffering from inoperable cancer, Oilman took her life. She wrote in a final note that ' 'when one is assured of unavoidable and imminent death, it is the simplest of human rights to choose a quick and easy death in place of a slow and horrible one.''

Plot Summary "The Yellow Wallpaper" opens with the musings of an unnamed woman. She, her husband John, their newborn baby, and her sister-in-law have rented a summer house. The narrator is suffering from postpartum depression, and the summer house will function as a place for her to get better. The doctor has prescribed a rest cure of quiet and solitude, with an emphasis on avoiding any form of mental stimulation like reading or writing. The woman notes that the room in which she is staying seems to be geared more for incarceration than rehabilitation. John classifies her merely as "sick," thereby exhibiting the prevailing attitude of the day, that mental illness in women was not real. Following the doctor's strict orders, he forbids his wife from doing any type of work and does not allow her to see her baby. The narrator believes that work, excitement, and change would do her good, but her opinion does not matter. She would like to write, which is forbidden, and surreptiously keeping a diary exhausts her, as does trying to oppose her husband. With very little to do, the woman is left to contemplate the ugly yellow wallpaper in the nursery that is coming off the wall in great patches. She begins to trace the pattern of the wallpaper. The woman's narration abruptly ends because her husband is coming. The story continues two weeks later when the narrator is able to write again. Even though she feels it might help relieve some of her tension, she generally gives in to her husband's desire that she not write. She has been feeling terribly depressed, but John says her case is not serious. He does not think her suffering amounts to anything more than "nervousness." He laughs at her hatred for the wallpaper, and though she wants him to repaper the room, he refuses to give in to her "fancies." When the narrator claims to have seen people walking on

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the path by the house, he cautions her that giving in to her imagination will overexcite her. The woman starts to examine the wallpaper, noticing how the patterns form "eyes'' that seem to be staring at her. When the sunlight shines in a certain way, she sees a figure skulking behind the pattern of the wallpaper. Again, the narrator must stop writing, for her sisterin-law, Jennie, is coming up the stairs. Because the narrator does not seem to be getting better and spends a lot of time crying, John threatens to send her to Weir Mitchell, a doctor who believes even more strongly than himself in rest treatments. The narrator has become fond of the room, perhaps because of the wallpaper. She enjoys lying on her bed, following the patterns in the wallpaper and attempting to trace one of the strands to a conclusion. As she spends all her time in the bedroom, the wallpaper continues to captivate the narrator. She realizes that it knows things about her that no one else does. More alarmingly, the figure she sees in the wallpaper has begun to take shape— that of a woman stooping down and creeping behind the pattern. One night the narrator tells John that she is getting no better and wants to leave the house, but he refuses, insisting the rest cure will work. She then returns to her examination of the wallpaper. Her diligent attention reveals that there is a front pattern and a back pattern and that at night the front pattern forms bars. The woman in the wallpaper is quiet during the day and more active at night, as is the narrator. The narrator has also grown fearful of John and Jennie, for they seem to be studying the wallpaper as if they want to understand its pattern before she does. During the last week of their stay, the narrator fakes improved health and spirits when her husband is around but has become completely obsessed with the wallpaper. She constantly notices new facets of the wallpaper: the smell of yellow that creeps through the whole house; a streak along the baseboard encircling the room. She discovers that the woman in the wallpaper shakes the bars of the front pattern as she tries, unsuccessfully, to climb through them. Though she has only two days left in the house, she is determined to get the paper off and thus free the woman inside. When John is away one evening, she locks the door, throws the keys out the window, and begins peeling the wallpaper. Despite her efforts, however, she cannot remove it all. In her desperation, she considers committing suicide but decides that this

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would be "improper and might be misconstrued." She begins circling the room, following the pattern of the wallpaper, in essence becoming the woman inside, trapped in an endless maze. John breaks open the door to see his wife creeping along the wall and faints. The narrator only laughs. His slumped body is blocking her path, and she is forced to creep over him each time she circles the room.

Characters Jennie Jennie is the narrator's sister-in-law. She helps to take care of the narrator and, more importantly, the narrator's newborn baby. She is described as ' 'a perfect and enthusiastic housekeeper." She represents the nineteenth-century view of the role of women as housekeepers and child rearers.

John The husband of the unnamed narrator, John is a doctor who believes in the ' 'rest-cure,'' a treatment developed by real-life neurologist S. Weir Mitchell, for women suffering from hysteria. Therefore, he prescribes complete bed rest, not allowing his wife

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Themes

Media Adaptations A short film adaptation of' 'The Yellow Wallpaper' ' was produced in 1977 by Marie Ashton and is available on videotape through Women Make Movies. "The Yellow Wallpaper" was adapted as a television film, produced by the British Broadcasting Company (BBC) for its series ' 'Masterpiece Theatre" in 1989. It was adapted by Maggie Wadey and directed by John Clive. ' "The Yellow Wallpaper'' appeared as an audio, book in 1997. Read by Win Phillips, it was produced by Durkin Hayes.

to do anything. John in many ways treats his wife like a child, calling her his "blessed little goose" and "little girl." The character displays the nineteenth-century attitude that women were to behave demurely and remain within the domestic sphere, aspiring only to be competent mothers and charming wives.

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' 'The Yellow Wallpaper'' is the story of a woman who suffers from depression. Advised by her husband to rest, the woman becomes obsessed by the yellow wallpaper that decorates the room in which she has been confined.

Role of Women ' 'The Yellow Wallpaper'' examines the role of women in nineteenth-century American society, including the relationship between husbands and wives, the economic and social dependence of women on men, and the repression of female individuality and sexuality. The Victorian Age had a profound impact on the social values in the United States. Victorian values stressed that women were to behave demurely and remain within the domestic sphere. Suffering from postpartum depression after the birth of her son, the protagonist is advised to get complete bed rest by her husband and brother, despite her suggestions that she would like to write and read. While she does secretly write in a journal, it is made clear that her husband is to be the final decision-maker and that she has no role other than to be a charming wife and a competent mother. In fact, John often treats her like a child, calling her his "little girl" and his "blessed little goose." When the narrator has a "real earnest reasonable talk" with John during which she asks him if she can visit some relatives, he does not allow her to go.

Unnamed protagonist

Mental Illness

The unnamed narrator of' "The Yellow Wallpaper" is married to John, a doctor, and has just recently had a baby. She suffers from depression, or "nervous prostration," and is confined to a room that used to be a nursery, as a "bed-rest" cure, in a country house that she and her husband are renting for a holiday. While John does not allow her to read, write, or engage in any other type of mental stimulation, she does secretly write in a journal. The story itself is a transcription of these journal entries. Bored and restless, the narrator is driven to distraction by the yellow wallpaper that decorates the room, eventually suffering a complete mental breakdown after imagining that she sees in the wallpaper's pattern women who are trying to escape. Because the narrator is completely dependent on her husband and is allowed no other role than to be a wife and mother, she represents the secondary status of women during the nineteenth century.

"The Yellow Wallpaper," because of its firstperson description of mental illness, is also considered a work of psychological fiction. In the story Oilman addresses such themes as madness, depression, despair, and self-worth by presenting a realistic and shocking account of the stages of mental breakdown. Because the narrator has nothing to do to occupy herself and because she has no say in her treatment, she comes to project all of her pent up feelings onto the yellow wallpaper in her room. She eventually believes that there is a woman trapped in the wallpaper's pattern. This trapped figure symbolizes the narrator's emotional and intellectual confinement. Left with no real means of expression or escape, the narrator represses her anger and frustration and succumbs to insanity. Greg Johnson emphasizes this theme in an essay for Studies in Short Fiction in which he notes that the story "traces the narrator's gradual identification with her own sup-

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pressed rage, figured as a woman grasping the bars of her prison and struggling frantically to get free." The story also addresses how physicians, specifically world-famous neurologist S. Weir Mitchell, viewed mental illness in female patients at the end of the nineteenth century. Psychologists frequently dismissed serious illnesses like depression as nothing more than hysteria or a "case of the nerves." Mitchell and his proteges advised their patients get complete bed rest, believing that intellectual activity was detrimental to women's mental health. In 1935, Oilman explained the importance of this theme in her autobiography: ' The real purpose of the story was to reach Dr. S. Weir Mitchell, and convince him of the error of his w a y s . . . . Many years later, I met someone who said he had told them that he had changed his treatment of nervous prostration since reading The Yellow Wallpaper.' If that is a fact, I have not lived in vain."

Topics for Further Study Research literature on hysteria and other ' 'women's problems'' published at the end of the 1800s and relate them to "The Yellow Wallpaper." What role does John feel a woman should play in society? How might a contemporary feminist view John? What are the attitudes toward acceptable roles for women today? Read Oilman's autobiography The Living of Charlotte Perkins (1935) and compare her real-life experience with depression to that of the protagonist in "The Yellow Wallpaper."

Style ' The Yellow Wallpaper'' tells the story of a woman's mental breakdown. Suffering from depression following the birth of her first child, the woman is taken to the country by her physician husband, where she is kept in a room decorated with yellow wallpaper that used to be a nursery. Instructed by her husband not to engage in any intellectual activity and to get total bed rest, the narrator becomes obsessed with the wallpaper until, at the end of the story, she goes insane.

Setting "The Yellow Wallpaper" takes place in a country house that is located about three miles from the nearest village. Although the house is large and is surrounded by hedges, a garden, and servants' quarters, the narrator notes that the house and its grounds have fallen into a slight state of disrepair. At the beginning of the story, the narrator is interested in the surrounding scenery as well as the other rooms in the house. As the story progresses, however, she becomes fixated on the nursery and its yellow wallpaper. The setting has the appearance of tranquility but is actually a place of confinement— there are bars on the windows of the nursery, and the bed is secured to the floor. The isolated location of the house, its slight state of disrepair, and the narrator's further isolation in the fortress-like nursery, all symbolize the narrator's mental condition.

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Narration ' The Yellow Wallpaper'' is an example of a first-person narrative because it is told exclusively from the viewpoint of the unnamed protagonist, and the reader is given access only to her thoughts and emotions. Since the protagonist is suffering a mental breakdown, she is also considered an unreliable narrator because the reader cannot be certain if she is accurately relating the events of the story. This adds emotional impact to the narrative because the reader is given an intimate account of the protagonist's growing feelings of despair and confusion. The story itself is, in part, a transcription of a journal which the narrator secretly writes as she lays in bed. The writing style, and the way it changes as the story progresses, gives the reader clues to the protagonist's deteriorating mental condition. For example, throughout the story the narrator's sentences become shorter and more curt, with paragraphs consisting of only one or two sentences. This helps convey her distraught mental state and her inability to think clearly. The overall tone of the narrator's writing also changes. At the beginning of the story, she writes with humility, stating that while she does not agree with her treatment, her husband John probably knows better than she what is good for her. By the end of the narrative, however, a tone of complaint and rebellion has entered the narrator's account. When she locks the door of the nursery at

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the end of the story, for example, she declares: "I don't want to go out, and I don't want to have anybody come in, until John comes. I want to astonish him."

Symbolism The most important symbol in the story is the yellow wallpaper. Most critics have concluded that the wallpaper represents the state of mind of the protagonist. In a more general sense, the wallpaper also symbolizes the way women were viewed in nineteenth-century society. It is described as containing "pointless patterns," "lame uncertain curves," and "outrageous angles" that "destroy themselves in unheard of contradictions." Despite the narrator's detailed description of the wallpaper, however, it remains mysterious. Elaine R. Hedges wrote in the afterword to the 1973 edition of the story that "the paper symbolizes [the narrator's] situation as seen by the men who control her and hence her situation as seen by herself. How can she define herself?'' Other important symbols in "The Yellow Wallpaper' ' are the nursery, the barred windows, and the nailed-down bed. The nursery is said to represent nineteenth-century society's tendency to view women as children, while the barred windows symbolize the emotional, social, and intellectual prison in which women of that era were kept. Finally, the bed is said by some critics to represent repressed female sexuality.

Psychological Realism The story is considered an example of psychological realism because it attempts to accurately portray the mental deterioration of the narrator. It is also considered realistic in that it depicts life the way it was for women during the nineteenth century. Oilman deliberately tried to make the narrator typical of that time period: she is economically dependent on her husband, she is not allowed to make her own decisions, she is discouraged from engaging in intellectual activity, and she is frequently treated like a child. Oilman also did not romanticize the character of John. While she could have depicted him sympathetically, she instead painted him as controlling, inconsiderate, and emotionally inaccessible.

Gothicism Oilman utilizes numerous conventions of Gothic fiction in "The Yellow Wallpaper," including horror, dread, dreams, suspense, and the supernatural.

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For example, the story takes place on an estate, which has fallen into a state of disrepair, three miles from the nearest village. This sense of isolation is frequently used in Gothic stories to create a foreboding tone. The narrator is also struck with the "strangeness" and "ghostliness" of the place. E. Suzanne Owens argues in Haunting the House of Fiction that "to a reader familiar with the Gothic, the events of the story suggest possession as much as they do hallucination."

Historical Context "The Yellow Wallpaper" was written and published in 1892. The last three decades of the nineteenth century comprised a period of growth, development, and expansion for the United States. Following the Civil War, which ended in 1865, the United States entered the era of Reconstruction, which lasted until 1877. There were many social and cultural changes during this period. Charles Darwin's The Origin of Species (1892) expounded his theory of evolution, and further incited controversy over women's roles and issues. His theory of evolution flouted conventional wisdom, contending that women were actually the hardier and more necessary sex, the one able to preserve the species. Because women were mothers, they were vital to survival. Darwin's theory was used to promote both sides of what came to be known as the ' 'Woman Question." Some scientists argued that because women were physiologically hardier, they were capable of being both mothers and professionals. Others contended that Darwin's theory proved that motherhood was necessary to women and that it should retain a supreme priority in a woman's life. Throughout much of the 1800s, the common law doctrine offemme convert was prevalent in the United States. Under this law, wives were property of their husbands and had no direct legal control over their earnings, children, or belongings. Some state laws prohibited women from going into business without their husband's consent, and some dictated that a husband could decide where the family would live. Other state laws dictated that adultery was not considered sufficient grounds for divorce if committed by a man, but it was if committed by the wife. Women also could not vote; they were not allowed to do so until 1920, when the 19th Amendment to the Constitution was adopted. In 1875, in Minor v. Happensett, the Supreme Court

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Compare & Contrast 1892: Women cannot vote for public officials or hold public office. Occupations other than teaching, nursing, low-level factory labor, or domestic service are closed to them, and a college education is rare. Today: Women have achieved a great deal toward true equality with men. Virtually all occupations are now open to women. Many issues remain, however, including equal pay. 1890s: A rash of so called "hysteria" cases occur during the late 1800s and early 1900s. Medical professionals define the malady in terms of femininity and female sexuality, claiming that women are prone to hysteria because of their emotionality and delicate constitutions.

ruled that states could withhold the right to vote from women as they did from criminals and the mentally insane. The rise of women's consciousness regarding such oppression was influenced by their participation in the abolitionist movement prior to and during the Civil War. In 1869, the first organizations devoted to women's rights were founded. By 1890, such organizations claimed a total of 500,000 members. While there were more women than men in high school by 1890, higher education was not an option for most women, and the only professions open to them were nursing and elementary education. Oilman, as a leading feminist and social activist during the late nineteenth century, argued that women's secondary status in society, and especially women's economic dependence on men, was not the result of biological inferiority but rather of culturally enforced behavior. In ' The Yellow Wallpaper," which was, in part, a reaction to the oppression of women prevalent during this time, Oilman emphasized these beliefs. In 1926, she stated, regarding her work in general, "One girl reads this, and takes fire! Her life is changed. She becomes a power—a mover of others—I write for her."

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Today: Hysteria has long been considered an invalid diagnosis of mental illness. Post-partum depression is recognized as a common condition and can be treated in a variety of ways, often with medication. 1890s: Along with Oilman, Kate Chopin, Louisa May Alcott, and Sarah Orne Jewett are some of the few women writers who obtain success and popularity by publishing their stories in women's magazines. Today: Many women writers are being rediscovered and reevaluated, such as Oilman, and have been added to the literary cannon.

Critical Overview "The Yellow Wallpaper," which was first published in the New England Magazine in 1892 after being rejected by the editor of The Atlantic, did not receive much serious attention until American writer and critic William Dean Howells published it in his The Great Modem American Stories in 1920. In that volume he wrote: ' 'Now that I have it in my collection, I shiver over it as much as I did when I first read it in manuscript, though I agree with the editor of The Atlantic of the time that it was too terribly good to be printed." It was not until 1973, when it was republished after being out of print for years, that the first lengthy analysis of the story was written by Elaine R. Hedges. Writing in the afterword to the volume, she stated that "The Yellow Wallpaper' is a small literary masterpiece'' and a work that "does deserve the widest possible audience." Since then, ' The Yellow Wallpaper'' has received widespread critical attention. Contemporary scholars have interpreted the story in numerous ways, with feminist readings being the most common. Reviewers focus on the relationship between the narrator and her husband John, maintaining that

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John's treatment of his wife represents the powerlessness and repression of women during the late nineteenth-century. Hedges concluded that the story is ' 'one of the rare pieces of literature we have by a nineteenth-century woman which directly confronts the sexual politics of the male-female, husband-wife relationship." Critics have also commented on the story's focus on psychology and its influence as an example of both psychological realism and Gothic fiction. It is often considered one of the most detailed and emotionally charged accounts of depression and despair in short fiction because it is told from the vantage point of the person actually suffering a nervous breakdown. Furthermore, Oilman does not romanticize or downplay the realities of mental suffering. In addition to being discussed as feminist literature and as an example of psychological realism, ' 'The Yellow Wallpaper'' has been lauded as a preeminent piece of Gothic fiction because of its incorporation of such Gothic literary elements as horror, suspense, and the supernatural. "The Yellow Wallpaper," like Oilman's other short stories, has been faulted by some critics who claim the story is nothing more than a vehicle through which she explicated her feminist social beliefs. In fact, Oilman once stated that she wrote the story "to preach. If it is literature, that just happened." However, most critics have acknowledged that "The Yellow Wallpaper" is realistic, accessible, and thought-provoking and have called it Oilman's best work of fiction.

Criticism Rena Korb Rena Korb is a writer and editor. In the following essay, Korb discusses ' 'The Yellow Wallpaper' ' as a story of female confinement and escape. In 1913, more than twenty years after the first publication of' 'The Yellow Wallpaper," Charlotte Perkins Oilman wrote that she devised the story, "to save people from being driven crazy." Oilman had suffered a near mental breakdown herself, and had been prescribed a rest treatment very similar to that prescribed to the narrator in "The Yellow Wallpaper." For Oilman, the act of resuming her

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normal life, which certainly included writing, was what restored her health. Though we don't know what became of Oilman's narrator, we can chronicle Oilman's own life after her near mental breakdown. If Oilman's narrator in ' 'The Yellow Wallpaper' ' regressed into her insanity, Oilman certainly did not; unlike the narrator she created, she made her voice heard. She pursued her career as a writer and lecturer, and she wrote works of theory and social commentary that brought her international fame. Though she concentrated on feminist issues, her influence reached beyond the woman's sphere. She has been compared by some critics to the author George Bernard Shaw and the art critic John Ruskin, and the London Chronicle compared her book, Women and Economics, to the writings of John Stuart Mill. ' "The Yellow Wallpaper'' commands attention not only for the harrowing journey into madness it portrays, but also for its realism. It comes as no surprise, then, to discover that the "The Yellow Wallpaper" is autobiographical. In 1887, Charlotte Perkins Oilman placed herself under the care of Dr. S. Weir Mitchell, a well-known nerve specialist. She was suffering from depression,' 'nervous prostration" as diagnosed by the doctor, after the birth of her daughter. At that time, the medical profession had not yet distinguished between diseases of the mind and diseases of the brain; problems that would now be treated by psychiatrists, such as depression, were treated by neurologists such as Mitchell. The symptoms of depression—fatigue, hysteria, crying fits—were thought to stem from the body, and thus were treated through care of the body. Mitchell's treatment for breakdowns of the nervous system, and the treatment he prescribed for Oilman, included total bed rest and isolating the patient from family and familiar surroundings. In ' "The Yellow Wallpaper," Oilman demonstrates the horror that such a treatment could induce in its subject. When the narrator is threatened by her husband with being sent to Weir Mitchell if she does not get better quickly, she says: "But I don't want to go there at all. I had a friend who was in his hands once, and she says he is just like John and my brother, only more so!" Oilman was sent home from Mitchell's sanitarium after one month, having been pronounced "cured," with the following instructions: "Live as domestic a life as possible.... Have but two hours' intellectual life a day. And never touch pen, brush or pencil as long as you live." When Oilman heeded

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What Do I Read Next? The short story "The Tell-Tale Heart" (1843) by Edgar Allan Poe is told from the perspective of an insane man who murders an old man and buries the dismembered body beneath the floor boards of the room in which he lives.

The short story "Silent Snow, Secret Snow" (1932) by American writer Conrad Aiken explores the hallucinations of a sensitive youngster named Paul Haslemann.

In her nonfiction work Women and Economics (1898), Oilman argues that men and women are more similar than different and that women should have all of the social and economic freedoms of men, including the right to work.

The Madwomen in the Attic (1979) by Susan Gubar and Sandra Gilbert examines the ways nineteenth-century women writers, including Oilman and Charlotte Bronte, expressed forbidden emotions in their works.

In The Treatment of Certain Forms of Neurasthenia and Hysteria (1887), doctor S. Weir Mitchell explains his treatment of nervous prostration in women. He advocates a "restcure," or complete bed rest, believing that intellectual, literary, and artistic pursuits are destructive to women's mental health.

The Awakening (1899) is a novel by American writer Kate Chopin. It is the story of a conventional wife and mother who, after engaging in an extramarital affair, commits suicide when she realizes she cannot reconcile her actions with the moral restrictions of society.

this advice she came, in her own words,' 'perilously close to losing my mind." Mitchell's "rest cure" had been used on other literary figures—Walt Whitman, Edith Wharton, and Virginia Woolf— and other noted persons—Jane Addams and Winifred Howells, whose father, the editor William Dean Howells, was instrumental in the publication of "The Yellow Wallpaper." Woolf, Addams, and Howells, like Oilman, protested against the treatment (Woolf also attacked it in her novel Mrs. Dalloway). In "The Yellow Wallpaper," Oilman chronicles what happens to a woman forced to succumb to the ' 'rest cure'' and thus, to her inflexible position in society as a prisoner of the domestic sphere. Oilman claimed a purpose for everything she wrote. "The Yellow Wallpaper" pointed out the dangers of the medical treatment imposed by Mitchell and other doctors like him. Years later, Oilman learned that Mitchell had changed his treatment of nervous prostration after reading the story, so she won her victory. Yet, the story is far more than just a crying out for improvement in one facet of a wom-

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an's life; it touches on many issues relevant to women of the nineteenth century, particularly that of the limited roles available to them. Despite Oilman's avowal that her story was not literature, it has been appreciated as such since its rediscovery in the 1960s (Oilman's works had been out of print since the 1930s). And just as "The Yellow Wallpaper" espoused Oilman's feminist views when she wrote it, critics have analyzed it as a feminist work—or a work that has feminist issues as its main concerns—for the past two decades. As is often the case, the critics disagree. The story has been seen as a realistic tale in its portrayal of the narrator's descent into madness, as a feminist Gothic tale in its use of abnormal behavior and occurrences, and as one of the earliest modernist texts for its unaware narrator and its intense focus on what she is thinking and feeling. Readers and critics alike have even disagreed over the meaning of the story's ending. Some critics see the narrator's defeat: she has retreated into the world of childishness. Others, such as Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, see in it the narrator's triumph: by fainting, John shows he is

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the window, the gate at the top of the stairs, steel rings on the wall, and the nailed-down bedstead.

'The Yellow Wallpaper' is far more than just a crying out for improvement in one facet of a woman's life; it touches on many issues relevant to women of the nineteenth century, particularly that of the limited roles available to them."

defeated, and the narrator has become the woman behind the wallpaper, who can creep down the road, away from the house and her husband's authority. Even attempts to understand why the story was ignored for so long have led to dissent. Some critics argue that Oilman's contemporaries could not understand this story of a woman's mental breakdown because they were accustomed to "traditional" literature. Still others believe that women could accurately read the story, but they chose not to because they were afraid of what they would find. What then are we to make of Oilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper"? Essentially, it is a story of female confinement and escape. Oilman's narrator is trapped in the home, in her maternal body, and in the text she has created for herself, which is the only escape she can find. That Oilman's narrator is physically and spiritually trapped by her husband is apparent from the beginning of the story. Though she "wanted [a room] downstairs that opened on the piazza ... John would not hear of it." The narrator strives for some space of her own; the room she would have chosen would not fit two beds and had no other bedroom for John nearby. Instead, John has put his wife on the top floor, away from the rest of the household (their baby, the nurse, and John's sister) in a room she believes to have been a ' 'nursery first and then playroom and gymnasium." Though she recognizes her captivity—John ' 'hardly lets me stir without special direction"—she overlooks other more ominous signs of her confinement: the bars at

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This habit of the narrator of deliberately misreading her surroundings is apparent throughout the story. For instance, when John refuses to give in to her fancies about changing the wallpaper because, after that' 'it would be the heavy bedstead, and then the barred windows, and then that gate at the head of the stairs, and so on," is he reminding her of her confinement? Does she recognize this subtle way of controlling her? Rather than confronting such a possibility she instead, outwardly, relies on John's advice. "I think sometimes if I were only well enough to write a little it would relieve the press of ideas and rest me," she muses, which she then follows with a reiteration of what John wants her to think—"But I find I get pretty tired when I try." Such is her effort to believe in him and thus preserve her sanity (sanity as defined by John), because she knows she has not the will to resist him: ' 'But what is one to do?'' she says. In fact, she does something John doesn't approve of—she writes in a journal, thereby creating her own text. Unfortunately, because the text is her only place of true self-expression, it becomes as oppressive as the room, as oppressive as her husband. Oilman's narrator is so cruelly trapped both by the conventions of nineteenth-century American society, which says that a woman's function is to bear and raise children, and by her husband's inflexible belief in this code. John has attempted to take away one of the few things that bring her consistent pleasure, her writing, ' 'He hates to have me write a word," she says, and notes his determination to correct her "imaginative power and habit of storymaking." Unfortunately, for Oilman's narrator, these sentiments are shared by others in society. John's sister, a woman who occupies her proper place in the domestic sphere by being "so good with the baby" and a "perfect and enthusiastic housekeeper," seems to believe "it is the writing which made [the narrator] sick!" Because the narrator has no physical or spiritual escape from her husband, she must seek relief elsewhere: in the yellow wallpaper, and thus, in the text she creates as she describes her relationship with the wallpaper. Though at first she says of it, "I never saw a worse paper in my life," as she loses her slim hold on sanity, she gets' 'really fond of the room in spite of the wallpaper. Perhaps because of the wallpaper." Her initial discomfort decreases as she sees mirrored in the wallpaper her own exist-

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ence. She realizes that the wallpaper has two patterns; the front pattern is made of bars, and in the back pattern is a woman "stooping down and creeping about," and later shaking the bars. And the woman in the wallpaper continues to reflect the narrator: "she is all the time trying to climb through. But nobody could climb through the pattern—it strangles so." By the end of the story, the narrator finds escape when she becomes the wallpaper woman as she "creepfs] smoothly on the floor." With this final action she escapes those places of her confinement. Her husband, the force that keeps her in the home, has become an inanimate object, one that only gets in the way of her "path by the wall, so that [she] had to creep over him." She releases herself from her maternal role as she occupies the role of a ' 'madwoman.'' And, by refusing to write it anymore, she has freed herself from the text that chronicles her mental breakdown.

paper her bedroom. This he did, while Emily was being born."

Virginia Woolf, in her important essay A Room of One's Own, says that in order to write a woman must have money and her own private room. Perhaps implicit in Woolf's words is that women also need to be accepted for what they are: creative, independent, thinking creatures. For Oilman's narrator, having money, a private room, and the necessary leisure time certainly was not enough to sustain her as a writer and as a person; she was lacking that other essential element: a family who believed in a woman's right to creativity and self-expression.

Though the color of Mrs. Dickinson's wallpaper went unrecorded, the anecdote forms a striking parallel to Charlotte Perkins Oilman's ' The Yellow Wallpaper," first published in 1892 but, like Emily Dickinson's work, under-appreciated until decades after her death. Both the domestic incident and the terrifying short story suggest the familiar Gothic themes of confinement and rebellion, forbidden desire and "irrational" fear. Both include such Gothic staples as the distraught heroine, the forbidding mansion, and the powerfully repressive male antagonist. If we focus on the issue of the Gothic world and its release of imaginative power, however, the stories form a dramatic contrast. A woman of ordinary abilities, the unimaginative Mrs. Dickinson would later represent the nadir of female selfhood to her brilliant, rebellious daughter. ' 'Mother does not care for thought," the poet remarked dryly in 1862; and by 1870, she could issue this blunt dismissal: "I never had a mother." But Dickinson surely would have admired the unnamed heroine of "The Yellow Wallpaper," who willingly accepts madness over repression, refusing a life o f ' 'unhappy, silent acceptance." The poet would have especially responded to the woman's identity as a writer, and to the way in which her story adroitly and at times parodically employs Gothic conventions to present an allegory of literary imagination unbinding the social, domestic, and psychological confinements of a nineteenth-century woman writer.

Source: Rena Korb, for Short Stories for Students, Gale Research, 1997.

Greg Johnson Johnson is an American critic, short fiction writer, and novelist. In the following essay, Johnson argues that the narrator's breakdown in "The Yellow Wallpaper" can be viewed as the result of many years of suppressed rage. In the autumn of 1830, shortly before Emily Dickinson's birth, her mother made an unusual request. At a time when her pregnancy—or as it was then called, her "confinement"—might have been expected to absorb her attention, Mrs. Dickinson abruptly demanded new wallpaper for her bedroom. Apparently dismayed by this outburst of feminine whimsy, her stern-tempered husband refused, prompting Mrs. Dickinson to her only recorded act of wifely defiance. Though "the Hon. Edward Dickinson would not allow her to have it done," a neighbor's descendant recalled, "she went secretly to the paper hanger and asked him to come and

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To place this incident in context, we should be note that Mrs. Dickinson, aged twenty-six, had just moved into her father-in-law's Amherst mansion and now faced the grim prospect of living with her husband's unpredictable relatives, along with the even grimmer perils of early nineteenth-century childbirth. Although Mrs. Dickinson was by most accounts a submissive, self-abnegating, rather neurasthenic woman—in short, the nineteenthcentury ideal—it is tempting to read the wallpaper incident as a desperate gesture of autonomy and self-assertion. Emily Dickinson's most recent biographer, Cynthia Griffin Wolff, suggests that ' The little explosion of defiance signaled fear and distress, and it was the prelude to unhappy, silent acceptance."

Rather than simply labeling the narrator a madwoman at the story's close, we might view her behavior as an expression of long-suppressed rage: a rage which causes a temporary breakdown (like

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those actually suffered by both Dickinson and Oilman) but which represents a prelude to psychic regeneration and artistic redemption. This reading accounts for two elements of the story usually ignored: its emphasis upon the narrator as a writer, who is keeping a journal and putting forth her own text—"The Yellow Wallpaper"— as an antithetical triumph over the actual wallpaper that had nearly been her undoing; and its brittle, macabre, relentlessly satiric humor that suggests, in the story's earlier sections, her barely suppressed and steadily mounting anger. As in many of Poe's tales, this seemingly incongruous humor serves only to accentuate the Gothic terror of the narrator's situation.... The narrative focus of "The Yellow Wallpaper' ' moves relentlessly inward, detailing the narrator's gradual absorption into the Gothic world of psychic chaos and imaginative freedom; but Oilman controls her heroine's deepening subjectivity through repetition, irony, parodic humor, and allegorical patterns of imagery. The two worlds of the story— the narrator's husband and sister-in-law's daylight world of masculine order and domestic routine, and her own subjective sphere of deepening imaginative insight—are kept clearly focused and distinct. Most important, Oilman reminds the reader frequently that her narrator is a habitual writer for whom ' "The Yellow Wallpaper" is a kind of diary, an accurate record of her turbulent inward journey. Drawing on Oilman's experience of post-partum depression and breakdown, the story is far more than an indictment of nineteenth-century attitudes toward women and an account of one woman's incipient psychosis. Oilman made her heroine a writer for purposes of art, not autobiography, and the story as a whole describes a woman attempting to save herself through her own writing, to transform what she calls ' 'dead paper" into a vibrant Gothic world of creative dreamwork and self-revelation. Two of the story's major structural devices are its contrasting of the husband's daylight world and his wife's nocturnal fantasy, and the religious imagery by which she highlights the liberating and redemptive qualities of her experience. When the story opens, she acknowledges that the idea of their rented summer house as a Gothic setting is laughable, a romantic fancy of the kind her husband wishes to repress. The allegorical opposition is quickly established: her husband (named John, suggesting a male prototype) is a ' 'physician of high standing," a figure of dominance in every sense— social, domestic, intellectual, physical. He is a thor-

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oughgoing empiricist who "scoffs openly at any talk of things not to be felt and seen and put down in figures." Throughout the story John, along with his like-named sister and housekeeper Jane, is associated with the rigidly hierarchical and imaginatively sterile daylight world that ridicules Gothic "fancies" and represses in particular the "hysterical tendency" of women. Before the story opens, the narrator had abandoned her own social responsibility of motherhood, and the object of this summer retreat is a ' 'rest cure'' (of the kind made popular by Dr. S. Weir Mitchell, the famous Philadelphia neurologist who treated Oilman during her own depression, and against whom the story enacts a brilliant literary revenge). That her husband exerts his tyrannical control in the guise of protectiveness makes the narrator feel all the more stifled and precludes outright defiance. As she remarks sarcastically in the opening section,' 'He is very careful and loving, and hardly lets me stir without special direction." It is the daylight consciousness of late-Victorian America, of course, which has designed the flamboyantly hideous yellow wallpaper that the narrator initially finds so repulsive. Even John wants to repaper the room, but after his wife complains about the wallpaper, he benevolently changes his mind, since "nothing was worse for a nervous patient than to give way to such fancies." Associating her nervous illness with her' 'imaginative power and habit of story-making," he forces his wife into daily confinement by four walls whose paper, described as 'debased Romanesque', is an omnipresent figuring of the artistic degeneration and psychic chaos she fears. It is here that John makes a significant error, however, as he underestimates the very imaginative power he is seeking to repress. By placing his distraught wife in a nursery, he is merely following the nineteenth-century equation of nonmaternal women—that is, spinsters and "hysterics"—with helpless children. Yet he is unthinkingly allowing her the free play of imagination and abdication of social responsibility also characteristic of children. Thus as the story progresses, the narrator follows both her childlike promptings and her artistic faith in creating a Gothic alternative to the stifling daylight world of her husband and the society at large. The story's terrific suspense derives from the narrator's increasingly uncertain fate and from the considerable obstacles blocking her path from one world to the other, not the least of which is her own self-doubt and debilitating psychic exhaustion. Near the end of the next section, she glimpses a

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subpattern in the wallpaper, which can be seen only "in certain lights, and not clearly then"; beneath the ' 'silly and conspicuous front design'' is a figure she describes as "strange, provoking, formless." These three adjectives suggest a notably ambivalent attitude toward her own inchoate, slowly emerging selfhood; but significantly, she notes that she is viewing the pattern by sunlight. Near the end of the next section, at sunset, she can "almost fancy" a coherent design in the wallpaper. Yet immediately after using her husband's forbidden word, she feels an emotional and psychological depletion that is emphasized by a series of brief, depressed paragraphs: It makes me tired to follow [the pattern]. I will take a nap, I guess. I don't know why I should write this. I don't want to. I don't feel able. And I know John would think it absurd. But I must say what I feel and think in some way—it is such a relief! But the effort is getting to be greater than the relief.

This passage describes the narrator's spiritual nadir, and may be said to represent her transition from conscious struggle against the daylight world to her immersion in the nocturnal world of the unconscious—or, in other terms, from idle fancy to empowering imagination. The nature of Oilman's allegory becomes especially clear when, for the first time, the narrator watches the wallpaper by moonlight and reports with childlike glee: "There are things in the paper that nobody knows but me, or ever will." Yet the transition is incomplete and puzzling. While John sleeps, she lies awake ' 'trying to decide whether that front pattern and the back pattern really did move together or separately," noting that "by daylight" the pattern is a constant irritant to a "normal mind." Then comes the moment of terrified but thrilling revelation: By moonlight—the moon shines in all night when there is a moon— I wouldn't know it was the same paper. At night in any kind of light, in twilight, candlelight, lamplight, and worst of all by moonlight, it becomes bars! The outside pattern, I mean, and the woman behind it is as plain as can be. ...

As we witness the narrator in the final scene, creeping along the floor, we might recall once again that her bedroom is actually a nursery. The fact that she is crawling on all fours—as opposed to lying still and docile under her husband's "rest cure"— suggests not only temporary derangement but also a frantic, insistent growth into a new stage of being. From the helpless infant, supine on her immovable bed, she has become a crawling, "creeping" child, insistent upon her own needs and explorations. (The parallel with Bertha Mason in Jane Eyre, who likewise crawls on all fours and exhibits similar

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t her husband exerts his tyrannical control in the guise of protectiveness makes the narrator feel all the more stifled and precludes outright defiance. As she remarks sarcastically in the opening section, 'He is very careful and loving, and hardly lets me stir without special direction,'"

destructiveness, is surely deliberate.) To the daylight world, of course, this transition is terrifying; poor John, in Oilman's witty inversion of a conventional heroine's confrontation with Gothic terror, faints dead away. Seizing rather than surrendering to power, the narrator is thus left alone, the mad heroine of her own appalling text. Although Oilman's Gothic allegory so powerfully demonstrates that writing is her only salvation, the poignant facts of her own biography point to her internalization of the restrictions enforced by John in her story and by Dr. S. Weir Mitchell in her life. A compulsive writer who produced scores of volumes and earned a worldwide reputation as an eloquent advocate of women's rights, Oilman discredited the value of her imaginative writing throughout her career; she wrote to William Dean Howells, who asked to reprint "The Yellow Wallpaper" in a collection of American masterpieces, that the story was ' 'no more 'literature' than my other stuff, being definitely written 'with a purpose''' —that purpose being to demonstrate to Dr. Mitchell the cruelty and inefficacy of the restcure. (She sent him a copy of the story upon publication, but received no response.) Patricia Meyer Spacks, in an incisive discussion of Oilman's curiously impersonal autobiography, The Living of Charlotte Perkins Oilman, notes that although Oilman's breakdown led her to abandon marriage and motherhood, become a professional writer, and devote herself to social causes, this self-determination was limited strictly by het

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continuing need to be "good" and necessarily precluded the acknowledged use of her own imaginative power.

alive; and how to be both "good" and sensual, supportive and necessarily selfish, and, above all, sane.

Thus Oilman's life story became, as Spacks asserts, "a paradigm of feminine anger," what Oilman herself called ' 'a lifetime of limitation and wretchedness." Denied the artistic redemption that Emily Dickinson had achieved by renouncing the world, as well as the conventional satisfactions of nineteenth-century housewifery and motherhood, Oilman uneasily compensated for her denial of creative selfhood with the fulfillment of useful work. Committing suicide not because her inoperable cancer caused her pain but because she felt her "usefulness was over" —the phrase comes from her suicide note, a poignant last text of selfeffacement—Oilman stayed true to her own daylight world of feminism, social commitment, and constant hard work. Still under-read, still haunting the margins of the American literary canon, Oilman and the full scope of her achievement await their due recognition. Reading "The Yellow Wallpaper' ' we can only guess at the furious effort, and the constant bargaining with her own demons, by which that achievement came into being.

Of these many conflicts inherent in women's trying to lead acceptable female lives, perhaps the most troublesome is that of motherhood, its attendant responsibilities, and its almost inevitable loss of self-identity. Women who care for infants are almost literally used up in the process, the twentyfour-hour-a-day surveillance subsuming their own mental and physical activities. No other human situation demands the same level of inexorable attention. Yet of the many controversies about women's roles, that of motherhood—and, as Dorothy Dinnerstein emphasized, the care-giving during childhood as much as the actual birthing—has seldom been discussed. It is almost as if the role of mother is beyond discussion, beyond change: if one is a mother, one accepts its burdens with its joys, and does not in any way try to tailor its numerous givens....

Source: Greg Johnson, "Oilman's Gothic Allegory: Rage and Redemption in 'The Yellow Wallpaper'," in Studies in Short Fiction, Vol. 26, No. 4, Fall, 1989, pp. 521-30.

Linda Wagner-Martin In the following essay, Wagner-Martin, a noted feminist scholar and frequent essayist on women writers, takes the one-hundredth anniversary of "The Yellow Wallpaper" as an opportunity to comment on the schism in women's lives caused by their sometimes conflicting roles of being both an individual and a mother. It seems no accident that important recent novels have been Toni Morrison's Beloved, about the power of a sacrificed child over her mourning mother's life, and Marilyn French's Her Mother's Daughter, a major fiction about four generations of women, linked together in their martyred and futile lives through the mother-daughter bond. For at least these hundred years, since Charlotte Perkins Oilman wrote her controversial and relentlessly accurate "The Yellow Wallpaper," women writers have confronted the basic conflicts of women's lives: how to be both a person and a wife and mother; how to live with acceptable passivity in a patriarchal culture while yet being aggressive enough to stay

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When Oilman wrote the short novella, she— married and a mother—had recently recovered from the trauma of a severe postpartum depression. And she had managed that recovery by defying the advice of one of the most respected of American physicians, S. Weir Mitchell. Mitchell was the physician of Jane Addams, Edith Wharton, and Winifred Howells, among other women who suffered from inexplicable Victorian "female" ailments such as hysteria and neurasthenia. Mitchell's treatment was a rest cure which depended upon seclusion, massage, electricity, immobility, and overfeeding. Isolated for up to six weeks, some women gained as much as fifty pounds on a milkbased diet. As a parallel to the rest and diet, most patients were forbidden to use their minds in any way. Oilman recalled in her autobiography that, because her "cure" added the almost constant presence of her infant daughter, Katharine, she ' 'made a rag baby, hung it on a doorknob and played with it. I would crawl into remote closets and under beds—to hide from the grinding pressure of that profound distress." . . . Oilman's autobiography makes clear her years of poverty and debt, her loneliness, and her arduous life. No wonder "The Yellow Wallpaper" portrays a spent woman so accurately. But it is not so much the truth of Oilman's presentation as the immediacy of her theme that attracts today's readers. "The Yellow Wallpaper" gives us the young married woman as mother.

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In the narrative, the protagonist's baby appears infrequently, but at crucial times; his existence is clearly a key to his mother's problems. Oilman underscores the identity of the protagonist as wifemother (a bewildered wife-mother, who sometimes becomes a child) by placing her in a room that was formerly a nursery—a nursery, however, with barred windows so that she cannot escape. The conflation of the roles of child and mother occurs as the narrator keeps her focus entirely on the enclosing walls of the sinister room. An infant would not be able to leave its nursery; neither is the mother (though Oilman makes clear that the protagonist does sometimes leave the house and walks in the garden or sits downstairs). For the purposes of our involvement with this narrative, however, the story's location is the nursery. And just as an infant would spend hours staring at walls and ceilings, kept in one place at the mercy of whatever authority was responsible for its care, so too does the protagonist. An infant would also have difficulty finding language to express its feelings. With a brilliance rare in nineteenth-century fiction, Oilman gives her suffering protagonist a restricted language that conveys her childlike frustration, even though it is not obviously childlike. For its effect, the protagonist's language works in tandem with the narrative's structure.. . . Oilman's protagonist may have found a more compatible world in her fantasy, but she still worries about her role as wife and mother. As the narrative ends—with her life as much in her own control as it has ever been—she is worried about wandering in this labyrinth, about physically losing her way. She is never to be the self-reliant, capable helpmeet of John's dreams. And that is one of Oilman's points, that a woman reared to be a child, treated like a child by her husband (and, one supposes, a father) will respond in kind. No woman expects to be literally put to bed, or removed from all responsibility. Oilman's prose tells of the greatest indignity: the mother of the child becomes the child, the "little girl" of the household (though the mention of the double bed and the husband's presence at night suggests that a sexual role still dominates the relationship). And what is the role of the young daughter in a patriarchal household? To be Daddy's favorite. This is the anger that Sylvia Plath's poem "Daddy" bares—the rage that, once having been brought up to trust the father figure, in whatever guise it appears, then being abandoned by it, being misled by it, being misused by it is insufferable.

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For at least these hundred years, since Charlotte Perkins Oilman wrote her controversial and relentlessly accurate 'The Yellow Wallpaper,' women writers have confronted the basic conflicts of women's lives: how to be both a person and a wife and mother; how to live with acceptable passivity in a patriarchal culture while yet being aggressive enough to stay alive; and how to be both 'good' and sensual, supportive and necessarily selfish, and, above all,

sane."

Oilman's young unnamed wife thus shares in two kinds of anger: that at having her rightful responsibilities taken from her, and that at being misled and miscounseled by the father figures (husband as well as brother) in her life. ' The Yellow Wallpaper'' shows what a frustrated woman does with anger. Repression cannot be healthful, and as the protagonist grows more and more quiet, she is becoming more and more mad. Her world has become the world of seething selfenclosure, sparked only by bright, jolting colors and the miasma of rotting odor. In the 1880s, as Carroll Smith-Rosenberg points out, a woman would probably have repressed her anger instead of showing it. If she had showed it, she might have been thought insane and institutionalized, a process which would probably have led only to deeper insanity. The ideal female would become the peaceful "good" girl, who does not cause trouble, does not want attention or help, but is content to wreak havoc in her own way—usually a silent, surreptitious, and vicious

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way. Oilman's protagonist does just that. The defiance she comes to feel has finally been shed in favor of outright rebellion, yet what would have been more obvious rebellion (harming the baby or John, running away, destroying things important to the household instead of just the horrible wallpaper) does not occur. Instead, the well-behaved woman protagonist (the "good" girl even in her madness) stays within the room, although she has a house key and could easily leave, joining the imaginary women who creep through the wallpaper. (The whole tribe of rebelling women are moving as if they were infants just learning to crawl.) The pathos of the characteristically docile protagonist finally coming to rage, and action, but venting her anger in such a tentative and hidden way underscores Oilman's irony. Even coming to anger does not mean change or improvement. It certainly does not mean victory for the protagonist of this novella. Her escape into madness may have won her continuing argument with John, though he will not recognize that it has done that, but it is only a Pyrrhic victory because her present life is valueless to anyone, particularly to herself.

terms, according to Fetterley, the movement of the end of the story is precise and highly directional; the reader goes where Oilman takes him or her. "Increasingly, her behavior becomes flamboyant and outrageous. Getting out through the text of the wallpaper, she not surprisingly gets in to the subtext within the text that presents the story of a woman trying to get out." She wins back her language, and vanquishes her husband—who has neither speech nor action by the end of the story. He lies as if dead in the path of her highly functional movement, and she simply crawls over him. The wallpaper has replaced the writing paper that he would have taken from her, and she has in some ways won back her right to speech and control.

The larger question, once the literary merits of Oilman's text have been proved, is what significance does this trapped protagonist have for today's readers? What does it mean to write about a woman caught within these circles of male authority (and cultural reification of that authority), trapped within a sickening room and made, in effect, to lose her mind because of the disgust she feels for not only her culture and the roles it mandates for women, but for herself as a sexual, procreative woman? What is the mode of literature that results from such deep anger, such unrelieved depression, that the text itself is unrelieved, pointed inevitably toward an ending that only repeats—relentlessly—the text's theme?

Sources

In Oilman's ' 'The Yellow Wallpaper," subtext becomes text, repressed discourse becomes visible. Oilman explained that in writing this novella, she had not intended ' 'to drive people crazy, but to save people from being driven crazy." Her didactic purpose, her intentional theme, was in some ways subverted by her own artistry. Unlike many of her shorter stories, "The Yellow Wallpaper" convinces less by its explicit content than by its metaphoric impression. As captured by the confines of the attic room as the protagonist is, the reader plots and charts, reads and worries as the story progresses. It is the Modernists' ideal of involving the reader to the fullest possible extent. In current narratological

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Source: Linda Wagner-Martin, "Oilman's The Yellow Wallpaper': A Centenary," in Charlotte Perkins Oilman, The Woman and Her Work, edited by Sheryl L. Meyering, UMI Research Press, 1989, pp. 51-64.

Gilbert, Sandra M., and Susan Gubar. "Infection in the Sentence: The Woman Writer and the Anxiety of Authorship," in The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination, Yale University Press, 1979, pp. 45-92. Hedges, Elaine R. An afterword to The Yellow Wallpaper, by Charlotte Perkins Oilman, Feminist Press, 1973, pp. 37-63. Howells, William Dean. "A Reminiscent Introduction," in The Great Modern American Stories: An Anthology, Boni and Liveright, 1920, pp. vii-xiv. Owens, E. Suzanne. ' The Ghostly Double behind the Wallpaper in Charlotte Perkins Oilman's The Yellow Wallpaper'," in Haunting the House of Fiction: Feminist Perspectives on Ghost Stories by American Women, University of Tennessee Press, 1991, pp. 64-79.

Further Reading Golden, Catherine. "'Overwriting' the Rest Cure: Charlotte Perkins Oilman's Literary Escape from S. Weir Mitchell's Fictionalization of Women," in Critical Essays on Charlotte Perkins Oilman, edited by Joanne B. Karpinski, G. K. Hall, 1992, pp. 144-58.

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Golden examines the relationships between Mitchell's rest cure, Oilman's fiction and nineteenth-century women.

Karpinski discusses Oilman's life and work and provides a brief introduction to the articles included in the volume.

Hedges, Elaine R. "Out at Last?: 'The Yellow Wallpaper' after Two Decades of Feminist Criticism," in Critical Essays on Charlotte Perkins Oilman, edited by Joanne B. Karpinski, G. K. Hall, 1992, pp. 222-33. Hedges provides an overview of feminist criticism of "The Yellow Wallpaper" since the story's rediscovery in the 1970s.

Lane, Ann J. To Herland and Beyond, Penguin, 1991,413 p. This biography of Oilman provides detailed information about the author's life as well as her writings.

Jacobus, Mary. "An Unnecessary Maze of Sign-Readings," in Reading Woman: Essays in Feminist Criticism, Columbia University Press, 1986, pp. 229-48. Jacobus discusses the validity of Freudian and feminist readings of the story. Karpinski, Joanne B. An introduction to Critical Essays on Charlotte Perkins Oilman, edited by Joanne B. Karpinski, G. K. Hall & Co., 1992, pp. 1-16.

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Shumaker, Conrad. '"Too Terribly Good to Be Printed': Charlotte Oilman's 'The Yellow Wallpaper,'" in American Literature, Vol. 57, no. 4, 1985, pp. 588-99. Shumaker presents a reading of' The Yellow Wallpaper' ' in the context of the treatment of women in the nineteenth century. Shumaker, Conrad. "Realism, Reform, and the Audience: Charlotte Perkins Oilman's Unreadable Wallpaper," in Arizona Quarterly, Vol. 47, no. 1, spring, 1991, pp. 81- 93. Discussion of the elements of realism and reform in "The Yellow Wallpaper."

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Young Goodman Brown Nathaniel Hawthorne

1835

"Young Goodman Brown," written in 1835 by Nathaniel Hawthorne, is known for being one of literature's most gripping portrayals of seventeenthcentury Puritan society. The tale first appeared in the April issue of New England Magazine and was later included in Hawthorne's popular short story collection, Mosses from an Old Manse, in 1846. "Young Goodman Brown" tells the tale of a young Puritan man drawn into a covenant with the Devil. Brown's illusions about the goodness of his society are crushed when he discovers that many of his fellow townspeople, including religious leaders and his wife, are attending a Black Mass. At the end of the story, it is not clear whether Brown's experience was nightmare or reality, but the results are nonetheless the same. Brown is unable to forgive the possibility of evil in his loved ones and as a result spends the rest of his life in desperate loneliness and gloom. Though a work of fiction, ' 'Young Goodman Brown" is widely considered to be one of the most effective literary works to address the hysteria surrounding the Salem Witch Trials of 1692. Hawthorne is also remembered for helping to establish the short story as a respected form of literature and as a proponent of instilling morals and lessons into his writing.

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Author Biography Hawthorne was an American fiction writer best known for his novel The Scarlet Letter. Born in Salem, Massachusetts, in 1804, he was one of those rare writers who drew critical acclaim during his lifetime. Today, readers still appreciate Hawthorne's work for its storytelling qualities and for the moral and theological questions it raises. Throughout his lifetime, Hawthorne felt guilt over certain actions of his ancestors. Critics view his literary preoccupation with Puritanism as an outgrowth of these roots. The first Hawthorne to immigrate to Massachusetts from England was William, a magistrate who once ordered the public whipping of a Quaker woman. Shortly thereafter, William's son, John, served as a judge in the Salem witch trials of 1692. Hawthorne's own father was a ship's captain who died when Hawthorne was only four years old. As a result of his family history, Hawthorne filled much of his work, including ' 'Young Goodman Brown,'' with themes exploring the evil actions of humans and the idea of original sin. After graduating from Bowdoin College in Brunsick, Maine, in 1825, Hawthorne moved back to Salem where he lived with his mother and served a twelve-year literary apprenticeship. Though he wrote regularly, he destroyed most of his early work. Only the unsuccessful Fanshawe was published in 1828. Hawthorne later sought out and burned every available copy. It was during this bout of obscurity and insecurity that Hawthorne first published ' 'Young Goodman Brown.'' Critics have since recognized it as one of his most successful short stories. In 1846 Hawthorne published it again as part of a collection of stories titled Mosses from an Old Manse. Hawthorne married Sophia Peabody, a neighbor who admired his work, in 1842. The couple had two daughters and a son. In their first year of marriage they moved to the Old Manse in Concord, Massachusetts, a community known for its liberal atmosphere and for being the home of other several other famous writers and philosophers. Hawthorne worked diligently there for three straight years, producing American Notebooks and the essay ' The Old Manse." He later described this period as the happiest of his life. Family debts forced Hawthorne and his family to move back to Salem in 1945, where he filled the

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first of two presidentially-appointed posts. Under James K. Polk, he served as Custom House surveyor, but was discharged four years later by the Whig Administration. After losing his job, Hawthorne wrote The Scarlet Letter. Controversy surrounding his discharge, and the content of the book itself, boosted sales. In 1851, the Hawthornes moved back to Concord, where they purchased and remodeled the childhood homestead of Louisa May Alcott, the author of Little Women. When his college friend Franklin Pierce was elected president in 1853, Hawthorne was offered the U.S. Consulship to Liverpool, England. That term ended in 1857, and he and his family moved again, this time to a seaside village in England where Hawthorne wrote The Marble Faun, a book about his experiences abroad. During the last four years of his life, Hawthorne's health failed. He did write a well-received collection of essays titled Our Old Home, but his passion for writing faded. Hawthorne died in Plymouth, New Hampshire, in 1864, at the age of 59.

Plot Summary "Young Goodman Brown" opens with Young Goodman Brown about to embark on an evening's journey. His young wife, Faith, fearful for some unknown reason, beseeches him to delay his journey. Goodman Brown, however, stresses that he has a task that must be accomplished before sunrise, and so the newlyweds reluctantly part. As he walks down the street, Goodman Brown chides himself for leaving Faith while he goes on his journey and resolves that, after this night, he will stay by the side of his good and pious wife. Pleased with himself, Goodman Brown then hurries through the forest to accomplish some unknown task. Deeper in the forest Goodman Brown spies an old man, who is actually the Devil in disguise, waiting for him. Goodman Brown blames Faith for making him late. The older man, who has a curious resemblance to Goodman Brown, carries a staff which resembles a black snake. When the older man urges Goodman Brown to take the staff to ease his walk, Goodman Brown expresses second thoughts and his intention to go home. The older man convinces Goodman Brown to walk with him, however,

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Goodman Brown realizes that Goody Cloyseis a witch. The two men continue walking throughthe forest. At a hollowin theroad, Goodman Brown refuses to go anyfurther,declaringhewould rather be on the side of Faith than Goody Cloyse.His companion leaves him tothink over the matter. Goodman Brown realizes thathisdecisiontostop will enable him tomeet hisministeranddeacon with a clear conscience. As hecontinues these comforting meditations,acarriage passesby on the road. Two men, whoreveal themselvesto be the minister and the deacon, speakof theevening's meeting and theyoung woman whowill be joining. After the carriage has passed,Goodman Brown feels faint as herealizes that these men, too, are in communionwiththeDevil.Now hequestions whether or not heaven really exists.Yet hisloveforFaith gives him thewillpowertoresist goingto themeeting.

and listen to thereasons why heshould continue. Goodman Brown agreesandmurmurs that his forefathers, good honest Christians, would never go on such a walk. To his surprise, Brownfindsthis is nottrue. His companion tellshimthathe iswell acquainted with the Brown familyandthathehelpedBrown's father and grandfather commit acts such as the punishment of religious dissenters and the massacre ofIndians. While Goodman Brown expresses surprise,his companion continuestospeakof thegood Christians of New England with whomhe isacquainted: deacons, town leaders, eventhegovernor. Goodman Brown is amazed but tells hiscompanion that were he to continue on this journey,hestill wouldnot beable to meet the eye of hisminister. Hearing this,the older man breaks intoa fit oflaughter. The two men then seeGoody Cloyse, the old woman who serves asGoodman Brown's moral adviser. Notwantingtoexplainwho he iswith and where he is going, Goodman Brown hidesin the woods. Again, Goodman Brownissurprised;the woman knows hiscompanion, who has now taken on the appearance ofGoodmanBrown'sgrandfather. The two older people talkof awitch's recipe and the meeting that will take place this evening.

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While he isliftinghishandstopray, however, he hears Faith'svoice.Hecallsout forher,and she answers with a scream. Herealizes that Faithis going to the meeting, and he decides toattend the meeting too becauseallgoodis nowgone. Soon he reaches a clearingwithacrude altar surrounded by the "saints" and "sinners" ofSalem. While the Devil's congregation singsanevil hymn rejoicing in sin, Brown waits, hoping thathe can find Faith. At a call for the newmembershesteps forward, and Faith is led forward by twowomen. Adark figure speaks of sin.Hecommandsthe newly wedstolook at each otherandthen declares that they now know virtue is but a dream andevilis thenature of mankind. Goodman Brown criesout toFaith to resist this evil. He never finds out, however,ifFaith does resist. As soon as thewordsare out of hismouth, Goodman Brownfindshimself alone in theforest. The next morning hereturns to Salem. Everywhere he goes he sees peoplewhoattendedthemeeting, but he turns awayfrom them.Heeven turns from Faith. Though Goodman Brown neverfinds out whether or not he dreamedthemeetingin theforest,the experience stillhas profound a effectonhim. After that night,he becomesastern,sad,and distrustful man. He rejectsthefaithheoncehad in hisreligion and even rejects his ownwife. At his death,no hopeful wordsarecarved uponhistombstone. He has lived alife of gloom, seeing sinnersand blasphemerseverywherehelooked.

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Characters Faith Brown Faith Brown serves an allegorical purpose in this story. It is Faith that Brown leaves behind, presumably for one night, in order to keep his appointment with the Devil. Explaining to the old man why he is late Brown says, "Faith kept me back a while." She represents the force of good in the world. Thus, when Brown perceives that she too has been corrupted, he shouts "My Faith is gone!" and rushes madly toward the witches's gathering. The pink ribbons that decorate Faith's cap have drawn more critical attention than any other symbol in the story. On one hand they have been said to represent female sexuality, while on the other, innocence. Or, they may merely signify the ornament of a sweet and cheerful wife. Whatever their purpose, Faith's pink ribbons are integral to the story's structure. They are mentioned three times: at the beginning when Brown is leaving Faith behind, near the climax when Brown sees a pink ribbon floating down from the heavens, and at the end when Brown is greeted by his wife upon his return.

Young Goodman Brown Much of this story's extensive body of criticism centers on its title character, whose name suggests he represents the average man. Brown makes his journey into the dark forest because he is curious and even tempted by the darker side of life. His brush with evil, however, leaves a permanently negative mark. Critics agree that whether the Black Mass really occurred or was dreamed, the impression on Brown is very real indeed. At the beginning of the story, Brown appears confident in his ability to choose between good and evil, but once he stands before the Devil's altar, he can no longer believe that good always prevails. He becomes a profoundly disillusioned man, who sees wickedness everywhere, even in those closest to him. Some critics have interpreted Brown's resulting distrust and isolation as the result of a guilty conscience; he cannot forgive himself or others for hidden sinfulness. In the end, Brown is unable to accept the duality of human nature-that a person can possess both good and evil qualities—and for this he suffers.

The Devil The figure of the Devil in ' 'Young Goodman Brown" appears as an older—though not ancient—

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Media Adaptations In 1968, Edward J. Megroth adapted Young Goodman Brown as an opera, with music by Harold Fink. Young Goodman Brown was adapted as a motion picture by Pyramid Films in 1972. This thirtyminute film won a special jury award at the Atlanta International Film Festival.

man who carries a twisted, snake-like staff. He seems to resemble Brown somewhat, and it has been suggested that he is a reflection of the darker side of Brown's nature. The Devil claims to know both Brown's grandfather, who participated in the persecution of Quakers, and Brown's father, who took part in an attack on an Indian village. Similar evil deeds were perpetrated in real life by Hawthorne's ancestors, and the author's alignment of his forefathers with the Devil suggests his feelings of guilt concerning his family history.

Goody Cloyse, the Minister, and Deacon Gookin All three of these characters serve as dramatic examples of the wickedness and hypocrisy that may hide in the souls of those who appear most virtuous. These three are distinguished from among the crowd of townsfolk at the gathering because they represent a standard of piety and godliness that is destroyed for Brown by his experience. Both Goody Cloyse and Deacon Gookin were real people who were involved in the Salem Witch Trials of 1692.

Themes "Young Goodman Brown" tells the story of a Puritan man who loses faith in humankind after he thinks he witnesses his wife and respected members of his town participating in a Black Mass. His

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which holds that people are evil by nature because of original sin.

Topics for rurther Study What does Goodman Brown mean when he says, "Faith kept me back a while," after the Devil comments on his lack of punctuality? Was Goodman Brown's brush with evil real or imagined? Read other works of literature in which the line between reality and imagination is blurred, such as "The Swimmer" by John Cheever and "The Fall of the House of Usher" by Edgar Allan Poe. What are some of the reasons why authors might use this technique? Investigate the dictates of Puritan culture. How is contemporary American culture different? How is it the same? What effects did the Salem Witch Trials have on the nation as a whole? Cite specific historic examples.

experience dooms him to a life of gloom and mistrust.

Guilt vs. Innocence Hawthorne presents Young Goodman Brown's evening of diabolical revelry as the first and last fling with evil the inexperienced young man ever has. Early in the story, Brown says: ' 'after this one night I'll cling to [Faith's] skirts and follow her to heaven." He believes Faith is an "angel" and one of the Puritan elect who is destined for heaven. Unfortunately, Brown's experience in the forest makes him reject his previous conviction of the prevailing power of good. He instead embraces the Devil's claim—"Evil is the nature of mankind"— by crying out' 'Come, devil: for to thee is this world given." This acknowledgment, fueled by the discovery of hypocrisy in the catechist, clergy, the magistrates of Salem, and his own wife, destroys Brown's faith in the Puritan elect. It also sets the tone for the rest of his life. Critics often view this outcome as an attack by Hawthorne on the unredemptive nature of the Puritan belief system,

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Alienation vs. Community Though Brown successfully rejects the Devil in his physical form, he allows sin to reside within him when he rejects his belief in humanity. "Often, awakening suddenly at midnight, he shrank from the bosom of Faith, and at morning or eventide, when the family knelt down at prayer, he scowled, and muttered to himself, and gazed at his wife, and turned away." By turning away, Brown becomes the symbolic representation of Hawthorne's belief in the isolation of the human spirit. In Hawthorne's own words, every human being is alone "in that saddest of all prisons, his own heart."

Good vs. Evil In "Young Goodman Brown," Hawthorne presents sin as an inescapable part of human nature. The fact that Goodman Brown only has to make his journey into the evil forest once suggests that the spiritual quest is a ritual all humans must undergo at some point in their lives. Brown, however, proves himself incapable of accepting this part of the human condition and cannot move forward with his life as a result. Faith, on the other hand, makes a leap of love and faith to welcome her husband back with open arms from his inexplicable night away from home. Brown, however, "looks sadly and sternly into her face and passes without greeting." Whereas Faith is able to accept the inevitable fallen nature of humanity and live prosperously with this realization, Brown the absolutist cannot accept this truth, and remains stuck in a state of suspicion and ill feelings. By portraying these two reactions, Hawthorne makes a statement not only about the black-and-white, Puritan view of good and evil, but how evil can take other forms as well.

Style ' 'Young Goodman Brown'' tells the tale of a young Puritan man drawn into a covenant with the Devil, which he adamantly tries to resist. His illusions about the goodness of society are crushed when he

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discovers that many of his fellow townspeople, including religious leaders and his wife, are attending the same Black Mass.

Allegory "Young Goodman Brown" takes the form of an allegory. An allegory uses symbolic elements to represent various human characteristics and situations. Brown represents Everyman ("Goodman" was a title for those under the social rank of' 'gentleman") while Faith represents his faith in humanity and society. In leaving his wife, Brown forsakes his belief in the godliness of humanity. He immediately enters a wood' 'lonely as could be'' that is enshrouded in a "deep dusk." These woods are the physical location in which Brown explores his doubts and opposing desires, and as such represent his personal hell. When he tells his companion ' 'Faith kept me back awhile," it is clear that he feels ambivalent about forging a pact with the Devil. Yet, while Brown pledges to return to Faith several times, he continues his dark journey. Although Brown eventually leaves the physical location of the woods, mentally he stays there for the rest of his life.

Symbolism Examples of symbolism in ' 'Young Goodman Brown'' include the pink hair ribbons, which represent Faith's innocence, and the snake-like staff, which is symbolic of the form the Devil takes to corrupt Adam and Eve in the Bible. Another symbol emphasizes a reaction instead of an object. The example unfolds part way through Brown's journey into the woods, immediately after he recognizes the voices of the deacon and the minister. The narrator relates that "Young Goodman Brown caught hold of a tree for support, being ready to sink down on the ground, faint and overburdened with the heavy sickness of his heart." This action symbolizes Brown's wavering faith and his growing realization that he is losing his basis of moral support.

Point of View Throughout "Young Goodman Brown" pointof-view swings subtly between the narrator and the title character. As a result, readers are privy to Goodman Brown's deepest, darkest thoughts, while also receiving an objective view of his behavior. Early in the story readers learn from Brown himself that he expects his journey to be a one-time event: ' 'Well, [Faith is] a blessed angel on earth; and after

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this one night I'll cling to her skirts and follow her to heaven." In contrast, readers get an intriguing perspective on Brown's mad dash to the Devil's altar from the objective narrator: ' 'The whole forest was peopled with frightful sounds . . . . But he was himself the chief horror of the scene, and shrank not from its other horrors." By the end of the story, the narrator supplies the only point of view; Brown's voice is conspicuously absent. This shift symbolizes the loss of Brown's faith.

Foreshadowing Hawthorne uses foreshadowing to build suspense and offer clues as to the story's direction. As Brown leaves for his mysterious journey, Faith voices her doubts: "Prithee put off your journey until sunrise and sleep in your own bed to-night. A lone woman is troubled with dreams and such thoughts that she's afeared of herself sometimes." This statement predicts Faith's betrayal and her appearance at the Black Mass. Brown offers a second example of foreshadowing during a brief monologue: "What a wretch I am to leave her on such an errand . . . . Methought as she spoke there was trouble in her face, as if a dream had warned her what work is to be done tonight. But no, no; 't would kill her to think it." Here Hawthorne hints both at Brown's later confusion over whether he had dreamed his experience and the symbolic death of Faith's innocence at the Black Mass.

Romanticism Romanticism was a literary movement originating in the eighteenth century that emphasized imagination and emotion, yet it was also marked by sensibility and autobiographical elements. According to Compton's Interactive Encyclopedia, Romanticists held that absolute principles lead to personal failure. Based on the destiny of the title character, it is clear Hawthorne subscribes to this theory as well. Unable to accept the duality of human nature—that good and evil can and often do exist side by side—Goodman Brown lives out the rest of his days as "a stern, a sad, a darkly meditative, a distrustful, if not a desperate man." Other examples of the Romanticist at work include an underlying message in ' 'Young Goodman Brown" that urges readers to examine the effect their behavior has on others and to change accordingly. This message illustrates the Romanticist conviction that human nature can change for the better.

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Lillian Gish and Lars Hanson as Puritans in the film version of Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter.

Historical Context

development, however; the social tenets of his contemporary society also played a key role.

Lingering Puritan Influences in Nineteenth-Century New England

Nineteenth-century English traveler Thomas Hamilton once described the descendants of New England's first colonists as ' 'cold, shrewd, calculating and ingenious," and asserted that "a New Englander is far more a being of reason than of impulse." Hawthorne applied these traits and values—which he struggled to accept within himself—to his characters, including the title character in "Young Goodman Brown." According to Hyatt H. Waggoner in his book, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Hawthorne "continued to note in himself, and to disapprove, feelings and attitudes he projected in . . . Young Goodman Brown. He noted his tendency not only to study others with cool objectivity, but to study himself with almost obsessive interest." The same Puritan values that inspired Hawthorne's objective observation of people and events contributed to his growth and genius as a writer.

Although the Salem Witch Trials had unfolded more than one hundred years prior, nineteenthcentury New England was still reeling from inherited guilt, even as it rebelled against the constrictive morals of its forebears, the Puritans. It was into this Salem, Massachusetts, society that Hawthorne was born in 1804. Despite the fact he listed Unitarian as his official religion, his roots and sensibilities were unmistakably Puritan. Hawthorne's great, great grandfather William Hathorne (Nathaniel added the "W" to the family name when he began signing his published works) was the first family member to emigrate from England. He once ordered the public whipping of a Quaker woman who refused to renounce her religious beliefs. Following in the footsteps of his father, William's son, John, presided over the Salem Witch Trials. Hawthorne claims he was frequently haunted by these unholy ghosts from his past. Hawthorne's heritage was not the sole influence on his

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At least one other classically Puritan trait emerges in Hawthorne's writings: a keen interest in the welfare of the community. With its emphasis on brotherhood and the perils of alienation, "Young Goodman Brown" is a good example of a Puritan

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1692: The Salem Witch Trials result in the hanging deaths of nineteen people accused of being witches. 1835: Hawthorne, a descendant of one of the judges who presided over the Witch Trials, publishes "Young Goodman Brown." The allegorical tale explores the society and the mindset that spawned the trials. 1996: Arthur Miller's play, The Crucible, is adapted for film. In 1953 Miller's play used the Salem Witch Trials as an allegory to condemn the actions of Sen. Joseph McCarthy's House Un-American Activities Committee. 1690: The first newspaper in British North America, Publick Occurrences Both Foreign and Domestick, is established. The Governor of Massachusetts scuttles the paper before the end of the year.

society. "Salem was a part of him," Waggoner concluded, "for good and ill."

The Industrial Revolution and the Publishing Business Printed communication increased by leaps and bounds in the first half of the nineteenth century as a result of new technology. Publishers enlarged their size and scope under the pressure of competition, and new agencies of delivery—including the ocean steamship and the railroad—increased the speed and efficiency of publishing. Improved presses sped up the rate of printing twenty-fold between 1830 and 1850. This trend contributed to Hawthorne's public reputation and income as many of his earlier short stories and essays found their way into print via a newsman's press. The literary output of New England writers between 1830 and 1850 was not only noteworthy for its volume but also because it reflected the qualities of the region, new contacts with European

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1835: James Gordon Bennett opens the New York Herald. Six years later, the New York Tribune is founded. These papers, which cost one penny, are meant to reach the multitudes and be non-partisan. 1997: USA Today is the nation's leading newspaper, based on circulation figures. Founded in 1982, it is the first paper to be published at several printing plants throughout the nation simultaneously. 1600s: The Native American population numbers an estimated six to nine million. 1800s: The Native American population numbers less than three million. 1997: The Native American population (now including Eskimo and Aleut ethnicities) has recently risen to just over two million.

culture, and the spirit of Jacksonian Democracy. The works of many writers of this period—including Oliver Wendell Holmes, Herman Melville, and Edgar Allan Poe—are still widely read today. According to Frederick Jackson Turner in his book The United States, 1830-1850: The Nation and Its Sections, however, Hawthorne was ' 'the greatest of the New England novelists'' and exhibited ' 'a power of psychological analysis and literary skill that have not since been equaled by any American writer.''

Critical Overview From the publication of his first collection of stories, Twice Told Tales, Hawthorne's books were reviewed often and enthusiastically. Although lavishly praised by critics, the collection itself sold poorly; an enlarged edition issued in 1842 fared no better. This pattern of critical appreciation and

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public neglect continued throughout Hawthorne's literary career, and he was forced to occupy a series of minor governmental posts in order to supplement his income. Hawthorne's work, which consists of over fifty stories and sketches as well as such classic novels as The Scarlet Letter, has continuously drawn critical and popular attention since his death. His work draws readers not only for its strong storytelling qualities but also for the moral and theological questions raised within. "Young Goodman Brown" ranks foremost among Hawthorne's short stories in both popular appeal and critical respect. It remains a favorite because it holds something of interest for almost everyone, be it plot line, the title character's moral dilemma, or the tale's ambiguity. Yet this universal appeal comes not at any sacrifice of artistic or structural integrity.

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perceive that the tale has a social as well as an allegorical and psychological dimension."

Criticism Rena Korb Rena Korb has a master's degree in English literature and creative writing and has written for a wide variety of educational publishers. In the following essay, she discusses various themes in "Young Goodman Brown," including Puritanism, good and evil, and ambiguity, as well as the tale's allegorical structure.

Some notable American authors of the nineteenth century, however, dismissed ' 'Young Goodman Brown" for its strong allegorical structure. Edgar Allan Poe thought Hawthorne's use of allegory distracted from the natural elements of his work, while Henry James believed it constituted Hawthorne's propsenity for taking the easy way out. Of Hawthorne's contemporaries, only Herman Melville saw merit in "Young Goodman Brown." "Who in the name of thunder," Melville wrote in Nathaniel Hawthorne's Tales, "would anticipate any marvel in a piece entitled 'Young Goodman Brown?' You would of course suppose that it was a simple little tale, intended as a supplement to 'Goody Two-Shoes.' Whereas it is deep as Dante."

Nathaniel Hawthorne was one of those rare writers who drew great critical acclaim during his own lifetime. To his contemporaries—Edgar Allan Poe, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and Herman Melville—as well as to the next generation of writers, Hawthorne was a genius. Poe said in Nathaniel Hawthorne's Tales that Hawthorne has ' 'the purest style, the finest taste, the most available scholarship, the most delicate humor, the most touching pathos, the most radiant imagination." Hawthorne's work, consisting of over 50 stories and sketches as well as such classic novels as The Scarlet Letter, continued to draw attention after his death and experienced a particular resurgence of interest after World War I. His writings attract readers not only for their storytelling qualities, but also for the moral and theological ambiguities Hawthorne presents so well.

Over the years, critics came to agree with Melville rather than Poe and James. In 1945, Richard H. Fogle offered these words of tribute in New England Quarterly: "In 'Young Goodman Brown,' then, Hawthorne has achieved that reconciliation of opposites which [Samuel Taylor] Coleridge deemed the highest art. The combination of clarity of technique, embodied in simplicity and balance of structure, in firm pictorial composition, in contrast and climactic arrangement, in irony and detachment, with ambiguity of meaning as signalized by the device of multiple choice, in its interrelationships produces the story's characteristic effect." Nearly twenty years later, critic David Levin was still finding genius in Hawthorne's outwardly simple tale.' 'By recognizing that Hawthorne built 'Young Goodman Brown' firmly on his historical knowledge," Levin wrote in American Literature, "we

The Latin American writer Jorge Luis Borges and the eminent American scholar Harold Bloom both agree that Hawthorne's shorter works are his best. Foremost among his stories in popular appeal and critical respect is "Young Goodman Brown," which tells the story of a young Puritan drawn into a covenant with the Devil, despite his attempts to resist. In the course of one evening, Brown's illusions of the godliness of his society are shattered as he discovers that his fellow townspeople, including religious leaders and his wife, are attending a Black Mass. At the end of the story, Brown is left to wonder whether his vision was, in fact, a dream. Yet the delineation between the imaginary and the real does not matter, because the mere ability to see such evil in his loved ones destines Brown thereafter to a life of desperate gloominess. The prose is powerful, prompting Melville, in Nathaniel Hawthorne's Tales

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What Do I Read Next? Nathaniel Hawthorne's masterpiece The Scarlet Letter (1850), centers on Hester Prynne, a young woman who incurs the wrath of her rigidly Puritan community when she becomes pregnant and refuses to name the father. Reverend Hooper, the main character in the "The Minister's Black Veil" an 1835 short story by Hawthorne, bears much in common with other Hawthorne characters: he is obsessed with sin and guilt and chooses to advertise his knowledge of the human potential for evil. The action unfolds in a seventeenth-century New England parish, when the minister reports to a Sunday morning service wearing a black veil. "The Tell-Tale Heart," Edgar Allan Poe (1843). Considered one of Poe's greatest tales of psychological horror, this story involves a murderer who buries his victim under the floor of his apartment and is then tortured by the sound of a beating heart.

to delight in this ' 'strong positive illustration of that blackness in Hawthorne." "Young Goodman Brown" has been analyzed through many lenses, including the psychological, historical, sociological, theological, and semantic. Critics still disagree over fundamental questions such as whether Brown is a victim or has only himself to blame for what befalls him. One feature that does stand out in the work is the accurate portrayal of Puritan society. Hawthorne clearly understands the demands of the Puritan faith, and it is no surprise to find that he has a legitimate claim to this heritage—among his ancestors number a constable who "lashed [a] Quaker woman so smartly" and a military officer who engaged in the destruction of an Indian village. Hawthorne also includes in his story the characters of Goody Cloyse, who taught Brown catechism, Martha Carrier, who had been promised to be "the queen of hell," and Goody Cory, all of whom were real people accused

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"The Devil and Daniel Webster" (1937) by Stephen Vincent Benet. An O. Henry Memorial Award-winning story about the trial of Jabez Stone, who sells his soul to the Devil, who has tricked the farmer by masquerading as a lawyer. At the trial, Stone is defended by famous New England lawyer Daniel Webster, and the judge presiding over the case is Nathaniel Hawthorne. "The Devil and his Grandmother," Jacob Ludwig Grimm and Wilhelm Carl Grimm (1812). This tale appears in the timeless collection of literary masterpieces known in English as Grimm's Fairy Tales. The German brothers translated the stories as told to them by common villagers. In this particular tale, three deserting soldiers serve the Devil for seven years and then must solve a riddle to avoid becoming his property. The soldiers are ultimately aided by the Devil's grandmother.

of sorcery during the Salem Witch Trials. Deacon Gookin also figures in Puritan history, as does, of course, Salem village. Such details challenge the reader to analyze Hawthorne's intentions: is he trying to influence us through his use of history to believe that Brown was not dreaming? Is he trying to cast doubt on historical figures and thus show that no one is beyond suspicion? Whatever the answers may be, Hawthorne effectively places us in the story, illustrating the social milieu which produced the Salem Witch Trials of 1692. Though "Young Goodman Brown" is sharply steeped in Puritan history and culture, like all great works of literature it can be viewed on a more universal level as well. ' 'Young Goodman Brown'' takes the form of an allegory, which uses certain elements of a story (characters, plot, etc.), or the entire story itself to symbolize something else. Brown represents Everyman ("Goodman" was a title for those who were beneath the social rank of

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Whereas many times a predominantly allegorical story fails in other areas— characterization, plot, or simply engaging the reader— Hawthorne succeeds at this double task remarkably."

"gentleman"), while Faith, his wife, represents his religious devotion. In leaving Faith, Brown forsakes his belief in the godliness of humanity. He immediately enters into a wood "lonely as could be," which is enshrouded in "deep dusk . . . deepest in the part" through which Brown walks. These woods are the physical location in which he will explore his doubts and conflicting desires. That he feels ambivalent about forging an alliance with the Devil is clear from his first entry into the forest, when he tells his companion that' 'Faith kept me back awhile." Yet though he pledges to return to Faith—or to his belief in humankind—several times, he continues his journey toward the Black Mass, which symbolizes his descent into Hell. Whereas many times a predominantly allegorical story fails in other areas—characterization, plot, or simply engaging the reader—Hawthorne succeeds at this double task remarkably. Not all critics and readers approve of use of the allegorical. Poe, for instance, avows in Nathaniel Hawthorne's Tales that "In defense of allegory . . . there is scarcely any respectable word to be said." Other critics see a purely allegorical reading of the story as far too narrow, and so have used it as a foundation upon which to construct other interpretations. Some psychological allegorists see the story as an example of Sigmund Freud's theory of the struggle between the ego, superego, and id. The id, which acts on one's instinctive desires, is represented by Brown's desire to submit to the evil of the Black Mass. His conflicts arise from his superego, or conscience, which wants no part of the night's events. The superego, created by the strict Puritan society, is represented by the town and its people. Brown's indecision characterizes the attempts of the superego to keep the ego, or Brown himself,

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from going along with the desires of the id. In a Freudian psychological reading such as this, Brown's journey through the forest is seen as a sexual adventure that ends with the revealing of sexual knowledge when the Devil shares the ' 'mystery of sin'' with his congregation. Still other critics read the story as Hawthorne's attack on the unredemptive nature of Calvinism, a system of beliefs which emphasizes the power of the Devil, the innate depravity of humans, and predestination—being chosen before birth to enter heaven after death. Such a reading can be supported by Brown's words, early in the story, that' 'after this one night I'll cling to [Faith's] skirts and follow her to heaven." Brown believes Faith is an "angel"— one of those selected for heaven. Though Brown rejects final acceptance of the Devil's proclamation that' 'Evil is the nature of mankind,'' after the Black Mass he only sees the capability of evil in those who surround him, and thus he endures his life under the hand of the Devil anyway. Critics who offer such readings, however, may be equating Hawthorne, the author, with Hawthorne, the descendant of Puritans who assumed the guilt of his witch-hunting ancestors. Author Henry James wrote that "Young Goodman Brown," "means nothing as regards Hawthorne's own state of mind, his conviction of human depravity and his consequent melancholy; for the simple reason that if it meant anything, it would mean too much." Though it may be tempting to look upon the story as a simple "tale," it is without a doubt a difficult one from which to draw conclusions. The ambiguous nature of the story is apparent throughout. For example, in the seeming appearance of Brown's dead father beckoning him to attend the Black Mass ' 'while a woman, with dim features of despair, threw out her hand to warn him back. Was it his mother?" One of the more alarming uncertainties, however, lies in the character of Faith. From the very beginning, Faith's "faith" is called into question—she wears pink hair ribbons, perhaps a sign of frivolity. More important, though, is the suggestion that Faith herself has also agreed to a covenant with the Devil. She asks Brown not to leave that evening, for she is filled with "such thoughts that she's afeared of herself sometimes." Yet her voice is sad, as if she has resigned herself to accepting the evil to come. In the end, Brown never knows if Faith also rejects the Devil. Brown, himself, is an inconstant character. He begins as a naive young man believing in his own

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free will to turn back on his sinful promise. His increasing struggles to resist evil show his development as a man. For example, at one point Brown challenges his companion, the Devil, for "any reason that I should quit my dear Faith." But when he has reaffirmed his decision to "stand firm against the Devil!" he discovers that Faith is on her way to the Black Mass. Suddenly, finding "There is no good on earth," Brown turns into a personification of the Devil. Brandishing the Devil's own staff, he rushes through the forest, blaspheming; and against the fearful backdrop of wild beasts and Indians (the antithesis of civilized Puritan society), he becomes ' 'himself the chief horror of the scene." Hawthorne adds ambiguity to the story with his suggestion "Had Goodman Brown fallen asleep in the forest and only dreamed a wild dream of a witchmeeting?" It is tempting to answer yes since Hawthorne suggests throughout the story that dreams can foreshadow events. Brown realizes that Faith spoke "as if a dream warned her what work is to be done tonight." Her speech at his leave-taking— "A lone woman is troubled with dreams"—implies, instead, that they may have been having a shared dream as both prepare to embark on the same journey. Certainly, Brown's understanding of his experiences can be filtered through the lens of a dream/nightmare—in the dark, gloomy forest, in voices so indistinct' 'he doubted he heard aught but the murmur of the old forest," and in the Devil's congregation that "alternately shone forth, then disappeared in shadow." Yet for Brown whether or not his experiences belong to a dream does not matter, because "a distrustful, if not a desperate man did he become." Although Brown did ' 'look up to heaven, and resist the wicked one," he has lost his faith as completely as if he had indeed given himself to the Devil. In church, he cannot listen to the psalms ' 'because an anthem of sin rushed loudly upon his ear''; while listening to a sermon he fears "the roof should thunder down upon the gray blasphemer and his hearers"; he even "shrank from the bosom of Faith''—yet he never knows if evil actually exists in these places. Though Brown succeeds in his rejection of the Devil in physical form—that of the dark figure leading the Black Mass—he allows sin to reside within him when he rejects his belief in humanity. Therefore, Brown comes to represent Hawthorne's belief in the isolation of the human spirit; Hawthorne acknowledged that every human being is alone "in that saddest of all prisons, his own heart."

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Source: Rena Korb, for Short Stories for Students, Gale Research, 1997.

Robert E. Morsberger Morsberger is an educator, editor, and nonfiction writer. In the following essay, he contends that Hawthorne's "Young Goodman Brown" is "our most effective literary work in recreating the atmosphere in which the witchcraft hysteria'' of the Salem Puritans occurred. Hawthorne, if any one, was equipped to write the definitive novel on the Salem witchcraft delusion; but he never confronted it head on.' 'Alice Doane's Appeal" conjures up the victims from the graveyard, Grandfather's Chair and "Main Street" give the barest bones of a synopsis,' 'Sir William Phips'' merely hints at it, and The House of the Seven Gables fictionalizes its heritage of guilt. But nowhere does Hawthorne give the dramatic account in depth of the trial and tragedy of Rebecca Nurse, George Burroughs, John Proctor, Giles Corey, George Jacobs and the other courageous victims, nor the damnable game of the "afflicted" girls, the admission of spectral evidence by autocratic judges, nor the sinister attempt by paranoid theocrats to maintain their power through terror. It remained for lesser writers to deal with such matters, for Hawthorne was not so much chronicling our history as he was molding the legend of our past. Thus the wholly fictitious "Young Goodman Brown" is our most effective literary work in recreating the atmosphere in which the witchcraft hysteria occurred. "Young Goodman Brown" is Hawthorne's most successful story. Here he is free from the authorial editorializing that makes some other tales excessively didactic. Nowhere does the author intrude; such moral generalizations as the story contains are spoken by the devil, who is, of course, unreliable. The reader is spared such obvious guidelines as, "and this shall be a moral unto you," that mar other tales. Hawthorne's allegories, profound though they usually are, often seem too contrived and their plots are sometimes inadequate for their meaning. But in "Young Goodman Brown," there are no poisoned Gothic gardens, no bosom serpents, Faustian laboratories, or other unnatural devices; the supernatural terror is not of Germany but comes from authentic American history; its folk-lore quality is not from flights of fancy but from an actual episode that has become a part of our heritage. As Hawthorne says elsewhere of the Salem

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iN dOODMAN bROWN, Hawthorne did conceive of a disillusioned Puritan, but Brown's tragedy is not the loss of his simple faith; rather it is that his faith is too simple to begin with."

burial ground, for every Bunker Hill monument in our history, there should be a Gallows Hill. As he says of democracy that it "comes from the nature of things," so does the situation in "Young Goodman Brown"; it is not superimposed from without but corresponds to the psychology of Puritan belief and of the Salem witchcraft delusion. Yet the very absense of editorializing has caused considerable ambiguity. In their introductory notes to the story, Sculley Bradley, Richmond Croom Beatty, and E. Hudson Long explain its meaning as Brown's "corruption through his loss of simple faith in the goodness of mankind...." This is comment has stood in the widely used The American Tradition in Literature since 1956; but in the context both of Hawthorne's fiction and of 17thcentury Puritanism, it is misleading. For Brown, as a Puritan, would have been indoctrinated with the Calvinistic concept of total depravity, according to which mankind is utterly corrupt and deserves no better than damnation. In the orthodox Calvinism of Michael Wigglesworth's doggerel "The Day of Doom," men of good works are damned to hell, and so are they Who dy'd in infancy, And never had or good or bad effected pers'nally, But from the womb unto the tomb were straightway carried....

They are damned not for sins of commission but simply for their humanity in being born with ' 'Nature / depraved and forlorn." Accordingly, Perry Miller maintained that "It is impossible to conceive of a disillusioned Puritan; no matter what misfortune befell him, no matter how often or how tragically his fellowmen failed him, he would have been prepared for the worst, and would have expected no better."

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In Goodman Brown, Hawthorne did conceive of a disillusioned Puritan, but Brown's tragedy is not the loss of his simple faith; rather it is that his faith is too simple to begin with. He is, of course, aware of evil from the start, for he is concerned lest a dream have warned his wife "what work is to be done tonight" as he sets forth on "his present evil purpose." But at this stage in his development, evil is still a notion; he may believe in it intellectually as dogma, but he has not yet experienced it. So his leaving his wife for an evening of diabolical revelry at the witches' sabbath is merely an untested young man's first (and he expects final) fling. One might compare him to the youth who thinks he will just once try drugs, prostitution, or some sort of perversity—just once, to see what it's like, and never again—and who gets hooked into addiction or shocked into fanatical reaction. Goodman Brown is like the person who from perverse curiosity experiments once with LSD and has a bad trip. His trip into the forest is indeed a bad one, so traumatic that he concludes by disbelieving in any goodness. Though he cries out to Faith to ' 'look up to heaven, and resist the wicked one," and is whisked away from the black mass, he still believes Satan's claim that "Evil is the nature of mankind" and blights the rest of his life by acknowledging, "Come, devil; for to thee is this world given." His discovery of the hypocrisy of the catechist, clergy, ministers and magistrates of Salem has destroyed his faith in the Calvinist elect, who if they persevered anywhere should have done so in the new Zion of Massachusetts. With the participation of his wife Faith in the devil worship, there are not brands spared from the burning; the depravity is indeed total. It is too simple to consider the story an unqualified attack on Calvinism. Though Hawthorne deplored the Puritans' grim bigotry, he respected their strength and commitment and wrote in the "The Old Manse'' that he preferred the warmth that their writings once had to the anemic frigidity of 19thcentury liberal theology. It is true that one element of "Young Goodman Brown" is a criticism of Puritan self-righteousness; the devil points out to Brown that he has "a very general acquaintance here in New England'' and proceeds to cite numerous instances of bigotry, persecution, and hypocrisy. On the question of evil, the issue is more complex. Hawthorne rejected Emerson's bland dismissal of evil as mere illusion that will vanish when one rises transcendently into the world of spirit: "So fast will disagreeable appearances, swine, spi-

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ders, snakes, pests, mad-houses, prisons, enemies, vanish .. . ." But how far did Hawthorne go in the opposite direction? Melville asked of Hawthorne "whether there really lurks in him, perhaps unknown to himself, a touch of Puritanic gloom'' and concluded (later citing "Young Goodman Brown" as an example) ' 'that this great power of blackness in him derives its force from its appeals to the Calvinistic sense of Innate Depravity and Original Sin, from whose visitations, in some shape or other, no deeply thinking mind is always and wholly free'' and that "this black conceit pervades him [Hawthorne] through and through." Though the lack of editorial explanation makes the story ambiguous, Goodman Brown's morbid misanthropy is not Hawthorne's. Henry James commented, "The magnificent little romance of "Young Goodman B r o w n ' " . . . evidently means nothing as regards Hawthorne's own state of mind, his conviction of human depravity and his consequent melancholy; for the simple reason that if it meant anything, it would mean too much." James further observed that the gloomy subjects of Hawthorne's tales "were not the expression of a hopeless, or even of a predominantly melancholy, feeling about the human soul." To find Hawthorne's own position, we must turn to other works, for he is one author whose writings can profitably be cross-referenced. What Goodman Brown experiences is an inversion of Jonathan Edwards' statement that it is one thing to have an opinion that God is holy and ought to be worshiped and quite another thing to have a sense of that holiness in one's heart. Thus in The Marble Faun, explaining the pure Hilda's reaction to discovering the crime of Miriam and Donatello, Hawthorne comments on ' 'those tears (among the most chill and forlorn that gush from human sorrow) which the innocent heart pours forth at its first actual discovery that sin is in the world. . . . They may have heard much of the evil of the world, and seem to know it, but only as an impalpable theory. In due time, some mortal, whom they reverence too highly, is commissioned by Providence to teach them this direful lesson; he perpetrates a sin; and Adam falls anew, and Paradise, heretofore in unfaded bloom is lost again, and closed forever, with the fiery swords gleaming at its gates." As a Puritan, Brown would have a knowledge of evil but a notional knowledge only until his ordeal in the forest. Then he falls into what William James calls "really insane melancholia . . . desperation absolute and complete, the whole universe coagulating

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about the sufferer into a material of overwhelming horror, surrounding him without opening or end. Not the conception of intellectual perception of evil, but the grisly blood-freezing heart-palsying sensation of it close upon one ...." Apropos of Hilda, Hawthorne explains further "that dismal certainty of the existence of evil in the world, which, though we may fancy ourselves fully assured of the sad mystery long before, never becomes a portion of our practical belief until it takes substance and reality from the sin of some guide, whom we have deeply trusted and revered, or some friend whom we have deeply loved. When that knowledge comes, it is as if a cloud had suddenly gathered over the morning light; so dark a cloud, that there seems to be no longer any sunshine behind it or above i t . . . as if the catastrophe involved the whole moral world." Clearly Hawthorne had a perspective that Brown lacks. His own position is perhaps best seen when he describes young Phoebe Pyncheon's distress upon discovering the evil in her respectable kinsman, Judge Jaffrey Pyncheon: A doubt of this nature has a most disturbing influence, and . . . comes with fearful and startling effect on minds of the trim, orderly, and limit-loving class . . . . Dispositions more boldly speculative may derive a stern enjoyment from the discovery, since there must be evil in the world, that a high man is as likely to grasp his share of it as a low one. A wider scope of view, and a deeper insight, may see rank, dignity, and station, all proved illusory, so far as regards their claim to human reverence, and yet not feel as if the universe were thereby tumbled headlong into chaos.

This final view was Hawthorne's own. It is matched by Melville's statement in Moby Dick: "Doubts of all things earthly, and intuitions of some things heavenly, this combination makes neither believer nor infidel, but makes a man who regards them both with equal eye." But Goodman Brown resembles Ishmael in "The Try-Works" chapter, Melville's equivalent of a witches' sabbath, during which as helmsman Ishmael is terrified by the thought that like Brown in the dark forest, he "was not so much bound to any haven ahead as rushing from all havens astern." Recovering his senses after almost capsizing the ship, he makes a statement that can serve with uncanny accuracy as a comment on "Young Goodman Brown." Look not too long in the face of the fire, O man! . . . Tomorrow, in the natural sun, the skies will be bright; those who glared like devils in the forking flames, the morn will show in far other, at least gentler relief. . . Nevertheless the sun hides not Virginia's Dismal

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Swamp nor Rome's accursed Campagna, nor wide Sahara, nor all the millions of miles of deserts and of griefs beneath the moon....

This is what happens to Brown on his return to Salem. Ishmael therefore concludes, matching the judgment of both Melville and Hawthorne, ' 'Give not thyself up, then, to fire, lest it invert thee, deaden thee.... There is a wisdom that is woe; but there is a woe that is madness." This is the woe that afflicts Brown. He has departed from Ishmael's "insular Tahiti, full of peace and joy," into "all the horrors of the half known life''; and as Ishmael says,' 'Push not off from that isle, thou canst never return!'' Brown's physical return to Salem poses a number of problems. If his experience is taken literally, then everyone else who had participated in the black mass would know that he too had been there. Yet no one else appears unchanged. Is it because the others did not renounce Satan, as Brown did? Faith would know that he knows she was there, and he would know that she knows he knows. At the beginning she has a knowledge or at least a premonition of ' 'what work is to be done tonight'' and urges him to stay as much for her sake as for his own on ' 'this night... of all nights in the year." Yet Faith greets him as if nothing amiss had occurred. She has not been overwhelmed with gloom; and if the rest of her days are blighted, it is because Brown's neverlifted depression turns their marriage into suttee on the psychological level. On the other hand, if the experience is a dream, it is not clear where the dream begins, unless it does so before the story starts. The tale opens factually with Brown setting out on his journey; and while it very effectively shifts into the supernatural, there is no transition from actuality to dream. Yet the dreamlike quality of the night-journey is essential for the mystery of iniquity. Like Dante at the opening of The Inferno, Brown "came to myself in a dark wood where the straight way was lost.... I cannot rightly tell how I entered it, so full of sleep was I about the moment that I left the true way." The forest is that of the soul, and there Brown learns like Melville, that "Though in many of its aspects this visible world seems formed in love, the invisible spheres were formed in fright.'' If one assumes that Brown literally drifts into a dream, other technical problems arise. Did he simply walk into the forest and fall asleep like Rip Van Winkle? Did he spend the night uncomfortably under a tree? If so, would he not realize upon

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waking that he had been asleep? On the level of motivation, why should he go into the forest to spend a night sleeping out, if he was not on his way to a rendezvous? The only way in which the dream version can be seen logically is for the entire story to be a dream, and such a reading still does not provide for a transition out of the dream at the end. Yet the dream alternative is necessary for modern readers who do not believe in witches. Despite the loose ends, the final ambiguity allows for a psychological or spiritual rather than a literal experience. There was no actual witchcraft at Salem, but twenty people died there as witches, and Hawthorne's story provides the atmosphere in which such hysterical delusion could take place. As Alan Simpson states, ' 'The Puritan was always obsessed by his sense of sin. Taught to expect it everywhere, and to magnify it where he found it, he easily fell into the habit of inventing it." Though the story makes no mention of witchcraft trials, it is not difficult to imagine Goodman Brown as an accuser and prosecutor of his neighbors. In his profound suspicion of evil on the part of everyone save himself, we see here, as Salem showed in actual history, a parable of the beginnings of American paranoia in society and politics. Source: Robert E. Morsberger, "The Woe That Is Madness: Goodman Brown and the Face of the Fire," in The Nathaniel Hawthorne Journal, edited by C. E. Frazer Clark, Jr., 1973, pp. 177-82.

Thomas E. Connolly Connolly is an educator, editor, and critic. In the following essay, he calls "Young Goodman Brown" "an individual tragedy,'' because while Goodman Brown retains his faith in God, he is still condemned by the imperfections of Calvinism. It is surprising, in a way, to discover how few of the many critics who have discussed "Young Goodman Brown'' agree on any aspect of the work except that it is an excellent short story. D. M. McKeithan says that its theme is "sin and its blighting effects." Richard H. Fogle observes, ' 'Hawthorne the artist refuses to limit himself to a single and doctrinaire conclusion, proceeding instead by indirection," implying, presumably, that it is inartistic to say something which can be clearly understood by the readers. Gordon and Tate assert, "Hawthorne is dealing

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with his favorite theme: the unhappiness which the human heart suffers as a result of its innate depravity ." Austin Warren says,' 'His point is the devastating effect of moral scepticism." Almost all critics agree, however, that Young Goodman Brown lost his faith. Their conclusions are based, perhaps, upon the statement, "My Faith is gone!" made by Brown when he recognizes his wife's voice and ribbon. I should like to examine the story once more to show that Young Goodman Brown did not lose his faith at all. In fact, not only did he retain his faith, but during his horrible experience he actually discovered the full and frightening significance of his faith. Mrs. Leavis comes closest to the truth in her discussion of this story in the Sewanee Review in which she says: "Hawthorne has imaginatively recreated for the reader that Calvinist sense of sin, that theory which did in actuality shape the early social and spiritual history of New England." But Mrs. Leavis seems to miss the critical implications of the story, for she goes on to say: "But in Hawthorne, by a wonderful feat of transmutation, it has no religious significance, it is a psychological state that is explored. Young Goodman Brown's Faith is not faith in Christ but faith in human beings, and losing it he is doomed to isolation forever." Those who persist in reading this story as a study of the effects of sin on Brown come roughly to this conclusion: "Goodman Brown became evil as a result of sin and thought he saw evil where none existed." Hawthorne's message is far more depressing and horrifying than this. The story is obviously an individual tragedy, and those who treat it as such are right, of course; but, far beyond the personal plane, it has universal implications. Young Goodman Brown, as a staunch Calvinist, is seen at the beginning of this allegory to be quite confident that he is going to heaven. The errand on which he is going is presented mysteriously and is usually interpreted to be a deliberate quest of sin. This may or may not be true; what is important is that he is going out to meet the devil by prearrangement. We are told by the narrator that his purpose in going is evil. When the devil meets him, he refers to the "beginning of a journey." Brown admits that he "kept covenant" by meeting the devil and hints at the evil purpose of the meeting. Though his family has been Christian for generations, the point is made early in the story that

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his story is Hawthorne's criticism of the teachings of PuritanicCalvinism."

Young Goodman Brown has been married to his Faith for only three months. Either the allegory breaks down at this point or the marriage to Faith must be looked upon as the moment of conversion to grace in which he became fairly sure of his election to heaven. That Goodman Brown is convinced he is of the elect is made clear at the beginning: "... and after this one night I'll cling to her skirts and follow her to heaven.'' In other words, at the start of his adventure, Young Goodman Brown is certain that his faith will help man get to heaven. It is in this concept that his disillusionment will come. The irony of this illusion is brought out when he explains to the devil the reason for his tardiness: "Faith kept me back awhile." That is what he thinks! By the time he gets to the meeting place he finds that his Faith is already there. Goodman Brown's disillusionment in his belief begins quickly after meeting the devil. He has asserted proudly that his ancestors ' 'have been a race of honest men and good Christians since the days of the martyrs," and the devil turns his own words on him smartly: Well said, Goodman Brown! I have been as well acquainted with your family as with ever a one among the Puritans; and that's no trifle to say. I helped your grandfather, the constable, when he lashed the Quaker woman so smartly through the streets of Salem; and it was I that brought your father a pitch-pine knot, kindled at my own hearth, to set fire to an Indian village, in King Philip's war. They were my good friends, both; and many a pleasant walk have we had along this path, and returned merrily after midnight. I would fain be friends with you for their sake.

Goodman Brown manages to shrug off this identification of his parental and grandparental Puritanism with the devil, but the reader should not overlook the sharp tone of criticism in Hawthorne's presentation of this speech. When the devil presents his next argument, Brown is a little more shaken. The devil has shown him that Goody Cloyse is of his company and

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Brown responds: ' 'What if a wretched old woman do choose to go to the devil when I thought she was going to heaven: is that any reason why I should quit my dear Faith and go after her?'' He still believes at this point that his faith will lead him to heaven. The devil's reply, "You will think better of this by and by," is enigmatic when taken by itself, but a little earlier the narrator had made a comment which throws a great deal of light on this remark by the devil. When he recognized Goody Cloyse, Brown said, "That old woman taught me my catechism," and the narrator added, ' 'and there was a world of meaning in this simple comment." The reader at this point should be fairly well aware of Hawthorne's criticism of Calvinism. The only way there can be a "world of meaning" in Brown's statement is that her catechism teaches the way to the devil and not the way to heaven. From this point on Brown is rapidly convinced that his original conception about his faith is wrong. Deacon Gookin and the "good old minister," in league with Satan, finally lead the way to his recognition that this faith is diabolic rather than divine. Hawthorne points up this fact by a bit of allegorical symbolism. Immediately after he recognizes the voices of the deacon and the minister, we are told by the narrator that "Young Goodman Brown caught hold of a tree for support, being ready to sink down on the ground, faint and overburdened with the heavy sickness of his heart. He looked up to the sky, doubting whether there really was a heaven above him. Yet there was a blue arch, and the stars brightened in it." Here the doubt has begun to gnaw, but the stars are symbols of the faint hope which he is still able to cherish, and he is able to say: "With heaven above and Faith below, I will yet stand firm against the devil." But immediately a symbolic cloud hides the symbolic stars:' 'While he still gazed upward into the deep arch of the firmament and had lifted his hands to pray, a cloud, though no wind was stirring, hurried across the zenith and hid the brightening stars." And it is out of this black cloud of doubt that the voice of his faith reaches him and the pink ribbon of his Faith falls. It might be worthwhile to discuss Faith's pink ribbons here, for Hawthorne certainly took great pains to call them to our attention. The ribbons seem to be symbolic of his initial illusion about the true significance of his faith, his belief that his faith will lead him to heaven. The pink ribbons on a Puritan lady's cap, signs of youth, joy, and happiness, are actually entirely out of keeping with the severity of the rest

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of her dress which, if not somber black, is at least gray. When the ribbon falls from his cloud of doubt, Goodman Brown cries in agony, "My Faith is gone!'' and it is gone in the sense that it now means not what it once meant. He is quick to apply the logical, ultimate conclusion of Goody Cloyse's catechizing: "Come, devil; for to thee is this world given." Lest the reader miss the ultimate implication of the doctrine of predestination, Hawthorne has the devil preach a sermon at his communion service: ' 'Welcome, my children . . . to the communion of your race. Ye have found thus young your nature and your destiny." Calvinism teaches that man is innately depraved and that he can do nothing to merit salvation. He is saved only by the whim of God who selects some, through no deserts of their own, for heaven which the great mass of mankind is destined for hell. The devil concludes his sermon: ' 'Evil is the nature of mankind. Evil must be your only happiness. Welcome again, my children, to the communion of your race." It is not at all insignificant that the word race is used several times in this passage, for it was used earlier by Goodman Brown when he said, ' 'We have been a race of honest men and good Christians...." After this sermon by the devil, Young Goodman Brown makes one last effort to retain the illusion that faith will lead him to heaven; he calls out: "Faith! Faith! . . . look up to heaven, and resist the wicked one." But we are fairly sure that he is unsuccessful, for we are immediately told: ' 'Whether Faith obeyed he knew not.'' Young Goodman Brown did not lose his faith (we are even told that his Faith survived him); he learned its full and terrible significance. This story is Hawthorne's criticism of the teachings of PuritanicCalvinism. His implication is that the doctrine of the elect and damned is not a faith which carries man heavenward on its skirts, as Brown once believed, but, instead, condemns him to hell—bad and good alike indiscriminately—and for all intents and purposes so few escape as to make one man's chance of salvation almost disappear. It is this awakening to the full meaning of his faith which causes Young Goodman Brown to look upon his minister as a blasphemer when he teaches "the sacred truths of our religion, and of saint-like lives and triumphant deaths, and of future bliss or misery unutterable," for he has learned that according to the truths of his faith there is probably nothing but ' 'misery unutterable'' in store for him and all his

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congregation; it is this awakening which causes him to turn away from prayer; it is this awakening which makes appropriate the fact that "they carved no hopeful verse upon his tombstone." Though much is made of the influence of Puritanism on the writings of Hawthorne, he must also be seen to be a critic of the teachings of Puritanism. Between the position of Vernon L. Parrington, who saw Hawthorne as retaining ' 'much of the older Calvinistic view of life and human destiny," and that of Regis Michaud, who saw him as "an anti-puritan and prophet heralding the Freudian gospel," lies the truth about Hawthorne. Source: Thomas E. Connolly, "Hawthorne's 'Young Goodman Brown': An Attack on Puritanic Calvinism," in American Literature, Vol. XXVIII, No. 3, November, 1956, pp. 370-75.

Sources Fogle, Richard H. "Ambiguity and Clarity in Hawthorne's 'Young Goodman Brown'," in New England Quarterly, December, 1945. Levin, David in American Literature, November, 1962. Melville, Herman. "Hawthorne and His Mosses," in Nathaniel Hawthorne's Tales, edited by James Mclntosh, W. W. Norton, 1987, pp. 337-350.

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Poe, Edgar Allan. "Tale-Writing—Nathaniel Hawthorne," in Nathaniel Hawthorne's Tales, edited by James Mclntosh, W. W. Norton, 1987. Turner, Frederick Jackson. The United States, 1830-1850: The Nation and Its Sections, Peter Smith, 1958. Waggoner, Hyatt H. Nathaniel Hawthorne, University of Minnesota Press, 1962,48 p.

Further Reading Levy, Leo B. "The Problem of Faith in 'Young Goodman Brown'," in Nathaniel Hawthorne, edited by Harold Bloom, Chelsea House, 1986, pp. 115-26. Levy discusses some of the critical interpretations of "Young Goodman Brown" and provides his own reading of the story, focusing on the character of Faith. Newman, Lea Bertani Vozar. A Reader's Guide to the Short Stories of Nathaniel Hawthorne, G. K. Hall & Co., 1979. Newman covers all of Hawthorne's stories, presenting publication history, circumstances of composition, sources, influences, relationships with other Hawthorne works, and interpretations and criticisms. St. Armand, Barton Levi. '"Young Goodman Brown' as Historical Allegory," in Nathaniel Hawthorne Journal, 1973, pp. 183-97. St. Armand presents a discussion of "Young Goodman Brown" as allegory and provides references to the Puritan background of the story's setting.

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Glossary of Literary Terms A Aestheticism: A literary and artistic movement of the nineteenth century. Followers of the movement believed that art should not be mixed with social, political, or moral teaching. The statement' 'art for art's sake" is a good summary of aestheticism. The movement had its roots in France, but it gained widespread importance in England in the last half of the nineteenth century, where it helped change the Victorian practice of including moral lessons in literature. Edgar Allan Poe is one of the best-known American "aesthetes." Allegory: A narrative technique in which characters representing things or abstract ideas are used to convey a message or teach a lesson. Allegory is typically used to teach moral, ethical, or religious lessons but is sometimes used for satiric or political purposes. Many fairy tales are allegories. Allusion: A reference to a familiar literary or historical person or event, used to make an idea more easily understood. Joyce Carol Gates's story "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?'' exhibits several allusions to popular music. Analogy: A comparison of two things made to explain something unfamiliar through its similarities to something familiar, or to prove one point based on the acceptance of another. Similes and metaphors are types of analogies.

Antagonist: The major character in a narrative or drama who works against the hero or protagonist. The Misfit in Flannery O'Connor's story "A Good Man Is Hard to Find'' serves as the antagonist for the Grandmother. Anthology: A collection of similar works of literature, art, or music. Zora Neale Hurston's "The Eatonville Anthology" is a collection of stories that take place in the same town. Anthropomorphism: The presentation of animals or objects in human shape or with human characteristics. The term is derived from the Greek word for "human form." The fur necklet in Katherine Mansfield's story "Miss Brill" has anthropomorphic characteristics. Anti-hero: A central character in a work of literature who lacks traditional heroic qualities such as courage, physical prowess, and fortitude. Anti-heroes typically distrust conventional values and are unable to commit themselves to any ideals. They generally feel helpless in a world over which they have no control. Anti-heroes usually accept, and often celebrate, their positions as social outcasts. A well-known anti-hero is Walter Mitty in James Thurber's story "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty." Archetype: The word archetype is commonly used to describe an original pattern or model from which all other things of the same kind are made. Archetypes are the literary images that grow out of the ' 'collec-

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live unconscious," a theory proposed by psychologist Carl Jung. They appear in literature as incidents and plots that repeat basic patterns of life. They may also appear as stereotyped characters. The "schlemiel" of Yiddish literature is an archetype. Autobiography: A narrative in which an individual tells his or her life story. Examples include Benjamin Franklin's Autobiography and Amy Hempel's story "In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson Is Buried," which has autobiographical characteristics even though it is a work of fiction.

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Avant-garde: A literary term that describes new writing that rejects traditional approaches to literature in favor of innovations in style or content. Twentieth-century examples of the literary avantgarde include the modernists and the minimalists.

Catharsis: The release or purging of unwanted emotions—specifically fear and pity—brought about by exposure to art. The term was first used by the Greek philosopher Aristotle in his Poetics to refer to the desired effect of tragedy on spectators.

Belles-lettres: A French term meaning "fine letters" or "beautiful writing." It is often used as a synonym for literature, typically referring to imaginative and artistic rather than scientific or expository writing. Current usage sometimes restricts the meaning to light or humorous writing and appreciative essays about literature. Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland epitomizes the realm of belles-lettres.

Character: Broadly speaking, a person in a literary work. The actions of characters are what constitute the plot of a story, novel, or poem. There are numerous types of characters, ranging from simple, stereotypical figures to intricate, multifaceted ones. "Characterization" is the process by which an author creates vivid, believable characters in a work of art. This may be done in a variety of ways, including (1) direct description of the character by the narrator; (2) the direct presentation of the speech, thoughts, or actions of the character; and (3) the responses of other characters to the character. The term ' 'character'' also refers to a form originated by the ancient Greek writer Theophrastus that later became popular in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It is a short essay or sketch of a person who prominently displays a specific attribute or quality, such as miserliness or ambition. "Miss Brill," a story by Katherine Mansfield, is an example of a character sketch.

Bildungsroman: A German word meaning "novel of development." The bildungsroman is a study of the maturation of a youthful character, typically brought about through a series of social or sexual encounters that lead to self-awareness. J. D. Salinger's Catcher in the Rye is a bildungsroman, and Doris Lessing's story "Through the Tunnel" exhibits characteristics of a bildungsroman as well.

B Black Aesthetic Movement: A period of artistic and literary development among African Americans in the 1960s and early 1970s. This was the first major African-American artistic movement since the Harlem Renaissance and was closely paralleled by the civil rights and black power movements. The black aesthetic writers attempted to produce works of art that would be meaningful to the black masses. Key figures in black aesthetics included one of its founders, poet and playwright Amiri Baraka, formerly known as LeRoi Jones; poet and essayist Haki R. Madhubuti, formerly Don L. Lee; poet and playwright Sonia Sanchez; and dramatist Ed Bullins. Works representative of the Black Aesthetic Movement include Amiri Baraka's play Dutchman, a 1964 Obie award-winner.

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Black Humor: Writing that places grotesque elements side by side with humorous ones in an attempt to shock the reader, forcing him or her to laugh at the horrifying reality of a disordered world. Joseph Heller's novel Catch-22 is considered a superb example of the use of black humor. Flannery O'Connor often used black humor in her stories, including the characterizations in ' 'A Good Man Is Hard to Find."

Classical: In its strictest definition in literary criticism, classicism refers to works of ancient Greek or Roman literature. The term may also be used to describe a literary work of recognized importance (a "classic") from any time period or literature that exhibits the traits of classicism. Examples of later works and authors now described as classical include French literature of the seventeenth century, Western novels of the nineteenth century, and American fiction of the mid-nineteenth century such as that written by James Fenimore Cooper and Mark Twain. Climax: The turning point in a narrative, the moment when the conflict is at its most intense. Typically, the structure of stories, novels, and plays is

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one of rising action, in which tension builds to the climax, followed by falling action, in which tension lessens as the story moves to its conclusion. Comedy: One of two major types of drama, the other being tragedy. Its aim is to amuse, and it typically ends happily. Comedy assumes many forms, such as farce and burlesque, and uses a variety of techniques, from parody to satire. In a restricted sense the term comedy refers only to dramatic presentations, but in general usage it is commonly applied to nondramatic works as well. Comic Relief: The use of humor to lighten the mood of a serious or tragic story, especially in plays. The technique is very common in Elizabethan works, and can be an integral part of the plot or simply a brief event designed to break the tension of the scene. Conflict: The conflict in a work of fiction is the issue to be resolved in the story. It usually occurs between two characters, the protagonist and the antagonist, or between the protagonist and society or the protagonist and himself or herself. The conflict in Washington Irving's story "The Devil and Tom Walker'' is that the Devil wants Tom Walker's soul but Tom does not want to go to hell. Criticism: The systematic study and evaluation of literary works, usually based on a specific method or set of principles. An important part of literary studies since ancient times, the practice of criticism has given rise to numerous theories, methods, and "schools," sometimes producing conflicting, even contradictory, interpretations of literature in general as well as of individual works. Even such basic issues as what constitutes a poem or a novel have been the subject of much criticism over the centuries. Seminal texts of literary criticism include Plato's Republic, Aristotle's Poetics, Sir Philip Sidney's The Defence ofPoesie, and John Dry den's Of Dramatic Poesie. Contemporary schools of criticism include deconstruction, feminist, psychoanalytic, poststructuralist, new historicist, postcolonialist, and reader-response.

D Deconstruction: A method of literary criticism characterized by multiple conflicting interpretations of a given work. Deconstructionists consider the impact of the language of a work and suggest that the true meaning of the work is not necessarily the meaning that the author intended.

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Deduction: The process of reaching a conclusion through reasoning from general premises to a specific premise. Arthur Conan Doyle's character Sherlock Holmes often used deductive reasoning to solve mysteries. Denotation: The definition of a word, apart from the impressions or feelings it creates in the reader. The word "apartheid" denotes a political and economic policy of segregation by race, but its connotations—oppression, slavery, inequality—are numerous. Denouement: A French word meaning "the unknotting." In literature, it denotes the resolution of conflict in fiction or drama. The denouement follows the climax and provides an outcome to the primary plot situation as well as an explanation of secondary plot complications. A well-known example of denouement is the last scene of the play As You Like It by William Shakespeare, in which couples are married, an evildoer repents, the identities of two disguised characters are revealed, and a ruler is restored to power. Also known as ' 'falling action." Detective Story: A narrative about the solution of a mystery or the identification of a criminal. The conventions of the detective story include the detective's scrupulous use of logic in solving the mystery; incompetent or ineffectual police; a suspect who appears guilty at first but is later proved innocent; and the detective's friend or confidant— often the narrator—whose slowness in interpreting clues emphasizes by contrast the detective's brilliance. Edgar Allan Poe's "Murders in the Rue Morgue" is commonly regarded as the earliest example of this type of story. Other practitioners are Arthur Conan Doyle, Dashiell Hammett, and Agatha Christie. Dialogue: Dialogue is conversation between people in a literary work. In its most restricted sense, it refers specifically to the speech of characters in a drama. As a specific literary genre, a ' 'dialogue'' is a composition in which characters debate an issue or idea. Didactic: A term used to describe works of literature that aim to teach a moral, religious, political, or practical lesson. Although didactic elements are often found in artistically pleasing works, the term "didactic" usually refers to literature in which the message is more important than the form. The term may also be used to criticize a work that the critic finds "overly didactic," that is, heavy-handed in its

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delivery of a lesson. An example of didactic literature is John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress. Dramatic Irony: Occurs when the reader of a work of literature knows something that a character in the work itself does not know. The irony is in the contrast between the intended meaning of the statements or actions of a character and the additional information understood by the audience. Dystopia: An imaginary place in a work of fiction where the characters lead dehumanized, fearful lives. George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-four, and Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale portray versions of dystopia.

E Edwardian: Describes cultural conventions identified with the period of the reign of Edward VII of England (1901-1910). Writers of the Edwardian Age typically displayed a strong reaction against the propriety and conservatism of the Victorian Age. Their work often exhibits distrust of authority in religion, politics, and art and expresses strong doubts about the soundness of conventional values. Writers of this era include E. M. Forster, H. G. Wells, and Joseph Conrad. Empathy: A sense of shared experience, including emotional and physical feelings, with someone or something other than oneself. Empathy is often used to describe the response of a reader to a literary character. Epilogue: A concluding statement or section of a literary work. In dramas, particularly those of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the epilogue is a closing speech, often in verse, delivered by an actor at the end of a play and spoken directly to the audience. Epiphany: A sudden revelation of truth inspired by a seemingly trivial incident. The term was widely used by James Joyce in his critical writings, and the stories in Joyce's Dubliners are commonly called "epiphanies."

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epithet applied to Professor Moriarty, arch-rival of Sherlock Holmes in Arthur Conan Doyle's series of detective stories. Existentialism: A predominantly twentieth-century philosophy concerned with the nature and perception of human existence. There are two major strains of existentialist thought: atheistic and Christian. Followers of atheistic existentialism believe that the individual is alone in a godless universe and that the basic human condition is one of suffering and loneliness. Nevertheless, because there are no fixed values, individuals can create their own characters—indeed, they can shape themselves—through the exercise of free will. The atheistic strain culminates in and is popularly associated with the works of Jean-Paul Sartre. The Christian existentialists, on the other hand, believe that only in God may people find freedom from life's anguish. The two strains hold certain beliefs in common: that existence cannot be fully understood or described through empirical effort; that anguish is a universal element of life; that individuals must bear responsibility for their actions; and that there is no common standard of behavior or perception for religious and ethical matters. Existentialist thought figures prominently in the works of such authors as Franz Kafka, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, and Albert Camus. Expatriatism: The practice of leaving one's country to live for an extended period in another country. Literary expatriates include Irish author James Joyce who moved to Italy and France, American writers James Baldwin, Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, and F. Scott Fitzgerald who lived and wrote in Paris, and Polish novelist Joseph Conrad in England. Exposition: Writing intended to explain the nature of an idea, thing, or theme. Expository writing is often combined with description, narration, or argument. Expressionism: An indistinct literary term, originally used to describe an early twentieth-century school of German painting. The term applies to almost any mode of unconventional, highly subjective writing that distorts reality in some way. Advocates of Expressionism include Federico Garcia Lorca, Eugene O'Neill, Franz Kafka, and James Joyce.

Epistolary Novel: A novel in the form of letters. The form was particularly popular in the eighteenth century. The form can also be applied to short stories, as in Edwidge Danticat's "Children of the Sea."

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Epithet: A word or phrase, often disparaging or abusive, that expresses a character trait of someone or something. "The Napoleon of crime" is an

Fable: A prose or verse narrative intended to convey a moral. Animals or inanimate objects with human characteristics often serve as characters in

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fables. A famous fable is Aesop's "The Tortoise and the Hare." Fantasy: A literary form related to mythology and folklore. Fantasy literature is typically set in nonexistent realms and features supernatural beings. Notable examples of literature with elements of fantasy are Gabriel Garcia Marquez's story "The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World" and Ursula K. LeGuin's "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas." Farce: A type of comedy characterized by broad humor, outlandish incidents, and often vulgar subject matter. Much of the "comedy" in film and television could more accurately be described as farce. Fiction: Any story that is the product of imagination rather than a documentation of fact. Characters and events in such narratives may be based in real life but their ultimate form and configuration is a creation of the author. Figurative Language: A technique in which an author uses figures of speech such as hyperbole, irony, metaphor, or simile for a particular effect. Figurative language is the opposite of literal language, in which every word is truthful, accurate, and free of exaggeration or embellishment. Flashback: A device used in literature to present action that occurred before the beginning of the story. Flashbacks are often introduced as the dreams or recollections of one or more characters. Foil: A character in a work of literature whose physical or psychological qualities contrast strongly with, and therefore highlight, the corresponding qualities of another character. In his Sherlock Holmes stories, Arthur Conan Doyle portrayed Dr. Watson as a man of normal habits and intelligence, making him a foil for the eccentric and unusually perceptive Sherlock Holmes. Folklore: Traditions and myths preserved in a culture or group of people. Typically, these are passed on by word of mouth in various forms— such as legends, songs, and proverbs—or preserved in customs and ceremonies. Washington Irving, in "The Devil and Tom Walker" and many of his other stories, incorporates many elements of the folklore of New England and Germany. Folktale: A story originating in oral tradition. Folktales fall into a variety of categories, including legends, ghost stories, fairy tales, fables, and anecdotes based on historical figures and events.

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Foreshadowing: A device used in literature to create expectation or to set up an explanation of later developments, Edgar Allan Poe uses foreshadowing to create suspense in ' 'The Fall of the House of Usher" when the narrator comments on the crumbling state of disrepair in which he finds the house.

G Genre: A category of literary work. Genre may refer to both the content of a given work—tragedy, comedy, horror, science fiction—and to its form, such as poetry, novel, or drama. Gilded Age: A period in American history during the 1870s and after characterized by political corruption and materialism. A number of important novels of social and political criticism were written during this time. Henry James and Kate Chopin are two writers who were prominent during the Gilded Age. Gothicism: In literature, works characterized by a taste for medieval or morbid characters and situations. A gothic novel prominently features elements of horror, the supernatural, gloom, and violence: clanking chains, terror, ghosts, medieval castles, and unexplained phenomena. The term "gothic novel" is also applied to novels that lack elements of the traditional Gothic setting but that create a similar atmosphere of terror or dread. The term can also be applied to stories, plays, and poems. Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and Joyce Carol Gates's Bellefleur are both gothic novels. Grotesque: In literature, a work that is characterized by exaggeration, deformity, freakishness, and disorder. The grotesque often includes an element of comic absurdity. Examples of the grotesque can be found in the works of Edgar Allan Poe, Flannery O'Connor, Joseph Heller, and Shirley Jackson.

H Harlem Renaissance: The Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s is generally considered the first significant movement of black writers and artists in the United States. During this period, new and established black writers, many of whom lived in the region of New York City known as Harlem, published more fiction and poetry than ever before, the first influential black literary journals were established, and black authors and artists received their first widespread recognition and serious critical

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appraisal. Among the major writers associated with this period are Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes, Arna Bontemps, and Zora Neale Hurston. Hero/Heroine: The principal sympathetic character in a literary work. Heroes and heroines typically exhibit admirable traits: idealism, courage, and integrity, for example. Famous heroes and heroines of literature include Charles Dickens's Oliver Twist, Margaret Mitchell's Scarlett O'Hara, and the anonymous narrator in Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man. Hyperbole: Deliberate exaggeration used to achieve an effect. In William Shakespeare's Macbeth, Lady Macbeth hyperbolizes when she says, "All the perfumes of Arabia could not sweeten this little hand."

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Image: A concrete representation of an object or sensory experience. Typically, such a representation helps evoke the feelings associated with the object or experience itself. Images are either ' 'literal" or "figurative." Literal images are especially concrete and involve little or no extension of the obvious meaning of the words used to express them. Figurative images do not follow the literal meaning of the words exactly. Images in literature are usually visual, but the term ' 'image'' can also refer to the representation of any sensory experience. Imagery: The array of images in a literary work. Also used to convey the author's overall use of figurative language in a work. In medias res: A Latin term meaning ' 'in the middle of things." It refers to the technique of beginning a story at its midpoint and then using various flashback devices to reveal previous action. This technique originated in such epics as Virgil's Aeneid. Interior Monologue: A narrative technique in which characters' thoughts are revealed in a way that appears to be uncontrolled by the author. The interior monologue typically aims to reveal the inner self of a character. It portrays emotional experiences as they occur at both a conscious and unconscious level. One of the best-known interior monologues in English is the Molly Bloom section at the close of James Joyce's Ulysses. Katherine Anne Porter's "The Jilting of Granny Weatherall" is also told in the form of an interior monologue. Irony: In literary criticism, the effect of language in which the intended meaning is the opposite of what

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is stated. The title of Jonathan Swift's "A Modest Proposal" is ironic because what Swift proposes in this essay is cannibalism—hardly "modest."

J Jargon: Language that is used or understood only by a select group of people. Jargon may refer to terminology used in a certain profession, such as computer jargon, or it may refer to any nonsensical language that is not understood by most people. Anthony Burgess's A Clockwork Orange and James Thurber's "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty" both use jargon.

K Knickerbocker Group: An indistinct group of New York writers of the first half of the nineteenth century. Members of the group were linked only by location and a common theme: New York life. Two famous members of the Knickerbocker Group were Washington Irving and William Cullen Bryant. The group's name derives from Irving's Knickerbocker's History of New York.

L Literal Language: An author uses literal language when he or she writes without exaggerating or embellishing the subject matter and without any tools of figurative language. To say "He ran very quickly down the street'' is to use literal language, whereas to say ' 'He ran like a hare down the street'' would be using figurative language. Literature: Literature is broadly defined as any written or spoken material, but the term most often refers to creative works. Literature includes poetry, drama, fiction, and many kinds of nonfiction writing, as well as oral, dramatic, and broadcast compositions not necessarily preserved in a written format, such as films and television programs. Lost Generation: A term first used by Gertrude Stein to describe the post-World War I generation of American writers: men and women haunted by a sense of betrayal and emptiness brought about by the destructiveness of the war. The term is commonly applied to Hart Crane, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and others.

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Magic Realism: A form of literature that incorporates fantasy elements or supernatural occurrences into the narrative and accepts them as truth. Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Laura Esquivel are two writers known for their works of magic realism.

Narration: The telling of a series of events, real or invented. A narration may be either a simple narrative, in which the events are recounted chronologically, or a narrative with a plot, in which the account is given in a style reflecting the author's artistic concept of the story. Narration is sometimes used as a synonym for "storyline."

Metaphor: A figure of speech that expresses an idea through the image of another object. Metaphors suggest the essence of the first object by identifying it with certain qualities of the second object. An example is ' 'But soft, what light through yonder window breaks?/ It is the east, and Juliet is the sun" in William Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet. Here, Juliet, the first object, is identified with qualities of the second object, the sun. Minimalism: A literary style characterized by spare, simple prose with few elaborations. In minimalism, the main theme of the work is often never discussed directly. Amy Hempel and Ernest Hemingway are two writers known for their works of minimalism. Modernism: Modern literary practices. Also, the principles of a literary school that lasted from roughly the beginning of the twentieth century until the end of World War II. Modernism is defined by its rejection of the literary conventions of the nineteenth century and by its opposition to conventional morality, taste, traditions, and economic values. Many writers are associated with the concepts of modernism, including Albert Camus, D. H. Lawrence, Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, Eugene O'Neill, and James Joyce. Monologue: A composition, written or oral, by a single individual. More specifically, a speech given by a single individual in a drama or other public entertainment. It has no set length, although it is usually several or more lines long. ' 'I Stand Here Ironing'' by Tillie Olsen is an example of a story written in the form of a monologue. Mood: The prevailing emotions of a work or of the author in his or her creation of the work. The mood of a work is not always what might be expected based on its subject matter. Motif: A theme, character type, image, metaphor, or other verbal element that recurs throughout a single work of literature or occurs in a number of different works over a period of time. For example, the color white in Herman Melville's Moby Dick is a "specific" motif, while the trials of star-crossed lovers is a "conventional" motif from the literature of all periods.

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Narrative: A verse or prose accounting of an event or sequence of events, real or invented. The term is also used as an adjective in the sense "method of narration." For example, in literary criticism, the expression ' 'narrative technique'' usually refers to the way the author structures and presents his or her story. Different narrative forms include diaries, travelogues, novels, ballads, epics, short stories, and other fictional forms. Narrator: The teller of a story. The narrator may be the author or a character in the story through whom the author speaks. Huckleberry Finn is the narrator of Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Novella: An Italian term meaning "story." This term has been especially used to describe fourteenth-century Italian tales, but it also refers to modern short novels. Modern novellas include Leo Tolstoy's The Death of Ivan Ilych, Fyodor Dostoyevsky's Notes from the Underground, and Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness.

o Oedipus Complex: A son's romantic obsession with his mother. The phrase is derived from the story of the ancient Theban hero Oedipus, who unknowingly killed his father and married his mother, and was popularized by Sigmund Freud's theory of psychoanalysis. Literary occurrences of the Oedipus complex include Sophocles' Oedipus Rex and D. H. Lawrence's "The Rocking-Horse Winner." Onomatopoeia: The use of words whose sounds express or suggest their meaning. In its simplest sense, onomatopoeia may be represented by words that mimic the sounds they denote such as ' 'hiss'' or "meow." At a more subtle level, the pattern and rhythm of sounds and rhymes of a line or poem may be onomatopoeic. Oral Tradition: A process by which songs, ballads, folklore, and other material are transmitted by word of mouth. The tradition of oral transmission predates the written record systems of literate society.

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Oral transmission preserves material sometimes over generations, although often with variations. Memory plays a large part in the recitation and preservation of orally transmitted material. Native American myths and legends, and African folktales told by plantation slaves are examples of orally transmitted literature.

p Parable: A story intended to teach a moral lesson or answer an ethical question. Examples of parables are the stories told by Jesus Christ in the New Testament, notably "The Prodigal Son," but parables also are used in Sufism, rabbinic literature, Hasidism, and Zen Buddhism. Isaac Bashevis Singer's story "Gimpel the Fool" exhibits characteristics of a parable. Paradox: A statement that appears illogical or contradictory at first, but may actually point to an underlying truth. A literary example of a paradox is George Orwell's statement "All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others" in Animal Farm. Parody: In literature, this term refers to an imitation of a serious literary work or the signature style of a particular author in a ridiculous manner. A typical parody adopts the style of the original and applies it to an inappropriate subject for humorous effect. Parody is a form of satire and could be considered the literary equivalent of a caricature or cartoon. Henry Fielding's Shamela is a parody of Samuel Richardson's Pamela. Persona: A Latin term meaning "mask." Personae are the characters in a fictional work of literature. The persona generally functions as a mask through which the author tells a story in a voice other than his or her own. A persona is usually either a character in a story who acts as a narrator or an "implied author," a voice created by the author to act as the narrator for himself or herself. The persona in Charlotte Perkins Oilman's story "The Yellow Wallpaper" is the unnamed young mother experiencing a mental breakdown. Personification: A figure of speech that gives human qualities to abstract ideas, animals, and inanimate objects. To say that' 'the sun is smiling'' is to personify the sun. Plot: The pattern of events in a narrative or drama. In its simplest sense, the plot guides the author in

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composing the work and helps the reader follow the work. Typically, plots exhibit causality and unity and have a beginning, a middle, and an end. Sometimes, however, a plot may consist of a series of disconnected events, in which case it is known as an "episodic plot." Poetic Justice: An outcome in a literary work, not necessarily a poem, in which the good are rewarded and the evil are punished, especially in ways that particularly fit their virtues or crimes. For example, a murderer may himself be murdered, or a thief will find himself penniless. Poetic License: Distortions of fact and literary convention made by a writer—not always a poet— for the sake of the effect gained. Poetic license is closely related to the concept of' 'artistic freedom." An author exercises poetic license by saying that a pile of money "reaches as high as a mountain" when the pile is actually only a foot or two high. Point of View: The narrative perspective from which a literary work is presented to the reader. There are four traditional points of view. The ' 'third person omniscient'' gives the reader a ' 'godlike'' perspective, unrestricted by time or place, from which to see actions and look into the minds of characters. This allows the author to comment openly on characters and events in the work. The "third person" point of view presents the events of the story from outside of any single character's perception, much like the omniscient point of view, but the reader must understand the action as it takes place and without any special insight into characters' minds or motivations. The "first person" or "personal" point of view relates events as they are perceived by a single character. The main character "tells" the story and may offer opinions about the action and characters which differ from those of the author. Much less common than omniscient, third person, and first person is the "second person" point of view, wherein the author tells the story as if it is happening to the reader. James Thurber employs the omniscient point of view in his short story ' The Secret Life of Walter Mitty.'' Ernest Hemingway's "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place" is a short story told from the third person point of view. Mark Twain's novel Huckleberry Finn is presented from the first person viewpoint. Jay Mclnerney's Bright Lights, Big City is an example of a novel which uses the second person point of view. Pornography: Writing intended to provoke feelings of lust in the reader. Such works are often condemned by critics and teachers, but those which

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can be shown to have literary value are viewed less harshly. Literary works that have been described as pornographic include D. H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover and James Joyce's Ulysses. Post-Aesthetic Movement: An artistic response made by African Americans to the black aesthetic movement of the 1960s and early 1970s. Writers since that time have adopted a somewhat different tone in their work, with less emphasis placed on the disparity between black and white in the United States. In the words of post-aesthetic authors such as Toni Morrison, John Edgar Wideman, and Kristin Hunter, African Americans are portrayed as looking inward for answers to their own questions, rather than always looking to the outside world. Two wellknown examples of works produced as part of the post-aesthetic movement are the Pulitzer Prizewinning novels The Color Purple by Alice Walker and Beloved by Toni Morrison. Postmodernism: Writing from the 1960s onward characterized by experimentation and application of modernist elements, which include existentialism and alienation. Postmodernists have gone a step further in the rejection of tradition begun with the modernists by also rejecting traditional forms, preferring the anti-novel over the novel and the antihero over the hero. Postmodern writers include Thomas Pynchon, Margaret Drabble, and Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Prologue: An introductory section of a literary work. It often contains information establishing the situation of the characters or presents information about the setting, time period, or action. In drama, the prologue is spoken by a chorus or by one of the principal characters. Prose: A literary medium that attempts to mirror the language of everyday speech. It is distinguished from poetry by its use of unmetered, unrhymed language consisting of logically related sentences. Prose is usually grouped into paragraphs that form a cohesive whole such as an essay or a novel. The term is sometimes used to mean an author's general writing. Protagonist: The central character of a story who serves as a focus for its themes and incidents and as the principal rationale for its development. The protagonist is sometimes referred to in discussions of modern literature as the hero or anti-hero. Wellknown protagonists are Hamlet in William Shakespeare's Hamlet and Jay Gatsby in F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby.

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R Realism: A nineteenth-century European literary movement that sought to portray familiar characters, situations, and settings in a realistic manner. This was done primarily by using an objective narrative point of view and through the buildup of accurate detail. The standard for success of any realistic work depends on how faithfully it transfers common experience into fictional forms. The realistic method may be altered or extended, as in stream of consciousness writing, to record highly subjective experience. Contemporary authors who often write in a realistic way include Nadine Gordimer and Grace Paley. Resolution: The portion of a story following the climax, in which the conflict is resolved. The resolution of Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey is neatly summed up in the following sentence: "Henry and Catherine were married, the bells rang and every body smiled." Rising Action: The part of a drama where the plot becomes increasingly complicated. Rising action leads up to the climax, or turning point, of a drama. The final' 'chase scene'' of an action film is generally the rising action which culminates in the film's climax. Roman a clef: A French phrase meaning "novel with a key." It refers to a narrative in which real persons are portrayed under fictitious names. Jack Kerouac, for example, portrayed various his friends under fictitious names in the novel On the Road. D. H. Lawrence based "The Rocking-Horse Winner" on a family he knew. Romanticism: This term has two widely accepted meanings. In historical criticism, it refers to a European intellectual and artistic movement of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries that sought greater freedom of personal expression than that allowed by the strict rules of literary form and logic of the eighteenth-century neoclassicists. The Romantics preferred emotional and imaginative expression to rational analysis. They considered the individual to be at the center of all experience and so placed him or her at the center of their art. The Romantics believed that the creative imagination reveals nobler truths—unique feelings and attitudes—than those that could be discovered by logic or by scientific examination. "Romanticism" is also used as a general term to refer to a type of sensibility found in all periods of literary history and usually considered to be in opposition to the

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principles of classicism. In this sense, Romanticism signifies any work or philosophy in which the exotic or dreamlike figure strongly, or that is devoted to individualistic expression, self-analysis, or a pursuit of a higher realm of knowledge than can be discovered by human reason. Prominent Romantics include Jean-Jacques Rousseau, William Wordsworth, John Keats, Lord Byron, and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.

5 Satire: A work that uses ridicule, humor, and wit to criticize and provoke change in human nature and institutions. Voltaire's novella Candide and Jonathan Swift's essay "A Modest Proposal" are both satires. Flannery O'Connor's portrayal of the family in ' 'A Good Man Is Hard to Find'' is a satire of a modern, Southern, American family. Science Fiction: A type of narrative based upon real or imagined scientific theories and technology. Science fiction is often peopled with alien creatures and set on other planets or in different dimensions. Popular writers of science fiction are Isaac Asimov, Karel Capek, Ray Bradbury, and Ursula K. Le Guin.

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Socialist Realism: The Socialist Realism school of literary theory was proposed by Maxim Gorky and established as a dogma by the first Soviet Congress of Writers. It demanded adherence to a communist worldview in works of literature. Its doctrines required an objective viewpoint comprehensible to the working classes and themes of social struggle featuring strong proletarian heroes. Gabriel Garcia Marquez's stories exhibit some characteristics of Socialist Realism. Stereotype: A stereotype was originally the name for a duplication made during the printing process; this led to its modern definition as a person or thing that is (or is assumed to be) the same as all others of its type. Common stereotypical characters include the absent-minded professor, the nagging wife, the troublemaking teenager, and the kindhearted grandmother. Stream of Consciousness: A narrative technique for rendering the inward experience of a character. This technique is designed to give the impression of an ever-changing series of thoughts, emotions, images, and memories in the spontaneous and seemingly illogical order that they occur in life. The textbook example of stream of consciousness is the last section of James Joyce's Ulysses.

Setting: The time, place, and culture in which the action of a narrative takes place. The elements of setting may include geographic location, characters' physical and mental environments, prevailing cultural attitudes, or the historical time in which the action takes place.

Structure: The form taken by a piece of literature. The structure may be made obvious for ease of understanding, as in nonfiction works, or may obscured for artistic purposes, as in some poetry or seemingly ' 'unstructured'' prose.

Short Story: A fictional prose narrative shorter and more focused than a novella. The short story usually deals with a single episode and often a single character. The "tone," the author's attitude toward his or her subject and audience, is uniform throughout. The short story frequently also lacks denouement, ending instead at its climax.

Style: A writer's distinctive manner of arranging words to suit his or her ideas and purpose in writing. The unique imprint of the author's personality upon his or her writing, style is the product of an author's way of arranging ideas and his or her use of diction, different sentence structures, rhythm, figures of speech, rhetorical principles, and other elements of composition.

Signifying Monkey: A popular trickster figure in black folklore, with hundreds of tales about this character documented since the 19th century. Henry Louis Gates Jr. examines the history of the signifying monkey in The Signifying Monkey: Towards a Theory of Afro-American Literary Criticism, published in 1988.

Suspense: A literary device in which the author maintains the audience's attention through the buildup of events, the outcome of which will soon be revealed. Suspense in William Shakespeare's Hamlet is sustained throughout by the question of whether or not the Prince will achieve what he has been instructed to do and of what he intends to do.

Simile: A comparison, usually using "like" or "as", of two essentially dissimilar things, as in "coffee as cold as ice" or "He sounded like a broken record." The title of Ernest Hemingway's "Hills Like White Elephants" contains a simile.

Symbol: Something that suggests or stands for something else without losing its original identity. In literature, symbols combine their literal meaning with the suggestion of an abstract concept. Literary symbols are of two types: those that carry complex

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associations of meaning no matter what their contexts, and those that derive their suggestive meaning from their functions in specific literary works. Examples of symbols are sunshine suggesting happiness, rain suggesting sorrow, and storm clouds suggesting despair.

T Tale: A story told by a narrator with a simple plot and little character development. Tales are usually relatively short and often carry a simple message. Examples of tales can be found in the works of Saki, Anton Chekhov, Guy de Maupassant, and O. Henry. Tall Tale: A humorous tale told in a straightforward, credible tone but relating absolutely impossible events or feats of the characters. Such tales were commonly told of frontier adventures during the settlement of the West in the United States. Literary use of tall tales can be found in Washington Irving's History of New York, Mark Twain's Life on the Mississippi, and in R. F. Raspe's Baron Munchausen's Narratives of His Marvellous Travels and Campaigns in Russia. Theme: The main point of a work of literature. The term is used interchangeably with thesis. Many works have multiple themes. One of the themes of Nathaniel Hawthorne's "Young Goodman Brown" is loss of faith. Tone: The author's attitude toward his or her audience may be deduced from the tone of the work. A formal tone may create distance or convey politeness, while an informal tone may encourage a friendly, intimate, or intrusive feeling in the reader. The author's attitude toward his or her subject matter may also be deduced from the tone of the words he or she uses in discussing it. The tone of John F. Kennedy's speech which included the appeal to ' 'ask not what your country can do for you" was intended to instill feelings of camaraderie and national pride in listeners. Tragedy: A drama in prose or poetry about a noble, courageous hero of excellent character who, be-

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cause of some tragic character flaw, brings ruin upon him- or herself. Tragedy treats its subjects in a dignified and serious manner, using poetic language to help evoke pity and fear and bring about catharsis, a purging of these emotions. The tragic form was practiced extensively by the ancient Greeks. The classical form of tragedy was revived in the sixteenth century; it flourished especially on the Elizabethan stage. In modern times, dramatists have attempted to adapt the form to the needs of modern society by drawing their heroes from the ranks of ordinary men and women and defining the nobility of these heroes in terms of spirit rather than exalted social standing. Some contemporary works that are thought of as tragedies include The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, and The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner. Tragic Flaw: In a tragedy, the quality within the hero or heroine which leads to his or her downfall. Examples of the tragic flaw include Othello's jealousy and Hamlet's indecisiveness, although most great tragedies defy such simple interpretation.

u Utopia: A fictional perfect place, such as ' 'paradise" or "heaven." An early literary Utopia was described in Plato's Republic, and in modern literature, Ursula K. Le Guin depicts a Utopia in ' 'The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas."

v Victorian: Refers broadly to the reign of Queen Victoria of England (1837-1901) and to anything with qualities typical of that era. For example, the qualities of smug narrow-mindedness, bourgeois materialism, faith in social progress, and priggish morality are often considered Victorian. In literature, the Victorian Period was the great age of the English novel, and the latter part of the era saw the rise of movements such as decadence and symbolism.

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SubjectITheme Index *Boldface terms appear as subheads in Themes section.

a Abandonment I Stand Here Ironing: 95, 98, 101 Adulthood Through the Tunnel: 242, 245, 248, 251-252 Adventure and Exploration The Most Dangerous Game: 155, 158-159,164-165 There Will Come Soft Rains: 240 Africa The Most Dangerous Game: 166-167 The Short, Happy Life of Francis Macomber: 214, 217, 219, 227 Alienation King of the Bingo Game: 122, 125, 128, 130, 132 Alienation and Loneliness Araby: 4 Through the Tunnel: 246 Alienation vs. Community Young Goodman Brown: 298 Allegory The Devil and Tom Walker: 55 The Lottery: 139,144,146 The Most Dangerous Game: 164-166

The Yellow Wallpaper: 288-289 Young Goodman Brown: 301304,310-311 American Northeast The Devil and Tom Walker: 4749, 53, 58-60 King of the Bingo Game: 128 The Lottery: 146, 148 Young Goodman Brown: 294296, 301-302 American Society The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County: 21 American South The Eatonville Anthology: 61-62, 68-70, 74 King of the Bingo Game: 125127, 130-131 American Southwest The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County: 16, 21-24 Anger Araby: 3-6 The Yellow Wallpaper: 292 Anthropomorphism The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County: 22 There Will Come Soft Rains: 232 Apathy / Stand Here Ironing: 98 Appearances and Reality The Open Window: 173 Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?: 261 Art of Storytelling The Eatonville Anthology: 66

B Beauty There Will Come Soft Rains: 236 Beauty and Aesthetics The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World: 82 Betrayal The Jilting of Granny Weatherall: 110-111 Black Arts Movement The Eatonville Anthology: 70, 72-73

c Change and Transformation Araby: 5 Communism Children of the Sea: 38-39 There Will Come Soft Rains: 233 Community The Eatonville Anthology: 66 Conflict The Short, Happy Life of Francis Macomber: 215 Courage The Secret Life of Walter Mitty: 184-187 The Short, Happy Life of Francis Macomber: 214-216, 219220, 225 Courage and Cowardice The Short, Happy Life of Francis Macomber: 214

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Crime and Criminals The Secret Sharer: 199-200 Cruelty Children of the Sea: 32, 34-38,42 The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World: 84-86 King of the Bingo Game: 126-129 The Lottery: 142-144 The Most Dangerous Game: 158-159 Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?: 262-269 Culture Clash The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County: 20 Custom and Tradition The Lottery: 142 Cynicism Araby: 1,5,7

D Death Children of the Sea: 34, 36-39 The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World: &\-&4, 8789, 92-93 The Jilting of Granny Weatherall: 109-119 The Lottery: 139-140, 144, 146 The Most Dangerous Game: 155156, 159, 162,164 The Short, Happy Life of Francis Macomber: 212-218, 225 There Will Come Soft Rains: 228231,240 Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?: 263 Death and Fear There Will Come Soft Rains: 231 Death and the Cycle of Life The Jilting of Granny Weatherall: 111 Deceit The Devil and Tom Walker: 51-53 Deception The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County: 20 The Open Window: 173 Depression and Melancholy The Yellow Wallpaper: 277-278, 281-284,288-290 Young Goodman Brown: 308 Devil The Devil and Tom Walker: 47, 49-53, 57-60 Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?: 215-216

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Young Goodman Brown: 295296, 299, 302, 304-306, 309-310 Dictatorship Children of the Sea: 3233, 37-38 Dreams and Visions Araby: 13-15 The Secret Life of Walter Mitty: 186-188, 191-198 Through the Tunnel: 256 Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?: 272-273 Young Goodman Brown: 303, 305-306 Duty and Responsibility / Stand Here Ironing: 106-107

E Europe Araby: 1-3,7,9,12-15 The Devil and Tom Walker: 56-57 The Open Window: 171 Through the Tunnel: 248 Evil The Devil and Tom Walker: 49, 52-53 There Will Come Soft Rains: 236-237 Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?: 270-271, 275-276 Young Goodman Brown: 296299,304-310 Exile Children of the Sea: 32-33, 37,41-42

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f Family Life / Stand Here Ironing: 103, 105-107 Farm and Rural Life The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County: 28-29 Fate and Chance The Short, Happy Life of Francis Macomber: 214 Fate and Chance King of the Bingo Game: 122, 124-126, 129-136 The Short, Happy Life of Francis Macomber: 215 Fate and Determinism King of the Bingo Game: 124 Fear and terror Children of the Sea: 34, 36, 38 The Most Dangerous Game: 156-159

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There Will Come Soft Rains: 233 Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?: 259, 262263, 268-269, 273-275 The Yellow Wallpaper: 279, 282, 284 Young Goodman Brown: 305, 307-308 Feminism / Stand Here Ironing: 99-100 The Yellow Wallpaper: 277, 283-285 Film King of the Bingo Game: 130-131 Folklore The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County: 16, 20-23 The Devil and Tom Walker: 55-58 The Eatonville Anthology: 63, 66, 68-70 The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World: 84, 87, 89-90 Forgiveness There Will Come Soft Rains: 240 Free Will vs. Determinism Young Goodman Brown: 306-311

Gender Roles The Short, Happy Life of Francis Macomber: 215-216 Gender Roles The Secret Life of Walter Mitty: 186 Ghost The Open Window: 111 God The Eatonville Anthology: 74 The Jilting of Granny Weatherall: 117-119 King of the Bingo Game: 125-126 There Will Come Soft Rains: 237-238 God and Religion Araby: 5 The Jilting of Granny Weatherall: 111 Good vs. Evil Young Goodman Brown: 298 Gothicism The Most Dangerous Game: 156, 158 The Yellow Wallpaper: 211, 282, 284, 287-289 Great Depression I Stand Here Ironing: 99, 101

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Subjecti Theme Index Greed The Devil and Tom Walker: 5152, 57-58 Grief and Sorrow The Jilting of Granny Weatherall: 119-121 Young Goodman Brown: 307-308 Grotesque Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?: 273-276 Guilt The Jilting of Granny Weatherall: 119,121 The Short, Happy Life of Francis Macomber: 224-226 Guilt and Innocence The Short, Happy Life of Francis Macomber: 215 Guilt vs. Innocence Young Goodman Brown: 298

H Happiness and Gaiety Araby: 1,5-7,13-15 Harlem Renaissance The Eatonville Anthology: 68, 70, 73 Hatred The Most Dangerous Game: 158, 161 Heaven Children of the Sea: 34, 37 Young Goodman Brown: 296, 298-299,310 Heroism Araby: 8, 11 The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County: 27-28 King of the Bingo Game: 132-135 The Secret Life of Walter Mitty: 189, 193-195 History Children of the Sea: 46 The Eatonville Anthology: 67-68 The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World: 85-86 Hope I Stand Here Ironing: 96, 98-100 Human Rights Children of the Sea: 36 Humor The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County: 16, 2021,24-31 The Devil and Tom Walker: 59 The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World: 86 The Open Window: 170, 173, 175-178, 181-184

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The Secret Life of Walter Mitty: 188-190, 193-194 Hypocrisy The Devil and Tom Walker: 51

i Identity and the Search for Self Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?: 261 Imagery and Symbolism Children of the Sea: 37 The Devil and Tom Walker: 52 The Jilting of Granny Weatherall: 113-115 King of the Bingo Game: 126, 129, 132-136 The Secret Sharer: 205-206, 209-211 The Short, Happy Life of Francis Macomber: 217 There Will Come Soft Rains: 234-235 Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?: 271 The Yellow Wallpaper: 280-282 Young Goodman Brown: 299, 3io Imagination The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World: 81-83 The Open Window: 177-178 Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?: 271 Immigrants and Immigration King of the Bingo Game: 127-128 Individual vs. Machine There Will Come Soft Rains: 230 Individualism Through the Tunnel: 245 Initiation and Self-Definition The Secret Sharer: 201 Insanity The Yellow Wallpaper: 291-292 Irony King of the Bingo Game: 126 The Lottery: 144 The Open Window: 178-179 There Will Come Soft Rains: 228, 230-232 Through the Tunnel: 254, 256

j Justice and Injustice Children of the Sea: 35

K Killers and Killing Children of the Sea: 33, 35-36

The Most Dangerous Game: 157158, 161 The Short, Happy Life of Francis Macomber: 212-213, 216218,225 Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?: 257, 259, 263-264 Knowledge Araby: 12 There Will Come Soft Rains: 235-236

l Landscape Children of the Sea: 34, 3637,43-45 The Devil and Tom Walker: 52, 54-55 The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World: 80-85, 8889, 92-93 The Most Dangerous Game: 157-160 The Secret Sharer: 209-210 Through the Tunnel: 244-250 Law and Order Children of the Sea: 33-39 King of the Bingo Game: 125-129 Limitations and Opportunities / Stand Here Ironing: 98 Loneliness Children of the Sea: 33 Through the Tunnel: 245-246 Love and Passion Araby: 12-15 Children of the Sea: 34, 3637,42-45 There Will Come Soft Rains: 239-240 Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?: 261-264, 274-276 Loyalty Araby: 8-9

M Magic Araby: 14-15 Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?: 27'1 Marriage The Short, Happy Life of Francis Macomber: 212, 215 Masculinity The Secret Life of Walter Mitty: 185-186, 189 The Short, Happy Life of Francis Macomber: 211,215-217

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Memory The Jilting of Granny Weatherall: 112 Memory and Reminiscence The Jilting of Granny Weatherall: 108-113 Mental Illness The Yellow Wallpaper: 280 Mental Instability The Yellow Wallpaper: 278, 280-281 Mirror Image The Secret Sharer: 201 Modernism The Jilting of Granny Weatherall: 112,114 The Secret Life of Walter Mitty: 188, 190 Through the Tunnel: 252-253 Money and Economics Children of the Sea: 34, 38 The Devil and Tom Walker: 47,49-52 The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World: 85, 93-94 I Stand Here Ironing: 100 King of the Bingo Game: 123, 126-127 Monologue / Stand Here Ironing: 94-96 Morals and Morality The Devil and Tom Walker: 48,51-52 There Will Come Soft Rains: 237-238 Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?: 268-269 Young Goodman Brown: 296, 299-300, 304-305, 309 Motherhood I Stand Here Ironing: 101-103, 106-107 The Yellow Wallpaper: 288-290 Murder The Most Dangerous Game: 158 The Secret Sharer: 199, 202 The Short, Happy Life of Francis Macomber: 224-225 There Will Come Soft Rains: 240 Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?: 262-263, 266, 276 Music Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?: 258, 261266, 271-276 Mystery and Intrigue The Secret Sharer: 199-200, 207-208 Myth and the Human Condition The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World: 82

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Myths and Legends The Devil and Tom Walker: 56-59 The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World: 80, 82-84, 87, 89, 91-93

N Nature The Devil and Tom Walker: 52 The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World: 79, 86, 88, 91-92 The Most Dangerous Game: 158, 163 The Short, Happy Life of Francis Macomber: 214-216 There Will Come Soft Rains: 228229, 232, 236-238 Through the Tunnel: 250 Nature vs. Science There Will Come Soft Rains: 231 1980s Children of the Sea: 32, 37-39 1950s There Will Come Soft Rains: 231-234 1970s Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?: 264-265 1960s Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?: 257-258, 263-264 1930s The Short, Happy Life of Francis Macomber: 216-217 1920s The Eatonville Anthology: 66-69

Philosophical Ideas King of the Bingo Game: 130-131 Poetry Araby: 12-13 There Will Come Soft Rains: 229-230 Politicians Children of the Sea: 35-36 Politics Children of the Sea: 3233, 37-39 Politics The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World: 80, 84-86 I Stand Here Ironing: 94, 99-100 King of the Bingo Game: 126, 128-129 There Will Come Soft Rains: 231,233 Preservation of Culture The Eatonville Anthology: 66 Pride The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County: 18, 20-22 Psychology and the Human Mind The Jilting of Granny Weatherall: 115 King of the Bingo Game: 136 The Secret Life of Walter Mitty: 193-195 The Secret Sharer: 200, 203-210 Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?: 258, 261262, 266, 268, 273, 276 The Yellow Wallpaper: 280282, 293

R

o Occultism The Lottery: 146, 149-150 Young Goodman Brown: 306, 308

P Permanence The Eatonville Anthology: 77-78 Personal Identity The Secret Sharer: 199, 202, 205, 207-208 Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?: 261-262, 266, 275-276 Personification Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?: 270-271

S h o r t

Race King of the Bingo Game: 125129, 132, 134-136 Race The Eatonville Anthology: 61, 63, 66-75 Through the Tunnel: 248 Racism and Prejudice Through the Tunnel: 246-247 Realism The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World: 87 King of the Bingo Game: 122, 126, 129 The Yellow Wallpaper: 282, 284, 293 Recreation The Most Dangerous Game: 162, 167 The Short, Happy Life of Francis Macomber: 217

S t o r i e

f o r

S t u d e n t s

S u b j e c t / T h e m e

Religion and Religious Thought Araby: 1-6,9,11 The Devil and Tom Walker: 48, 50-53, 59 The Jilting of Granny Weatherall: 111, 115, 118 Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?: 270, 273-275 Young Goodman Brown: 296, 299-300, 303-304, 310 Remorse and Regret King of the Bingo Game: 124-126 Revenge The Most Dangerous Game: 158 Revenge Children of the Sea: 35-36 Rites of Passage Through the Tunnel: 245 Role of Women The Yellow Wallpaper: 280 Roman Catholicism Araby: 5-6, 9 Romanticism Young Goodman Brown: 299

s Salvation King of the Bingo Game: 132-133 Sanity and Insanity The Open Window: 173 Satire The Celebrated Jumping Frog ofCalaveras County: 16, 21,23-31 The Open Window: 175-177 Science and Technology The Secret Life of Walter Mitty: 185-188 There Will Come Soft Rains: 228, 230-238 Sea and Sea Adventures Children of the Sea: 33-34, 37,39,42 The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World: 80-84 The Secret Sharer: 200, 202, 204 Search for Identity / Stand Here Ironing: 97 Search for Knowledge Araby: 11-12 Self-realization The Secret Sharer: 203, 205-206, 209-210

V o l u m e

1

Sex and Sexuality Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?: 259, 262264, 272-273 Sex Roles The Lottery: 143 The Secret Life of Walter Mitty: 186 Sin Children of the Sea: 35-36 The Devil and Tom Walker: 48,51-53 The Jilting of Granny Weatherall: 120-121 The Lottery: 147-148 Young Goodman Brown: 298299, 305-309 Slavery Children of the Sea: 34, 36-37 Soul The Devil and Tom Walker: 47,49,51 The Jilting of Granny Weatherall: 119-120 South America The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World: 79, 84-86 The Most Dangerous Game: 161 Space Exploration and Study There Will Come Soft Rains: 228, 232-234, 240-241 Spirituality The Devil and Tom Walker: 4849, 52-53 Young Goodman Brown: 296299,303-311 Sports and the Sporting Life The Most Dangerous Game: 155158, 161-168 The Open Window: 175 The Short, Happy Life of Francis Macomber: 212-223, 227 Stream of Consciousness Araby: 6 / Stand Here Ironing: 94, 98 The Jilting of Granny Weatherall: 108-109, 114 Suburban Life Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?: 258 Success and Failure The Secret Life of Walter Mitty: 185 Supernatural, Mystical, and Magical The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World: 83, 86-87

I n d e x

Survival in the Wilderness The Short, Happy Life of Francis Macomber: 215 Symbiotic Relationship The Secret Sharer: 202

u Uncertainty The Secret Sharer: 206-208 Young Goodman Brown: 303-305 Understanding Araby: 5 Young Goodman Brown: 306

v Victim and Victimization The Lottery: 143 Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?: 262 Violence and Cruelty Children of the Sea: 36 The Lottery: 142 The Most Dangerous Game: 158

w War, the Military, and Soldier Life Children of the Sea: 34-37 The Open Window: 170-171 The Secret Life of Walter Mitty: 186-188 There Will Come Soft Rains: 228229, 232-236 Wealth The Devil and Tom Walker: 47, 49,51-52 Western Hemisphere Children of the Sea: 33, 39 Wildlife The Most Dangerous Game: 156, 158-161, 166 The Short, Happy Life of Francis Macomber: 212-226 Witch The Lottery: 146, 148, 150 Young Goodman Brown: 294, 296,300-301,304-308 World War II The Secret Life of Walter Mitty: 187-188

333

Cumulative Author/Title Index A

G

Araby (Joyce): VI

Oilman, Charlotte Perkins The Yellow Wallpaper: VI

The Jilting of Granny Weatherall (Porter): VI Joyce, James Araby: VI

B Bradbury, Ray There Will Come Soft Rains: VI

C The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County (Twain): VI Children of the Sea (Danticat): VI Connell, Richard The Most Dangerous Game: VI Conrad, Joseph The Secret Sharer: VI

D Danticat, Edwidge Children of the Sea: VI The Devil and Tom Walker (Irving): VI

H The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World (Marquez): VI Hawthorne, Nathaniel Young Goodman Brown: VI Hemingway, Ernest The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber: VI Hurston, Zora Neale The Eatonville Anthology: VI

King of the Bingo Game (Ellison): VI

L Lessing, Doris Through the Tunnel: VI The Lottery (Jackson): VI

M / Irving, Washington The Devil and Tom Walker: VI / Stand Here Ironing (Olsen): VI

E The Eatonville Anthology (Hurston): VI Ellison, Ralph King of the Bingo Game: VI

K

/ Jackson, Shirley The Lottery: VI

Marquez, Gabriel Garcia The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World: VI The Most Dangerous Game (Connell): VI

O Gates, Joyce Carol Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?V VI

525

C u m u l a t i v e

A u t h o r / T i t l e

Olsen, Tillie / Stand Here Ironing: VI The Open Window (Saki): VI

P Porter, Katherine Anne The Jilting of Granny Weatherall: VI

S Saki The Open Window: VI

526

I n d e x

The Secret Life of Walter Mitty (Thurber): VI The Secret Sharer (Conrad): VI The Short, Happy Life of Francis Macomber (Hemingway): VI

Twain, Mark The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County: VI

W Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been? (Gates): VI

T There Will Come Soft Rains (Bradbury): VI Through the Tunnel (Lessing): VI Thurber, James The Secret Life of Walter Mitty: VI

Short

Y The Yellow Wallpaper (Oilman): VI Young Goodman Brown (Hawthorne): VI

S t o r i e s

for

Students

Nationality/Ethnicity Index African American Ellison, Ralph King of the Bingo Game: VI Hurston, Zora Neale The Eatonville Anthology: VI

American Bradbury, Ray There Will Come Soft Rains: VI Connell, Richard The Most Dangerous Game: VI Ellison, Ralph King of the Bingo Game: VI Oilman, Charlotte Perkins The Yellow Wallpaper: VI Hawthorne, Nathaniel Young Goodman Brown: VI Hemingway, Ernest The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber: VI Hurston, Zora Neale The Eatonville Anthology: VI

Irving, Washington The Devil and Tom Walker: VI Jackson, Shirley The Lottery: VI Gates, Joyce Carol Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?': VI Olsen, Tillie / Stand Here Ironing: VI Porter, Katherine Anne The Jilting of Granny Weatherall: VI Thurber, James The Secret Life of Walter Mitty: VI Twain, Mark The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County: VI

Lessing, Doris Through the Tunnel: VI Saki The Open Window: VI

Colombian Marquez, Gabriel Garcia The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World: VI

Haitian Danticat, Edwidge Children of the Sea: VI

Irish Joyce, James Araby:Vl

British

Polish

Conrad, Joseph The Secret Sharer: VI

Conrad, Joseph The Secret Sharer: VI

327