Encyclopedia of Themes in Literature

Encyclopedia of Themes in Literature

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AUTHOR NAME HERE

Encyclopedia of Themes in Literature

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Jennifer McClinton-Temple Editor

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Encyclopedia of Themes in Literature Copyright © 2011 by Jennifer McClinton-Temple All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage or retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher. For information contact: Facts On File, Inc. An imprint of Infobase Publishing 132 West 31st Street New York NY 10001 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data McClinton-Temple, Jennifer. Encyclopedia of themes in literature / Jennifer McClinton-Temple. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8160-7161-6 (hc : alk. paper) ISBN 978-1-4381-3268-6 (e-book) 1. English literature—Themes, motives—Encyclopedias. 2. American literature—Themes, motives—Encyclopedias. I. Title. PR19.M35 2010 820.9’303—dc22 2009047605 Facts On File books are available at special discounts when purchased in bulk quantities for businesses, associations, institutions, or sales promotions. Please call our Special Sales Department in New York at (212) 967-8800 or (800) 322-8755. You can find Facts On File on the World Wide Web at http://www.factsonfile.com Text design by Kerry Casey Composition by Hermitage Publishing Services Cover printed by Sheridan Books, Ann Arbor, Mich. Book printed and bound by Sheridan Books, Ann Arbor, Mich. Date printed: December 2010 Printed in the United States of America 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 This book is printed on acid-free paper.

CONTENTS ` List of Themes Included in This Book List of Authors and Works Included in This Book List of Works Included in This Book Introduction Part I: Themes A–Z Part II: Authors and Works A–E Part II: Authors and Works F–M Part II: Authors and Works N–Z Index

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LIST OF THEMES INCLUDED IN THIS BOOK ` abandonment alienation ambition American dream, the childhood coming of age commodification/commercialization community cruelty death education ethics family fate freedom futility gender

grief guilt heroism hope identity illness individual and society innocence and experience isolation justice love memory nationalism nature oppression parenthood pride

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race regret rejection religion responsibility science and technology sex and sexuality social class spirituality stages of life success suffering survival tradition violence work

LIST OF AUTHORS AND WORKS INCLUDED IN THIS BOOK ` Achebe, Chinua Adams, Henry Albee, Edward Alcott, Louisa May Alexie, Sherman Allende, Isabel Alvarez, Julia Amis, Kingsley Anaya, Rudolfo Anderson, Sherwood Angelou, Maya Anonymous Aristophanes Atwood, Margaret Augustine, Saint Austen, Jane Baldwin, James Bambara, Toni Cade Behn, Aphra Bellow, Saul Bierce, Ambrose Black Elk Blake, William Bradbury, Ray Bradford, William

Anthills of the Savannah Things Fall Apart Education of Henry Adams, The Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf ? Little Women Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven, The House of the Spirits, The How the García Girls Lost Their Accents Lucky Jim Bless Me, Ultima Winesburg, Ohio I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings Beowulf Frogs, The Lysistrata Handmaid’s Tale, The Surfacing Confessions of St. Augustine, The Emma Pride and Prejudice Sense and Sensibility Go Tell It on the Mountain Salt Eaters, The Oroonoko; or, The Royal Slave Adventures of Augie March, The “Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge, An” Black Elk Speaks Songs of Innocence and of Experience Fahrenheit 451 Martian Chronicles, The Of Plymouth Plantation

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Brontë, Charlotte Jane Eyre Brontë, Emily Wuthering Heights Browning, Robert “My Last Duchess” Bunyan, John Pilgrim’s Progress, The Byron, George Gordon Byron, Don Juan Lord Camus, Albert Stranger, The Cao Xueqin Dream of the Red Chamber Capote, Truman In Cold Blood: A True Account of a Multiple Murder and Its Consequences Carroll, Lewis Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland Carver, Raymond “Cathedral” Cather, Willa My Ántonia O Pioneers! Chaucer, Geoffrey Canterbury Tales, The Chekhov, Anton Seagull, The Chesnutt, Charles W. “Goophered Grapevine, The” Chopin, Kate Awakening, The Cisneros, Sandra House on Mango Street, The Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories Coetzee, J. M. Waiting for the Barbarians Coleridge, Samuel Taylor “Rime of the Ancient Mariner, The” Conrad, Joseph Heart of Darkness Lord Jim Crane, Stephen Open Boat, The Red Badge of Courage, The Dante Alighieri Divine Comedy, The Davies, Robertson Fifth Business Davis, Rebecca Harding Life in the Iron Mills Defoe, Daniel Moll Flanders Robinson Crusoe DeLillo, Don White Noise Dickens, Charles Christmas Carol, A David Copperfield Great Expectations Oliver Twist Tale of Two Cities, A Dickinson, Emily poems Dinesen, Isak Out of Africa Dos Passos, John U.S.A. trilogy Dostoyevsky, Fyodor Crime and Punishment Douglass, Frederick Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave. Written by Himself Doyle, Sir Arthur Conan Hound of the Baskervilles, The Dreiser, Theodore American Tragedy, An Sister Carrie DuBois, W. E. B. Souls of Black Folk, The

List of Authors and Works Included in This Bookâ•…â•… xi Edwards, Jonathan “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” Eliot, T. S. “Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, The” Waste Land, The Ellison, Ralph Invisible Man Emerson, Ralph Waldo “American Scholar, The” “Divinity School Address, The” “Self-Reliance” Equiano, Olaudah Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African. Written by Himself, The Erdrich, Louise Bingo Palace, The Love Medicine Tracks Euripides Medea Faulkner, William As I Lay Dying Light in August “Rose for Emily, A” Sound and the Fury, The Fielding, Henry Tom Jones Fitzgerald, F. Scott Great Gatsby, The Tender Is the Night Flaubert, Gustave Madame Bovary Forster, E. M. Passage to India, A Room with a View, A Frank, Anne Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl Franklin, Benjamin Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, The Frost, Robert poems Gaines, Ernest J. Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, The Lesson Before Dying, A García Márquez. Gabriel One Hundred Years of Solitude Gaskell, Elizabeth North and South Gay, John Beggar’s Opera, The Gilman, Charlotte Perkins Yellow Wallpaper, The Glaspell, Susan Trifles Golding, William Lord of the Flies Gordimer, Nadine Burger’s Daughter Grass, Günter Tin Drum, The Greene, Graham Heart of the Matter, The Haley, Alex, and Malcolm X Autobiography of Malcolm X, The Hansberry, Lorraine Raisin in the Sun, A Hardy, Thomas Jude the Obscure Tess of the d’Urbervilles Harte, Bret “Luck of Roaring Camp, The” “Outcasts of Poker Flats, The” Hawthorne, Nathaniel “The Birth-mark” House of the Seven Gables, The “Rappaccini’s Daughter”

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Heller, Joseph Hemingway, Ernest Hersey, John Hesse, Herman Hinton, S. E. Homer Houston, Jeanne Wakatsuki Hughes, Langston Hurston, Zora Neale Huxley, Aldous Ibsen, Henrik Irving, John Irving, Washington Ishiguro, Kazuo Jackson, Shirley Jacobs, Harriet James, Henry Jefferson, Thomas Joyce, James Kafka, Franz Keats, John Kerouac, Jack Kesey, Ken Kincaid, Jamaica Kingsolver, Barbara Kingston, Maxine Hong Kipling, Rudyard Knowles, John Kozinski, Jerzy Kundera, Milan Kureishi, Hanif Kushner, Tony Lawrence, D. H.

Scarlet Letter, The “Young Goodman Brown” Catch-22 Farewell to Arms, A Old Man and the Sea, The Sun Also Rises, The Hiroshima Siddhartha Steppenwolf Outsiders, The Iliad, The Odyssey, The Farewell to Manzanar poems Their Eyes Were Watching God Brave New World Doll’s House, A Hedda Gabler World According to Garp, The Sketchbook of Geoffrey Crayon, The Remains of the Day, The “Lottery, The” Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Written by Herself Daisy Miller Portrait of a Lady, The Turn of the Screw, The Notes on the State of Virginia Dubliners Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, A Metamorphosis, The poems On the Road One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest Annie John Small Place, A Bean Trees, The Poisonwood Bible, The Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book Woman Warrior, The Kim Separate Peace, A Painted Bird, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, The Buddha of Suburbia, The Angels in America Rainbow, The Women in Love

List of Authors and Works Included in This Bookâ•…â•… xiii Lawrence, Jerome, and Robert E. Lee Lee, Harper Lessing, Doris Lewis, C. S. Lewis, Sinclair London, Jack Lowry, Lois Machiavelli, Niccolò Malamud, Bernard Marlowe, Christopher Marshall, Paule McCarthy, Cormac McCullers, Carson McMurtry, Larry Melville, Herman Miller, Arthur Milton, John Mistry, Rohinton Molière Momaday, N. Scott Morrison, Toni Mukherjee, Bharati Nabokov, Vladimir Naipaul, V. S. Naylor, Gloria O’Brien, Tim O’Connor, Flannery O’Neill, Eugene Orwell, George

Inherit the Wind To Kill a Mockingbird Golden Notebook, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, The Main Street Call of the Wild, The White Fang Giver, The Prince, The Natural, The Doctor Faustus Brown Girl, Brownstones All the Pretty Horses Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, The Member of the Wedding, The Lonesome Dove “Bartleby the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street” Billy Budd, Sailor Moby-Dick Crucible, The Death of a Salesman Paradise Lost Fine Balance, A Misanthrope, The Tartuffe House Made of Dawn Way to Rainy Mountain, The Beloved Bluest Eye, The Song of Solomon Sula Tar Baby Middleman and Other Stories, The Lolita Bend in the River, A House for Mr. Biswas, A Women of Brewster Place, The Going after Cacciato Things They Carried, The “Good Man Is Hard to Find, A” Wise Blood Iceman Cometh, The Long Day’s Journey into Night Animal Farm Nineteen Eighty-Four

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Paine, Thomas “Age of Reason, The” Common Sense Paton, Alan Cry, the Beloved Country Pirandello, Luigi Six Characters in Search of an Author Plath, Sylvia Bell Jar, The Poe, Edgar Allan “Fall of the House of Usher, The” “Murders in the Rue Morgue, The” “Tell-Tale Heart, The” Pope, Alexander Rape of the Lock, The Potok, Chaim Chosen, The Proust, Marcel Remembrance of Things Past Rand, Ayn Anthem Reed, Ishmael Mumbo Jumbo Rhys, Jean Wide Sargasso Sea Roth, Philip American Pastoral Rowlandson, Mary Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson Roy, Arundhati God of Small Things, The Rushdie, Salman Midnight’s Children Salinger, J. D. Catcher in the Rye, The Shakespeare, William Hamlet Henry IV, Part I Henry V Julius Caesar King Lear Macbeth Merchant of Venice, The Midsummer Night’s Dream, A Much Ado about Nothing Othello Romeo and Juliet Taming of the Shrew, The Tempest, The Twelfth Night Shaw, George Bernard Pygmalion Shelley, Mary Frankenstein Shelley, Percy Bysshe poems Silko, Leslie Marmon Almanac of the Dead Ceremony Sinclair, Upton Jungle, The Smith, Betty Tree Grows in Brooklyn, A Solzhenitsyn, Alexander One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich Sophocles Antigone Oedipus the King Steinbeck, John Cannery Row Grapes of Wrath, The Of Mice and Men Pearl, The Red Pony, The

List of Authors and Works Included in This Bookâ•…â•… xv Stevenson, Robert Louis Stoker, Bram Stowe, Harriet Beecher Swift, Jonathan Synge, John Millington Tan, Amy Tennyson, Alfred, Lord Thoreau, Henry David Tolkien, J. R. R. Tolstoy, Leo Toomer, Jean Turgenev, Ivan Twain, Mark Updike, John Virgil Voltaire Vonnegut, Kurt Walker, Alice Washington, Booker T. Welty, Eudora Wharton, Edith Whitman, Walt Wiesel, Elie Wilde, Oscar Wilder, Thornton Williams, Tennessee Wilson, August Winterson, Jeanette Wollstonecraft, Mary Woolf, Virginia Wordsworth, William Wright, Richard Yeats, William Butler

Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, The Treasure Island Dracula Uncle Tom’s Cabin Gulliver’s Travels Modest Proposal, A Playboy of the Western World, The Joy Luck Club, The In Memoriam A. H. H. “Resistance to Civil Government” Walden Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, The War and Peace Cane Fathers and Sons Adventures of Huckleberry Finn Adventures of Tom Sawyer, The Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, A “A&P” Rabbit, Run Aeneid, The Candide Cat’s Cradle Slaughterhouse-Five Color Purple, The Up from Slavery Optimist’s Daughter, The Age of Innocence, The Ethan Frome House of Mirth, The Leaves of Grass Night Importance of Being Earnest, The Picture of Dorian Gray, The Our Town Cat on a Hot Tin Roof Glass Menagerie, The Streetcar Named Desire, A Fences Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit Vindication of the Rights of Woman, A Mrs Dalloway To the Lighthouse “Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey” Black Boy Native Son poems

LIST OF WORKS INCLUDED IN THIS BOOK `

“A&P” Adventures of Augie March, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn Adventures of Tom Sawyer, The Aeneid, The Age of Innocence, The “Age of Reason, The” Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland All the Pretty Horses Almanac of the Dead American Pastoral “American Scholar, The” American Tragedy, An Angels in America Animal Farm Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl Annie John Anthem Anthills of the Savannah Antigone As I Lay Dying Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, The Autobiography of Malcolm X, The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, The Awakening, The “Bartleby the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street” Bean Trees, The Beggar’s Opera, The Bell Jar, The Beloved Bend in the River, A Beowulf

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Updike, John Bellow, Saul Twain, Mark Twain, Mark Virgil Wharton, Edith Paine, Thomas Carroll, Lewis McCarthy, Cormac Silko, Leslie Marmon Roth, Philip Emerson, Ralph Waldo Dreiser, Theodore Kushner, Tony Orwell, George Frank, Anne Kincaid, Jamaica Rand, Ayn Achebe, Chinua Sophocles Faulkner, William Franklin, Benjamin Haley, Alex, and Malcolm X Gaines, Ernest J. Chopin, Kate Melville, Herman Kingsolver, Barbara Gay, John Plath, Sylvia Morrison, Toni Naipaul, V. S. Anonymous

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Encyclopedia of Themes in Literature Billy Budd, Sailor Bingo Palace, The “Birth-mark, The” Black Boy Black Elk Speaks Bless Me, Ultima Bluest Eye, The Brave New World Brown Girl, Brownstones Buddha of Suburbia, The Burger’s Daughter Call of the Wild, The Candide Cane Cannery Row Canterbury Tales, The Catcher in the Rye, The Catch-22 Cat on a Hot Tin Roof Cat’s Cradle “Cathedral” Ceremony Chosen, The Christmas Carol, A Color Purple, The Common Sense Confessions of St. Augustine, The Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, A Crime and Punishment Crucible, The Cry, the Beloved Country Daisy Miller David Copperfield Death of a Salesman Divine Comedy, The “Divinity School Address, The” Doctor Faustus Doll’s House, A Don Juan Dracula Dream of the Red Chamber Dubliners Education of Henry Adams, The Emma Ethan Frome Fahrenheit 451 “Fall of the House of Usher, The”

Melville, Herman Erdrich, Louise Hawthorne, Nathaniel Wright, Richard Black Elk Anaya, Rudolfo Morrison, Toni Huxley, Aldous Marshall, Paule Kureishi, Hanif Gordimer, Nadine London, Jack Voltaire Toomer, Jean Steinbeck, John Chaucer, Geoffrey Salinger, J. D. Heller, Joseph Williams, Tennessee Vonnegut, Kurt Carver, Raymond Silko, Leslie Marmon Potok, Chaim Dickens, Charles Walker, Alice Paine, Thomas Augustine, Saint Twain, Mark Dostoyevsky, Fyodor Miller, Arthur Paton, Alan James, Henry Dickens, Charles Miller, Arthur Dante Alighieri Emerson, Ralph Waldo Marlowe, Christopher Ibsen, Henrik Byron, George Gordon Byron, Lord Stoker, Bram Cao Xueqin Joyce, James Adams, Henry Austen, Jane Wharton, Edith Bradbury, Ray Poe, Edgar Allan

List of Works Included in This Bookâ•…â•… xix Farewell to Arms, A Farewell to Manzanar Fathers and Sons Fences Fifth Business Fine Balance, A Frankenstein Frogs, The Giver, The Glass Menagerie, The Go Tell It on the Mountain God of Small Things, The Going after Cacciato Golden Notebook, The “Good Man Is Hard to Find, A” “Goophered Grapevine, The” Grapes of Wrath, The Great Expectations Great Gatsby, The Gulliver’s Travels Hamlet Handmaid’s Tale, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, The Heart of Darkness Heart of the Matter, The Hedda Gabler Henry IV, Part I Henry V Hiroshima Hobbit, The Hound of the Baskervilles, The House for Mr. Biswas, A House Made of Dawn House of Mirth, The House of the Seven Gables, The House of the Spirits, The House on Mango Street, The How the García Girls Lost Their Accents Iceman Cometh, The I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings Iliad, The Importance of Being Earnest, The Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Written by Herself In Cold Blood: A True Account of Multiple Murder and Its Consequences Inherit the Wind

Hemingway, Ernest Houston, Jeanne Wakatsuki Turgenev, Ivan Wilson, August Davies, Robertson Mistry, Rohinton Shelley, Mary Aristophanes Lowry, Lois Williams, Tennessee Baldwin, James Roy, Arundhati O’Brien, Tim Lessing, Doris O’Connor, Flannery Chesnutt, Charles W. Steinbeck, John Dickens, Charles Fitzgerald, F. Scott Swift, Jonathan Shakespeare, William Atwood, Margaret McCullers, Carson Conrad, Joseph Greene, Graham Ibsen, Henrik Shakespeare, William Shakespeare, William Hersey, John Tolkien, J. R. R. Doyle, Sir Arthur Conan Naipaul, V. S. Momaday, N. Scott Wharton, Edith Hawthorne, Nathaniel Allende, Isabel Cisneros, Sandra Alvarez, Julia O’Neill, Eugene Angelou, Maya Homer Wilde, Oscar Jacobs, Harriet Capote, Truman Lawrence, Jerome, and Robert E. Lee

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In Memoriam A. H. H. Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African. Written by Himself, The Invisible Man Jane Eyre Joy Luck Club, The Jude the Obscure Julius Caesar Jungle, The Kim King Lear Leaves of Grass Lesson Before Dying, A Life in the Iron Mills Light in August “Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey” Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, The Little Women Lolita Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven, The Lonesome Dove Long Day’s Journey into Night Lord Jim Lord of the Flies Lord of the Rings, The “Lottery, The” Love Medicine “Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, The” “Luck of Roaring Camp, The” Lucky Jim Lysistrata Macbeth Madame Bovary Main Street Martian Chronicles, The Medea Member of the Wedding, The Merchant of Venice, The Metamorphosis, The Middleman and Other Stories, The Midnight’s Children Midsummer Night’s Dream, A Misanthrope, The Moby-Dick Modest Proposal, A

Tennyson, Alfred, Lord Equiano, Olaudah Ellison, Ralph Brontë, Charlotte Tan, Amy Hardy, Thomas Shakespeare, William Sinclair, Upton Kipling, Rudyard Shakespeare, William Whitman, Walt Gaines, Ernest J. Davis, Rebecca Harding Faulkner, William Wordsworth, William Lewis, C. S. Alcott, Louisa May Nabokov, Vladimir Alexie, Sherman McMurtry, Larry O’Neill, Eugene Conrad, Joseph Golding, William Tolkien, J. R. R. Jackson, Shirley Erdrich, Louise Eliot, T. S. Harte, Bret Amis, Kingsley Aristophanes Shakespeare, William Flaubert, Gustave Lewis, Sinclair Bradbury, Ray Euripides McCullers, Carson Shakespeare, William Kafka, Franz Mukherjee, Bharati Rushdie, Salman Shakespeare, William Molière Melville, Herman Swift, Jonathan

List of Works Included in This Bookâ•…â•… xxi Moll Flanders Mrs Dalloway Much Ado about Nothing Mumbo Jumbo “Murders in the Rue Morgue, The” My Ántonia “My Last Duchess” Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave. Written by Himself Native Son Natural, The Night Nineteen Eighty-Four North and South Notes on the State of Virginia “Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge, An” Odyssey, The Oedipus the King Of Mice and Men Of Plymouth Plantation Old Man and the Sea, The Oliver Twist One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest One Hundred Years of Solitude On the Road Open Boat, The O Pioneers! Optimist’s Daughter, The Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit Oroonoko; or, The Royal Slave Othello Our Town “Outcasts of Poker Flats, The” Out of Africa Outsiders, The Painted Bird, The Paradise Lost Passage to India, A Pearl, The Picture of Dorian Gray, The Pilgrim’s Progress, The Playboy of the Western World, The poems poems

Defoe, Daniel Woolf, Virginia Shakespeare, William Reed, Ishmael Poe, Edgar Allan Cather, Willa Browning, Robert Rowlandson, Mary Douglass, Frederick Wright, Richard Malamud, Bernard Wiesel, Elie Orwell, George Gaskell, Elizabeth Jefferson, Thomas Bierce, Ambrose Homer Sophocles Steinbeck, John Bradford, William Hemingway, Ernest Dickens, Charles Solzhenitsyn, Alexander Kesey, Ken García Márquez, Gabriel Kerouac, Jack Crane, Stephen Cather, Willa Welty, Eudora Winterson, Jeanette Behn, Aphra Shakespeare, William Wilder, Thornton Harte, Bret Dinesen, Isak Hinton, S. E. Kozinski, Jerzy Milton, John Forster, E. M. Steinbeck, John Wilde, Oscar Bunyan, John Synge, John Millington Dickinson, Emily Frost, Robert

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Encyclopedia of Themes in Literature poems poems poems poems Poisonwood Bible, The Portrait of a Lady, The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, A Pride and Prejudice Prince, The Pygmalion Rabbit, Run Rainbow, The Raisin in the Sun, A Rape of the Lock, The “Rappaccini’s Daughter” Red Badge of Courage, The Red Pony, The Remains of the Day, The Remembrance of Things Past “Resistance to Civil Government” “Rime of the Ancient Mariner, The” Robinson Crusoe Romeo and Juliet Room with a View, A “Rose for Emily, A” Salt Eaters, The Scarlet Letter, The Seagull, The “Self-Reliance” Sense and Sensibility Separate Peace, A Siddhartha “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” Sister Carrie Six Characters in Search of an Author Sketchbook of Geoffrey Crayon, The Slaughterhouse-Five Small Place, A Song of Solomon Songs of Innocence and of Experience Souls of Black Folk, The Sound and the Fury, The Steppenwolf Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, The Stranger, The Streetcar Named Desire, A Sula Sun Also Rises, The

Hughes, Langston Keats, John Shelley, Percy Bysshe Yeats, William Butler Kingsolver, Barbara James, Henry Joyce, James Austen, Jane Machiavelli, Niccolò Shaw, George Bernard Updike, John Lawrence, D. H. Hansberry, Lorraine Pope, Alexander Hawthorne, Nathaniel Crane, Stephen Steinbeck, John Ishiguro, Kazuo Proust, Marcel Thoreau, Henry David Coleridge, Samuel Taylor Defoe, Daniel Shakespeare, William Forster, E. M. Faulkner, William Bambara, Toni Cade Hawthorne, Nathaniel Chekhov, Anton Emerson, Ralph Waldo Austen, Jane Knowles, John Hesse, Herman Edwards, Jonathan Dreiser, Theodore Pirandello, Luigi Irving, Washington Vonnegut, Kurt Kincaid, Jamaica Morrison, Toni Blake, William DuBois, W. E. B. Faulkner, William Hesse, Herman Stevenson, Robert Louis Camus, Albert Williams, Tennessee Morrison, Toni Hemingway, Ernest

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Surfacing Tale of Two Cities, A Taming of the Shrew, The Tar Baby Tartuffe “Tell-Tale Heart, The” Tempest, The Tender Is the Night Tess of the d’Urbervilles Their Eyes Were Watching God Things Fall Apart Things They Carried, The Tin Drum, The To Kill a Mockingbird Tom Jones To the Lighthouse Tracks Treasure Island Tree Grows in Brooklyn, A Trifles Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book Turn of the Screw, The Twelfth Night Unbearable Lightness of Being, The Uncle Tom’s Cabin Up from Slavery U.S.A. trilogy Vindication of the Rights of Woman, A Waiting for the Barbarians Walden War and Peace Waste Land, The Way to Rainy Mountain, The White Fang White Noise Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf ? Wide Sargasso Sea Winesburg, Ohio Wise Blood Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories Woman Warrior, The Women in Love Women of Brewster Place, The World According to Garp, The Wuthering Heights Yellow Wallpaper, The “Young Goodman Brown”

Atwood, Margaret Dickens, Charles Shakespeare, William Morrison, Toni Molière Poe, Edgar Allan Shakespeare, William Fitzgerald, F. Scott Hardy, Thomas Hurston, Zora Neale Achebe, Chinua O’Brien, Tim Grass, Günter Lee, Harper Fielding, Henry Woolf, Virginia Erdrich, Louise Stevenson, Robert Louis Smith, Betty Glaspell, Susan Kingston, Maxine Hong James, Henry Shakespeare, William Kundera, Milan Stowe, Harriet Beecher Washington, Booker T. Dos Passos, John Wollstonecraft, Mary Coetzee, J. M. Thoreau, Henry David Tolstoy, Leo Eliot, T. S. Momaday, N. Scott London, Jack DeLillo, Don Albee, Edward Rhys, Jean Anderson, Sherwood O’Connor, Flannery Cisneros, Sandra Kingston, Maxine Hong Lawrence, D. H. Naylor, Gloria Irving, John Brontë, Emily Gilman, Charlotte Perkins Hawthorne, Nathaniel

INTRODUCTION ` cept, especially for less experienced students) seeks first to enumerate and explain the many different definitions of the word, and then to demonstrate how it might be used in various contexts, thus simplifying a complicated concept. The essay on success (a concept with which students will certainly be familiar) starts by providing a few alternative definitions of success, in order to complicate and enrich an ostensibly simple term. All the essays on themes endeavor to answer the central questions of how the theme has been used and why it has proven so appealing throughout literary history. The second part of the set contains essays on specific themes in more than 300 individual works of literature. Here, the essays are organized in alphabetical order, first by the author of the subject literary work, and then by the title of the work. (An appendix lists all the works covered in the book in alphabetical order.) Each section on a particular work contains a brief introduction to the work and then usually three essays, each on a different literary theme in the work. For instance, for the first work covered in the encyclopedia, Chinua Achebe’s Anthills of the Savannah, we provide essays on the themes of gender, oppression, and social class in Anthills. This format allows students to examine the text from three of its most important vantage points, making connections and understanding details they might not have picked up by reading the text on their own. Each essay is relatively short (750 words) and is intended to provide not a comprehensive

Encyclopedia of Themes in Literature is unique among literature references in that it is general and specific. It offers both a survey of literary themes and a number of in-depth analyses of how these themes operate in individual literary works. The first part of this set contains essays on 50 literary themes. Each essay examines a specific theme in a general, accessible, interdisciplinary manner, usually describing how the theme has evolved over time, how it relates to other important themes, and most importantly, why the theme is powerful enough to recur so often in great literature. For example, the essay on abandonment begins with the origin of the word itself; goes on to explain how early literature, such as the Bible and various folktales, treated the theme; and finally discusses occurrences of the theme in more modern literature, such as Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Louise Erdrich’s Love Medicine. (Themes, authors, and titles are set in small capital letters the first time they appear in a particular entry to indicate a cross-reference to an entry on that subject in part 1 or part 2 of the set. Works cross-referenced in the text are discussed under the entries on the writers who wrote them; both the author and the work are set in small caps.) Along the way, the essay explains how various disciplines outside literature view the concept of abandonment and how those views relate to its portrayal in literature. Each essay is structured to fit its subject. For instance, the essay on nationalism (a difficult con-

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examination of the theme in the work but, rather, enough information and context to encourage the reader’s own thoughts on the subject. The essays are also designed to help students think about these works in ways that are both traditional and unexpected. For instance, one might expect a discussion of gender in Bram Stoker’s Dracula; certainly Dracula’s manipulations of Mina and Lucy, and the attempts by Van Helsing and his crew to save them, are fraught with issues of masculinity, femininity, and sexuality, and the essay on gender in Dracula does indeed examine these issues. However, there is also an essay on nationalism in Stoker’s novel, a topic perhaps not so obvious. This essay asks students to think about how the English characters’ assault on Dracula could be seen as an assertion of their “Englishness” and how banishing Dracula is, metaphorically, an imperial act. In selecting themes, we used the Modern Language Association (MLA) Bibliography Database to determine the frequency of common themes in literature. In selecting works entries, we consulted anthologies, study guides, standard reading lists, and available syllabi to determine the most commonly assigned literary works in high school and college classrooms. Most works included here are novels, plays, or longer poems, which are more suited to this type of approach, but we also decided to cover the works of six essential poets: Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost, Langston Hughes, John Keats, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and William Butler Yeats. A few longer poems, such as Robert

Browning’s “My Last Duchess” and William Wordsworth’s “Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey,” have also been included on their own. Students will be able to use the set in two different ways. Some will want to research a particular work, such as F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, and will therefore head directly to the three essays on that novel in the second part of the set. After reading each of the individual essays—on the American dream, identity, and social class—they may then turn to part 1 to read more about those three themes and find other examples of great literature that use the same theme, but perhaps in a different way. Other students might want to begin their investigations by reading first about a particular theme. Some might be interested in writing on broader subject, such as childhood, and might want to begin by examining the theme as a whole and then turning to a number of works of literature that features the theme. Or some might simply be searching for a work of literature that addresses a subject that interests them. As a whole, Encyclopedia of Themes in Literature provides an unprecedented amount of information on literary themes, written in language designed to be accessible and appealing to students, yet at the same time challenging enough to encourage them to formulate their own ideas about literature. —Jennifer McClinton-Temple, Editor

part i

Themes A–Z `

abandonment

The origins of the word abandon, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, demonstrate that it has not always had the wholly negative connotations it does today. In the Middle French, for instance, metre à bandon could have meant both “to proscribe” and “to release from proscription.” Thus, the term might apply equally to an outcast shunned from society and to the former outcast being welcomed back. Both are being “abandoned.” One may then abandon one’s child, one’s property, or one’s self. The common thread in these definitions in that there is an active choice being made and that the nature of this choice is absolute. Abandonment is never accidental, and it is never partial—it is deliberate and it is complete. It is, perhaps, these qualities that account for the recurrence of the theme in folklore and mythology, in social science, and in art and literature. In the Bible, Adam and Eve are banished from the Garden of Eden. In being left to their own devices, being forced to provide for themselves, they are, in their eyes at least, being abandoned by God. Abraham casts off his wife’s maidservant Hagar and their son Ishmael, abandoning them to the desert and denying them Ishmael’s birthright. Baby Moses, cast among the bulrushes for his own protection, is abandoned by his biological family into the care of another. Folklore and fairy tales abound with stories of abandonment: Snow White is left alone in

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the forest; Romulus and Remus, the mythological founders of Rome, are placed in their cradle in the Tiber River; and, of course, Hansel and Gretel are forced from their home and into the lair of a witch. In many foundational stories of abandonment, the abandoned child returns to his or her true family in triumph, either as a leader or having achieved great success in one way or another. This triumph seems to mitigate the trauma of the abandonment, implying that the abandonment resulted in some good and allowing for a happy, or at least a contented, ending. In the case of Moses, for instance, it is his abandonment that saves his life. As the pharaoh has ordered that all male babies born to Hebrews be drowned in the Nile, Moses’s mother hides him in a basket in the river where he would be found (and ultimately adopted) by the Pharoah’s daughter. In the story of Hansel and Gretel, the children return, having killed the witch, to find that their stepmother has died and they may live happily with their father. In other stories, however, the return from abandonment proves tragic. For instance, in Sophocles’ Oedipus the King, perhaps one of the most famous stories of abandonment, Oedipus is abandoned as an infant because it has been prophesized that he will grow up to kill his father, the king of Thebes, and marry his mother, the queen. A servant is ordered to take the baby away and kill him, but the servant cannot carry out the order and leaves the baby at the

2â•…â•…˘2 abandonment 2â•…â•… gates of the royal family of a distant city, Corinth. As a young man, however, Oedipus hears the prophecy as well, thinks that it is in reference to his adoptive Corinthian parents, and flees. Ultimately, the prophecy comes true as he kills his real father, Laius, in self-defense and marries Laius’s widow, Jocasta, his real mother. Jocasta then hangs herself, and Oedipus blinds himself with the pins from her dress. Obviously, in this case, grave tragedy resulted from the child’s abandonment, implying that this fate might have been better avoided by keeping him close. Perhaps abandonment appears so frequently in art and literature because, as some philosophers and psychologists believe, the fear of abandonment begins at birth. Sigmund Freud, the Austrian psychiatrist regarded as the father of modern psychological thought, believed that when we are born, and thus physically separated from our mothers, this trauma becomes a central force in our lives. We must, according to Freud, spend a great deal of our lives coming to terms with this separation, which we internalize as an abandonment. Later psychologists would delve deeper than Freud into the fear of and effect of abandonment on our young psyches. In his highly influential three-volume work Attachment, Separation, and Loss (1973), the British psychologist John Bowlby discusses his decades-long studies of children and their attachment to their caregivers, specifically their mothers. Bowlby notes that infants seek to find their mother when she leaves the room as soon as they are able to crawl. Additionally, the child will follow any familiar adult in lieu of the mother if she is unavailable (200–202). Infants demonstrate distress upon their mother’s impending departure as soon as they are old enough to sense the signs that she is leaving, around six to nine months of age (204). For Bowlby, the infant is exhibiting the innate fear of abandonment, which produces anxiety. The psychologist Yi Fu Tuan calls fear of abandonment a “central childhood fear” and points to the frequent use of the motif in fairy tales as a method of playing on that fear and keeping control of children (Salerno 98). If this abandonment does happen and it is prolonged, the anxiety becomes a part of the infant’s, later the child’s, later the adult’s personality. Yi Fu claims that adult anxiety disorders can be attributed to

specific child-rearing practices; in particular, he says, frequent and regular separations, or even frequent and regular threats of abandonment have huge consequences later in life (Salerno 97). Modern philosophers have also considered the fear of abandonment as a central component to modern consciousness. Soren Kierkegaard, the 19thcentury Danish philosopher, defined modern angst or anxiety as a feeling of looming danger where the source of the threat is unknown. G. W. F. Hegel, a German philosopher of the same era, claimed that the true mark of becoming human is not to desire but to want to be the object of someone else’s desire. Combining these theories, then, and remembering as well Bowlby’s infants, can lead to the theory that humans innately fear being abandoned and that as we grow older, we are consumed by a feeling that we will lose our most prized object: another human being. In other words, we live as adults with a constant fear of being abandoned, and if we were indeed abandoned as children, either actually or metaphorically, this fear can be the source of debilitating anxiety. Twentieth-century philosophers have taken these ideas and demonstrated how the detached, impersonal modern world exacerbates the natural fear of abandonment. The Industrial Revolution— the 19th-century shift from rural, manual labor to automated, technologically advanced work in the Western world—took control of the future out of the hands of the family and placed it in the hands of a stranger. Philosophers such as Theodor Adorno have theorized that this led to the breakdown of the family, as the father figure, who perhaps felt abandoned himself, abandoned his own family in search of strong, authoritarian figures outside the family. The French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, the primary figure in the school of philosophical thought known as existentialism, rejected the very idea that the world is ordered and that human beings can make sense of it. Thus, he argued, we realize that we are alone, abandoned in the world. In literature, we see this crisis of abandonment in the works of many different writers. In Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, for instance, Victor Frankenstein, the doctor who creates the famous monster, wants only to intellectualize, to think, never to

alienationâ•…â•… ╅╅ 3 emote or to feel. He leaves his loved ones lonely and alone in search of individual, intellectual glory. In turn, he abandons the monster he has created and the creature spends the rest of the novel in search of a connection, resulting in tragic consequences. In Louise Erdrich’s Love Medicine, abandonment is explored on an individual level, as there are several characters who are left alone and helpless, but also on a community level, as the Indian tribes of North America were abandoned by the U.S. government, which had promised to protect and provide for them. This novel convincingly demonstrates why the theme of abandonment is so common in literature. On a personal level, all human beings feel a fear of abandonment stemming from our childhood separations from our parents. Additionally, however, in the modern world, whole communities might live in a general state of abandonment based on that world’s impersonal, disconnected nature. See also Alexie, Sherman: Lone R anger and Tonto Fistf ight in Heaven, The ; Angelou, Maya: I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings; Euripides: Medea; Kingsolver, Barbara: Bean Trees, The; McCullers, Carson: Member of the Wedding, The ; Roy, Arundhati: God of Small Things, The; Silko, Leslie Marmon: Ceremony; Tan, Amy: Joy Luck Club, The. FURTHER READING Bowlby, John. Attachment and Loss. New York: Basic Books, 1973. Salerno, Roger A. Landscapes of Abandonment: Capitalism, Modernity, and Estrangement. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2003.

Jennifer McClinton-Temple

alienation

Countless literary characters feel painfully alienated from the social institutions that surround them. Some, like Jake Barnes in Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, feel alienated from their own communities. Others, like Caddy Compson in William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, feel alienated from their closer connections, including family members and loved ones. Still others, like Stephen Dedalus in James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, feel alienated by the

religious institutions in which they have been raised; sometimes this type of alienation extends so far that the character or characters feel alienated from God himself. Perhaps the most extreme form of alienation lies in characters such as Meursault in Albert Camus’s The Stranger, who feels alienated from everything with which he comes into contact: his family, his society, and the whole of modern life. The proliferation of literary characters who struggle with alienation is a result of the real-life struggle many human beings have with feeling disconnected from, shunned by, and unrelated to other human beings and the societal institutions that shape and guide us. Alienation is a powerful force, one that moves humans toward the negative impulses of self-pity, vulnerability, and violence, but that can also result in the positive results of deep introspection and intellectual independence. Many would associate alienation primarily with the 20th century and beyond, and indeed, the modernist movement, dated roughly from 1890 to 1950, has as one of its central themes the idea that in the modern era, with its increased reliance on science and technology, and the gradual removal of the individual from rural community into urban isolation, the individual and society are at odds with one another. Modernism explores how our relationships with each other and with social institutions such as the church, school, work, and family have grown weaker, leading us to be increasingly individualistic in our thinking and thus, alienated. In fact, the works listed above are all works in the modernist tradition. In addition to those novels and their alienated characters, modernism produced works such as T. S. Eliot’s “The Wasteland” and “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” both poems that explore at length human beings’ alienation from one another and from the world around them. For example, in “Prufrock,” even though the speaker begins by saying, “Let us go then, you and I” (l. 1), the poem never feels like it is telling the story of a couple, as though the speaker is pretending to be working under the misconception that he is part of a community but is actually quite alone. The “you” has been variously interpreted to refer to the reader, the author, or some missing part of the speaker himself. It is precisely this problem—that the speaker is not

4â•…â•…˘4 alienation 4â•…â•… alone but is clearly disconnected from his companion—that creates the feeling of alienation. Near the end of the poem, the speaker says, “I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each / I do not think that they will sing to me” (ll. 124–125). Again, he is alive and moving through the world, but he is disconnected from it, hearing but not listening. Other 20th-century works explore the general condition of alienation by depicting characters who are cut off from one another despite familial connections or close daily proximity. In F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, for instance, the title character, Jay Gatsby, born Jay Gatz, has cut himself off from his past, thus alienating himself from what might be called his natural place in the world. He has done this so that he may infiltrate Daisy Buchanan’s world—a world of wealth, society, and superficiality. Yet despite making this transfer, he remains alienated, as Daisy’s circle see him as foreign and out of place. He yearns to be a part of her world, but he does so because he thinks that is the way to win her love. Because he moves along this route, which is unnatural to him, his attempt is doomed to fail. The modern world Fitzgerald depicts in The Great Gatsby—with its artificial distinctions between West Egg and East Egg; its social caste system that leads Myrtle Wilson to have no more value than an animal; and its monumental Valley of Ashes, an artificial barrier separating the rich and the poor, brought about by capitalism and industrialization—suggests a world that will eventually alienate us all from one another by replacing honesty and emotion with facade and ambition. Although the 20th century is the primary home of literature exploring alienation, the concept is much older. The biblical story of the golden calf, for instance, shows us a populace who are alienated from God and from themselves. In the story, Moses has left the Israelites for 40 days and 40 nights to climb Mount Sinai and receive the Ten Commandments. Because they are disconnected from Moses, they also disconnect from the idea of God and immediately fear that they are alone in the world and need an idol to worship to focus their beliefs. They therefore convince Moses’ brother Aaron to forge a golden calf for them. As Erich Fromm points out, this story shows us how “man is in touch with himself only through

the worship of the idols” (quoted in Khan 196). This story, of course, comes from the Old Testament, before the arrival of Christ. One way to read the New Testament is that the coming of the Messiah saves the world from its state of alienation from God. In fact, in his Epistle to the Ephesians, Paul writes, “Remember that ye were without Christ, beings alien from the Commonwealth of Israel” (Eph 2:12, KJV). This connection, then, is vital for Paul; for him, the alienated being naturally yearns for connection. The idea of alienation would remain chiefly theological for centuries. In Middle English, the word signified a kind of “transfer,” almost as though one owned oneself, and if “aliened” or “alienated,” one was transferring that ownership to someone or something else. This could be active and hostile, as if one was being forced into the transfer, or it could be passive and indifferent, as though one was giving up oneself voluntarily. Beyond transferring one’s will to God, the concept of alienation as we know it today did not exist. However, in the 18th century, the Swiss philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau would postulate that alienation involves the giving of oneself freely, and that it benefits the individual by entering him or her into society, by freeing that person from the selfish state in which one serves only oneself. Although this might sound positive, for Rousseau it was the dependence on others whom society facilitates that created all vice. He believed that we must give up our rights and “transfer” them to the community. This creates in humans a state of alienation. In the 19th century, the German philosopher Georg Hegel took up Rousseau’s line of thinking, declaring that humans “live in a world shaped by his work and his knowledge, but it is a world in which man feels himself alien, a world whose laws prevent basic need satisfaction” (qtd. in Khan 26). Hegel is extending Rousseau’s ideas here, arguing that modern man will always feel the struggle between his own individual needs and participation in society, and that the result is a feeling of detachment or estrangement. Hegel centered in on work as a primary agent of this detachment, a move that was echoed in the writing of Karl Marx, who articulated ideas of alienation better than anyone had before and who is still considered one of the most important thinkers on the concept. Marx explained alien-

ambitionâ•…â•… 5 ation as the state that exists when things that should naturally go together are kept apart. Modern work, Marx argued, does this in many ways. The Industrial Revolution created workers who were alienated from their own essential humanity, because they were treated as “machines” as opposed to human beings. Further, they are alienated from one another because there is no social relationship involved in the production of a commodity. They are also alienated from the product they are producing, because it will be sold on the market with no relationship to the human that produced it, and from the act of work itself, because there is no satisfaction or meeting of desire involved. Preindustrial work did not have these attributes, as work was often performed in a family setting, with tangible results and, for many, a clear sense of pride and satisfaction. For Marx, and for many other philosophers of alienation, the farther society moves away from these more “natural” states, the more alienated we will become. See also Albee, Edward; Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf ?; Bradbury, Ray: Martian Chronicles, The; Carver Raymond: “Cathedral”; Dos Passos, John: U.S.A. trilogy; Fitzgerald, F. Scott: Tender Is the Night; Gaines, Ernest J.: Lesson Before D ying, A; Hesse, Herman: Steppenwolf; Kushner, Tony: Angels in America; McCullers, Carson: Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, The; Miller, Arthur: Crucible, The; Momaday, N. Scott: House Made of Dawn; O’Neill, Eugene: Iceman Cometh, The; Shakespeare, William: Tempest, The; Toumer, Jean: Cane. FURTHER READING Khan, Nasir. Development of the Concept and Theory of Alienation in Marx’s Writings. Oslo, Norway: Solum Forlag, 1995. King James Bible Online. Available online. URL: http://www.kingjamesbibleonline.org. Accessed January 22, 2010. Schacht, Richard. Alienation. New York: Doubleday, 1970. Stearns, Peter. From Alienation to Addiction: Modern American Work in a Global Historical Perspective. Boulder, Colo.: Paradigm, 2008.

Jennifer McClinton-Temple

ambition

“Ambition” is a difficult trait to pin down because it is so human: On the one hand, we want to reward ambition, yet on the other hand, we want to warn against it. Literature, especially, has taken the latter interesting approach to examining ambition; however, the term itself was originally relatively neutral, coming from the Latin ambito or ambitus, meaning “going around, circuit, edge, border.” Initially, this referred to a “going around” in the early Roman republic as a means of collecting votes or of canvassing for various political positions. Over time, however, the word ambition would take on other connotations, such as when the Roman poet Lucretius stated, “Angustum per iter luctantes ambitionis,” referring to ambitious men who were “struggling to press through the narrow way of ambition,” usually in a desire for honor, popularity, and power. It is perhaps because of these very human qualities—to desire love, honor, knowledge, and power—that the theme of ambition has been so prevalent in literature. Whether in Greek mythology or a 20th-century novel such as Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, literature often highlights the consequences of ambition gone awry. The dangers of ambition have been a popular theme not only in literature, but also through religious and mythological texts. In the book of Genesis in the Old Testament, for example, ambition is given much attention. The earliest consequence of ambition occurred when Adam and Eve decided to eat the fruit from the tree of knowledge, so that their “eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil” (Gen. 3:5), even though God had warned them that they would die if they ate of the tree. The result of such ambition? Adam and Eve were granted knowledge, but they were banished from the Garden of Eden. Later in Genesis, ambition is once again punished when the Tower of Babel is constructed, so that the people may “build us a city and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven; and let us make us a name, lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth” (11:4). The result of the Babylonians’ ambition was exactly what they had built the tower to defend against: God causes them to speak in different languages and to be scattered across the land, resulting in confusion.

6â•…â•… ambition Similarly, in Greek mythology we see the consequences of foolishly following ambition. In his Metamorphoses, Ovid tells the story of Phaethon, the son of the sun god Helios. Phaethon succumbs to his ambition for pride and reputation and brags to his friends that he is the son of Helios. Angered, Phaethon meets with his father and takes advantage of his father’s goodwill, securing permission to drive Helios’s chariot (the sun) for a day. Phaeton’s ambition exceeds his grasp, however, as he loses control of the horses, scorching the earth and turning Africa into a desert. The chariot is so out of control that Zeus is forced to intervene, striking down Phaethon with a lightning bolt. Phaethon was not the only character to “fall” due to his ambition, however. John Milton’s epic poem Paradise Lost tells the story of the fall of man, but also of the fall of Satan. Satan, filled with ambition and pride, wages war against God, thinking to supplant him. Satan is defeated and cast out of heaven; his ambition does not leave him, however, as he quickly decides to bring about “the fall of man” by introducing evil to the world. But beginning with the romantics in the 19th century, the character of Satan was not seen as an antagonist but as a protagonist, celebrated for his flawed but idealistic nature. In his 1932 essay on Dante, T. S. Eliot would refer to the character of Satan as a “Byronic Hero,” strengthening the image from 17th-century Britain to the romantic poets to the modern world. Since ambition is such a human struggle between making choices—and dealing with the consequences that result from these choices—philosophers, psychologists, and academics have been attempting to understand how and why we are driven by ambition. Perhaps one of the earliest examinations came when Plato presented his concept of the “tripartite soul” in Phaedrus (the concept of which he would later refine in The Republic). Plato’s analogy depicts the soul as a charioteer, noble horse, and base horse. Essentially, the charioteer (the individual) is always struggling to keep the two horses in control. In general, these three parts of the soul are taken to represent, respectively, reason, our noble desires (such as honor and courage), and our base or animal desires (such as ambition, lust, greed, avarice, and anger).

In many ways, this way of thinking about human desires and ambitions is quite similar to the model the Austrian psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud proposed in his 1920 essay “Beyond the Pleasure Principle,” in which he argues that the human psyche is divided into three parts: the id, the ego, and the superego. The id represents the human unconscious, amoral desire to be satisfied, whether it is by food, sex, drugs, or power. The ego strives to mediate between the id and the superego—sometimes having to satisfy one or the other; the ego is a conscious attempt to balance primitive desires with a rational need to negotiate the “real world.” The superego essentially functions as an individual’s conscience, reminding him or her what the “real world” views as acceptable and moral—and what it does not; the super-ego is at odds with the potentially ambitious id. Shortly after Freud presented his model for the psyche, human desires—of which ambition is one of the most powerful—found itself being examined through the lens of psychology yet again. If we consider ambition as essentially a form of motivation, a manifestation of desires, then it was the American psychologist Abraham Maslow who, in 1943, first helped contextualize ambition within his “hierarchy of needs.” Within this hierarchy, Maslow argues that humans have several types of needs, ranging from the most basic to the most complex; these needs address physical (hunger, sleep), safety (housing, jobs), social (love, friendship), esteem (achievements, power), and self-actualization (wisdom and enlightenment) desires. Ambition can easily be considered a “desire for esteem,” which nicely aligns with the Oxford English Dictionary’s primary definition of ambition as an “inordinate desire.” No examination of ambition would be complete without considering potentially the most famous literary example of “inordinate desire,” Macbeth. Within William Shakespeare’s play, Macbeth (the central, tragic figure) claims “I have no spur / To prick the side of my intent, but only / Vaulting ambition, which o’erleaps itself / And falls on the other” (1.7.27–30). Macbeth faces an internal struggle between his noble, civilized desires (admirable ambition) and his more savage, primal desires (ambition as a tragic flaw). Perhaps Lady Macbeth

ambitionâ•…â•… 7 presents his struggle best when, pondering her husband’s character, she states: It is too full o’ the milk of human kindness To catch the nearest way. Thou wouldst be great, Art not without ambition, but without, The illness that should accompany it. What thou wouldst highly That wouldst thou holily—wouldst not play false And yet would wrongly win. (1.5.17–22) Macbeth, in order to achieve his goals, gives in to his uncivilized desires and becomes a tragic figure: someone who made the wrong moral choice. Ultimately, this costs him not only the power that he desires but also his life. This trend of identifying ambition as a central character trait—sometimes a strength, sometimes a flaw—proceeded from the Byronic hero of the 19th century to the more modern antihero. Perhaps one of the best examples in modernism of an antihero is the character of Stephen Dedalus in James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Dedalus even goes so far as to compare himself to Satan when he claims “non serviam,” or “I will not serve.” Like the character of Satan, Dedalus desires to be free from accepted constraints—in his case, family, religion, and country. Dedalus desires to be more, to be great. Indeed, at the conclusion of Portrait he presents himself as his namesake (Daedalus). Other modern texts also highlight figures with conflicting desires. In Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman, Willie Loman struggles with his failure to achieve what he perceives as the modern, postWorld War II version of the American dream, defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as “the ideal that every citizen of the United States should have an equal opportunity to achieve success and prosperity through hard work, determination, and initiative.” In short, Willie’s ambition was to achieve success through owning his own business and making as much money as possible. But it is Willie’s ambition—or lack thereof—that makes the play an intriguing look at how ambition can affect our lives.

An earlier text, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, revolves around the misunderstanding of the main character, Jay Gatsby, whose business success during the Roaring Twenties was probably caused by his ambition to achieve the American dream, to “do better” than his modest beginnings seemed to allow him to do. Gatsby’s rise in power and acquisition of wealth stand in stark contrast to Willie Loman’s failure to attain any of these things. Both characters, however, seem uncomfortable with their ambition and its consequences, remaining conflicted characters throughout the telling of their respective tales. In Achebe’s Things Fall Apart we are presented with yet another example of a conflicted character and how the consequences of ambition can lead to ruin. In this case, Okonkwo (the main character) struggles with the past and the present, old cultural norms and new cultural norms, as British colonialism introduces itself to his home village in Nigeria, Africa. Okonkwo’s misguided ambition proves to be his downfall, likening Things Fall Apart to some of the Greek tragedies. In modern society and literature, ambition is no longer presented as a human struggle with gods (at least not solely) but as a struggle within the individual. However, while ambition has always been an internal struggle between an “honorable” approach or a “dishonorable” approach to a situation, our modern, globalized world presents new layers to this theme. Individuals no longer struggle only within themselves: They also struggle to understand how their ambition can—and should—be acted upon in a society that has new means of waging warfare, merging cultures, free-market economies, and evolving forms of communication. In such a world, ambition does not always need to be a tragic flaw. After all, without ambition the United States would not have pushed westward, eventually spreading from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean. Without ambition, the world would not have achieved spaceflight, prompting new questions and new discoveries. Without ambition, we would not have the wealth of knowledge available to us through the Internet. Without ambition we would not have had the Civil Rights movement. However, without ambition we also would not have had the Holocaust, the Water-

8â•…â•… American dream, the gate scandal, or the stock market crashes of 1987 and 2008. Ambition itself is not a “good thing” or a “bad thing,” but it is a human thing. Ultimately, it is up to individuals, whether through literature, politics, or daily life, to determine how they will use their ambition. See also Aristophanes: Frogs, The; Dreiser, Theodore: American Tragedy, An; Hardy, Thomas: Jude the Obscure; Ishiguro, Kazuo: Remains of the Day, The; James, Henry: Portrait of a Lady, The; Marlowe, Christopher: Doctor Faustus; Plath, Sylvia: Bell Jar, The; Shakespeare, William: Julius Caesar; Shelley, Percy Bysshe: poems; Steinbeck, John: Cannery Row. FURTHER READING King James Bible Online. Available online. URL: http://www.kingjamesbible.org. Accessed January 22, 2010. Maslow, A. H. “A Theory of Human Motivation.” Psychological Review 50, no. 4 (1943): 370–396.

Stephen Fonash

American dream, the

In his 1931 book The Epic of America, James Truslow Adams coined the phrase the American dream, which is “that dream of a land in which life should be better and richer and fuller for everyone, with opportunity for each according to ability or achievement. It is .╯.╯. a dream of social order in which each man and each woman shall be able to attain to the fullest stature of which they are innately capable, and be recognized by others for what they are, regardless of the fortuitous circumstances of birth or position” (415). Within the whole of the American psyche, there lies an eternal hope that the nation’s citizens will be afforded the opportunity for both monetary growth and social advancement. Of course, hard work and industriousness are embedded within this concept: In the traditional American mindset, any man or woman can achieve whatever he or she wants as long as there is the drive and will to obtain it. Indeed, although “the American dream” was not used by Truslow until 1931, the concept has always been an integral part within the consciousness of Americans. In the 1776 Declaration of Indepen-

dence, Thomas Jefferson laid out what may be the most important and well-known reference to the American dream. The Declaration maintains that “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” Along with the other Founding Fathers, Jefferson believed that the United States could and should be a nation giving every opportunity to individual progress and achievement. In contrast to Great Britain and its strict class structure, the United States represented to Jefferson the chance for all Americans, even those with poor economic backgrounds, to become pillars of their communities. To much of the world, Benjamin Franklin, another Founding Father, has come to embody the American dream. In The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin (1793), Franklin states that he arrived in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, as a nearpenniless youth. He describes walking down the streets with three bread rolls in his hands—those being all he could afford for dinner—and looking about him in order to gauge his opportunities. The remaining sections of the autobiography chronicle his emergence as one of the most influential men in the then-fledgling American nation. Through his diligence, Franklin transformed himself from a poor teenager into a successful businessman, inventor, and ambassador. He established the first library and first fire station, and he initiated the process of harnessing the power of electricity, so it could later be used for the public good. However, not all depictions of the American dream in literature have been quite so favorable. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1925 novel The Great Gatsby depicts the lure of the American dream as being a destructive force rather than a beneficial one. Jay Gatsby, the novel’s main character, believes that if he can move up in society by obtaining as much monetary wealth as possible, then he will be able to achieve the happiness he has always desired. Unlike Franklin, Gatsby is accused of having acquired his money through possibly disreputable means. He does not appear interested in working hard to achieve the luxuries of money; he is instead merely interested in obtaining the end results of actu-

American dream, theâ•…â•… 9 ally possessing it. These materialistic values, which he and the other characters in the novel uphold, serve to produce a general feeling of despondency throughout the text. By the end of the novel, this despondency leads to despair, and the greed that overruns the novel leads to Gatsby’s murder. In a similar vein, Arthur Miller’s 1949 play Death of a Salesman is also critical of the effects the American dream can produce in those who believe wholeheartedly in its monetary promise alone. Like Jay Gatsby, Willy Loman, the play’s protagonist, is obsessed with making money. Rather than finding a job as a physical laborer, which he enjoys, Willy devotes his life to selling. In other words, he devotes himself to the sole task of making money. Throughout the play, Willy experiences flashbacks in which he relives various incidents from his life. He is a constant daydreamer and therefore has a difficult time focusing on the reality of the moment he is currently experiencing. Ultimately, Willy’s obsession with the American dream makes him forget that he has a family who loves him and natural talents that he could employ. In the end, Miller’s depiction of the quest for the American dream is even more somber than is Fitzgerald’s: Willy kills himself, while his son Happy decides to follow along in his father’s footsteps, avenging what he sees as the wrongs society enacted against Willy. At his father’s funeral, Happy asserts: “Willy Loman did not die in vain. He had a good dream. It’s the only dream you can have—to come out number-one man” (2049). This conclusion to the play indicates that Miller believes that what he views as the treacherous myth of the American dream will continually perpetuate itself, relentlessly casting its dark shadow on future generations of young Americans. Yet it can easily be argued that those who feel slighted by the promise of the American dream the most are minority groups—those who have been constantly disenfranchised by the American governmental system and who have been forced to view the hypocrisy they see as inherent within the Dream their entire lives. In his famous 1963 “I Have a Dream” speech, the African-American civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr., declared that his hope for the equality of all races in America was one “deeply rooted in the American dream.” King

believed that all Americans should be provided the opportunity to prosper to their fullest potential. Much like King, the Harlem Renaissance poet, Langston Hughes also lamented that minority groups were never given the opportunity to experience the hope the American dream supposedly provides to its nation’s citizens. In “Let America Be America Again,” Hughes juxtaposes the image of what privileged white Americans envision their country to be with his own experience in the country as an African-American citizen, remarking that “America never was America to me” (l. 5). Likewise, in his 1951 poem “Harlem,” Hughes asks the question, “What happens to a dream deferred?” (l. 1), ultimately suggesting that minority groups are denied the realization of their dreams in America. Deciding to mimic some of Hughes’s themes, Lorraine Hansberry adopted one of the lines from “Harlem” as the title to her 1959 play A Raisin in the Sun. Hansberry’s play follows the lives of the Youngers, an African-American family living in 1950s Chicago. In the drama, Lena Younger, the family matriarch, receives insurance money from the death of her husband. She puts a deposit down on a house and gives the rest of it to her son, Walter Lee. Almost predictably, Walter Lee quickly squanders the rest of the money on a “get rich quick” business scheme that fails. After all, as has been shown in many of the prior examples, a driving theme throughout much American literature is that the pursuit of monetary gain above all other factors almost inescapably leads to suffering. Because Lena does at least have the chance to put the money down for the house, the play actually concludes on a somewhat positive note. Though the family expects to experience racial oppression in the white neighborhood to which they are moving, they still decide to proceed with the move and to face that problem together. By the play’s end, then, the family is unified. They have all forgiven Walter, and they have come to realize that appreciating family relationships in the same way that Lena does should construct the basis of a “real” American dream. Further, in his 1993 short story collection, The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistf ight in Heaven, the Native American writer Sherman Alexie shows that, like African Americans, Native Ameri-

10â•…â•… childhood cans experience the idea of the American dream in a unique way. Unlike other minority groups, Native Americans are left out of the American dream because the ideal of white prosperity and “industriousness” led to the destruction and seizing of what was once Indian property and land. Rather than simply being unattainable, the American dream in this case takes on an even more sinister connotation. Overall, whether they realize it or not, the American dream remains a fundamental factor in most Americans’ lives. Self-fulfillment through monetary satisfaction and whether or not that satisfaction was gained through sufficient hard work is constantly debated and discussed in the media, at neighbor’s houses, and over coffee with friends. Literature is just one venue Americans use to determine their own successes and the successes of those around them. Just as Willy Loman passed on his way of viewing the world to his son Happy, the lens that the idea of the American dream provides will continue to sustain itself for countless future generations of American citizens. See also Alcott, Louisa May: Little Women; Alvarez, Julia: How the García Girls Lost Their Accents; Cisneros, Sandra: House on Mango Street, The; Dreiser, Theodore: American Tragedy, An; Hinton, S. E.: Outsiders, The; Kerouac, Jack: On the Road; Naylor, Gloria: Women of Brewster Place, The; O’Neill, Eugene: Iceman Cometh, The; Sinclair, Upton: Jungle, The; Steinbeck, John: Of Mice and Men. FURTHER READING Adams, James Truslow. The Epic of America. Baltimore, Md.: Simon Publications, 2001. Brown, Lloyd W. “The American Dream and the Legacy of Revolution in the Poetry of Langston Hughes.” Studies in Black Literature 7 (Spring 1976): 16–18. Greenbie, Marjorie Barstow. American Saga: The History and Literature of the American Dream of a Better Life. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1939. Miller, Arthur. Death of a Salesman. In Norton Anthology of American Literature. 4th ed. Vol. 2, edited by Ronald Gottesman and Laurence B. Holland. New York: Norton, 1994, 1995, 2,048.

LuElla Putnam

childhood

In 1960, the French historian Philippe Ariès advanced the hypothesis that the idea of childhood was practically nonexistent before the early modern period. The controversy about the existence or absence of the idea prior to that time in history gave rise to a host of studies on childhood. But what does the word childhood mean? Our awareness that it refers to a distinct period of human life is natural, but how do we determine its duration? How long does childhood last? Many psychologists and specialists in children’s studies conclude that childhood is an endlessly complex term. All have agreed that it refers to a set of experiences and behaviors, characteristic for the earlier part of our lives, meant to prepare us for adulthood and active life. As to its duration, individual differences should be taken into account. In this sense, childhood is defined in opposition to adulthood: One is no longer a child when one becomes an adult. However, this theory has not sufficed, and the growth of research on the subject is telling. The common denominator of many studies on childhood is the attempt to grasp its essence, to define the experience of being a child and to explain the nature of children. One of the most important conclusions these studies have drawn is that our notions of childhood have changed. They have adapted themselves to society and to its conception of what a child should be. Thus, the ideas about childhood during the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries evolved continually. Writing and literature tell us more about this evolution. Childhood has for long been one of the central themes of English literature. Children were the subject of a great number of Elizabethan lyrics, and we can find them in the works of Dryden and Pope. However, childhood as a truly substantial theme arose with the novel, and its importance gradually increased through the 18th century. Later on, the theme developed and matured, and we can easily find its numerous ramifications in the literature of the 19th century as well as the 20th. Today, it is seen as essential for the critical understanding of the literary production of the 19th century and the Victorian period. In addition, the 19th and 20th centuries saw the steady emergence of a real literature for children, either for their instruction or entertain-

childhoodâ•…â•… 11 ment. Thus, the child has been either the subject or the object of a plethora of writings since the 18th century. These writings reflect the dichotomy of childhood, which was seen as a symbol of growth and development on the one hand and as a symbol of regression and ignorance of the world on the other. Authors such as James Janeway (A Token for Children, 1671–72) spread the doctrine of original sin during the 17th century and constructed highly moralizing, religion-oriented visions of childhood. All of these were based on the theory of the Christian “fallen state” and looked upon children with pessimism. Childhood was seen as the most decisive period for the acquisition of the fundamentals of spirituality and for the construction of true faith. However, the thinkers of the 18th century promoted reason as one of the highest virtues. The century became a period of transition, of which childhood was the supreme symbol, celebrating the cult of nature, the purity of mind and soul, and the triumph of innate goodness. Contrary to what was professed in earlier centuries, childhood was perceived in an increasingly positive light. Soon it became a favorite theme of the sentimental novel, and the poverty and misfortunes of guiltless, insightful, and virtuous children were an object of considerable import and frequent discussion in the works of many women writers (for example, Elizabeth Bonhote’s Hortensia; or, The Distressed Wife, 1769). The period saw the emergence of the idea that in childhood, the concepts of imagination, sensibility, and nature were joined in one. The influence of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and his Émile (1762) on this representation of childhood in the literature of the times is undeniable. But sentimentality was not reserved to the 18th century only, and in her early novels, George Eliot molded childhood according to the same principles. Her children were portrayed as carefree and unencumbered with adult sorrow and the awareness of death. An interesting peculiarity of her work is the attention Eliot pays to baby-talk and children’s ways of talking. For William Blake (e.g., Songs of Innocence, 1789) and William Wordsworth (e.g., “Ode on Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood,” 1807, or “We Are Seven,” 1798), the child became a theme of a certain weight. For

Blake, childhood signified innocence; for Wordsworth, the child had natural piety and wisdom, and his famous line “The Child is father of the Man” (“My Heart Leaps Up,” 1802) became an increasingly popular motif. The child and the process of growing up were common metaphors for the regeneration and renewal of society, while childhood was seen as the equivalent of humanity in its infancy. Gradually, children became symbols of hope and childhood synonymous to new beginnings. Such was the case in Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations (1860–61). The child in Dickens grew to be the incarnation of spontaneity, love, and innocence on the background of the ugliness, squalor and inhumanity of industrial London. Dickens offered his readers a view through the child’s eyes, creating a palpable experience of childhood. Indeed, many of his novels bear the names of children—Oliver Twist (1837–39), Nicholas Nickleby (1838–39), Dombey and Son (1846–48), David Copperf ield (1849–50), Little Dorrit (1855–57). Charlotte Brontë in Jane Eyre (1847) explored the victimization, loneliness, and isolation of children within a hostile environment. Virtually deprived of childhood, the girls at the Lowood school for poor and orphaned children are vowed to a life of slavery and an early death. Jane Eyre fed on a strong heritage of gothic villainy and persecuted femininity to denounce the rigid education and brutal practices of the schooling system. While Brontë chose to give the reader an account of the negative effects a difficult childhood might have on an adult’s life, Henry James focused some of his writings on children exclusively. James was mostly concerned with the innocence of childhood and how this innocence can be corrupted if the family circle is unbalanced. The major themes of both What Maisie Knew (1897) and The Turn of the Screw (1898) are knowledge and ignorance, and they explore a number of problematic Freudian concepts, among which are children’s exposure to sexuality and early contact with death. During the second half of the 19th century, Lewis Carroll was one of the authors who wrote extensively for and about children. His Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865), Through the Looking-Glass (1871) and Sylvie and Bruno (1889–93)

12â•…â•… coming of age were specifically produced for an audience of children and even their cover art was conceived in such a way as to please children. Carroll’s correspondence with his editors is one of the numerous testimonials that a real concern about children and childhood had developed. Moreover, Carroll’s writings contain a great deal of information about what it meant to be a British child during the Victorian period. Laden with political implications and comments on the British Empire, Alice’s world places a heavy burden on the shoulders of its youngest subjects whose childhood is to prepare them for servitude. Almost at the same time in America, Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884) appear as stories of childhood escape, of willful isolation from society and a continual struggle against conformity. In line with the tradition of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s portrayal of children (Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 1852), Twain’s works discuss freedom and liberty in a reaction against the limits and constraints of society. All of these are themes that echo William Blake’s natural, joyful, carefree, and enlightened romantic child. During the 20th century, childhood developed into a favorite theme for an ever-increasing number of genres. The examples vary extensively, from C. S. Lewis’s indirect portrayals of children at times of war to the poems, diaries, and writings by children (e.g., Anne Frank: The Diary of A Young Girl, 1947) and children writing of the various experiences of their own childhood. While in earlier centuries childhood was a preparation and a period of growing up, the early 19th and 20th centuries saw the rise of the idea of holding on to childhood with authors such as J. M. Barrie (Peter Pan, 1902–06) and Ray Bradbury (Dandelion Wine, 1957; Farewell Summer, 2006). They represented the magic, wonders, and transience of childhood. The scope for the study of childhood in literature is wide indeed. Today, researchers are asking more questions. They are discussing problems that had never been looked into before, and their work has uncovered a remarkable variety in the portrayal of children and childhood in literature, beyond the fundamental polarities of the good and the bad child. Studies, among which are those of Jacqueline Banerjee, Andrea Immel, and Michael Witmore,

have shown that childhood stands at the heart of many works of literature from which it was initially thought absent. Thus, from the 20th century onwards, there has been a global and unprecedented interest in childhood. See also Augustine, Saint: Confessions of St. Augustine; Lee, Harper: To Kill a Mockingbird; Morrison, Toni: Beloved; Tolstoy, Leo: War and Peace; Winterson, Jeanette: Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit. FURTHER READING Ariès, Philippe. Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of Family Life. New York: Vintage Books, 1962. Banerjee, Jacqueline. Through the Northern Gate: Childhood and Growing Up in British Fiction, 1719–1901. New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 1996. Coveney, Peter. The Image of Childhood: The Individual and Society: a Study of the Theme in English Literature. London: Penguin Books, 1967. Cunningham, Hugh. Children and Childhood in Western Society since 1500. London: Longman, 1995. Immel, Andrea, and Michael Witmore, eds. Childhood and Children’s Books in Early Modern Europe, 1550– 1800. New York and London: Routledge, 2006. Pollock, Linda A. Forgotten Children: Parent-Child Relations from 1500 to 1900. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983.

Margarita Georgieva

coming of age

Most scholars agree on a standard definition of the coming-of-age narrative: Simply put, it follows the development of a child or adolescent into adulthood. The roots of this narrative theme can be traced back to the bildungsroman, or “formation novel.” Late 18th-century German novels, such as Johann Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship (1795), established a narrative pattern that would be followed by several other authors in the forthcoming centuries. This pattern typically features a young protagonist—either male or female—who undergoes a troubled search for an adult identity by process of trials, experiences, and revelations. This theme is prominent in several well-known European and American novels of the 19th and early 20th centuries, such as Charles Dickens’s David

coming of ageâ•…â•… 13 Copperf ield (1849–50) and Great Expectations (1860–61); Horatio Alger, Jr.’s Ragged Dick; or, Street Life in New York with the Bootblacks (1868); Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women (1869); Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884); James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916); and J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye (1951). The popularity of this narrative has continued into the late 20th and early 21st centuries, as shown in critically acclaimed books such as Dorothy Allison’s Bastard Out of Carolina (1993) and Jon Krakauer’s 1996 account of the life and death of Chris McCandless in Into the Wild, and through popular culture texts, such as J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series. While there is agreement on a standard working definition of a coming-of-age narrative, there is little agreement among scholars on the constituent elements of these narratives. James Hardin, a theorist of genre studies, argues that there can be no agreement about the elements of a coming-ofage narrative because of the various meanings of the word Bildung in German. While most scholars interpret the word’s meaning as “formation,” Hardin contends that this interpretation is unique to a series of 18th- and 19th-century novels, and to use that term and its meaning for an examination of 20thand 21st-century novels is to take it out of its proper context. Other interpretations of the German word Bildung, such as initiation, education, and building, have served to further complicate understanding of the coming-of-age narrative. In addition to a debate over the origin of the term, other scholars argue over the age group of protagonists coming of age in these texts. Most 18th- and 19th-century protagonists featured in these novels came of age in their midto-late teenage years. Throughout the 20th century, however, the range in years for a coming-of-age narrative widened from this age group to include protagonists in their early to mid-20s. It is for this reason that the genre studies scholar Barbara White limits the definition of a coming-of-age narrative to focus on protagonists between the ages of 12 and 19. Additionally, in the latter part of the 20th century, the works of anthropologists, such as Arnold van Gennup and Margaret Mead, have added to the debate over the elements of a coming-of-age

narrative. Through their research in rites of passage and social development and structure, the works of anthropologists such as van Gennup and Mead allow scholars to examine the sociocultural implications of these narratives. It is the sociocultural implications that cause the most debate among scholars. Indeed, since a coming-of-age narrative is dependent on a quest for an adult identity, this narrative is closely linked to other areas of identity development, such as gender, race, social class, and national identity (see nationalism). As Kenneth Millard argues, a recurring element of the coming-of-age narrative is the way in which a protagonist’s adult identity is framed by historical events and points of origin and conditioned by social obligations and expectations. Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn serves as an example of this theory. In the novel, a young Huck accompanies Jim, a runaway slave, on a trip down the Mississippi River to reach the free North. The novel’s climax occurs when Jim is caught by slave catchers, and Huck must make a decision between informing Miss Watson, Jim’s owner, about Jim’s location or attempting to free Jim from his bondage. In his decision, Huck must balance the social obligation of returning “property” to its rightful owner and his own conscience—during his trip, Huck has come to see Jim not as a piece of property but as a human. Ironically, Huck makes the decision to “go to hell” by following his conscience, attempting to free Jim from his captivity. Twain’s novel, of course, was published after the institution of slavery was abolished, but it serves as a historical point of reference, as Finn would have grown up in pre-Civil War America. Huck Finn’s adult identity is framed within these racist confines; although African Americans were free, they still were considered as inferior to whites. Thus, the socially acceptable and expected thing for Huck to do would be to turn Jim in to Miss Watson, and it is the deviation from this expectation that Huck believes will condemn his soul. The Huck Finn example also serves as a way to highlight three additional features of the comingof-age narrative. One of these features is the loss of childhood innocence. In Twain’s novel, although Huck naïvely misunderstands the consequences of his decision, his naïveté speaks volumes to readers.

14â•…â•… coming of age The consequence of his decision marks his transition from childhood to adulthood. Prior to the novel’s climax, Huck has been witness to the darker side of the adult world—from his father’s racist diatribe about the voting rights of recently freed slaves to a long and bloody family feud to the con artistry of the Duke and Dauphin. Unbeknownst to Huck—but abundantly clear to the novel’s readers—is the influence that these events have on his decision to attempt to free Jim—the first adult decision of his life. Because of his experiences and this decision, Huck realizes that he may be outcast from his society, as he has deviated from its expected adult norms, and he will no longer be able to go back to live his previous lifestyle of barefooted, pipesmoking truancy. This deviation from expected norms highlights another feature of the coming-of-age narrative: the realization of social expectations and norms. To once again use the Huck Finn example, Huck fully realizes the implications of his decision: He considers himself damned and acknowledges that he will be unable to fully participate in the adult world because of this violation. As such, he is able to recognize the social, adult world now laid out before him. While this realization further distances Huck from his childhood innocence, it also presents him with a choice: Either accept this adult world and conform to its norms and standards or decide on self-exile. Huckleberry Finn, of course, chooses the latter, as he decides to light out for the territories of the American West rather than conform to the rigid social obligations demanded by pre–Civil War rural Missouri. Huck’s choice to light out for the territories highlights a third feature of the coming-of-age narrative. His decision to leave is rooted in another choice: to accept a socially constructed identity, or to construct a personal sense of identity for oneself. While this idea is one of the oldest and most common themes of literature, when examined through the lens of a coming-of-age narrative, it takes on additional weight. Not all coming-of-age protagonists are as fortunate as Huck Finn, though. For some, their gender, race, and class serve as impediments to a sense of freedom. As the feminist scholar Rachel

Blau DuPlessis observes, most 19th-century female protagonists have two options presented before them when coming of age: marriage, the socially acceptable option for young women; or death, the end result for those young women who deviate from socially expected norms. Indeed, constraining one’s identity to social norms and expectations is the choice for one of 19th-century America’s most wellknown female protagonists, Jo March. In Alcott’s Little Women, the creative and headstrong Jo winds up married by the novel’s end. Race and class also serve as factors in these narratives. The unnamed narrator of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952) comes to realize his situation very early on in the novel. After the narrator, a promising young African-American student, agrees to show a white benefactor the poor living conditions of sharecroppers living around the narrator’s college, he is expelled from school and is forced to decide between accepting society’s roles for an African-American man or developing his own identity. Jon Krakauer’s Into the Wild features the real-life story of Chris McCandless, a college graduate from a well-to-do East Coast family. When McCandless realizes the limitations of the options set before him—continued graduate studies, a position in a well-paying job in the business world—he renounces his previous materialistic life and sets off on the roads of America in an attempt to discover who he truly is. National character is also an important factor in coming-of-age narratives. Some preeminent American literature scholars, such as Leslie Fiedler, Ihab Hassan, and R. W. B Lewis, have argued that the coming-of-age narrative is one of the most dominant narratives in American literature. For these scholars, a sense of history, or lack thereof, is key to their view of the importance of the coming-of-age narrative in American literature. At the heart of this contention is the argument that the American national identity shares several key characteristics with the coming-of-age narrative. The first of these characteristics is Lewis’s argument that the American national character is primarily based on renewal and innocence. His theory of the American Adam states that American culture is constantly going back to beginnings and new starts, an attempt to

commodification/commercializationâ•…â•… 15 revert to a lost childhood or return to a forgotten Eden. This theory, according to Lewis, is at the center of most American literature—a constant return to youth, with an emphasis on the experiences, revelations, and trials inherent in a coming-of-age narrative. Thus, in a sense, the focus on coming of age in American literature and in the national character can be argued as an unwillingness to acknowledge history: All events are subject to change and to reinterpretation, a kind of automatic “redo” where each generation must begin its task of the coming of age process. Like Lewis, Ihab Hassan sees the idea of innocence as a conscious denial of American history, but he contends that the denial is also firmly rooted in political ideology. The focus on a wide-eyed, naive innocence of each generation defining itself is not just a literary trope for Hassan; rather, it is deeply enmeshed in an ideology that offers no roots, no genealogies, and no sense of a permanent and static identity. For Leslie Fiedler, this focus on coming-ofage narratives underscores the preoccupation with youth found in American culture. Fiedler argues that this desire to return to a childlike, Edenic state is predicated on the idea that the American national character is constantly fluid and dynamic, youthful and energetic. To allow the national character to grow static and permanent would force American culture to grow old, and perhaps grow up. The coming-of-age narrative is quite simple to define; however, the implications of that definition are numerous and wide-ranging. What began as a way to fictionalize how a child became an adult became complicated throughout the centuries by other issues. Race, class, and gender all play a pivotal role in how a youth is expected to grow into an adult in various societies. Furthermore, the acceptance or rejection of social obligations and duties is another factor in how teens grow into adults. All of these factors expand a relatively benign textbook definition into a wide-ranging, thoroughly complex theme. See also Anaya, Rudolfo: Bless Me, Ultima; Anderson, Sherwood: Winesburg, Ohio; Austen, Jane: Emma; Chopin, Kate: Awakening, The; Crane, Stephen: Red Badge of Courage, The; Kincaid, Jamaica: Annie John; Knowles, John: Separate Peace, A; Marshall, Paule

Brown Girl, Brownstone; McCarthy, Cormac: All the Pretty Horses; McCullers, Carson: Member of the Wedding, The; Shakespeare, William: Henry IV, Part I; Steinbeck, John: Red Pony, The; Stevenson, Robert Louis: Treasure Island; Tolkien, J. R. R.: Hobbit, The; Updike, John: “A & P.” FURTHER READING Du Plessis, Rachel Blau. Writing Beyond the Ending: Narrative Strategies of Twentieth-Century Women Writers. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985. Fiedler, Leslie A. An End to Innocence: Essays and Culture and Politics. Boston: Beacon Press, 1955. Hardin, James, ed. Reflection and Action: Essays on the Bildungsroman. Columbia: South Carolina University Press, 1991. Hassan, Ihab. Radical Innocence: Studies in the Contemporary American Novel. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1965. Lewis, R. W. B. The American Adam: Innocence, Tragedy, and Tradition in the Nineteenth Century. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1955. Millard, Kenneth. Coming of Age in Contemporary American Fiction. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007. White, Barbara. Growing Up Female: Adolescent Girlhood in American Fiction. Westwood, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1985.

Daniel G. Jones

commodification/commercialization

Commodification is a multifaceted concept, having roots in political and economic theory as well as cultural and literary studies. Broadly defined, commodification is the transformation of immaterial, social relationships into commercial relationships that often utilize the language and ideological stances of a market driven economy and capitalist society (for example, terms and ideas surrounding “buying and selling,” “supply and demand”). In order to understand this important and complex idea, we need to understand the etymology of the word commodification. At the root of the word is commodity, which in modern language usage is defined as “a kind of thing for use of sale, an article of commerce, an object of

16â•…â•… commodification/commercialization trade” and “food or raw materials as objects of trade” (Oxford English Dictionary). The act of trading one good for another is an ancient one, and the act of using currency to purchase a grown or manufactured good is almost as ancient. The act of commodification (sometimes referred to as commoditization) is significant, then, because it is a modern metamorphosis of an ancient idea. Today, it is not only grown and manufactured goods that can be bought and sold: Ideas, social relationships, even individuals can now be viewed as commodities—goods available for trade or purchase. Commodification, in effect, turns people and ideas into goods and machines. The idea of commodification was first broadly explored when, in the Communist Manifesto (1848), Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, noted that everything—not merely food, clothing, and other tangible goods—can become a commodity in a modern, industrial, capitalistic society. It is important to remember, however, that a commodity derives its value not from what it can do (use value) but from what it can be sold or traded for (exchange value), often in order to attain some sort of perceived cultural prestige or social status or identity. To Marx and Engels, people (more specifically, the modern working class), as well as the goods they produce, have become commodities themselves, since people “live only so long as they find work, and who find work only so long as their labor increases capital.” In other words, industrialization has increased the amount of commodities that can be produced (and often increased their exchange value as well), but the machine cannot run without the human being. However, the commodity costs money to produce, and so it must always be sold at a set minimum price. The human being, though, has no set minimum price, requiring only “the means of subsistence that he requires for maintenance, and for the propagation of his race.” As a result, the laborer himself becomes a commodity in that his wage is tied to his use in producing the original good. In other words, the “worth” of the laborer is directly associated to the worth of the good (and the exchange value of the laborer is nearly always lower than the exchange value of the good).

However, more and more the workers are separated from the means of production: Workers in a capitalistic society often have no connection to the commodity they are producing; the commodity will often not be purchased or utilized by the laborer’s own community. Rather, they work for a company that is not connected to their community, producing commodities that have no relationship to them, by using machines that they merely operate. Eventually, this leads to the Marxist concept of alienation, in which laborers feels disconnected from their own work, from what they produce, and ultimately from other human beings in their community (since the product of their work is purchased by others and made by machines). The idea of alienation is important to understanding commodification because it deflects the focus of production from the human being, making him a minor part of the process. When this happens, goods can take on a life of their own, almost seeming to appear magically on the shelf of a store, where someone will purchase the good, often without having any idea where, how, or by whom it was made. The process of production (including the human factor) is hidden, and the commodity itself appears as a “natural object,” as if its existence is a matter of natural means, as opposed to manufactured means. When this occurs, it is often referred to as “commodity fetishism” (Marx, Capital) or “reification” (Lukács, History and Class Consciousness), within which the material world is viewed as objectified and out of society’s control; the primary human actions in a reified world are those of buying and selling. In recent years, the concepts of commodification and reification have been analyzed within the sphere of popular culture. For example, theorists such as Theodore Adorno and Max Horkheimer (1944) have identified the emergence of “the culture industry,” which views popular culture as a “factory,” mass-producing goods for society’s consumption. This easy consumption of goods—being a “good consumer” in a capitalistic society—results in satisfying a perceived need for “culture,” and that being able to purchase and thereby participate in this culture will therefore create happy citizens.

commodification/commercializationâ•…â•… 17 A criticism of such a relationship, however, is that the culture industry does not accurately reflect true human needs; instead, it creates false needs—to own certain goods in order to belong as a functioning member of society—as opposed to fulfilling “true” human needs such as liberty, creativity, and community. In other words, the culture industry creates a commodity that it sells to society as a “need” (often through the effects of advertising); society purchases the commodity, which minimizes identity and creates new, similar needs for newer, similar goods. Along the way, the human aspect of society’s consumption is weakened, and culture itself becomes commodified, creating a “culture industry.” The need and the way of belonging and having identity in a culture industry is through ownership and image. Anything, it seems, can be commodified: art, music, footwear, ideas, “beauty,” human relationships, even dreams and ideas. The use value of the good becomes obscured, and the culturally manufactured exchange value is what compels the consumer to buy a Degas painting, an original pressing of The Beatles’ White Album, copyright a new idea or way of doing something, sell cosmetic surgeries and “fad diets,” participate in human trafficking, and even corrupt (or change) the American dream. Literature has long been society’s way of taking a close look at itself, and many literary works have taken a long, hard look at commodification and its related process, commercialization. Perhaps the most significant work to examine how something immaterial and human can be changed into a commodity—something to be purchased, or something that has an exchange value greater than its use value—is Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller. In Death of a Salesman, the Loman family is struggling to find its identity and place in mid20th-century America. This struggle, however, is compounded by modern society’s generally uncaring attitude, best exemplified by Willy Loman’s heartless and dramatic firing by Mr. Wagner, and its obsession with material possessions and social status. While each character in the play is complicit in the commodification of the American dream, none exhibits it better than Willy Loman, who commodifies his personal image, especially in his perpetual desire to be “well liked” and his valuing of labels. For

example, he believes a punching bag to be of good quality because “It’s got Gene Tunney’s signature on it!” (1.1). Willy’s willing participation in the culture industry will not allow him to separate real, human needs from the reified, manufactured image of the American dream—in Willy Loman’s case, to be a successful, well-liked, and influential salesman. In a similar vein, in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, Jay Gatsby’s pursuit of an idealized, successful image of himself—in short, the commodified version of the American dream—led him to a lifelong pursuit of buying an image and a reputation. Yes, Gatsby is a “self-made man,” part of the American dream mythos, but he is a self-made man who places greater exchange value on things and ideas than he should, and conversely, he places little value upon human friendships. The “pursuit of happiness” in Gatsby devolves largely into a pursuit of quick, greedy, superficial moments of happiness. It is money, possessions, and reputation—as well as being part of a social group (being invited to one of Gatsby’s parties, for example) that stand in as “needs,” not the traditional American dream ideas of rugged individualism, human connection, or liberty. Jay Gatsby, however, was not the only character to buy into the commodified American dream being produced by the early culture industry. Daisy, in how she views herself and how she is viewed by others, also acts as a commodity within The Great Gatsby. Daisy, married to her husband, Tom, but in love with Jay Gatsby, is a bright and progressive woman. However, in the commodified world of the Roaring Twenties, within which Gatsby is set, it is easier for her to “buy into” the image of the woman upon whom society has placed value: simple, fun, and beautiful. Putting such an exchange value on the image and role of a woman in this society has the consequences of Daisy wishing the following for her baby girl: “I hope she’ll be a fool—that’s the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool” (Fitzgerald 12). Daisy hopes that her daughter will be “marketable,” and valued for her successful image within the society of Gatsby. But Daisy is not the only character commodifying women. Daisy’s husband, Tom, views her as a possession rather than as a human being—as he does many women in the novel, even having an affair, not out of love but out

18â•…â•… commodification/commercialization of exchange value. For Tom, women are merely something to be “owned.” In a different yet similar manner, Jay Gatsby also views Daisy as a commodity. While both Miller and Fitzgerald examined the commodification of ideas and ideals, Don DeLillo focuses not only on ideas, but also provides a strong critique of the culture industry in his postmodern novel White Noise. Within this novel, DeLillo examines modern suburban life. From the opening paragraph, the reader is bombarded with lists of goods being moved into college dormitories: “stereo sets, radios, personal computers; small refrigerators and table ranges; the cartons of phonograph records and cassettes; the hair dryers and styling irons; the tennis rackets, soccer balls, hockey and lacrosse sticks, bows and arrows; the controlled substances, the birth control pills and devices; the junk food still in shopping bags—onion-and-garlic chips, nacho thins, peanut creme patties, Waffelos and Kabooms, fruit chews and toffee popcorn; the Dum-Dum pops, the Mystic mints” (1). By presenting us with such an exhaustive list, we are immediately submerged into a materialist and image-conscious society—a society that has a department of Hitler Studies, taught by Jack Gladney, a professor who does not speak German and who is helping a friend establish a department of Elvis Studies; a society where the children are often more mature than the adults, where drugs are exchanged for sex, where the rearrangement of the supermarket is profoundly disorienting to the people of the community, and where the omnipresent television chatters in the background. Other literary works address commodification in different and interesting ways. Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, for example, asks about the relationship between the use value and the exchange value of books and knowledge. In Catch-22, Joseph Heller presents an absurdist narrative of war within which soldiers and prostitutes alike are viewed as disposable commodities. In Beloved, Toni Morrison examines how human beings can be commodified, largely through the portrayal of characters who were born into slavery and who are not viewed as subjects but as objects or commodities. A good example of self-commodification can be seen in the character of Joshua, who changes his

name to Stamp Paid after he “handed his wife over to his master’s son” (124) in order to “buy” his life, and later his freedom. Stamp Paid spends the rest of the novel questioning notions of identity, obligation, and community. Commodification and the culture industry are part of modern-day society; they are built into our political, economic, and entertainment industries. While commodification can be difficult to identify, it is worthwhile to consider its role in everyday life. How does commodification change (for better or worse) how we see the world? How does it change how we view ideas and products? Most important, how does it change how we view each other? Literature, it seems, remains one of our best means of asking—and answering—these questions. See also Defoe, Daniel: Moll Flanders; Dinesen, Isak: Out of Africa; Erdrich, Louise: Bingo Palace, The; Hawthorne, Nathaniel: House of the Seven Gables, The; Huxley, Aldous: Brave New World; Kincaid, Jamaica Small Place, A; Kingston, Maxine Hong: Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book; Lawrence D. H.: Rainbow, The; Women in Love; Melville, Herman: “Bartleby the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street”; O’Connor, Flannery: Wise Blood; Pope, Alexander: Rape of the Lock, The; Roy, Arundhati: God of Small Things, The; Steinbeck, John: Grapes of Wrath, The; Swift, Jonathan: Modest Proposal, A; Tolkien, J. R. R.: Hobbit, The; Twain, Mark: Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, A; Updike, John: “A & P”; Wharton, Edith: House of Mirth. FURTHER READING DeLillo, Don. White Noise. New York: Penguin, 1984, 1985. Fitzgerald, F. Scott. The Great Gatsby. New York: Scribner, 1999. Lukács, Georg. History and Class Consciousness. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1979. Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. The Communist Manifesto. Center for Digital Discourse and Culture. Available online. URL: http://eprints. cddc.vt.edu/Marxists/archive/marx/works/1848/ communist-manifesto/ch01.htm. Accessed January 22, 2010. Morrison, Toni. Beloved. New York: Knopf, 1987.

communityâ•…â•… 19 Tyson, Louis. Psychological Politics of the American Dream: The Commodification of Subjectivity in Twentieth-Century American Literature. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1994.

Steven Fonash

community

Community is an oft-invoked, seemingly simple term that has widely varying historical and current meanings dependent on sociocultural and discipline-specific contexts. As such, its meanings differ between everyday discourse and the specialized terrain of scientific, technological, and sociological discourse. Today, the fundamental notions of community are undergoing a sea change because of the emergence of new communication technologies, access to the Internet, and the formation of different kinds of Web-based communities that have paradoxically both expanded as well as made more intimate the connections between people. Blogospheres, chat rooms, Web sites such as YouTube and MySpace, and other such new avenues of expression in cyberspace have democratized and made the world more intimate in ways never imagined before. Local communities have been revived even as cyber-technology has been accused of destroying traditional bonds of community life. In its most commonly understood sense, community implies networks of solidarity and connection that attest to a primary instinctual need of humans beings as social animals. Community is thus an important source of meaning and validation in human lives and is predicated on a set of commonly held beliefs, values, interests, knowledge and information, and interpretive frameworks deemed as good by those who belong to the community. A sense of belonging to a collective is an integral aspect of community, and this sense of belonging may be located in a series of things, whether it be a common cultural heritage, religion, language, rituals, race, ethnicity, nation, or geographical territory. Indeed, a nation is merely a larger political form of community. In James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, the young Stephen Dedalus inscribes his name in his geography book followed by a series of addresses that locate him in a chain of increasingly wider personal and community

networks: “Stephen Dedalus, Class of Elements, Clongowes College, Sallins, County Kildare, Ireland, Europe, the World, the Universe” (24). Here the widening circle of belonging extending from his class, college, county, country, and continent to the very universe itself traces Stephen’s expanding notion of self entrenched in a chain of being that ties the individual to the community. In 1887, German sociologist Ferdinand Tonnies, in his book Community and Civil Society, developed the distinction between community—which he said is informal and ethically oriented, with mutual bonds of a traditional communal life—and civil society, which is impersonal, formal, and relatively more amoral, with merely administrative ties. The chief distinction in Tonnies’s view is that while the onus of pursuing the community’s goals of common well-being is on its members, in a civil society, the group itself becomes instrumental for its members’ individual goals and aims. Community may be exemplified by a family or neighborhood, while a modern state or industrial corporation arising out of an urban capitalist setting is an example of society. The former is romanticized as embodying more enduring, personal relationships while in the latter relationships are more impersonal, superficial, and motivated by professional and monetary connections. Tonnies’s theorization between the organic mutually sustaining holistic natures of a community as opposed to the individual-centered society has become central to debates on the sociological, moral, and political implications of community. The chief distinction between the two modes of organization or belonging can be seen as that between holistic communitarianism versus individual liberalism, and this has implications for citizenship, political participation, and notions of common good. However, communities, although they imply a largely positive social network based on collaborative ties and shared goals, can also be oppressive forces if they assume an identity that is oriented on exclusionary or supremacist principles in the guise of universal or community values. Nazi Germany under Hitler’s rule, guided by principles of Aryan supremacy, or Fascist Italy under Mussolini are examples of pathological community formations that pervert the generally benign and organic roots

20â•…â•… community of community. The relation between individual and community has to be one that is oriented toward the common good but still gives the individual space to exercise his or her own free will. The conflict between individual and the community is a common theme in literature and focuses on opposing forces, society, history, and the community at odds with individual subjectivity, desire, and will. In classical Greek drama, the community appears in the guise of the chorus of townspeople articulating the voice of common sense and reason. Whether it is the group of elders in Sophocles’ Oedipus the King who preach temperance and moderation to the hotheaded and arrogant Oedipus or the chorus of women in Euripides’ Medea who call upon her maternal instincts to subdue her desire for revenge against Jason, they both advocate the central principle of the golden mean which was such a cornerstone of Greek civilization. Literary theorists such as Northrop Frye have argued that tragedy as a form usually ends with the expulsion or death of the overweening tragic protagonist who threatens social norms and community well-being through his larger-than-life desires or hubris, while comedies end with community values being restored through communal celebrations, such as a wedding where the hero and heroine are finally united after a series of obstacles. These community values are affirmed in such works as William Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night and Much Ado about Nothing. Twentieth-century literature has been marked by a critique of a postindustrial society that values efficiency and productivity over the more personal communal bonds. The themes of alienation and isolation amid the impersonality of the modern metropolis are recurrent in modernist literature and especially resonant in the poetry of T. S. Eliot in the figure of a much-misunderstood Alfred J. Prufrock, who yearns to communicate his spiritual insights but is spurned by the superficiality of society ladies who talk of Michelangelo (see “Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, The”). Similarly, W. H. Auden, in his poem “The Unknown Citizen,” bemoans the impersonal efficiency of the modern welfare state that is technologically advanced and has statistics on all its citizens but does not really know whether its individuals are free or happy. The poem implies that

for the modern state, even the question of freedom and happiness would be a quantifiable category, if it had thought of these as important variables on which statistics should be kept. While modernist literature’s innovations in narrative techniques, such as stream of consciousness, testify to the influence of Sigmund Freud and William James in shedding new light on human psychology and consciousness and hence the intense focus on subjectivity, they also function as a testament to the decline of a shared communal framework of values that underlines the decline of community. One could argue that the prevalence of the third-person narrative in the 18th- and 19thcentury novel that features an all-knowing, often judgmental narrator, who takes the reader by the hand and guides him or her through the world of the novel, underscores the existence of community with its assumption of shared moral values. As the world has become more fragmented, the narrative voice has also become more partial, personal, and prone to error. For instance, in Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, the transformation of Ebenezer Scrooge from a miserly misanthrope to one who shares in the spirit of Christmas cheer and sharing is an assertion of the power of community over the individual. In more contemporary times, Raymond Carver’s “Cathedral” traces the transformation of an insecure man, jealous of his wife’s blind friend who has come to visit them, from an alienated, somewhat misanthropic character to one who has an epiphany about the importance of human contact and shared community values shown in the building of ancient cathedrals. While overweening individualism threatening the stable social order and community well-being is a common theme, the obverse is equally true as well. In Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid ’s Tale, the dystopian community of Gilead, a totalitarian pseudo-Christian theocracy that subjugates women in the service of the state, is clearly an example of a community that can only exist by annihilating individual free will and agency, especially that of women. Community is thus a complex concept possessing varying ethical, political, social, psychological, and epistemological dimensions, which finds recurrent expression as a literary theme.

crueltyâ•…â•… 21 See also Anonymous: Beowulf; Austen, Jane: Emma; Baldwin, James: Go Tell It on the Mountain; Black Elk: Black Elk Speaks; Bradford, William: Of Plymouth Plantation; Coetzee, J. M.: Waiting for the Barbarians; Conrad, Joseph: Heart of Darkness; Crane, Stephen: Open Boat, The; Forster, E. M.: Passage to India, A; Gaines, Ernest J.: Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, The, and Lesson Before D ying, A; García Márquez, Gabriel: One Hundred Years of Solitude; Hardy, Thomas: Tess of the d ’Urbervilles; Harte, Bret: “Luck of Roaring Camp, The”; Hawthorne, Nathaniel: House of the Seven Gables, The; McCullers, Carson: Member of the Wedding, The; Miller, Arthur: Crucible, The; Mistry, Rohinton: Fine Balance, A; Naylor, Gloria: Women of Brewster Place, The; Orwell, George: Animal Farm; Paine, Thomas: “Age of Reason, The,” and Common Sense; Shakespeare, William: Twelfth Night; Silko, Leslie Marmon: Almanac of the Dead; Steinbeck, John: Pearl, The; Synge, John Millington: Playboy of the Western World, The; Twain, Mark: Adventures of Tom Sawyer, The; Wharton, Edith: Age of Innocence, and Ethan Frome. FURTHER READING Bauman, Zygmunt. Community: Seeking Safety in an Insecure World. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2001. Hilde, Thomas C. “The Cosmopolitan Project: Does the Internet Have a Global Public Face?” In The Internet in Public Life, edited by Verna V. Gehring, Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2004. 121–130. Joyce, James. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. New York: Penguin, 1987. Tonnies, Ferdinand. Community and Civil Society. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001.

Rajender Kaur

cruelty

The idea of cruelty, for most readers, calls to mind actions or behaviors that inflict suffering in ways that are especially coldhearted, depraved, or indifferent. Acts or words considered cruel seem to go beyond what is merely unkind or simply violent

in a way that harms the victim irreparably. Cruelty can be physical or mental; it can be inflicted upon human beings or upon animals; it can take the form of large-scale horrors such as the Holocaust or the September 11, 2001, destruction of the World Trade Center; or it can involve only two people, as in cases of domestic abuse. The binding factor in all of these cases is the intent of the perpetrator. To willfully hurt others and to feel indifferent at the suffering of one’s fellow human beings, to enjoy or delight in the infliction of pain—these are acts of cruelty. Acts of cruelty such as torture, domestic abuse, terrorism, and genocide profoundly alter the victims’ sense of the world, how it works, and their place in it. Perpetrators attempt to take away the victims’ humanity, to reduce them to an object in a way that simple violence does not. At first glance, the definition of cruelty might seem straightforward, but upon further consideration, determining what is cruel and what is not is not so easy. Seneca, a Roman philosopher from the first century, wrote that the factor that determines cruelty rests in the mind of the perpetrator in exacting punishment. Excessive punishment or torture was, for Seneca, the opposite of clemency, or mercy, and leaders should avoid it. Seneca wrote his treatise De Clementia to the Roman emperor Nero, to whom he was an adviser. He encouraged the cultivation of mercy in the emperor, in what was probably an attempt to move him away from the brutality of his predecessors. St. Augustine (354–430), one of the most important figures in the development of Western Christianity, went beyond Seneca’s theories and wrote of cruelty as a reflexive evil that destroys its inflicter and should be judged by its effect on him or her. What is important here is that Augustine explored the connection between the body and the soul, understanding that cruelty goes beyond the physical pain it causes and alters the way both victim and victimizer see the world. In Summa Theologica, St. Thomas Aquinas (1225–74) relied heavily on Seneca’s work when he discussed cruelty, believing that “harshness of mind” in the inflicter of cruelty was the determining factor. For Thomas Aquinas, intention was all-important; in other words, an excessive punishment was certainly unjust, but not necessarily

22â•…â•… cruelty cruel. For Michel Montaigne, the French philosopher and essayist writing in the 16th century, intent was important, but it was not the only determining factor. Actions could be cruel in and of themselves even when allowed by law. For instance, many societies have allowed slavery, but as Montaigne pointed out, the fact that the practice is legal does not make it merciful. Like St. Augustine, the 18th-century British philosopher John Locke focused on the effect cruelty has on the perpetrator. Even when the victims were animals and not human beings, Locke believed cruelty had a destructive effect on those who inflicted harm. If it seems that much philosophical thought on cruelty attempts to define it, perhaps that is because one of the central philosophical questions on the topic has to do with whether or not cruelty is ever justified. In order to justify (or to condemn) cruelty, it must first be defined. For instance, the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki by the United States in World War II was without question devastating and brutal, and many noncombatants, including children, were seriously injured and killed. Whether or not we are willing to call that action cruel, however, seems to have to do with whether or not it was justified. Psychologists, however, have argued that in the minds of many perpetrators of violence, any action may be justified. Roy Baumeister, for instance, argues that most acts of violence result from mutual, escalating provocations and grievances. This leads to a rationalization in the mind of the victimizer. For instance, people often feel victimized by other groups and convince themselves they are acting out of a justified need for a role reversal. Rapists, for instance, often claim to have been enacting a kind of revenge against all women (166). Incredibly, the Ku Klax Klan often claimed they were acting out of revenge when they burned down homes, raped black women, and lynched black men throughout the 20th century. These acts, they claimed, were in retaliation against freed slaves who had disrupted the system of white superiority and complacency (166–167). Ideology is often another justification for violence and cruelty. Even seemingly good, ordinary people who have convinced themselves they are “fighting for a good cause” have engaged in despicable acts of cruelty. The Crusades, for instance,

beginning in the 1100s, were led by soldiers who believed they were heeding the pope’s call to recapture the Holy Land. In general, these were ordinary men who believed they were serving their God, but they participated in the vast slaughter of innocent human beings and barbaric acts of brutality, such as burning people alive and mutilating and torturing noncombatants. In the Ukraine in the mid-20th century, soldiers under the orders of Joseph Stalin systematically confiscated the food of peasant farmers and their families all in the name of the “universal triumph of communism” (Baumeister 179). Ultimately, 11 million starved to death—a torturous, brutal way to die. But these soldiers, acting in the sway of an ideology, believed, or forced themselves to believe, that the ends justified the means. Indeed, many philosophers and psychologists would argue that driven by ideology, or in the pursuit of revenge, most human beings are capable of cruelty. In fact, two famous experiments seem to indicate that even being placed in a culture whereby such acts are acceptable and being given orders is enough for many ordinary people to cross the line. In 1963, the social psychologist Stanley Milgram conducted an experiment that has come to be named for him. Participants were told to choose slips of paper from a hat, and they would be assigned either “teacher” or “learner.” The teacher would read word pairs out to the learner and then ask questions about what the learner remembered. When the learner made a mistake, the teacher was to administer an increasingly painful electric shock. In reality, there were no actual shocks; all the slips said “teacher,” and the “learner” was played by an actor. Even when the learner asked to stop the experiment, 65 percent of the subjects went on to administer the most powerful shock: 450 volts. In the 1972 Stanford Prison Experiment, the psychologist Philip Zimbardo staged an experiment in which undergraduate volunteers took on the roles of “prisoner” and “guard” in a mock prison. The “guards” became so sadistic and the “prisoners” so emotionally traumatized that the experiment, planned for two weeks, was halted after six days. In both of these experiments, the victimizers focused not on the human beings on the receiving end of the cruelty, but on the rationales they had been given. Cruelty must necessarily turn human

deathâ•…â•… 23 subjects into objects, and this transformation is the reason why the victims of cruelty experience such a disruption of their worldview. Victims of cruelty move from “life—to a kind of death” (Arnault 7). They feel they can never go back to the vision of life before. There can be no redemption, no happy ending. While life may go on, the meaning of life is forever changed for them. Flannery O’Connor’s short story “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” is an excellent example of how cruelty disrupts meaning. The family who are murdered in the story do not resist their deaths; the moments in which they are taken into the woods and shot seem surreal. The grandmother refuses to comprehend what is happening around her, exhorting The Misfit to “Pray!” and insisting, beyond reason, that he would not kill an old lady. In Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, Heathcliff endures cruelty throughout his life. He is, almost like a stray dog, brought home to Wuthering Heights by Mr. Earnshaw. Although he is fed and clothed, he is treated more as an animal than a human, with no one save Catherine encouraging him to have feelings. When Mr. Earnshaw dies, Heathcliff endures even greater cruelty at the hands of the sadistic Hindley. As he grows to adulthood, Heathcliff never establishes the human connections that would make it possible to be merciful. Instead, he learns that cruelty is the only way and turns that cruelty on Isabella, Hareton, Linton, and Cathy. Cruelty, and the evil that lurks behind it, has devastating consequences for both victims and victimizers. Victimizers tend to lose their humanity, even as they force themselves to view their victims as something less than human. Victims, on the other hand, tend to enter a new, incomprehensible world, one in which they have no rights, no agency, no dignity, no humanity. Ultimately, although they may move past the cruelty physically and emotionally, they are unable to see the world the same way ever again. See also Coetzee, J. M.: Waiting for the Barbarians; Doyle, Sir Arthur Conan: Hound of the Baskervilles; Frank, Anne: Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl; Golding, William: Lord of the Flies; Hinton, S. E.: Outsiders, The; Orwell, George: Animal Farm;

Poe, Edgar Allan: “Tell-Tale Heart, The”: Salinger, J. D.: Catcher in the Rye, The; Virgil: Aeneid, The; Williams, Tennessee: Streetcar Named Desire, A. FURTHER READING Arnault, Lynne. “Cruelty, Horror, and the Will to Redemption.” Hypatia 18, no. 2 (2003): 155–188. Baumeister, Roy F. Evil: Inside Human Cruelty and Violence. New York: Freeman, 1997. Edgerton, Robert B. The Balance of Human Kindness and Cruelty: Why We Are the Way We Are. Lewiston, N.Y.: Mellen Press, 2005 Waller, James. Becoming Evil: How Ordinary People Commit Genocide and Mass Killing. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002.

Jennifer McClinton-Temple

death

In Poetics, Aristotle recognized literature’s value for humanity when he stated that “the object of art is an imitation of life.” Writers have always used the situations and events of everyday life in their writing, and since death is just as much a part of life as anything else, it is arguably one of the most recurring themes in all of literature. In poetry, fiction, and drama, death is seen as a central theme that gives way to other themes ranging from justice to rites of passage to grief. Death is a crucial fact of life, and from the emotional response to death to the various religious frameworks through which it is interpreted, it is obvious why death is used as a theme in literature so extensively. In ancient literature, the theme of death is seen regularly. In Gilgamesh, the ancient epic of Mesopotamia, death is clearly illustrated through relationships, responding to the deaths of loved ones, and war. Once Gilgamesh comes to love Enkidu, he dies, and the reader is left with Gilgamesh’s thoughts and response to his friend’s death. In ancient Greek mythology, the Trojan War provided a framework for a myriad of stories, including Homer’s The Iliad and The Odyssey; both stories recount numerous lengthy battles and gruesome scenes of death. Later, Sophocles, Aeschylus, and Euripides, the three great Greek tragedians, created death-driven plays, such as Sophocles’ Oedipus The King and Antigone,

24â•…â•… death which includes patricide, suicide, and fratricide. In Poetics, Aristotle highlights the value of tragedy, which compels an audience to feel a catharsis, or cleansing of the soul, by witnessing tragic acts, typically deaths of highly regarded characters—deaths those characters may not totally deserve. Even in ancient literature, authors were utilizing death as a theme to elicit an emotional response in the reader or audience. Later, in the Roman myths told in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, death is one of the underlying themes present, in which characters face transformation, which for them is often the same as death. In the Roman poet Virgil’s The Aeneid, Aeneas is to establish the city of Rome, but this is only after his home has been destroyed and his family killed. Throughout the story, the reader witnesses constant death in battle. In book 10, after Aeneas takes the life of Lausus, his father, Mezentius, comes to Aeneas to avenge his son’s death. Mezentius calls out to Aeneas, why do you ridicule me, threaten me with death? Killing is no crime. .╯.╯. Let me rest in the grave beside my son, in the comradeship of death. (Virgil, The Aeneid, book 10:1,067–1,077) Here it seems that death would be a comfort to this father whose son has been killed in combat. In this perspective, a reader can understand how death is seen in battle as valorous and can even be consoling. Especially throughout literature of battle and war, death is faced with bravery and moral courage. In the Middle Ages, the theme of death often underlies the literature as well. In a lot of the romance literature, such as Sir Thomas Mallory’s Le Morte D’Arthur, the idea of chivalry is a prominent theme, and one aspect of chivalry was that a knight was expected to fight valiantly to uphold his king’s or his lady’s honor, even forfeit his life in battle if need be. One of the major European events in the Middle Ages, the bubonic plague, certainly had an effect on literature, as in Giovanni Boccaccio’s The Decameron, in which 10 people flee the plague in

Florence, and each tells a different story over the course of 10 days in order to keep his or her mind off of the deaths of friends and loved ones left behind. One of the biggest literary figures of the Middle Ages, Dante Alighieri, wrote The Divine Comedy, a story in which the poet is given a guided tour of life after visiting the inferno, purgatory, and heaven. This work seems reminiscent of Aristotle’s catharsis idea in that the reader’s soul is cleansed by seeing what Dante sees. Geoffrey Chaucer uses death as a central theme in several of his Canterbury Tales. In “The Pardoner’s Tale,” three men actually set out to find and kill Death, who has taken the life of one of their friends. The Wife of Bath, one of the most critically examined female literary characters, tells a story of a knight who faces execution unless he can find out what women truly want. In these stories Chaucer uses death as a theme to demonstrate several ideas: Humans are afraid of death; they sometimes become at once saddened and angry when loved ones die; and finally, something demonstrated in nearly all of these works is the idea that humans fear death because they value life so dearly and they do not know what comes after death. Not knowing what comes after death is significantly portrayed in Renaissance literature as well, especially in the poetry of England, in which the theme of carpe diem (Latin for “seize the day”) is so common. From Robert Herrick’s iconic “To the Virgins to Make Much of Time” to John Donne, the idea of “seize the day” is not so much an inspiration to enjoy life as it is a warning to enjoy life quickly before it ends. On the other hand, in Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus, the title character makes a deal, transferring his soul to the devil for immortality because he does not want to die. Later in the Renaissance, John Milton composed one of the greatest epics in the English language, Paradise Lost, in which he sets out to “justify the ways of God to men” (book 1, l. 26). In doing so, he must explain death as much as life. However, any discussion of Renaissance literature must highlight William Shakespeare, who used the theme of death in many of his works. In Sonnet 73, he uses the traditional symbolism of seasons, in which spring represents birth and youth

educationâ•…â•… 25 while winter represents death with the lines “That time of year thou mayst in me behold, / When yellow leaves, or none, or few do hang, / Upon those boughs which shake against the cold” (ll. 1–3). The speaker is calling for the reader to see how he is getting close to death. The sonnet ends with the line “To love that well, which thou must leave ere long” (l. 14), which again alludes to the carpe diem theme. However, Shakespeare incorporates diverse ideas about death in his works, and one that is different is in Sonnet 71, “No longer mourn for me when I am dead,” in which the speaker recommends forgetting about him, “Lest the wide world should look into your moan / And mock you with me after I am gone” (ll. 13–14). Here, Shakespeare proposes a different idea about death, mainly to forgo grieving and simply get on with life. Of course, he employs the death theme in his plays in various ways as well, from the suicidal Ophelia in Hamlet to the pretended death of Hero in Much Ado about Nothing to the deaths brought on by the evil Iago in Othello. Characters avenge deaths of loved ones, face death in battle, and even plot the betrayal of other characters. Shakespeare is perhaps unparalleled in all of literature in his ability to invoke the whole range of human emotion regarding death. Through later periods of literature all over the world, authors have continued to use death as a major theme, symbolically, metaphorically, and physically. Evident in such novels as Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, Charles Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities, and Richard Wright’s Native Son, Alexandre Dumas’s The Count of Monte Cristo, Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace, death provides authors with the substance to create an emotional response in the reader like no other topic. Themes like betrayal, vengeance, greed, honor, justice, courage, and failure are almost always portrayed in conjunction with death. Some of the great novels have been born in a response to death, including Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, in which Victor struggles to create life out of his response to his own mother’s death, but in the ensuing action, he loses those most dear to him. Looking at more contemporary novels, some of the most famous American writers—Stephen King, John Grisham, Nicholas Sparks—are noted for their

riveting stories that revolve around mystery and death. Authors have all the material of life around them from which to draw, but nevertheless, death has always been and will continue to be one of the most prominent themes in literature, and for many reasons: There is a pervading symbolism attached to death in different cultures and religions. Death signifies an end and a great mystery about what comes next, and the range of human emotions surrounding it is so vast that authors are able to combine it with many other themes. See also Allende, Isabel: House of Spirits, The; Bierce, Ambrose: “Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge, An”; Brontë, Emily: Wuthering Heights; Browning, Robert: “My Last Duchess”; Camus, Albert: Stranger, The; Capote, Truman: In Cold Blood; Coleridge, Samuel Taylor: “Rime of the Ancient Mariner, The”: DeLillo, Don: White Noise; Dickens, Charles: Christmas Carol, A; Dickinson, Emily: poems; Eliot, T. S.: “Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, The”; Hawthorne, Nathaniel: “Rappaccini’s Daughter”; Keats, John: poetry; Miller, Arthur: Death of a Salesman; Poe, Edgar Allan: “Fall of the House of Usher, The”; Shakespeare, William: Romeo and Juliet; Welty, Eudora: Optimist ’s Daughter, The; Whitman, Walt; Leaves of Grass; Woolf, Virginia: Mrs Dalloway; To the Lighthouse. FURTHER READING Fiedler, Leslie. Love and Death in the American Novel. New York: Dalkey Archive Press, 1998.

Christopher Lessick

education

It is no surprise that education, which affects the relationship between the individual and society, should figure as a perennial theme in literature from the ancient classics of Greece and Rome to contemporary literature. The shadow of the Dark Ages is said to have lifted only after the ancient classics were rediscovered in the wake of the fall of Constantinople in 1453 and the dispersal of its famous libraries that housed these books. Education is not always delivered through the same channels, nor does it always serve the same purposes, and it is not

26â•…â•… education always a positive force. However, its ability to shape society is undeniable. Plato’s The Republic offers two models of education, one for warrior rulers and the other a more philosophical approach for the philosopher ruler, given through the pedagogical example and allegory of the cave. In this allegory, Plato describes a group of people who have been imprisoned in a cave all their lives. They see shadows of things passing in front of them and believe the shadows to be reality. The philosopher is like a prisoner freed from the cave who understands now the true reality of things. The highest goal of this form of education is knowledge of the good, and it is only through this that Plato’s enlightened philosopher rulers can rule a utopian community. Similarly, Niccolò Machiavelli’s The Prince is focused on the education of the sovereign or political leader of a state in the art of good governance through a strategic deployment of force and guile. Machiavelli uses the metaphors of the lion and the fox to underscore the strength, nobility, slyness, and shrewdness needed to retain power and triumph over one’s rivals. During the Renaissance, education found literary expression in the form of conduct books. The Renaissance was a golden age for the proliferation of conduct and etiquette books, which were an important aspect in the achievement of a well-rounded individual, especially in a feudal world where manners reflected the person. Unlike practical books that taught the martial arts or educated one in the sciences and arts, these books had a strong moral dimension that sought to inculcate ethical virtues and produce the ideal gentleman or gentlewoman. Baldassare Castiglione’s The Book of the Courtier (1528) is a prescriptive treatise on the ideal courtier and outlines the essential virtues that he should embody. Narrated through an engaging series of imaginary conversations between the real-life courtiers to the duke of Urbino, Castiglione’s speakers discuss qualities of noble behavior—namely, discretion, decorum, nonchalance and gracefulness—as well as wider questions, such as the duties of a good government and the true nature of love. Castiglione’s literary skill and sharp psychological insights make this guide to manners both an entertaining

and a definitive glimpse into the ideals and debates of Renaissance life. Advice and conduct books targeted at women were an especially popular genre in 19th-century England and America. These guidebooks recommended a broad education for women that also included French, drawing, sewing, and the ability to sing or play a musical instrument. They emphasized the importance of a sweet demeanor and courteous tongue, of good humor and wit. Jane Austen’s heroines, for example, embody the lightness of spirit and wit that all women could aspire to if they wanted to snare a suitable man. In America, Emily Thornwell’s The Lady’s Guide to Perfect Gentility (New York, 1857) was aimed at white women, The College of Life, or Practical Self-Educator [sic], a Manual of Self-Improvement for the Colored Race, shows that rules for good wifehood were proposed for both white and African-American middle-class women. Writings on education such as John Milton’s Tract on Education and Free Expression (1644), and John Locke’s Thoughts Concerning Education (1693) reflect the intense debates on education in the 17th and 18th century. Mary Wollstonecraft wrote Thoughts on the Education of Daughters (1786), and her later A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) is a radical political and educational treatise. She critiques Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s view on women’s education and argues that women are not naturally submissive and dependent creatures and that if they exercised their rationality through a good education, they could be equal partners of men. In emphasizing rationality in women, Wollstonecraft was extending the basic ideas of Enlightenment philosophy to women. Rousseau’s Émile, or On Education (1762) was the precursor of the education novel. In Émile, Rousseau advocates a system of education that would enable the natural man to survive corrupt society. Divided into five books, the novel traces Émile’s education from childhood to maturity. The first three books focus on childhood; the last two examine Émile’s youth and domestic and civil life as he falls in love with Sophie. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship (1795–96) is a novel of upbringing and education and tells the story of Wilhelm’s disillusionment with bourgeois

educationâ•…â•… 27 life as he apprentices himself to the mysterious Tower Society comprising enlightened aristocrats who will guide him towards his true calling. In Plots of Enlightenment: Education and Novel in Eighteenth Century England (1999), Richard A. Barney argues that the conjunction of the early novel with theories of education reflects the cultural developments of the 18th century. He states that “educational theory during the late 17th and 18th century formed an indispensable source for the novel’s narrative form and its often contradictory representation of individual social identity” (2). Education is an important theme in Victorian fiction, not just through the bildungsroman, or coming of age novel, but also in the form of a critique of methods of education, of corporal punishment, and of inhumane boarding schools such as those portrayed in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847). The harsh and inhumane conditions of Lowood, the boarding school that Jane is dispatched to after she rebels against Mrs. Reed, reflect the desperate conditions of many real schools in England at that time. The hypocrisy of Brocklehurst, who lives a life of luxury while preaching the values of a Spartan life for the girls at Lowood highlights the hypocrisy of the moneyed patrons of many of these so-called charitable educational institutions run for the poor. The bildungsroman, or “novel of formation,” is essentially a novel of education as it traces the journey of a character from childhood to adulthood through education and the life experiences that he or she has. Charles Dickens’s David Copperf ield (1849–50) Nicholas Nickleby (1838–39), and Great Expectations (1860–61) are all novels that tell stories of rags to riches made possible through education and wealthy benefactors, but they also count the tragic toll in loss of friendships and self included in this process. In Dombey and Son (1846– 48), Dickens offers a critique of the emphasis on acquiring classical languages in schools as a passport to university admission and upward social mobility. The force-feeding of the boys is communicated through the aptly named Mr. Feeder’s method of instruction: “They knew no rest from the pursuit of strong-hearted verbs, savage noun-substantives, inflexible syntactic passages, and ghosts of exercises that appeared to them in their dreams” (11).

Contemporary cultural theorists recognize the vital relationship between power, knowledge, and cultural development. Literature as an expression and constituent of culture plays an integral role in the perpetuation of certain power relations, whether they are of class, caste, or gender relations. In Annie John, Jamaica Kincaid unmasks this colonial mission through the examination of colonial institutions such as the convent schools of various missionary orders. In particular, she excoriates the soft propaganda of British colonial rule through the widespread teaching of William Wordsworth’s poem “Daffodils.” Generations of students from Africa, South Asia, and the Caribbean have memorized “Daffodils” as the very epitome of romantic imagination and cultured sensibility, despite never having set sight on a daffodil. The daffodil only grows in temperate zones and is foreign to the tropical climes of these colonized places. If literature functions as a hegemonic tool to shape the sensibility of the colonized, it also functions as a counter-hegemonic tool by inspiring writings of resistance through the ideals of liberty, equality, and the brotherhood of man as set out in the works of Rousseau, John Stuart Mill, and Karl Marx. Much of postcolonial literature embodies this ambivalent function of education, as in Tsi Tsi Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions (1988), in which the character Tambu aspires to wealth and status through education, but this very education becomes a culturally alienating force where she loses touch with her roots and family. Learning, knowledge, and culture are closely allied to literature, and consequently education and literature share a symbiotic relationship. By extension, adjectives such as literate, educated, cultured, and learned are synonyms of each other and reflect a conglomerate of desired attributes that are centered in and expressed through literature. Both education and literature work hand in hand as powerful transformative tools that can shape minds and hearts and in turn effect change for the better. See also Adams Henry: Education of Henry Adams, The; Amis, Kingsley: Lucky Jim; Bradbury, Ray: Fahrenheit 451; Byron, George Gordon Byron, Lord: Don Juan; Emerson, Ralph Waldo: “American Scholar, The”; Haley, Alex,

28â•…â•… ethics and Malcolm X: Autobiography of Malcolm X, The; Huxley, Aldous: Brave New World; Lawrence, D. H.: Rainbow, The; Plath, Sylvia: Bell Jar, The; Shaw, George Bernard: Pygmalion; Shelley, Mary: Frankenstein; Smith, Betty: Tree Grows in Brooklyn, A; Walker, Alice: Color Purple, The; Washington, Booker T.: Up from Slavery. FURTHER READING Barney, Richard A. Plots of Enlightenment: Education and the Novel in Eighteenth Century England. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press. 1999. Dickens, Charles. Dombey and Son. New York: Penguin Classics, 1980. Hickling-Hudson, Anne, Julie Matthews, and Annette Woods, eds. Disrupting Preconceptions: Postcolonialism and Education. Brisbane: Post-Pressed, 2004.

Rajender Kaur

ethics

Ethics, as a branch of philosophy, seeks to explore rational decision making, with the hope of establishing standards for ideal behavior. Although most people believe that they have an inherent sense of right and wrong, thus making the study of ethics unnecessary, when ethics is examined across time and across various cultures, we see significant differences in how people interpret these concepts. Complicating things further, ethics is often taught alongside or as an extension of religion. For many, the answer to moral questions can be found in holy books or by consulting clergy. However, the way that Scripture is translated and interpreted has changed over time and is susceptible to different interpretations from one person to another. The study of ethics, then, seeks to explore the standards people have adopted for themselves, whether unconsciously or as part of moral or religious instruction, and to recommend a rational basis for these standards through this process. Because ethical positions are human constructs and because humans are capable of changing their conceptions of right and wrong, ethics is hardly a stable field of study. Rather, these debates are ongoing both among individuals and within larger, even global, communities.

Ethics and literature are intimately connected, having emerged simultaneously as humans developed language and began to communicate through stories. Literature is a particularly rich source of ethical reflection in that characters in imagined worlds can make decisions without hurting real people. There is also a level of ethical engagement outside of the story, on the formal level. How writers represent the world has an impact on how the reader thinks of his or her own world. Although fictional characters run the ethical spectrum (some positively evil, others absolutely good, most somewhere in between) stories very often involve characters making choices with ethical implications. Similarly, many philosophical texts dealing with ethics make use of small fictions to illustrate a point. For example, the German philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) tells a story to help develop his position on being untruthful. If someone runs into your house to escape a murderer, and the murderer knocks at the door to ask if you have seen his or her intended victim, you are forced to decide between lying or telling the truth (and thus helping the murderer). For reasons that will be examined here, Kant argues that even in this situation it would be unethical to lie. If every ethical decision was clear-cut, there would not be much need for or interest in ethics. However, because so many decisions are not as clear-cut as people would like, often involving a choice between two conflicting principles that we believe in, it helps to think through and articulate not only what we believe to be right, but also the relative importance of the principles behind these decisions. While many philosophers have commented on these issues, there are a number of important positions that help to orient the novice. It should be noted, however, that although the Western tradition has been emphasized in American and British education, there are writers on ethics and ethical traditions from all over the globe, many of whom are gaining prominence in literary study. The English word ethics is derived from the Greek ethike, and in keeping with this linguistic borrowing, the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle (384–322 b.c.) is often thought of as the first significant contributor to the Western tradition of ethics. In the Aristotelian view, everything has a reason for existence, or some end

ethicsâ•…â•… 29 that it is meant to achieve. For humans, this state is happiness and it is reached through the cultivation of virtues. In order to be happy, humans have to cultivate their potential, often by seeking what Aristotle called the golden mean, or, in other words, by seeking moderation in most things. People act ethically—for example, giving up some of their dinner to help feed a hungry child—not because it is in their self-interest (most probably their stomach wants the whole thing) but because it reflects the cultivation of the virtue of generosity. Put simply, in Aristotelian ethics, people act to demonstrate or work toward being better, more virtuous people. They show who they are, not what they want. Kant, one of the most influential writers on ethics, offered a different, though not unrelated, position. In the Kant view, every human is free insofar as he or she has the ability to exercise reason. Ethics, then, is something that each person imposes on him or herself freely. Kant developed what he called the categorical imperative to describe the basis for ethical action. Lying, according to Kant, is evil in that it deprives others of the ability to exercise their reason properly. Therefore, telling the truth is a categorical imperative—it is the right thing to do, no matter the circumstances. The other major 18th-century ethical philosophy is that of utilitarianism. Developed by Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832) and John Stuart Mill (1806– 73), utilitarianism can be described as a philosophy seeking the greatest good for the greatest number of people. Unlike Kant’s philosophy, utilitarianism is concerned only with the results of actions, not the intentions of the people making the decisions. For these thinkers, lying could be justified if it did more good than harm. There are, however, objections to this philosophy; most people would have a hard time sacrificing a family member to try to save two strangers, for example. One important 20th-century ethical thinker was Emmanuel Levinas (1906–95). Unlike Aristotle, Bentham, or Kant, Levinas begins his ideas on ethics with an interaction with another human. For Levinas, each of us has an infinite responsibility to the other person, who will always remain a mystery to us. In fact, Levinas argues that it is precisely when we stop looking at one another as unique people

that ethical problems arise. As a prisoner in a Nazi concentration camp during the Second World War, Levinas saw firsthand what people were capable of when they labeled others and thought of them as a group rather than as individuals. Precisely because his philosophy emphasizes the importance of language and labeling, Levinas’s thought demonstrates the importance of literature in either furthering bigotry or in exposing the workings of this procedure and warding against it. Few stories have remained in the popular imagination as long or as firmly as Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) and this, in large part, is because many of the ethical questions it raises are still being debated today. For example, is it right to take advantage of scientific advances to create new life forms? Is the genetic alteration of plants and animals safe? Is it right to clone humans? If we do, does the clone have the same rights as the original person? Relating to debates over abortion rights, when is a human a human? At what point do the rights of the child supersede the mother’s right to choose? Is it ethical to abort a pregnancy if the child has traits the parents consider to be undesirable? In the novel, Victor Frankenstein becomes obsessed with exploring the limits of his power as well as the limits of science and locks himself away from family and friends in order to create a being. Although he at first finds his creation to be beautiful, when the being finally awakes, Victor is horrified by his creation and runs away. Unlike his portrayal in many adaptations of the novel, Victor’s creation is hardly a monster at first; he begins his life by helping a poor family, learning their language, and reading John Milton’s Paradise Lost. Only after the monster, based solely on his appearance, is repeatedly rejected by those around him, including Victor, does he become evil and set out on a path of vengeance. The novel simultaneously taps into many ethical debates over the responsibility of parents to their children, the responsibility of society to those it superficially labels monstrous, the ethics governing experiments with science and technology, and many more. Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway (1925) is another novel that resonates with many ethical debates. Clarissa Dalloway is an unlikely heroine according to traditional logic, in that the culmina-

30â•…â•… family tion of her day is a small party she is giving (rather than, say, an epic battle or journey). By conveying her thinking directly through stream-of-consciousness narration, Woolf exposes the complicated, nearly countless threads of Clarissa’s thought as she goes about her day. In this way, the novel challenges not only 19th-century novelistic conventions but a predominant sexist society that values the accomplishments of “great men” as well. The character who seems to most resemble Clarissa, the shell-shocked soldier Septimus Smith, commits suicide at the end of the novel. This grim conclusion brings up two debates: first, whether suicide is ever ethically permissible, and second, what responsibility society has to returning soldiers. Haunting the entire novel is World War I and questions about whether war is ever justified and what its relation is to sexism at home and imperialism abroad. One of the strengths of Woolf ’s writing is the way in which it subtly critiques misogynistic society, demonstrating, for example, how much of the thinking and writing deemed important (including the ethical philosophies discussed above) are written by men or assume a male agent and fail to account for the impact of emotions and the subconscious on reason. Flann O’Brien’s At Swim-Two-Birds (1939) extends the formal experimentation of Woolf and O’Brien’s fellow Irishman James Joyce, offering a much more humorous, though no less ethical stance on writing. One of the novel’s many plots centers on Dermot Trellis, a popular fiction writer who uses character types to create marketable fiction. When he sleeps, his characters come to life and, unhappy with the roles they have been given, work to keep the writer asleep while they put him on trial. In this sense, this highly self-conscious work dramatizes the argument forwarded by Levinas. Additionally, Trellis’s decision to write a moral tale that nonetheless includes enough smut and bad language to keep it interesting offers a satiric commentary on the genre of the novel, whose practitioners have time and again defended the inclusion of “unsavory” parts as necessary to the book’s overall moral purpose. While the decision in this instance can be ridiculed as self-serving, it does seem that works that are overly didactic lack the complexity and therefore the staying power of other stories. It is clear that ethics will

continue to play an important part in literature for some time to come. See also Chestnutt, Charles W.: “Goophered Grapevine, The;” Davis, Rebecca Harding: Life in the Iron Mills; Defoe, Daniel: Moll Flanders; Ibsen, Henrik: Doll ’s House, A; Hedda Gabler; Ishiguro, Kazuo: Remains of the Day, The; Kingsolver, Barbara: Poisonwood Bible, The; Machiavelli, Niccolò: P rince, The; Malamud, Bernard: Natural, The; McMurtry, Larry: Lonesome Dove; Molière; Misanthrope, The; Paine, Thomas: “Age of Reason, The”; Thoreau, Henry David: “Resistance to Civil Government”; Vonnegut, Kurt: Slaughterhouse-Five; Wollstonecraft, Mary: Vindication of the Rights of Woman, A. FURTHER READING Eagleton, Terry. Literary Theory: An Introduction. 2d ed. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996. Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Practical Reason. Translated by Werner S. Pluhar. Indianapolis: Hackett, 2002. Levinas, Emmanuel. Otherwise Than Being: or, Beyond Essence. Translated by Alphonso Lingis. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1998.

Daniel Ryan Morse

family

Much has been written on the institution of family in the fields of sociology, psychology, and anthropology, but one of the most famous comments on the family comes from literature. Leo Tolstoy wrote, in Anna Karenina, “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” This comment underscores the importance of family happiness in our lives as human beings. From our family, we get our beliefs and values—religious, political, social. From our family, we learn to function in the real world as adults. We spend an average of 18 years in this environment, and its atmosphere, positive and negative, cannot help but deeply affect us for life. Furthermore, it is not just the families in which we are raised that shape our worldview, but also the families in which we function as adults. As parents and spouses, we tend to prioritize our families over all other aspects of life, and also to see our families

familyâ•…â•… 31 as coherent units, united in solidarity against the outside world. These family ties can be a soothing, strengthening force, helping us to battle life’s trials. However, these ties, always complicated, can also work to destroy us, rob us of the emotional tools we need to survive, and provide us with no defenses when trouble sets in. The families into which we are born and the families we create as we get older hold such importance for us because they are our primary sources of identification. The answer to the question “Who am I?” lies, in large part, in who our families are. The sociologist Jerome Kagan notes that children identify most readily with their parents, and that before adolescence they believe they share the same basic qualities and values with their “parental models” (Kagan et al. 40). In Chaim Potok’s The Chosen, David struggles with his father’s identity as a rabbi and Reuven struggles with his father’s identity as an academic. Neither boy feels the chosen path is necessarily the right one for him, but because they identify so strongly with their fathers, they are confused about who they are and who they are supposed to be. Ultimately, although they will, in a sense, trade paths, with Reuven entering the rabbinate and David going to graduate school, the bonds they formed with their families in childhood will serve them well. Not all family identifications are positive, of course. In Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night, the Tyrones all feel that they are doomed to never achieve their dreams and goals precisely because they are Tyrones. Brothers Edmund and Jamie, one a tubercular alcoholic and sometime merchant mariner and the other a failed alcoholic actor, are both trapped in a family system that will not allow them happiness, only dreams of happiness. Their father is a cheap, belittling alcoholic whose own dreams of vaudeville success died, and their mother is a morphine addict constantly in mourning for the son she lost as an infant and the “normal” life she gave up to marry Tyrone. For each of the Tyrones, “who they are” seems sadly predetermined. In addition to helping to identify us, family also provides us with a haven in times of adversity. Especially in the modern Western world, according to Edmund Shorter, there is a “special sense of soli-

darity that separates the domestic union from the surrounding community” (205). Families have a tendency to protect their own and to shut out the outside world if need be. Even families who participate heavily in the community, such as the March family in Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women, put family before others. For instance, when they receive a telegram that Mr. March is ill, Marmee goes off to Washington, D.C., to be with him, while Jo sells her hair to finance the trip. The entire family worries over Beth when she is ill and mourns her deeply when she dies, with Jo and Amy putting aside their differences for the sake of their beloved sister. In Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie, the “safe” haven of family actually becomes a handicap to both Laura and Tom Wingfield. Because Laura has the security of knowing she can cocoon herself away from the outside world that terrifies her so much, she never overcomes her painful shyness and cannot function outside her family’s apartment. For Tom, because his mother expects him to take care of the two of them, the “haven” becomes a prison, and he can think of nothing but escape, first the metaphorical escape of alcohol and movies and finally the literal escape of a job that will take him far away. The Wingfield family are able to keep their troubles locked up in an apartment because that is how families work. If they so choose, they may stay behind closed doors. This domestic sphere, as it is sometimes called, is not subject to what society might want, but only what the family itself desires. The ancient Greek philosopher Plato spoke of this separation between the “public sphere” and the “private sphere,” saying that public people must be responsible and rational at all times because they participate wholly in both private life and the life of the community around them. Therefore, they must have the highest moral standards and the most exacting sense of justice (Elshtain 53). Private people, on the other hand, need not live up to high ideals; they need only possess a “limited goodness” as it applies to the sphere in which they dwell (54). The family, then, as the nexus of the “private sphere” is important, but only because it provides a sanctuary from public life. Those most closely associated with the family, women and children, need only aspire to this “limited goodness.” This view, unfortunately,

32â•…â•… family persisted well into the 20th century. In Barbara Kingsolver’s The Poisonwood Bible, Nathan Price drags his wife and four daughters to Africa, bent on converting the Africans to Christianity but uncaring and unmindful of how his family will survive there. Reverend Price, as a public figure, believes that only he has the answers to how life should be lived. However, it becomes clear that it is the domestic sphere that will prove to be the most important prong of life in the Congo. Providing food and shelter and avoiding deadly animals is the immediate necessity for the Price family, and Price cannot do those things. In contrast to Nathan Price, the characters in Thornton Wilder’s Our Town celebrate the domestic sphere and the importance of family in our lives. The Stage Manager does not exalt the work of Dr. Gibbs, providing medical care to the town, over the cleaning, cooking, and child-care duties of Mrs. Gibbs, his wife. In fact, he explicitly points out how important these day-to-day tasks are in the life of a human being. Emily Webb’s final speech in the graveyard emphasizes the beauty of these mundane elements of life, demonstrating that when we underappreciate the private in favor of the more flashy public, we miss out on the wonder of life. Not all families provide sanctuary or comfort, however; many make life harder for their members. In fact, it is common in Western society to blame the problems of adults on unhappiness in their families when they were growing up, whether there is good evidence of this causal relationship or not (Kagan et al. 41). Bigger Thomas, the protagonist of Richard Wright’s Native Son, would like nothing more than to get away from his nagging mother and his annoying sister, who, he feels (with good reason), are unsupportive of him. Bigger’s frustration and anger, of course, have more to do with being poor and black in Chicago in the 1930s than they do with his mother, but it is significant that he would allow himself to blame her at all for the way he feels. Despite evidence to the contrary, many children look to their parents as the source of their travails. Bigger finds himself an alternative “family,” albeit not a very functional one, in the form of a small gang of friends. This impulse, too, is

common. When family, for whatever reason, disappoints us, we turn to others to provide identification, support, comfort, and sanctuary. While some social commentators might worry that this is a product of the modern era, history shows otherwise. Families have always had to compete with “others” and family members have always sought time with same-sex peers (Shorter, quoted 15). In fact, because the community no longer actively participates in private ceremonies surrounding birth, marriage, and death, it can be argued that families are more stable in the 21st century than they were before the industrial age. The family, far from being weakened by the changes and problems that come with the modern world, has instead adapted to it, remaining a source of inspiration in our lives and our literature. See also Albee, Edward: Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf ?; Anaya, Rudolfo: Bless Me, Ultima; Anderson, Sherwood: W inesburg, Ohio; Baldwin, James: Go Tell It on the Mountain; Cao Xuequin: Dream of the Red Chamber; Erdrich, Louise; Tracks; Franklin, Benjamin: Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, The; Hansberry, Lorraine: R aisin in the Sun, A; Homer: Odyssey, The; Houston, Jean Wakatsuki: Farewell to Manzanar ; Joyce, James: Dubliners; Kafka, Franz: “Metamorphosis, The”; Lewis, Sinclair: Main Street; Lowry, Lois: Giver, The; Molière: Tartuffe; O’Connor, Flannery: “Good Man Is Hard to Find, A”; Paton, Alan: Cry, the Beloved Country; Sophocles: Antigone; Steinbeck, John: Grapes of Wrath, The; Red Pony, The; Stowe, Harriet Beecher: Uncle Tom’s Cabin; Welty, Eudora: Optimist ’s Daughter, The; Wordsworth, William: “Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey.” FURTHER READING Elshtain, Jean Bethke. The Family in Political Thought. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1982. Kagan, Jerome, Alice Rossi, and Tamara Hareven. The Family. New York: Norton, 1978. Shorter, Edward. The Making of the American Family. New York: Basic Books, 1975.

Jennifer McClinton-Temple

fateâ•…â•… 33

fate

Fate, according to modern usage, is an agency or power that orders and predetermines a future course of events. In the ancient world, the often inexplicable and unavoidable in the affairs of human beings were attributed to fate. In Greek mythology, the goddesses known as the Fates, or Moirae, spun out the destinies of men and women. With the resurgence of confidence in human agency in fifth-century Athens, the Greeks began to develop more subtle conceptions of the relationship between fate and free will, especially through the tragedies of their theater, which were grounded in religious ritual. Sophocles’s Oedipus the King presents the classical treatment of human action as determined by fate or free will, or a convergence of the two. Such a convergence is understandable through a thought of the early Greek philosopher Heraclitus, “Man’s character is his fate [daimōn]” (Fragment 119), or the more familiar “Character is destiny.” Since demon (Gr. daimōn) means both “supernatural being” and “ministering, or indwelling spirit” (Oxford English Dictionary), the statement allows a convergence of superhuman and human agency, fate and free will. In other words, the guidance of our actions derives from ourselves, our own character. Sophocles’ tragedy supremely illustrates this idea. Oedipus, a prince of Corinth who is led to doubts about his parentage by a stray comment from a drunken man, goes to Delphi, where he consults the oracle, which tells him that he will kill his father and marry his mother. Shocked by this prophecy, Oedipus immediately flees Corinth to evade the oracle, the illogic and inconsistency of his actions never occurring to him. Regarding the unresolved question of parentage, he is fleeing the king and queen of Corinth, who might not be his parents. Regarding his contradictory attitude toward the oracle, he believes in the oracle enough to react to its admonition but not enough to realize that he cannot evade his foreknown destiny. His destiny, however, is not necessarily predetermined by the powers above. Rather, his foreknowledge makes him act irrationally to fulfill his destiny. This irrational conduct is part and parcel of his hubris (the overstepping of the bounds of human conduct), as exhibited often in his killing of an older

man (his real father) in a fit of alpha male rage and his angry browbeating of both Creon, his trustworthy brother-in-law, and Teiresias, the revered seer, when they tell him that he himself is the murderer of the former king of Thebes—to him preposterous but, nonetheless, the truth. Ironically, Oedipus’s foreknowledge drove him to fulfill the very prophecy that he was trying so hard to evade. He broke the two cardinal rules of Greek ethics that would guide one toward good destiny: “Know thyself ” and “Nothing in excess.” In his version of Oedipus, Sophocles turns the standard story of the futility of trying to evade an inevitable fate dictated by the gods and transforms it into a veritable tragedy of a human agent through his own character flaws and actions. In a further exploration of fate and autonomy, human action, expanded to a wide sphere of civic enterprise in Virgil’s The Aeneid, translates itself into a founding myth, whereby personal good yields to the greater good of nation formation. It is Aeneas, fleeing to Italy after the fall of Troy, who, according to prophecy, will there found a noble and courageous race, which in time will surpass all other nations. At the same time, the fate of Aeneas and his descendants, the Romans, is influenced by the gods’ actions, particularly in the conflict between Venus and Juno, who respectively support and hinder the Roman enterprise for reasons that go back to Priam’s son Paris choosing Venus, goddess of love, as the most beautiful over Hera, goddess of marriage, and Athena, goddess of wisdom. Thus, in this nationalistic epic, divine agency and human aspiration—both personal and civic—constitute fate. Aeneas is the epitome of Roman piety—loyalty and devotion toward one’s homeland, family, and father—and his fate is synonymous with the future of Rome. In his wanderings, Aeneas finds shelter in Africa with the sympathetic Dido, the queen of Carthage. Later, the two fall in love and consummate their union. Aeneas is torn between his desire for a woman and his patriotic love: “hic amor, haec patria est” (“There is my love, there my country” [4.537]). Ultimately, both divine pressure and a sense of duty, as solemnized by prophecy, compel Aeneas to leave Dido, choosing Roma and its implicit amor (Roma spelled backwards) of patria—love of country—as his destiny.

34â•…â•… fate Virgil wrote his epic during a period of civil war and political and moral chaos in Rome after the fall of the Republic. Accordingly, The Aeneid reflects an attempt to revive Roman greatness by appealing to its mythic history and its basic moral values of piety, virtue, and constancy. At the same time, it sets out a political ideology that could be used beyond Virgil’s moral aims to justify imperialistic ambitions in the aggrandizement of the Roman Empire. In more modern times, the concept of manifest destiny, in the history of American expansion, worked in similar fashion to appropriate Native American land and to exploit indigenous people, in a “divinely ordained” mission to spread democracy. Both examples show how human beings have exploited “divine agency” and otherwise manipulated fate and destiny toward self-interest. As in the previously discussed works, the classical trope of superhuman prophecy figures importantly in William Shakespeare’s Macbeth to advance plot and human intention. Unlike Oedipus the King and The Aeneid, both of which revolve around a single, defining prophecy, Shakespeare’s tragedy operates with two, one propelling the rise and the other underwriting the fall. The prophecy of the three witches (a spin-off of the Fates) incites the protagonist into evil in the first half of the play; then, symmetrically in the second half, the suddenly unveiled prophecy regarding Macduff seals Macbeth’s defeat and death. In act 1, Macbeth, thane of Glamis, and his companion, Banquo, come upon three witches on the heath who respectively address Macbeth as thane of Glamis, thane of Cawdor, and “king hereafter” (1.3.50). To Banquo they enounce the following occult prophecy: “Lesser than Macbeth, and greater. / Not so happy, yet much happier. / Thou shalt get kings, though thou be none” (1.3.67–68). With the partial fulfillment of the prophecy, his becoming thane of Cawdor, Macbeth is tempted against his better reason by the further fruits of “vaulting ambition” (1.7.27): kingship. When the she-man, Lady Macbeth, accuses him of unmanly cowardice in her infamous speech (of how she’d “[pluck her] nipple from [her baby’s] boneless gums, /And dash’d the brains out” [1.7.57–58]), she gives Macbeth the courage to kill the king. Though Mac-

beth chidingly affirms the moral position “I dare do all that may become a man; / Who dares do more is none” (1.7.46–47), he goes along with the plan of regicide nonetheless, crossing from honor to villainy. After the murder of Duncan, Macbeth becomes king in his place, but the more he tries, like Oedipus, to adhere to the prophecy, the more it eludes him. Hence, one murder leads to further: He has Banquo killed to ensure the crown for his progeny rather than Banquo’s as the witches foretold. Again like Oedipus, Macbeth both acts upon and acts against the prophecy in ardent contradiction, incited by momentary megalomania, sealed by the murderous deed and, thereafter, the will never to submit in the downward spiral of violence and death. The fulfillment of the witches’ prophecy drives the events of further carnage fatefully and fatally with a peculiar vitality of their own—a concatenation of one violent act igniting the next. Ultimately, Macbeth’s final end comes in a showdown in act 5, scene 8 with Macduff, the man “of no woman born” (5.8.13), the only man whom, according to the witches’ prophecy, Macbeth must fear. Presenting itself as the fulfillment of fate, the duel between Macbeth and Macduff can also be seen, like the other preceding cases, as an example of self-fulfilling prophecy. The event materializes not so much through the agency of higher powers but more often through a human being’s reactions to his foreknowledge of the event. In Macbeth’s case, it is less a superhuman agency that controls the outcome and more a wearied Macbeth himself, who, finally facing his nemesis, is taunted by Macduff, who fights him with invincible fury to avenge the deaths of his wife and children. In Romeo and Juliet, fate again plays a defining role to induce tragedy, working as a force of fortuity to obstruct the best intentions of human beings. In Shakespeare’s early tragedy about star-crossed lovers, Romeo and Juliet’s problems lie in that they have been born into two families engaged in an age-old feud. The deaths of the young lovers might have been prevented had there not been a plague, which kept Friar John from informing Romeo that Juliet was under a spell of faked death. They might have succeeded in living peacefully apart from their families, but such an outcome probably would not have effected an end to the feud that the chastening

freedomâ•…â•… 35 deaths of the two lovers apparently induced. Despite the role of fortuity in the tragic outcome, the more defining accountability rests in the human agents themselves. To this effect, the plague, seemingly fortuitous, precisely symbolizes the feud’s moral rottenness. In all these works, with the exception of The Aeneid, fate presents divine agency as muted, passively present, or altogether absent in the affairs of human beings. The emphasis, rather, is that events emerge through deliberate human action, not through chance. Such a conception prefigures the 20th-century philosophy of existentialism, which affirms a human being’s freedom to act and accountability for choices made, despite the nihilism to which random, meaningless, absurd events may lend themselves. Suzan-Lori Parks’s 21st-century Pulitzer Prize– winning play Topdog/Underdog further explores the themes of fate and free will through the experience of two African-American brothers struggling to get by and get ahead, the tragicomic absurdity of their underclass existence deftly balanced with the burdens placed by mythology and history on their autonomy. Their father, in a whim, named the brothers Lincoln and Booth, foreshadowing the antagonism that will plague their interactions within their instinctive alliance to assist each other in the plight of the African-American man: dearth of opportunity. Thus, they wrestle in the age-old struggle of Cain and Abel, representing the eternal clash between the topdog and underdog as both individuals and subgroups of society. Lincoln (Link) emancipates himself from his former lucrative but dangerous life as a three-card monte hustler and instead, ludicrously, becomes a black impersonator of Lincoln in an amusement park game, whereby he gets repeatedly “assassinated” by all the Booths in the world who have an “axe tuh grind” (46). Like President Lincoln, who single-handedly freed the slaves, Link tries to free his younger brother from the enthrallment of three-card monte—unsuccessfully because, like his namesake, he cannot offer Booth viable opportunities of gainful employment. His efforts to protect Booth only appear as actions of a rival and inexorably lead the two into a fatal face-off in the three-card monte. Again, as with all

the works previously discussed, in Topdog/Underdog it is individual action based on characteristic disposition, induced by the psychological, emotional, and economic urgencies of the dramatic moment, that bring Lincoln and Booth to the self-fulfilling prophecy presaged by fate, myth, and history. See also Bellow, Saul: Adventures of Augie March, The; Coleridge, Samuel Taylor: “Rime of the Ancient Mariner, The”; Conrad, Joseph: Lord Jim; Dickens, Charles: Tale of Two Cities, A; Doyle, Sir Arthur Conan: Hound of the Baskervilles, The; Dreiser, Theodore: American Tragedy, An; Edwards, Jonathan: “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God”; Erdrich, Louise: Bingo Palace, The; Flaubert, Gustave: Madame Bovary; García Márquez, Gabriel: One Hundred Years of Solitude; Harte, Bret: “Outcasts of Poker Flats, The”; Homer: Iliad, The; Lowry, Lois: Giver, The; McCarthy, Cormac: All the P retty Horses; Naipaul, V. S.: Bend in the River, A; Shakespeare, William: Twelfth Night; Tolkien, J. R. R.: Lord of the Rings, The; Wilde, Oscar: Importance of Being Earnest, The. FURTHER READING May, Rollo. Freedom and Destiny. New York: Norton, 1981. Parks, Suzan-Lori. Topdog/Underdog. New York: Dramatist’s Play Service, 2004.

Unhae Langis

freedom

Close observers can see that, rather than standing still, the Statue of Liberty steps forward over broken shackles, representing how freedom progresses, its very definition changing over time. In the medieval worldview, freedom meant acting according to reason, and it focused on the discussion of free will. However, the modern definition of freedom primarily focuses on political and civil freedoms, having little to do with reason. This differentiation between medieval and modern conceptions of freedom follows the English philosopher John Locke’s 17thcentury divide between liberty and license. In his Second Treatise of Government (1690), Locke writes, “The state of nature has a law of nature to govern it,

36â•…â•… freedom which obliges every one: and reason, which is that law, teaches all mankind, who will but consult it, that being all equal and independent .╯.╯. there cannot be supposed any such subordination among us, that may authorize us to destroy one another” (4). Liberty, then, may be defined as actions that conform to reason, whereas license allows for acts of passion, which may subordinate or harm others or the self. The assumptions Locke makes concerning why humans should conform to reason adhere to the medieval notion of the universe—namely, that it has a Creator who endowed humans with reason. Locke writes that all humans are “the workmanship of one omnipotent and infinitely wise maker.” (4) Created by an omniscient, omnipotent being, humans struggle to understand how they also may maintain freedom. The tension between free will and predestination dominates the concerns of medieval writers from Saint Augustine to John Milton. In the middle of Dante Alighieri’s The Divine Comedy, Dante the Pilgrim discusses the relationship between the freedom of human beings and the plans of the omnipotent creator. His dialoguing partner, Marco the Lombard, says that while “the heavens set your appetites in motion .╯.╯.╯, on greater power and a better nature you, who are free, depend; that Force engenders the mind in you, outside the heaven’s sway” (2.16.73, 79–81). In other words, God creates humans and provides them with reason, but he does not control them. As the “joyful Maker,” God gives the human soul motion, so “it turns willingly to things that bring delight” (2.16.89, 90). The will turns naturally to good objects. While the will should know the good objects by reason, the human souls, catering to their physical over their spiritual nature, often falter and choose earthly over heavenly goods. Thus, Dante the Pilgrim, representing “everyman,” has used his freedom for earthly delights and must learn instead to align his will with God’s. Describing the beginning of humanity’s fall from God’s will, John Milton writes about the first human beings in Paradise Lost. Adam and Eve, whom God labels as “sufficient to have stood, though free to fall” (3.99), succumb to Satan’s temptation to eat of the tree of knowledge. Before Eve commits the sin, Adam reminds her that “God left free the will, for what obeys Reason is free, and reason he

made right” (9.350–351), echoing Milton’s notion that freedom depends on reason. Despite Adam’s warning, Eve subordinates her reason to her desire; Adam then follows. In this act, they both lose their freedom. In his essay “Freedom and Necessity in Paradise Lost,” J. B. Savage writes that Adam “by becoming absorbed in the things of the world, he becomes governed and determined by them .╯.╯.╯; by neglecting the motive of moral obligation, by which alone he is free, he must unavoidably surrender his freedom” (305). The example of Adam can be illustrated in an analogy: If a man freely walks off a cliff, he gives up his freedom and surrenders to the law of gravity. In the same way that physical actions must comply with the scientific laws of reality, so must moral actions observe the laws of reason. This definition of freedom reiterates the Lockean idea of liberty, while the actions of Satan and the first human beings illustrate license. Though Satan argues that it is “better to reign in hell than serve in heaven” (1.263), he does not realize that since God’s will dictates the laws of the universe, only slavery and determinism are possible when acting against God’s will. Locke refers to these laws as natural laws engrained in every human person, laws that respond to reason and protect the equal and independent nature of human beings. His Second Treatise is written to the government, so his main objective is to convince civil authorities of these innate human freedoms. While this definition of freedom is invoked in the American Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, it took almost two centuries to be properly enacted for all races, classes, and genders. African-American and feminist literature responds to this earlier oppression of the liberties of human beings, recognizing the need for what the 20th-century philosopher Isaiah Berlin categorizes as the two types of freedom—negative and positive freedom. While negative freedom is a freedom from oppression, coercion, or tyranny, positive freedom is a freedom for opportunity, ability, or privilege. In the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, the author tells his own story of his search for freedom from slavery and for education. Slavery is, first, an impingement on Freder-

freedomâ•…â•… 37 ick Douglass’s personal freedom and, second, a restriction on the positive freedom for education. Since freedom must correspond with reason, those restricted from education have greater susceptibility to slavery. As the English philosopher Francis Bacon famously said, “Knowledge is power.” Thus, the contrary also proves true: Ignorance is slavery. The two work with each other and against Douglass: His slavery keeps him from learning, and his ignorance keeps him a slave. When his mistress, Mrs. Auld, attempts to teach him to read, Mr. Auld forbids it, saying, “↜‘Learning would spoil the best nigger in the world. Now,’ said he, ‘if you teach that nigger (speaking of [Douglass]) how to read, there would be no keeping him. It would forever unfit him to be a slave’↜” (Douglass 41). Mr. Auld realizes that learning frees human beings. Overhearing this dialogue, Douglass, too, understands that knowledge is the “path from slavery to freedom” (41). Thus, through education, he overcomes the subordination he has suffered. In Kate Chopin’s The Awakening, her protagonist. Mrs. Edna Pontellier, overcomes her subordination as a woman through education as well, though of a different kind, education of experience. Similar to Douglass’s transformation, Edna begins by desiring negative freedom—freedom from the dominance of her husband. In a moment of selfawareness, she perceives “that her will had blazed up, stubborn and resistant” when her husband Léonce demanded that she come to bed. She wonders whether “her husband had ever spoken to her like that before, and if she had submitted to his command. Of course she had .╯.╯. But she could not realize why or how she should have yielded, feeling as she did then” (37). Edna then begins to seek positive freedom for individual autonomy—to use her time as she desires, painting, swimming, and taking a lover. However, these choices do not accord with reason but with desire, and thus they are not free. By the end of the novel, Edna has lost the respect of society, left her husband and her children, and has been abandoned by her lover. Realizing her solitude, she commits suicide, though this ending remains ambiguous as to its triumph. The modern interpretation of freedom, which could be categorized as license, exalts actions such as

Edna’s. In the 19th century, the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche declares that modern society has murdered God. Without a conception of God, all freedom is dictated by the autonomous individual. As the existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre writes, “Man is freedom.” Each person must determine his or her own freedom by acting as he or she chooses, apart from the constrictions of family, religion, time, or even reason. In his article “Existentialism and Human Freedom,” John Killinger writes, “Man’s nature is not ‘fixed’ as a stone’s or a tree’s is; he is a creature with the ability to choose, and decides what he shall become” (304). Humans have no created essence, but they must create their existence by free actions. Fyodor Dostoyevsky rightly foresaw the problem with this philosophy, namely that every action then becomes permissible. In Dostoyevsky’s masterful novel Crime and Punishment, the main character Raskolnikov believes that extraordinary human beings may act not only above the laws of morality or reason, but also above civil laws. His examples of extraordinary human beings include Isaac Newton and Napoleon Bonaparte—men who felt free to remove any persons who obstructed their noble purposes. Considering himself such an extraordinary person, Raskolnikov murders the local pawnshop owner because she belongs to the lower, ordinary kind of people. To comfort himself against the encroaching guilt that follows this act, he exclaims, “it wasn’t a human being I killed, it was a principle!” (274). The woman is no more than an object to him. This subordination and harm imposed on others is exactly what Locke thinks stems from not subjecting freedom to reason, what African Americans and women overcame in the 20th century, and what still must be fought against in contemporary societies around the world. See also Capote, Truman: In Cold Blood; Chestnutt, Charles W.: “Goophered Grapevine, The”; Equiano, Olaudah: Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano; Flaubert, Gustave: Madame Bovary; Gilman, Charlotte Perkins: Yellow Wallpaper, The; Hughes, Langston: poems; James, Henry: Daisy Miller; Portrait of a Lady, The; Kafka, Franz: Metamorphosis, The; Kerouac, Jack: On the

38â•…â•… futility Road; London, Jack: Call of the Wild, The; Morrison, Toni: Beloved; Mukherjee, Bharati: Middleman and Other Stories, The; Paine, Thomas: “Common Sense”; Steinbeck, John: Of Mice and Men. FURTHER READING Chopin, Kate. The Awakening. New York: Norton, 1993. Dostoyevsky, Fyodor. Crime and Punishment. Translated by Constance Garnett. New York: Bantam, 1996. Killinger, John. “Existentialism and Human Freedom.” English Journal 50, no. 5 (May 1961): 303–313. Locke, John. Second Treatise of Government. New York: Barnes & Noble, 2004. Savage, J. B. “Freedom and Necessity in Paradise Lost. ELH 44, no. 2 (Summer 1977): 286–311.

Jessica Hooten

futility

The theme of futility or overriding hopelessness in literature has been driven by philosophical concepts regarding life and how we live it. The later decades of the 19th century saw rapid industrialization, which helped support Karl Marx’s theories of alienation and the consideration of all history as a battle between opposing economic forces—an eternal class struggle between the new industrialists and their workers. If Marx was right, then human history is robbed of any emotional or superlative value and God is unnecessary. Thus, human life becomes valueless and life after death just so much dust and myth. In 1859, Charles Darwin (1809–82) wrote On the Origin of Species, in which humans were shown as descending from primates. The long-held idea that man was simply made in the image of God was challenged by science. Thomas Huxley (1825–95), the grandfather of the novelist Aldous Huxley (1894–1963) was one of the eminent men who took upon himself to refute religion and establish this new Darwinian idea. Marx and Darwin, though perhaps not intentionally in the latter’s case, called the idea of God’s existence into question. This naturally had the effect of extinguishing any hope that people had of better lives after death. This sense of futility and utter hopelessness was expressed in

British literature by Matthew Arnold (1822–28) in Dover Beach (1851): The Sea of Faith Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furl’d. But now I only hear Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar, Retreating, to the breath Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear And naked shingles of the world. This is further reflected in Thomas Hardy’s pessimistic novels The Return of the Native (1878), Tess of the d ’Urbervilles (1891), and Jude the Obscure (1895). This line of thinking was continued by the likes of the French author Albert Camus (1913–60), who had written on the monotonous absurdity of daily life in The Myth of Sisyphus (1942). The novel is a retelling of the ancient myth of Sisyphus, who has to forever push a stone up a hill. Our lives are like Sisyphus’s: No matter what we do, we are bound to fail. Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus (1604) is a well-known study in futility. Faustus loses all hope in both the Renaissance and Christianity. He can only lament when he hears Satan answer about life: Why this is hell, nor am I out of it. Think’st thou that I, who saw the face of God, And tasted the eternal joys of heaven, Am not tormented with ten thousand hells In being deprived of everlasting bliss? (3.74–78) Even in the 17th century, Marlowe anticipated the intensity of futility’s pain that the modern era would explore in depth. The irony of the critiques of futility, both literary and philosophical, lies in their ultimately revealing the “charm” of despair and how futility almost always gives way to inner spiritual freedom. We see these kinds of Romantic meditations on futility in such diverse works as William Shakespeare’s Mac-

futilityâ•…â•… 39 (1603) and Carson McCullers’s The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter (1940). Tragedy, according to Aristotle, is a journey by the audience into futility and then a rebirth from despair. Macbeth goes insane when accosted with the pointlessness of action: beth

To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow, Creeps in this petty pace from day to day, To the last syllable of recorded time; And all our yesterdays have lighted fools The way to dusty death. (5.5.19–23) These famous lines are glossed as the essence of futility and how, being aware of the deceptive nature of time, we will surely be wary of actions similar to Macbeth’s. The underlying idea is that there still remain ways to make our lives less than futile, if only we can avoid imitating Macbeth. After all, according to Aristotle, tragedies purge us even of despair. When, by definition, the awareness of futility cannot conceive of anything beyond the limitations of the present moment, this leaves alone any soul whose freedom is worth attaining. Futility in literature is not an isolated concept. Rather, it is located firmly within the repressive process of Sigmund Freud’s pleasure principle, or the id. According to Freud, when our desires are thwarted, we start sinking into despair, which creates within us a sense of uselessness or futility. This is not to be confused with the ideas of existential philosophers such as Jean Paul Sartre (1905–80), who saw the world as a stage where every action is meaningless. Existentialism posits that while our actions may be meaningless, they are influenced by inner spiritual struggles. Much later, after the great surge of existentialist writings, we find the French philosopher Jacques Derrida (1930–2004) establishing futility as the end result of his forays into literature and texts. Derrida argued that it is futile to search for ultimate meanings in texts, including patterns in historical thought. Futility, then, has a long ideological history, from the laments of the preacher in Ecclesiastes, “Vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher, vanity of vanities; all is vanity. What profit hath a man of all his labour which he taketh under the sun?” (1:2–3); listless-

ness to St. Augustine of Hippo’s concept of acedia which had such a hold on the British romantics; to the agnosticism that we find in Friedrich Nietzsche, Émile Durkheim (Suicide, 1897), Freud, Sartre, and Ludwig Wittgenstein; and then through Michel Foucault, Derrida, Jean Baudrillard, and their disciples to such present-day classics as the best-selling writers Stephen King (The Stand, 1978) and Cormac McCarthy (Blood Meridian, 1985; The Road, 2006). We find deep despair in the heroic codes of old: The Babylonian Gilgamesh, the Scandinavian Beowulf (Anonymous), Widsith, The Wanderer, and The Ruin seamlessly spill over to the famous “Dance of Death” poems in the Middle Ages. In Europe we find the uselessness of trying to find meaning in life in the works of Franz Kafka (1883–1924; especially The Trial, 1925) and Luigi Pirandello (1867–1936). American literature, too, obsesses about the uselessness of life and its struggles. Famous examples are Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick (1851) and, to an extent, J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye (1951). Salinger’s teenage protagonist, Holden Caulfield, even finds it futile to consider people as individuals. He just calls everyone he meets “phonies,” much in the same way as Antoin Roquentin, the main character of Sartre’s Nausea (1938), continually feels nauseous in his utter disgust at the futility of breathing to live on. Futility also figures as a theme in non-Western literature. Whereas the Christian concept of history is forward-looking with clear divides, the Eastern sense of history is circular. In the Hindu, Buddhist, and Jain traditions, events are considered as repeating themselves endlessly. As such, God is not thought of as a separate entity as in Christianity and Islam. Hinduism sees the world itself as an emanation of the godhead, or Brahma. Thus, all sorrow is momentary and born of ignorance of our final ends and our true natures. We indeed are “amritasya putra” (Shvetashvatara Upanishad, 2.5) or “sons of the Immortal.” While Buddhism is silent about the presence of God, Jainism denies it. But in both these systems of thought, what occurs now will repeat itself in some manner later, giving eternal scope for personal and social improvements. Thus, there is present a conscious negation of futility in Eastern ancient literatures, including those written

40â•…â•… gender in Sanskrit, Pali, and Prakrit. As a result, nothing is seen as futile in the end; there are salvation and hope that every single living and nonliving being will ultimately be set free from the bondage of repetitive historical processes or Karma. This is why Sanskrit poetics eschew tragic endings, and tragedy as a genre is nonexistent in ancient India. Abhijñānashākuntala’s tragic heroine Shakuntala is saved from ultimate despair right at the last moment by the fourth- or fifth-century playwright Kalidasa. This is the norm in ancient Indian literature. While the West has a rich tradition of meditating on futility, the East has struggled to show futility as a paralyzing emotion to be discarded by the individual at all costs. The Buddha sees futility as a disease to be disposed of. We know of an anecdotal story where the Buddha exhorts one not to analyze life in a morbid manner but rather to find out ways to come out of the resultant inertia brought about by depression. The Buddha draws an analogy between an arrow-struck man and the need to heal him rather than telling him of the arrow’s origins. This is the hallmark of Eastern ancient literatures. There is no scope for Dante Alighieri’s “All hope abandon, ye who enter here” (The Divine Comedy). Futility is thus seen as a luxury we can ill afford. See also Byron, George Gordon Byron, Lord: Don Juan; Camus, Albert: Stranger, The; Eliot, T. S.: Wasteland, The; Greene, Graham: Heart of the Matter, The; Hemingway, Ernest: Sun Also Rises, The; Vonnegut, Kurt: Slaughterhouse-Five; Williams, Tennessee: Cat on a Hot Tin Roof; Yeats, William Butler: poems. FURTHER READING King James Bible Online. Available online. URL: http://www.kingjamesbibleonline.org. Accessed January 22, 2010.

Subhasis Chatterjee

gender

In common usage, the word gender most typically refers to the perceived and natural differences between men and women. In literary studies, the term more specifically refers to how individuals define themselves and how they are evaluated by

others on the basis of gender. Gender is often associated with feminism (women’s activism against gendered oppression), feminists (those who study and advocate women’s equality), and Women’s Studies (interdisciplinary academic programs dedicated to the study of gender and women’s gendered oppression) because one must understand how gender functions before one can examine the oppression or lack thereof that gendered behavior entails. The study of gender is then also the study of power relationships—of how one’s gender, typically the male gender, gives one a power advantage over the other gender. Thus, founders of Women’s Studies and feminist theory such as the French psychoanalytic feminist theorists Simone de Beauvoir, Julia Kristeva, Hélène Cixous, and Luce Irigaray have helped to formulate our current understandings of gender. At the most basic level, the theories of these early psychoanalytic feminists assume that human behavior is learned and not innate. In other words, men are not necessarily more naturally aggressive. Instead, a critic applying gender theory would argue that if the majority of the men in a particular group are aggressive, this aggression is learned as part of their “gender identity” as a man. “Gender roles,” in turn, are the codes of behavior that a society expects for one gender or another. These codes are learned in childhood. According to this theory, children see adults model gender-appropriate behavior, and then their desire to be a member of that society impels them to accept the modeled behavior as the best and most appropriate for themselves and others. Adopting and practicing a “gender role” is therefore what helps an individual to construct a “gender identity” of who they are. The American philosopher Judith Butler builds on the work of these French theorists by arguing that gender is performative. Butler’s premise is that since gender entails a role, and roles are the culmination of actions, gender must also be a culmination of actions. In making this claim, Butler extends the idea that there is nothing intrinsic to gender identity by showing that an individual can vary his or her performance of gender from moment to moment. In other words, every action, every choice, be it the clothes we choose or the way in which we speak to

genderâ•…â•… 41 authority figures, is an act of choosing to perform a gender. One of her most controversial theories is that individuals only perceive themselves as having constant gender identities, when in reality every action and every choice they make is one that either confirms or violates the gender roles of a particular group. Because gender is basic to human behavior, the study of gender can be applied to any (or virtually any) social context or literary work. Thus, the focus on gender as a role has recently expanded to the social and cultural forces that shape men’s gendered behavior. Therefore, one could carry out a gender study on the masculinity of men in power, exploring how they enjoy and benefit from their performance of masculine-coded behavior. More typically, however, theorists look at male gendered behavior among oppressed groups, the ill-effects of the performance of masculinity among dominant groups, or how the male performance of gender roles has the potential to harm both men and women. Three examples of literary works—Suzan-Lori Parks’s Topdog/Underdog (2002), David Henry Hwang’s M. Butterfly (1998), and William Shakespeare’s Othello—as well as selected criticism on these works provide examples of scholarly gender study. In Topdog/Underdog and M. Butterfly, the authors consciously incorporate a study of gender into their creative processes. Topdog/Underdog is a play that works to explain the ill-effects of contemporary lower-class African-American male gendered roles. Because the play’s two male characters, the brothers Booth and Lincoln, are poor and largely uneducated, they face restrictions in the performance of their masculinity that wealthier, and especially wealthy Caucasian, men do not. All the men in the larger American culture depicted in the play may display their masculinity through acts of sexual virility and by dominance over men lower in status themselves. Only middle- and upper-status men can demonstrate their masculinity by flaunting their high work incomes. Because the brothers are poor and extremely low-status, they are restricted to sexual prowess and the domination of one another as the means of defining their masculinity. The ill-effects of the encompassing cultural system are shown

when their mutual attempts at domination culminate in Booth shooting Lincoln to death. M. Butterfly also looks at the expression of masculinity within oppressed groups and, as in the case of Topdog/Underdog, explores the issues of gender in combination with those of race. Here the comparison is between a sexist and racist male French diplomat, René Gallimard, and a transsexual (a person of one gender who adopts the clothing and often the mannerisms of the opposite sex gender but retains their original sexual organs) Chinese male spy, Song Lilling. The two have an enduring love affair, during which time Lilling steals various diplomatic secrets and completely conceals his male sexual organs from his French lover, despite many occasions of sexual activity. The cause of Gallimard’s misreading of Lilling’s sex is shown to be the result of Lilling’s perfect performance of what Gallimard believes to be Asian femininity. For example, Lilling apologizes for her breastless chest and begs Gallimard to love her anyway. Gallimard is so attracted to this performance of self-denigration and subordination that he fails to explore the likely physical causes for Lilling’s lack of breasts. Similarly, Lilling claims to be so shy and ashamed of her body that she will not allow Gallimard to touch her genitals or to see her/him naked. Again, Gallimard is so attracted to what he perceives as the feminine performances of shame that he does not explore other likely explanations for Lilling’s behavior. The plot’s obvious twist is that the transsexual Lilling uses the performance of subordination and femininity to gain power over a heterosexual man who enjoys performing masculine dominance. Thus, while Lilling’s behavior is not traditionally masculine, and thus would be disempowering for many men, for the character of Lilling, such performances of gender are nonetheless his means of expressing power and dominance over another man, and thus they express his masculinity. In “Men and Women in Othello,” from her book Broken Nuptials in Shakespeare’s Plays, Carol Thomas Neely looks at the gendered behavior of the men in Othello and compares it to the women’s gendered behavior. Neely evaluates a 16th-century play in terms of seeming universal gender roles and finds the men of the play to be too concerned with male honor, their ability to dominate other men, and their

42â•…â•… gender control of women’s sexuality. For example, Othello believes Iago’s lies about his wife Desdemona’s chastity because Othello is too preoccupied with what other men think of him. This need to protect his honor leads him to first murder his wife and then to commit suicide. Similarly, the play’s women are too trusting of the men and refuse to see their faults clearly. For example, Neely implies that if either Desdemona or Emilia had been able to be honest with themselves about the limitations of their husbands, Othello and Iago respectively, before Othello murdered Desdemona, the play’s tragic ending would have been averted. Despite their shared interest in gender roles and issues of race and ethnicity, a key difference between Topdog/Underdog and M. Butterfly and Shakespeare’s Othello is that in the two former plays, the authors and today’s readers are responding to the same contemporary cultural issues and influences that help to shape gender. In the case of Othello, the distance in time between author and reader means that the modern reader will almost certainly not share the same assumptions regarding gender roles and gendered behavior as the author. Critics such as Ania Loomba, following the historicist theories of Stephan Greenblatt (a school of thought often referred to as New Historicism, which holds the premise that literary study has to be based on the historical beliefs of the author’s time period), has argued that the critic always needs to keep in mind the attitudes toward gender and race in the author’s time. Indeed, the historicist argument has so resonated within the academic community that today it is the dominant factor in studying gender. Future study is likely to continue these trends, balancing the need to assess what are common gender roles over time and geographic space and what roles are more specific to one time and one place. See also Achebe, Chinua: Anthills of the Savannah; Alvarez, Julia: How the García Girls Lost Their Accents; Aristophanes: Lysistrata; Atwood, Margaret: Handmaid ’s Tale, The; Surfacing; Austen, Jane: Pride and P rejudice; Sense and Sensibility; Behn, Aphra: Oroonoko; or, The Royal Slave; Brontë, Charlotte: Jane Eyre; Brontë, Emily: Wuthering Heights; Cao Xueqin: Dream of the Red Chamber; Chaucer,

Geoffrey: Canterbury Tales, The; Cisneros, Sandra: Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories; Dos Passos, John: U.S.A. trilogy; Douglass, Frederick: Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave; DuBois, W. E. B.: Souls of Black Folk, The; Euripides: Medea; Forster, E. M.: Passage to India, A; Gaskell, Elizabeth: North and South; Gilman, Charlotte Perkins: Yellow Wallpaper, The; Glaspell, Susan: Trifles; Harte, Bret: “Luck of Roaring Camp, The”; Hemingway, Ernest: Sun Also Rises, The; Hurston, Zora Neale: Their Eyes Were Watching God; Ibsen, Henrik: Hedda Gabler; Irving, John: World According to Garp, The; Irving, Washington: Sketchbook of Geoffrey Crayon, The; Jacobs, Harriet: Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Written by Herself; Kingsolver, Barbara: Bean Trees, The; Kingston, Maxine Hong: Woman Warrior, The; Lawrence, D. H.: Rainbow, The; Women in Love; Lessing, Doris: Golden Notebook, The; Malamud, Bernard: Natural, The; McMurtry, Larry: Lonesome Dove; Morrison, Toni: Sula; Naylor, Gloria: Women of Brewster Place; O’Brien, Tim: Things They Carried, The; Pope, Alexander: Rape of the Lock, The; Rhys, Jean: Wide Sargasso Sea; Rowlandson, Mary: Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson; Shakespeare, William: Much Ado about Nothing; Taming of the Shrew, The; Shaw, George Bernard: Pygmalion; Stoker, Bram: Dracula; Tan, Amy: Joy Luck Club, The; Woolf, Virginia: Mrs Dalloway; To the Lighthouse. FURTHER READING Abrahamson, Myka Tucker. “The Money Shot: Economies of Sex, Guns, and Language in Topdog/ Underdog.” Modern Drama 50, no. 1 (2007): 77–97. Beauvoir, Simone de. The Second Sex. Translated and edited by H. M. Parshley. New York: Knopf, 1953. Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble. New York: Routledge, 1990. Cixous, Hélène. “The Laugh of the Medusa.” Translated by Paula Cohen. Signs 1, no. 4 (1976): 875–893. Greer, Germaine. The Female Eunuch. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1971.

griefâ•…â•… 43 ———. Sex and Destiny. New York: Harper & Row, 1984. Irigaray, Luce. This Sex Which Is Not One. Translated by Catherine Porter with Carolyn Burke. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1985. Neely, Carol Thomas. Broken Nuptials in Shakespeare’s Plays. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1985. Rich, Adrienne. Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution. New York: Norton, 1976. Rossini, Jon D. “From M. Butterfly to Bondage: David Henry Hwang’s Fantasies of Sexuality, Ethnicity, and Gender.” Journal of American Drama and Theatre 18, no. 3 (2006): 54–76.

Silver Damsen

grief

Grief is arguably life’s greatest source of stress and turmoil. Our relationships with others play important roles in the development of our identities, and when those people are lost, we can feel as if we, too, are lost, unsure of who we are and how we will continue to function in a world that seems to have changed irrevocably. Grief, in short, is the mourning of a loss, usually the loss of a loved one but easily expanded to cover any loss that represents a core part of our lives. The loss of careers, mental or physical health, and pets can also trigger the difficult grieving process. This process is often disorderly and confusing, throwing the mourner into a whirlwind of emotion over which he or she has little control. Unlike other stressful emotions, grief carries such power because it calls into question how the mourner finds meaning in life. An important loss can induce us to feel that life has no meaning, because every facet of our lives—every memory, every sound, every gesture—reminds us of what we have lost. One of the difficult parts of the grieving process is putting what we are feeling into words, not just to explain our thoughts to others but also to understand what we are feeling ourselves. Literature, then, is an invaluable tool for expressing grief. Literature can employ figurative language to go deeper and to convey indescribable emotions in a way that plain language cannot. Art is one of our most valuable tools in life for expressing that which we cannot find the words to explain.

In fact, literature, especially poetry, has historically helped people to work through their grief. Elegies, poems written to commemorate a person’s death, can be great sources of solace and understanding to those in mourning. That we might need the help of poets in understanding our grief process has been long understood in the psychiatric community. Grief, by its very nature, disrupts us, places us at a loss for words. In fact, early on grief was thought of as a “psychiatric disorder,” and indeed there is evidence that grief can induce physical illness in mourners (Gilbert 255). The standard symptoms of grief are bodily distress, guilt, hostility, a preoccupation with the image of the deceased, and the alteration or loss of normal patterns of conduct (Kamerman 66). It is these last two that make grief so disruptive to the functioning mind. Because we are preoccupied with the image of the lost loved one, we find it very difficult to imagine life ever returning to normal. C. S. Lewis, in his chronicle of the loss of his wife, says, “Her absence is like the sky, spread over everything” (13). Lewis points out here that there is not one time of day or one activity or one occasion that reminds him of his loss, but that the loss pervades his every waking moment. W. H. Auden, in his poem “Funeral Blues,” explains this well, saying of his lost loved one, “he was my North, my South, my East, and my West / my working week and my Sunday rest” (ll. 9–10). Moving through grief requires a great deal of hard work on the part of the mourner. The Austrian psychiatrist Sigmund Freud noted in his influential 1917 essay “Mourning and Melancholia” that mourning takes time and mental labor to “revive, relive, and release” (quoted in MacKenzie 131). Although Freud himself did not propose the theory that the process of grief moves in stages, this essay laid the groundwork for that now commonly accepted theory. The most famous theory involving “stages of grief ” is that of the Swiss psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross. Her theory actually deals with terminally ill patients dealing with their own deaths, a process that might be called anticipatory grief, but she and others later realized it could apply to those mourning for others as well. Although different theorists have different ideas about the stages, in

44â•…â•… grief general, most agree that the opening stage is one of denial, followed by a period of anger, followed by some kind of depression or disorganization, with a final period of acceptance or reorganization. The stages do not necessarily occur in order, and they can and do overlap with one another. We can see these stages played out in works of literature. For instance, when Laurel must deal with her father’s death in Eudora Welty’s The Optimist ’s Daughter, she embarks on a journey that begins with her idealizing her childhood, includes misplaced anger at her stepmother, and ends with her acceptance of her life in the present. In one of the most famous literary expositions on grief, In Memoriam, A. H. H. by Alfred, Lord Tennyson, we see meditations on the denial of his friend’s death when he says he is having trouble accepting reality. He says, “By faith, and faith alone embrace, / Believing where we cannot prove” (ll. 3–4). By the end of the poem, however, he seems to have moved toward acceptance, saying, “Ring out the old, ring in the new / Ring happy bells, across the snow / The year is going, let him go” (ll. 103–105). Sometimes one stage or one phase of grief dominates the literature, as Homer’s The Iliad, when Achilles, in his grief over the death of Patroclus, vents his anger by cutting the throats of 12 Trojan youths, or when the soldiers in Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried savagely kill the water buffalo and burn the village in a misguided attempt to avenge the deaths of their fellow soldiers. Denial, on the other hand, takes center stage in John Updike’s Rabbit, Run, when Rabbit refuses to fully acknowledge the horrific death of his infant daughter, and in Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon, when Macon finds Ruth alone and naked with the body of her dead father. Both Rabbit and Ruth may have a hard time dealing with these deaths because they live in a culture that finds grief, mourning, and their expression embarrassing. Grief has been defined by many as an “open wound”—and others want to look away from that wound, because to acknowledge it is invariably difficult and confusing. Sandra Gilbert says about this phenomenon that “even while it wounds the mourner, the embarrassment of the

comforter is a sign of a wound for which neither mourner nor comforter has the proper language” (254). Bertha Simos calls Western society a “deathdenying culture,” noting that the social psychologist Erich Fromm has gone so far as to “suggest that the increase in violence in society today is directly related to our inability to grieve” (5). We see death denial in literary characters such as the Tyrone family in Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night, who avoid the topic of their long-dead infant son and brother and ignore their mother’s obvious grief (and subsequent morphine addiction). We see it also in the reactions others have to Septimus Warren Smith, the disturbed war veteran in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway. Smith’s pain is an embarrassment, a fact that no one wants or knows how to deal with, and ultimately this denial kills him. The expression of grief is crucial to moving through its process, as Toni Morrison says in Sula, “The body must move and throw itself about, the eyes must roll, the hands should have no peace, and the throat should release all the yearning, despair and outrage that accompanies the stupidity of loss” (135). Occasionally, even when grief is acknowledged, mourners are unable regain a sense of normal, functioning life without their object of loss. Psychologists call this “exceptional” or “pathological” grief, and characters entrenched in this state make appearances in literature as well. Ophelia, for instance, in William Shakespeare’s Hamlet, cannot fathom the death of her father, Polonius, especially coupled with the emotional torment she is receiving from Hamlet, and, losing her grasp on reality, she drowns herself. Sethe, in Morrison’s Beloved, is so disturbed by her grief over having killed her daughter that she is haunted by the ghost of this loved one for most of her adult life. Perhaps most disturbing is when the adult ghost of Beloved returns to wreak havoc on Sethe’s life, to demand complete subservience to her at the expense of Sethe’s relationships with Paul D. and with Denver, her living child. Sethe should recognize this, that Denver, a child fully part of this world, should take precedence over the otherworldly Beloved; that she takes so long to do so demonstrates the depth of her grief. Of all the themes in literature, grief is perhaps the only one that can serve to illuminate the nature

guiltâ•…â•… 45 of the theme itself by acting, as a form of therapy to readers who might be in mourning themselves. See also Chaucer, Geoffrey: Canterbury Tales, The; Faulkner, William: Sound and the Fury, The; Shelley, Percy Bysshe: poems. FURTHER READING Gilbert, Sandra. Death’s Door: Modern Dying and the Ways We Grieve. New York: Norton, 2006. Kamerman, Jack B. Death in the Midst of Life: Social and Cultural Influences on Death, Grief, and Mourning. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1988. Kirkby, Joan. “A Crescent Still Abides.” In Wider than the Sky: Essays and Meditations on the Healing Power of Emily Dickinson, edited by Cindy MacKenzie and Barbara Dana, 129–141. Kent, Ohio: Kent University Press, 2007. Lewis, C. S. (as N. W. Clerk). A Grief Observed. London: Faber, 1961. Morrison, Toni. Sula. New York: Plume, 2002. Simos, Bertha G. A Time to Grieve. New York: Family Service Association of America, 1979.

Jennifer McClinton-Temple

guilt

When we hurt someone, we usually feel guilty. If the hurt was committed deliberately, this is understandable. However, many of us can feel guilt even when the hurt is inadvertent. Human beings are also capable of feeling guilt merely for existing when others have died, or for being born wealthy when others live in poverty. Guilt, at its heart, reflects a transgression, a crossing of boundaries. Societies have rules, written and unwritten, and when we break those rules, we often feel guilty unless and until we can effect restitution or restore harmony. Guilt is so fundamental to human existence that it makes an appearance as early as the book of Genesis, the first book of the Bible. God tells Adam and Eve that they are free to do what they wish, as long as they keep his only rule: that they will not eat from the fruit of the tree in the middle of the Garden of Eden. Yet they do, thanks to the serpent’s temptations, and they are banished from the garden forever. Their lasting punishment, though, is that the “eyes of them both were opened” (Gen. 3:7). Further, they have generated what would come to be known

as original sin. The notion of original sin is that because of Adam’s and Eve’s transgression, we are all born as sinners, guilty from the start. Adam and Eve had only one rule to follow, and they broke it. For the rest of us, the rules we must follow in life are legion, as well as far more difficult to know and discern at all times throughout our lives. Because we cannot control when and if we might be transgressing, guilt pervades human existence. We can be under the thrall of collective guilt, as is the society depicted in Günter Grass’s The Tin Drum. Guilt over the Holocaust is so pervasive in Grass’s post–World War II Danzig that his protagonist, Oskar, refuses to grow up and enter the world of complicitous and duplicitous adults. We can also be following the “rules” of our society and still find ourselves feeling guilty. For instance, soldiers who kill in battle have, on the surface, done nothing for which to feel guilty; they are merely doing their jobs, following their orders. However, many of them can and do feel guilty about the killing they do, as exemplified by Paul Berlin in Tim O’Brien’s Going after Cacciato. Berlin is following the rules, and yet he feels guilty; Cacciato has broken the rules by going AWOL, and yet he is depicted as happy and free. We may also, like Dunstan Ramsey in Robertson Davies’s Fifth Business, feel guilty about events that we were involved in but were not our fault. Dunny feels guilt his whole life for ducking the snowball that hit Mrs. Dempster. That he is never able to fully make restitution to her is most likely a result of it not having been his fault in the first place. That guilt is a complicated concept, often felt irrationally, is clear. That it pervades Western culture is no less so. As recounted above, the concept of original sin makes us all “born guilty.” Christianity certainly bears a good deal of responsibility for making guilt so important in our lives. The German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche argues that guilt has its origins in a creditor and debtor concept of human relationships. He argues that it is in these types of relationships that we break the rules for which we must make restitution. He further argues that Christianity is based on such a relationship, with Jesus Christ’s sacrifice on the cross serving to put all humanity in “debt.” If Nietzsche is correct,

46â•…â•… guilt then the guilt we feel due to original sin is compounded by our need to repay Jesus for his sacrifice. Indeed, religion has historically played an important role in the development of the concept of guilt. Arthur Dimmesdale, in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, is a good example of guilt driven by religious beliefs. The Puritan code under which Dimmesdale lives confines him so that he cannot admit his affair with Hester (who cannot hide the evidence that she has sinned). Although engaging in adultery would certainly break the rules of his society, he is so stifled that he further compounds his guilt by refusing to admit the truth and claim Pearl as his child. Hester, on the other hand, is not consumed with guilt, adhering to her own moral code, which appears more natural in comparison. For some, Christianity puts too much emphasis on the sinful (and thus guilty) nature of human beings. This is arguably a distortion of the message of Jesus Christ, which emphasizes love and goodwill toward other humans. One explanation for this distorted emphasis is that for Christian leaders, keeping their flocks “in line” is one of their most arduous tasks. Convincing the faithful that they must constantly atone in order to be admitted to the kingdom of Heaven keeps them from complacency. In “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” Jonathan Edwards elucidates the horrors of hell, invoking the wrathful Old Testament God rather than the New Testament Christ. This has the effect of scaring the listeners into prayer, which will help to balance their inherently guilty natures. This balance, which can also be described as a kind of repayment, is what differentiates guilt from its close counterpart, shame. The American philosopher John Rawls believed that in order to experience guilt, another must have been harmed in some way. Guilt, said Rawls, is also localized—that is, it is about our transgressions—whereas shame is about who we think we are as people. Thus, repayment and punishment are appropriate only to guilt, not shame. Hamlet, in William Shakespeare’s Hamlet, feels guilty that he cannot immediately avenge his father’s death. He says, Yet I, A dull and muddy-mettled rascal, peak,

Like John-a-dreams, unpregnant of my cause, And can say nothing; no, not for a king, Upon whose property and most dear life A damn’d defeat was made. (2.2.566–571) He resolves to reveal Claudius’s guilt and kill him, thus ending his own guilt, repaying his father as it were. In Edith Wharton’s Ethan Frome, Ethan spends his entire life unable to escape his loveless marriage. He feels guilty, first because he does not love Zeena and then because he has fallen in love with Mattie. He then spends his life punishing himself by staying married to Zeena. Ironically, when he tries to end his life (and Mattie’s) things go horribly wrong and he is further doomed, trapped as an invalid being taken care of by Zeena, consumed by guilt over what has happened both to her and to Mattie. Ethan ends his life unable to restore the balance created by his transgressions in love. Sethe, in Toni Morrison’s Beloved, is also unable to restore the balance. She murdered her child to keep her from slavery, and her guilt haunts her, literally, in the form of Beloved. Sethe tries to assuage this guilt by showering Beloved with attention, but her growing obsession with this manifestation of her dead daughter threatens to kill her. The horrors of slavery have wrought crimes so great no balance can be restored. The community comes together to exorcise the ghost and help Sethe to move on. The destructive behavior that Sethe exhibits is common for those suffering from guilt feelings. According to the psychologist E. Mark Stern, guilt that is long-lasting and preoccupying can interfere with our cognition and promote additional self-destructive behaviors. Stern demonstrates that this behavior contributes to a vicious cycle, stating that “the more a person blames himself or herself for unacceptable behavior, the more unacceptable behavior the person will perform” (260). The Scarlet Letter’s Dimmesdale is an example of this kind of self-destructive cycle. He tortures himself, carving his own scarlet letter into his breast and wasting away from the torments through which he puts himself. In Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, Mr. Rochester, too, hides himself away in lonely despair

heroismâ•…â•… 47 after he is blinded by the fire at Thornfeld Hall. His guilt stems from his locking away Bertha, as well as from his deception of Jane, and he compounds his guilt by hiding in his damaged mansion, doing nothing to restore the balance upset by his transgressions. While some literary characters are undone by guilt, others seem impervious to it, acting as if they are conscience-free. In fact, the sense of guilt is so fundamental to the human condition that one must assume something is wrong at the core of those who can commit evil and feel nothing. For instance, Iago in Shakespeare’s Othello and Chillingsworth in The Scarlet Letter wreak havoc on all those around them, bent only on achieving their own goals, which in Iago’s case is power and in Chillingsworth’s is revenge. Given Sigmund Freud’s theory of the id, the ego, and the superego, in which the id is our primitive impulses, the superego is morality tempering those impulses, and the ego is the mechanism that mediates between the two, these characters would seem to be missing an important part of their psyches. Characters such as these, as well as characters whose lives are spent controlled by guilt, can function as cautionary tales for the reader. Guilt is an important part of human personality, but when it takes over a life, that life may not be worth living. See also Bunyan, John: Pilgrim’s P rogress, The; Davis, Rebecca Harding: Life in the Iron Mills; Dostoyevsky, Fyodor: Crime and Punishment; Hardy, Thomas: Tess of the d ’Urbervilles; Irving, John: World According to Garp, The; Kingsolver, Barbara: Poisonwood Bible, The; Knowles, John: Separate Peace, A; O’Brien, Tim: Things They Carried, The; O’Neill, Eugene: Long Day’s Journey into Night; Poe, Edgar Allan: “Tell-Tale Heart, The”; Shakespeare, William: Julius Caesar; Macbeth; Turgenev, Ivan: Fathers and Sons. FURTHER READING Stern, E. Mark. Psychotherapy and the Remorseful Patient. New York: Haworth, 1988. Taylor, Gabrielle. Pride, Shame, and Guilt: Emotions of Self-Assessment. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985.

Jennifer McClinton-Temple

heroism

The word hero is commonly applied to many different types of people performing wildly varying acts. For instance, extraordinary acts of physical strength and courage, such as saving a stranger from a burning house or standing up to an armed assailant, are feats we would typically label heroic. Physical courage is not the only component of heroism, however. Those who exhibit moral courage, such as people who put their own lives or reputations at stake to do or say what is right, rather than what is merely popular, are also called heroes. Heroes can also be those close friends or loved ones whom we admire and treat as role models, calling such a person “my hero.” We routinely use the term for our popular and talented sports figures as well, whether or not their behavior off the playing field can be considered heroic. We even use it to refer to people who are inspirations to others, inspirations that do not necessarily hinge on physical strength or moral superiority. With all of these varied uses, clearly explaining the allure of heroism as a literary theme is difficult. Compounding that difficulty is the fact that in literary studies, the term hero is used to refer to the central character of a work. John Dryden first used the term this way in 1697, and it is still commonly accepted as a synonym for protagonist, even when the protagonist does nothing particularly heroic. We have long used the word heroic to refer to acts that are special or extraordinary. The exploits of professional athletes, the life-saving missions of soldiers and firefighters, the bravery of whistleblowers, and even the lives of fictional characters in our most cherished works of literature seem, in our minds, to certify them as “heroes.” Getting at the heart of what qualifies behavior as heroic may explain why Dryden’s arguable misuse of the term has had such staying power. The word hero is of Greek origin, and in Greek mythology it referred to those who were favored by the gods or had “godlike” qualities. The Oxford English Dictionary describes heroes as “men of super human strength, courage, or ability.” The emphasis here is on super, an adjective that suggests heroism goes beyond what human beings are expected to do. Friedrich Nietzsche’s theory of the übermensch (sometimes translated as “superman”) speaks to this concept of going beyond

48â•…â•… heroism human ability. Nietzsche, a 19th-century German philosopher, wrote in Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883) that in the modern world, God, or the concept of God, had ceased to give life meaning. This void, he wrote, could be filled by the übermensch, a superior, transcendent human being who would give new meaning to life. All could seek to reach this status, thus creating a world in which all were motivated by a love of the present world and the present time. The Scottish historian Thomas Carlyle, writing in 1840, would agree that the heroism must be lifeaffirming, although he would not agree that religion had ceased to give life meaning. In fact, in On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History, he wrote that “all religions stand upon” the worship of heroes, and that Jesus Christ could be considered the “greatest of all heroes” (249). Carlyle goes on to set up criteria for what makes a hero or a heroic action: He says a hero must conquer fear, otherwise he is acting as but a “slave and coward” (268). Further, he must be earnest and sincere and have a vision that penetrates beyond what the average eye might see (281, 325). Finally, he must be an inspiration to others, someone who can “light the way” (347). As Carlyle was one of the first to write on the subject seriously, many of his criteria have lasted and are reinforced by theorists of the present day. Joseph Campbell, who has written some of the best-known works on mythology and heroism, echoes Carlyle when he says: “The hero, therefore, is the man or woman who has been able to battle past his [or her] personal and local limitations to the generally valid, normally human forms” (30). In other words, heroes begin life as normal people, but through some extraordinary gift, they are able to begin on and succeed at the journey upon which they will prove their heroism. Carlyle and Campbell both stress that human beings need heroes—that our response to them satisfies a basic human impulse. We need, apparently, the inspiration and motivation derived from believing there are heroes in the world to whose example we may aspire. The psychologist Miriam F. Polster, writing in 1992 about female heroes, compiled a roster of qualities culled from qualities ascribed to heroes over time. Recalling Nietzsche’s übermensch, she notes that they are “motivated by a profound respect for

human life,” that their vision of what is possible goes beyond that of others, that they possess great courage, and that they are not motivated by public opinion (22). She cites as one of her examples Antigone, from Sophocles’ play Antigone, who at great personal risk to herself buries the body of her brother Polynices against the wishes of her uncle, the king. Antigone is a hero here because her driving motivation is respect for her brother’s life. She knows she must honor this life, even in death. Polster goes on to note that hero and heroism are words that have long been associated with men because of the popular focus on physical courage and strength. Indeed, the word first appeared in Homer’s The Iliad, when the name was given to all those who had participated in the Trojan Wars and about whom a story could be told. But, as Carlyle and Campbell both stress, possessing great moral courage is just as rare and should be honored with as much fervor. For example, in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, Jane displays more moral courage than anyone in the novel, standing by her friend Charlotte Temple, standing up to her evil Aunt Reed, refusing to marry St. John Rivers because she is not in love with him, and returning to the injured Mr. Rochester. Jane’s efforts are consistently heroic because they affirm life, they are selfless, and they inspire others to good. In contrast, Henry Fleming’s actions in Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage are not so consistent. Fleeing his first battle, Fleming acts only out of fear. However, when he returns to battle a changed man, Crane seems to suggest that he is still acting out of fear. He is now motivated by his desire not to be seen as a coward. Tim O’Brien, author of the Vietnam War novels Going after Cacciato and The Things They Carried, has asserted that men have killed and died “because they were afraid not to.” This is exactly the point of Crane’s treatment of heroism: that it is complicated, is hard to discern, and can carry with it a great deal of ambiguity. Henry Fleming is a soldier, and physical acts of courage such as those displayed in war have long been the province of heroism. But what of ordinary people, those whose daily lives do not place them in typically “heroic” situation? Can these people exhibit heroism as well? For example, in John Updike’s

hopeâ•…â•… 49 “A&P,” Sammy, the supermarket cashier who tells the story, abruptly quits his job when his manager is disrespectful to three teenaged girls who enter the store. In the grand scheme of things, this action might not seem noteworthy. But in the world of the A&P, it certainly is. To return to some of the criteria discussed above, Sammy has respect for life and respect for the present in that he does not want to simply carry on as though nothing has happened. He wants to acknowledge the girls’ worth as human beings and not simply see them as “sheep” like the other people in the store. Also, Sammy has vision. He does not want the A&P to be his life; he is thinking of the future and how he can contribute toward it in a more meaningful way than he would standing behind the cash register. Heroic behavior can also come from those whom we might not see as typically “good” people. Sometimes, the term antihero is used for these characters. In John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera, Macheath is a thief and a murderer. He “marries” several women under false pretenses and exhibits little regard for the laws of the city. However, Macheath is arguably a hero because the system within which he operates is so corrupt and bereft of compassion itself that the audience actually roots for him to beat that system. He has his own moral code, and he sticks by it. Looked at from this perspective, one can easily see how Macheath’s daring actions might be seen as heroic. There is quite a leap from a character such as Macheath to a character such as Sammy the checker. And again, there is another great leap from Sammy to characters such as Jane Eyre and Antigone. However, all of these characters exhibit behavior that is inspirational, courageous, and extraordinary, and in doing so all of them exemplify the theme of heroism. See also Achebe, Chinua: Things Fall Apart; Allende, Isabel: House of the Spirits, The; Atwood, Margaret: Handmaid ’s Tale, The; Behn, Aphra: Oroonoko; or, The Royal Slave; Doyle, Sir Arthur Conan: Hound of the Baskervilles, The; Conrad, Joseph: Lord Jim; Dickens, Charles: Tale of Two Cities, A; Douglass, Frederick: Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave; Fielding, Henry: Tom Jones; Heller, Joseph: Catch-22;

Hersey, John: Hiroshima; Homer: Odyssey, The; Hinton S. E.: Outsiders, The; Kesey, Ken: One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest; Lewis, C. S.: Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, The; Malamud, Bernard: Natural, The; McMurtry, Larry: Lonesome Dove; Orwell, George: Nineteen Eighty-Four; Rand, Ayn: Anthem; Sophocles: Oedipus the King; Stevenson, Robert Louis: Treasure Island; Synge, John Millington: Playboy of the Western World, The; Tolkien, J. R. R.: Hobbit, The; Lord of the Rings, The; Virgil: Aeneid, The. FURTHER READING Campbell, Joseph. The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1949, 1968. Carlyle, Thomas. On Heroes, Hero-Worship and the Heroic in History. 1908. Reprint, London and Toronto: J. M. Dent, 1924. Polster, Miriam F. Eve’s Daughters. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1992.

Jennifer McClinton-Temple

hope

Hope is closely related to desire, faith, and possibility. Stories about hope are central not only to the study of literature but also to psychology, social movements, and religious studies. In literature, hope tends to center on the belief that positive change— either individual or societal change—can or will occur. Hope is an exceptionally common theme in literary works for several reasons. The theme of hope directly addresses one of the foremost characteristics of human experiences: anxiety about the uncertainty of the future. Furthermore, many literary works have plot events spurred on by characters that pursue something they want. Hope of attaining a goal is thus a central part of almost any traditionally structured novel or play. Holding onto hope when confronting seemingly impossible odds is another important theme in many texts; hope in these cases may be closely related to faith in human nature, faith in oneself, or religious or spiritual faith. Additionally, hope can be both an emotional state and also a perspective on reality; as the latter, hope is an example

50â•…â•… hope of how a worldview can shape one’s actions, often in profound and life-affirming ways. In Greek mythology, “Hope” is part of the story of Pandora’s box. After Prometheus stole fire from the gods and gave it to humans, Zeus gave Pandora as a “gift” to Prometheus’s brother, but she was actually a punishment for Prometheus’s crime. Out of curiosity, Pandora opens a box (or jar) containing all the world’s evils—diseases, envy, vengeance, and more—and thereby lets them loose upon the human race. The evils spread throughout the world, but Pandora manages to close the lid before the last one—Hope—escapes. The myth provides an explanation of why hope remains even when all other ills seem to be insurmountable. Some versions also suggest that Hope was by far the most important to keep in the box; if Hope escaped from human possession, human beings would have no way to cope with all the other ills, because without hope human existence would be unbearable. Hope is also a central theme in the JudeoChristian tradition, and it is especially notable in the Bible in Exodus, Psalms, and the Gospels. Other hope-centered works include stories of the lives of saints as well as the larger body of religious-themed works in Western and related literatures. Often the emphasis is on the hope for salvation or deliverance; this may be the hope for eternal life, for the coming of the Messiah, for deliverance from sin, or for other forms of spiritual or religious salvation; these narratives are often connected to hope for earthly deliverance from persecution, one’s enemies, great hardships, or even the material world and the limitations and desires of the human body. Narratives of the miraculous often emphasize that hoping for the impossible, or for what merely seems impossible according to earthly knowledge, is a sign of one’s moral rectitude and spiritual faith. This emphasis can also be seen in genres that lean a little more toward the secular, such as medieval romances about the quests of Arthurian knights. In these stories, hope is an important part of moral character because it stands fast in times of great adversity, and because it allows courage to triumph over fear. Hope in the Western Christian tradition is also one of the three Christian virtues (or the three

theological virtues), which are faith, hope, and charity. These virtues are sometimes personified as three sisters whose mother is Wisdom. The personification of the virtues (of varying number) is also found in many medieval works of literature. For example, Hope is a character in Hildegard von Bingen’s Order of the Virtues (ca. 1151), which is sometimes called the first morality play as well as the first European opera. In it, a human woman must choose between the virtuous way of life and the temptations of the devil; Hope therefore is part of the victory of good over evil. St. Thomas Aquinas, who founded the discourse on the three theological virtues, similarly argues that hope is a virtue that keeps one tending toward the divine and spiritual rather than focusing on fear and despair. It is notable in these religious traditions that despite the importance of hope to individual believers, the fundamental or underlying hope is for the ultimate deliverance to or reconciliation with God of all of Creation. The use of light or fire as a symbol for hope is seen in both Judeo-Christian and other traditions. Light is used as a symbol not only for life but also for the hope of renewal or restoration of what has been lost or separated; it may be for this reason that winter celebrations often use light or fire to symbolize hope that the spring (and new life) is on its way. This imagery of light as a symbol for both hope and life may also be seen in the metaphorical use of the phrase “the light at the end of the tunnel,” as well as literary works such as Dylan Thomas’s villanelle “Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night” (1951). Many authors and scholars have considered the nature of hope. In his 1732 Essay on Man, Alexander Pope writes: “Hope springs eternal in the human breast.” (1.95) Emily Dickinson writes of the beauty, comfort, and constancy of hope in a poem usually identified by its first line, “↜‘Hope’ is the thing with feathers.” More recently, the author Barbara Ehrenreich has argued that the constant pressure to demonstrate a hopeful attitude is part of the “cult of positivity” that places an undue psychological burden on those who must suffer silently and absolves those with the power to lessen suffering; she uses her experiences as a cancer patient to argue that “[t] o be hope-free is to acknowledge the lion in the tall

hopeâ•…â•… 51 grass, the tumor in the CAT scan, and to plan one’s moves accordingly” (11). The Czech playwright and essayist Václav Havel defines hope differently, however, describing it as “a dimension of the soul .╯.╯. not essentially dependent on some particular observation of the world or estimate of the situation.╯.╯.╯. It transcends the world that is immediately experienced, and is anchored somewhere beyond its horizons.╯.╯.╯. Hope .╯.╯. is not the same as joy that things are going well .╯.╯. but, rather, an ability to work for something because it is good, not just because it stands a chance to succeed” (181). The American philosopher Cornel West cites Havel to expand on the distinction between hope and optimism, arguing that hope is far more profound and significant, and that it is acting in a belief even when there is no reasonable expectation of success. Clearly, the more dire the situation, the more important it is to maintain hope; wilderness survival experts often emphasize that keeping one’s hopes up is absolutely imperative. A literary example that shows the importance of hope to survival is Homer’s The Odyssey. Odysseus must maintain hope for his eventual return home, and for reunification with his wife and son, through 10 years of war followed by 10 years of hardship and danger while lost at sea. Even as gods and various supernatural beings conspire against his return, as disaster after disaster hits him, and even when every other member of his crew is killed, Odysseus keeps his eye set on his homecoming. His wife, Penelope, undergoes a similar story at their home in Ithaca as she holds on to hope that her presumed-dead husband will return, and she cleverly works to stall the aggressive suitors who conspire against her family. Again, hope is necessary for maintaining courage, dedication, and perseverance, which suggests that it is a fundamental survival skill. On the other hand, some works of literature critique or even mock those who cling to foolish or unrealistic hopes. Often, those who encourage false hope are portrayed as cruel, while those who refuse to let go of their futile hopes are portrayed as pompous or lacking in self-awareness. In William Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, for instance, several characters play a prank on Malvolio, a self-

important steward, by fooling him into thinking he might reasonably hope to woo Olivia, a countess. Ironically, one of the pranksters, Sir Andrew Aguecheek, is also completely mistaken when he believes that he might succeed in wooing Olivia, and he is encouraged by his “friends” who hope to take advantage of his wealth. Olivia, after a long period of mourning and despair for a deceased family member, finally finds hope for a happy future in her infatuation with “Cesario”; she, of course, will never be able to marry “him” because “Cesario” is actually a woman disguised as a man, and such a marriage would have been impossible. Through these and other relationships, the play portrays love and romance as a series of false and foolish hopes followed by confusion, compromise, and often bitter disappointment. Closely related to false hope are the themes of hopelessness, futility, and despair. In literature, hopelessness may be portrayed as an internal obstacle a character must overcome (or be destroyed by). Alternately, literary works with a more cynical or even a nihilistic perspective may portray hope as a foolish or childlike trait with no basis in reality. For example, in Samuel Beckett’s play Waiting for Godot (1953), Vladimir and Estragon wait, futilely, for the arrival of Godot. They are stuck in the same place, longing for meaning, movement, or answers, but their hopes and words are useless in altering their situation. The play suggests that existence itself is absurd and without meaning, like a game of language, and to hope otherwise is foolish. Tom Stoppard’s play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1966) which is heavily influenced by Beckett, portrays the futility of hope in a similar fashion. The title characters, which were originally very minor characters in Hamlet, are both sympathetic and absurd in their attempts to evade their fate, but their ending has already been written (literally). Hope for the future, however, is necessary for courage and perseverance, especially when one’s cause seems dangerous, unsustainable, or impossible. Social movements of all kinds therefore depend on the hope that their efforts and sacrifices have not been and will not be for nothing. Especially important is the hope that the actions of a person or group can make the leap to actions of historical import; a

52â•…â•… hope sense of hopelessness, on the other hand, makes it nearly impossible—and seemingly pointless—for groups or individuals to continue their efforts. It is no surprise, then, that hope is an important theme in many works of social or political commentary in literature. Readers often expect that books that critique the status quo will offer suggestions for change and encourage a sense of hope for the future. Some literary works do so, while some actively subvert this expectation. Utopian literature is often quite hopeful about the possibility of a far better world, whereas dystopian literature, such as Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World or Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We, often portrays a future world that seems hopeless. The very premise of dystopian fiction may, however, imply hope for change; the books stand as calls to action to prevent such a dystopian future from ever coming about, which suggests that some degree of hope remains. One complication in the representation of hope in politically oriented books is that literary works are often intended less as conventional arguments and more as explorations, or experiments in imagining possibilities; in simpler terms, literary genres may be better suited for raising new questions than for arguing for a position without ambiguity or contradiction. Furthermore, socially engaged literature often reveals the inequalities, injustices, and power relations of everyday life, many of which go unnoticed or are thought irrelevant to larger historical factors. When showing the extent, degree, and pervasiveness of these injustices, books often must address how (or whether) one preserves hope in the face of such farreaching problems. Some authors who discuss social change end their books not with a stereotypical sense of upbeat hope but with a more complex discussion of hope and possibility. Jamaica Kincaid’s A Small Place discusses the lasting impact of British colonialism in Antigua and elsewhere, as well as issues such as globalization, class inequalities, racism, and government corruption. The book ends with a meditation on the ambiguity of hope; it suggests that the global changes and individual failings that make oppression harder to identify, harder to resist, and harder to escape may also allow for new possibilities for human (and humane) connections.

Clearly, many works of literature explore how hope relates to imagination; hope, after all, fundamentally depends on the ability to see beyond the present circumstances. Tony Kushner’s two-part play Angels in America is particularly concerned with this relationship as it depicts the character of Prior Walter, who faces AIDS, his ancestors, angelic visitors, and abandonment by his partner. Other characters also struggle for hope and restoration as the play deals with sexuality, politics, history, and religion, as well as the medical and institutional limitations of the 1980s that made treatments for AIDS largely ineffective. In addition to angels, there are ghosts, hallucinations, and a visit to heaven, all of which push characters into expanding their sense of what is possible. More down-to-earth confrontations among characters have this effect as well, often throwing characters’ worldviews into tumult. The spiritual and psychological value of imagination, and the ability to envision what others cannot or will not, relates directly to these characters’ experiences of hope or of despair and fear. Furthermore, in this play, hope often springs from the capacity to imagine and acknowledge surprising connections between vastly different individuals—and also the connections between heaven and earth, between sex and politics, and between the past, present, and future. By the end, many of the characters break into a new stage in their lives that they never imagined possible; most notably, Prior not only copes with the abandonment but also fulfills the prophesy that he would live years longer than anyone thought possible. Angels in America is thus part of a larger trend in which authors find hope in times of great upheaval by suggesting that chaos, in addition to its ill effects, offers many opportunities for transformation. The connection between hope and imagination is thus bound tightly to the relationship between hope and survival. For this reason, it may be possible to generalize that books that discuss the relationships among hope, imagination, perseverance, and the capacity to survive and thrive implicitly argue that works of the imagination (such as literature) are vital to the wellbeing of individuals and societies. See also Aristophanes: Lysistrata; Bierce, Ambrose: “Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge, An”; Chekhov, Anton: Seagull, The; Davis,

identityâ•…â•… 53 Rebecca Harding: Life in the Iron Mills; Dickens, Charles: Great Expectations; Frank, Anne: Anne Frank: Diary of a Young Girl; Hersey, John: Hiroshima; Lawrence, Jerome, and Robert E. Lee: Inherit the Wind; Naipaul, V. S.: Bend in the River, A; O’Neill, Eugene: Iceman Cometh, The; Tolkien, J. R. R.: Lord of the Rings, The; Voltaire: Candide. FURTHER READING Cartwright, John. “From Aquinas to Zwelethemba: A Brief History of Hope.” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 592, no. 1 (2004): 166–184. Ehrenreich, Barbara. “Pathologies of Hope.” Harper’s Magazine (February 2007): 9–12. Eliott, Jaklin. Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Hope. Hauppauge, N.Y.: Nova Science Publishers, 2005. Havel, Václav. Disturbing the Peace: A Conversation with Karel Hvížd’ala. Translated by Paul Wilson. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1990. Keyes, Flo. The Literature of Hope in the Middle Ages and Today: Connections in Medieval Romance, Modern Fantasy, and Science Fiction. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland and Company, 2006. West, Cornel. Commencement Address at Wesleyan University. Middletown, Conn., May 30, 1993.

Ellen Moll

identity

The nature of textual creation from a blank page— of all creation, really—is an exercise in identity politics: Each entity fashioned depends on inclusions and exclusions. Thus, literary texts achieve selfhood via the delicate balance of their various constituent parts; just as humans are products of their DNA, so are literary texts the result of the countless phenomena occurring between their covers. They are unique entities, themselves possessing a sort of identity to which we, as readers, bring our own experiences and resultant identities, therewith interacting to produce a distinct and original product: our individual, respective interpretations of a text. Hence, literature serves as a conduit not only to the world in which an author writes but also to our very selves. Naturally, this idea of self—of who we are—plays an important role in the dissection of literature as it is very

active during our consideration of texts. Examining this interaction further, literary theorists and critics add another wrinkle by advocating myriad different critical approaches by which to dissect a given document. Marxists focus on the manner in which societal institutions determine consciousness, and, therefore, identity: New Historicists view the text as a representative product of a certain time and place; psychoanalysts seek the unwritten text, interpreting the significance of absence; and many, many more urge their respective techniques for interrogating literature, which is, after all, a function of identity formulation. Regardless of approach, however, one thing is clear: English letters have, throughout the years, approached questions of identity in myriad different ways. The texts that constitute the genesis of Western literary studies pose questions of identity via their rootings in conflict. Homer’s The Iliad and The Odyssey, Beowulf (Anonymous)—the cornerstone documents of the field wage war with nearly every word. And while bloodshed presents itself often in these seminal works, on a more abstract level, it is the struggle that has prime significance. The drawing of battle lines and national boundaries affords both the author and the reader the opportunity to choose sides—to ask: Where do I stand? With whom am I? And concurrent to consideration of these spatial and philosophical concerns is the broader question of, simply, who am I? Along with battle, another way humans attempt to define themselves is through religion, and this has certainly been demonstrated in literature. Of course, the significance of the Bible itself cannot be overstated, but neither can the subsequent works of fiction that sought to allegorize Christianity for the purpose of providing direction and, concurrently, identity to their readers. Texts such as William Langland’s Piers Plowman and John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s P rogress feature “everyman” protagonists struggling against the pressures of temptation and sin in a post-Fall world, whereas religious ecstasy is sought in the poetry of George Herbert and Robert Herrick. Thus, whereas conflict for one’s selfhood can, as demonstrated by Homer and others, present itself externally, strife can nevertheless rage within as

54â•…â•… identity well, and religious commitment has played a major role in this issue. Identity as a product of one’s relationship with the Almighty aside, temporal matters persist nevertheless. As geography, racial identity, and religious fervor organized cultures into nation states that legitimized themselves across Europe, people began to focus on their immediate surroundings in order to establish a more stable sense of self. Enter William Shakespeare, whose examination of British (and greater European) court life in many of his plays closely inspects not merely how we have come to occupy our places in society, but the economic, political, cultural, and social repercussions of the manner in which we have arranged ourselves. That is, the army of Rome or God aside, identity can also be derived from one’s societal position. In the 17th century, however, the poet John Donne, called this entire social framework into question with his own metaphysical take on existence and identity. As the Renaissance, during which Shakespeare and Donne wrote, ushered in various scientific and technological innovations, the speed of life increased, and this acceleration eventually resulted in the Industrial Revolution of the early 19th century. The romantic period, led by William Wordsworth, sought to counter this movement grounded in commercialism, doing so by harkening back to simpler times, places, and lifestyles. The rebellion against ever-expanding industrialization romanticized the simplicity of yesteryear, and in favoring the rustic cottage over urban bustle, reactionary romantics promoted an identity based on the pastoral and the past—an identity, they maintained, that was worth resurrecting. Romanticism in the United States prospered as well, as authors looked to the past to answer a fundamental question plaguing the new nation: Just what—who—is an American? Unlike Britons, whose country had demonstrated sovereignty for more than half the years since Christ, Americans had problematic issues with which to contend: They were, after all, a nation born of Great Britain but liberated with the help of France; a place rooted in equality, yet devoted to slavery and class divides; and a state inspired by a yearning for religious freedom that already sported a less-than-tolerant record on

tolerance. These early obstacles to a cohesive identity demanded consideration, and the country’s early literary endeavors did not disappoint. Nathaniel Hawthorne’s interest in history facilitated his own approach to this enigma, producing introspective tales such as The House of the Seven Gables, and Herman Melville’s fictive microcosms endeavored to inspect the American identity as well (Moby-Dick, “Bartleby, the Scrivener,” Billy Budd, Sailor, and Benito Cereno come readily to mind). The romantic mindset also fostered the American transcendentalist movement, which radically challenged contemporary religious thought by proclaiming that divinity presided in each and every person. But times change, and violent conflict and its pursuant debilitating recessions tend to alter the way a citizenry views itself. Therefore, transcendentalism, with all its hope and possibility, gave way to the prostitute- and drunkard-ridden slums of the realists Stephen Crane (The Open Boat and The Red Badge of Courage) and Theodore Dreiser (An American Tragedy and Sister Carrie) and the harsh reality of 19th-century London we find in Charles Dickens. In a few deft literary strokes, humans went from Gods to insignificant specks. War, however, need not always precipitate humility. Whereas the Civil War rattled America’s literary girders, the interwar period of the 20th century inspired the dynamism and innovation of the modern period. T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, H.D. (Hilda Doolittle), Langston Hughes, Robinson Jeffers, and others rewrote national myths, questioning the very notion of patriotic allegiance itself. Coping with a dramatically and rapidly changing world left them eager for new ways to artistically express an ever-morphing self they sought to articulate. Hence, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Nick Carraway seems lost in both his adopted home on the eastern seaboard and back in his native Midwest in The Great Gatsby, thereby anticipating J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, in which Holden Caulfield ambles, stupefied, through a New York City that, while geographically holding true to his home, nevertheless seems odd, off—different. In The Sound and the Fury, William Faulkner’s Compsons and McCaslins even seem out of place in their own

illnessâ•…â•… 55 Mississippi homes, which have been in their respective families for generations. Modernists entertained new approaches to a newly emergent self, which, although complex (as in Ezra Pound’s epic, and fittingly, unfinished, Cantos), at least presupposed that definable identity could exist. For the postmodernists who followed, this was not necessarily a given. The postmodern age, in which most would agree we now live, takes nothing for granted, rejecting the notion that an underlying absolute truth inevitably exists. Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried, for instance, features a central character named Tim O’Brien who is not necessarily the author (but is not necessarily not the author, either); claims that the most far-fetched tales are “real,” whereas those that sound the most believable are pure invention; includes stories of soldiers in Vietnam that have nothing to do with war and accounts of men in Minnesota that have everything to do with conflict; and even defies simple generic classification as either a novel or a short-story collection. Toni Morrison’s Beloved deconstructs the objectivity of time, agency, and place. Burgeoning magical realism, as found in Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude routinely presents seemingly supernatural events as quotidian, based on the idea that assumption—of fixity, of consistency, of identity—is ultimately quite dangerous. Attempting to capture something as ambiguous as identity via a literary medium is truly an exercise in frustration, for as words are committed to paper, and therefore rendered static, identity has consistently proven dynamic. Authors continually attempt to pin down the moment, to speak a word for the present; hence, as history unfolds and we continue to evolve as a species, works change over time—not only in the styles employed in their composition but also in the manner by which we approach them. That is, while a text’s words may never change, we do, and hence the interaction between text and reader is, like our identities, ever-evolving. Tomorrow, a breakthrough development in space exploration or biomedicine may change how we interpret a novel finished yesterday, thereby altering our estimation of just who we are and what our place or our role—our identity—is. Thus, as long as works of literature and humankind coexist, they will continu-

ally seek new ways to define themselves—and each other. See also Alvarez, Julia: How the García Girls Lost Their Accents; Angelou, Maya: I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings; Aristophanes: Frogs, The; Bellow, Saul: Adventures of Augie March, The; Bradford, William: Of Plymouth Plantation; Cisneros, Sandra: House on Mango Street, The; DuBois, W. E. B.: Souls of Black Folk, The; Eliot, T. S.: “Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, The”; Ellison, Ralph: Invisible Man; Equiano, Olaudah: Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano; Erdrich, Louise: Bingo Palace, The; Grass Günter: Tin Drum, The; Ibsen, Henrik: Doll ’s House, The; Kesey, Ken: One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest; Kincaid, Jamaica: Annie John; Kingston, Maxine Hong: Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book; Kozinski, Jerzy: Painted Bird, The; Kundera, Milan: Unbearable Lightness of Being, The; Lessing, Doris: Golden Notebook, The; London, Jack: Call of the Wild, The; White Fang; Mistry, Rohinton: Fine Balance, A; Momaday, N. Scott: House Made of Dawn; Way to Rainy Mountain, The; Morrison, Toni: Bluest Eye, The; Pirandello, Luigi: Six Characters in Search of an Author; Poe, Edgar Allan: “Fall of the House of Usher, The”; Potok, Chaim: Chosen, The; Roth, Philip: American Pastoral; Rowlandson, Mary: Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson; Rushdie, Salman: Midnight ’s Children; Shakespeare, William: King Lear; Stevenson, Robert Louis: Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, The, and Treasure Island; Wiesel, Elie: Night; Wilde, Oscar: Picture of Dorian Gray, The. David Visser

illness

In her well-known 1978 book Illness as Metaphor, Susan Sontag says, “Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick. Although we all prefer to use only the good passport, sooner or later each of us is obliged, at least for a spell, to identify ourselves as citizens of that other place” (3). Illness affects all human beings in some way, whether it is a simple

56â•…â•… illness bout of the flu, a chronic painful condition, a disability, or a life-threatening disease. Because all readers, even if we have not ourselves been severely ill, can relate to the idea of Sontag’s two kingdoms, illness is a frequent and powerful theme in literature. When we are sick, we have a feeling of not being part of the mainstream; we can concentrate only on the sickness, the pain, and the discomfort, and in doing so, we remove ourselves from life for a while. The sick, then, are deviant; they are not normal. Literature has a history of using illness to highlight deviations from what is normal, both positive deviations and negative ones. Sociologists and medical professionals have several different ways of explaining why illness has such a powerful hold over our imaginations. Echoing Sontag’s metaphor, the physician Michael Stein says in The Lonely Patient that illness is a kind of travel into a “foreign kingdom” or an “unrecognized neighborhood” (10). The sick person is confused and anxious, asking many unanswerable questions about how to act, what to say, and how long the stay in this “foreign kingdom” will be. Illness, then, can symbolize a journey, albeit a frightening, disorienting one. The writer and physician Oliver Sacks notes that the word we use to describe that journey—sickening—has no counterpart: There is no “healthening.” We usually use the word recovery, which indicates we are retrieving our lost health from somewhere, but it is the “sickening” that provides the powerful metaphor (quoted in Stein 96). This metaphor is so powerful, claims David B. Morris in Illness and Culture in the Postmodern Age, that “almost every era seems marked by a distinctive illness that defines or deeply influences it” (50). In the Middle Ages, the bubonic plague changed the face of Europe, killing millions of people, approximately one fourth of the population. Not only did millions die, but millions more lived in constant fear of contracting the dreaded plague. In the Renaissance, what was known at the time as “melancholy,” but what today we would call depression, pervaded. In the late 17th and 18th centuries, sometimes referred to as the Enlightenment, gout, a kind of arthritis, and syphilis, a deadly venereal disease, held sway. Doctors attributed both of these diseases to the loosening morals of the upper classes, as gout

was mostly diagnosed among the wealthier citizens who could afford treatment, and syphilis was the product both of aristocratic promiscuity and the urban poverty of the prostitutes they frequented. In the 19th century, tuberculosis was the dominant illness. With its victims weak, pale, and bedridden, the disease seemed to indicate that the suffering it brought purified those whom it struck, or at least returned them to a natural state. Many artists and writers of the 19th century died from tuberculosis, including the writers John Keats, Emily Brontë, and Robert Louis Stevenson and the composer Frédéric Chopin, leading to the assumption that those of artistic temperament were especially susceptible. In the 20th century, cancer took over as the defining illness. Cancer is a brutal, seemingly indestructible enemy that can attack out of nowhere and that often must be fought by further brutalizing the body with surgery, chemotherapy, and radiation. It dehumanizes the patient. As such, it is an appropriate metaphor for the 20th century and the rise of technology. Many authors have harnessed the power of illness—its anxiety, its dread, its ability to drive people apart and to bring them closer together—to tell their stories. In Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women, for instance, Beth, the sweetest of the March sisters, contracts scarlet fever while nursing a poor family. Although she recovers, she lives life in a weakened state and eventually succumbs. Her death reminds the March sisters, especially Jo and Amy, of the importance of family unity despite disagreement. In Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, Dickens uses the sickly, disabled figure of Tiny Tim to illuminate the joy of Christmas. If this poor creature can be happy, Dickens seems to say, then so should we all be. A 20th-century take on illness can be found in Don DeLillo’s White Noise. Jack and his family have come simultaneously to fear illness and to see it as inevitable. They take pills for reasons they do not understand and receive vague diagnoses that only serve to frighten them. In addition to serving as a useful vehicle around which to tell a powerful tale, illness has also functioned as a more specific metaphor. For example, illness can also represent failure. The noted American sociologist Talcott Parsons has described health as

illnessâ•…â•… 57 a “gatekeeper” to success. A healthy body and mind is the basic condition, he says, for functioning in a democracy and “too low a general level of health is dysfunctional” (quoted in Gerhardt 7). When illness stands as a metaphor for failure, it symbolizes deviancy. The sick person has failed to keep well, failed to keep personal commitments, and failed to adequately garner support and admiration from others (Gerhardt 22). The ill in this scenario are necessarily passive, helpless, and detached from reality. Therefore, they lack the characteristics to succeed in the modern world. In Eugene O’Neill’s play Long Day’s Journey into Night, half of the Tyrone family suffers from chronic illness. At the play’s start, Edmund has just learned he suffers from tuberculosis. His many attempts to find his place in the world have failed and now, O’Neill seems to be suggesting, he will find his true calling in death. His mother, Mary, suffers from a debilitating morphine addiction; she has failed to face the problems in her real life, so she uses morphine to dull the emotional pain this gives her. The morphine, in effect, paralyzes her, highlighting the metaphorical paralysis in which the whole family is trapped. While the idea that illness represents a kind of failure is common in discussions of physical illness, in discussions of mental illness it is practically normative. Mental illness, as the literary historian Shoshana Felman has theorized, is like a kind of blindness, a literally inability to see what is actually happening. As such, those who are mentally ill are often shunned because they are incapable of acting in a way we consider reasonable. In Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar, the protagonist, Esther Greenwood, loses her ability to function in the real world as the novel progresses. She cannot “see” who she really is—a young woman with talent and intelligence. She feels trapped, not only by her skewed view of the world but also by the assumptions of those around her that she could just “decide” to be all right. That those who, like Esther, are sick because they want to be or because they deserve it is another common portrayal of illness in literature. Disease has long been seen as a form of divine punishment—a curse well deserved by those who have fallen sick. Susan Sontag explains that the ancient Greeks believed illness sprung from super-

natural punishment or demonic possession and that the accursed must have done something to warrant this affliction. Early Christians, she writes, had more moralized notions of disease. Disease was still viewed as a divine punishment, but now the specific disease was thought to express the deviant character of the patient. This view of disease can be seen well into the 20th century. Tuberculosis, for instance, was long believed to result from too much passion, while cancer was thought to result from the suppression of passion (Sontag 21). AIDS, with its most common methods of transmission involving behavior considered deviant by most (homosexual intercourse, the use of intravenous drugs), has been referred to as a “punishment from God” by ignorant, fearful critics. In Tony Kushner’s Angels in America, Roy Cohn, the closeted homosexual lawyer diagnosed with AIDS, certainly feels this way. He is ashamed of his disease and does everything he can to hide it. Prior Walter, on the other hand, also diagnosed with AIDS, gains confidence as he embraces his past and his present, being visited by an angel and dead relatives and being declared a prophet. In the end, perhaps Cohn is being punished—not for being gay, but for hiding his true identity. Although there are many different methods by which authors deal with illness in their texts, it is such an important, unavoidable part of real life that it always serves as a powerful device. Depictions of illness can carry hope, despair, and grief; they can illuminate difference and similarity; and they can most powerfully display the experience of being human. See also Capote, Truman: In Cold Blood; Cather, Willa: O Pioneers!; Hawthorne, Nathaniel: House of the Seven Gables, The; Ibsen, Henrik: Doll ’s House, A; Lessing, Doris: Golden Notebook, The; Poe, Edgar Allan: “Fall of the House of Usher, The”; “Tell-Tale Heart, The”; Fitzgerald, F. Scott: Tender Is the Night; Gilman, Charlotte Perkins: Yellow Wallpaper, The; Rhys, Jean: Wide Sargasso Sea; Silko, Leslie Marmon: Ceremony; Sinclair, Upton: Jungle, The; Turgenev, Ivan: Fathers and Sons; Steinbeck, John: Of Mice and Men. FURTHER READING Felman, Shoshana. Writing and Madness (Literature/ Philosophy/Psychoanalysis). Translated by Martha

58â•…â•… individual and society Noel Evans and the author with the assistance of Brian Massumi. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1985. Gerhardt, Uta. Ideas about Illness: An Intellectual and Political History of Medical Sociology. New York: New York University Press, 1989. Morris, David B. Illness and Culture in the Postmodern Age. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998. Sontag, Susan. Illness as Metaphor. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1978. Stein, Michael. The Lonely Patient: How We Experience Illness. New York: William Morrow, 2007.

Jennifer McClinton-Temple

individual and society

Human beings have always tried to come together in groups, not only to live in a way that ensures an escape from pangs of solitude but also to attain a collective strength against a common enemy, be it animals, other humans, or the wrath of nature. Even so, the relationship between the individual and society has always been simultaneously rewarding and conflicting. An endless debate exists over whether an individual—the basic unit of the society—should be able to claim greater attention to his personal rights and privileges, or the society—the alliance of individuals strengthened by their mutual consent— should be empowered to overlook one for many. The tension inherent in such a puzzling relationship becomes apparent from the subtle contradiction in defining each. The Concise Oxford Dictionary (8th edition) defines an individual as a “single human being as distinct from a family or group,” whereas a society is the “sum of human conditions and activity regarded as a whole functioning interdependently” (emphases mine), and this “distinctness” of an individual struggles against the societal stipulation for a merging “interdependence.” The brightest minds have long endeavored to solve this conundrum. Every age has generated theories with clashing conclusions on this subject. The Greek philosopher Plato argued that an individual, not being self-sufficient, cannot live alone. Aristotle more considerately highlighted not just man’s “need of ” but also his “desire for” society. Nevertheless, for both the society was more important than the individual. The Stoics envisaged a brotherhood of

mankind; the Epicureans instead openly avowed an individual’s conscious self-interest, which was strikingly individualistic for its time. The Roman statesman Cicero rejected Epicureanism in favor of the Aristotelean view. The Middle Ages, under the banner of Christianity, revived the idea of a universal brotherhood and emphasized the society’s being a “natural product” since it arises out of an individual’s “natural” sociability. Even during the transition from the medieval to early modern times, society was prioritized over the individual. The early modern era promoted the social contract theory. The 17th-century English philosopher Thomas Hobbes, believing the pre-social man to have been antisocial, averred that mutual fear produced society. For John Locke, who dismissed this theory, man merely executed the laws of nature in a pre-political rather than a pre-social situation. To the French philosopher Montesquieu, societal structure depended on a proper balance between such factors as climate, religion and customs. The 18thcentury philosopher David Hume and Jean-Jacques Rousseau blamed property and social classes for creating inequality among individuals in a society. Immanuel Kant and George Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, opposing the egotism of contemporary German romanticism, discouraged “pure” individuality. After the advent of the Industrial Revolution, the French philosopher Claude-Henri de Rouvroy Saint-Simon thought that the “industrial society” of the 19th century was “healthier” since it created partners, not subjects. Karl Marx, in contrast, famously prophesied the bourgeoisie’s downfall due to modern industry and the consequent rise of a classless society. Utilitarianism advocated “greater good for a greater number.” Yet individual rights had already started gaining priority over those of a group, and the term individualism was also coined. Moreover, with the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche declaring the death of God, all binding factors that had kept social obligations alive so far seemed to crumble, and individuals were suddenly left with a dangerous kind of freedom encumbered with a responsibility for every decision taken. With the two devastating world wars of the 20th century, no wonder older traditions lost their worth for the trauma-ridden individual. Such despair of

individual and societyâ•…â•… 59 “isolation amid crowds” understandably gave rise to Jean-Paul Sartre’s existentialism and Albert Camus’s sense of the absurd. All age-old conflicting theories finally seem to endorse a paradox: An individual is both “the creature and the creator of society” (Hawthorn 27). The individual, the French sociologist Émile Durkheim declared in the latter part of the 19th century, is defined by his social relations. By playing his “social role,” he metamorphoses from an individual into a person (persona is a Latin word for the ancient theatrical mask). Since this “person” is a social being, his every act is invariably a social (because human) act. So is his literary venture. He writes in a language which, the 20th-century British sociologist Anthony Giddens would argue, he did not even create. Even in satirizing society, he may distance himself from the society he criticizes, but that again underscores the inseverable link between himself and his society. An individual can never be completely divorced from society. The society allocates roles for each individual and prescribes rules for each role. The violation of “formal” rules is punished by judiciary and police; that of the “informal” ones by shame and ostracism. Meursault, in Camus’s The Stranger, is condemned when he refuses to conform to the unwritten norm of showing grief at his mother’s death; his society is unwilling to condone a murder committed due to the glare of the sun. For his former offense, he reaps societal suspicion and dislike; for his latter crime, he gets capital punishment. In Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment, Raskolnikov’s punishment for murder is more personal than judicial. The judiciary comes to know of it only when he confesses of his own accord, and that very confession is the outcome of a thorough internalization of his society’s morality. Conditioned by social expectations, Beowulf (Anonymous), as the hero of his people, must show extraordinary courage. Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, for all her radical thoughts of emancipation, may still be redeemed by her ultimately not flouting the social dictates of feminine tenderness, faithful love, and Christian kindness. But in Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, the title character’s violation of norms in the form of an extramarital

affair cannot be exonerated by her conservative society. Her husband forgives her, yet she must still die in the end to maintain the societal status quo. A society inevitably dooms an individual to a divided self. Various social positions and phases demand various social roles to be played. To do so, the anthropologist Margaret Mead argued, I (the real self ) must give in to Me (the social self )—willingly or otherwise. The uncoordinated instincts of the id (the dark, unconscious part of human psyche), to use Freudian terms, must be reined in by the rationality of the ego (the polished part modified by external influences) and the moralizing function of the superego (the critical conscientious part). A fantastical allegorical representation of this dichotomy of self is seen in Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, where Dr. Jekyll is the “social” face of the named individual and Mr. Hyde is the “real,” untailored part of him that defies social conventions and performs deadly acts contrary to a doctor’s healing duties. The healer by day horrifyingly transforms into the killer by night, symbolizing the hideous image of an individual when uncontrolled by society’s leashes. “Without a social environment no self can arise” (Aubert 58) because self-analysis is possible only by considering others’ perception of it. Hence, extended isolation may “threaten to disturb or destroy the perceptions of the self ” (58). Though Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe is portrayed as the sole shipwreck survivor, rebuilding his world on a remote island with the morals and customs of his civilization indelibly etched in his nature, William Golding takes a more skeptical approach. His Lord of the Flies instead subverts Defoe’s world to illustrate how something goes very wrong with human “culture” when segregated from the civilizing influences of society by showing a swift degradation of morals in a band of boys left stranded on a deserted island. Not just total isolation but confrontation with other cultures may also challenge the stability of one’s own cultural values. In the absence of the restraining measures of his compatriots, Kurtz, in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, “goes native.” Chinua Achebe, on the other hand, depicts the doomed struggle of an individual, Okonkwo, to hold together his dilapidating traditional society

60â•…â•… innocence and experience against the superior power of the white man in Things Fall Apart. Nonetheless, society is not an unmixed blessing. Pip, in Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations, loses his essential innocence and goodness in the urge to rise in an ambitious and mercenary society; while A Tale of Two Cities shows a Sidney Carton distraught with disappointments, although his innate capacity to love cannot be killed even amid the bloodthirsty fury of Paris in the grip of the French Revolution. George Eliot’s Silas Marner suffers wrongly in the hands of his fellow beings and becomes an embittered recluse but is later rescued from the unenviable fate of a misanthrope by the love of a castaway child. That man cannot live alone is depicted, consciously or unconsciously, even in texts where this theme is least expected. It is an utter lack of communication with his family and society who have forsaken him, terrified at his vermin form, that eventually kills Gregor Samsa in Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis. Estragon and Vladimir, in Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, decide not to even playfully attempt suicide to pass their time because if one dies accidentally, the other will be left alone. So, even amid existentialist angst and in an absurdist limbo, an individual’s minimal necessity for company cannot be disregarded. A society is a “natural” product, and an individual, in turn, is a “social” one. See also Anderson, Sherwood: Winesburg, Ohio; Bradbury, Ray: Fahrenheit 451; Bunyan, John: Pilgrim’s P rogress, The; Byron, George Gordon Byron, Lord: Don Juan; Dickens, Charles: Christmas Carol, A; Emerson, Ralph Waldo: “American Scholar, The”; “Self-Reliance”; Faulkner, William: Light in August; Gay, John: Beggar’s Opera, The; Hawthorne, Nathaniel: Scarlet Letter, The; “Young Goodman Brown”; Hesse, Herman: Siddhartha; Huxley, Aldous: Brave New World; Irving, Washington: Sketchbook of Geoffrey Crayon, The; Jackson, Shirley: “Lottery, The”; Kerouac, Jack: On the Road; Kipling, Rudyard: Kim; Kozinski, Jerzy: Painted Bird, The; Lewis, Sinclair: Main Street; Melville, Herman: Billy Budd, Sailor; Molière: Misanthrope, The; Naipaul, V. S.: House for Mr. Biswas, A;

Orwell, George: Nineteen Eighty-Four; Poe, Edgar Allan: “Murders in the Rue Morgue, The”; Rand, Ayn: Anthem; Shakespeare, William: Romeo and Juliet; Taming of the Shrew, The; Solzhenitsyn, Alexander: One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich; Sophocles: Antigone; Swift, Jonathan: Gulliver’s Travels; Thoreau, Henry David: “Resistance to Civil Government”; Walden; Vonnegut, Kurt: Cat ’s Cradle; Wharton, Edith: Ethan Frome; House of Mirth; Winterson, Jeanette: Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit. FURTHER READING Aubert, Vilhelm. Elements of Sociology. London: Heinemann, 1968. Hawthorn, Geoffrey. Enlightenment and Despair: A History of Sociology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976.

Susmita Roye

innocence and experience

Perhaps because literature so often focuses on human experience, it frequently covers the themes of innocence and experience. Just as there are many stories, so too are there many forms of both innocence and experience. For many centuries, innocence and experience were interpreted primarily in terms of religion, with innocence denoting a state free from sin. As European civilization became increasingly secularized, however, these terms took on more general usage wherein innocence came to denote roughly a state of naïveté or simplicity without necessarily implying religious overtones (though these had not vanished). One of the most frequently depicted changes, and one that became a touchstone of romanticism, is that from the optimism of childhood to the realities of adulthood. William Blake’s popular set of poems Songs of Innocence and of Experience (1794) helps to illuminate the interdependence and relative value of both terms. At first, childhood may seem like a time of innocence and freedom from the responsibilities of maturity, whereas adulthood is a time when experience, education, and exposure to the world taint one’s sense of innocence. Even in this straightforward account, the two terms are interdependent, as a

innocence and experienceâ•…â•… 61 time of innocence can only be recognized retrospectively, from the vantage point of experience. Blake takes this tension between the two terms to new heights in his poems, however, demonstrating that people are capable of either state at various times in their lives. Furthermore, either state might take the form of the other. For example, in “The Chimney Sweeper” from Songs of Innocence, the young chimney sweep Tom Dacre has a dream wherein he and his friends are freed from their coffins by an angel, who leads them to play happily in the clouds. On the one hand, the dream epitomizes innocence in that it takes the form of a fantasy in which Tom gets to escape from work to play with his friends. This thought, that he would be rewarded at the end of his life, keeps him going: “Tho’ the morning was cold, Tom was happy & warm / So if all do their duty they need not fear harm” (ll. 23–24). On the other hand, this vision of innocence seems to simultaneously convey a darker point from the side of experience. In one sense, Tom’s vision suggests that the only way for these children to be released from their horrible working conditions is through death. Inverting the closing line, it is precisely by doing their duty (cleaning chimneys) that they need to fear harm (black lung, cancer, accident). This final line turns out to be ambiguous indeed, because it could equally serve as a kind of threat to the people who mistreat the children: If they do their duty to the children, then they need not fear harm. The companion poem (also named “The Chimney Sweeper”) from Songs of Experience reinforces this point. The speaker of this poem fully recognizes what might only be hinted at in the other. Of his parents, who put him to work, he says, “They think they have done me no injury: / And are gone to praise God & his Priest & King / Who make up a heaven of our misery” (ll. 10–12). These lines serve as a great example of how Blake’s poems complicate the narrative of growth, because here it is the adults who are innocent and naive whereas the child is burdened by the harsh realities of his experience. In another sense, however, the adults could be to blame for purposely trying to minimize their responsibility by inventing the idea of heaven to justify their exploitation of children. In other words, adults fully realize how horrible their actions are but seek to

cover up their knowledge with narratives of earthly suffering and heavenly reward. Like poetry, fiction often deals with issues of innocence and experience. In fact, one of the major genres of the novel, the bildungsroman, tells the story of a character’s education and growth. While these stories ostensibly focus on a single protagonist, the growth of the individual is often linked to and helps to illuminate larger societal changes or conflicts. In this sense, the bildungsroman often tells the story of a particular character in a way that also ties into the development of his or her community. Both Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1902) and James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as A Young Man (1916) are examples of the genre, although Portrait resists the kind of closure typical of the genre. One novel that resonates on both personal and societal levels in terms of the relationship between innocence and experience is Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. The story is initially narrated by a sailor who listens to the mysterious Marlow, who in turn recounts his experiences piloting a steamboat up the Congo River. Marlow begins as an idealistic youth, looking to a life at sea as a chance to explore new lands or, as he phrases it, the blank spaces on maps. Taking a job with a Dutch trading company, Marlow heads to Africa with high hopes. Through a series of events in which he witnesses firsthand the cruel and senseless behavior of the Europeans, culminating in his meeting with Kurtz, Marlow is forced to question many of the traditional narratives he started out with, including that of the moral and spiritual superiority of Europeans compared to the native African peoples. Marlow’s physical journey up the Congo, into the heart of Africa, can be said to correspond with his spiritual journey, in which he investigates the “heart” of humanity. Kurtz’s dying words, “the horror,” coupled with his barbaric behavior (note, for example, the skulls on the fence around his house) suggest that there are terrible passions in each of us waiting to be released. Marlow’s encounter with Kurtz is immensely disappointing in that Marlow had heard nothing but fantastic tales about how intelligent, cultivated, and efficient Kurtz was. Kurtz turns out to be a disappointing hero to say the least. In a much broader

62â•…â•… isolation sense, however, Marlow’s transition into experience can be seen to represent the larger experience of European colonialism. As he points out to his listeners, “The conquest of the earth, which mostly means the taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much” (7). Marlow’s personal disillusionment signals a growing awareness of the violence and cruelty that underpinned the supposedly beneficial process of colonization. James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man tells the story of the growth and development of Stephen Dedalus. Like Marlow, Stephen slowly gains knowledge about the effects of imperialism, though in his case he does so as a member of the colonized people. Portrait presents a more complex picture of the interrelationship of innocence and experience, as Stephen moves from one pole to another within each of the novel’s five sections. For example, at the end of the third section, Stephen has become convinced that he must repent his sins and dedicate his life to serve within the Catholic Church. In the next section, however, he begins to implement this plan only to abandon it in favor of his calling to become an artist. Each section presents a crisis that Stephen responds to by adopting a new goal, which is then replaced in the face of the next crisis or problem that he faces. In this sense, Stephen is constantly passing through stages of innocence and experience, but each version of experience is subsequently revealed to be yet another form of innocence. Accompanying each new goal or level of experience, Stephen employs an increasingly complex vocabulary and style. For example, the simple language of the children’s tale at the beginning, “Once upon a time and a very good time it was” gives way, in the final section, to Stephen’s elaborate arguments about aesthetics. In keeping with the restless mental development of its protagonist, Portrait is difficult to read as a straightforward national allegory for Ireland. While Stephen recognizes the power structures behind the use of the English language, for example, he also flatly rejects the calls of nationalism in favor of a European cosmopolitanism in the form of his pending trip to Paris. Stephen’s dedication to further his education and to escape

from the confines of his country demonstrates a commitment to continue the process of discovery that is at the heart of literature. Precisely by reading and thinking about literature, we are able to evaluate our own sense of experience and, hopefully, to enrich it as well. See also Adams, Henry: Education of Henry Adams, The; Austen, Jane: Sense and Sensibility; Carroll, Lewis: Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland; Cisneros, Sandra: House on Mango Street, The; Defoe, Daniel: Moll Flanders; Dreiser, Theodore: Sister Carrie; Forster, E. M.: Room with a View, A; Harte, Bret: “Outcasts of Poker Flats, The”; Hawthorne, Nathaniel: “Young Goodman Brown”; James, Henry: Portrait of a Lady, The; Turn of the Screw, The; Kincaid, Jamaica: Annie John; Nabokov, Vladimir: Lolita; O’Brien, Tim: Things They Carried, The; Poe, Edgar Allan: “Murders in the Rue Morgue, The”; Salinger, J. D.: Catcher in the Rye, The; Twain, Mark: Adventures of Tom Sawyer, The; Voltaire: Candide; Wharton, Edith: House of Mirth, The; Wiesel, Elie: Night; Wilde, Oscar: Importance of Being Earnest, The; Picture of Dorian Gray, The. FURTHER READING Brivic, Sheldon. Joyce between Freud and Jung. Port Washington: Kennikat Press, 1980. Conrad, Joseph. Heart of Darkness. New York: Norton: 1988.

Daniel Ryan Morse

isolation

Isolation is a powerful force. Human beings live, work, and play in groups, and to be separate from the whole of humanity can disorient us, debilitate us, and even make us question our place in the world. Isolation is easily confused with other forms of aloneness such as loneliness and alienation, but the condition of being isolated requires that one be detached from others through reasons not in one’s control. Isolation produces devastating consequences for many people, leading to lifelong emotional problems and difficulty in relationships with others. Conversely, the condition can move

isolationâ•…â•… 63 others toward extraordinary creativity and innovation as a result of having been forced to rely solely on their own minds as a source for meaning. As one might suspect, these two sides of the coin are not mutually exclusive; many people experience both positive and negative effects of isolation, deriving inspiration from it while at the same time feeling hurt and disturbed. Obviously, not all who feel isolated are literally alone, and not all who are alone are isolated. In an essay on isolation in literature, Mark Conliff points out that the condition hinges on the individual having once been part of a whole. The isolated person is not really a “stranger” or an “outsider,” words that might come to mind when thinking of this solitary state. Isolation requires that one was part of the group (at least at one time) and that he or she continues “to be defined, however subtly, by his association with his usual world” (121). That identification is what makes isolation so powerful. The stranger might long to be part of the group but, having never been a member, will not derive meaning or shape her identity based on this association. The isolated soul, however, cannot escape the connection. Whether the isolation is voluntarily imposed on the self or forced by some other entity, it is a condition that is objective in that it is not merely a feeling, and that is created by an outside force, not by happenstance. When human beings are genuinely isolated from others, serious psychological consequences may result. This is due to the basic human need to belong, to depend on and be accompanied by others throughout life. When human beings lived in hunter-gatherer societies, survival required these affiliations. As humans have evolved from that period in their history, they have not lost that need. The English psychiatrist Anthony Storr noted that these connections need not be intimate ones, but that they must be there: “[W]hether or not they are enjoying intimate relationships, human beings need a sense of being part of a larger community than that constituted by the family” (13). Kipling D. Williams, in his study of ostracism and its effects, notes that the need to belong is fundamental, and that “an absence of affiliation .╯.╯. with others produces a host of negative psychological consequences, including depression, anxiety, stress, and physical and mental

illness” (60). Being isolated from others, Williams goes on to argue, can also effect other fundamental needs, such as the need for self-esteem, the need to feel in control of one’s own life, and the need for meaningful existence (59–60). Being apart from others in any kind of systematic way can, in fact, alter the way we derive meaning from our lives. Isolation, forced or voluntary, can be as a window into what life would be like if we did not exist. When there is no one to take notice of us, no one to see us, talk to us, or respond to us in any way, it is as though we are dead, for there is no one there to remind us that we are alive. William James, in his groundbreaking Principles of Psychology (1890) says, “No more fiendish punishment could be devised, were such a thing physically possible, than that one should be turned loose in society and remain absolutely unnoticed by all the members thereof ” (quoted in Williams 2). To be cut off like this, or “cut dead” as James puts it, is one of the most powerful weapons humans wield against one another and the basis for one of our society’s most common punitive actions: incarceration. When isolation is forced, as in incarceration or ostracism, its victims can undergo enormous pain and stress. For example, in Susan Glaspell’s play Trifles, Minnie Wright has been isolated by her cruel husband for many years. She sees no one, talks to no one, and must live out her days in only his infrequent and reticent company. Thus, Mrs. Hale and Mrs. Peters surmise that when John Wright kills her only source of comfort, and indeed her only source of identification, her parakeet, she snaps and turns to murder, a completely uncharacteristic move. This parakeet is the only way Minnie knows she is alive, because it responds to her by singing, which she herself used to do in church with other members of her community. Minnie’s isolation is created by her husband; many characters in literature suffer forced isolation at the hands of family members. In The Color Purple, by Alice Walker, Celie is isolated first by her father and then by her husband, Mister. She is given no access to those who love her and those who would give her life intimacy and connection. First her father takes away her babies moments after they are born, then he marries her off to Mister, separat-

64â•…â•… isolation ing her from her beloved sister, Nettie. After Celie goes to live at Mister’s house, he in turn isolates her, keeping her like a prisoner, forced to cook, clean, and have sex, but receiving no comfort or love from anyone. Briefly, when Nettie lives with them, Celie feels joy again, but Mister literally tears them apart from one another and forces Nettie out of the house. Significantly, Mister tries to keep Nettie from teaching Celie how to read—and once she is gone, he hides the letters Nettie sends. These letters, had they been delivered, would have given Celie the human connection she so desperately needed. Her isolation cultivates in her feelings of worthlessness—feelings that leave her to wonder if she is even human. Forced isolation such as Celie and Minnie experience may also be brought on by society or by the circumstances of one’s life. In William Shakespeare’s The Tempest, Ariel and Caliban have been isolated for years, alone on an island, until a shipwreck brings others into their lives. Both of them react based on their previous isolation. Ariel, who has been imprisoned in a tree, is willing to do Prospero’s bidding because he is grateful to have the company of others once again. Caliban, on the other hand, is horrified to have to share “his” island. His years alone have made him rough and unable to communicate well—and thus he appears to the shipwreck survivors as a beast, unfit for human interaction. While isolation often produces effects that dehumanize people, positive changes may also result from extended solitude. As Anthony Storr argues, “The capacity to be alone is a valuable resource when changes of mental attitude are required” (29). He relates stories of such isolated souls as the children’s author Beatrix Potter and the 17th-century explorer and nobleman Sir Walter Raleigh. Schooled at home by a nanny, Potter was isolated as a child, with no opportunity to mix with other children. She made “friends” with the animals she encountered—rabbits, mice, ducks—and spent hours drawing them. As an adult, she would go on to produce the famous and beautifully illustrated Peter Rabbit stories. Storr theorizes that the isolation she experienced as a child forced her to create companions, and that is what led to her ultimate creativity (111–112). Raleigh wrote the first volume of his Historie of the World, about ancient Greece and Rome, while

imprisoned in the Tower of London. Again, Storr theorizes that like Potter, Raleigh devised something for his mind to do while his body was physically isolated. In Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s short story The Yellow Wallpaper, the narrator is confined to her room for what her husband and her doctors have declared a “nervous” depression. With nothing else to do, she becomes obsessed with the room’s wallpaper, eventually believing she is one of the women on the wallpaper. In the end, the narrator does reach psychosis—but one can read this ending as a kind of freedom from her husband’s control. Her isolation forces her to think in a new way, and ultimately he frees her from the room because of this. Isolation, while mostly a difficult, debilitating force for human beings, can also produce interesting, creative results in its victims. By and large, however, being isolated challenges our basic human needs and calls into question the meaning of our lives. Literature, with its windows into the thoughts and feelings of the characters it portrays, allows us a glimpse into the isolated mind. See also Bierce, Ambrose: “Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge, An”; Chopin, Kate: Awakening, The; Conrad, Joseph: Heart of Darkness; Defoe, Daniel: Robinson Crusoe; Frost, Robert: poems; Harte, Bret: “Luck of Roaring Camp, The”; Hawthorne, Nathaniel: “Rappaccini’s Daughter”; Hemingway, Ernest: Old Man and the Sea, The; Hurston, Zora Neale: Their Eyes Were Watching God; James, Henry: Turn of the Screw, The; Joyce, James: Dubliners; Molière: Misanthrope, The; Morrison, Toni: Bluest Eye, The; Salinger, J. D.: Catcher in the Rye, The; Steinbeck, John: Of Mice and Men; Twain, Mark: Adventures of Huckleberry Finn; Wharton, Edith: Frome, Ethan; Williams, Tennessee: Streetcar Named Desire, A. FURTHER READING Conliffe, Mark. “On Isolation.” Midwest Quarterly 47, no. 2 (Winter 2006): 115–130. Storr, Anthony. Solitude. New York: Free Press (1988). Williams, Kipling D. Ostracism. New York: Guilford, 2001.

Jennifer McClinton-Temple

justiceâ•…â•… 65

justice

The desire to be treated fairly, and to see others treated fairly, is a fundamental human impulse. We seek justice in our own lives, and many of us promote it in the lives of others. Injustice strikes us as unnatural, an imbalance that should not be tolerated in moral, humane societies. Some would even argue that justice is the most important factor in making a moral society, saying that without justice, there can be no true moral authority. Philosophers do not agree, however, on virtually any aspect of justice. There are controversies involving whether or not actions can be considered just, what intellectual paths we must take to make those determinations, how justice should be carried out, and whether or not there can be such a thing as “natural” justice— that is, universal principles that all societies should follow. Justice is a complicated subject because what is “right” may not always be what is “just,” and what is “just” may not always be “right.” For instance, a culture that follows the Old Testament precept of “an eye for an eye” might call killing an innocent person to avenge the death of another innocent person “just.” Few of us, however, would call that the right course of action. Conversely, the institution of slavery might help a local economy function well, leading some to label it “good,” but it would be impossible to argue that slavery is ever “just.” Literature explores the complexities surrounding the concept of justice often. For instance, when the lion Aslan agrees to be sacrificed in place of the traitor Edmund in C. S. Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, he is conforming to the laws of Narnia, laws whose stated role is to deliver justice. Edmund, after all, did commit treason, and treason should be punished. For Edmund to die at the hands of the White Witch might be justice, but Aslan knows it would spell disaster for the future of Narnia, so he dies in Edmund’s place. Conversely, the women of Susan Glaspell’s play Trifles subvert justice, becoming criminals themselves in the process when they hide evidence that might convict Minnie Wright. What they do may not be just, but Glaspell definitely wants us to believe that what they do is right.

This question of what is “just” and what is “right” is one of the questions philosophers grapple with when they discuss justice. Serious explorations of the problem must examine first whether or not we can ever rationally justify these terms, which seem so very subjective. If we can justify them, then we are left asking the equally difficult questions of “How ought we to act in order to be just?” and “How ought social institutions be structured so as to achieve justice?” (Buchanan and Mathieu 12). Some theories of justice are retributive—that is, they are concerned with using punishment to restore the imbalance created by the injustice of crime. This type of justice is almost exclusively associated with criminal justice. When it is properly retributive, those who have taken “unfair advantage of the law abiding populace” are punished in proportion to their crime (12). The killers depicted in Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, Dick Hickock and Perry Smith, brutally murder a family of four. They performed this deed, as Capote notes through his title, “in cold blood.” What this phrase indicates is that there were no mitigating circumstances to explain why they committed this crime. In William Shakespeare’s Othello, the title character kills his wife, Desdemona, because he believes she has been unfaithful; it is a crime of passion that he commits in a fit of rage. But Hickock and Smith kill the Clutter family calmly and without remorse. When society seeks justice for this offense, then, it seeks the highest penalty. Because Hickock and Smith took lives so coldly, they must pay with their own. This is retributive justice. While we may not always agree on just how to make all punishments fit their crimes, the concept itself is relatively simple. Distributive justice, on the other hand, is a much more complicated concept. Theories of justice that are distributive seek to regulate social and economic inequalities. The distribution of goods in a society can never be perfectly equal: Some will always have more than others, due to differences in intelligence, skill, personality, or sheer luck. Distributive justice asks us to determine how this inevitable imbalance might be most fairly corrected. One of the foundational principles of distributive justice, sometimes called the “formal principle” and usually attributed to the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle, is that

66â•…â•… justice “equals should be treated equally and unequals unequally—but in proportion to their relevant similarities and differences” (Buchanan and Mathieu 15). Applying that principle to real-life situations is complicated. Most philosophers of justice agree that we must focus on certain material principles in our consideration of whether or not inequality is just: need, ability, effort, productivity, public utility, and supply and demand. In other words, when we try to determine whether or not a particular state of inequality is just or unjust, we must consider the above categories. One system of distributive justice is known as utilitarianism. This system asks one question of actions and policies concerned with distribution: Does it maximize overall utility? For example, for utilitarians, “maximizing overall utility might permit or even require members of one segment of society to lead live of impoverished slaves, lacking even the most basic civil and political liberties” (26). In the system of apartheid depicted in Isak Dinesen’s Out of Africa, the black Africans live lives in just such a position. Dinesen is able to justify this situation because she sees them as childlike and unable to handle their own affairs. She truly sees this clearly unfair situation as being better for society as a whole; thus, she is adopting a utilitarian position. John Rawls, perhaps the best known philosopher of distributive justice, rejects this utilitarian mindset. His principles of justice, outlined in his 1971 book A Theory of Justice, are threefold. First, each person is to have an equal right to the most extensive system of equal basic liberties. For Rawls, these basic liberties are freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, freedom from arbitrary arrest, the right to hold personal property, and freedom of political participation. Second, offices and position are to be open to all; people with similar abilities and skills should have equal access to positions of power and importance. Third, social and economic institutions are to be arranged in ways that maximize the benefits for the worst off. Rawls’s ideas are controversial, to be sure, as adhering to his principles almost guarantees a redistribution of wealth. Another school of thought, libertarianism, would declare that any redistribution of wealth is theft.

So how can we assure ourselves that our societies are just without becoming Robin Hoods, robbing the rich to give to the poor? Or maybe Robin Hood, despite his criminal ways, was acting in the name of justice. Criminal justice, of course, would punish Robin Hood for stealing from others, but it is social justice we discuss here. The basic question is whether or not those at the top of the social heap have a moral responsibility to share with those at the bottom. Samuel Clemens, writing as Mark Twain, seems to have felt that they did. In his Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Clemens uses the story of a child, Huck, who has been forgotten by his society, to “argue for the ethical and moral treatment of children” (Kiskis 67). If it is incumbent upon us as Christians to physically and spiritually comfort the poor, how can we let a child like Huck forge his way alone? He is abused by his father, isolated by society, treated as an outcast, and finally left to fend for himself. The community sees this as Huck’s own choice, but Twain wants us to consider how we can let a child make such a choice. Twain’s Huck “reminds us of our complicity in a society that disposes of people” (71). If we accept that complicity, then we might also consider the possibility that our society should mandate reversing such injustice, and this would inevitably require some type of redistribution of wealth. We give up some rights, then, if we are willingly a part of such a society. If in order to right these wrongs, we have to give up some of our own basic liberties, or allow those liberties to be infringed upon, then perhaps that is the way we achieve justice as a society. See also Carroll, Lewis: Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland; Conrad, Joseph: Lord Jim; Dante Alighieri: Divine Comedy, The; Edwards, Jonathan: “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God”; Fielding, Henry: Tom Jones; Gaskell, Elizabeth: North and South; Gay, John: Beggar’s Opera, The; Gordimer, Nadine: Burger’s Daughter; Jacobs, Harriet: Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Written by Herself; Kincaid, Jamaica: Small Place, A; Lawrence, Jerome, and Robert E. Lee: Inherit the Wind; Lee, Harper: To Kill a Mockingbird; McMurtry, Larry: Lonesome Dove; Molière:

loveâ•…â•… 67 Tartuffe; Paine, Thomas: Age of Reason, The; Pirandello, Luigi: Six Characters in Search of an Author; Shakespeare, William: Hamlet; Othello; Silko, Leslie Marmon: Almanac of the Dead; Sophocles: Antigone; Twain, Mark: Adventures of Tom Sawyer, The. FURTHER READING Buchanan, Allen, and Deborah Matthieu. “Philosophy and Justice.” In Justice: Views from the Social Sciences, edited by Ronald L. Cohen, 12–36. New York: Plenum Press, 1986. Kiskis, Michael J. “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Again!): Teaching for Social Justice or Samuel Clemens’ Children’s Crusade.” Mark Twain Annual 1 (2003): 63–77. Rawls, John. A Theory of Justice. 1971. Reprint, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2005.

Jennifer McClinton-Temple

love

There is perhaps no other theme in world literature as prevalent, provocative, diverse—and perennially compelling—as that of love or its absence. An integral part of the human experience in its various forms, love is also a key if highly complex component of what writers and critics have tried to express for their readers. Exploring different kinds and consequences of love in literary works can thus serve to define what it means as a theme within particular cultural contexts and genres as well as in our lives. But a distinction must first be made between the word love’s common usage (as in, “I loved lunch”) and its deeper, more intense and abstract meanings with which we are primarily concerned here. Among the most common kinds of love depicted in literature is that between family members. Marriage, a familiar ending of many comedic plays, tends either to be the culmination of romantic love (discussed below) or a matter of convenience, such as money and social status, often by parental, political, or economic arrangements. Jane Austen’s novels, such as Sense and Sensibility and P ride and P rejudice, are prime expositions of the theme of tensions that can arise between the two marriage motives, one love-based and the other not. Sustained lack of love in a marriage can lead to estrangement,

separation, divorce, or extramarital affairs (adultery, considered a sin in many religions), in which one spouse seeks out the love, affections, or opportunities denied by the other elsewhere, frequently tragically. The misadventures of Emma, the namesake character of Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, are a case in point. A second kind of familial love, that between parents and their children, usually differs greatly depending on the genders, personalities, and cultural circumstances of the individuals in the relationship. Motherly love is generally described as being boundless, tender, and attentive, while paternal love, in contrast, is commonly depicted as unemotional and contingent, and it often has to be earned. In the psychologist Sigmund Freud’s analysis of Sophocles’ play Oedipus the King, such stereotypes of parental love lead boys to seek out women like their mothers and rebel against their fathers (or father figures) later in life, and girls to see their mothers as competing for their father’s love; by extension, this makes all women jealous of their lovers’ attentions. Many literary works follow these basic patterns, purposefully or not. Sibling love between brothers and sisters is not only used literally by writers and critics; it can also be a metaphor for specific kinds of relations between characters unrelated by blood. The relationships between the two twin hobbits Merry and Pippin and between Frodo and Sam in J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings draw attention to the similarity between biological and nonbiological sibling love. Big Brother totalitarianism in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four is a satirical extension of brotherly love, often overly protective. Fraternal love, on the other hand, develops through bonding experiences among men of all ages, as with certain of the teenagers in William Golding’s Lord of the Flies. Sisterhood is likewise not limited to the love between biological sisters but is a thematic term also applied to close and affectionate relations between women friends—as, for example, between the sisters in Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women or the sisterly bond among the women of the older generation in Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club. Another kind of love quite unlike familial love is that which characters and people can have for

68â•…â•… love the nonhuman, whether animals, things, or ideas. Pastoral works of poetry and fiction, for instance, celebrate the relationships between farmers and their animals or shepherds and their flocks, while other narratives focus on the love between pets and their owners, as in John Steinbeck’s The Red Pony. Some of the most cherished children’s stories, such as A. A. Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh, use love and affection between animals to reflect on their human equivalents. Love of money, maybe more accurately described as an obsession, as well as of other tangible things—from cars and clothes to places—frequently plays pivotal thematic roles in life as in literary works. The main character in Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray is so enamored with the idea of his youth and beauty that he debauches his life in preserving them, as others have sacrificed theirs for ideas and ideals such as nation, freedom, and loyalty. Philosophy, it should be remembered, literally means a love (philo) for or friend of knowledge (sophia). As a primary thrust or secondary incidental occurrence in literature, however, it may be safe to say that no theme is as ubiquitous and variously treated as romantic love. For example, the theme of courtly love, or passion between two members of the nobility, began circulating in Europe as early as the 11th century, and by the 19th century, it was an object of ridicule in fiction in some circles. Still, certain elements within the theme of romantic love are constant and unchanging, as in its progressive stages. First comes the discovery of one lover by the other or both at once—hence the expression “lovestruck,” as when the war-injured Henry meets the nurse Catherine in Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms. The second stage is courtship, when one potential partner attempts to woo or seduce the other. Some of the best-known examples of this are contained in the large corpus of chivalric poetry, in which knights euphemistically persuade ladies to accept their overtures, ostensibly without losing their virginity or “virtue.” If the courtship is successful on both ends, then the third stage is consummation; if it is unsuccessful, then there is rejection by one or the other, or unrequited love. Thus, romantic love as an emotion must be distinguished from love

as activity, just as love as a biochemical process must be distinguished from love as thought. The thematic process of romantic love is everywhere circumscribed by the identities of its participants and the cultures in which their escapades take place. Forbidden love, sought after by participants but scorned by others or the culture, is epitomized by that between the title characters of William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet as their meeting, courtship, and tragic consummation take place against the backdrop of their feuding families. Racial, national, and class disparities between potential or actual lovers have proven to be considerable cultural obstacles that they can or cannot overcome. Pederasty, the love and mentorship of older men for younger, was commonplace in ancient Athens but would now be considered pedophilia. It is in this context that the notion of platonic love, so named after the philosopher Plato, came to be a spiritual and intellectual union rather than physical, considered base within this paradigm. Love between two people of the same sex, or homosexual love, is depicted without hesitation in the fragments of the ancient Greek poet Sappho of Lesbos, but its trials and tribulations in more contemporary times are made clear in Tony Kushner’s Angels in America. A final kind of love to be mentioned here is that which is sometimes called “universal love,” an acknowledgment of the value of all life and commitment as being unconditionally benevolent. Religious texts such as the Torah, Bible, and Quran equate this kind of supreme love to that which the Deity holds for believers and vice versa, and which enables believers to love others in the same way. It is in these senses that love is sometimes said to be blind (that is, in overlooking the faults of others) or that individuals are instruments of an independent force of love, not the other way around. But thinkers and writers such as the Russian Leo Tolstoy and the American Ralph Waldo Emerson have also described equivalents to universal love that do not require religious foundations, although they are free to have them. In an allegorical sense, then, no matter which kind of love a character or person experiences, it ultimately brings him or her closer to, or makes them more a part of, this ultimate theme of universal love.

memoryâ•…â•… 69 See also Augustine, Saint: Confessions of St. Augustine, The; Bambara, Toni Cade: Salt Eaters, The; Bradbury, Ray: Martian Chronicles, The; Brontë, Charlotte: Jane Eyre; Brontë, Emily: Wuthering Heights; Chekhov, Anton: Seagull, The; Dante Alighieri: Divine Comedy, The; Faulkner, William: Sound and the Fury, The; Fitzgerald, F. Scott: Tender Is the Night; Gay, John: Beggar’s Opera, The; Hardy, Thomas: Jude the Obscure; Hawthorne, Nathaniel: “Birth-Mark, The”; Hesse, Herman: Siddhartha; Keats, John: poems; Kundera, Milan: Unbearable Lightness of Being, The; McCullers, Carson: Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, The; Milton, John: Paradise Lost; Morrison, Toni: Tar Baby; Nabokov, Vladimir: Lolita; parenthood; Proust, Marcel: Remembrance of Things Past; Shakespeare, William: Hamlet; Othello; Tolstoy, Leo: War and Peace; Wharton, Edith: Age of Innocence, The; Yeats, William Butler: poems. FURTHER READING Fiedler, Leslie. Love and Death in the American Novel. New York: Dell, 1966. Hagestrum, Jean. Esteem Enlightened by Desire: The Couple from Homer to Shakespeare. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992. Siddall, Stephen, ed. The Truth about Love: A Collection of Writing on Love through the Ages. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009.

Antony Adolf

memory

Memory in literature is the written form of that which has come before. Memories come from the historical past but are also formed by social, political, and religious events in the lives of literary characters. Memory is employed in three distinct fashions, which often exist concurrently in a text: first, to establish the validity and importance of a text based on the expertise and reputation of past writers; second, as a means of instilling a feeling of nostalgia in a text; and third, and most universally, as a method of constructing individual and cultural identity. The first construction is particularly prevalent in the literature of the English Middle Ages and the

romantic movement of the 19th century, while the second has been employed throughout the 20th century by writers of both British and American origin in the wake of the sociopolitical upheavals caused by World Wars I and II. The third construction is ubiquitous in all written works dealing with individual or cultural issues, and because of this, memory serves as a literary theme of profound importance. The earliest written epic works establish memory as a central literary theme. Homer’s The Iliad and Virgil’s The Aeneid serve to establish the character and ideology of the Greek and Roman nations, respectively, through the blending of fictional elements with the recording of great men, heroic battles, and important, long-past events. It is here that the use of the catalog, or list of important historical figures, is employed not only to give the work authenticity through the presence of verifiable historical names and places, but also to convey a sense of historical memory to works that are primarily fictional in nature. Through the heroic actions of Achilles and his comrades in arms on the battlefields of the Trojan War, Homer sets down his view of the national identity and character of ancient Greece, a view that prevails today. Deliberately crafting his work on the model of Homer’s by incorporating elements both from The Iliad and The Odyssey, Virgil constructs a national history of Rome, linking Augustus himself to the ancient world and thus reinforcing his provenance to rule through the tale of Aeneas’s journey from the ruins of Troy to found Rome. Virgil, however, takes memory further in the Aeneid: Making use of the catalog and of the presence of events from Homer’s work, he expands on the theme through the instance of Aeneas’s dalliance with Dido. Sworn to travel to the location of the future Rome and establish the foundations of that great city, Aeneas finds himself delayed by an affair with the queen of Carthage; he seemingly forgets his purpose and must be reminded of his destiny by Mercury, messenger to Jupiter, the king of the gods. In this manner, Virgil adds the importance of individual memory to his text, expanding the role of memory in his writing from a collective to an individual construction. Medieval writers, steeped in the Scholastic tradition of thought, which required proof based in

70â•…â•… memory Scripture or other foundational texts of each point or idea presented within a text, probably did more than any other group to construct memory as a literary theme of supreme importance in its own right. Through compendia, or collections of writings, religious authors sought to establish validity of thought in their writings; through catalogs based on ancient Greek and Roman models, religious and secular authors alike sought to establish textual authority and to craft a memory tradition of thinking and cultural identity. Geoffrey Chaucer provides an excellent example of this in The Canterbury Tales, in which assorted travelers on pilgrimage to the shrine of Thomas à Beckett at Canterbury Cathedral stop at an inn and conduct a storytelling contest. In this work, Chaucer not only creates a fictional cross-section of British society in his time but does so by having each of his travelers tell his or her story in a literary genre suited to his or her station in life. For example, the Knight, a noble, tells a romance; the lower-class Miller tells a fabliau, or dirty tale; the middle-class Wife of Bath tells an Arthurian legend; the Nun’s Priest tells a beast fable, or story with personified animals as the main characters; and the Second Nun tells of a saint’s life. In this fashion, Chaucer creates a compendium of literary genres fashionable in his time, in addition to providing a glimpse of British attitudes toward social, political, and religious issues in his day, and his work therefore serves as an excellent example of the use of memory to construct collective identity. The British romantics transformed the use of memory in literature, often basing their writing on earlier forms and themes, upon which they embroidered a highly personal nostalgia and quest for identity. William Wordsworth’s “Lines Composed A Few Miles above Tintern Abbey” is widely acknowledged as the work that ushered in the romantic movement. As the narrator returns to a spot he visited years earlier, he is swept away by the changes in the abbey and in himself, while simultaneously delighting in the eternal quality of the countryside surrounding him. The inclusion of personal memory in the form of nostalgia, married to collective memory in the public form of the abbey itself, demonstrates the power of memory to evoke strong emotion. John Keats similarly makes

use of the individual/collective dichotomy in his “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” in which he observes the eternal images painted on an ancient vase, constructs stories about them derived from his knowledge of ancient culture, and simultaneously considers his own ephemeral place in time. His recollection of history, fused with his own mortality, render the poem highly emotional. Rather than using memory to underscore textual legitimacy or to convey national ideology, the romantics employed it to evoke nostalgia and to highlight personal conflicts in the search for identity. Marcel Proust furthered the evolution of memory in his monumental autobiographical novel Remembrance of Things Past. In this work, Proust is plunged into memories of his childhood through the taste of a madeleine (small cake) dipped in tea. From the original flashback evoked by the taste of the cake, he maps an inner landscape of the mind through further mental associations with that first, sense-based moment, thus evolving the story from a single memory to a vast panorama of identity constructed through memory. This work more than any other has profoundly impacted the use of memory in modern literature; with it, Proust wrested memory entirely from its original use as a means of establishing textual authority and national character, recreating it as a means of personal exploration of self and the world. Twentieth-century writers have tended to follow Proust’s use of association in the construction of memory. Perhaps the single best example of this is T. S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land.” A modern poem about the collapse of tradition and history and the struggle for identity in the wake of World War I, “The Waste Land” is a masterwork of association, employing allusions to historical events, contemporary affairs, literature, music, art, the occult, science, astronomy, important centers of learning and culture, and various figures (both real and fictional) to underscore the impoverished state of postwar society. Eliot’s use of memory is a subversion of the traditional; his is a construction of memory as that which has been forgotten. He employs vast references to the past in order to underscore their absence in the present. Panoramas of ancient cities such as Alexandria and cultural centers such as

nationalismâ•…â•… 71 Vienna, the pageantry of Shakespeare’s Cleopatra on the barge, the splendor of Elizabeth I’s reign, the glory of King Arthur’s legend, and the foundational humanity of Ovid’s mythological figures are juxtaposed with the garbage of modern picnickers floating down the Thames River, with throngs of dejected workers filing down the streets of London and with an overall barrenness in the modern landscape, in order to highlight the national and personal crises of identity that for Eliot marked the modern era. His work, then, not only serves as a sort of compendium of European culture but also as a call to mindfulness in the reader; through the authority of the objects, events, and people incorporated in his allusions, the reader is free to indulge in nostalgia for the great moments of the past as well as to make associations with them, leading to highly personal questions of identity and nationalism. In the modern world, then, memory is as important as ever as a means of establishing authority, evoking nostalgia, and helping to forge personal and national identity. See also Bambara, Toni Cade: Salt Eaters, The; Cather, Willa: My Ántonia; Dickens, Charles: David Copperf ield; Ellison, Ralph: Invisible Man; García Márquez, Gabriel: One Hundred Years of Solitude; Joyce, James: Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, A; Momaday, N. Scott: Way to Rainy Mountain, The; O’Neill, Eugene: Long Day’s Journey into Night; Rhys, Jean: Wide Sargasso Sea; Rushdie, Salman: Midnight ’s Children; Welty, Eudora: Optimist ’s Daughter, The; Wiesel, Elie: Night; Wilder, Thornton: Our Town; Williams, Tennessee: Glass Menagerie, The; Woolf, Virginia: To the Lighthouse. FURTHER READING Carruthers, Mary. The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Ender, Evelyne. Architexts of Memory: Literature, Science, and Autobiography. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005. McConky, James, ed. The Anatomy of Memory: An Anthology. Oxford University Press, 1996. Middleton, Peter, and Tim Woods. Literature of Memory: History, Time and Space in Post-War Writing.

Manchester, Eng.: Manchester University Press, 2001. Nalbantian, Suzanne. Memory in Literature: From Rousseau to Neuroscience. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004.

Melissa Ridley-Elmes

nationalism

Many scholars have struggled to define the term nationalism in a way that encompasses and makes sense of all the different situations in which it is employed. In general, it is an ideology in which nationality is a category by which humans define themselves. Nationalism necessarily categorizes people—one either is or is not a member of “my nation.” It thrives through the use of such elements as national folklore, symbols, heroes, sports, music, religion, and the idea that there is a national identity or character. Anthony D. Smith, a theorist of nationalism, has suggested that there are criteria that must be in place for nationalism to exist. His list includes a physical homeland, either current or ancient; a high degree of autonomy among the citizens, hostile surroundings, memories of glory or defeat in battle, special customs, historical records, common languages and scripts, and what he calls sacred centers or places (17). This sort of nationalism is highly dependent on the concept of the nation-state and probably represents the most common use of the term. It has been used to justify imperialism, to unite countries in times of war, and to describe the struggles for nationhood in colonized countries such as Ireland and India. However, nationalism has also been used to describe movements within sovereign nations, such as the black nationalist movement in the United States in the 1960s and 1970s and the Hindu nationalism currently seen in India. American Indian activists have also called for American Indian nationalism, especially given that many of their tribes are sovereign nations themselves. One of the reasons nationalism is so difficult to define is that any discussion involving the subject necessarily spills over into cognate subjects such as race and racism, fascism and other ideologies, language development, international law, genocide, and immigration. In addition, nationalism can take

72â•…â•… nationalism many different forms, with the central factor upon which a movement is based being, for instance, religious, political, ethnic, or cultural. This further confuses the way the term is used and defined. In the latter half of the 18th century, for instance, the people of France had successfully united under such symbols as the tricolor flag, the sentimental power of the anthem “The Marseillaise,” and the ideals of liberté, egalité, fraternité (liberty, equality, fraternity). This type of patriotism allowed the nation to feel as one in a way that had not been possible before the French Revolution. For the French, at least in overthrowing the monarchy, the loyalty inspired by nationalism helped to create a “free” society, the goal of the Revolution. Throughout the 19th century, however, nationalism would be used to justify imperialism, jingoism, and xenophobia in countries such as Great Britain, the United States, Italy, and France itself. Some scholars also attribute the 20th-century rise of fascism to nationalism taken to its extreme. In the late 20th century, the term came to be used most often to describe indigenous movements seeking autonomy, equality, and recognition. Most broadly, the term has been used to describe the way the people of a country define themselves. The idea that a “nation” is an entity, an identifiable thing moving forward through time, is a relatively new one, having only been around since the 18th century or so. Although some historians believe that the “concept” of nationalism existed even in tribal communities and has probably been around since the beginning of humanity, modern theorists place its origins at the beginning of the 18th century. Before that period, they say, no one had more than local interests. Nationalism, for these theorists, was made possible by the Industrial Revolution, the widespread use of the printing press, and the rise of capitalism. All of these things relied on a large, literate, and culturally homogeneous population for their success. These theories, expounded by people such as Benedict Anderson and Ernest Gellner, argue that nationalism is a “socially constructed” phenomenon. In other words, they believe that it is an artificial designation, imposed on the denizens of a country for social or political purposes. This belief does not reduce the power of the concept but merely suggests that it is not a real, organic phenomenon arising

from the true feelings and motives of the country’s people. As viable political entities, nations must concern themselves with defining what it means to be a nation. This is a challenge even for the most homogenous linguistically and historically bound people, but it is a concern that is crucial to their existence. Literature, as a vehicle, helps to express nationalist ideas particularly well. If nations or nationalist movements are indeed identifiable entities moving forward in time, they need to speak, and literature gives them a voice to do just that. Postrevolutionary America, for instance, needed to come to terms with its independence, as well as to establish and put forward a national character. Washington Irving’s The Sketchbook of Geoffrey Crayon (1819) depicts characters struggling with these ideas. In one of Irving’s most famous stories, “Rip Van Winkle,” the main character goes to sleep for 20 years and wakes up in a world unfamiliar to him. What was once a pleasant, sleepy community now seems, to Rip, like a busy, contentious place, rife with disagreement. The American Revolution has taken place while he slept, but instead of focusing on political matters, Irving uses Rip to show the reader how daily life has changed in those lost years—daily life being more important than politics in the life of an ordinary man. This reading helped early Americans take a step toward defining the national character of the fledgling country; it also helped readers understand the pain of independence from the mother country. Similarly, in William Butler Yeats’s poetry, metaphors for national character and the struggle toward independence abound. In poems such as “The Stolen Child,” “Chuchulain’s Fight with the Sea,” “Who Goes with Fergus?,” and the long poem “The Wanderings of Oisin,” Yeats strives to invoke old Ireland, mystical and Celtic, in order to create for the modern country a precolonial image to which it might aspire. Ireland was the oldest of England’s colonies, held for nearly 800 years, and an obstacle for Irish nationalists was finding a way to clearly distinguish what was Irish from what was English. Yeats was such a nationalist poet, however, that he did not merely speak in metaphors. Much of his commentary on nationalism is not figurative at

natureâ•…â•… 73 all but is explored literally, in largely unambiguous language. In poems such as “Easter 1916,” “To Ireland in the Coming Times,” and “The Irish Airman Foresees his Death,” Yeats is explicit, mourning the loss of lives in the struggle for independence and noting the toll that years of oppression have taken on the Irish character. While both Irving and Yeats were working with countries struggling with defining their identities against the specter of English dominance, in 1897 Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula addressed the difficulty of nationalism and England itself. Count Dracula, whom Stoker portrays as everything that is foreign to England and the English characters, seeks to capture Mina, whose purity, intelligence, and kindness make her a perfect symbol of Victorian womanhood. In contrast, Dracula is mysterious, speaking in heavily accented English and living in a remote castle in Transylvania. He is Eastern as opposed to the very Western Mina, and worst of all, he is believed to be a vampire, the undead creature from eastern European folklore. In his quest, Dracula purchases various pieces of real estate around London so that he may have resting places to protect him should he be caught outside as the sun rises. He has transported native soil from his homeland to deposit in these locations. This represents a kind of reverse colonialism, with the foreigner imposing himself upon England during the heyday of Victorian imperialism. The “good” character—that is, the English—must unite to destroy the foreign menace and thus save the character of their nation. Other literary works, such as Salman Rushdie’s Midnight ’s Children (1983), are openly critical of nationalist movements, portraying them as dehumanizing groups that stress unity over humanity. In Midnight’s Children, both the Indian nationalist movement and the Indo-Pakistani War (a nationalist-driven war) come very close to destroying the future of India, all for the advancement of the idea of a strong, homogenous, modern nation. Just as nationalism itself is a term that is difficult to define, literary portrayals of nationalism take many different forms and approach the subject from many different angles. Minority groups, dominant religions and ethnicities, and political entities (both new and long-established) may all embrace the ide-

ology of nationalism. Literature, with its many layers of meaning, can express this ideology in support of all these different groups. See also Atwood, Margaret: Surfacing; Fielding, Henry: Tom Jones; Forster, E. M.: Passage to India, A; Hemingway, Ernest: Farewell to Arms, A; Houston, Jeanne Wakatsuki: Farewell to Manzanar; Kipling, Rudyard: Kim; Machiavelli, Niccolò: P rince, The; Naipaul, V. S.: Bend in the River, A; Poe, Edgar Allan: “Murders in the Rue Morgue, The”; Shakespeare, William: Henry V; Merchant of Venice; The; Much Ado about Nothing. FURTHER READING Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. Rev. ed. London and New York: Verso, 2006. Corse, Patricia. Nationalism and Literature: The Politics of Culture in Canada and the United States. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Ignatieff, Michael. Blood and Belonging: Journeys into the New Nationalism. London: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1995. Kohn, Hans, and Craig Calhoun. Nationalism: A Study in Its Origins and Background. Edison, N.J.: Transaction Publishers, 2005. Smith, Anthony D. Nationalism: Theory, Ideology, History. London: Polity Press, 2001.

Jennifer McClinton-Temple

nature

Nature, taken broadly as the earth’s physical phenomena, is omnipresent, in literature as in life. Just as we do not live and function in a vacuum, literary events cannot transpire without some type of space, some sort of environment, however basic or unconventional it might be. But other than this initial stipulation that nature pervades all literature, further universals are difficult to defend. Perhaps the only other truth ascribable to the role of nature in literature is that it has demonstrated near-constant fluidity, from the dawn of English letters to the contemporary era. Many early texts utilize nature to describe origin. North American Indian tribes such as the Iroquois and the Pima told nature-focused creation stories.

74â•…â•… nature Homer in The Iliad and The Odyssey, Virgil in The Aeneid, and the early English poet Caedmon explain how a people came to inhabit the specific landscape they do. Beowulf (Anonymous) dramatizes the defense of one’s turf. Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales lend further to the trope of journey as tale, tale as journey, thereby paralleling nature and the act of storytelling itself. John Milton’s Paradise Lost even details heaven and hell as determinants of human consciousness, thereby deeming the eternal and ethereal as influential spaces as well. But throughout the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, and the Restoration, nature was, for the most part, allocated the role of backdrop—a mere canvas upon which the acts of humans were transposed. Occasional personification aside, nature was rarely afforded the power of agency. The romantic period (1785–1830) saw nature utilized as more of a primary subject matter than previously. William Shakespeare’s comparisons of women to summer’s days yielded to the direct treatment of seasonal splendor by William Blake (Songs of Innocence and of Experience), William Wordsworth (“Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey”), and Percy Bysshe Shelley, who celebrated nature as an inspiration and thereby ascribed it the role of muse, a position previously allocated to the divine. But while nature certainly plays a part in writings of the “Old World,” it was truly the genesis and flourishing of American literature that eventually repositioned it as a central, rather than merely a peripheral, thematic element, replete even with agency. As opposed to the letters produced in the well-known, exhaustively mapped countryside of Great Britain and Europe, those of the Western Hemisphere were recorded by pioneers in the throes of attempting to explore—both physically and intellectually—the immensity of an unforgiving foreign wilderness. These prenational, or colonial, writings are most recognizable by the strong and overt religious sentiment they propound. Tracts drafted by Puritans emigrating from Europe to New England promulgated strict Calvinism, by which humankind was placed on a pedestal above the natural world due to the favor shown it in the Bible, particularly in

the creation of man as the pinnacle of God’s work. This anthropocentric worldview traveled across the Atlantic with emigrants who sought to civilize the “savage” wild into which they were moving: The wilderness was seen as being in need of the doctrine they promulgated, as salvation was to be found not in the forests but in civilization, a divergent absolute from the “trickster” tales of the Winnebago, Sioux, Navajo, and other Native American tribes, in which natural elements and creatures display, paradoxically, a certain consistent unpredictability when interacting with people. The Puritans frowned on this subjectivity, maintaining instead that wilderness was the realm of beasts, of evil—this was the scene of Christ’s temptation, after all, the post-Fall wasteland. The key, they believed, was to carve out their own space and to introduce the word of God to the deprived landscape that lay before them. If paradise could be regained, it was not in the trees themselves but in their felling. Churches were needed to subordinate the wickedness of the uncouth wilderness to Providence, illustrated efficiently by the shining “city upon a hill” envisioned by John Winthrop in his sermon A Model of Christian Charity, delivered as a mission statement of sorts while en route from England in 1630. The concrete physical situation of the suggestion conveys the goal of these refugees: The realm of humans, the organized city, will be, quite literally, constructed above nature. Following independence, a new challenge presented itself to the now “American” authors. As former British subjects became pioneering patriots, the question of their interaction with their surroundings followed logically—that is, we know how subjects of the Crown treat nature, but what of American citizens? Merely regurgitating the ideology of those against whom they had fought so hard and long for independence lacked ambition at best, and seemed dangerously cyclical at worst. Hence, the initial American literati focused primarily on this new man, this fresh being (whom the 20th-century literary critic R. W. B Lewis would deem “the American Adam” in his work of the same name) reborn on a still largely unknown continent. The French-American writer J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur explored this creature as a product of its space. Washington Irving’s fiction, especially

natureâ•…â•… 75 The Sketchbook of Geoffrey Crayon, depicted the ever-evolving Dutch settlements of New York. James Fenimore Cooper’s five-volume Leatherstocking Tales follow Natty Bumppo—a European emigrant who consistently becomes more native in his lifestyle and politics—from the East Coast into the wilderness, all the way to the Rocky Mountains. And while all three writers concern themselves with the overarching issue of what it means to be American, they do so by deliberating specifically on the individual’s position within his or her environment. Quite literally, they focus on the situation of the early American. Furthermore, tough questions regarding Puritan fervor began to intensify (as demonstrated, most prominently, in the works of Nathaniel Hawthorne), leaving the door open for a new consideration of humankind’s relationship to nature, one which would be provided by Ralph Waldo Emerson. Emerson, a Unitarian minister living in Concord, Massachusetts, was notably affected by the romantic movement and desired, for his young country, a literature of its own. His consideration of European idealism—thoughts advanced by Immanuel Kant, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Thomas Carlyle, among others—led to his own brand of American transcendentalism, an ontological inspection in which nature factored centrally. Emerson believed that humankind had strayed from its course, thereby blurring the innate divinity by which all souls relate to each other and to God. The way to recover this lost relationship was present in nature, which, Emerson maintained, functioned as a sort of blueprint through which we could witness the mind of God. His ideas, though initially quite controversial when published in his long essay Nature (1836), gradually became more mainstream, particularly since they were advocated by the stable of talented writers with whom he surrounded himself in Concord. Margaret Fuller augmented her feminist societal critiques with natural observations. Henry David Thoreau lent Emerson’s abstractions practical examples in Walden, his account of two years spent living in the woods. Walt Whitman poeticized Emerson’s promotion of nature in his passionate tome Leaves of Grass. Emerson even sought to take the future outdoorsman and “wild man” John Muir under his

wing, but Muir preferred his California home. But just as the movement that sought to rewrite nature as sacred rather than subordinate began gaining momentum, the Civil War and the resultant economic slump, coupled with urbanization, instead led writers concerned with the natural world in a new, less hospitable direction. And so while nature was portrayed as an enlightening, esteemed realm for much of the mid-1800s, by the turn of the century this favorable depiction was replaced with caustic naturalist depictions that reflected the acerbic times. Literary naturalists refuted the pessimistic and optimistic natural views employed by the Puritans and transcendentalists, respectively, opting instead to allow nature to define itself. Previously popular natural personifications were eschewed in favor of more objective environmental renderings. These purportedly more realistic representations envisioned the outdoors as neither malevolent nor beneficent, but instead indifferent. Jack London’s tales, including The Call of the Wild and White Fang, depict an Alaskan interior unforgiving to both man and beast, whereas Stephen Crane’s works illustrate similar themes within the context of a gritty metropolis. Over the last century or so, the growth of the environmental movement has increased—and politicized—the role of nature in literature. John Muir founded the Sierra Club in 1892. The First World War inspired T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, an exposé of a once-promising landscape rendered dismal and hopeless at the hands of humankind. The ecologist Aldo Leopold, seeking to heal, at mid-century proposed his “land ethic,” asserting that decisions affecting nature should be considered neither economically nor commercially but morally. The environmentalist Edward Abbey scolded civilization’s convenience-based impingement on the wilderness. The writer and scientist Rachel Carson, in Silent Spring, warned against the lasting effects of chemical inundation. Transcending the strictly literary, the Wachowski brothers’ postmodern film The Matrix trilogy implores us to call into question the very validity of our perceived surrounding, and the politician Al Gore’s documentary An Inconvenient Truth has proved a powerful ecocritical text. Thus, while the precise future of natural literature is uncer-

76â•…â•… oppression tain, it seems quite clear that as global warming, overpopulation, and general environmental degradation continue, themes of nature will play increasingly important roles not only in the literature we study but also for the planet on which we live. See also Atwood, Margaret: Surfacing; Bradbury, Ray: Martian Chronicles, The; Cather, Willa: My Ántonia; O Pioneers!; Coleridge, Samuel Taylor: “Rime of the Ancient Mariner, The”; Crane, Stephen: Open Boat, The; Dante Alighieri: Divine Comedy, The; Dickinson, Emily: poems; Dinesen, Isak: Out of Africa; Emerson, Ralph Waldo: “SelfReliance”; Forster, E. M.: Room with a View, A; Frost, Robert: poems; Harte, Bret: “Luck of Roaring Camp, The”; Hemingway, Ernest: Old Man and the Sea, The; Jefferson, Thomas: Notes on the State of Virginia; Keats, John: poems; Kingsolver, Barbara: Bean Trees, The; Lewis, C. S.: Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, The; McCarthy, Cormac: All the P retty Horses; Shakespeare, William: Midsummer Night ’s Dream, A; Steinbeck, John: Pearl, The; Red Pony, The; Wilde, Oscar: Picture of Dorian Gray, The. FURTHER READING Anderson, Lorraine, Scott Slovic, and John P. O’Grady. Literature and the Environment: A Reader on Nature and Culture. New York: Longman, 1998. Keegan, Bridget, and James M. McKuzick, eds. Literature and Nature: Four Centuries of Nature Writing. Upper Saddle River, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 2000.

David Visser

oppression

As a concept frequently found in historical and sociological texts, oppression is typically defined in terms of a dominant group subjugating another minority group. In Race and Ethnic Relations (1985), Martin N. Marger explains that a sociological minority and a mathematical minority are not the same. Mathematically, a group can be the majority and yet still be victims of an oppression imposed by a more powerful yet numerically smaller dominant group. He goes on to delineate the qualities of oppressed minorities by detailing how they receive differential treatment,

as they are not afforded the same rights and privileges as the dominant group. Additionally, Marger notes that minority groups are socially denied, have differential power, and are treated categorically (all members are defined by group status as opposed to individually) (37–38). Also, dominant groups can be distinguished culturally, economically, and politically (41). With this diversity in mind, the theme of oppression would include all of the “-isms” we have come to identify with prejudice. It can be based on race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, political or national affiliation, age, physical or mental disability, religion, and other factors. In his authoritative The Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970), Paulo Friere identifies several characteristics of oppressive societies. For example, oppressors often refer to the oppressed in nonhuman terms. Correspondingly, oppression is against the ideals of humanity because it prevents people within the oppressed group from being fully human (43). In her article “Oppression,” Marilyn Frye expands on this: “The experience of oppressed people is that the living of one’s life is confined and shaped by forces and barriers which are not accidental or occasional and hence avoidable, but are systematically related to each other in such a way as to catch one between and among them and restrict or penalize motion in any direction” (40). This definition helps bring about a distinction between injustice and oppression. Whereas injustice can occur at any level, the more specific concept of oppression involves a systemic structure that shapes and restricts the life of an oppressed population. In Privilege, Power, and Difference, Allan G. Johnson describes the two sides of the oppressive society as the privileged and the oppressed. This terminology implies that the members who are receiving the benefits of the societal structure may not be actively oppressive toward others. Sometimes one is a member of a privileged group without feeling particularly dominant. However, membership in the majority group opens doors for members while membership in oppressed groups tends to shut doors. Interestingly, Friere asserts that the oppressed, rather than standing up against all tyranny, often become “sub-oppressors” against others within their minority group (45). This can be seen in Alice

oppressionâ•…â•… 77 Walker’s The Color Purple and Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, where the oppressed black men further subjugate the black women. Thus, the black women in the novels are doubly oppressed in their rural southern societies. This is specifically addressed in Their Eyes Were Watching God when the protagonist Janie is told by her grandmother that black women are the mules of the world. While the black men are oppressed by white society, according to Nanny, the black women are oppressed by both the white power structure and black men. This is also seen in the experiences of Celie, who for much of The Color Purple is beaten and oppressed by her husband, Mr. ——. In this novel, even Celie, who is subjugated for most of her life, encourages her stepson Harpo to beat his strong-willed wife, Sofia. In Friere’s view, Celie has become so enmeshed in a culture of oppression that she does not see it as aberrant. Oppression, with all its diverse implications, has been apparent throughout much of time. For example, in the Bible, not only are the Jews oppressed by the Egyptians and the Syrians, but the women of the Old Testament are also faced with laws that are inequitable. In fact, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, the earliest recorded use of the word oppression in the English language was in a 1382 version of the Bible. As an example of female oppression, in the book of Exodus, it is indicated that it is permissible to sell one’s daughters into slavery. Unlike sons who were sold into slavery, daughters were not released after a six-year period; they remained slaves. Similar to examining the religious text of the Bible, one needs only look at various historical periods to see countless examples of groups oppressed by others. Two modern examples of oppression are the apartheid of South Africa and Adolf Hitler’s oppression and persecution of the Jewish people. South African apartheid was a system of legalized racism and segregation enforced by the National Party government. In this society, marginalized populations, particularly “black” and “colored” (which was a mixed-race designation), were subjected to laws restricting where they resided, their right to voting, their ability to marry or engage in sexual relations with members of other races, where they

could work, and eventually their ability to be citizens. Similarly, the Jewish people of Hitler’s Germany were subjected to extremely differential treatment. The Nuremburg Laws prohibited marriage and sexual relations between Jews and Germans and stripped Jewish people of citizenship. Laws prohibiting where, and eventually if, Jewish people could work and be educated were part of the path that led to the Holocaust. The memoirs Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl, by Anne Frank, and Night, by Elie Wiesel, document the oppressive experience of subjugated people living in Nazi Germany. Both of these periods are emblematic of the oppression that permeates history. Since the works written in each era can be seen to reflect the zeitgeist of that period, and since oppression is so prevalent in history, it makes sense that it can be identified in works from multiple eras, countries, and cultural/social groups. At times, the works have been written purposefully to demonstrate the evils of the oppression, as in Richard Wright’s Native Son, a novel in which the author presents the oppressive racism of America in the 1930s, as experienced by his protagonist, Bigger Thomas. Sometimes, the works studied will not intentionally describe the oppressive system; instead, through their illustration of the social structure and mores of their times, they depict oppressions that critics can analyze. For instance, literary scholars frequently examine William Shakespeare’s play The Taming of the Shrew and analyze the oppression of women. Whether or not Shakespeare intended to subvert or uphold the patriarchy of his time, his play can still be studied to analyze the oppression of women. In terms of literary theory, critics did not always address the oppression in works. It became most apparent with the emergence of fields of criticism that are sociologically and culturally based. Because of its diverse dimensions, the theme of oppression is evident in many of these fields of literary study. For example, analyses of oppression are explored in gender studies, cultural studies, Marxist criticism, feminist criticism, postcolonial criticism, queer theory, and other sociologically influenced branches of criticism. To illustrate, books addressing South African apartheid would be of particular interest

78â•…â•… parenthood to postcolonial critics, who examine the works produced in or written about countries that have been subject to European colonial powers in their history. Since apartheid was instituted in a colonial area, where the colonizer was oppressing the native residents, works addressing this area would fall within the scope of postcolonial studies. Similarly, in feminist criticism, works would be examined to see how the patriarchal society dominates women. Historically, an admonition of patriarchal oppression can be found as far back as Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792). In this manifesto, Wollstonecraft contends that familial tyranny is unjust, that women should be educated, and that the differentiation of the sexes should cease. Many feminist texts have emerged over the years. The works of Virginia Woolf, Kate Chopin, Margaret Atwood, and Toni Morrison are often analyzed to demonstrate the oppression of women. Racial oppression is frequently treated in literature. While this includes much of postcolonial studies, it is not limited to them. In American literature, there are poignant examples of racial oppression. As a documentation of the slavery of blacks in America, Frederick Douglass’s Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, authenticates the experience of living in a dominated minority during the 1800s. Poetically, Langston Hughes’s works arising out of the Harlem Renaissance illuminate the oppression of black Americans at that time. One of the best examples of this is seen in his poem “I, Too,” which is an answer to Walt Whitman’s famous “I Hear America Singing.” In this, as in many of his works, Hughes asserts black humanity, one of the major focuses of the Harlem Renaissance. Remembering Friere’s point that oppressors dehumanize the oppressed, the need for the dominated to assert their humanity is understandable. In the poem, Hughes uses the metaphor of being sent to eat in the kitchen when company comes to represent the differential treatment of this era. The poem clearly subverts the current social system, and Hughes writes that the oppressed will grow stronger, indicating that one day they will bring down the oppressors. However, although the poem indicates the oppressed will rise

up against the dominant, it ends with the hopeful wish that the oppressors will see their mistake and change the system themselves. These works present a small sampling of oppression evident throughout much of literature. See also Achebe, Chinua: Anthills of the Savannah; Things Fall Apart; Allende, Isabel: House of the Spirits, The; Atwood, Margaret: Handmaid ’s Tale, The; Black Elk: Black Elk Speaks; Kesey, Ken: One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest; Kincaid, Jamaica: Small Place, A; Kundera, Milan: Unbearable Lightness of Being, The; London, Jack: White Fang; Mistry, Rohinton: Fine Balance, A; Paine Thomas: Common Sense; Rand, Ayn: Anthem; Reed, Ishmael: Mumbo Jumbo. FURTHER READING Awkward, Michael. Negotiating Difference: Race, Gender, and the Politics of Positionality. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995. Friere, Paulo. The Pedagogy of the Oppressed. New York: Continuum, 1993. Frye, Marilyn. “Oppression.” In Race, Class, and Gender: An Anthology, edited by Margaret L. Andersen and Patricia Hill Collins, 37–41. Belmont, Calif.: Wadsworth, 1992. Johnson, Allan G. Privilege, Power, and Difference. New York: McGraw Hill, 2001. Marger, Martin N. Race and Ethnic Relations: American and Global Perspectives. Belmont, Calif.: Wadsworth, 2006. Oppenheimer, Martin. The Hate Handbook: Oppressors, Victims, and Fighters. New York: Lexington Books, 2005. Smith, Barbara. “Toward a Black Feminist Criticism.” In All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, But Some of Us Are Brave: Black Women’s Studies, edited by Gloria T. Hull, Patricia Bell Scott, and Barbara Smith, Old Westbury, N.Y.: Feminist Press, 1982, 157–175.

Tracey L. Marticek-Raimondo

parenthood

Parenthood has been defined as a process of rearing children. According to contemporary standards, “parenthood” involves a number of daily responsi-

parenthoodâ•…â•… 79 bilities and financial and affective obligations such as the education and instruction of one’s children. The notion of “parenthood” also presupposes an active concern for a child’s welfare and physical and intellectual development. Initially, parenthood was concerned with teaching the taboo—what is forbidden—and with inculcating basic rules and restrictions to the young. Later on, parenthood began to be seen as a longer process of nurturing that was increasingly centered on the concept of caring. Such was the case with certain utopian societies founded on the American continent (for example, the Owenite societies of the 19th century), which developed some of the first kindergartens. Children were raised and educated together, and society itself was engaged in a collective effort of parenting. The same concept was developed in Europe at almost the same time. In fact, defining parenthood is a recent preoccupation, but the concerns and worries of parenthood are as old as the world. As early as ca. 440 b.c., the Greek tragedian Sophocles produced a series of plays—Oedipus the King, Oedipus at Colonus, and Antigone. Without mentioning “parenthood” explicitly, the trilogy’s plots develop a familial tragedy, based on a hereditary curse, and discuss the problems of knowledge, ignorance, destiny, and personal choice as related to the denial/rejection of parenthood and abandonment. Oedipus is a victim, an abandoned child, threatened with death by his father, while Antigone is the daughter of the incestuous relationship between Oedipus and his mother, Jocasta. Epitomizing the major family taboos, the figure of Oedipus is extensively referred to in child psychology since the Austrian psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud explored the myth in the light of a father and mother’s unconscious feelings regarding the early stages of parenthood. Antigone, on the other hand, is in total opposition to the will of the king. She acts against the orders of the “parent” of the nation, obeying her instinct of filial duty. It has also been suggested that her name means “opposed to motherhood.” Her behavior engenders destruction, while the outcome of the tragedy implies that there are different levels of parental allegiance. In the same fashion, English literature of the 16th and 17th centuries was concerned with the

structure of the world as God’s supreme creation and introduced a complex, layered structure of parentchild relationships. The political and religious climate favoured biblical examples of parenthood; the attempted sacrifice of Isaac by his father Abraham is a case in point. It demonstrated that God was the father of humanity and that humanity was to obey. Humanity’s allegiance to God was likened to a child’s obedience to its parents. This reasoning was a part of what is known as “the great chain of being,” a conception of the world as a strictly hierarchical system composed of intricate links and interactions. It was frequently alluded to in John Milton’s Paradise Lost, and it was also much utilized by William Shakespeare in his tragedies, including Romeo and Juliet and Hamlet. Both plays introduce us to strict, forbidding parents whose word is law. Every opposition to their wishes on the domestic or public level has diverse implications on the scale of the great chain of being. Hamlet’s revolt brings political change, while Romeo and Juliet’s deaths launch a reconciliation of the feuding families. The authority of parenthood in both plays is the highest authority conceivable. In Macbeth, on the other hand, the fear of disobedience to the king is essentially a fear of causing imbalance on a natural and divine level. The fragile balance of power is disturbed by the murder of the kingdom’s wise and just parent, and even the supernatural demonstrate their fury at the deed. The 18th century was the century of reason, and concepts of parenthood were significantly modified. The anxiety and fear of confrontation were transposed from the level of the state to that of the family cell, and the notion of exercising effective parental control on the child’s development gradually emerged. Conduct and advice books, written for both parents and children, were very common throughout the 18th century and well into the 19th. The correct methods for educating one’s children and the basics of good behavior in society were the main concerns of such works. Concurrently, a strong tradition of educational theory was founded with the publication of John Locke’s Thoughts Concerning Education (1692), and it spread to the writings of Daniel Defoe (e.g., The Family Instructor, 1715), Anna Laetitia Barbauld (Early Lessons, 1781), Maria

80â•…â•… parenthood Edgeworth (Parent’s Assistant, 1796, and Practical Education, 1798), and many minor authors of the late 1780s and the 1790s. An interesting but also extreme example is the moralizing of the notorious Thomas Day (Sandford and Merton, 1783–89) who adopted two sisters with the hope of raising one or the other as his wife. His purpose was to instill in their minds all the characteristics that made the perfect woman as he saw her. Rumors of mistreatment and even torture were circulated, and he abandoned the experiment. In 1719, Daniel Defoe published Robinson Crusoe and suggested that a child’s flight from paternal authority and protection is not a solution. His economic man established a new paternalistic state, and the father-son relationship between Crusoe and Friday have been interpreted as economic, political, and social ideals, though they can actually be seen as a simulation of perfect, natural parenthood. Crusoe enlightens Friday on moral and religious matters, while Friday demonstrates submission to his spiritual parent. Twenty years later, Samuel Richardson’s Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded presented a very interesting form of passive parenthood. This epistolary novel insists on the fact that even though outside the sphere of parental protection, the virtuous offspring should follow her parents’ moral principles in her quest for happiness. In a series of letters, Pamela complains of the treatment she receives, only to be rewarded by matrimonial happiness and parenthood herself. The later 18th and earlier 19th centuries saw the rise of new fears and quite a few revivals of the incest taboo, a widespread gothic theme. The gothic novel of the second half of the 18th century was very much concerned with parenthood; with issues of succession and usurpation of birthright; and with heritage and extended, increasingly complex family ties. It depicted the dissolution of the nuclear family and the psychological instability generated by guilty or adoptive parents. As a natural fin de siècle continuation of this literary current, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) is about the monster made by man, reflecting Shelley’s own childbirth and parenting fears. It also introduces a new literary theme that would be explored throughout the 19th and 20th centuries: The creator is also a parent

to be held responsible for his creation. The period also saw some pre-Freudian, post-gothic musings by Edgar Allan Poe. In his “Ligeia” (1838), Poe reflects on the obsessive behavior of a father figure, linking eroticism and parenthood into a narrative of morbid incest. The 18th and 19th centuries were concerned with establishing models for the roles of parents of both sexes, consigning the women to the domestic sphere and the men to the public sphere. Such ideas of parenthood were driven by family narratives, autobiographies, and instruction booklets but also by many novels. The mothers would provide care to the younger children and girls, while fathers were considered responsible for the education of elder children—boys in particular. Parenthood became at once a duty and an obligation. Some of the paintings and drawings of J. E. Millais depict the ideal family and present the image of successful parenthood (e.g., The Young Mother, 1857; The Crawley Family, 1860; The Ruling Passion, 1885). Much in the same fashion, the beginning of Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women announces the typical family structure with Beth’s famous “We’ve got Father and Mother, and each other.” Alcott’s book is said to represent the female revolt against 19th-century assumptions that a “female genius” cannot be a parent, but it also explores the cult of femininity, of childbearing and parenting—roles to be contested by some feminists but advocated by others. In this respect, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter displays a challenging plot based on an innovative theme. Beyond the most obvious problem of original sin lies a discussion of the hardships of single parenthood. It also develops the stereotype of the “Madonna with Child,” raising parenthood to a higher level. In The House of the Seven Gables, Hawthorne goes back to the theme of the heritage parents leave to their children, much in line with Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764). However, Hawthorne is more concerned with hereditary transmission of sin than with the practical problems of parenthood. Thomas Hardy’s The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886) also goes back to an old theme, that of the abandoned child. Instead of focusing on the child itself, Hardy depicts the life of the parent, haunted by guilt and the painful souvenir of past parenthood.

prideâ•…â•… 81 In an attempt to expiate the sin of abandonment, the main character becomes mayor. The impulse to compensate for his wrongdoing makes him the parent of an entire town. Here we notice a change in perspectives: While the sentimental and gothic novel would focus on the life, adventures, and growing up of the abandoned child, later 19th-century authors chose a perspective that permitted them to explore the psychology of the abandoning parent. Another late 19th-century author who is frequently associated with the intricacies of the parental psyche is Henry James. His The Turn of the Screw is a story told by a governess, concerning dead parents, neglected children, an absent uncle, and disturbed guardians. The psychological frustration accumulates and causes the death of a child, a death that can be taken literally or as a metaphor of the premature death of childhood and innocence. The 20th century saw a number of literary developments and experiments. On the one hand, William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World propose dystopian visions of parenthood. In the first novel, parental control is totally absent from an aggressive, deathly world. The second presents twisted political machinery, as a result of which children send their parents to their deaths. The third speculates about the implications of planned parenthood if carried too far. On the other hand, Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid ’s Tale (1985) focuses on birth as a metaphor of writing and artistic creation. Atwood likens the conception of a story to the conception of a child, and the writing process to a painful delivery. As we have seen, the image of the parent in literature is far from immutable. The relationships and conflicts between parents and children have become recurrent themes in world literature. Some of them are not developed explicitly or intentionally, but they are present nevertheless, and through them we can try and imagine what parenthood was like throughout past centuries. Through diverse forms of literature, society gradually came to conceptualize parenthood, often without making direct reference to the word itself. However, the ramifications of the theme are numerous and provide a rich background for innovative academic research.

See also Hemingway, Ernest: Farewell to Arms, A; Irving, John: World According to Garp, The: Kureishi, Hanif: Buddhist of Suburbia, The; Morrison, Toni: Song of Solomon; Sula; Potok, Chaim: Chosen, The; Silko, Leslie Marmon: American Pastoral; Turgenev, Ivan: Fathers and Sons. FURTHER READING Backus, Margot Gayle. The Gothic Family Romance. Heterosexuality, Child Sacrifice and the Anglo-Irish Colonial Order. Durham, N.C., and London: Duke University Press, 1999. Erickson, Robert A. Mother Midnight. Birth, Sex, and Fate in Eighteenth-Century Fiction (Defoe, Richardson, and Sterne). New York: AMS Press, 1986. Flint, Christopher. Family Fictions: Narrative and Domestic Relations in Britain, 1688–1798. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1998. Hilton, Mary. Women and the Shaping of the Nation’s Young: Education and Public Doctrine in Britain 1750–1850. Aldershot, Eng.: Ashgate Publishing, 2007. McKeon, Michael. The Secret History of Domesticity— Public, Private, and the Division of Knowledge. Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005. Pollock, Linda A. Forgotten Children: Parent-Child Relations from 1500 to 1900. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Rashkin, Esther. Family Secrets and the Psychoanalysis of Narrative. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1992.

Margarita Georgieva

pride

Literature grapples with the question of how and where human beings fit in the scheme of things and how they should best live. Philosophers, religious thinkers, and writers in the Western tradition have seen the human being in an intermediary position between divine beings and lower animals. The ethical teachings of religion and philosophy and their offshoots of drama and literature have emphasized piety: conducting oneself within the proper sphere of human action and in proper relation with fellow human beings. Exceeding those bounds upward would be to aspire to be a god; exceeding those

82â•…â•… pride bounds downward would be to become a beast. In this ethical scheme, pride, understood negatively as an overly high opinion of oneself, figured as a principal human flaw in societies in which divine and human authority were well established. It kept human beings in their place and subjects in order. “Pride goes before a fall,” teaches one famous Hebrew proverb, representative of the cautionary warnings against human overreaching so richly documented in the tradition of the medieval De casibus, Giovanni Boccaccio’s chronicles of the fall of great men. Besides the Judeo-Christian tradition, other great religions of the world—Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam, Taoism—seem to have their own variant against the sin of pride, suggesting a universal bias against any action that places self-love before universal love, the basis of most religious systems. At the same time, despite these constraints on mortal aspiration, early heroic societies worshipped human excellence, especially in the form of military prowess. Honor in these ancient and medieval warrior societies was achieved through physical strength, skill, and the courage to die in battle for one’s cause. Pride, as an excessive regard for honor, became a focal point in the great epic poems of Homer, who, in particular, was able to capture the psychological drama of heroes acting as human beings with virtues and flaws in situations of crisis. Because of his superior qualities, the Homeric hero was more easily prone to exhibit hubris, roughly translated as excessive pride—as though one is greater than the gods—often expressed through violent acts. A prime example is Achilles in The Iliad, the Greek warrior in the Trojan War, considered to be the first tragic hero in literature. This epic poem explores the consequences of its principal conflict of egos between the Greek commander Agamemnon and Achilles, his greatest warrior, in which both behave in hubristic ways, resulting ultimately in increased harm and death to many on their side. Flaunting his power, Agamemnon shames Achilles publicly by forcing Achilles to deliver to him Briseis, the maiden he has claimed for his own. Despite his righteous anger, Achilles’ decision to withdraw from battle cripples the Greek army and causes thousandfold pains on his comrades, notably his best friend, Patroclus, who, mistaken for Achilles, is killed by the Trojan

commander Hector. Despite his worthy qualities of military prowess, capacity for compassion, and understanding of the human condition, Achilles, in his wrath, commits what is to the Greeks an intolerable insult: the outrageous treatment of slain Hector of dragging the dead body behind his chariot for 12 days before returning it to the Trojans. As in the epic, pride figures importantly in Greek drama, which further explored the ambivalent qualities of the tragic hero in powerful ways. Sophocles’ Oedipus the King explores the religious and social function of myth by examining this Greek hero as an archetype of the scapegoat and the usurping son, centered on the theme of hubris. A close comparison of an oral version of the myth with Sophocles’ dramatic interpretation amplifies not only the tragic vision by which the culture grappled with the limitations of human life but also the playwright’s aesthetic achievement: to get the audience, in Aristotle’s words, both to pity and fear Oedipus’s tragic situation. After hearing the oracle predict that the plague upon his city will not lift until the murderer of his predecessor is punished, Oedipus, king of Thebes, initiates a methodical investigation of the death of the king, only to find out in his role as responsible ruler that he himself is culpable for the murder. This discovery reveals the key irony of Oedipus’s hubristic actions as a young man: his decision to evade a horrible prophecy that he will kill his father and marry his mother only leads him to fulfill it. This very human response reveals an irrational double-mindedness. If he believed the oracle to be true, he should have also believed that it was futile to evade it. Instead, Oedipus hubristically tries to evade the oracle but proceeds so carelessly—reflective of youth’s delusion of invincibility—that he does precisely what he should have forbidden to himself: kill an older man his father’s age, let alone kill anyone, and marry someone his mother’s age. Through his past and present actions, Oedipus gravely transgresses the Delphic oracle’s prescriptions for virtuous life: “Know thyself ” and “Nothing in excess.” Pride is further explored through the myth of Prometheus, the Titan advocate of man, who incurs eternal punishment for his act of bringing fire to humankind. Whether Prometheus is a heroic rebel, a savior, or a hubristic overreacher is a ques-

prideâ•…â•… 83 tion to ponder as one compares Aeschylus’s Prometheus Bound with its later variants, Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, The Modern Prometheus. While Aeschylus presents a philanthropic Prometheus, disobeying the gods’ orders for the benefit of the helpless human race, Marlowe’s tragedy of Faustus plays on both the heroic and the comic tradition, turning the intellectual hero into a trickster, whose desire “to gain a deity” (1.1.65) inevitably shrinks to horseplay as, at the end of Mephistopheles’ indenture period, he himself dissolves into the void of death. Marlowe’s rebellion against God cannot succeed within the prescripted confines of a Christian morality play. In signing away his soul to Satan, Faustus reenacts Lucifer’s revolt against God, filled with “Vain hopes, vain aims, inordinate desires/ Blown up with high conceits engendering pride” ( John Milton, Paradise Lost, 4.809), the queen of sins. Faustus’s victory is rather one of principle: opposing God to satisfy his desire for omnipotence and not backing down in the face of certain defeat. Despite the Christian lesson of the vanity of human pursuits, instructed through the increasing trivialization of his heroic endeavors, Faustus, through Marlowe’s rendering, retains his heroic status simply by undertaking the impossible. Shelley’s Victor Frankenstein, however, is a self-deluded Prometheus who is as unsuccessful as Faustus without the latter’s attribution of heroic rebel. The scientist’s philanthropic endeavors to advance knowledge for humanity’s benefit—or more accurately, his solipsistic fantasies of fathering a new race—are belied by his foolish neglect of the loved ones around him, thus his inability to prevent their deaths, a direct result of his hubristic creation of a humanoid without assuming the consequent parental obligations toward him. As many of these literary examples indicate, pride entails not only transgressions against divine authority but also infractions against fellow human beings. Jane Austen insightfully dramatizes the woes that come when pride and prejudice rule in Pride and P rejudice. Fitzwilliam Darcy, a wealthy member of the landed gentry, acquires the reputation in Hertfordshire of being a proud aristocrat when he arrogantly refuses to dance at the Netherfield ball and slights Elizabeth Bennet as being only

“tolerable” (7). Her friend, Charlotte Lucas, defends Darcy’s pride by claiming that “so very fine a young man [as he], with family, fortune, every thing in his favour, should think highly of himself. If I may so express it, he has a right to be proud.” With her vanity wounded, Elizabeth replies, “I could easily forgive his pride, if he had not mortified mine” (13). After setting up this misunderstanding, Austen takes 59 chapters to bridge the gap between Darcy’s arrogance vis-à-vis Elizabeth and her prejudice against him toward reconciliation and marriage. According to Aristotle, pride is the proper mean between humility and vanity, for the rightly proud man “claims what is in accordance with his merits, while the others go to excess or fall short” (Nicomachean Ethics, book 4, 2.1123b12–14). The difficulty in this assessment lies in the numerous interpretations of merit: wealth, noble birth, and/ or personal virtue. While Charlotte believes that Darcy has a right to be proud simply because of his rank and money, the crux of the novel is that gentle birth does not always entail personal nobility. At one side of the amorous discord, though Darcy is born into the upper class, his demeanor is construed by the social circle of Hertfordshire as less than noble. At the other side, Elizabeth is born to lower gentry, but her superior “understanding” (Austen 43) in mental and moral capacities distinguishes her as a true gentlewoman above both her family of meaner understanding and haughty aristocrats like Lady Catherine. The pride and prejudice of both Darcy and Elizabeth abate when Darcy is irresistibly wooed by her personal merits and when Elizabeth comes to know Darcy as “perfectly amiable” (282), always acting in principled honor. In this manner, for both of them vanity becomes humbled and pride affirmed. As discussed above, pride, as hubris, can be a negative force disrupting social bonds and affronting the gods, fellow beings, and oneself. Pride is, nonetheless, also a positive force, affirming one’s achievements and promoting self-worth and self-contentment. According to Aristotle, pride, as opposed to hubris, is grounded in virtue (NE, book 4, 3.1124b30). “[W]here there is a real superiority of mind,” Darcy claims, “pride will be always under good regulation” (43), and that is Darcy and Eliza-

84â•…â•… race beth’s path to a deep-rooted happiness rather than the mere fairy-tale assurance of “happily ever after.” See also Browning, Robert: “My Last Duchess”; Doyle, Sir Arthur Conan: Hound of the Baskervilles, The; Gaskell, Elizabeth: North and South; Hawthorne, Nathaniel: “Rappaccini’s Daughter”; Miller, Arthur: Death of a Salesman; Poe, Edgar Allan: “Murders in the Rue Morgue, The”; Roy, Arundhati: God of Small Things, The; Shakespeare, William: Henry IV, Part I; Julius Caesar; Much Ado about Nothing; Swift, Jonathan: Gulliver’s Travels; Williams, Tennessee: Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. FURTHER READING Aristotle. Nicomachean Ethics. Translated by David Ross. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980. Austen, Jane. Pride and Prejudice. New York: Bantam, 1989. Lattimore, Richmond Alexander. Story Patterns in Greek Tragedy. London: Athione Press, 1964.

Unhae Langis

race

The theme of race has been and continues to be hotly debated in the modern world. Questions of whether race is a biologically determined grouping of characteristics or whether it is merely a socially constructed means of classifying and dividing people are still asked in every field imaginable, including science, legal studies, politics, and literature. Even defining the term race is a complicated and sensitive task, particularly since race has been a justification for suppressing and oppressing large groups of people across the globe and throughout history. Two main schools of thought exist regarding the definition of race, and importantly, both developed in the modern era. One belief asserts that race is a genetically determined factor that influences external and internal characteristics, such as skin color, features, and predispositions to illnesses. The other philosophy contends that race is a socially constructed characteristic, arbitrary and hurtful in its exclusionary application. Whichever school one believes, and many scholars and critics acknowledge some truth in both, the use of race as a characteristic to divide groups of people and to control or elimi-

nate them is the central problem bound up in the theme of race. The concept is instantly polarizing— whether or not one believes race is a significant biological issue, it is clear that as humans we tend to separate according to race. In some cases it is selfseparation, while in others it is forced separation. In their introduction to Theories of Race and Racism, John Solomos and Les Back suggest that while race is still a primary theme in our daily lives, it has shifted somewhat in focus all over the world. Throughout the years leading up to and including the 20th century, institutionalized racism—slavery, disenfranchisement, lynchings—was the primary way in which racism was expressed, but according to Solomos and Back, “in recent times questions about race and racism have been refashioned in ways that emphasize cultural difference” (4). This move toward seeing a larger, more globalized picture of race and racism coincided with the end of colonialism and the creation of postcolonial literary criticism. Scholars who focus on the theme of race and related issues in postcolonial studies analyze literature from the perspective of the underprivileged, the suppressed, and minority characters and people. Thus, race becomes an underlying—or, in many cases, overarching—theme in works that may not include minority characters or “colonial” locales. For example, race becomes an unsettling theme in Bram Stoker’s Dracula, as the Eastern European “other” makes his way to England and engages in a process some have called “reverse colonization,” by taking victims and making them into vampires like himself. In countries that were former colonies of imperial powers, literature addressed the issues of race that surrounded independence movements and the winning of autonomy by nations such as India, Pakistan, and the Philippines, to name just a few. In literature, race often takes on characteristics of being divisive or oppositional. Frequently, stories involving themes of race involve “clashes” or struggles between white groups and minority, or “native” groups. Rudyard Kipling coined the phrase “the white man’s burden” in his poem of the same name, in 1899. The phrase, at the time a description of the stated motivations of colonial behavior, has come to also refer to white support for minority individuals

raceâ•…â•… 85 and the “civilizing” effect it is purported to have on native peoples. In addition to postcolonial politics, race has been a recurring theme in literature, most pointedly beginning in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. An early novel to deal with the issues and effects of race was Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, a story about slavery in the United States. While Stowe’s novel has endured its fair share of criticism and close study, the author always maintained that she wanted to engage readers’ sympathies and change their minds about slavery. Certainly, novels and other literary works that featured black characters or were written by black authors gained prominence before Stowe’s work—from the English writer Aphra Behn’s novel Oroonoko; or, The Royal Slave to the former American slave Phyllis Wheatley’s poetry, both of which were written in the 18th century. Mark Twain’s famous novel Adventures of Huckleberry Finn features an AfricanAmerican character named Jim who escapes slavery himself. From the 20th century onward, race moved to the forefront of politics, especially in the United States, where institutionalized racism was the law of the land until the late 1960s. In 1903, the AfricanAmerican writer W. E. B. DuBois suggested that the biggest problem of the 20th century would be the problem of race. As the 20th century progressed, race became a key theme for writers, especially writers of color. In 1940, the African-American author Richard Wright published Native Son, the story of Bigger Thomas, a young black man who, largely on the basis of his race, gets caught up in poverty, violence, and judicial mistreatment. All the actions Bigger takes are directly related to or motivated by race in some way. He comes into his first job because his employer wishes to help African Americans improve their lives. He accidentally smothers Mary Dalton to prevent her blind mother from noticing Bigger in Mary’s bedroom late at night. Fearful of the punishment he might receive as a black man who murdered a white woman, Bigger tries to dispose of the body in the family furnace, and his situation continues to worsen. Native Son graphically represents the deep divide between white America and black America while illustrating

how pervasive the theme of race is in our lives. For Bigger, it is inescapable in the mazes—literally and figuratively—of Chicago. Race and the divide we allow it to create are not merely an American invention, however. In Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, white missionaries arrive in Nigeria and begin to set up a new religion, law, and justice among the Umuofia clan. What results is a confusing and violent clash between cultures, with the white colonists taking power by force and manipulation in order to “civilize” the native Africans. Unlike Native Son, which portrays the youth of color as one against overwhelming forces beyond his control, Things Fall Apart is about invasion from without: An entire society crumbles in the face of the violent threat of colonialism. The race of the colonizers becomes important to the story because it is their version of law and order that ultimately controls the African village and forces the villagers to cooperate. Okonkwo is unable to reconcile the two clashing ideologies—he does not want to be punished for his crimes by white men from another continent. Thus, race becomes a basis for the threatening relationship between interloper and native. As the 20th century progressed, race pride and power became a dynamic facet in literature, building on progressive political movements around the world. In the United States in particular, the progressive movements of the 1960s and 1970s were key for a new wave of race pride. In the poetry and drama of Amiri Baraka, for example, the theme of race becomes a source of strength and power for African Americans. In Baraka’s play Dutchman, a white woman and a black man enter into a verbal sparring match over racial difference that ends with the woman’s murder of the man. Race is figured in Dutchman as an insurmountable barrier, a theme as old as time itself. While Dutchman examines race relations in the supposedly free and equal American society of the late 1960s, Athol Fugard’s play Master Harold .╯.╯. and the Boys takes apartheid-era South Africa for its setting for exploring the theme of race. The play centers on the young Master Harold, a white South African teenager who discusses life, love, literature, and history with his family’s two black

86â•…â•… regret servants, Sam and Willie. Sam and Harold have an equal footing—a long relationship that goes back to Harold’s childhood, in which Sam often stood in for Harold’s own father. The two are so familiar with one another that Sam calls Harold by the nickname “Hally.” However, the relationship sours over the course of the play, until Harold insults Sam and tells him to only address him as Master Harold from then on. The heretofore amicable relationship crumbles in the face of authority, represented by the return of Harold’s father, and the racial schism created through apartheid is reestablished—even though the characters had earlier proven it to be a false schism. Literary considerations of race continue to challenge, inform, and surprise, even as the Internet age continues to decrease the separation among people of all racial backgrounds. Race, whether as a source of pride, strength, pain, or sadness, will remain a dynamic element in literature. The debates over race as social construct versus race as biological feature may never be settled, but literary explorations can help readers understand their own place in the debate as well as others’ positions. Indeed, literature will undoubtedly provide entirely new perspectives as time goes on—perspectives that may change everything we understand about race today. See also Angelou, Maya: I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings; Chestnutt, Charles W.: “Goophered Grapevine, The”; Coetzee, J. M.: Waiting for the Barbarians; Conrad, Joseph: Heart of Darkness; Douglass, Frederick: Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave; DuBois: W. E. B.: Souls of Black Folk, The; Ellison, Ralph: Invisible Man; Faulkner, William: Light in August; Gaines, Ernest J.: Lesson Before D ying, A; Gordimer, Nadine: Burger’s Daughter; Hansberry, Lorraine: Raisin in the Sun, A; Hughes, Langston: poems; Jacobs, Harriet: Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Written by Herself; Jefferson, Thomas: Notes on the State of Virginia; Kingston, Maxine Hong: Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book; Lee, Harper: To Kill a Mockingbird; Melville, Herman: Moby-Dick; Morrison, Toni: Bluest Eye, The; Song of Solomon; Sula; Tar Baby; Marshall, Paule: Brown Girl,

Brownstones; Paton, Alan: Cry, the Beloved Country; Shakespeare, William: Merchant of Venice, The; Othello; Tempest, The; Toomer, Jean: Cane; Wright, Richard: Black Boy. FURTHER READING Carby, Hazel. Race Men. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998. Hooks, Bell. Killing Rage: Ending Racism. New York: H. Holt and Co., 1995. Kipling, Rudyard. “The White Man’s Burden.” McClure’s Magazine 12 (February 1899). Solomos, John, and Les Black, eds. Theories of Race and Racism. New York: Routledge, 2000.

Sharyn Emery

regret

“I have no regrets.” Surely we have all heard this announcement made at one time or another, however implausible it might be. We may have even made it ourselves. Living a life with no regrets, however, seems impossible. Since regret is a feeling generated by looking back on our mistakes, omissions, lost opportunities, and bad behavior, and since one may feel regret over something as trivial as the purchase of a sweater, the person with no regrets is either flawless in every regard or has no conscience. Regret is a complicated emotion capable of leading to various consequences, both good and bad. Sometimes it can make us grow by helping us learn from our mistakes. For instance, in John Knowles’s A Separate Peace, Gene’s lifelong regret at having hurt his friend plagues him, keeping him from living his life freely. When the truth finally comes to the surface, Gene takes responsibility. Thus, when Finny tragically dies in surgery, Gene is at peace, knowing he did the right thing by being honest. On the other hand, regret can lead us to paralysis, when we are consumed by it, but can do nothing to rectify the past. In William Shakespeare’s King Lear, Lear regrets his ill-treatment of Cordelia, his only truly loyal child. However, he cannot reverse the events his bad decisions set in motion, and madness destroys him in the end. While there is some disagreement over the nature of “true regret,” most psychologists and philosophers agree that, first and foremost, it is

regretâ•…â•… 87 cognitive. That is, to feel regret requires that we think about what we have done (or failed to do). Regret, by its very nature, requires us to assess the past and our role in it. It is associated with what psychologists call “counterfactual” thought, or thinking about “what might have been” (Landman 37). This counterfactual thinking connects regret with the intellectual process of decision making, setting it apart from other emotions such as sadness, happiness, and love: These may all be safely rooted in the present and require only that we “feel” what is right in front of us. Pure emotions generally stem from a less cognitive impulse. Whether or not regret is an emotion at all is a source of disagreement among scholars. However, the psychologist Janet Landman argues persuasively that because regret is well known to have physiological effects (some refer to feelings of regret as a sharp “pang”) and because it entails making judgments about oneself, it undoubtedly qualifies as an emotion (37). Thomas Gilovich and Victoria Husted Medved echo Landman by calling regret a “cognitively determined emotion” (379). Regret is easily confused with other emotions and patterns of thinking, such as remorse and guilt. In general, scholars agree that these terms are related but different. Remorse is typically used when referring only to one’s own past acts or failures to act, and only when these acts were within one’s control. Regret is broader and refers to those types of situations, but also to situations over which we have no control, such as the passing of summer (Landman 52). In addition, we may feel regret for events or policies in which we personally were not involved, such as the segregationist Jim Crow laws that lasted in the United States from 1876 to 1965. Guilt, too, is closely associated with, although not identical to, regret. Guilt, like remorse, comes from thoughts and feelings resulting from one’s own actions. While there is a popular notion of “collective guilt” over tragic events such as the Holocaust or slavery, the philosopher Hannah Arendt has argued that collective guilt simply justifies the evil done: if everyone is guilty, then no one is (Landman 55). In addition, it is difficult to imagine guilt without regret. In Shakespeare’s Macbeth, Macbeth feels horrible guilt over his murder of Duncan; that he feels regret as well seems obvious. The opposite,

regret without guilt, is not so difficult to imagine. One may regret having turned down an opportunity to lunch with friends, but such a regret seems unlikely to produce guilt. Regret, then, is complicated. It has the qualities both of a cognitive process and an emotion. It can be felt for actions and events both within one’s control and beyond it, as well as over decisions ranging from quite serious to hopelessly trivial. The characters in Jane Austen’s novels and their varying degrees of regret help to illustrate this complicated theme. Emma Woodhouse, for instance, the title character of Emma, is a creature full of regrets. She regrets that her dear governess, Mrs. Weston, has married and so no longer lives with Emma, although she is very happy for Mrs. Weston. She regrets her friend Harriet Smith’s poor station in life, a station that has destined her to depend on the kindness of others and to marry someone no more important than a farmer, a state of affairs over which she has no control. She most deeply regrets her unkind treatment of Miss Bates, and for this she feels true remorse. Regret, for Emma, helps her to become a better person. It helps her understand her own actions and her role in society (of course, Mr. Knightley helps her come to that understanding) and thus to mature and grow. Emma’s case shows us that while regret is painful and often forces us to admit failure, it can be a constructive force in our lives. It requires us to reflect, to imagine how things might have gone differently, so that we do not repeat our mistakes in the future—or at least we hope so. As it can come both from wishing we had acted and wishing we had not, it helps us make life changes and identify silver linings, a process that can be a very positive force (Gilovich and Medved 379). Regret also helps others see us as moral people, capable of contributing positively to society. When F. W. de Klerk, president of South Africa from 1989 to 1994, issued an official apology from the National Party for the system of apartheid that had held sway in his country for decades, he said, “Apartheid caused misery and deprived people of their rights” (quoted in Lazare 105). He did not attempt to justify the policy or to mitigate the pain it caused. This regret, publicly acknowledged, along with the South African Truth and Reconciliation

88â•…â•… rejection Commission, helped to partially heal the country’s deep wounds and allow citizens to move forward together. In Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations, Pip regrets much. He regrets that which is beyond his control: his parents’ death, his difficult upbringing, his meeting Magwitch in the cemetery. This type of regret does nothing good for him; it makes him bitter, greedy, and distrustful of others. But more important, he feels regret for things that were of his own doing. He regrets abandoning Joe and Biddy; he regrets the way he acted after receiving the money from his mysterious benefactor; and most of all, he regrets the way he treated Magwitch upon the convict’s return from Australia. Pip learns from this regret, however; he reforms his ways and ends the novel treating Magwitch as only a son would. Even more important, the novel ends with hope, as Pip has developed a stronger moral compass than before and will undoubtedly make better decisions in the future. In general, Pip’s sense of regret helps him to grow. For many, however, regret is a destructive, paralyzing force to be avoided at all costs. Harry Truman, the 33rd president of the United States, said, “Never, never waste a minute on regret. It’s a waste of time” (quoted in Landman 9). Regret can keep us from looking forward and experiencing life to the fullest extent. It can also play a destructive role in decision making. As we are apt to worry about what effect the decisions we make now will have on us later, fear of future regret may keep us from acting as we know we should. Such is the case for both Clarissa Dalloway and Peter Walsh in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway. As a girl, Clarissa loved both Peter and her free, wild friend Sally. Fear of bucking convention made her seek stability over lasting attachments with them. She regrets those decisions now but attempts to live her life as though she has no regrets. The result is that she is a person who moves through life without feeling much of anything. Avoiding the pain of regret is so paramount that she must block out all other feelings as well. Peter, on the other hand, feels the pain too much. After many years, his regrets over his failed relationship with Clarissa still sting as though it happened yesterday. This pain prevents Peter from

truly moving on in life; his obsession with what might have been has paralyzed him. Despite our admonitions to the contrary, few of us could truly live a life without regret. Indeed, since regret can function as a catalyst toward change, redemption, and reform, it would be unwise for human beings to avoid this emotion entirely. Healthy regret—that is, regret that does not consume us but allows us to move forward—is undoubtedly an integral part of life’s journey. See also Alexie, Sherman: Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistf ight in Heaven, The; Eliot, T. S.: “Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, The”; Ishiguro, Kazuo: Remains of the Day, The; Morrison, Toni: Song of Solomon; Tan, Amy: Joy Luck Club, The; Tolstoy, Leo: War and Peace; Williams, Tennessee: Streetcar Named Desire, A. FURTHER READING Gilovich, Thomas, and Victoria Husted Medved. “The Experience of Regret: What, When, and Why.” Psychological Review 2, no. 2 (1995): 379–395. Landman, Janet. Regret. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993. Lazare, Aaron. On Apology. London: Oxford University Press, 2005.

Jennifer McClinton-Temple

rejection

In Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations, Miss Havisham is rejected by her would-be groom before the novel’s action begins. For many years, she has sequestered herself in her mansion, surrounded by the aging relics of her doomed wedding ceremony. More important, though, is the effect this ancient rejection has had on Miss Havisham. She is bitter, to be sure, but the bitterness goes so far and runs so deep that she is eager to raise her ward, Estella, to exact a kind of revenge for her by hurting others, specifically men. Great Expectations is somewhat of a treatise of the effects of rejection on the human psyche. In addition to Miss Havisham, Pip, Joe, Biddy, and Magwitch all experience this deep pain. Pip is rejected by his sister and Estella, Joe, and Biddy by Pip, and Magwitch by his country. For these and other literary characters, rejection creates a void that is difficult to fill and that is capable of

rejectionâ•…â•… 89 distorting their personalities forever. This theme is powerful because of these far-reaching consequences. Rejection is a powerful force in works from a myriad of time periods and genres, including the Bible, John Milton’s Paradise Lost, Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders, Jane Austen’s P ride and P rejudice, Richard Wright’s Native Son, William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, and Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club. Social scientists have shown time and again that human beings need social connections. According to the psychologist Mark Leary, this need is an adaptation that evolved because it promoted survival and reproduction (3). In the early days of the human race, we needed each other with an intensity that industrialism and technology have taken away. Humans lived in small groups, far away from other groups. In order for our species to reproduce, we had to choose from the mates who were available. In addition, because we do not have the natural defenses possessed by other animals (such as claws, antlers, and sharp, powerful teeth), we had to work together to defend ourselves. This evolutionary adaptation has stayed with us. Research demonstrates that we still need human contact in order to thrive, with some studies even showing that social isolation can do damage to the immune system, threaten cardiovascular health, and even hasten death (Fiske and Yamamoto 185). Because this contact is a good thing, and because we are drawn to make connections, when a specific connection is refused, as is the case in acts of rejection, the result can devastate us. Those who are rejected feel worthless, have pronounced feelings of inferiority and inadequacy, and move through life never showing their “real selves” (Evoy 54, 57). In other words, rejection, to the human animal, does not make sense, and our bodies and minds do not know how to handle it. Knowing this about rejection helps to explain why it is such a powerful theme in literature and culture. Several stories in the Bible explore rejection in depth, and because the Bible is a foundational text of Western culture, these stories help to establish the larger context in which the concept of rejection may be considered. The story of Ishmael and his mother, Hagar, is a good example. Abraham and Sarah were,

for many years, unable to conceive children. Sarah presented her maid, Hagar, to Abraham in the hope that she could produce a son for him. The plan worked, and Hagar gave birth to Ishmael. However, God declared to Abraham that he and Sarah, despite their advanced age, would have a son as well. Isaac, son of Sarah and Abraham, soon followed. Ishmael and Hagar were eventually sent out into the desert, rejected by Abraham. This story is significant for many reasons, perhaps the most important of which is that Isaac is considered a patriarch of the Jewish religion, and Ishmael is considered the progenitor of Arabic peoples. Certainly the centuries-long conflict between these two groups is not caused by the biblical story, but the story does provide a foundation by which we may understand the lasting power of rejection. The rejected feel like outcasts, and in many cases they are literally outcasts, driven from others, just as Ishmael and Hagar were. The Bible is not the only early document that deals with rejection. Monica Melancthon explains that the motif, manifesting itself as a rejection by God or other divine beings, is found in other Semitic languages of the time. The lamentation, a vocalizing of the pain of rejection, is a commonly found form in ancient Semitic literature. For instance, in The Curse of Agade, composed around 2000 b.c., a rebellious act by King Naram-Sim kindles the fury of the deity and leads to the destruction of the city. Similarly, in Lamentations 3, the city of Jerusalem, the “nerve center of religious activity” in 587 b.c., lies in ruins. Lamentations 3 reads, in part, “He has driven me away and made me walk / in darkness rather than in light; indeed, he has turned his hand against me / again and again, all day long” (3:2–4). Its people, rejected by their God, are devastated. As Melancthon notes, this destruction showed their status as God’s chosen people and Jerusalem’s status as God’s chosen city were in question. They associated this perceived rejection with human guilt and disobedience. In other words, they felt they must have done something wrong to deserve God’s wrath. Much like the early citizens of Jerusalem, children who have been rejected by their parents often internalize feelings of guilt and wrongdoing. Parental rejection is so powerful, research shows, that its victims never completely get over it; it remains with

90â•…â•… rejection them in some form for life. These children, denied the love of one or both parents, carry “feelings of emptiness where that love should have been—often for the rest of their lives. The rejected live with an emotional hole in the center of their being” (Evoy 72). They experience guilt, depression, anger, hostility, and aggression, and they actively seek out, sometimes in dangerous ways, situations in which they are valued (66). In Louise Erdrich’s Love Medicine, for instance, June Morrisey is rejected by her mother as a young child. As she grows into a woman, she exhibits many of the signs listed above. She tries to hang herself during a game with her cousins, convinced she has no real worth. She cannot truly accept the genuine love Marie gives her, fearful as she is of yet another rejection. June lives her entire life aggressively and angrily hurting others, and she frequently puts herself in precarious situations, one of which ultimately kills her. In Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Huck is rejected by his father and then again by the society at large. While he is a resilient, confident child, he believes himself to be, quite naturally, worth less than other children. He seems to be most comfortable when he is alone and acting independently. While this may be part of his perceived charm (and also why he is seen as so incorrigible by the townspeople), Twain’s characterization here highlights Huck’s state of rejection. Children should not seek to be independent; they should not have to. Childhood is naturally a state in which we should seek the help and guidance of our elders. When we are shown, as Huck was, that the help and guidance is either not forthcoming or will lead to more pain, we learn to stop asking for it. For Huck, rejection made him (rightly) suspicious of society at large. He simply did not trust people, even those who claimed to want to help him. A pattern of rejection can force victims into irrational states, where they see and feel rejected from all angles. Mark Leary points out that feelings of rejection can become so pervasive that even “slights or inconsiderate behavior” can be taking as wholesale rejection, further driving the rejected person away from society at large. In Native Son, we see this in Bigger Thomas. Society has rejected him because he is black; that is his reality. However, his mother

is angry with him because of what she sees as his laziness and lack of ambition. Bigger simply adds this to the mountain of rejection he already feels. In addition, when Mary and her boyfriend are kind to him, he does not know how to take that behavior. Rejection has inured him to real feelings. He, like many of the rejected, must close his “real self ” off. Of all the varieties of rejection, romantic rejection, such as the type felt by Miss Havisham, provides perhaps the most immediate, crushing blow. Romantic rejections are difficult to weather because if we are hard-wired to create connections, the connections we seek with potential mates are the most important connections of all. Being rejected on those occasions makes the least sense to us biologically. Indeed, when Marianne is rejected by Willoughby in Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility, her devastation sends her into a physical illness that almost kills her. Marianne’s whole sense of self and sense of purpose are shaken. Even though Willoughby is revealed to be a cad, Marianne’s grief is not generated by his obvious mistreatment of her, but rather by the loss of what she thought was a perfect love. As much as she later learns about him, she cannot bring herself to truly blame him. Being rejected by others is an experience that can change human beings at their core. It can call into questions what we think we know about our own intelligence, beauty, personality, and overall worth. Rejection can absolutely devastate us, causing us to hide our real selves and operate as mere shells of human beings. Because these experiences are so powerful, it is no wonder literature explores the subject again and again. See also Kureishi, Hanif: Buddha of Suburbia, The; Shakespeare, William: Twelfth Night. FURTHER READING Evoy, John Joseph. The Rejected. University Park, Pa.: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1981. Fiske, Susan T., and Mariko Yamamoto. “Coping with Rejection.” In Interpersonal Rejection, edited by Mark Leary, 185–198. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. Holy Bible. New International Version. New York: Biblica, 1967.

religionâ•…â•… 91 Leary, Mark, ed. Interpersonal Rejection. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. Melancthon, Monica J. Rejected by God: The History and Significance of the Rejection Motif in the Hebrew Bible. New York: Peter Lang, 2001.

Jennifer McClinton-Temple

religion

Religion and literature are inextricably intertwined. Many of the world’s major religious texts, such as the Bible, the Quran, and the Bhagavad Gita, are studied not just for their philosophical and spiritual truths but for their literary aesthetics as well. Both religion and literature spring from a common impulse to explore and explain the fundamental mystery of human existence—of humankind’s place in the world and our relationship to the created universe, to the Divine, and to our fellow human beings. Religion, like literature, mirrors the ruling cultural paradigms of the day while also taking issue with them, interrogating and interpreting social and cultural mores and offering compelling new visions of being in the world. They offer both comfort to the troubled and the joys of quiet repose, and they are intimately personal and reassuringly or troublingly (as the case may be) public at the same time. Not surprisingly, religion is not only a key theme in literature but has functioned as the very fountainhead of much literature from antiquity to the present time. The ancient epics of the world, from Homer’s The Iliad and The Odyssey to the Mahabharata and the Ramayana from the Indian subcontinent, give us a revealing glimpse into the cultural makeup of their peoples. They also feature an elaborate parallel universe of gods and goddesses who are intimately involved in the world of mortals and, indeed, mirror some of the same vanities and foibles of the human world. For example, Athena is Odysseus’s patron deity and assists his return home, helping him to, among other things, fight the houseful of suitors who are pursuing his wife Penelope and living the good life at his expense. Similarly, Krishna, an important deity in the Hindu pantheon of gods, helps the righteous Pandavas defeat their cousins, the immoral Kauravas, and regain their kingdom. In Sophocles’ Oedipus the King, Antigone risks Creon’s wrath and becomes a

tragic heroine by virtue of her determination to perform her brother Polynices’ burial rites. She acts not just out of filial duty but also because proper burial rites for the dead, whether they are foe or friend, are demanded by the gods. In more modern times, John Milton set out to accomplish the ambitious task of writing a contemporary epic for England in the 17th century by choosing to write a Christian depiction “of man’s disobedience of God” and the expulsion of Adam and Eve from Paradise. The Bible is the inspiration for his great epic, Paradise Lost, and biblical themes of good, evil, the nature of sin, and the power of redemption with true repentance that is available through religion stem from the core of this text. Similarly, Christopher Marlowe’s play Doctor Faustus, based on the Faust legend, explores the pitfalls of the arrogance of knowledge as Faustus signs away his soul to the devil in exchange for the fleeting pleasures of necromancy and magic for a brief 24 years. The play is notable in the way it explores Faustus’s battle with his conscience (imagined as his good and bad angels), and then sketches in moving detail the plight he faces with the prospect of eternal damnation. But more profound is its depiction of Mephistopheles, one of Satan’s chief emissaries, sent to interact with Faustus. The very origins of British drama can be located in religion in the shape of the medieval miracles and morality plays that featured stories from the Bible and were concerned with moral education. In fact, scholars have traced the origins of fool characters common in Shakespeare back to the portrayal of Satan as a bawdy and buffoonish character in the Morality plays. In the West, religion has been the inspiration for much of its most acclaimed art and architecture, as well as its literature. The work of Raphael, Michelangelo, and Leonardo Da Vinci, to name a few of the most acclaimed painters of Renaissance Europe, as well as the most exquisite churches and cathedrals in Europe, owe their origin to the religious impulse. In addition, the church has always been a major patron of the arts, commissioning some of the most profoundly important works, whether they be painting, religious manuscripts/treatises, or the buildings of western civilization. In the Dark Ages in medieval

92â•…â•… religion Europe, it was the monks who preserved some of the most valuable books of ancient Greece and Rome by diligently copying them on vellum by hand before the advent of the printing press. Dante Alighieri’s The Divine Comedy, and Saint Augustine’s Confessions and The City of God are all intensely religious in content. While Dante presents a complicated three-tier system of the Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso, an imaginative and allegorical imagining of the afterlife, Augustine’s autobiographical text presents a compelling view of the journey to religion and selfhood. Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, written in the 14th century, is structured around the tales told by a group of 23 pilgrims on a pilgrimage from London to the shrine of Saint Thomas Becket in Canterbury. Although Chaucer presents a fairly wide cross section of medieval English society from the noble Knight to the humble Yeoman, a majority of the pilgrims, such as the Monk, the Pardoner, the Friar, the Prioress, and the Summoner, among others, belong to the Christian orders. These characters are some of the most interesting in The Canterbury Tales, and Chaucer satirizes corruption among the church’s functionaries through them. Some of the most emotionally resonant wrestling with questions of faith can be found in the metaphysical poetry of 17th-century poets such as John Donne, Andrew Marvell, and George Herbert, in appeals such as Donne’s “Batter my heart, three personed God” or in Herbert’s poems “The Affliction” and “The Collar.” In 19th-century Victorian literature, the question of faith and doubt that afflicted people after Charles Darwin’s publication of On the Origin of Species, which declared that man is not made in the image of God but is descended from apes, is a recurring theme. In different ways, Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach,” Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s In Memoriam, A. H. H., Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d ’Urbervilles, all express the painful incomprehension and angst of a world suddenly deprived of the certitudes of religion expressed so well in Robert Browning’s “Pippa’s Song”: “God’s in His Heaven— / All’s right with the world” (ll. 7–8). Religion may seem to have been in slow retreat because of the onslaughts of industrialism, the coming of the railroads, the depopulation of the coun-

tryside, the findings of the geologist Charles Lyell and the psychiatrists Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung, and Karl Marx’s declaration that “religion is the opiate of the masses,” but it nevertheless has continued to preoccupy writers, whether they be poets, novelists, or dramatists. T. S. Eliot’s modernist masterpiece The Wasteland articulates a deep sense of the loneliness and alienation experienced by people lost in the facelessness of the modern metropolis, but it also closes with a heartfelt prayer of “Shantih, Shantih, Shantih,” invoking the ancient mantra of peace from Hindu religious traditions. In his later work “Burnt Norton,” and particularly in his poetic dramas, Eliot turned to religion in his quest for answers to the modern malaise of isolationism and loss of faith. Murder in the Cathedral, his best-known play, centers on the martyrdom of Saint Thomas Becket and explores with insightful nuances the nature of temptation for one even so deeply steeped in Christ as Becket, the archbishop of Canterbury. Even the desire to martyrdom, as long as it springs from an earthly desire to garner spiritual capital, can be corrupt and compromised. Becket’s union with God can only come once he transcends this greed for spiritual acclaim and annihilates all egotism. Beyond spiritual and ethical explorations, literature also portrays religion as a great source of discord and dissension in the world and thus critiques the violence and fanaticism that results from a narrow-minded adherence to creed. Much of Salman Rushdie’s work, for instance, refers to the violence arising from the conflicts between the Hindu and Muslim communities in India, such as his Midnight ’s Children. But the power of religion to inflame passions is most aptly demonstrated through the controversy surrounding the publication of his The Satanic Verses in 1988. The Satanic Verses is a part-fantasy, part-realist novel in which Rushdie presents a fictionalized story related to some apocryphal verses from the Quran, and consequently makes references to the life of Muhammad, the Prophet. The creative liberties taken by the text upset some sections of the Islamic community, which widely condemned it, and Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa, or religious decree, condemning Rushdie as an infidel. Rushdie went into hiding in fear following much violence involving the publication of this

responsibilityâ•…â•… 93 book around the world, and he suffered threats to his life. Countries such as Pakistan and India with large Muslim populations banned the book in the interest of public safety. Religion is a powerful source of both succor and conflict, emerging from the wellsprings of our most deeply human impulses and arousing our most passionate responses. It becomes a lens through which issues of race, ethnicity, and identity are parsed. Literature, in its extraordinary power to mirror and mediate these passions and conflicts, finds both its source and its substance in religion, in the shape of themes, images, symbols, and the very language it uses to appeal to us. See also Anonymous: Beowulf; Bunyan, John: Pilgrim’s Progress, The; Crane, Stephen: Red Badge of Courage, The; Defoe, Daniel: Robinson Crusoe; Emerson, Ralph Waldo: “Divinity School Address, The”; Faulkner, William: Light in August; Greene, Graham: Heart of the Matter, The; Hawthorne, Nathaniel: Scarlet Letter, The; Young Goodman Brown; Hemingway, Ernest: Farewell to Arms, A; Jefferson, Thomas: Notes on the States of Virginia; Joyce, James: D ubliners; Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, A; Lawrence, Jerome, and Robert E. Lee: Inherit the Wind; Melville, Herman: “Bartleby the Scrivener”; Moby-Dick; Molière: Tartuffe; O’Connor, Flannery: “Good Man Is Hard to Find, A”; Wise Blood; Potok, Chaim: Chosen, The; Rowlandson, Mary: Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration of Mary Rowlandson; Steinbeck, John: Grapes of Wrath, The; Stowe, Harriet Beecher: Uncle Tom’s Cabin; Twain, Mark: Adventures of Huckleberry Finn; Winterson, Jeanette: Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit; Wright, Richard: Black Boy. FURTHER READING Detweiler, Robert, and David Jasper, eds. Religion and Literature: A Reader. Louisville, Ky.: Westminster John Knox Press, 2000. Frye Northrup. The Great Code: The Bible and Literature. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1982. Jasper, David. Images of Belief in Literature. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1984.

Rajender Kaur

responsibility

The word responsibility has two connotations in modern English. We can be responsible for something, which means we are accountable and we will take the blame or reward should there be any. This connotation can apply to a person, as in the way that parents are responsible for their children or coaches are responsible for their players, or it can apply to a thing, as in the way someone might take responsibility for a car accident or an accounting mistake. We can also be responsible to people or organizations. This connotation implies that we “report” to someone, or more accurately that we must “respond” (the root of responsibility) to them. The parent who is responsible for her children, in that she will take responsibility should they break a neighbor’s window or skip school, is at the same time responsible to her children in that she must account for the decisions she makes that affect their lives, such as distinguishing right from wrong and providing a stable home life. These two connotations work well together in that they both derive from the same idea. As noted above, the root of responsibility is “reponse.” To “respond” is an action. In life, being “responsible for” or being “responsible to” both require responding to situations—in other words, acting in the best interests of those in our sphere, including ourselves. However, there are no clear-cut answers to questions regarding just what those best interests are and just how far we are required to widen that sphere. It is only in the 20th century and beyond that these questions about responsibility have become so difficult. Prior to this period, the emphasis was always soundly on being responsible to, and responsibility was not thought of as being particularly virtuous (Moran 35). Being responsible to people, or things, or God, simply meant that these were the entities to whom you would be held accountable. This simpler interpretation of the word may have made it easier for a society to know how to be accountable and what the implications of that were. But as the shift occurred in the 20th century toward responsibility for, and its accompanying blame and punishment, these questions became more complicated. For example, in Gilead, the dystopian society Margaret Atwood depicts in The Handmaid ’s Tale, the concept of responsibility has

94â•…â•… responsibility become grossly distorted. First, the ruling powers hold humanity (women in particular) responsible for the decline in fertility that has led to the population collapse. They then take all responsibility away from the Maids, making them of the men but having no relationships with them. No one is actually responsible to or for anyone, other than the state, which apparently takes no responsibility for its people, as evidenced by the killings in the stadium and the presence of the forbidden “clubs” to which the Commander takes Offred. It is an experiment that is doomed to fail because humans have no accountability to each other, they are only forced to take accountability for things that may or may not be their fault. As in Gilead, the characters in Herman Melville’s Billy Budd, Sailor focus on blame, rather than on being responsible to one another, and Billy dies because of it. Captain Vere and the others should take responsibility for Billy both before and after the incident with Claggart, instead of simply forcing all the responsibility on him, as they do by revering the law over what they know to be the truth. The idea of being responsible to someone is analogous to having an obligation. Originally, obligation meant “something owed,” and a similar word, duty, meant a “debt.” Richard Swinburne, in Responsibility and Atonement, describes our responsibilities in life as obligations: “By our words and actions we undertake to do certain things” (20). If we become parents, we undertake the obligation of taking care of our children and teaching them right from wrong. We make other such obligations in our roles as members of communities and in our jobs. For instance, in Willa Cather’s O Pioneers!, Alexandra believes she is obligated to care for the family, especially Emil, as well as for the land on which the farm sits. It is her sense of responsibility that causes her father to choose her, rather than her brothers, to carry on his legacy. In William Shakespeare’s Henry V, King Henry is obligated to carry on the cause of his father, King Henry IV, and improve England’s fortunes on the world stage. He also feels a heavy sense of responsibility to the crown itself and, by extension, to the people of England. Thus, he turns his back on Falstaff, the mentor of his

reckless (and irresponsible) youth, and has Bardolph hung for stealing. He also feels a responsibility for the men who are killed by the French, as they were there in England’s—and thus his—service. King Henry feels responsible for his men in the same way a parent feels about his children. But unlike Henry, nonroyal parents are expected to take as much responsibility when their children err as when they do well. It is here and in other situations where there is blame to be assigned that the more common modern usage of responsibility looms large. Peter French, in Responsibility Matters, notes that we “spend a lot of time trying to avoid responsibility.” He also notes that this is as true for positives as it is for negatives, leading to the conclusion that responsibility is a burden in any situation (18). Perhaps, French argues, this is because we do not want the worry that comes along with membership in a morally responsible community. French says that we seek to obscure accountability, even when the consequence would be praise, not blame, because it signifies a loss of innocence merely to acknowledge that someone—anyone—is responsible. He says, “The practice of holding people responsible for things that happen, hence the concept of responsibility itself, depends for its sense on the purposes or ends to which we put it” (19). In other words, if there are no consequences, there is no point in assigning responsibility. And to be truly responsible, we must also be consistent, a burden in and of itself. Albert Jonsen, in Responsibility in Modern Religious Ethics, says “The responsible man is not merely the one who is able to perform good actions; he is, in fact, the good man. His goodness consists precisely in his responsibility” (5). In Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, Gregor Samsa is heavily burdened by the responsibility placed on him by his family. He accepts that responsibility, however, and goes to work every day to a job that he loathes. Gregor, unlike the rest of his family, who sit home, irresponsibly allowing Gregor to support them, cannot pretend innocence of the world and its workings. However, when one day he wakes up as a giant cockroach, he is gradually freed of this burden. He cannot work in this condition, so the responsibility is lifted from him. As his family slowly takes on the burdens of taking care of Gregor

science and technologyâ•…â•… 95 and supporting themselves, they grow more and more resentful, with Gregor’s father even resorting to violence. Gregor’s death sets them all free, and the family ends the story with thoughts of finding sister Grete a husband, who presumably will take responsibility for them all. Unlike Gregor, Victor Frankenstein in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein has lived a life of bliss and privilege. Sadly, he uses this privilege irresponsibly and becomes obsessed with creating life. The creature he creates kills everyone whom Victor loves, and when he comes to the realization that it is he, not the creature, who is truly responsible for their deaths, the pain is almost too much for him to bear. It is only at this point in the novel that Victor actually takes on the mantle of responsibility and hunts the creature until his death. Additionally, in his faithful telling of the story to Walton, Victor passes on his cautionary tale, another act that demonstrates his newfound accountability. Although Frankenstein was written in the 19th century, its themes regarding the responsible use of science and technology echo loudly here in the 21st century. Some philosophers have argued that in the contemporary era, everything has become our responsibility—nature, war, death, global poverty. As the range of human action is much broader than it ever was before—that is, what we can do is greater and more fantastic than what could have been imagined in the past—our responsibilities have widened to an almost limitless point. While the need to do the right thing by those to whom we are responsible has not changed, what that right thing might be has grown more confusing, and the number of those to whom we might be held responsible has increased exponentially. See also Davies, Robertson: Fifth Business; Dinesen, Isak: Out of Africa; James, Henry: Daisy Miller; Machiavelli, Niccolò: P rince, The; Shakespeare, William: King Lear; Virgil: Aeneid, The; Vonnegut, Kurt: Cat ’s Cradle; Thoreau, Henry David: “Resistance to Civil Government”; Wilder, Thornton: Our Town; Williams, Tennessee: Glass Menagerie, The. FURTHER READING French, Peter A. Responsibility Matters. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1992.

Jonsen, Albert R. Responsibility in Modern Religious Ethics. Washington, D.C.: Corpus Books, 1968. Swinburne, Richard. Responsibility and Atonement. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989. Moran, Gabriel. A Grammar of Responsibility. New York: Crossroad, 1996.

Jennifer McClinton-Temple

science and technology

While science and technology play key roles in human affairs, they tend to recede into the background of daily life. We seldom think about the structures and practices of scientific institutions or about the social and environmental costs of our technologically textured lives. But as canonical literature from medieval times to the present makes abundantly clear, cultural responses to and attitudes about scientific developments and engineering breakthroughs have always been potent, complex, and multiple. Literary works by authors from Geoffrey Chaucer to Don DeLillo have variously reflected, reinforced, and (in some cases) destabilized these larger societal responses and attitudes. Studying this literature, therefore, occasions valuable opportunities to better understand the taken-for-granted background of science and technology. Many literary texts foreground the complex relations between science, technology, and society by calling attention to fundamental problems of definition and recognition. The term science, for instance, poses considerable problems precisely because of its privileged status in mainstream culture. We associate it with “reality,” “truth,” and “reason,” and when individuals or institutions speak on behalf of science, lay audiences often assume that what is being conveyed is factual, trustworthy, and authoritative. Unfortunately, distinguishing between “genuine” and “mock” science is no easy matter; scores of unscientific practices and products announce themselves as thoroughly scientific simply to gain acceptance or to influence consumers. Even in early modern times, when science referred generally to any systematic acquisition of knowledge, differentiating between real and fake science could be tricky. Geoffrey Chaucer dramatizes this problem in “The Canon’s Yeoman’s Tale” of The Canterbury Tales by critiquing mutually reinforcing entities within medieval

96â•…â•… science and technology society: devious alchemists, armed with a bewildering scientific vocabulary and an arsenal of laboratory technologies, who promise to transform base metals into gold; and greedy clients whose materialistic desires perpetuate the existence of charlatan science. In so doing, this satiric tale foregrounds fundamental problems of “validity” and “misrecognition” that arise any time science is invoked. Significantly, Chaucer links these problems to cultural ideas about technology. Prior to the 19th century, this term could refer broadly either to material instruments or to any systematic technique. Chaucer’s text suggests that any technology—whether instrumental or methodological—should be understood as an extension of the culture that produces and employs it. The early laboratory implements of this tale—fire, crucibles, chemical elements—are not value-neutral: They establish and confer authority, and their use and abuse reflect and shape particular human interests and cultural values. In the 17th and 18th centuries, the term science gradually lost cultural and professional currency and gave way to natural science, a phrase denoting only those enterprises that advanced our understanding of the physical world. The circulation of this phrase was largely an attempt to distinguish “real science” from other forms of systematic inquiry (philosophy, history, theology, and so on) whose methods did not require observation, experimentation, and replication. Because this new emphasis on discovering nature’s secrets called into question long-standing theological explanations of the universe, many writers explored the ethical and philosophical implications of natural science’s goals. Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus, for example, takes place in a theocentric universe, but it registers profound anxiety about scientific ambitions. Inquiries into the laws of nature, the play suggests, can give way to scientific hubris, to an immoral aspiration to attain godlike wisdom. For the play’s protagonist, seeking such knowledge comes at the expense of his moral decency. Thus, when Faustus bargains away his soul for ultimate knowledge, he sinks deeper and deeper into despair until his final dismemberment by the devil’s brutal agents. Of course, many other writers saw promise, nor corruption, in the natural sciences. Francis

Bacon’s The New Atlantis (1627) conjures a mythical island replete with a compassionate citizenry and an expansive scientific institute aimed at studying physical laws and taming an inhospitable natural world. Still, while proponents of Bacon’s ambitious scientific vision increased in number, many writers in the 18th century would nevertheless continue to examine the consequences of imperialistic science. Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, for instance, depicts astronomers as a dark embodiment of humankind’s growing preoccupation with the physical world, suggesting, as Marlowe did, that such concerns come at the expense of moral and spiritual growth. Most 19th-century literary texts concerned with science and technology are probably best understood as responses to the so-called Age of Enlightenment of the previous century. Philosophical and scientific thinkers of the Enlightenment generally asserted that reason and science provided the means of overcoming superstition, controlling nature, and achieving social and political progress. Against such assertions stands Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, whose scientist embodies the Enlightenment faith that all laws of the physical universe can be known. While this novel condemns detached intellectualism, it also raises serious questions about the motives and consequences of scientific work. Lured less by “knowledge for its own sake” than by the promise of power that knowledge confers, Victor Frankenstein signifies the negative potential of science. He functions as a nightmarish counterexample to the idealized image of the Enlightenment scientist dedicated to cool, dispassionate observation and truth seeking. Victor’s success in animating an assemblage of dead body parts is undone by his subsequent inability to ease the torment endured by his monstrous creation; their entwined lives serve as a dramatic argument for responsible science that properly accounts for the social costs of so-called breakthroughs. Similar critiques of Enlightenment values can be found in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s fiction. In “The Birth-mark,” a chemist’s clinical obsession with his wife’s birthmark threatens her well-being and eventually leads to her death. Similarly, “Rappaccini’s Daughter” features an inhumane scientist whose isolated horticultural experiments leave him

science and technologyâ•…â•… 97 emaciated, sallow, and sickly looking. His work also transforms his daughter, who develops immunity to the poisonous flowers he cultivates but renders her toxic to anything or anyone in proximity of her breath. Collectively, these texts argue for a mode of science that critiques and limits its own ambitions and takes into account the social costs of scientific work once it leaves the laboratory. These literary arguments, however, did little to curtail the degree to which science and technology propelled larger processes of urbanization and industrialization. Many late 19th-century literary texts responded to this nagging realization by juxtaposing pastoral and industrial imagery. Huck’s desire to embark on a journey into unspoiled territory, near the end of Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, for instance, might reflect a growing ambivalence about the purported civilizing effects of an increasingly urbanized world. And in Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, the protagonist’s failed attempts to industrialize Arthurian England offers a stark rejection of Enlightenment notions that time and scientific initiative result in progress. By the 20th century, science no longer needed the qualifying term natural to denote methodological research capable of generating certainty about aspects of the physical world. Nevertheless, the definitional instability of the term remains to this day as the intellectual writings of social scientists, historians, and philosophers have increasingly questioned the supposed boundaries dividing science from other forms of intellectual and cultural work. Such writings argue that scientists belong to a distinct culture with its own ethics, politics, languages, and rituals, and that their work is shaped, in direct and indirect ways, by larger national and international pressures. Much 20th-century literature reflects and informs these observations by questioning science’s autonomy and objectivity. In many texts, scientific research and its technologies become driving forces behind the growth of consumer culture, corporations, economic systems, and political entities. In his U.S.A. trilogy, John Dos Passos employs a narrative technique that interweaves documentary sources, newspaper collages, fiction, montage techniques from film, and biographical sketches to depict the lives of working

Americans in an industrial culture. His rapid narrative transitions emphasize the role of communication, entertainment, and information technologies in shaping lived experience. A few decades after Dos Passos’s trilogy, Ray Bradbury’s fiction would consistently imagine future worlds in which consumer culture and entertainment technologies render the critical imagination obsolete and undesirable. His Fahrenheit 451, along with Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, dramatize how computer and surveillance technologies disseminate and enforce values compatible with the dominant power structures. These nightmare worlds depict entire populations that come to see individual conformity as an acceptable price to pay for national security. Other texts reveal a growing ambivalence toward the seeming omnipresence of military and information technologies in our lives. An atomic war might be the cause of the airplane crash that strands a group of schoolboys on a deserted island at the beginning of William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, but details of the cataclysm are mentioned only in passing. Later in the novel, the bestial violence that erupts on the island suggests that military technologies might be little more than extensions of an inherently violent and combative human nature. Published a few decades later, Don DeLillo’s White Noise employs an ironic and ambivalent narrative voice for a plot that juxtaposes consumer excess, unstable identities, omnipresent information technologies, and looming threats of ecological disaster. In complex ways, these texts contribute to the always unfinished work of historicizing and theorizing the relations between society, science, and technology. They reflect and contribute to larger cultural debates about how best to understand the impact of science on our present circumstances and how to approach an uncertain future in which technology and science will unquestionably play a role. See also Adams, Henry: Education of Henry Adams, The; Lowry, Lois: Giver, The; Poe, Edgar Allan: “Murders in the Rue Morgue, The”; Silko Leslie Marmon: Ceremony; Steinbeck, John: Cannery Row; Stevenson, Robert Louis: Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr.

98â•…â•… sex and sexuality Hyde; Vonnegut, Kurt: Cat ’s Cradle; Whitman, Walt: Leaves of Grass. FURTHER READING Daly, Nicholas. Literature, Technology, and Modernity, 1860–2000. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Marx, Leo. The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1964. Scholnick, Robert, ed. American Literature and Science. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1982.

Neal Bukeavich

sex and sexuality

Many classic works of literature have been banned because of their treatment of sex or sexuality. School boards, parents, and governments have tried to stop children and adults from reading such works as Aristophanes’ Lysistrata, Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders, Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita, Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, D. H. Lawrence’s Women in Love, and a long list of others, because these books were felt to deal with issues involving sex in ways that were deemed inappropriate or obscene. Objections range from a “too frank” discussion of rape, as in I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings; to depictions of promiscuity thought to be too suggestive, as in Moll Flanders; to descriptions of consensual sexual intercourse labeled too “explicit,” as in Women in Love. Sex, both the physical act and the broad range of feelings involved in sexual desire, is an important part of human life. It is, of course, the way in which we procreate and thus the method by which our species survives, but outside of procreation, sex and sexual desire are vital components of what it means to be human. All healthy human beings have sexual impulses and sexual desires. Our sexual histories, fantasies, and relationships (or the lack thereof ) are a part of our identities. Literature, as a mirror on the human condition, therefore must address the subject of sex and sexuality, but there are great variations on how and to what extent.

The human need to procreate is one obvious reason why sex is so important to human beings, but it is by no means the only reason, or even the primary one. Sexual desire—even merely feeling it, not necessarily acting upon it—has been seen as inspiring as well as impure, as a generator of creativity but also as an initiator of debilitating guilt, as the source of life’s greatest pleasures, and as the cause of life’s greatest pain. From the beginnings of Western civilization, discussing and writing about sex has been controversial. In Desire: A History of European Sexuality, Ann Clark explains that Western thought regarding sex has traditionally been divided into two competing threads: one that sees sexual desire as “polluting and dangerous,” and one that sees it as “creative, transcendent, and transformative” (1). Some ancient Greeks worried that reason and sexual desire were incompatible, but in general the Greeks did “not see sex itself as shameful or honorable” and believed that “aggressive sexual energy could be a force for fertility, culture, and spirituality” (15). They even used “the language of erotic love to describe the ascent from earthly love to spiritual love” (1). In fact, sex for the ancient Greeks only became a “problem” when it transgressed the boundaries of the social order, as when a man had sex with another man’s wife (i.e., his property) or if a man of the upper class took a submissive role in sex with a man of the lower classes. The early church, however, had a largely negative attitude toward sex and sexual desire, seeing celibacy as a better, more pure way of life. In Jewish life, sexual desire was not seen as inherently evil, and sex within marriage was a definite good. However, early Christians, such as the apostle Paul in the first century, saw sex, even sex within marriage, as a dangerous corruption that would lead believers away from God (39). Saint Augustine, for example, writing in the fourth century, greatly admired celibates and felt much guilt about his early pagan life. This attitude, that sex is polluting, corrupting, and dirty, is present even today. In literature, we see this attitude in many works. In William Shakespeare’s King Lear, for instance, men who pursue their sexual desires are clearly painted as fools, doomed to eventual ruin. In Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure, Sue Bride-

sex and sexualityâ•…â•… 99 head sees the act of sex as the road to disaster, avoids it whenever she can, and blames her sexual relationship with Jude for their tragic end. Other works of literature hold the opposite view, however, treating sex as a positive force, even sometimes as a useful metaphor for things such as ambition, transcendence, and crossing difficult boundaries. In Lysistrata, for example, the women know that they can use sex as a weapon for peace. Thus, sex is seen as wholly positive. The men want sex because it delivers pleasure, and the women know that its power is so great that it can end the wars they so despise. Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night ’s Dream shows the reader that while a surrender to lust can be destructive, as when Oberon tricks Titania into sleeping with Bottom, sexual union within marriage brings about great things: fertility, spirituality, and creativity. Similarly, the relationship between Rupert and Ursula in D. H. Lawrence’s Women in Love is portrayed as an ideal sexual relationship, transcendent and mystical, that unites the two lovers while still leaving them as individual beings. Women in Love is only one of the many Lawrence novels that treat sex and sexuality so frankly. The Rainbow, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, and Sons and Lovers all contain plots that emphasize the important role of sex and sexuality in the lives of human beings. Lawrence was heavily influenced by the psychosexual development theories of the Austrian psychologist Sigmund Freud. Freud’s theories on how we develop as sexual beings are so important to the way in which we think about sex and the brain that they cannot be ignored. He argues that all adult neurosis is borne from childhood sexuality. According to his theories, we have instinctive sexual appetites, even as infants, and these appetites mature in a series of changes, with the object of our affection being the primary change. Freud believed that getting “stuck” in one phase was the source of psychological problems in adults. He even used a work of literature, Sophocles’ Oedipus the King, to name the complex in which an adult remains fixated on his mother as the object of affection. Freud’s theories on psychosexual development received an enormous amount of attention throughout most of the 20th century. However, other

scientists have criticized his theories for being focused on sex to the exclusion of other elements that influence our personalities, and feminists have pointed out that his theories focus heavily on male sexuality. Nevertheless, his attention to sexual desire as an important part of our personalities was an invaluable step in terms of transforming the ways in which we talk about sex and sexuality. The French theorist Michel Foucault points out this importance in his own influential work The History of Sexuality (1976–84). Foucault’s argument counteracts the generally accepted narrative that in Western society, talk of sex is repressed. Instead, he claims that since the 19th century, discourse about sex has exploded, in venues such as the doctor’s office and the church confessional. As in those two examples, however, this discourse has been controlled by those in power, keeping those not in power marginalized. Part of this control involves labeling certain sex acts, or even sexual urges, pathological. Foucault’s own identity as an open homosexual to his friends, but not open to the rest of the world, may have influenced his thinking here. In fact, briefly surveying the treatment of homosexuality in literature, one might be left with the mistaken impression that there were no open homosexuals well into the 20th century. Homosexual themes and story lines abound in this history, but they are almost always coded and indirect. One of the most famous examples is in Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s In Memoriam, A. H. H, an elegiac poem written after the death of his dear friend Arthur Hallam. Tennyson speaks of his loss in intense terms, some of which have become famous for speaking of heterosexual love: “↜’Tis better to have loved and lost, than never to have loved at all” (Canto 27, 15–16). That the object of his love and his loss was another man was not considered scandalous, precisely because Tennyson was indirect here, rather than explicit. In fact, describing close, intense friendships between same-sex pairs is one of the most common ways in which homosexuality has historically been expressed in literature. Writers as diverse as Edmund Spenser, Lord Byron, Sarah Orne Jewett, and Virginia Woolf have written of these devoted friendships in a way that allows the spirit of same-sex love to be expressed without

100â•…â•… social class explicitly naming the relationship as a sexual one. In addition, literary critics have long found homoerotic undertones in works that involve “male bonding,” even when that was not necessarily the author’s intention. The American critic Leslie Fiedler noted these undertones between Huck and Jim in Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in his famous essay “Come Back A’gin to the Raft, Huck Honey” (1948). Fiedler and others have pointed out similar relationships between Ishmail and Queequeg in Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, the vampire hunting crew in Bram Stoker’s Dracula, and Finny and Gene in John Knowles’s A Separate Peace. Openly homosexual characters in literature were rare until the late 20th century. Society’s prohibition against same-sex relationships, as well as the probable desire of some homosexual authors to keep their sexuality hidden, limited the direct display of any sexual orientation that was not heterosexual in all forms of art. In fact, when the lesbian author Radclyffe Hall published the lesbian novel The Well of Loneliness in 1928, she was put on trial for obscenity. When homosexuality did make an open appearance in literature before this point, it was usually mocked, as in many English plays of the 18th century, or clearly considered a failing, as in Tennessee Williams’s Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. The end of the 20th century saw a somewhat more open attitude, with texts like James Baldwin’s Go Tell It on the Mountain and Jeannette Winterson’s Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit treating homosexuality as one important facet of a character’s identity. While sex and sexuality are clearly vital to human existence, their treatment in print has often been oblique, requiring the reader to read between the lines and tease out meanings from indirect references and suggestive metaphors. Obviously necessary for the continuation of the species, sex is also of paramount importance in terms of identity and can have a profound effect on our health and our emotions. Literature, therefore, has always addressed the issue and will continue to do so (perhaps more openly) as we move into the 21st century. See also Chopin, Kate: Awakening, The; Cisneros, Sandra: Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories; Dreiser, Theodore: Sister Car-

rie;

Erdrich, Louise: Love Medicine; Hesse, Herman: Steppenwolf; Jacobs, Harriet: Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Written by Herself; James, Henry: Turn of the Screw, The; Marshall, Paule: Brown Girl, Brownstones; Shakespeare, William: Taming of the Shrew, The; Silko, Leslie Marmon: Almanac of the Dead; Smith, Jean: Tree Grows in Brooklyn, A; Toomer, Jean: Cane; Walker, Alice: Color Purple, The. FURTHER READING Clark, Anna. Desire: A History of European Sexuality. New York and London: Routledge, 2008. Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality. Vol. 1. New York: Vintage, 1978.

Jennifer McClinton-Temple

social class

Contemporary and historical studies of varied social structure systems suggest that stratification of wealth and status is inevitable. When people come together to form a community, one of the results is an intricate organization wherein we notice a continuum of wealth and status ranging from the most deprived street beggar to the most privileged administrator of that society. Currently there are many types of these stratified systems in existence, and a cursory understanding of a few of them will give a reader insight into his or her own society’s hierarchical structure. And with a closer look at many postindustrial societies’ class systems, we are better able to understand why and how writers find the inspection of this type of social hierarchy so valuable. Social stratification takes many forms, and the class system with which we are familiar in the United States is only one of many. While there are infinite other divisions that separate groups from one another, we might relate these divisions to three qualities that give a group more privilege than another: power, status, and wealth. A few categories of these stratifying structures are those of the caste, estate, and slavery systems (Schaefer 187–188). India, Sri Lanka, and Pakistan have a long history of the caste system, wherein people’s occupations, earning capabilities, and life opportunities are determined by ancestral background. Once

social classâ•…â•… 101 born into a caste, a person will face many obstacles in attempting to maneuver beyond certain stigmas or narrowly defined possibilities dictated by caste membership. Alternatively, the estate system, or feudalism, is based on land ownership, as well as the power and wealth that come with such ownership. Under this system, a lowly serf might serve a life of physical labor with little hope of owning land, while a lordly landowner would pass down property through familial inheritance. Thus, families maintain powerful status in the feudal system. The slavery system also encourages the power of families in maintaining ownership of land and slaves. Until the mid-19th century in the United States, the slavery system enabled families in the Confederate States to exercise much economic and political power. This power did not wholly dissipate after the abolition of the slavery system. The caste, estate, and slavery systems are all examples of “closed systems” of social ranking (Schaefer 536). Alternatively, an “open system” is one that offers individuals opportunity for greater mobility between levels in the hierarchical social structure. The class system falls under this “open system” category. Max Weber, an influential German sociologist of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, proposed three distinctions for the purpose of analyzing and categorizing people and groups within this system: class, status, and wealth (Schaefer 191). People in this system are stratified into social classes that we normally subdivide based on families’ and individuals’ monetary income. Along with greater monetary income comes the capability to access certain luxuries and amenities that a lesser income may not allow. Accordingly, the stratified levels of this system are labeled along a continuum of wealth, which, as we have seen, is concomitant in most cases with continuums of power and status. W. Lloyd Warner, in his book Social Class in America, recommends a six-level ranking system of social class divided into the (1) upper-upper, (2) lower-upper, (3) uppermiddle, (4) lower-middle, (5) upper-lower, and (6) lower-lower classes (14). Along with these differing class levels and their respective access to wealth and earning power come capabilities and deprivations closely associated with

such rankings. Literature that deals with social class often comments on these capabilities and deprivations. According to Warner, authors who focus on class characteristically give their attention to the phenomena of social inequality—the tragic or comic, but always strained, relations between the members of different social strata, and the rise and fall of individuals and families, particularly emphasizing the strivings of people to climb into the class above and the efforts of those above to keep them out. (231) In conjunction with this type of commentary, an author might focus on divisive group characteristics that are necessarily linked to social class. Gender, race, genealogy, and locality are among some of the characteristics that might affect, at least in part, one’s social class. In their study Women and Social Class, Pamela Abbot and Roger Sapsford ask a question, specifically with regard to women: Are open systems really open? According to these scholars, current theoretical analyses of social class do not thoroughly explain “the subordinate position of women” or “adequately reflect the full range of stratification, social mobility and class awareness” of those living within class systems (1). We can easily expand Abbot and Sapsford’s viewpoint to apply to other groups that are similarly limited in their abilities to move from lower social strata to higher class status. Various authors, poets, and playwrights establish similar perspectives. In William Faulkner’s Light in August, we see the struggles of a young man with a multiethnic background. The protagonist, Joe Christmas, lives in early 20th-century Mississippi and falls victim to a local community’s rumors, prejudice, and violence. He meets one frustrating situation after another in his effort to evade the history of exploitation and hatred directed at him and others of African-American ancestry. Though coming, in part, from Anglo-European lineage, he cannot evade victimization and prejudice. As a result, he sees no prospects of rising out of the lower class, even though Joanna Burden, his clandestine lover and sympathizer, encourages him to pursue an

102â•…â•… social class education. Christmas internalizes the racial “glass ceiling” and sees it at each possible opportunity. Addressing issues of social class has been a pattern in literature for some time, yet facing the realities of the lower class’s plight has been a somewhat recent development in literature. Novels focusing on the lifestyles and scandals of those in the upper classes were common during the Victorian Age (1837–1901) in Europe and the United States. Members of the upper classes steeped in luxury appear in novels such as Henry James’s Daisy Miller and Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations. However, Dickens also focuses on the plight of the lower classes, a focus uncommon in the early 19th century. Dickens’s open-eyed awareness and experience of poverty motivated him to tell tales that depicted the struggles of the poor: a primary theme in many of his novels. The late 19th and early 20th century (sometimes known as the Gilded Age) saw an increase in literary attention on laborers and vagabonds of the lower class. Eric Shocket describes this focus as the “gaze over the divide at the Other” (2), suggesting that those who read these texts are more privileged than those under inspection. Stephen Crane, a popular and groundbreaking author of this period, created works that exposed the reading public to degraded images of the underprivileged. In his works, he paints grim pictures of those who endure many of the hardships associated with ghetto life. He and other writers of the naturalist movement likewise comment on the struggles of similarly deprived groups: those thought to be racially inferior and those from purportedly less-refined gene pools. During the Gilded Age, cultural views of gender, race, and ethnic equality were much less egalitarian than those of contemporary Europe and America, and these dated views are apparent in works of the period. Crane’s short novel Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (1893) shows the heart-wrenching trials of a poverty-stricken adolescent and the abuse she endures at the hands of her family, and eventually at the hands of seducers. The lamentable qualities of the living conditions in the San Francisco slums compound our sorrow at her demise. Many works that deal with social class tend to take on a “rags to riches” theme by showing

characters striving to move from a lower to higher social stratum. The American media is particularly strewn with this trope. “[M]ass magazines and newspapers print and reprint the legendary story of rags to riches and tell over and over again the Ellis-island-to-Park-Avenue saga in the actual lives of contemporary successful immigrant men and women” (Warner 4). Some might question the degree to which this ideal is attainable, though we may quote multiple well-known examples. By way of challenging this trope, authors such as Theodore Dreiser have shown the damaging effects of such an ideology. Drieser’s novel An American Tragedy shows a young, intelligent, and energetic member of the lower class striving to reach the upper class by becoming a successful businessperson. Elitist ostracism, spite, and misfortune lead to Clyde Griffith’s eventual downfall after his attempt to climb the social class ladder. Inner turmoil, failed attempts at corporate climbing, and a confusing murder prosecution finally cause Griffith to regret his efforts. In depicting the protagonist’s ruin, Dreiser seems to suggest that one cannot easily abandon the learned tendencies of the lower class, nor climb easily upward in the social hierarchy. Today, fiction focusing on social climbing and plights of the lower and middle classes is very common. Much more than in literature of the 19th and early 20th centuries, we see novels combining issues of class with race, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, and locality. Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner (2003) is a prime example of a novel which confronts these issues in a tale of a family’s struggle to survive in cold war–era Afghanistan. A Sunni Muslim father and son, after enduring unabated turmoil in Afghanistan, immigrate to California, where they must make a new start, emotionally and financially. Louise Erdrich’s Tracks confronts the desperate situation of a group of Native Americans in northern Minnesota. Her characters must come to terms with a new, dominant culture’s policies of land ownership and commerce. Nanapush, Fleur Pillager, and their immediate relatives must confront troubling changes to their local community; they face difficulty adapting to foreign concepts of property rights and class division. In the novel, the Indians are relegated to a remote area on the banks of a lake,

spiritualityâ•…â•… 103 where they attempt to sustain themselves. However, the local authorities confiscate their land because, by an unfortunate mishap, they have neglected to pay property taxes. They resist the foreign concepts of a highly organized class system. The local community subjugates them and eventually pushes them off the land they once inhabited. In the end, we see their way of life vanishing as a newer system takes its place. Partly as a result of these expanded and multitudinous considerations of societal inequality, some theorists question the efficacy of assessing social class as the primary source of stratification. The postmodernist movement encourages us to see aspects of culture as fragmented and uneasy to categorize or discern. Accordingly, some contemporary sociologists argue that social class is an “outmoded concept” and that we must consider the increasingly “fragmented” quality of social stratification (Devine 1). For these scholars, traditional class stratification concepts are changing and possibly no longer applicable to a postindustrialist society where the majority of people are preoccupied with lifestyle and amenity concerns. However, these theorists are currently on the margins of contemporary sociological study. They focus on a demographic that does not represent the myriad nations and communities characterized by highly varied stratification. Social class remains a prevalent reality for those living within its characteristic open system. Class greatly affects the way individuals, families, and communities prioritize particular ways of living. And where one falls within this stratified hierarchy is closely and irrevocably related to one’s intimate and outward identity. See also Achebe, Chinua: Anthills of the Savannah; Amis, Kingsley: Lucky Jim; Austen, Jane: Emma; Bellow, Saul: Adventures of Augie March, The; Cao Xueqin: Dream of the Red Chamber; Cather, Willa: My Ántonia; Dickens, Charles: G reat Expectations; Tale of Two Cities, A; Dreiser, Theodore: Sister Carrie; Fitzgerald, F. Scott: Great Gatsby, The; Hardy, Thomas: Tess of the d ’Urbervilles; James, Henry: Daisy Miller; Lewis, Sinclair: Main Street; Naylor, Gloria: Women of Brewster Place, The; Proust, Marcel: Remembrance

of Things Past; Shakespeare, William: Henry V;

Merchant of Venice, The; Midsummer Night ’s Dream, A; Shaw, George Bernard: Pygmalion; Smith, Betty: Tree Grows in Brooklyn, A; Swift, Jonathan: Modest proposal, A; Updike, John: Rabbit Run; Wharton, Edith: Age of Innocence, The; Woolf, Virginia: Mrs Dalloway. FURTHER READING Abbot, Pamela, and Roger Sapsford. Women and Social Class. London: Tavistock Publications, 1987. Devine, Fiona. Social Class in America and Britain. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1997. Schaefer, Richard T. Sociology. New York: McGrawHill, 1983. Shocket, Eric. Vanishing Moments: Class and American Literature. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 2006. Warner, W. Lloyd. Social Class in America: A Manual of Procedure for the Measurement of Social Status. New York: Harper & Row, 1960.

Liam Conway Nesson

spirituality

The term spirituality has been used in a great variety of ways, both religious and secular. When associated with religion, the term is practically inextricable from “God” and the myriad concepts connected with a belief in a higher power that guides, directs, and rewards human beings for leading a life in accordance with religious principles. From a secular perspective, the term is aligned with the workings of the mind, the senses, and the perceived material and, in some cases, immaterial world. For instance, the American transcendentalists used spirituality as a special mark of those superior intellects able to perceive a reality beyond the material world, a world of the “spirit” which is not necessarily dependent on the physical senses to interpret. Evangelical Christianity reserves the term to describe tender religious emotions, while, in contrast, the French have appropriated it as the name for the finer perceptions of life, which implies a firm link with the material evidence of reality around us. Various derivatives of the term include spiritual, spiritualism, spiritualist, spiritism, and the spirit, all words implying slightly

104â•…â•… spirituality more nuanced interpretations of the disconnect between the perceived reality of the physical world and a conceived reality of a realm beyond it—one that is not relative to, nor dependent on, the senses reacting in conjunction with the mind. If all of this sounds rather mysterious, it is primarily because the conceptual nature of the term has its etymological roots in the Hebrew word ruach, which refers to the ethereal or elusive nature of spirit, breath, or wind, as that which gives life and animation to something. Further, the term gets its modern implications from the Latin definition of immaterial (immaterialis, late Latin, 14th century) which consists of an essence that cannot be seen, contained, or even proven in a validated manner (i.e., scientifically). Thus, spirituality is a quality that is associated with persons or things but is paradoxically distinct from material or worldly concerns. Indeed, as the Scottish evangelist Henry Drummond stated in Natural Law in the Spiritual World (1883), “No spiritual man ever claims that his spirituality is his own” (89). This distinction between the material or natural world and the immaterial or spiritual world is central to the history of the debate regarding the nature of spirituality. By the 19th century, this debate assumed even greater proportions after Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species, which posited man’s descent from apes through a process of natural selection, thereby calling into doubt the validity of man’s creation by God as depicted in the book of Genesis in the Bible. The struggle to define spirituality in terms that account for this ongoing debate has continued ever since. However, what can be stated with assurance is that the concept of spirituality relates directly to the conception of faith and arises from a creative and dynamic synthesis of faith and life. Broadly interpreted, fiction is about the human condition, and spirituality is that sense of our selves as linked in some relational way to the larger concept of the universe. As such, this theme permeates nearly all fiction in ways that can be either subtle or dramatically overt, depending on how we as readers react to the conceptual, and frequently nonmaterial, clues provided by the author. Concepts such as the divine (or divinity), the soul or spirit, the mystical, transcendence, suffering, love, ecstasy, and even

human egotism are linked in multiple complex ways to our understanding and practice of spirituality. Among the Christians (especially the mystics) and the Sufis (a Muslim sect), the main concern of spiritual life is with the human mind and its divine essence. As Saint Catherine of Genoa, a renowned Christian mystic, wrote, “My Me is God, nor do I recognize any other Me” (quoted in Huxley 11, italics added). Within a religious context, there are myriad guides to understanding what constitutes the “spiritual” since religious history provides us with textual references that document, historicize, and instruct the individual’s understanding of the universe and their place in it. These guides include the Bible; the Torah; the Quran; and the writings of Buddha, the Hindu gods, and Confucius, to name but a few. Yet the spiritual cannot be confined to merely the religious and textual foundations of belief, since the spiritual also puts us in touch with that center of ourselves that is silent, mystical, and profoundly aware of the awesome beauty and power of what is clearly felt, yet beyond our control—the emotive force and energy of love; the symmetry and perfection of nature; and, not least of all, the passions and beliefs that ignite the soul. In more explicitly fictional terms, spirituality can be thematically reflected in texts through a number of literary devices that evoke specific spiritual responses from the reader. Readers may feel transformed in their consciousnesses or their lives, either vicariously through the fictive experience of one or more characters or more directly through a cathartic (energizing or healing) response to the work as a whole. Readers might also experience and know God through the creation of a fictional world; these works serve as allegories and are frequently imitative of previous works. Some works describe quest narratives that take one or more characters through the stages of a spiritual journey toward greater understanding of themselves; of the world around them; and of the nature of faith, hope, and love. Works that describe spirituality on this level may involve actual or imaginative travel to realms of otherworldliness, flights of fancy, or human physical/mental transport that defies the limitations of time and place. Other works infuse mystical feeling into their settings and natu-

stages of lifeâ•…â•… 105 ral worlds, such that a divine influence or presence is rendered as an aesthetic sensibility (an artistic, visual representation of beauty). Poetry, in particular, abounds with examples of natural imagery that is imbued with an ethereal quality reminiscent of spiritual perfection. Writers might also include symbols and motifs that emphasize aspects of faith particular to one or more sets of religious beliefs and values (the theology that can give rise to different spiritualities). Such references are usually universally identifiable by virtue of their iconic significance or historical prevalence, and they can include both occult as well as monotheistic images, such as angels, the all-seeing eye, butterflies, the cross of Christianity, the Celtic cross, the dove, the circle (or ring), the evil eye, the hexagram (or six-pointed star), the serpent or snake, the trident, and the triangle (or pyramid). For example, works such as Dante Alighieri’s The Divine Comedy, John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s P rogress, and John Milton’s Paradise Lost address the theme of spirituality within an exclusively religious or ecclesiastical context, since each work is essentially an allegory or parable that posits a fictional account of the respective Catholic, Puritan, and Episcopal traditions of religious life and afterlife as described by believers. Indeed, the function of parable in religion is to exhibit “form by form”; thus, natural phenomena serve mainly an illustrative function in religion. Accordingly, within each of these works, the path to spiritual awareness is well documented and the lines between good and evil are clearly drawn; the individual’s experience in life and on earth is characterized as a precursor to the progress of their soul after death. Similarly, works such as Herman Melville’s Billy Budd, Sailor; Arthur Miller’s The Crucible; George Eliot’s Silas Marner; and William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and of Experience can also be considered parables in which the individual is subjected to external, natural, and social forces characterized as both good and evil in order to illustrate the power of the spirit over the materiality and grossness of the world, albeit at a price. See also Anaya, Rudolfo: Bless Me, Ultima; Black Elk: Black Elk Speaks; Carver, Raymond: “Cathedral”; Davis, Robertson: Fifth Busi-

ness;

Dickinson, Emily: poems; Dostoyevsky, Fyodor: Crime and Punishment; Emerson, Ralph Waldo: “American Scholar, The”; “Divinity School Address, The”; Equiano, Olaudah: Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African, The; Hesse, Herman: Siddhartha; Ibsen, Henrik: Hedda Gabler; Kipling, Rudyard: Kim; Kureishi, Hanif: Buddha of Suburbbia, The; Reed, Ishmael: Mumbo Jumbo; Thoreau, Henry David: Walden. FURTHER READING Blythe, Ronald, et al. Ink and Spirit: Literature and Spirituality. Norwich, Eng.: Canterbury Press, 2000. Drummond, Henry. Natural Law in the Spiritual World. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1892. Huxley, Aldous. Perennial Philosophy. New York: HarperCollins, 1945.

Colleen Pauza

stages of life

If, as the American mythologist Joseph Campbell has suggested, a primary purpose of storytelling is “the reconciliation of consciousness with the preconditions of its existence” (180), then, given the undeniable precondition of mortality, it is to be expected that the journey a life makes in its arc from cradle to grave is a common concern of literature. Indeed, most of the world’s religions include in their respective mythologies ideas concerning life comprising segments or movements. For instance, Hinduism teaches that a life span consists of three primary stages: the student, the householder, and the retiree. The Talmud instructs that a man will find himself playing seven roles in his life: infant, child, boy, young man, married man, parent, and old man, each in regular succession. Cree Indian spiritualism holds that there are seven “times” that demarcate one’s existence, each characterized by a condition (e.g., confusion) or an action (e.g., planting). Similarly, when we look at traditional folktales, we find a persistent concern with stages of existence. From Aesop we have the story of the horse, the ox, and the dog who bestow upon man the gifts of their natures with which to divide up his life. Included in Grimm’s Fairy Tales is the narrative of God decid-

106â•…â•… stages of life ing the life span of each living thing, with man in his greed receiving the rejected remainder from the more humble donkey, dog, and monkey. Hence, working is burdensome, retirement is suspicious, and old age is foolish. The best description in a literary masterpiece of this tradition of inevitable progression through stages of life is the “All the world’s a stage” monologue of the cynical courtier Jaques in Shakespeare’s As You Like It (act 2, scene 7): All the world’s a stage, And all the men and women merely players: They have their exits and their entrances, And one man in his time plays many parts, His acts being seven ages. At first the infant, Mewling and puking in the nurse’s arms: Then the whining school-boy, with his satchel And shining morning-face, creeping like snail Unwillingly to school. And then the lover, Sighing like furnace, with a woeful ballad Made to his mistress’ eyebrow. Then a soldier, Full of strange oaths, and bearded like the pard, Jealous in honour, sudden, and quick in quarrel, Seeking the bubble reputation, Even in the cannon’s mouth. And then the justice, In fair round belly with good capon lin’d, With eyes severe, and beard of formal cut, Full of wise saws and modern instances; And so he plays his part. The sixth age shifts Into the lean and slipper’d pantaloon, With spectacles on nose and pouch on side; His youthful hose, well sav’d, a world too wide For his shrunk shank; and his big manly voice, Turning again toward childish treble, pipes And whistles in his sound. Last scene of all, That ends this strange eventful history,

Is second childishness, and mere oblivion, Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything. In Edgar Allan Poe’s masterful allegory “The Masque of the Red Death,” Prince Prospero vainly imagines he can first wall out and then defeat death. The arrangement of the abbey within which Prospero and his guests imagine themselves to be invulnerable is symbolic and also highly evocative of Jaques’s speech: seven rooms, each of a different hue and thus character, each imperceptible from the vantage point of the others. There is a sense in which the concept of life comprising stages is less a theme of literature than a precondition itself, an assumed norm, and many thematic concerns arise from the frustration, retardation, or inhibition of the process. That is, characters who fail to progress in a timely fashion experience considerable turmoil and anguish due to their unnatural state. This posits the notion that the stages are contingent on volition, the character’s capacity to make the proper choices or draw the correct conclusions from experience. Consider, for instance, the number of memorable characters who are, in essence, stuck as adolescents. Holden Caulfield in J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye is, though still young, unnaturally bent on dividing the world into “phonies” (nearly every adult) and those more like his sister Phoebe and late brother Allie, whom he imagines to be uncorrupted and static in a wholly unrealistic way. His inability to function at a level appropriate to his age (failure at a succession of preparatory schools, childish infatuation without any overt action with Jane Gallagher, impotent response to the prostitute Sunny) could all be seen as inevitable consequences of his untenable mental/emotional/spiritual stage/age (roughly 12, instead of 16). Similarly, though in many respects more egregiously, Harry Angstrom from John Updike’s Rabbit, Run cannot bring himself to accept the preconditions of life as a 26-year old husband and father-to-be. Just as his nickname implies, he runs, toward irresponsibility and what he imagines to be inconsequential hedonism with a prostitute. However, as the tragedy of his denials unfolds, we are

successâ•…â•… 107 made to understand that Harry’s flight from young adulthood is not only futile but also destructive. Interestingly, Updike’s three subsequent installments of Harry’s life all find him at least one step behind (and he dies where he essentially began—playing basketball). Just as striking are the sundry literary characters whose progress through the latter stages of existence is thwarted by magic, addiction, attachment to the past, or a simple lack of faith. In his poem “Tithonus,” Alfred, Lord Tennyson memorably depicted the story of Tithonus, Aurora’s beloved, doomed to “wither slowly” in her arms because he cannot die. His is the story of the dark side of immortality, of course, the realization that our fear of death often obscures its necessity. T. S. Eliot’s Prufrock, in “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” offers the figure of one who seeks to arrest the progress of time by never choosing (“Do I dare?”). He grows old, but he cannot “force the moment to its crisis”—that is, he remains more observer than agent in his own life. Like Tithonus, he has come to realize that there are worse things than the surrender to the inevitable conclusion of life—namely, that one can live out a spiritual death of excruciating torture. Fiction writers subsequent to the advent of modernism at the turn of the 20th century seemed increasingly inclined to suggest that, far from inevitable, progress through life necessarily involves struggle and, ideally, a crucible or challenging ritual that forces graduation to the next stage. Later in the century, Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony offered the compelling portrait of Tayo, whose alcoholism and inner turmoil keep him rooted in the crucible of his youth, World War II. Through the help of Betonie, the shaman, he is able to see a way forward by accepting the crucible of the moment. Tayo realizes “there were transitions that had to be made in order to become whole again” (170). Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea is another example of this concept of conditional stages at work. Santiago’s crucible of more than 80 days of fishing without a catch becomes the ultimate test of faith in himself, his traditions, his beliefs, and his capacity for endurance. By implication, Santiago’s great struggle is the struggle we all must face as the time of our thriving inevitably

passes, when the world is unlikely to offer much in the way of affirmation. For Santiago, the passage through is not a form of surrender nor, certainly, a turning away from the moment toward fantasy. Rather, his essence is reaffirmed by the fact of his endurance, his ultimate landing of the great marlin. Although the marlin is stripped of its tangible value by sharks, Santiago’s victory is ensured by the enormity of the skeleton. In a sense, Santiago’s triumph unifies all the stages of a life lived in obedience to a code. Ironically, had he changed with the times, he would have negated his very existence. His ultimate test of faith in himself comes when he has the least reason for faith, which Hemingway strongly suggests is the nature of life when he has Santiago tell the young Manolin that September is the time of the great fish, and thus “anyone can be a fisherman in May” (18). See also Carroll, Lewis: Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland; Frost, Robert: poems; Gaines, Ernest J.: Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, The; Houston, Jeanne Wakatsuki: Farewell to Manzanar; Hurston, Zora Neale: Their Eyes Were Watching God; Shakespeare, William: Tempest, The; Shelley, Percy Bysshe: poems; Wilder, Thornton: Our Town; Williams, Tennessee: Cat on a Hot Tin Roof; Wordsworth, William: “Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey”; Wright, Richard: Black Boy. FURTHER READING Campbell, Joseph. The Mythic Dimension: Selected Essays 1959–1987. Edited by Antony Van Couvering. San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1997. Hemingway, Ernest. The Old Man and the Sea. New York: Scribner, 1975. Silko, Leslie Marmon. Ceremony. 1977. Reprint, New York: Penguin, 2006.

Daniel Ryan Morse

success

What does it mean to be successful in life? Many people would equate success with wealth, but some wealthy people are profoundly unhappy. Others would equate success with power or fame, which are equally problematic. If we assume that being successful is about attaining goals, few would pur-

108â•…â•… success sue goals that were geared toward making them unhappy. It seems, then, that success might best be equated with, or at least linked to, happiness. Indeed, when we look at differing accounts of the “successful” over time, we see that one thing they have in common, whether we are discussing a simple, yeoman farmer from the 18th century, or the 20thcentury steel baron Andrew Carnegie, is that they were pursuing their dreams in order that they might achieve excellence and be fulfilled. In other words, they were tying success to personal happiness, not to wealth, power, or fame. Those things might come as accessories to success, but they are not the primary motivators. Literature is full of characters for whom those empty dreams are the driving forces, and those characters usually meet bad ends. In order to see the truly “successful” among the pantheon of literary characters, we must first explore exactly what we mean by success. Although thoughts on success and its nature are quite common in literature, often the characters who embody it or seek it are deeply unhappy and dissatisfied with their lives. The philosopher Tom Morris might argue that this is because these characters are confusing true success with something else, something destructive in its emptiness. In his 1994 book True Success, Morris argues that we misconceive the meaning of success, confusing it with fame or with power or, most often, with wealth. But, he says, we can all think of wealthy people who are unhappy or who did nothing on their own to attain their wealth. Both of these qualifications seem to go against the basic definition of success: obtaining the object of one’s desire. In Silas Marner, by George Eliot, Silas hoards the gold he earns, becoming very wealthy but very unhappy. It is not until he has a fulfilling purpose in life, raising Eppie, that he can truly be called successful. The extreme unhappiness and dissatisfaction of the wealthy Sutpen family from William Faulkner’s Absalom! Absalom! demonstrates how inherited wealth does not automatically bring success. Thomas Sutpen is a self-made man whose outward appearance might be the picture of success. But although he is wealthy and powerful, he not only guarantees his own unhappiness by denouncing his part-black son but also passes that unhappiness on to his chil-

dren. He ends his life an alcoholic, murdered by the grandfather of his 15-year-old mistress and largely forgotten by his community. Like wealth, fame and power do not guarantee success either. Both can be fleeting, and if our only end is to achieve them, not to find fulfillment in the pursuits that led to the fame and the power, then we are doomed to fail. In our tabloid rich society, it is not difficult to think of people whom power and fame had seemingly put on top of the world, but who quickly descended to the depths of failure. In lieu of the dubious pursuits of wealth, fame, and power, Morris posits a new conception of success, one requiring that we incorporate certain conditions into our daily lives. He says, “Our idea of success should be more closely related to our ideas of excellence and fulfillment. And to our idea of happiness” (32). He claims that to truly be successful, we must have a clear idea of what we are seeking; we must be confident and consistent, committed to the pursuit and the concentration it takes; and finally, and perhaps most interestingly in light of literature, we must have character of “high quality” and the capacity to enjoy our success. Morris contends here that if “success” is pursued for immoral means or if the spoils of success are the only motivator, then that is not “true success.” Morris is (understandably) working against the popular 20th-century concept of success. Interestingly, definitions of success prior to this period were more in line with Morris’s thinking. Rex Burns, in Success in America, explores older ideas of success, focusing on the yeoman farmer, the epitome of success in the 18th century. He explains that under this conception, there were three major elements in order to claim success: competence, independence, and morality. This farmer needed not wealth, and certainly not fame or power, to be considered successful. In fact, Jeffrey Decker explains in Made in America that in the 18th and 19th centuries, success was “character based.” There was an explicit link between productive enterprise and religious faith that came to be known as the “Protestant work ethic,” which informs the stories of Horatio Alger, popular in the 19th and early 20th centuries. These stories, sometimes called “rags to riches” or “luck and pluck” stories, usually involve a poor adolescent boy

successâ•…â•… 109 who manages to rise to prosperity on the strength of his character and determination. Decker believes that these stories allowed turn of the century readers “an outlet for reinforcing their belief in the residual concept of character based success” (2). American literature from this period and into the 20th century is full of examples of characters who, because they lack character, cannot be truly successful. Besides the aforementioned Thomas Sutpen, there is Jay Gatsby, the title character of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. Gatsby earns his wealth through questionable associations with unscrupulous people, all so that he may win the love of Daisy Buchanan. Even were he to achieve this goal, he would not be truly successful. He would be unable to enjoy his achievement, because he showed poor character in its pursuit, and because he is denying his true identity in the entire enterprise. Like Sutpen, Gatsby ends up a victim of murder. Willy Loman, from Arthur Miller’s Death of A Salesman, is an excellent example of a character who strives his whole life for success, but because he does not really understand what success is, he is doomed to never achieve it. Willy wants only to be “well-liked” and takes no joy from the job he thinks will help him to achieve this end. He interacts with his family only in the context of how successful he is, and since this existence is a lie, his relationships with them are empty. Like Willy, Rabbit Angstrom in John Updike’s Rabbit, Run desperately bemoans the life he sees as mundane and stagnant, thinking that his only successes in life are behind him, with the glory of his high school basketball career. Because he puts no focus, concentration, or passion into his current life, he cannot feel, even to mourn the death of his baby daughter. On the other hand, a character such as Jo March, from Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women, despite a distinct lack of wealth, power, and social status, ends the narrative very happy and, because she achieves her aims, successful. Jo wants to be an intellectually independent woman, and in 19th-century New England, this was not a common or easily attained goal. She rejects the love of Laurie because, despite her affection for him, she knows he will want a traditional marriage. She moves to New York to pursue her love of writing and gain independence,

and there she meets her true mate, Professor Bhaer, who understands and respects her forthright, determined nature. She opens a school, marries Bhaer, and ends the novel the epitome of success. While success as a theme is common in all American literature, it is perhaps most common in African-American literature. This is perhaps because, as Audrey Edwards and Craig K. Polite argue, for black Americans, success is “a relative” phenomenon, “measured as much by what has been overcome as by what has been achieved” (3). Often systematically denied a level playing field, such as equal educations, equal access to certain careers, and equal opportunities to live and work in desirable places, African Americans have been forced to define success differently than whites. In addition, the specter of failure has been so internalized among African Americans that many may feel that they are inferior and cannot truly compete in the white world. Thus, success and its pursuit are frequently explored in texts by African-American writers. Booker T. Washington’s Up from Slavery presents one view of African-African success, albeit a controversial one. Washington believed blacks’ road to success was to be found in learning to work hard, have good manners, and participate in the rank and file of the working class. At the Tuskegee Institute, a school he founded, all students had to participate in menial chores as well as their studies. Although many students rebelled, Washington was resolute in his view that blacks had to build a modest foundation before they could reach for the heights of success. Ralph Kabnis, in Jean Toomer’s Cane, represents the rebellious students who did not agree with Washington’s plan. Educated in the North, he does not anticipate that despite his credentials and social standing, he will be forced to act deferential around all whites, even those who are less educated than he and who hold a less prestigious place in society. Like many African Americans both before him and after him, he finds that he must begin in a metaphorical hole and dig his way out just to get the respect any human being deserves. Characters like Ralph chafe against Washington’s idea that blacks should prove their worth to whites. Instead, they want that worth to be assumed from the beginning.

110â•…â•… suffering Feeling worthy of success in this way is, perhaps, a criterion for achieving it. The underlying reason why many literary characters who are focused on wealth, power, and fame fail spectacularly in these pursuits is because there is no intrinsic value in their quest. When we strive for wealth just for wealth’s sake, and not because what we are doing to achieve it fulfills us, we are doomed to fail. See also Angelou, Maya: I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings; Dos Passos, John: U.S.A. trilogy; Franklin, Benjamin: Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, The; Morrison, Toni: Tar Baby; Mukherjee, Bharati: Middleman and Other Stories, The; Naipaul, V. S.: House for Mr. Biswas, A; Steinbeck, John: Cannery Row; Wilde, Oscar: Importance of Being Ernest; The. FURTHER READING Burns, Rex. Success in America. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1976. Decker, Jeffrey. Made in America. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997. Edwards, Audrey, and Craig K. Polite. Children of the Dream. New York: Doubleday, 1992. Morris, Tom. True Success. New York: Putnam, 1994.

Jennifer McClinton-Temple

suffering

Human beings shrink from suffering. We avoid confronting the afflictions of others because it is unpleasant, and if we focus on suffering for too long, it could give us a pessimistic view of the world. Nevertheless, we remain avid fans of television dramas, intense and violent movies, and works of literature that speak to the truest of human experiences. We read stories of the tragedies of others, partly as a form of escapism from our own troubles but also to reinforce our conviction that suffering is meaningful, as the conflicts in literature are almost always resolved (though perhaps not always to our satisfaction). In this way, literature involving suffering often restores our faith in justice and aids us in grappling with the question of why we suffer at all. At times characters’ trials are a tool authors use to reveal truths about the human condition, address flaws in society, or identify ways in which suffer-

ing can function as a motivator for progress (either individual or large-scale). Portrayals of suffering in literature also add realism and drama to the work while involving, influencing, and at times even challenging the reader. The theme of arbitrary, undeserved suffering has been taken up by a number of writers, including Shirley Jackson. In her short story “The Lottery” (1948), a quaint town prepares for an annual tradition. All of the families are present, and everyone draws a piece of paper out of a box. Tessie Hutchinson picks the one with the mark on it. The story ends abruptly and morbidly, with Tessie being stoned to death by her family and other members of the town. Her death is not redemptive, not meaningful except insofar as it constitutes in itself the meaning or essence of life. It is merely the result of a backward, empty ritual that the characters refuse to challenge. The town can also be interpreted as a microcosm of the world, in which people are capable of inflicting harm on others for no apparent reason. “The Lottery” is thus a parable about the arbitrariness of suffering, many of the traditions we hold, and of life itself. The cruelty inflicted by people or institutions, like that in “The Lottery,” is addressed in many other literary works as well. In such cases, depictions of suffering are often used in the service of social critique. For example, in her novel The Bluest Eye, Toni Morrison confronts the reader with the harsh realities of growing up in a dysfunctional African-American family during a time of lingering discrimination and racism. The novel tells the story of a young girl, Pecola, who is tortured by abusive parents and deeply rooted feelings of inadequacy. As a result of her being raped by her father and becoming pregnant with his child, Pecola’s childhood is cut short, and she eventually slips into madness. Her self-esteem is virtually nonexistent from having grown up with the notion that whiteness is inherent in the definition of beauty. Her suffering, however, is merely the latest in a chain of human suffering as a result of the cruelty of others. Her father was abandoned by his parents and tormented by white men from early on. He is apathetic toward his marriage and life in general, while his wife, Pecola’s mother, is physically disabled and endures her husband’s abuse

sufferingâ•…â•… 111 because she feels she is deserving of it. Like Pecola, she is vastly insecure and has adopted society’s limited standards for beauty. She refuses to believe Pecola’s account of the rape and beats her. Many of the characters in Morrison’s novel are both victims and perpetrators of suffering, which contributes to its realism. We learn behavior from figures of authority, and after being affected repeatedly by the cruelty of others or of society, it is hard not to react by mimicking that behavior for self-preservational reasons, thereby continuing the cycle. Accounts of suffering as a result of human cruelty are most powerful in stories that are based in truth. This is the case in Elie Wiesel’s account of the Holocaust, entitled Night. The atrocities described through Wiesel’s narrator are all the more poignant because we know them to be real. The novel, which is in part a memoir, also addresses how suffering can lead to a crisis of (or loss of ) faith. In Night, the main character, Eliezer, is a devout Jew who endures the horror of the Jewish concentration camps. As a youth, he learned about God’s goodness and omnipotence; however, after being separated from his mother and sister, seeing babies burned alive and children hanged, and being forced to work long days with little or no food, his faith in a compassionate God wavers, understandably. The cruelty of the Nazis and even of the other prisoners is at odds with his religious teachings. He doubts and questions the existence of God but still references biblical passages. Although his intense suffering causes a crisis of faith, he never abandons his faith, but he grapples with reevaluating it to better explain his experience. Suffering, then, can act as a catalyst for learning and for spiritual and mental renewal. Suffering can also result from social institutions and philosophies, rather than from direct physical cruelty or arbitrary, superhuman forces. Lorraine Hansberry’s play A Raisin in the Sun illustrates the suffering that is caused by class stratification and the illusions inherent in both class divisions and the striving to ascend to a higher class. The Youngers are trapped by their social class and unable to move up in the world. They hungrily look forward to a $10,000 insurance check from the deceased Mr. Younger’s life-insurance policy. Each member of the family has his or her own personal plan for where

the money should go, but they ultimately decide to spend it on a new house in a white neighborhood. They are soon approached by a man who is willing to pay them to keep them from moving in. The Youngers are limited not only economically but also as a result of latent discrimination. They are unable to attain the American dream: that with hard work and perseverance, one can achieve anything. Rather, they are only able to improve their situation when they collectively decide to put the well-being of the family as a whole before their individual wishes. By cooperating and working together, they can transcend those boundaries that limit them, if not materialistically then in their outlook on life. Portrayals of suffering also often serve as vehicles to redemption or moral growth. This is true in Richard Wright’s novel Native Son, in which the main character, Bigger, only realizes the motivation behind his violent crimes after he is caught and doomed to execution. Bigger’s whole life has been spent suffering under the thumb of a “superior” white society, limited in what he could achieve from the start because he was black. The anger and resentment against the forces oppressing him build up and manifest themselves in violence against his friends, his girlfriend, and the daughter of the white man who employs him. The murders he commits empower him and give his life meaning for the first time, and he feels little guilt as a result. Before the end of the novel, though, he realizes that his behavior is a direct result of the racism he has experienced, and that equality is something to be strived for. Rather than defying the status quo, Bigger’s actions contribute to the cycle of racism by reaffirming the fears whites have of blacks. It is only by acting on his frustration that Bigger comes to realize the cause for them, and he finally feels remorse. Suffering is a key theme in literature because it unlocks the ethical possibilities of almost any literary text. Literature nurtures the reader’s ethical awareness and compassionate faculty with characters who may be quite different from the reader but inspire affinity and sympathy nonetheless. The emotional and intellectual responses to these characters’ suffering help increase a reader’s awareness of what is possible, and inherent, in this world—that is, suffering caused by others or by institutions. Literature

112â•…â•… survival depicting suffering also inspires hope and confidence in the resilience of the human spirit. In most stories, suffering is temporary and usually resolved by the end, even if the resolution is simply death or justice served for those who have suffered. Literature involving suffering, then, is often true to life, in that it portrays suffering as inevitable and sometimes inexplicable, but often endured and overcome. See also Bradford, William: Of Plymouth Plantation; Cather, Willa: O Pioneers!; Cisneros, Sandra: Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories; Dostoyevsky, Fyodor: Crime and Punishment; Edward, Jonathan: “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God”; Faulkner, William: Light in August; Greene, Graham: Heart of the Matter, The; Haley, Alex, and Malcolm X: Autobiography of Malcolm X, The; Heller, Joseph: Catch-22; Hersey, John: Hiroshima; Kafka, Franz: Metamorphosis, The; O’Connor, Flannery: W ise Blood; Orwell, George: Nineteen Eighty-Four; Paton, Alan: Cry, the Beloved Country; Pirandello, Luigi: Six Characters in Search of an Author; Shakespeare, William: King Lear; Swift, Jonathan: Modest Proposal, A; Voltaire: Candide. FURTHER READING Bending, Lucy. The Representation of Bodily Pain in Late Nineteenth-Century English Culture. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000. Noble, Marianne. The Masochistic Pleasures of Sentimental Literature. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000. Nussbaum, Martha C. Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990. Scarry, Elaine. The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985.

Kristy Cerullo

survival

As with any thematic approach to literary study, consideration of the role of survival in literature requires an acknowledgement of the ever-evolving nature of the theme itself. Of primary importance, then, is recognizing that at different times, in differ-

ent places, and to different people, the word survival has taken on myriad different meanings. Our very understanding of the term fluctuates. Centuries before the printing press, when written texts were far less common, oral transmission was often utilized as a means of relaying a text, thus literally tying the survival of texts to the living, breathing carriers thereof. The fate of people and texts were parallel. Numerous works, including Beowulf (Anonymous), when eventually recorded, sustained damage or were lost or consumed by fire. Therefore, concomitant to examining survival in literature, we have also to acknowledge the necessary survival of literature, an issue which, even with the technological advances that have taken place over the epochs, is again presenting itself. Literature, of course, cannot be without language, and this basic concern is not lost when we consider the founding documents of the English language. Early Anglo-Saxon pieces such as Bede’s Caedmon’s Hymn (ca. seventh century) are, in and of themselves, testaments to a fledgling language struggling for its very existence. Works like Bede’s faced an uphill battle against the preeminence of Latin, a language to which most deferred due to its association with the church. Hence, the survival of any language is, in and of itself, the survival of familiar ideas and expressions, of connective provincialism. The early forms of English thus served as a sort of cultural conduit to crude patriotism. Correspondingly, the texts that utilize these forms concern themselves often with defense and survival, whether focusing on the tribe or on the nation-state. The Arthurian legend serves as an early example of literature concerned with survival beyond merely that of the individual, as does Sir Gawain and the Green Knight centuries later (although as Gawain’s head is literally at stake, individual survival is not entirely dismissed). Given the ties between the church and Western states, especially since the rise of Christianity, the intermingling of religion, the state, and the texts that carried their respective messages was of the utmost importance. The middle of the second millennium in particular saw monumental struggles between Catholics and the newly emergent Protestants for control of the hearts, minds, and truly the states

survivalâ•…â•… 113 and texts of Europe. The inception of the printing press in the 15th century facilitated the transmission of Martin Luther’s and John Calvin’s iconoclastic Protestant ideas and encouraged vernacular translations, sentiments that clashed with Catholicism’s insistence on Latin. Both biblical translations deemed unacceptable and those propounding them were subject to destruction via fire, and thus, the survival of both people and texts were again aligned. Dynamic both politically and textually, this era saw Henry VIII’s refutation of papal authority and his subsequent founding of the Anglican church; Elizabeth I’s rise, rule, and promulgation of Protestantism; and the ascension of King James I and creation of his conservative new Bible. The boundaries of these disputes, however, were continually expanding, as the dictums of the early modern age insisted that to be prosperous at home meant being prosperous abroad, and that meant the maintaining of colonial empires. As the struggle of the dominant ideologies in Europe quickly spilled over into its ever-expanding imperial holdings abroad, different views on survival presented themselves. John Milton’s Paradise Lost applied the Christian mythos as a means of examining survival in new worlds—Eden for Adam and Eve, and Hell for Lucifer. Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels explored the notion that, sail where one may, survival—however one chooses to define it—is only ultimately possible through selfknowledge. Tales pouring back to Europe from the Western Hemisphere, including those of Cabeza de Vaca and John Smith, told harrowing tales of survival amid unfamiliar new environments. Captivity narratives such as Mary Rowlandson’s Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration of Mary Rowlandson, further underscored the dangers incumbent upon usurpation-based foreign settlement. The attendant horrors of “progress” helped, over the course of time, to spawn the romantic movement. Writers such as William Wordsworth (see “Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey”), John Keats, and Sir Walter Scott sought survival in and pined for a departed day that favored bucolic simplicity in tried locales over the ever-advancing technology utilized to conquer alien landscapes, cultures, and people.

But neither colonial exploitation nor its attendant cultural emphases would survive in the New World. Shortly after gaining independence, the United States produced its own literary examinations of just what it meant to survive. Early American writers—not merely those reproducing British fiction, but those with whom others identified the young country—such as James Fenimore Cooper, Washington Irving (see Sketchbook of Geoffrey Crayon, The), and Michel-Guillaume-Jean de Crèvecoeur deductively chronicled the survival of the state by examining parcels thereof: ostensibly, the small villages and hamlets ranging across the frontier and the manner in which they were configured, governed, and threatened. From a spiritual perspective, Calvinist notions of predestination, which seem to take away our ability to act on our own, became the target of more and more disdain, as Americans inundated with notions of new horizons leveled mounting attacks on what they believed to be the domineering beliefs of their forbears, a system that essentially attributed the nature of one’s soul’s survival to luck. Such is the nature of Emily Dickinson’s probing, almost haunted poetry; hers is unsatisfied verse, work permeated by restlessness, want, and a need for a new savior. Her yearning for something new was largely representative of the mid-19th-century atmosphere that gave way to a more liberal unitarianism and, finally, transcendentalism. Spearheaded by the disheartened Unitarian preacher Ralph Waldo Emerson and his 1836 essay “Nature,” transcendentalists advanced the idea that surviving and flourishing were merely functions of recognizing one’s own innate divinity, an endeavor undertaken not via the intermediary of a preacher or priest in a church house, but alone. Hence, although the number of transcendentalists within the United States never exceeded that of an infinitesimal minority, their legacy survives and is celebrated as integrally American due to the manner in which emphasis on individuality and independence mirror the country’s stated goals. For example, Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself ” (see Leaves of Grass) is an inductive celebration of the nation-state as construed by each and every one of its respective constituent citizens and environs. His

114â•…â•… survival is truly poetry of inclusion, stressing both his spirit and body; by commemorating, rather than debasing his physicality, Whitman marvels at the manner in which matter only changes form, thereby ensuring its survival, be it as human, grass, or dirt beneath one’s boot soles. Henry David Thoreau took Whitman’s ebullience even further, specifically positing the wilderness as savior by writing in his essay “Walking” (1862) that “in wildness is the preservation of the world,” a sentiment that would come to serve as a mantra for environmentalists. The idealism of transcendentalism, however, would last only until the time of the Civil War, as national survival quickly advanced to the forefront of public consciousness. Slave narratives penned by Harriet Jacobs (Incidents in the Life of A Slave Girl, Written by Herself ) and Frederick Douglass (Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave), along with Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, intensified the debate over slavery that threatened to destroy the country. Yet amid all the politics of division, the transcripts of Abraham Lincoln’s speeches reveal a president concerned, first and foremost, with the survival of the Union. In 1890, the American frontier was declared “closed,” thus effectively ending what had until then been the country’s most enduring myth: that of the West. Suddenly, the United States and her authors had to acknowledge the philosophical significance communicated by this spatial reality: There was, indeed, no more second chance. What remained was to turn back around and re examine the manner in which the continent had been settled. Furthermore, the Industrial Revolution and its attendant advances in transportation had shifted the American economy from agrarian to mechanized. This phenomenon, along with tough economic times following the war, facilitated the rise of naturalists like Theodore Dreiser (An American Tragedy) and Stephen Crane (The Open Boat), whose writing highlighted the manner in which survival now pertained more to getting along in bustling capitalist metropolises than on sun-drenched prairies. Modernists sought solace with this increasingly unrecognizable world. Willa Cather, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and William Faulkner all wrote eulogistically of a

country they were not certain they really knew. Jack Kerouac and Kurt Vonnegut followed suit. Postmodernism interrogated what surviving in the 20th century necessarily entailed. Most recently, however, the ecocritical movement, a critical literary approach aiming to treat nature, according to the scholar David Mazel, as if it were consequential has added further nuance to survival’s role in literature. Citing environmental degradation, including groundwater contamination, overuse of pesticides, deforestation, pollution, and global warming, authors (beginning ostensibly with Rachel Carson in Silent Spring [1962] and still gaining momentum from scholars like Glen Love) have stressed the seemingly rudimentary concept that the survival of literature—indeed, that of all art—is integrally dependent on the survival of an environment able to sustain humanity itself. This basic assumption refutes the postmodern maxim that there are no absolutes, and it emphasizes that the theme of survival in literature is a very fundamental one; indeed, as people and texts are paralleled, they share a similar fate. See also Bradbury, Ray: Fahrenheit 451; Defoe, Daniel: Robinson Crusoe; Dickens, Charles: Oliver Twist; Erdrich, Louise: Love Medicine; Tracks; Frank, Anne: Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl; Golding, William: Lord of the Flies; Gordimer, Nadine: Burger’s Daughter; Harte, Bret: “Outcasts of Poker Flats, The”; Hemingway, Ernest: Farewell to Arms, A; Kingston, Maxine Hong: Woman Warrior, The; Mukherjee, Bharati: Middleman and Other Stories, The; O’Brien, Tim: Going after Cacciato; Solzhenitsyn, Alexander: One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich; Steinbeck, John: Pearl, The; Tennyson, Alfred, Lord: In Memoriam A. H. H.; Wright, Richard: Native Son. FURTHER READING Dailey, Kate. “Literature of Survival: A Literature Class as a Place of Healing.” Teaching English in the TwoYear College 34, no. 2 (December 2006): 196–201. Mazel, David, ed. A Century of Early Ecocriticism. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2001.

David Visser

traditionâ•…â•… 115

tradition

Although most people today might think that the word tradition is a reference to things from the past that are fixed and therefore must be replicated, the English word tradition actually comes from the Latin infinitive tradere literally meaning “to hand across.” However, the same word frequently meant “to surrender.” The various meanings of the Latin tradere can also be found in Greek words that translate as “tradition.” In both languages, the idea of “tradition” is at once a handing on of customs, rituals, expectations, and methods of doing things outside of written documents and a rejection of such customs or even a betrayal of them. This doublesided meaning of the word, which gives a truer picture of what tradition actually is, can be traced throughout the Western literary canon. From the earliest examples of literary art, the issue of tradition can be seen. For example, in the Babylonian poem Gilgamesh, the goddess Ishtar is outraged that Gilgamesh dishonors her; to punish him, she sends a bull to destroy him. This early example of a god expecting “traditional” behavior from a human, and the human responding by breaking the tradition, sets the stage for conflict found in nearly all classical and biblical literature. Yet the idea of tradition implies an appeal to stability, an unchanging order of expectations and events that makes human life possible because tradition presumes that tomorrow will be more or less like today. If the breaking up of expectations is also part of the idea of tradition, then one may question when such rejection is warranted and when it will introduce chaos into ordinary life. This problem of tradition—knowing when to maintain it and when to reject it—is a subject for political philosophy. Plato’s dialogue The Republic is structured around an argument in three waves, each of which contradicts the argument presented up to that point. The establishment of a proposition that is then contradicted is very much like the idea of a word, custom, or ritual handed down and then rejected by another contradictory word, the basic meaning of tradition. According to Plato, the wise statesman is the one who knows when to maintain a political order and when to initiate a change that will cause the city to more closely resemble its ideal.

Thus, at the very beginnings of Western literature, in Gilgamesh and in The Republic, the idea of tradition contains both a thematic and a political meaning. A third meaning, of intertextuality, can also be seen in ancient literature: the relationship between an earlier writer and a later one. Intertextuality is the influence of a set of written signs on later literary productions; it is neither allusion, allegory, nor a collection of earlier sources but a transposition of elements found in earlier literature and “carried across” to later compositions to create something new. The best example of intertextuality is Virgil’s use of Homer in The Aeneid. Although The Aeneid is sometimes described as The Odyssey first and then The Iliad, with actions merely lifted from Homer, in fact Virgil’s transposition of elements found in Homer’s epics forces readers to reinterpret meanings and thereby imaginatively create new understandings from an epic poetic form that seems “traditional.” For example, the images on Achilles’ shield in The Iliad signify the meaning of the war from the Greek perspective: the city of war, governed by Apollo and Athena; the city of peace, centered on a human marriage, with no gods present; around them plowing, harvesting, dancing, and the ocean. In The Aeneid, the images on Aeneas’s shield also function as symbols of the meaning of the battle about to begin: Romulus and Remus; the Sabines; Manlius; Catiline; Julius Caesar; Augustus; and, in the center, the Battle of Actium, which ended the republic and established the Roman Empire. The implication is that these images represent the same civilizational values for the Romans as the cities of war and peace for the Greeks. Yet the changes in the images on Aeneas’s shield do more than merely fit a different plot; these changes affect the audience’s expectation of the meaning of symbol because the entire poem is meant to change their expectation of themselves and their situation after the civil war. Though both shields contain images important for each civilization, those on Aeneas’s shield have not happened yet as far as Aeneas himself is concerned, but the audience knows they have happened as they show the major events in Roman mythological history. The purpose of such double-sided representation is exactly what tradition, in the form

116â•…â•… tradition of intertextuality, does. The question Virgil raises for the characters within the story is whether their virtue will be enough to “spare the conquered and battle down the proud,” the rule of law given to Aeneas so that Rome may be founded. Will Aeneas be strong enough and wise enough to show the wisdom necessary for a true ruler of a great city, or will his desire for the past in Troy still affect his judgment? Because the images on the shield remind the audience of the glory of republican Rome, the question being asked of them is whether they have the strength and wisdom necessary to go forward into the imperial future in order to create, through their own practice of virtue, an even greater city than the one Aeneas founded. Can they go forward and not look back to the past, to “tradition”? Thus, in The Aeneid, Virgil combines the thematic and political meanings of tradition through intertextuality by changing the significance of an important literary symbol. In contrast to what has been handed down, these three actions—conflict, wisdom, and intertextuality—can be seen in later literature. In his book The Anxiety of Influence, the literary critic Harold Bloom attempts to describe the stages of change that take place as the ephebe (the younger artist) asserts his voice over the father (the precursor: the elder artist or the tradition). These are: clinamen, or poetic misreading; tessera, or antithetical completion—that is, finishing the misreading in a logical way; kenosis, a turn away or break from the logical implications of the precursor; demonization, an inspiration derived from the ephebe’s reaction to the precursor, but not contained in it; ascesis, the solitude derived from a movement toward a completed vision; and apophrades, the revisionary image held up to its precursor. Although Bloom’s language derives from Neoplatonism and gnosticism, his description follows the classical tradition as shown above. An earlier critic, T. S. Eliot, also describes the relationship between a new work of literary art and its predecessors in his essay “Tradition and the Literary Talent” (1919). Eliot shows the necessary interaction between a new work and the context in which it appears. For him, the new work is accepted as literary because it fits into the context of which it is a part; in turn, because it is a literary work of

art, the new work changes readers’ understanding of the entire tradition by its refiguring of the whole context. Unlike Bloom’s esoteric description, Eliot’s understanding of the literary tradition adds a new component to the term tradition by showing that tradition itself is constantly changing and unstable. In other words, the “tradition” of literary tradition is the constant production of new works added to the canon. The critic must develop the wisdom to decide which new works of art deserve to move the tradition forward and which do not rise to that level. One question that Eliot’s essay raises is, of course, what is meant by a literary tradition. As we have seen, authors read earlier authors and derive inspiration and innovations from them. The rejection of both subject matter and form creates new subject matter and form for new audiences. The texts that make up this development are called a “tradition” as well. Thus, every linguistic group has some sort of literary tradition, whether oral or written, by which stories give meaning to experience. The particular groupings for literary traditions can be national (English, German, Chinese), formal (epic, tragic, comic, lyric, narrative, poetic, dramatic), or periodic (ancient, medieval, modern.) Within each of these groupings are particularities of form, language, subject matter, worldview, and so on, which identify the work as part of its “tradition” even though, as discussed above, each work will also be unique because of its rejection of some aspect of its tradition. The example of Virgil’s changing Homer is part of the classical tradition, which in turn forms the basis of Western literary tradition, but there are many more. In our global environment, the dynamic meaning of tradition is perhaps more important than ever, for authors writing in their national “traditions” are now borrowing from each other at a very rapid pace, producing a literary environment that in time may change our understanding of literature itself. For example, postcolonial literature borrows from European models but adds native experience and forms into that tradition; Salman Rushdie is perhaps the best-known writer in this tradition. See also Alexie, Sherman: Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistf ight in Heaven, The; Alvarez, Julie: How the García Girls Lost Their Accents;

violenceâ•…â•… 117 Aristophanes: Frogs, The; Browning, Robert: “My Last Duchess”; Dickens, Charles: Christmas Carol, A; Dreiser, Theodore: American Tragedy, A; DuBois, W. E. B.: Souls of Black Folk, The; Eliot, T. S.: Waste Land, The; Emerson, Ralph Waldo: “Divinity School Address, The”; Erdrich, Louise: Tracks; Euripides: Medea; Faulkner, William: Light in August; Sound and the Fury, The; Forster, E. M.: Room with a View, A; Jackson, Shirley: “Lottery, The”; Kingston, Maxine Hong: Woman Warrior, The; Momaday, N. Scott: House Made of Dawn; Way to Rainy Mountain, The; Naipaul, V. S.: House for Mr. Biswas, A; Reed, Ishmael: Mumbo Jumbo. FURTHER READING Bloom, Harold. The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry. 2nd ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. Booth, Wayne C. Critical Understanding: The Powers and Limits of Pluralism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979. Eliot, T. S. “Tradition and the Individual Talent.” Contemporary Literary Criticism. Edited by Robert Con Davis and Ronald Schleifer. New York: Longman, 1994, 27–33. Maritain, Jacques. Creative Intuition in Art and Poetry. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1953. Perl, Jeffrey M. The Tradition of Return: The Implicit History of Modern Literature. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1984.

Lylas Rommel

violence

The term violence originates from the Latin violentia, meaning vehemence, which in turn implies an intense force. Etymologically, “violence” is akin to “violate” and thus is suggestive of damage and destruction that would characterize a violent storm or a traumatic experience such as rape, terrorism, or war. In its primary sense, therefore, violence denotes injury and also violation involving people or property. Though the concept of violence has always intrigued philosophers, psychologists, and literary artists, it is only in the 20th century that it has

gained currency in most cultural discourses. Perhaps this is owing to the exponential increase in the incidence of violence in the modern era, to the unprecedented carnage the world has witnessed in the course of the century, and to the emergence of crusaders of nonviolence such as Mohandas Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. Beyond defining what violence is, social thinkers have lately turned their attention to its moral and cultural justifiability as a means to achieve personal, social, or political ends. While the concept of violence itself has undergone considerable philosophical analyses since ancient times, thus far there has been no consensus about its precise character. Simply put, violence is the overt physical manifestation of force on individuals, groups, or nations. Its definition, however, has been continually evolving with an increasing philosophical interest that goes beyond its overtly physical manifestations to more covert psychological and institutional practices. Broadly speaking, racism, sexism, economic exploitation, and ethnic and religious persecution are all possible sources of violence involving constraints that abuse people psychologically, if not physically. Philosophers also disagree on the moral and political justifiability of employing violence to achieve personal or social ends. While some thinkers view violence to be inherently wrong (e.g., murder), others defend it. The philosophical positions rationalizing violence tend to focus on ends that outweigh the evils of injury or violation involved. Conversely, proponents of nonviolence challenge the claims of advocates of violence, citing the misery and mayhem it brings about. Significant philosophical debates on violence include the French philosopher Georges Sorel’s Reflections on Violence (1908). In this text, Sorel worked with Karl Marx’s ideas on the proletariat, or the working class, and their ability to overthrow the middle class. By advocating violent general strikes, Sorel sought to inaugurate a class warfare against the state and capitalistic industrialists. The political theorist Hannah Arendt’s On Violence (1970) is another landmark treatise on 20th-century apologists for violence from a New Left perspective. Arendt concedes that violence can be justified only in defense against perceived threats to life, when it does not exceed necessity and its ends are patently

118â•…â•… violence positive. Drawing on notions of power developed by the French philosopher Michel Foucault, Newton Garver’s essay “What Violence Is” (1975) includes covert, psychological, and institutional forms of violence in declaring, “Any institution which systematically robs certain people of rightful options generally available to others does violence to those people” (420). Despite his sympathies with nonviolence as a stance, Garver does not advocate it as a viable social goal and posits that conflicts between nations may be minimized but not always eliminated. Obviously, thinkers differ in their approach to defining violence and continue to examine its apocalyptic manifestation in contemporary times. The problem of violence has also been of considerable interest to psychologists. Sigmund Freud was the first to diagnose the origins of neurosis, including violent behavior in human subjects. According to Freudian psychoanalysis, repression of the instinctual id leads to the “psychopathology of everyday life,” which in turn makes violent behavior commonplace. Likewise, Herbert Marcuse’s Eros and Civilization (1955) combines Freudian and Marxist theories to undercut the cultural codes that overdetermine and repress human psychology and sexuality, resulting in deviant tendencies. Following the psychoanalytic paradigms of repression, the complexity of human violence has been studied by modern psychiatrists such as James Gilligan in Violence: Reflections on a National Epidemic (1996). Asserting that “violence, like charity begins at home” (5), he demonstrates how home as a microcosm reflects the cultural and historic macrocosm in which violence thrives. While he celebrates civilization as the greatest blessing of humanity, Gilligan condemns its “tragic flaw—the violence it stimulates” (267). He attributes violence in humans to a life bereft of love, either from without (resulting in feelings of rejection) or from within (resulting in shame). Thus, both these deficiencies are an outcome of the patriarchal structure of civilization that assigns codified and often repressive roles to each of the sexes, reinforcing traditional ideas of honor and dishonor, pride and shame. For psychoanalysts from Freud to Gilligan, violence remains a disturbing subject whose origin as well as cure lies within the complex cultural network that fashions human subjects.

Owing to its omnipresence and the human mind’s obsession with it, violence has had ubiquitous representation, from cave paintings to the contemporary television drama The Sopranos. Beginning with epic narratives like The Mahabharata, the Homeric verses, and Beowulf (Anonymous), among others, literature has always attempted to represent violence as a trope for relationships of power and domination. In many respects, Western literature, ranging from Sophocles’ Oedipus the King (429 b.c.), the biblical stories of Cain and Abel, Dante’s Inferno (14th century), William Shakespeare’s King Lear (1608), and Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick (1851), seeks to define itself by the tragedy arising from human violence. For most 20th-century artists, violence, ranging from the destruction of large-scale warfare to individual crimes of murder, rape, and abuse, is an inevitable aspect of their visions. Unable to accept a fallen world, modernist writers often employ destructive violence as the central motif in their works. For instance, the poetry of Sylvia Plath and John Wain attempts to discern the sources and effects of modern violence culminating in anger, frustration, despair, and even suicide. For some modern poets, however, violence has provided an ironic source of creativity and change, a view articulated by William Butler Yeats in poems like “The Second Coming” and “Easter 1916.” Critics generally attribute the predominance of violence in modern literature to both its sensational appeal and its potential to shock readers, leading them to question their beliefs. Critics also emphasize the historical significance of violence in the period following World War II, when poets and novelists bemoaned a world mired in conflict, and in which aggression threatened to destroy all humane qualities. The Holocaust has been a common subject with American literary artists ranging from Sylvia Plath to Saul Bellow. Anne Frank: The Diary of A Young Girl (1947) is a significant Holocaust document on the experiences of a war victim during the German occupation of the Netherlands during World War II. Other postwar novels, such as George Orwell’s dystopian Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) condemn totalitarianism in an essentially meaningless world. Likewise, Kurt Vonnegut’s deeply pessimistic vision pervades his novels, including Player Piano

violenceâ•…â•… 119 (1952) and Slaughterhouse-Five (1969), which portray the violent decay of the modern world. Racial violence is apparent in novels like Richard Wright’s Native Son (1940) and Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye (1970). The universality of women’s experience of sexual violence has provided grounds for feminist contributions from writers such as Margaret Atwood and Joyce Carol Oates. With the close of the 20th century, imagistic representation of violence in all forms of media has become commonplace. Films, television, art, and print media are saturated with images of familial violence involving women and children; issues of community violence directed toward ethnic and minority groups; the practice of institutional violence in workplace, schools, hospitals, police and law enforcement agencies; and incidents of state violence, such as the repression and surveillance practices after the September 11, 2001, destruction of the World Trade Center in the United States, the legitimation of violence through state support witnessed in the communal riots in Gujarat, and the Nandigram massacre in West Bengal, India. Though the media plays an active role in recording, portraying, disseminating, and reflecting on violence, its methods and intentions are often suspect because the politics influencing it may engender newer forms of violence. Plagued by violence, the contemporary era views nonviolence as a redeeming idea and the need of the hour. Though the history of nonviolence as a religious or philosophical doctrine has been traced as far back as the Chandogya Upanishad of ancient Hinduism, the Chinese Tao Te Ching, the Bible, and the early Christian prophets, the dramatic advent of nonviolence as a favored alternative position occurred in the recent past with Mohandas Gandhi’s “Satyagraha” campaigns for India’s independence in the 1920s, and the struggle for racial justice in the United States during the 1960s. Contemporary discourses on nonviolence not only advocate traditional ideals such as love and tolerance to protect both human and animal rights; they also focus, paradoxically, on the use of violence to achieve peace through enforcement and prosecution. Besides, the modern practitioners of nonviolence seek to strengthen the role of nongovernmental organizations that pro-

mote education to prevent violence. Significantly, pacifist propaganda, too, is embedded in the matrix of human civilization and continues to be a cause worth fighting for in a world with ever-escalating incidences of violence. See also Albee, Edward: Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf ?; Bambara, Toni Cade: Salt Eaters, The; Conrad, Joseph: Heart of Darkness; Dickens, Charles: Tale of Two Cities, A; Grass, Günter: Tim Drum, The; Hesse, Herman: Steppenwolf; Jackson, Shirley: “Lottery, The”; Jacobs, Harriet: Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Written by Herself; Knowles, John: Separate Peace, A; Kozinski, Jerzy: Painted Bird, The; Melville, Herman: Billy Budd, Sailor; Morrison, Toni: Song of Solomon; O’Connor, Flannery: “Good Man Is Hard to Find, A”; Pope, Alexander: Rape of the Lock, The; Roth, Philip: American Pastoral; Shakespeare, William: Hamlet; Henry IV, Part I; Twain, Mark: Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, A; Walker, Alice: Color Purple, The; Williams, Tennessee: Streetcar Named Desire, A. FURTHER READING Arendt, Hannah. On Violence. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1970. Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish. Translated by Alan Sheridan. New York: Vintage Books, 1977. Freud, Sigmund. Psychopathology of Everyday Life. Classics in the History of Psychology. Available online. URL: http://psychclassics.asu.edu/Freud/ Psycho/. Accessed March 17, 2010. Garver, Newton. “What Violence Is.” In Today’s Moral Problems, edited by R. Wasserstrom, New York: Macmillan, 1975. Gilligan, James. Violence: Reflections on a National Epidemic. New York: Vintage Books, 1996. Marcuse, Herbert. Eros and Civilization. New York: Vintage Books, 1955. Miller, William Robert. Nonviolence: A Christian Interpretation. London: George Allen and Unwin, 1964. Sorel, Georges. Reflections on Violence. Translated by T. E. Hulme and J. Roth. Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1950.

Srirupa Chatterjee

120â•…â•… work

work

The concept of work is notoriously difficult to define. The payment of wages cannot be the sole criterion in determining whether an action counts as work, since men and women throughout history have often labored without compensation. The physical efforts expended by a slave in ancient Greece, for example, or by a homemaker today certainly qualify as work even though neither worker would be paid. Additionally, an individual can undertake many demanding tasks with little or no hope of payment: A would-be writer might spend weekends working diligently on his novel, while a hobbyist could spend evenings in her workshop making furniture that only her family will use. These examples might suggest that physical or mental exertion in pursuit of a goal, whether paid or not, is sufficient to qualify an activity as work. But not all purposeful action—exercise and recreational sports, for example—is considered work. While it is true that we call vigorous exercise a “workout,” a sense of fairness suggests that there is an essential difference between lifting weights in a gym and loading boxes onto the back of a truck. Many people detest work and avoid it whenever possible, but these subjective attitudes are useless in forming a definition (such as “work is activity we find unpleasant”) since just as many people find pleasure in their work; “workaholics,” in fact, find labor more attractive than leisure. Keith Thomas, editor of The Oxford Book of Work, provides a definition that, while necessarily limited, covers many activities that we recognize as work: “Work has an end beyond itself, being designed to produce or achieve something; it involves a degree of obligation or necessity, being a task that others set us or that we set ourselves; and it is arduous, involving effort and persistence beyond the point at which the task ceases to be wholly pleasurable” (xiv). We might abbreviate this definition to say that work is productive, necessary, and difficult. Work, so broadly defined, has long been a theme in literature, but rarely is it the main theme of literature written before the 18th century. The work done by soldiers—who labor to achieve victory or exact revenge, engage their tasks under obligation, and persist under the most unpleasant conditions—is one of the subjects of both Homer’s The Iliad and Virgil’s The Aeneid. Mythical heroes frequently

endure difficult tasks: Hercules accomplishes 12 labors to atone for killing his children and later joins Jason in his arduous search for the golden fleece. These battles, punishments, and quests, however, differ from what we normally consider work, such as toiling in fields and households. Ancient writers, like their counterparts in philosophy, would have considered such manual laborers unworthy of serious attention. In fact, the negative attitude toward manual labor is echoed in Genesis 3:16–19, where hard work is depicted as punishment for humanity’s sinfulness in the Garden. Adam’s transgression earned men a lifetime of “painful toil,” while Eve’s earned women “pains in childbearing.” After the Fall, humanity would survive only through very hard labor. When laborers do show up in classical literature, they are often little more than stock characters, such as shepherds, used to idealize rural life, a literary custom continued in medieval literature, where workers serve primarily as allegorical symbols meant to encourage humility, patience and devotion to Christian principles. In The Canterbury Tales, Geoffrey Chaucer’s Plowman, “a true worker .╯.╯. living in peace and perfect charity,” exemplifies that tradition, but unlike his predecessors and many of his contemporaries, Chaucer describes his working characters in highly realistic terms. His company of pilgrims, all of them identified by their occupations (even the Wife is a professional of sorts), are drawn in exquisite and differentiating detail. With Chaucer, workers in literature have faces and personalities. Although the tales’ prologue includes a number of themes regarding work (our words should be matched by our actions; the most honorable labor is done in the service of humanity), the poem is not about work. Work as a central subject in literature was still very rare at this time, and while writers after Chaucer were more inclined to portray workers as individuals rather than as symbols, the portraits were often dismissive and unflattering. Writers, who tended to come from the educated and moneyed classes, seldom looked with much empathy on manual laborers. In the 18th and 19th centuries, writers in England and America begin to devote more attention to the lives and experience of workers (maids, shep-

workâ•…â•… 121 herds, stable hands, miners, factory workers, and so on). One cause for the foregrounding of work is a change in attitude toward the nature and value of work, which came to be seen as both a blessing and a curse. For perhaps the most prominent philosopher on labor, Karl Marx, work could be a liberating activity. Freely chosen productive labor would lead to self-realization and fulfillment for both the individual worker and the laboring community. A farmer’s well-tended fields reflected his discipline and knowledge, and in working those fields, the farmer might feel a sense of connectedness to the land and a sense of purpose in providing food for his family and neighbors. People who worked the land collectively would also see their social cooperation mirrored in the results of their work. This concept of self-realization was important for Marx primarily in how it is violated in work that is not freely chosen, especially in work done under capitalism, in which self-realization and fulfillment are replaced by what Marx termed alienation. Alienation is especially evident when human beings are forced to sell the only thing they own— their labor—in a system imposed upon them by those who own the means of production (land, factories, machinery, etc.). A migrant worker on a huge corporate farm hardly sees her best qualities reflected in the backbreaking, miserable, monotonous work she does; she may be scorched by the sun, exhausted by the pace and physical movement, unable to talk to her fellow workers during her shift, and paid so little that even the crop she picks would be a luxury. In Marx’s terms, she is alienated from nature, her community, the product of her labor, and especially from herself. Her work satisfies no intrinsic need or desire; she works only to satisfy other needs. In contemporary terms, she might say of her work, “This is not who I am.” It is easy to see how a production-line worker or anyone toiling for low wages in a dangerous, tedious job may be considered alienated from himself, but even an office worker suffering through a dehumanizing job that strips him of his identity and makes him feel out of sorts can be considered a member of Marx’s exploited, alienated class. These two concepts—the blessings of work as a path toward self-realization and the curse of toiling

in an exploitative system—provide the themes for many works of literature written in the mid-19th century and later. Whether a work of literature includes only passing mention of workers and the laboring life or takes work as its central topic and theme, it might examine any number of specific concepts: the struggles of immigrant, African-American, and female workers; the dangers of manual labor and the effects of work on the bodies and psyches of laborers; the way in which work infiltrates and affects domestic life and leisure; the ethical and moral issues associated with slavery and with other forced labor; the camaraderie and interdependence in the working community; the struggle to unionize and the battle between collective and individual values; the personal and psychological rewards of freely chosen labor; and the degree to which a worker is alienated from himself, his work, his community, and the natural world. And while some popular literature, treating useful toil as empowering, preaches a gospel of self-improvement and celebrates the work ethic of committed laborers, much serious literature centers on the exploited worker and the miserable conditions endured by individual workers and by the working class. The so-called industrial novel, a genre that includes works by Elizabeth Gaskell (North and South) and Charles Dickens, depicts the harsh conditions endured by factory workers in Victorian England. Thomas Hardy reveals in Jude the Obscure the many forces that appear to be allied against members of the working class. Poverty and exploitation among workers has drawn the attention of numerous American writers, including Herman Melville; Walt Whitman; Rebecca Harding Davis (Life in the Iron Mills); and, perhaps most famously, Upton Sinclair, whose The Jungle exposed the poverty, injustice, and unsanitary conditions of life in the slaughterhouses of Chicago. The “proletarian novel” of the 1930s in America promoted Marx’s notion that only a socialist revolution could bring about a system conducive to selfactualizing labor, while John Dos Passos (U.S.A. trilogy) saw nothing to be gained under socialism, a system as destructive of individual identity as capitalism. In The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck strikes a few astounding notes of hopefulness

122â•…â•… work that result from collective values and individual resilience. And without overlooking the profound damage done by Willy Loman’s personal lapses in judgment and morals, readers of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman cannot help recognizing that his status as a lowly worker in a coldhearted alienating business has contributed greatly to his downfall. Although few writers today take work as the main setting or plot of their stories, the theme has by no means disappeared from literature. In addition, scholars interested in cultural studies, labor studies, and feminist theory have in the past few decades unearthed the literary accomplishments of many laborers whose poems, songs, stories, and essays provide an insider’s look at the world of work. And the plight of the struggling employee continues to be told, often very comically, in film and television. See also Amis, Kingsley: Lucky Jim; Chekhov, Anton: Seagull, The; Dickens, Charles: Oliver Twist; Emerson, Ralph Waldo: “SelfReliance”; Frost, Robert: poems; Gaines,

Ernest J.: Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, The; Haley, Alex, and Malcolm X: Autobiography of Malcolm X, The; Hawthorne, Nathaniel: “Birth-mark, The”; McCullers, Carson: Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, The; Melville, Herman: Billy Budd, Sailor; Orwell, George: Animal Farm; Solzhenitsyn, Alexander: One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich; Thoreau, Henry David: Walden; Washington, Booker T.: Up from Slavery; Whitman, Walt: Leaves of Grass. FURTHER READING Hapke, Laura. Labor’s Text: The Worker in American Fiction. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2001. Marx, Karl. The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 and the Communist Manifesto. New York: Prometheus Books, 1988. Thomas, Keith, ed. The Oxford Book of Work. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.

James Wallace

part ii

Authors and Works A–E `

ACHEBE, CHINUAâ•… Anthills of the Savannahâ•… (1987)

different forms, but he also holds out the possibility of an alternative, more inclusive and hopeful vision. Kerry Vincent

The Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe’s first novel, Things Fall Apart, published in 1958, is considered by many to be the prototype for modern African literature. In June 2007, his monumental standing in the world of African letters was recognized when he was awarded the prestigious Man Booker Prize for fiction. Many of the themes introduced in that novel, such as colonialism, language, the clash between tradition and modernity, various forms of inequality and corruption, and the abuse of power are important issues that Achebe (b. 1930) has continued to develop and probe in his other novels, including his last to date, Anthills of the Savannah. His belief that the primary responsibility of the African writer should be to educate the people is clearly evident in the way in which he portrays social injustice in many of its manifestations. In Anthills of the Savannah, Achebe takes aim at a corrupt postcolonial African regime and shows how government self-interest and power politics isolate those who should be working on behalf of the people. This corruption, the novel demonstrates, spreads and repeats itself in various ways throughout society in forms such as the wide gulf between the rich and the poor or the educated and the illiterate, and between males and females. In the novel, Achebe scrutinizes unequal power relations as they are practiced in their

Gender in Anthills of the Savannah

The opening chapters of Anthills of the Savannah introduce readers to a country that is shaped and defined by male power politics. By the novel’s closing chapter, however, these aggressive and cynical male voices have given way to the inclusive and reconciliatory voices of female characters. This shift in emphasis reflects a key recognition in the novel of the need to reconfigure assumptions of male domination that are deeply embedded in this traditionally patriarchal society. Achebe conveys this need for more equitable gender relations particularly through the gradual development of Ikem, a key male character, and through the presence of Beatrice, an equally important female character. During a conversation with Chris, in which he is attempting to explain his relationship with Sam and Ikem, Beatrice interrupts him to exclaim, “Well, you fellows, all three of you, are incredibly conceited. The story of this country, as far as you are concerned, is the story of the three of you .╯.╯.” This “story,” of course, is exclusively male and singularly elitist, and it is one that Achebe examines during the course of the novel. The correlation of institutional power with male dominance is perhaps best articulated

123

124â•…â•… Achebe, Chinua through Sam’s derisive and indulgent quip, “African Chiefs are always polygamists.╯.╯.╯. Polygamy is for Africa what monotony is for Europe.” Sam’s remark reflects a complacent chauvinism. Other male figures besides the politically and morally corrupt character of Sam make equally patronizing and sexist remarks, and these are intensified by the more vicious physical violence toward women encountered with the attempted rape of a young woman by a police sergeant near the end of the novel and Beatrice’s remembering that when she was growing up, her mother was very often beaten by her father. Even the worldly Ikem is associated with various forms of female abuse, until he gradually gains insight into his biased assumptions. His detached interest in the violent beatings of a wife in a neighboring flat, or his own devaluation of women as only being useful as, in Beatrice’s words, “comforters,” mark Ikem as a product of a deeply embedded masculinist world view. With Beatrice’s guidance, however, he slowly comes to apprehend that women are “the biggest single group of oppressed people in the world .╯.╯. and the oldest,” who also have a potentially pivotal role to play in society. While Ikem’s girlfriend, Elewa, plays an important role in changing his attitude toward women, Beatrice acts as the catalyst for his dawning awareness. The tenuous status of females in this society is emphasized by one of the birth names she is given: Nwanyibuife, or, “A female is also something.” Despite growing up in a rigid patriarchal household where females were considered secondary (as her other name suggests), Beatrice manages to obtain a university education and fairly prominent social status with a mid-level government job, and throughout the novel her voice insists on the recognition of women as being equal to men. Through Beatrice, Achebe also draws a link between the traditional and the modern in order to suggest that the high esteem with which some females were held in the past has largely been forgotten in the present because of a male desire for power. Beatrice is repeatedly referred to as a prophetess and associated with Idemili, a powerful female goddess—if not displacing, then certainly disrupting the primacy of the male characters.

Beatrice’s ceremonial role carries into the present in the novel’s final chapter as she presides over the naming of Elewa’s new baby girl. In the absence of a male figure to conduct the ceremony, Beatrice improvises and leads a new ritual, and the female infant is given the name Amaechina, conventionally a boy’s name meaning “May-the-path-never-close,” and in direct contrast to the demeaning Nwanyibuife (“A female is also something”). This disregard for gender-specific names and for the customary forms of the ritual during the novel’s closing moments signals the possibility for a reshaping of traditional perceptions of gender roles that have ossified and been carried forward into the modern world. While it might be argued that Achebe idealizes the character of Beatrice, he does manage, nonetheless, to depict a female character who demands to be heard. As a result, the novel goes further than simply depicting gender conflict; it also attempts to offer a tentative alternative vision of a more equal society. Kerry Vincent

Oppression in Anthills of the Savannah

Almost midway through Anthills of the Savannah, Ikem Osiri exclaims that his friend Beatrice has forced him to think about “the nature of oppression—how flexible it must learn to be, how many faces it must learn to wear if it is to succeed again and again.” The many faces of oppression is a key theme in Achebe’s novel, which follows the rise and fall of a dictator in the fictional African country of Kangan, and references to separate coups (short for coup d’état, meaning the often violent overthrow of a government) near the novel’s opening and conclusion warn of its potential to resurface. Whereas the first coup brings His Excellency, Sam, to power, the second one brings about his death. In between, Sam’s two old friends, Ikem Osiri and Christopher Oriko, witness and become victims of Sam’s degeneration from a relatively well-meaning military officer to a dictator who will go to any lengths to realize his obsession with becoming president for life. Sam’s rebuke to Chris at the opening of the novel—“But me no buts, Mr Oriko!”—immediately reveals much about his character. While its unintentionally humorous clumsiness reflects something of Sam’s endearing lack of sophistication, its

Anthills of the Savannahâ•…â•… 125 impatient aggression marks someone who will allow no contradictions and tolerate no alternatives, nor accept any conditions that might seem to threaten his authority. His refusal to take counsel is further reinforced on the same page with his declaration, “Kabisa!,” a Swahili word that Achebe translates into English as “Finished.” As a result of Sam’s lack of political experience, the dubious means by which he has attained power, and the false adulation poured on him by sycophantic advisers, personal insecurities drive him to imagine subversive plots are being hatched against him. Sam’s paranoia leads him to curtail the freedom of the press by placing both the print and electronic media under government censorship and control, and to appoint a director of a secret police force (euphemistically called the Directorate of State Research) that restricts individual and community voices. For example, Sam forces Chris, his commissioner for information, to muzzle the dissenting views expressed by Ikem, the editor of the National Gazette. Following a speech that Ikem makes to students at the university, the government-controlled radio announces a series of manufactured charges against him and later describes his subsequent death while supposedly resisting arrest. After his own attempt to reason with Sam, Chris is perceived as a threat and is forced to go into hiding as the police hunt for him throughout the city. Eventually, he secretly flees the city, heading for the northern provinces by bus. Meanwhile, the legitimate concerns of a delegation from the drought-stricken northern Abazon Province are brushed aside as Sam refuses to meet with them, and he eventually has them placed in detention for supposedly plotting against the government. As the state-controlled oppression of individuals and groups accelerates, Sam’s physical presence recedes, suggesting just how out of touch he is and how much he has isolated himself from the people of Kangan. He last appears in chapter 11, the same chapter that concludes with a description of the arrest and, it is implied, torture, of the Abazon delegation. Sam’s physical absence from the scene reflects the need to speak out against oppression. Besides the dominant forms of oppression practiced by a dictatorial military government, Achebe

also introduces the equally destructive abuses of power caused by males against females, and by the privileged, educated classes against the less educated working classes. During the course of the novel, Chris and Ikem move from differing degrees of isolation—Chris has a “detached clinical interest” in the workings of the state, while Ikem confesses to finding a neighbor’s brutal beatings of his wife “satisfyingly cathartic”—to a greater awareness, sympathy, and even admiration for the oppressed. At one point in the novel, a creation myth is described in which Idemili, the daughter of the Almighty, is sent “to bear witness to the moral nature of authority by wrapping around Power’s rude waist a loincloth of peace and modesty.” In Anthills of the Savannah, Achebe not only presents a biting critique of power in its various forms and its capacity to abuse and oppress individuals, groups, and nations; he also reminds us of the urgent need to bear witness to its existence and act against it, if freedom from oppression is to be achieved. Kerry Vincent

Social Class in Anthills of the Savannah

In his first novel, Things Fall Apart, Achebe includes many proverbs, folktales, and rituals in order to reinforce his depiction of a rich and ancient traditional African society. He continues this practice in Anthills of the Savannah but incorporates a much wider variety of texts and registers, as a means of projecting his ideal vision of an inclusive and equitable postcolonial society that recognizes and acknowledges the legitimacy of diverse voices from different social classes, and not just those of a primarily male elite. As Chris, Ikem, and Beatrice are increasingly alienated from Sam’s manic exercise of power, they gradually become more attuned to the voices of the less privileged peasants and workers. The catalyst for the sequence of events that lead to Sam’s defeat and the deaths of Ikem and Chris is the visit by the delegation from Abazon, which very early in the novel highlights such oppositions as rural-urban, uneducated-educated, poor-rich, and traditional-modern. More than anyone, Ikem appreciates the integrity of this peasant class, even as he puzzles over how their values can be adapted to the modern world.

126â•…â•… Achebe, Chinua Ikem conveys his recognition of the disparity between social classes during a speech at the university that he entitles “↜‘The Tortoise and the Leopard—a political meditation on the imperative of struggle.’↜” This traditional story, first told to Ikem by the chief of the Abazon delegation, emphasizes the importance of resistance and of leaving a mark to act as inspiration for those who follow. Ikem, then, draws on and updates traditional folk wisdom to address an urban student body and challenge them to acknowledge his earlier insight that “It is the failure of our rulers to re-establish vital inner links with the poor and dispossessed of this country, with the bruised heart that throbs painfully at the core of the nation’s being.” Ikem’s challenge represents a culmination of his own recent awareness of the distance between the educated elite and the working poor and the peasants. His initial complacent belief in a kind of solidarity with the underclass is humorously enacted when he finds himself locked in a battle against a determined taxi driver during a traffic jam. Ikem wins the contest because he is not afraid to damage his already beaten-up car, but he subsequently comes to realize how petty his victory was when the taxi driver later finds him and apologizes for daring to challenge such an eminent figure. During their meeting, conducted in the largely working-class language of pidgin English, Ikem feels exhilaration over “this rare human contact across station and class,” but he wonders, nonetheless, about the huge divide between the privileged and the poor. A taxi driver also figures in Chris’s forced plunge into the world of the lower classes, a transformation that is realistically and figuratively conveyed by the worker’s clothing that he puts on as a disguise to help him negotiate roadblocks set up throughout the city. Chris also realizes that his own educated speech is now a liability, and his switch to pidgin reinforces his immersion in a class that he had previously taken for granted. He is only saved from detection by his taxi driver’s interventions, and once out of danger he announces, “To succeed as small man no be small thing.” Beatrice, too, learns some humility during the hunt for Chris, to the point where she is even able to recognize something of the unhappiness of Agatha,

her domestic worker, and to break down the rigid employer-employee relationship with the simple words, “I am sorry Agatha.” She is further humbled after recognizing the sacrifices made by a very poor family to shelter and protect Chris. Her concern for Chris and desire to be with him comes at the expense of the family’s own privacy, and her awareness of their generosity is partly what allows her to reassess her relationship with Agatha and recognize “the absurd raffle-draw that apportioned the destinies of post-colonial African societies.” In the novel’s final pages, Beatrice decodes Chris’s dying words, “The last green,” which alludes to just how tentative the assumed heights of the powerful elite really are, and she concludes, “This world belongs to the people of the world not to any little caucus, no matter how talented.” In light of Achebe’s scathing critique of the powerful, educated elite, it is certainly appropriate that he chooses to use pidgin English and give the novel’s final supportive and comforting words to the half-literate salesgirl, Elewa. Kerry Vincent

ACHEBE, CHINUAâ•… Things Fall Apartâ•… (1958)

In 1958, Chinua Achebe published Things Fall Apart, which depicts the tragic downfall of a strong African clansman faced with the budding presence of colonialism. Okonkwo, Achebe’s central character, represents a man tied to his clan’s culture; moreover, Okonkwo represents the essence of male vigor within the tribe as he strives to lead the clan with strength and stoicism, persistently avoiding the appearance of weakness. Yet Okonkwo’s strength falters under the weight of an ever-changing Africa when his family and his clan encounter a new way of living through the white man’s Christian religion. The first part of the novel centers on Okonkwo, his family, and the rituals of his tribe. Achebe depicts how Okonkwo’s relationships with his father, Unoka; his son, Nwoye; his daughter, Enzima; and Ikemefuna, a boy who calls Okonkwo father, all define Okonkwo’s identity. Despite his trials in the beginning of the novel, including his exile from the clan, the true test of Okonkwo’s strength comes

Things Fall Apartâ•…â•… 127 with the entrance of Mr. Brown, Reverend Smith, and the other white characters. As Christianity begins to spread through the clan, Okonkwo’s eldest son becomes a missionary, conflict arises between the clan and the government of the colonists, and Okonkwo’s desire to lead the clan results in violence as he kills a white man. Yet the tribe does not partake in his violence, and Okonkwo reacts by taking his own life. His tragic story probes into themes of heroism’s validity, the solidity of tradition, and the relationship between an individual and a society in flux. Lindsay Cobb

Heroism in Things Fall Apart

In Things Fall Apart, Chinua Achebe immediately asserts the main character Okonkwo’s status as a heroic figure. Okonkwo’s position as a pillar of strength throughout nine villages and “even beyond” solidifies his laudable identity. However, it is Okonkwo, more than any other character, who aims for self-definition as a hero—a hero defined by personal triumphs and masculinity. This definition problematizes the theme of heroism because Okonkwo’s definition of a hero lacks the substance to prevail in Achebe’s work. In fact, Okonkwo’s pursuit to attain extraordinary status as the leader of a healthy tribe occurs alongside the tribe’s own attempt to retain its strength against the threat of the white man’s government and religion. Okonkwo, indeed, represents the human embodiment of the failing strength of his tribe, Umuofia. As tensions between Umuofia and the white man’s society test Okonkwo’s greatness, his fear of failure and desire to succeed supersede his ability to thrive as a hero. Moreover, Okonkwo’s need to prove his masculinity serves as a catalyst to his inability to understand not only the world of the white man but the needs of his own tribe, thus resulting in his loss of heroism. Okonkwo’s definition of heroism exists primarily as an exact opposite to his father, Unoka. During his childhood, Okonkwo felt shame over his father’s status as an agbala, a term meaning both “woman” and “man without titles.” Okonkwo, as a result of his father’s idleness and gentleness, did not enter the world with prosperity; he had neither a barn nor a wife to inherit. Thus, even at a young age, he

endeavored to build a prosperous future—to achieve a heroic life—by representing everything his father did not. He therefore valued emotional strength and physical strength above all else, and he ruled his lands, wives, and children with a heavy hand. Yet this strength overextends into brutality when Okonkwo kills Ikemefuna, a boy who calls him father—an action that begins to damage Okonkwo’s heroic identity. Ikemefuna came under Okonkwo’s care after Umuofia helped make a settlement with a neighboring tribe, and his presence brought a subtle shift in Okonkwo’s house. Despite the fact that Okonkwo did not show Ikemefuna any outward affection, for to him such affection would denote weakness, he develops great affection for the boy. Nevertheless, when the tribe decides that Ikemefuna must die after three years, Okonkwo’s hardness overshadows his ability to gently love a new son. In order to not seem weak in front of his peers, he kills the boy with his own hand. After Okonkwo’s decision to kill Ikemefuna, his status as the tribe’s hero seems to crumble. First, his close friend Obierika bemoans his action; then, at a tribal meeting, Okonkwo accidentally kills a 16-year-old boy, and for atonement he must leave the clan for seven years. This series of events eventually exposes the message Achebe folds into the relationships between fathers and sons—a message concerning heroism. Okonkwo’s great flaw, then, derives from his obdurate passion for strength and thus heroism. His zeal stems from his own disappointment in his father; moreover, this fervor damages his relationship with, first, his eldest son, Nyowe, and then his own clan. After Okonkwo kills Ikemefuna, Nyowe questions the clan’s practices, and his doubts fuel his decision to follow the new Christian religion. Nyowe’s departure from the clan marks an irrevocable gap between Nyowe and his father. When Okonkwo notices Nyowe’s growing interest in the Christian faith, he reprimands his son through violence and threatens to kill him. Though Okonkwo does not kill Nyowe, this exchange leads to Nwoye’s permanent departure and Okonkwo’s own perception of his son as degenerate and effeminate. He extends this perception to his own tribe when he feels that they will not stand up against the ever-growing presence

128â•…â•… Achebe, Chinua of the white man and his religion. This view eventually results in Okonkwo’s separation from the tribe when he kills a court messenger, thus choosing to act alone—to act with his definition of heroism, rather than the clan’s. Yet this act does not result in heroic triumph, and Okonkwo realizes that his reliance on strength and manliness has overreached the best of his intentions. Thus, as he chooses to kill himself, he dies a death which his clansmen cannot sanctify, alone and unheralded like his father, and he loses his potential to be remembered as a hero of Umuofia. Lindsay Cobb

Individual and Society in Things Fall Apart

From the initial pages of his novel Things Fall Apart, Chinua Achebe makes it clear that the main character, Okonkwo, represents an individual deeply aligned with his society. Okonkwo’s strength and presumed heroism within the novel derive from his ability to fully accept the clan’s culture and follow faithfully in its traditions. Yet as his society begins to change with the expansion of colonialism in Africa, Okonkwo’s relationship with his society begins to evolve—and eventually fall apart. Achebe’s novel investigates the complex relationship between an individual and his or her society; moreover, it reveals the damaging strains this relationship undergoes when faced with drastic and inevitable changes. Part 1 and part 2 of the novel define Okonkwo as a follower of his clan, Umuofia. Regardless of the painful actions the traditions of the clan require of him, he never wavers in his devotion. In spite of his high regard for Ikemefuna, a young boy sent to live with his family after a clan dispute, he accepts Umuofia’s declaration that Ikemefuna—who calls him father—must die. Later, after he accidentally murders a member of the clan, Okonkwo dutifully allows Umuofia to burn his home, and he leaves for a seven-year exile in his motherland. Nevertheless, signs of his fierce independence pepper the story. He does not dispute the clan’s decision to kill Ikemefuna, but he goes so far as to kill the boy himself to show his own strength as a clansman. Here, then, Okonkwo tries to set himself apart from the clan as an individual member. His endeavor to prove himself as Umuofia’s strongest member shows itself dis-

tinctly in this moment, and it is this endeavor that contributes to his tragic separation from the clan. As the violence mounts between the colonists and Umuofia in part 3, Okonkwo’s frustration with the clan’s lack of action increases. He does not understand why Umuofia does not act aggressively against the changes the colonists wish to impose on their society. Moreover, he wishes the clan to remain dedicated to its traditions and not bend to the potential of change. Thus, he comes to the novel’s final clan meeting with the goal of convincing Umuofia to fight back against the colonists. He declares to his friend Obierika that if the clan does not fight, he will fight alone—and he does. Yet after he kills one of the colonists and realizes that the clan will not follow his actions, Okonkwo forsakes his society and chooses to commit suicide. Though he had chosen to act alone, he cannot stand to live alone—apart from his clan. Umuofia, however, cannot honor his death because suicide represents an abomination and a sin against the gods. Thus, not only does Okonkwo choose to act independently of his society, his society—his clan—must spurn him as well. In this moment, Okonkwo represents an individual deeply disconnected from his society. Yet Achebe does not conclude the novel with Okonkwo’s death. In the closing paragraph, the narrator explains that the commissioner of the colonists plans to write a book entitled The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger. He first considers writing a chapter concerning Okonkwo, but then he determines that a “reasonable” paragraph will suffice in order to tell Okonkwo’s story, which he witnessed firsthand. Achebe’s choice to end the novel with this information further complicates the relationship between an individual and society in a land beset with change, because this revelation starkly contrasts with Okonkwo’s decision to end his own life. Thus, the novel—which Achebe devotes primarily to the story of Okonkwo—may, in the hands of the colonizers, find itself reduced to one paragraph in the midst of many. Okonkwo loses his individuality and, despite his lifelong dedication to strength and thus fame, becomes a mere paragraph among others in his evolving society. While the commissioner decides to group Okonkwo deep within a community of stories, Okonkwo’s purely individual decisions lead

Things Fall Apartâ•…â•… 129 to his tragic death. The novel’s conclusion, therefore, represents an ironic truth concerning Okonkwo’s existence: Though he died putting his individual decisions above those of his community, the commissioner refuses to see his individuality as worthy of an entire novel or even a chapter—just a paragraph. Lindsay Cobb

Tradition in Things Fall Apart

In his novel Things Fall Apart, Chinua Achebe tragically illustrates the collision between tradition and change through the story of Okonkwo. Achebe’s main character represents a man devoted to his culture’s tradition. Yet his devotion does not yield to change, and he ultimately succumbs to his own unwillingness to accept the changes his clan faces with the arrival of the white man and Christianity. Achebe further complicates the novel’s perceptions of change and tradition by including characters that mirror and oppose Okonkwo’s attitude, such as Mr. Smith, whose own devotion to his culture exacerbates the hostile situation between the Christians and the clan leaders, including Mr. Brown and Akunna, who show the promise of respectfully discussing each culture’s varying traditions in a move toward peaceful change; and Obierika and Nwoye, who demonstrate the ability to question traditional customs. Achebe first asserts the dominance of tradition in the clan, Umuofia, by showing how steeped in convention Okonkwo and his family remain. The clan values strength; therefore, Okonkwo becomes the strongest. The clan values manliness; therefore, Okonkwo shuns all effeminate behavior. When the clan’s oracle declares that Ikemefuna, a boy who lived in Okonkwo’s home for years like a son, must die, Okonkwo follows dutifully and even uses his own hand to kill Ikemefuna in order to show his strength and dedication to the clan’s mores. Yet with the death of Ikemefuna also comes the first signs of doubt in Okonkwo’s eldest son, Nwoye. The narrator reveals Nyowe’s doubts following his realization that Ikemefuna—whom he thinks of as a brother— has died according to the traditions of the clan. Nwoye feels something snap within him and doubts the justice of this action. This revelation, then, marks the first example of a clansman questioning the long-held traditions of Umuofia.

Another example of questioning occurs after Okonkwo accidentally shoots a member of the clan and thus must leave the clan and go into exile for seven years; according to custom, after he leaves, other clansmen must destroy his homes, land, and animals. In this moment, Okonkwo follows dutifully without questioning the clan’s ways. However, Obierika, Okonkwo’s closest friend and a respected member of the clan, has a head full of questions as he completes these traditional duties. Obierika’s questions probe the logic and justice of the clan’s traditions; more important, his questions end the first section of Achebe’s novel. These are the final thoughts before the white man and Christianity enter both the novel and Umuofia’s culture. As stories of violence become more prominent in the region, and as Okonkwo’s own son, Nwoye, chooses to follow the Christian missionaries, tensions mount irrevocably between the ever-growing Christian population and the traditional clans. Nevertheless, though the Christians represent change to the clansmen, Achebe also illustrates their own devotion to tradition through the figure of Reverend Smith, the missionaries’ second leader. The narrator describes Smith as a man who only sees the world in black and white, and his actions reflect his unwavering belief in the ways of his own culture and religion. Mr. Smith, much like Okonkwo, refuses to see value in other cultures, other traditions. Both Okonkwo and Mr. Smith starkly contrast the actions of Mr. Brown, the missionaries’ first leader, and Akunna, a great man in one of Umuofia’s neighboring villages. Mr. Brown and Akunna spend hours respectfully discussing their respective religions, and though neither of them convert to a new religion, both men begin to develop a sense of understanding for the other’s beliefs. Okonkwo and Mr. Smith, however, never develop a sense of understanding, and neither man allows his traditional belief system to change. Moreover, both Mr. Smith and then Okonkwo react to the potential of change with violence. Okonkwo’s ultimate demise occurs when he is so overwrought with aggression and violence that he slays a court messenger in order to protect Umuofia’s sanctity. When he realizes that his clansmen will not follow in violence, Okonkwo decides to take his own life

130â•…â•… Adams, Henry rather than face the changes his clan will inevitably undergo. Therefore, his obstinate devotion to tradition leads to his shameful death. Perhaps, then, the best solution Achebe includes in the novel comes through the quiet discussions between Mr. Brown and Akunna—two men who do not act in violence or hatred in order to guard their respective traditions, but instead strive to understand. Lindsay Cobb

ADAMS, HENRYâ•… The Education of Henry Adamsâ•… (1907)

The Education of Henry Adams, first published privately in 1907, remains Henry Adams’s best-known work and one of the greatest autobiographies ever written. In it, Adams (1838–1918) tells of his own life in the third person, covering the period of his early childhood to his later life. The Education, richly filled with symbolism, contains his systematic view of history as a force of progress. The main character of the Education is Adams, narrated in the third person by the author, born into the great Adams family (the same family that produced the U.S. presidents John Adams and John Quincy Adams) in the early 19th century. As a young boy, Adams grows up in luxury, and he encounters a number of famous Americans, beginning with those in his family, to whom he gives heroic status. He later attends Harvard and embarks upon a career. During this time, as he moves out of the comfort of New England, young Adams finds a number of new heroes, especially the English. Throughout his “education,” the young Adams explores such themes as education, science and technology, and innocence and experience. The Education tells the story of one man’s engagement with his culture and society. Henry’s experiences allow the author Adams to step back and evaluate his life in relation to the larger movement of history and the growth of America toward the turn of the century. Michael Modarelli

Education in The Education of Henry Adams

Education in Henry Adams’s autobiography is a quest for a specific doctrine—perhaps a specific

plan of action or worldview—by which he can live his life. In contrast to other famous autobiographies, such as the Confessions of Jean-Jacques Rousseau or The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, Adams’s work does not end as a success story. In fact, the quest for education carries Adams through to the final chapters. Never culminating in a heroic apex, the work describes the protagonist’s attempt to reconcile ideas of past learning with the new technological and industrial world. Indeed, education serves to bring the author to the unfolding nature of learning and knowledge as it plays out in progressive civilizations. The Education of Henry Adams begins as Adams is born in Boston, Massachusetts, in privileged circumstances as a member of the illustrious Adams family; his father was the diplomat Charles Francis Adams I, and his grandfather was the former U.S. president John Quincy Adams. To distance himself from the narrative, however, he writes the story in the third person, calling himself Henry. From the outset, Adams notes that the “problem” of education began at a very early age. He traces his first rudimentary forays into education from the beginning when, as a child living in Quincy, just south of Boston, he learned color and taste. From here, he begins to notice divisions—marked separations in the world, starting with summer and winter—and these notions would permeate his more formal education. Isolated in his Quincy home, young Henry knew little of the exterior problems of the world. When his grandfather puts on his hat and walks young Henry to school, this marks the boy’s entry into formal education. Of his formal education he says little—he disliked the formalities of education and rote memorization. Of entering a symbolically American institution, Harvard, he notes only that his four years there left him with an autobiographical “blank.” Adams continues to remind the reader, however, that his narrative is a story of education. The places and people who figure in the narrative only have value insofar as they pertain to Henry’s education. His early heroes were John Quincy Adams and George Washington, as well as 18th-century historians. Soon he widens his horizons, geographically speaking, by moving out of Massachusetts, and he

The Education of Henry Adamsâ•…â•… 131 seeks out new heroes from whom he can learn. As secretary to his father, ambassador to Great Britain (1861–68), Adams finds little redeeming in Englishmen and British politicians. In England, he learns the Englishmen show more compassion for the American confederacy than he initially thought. And, upon returning to the United States, he finds little in the people that he can salvage for his education. Henry votes for Ulysses S. Grant after the war because he thinks a decorated military hero will lead well, but, in an entire chapter devoted to Grant, he ends up finding the president distasteful. All in all, Adams sees a decline in the United States from Washington to Grant. Once again, he returns to Harvard, this time to teach medieval history, but his educational idealism finds university life mediocre at best, and he considers this more education lost. The book jumps forward at this point 20 years because, as Adams reminds the reader, his is a story of education, and only matters pertinent to education are noted. This is a new educational starting point for Adams, he writes. At this time in his education, he wishes to drop studying what the world does not care for anymore and concentrate his education on what interests people. At the Chicago Exposition of 1893, he notices the dominance of wealth and science. Clearly, it seems to Adams, the country is moving in a path that favors capitalism and technological power. These are contrasts to what Adams calls his 18th-century education, and as symbols of power and wealth, they contradict his ideas of medieval art. At the Paris Exposition seven years later, Adams once again comments on the importance of these symbols, specifically in the demonstration of the dynamo, an electrical generator invented for producing power. In the famous chapter entitled “The Virgin and the Dynamo,” Adams compares the Virgin Mary’s power for stimulating human energies with the dynamo’s power. Believing the dynamo might somehow provide a specific world plan for him, much as writing about the Romans had stimulated the 18th-century historian Edward Gibbon, Adams believes he has finally found a satisfactory way of looking at history. By placing the medieval expression of art into a system of history, he finds a way that he, and he hopes other people, might better cope with historical pattern and change.

Although much of the Education bases itself on Adams’s personal learning, the book is an attempt to come to grips with the larger ethos of education. What Adams sees in the Virgin, for example, is a symbol of force; in the dynamo, he envisions the same notion of force, as comprehended by modern man. The medieval mind symbolized its power of force in the Virgin, so this forms the connection to Adams’s idea of the dynamo—a symbol of the technology of the oncoming 20th century—and its effects on his life, which began in Quincy and Boston, symbols of the young America. Michael Modarelli

Innocence and Experience in The Education of Henry Adams

The symbolism in Henry Adams’s autobiography clearly marks his progression from innocence to experience. As Adams traces the paths of symbols from his childhood home in Boston, he essentially delineates his route from innocence to experience. Born in an upper-class home in Boston and raised in Quincy, where his grandfather, John Quincy Adams, walked him to school, young Henry becomes immediately influenced by his illustrious relative. For Henry, his grandfather represents the shaping of America, the glorious common sense of the 18th century, and he often thinks of John Quincy’s role in the formation of the country as well as his journeys to foreign lands as a diplomat. John Quincy Adams was not Henry’s only hero—in his youth he idolized George Washington, Edward Gibbon, his great-grandfather John Adams, and others. In these heroes Henry found men whose interests lay in wide realms; these were men of action and, most specifically, men whose values reflected conventional New England attitudes of self-discipline, character, and accomplishment. But Henry’s life, which means his education, forms the kernel of the Education, and it is John Quincy Adams who precipitates this journey, taking young Henry by the hand and walking him in silence to the school on a hot morning. Symbolically, then, his grandfather ushers Henry into the Adams fold and into education at a very young age, marking the gradual transition from innocence to experience.

132â•…â•… Adams, Henry In his youth, however, Adams hates the rote memorization and formalities of school. He would rather go to see Washington than read about it, which he does at age 12, and he seems to think application lies in actual experience and not formal schooling (although he does have a predilection for languages and mathematics). Eventually, like all upper-class New England boys, Adams enters Harvard, where he later concludes that he learned nothing, or all that he learned could have been done in four months’ time. Harvard, then, does nothing to improve Adams’s transition to experience—it seems it was still the beginning point. And teaching provides him with no relief. As a professor of medieval history at Harvard, he is successful, producing many respectable students; however, his upbringing in the Adams fold has taught him never to be satisfied with mediocrity, which he finds in his education. And although he has the experience of education behind him, Adams feels his journey is not done. In fact, all of Adams’s life as documented in the Autobiography is a progression from innocence to experience. Adams often reflects on his early heroes, not necessarily acquiring new ones but comparing the old ones to the heroic figures of his day. He compares Ulysses S. Grant to Washington, claiming a sad degeneration of mankind in the former from the latter. And although his life progresses throughout his education and he moves through a succession of careers with success, he constantly notes that his education has come, sadly, to some kind of end. Still, by the Chicago Exposition of 1893, Adams admits he is still innocent in a certain way. He knows how to look at art, he knows how to study history, and he has a storehouse of information and a wealth of 18th-century values. However, he has no way to assimilate the new technology at the exposition—he cannot reconcile these exhibits with any experience he has had. Adams is completely innocent in the ways of the changing world. This is especially evident when he encounters the dynamo, the newest power generator. What Adams finds he has to do is to somehow find a link from the past to the present—to, in this case, the powerful and awesome dynamo—so that he can understand the shift the world is making.

The narrative in the Autobiography leads up to this culminating point, where Adams must move from innocence to experience by coming to a historical understanding of mankind. From this understanding, he can then find the natural shifts in his own life, prompting him to write the Education. And he finds the answer in his use of symbols, which have played such an important part of his life. What Adams discovers is that although the dynamo is a relatively new force, forces have been around since the beginning of time. The dynamo is, in effect, the symbol for a new era. Past eras such as the Middle Ages, Adams concludes, found their symbols in religion, especially the Virgin Mary. In order to come to an awareness of some kind of force, he contends, man symbolized it, much like Adams had done in his youth with the forces around him. The concept of force, then, plays a fundamental role in his view of history and life—force becomes symbolized to represent its power on and within the lives of people. In a sense, Adams’s Education comes to represent the forces exterior to his own life, and the book becomes a symbol for his progression from innocence to experience. Michael Modarelli

Science and Technology in The Education of Henry Adams

As a child, young Henry grows up with what he describes as an 18th-century mind-set, but his view must soon change to accompany the introduction of new science and technology in the 19th century. The Adamses, a lineage tracing back to the United States’s foundation as a nation, were symbolic of America, and young Henry sees the connections between his family and American nationhood. The Massachusetts State House, New England, his grandfather John Quincy Adams, and the entire Adams family symbolize the educated mind and its entry into a new world. Adams reflects on this especially as his grandfather walks him to school, a symbolic entry into education. Adams links the mind and its application to changing epochs in symbols. As a historian, Adams has studied the Middle Ages, and he notices the power of the symbol in the Virgin Mary. Later, at the Chicago Exposition of 1893, he notes the grow-

Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf ?â•…â•… 133 ing symbolism of money inherent in capitalism. However, the symbolism of science and technology remains the greatest influence for his theory of history. While at the Paris Exposition of 1900, Adams connects this power of symbolism to the science and technology of his day. He sees the power of the dynamo much as he suggests people of the Middle Ages saw the cross or the Virgin Mary: The power of both represent a symbol of infinity, or a great moral force. Adams sees the Virgin as her time’s dynamo; she was a power of force, a mysterious bundle of energy. Similarly, the burgeoning inventions in science and technology of the 20th century represent a phenomenon of new force, which the individual must learn to grasp. Since science and technology represent, for Adams, a large shift from his 18th-century upbringing, he feels he must understand the movement of history. His ideas of history are found in two chapters in which Adams becomes enamored with the complexity of the 20th century. The two chapters in the Education, “A Dynamic Theory of History” and “A Law of Acceleration,” are his solution to this complexity. Here, he argues that the solution is the mind. According to Adams, man has always conceptualized force into symbols. Since man can conceptualize force, he can control it. Adams sees