Elizabeth is the central character in Pride and Prejudice – indeed it could be said that Elizabeth is Pride and Prejudice. She is the main focus of our interest, she is the novel’s heroine, even though she makes mistakes and is not particularly heroic. Her personality, her attitudes and her development throughout the novel bring together the story and all the other characters. The novel is concerned with pride and with prejudice and she and Darcy are the main players. She is Mr Bennet’s favourite daughter and her ‘quickness of mind’ is made evident in her witty and teasing conversations, where she often adopts striking and independent views. (See Chapters 8,9, and 11, when she is looking after Jane at Netherfield, in her conversations with Bingley, his sisters and Darcy).
She likes to laugh at people, including herself. She shares her capacity for irony with her father and the narrator. This allows her to stand back and offer judgements on certain situations. She often says the opposite of what she really means. In Chapter 6 (p. 27) she says, ‘Mr. Darcy is all politeness’, as a way of avoiding dancing with him after his rude remarks earlier.
A key passage in reviewing Elizabeth’s growth is Chapter 36 when we see her painfully coming to terms with her mistaken understanding of Wickham and Darcy while reading Darcy’s letter. She is forced here to confront some of her prejudices and earlier judgements, and in doing so realises that she has not been as sharp a reader of character as she has previously supposed. She blames herself for not having recognises the smack of ‘impropriety’ in Wickham’s behaviour, but had allowed herself to be deceived by his charm.
Elizabeth’s most appealing characteristic is her independent streak, her ‘self-sufficiency’. She judges things for herself and she is capable of decisive action as when she calmly, yet firmly, stands up to Mrs Bennet over Mr Collins’s proposal. She argues later that it is this ‘self-sufficiency’ which made Darcy fall in love with her.
However, though formidable at times, Elizabeth is also emotional. She feels great affection for Jane and is concerned for Lydia and Kitty. She is very close to her father, though she is often exasperated by her mother’s behaviour. She is very kind-hearted and we see this in her relationships with Charlotte and Georgiana.
She is not faultless, however, and her main fault is her prejudice. As Darcy is Pride, so Elizabeth is the Prejudice of the book’s title. She may see and judge for herself, but often these judgements are based on appearance rather than reality, on her strong emotions, not on rational thought. The two main targets for her prejudice are Darcy and Wickham. She tells us that from the beginning she meant to be ‘uncommonly clever’ in disliking Darcy ‘without any reason’. In fact, her initial dislike is seen as being justified because Darcy’s first comment was cruel and offensive. Afterwards, however, she delights in provoking him, and when he is denounced by Wickham, she is more than ready to believe the accusations made about him. One moment she is stating firmly that she does not think Darcy capable of such inhumanity, the next she is totally accepting Wickham’s story that he is! From the start, she is ‘out of her senses’ about Wickham’s looks and charm. For the next twenty chapters (!) she takes Wickham’s side despite warnings from Jane, Mrs Gardiner and Caroline Bingley, all of whom, ironically, Elizabeth considers to be prejudiced!
Darcy’s letter opens her eyes to the truth. He has already hinted that she only hears what she wants to hear. She therefore makes a conscious effort to read his letter openly, and on the second reading does so, analysing it rationally and she finally begins to notice Wickham’s inconsistencies and the lack of any real evidence of goodness on his part. She finally realises how ‘blind, partial, and prejudiced’ she has been. She also realises that she has been guilty of the same fault she accused Darcy of having – pride. She, too, has believed herself to be superior to others, and refused to believe she could be wrong, her vanity fuelled by Wickham’s attentions and offended by Darcy’s. She realises that ‘Till this moment, I never knew myself’. This is a crucial moment in the novel which marks her realisation of her faults and her decision to change.
Although she is still angry with Darcy, from this point on in the novel we see that she has changed and we see that she does try to see things clearly and without pride. She admits her faults to Jane, tells Wickham she knows the truth about him, tries to work out her problems honestly and rationally, and from now on values Darcy. It is her ability to do this which makes her the heroine of the novel. Faced with the truth about herself, realising she has been badly affected by both her pride and her prejudice, she accepts the fact, thinks about it and acts on her conclusions. She has, in effect, become a mature adult.
Her views on love and marriage also change. Jane Austen uses Elizabeth to show us the mature, ideal marriage, and by contrasting through her eyes other, less worthy marriages, we ourselves learn what is best. Elizabeth, at first, seems very clear about what she expects from a relationship. As she tells Charlotte, she is not seeking a husband, let alone a rich one. She despises courtship games, wants to know all about her partner, and when she hears of Charlotte’s engagement, her reaction is ‘impossible!’. She slowly learns that her prejudice has led her astray. Her visit to Hunsford shows her that such a marriage is not only possible but a fair compromise. Darcy’s views, Pemberley, and the elopement show her too that financial and social considerations in marriage are important. She needs to learn this before she can take a realistic view of marriage as a social union and become the responsible mistress of Pemberley. However, her view of marriage as an equal partnership is a very valid one and her refusal of Mr Collins’s proposal is vindicated. His marriage to Charlotte works because it is balanced, and all that remains now is for Elizabeth to meet her equal – quite literally she too must meet her match! Elizabeth needs a real partner, like Darcy.
It is worth your while trying to pinpoint the exact moment at which Elizabeth falls in love with Darcy. The fact that she dislikes and provokes him in the early part of the novel may well be a sign of her attraction, but Elizabeth does not admit this. She claims to find him obnoxious and certainly has no second thoughts about refusing his first patronising proposal. Not until her visit to Pemberley does she appreciate Darcy’s real worth and his change of heart, and she begins then to feel more for him. Her view of marriage also begins to change. She knows that Darcy is correct in his assessment of her family, and Lydia’s elopement only confirms this. The inequalities between herself and Darcy are eventually overcome, and Elizabeth betters herself by marrying Darcy. However, she never takes advantage of this. Seeing Pemberley marks the start of her affection for Darcy because there she begins to appreciate his real character, rather than simply his wealth.
The elopement crystallises Elizabeth’s view of marriage – she now sees the ideal, and realises that Darcy could provide it, ‘answer’ her needs. His generosity on Lydia’s behalf compounds her feelings and when he returns to Longbourn, Elizabeth is quiet and uncertain; he is now important to her and she knows that she needs his attention and approval. But first, she must overcome the twin hurdles of Darcy’s family and her own! She defeats Lady Catherine first, defending the right of Darcy and herself to choose their own partner. Her courage here against the formidable Lady Catherine surely encourages Darcy to propose again. She then overcomes her own family’s prejudice against Darcy, showing that she is now a truly independent adult and ready to be married.
Her relationship with Darcy is sound. They communicate well, give each other mutual support and affection and generally are good for one another. She has found her true partner, with whom she can live at Pemberley, her true home. At the end of the novel, Elizabeth is the happy heroine, the centre of everything. She has not only changed herself through her newly found love for Darcy, but she equally has changed Darcy through his love for her.
Mr. Darcy
Mr Darcy is the hero of Pride and Prejudice. He is entitled to be considered a hero because he has the capacity to change and mature and because he is a true partner for our heroine, Elizabeth Bennet. When we meet him first, however, he seems to be the villain of the book. He appears at the Meryton ball and is immediately disliked by everyone because he so obviously disapproves of the evening, will not mix, and seems above himself, particularly to Elizabeth. What we learn about him later supports this view: he is ‘haughty, reserved ……. continually giving offence’. These ‘first impressions’ are strengthened by more serious criticisms: his condescending manner towards Elizabeth at Netherfield, his actions to Wickham, his influencing of Bingley against Jane.
By the end of Chapter 33 we, like Elizabeth, have come to form a clear but negative view of Darcy. Then he proposes, but patronisingly, and they quarrel, gaining self-awareness shortly afterwards. From this point on, Darcy ceases to be an anti-hero and begins to change. We also begin to view him differently. Once the truth behind Wickham’s assertions and the reasoning behind Darcy’s influencing of Bingley are known, Elizabeth begins to reconsider her opinion of Darcy. The business with Wickham was, of course, a slander. Darcy seems to have done all that could have been asked of him and more: to have judged Wickham correctly and to have been generous enough not to seek revenge for the planned elopement with his sister. Over the Jane and Bingley affair, he seems to have acted honestly, if through pride, and his concern for Bingley’s welfare is touching.
We, like Elizabeth, begin to see things in a new light and to reconsider our own opinion of Darcy. Notice that in fact the very first impression he gave, at the Meryton ball, was good: ‘fine, handsome, noble’. We learnt too that he was intelligent and clear-sighted, and his conversations with Elizabeth certainly showed his thought and intelligence. When she finally realises that Darcy is right for her, she comments particularly on his ‘judgement, information, and knowledge of the world’. We are made increasingly aware also of Darcy’s real kindness and generosity. He is an affectionate brother, trusted by Georgiana, a wise and generous landlord and a good friend to Bingley. His free use of money to help first Wickham, then Lydia, is admirable.
In fact, Darcy’s chief fault is his pride, and this he honestly tries to conquer in the course of the novel. His is the pride in the title of the novel. He was brought up to be proud, almost trained to it. At the start of the novel, he triumphantly defends it, though he realises the importance of controlling it, which he feels he can do. However, he is wrong. His pride does lead him to behave wrongly – on three occasions. He conceals Wickham’s faults because he does not wish the name of Darcy to be humiliated. He is totally convinced of his own good judgement over the matter of Jane and so influences Bingley accordingly. Over Elizabeth, his pride causes him to despise her family connections, and though at first he resists, the attraction remains; he sees his own proposal as demeaning, without realising the implications of this for his relationship with Elizabeth.
Elizabeth reacts to his proposal with genuine anger, and for the first time in his life, Darcy’s ‘arrogance, conceit, disdain’ are challenged. This is, of course, the point of change for Darcy. He later tells Elizabeth that it took him some time to begin to alter, but in fact, by the next morning, he has understood enough to want to justify himself in a letter. He thinks over his actions, slowly realising ‘how insufficient were all my pretensions to please a woman worthy of being pleased’. By the time we reach Pemberley, he is eager to show his new persona. His outward manner, unlike so many in the novel, is a sign of his inward change. He accepts Elizabeth and her relations, and soon after accepts responsibility for Lydia’s elopement and arranges her marriage. His final proposal expresses his hopes, but not expectations, of being accepted, and he admits his pride, with gratitude to Elizabeth for humbling him.
We must not, however, judge Darcy too harshly. He is neither vain nor self-centred. Much of his pride is valid, the natural result of being master of Pemberley, affording him a self-confidence that allows him to help others. Equally, Elizabeth has coloured our view! Much of Darcy’s pride is a figment of her own prejudice. Her final declaration to her father, that ‘he has no improper pride’, says everything.
Although he represents pride in the novel, he is not without prejudice. He sees beyond superficial appearance more quickly than Elizabeth but nevertheless dismisses her at first glance on her looks alone. He soon changes his mind but is still put off by her inferior connections and does not consider her on her true merits. He learns to recognise his priorities after she has rejected his first proposal, and on his return to Longbourn is not disheartened by his reception, also seeing clearly now what he before judged wrongly – Jane’s true feelings for Bingley.
Darcy is, however, generally more clear-sighted than Elizabeth, and points out to her that she is prejudiced. This is the point of self-awareness for her and completes the circle whereby both hero and heroine are responsible for the other’s maturity. It is evident that as Darcy develops and matures so too does his love for Elizabeth. He is, from the start, Elizabeth’s obvious match; the story of their relationship is the story of the novel. At first, he dismisses her, then is attracted by her ‘playfulness’ and her kindness to Jane. His love is immature, though, and after her refusal of his proposal, he is forced to reconsider and reassess what she thinks of him and act on it. Gradually he develops a genuine regard for her. During the elopement crisis, his awareness and practical help both reflect and develop the growing affection he feels. One thing is certain; only when Darcy overcomes his faults and infatuation and acts truly for Elizabeth’s sake can he hope to win her. When he does, also righting the wrong he has done, by persuading Bingley after all to marry Jane, he proposes again. He is now in a position to receive the ‘happiness’ he deserves.
Darcy and Elizabeth are the one true model union in the novel. He is good for her; his pride shows her her own and through him, she learns how prejudiced she is. He alone can stand up to her, balancing her uncontrolled emotion with his controlled rationality. He ‘answers’ her totally, as no one else can. Darcy is thus the hero. He stands head and shoulders above all the other male characters in the novel. His personality also contrasts with Elizabeth’s, complementing it, as has been said, and forming a true unity. As her partner, he is as much the centre of the novel as Elizabeth is, though it is not seen through his eyes. He represents the male ideal: intelligent, rational, shows good judgement and right action, has a handsome, moneyed appearance but is nevertheless valued for his true inner qualities. He is indeed the ideal partner for our heroine; he is mature and unlike the New Man (Our 21st. Century Model!) he always considers her before himself!
This novel lays claim to being (probably) the most memorable fictional evocation of America of the ‘roaring twenties’, the jazz-age America which came to such a devastating end with the Wall Street Crash at the end of that crazy decade. Gatsby, Fitzgerald’s finest achievement, is interesting as the record of an era and of the disillusionment felt by thoughtful, sensitive people with established institutions and beliefs and in their sense of moral chaos in America after the Great War of 1914-1918.
Such was Fitzgerald’s success in expressing what was widely regarded as the spirit of the twenties that he was virtually credited with inventing the period. It was inevitable that he should be honoured with such dubious titles of distinction as ‘the laureate of the jazz age’ and ‘the novelist of the American dream’. It is true that he is remarkably successful in rendering some of the essential features of an exciting time. Sometimes it seems that Gatsby captures the moment and renders a more convincing account of the ‘Roaring Twenties’ than many a historical document.
The fragile, rich, drifting world of the twenties was the emotional heart of Fitzgerald’s life, the source of his happiness as well as his misery. Gatsby is a reflection of his passionate involvement in the issues of his day, but also of his ambivalent attitude to what he saw and experienced. It is, however, more than that. In 1950, the critic Lionel Trilling remarked that The Great Gatsby was still as fresh and as relevant as when it first appeared in 1925, and that it had even gained in stature and relevance, something that could be said of few American novels of its time. Sixty five years after Trilling’s comment, there is little evidence that interest in the novel has in any way declined. Indeed, its popularity has been enhanced by Hollywood film producers who have brought the novel and the era to the silver screen with great success and acclaim.
The American Dream
The Great Gatsby is, like many American novels, about an American dream, one dreamed by the romantic, wealthy bootlegger who gives the book its title. Gatsby’s dream begins when, as a poor young man, he falls in love with Daisy, a girl whose charm, youth and beauty are coloured and made glamorous in his eyes by a lifetime of wealth, whose very voice, he notes, ‘is full of money’. His dream that Daisy may become accessible to one of his class and background is nourished by two circumstances: the war makes him an officer, and his post-war activities elevate him to riches. Gatsby must, however, learn that such things will not bring Daisy wholly within his reach and that however ardently he may pursue it, his dream cannot be realised simply because he wills it.
Class differences
In Gatsby, Fitzgerald is dealing with an important social theme. He is fascinated by class distinctions and their relationship with the possession of wealth. This places him firmly in the tradition of the great classical novelists. The English novel originated in an age (the early eighteenth century) when class structures were drastically disturbed. Most of the major English novelists have since continued to be absorbed by class differences, and to draw heavily on these and their influences on human behaviour and attitudes. Think of the dominance of class and money in the novels of Jane Austen. Although there is an evident ambiguity in Fitzgerald’s attitude to those who possess great wealth, the established rich, they still represent what Lionel Trilling calls, ‘the nearest thing to an aristocracy that America could offer him’. Fitzgerald deals with the trappings and symbols of this American aristocracy, the great one being money. In one of his stories, The Rich Boy, there is this telling comment:
Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me. They possess and enjoy early, and it does something to them.
Readers of Gatsby will recognise that it is mainly about what money does to those who possess it in abundance.
There are, of course, two main versions of wealth in The Great Gatsby, dramatically contrasted throughout. This contrast gives the book much of its interest. Gatsby himself is the newly-rich tycoon, the boy from Dakota who thought he had to get rich quickly to win the love of a rich girl. His wealth gives him a vulgar neo-Gothic mansion, an incredible car, and garish clothes; it causes him to assume uncharacteristic stances and attitudes, including ‘an elaborate formality of speech’. All of these things placed side by side with the grace and ease associated with the representatives of the established rich, Daisy and Tom Buchanan, appear ludicrous. Gatsby is, from one point of view, a vulgar upstart who purchases his standing in society by giving mammoth parties patronised by all and sundry. (Check out Fitzgerald’s descriptions of these parties). His great wealth, for all his efforts, cannot imitate the effects produced by that of the Buchanans.
The world of the Buchanans
But the contrast is not entirely, or even mainly, in favour of the established rich. Gatsby, for all his lavish vulgarity, turns out all right in the end in the eyes of the reader; the Buchanans do not. Gatsby is using his money as an instrument with which to achieve something, to further his aim of enriching his life; he has a capacity for wonder, for excitement, not shared by the Buchanans. Their wealth and that of their associate Jordan Baker is sterile, which induces a tired, bored attitude to life. “We ought to plan something,” yawns Jordan, ‘sitting down at the table as if she were getting out of bed’; and again, “You see I think everything’s terrible anyhow … Everybody thinks so.”
What Fitzgerald establishes in the scenes involving the Buchanans is that their money has drained away their emotions. Daisy’s pattern of living, based as it has always been on the security of possession, has given her the habit of retreating in the face of responsibility into ‘their money or their vast carelessness’. This aspect of the mentality of the established rich is more than once contrasted with Gatsby’s heroic, if ludicrous, romantic idealism. He watches outside the Buchanan house after the accident, seeking to shelter Daisy from its unpleasant consequences. She is seated with Tom over a plate of cold chicken and two bottles of ale (‘an unmistakable air of natural intimacy about the picture’) when Nick arrives. Gatsby looks at the latter ‘as though his presence marred the sacredness of the vigil’. The vulgar tycoon can also be the chivalrous, incorruptible upholder of ideals, however, mistaken these may be.
Gatsby’s world
The superficial beautiful world of Tom and Daisy is just as ludicrous in its way as the one Gatsby creates around himself. Gatsby’s world is, of course, a pathetic attempt to reproduce that of people like the Buchanans; by aping its surface, he fondly imagines that he can capture its heart. His provision for himself of an acceptable background is part of the elaborate, absurd pretence. As he reveals these fictional details, his speech becomes stiff and stilted, he chokes and swallows on the phrases:
I am the son of some wealthy people in the Middle west – all dead now. I was brought up in America but educated at Oxford, because all my ancestors have been educated there for many years. It is a family tradition.
Almost all of this is false, of course, the truth being less flattering: ‘An instinct towards his future glory had led him to the small Lutheran college of St Olaf’s in Southern Minnesota’. His stay at Oxford is short and undistinguished. But the attitudes of the Buchanans are exposed by Fitzgerald to as pitiless a scrutiny. Here is a sample of what passes for thinking among them on ‘serious’ issues:
This idea is that we’re all Nordics. I am, and you are, and you are, and – After an infinitesimal hesitation he included Daisy with a slight nod, and she winked at me again – And we’ve produced all the things that go to make civilisation – oh, science and art and all that. Do you see?
The narrator Nick caraway remarks at the beginning that one of the things his father told him was that ‘a sense of the fundamental decencies is parcelled out unequally at birth.’ It is, oddly enough, in the socially deprived Gatsby rather than the long-established Buchanans that the ‘fundamental decencies’ are most in evidence.
Balancing two worlds in the novel
‘The test of a first-class intelligence,’ Fitzgerald remarked, ‘is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.’ In The Great Gatsby, he holds contrasting ideas simultaneously on some major aspects of his material and successfully integrates opposing arguments and points of view. The most obvious instance of this is when he oscillates between imaginative identification with the splendours of rich society and a recurring tendency towards objective analysis of its limitations. The boredom, limited emotional range and narrowness of mind of the Buchanan set is very cleverly conveyed in the dialogue, but against this, he can also convey in a very sensuous way the attractions of being very wealthy:
All night the saxophones wailed the hopeless comment of the ‘Beale Street Blues’; while a hundred pairs of golden and silver slippers shuffled the shining dust. At the grey tea hour there were always rooms that throbbed incessantly with the low, sweet fever, while fresh faces drifted here and there like rose petals blown by the sad horns around the floor.
But a more significant tension is that between the responses called forth by the two sides of Gatsby’s nature, as they are revealed in a few critical episodes and mediated to us through the play of Nick’s judgement of the events and his responses to them. The central passage of the novel, taken in conjunction with Gatsby’s own account of his background, provides a good example of the ambivalence with which the hero is regarded by his creator:
I suppose he’d had the name ready for a long time, even then. His parents were shiftless and unsuccessful farm people – his imagination had never really accepted them as his parents at all. The truth was that Jay Gatsby of West Egg, Long Island, sprang from his Platonic conception of himself. He was a son of god – a phrase which, if it means anything, means just that – and he must be about His Father’s business, the service of a vast, vulgar, and meretricious beauty. So he invented just the sort of Jay Gatsby that a seventeen-year-old boy would like to invent, and to this conception, he was faithful to the end.
The obscene, gargantuan vulgarity of his weekend parties is evoked with sober irony:
Every Friday, five crates of oranges and lemons arrived from a fruiterer in New York – every Monday these same oranges and lemons left his back door in a pyramid of pulpless halves. There was a machine in the kitchen which could extract the juice of two hundred oranges in half an hour if a little button was pressed two hundred times by a butler’s thumb!
Gatsby as a tragic figure
If this were all there was to Gatsby, we would read the novel as a satire on contemporary manners. Fitzgerald’s first publishers did, indeed, call the book a satire, but it is only incidentally so: principally in the contribution of the minor characters, and in the occasional comment on the incongruous activities of the major ones. But the story and the main character are tragic. The tragic implications of story and character arise chiefly from Gatsby’s redeeming qualities. Like Fitzgerald himself, Gatsby is a romantic, and in the end meets the fate of all romantics: disillusion, a sense of inadequacy in the face of experience, a deeply felt sense of failure. His romantic dream is centred on Daisy, an unworthy object as he finds out too late.
Gatsby’s romanticism is stressed throughout the book. It sometimes involves an endearingly childlike attitude to experience, a sentimental attachment to anything associated with those he loves, not found in any of the other characters. ‘If it wasn’t for the mist,’ he tells Daisy, ‘we could see your house across the bay. You always have a green light that burns all night at the end of your dock.’ This green light acquires a symbolic force. In a famous passage at the close of the novel, we are reminded of the sense of wonder Gatsby experienced when he first noticed the light at the end of daisy’s dock; it comes to stand as a memorial to his romantic idealism:
Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter – to-morrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther … And one fine evening – So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.
A sense of the past
Gatsby has the characteristic romantic preoccupation with the past. This is beautifully evoked by Fitzgerald in a telling passage, which reveals some of the hidden springs of his failure and of his tragedy. His great delusion is a sad and common one: that the past can be restored and duplicated, and the effects of the passage of time erased. Gatsby wants Daisy to abandon Tom Buchanan so that, after she is free, she may go back with him to Louisville to be married from her house, ‘just as if it were five years ago’. When caraway tells him he can’t repeat the past like this he can see no reason whatever why: ‘I’m going to fix everything just as it was before.’ His longing to do so is perfectly comprehensible. His life has been disordered since his parting with Daisy: he wants to ‘recover something, some idea of himself, perhaps, that had gone into loving Daisy’. He returns in his poignant day-dream to a starting place, to a scene with Daisy, described in heightened, poetic, emotionally-charged language, that can make sober realities pale into unimportance. The incident takes on almost an absolute value, for us readers as well as for Gatsby. Little wonder that he wants to begin again from such a point:
One autumn night, five years before, they had been walking down the street when the leaves were falling, and they came to a place where there were no trees and the sidewalk was white with moonlight. They stopped here and turned toward each other. Now it was a cool night with that mysterious excitement in it which comes at the two changes of the year …
His vain hope of recapturing such a past is finally extinguished by Tom Buchanan’s exposure of his activities during the intervening years. The romantic cavalier is mercilessly stripped of his glamour: ‘He and Wolfstein bought up a lot of side-street drug stores here and in Chicago and sold grain alcohol over the counter … I picked him for a bootlegger the first time I saw him.’ Tom reduces Gatsby’s thrilling aspirations to the level of the sordid: ‘I think he realises that his presumptuous little flirtation is over.’ The end of the quest for lost happiness is tellingly rendered:
But with every word she was drawing further and further into herself, so he gave that up, and only the dead dream fought on as the afternoon slipped away, trying to touch what was no longer tangible, struggling unhappily, undespairingly, towards that lost voice across the room.
Fitzgerald the moralist
Scott Fitzgerald was at heart a moralist. He once gave as his reason for writing fiction ‘a desire to preach at people in some acceptable form’. Moralists often find their natural outlet in satire, and Fitzgerald was gifted with a keen satiric eye and a keen sense of the absurdities of human nature. Tom’s defence of ‘civilisation’ against the ‘inferior’ races provides a good example. There are more good satiric portraits of minor figures like Catherine and Mr. McKee:
Her eyebrows had been plucked and then drawn on again at a more rakish angle, but the efforts of nature toward the restoration of the old alignment gave a blurred air to her face … He informed me that he was in ‘the artistic game’, and I gathered later that he was a photographer and had made a dim enlargement of Mrs. Wilson’s mother which hovered like an ectoplasm on the wall. His wife was shrill, languid, handsome and horrible.
But these, and the description of the massive vulgarity of the Gatsby residence are isolated patches; Fitzgerald was much more attracted to the affirmation of what he saw as the good than to the denunciation of the bad. The positives celebrated in The Great Gatsby are the simple virtues: the hopeful, wondering, questioning attitudes of mid-Western America, o the ‘broad, sprawling, swollen towns beyond the Ohio’, over against which, in rich contrast, is the urban sophistication, culture, boredom and corruption of the jaded East.
Flaws in the novel
The significance of the title of the book in relation to all this is often missed. Gatsby is great is so far as he stands for the simplicity of heart Fitzgerald identified with the mid-West; he is a vulgar, contemptible figure in so far as he revels in the notoriety that his worldly success lends to his name. He is, of course, a man of limited understanding, failing at once to appreciate his own real claims to recognition (his idealism, his high romantic aspirations) and to recognise his error in thinking that he really belongs to the world he has entered. In its way, too, the novel is limited in its treatment of its central figure. After all, we are expected to find the supreme value of the story and its hero in its romantic aspirations, in his ‘heightened sensitivity to the promises of life’. There is no voice in the novel, no point of view which seems to question the adequacy of this attitude. To many readers, it must seem a poor enough one in face of the complexities of actual living. What is perhaps more disturbing is that the novelist himself seems to find Gatsby’s romantic stance entirely adequate. A remark of his seems to bear this out:
That’s the whole burden of the novel, the loss of those illusions that give such colour to the world so that you don’t care whether things are true or false as long as they partake of the magical glory.
If this is the best that can be set over against the amoral world of the established rich, many readers will leave the book down with a sense of disappointment.
Merits of The Great Gatsby
Against this, however, one must stress the considerable virtues of The great Gatsby: its poetic quality (Fitzgerald was a devoted reader of T.S. Eliot, who influenced him here), its almost flawless structure, Fitzgerald’s mastery of technique. His use of detail to suggest symbolic meaning is particularly impressive. Here it is interesting to note that one of the best symbols in the book, the grotesque eyes of T.J. Eckleburg’s billboard came to him by chance. His publisher had a dust jacket designed for The Great Gatsby, a poor quality picture intended to suggest, by means of two enormous eyes, Daisy brooding over an amusement-park version of New York. Fitzgerald’s brilliant reworking of this in the book is a tribute to his intuitive skill. Again, the slow, gradual presentation of Gatsby is a tour de force. We are more than half-way through the book before we know the important things about him. The evocation of atmosphere and background is memorable and utterly satisfying; a detail or two will often suffice to fix indelibly a scene, a character or a mood:
With an effort Wilson left the shade and support of the doorway, and, breathing hard, unscrewed the cap of the tank. In the sunlight his face was green.
One must not ignore the intelligent use by Fitzgerald of Carraway as narrator; a good deal of the colour and subtlety of the novel arises from the response of the narrator’s judgement and feelings to the events he describes.
Finally, the power and impact of the book are greatly enhanced by Fitzgerald’s concentration of his story and theme into a relatively few telling scenes.
About the Author....
Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald (September 24, 1896 – December 21, 1940), known professionally as F. Scott Fitzgerald, was an American novelist and short story writer, whose writing gives us a memorable fictional evocation of America of the ‘roaring twenties’ and of the Jazz Age. He is widely regarded as one of the greatest American writers of the 20th century. Fitzgerald is considered a member of the “Lost Generation” of the 1920s. He finished four novels: This Side of Paradise, The Beautiful and Damned, The Great Gatsby (his best known), and Tender Is the Night. A fifth, unfinished novel, The Love of the Last Tycoon, was published posthumously. Fitzgerald also wrote numerous short stories, many of which treat themes of youth and promise, and age and despair (Wikipedia).
The critic C.S.Lewis once remarked that the qualification for judging any piece of workmanship from a corkscrew to a cathedral ‘is to know what it is, what it was intended to do and how it is meant to be used’. George Orwell, with nice irony, subtitled Animal Farm ‘A Fairy Tale’. It is, in fact, an extended allegory. As a literary term, allegory is not really difficult to grasp. The writer of allegory describes a subject under the guise of another subject which has apt and suggestive resemblances to the first one. The allegorical work conveys a meaning other than, and in addition to, the literal meaning. If we read a story and conclude that beneath its surface meaning another meaning may be discovered and that the real point of the story resides in this other meaning, then we may safely conclude that we have been reading an allegory. Even the least qualified reader of Animal Farm will no doubt reach such a conclusion.
Animal Farm is a special kind of allegory, the beast fable. Most of us are familiar with this universal literary form through our reading of Aesop’s Fables. Those who have read the Fourth Book of Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels will scarcely be surprised to learn that Swift’s talking horses are literary ancestors of Orwell’s talking farm animals. A fable is a story designed to inculcate a moral about some aspect of human behaviour. Sometimes (as in the case of Animal Farm) the moral or lesson is implicit in the story; sometimes it is explicitly stated in brief form at the end. Like other writers of beast fables, Orwell uses animals and birds to represent the deeds and motives of human beings; like them, too, he has his moral lesson to enforce.
Satirical allegory of the Russian Revolution
Every account of Animal Farm traces the fairly obvious parallels between the characters and motives of Orwell’s animals and those of the human beings they represent. It was immediately clear to his original readers (in the mid-1940’s) that Orwell had written a fairly explicit satirical allegory of the Russian Revolution and the rise of Stalin, a circumstance which made it difficult for him to find an English publisher. The parallels are easily traced. Major is Lenin, although since he dies before the rising, the identification is not exact. Napoleon is Stalin, and Snowball is Trotsky, whose quarrel with Stalin after Lenin’s death led to his expulsion from the Communist Party and from Russia. Molly stands for those Russians who fled the country after 1917. Boxer is an image of the loyal, uncomplaining proletariat, and Moses an unattractive representation of the Russian Orthodox Church. The Battle of the Cowshed is clearly the Civil War that followed the 1917 Revolution; Western countries (Jones and his neighbours) sent troops to the aid of the dissenting White Russians. The Battle of the Windmill is the German invasion of 1941. Orwell pointed this out in a letter to his publisher. He felt that at one point in the story he had been unfair to Stalin. ‘All the animals including Napoleon,’ he wrote in the Windmill episode, ‘flung themselves on their faces.’ This he wanted altered to ‘All the animals except Napoleon flung themselves on their faces,’ pointing out that Stalin, after all, did remain in Moscow during the German invasion.
The moral lesson of the fable
So much for the main parallels between Orwell’s animals and their human counterparts. What of the moral lesson of the fable? His experiences during the Spanish Civil War and his close study of Russian politics made Orwell acutely conscious of what he called ‘the barbaric and undemocratic’ methods of Communist governments. His main concern in Animal Farm was to make people in Western Europe see the Soviet regime for what it really was.
It appeared to him that since 1930 the USSR, far from moving towards socialism, showed clear signs of transforming itself into a hierarchical society in which the rulers (the pigs of the fable) were no more inclined than were the members of any other power elite to surrender their privileges. Since it was the common view of Western European socialists that a genuinely socialist regime existed in Russia, Orwell saw it as one of his tasks to dispel this misunderstanding in a story that could easily be assimilated by almost anyone, and that would lend itself to easy translation into other languages.
At the end of Animal Farm it is impossible to distinguish the human beings from the pigs, the latter having entered heartily into commercial and social relations with their former enemies and abandoned the major slogan of the Revolution, ‘Four legs good, two legs bad.’ In his preface to the Ukranian edition, Orwell made an interesting (and perhaps surprising) comment on his ending. A number of readers, he felt, might finish Animal Farm with the impression that it ends in the complete reconciliation of the pigs (the Soviet power elite) and the humans (the Western capitalist leaders). This, he pointed out was not his intention. On the contrary, he meant the book to end on a note of discord. He wrote it immediately after the Teheran Conference, which everybody thought, had established the best possible relations between the USSR and the West. ‘I personally,’ Orwell observed with satisfaction, ‘did not believe that such good relations would last long; and, as events have shown, I wasn’t far wrong.’
A novel of universal political truths
Some of the pleasure of reading Animal Farm lies in the reader’s gradual recognition of the parallels with modern Russian history. The various identifications can be disclosed rather like the answers to a crossword puzzle, or chalked up on the blackboard like so many equations. But the question arises: once we have made all the identifications what further interest are we likely to have in a work like Animal Farm? It might be argued that even as an allegory of Soviet politics, the book has lost some of its original point, since Orwell clearly did not contemplate, for example, such developments as those associated with the Krushchev era, or the astonishing course taken by the Soviet system since the coming to power of Gorbachev in 1985. Fortunately for Orwell’s reputation, his book is likely to attract readers long after the Russian experience has been forgotten, because it has large implications extending beyond the immediate circumstances of any single movement such as the Russian Revolution of 1917.In several respects, Orwell’s fable embodies universal political truths. What he describes is what happens sooner or later, to a greater or lesser extent, to all revolutionary movements. The modern Chinese theory of continuous revolution as a means of preserving intact the ideals of the first revolutionaries is an interesting recognition of the dangers (so convincingly illustrated in Animal Farm) which attended all large-scale efforts at the betterment of the human lot. Orwell’s book is a comment on the failure, as he saw it, of the Russian Revolution to fulfil the expectations of those who saw it marking a new era of true socialist democracy. But it can also be read as a disillusioned recognition of the apparently inevitable failure of every great reforming movement to preserve its original momentum. The French Revolution began in unbounded hope for a better world and petered out in the Jacobin terror.
Limitations of the moral fable
In Animal Farm, as in all moral fables, the author starts off with his abstract truth or idea, and uses his story to illustrate this, to give it life. All the elements in the story are necessarily subordinated to the pattern dictated by whatever precepts the author desires to enforce on the minds of his readers. Even these bald statements about the literary genre to which Animal Farm belongs suggest its almost inevitable limitations. The major landmarks of fiction are exploratory in character; their important discoveries about human life and conduct emerge with the progress of the story. Writers like the Orwell of Animal Farm, on the other hand, give the impression of having made their discoveries before composing their works. The problem for all those who write fiction to illustrate pre-conceived ideas is that they must force a disorderly mass of experience into conformity with these ideas, which results inevitably either in some falsification of experience, or in a radically simplified view of it. Inconvenient facts tend to be rigorously excluded. Orwell, however, in choosing to illustrate what seems to be a universal human experience, is exempt from charges of distortion, whatever may be said about the limitations of his fable.
Orwell was one of those fortunate writers who recognised his limitations, who knew what suited his special talents and what did not. Readers of his other novels will quickly realise that he found it extremely difficult to breathe life into his characters, none of whom is really convincing or memorable. There is a sense in which Orwell is not really a creative writer, but a brilliant publicist, journalist, and apologist for liberal causes, who used the conventional fictional framework for his special purposes. If he could not create life-like characters in his novels, he could at any rate write a great political fable. What gives Animal Farm its vitality is not the kind of imaginative power one associates with a great novelist. Such imaginative power was not really needed in this kind of work. Orwell’s mind was one, which, like Swift’s, often contemplated the great human questions in political terms; like Swift, he found the beast fable an admirable vehicle for political ideas. The almost perfect correspondence in Animal Farm between form and content at once helps to explain its astonishing popular success and to ensure its survival as a minor classic.
Lord of the Flies was published in 1954 and in it, William Golding sets out to create a disturbing and dystopian view of the world – a social experiment that goes horribly wrong. The bleak aftermath of the second war to blight the Twentieth Century is still being felt in Britain, Europe and the rest of the world in the early 1950’s. Images of the Holocaust and Hiroshima, along with personal war memories and experiences and other atrocities were still very raw in people’s minds. This powerful novel can be included among other dystopian classics such as Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and George Orwell’s 1984. This genre of dystopian fiction represents the other extreme from Utopias, fictional representations of ideal political states or ways of life, the classical example here being St. Thomas More’s Utopia, a Latin work written in 1516.
Golding, as you will soon be aware, is very concerned with the pervasive influence of evil forces in our world, and he has few allusions about the counterbalancing forces of good. It is possible to classify Lord of the Flies as a dystopian fable because in it Golding is casting a jaundiced eye on earlier and more optimistic variations on his theme, the best known of these being R.M. Ballantyne’s The Coral Island. Lord of the Flies was written as a kind of parody of The Coral Island and Golding makes specific reference to it in his novel. A very brief comparison with Ballantyne’s book helps us see what Golding is attempting in Lord of the Flies. In The Coral Island, Ballantyne shipwrecks a group of upright, solid, church-going British boys, and allows them to build a decent imitation of British civilisation in their new and primitive surroundings. In Lord of the Flies, the shipwreck is now a plane wreck; the boys are still middle-class British Christians. Even the names of three of Golding’s main characters are similar to those in Ballantyne – Golding’s three central characters – Ralph, Piggy and Jack – are caricatures of Ballantyne’s heroes . The vital difference between the two novels, however, is that whereas Ballantyne’s is thoroughly optimistic in spirit and outcome, Golding’s outcomes are disillusioning and pessimistic.
The need for social order
Lord of the Flies is a very grim illustration of the kind of situation that, as Golding sees it, must inevitably arise if the sanctions and controls of society are abandoned. In this kind of situation, the great majority of human beings (whether boys or men) will choose destructive courses. There will be the few who will choose order, whose acts reflect human decency and goodness, but they will be outnumbered and defeated by the evil tendencies of the many. The ethos of Ballantyne’s island was that of the boy-scout camp; on Golding’s the greater number of the boys choose to enact the roles of savages, painting themselves, wallowing in an orgy of animal slaughter, sinking into bestial habits, engaging in torture, murder and sacrifice to false gods.
Speaking of false gods prompts a reference to the significance of Golding’s title for the novel. This refers to Beelzebub, traditionally the most debased and disgusting of all the devils. The young British Christians, most of all the choirboys, instinctively chose him, rather than the Christian God as the object of their worship. This choice bears fundamentally on Golding’s views on human nature. Golding is, above all, a didactic writer and he is trying, therefore, to teach us a moral lesson here. One of his primary purposes is to expose what he sees as the shallowness of optimistic theories (he would see them as illusions) about human nature. At one level, his novel can be read as a strenuous rejection of humanistic theories of human perfection. It enacts an unrepentant belief in the traditional Christian doctrine of Original Sin; the doctrine which teaches that the first sin of Adam, as the old Catechism put it, ‘darkened the understanding, weakened the will, and left us a strong inclination to evil’.
A pessimistic world view?
This traditional view sets Golding apart from many of the modern ‘trendy’ currents of thought. Few of us have escaped the influence of the romantic view of childhood as a time of glorious innocence; the cult of the noble savage has, since Rousseau, enjoyed widespread support in all kinds of fiction. It was a common Romantic assumption that man was potentially a noble, upright creature if only he could be freed from the fetters of a corrupt society. Golding is having none of this! Not for him the vision of the child emerging in clouds of glory, or the inherent nobility of the savage life. What he finds instead, is that only the slightest push, or the removal of sanctions or firm restraints, is needed for children, as well as for men, to tumble into unfathomable depths of depravity. In Lord of the Flies he is trying to show us with what frightening ease man and boy can throw off all his superficial decency (‘off you lendings’ in Lear’s version) and regress back to that primitive state where ‘chaos is come again.’
To return to categories and literary genres for a moment, Lord of the Flies is a fable. As Golding himself points out, the writer of fables is a moralist: ‘he cannot make a story without a human lesson tucked away in it’, very similar to the parables in the Gospels. No matter how we look on this novel, however, it would be very difficult to describe Golding’s lesson here as a hopeful one. For him, men are generally vicious, murderous and liable to extremes of self-degradation and animal behaviour. What most forcibly strikes us as we read this novel is Golding’s intuition that, at best, civilising conventions and rules are passing things, but that what endures is man’s wild irrationality and his destructive urges. A passing visit to Sky News or CNN or BBC News may confirm this for us on a daily basis! Who would choose to live in Aleppo in Syria or the many cities in Iraq who have been condemned to untold barbarity in recent times?
A realistic novel
Lord of the Flies has proved an extraordinary popular book, both from the point of view of general readership and among academics. Golding may have conceived his novel as an allegory, but he is also a master of realistic fiction, and the book has a striking impact on the generality of young readers, for whom it is, here in Ireland as well as in Britain, a widely prescribed school text. Golding was a teacher for a number of years, and has an instinctive understanding of, and feeling for, the characters and mannerisms of schoolboys. One of the striking features of his method is his success in presenting his young characters in terms of idiom and linguistic habit (compare the under-educated, ill-spoken Piggy in this respect with Ralph and Jack). The novel, for all its allegorical and symbolic overtones, is rooted firmly in real experience. Physical sensations are admirably and tellingly rendered; the discomforts, unpleasantness, delights and other sensations associated with life on the island are evoked with astonishing realism. The beautiful descriptions of island and sea are unforgettable. Golding’s continuous success with the depiction of the physical realities of life, the rootedness of the book in the solid earth, is perhaps its most memorable feature for younger readers, most of whom, it is safe to suggest, can approach it on a realistic level without bothering unduly about its allegorical implications or its status as a moral fable. Discussing the wider picture, the novel as fable or allegory or simply realistic novel with an eager English class, is one of the great joys and job satisfactions of the teacher of English Literature!
Symbolism
Academics have naturally tended to focus on the allegorical and symbolic features of the book, following Golding himself, who has strongly emphasised these in his critical comments. There are numerous examples of symbols in the novel. The shell or conch discovered by Ralph and Piggy has attracted a wide variety of such interpretations. It is most obviously to be regarded as a symbol of the forces in the boys striving to uphold civilised standards and values. The character of Simon attracts a good deal of symbolic weight also. The pig’s head covered in flies is a symbol or sign of Beelzebub, the Lord of the Flies. Simon’s hallucination of the monologue from the pig’s head is another symbolic feature. But whatever importance one may attach to such matters, the vital consideration is that most of the episodes which obviously attract symbolic interpretations also work most successfully at a realistic level, which adds to the great appeal of the novel.
Dream to nightmare
Golding has a remarkable gift for presenting abstract conceptions in compelling concrete terms. One of the themes of the book that particularly appeals to younger readers is that it enacts a powerfully imagined version of the dream that most children cherish at one time or another of escaping from the restraints of a society controlled by adults. What Golding does in Lord of the Flies is bring this dream to life. But what he also does is to turn the dream into a virtual nightmare. Escape from the stabilising forces of the adult world, instead of bringing about happiness, results in a riot of destructive individualism. At the beginning, there is a vague, unsatisfactory sense of kinship and comradeship: Ralph and Jack, the two ‘mighty opposites’ of the later parts of the novel, can, at the beginning, look at each other ‘with a shy liking’. The collapse of this sympathy, the breaking of most of the bonds of human kinship, is the stark reality which haunts Golding’s fable. And even when the outside world comes to the rescue at the conclusion of the novel it only brings further reminders of disorder and war with the finding of the dead airman and the arrival of an armed warship. There is little comfort, then, to be drawn from Golding’s dystopian novel: neither a ‘civilised’ environment nor the lack of it, seem to offer much hope of even limited perfection or happiness to human beings.
This novel, first published on this day, 16th July in 1951, by the enigmatic J. D. Salinger, belongs to a category of fiction made popular by writers as diverse as Dickens and Joyce. It is Bildungsroman, or novel about upbringing and education – a novel of maturation. The heroes of novels of this type are invariably young people or children seeking to find their identities and roles in the big bad world. Nineteenth-century examples are David Copperfield (1850) and Great Expectations (1861), both by Charles Dickens. The most famous twentieth-century example is James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916). Probably the most famous example from American fiction before Catcher in the Rye was the classic The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain. Many of these novels go far beyond the treatment of the educational development of the central figure, and concern themselves with profound spiritual and moral experiences.
The Catcher in the Rye is the story of the efforts of an adolescent American to relate to a grown-up world that he finds deeply flawed and fundamentally unsympathetic. The central figure, Holden Caulfield, leaves his boarding school and spends a weekend in New York City. Here he finds himself alone in what he sees as a grown-up world of corruption, unkindness and hypocrisy. The main theme of the novel is Holden’s resistance to growing up into this kind of world, which, as he sees it, undermines youthful innocence and integrity. The novel has no real plot. It consists mainly of the observations of Holden on his experiences, particularly on the ‘phoniness’ of those he encounters. His attempt to reconcile himself to the values of the adult world is a failure. He retreats from this failure into mental illness, and writes his story while under psychiatric treatment.
Resistance to loss of innocence
The title of the novel is a glance at Holden’s dream of protecting other, younger children from the curse of maturity, of saving such innocents before the world corrupts them. One of Robert Burns’s most famous songs has the line, ‘If a body meet a body coming through the rye’, Holden has misheard the words and thinks the line should go, ‘If a body catch a body coming through the rye’. He uses the mistaken version as a slogan for his own dream-activity. He will catch the innocent children who play in the ryefield because they are in danger of falling over the unseen edge of a cliff. His vision of his saving role is pathetic in its futility:
‘I thought it was “If a body catch a body”,’ I said. ‘Anyway, I keep picturing all these little kids playing some game in this big field of rye and all. Thousands of little kids, and nobody’s around – nobody big, I mean – except me. And I’m standing on the edge of some crazy cliff. What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff – I mean if they’re running and they don’t look where they’re going. I have to come from somewhere and catch them. That’s all I’d do all day. I’d just be the catcher in the rye and all. I know it’s crazy, but that’s the only thing I’d really like to be. I know it’s crazy.’
An uncaring adult world
Part of Holden’s depression arises from his awareness of himself as an innocent abroad in a world of phoney values, a world which, like Holden himself, needs love but does not know where to find it. It is, in many of its manifestations, a world that believes that it can get on without love, or even without decency. What passes for love in the adult world through which he moves is little better than selfish exploitation. Most of those with whom he comes in contact are crudely dismissive of him and his concerns (the taxi-drivers, for example), try to exploit him for money, like the offensive pimp in the hotel, or seem ready to abuse him sexually, like Antolini, his former schoolmaster, to whom he turns in desperate need for help and advice. It is not surprising that Holden cannot form a viable or stable relationship with adult society. That society cannot give him the love and affection for which he craves. These values seem to be associated in his mind with two things: death and the innocence that disappeared with the loss of childhood.
The death-motif and its association with love appear from time to time in Holden’s references to his much-loved brother, whose death from leukemia has blighted his family. His longing to preserve innocence in a world given over to destroying it makes him the idealist who rubs obscenities off walls so that small girls will not have to see them. In The Catcher in the Rye, Salinger, who clearly approves of his hero, raises fundamental questions about man’s inhuman treatment of his fellow-men. What, we are forced to ask, makes New York an abode of indifferent, uncaring individuals? Is the answer to be found in some radical flaw at the heart of human nature, or in society? The novel suggests that human nature is not primarily to blame for the sufferings which Holden and others like him have to endure. Salinger conveys a sense that the world is populated by fallible, foolish, pompous, careless, morally weak individuals rather than by evil ones, and that human beings are potentially loving and joyful if only society will permit them to satisfy these basic longings. It was this aspect of The Catcher in the Rye that caused it to appeal most widely to a generation of American students in the nineteen-fifties. As Anthony Burgess has pointed out, the novel was,
‘a symptom of a need, after a ghastly war and during a ghastly peace, for the young to raise a voice of protest against what the adult world was doing, or failing to do’.
Holden’s depression
The Catcher in the Rye has a single unifying theme: the nervous breakdown or intensifying depression of a sixteen-year-old boy. The progress of Holden’s psychiatric illness is chronicled not from its origins but through its critical phase. This is done with remarkable understanding of how depression actually works, and how it affects behaviour and the processes of thought. Salinger is particularly impressive in his handling of the correlation between depressive illness and physical symptoms. As his depression intensifies, Holden experiences psychosomatic symptoms, which feature a morbid fear of painful death (‘I figured I’d be dead in a couple of months because I had cancer’) and much physical distress (‘The thing is, if you get very depressed about something, it’s hard as hell to swallow’). What we learn about him from his own narrative of his life makes his depressed state comprehensible enough. The death of his much-loved brother Allie from leukaemia is one major influence on his mental and emotional states, leaving him with a grievance against the unfairness of things. His emotional difficulties are not eased by his relationship with his parents. His mother has been depressed since Allie’s death, and is not a positive force in his life, while his father, preoccupied with being successful, never discusses problems with him.
Holden is thus deprived of the parental guidance every adolescent needs. His lack of emotional stability is not surprising. The boarding school to which he is sent is no substitute for his parents. His primary need is for the kind of understanding and sympathy that will see him through a difficult period in his life. Whenever he seeks this from his acquaintances he is rebuffed or ignored. As he ruefully remarks, Stradlater is not interested in a person’s ‘lousy childhood’, while Ackley will respond only if yelled at. Both Ackley and Stradlater make little of the few achievements that might give Holden some badly needed self-confidence and self-esteem. When Holden puts a heartfelt question to his history instructor (‘Everybody goes through phases and all, don’t they?’), the latter cannot answer him. His old girl-friend Sally Hayes can do no better than the others in providing the understanding he needs if he is to keep depression at bay. Carl Luce, an ex-schoolmate now at Columbia University, responds coldly and unfeelingly to Holden’s plea for help in sorting out his mental and emotional confusion, callously advising him to see a psychiatrist.
As a final despairing gesture, Holden turns to a man he respects, his teacher Mr. Antolini. The latter can help him no more than the others could. He lectures him at length, but fails to notice how deeply disturbed he is. At this stage, Holden is at breaking-point, descending to deeper levels of depression, while Antolini is telling him that an academic education will give him an idea what size of mind he has. Salinger provides some obvious pointers to Holden’s lack of mental stability in his numerous self-contradictions. Our hero tells Antolini, for example, that a teacher at Pencey, ‘was intelligent and all, but you could tell he didn’t have too much brains’. He also claims that there were a couple of classes he didn’t attend for a while, but that he didn’t cut any. The outcome of the episode with Antolini is that Holden is more depressed than ever. Convinced that society has finally failed him, he decides to run away and pretend to be a deaf mute, so avoiding, ‘any goddam stupid useless conversations with anybody’. He will make no further efforts to gain the understanding of other people, and will renounce the ‘phoney’ world.
Phoebe, an agent of redemption
If he is to be redeemed from his hopelessly depressed state, this must now be through the voluntary, unsolicited intervention of somebody else. His sister Phoebe becomes the agent of his redemption from total despair. When Phoebe insists on running away with him, he comes to the conclusion that he cannot take responsibility for her, and decides that he must go home, not for his own sake, but for hers. This gesture of submission is rewarded with a fleeting spell of intense happiness, lovingly described. The sight of Phoebe going round and round on the carousel fills him with inexplicable joy and tranquility, although the contradictory account of how he fares in the rain is a sinister indication of his confused mental state:
‘My hunting hat really gave me quite a lot of protection, in a way, but I got soaked anyway. I didn’t care, though. I felt so damn happy all of a sudden, the way old Phoebe kept going round and round. I was damn near bawling. I felt so damn happy, if you want to know the truth. I don’t know why. It was just that she looked so damn nice, the way she kept going round and round, in her blue coat and all. I wish you could’ve been there’.
After his painful quest, involving disappointment, frustration, bitterness, depression and disillusionment, Holden has at last found something beautiful in a world he has so often condemned as ‘phoney’. This does not necessarily mean that he novel has a happy ending. We know that the carousel will have to stop, and Holden and his sister will have to return to the world from which all his instincts have been urging him to escape. The best things that life has to offer him are the few fleeting moments of exaltation he has experienced watching Phoebe on the carousel.
Holden’s distorted view of the world.
The Catcher in the Rye is often read as a sympathetic account of a good-natured, sensitive boy confronted by a cruel, dishonest world, populated by freaks, exploiters and phoneys. The following is typical of his view of other people:
I was surrounded by jerks. I’m not kidding. At this other tiny table, right to my left, was this funny-looking guy and this funny-looking girl.
It is clear from the novel that Salinger likes Holden and expects his readers to like him, but the question must be asked, how likable is he? Does he deserve to be taken at his own valuation as an idealist who suffers at the hands of others? Are we to applaud his trenchant exposures of virtually all those who cross his path?
The presentation of Holden involves an obvious paradox: the childlike idealist with the vulnerable, sensitive nature can appear heartless and cruel in his comments on almost everybody else. There is the curious fact that although he is constantly protesting against the phoniness of almost everybody else, he himself is far from exempt from this fault. In this context, phoniness means hypocrisy, empty, insincere moralising and fraudulent attitudes and behaviour. It is true that Holden is upset by such things; as he puts it, they cause him to ‘puke’. The only people he can think of as being free from phoniness are his sister Phoebe, the two nuns he meets in the sandwich bar, and children in general. Were he also to look more closely at himself, he would have to acknowledge that he shares the qualities he condemns in others. He often tells lies, often pretends to be someone he is not, and can be quite bitter in his comments on his friends, while at the same time pleading for charity and kindness towards himself.
The key to Holden’s character is his mental confusion. This shows itself particularly in his inability to see people and their activities in proportion. Again, his lack of a proper sense of proportion expresses itself in an outrageously exaggerated habit of speaking. By referring to almost everybody and everything in grossly inflated language, he can make relatively innocuous circumstances sound wicked and dangerous.
It is not enough for him to describe a woman who sits next to him at the cinema as the slightly inconsiderate person she is; he feels obliged to describe her as being ‘about as kind-hearted as a goddam wolf’. He doesn’t like Ossenburger the undertaker, and takes exception to the man’s religious inclinations. His dislike vents itself in great crude fantasies in which Ossenburger features as a monstrous fraud who shoves corpses into a sack and dumps them in the river, who prays fervently to Jesus to send him more corpses and who bores a captive audience with ‘about fifty corny jokes’. He describes places and their atmospheres in the same wildly exaggerated fashion, particularly when their impact on him is unfavourable. A hotel lobby cannot seem merely stale-smelling to him; it must convey the impression of ‘fifty million dead cigars’. No wonder Phoebe tells him, ‘You don’t like anything that’s happening.’ This is because his view of reality is hopelessly distorted; his depressed state makes him so utterly negative about experience that he cannot see that even the worst people and situations have some redeeming qualities.
One of Ireland’s most widely read authors John McGahern was born on November 12th, 1934. The family lived in Leitrim until his mother’s death in 1945, when they moved to their father’s home at the police barracks in Cootehall, County Roscommon. In his early twenties McGahern worked as a teacher and wrote an unpublished novel, The End and the Beginning of Love. His first published novel, The Barracks (1963), won the AE Memorial Award and earned him an Arts Council Macauley Fellowship. His next novel, The Dark (1965), was widely praised and drew comparisons to James Joyce, but it also offended the Archbishop of Dublin and the state censor, who banned the book and he was also sacked from his teaching position.
He refused, however, to capitalise on this notoriety, instead continuing to publish quietly. Three novels followed – The Leavetaking (1974), The Pornographer (1979), and Amongst Women (1990; winner of the Irish Times Award and short-listed for the Booker Prize). McGahern’s four volumes of short stories were published in The Collected Stories in 1992.
His final novel That They May Face the Rising Sun (published in the United States as By the Lake) is an elegiac portrait of a year in the life of a rural lakeside community. McGahern himself lived on a lakeshore and drew on his own experiences whilst writing the book. Lyrically written, it explores the meaning in prosaic lives. He claimed that “the ordinary fascinates me” and “the ordinary is the most precious thing in life”. The main characters have – just like McGahern and his second wife, Madeline Green – returned from London to live on a farm. Most of the violence of the father-figure has disappeared now, and life in the country seems much more relaxed and prosperous than in The Dark or Amongst Women.
During his writing career, he served as a visiting professor at Colgate University and the University of Victoria, British Columbia, and he was writer-in-residence at Trinity College, Dublin in 1989. He died from cancer in the Mater Hospital in Dublin on 30 March 2006, aged 71. He is buried in St Patrick’s Church Aughawillan alongside his mother.
Historical and Literary Background
This novel is set in Ireland in the years following the Irish War of Independence. We hear references to reviving Monaghan Day, which is obviously a tradition of the time. The story is set in the country and outlines the position of the family of the time. It may be worth mentioning that Patrick Kavanagh’s The Great Hunger was written about rural life in Ireland about this time also. Are there any similarities between Moran and the character of Paddy Maguire?
During these years, post War of Independence and pre World War II, McGahern tells us family bonds were strong. The Moran family is united, in spite of their father’s erratic temperament. Luke is the only exception to this happy picture of family solidarity.
Women married securely in this society. Secure jobs such as the civil service were recommended. Study at the university was not financially possible for Sheila. The profession of doctor is also not acceptable within this family because the doctors had emerged as the bigwigs in the country that Moran had fought for during the war.
We also see the faithful practice of the rosary. This is a prayer that is said by the family every night. Moran makes use of this to assert his dominance over the family while refusing to face his own shortcomings.
One of Moran’s big fears is being poor. For this reason he is miserly with money and even though he eventually gets two pensions he still exerts a tight control over the finances. He also takes pride in the land he owns. He uses the land as a refuge, many times escaping from the house to work furiously at hay-making or reaping whenever he loses control of himself.
At the end, on his death, Moran is given the typical Republican burial with the tricolour draped over his coffin. (Check the front cover of the novel!)
Dr. John McGahern by Zaan Claassens
THE STORY
The story is based on the Moran family who live in Mohill, Co. Leitrim. The house is called Great Meadow. The story is told in flashback and is framed at beginning and end with Moran in a depressed state and wishing for death. Moran is an old Republican who was a guerrilla leader in the War of Independence. His wife is dead and he is left to bring up their five children; three girls and two boys. Luke is the oldest and he has gone to work in London because he will not tolerate his father’s violent behaviour. Moran can never forget the authority he wielded during the war and tries to behave in the same way within his household. He continually uses the rosary to regain control and power over his family. Moran marries a girl called Rose Brady when he is beginning to get old. Initially Rose is very idealistic about the marriage, but she soon discovers the true nature of Moran and his capacity for violence and dark moods.
Rose is a very selfless person who clearly loves Moran in spite of his strong character and difficult temperament. She encourages the girls to become independent and achieve the best they can in life. Maggie settles in London and eventually marries, as does Sheila. Mona gets a good job in the civil service and remains single. Michael, the youngest, leaves and marries. Luke’s refusal to return to Great Meadow, the family home, frustrates and angers Moran greatly. All the rest of the family visit him regularly in spite of the fact that he has been domineering and violent. They are all happy together and have learned to accept Moran’s peculiar temperament. Moran dies at the conclusion. Everyone except Luke turns up at his funeral and acclaim him as a truly great and heroic man
LITERARY GENRE
This is a novel of social realism, which is written in the third person omniscient narrative voice. It can, therefore, be classed as a social document that is set in Ireland in the period following the War of Independence. There are no official chapters; the narrative is broken into sections separated by a short space. Much of the story is told through dialogue, which gives a vivid insight into the various characters. The first section is written towards the conclusion of the story when Moran becomes sick. The rest of the story gives an extended account in flashback about the life of the Moran family in Great Meadow.
There is a great similarity between Amongst Women and William Shakespeare’s great tragedy, King Lear. By insisting that each of his daughters proclaim her love for him to win her share of his kingdom, Lear sets in motion a plot that reveals the complex dynamic at work among an elderly patriarch and his three daughters. Like King Lear, Amongst Women investigates the love between a father and his children, the struggle to maintain strength in advancing age, and the difficulty of negotiating between independence and an identity tied to family roots.
THEMES AND ISSUES
There are a number of themes and issues raised in the novel. The main themes dealt with here are:
Power/Control/Patriarchy
The Family
The Role of Women
Power/Control/Patriarchy
Moran has been a guerrilla fighter in the War of Independence. He never got used to the failure of that war, and so he tries all his life to master his family and dominate them. It is only when he feels he is in control and the centre of things that he can manage to deal with issues in life. Much of his power is achieved through violence and physical abuse. He also uses the rosary as a weapon to establish his control in the house. When he marries Rose Brady things change slowly but subtly. He verbally abuses her several times but her firm reaction chastens him and shows him the need for self-control. When there are difficulties with young Michael who begins to drink and womanise, Moran threatens to use physical violence to control him, as he had once done with Luke. Michael runs away to England and gets a job. Moran is left on his own with Rose and simply becomes more introverted and depressed. As an old man he loses the ability to exert control through his mood swings and violence. He changes and writes a letter of apology to his oldest son Luke who has left him a long time ago.
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Amongst Women can be seen as a critique of patriarchy. McGahern connects nationalism, Catholicism and patriarchy in an unholy trinity. In the novel McGahern is turning away from the Big House novel, that had played such a big part in earlier Irish fiction, to what might be termed the small house novel, portraying rural Catholic family life. In the novel death frames the novel, but the intervening narrative is an extended flashback to family life in Great Meadow with Moran bestriding his little kingdom as a crusty, would-be Colossus. The relationship between him and his wife and children is the principal focus of this plotless novel. The focus is on scenes in which some or all of the family are assembled and the narrative moves in and out of the consciousness of various members of the group. In this novel, for the first time in his writing, the subject of patriarchy assumes a central theme.
‘Only women could live with Daddy,’ Moran’s alienated son, Luke, comments, and the novel, to some extent, endorses this viewpoint. Moran is first encountered ‘amongst women’, an ailing old man fussed over by his wife and three daughters. The theme of the relationship between power and gender is announced in the opening sentence. Moran’s physical weakness has transformed relations between him and his womenfolk to one of fear on his part and dominance on theirs. However, even at his most physically incapacitated, Moran has still not lost his hold over his daughters: he ‘was so implanted in their lives, that they had never left Great Meadow’ (p.1).
The narrative pulse of Amongst Women is one of homecoming and leave-taking: welcomes and farewells at the train station; cars turning in the open gate of Great Meadow under the poisonous yew; children leaving home to embark on their adult lives, all but one drawn back with increasing frequency as the years pass; happy family reunions and the sad final reunion at Moran’s funeral. Initially the rhythm is homecoming, and the verb ‘come’ is repeated seven times on the first page. The reader is being drawn into this world where Moran is at the centre. By the end of the second paragraph we have been introduced to its setting and principal characters: the ‘once powerful’ Moran, his second wife, Rose, his three daughters, Maggie, Mona, and Sheila, his younger son, Michael, and the eldest, Luke, distinguished from the rest by his refusal to come back to Great Meadow.
Patriarchy in Amongst Women can be seen to derive to a great extent from patriotism. Moran is the hero of the War of Independence, who has failed to make a successful career in the Irish army in peacetime, directs his frustrated drive for power into a diminished form of home rule. His status as a former guerrilla fighter is repeatedly emphasised at the outset by the device of juxtaposing two episodes which celebrate his youthful exploits as leader of a flying column, thereby ensuring that all his subsequent conduct is ‘placed’ in the light of this wartime experience. Monaghan Day, a fair day in late February when he received an annual visit from McQuaid, his former lieutenant, and the two reminisced over their youthful heroics, is Moran’s equivalent of Remembrance Day. The novel opens with his daughters’ revival of Monaghan Day when Moran is old and ill. On this occasion he deglamourises his role as freedom fighter and refers to his flying column as ‘a bunch of killers’ (p.5). That he has never lost his own killer instinct is demonstrated next morning when he rises from his sickbed to shoot a jackdaw. His targets may have diminished, but he is still prepared to resort to violence to assert his limited power. The incident rather pathetically demonstrates his present impotence, yet he himself uses it to illustrate his connection between intimacy and mastery:
The closest I ever got to any man was when I had him in the sights of my rifle and I never missed. (p.7)
Moran is at pains to tell his wife and daughters that his flying column did not shoot women or children, treating both categories as minors or inferiors.
Beginning on P. 8 we are given another flashback to the last Monaghan Day. In this episode Moran’s bullying of his teenage daughters is contrasted with his inability to gain power over McQuaid. He terrorises his daughters, so that in his presence they ‘sink into a beseeching drabness, cower as close to being invisible’ (p.8) as possible, but it is obvious now that his power does not extend outside his own family. McQuaid, who has long outstripped Moran in terms of worldly achievement, is happy to indulge in war memories for an evening, but he is unwilling to perpetuate his former role of junior officer. His visit brings something of the secular, commercial outlook of modern Ireland into the pious, traditional world of Great Meadow. Here again the rhythms of arrival and departure are evident as the annual ritual of Monaghan Day is brought to an end with McQuaid’s abrupt exit. Henceforth, the cars that turn ‘into the open gate under the yew tree’ will convey returning Morans. From here on Great Meadow becomes a house hospitable only to its own family.
As has been said already, Amongst Women offers a penetrating critique of patriarchy. McGahern goes even further and shows that patriarchy as a refuge of the socially ill-adjusted and emotionally immature man and asks probing questions about the cult of family. Moran has transformed his inadequacies into a show of strength by making his home his castle. Denied a role as founding father in the Irish state he sets up his own dominion. Actually, Great Meadow, bought with his redundancy pay from the army, should be a monument to Moran’s failure to live up to his youthful promise. Though it is not an ancestral home it becomes, under his regime, a family seat, more cut off from the life of the surrounding village than any Big House. Because of an inability to relate to his fellow-villagers, Moran turns his family into a closed community and the absence of any outside contacts further strengthens his own paternal supremacy. He successfully indoctrinates his children with the idea that such reclusiveness denotes exclusiveness, that to be ‘proud’ and ‘separate’ is a mark of distinction, to be friendly and extroverted a sign of commonness. House and family are connected in exhortations to his daughters: ‘Be careful never to do anything to let yourselves or the house down.’ (p. 82). He thus forges an association between family and farmstead, roots his children in a ‘perpetual place’. As the founder of a new dynasty Moran acts as if he were self-propagated and never refers to his own parents. His cult of family does not include any filial loyalties which might conflict with the prior claim of being a Moran of Great Meadow, so he actively discourages his wife’s visits to her family home.
Moran’s family is an extension, a ‘larger version’ of himself. When he promotes the values of home and family he is obliquely bolstering his own self-importance. The ‘good of the family’ provides him with a virtuous, unselfish motivation for suiting himself. When he is about to remarry, for instance, he tells his daughter Maggie that he is doing so in the best interests of the family, though it has just been revealed to the reader that his only motive is his own future welfare. He also repeatedly stresses that all his children are equal, further emphasising his own unique superiority. The ex-officer promotes esprit de corps, though his theatre of operations is a hayfield and not a battlefield: ‘Together we can do anything.’ Such affirmation of solidarity and de-emphasising of individual differences serve to bind the family into ‘something very close to a single presence.’
In view of the novel’s critique of patriarchy it is interesting to note the effect this has on his daughters at the end of the novel. Turning the page at the end of the novel, we are given a glimpse of what ‘becoming Daddy’ means. A reversal of gender roles takes place as brother and husbands, seen from a patriarchal perspective, are transformed into wives. It is obvious that Moran’s honorary male daughters have inherited his contempt for the feminine, which they associate with levity and amusement:
‘Will you look at the men. They’re more like a crowd of women,’ Sheila said, remarking on the slow frivolity of their pace. ‘The way Michael, the skit, is getting Sean and Mark to laugh you’d think they were coming from a dance’ (p. 184)
Their exclusiveness as Morans of Great Meadow is such that it does not even embrace their own husbands and children.
It is also worthwhile to consider here the links between Catholicism and patriarchy. These links are forged in the novel by its most repetitive narrative ritual and the family prayer from which it derives its title. Moran’s devotion to the rosary is explained on familial and patriarchal grounds. ‘The family that prays together stays together,’ he observes, quoting the Rosary-crusader priest, Father Peyton. As in many Irish homes, (in the past?) the rosary in the Moran household is a public prayer that reinforces a hierarchical social structure: it is presided over by the head of the family and the five decades are allocated from eldest to youngest in descending order of importance. Though the rosary repeatedly pronounces Mary as ‘Blessed … amongst women’, because she was chosen to be the mother of Christ, in the Moran household, the character, blessed amongst women, is Moran himself. He even manages to die ‘amongst women’, since his son Michael is temporarily absent! The Rosary is peculiarly identified with Moran and it is a very clever device used by McGahern to emphasise the narrative repetitiveness, which is a feature of this novel. Over and over again the newspapers are spread on the floor, Moran spills his beads from his little black purse, and all kneel in prayer. The stability conferred by ritual and repeated phraseology underscores the disruptions and changes that the passage of time brings to Great Meadow.
Yet we should not be over negative in our assessment of Moran and his little kingdom. He does exhibit some inherent attractive qualities. Indeed his portrait is the most imaginatively generous picture of a father in McGahern’s many novels and short stories. He radiates enormous energy and this surely can be seen as a redeeming feature. He also shows great anguish for the son who is lost to him and he also shows a certain bafflement and frustration in the face of oncoming death. In particular he is associated with the annual haymaking, an activity shared by the whole family. From distant London or Dublin, Great Meadow in summer appears a therapeutic, pastoral world: ‘The remembered light on the empty hayfields would grow magical, the green shade of the beeches would give out a delicious coolness as they tasted again the sardines between slices of bread: when they were away the house would become the summer light and shade above their whole lives’ (p.85). Such memories turn Moran’s children into true Romantics, sustained ‘amid the din of town and cities’ by images of their fatherland.
Therefore, McGahern manages to balance the attractive and the repellent aspects of patriarchy in this novel. The glorious revolution that brought about the Irish State is so remote by the time of Moran’s death that the fellow revolutionary who tends to the faded tricolour on the coffin seems as old as Fionn or Oisín. Nevertheless, the legacy of the War of Independence, seen by some as a triumphalist, masculine ethic of dominance, has been passed on to the next generation.
Irish people everywhere seem to have an often inexplicable affection for their country, whether they be urban, suburban, rural or living in Boston. This love for ‘the ould sod’ is turned on its head here in this novel in McGahern’s examination of home, farm and fatherland. Idyllic though Great Meadow often appears, access to it involves passing under ‘the poisonous yew.’
The Family
In Amongst Women we see the powerful bond of the family and how it can withstand so many difficulties. Even though Moran is stubborn and mercurial in temperament, the family remain strongly bound together. Together they feel invincible in the face of the outside world, and when they gather together at Great Meadow, each member feels bound by this strong family unit.
The novel pulls us into a tight family circle with its first sentence – ‘As he weakened, Moran became afraid of his daughters’ (p.1). A ‘once powerful man’ (p.1), Michael Moran was an officer in the Irish War of Independence in the 1920’s. He was intelligent, fierce and deadly, but like many soldiers after a war, he felt displaced, unwilling to continue in the military during peacetime and unable to make a good living in any other way. ‘The war was the best part of our lives,’ Moran asserts. ‘Things were never so simple and clear again’ (p.6). While the army provided the security of structure, rules, and clear lines of power, Moran’s life after the war has consisted of raising two sons and three daughters on a farm and scraping out a living with hard manual labour. A widower, Moran confuses his identity with the communal identity of his family in a gesture that divides and conquers. Moran’s daughters are ‘a completed world’ separate from ‘the tides of Dublin and London’ (p.2). As such, he can control them, as when he discourages one from accepting a university scholarship. No longer powerful, Moran is repeatedly described as withdrawing into himself ‘and that larger self of family’ (p.12) in order to channel his aggressions into a shrunken realm he attempts to control. He can be tender with his children, but he also berates and beats them. His adjustment from guerrilla fighter to father is never complete, and the question of how to maintain authority over children while allowing them room to grow is central to the novel.
Nowhere is this struggle between dependence and independence more pronounced than in the character of Luke, the oldest son who runs away from Moran’s overbearing authority, never to return. Rejecting his father, Ireland, and all of the violence and provincialism he associates with both, Luke flees to England. He ignores all but one of Moran’s many letters, and he doesn’t return to Ireland except at the end of the novel when his sister gets married. ‘Please don’t do anything to upset Daddy,’ one of the sisters pleads, typically trying to placate her father. ‘Of course not I won’t exist today,’ Luke replies (p.152). His best weapon against Moran’s control is absence. Whereas the daughters, ‘like a shoal of fish moving within a net’ (p.79), find individuality painful compared to the protection of their familial identity, Luke gains strength in departure. ‘I left Ireland a long time ago’ (p.155), Luke announces gravely. As it does for Stephen Dedalus in James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, life in Ireland seems like imprisonment.
‘I’m afraid we might all die in Ireland if we don’t get out fast’ (p.155-156), says Moran’s younger son, Michael. Like other Irish writers, McGahern asks whether exile offers the only hope for freedom and individuality. How does the political turmoil which has long suffused Irish history affect the smaller unit of the family? How do other elements of Irish life contribute to familial dysfunction? In the claustrophobic world McGahern portrays, escape proves sustaining for a character like Luke, but it is not an unequivocal good. Luke is strong but cruel like his father. His sisters, on the other hand, not only fail to break away from the family, but by the time of their father’s death, ‘each of them in their different ways had become Daddy’ (p.183). Their identification with and loyalty to Moran threatens to subsume them, but it also gives them a kind of strength, as Michael seems to understand: ‘In the frail way that people assembled themselves he, like the girls, looked to Great Meadow for recognition, for a mark of his continuing existence’ (p.147).
The Role of Women
(This theme has obviously to be examined in the light of what has already been said about Patriarchy.)
With the exception of Moran and his young son Michael, this story centres on many women characters. Rose Brady is the main character who makes life bearable for everyone in Great Meadow. At every stage she is deeply loyal to Moran and never allows herself to criticise him or his fickle actions in front of the others. She loves him deeply and when he treats her badly she is quick to assert her rights. She does this in a quiet but strong way. She becomes a strong moral power in the house, and through this strength she manages to control Moran and get him to change his bad temperament subtly.
When Moran marries Rose it is obvious that he never intended a marriage of equals. She is to serve as a loyal and devoted second in command and at some future date, when his children have departed, to become his sole subordinate. Rose, a woman in her late thirties at the time of her marriage, is ideally suited to the role of compliant wife and surrogate mother. Her previous profession has been that of valued servant: a children’s nursemaid, and the valet her former master would have chosen had his wife permitted it. She has acquired the social skills that please employers, learned to indulge their whims. That she is good at ironing takes on a metaphorical significance, since she has spent much of her married life ‘smoothing’ out household difficulties. She is attracted by Moran’s aloofness and, ironically, she sees marriage as an opportunity to become mistress of her own establishment. For all his local notoriety as a strategist in the war, Moran doesn’t seem to be able to exercise much control in the matter of his marriage. He is continually out-manoeuvred by Rose, who mounts a shrewd, tactical campaign to get her way when he would prefer to retreat or delay.
Once married, Rose proves to be an angel of the house: a kind, caring, capable homemaker, whose warmth and good humour contrast sharply with Moran’s sudden rages and unpredictable mood swings. Her genuine interest in each child’s welfare contrasts with Moran’s inability to value his children’s individual identity and autonomy. However, it must be said that Rose colludes in perpetuating Moran’s patriarchal regime. She is unfailingly loyal to him and she refuses to entertain his children’s criticism of his petulant behaviour. In his children’s presence she always refers to Moran as ‘Daddy’, the title by which he himself insists that they address him.
Rose’s strategy is to become indispensable to the household. The tea-ceremony on her first evening is very revealing of the future status quo. She takes on the role of a kind of superior servant, co-opting the girls as helpers, and humouring her disgruntled husband by treating him ‘like a lord’:
Rose and the girls smiled as the tea and the plates circled around him. They were already conspirators. They were mastered and yet they were controlling together what they were mastered by. (p.46)
Later on this is viewed in a more negative way:
Then, like a shoal of fish moving within a net, Rose and the girls started to clear the table. (p. 79)
Here the women are seen as victims, trapped in the tense atmosphere which Moran generates. A shift in power relations has occurred and Rose is no longer in control. Her status is now equal with that of Moran’s children.
The power struggle between Rose and her husband centres on two episodes. In the first he is compelled to apologise and she is rewarded with a mini-honeymoon, but she has been made aware of his ‘darkness’ and decides to concentrate her strategy on diverting his attacks – cutting him off at the pass, so to speak. In the second episode he embarks on a prolonged campaign to crush her and she attempts to conciliate and pacify him, until she discovers that she can ‘give up no more ground and live’ (p.71). Her tactic now is to threaten to leave him, a shrewd stroke; since she knows that Moran is already obsessed with Luke’s departure. This power struggle between the two is several times alluded to in military terms. It is a ‘hidden battle’ from which she, apparently, emerges victorious, her objective having been to ensure her ‘place in the house could never be attacked or threatened again’ (p73). What she has settled for, however, is the limited right to be treated like a member of Moran’s family, to swim like a fish in his net.
Moran’s daughters adapt to life by avoiding confrontation. Indeed, there seem to be very limited options in counteracting Moran’s dominance. Compliance, continual confrontation, or departure are the three choices facing Moran’s household. The strategy of the womenfolk, at least, is to ‘slip away’ or try to appear invisible. Such evasion is a tactical manoeuvre, a recognition of their own defencelessness. Beneath their cringing exterior, Mona and Sheila each conceals a forceful character. Mona is ‘unnaturally acquiescent’, ‘full of hidden violence’; Sheila, even as a young child, knows better than ‘to challenge authority on poor ground’. They bide their time until their jobs in the Civil Service set them free from Moran’s daily oppression, though Sheila comes near to confrontation before surrendering her opportunity to attend university. They show their attitude to parental domination in their advice to Michael, to make the best of it until he has finished school and is in a position to choose a career of his own.
In view of their unhappy childhood why do Moran’s children, with the exception of Luke, turn Great Meadow into a place of pilgrimage and their father into a cult figure? What McGahern presents in Amongst Women is the charisma of patriarchy, which consists in its exercise of sole and absolute authority, the power to approve or disapprove, endorse or withdraw support, affirm or reject, and thereby, to nurture an emotional dependency. Though in their last years at home, the Moran children flourish under Rose’s benign dispensation, their primary relationship is with their father. Because his second marriage does not occur until his daughters are in their teens, Rose’s advent does not alter Moran’s status as a dominant single parent, the permanent emotional focus of their lives. They never allude to their dead mother, and the novel ignores the ‘umbilical debt’, according her no influence whatever on their upbringing.
A large part of the fascination the handsome Moran holds for Rose and for his daughters is sexual. Rose loves him; his daughters also experience an ‘oedipal’ attachment. He is their ‘first man’. He looks on their husbands and male friends as rivals and is content when these prove ‘no threat’ to his primal place in their affections. Neither Maggie nor Sheila marry dominant men, and Mona resists marriage altogether. Sheila is the only one to violate this ‘incestuous’ relationship with her father when she leaves him in the hayfield to go indoors and makes love to Sean.
As the novel ends the reader’s sympathies are drawn towards the ailing and dying Moran, so that we share the family’s grief at his death. His corpse is taken to the church on a ‘heartbreakingly lovely May evening’ and buried on a morning when the ‘Plains were bathed in sunshine’ and ‘the unhoused cattle were grazing greedily on the early grass’ (p.182). The sadness of this final parting from the fertile spring world is rendered all the more poignant by the baffled love Moran experiences for his own land in old age. He is shown walking it, ‘field by blind field’, ‘like a blind man trying to see’. In his last month he repeatedly escapes from his sickbed to stare at the beauty of his meadow. At the end of his life Moran eventually arrives at a deep appreciation of the ‘amazing glory he is part of’ (p.179). Maybe this final epiphany is the blessing he always craved and was unable to receive, a blessing hinted at in the name Rose?
John McGahern, oil on canvas, by Barrie Cooke, 1997/8.
GENERAL VISION AND VIEWPOINT
This is a realistic novel, which traces the history of an Irish rural family in the early twentieth century. McGahern focuses on one family and one house and we follow the subtle changes that take place in the comings and goings of various members of the family. He has created a microcosm in Great Meadow from which to view and comment on the changes which have come about after the War of Independence. Even though there is a timeless quality to the novel and no dates are mentioned we are being asked to pass judgement on the new State that has emerged and was beginning to find its feet under the influence of the 1937 Constitution. De Valera’s vision of this New Ireland eulogised the role of women as mothers and home-makers and he painted an idealised picture of life in the Irish countryside:
A land whose countryside would be bright with cosy homesteads, whose fields and villages would be joyous with sounds of industry, the romping of sturdy children, the contests of athletic youths, the laughter of comely maidens; whose firesides would be the forums of the wisdom of serene old age.
McGahern in Leitrim and Kavanagh in Monaghan both knew that the realities of life for poor, farm families were radically different from this version offered by de Valera.
McGahern shows that the power of family bonds to withstand all difficulties is clearly evident throughout every aspect of this story. At the centre of this story is Moran and his wielding of mesmeric power over his children but it obvious also that Rose Brady is truly the moral centre of the novel. It is she who silently manages to improve things within the Moran household, and by doing this she controls a good deal of the violence latent in Moran. It is her undoubted love and loyalty to Moran and her spirit of self-sacrifice in the household, which creates this extraordinary bond of strength which each of the members feel among themselves.
The implication at the conclusion is that Moran’s family is stronger than ever in their love and allegiance to one another. They truly recognise that Moran played a central part in all their lives. Their attendance at his funeral strengthens this bond between them even more. They realise that each one of them, in different ways, has truly imbibed Moran’s beliefs and values. They remain loyal to his person and beliefs in spite of everything. Only Luke remains obstinate in his decision not to return home – a reminder that even he has inherited a great deal of stubbornness and pride from his father.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Sampson, Denis. 1993, Outstaring Nature’s Eye – The Fiction of John McGahern. The Lilliput Press, Dublin.
Quinn, Antoinette. 1991, A Prayer For My Daughters: Patriarchy in Amongst Women in The Canadian Journal of Irish Studies (Special Issue on John McGahern), Volume 17, Number 1, July, 1991
Read also ‘Close Analysis of John McGahern’s ‘That They May Face the Rising Sun’here
The title that Steinbeck finally chose for his novel emphasises the unpredictable nature of existence as well as its promise, George and Lennie’s blasted dream to ‘live of the fatta the lan’. Taken from a poem by Robert Burns, the Scottish poet, the novel’s title suggests the transitory quality of even ‘best laid schemes’. Burns’s poem tells of an unfortunate field mouse whose home is flattened by a plough:
But Mousie, thy art no thy lane,
In proving foresight may be vain:
The best laid schemes o’ mice an’ men
Gang aft a-gley
An’ lea’e us nought but grief an’ pain
For promised joy.
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CHARACTER PROFILES
GEORGE: George is the story’s main protagonist, a small, quick man with well-defined features. A migrant ranch worker, George dreams of one day saving enough money to buy his own place and be his own boss, living off the land. The hindrance to his objective is his mentally handicapped companion, Lennie, with whom he has travelled and worked since Lennie’s Aunt Clara, whom George knew, died. The majority of George’s energy is devoted to looking after Lennie, whose blunders prevent George from working toward his dream, or even living the life of a normal rancher. Thus, George’s conflict arises in Lennie, to whom he has the ties of long-time companionship that he so often yearns to break in order to live the life of which he dreams. This tension strains George into demonstrating various emotions, ranging from anger to patience to sadness to pride and to hope.
LENNIE: George’s companion, the source of the novel’s conflict. Lennie, enormous, ungainly, and mentally slow, is George’s polar opposite both mentally and physically. Lennie’s ignorance and innocence and helplessness, his childish actions, such as his desire to pet soft things, contrast his physical bulk, making him likeable to readers. Although devoid of cruel intentions, Lennie’s stupidity and carelessness cause him to unwittingly harm animals and people, which creates trouble for both him and George. Lennie is tirelessly devoted to George and delights in hearing him tell of the dream of having a farm, but he does not desire the dream of the American worker in the same way that George does. His understanding of George’s dream is more childish and he grows excited at the possibility of tending the future rabbits, most likely because it will afford him a chance to pet their soft fur as much as he wishes. Nevertheless, a dream is a dream, different for everyone, and George and Lennie share the similar attribute of desiring what they haven’t got. Lennie, however, is helpless to attain his dream, and remains a static character throughout, relying on George to fuel his hope and save him from trouble.
CANDY: He is the old, one-handed swamper who is the first to befriend George and Lennie at Soledad. He is humble and weary and seems to be at the end of his line after Carlson shoots his last possession and companion, his old, blind, dog. ‘When they can me here I wisht somebody’d shoot me’, Candy confesses to George and Lennie, hoping for a similar fate as his dog. But when he hears the two talking of their little place, Candy offers all his money and his meagre services to be in on the dream. His substantial sum of money and the fact that he knows of a place make it impossible for George to refuse him. Candy clings to this hope of a future as a drowning man would to a piece of driftwood. It rekindles life within him, but it also becomes an obsession, and in his excitement and indignation, he lets the secret slip to both Crooks and Curley’s wife. And when Lennie kills Curley’s wife and shatters the reality of the dream, Candy becomes hopeless and full of anguish, the broken shell of a man.
CURLEY: He is the boxer, the son of the boss, the angry and hot-headed obstacle to George’s attempt to keep Lennie out of trouble at Soledad. Insecure because of his size and over-protective of his wife, Curley is eager to fight anyone he perceives as a threat to his self-image. Lennie unwittingly incurs Curley’s antagonism simply because of his size, and the reader immediately braces for future confrontation. Curley remains undeveloped, forever little and forever mean, poking his head in at various points in the novel, either to look for his wife or to stir up trouble on account of her.
CURLEY’S WIFE: Nameless and flirtatious, Curley’s wife is perceived by Candy to be the cause of all that goes wrong at Soledad: ‘Ever’body knowed you’d mess things up. You wasn’t no good’, he says to her dead body in his grief. The workers, George included, see her as having ‘the eye’ for every guy on the ranch, and they cite this as the reason for Curley’s insecurity and hot-headed temperament. But Curley’s wife adds complexity to her own characterisation, confessing to Lennie that she dislikes Curley because he is angry all the time and saying that she comes around because she is lonely and just wants someone to talk to. Like George and Lennie, she once had a dream of becoming an actress and living in Hollywood, but it went unrealised, leaving her full of self-pity, married to an angry man, living on a ranch without friends, and viewed as a trouble-maker by everyone.
CROOKS: called such because of a crooked spine, Steinbeck does not develop Crooks, the Negro stable buck, until Chapter Four, describing him as a ‘proud, aloof man. He kept his distance and demanded that other people keep theirs’. Crooks is bitter, indignant, angry, and ultimately frustrated by his helplessness as a black man in a racist culture. Wise and observant, Crooks listens to Lennie’s talk of the dream of the farm with cynicism. Although tempted by Candy, Lennie and George’s plan to buy their own place, Crooks is constantly reminded (in this case by Curley’s wife) that he is inferior to whites and, out of pride, he refuses to take part in their future farm.
SLIM: The tall, jerkline skinner whom Steinbeck describes as something of a living legend: ‘He moved with a majesty only achieved by royalty and master craftsmen. He was a jerkline skinner, the prince of the ranch, capable of driving ten, sixteen, even twenty mules with a single line to the leaders. He was capable of killing a fly on the wheeler’s butt with a bull whip without touching the mule. There was gravity in his manner and a quiet so profound that all talk stopped when he spoke ….. His hatchet face was ageless. He might have been thirty-five or fifty. His ear heard more than was said to him, and his slow speech had overtones not of thought, but of understanding beyond thought.’ Slim lingers in the shadow of this overwhelming description throughout the novel. He serves as the fearless, decision-maker when conflicts arise among the workers and wins the confidence of George, offering advice, comfort, and quiet words of wisdom.
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METAPHOR ANALYSIS
CANDY’S DOG: ‘A dragfooted sheepdog, gray of muzzle, and with pale, blind old eyes’, Candy’s dog is a far cry from his sheepherding days. Carlson says to Candy, in regard to the dog: ‘Got no teeth, he’s all stiff with rheumatism. He ain’t no good to you, Candy. An’ he ain’t no good to himself. Why’n’t you shoot him, Candy? And Candy is left with no other option, but to shoot his longtime companion. This sub-plot is an obvious metaphor for what George must do to Lennie, who proves top be no good to George and no good to himself. Steinbeck re-emphasises the significance of Candy’s dog when Candy says to George that he wishes someone would shoot him when he’s no longer any good. And when Carlson’s gun goes off, Lennie is the only other man not inside the bunk house, Steinbeck having placed him outside with the dog, away from the other men, his gun shot saved for the novel’s end.
THE CRIPPLES: Four of Steinbeck’s characters are handicapped: Candy is missing a hand, Crooks has a crooked spine, Lennie is mentally slow, and Curley acquires a mangled hand in the course of the novel. They are physical manifestations of one of the novel’s major themes: the schemes of men go awry. Here, to reiterate the point, Steinbeck has the actual bodies of his characters go awry. It is as if nature herself is often doomed to errors in her scheme. And whether they be caused at birth, or by a horse, or by another man, the physical deformities occur regardless of the handicapped person’s will or desire to be otherwise, just as George and Lennie’s dream goes wrong despite how much they want it to be fulfilled.
SOLITAIRE: George is often in the habit of playing solitaire, a card game that requires only one person, while he is in the bunk house. He never asks Lennie to play cards with him because he knows that Lennie would be incapable of such a mental task. Solitaire, which means alone, is a metaphor for the loneliness of the characters in the novel, who have no one but themselves. It is also a metaphor for George’s desire to be ‘solitaire’, to be no longer burdened with Lennie’s company, and his constant playing of the game foreshadows his eventual decision to become a solitary man.
THE DEAD MOUSE AND THE DEAD DOG: These two soft, furry creatures that Lennie accidentally kills are both metaphors and foreshadowing devices. As metaphors, they serve as a physical representation of what will happen to George and Lennie’s dream: they (Lennie in particular) will destroy it. Lennie never intends to kill the thing he loves, the soft things he wants more than anything, but they die on him nonetheless. The dead mouse is also an allusion to the novel’s title – Of Mice and Men, a reminder that dreams will go wrong, even the desire to pet a mouse. And because bad things come in threes, Lennie’s two accidental killings of animals foreshadow the final killing of Curley’s wife, an accident that seals his fate and ruins the dream for him, George and Candy.
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THEME ANALYSIS
When discussing the various themes in Steinbeck’s novel, we would do well to first examine the title, which is an allusion to a line from one of Robert Burns’s poems: ‘The best laid schemes o’ mice an’ men gang aft aglay.’ Translated into modern English, this line reads: ‘The best laid schemes of mice and men often go awry.’ This cynical statement is at the heart of the novel’s action and serves as a foreshadowing prophecy of all that is to come. For, indeed, the novel’s two main characters do have a scheme, a specific dream of changing their current way of life in order to have their own place and work only for themselves. The tragedy, of course, lies in the fact that no matter how elaborately our heroes plan, regardless of how intensely they hope and dream, their plan does not find fulfilment.
This is a novel of defeated hope and the harsh reality of the American Dream. George and Lennie are poor homeless migrant workers, doomed to a life of wandering and toil in which they are never able to reap the fruits of their labour. Their desires may not seem so unfamiliar to any other American: a place of their own, the opportunity to work for themselves and harvest what they sow with no one to take anything from them or give them orders. George and Lennie desperately cling to the notion that they are different from other workers who drift from ranch to ranch because, unlike the others, they have a future and each other. But characters like Crooks and Curley’s wife serve as reminders that George and Lennie are no different from anyone who wants something of his or her own.
All the characters (all the ones that Steinbeck has developed, at least) wish to change their lives in some fashion, but none are capable of doing so; they all have dreams, and it is only the dream that varies from person to person. Curley’s wife has already had her dream of being an actress pass her by and now must live a life of empty hope. Crooks’ situation hints at a much deeper oppression than that of the white worker in America – the oppression of the black people. Through Crooks, Steinbeck exposes the bitterness, the anger, and the helplessness of the black American who struggles to be recognised as a human being, let alone have a place of his own. Crooks’ hopelessness underlies that of George and Lennie’s and Candy’s and Curley’s wife. But all share the despair of wanting to change the way they live and attain something better. Even Slim, despite his Zen-like wisdom and confidence, has nothing to call his own and will, by every indication, remain a migrant worker until his death. Slim differs from the others in the fact that he does not seem to want something outside of what he has, he is not beaten by a dream, he has not laid any schemes. Slim seems to have somehow reached the sad conclusion indicated by the novel’s title, that to dream leads to despair.
Another key element is the companionship between George and Lennie. The two men are not unique for wanting a place and a life of their own, but they are unique in that they have each other. Their companionship contrasts with the loneliness that surrounds them – the loneliness of the homeless ranch worker, the loneliness of the outcast black man, the loneliness of Curley’s wife, the loneliness of the old, helpless cripple – and it arouses curiosity in the characters that they encounter, Slim included. And indeed, the reader becomes curious as to their friendship as well. And can we call it friendship? Lennie would call George a friend, but George would perhaps be hard-pressed to admit the same of Lennie. As he tells Slim, he has simply become so used to having Lennie around that he, ‘can’t get rid of him’. Despite his annoyance, George also demonstrates protectiveness, patience, and pride when it comes to Lennie. He is perhaps motivated to stay with Lennie by a sense of guilt, or responsibility, or pity, or a desire to not be alone himself. Most likely it is a combination of all these motivations. Yet it seems strange that George would choose to remain with Lennie, given the danger that Lennie poses for the both of them. George is not blind to the fact that life would be easier without Lennie, and he often yearns for independence when Lennie becomes troublesome, creating a major source of tension in the novel. This tension is not resolved until the final gunshot by the riverside, when the strain of Lennie’s company makes it impossible for George to survive with his companion.
By killing Lennie, George eliminates a monumental burden and a threat to his own life (Lennie, of course, never threatened George directly, but his actions endangered the life of George, who took responsibility for him). The tragedy is that George, in effect, is forced to shoot both his companion, who made him different from the other lonely workers, as well as his own dream, and he is forced to admit that it has gone hopelessly awry. His new burden is now hopelessness and loneliness, the life of the homeless ranch worker. Slim’s comfort at the end (‘You hadda George’), indicates the sad truth that one has to surrender one’s dream in order to survive, not the easiest thing to do in America, the Land of Promise, the land of the Free and the Home of the Brave.
O stony grey soil of Monaghan
The laugh from my love you thieved;
You took the gay child of my passion
And gave me your clod-conceived.
You clogged the feet of my boyhood
And I believed that my stumble
Had the poise and stride of Apollo
And his voice my thick tongued mumble.
You told me the plough was immortal!
O green-life conquering plough!
The mandril stained, your coulter blunted
In the smooth lea-field of my brow.
You sang on steaming dunghills
A song of cowards’ brood,
You perfumed my clothes with weasel itch,
You fed me on swinish food
You flung a ditch on my vision
Of beauty, love and truth.
O stony grey soil of Monaghan
You burgled my bank of youth!
Lost the long hours of pleasure
All the women that love young men.
O can I stilll stroke the monster’s back
Or write with unpoisoned pen.
His name in these lonely verses
Or mention the dark fields where
The first gay flight of my lyric
Got caught in a peasant’s prayer.
Mullahinsa, Drummeril, Black Shanco-
Wherever I turn I see
In the stony grey soil of Monaghan
Dead loves that were born for me.
Kavanagh spent the first half of his life farming ‘the stony grey soil’ of his native Monaghan. In Ireland in the 1930’s and ‘40’s this usually meant a life of dull, hard work. He recalls the hardship, misery and austerity in this poem and also, of course, in his major opus, ‘The Great Hunger’. In ‘Stony Grey Soil’ Kavanagh regrets having wasted his youth in a barbarous, bleak place. The very title, ‘Stony Grey Soil’ suggests a hard, harsh, dull, unimaginative world – not an ideal environment for a poet.
In this poem, Kavanagh sees himself as a victim who was deprived, deceived, lied to, cheated and robbed by his homeplace and the way of life it imposed on him. The poem is an outpouring of anger and accusations against Monaghan for what it did to the poet. The soil of Monaghan is personified in the poem in very unflattering terms. Because he is personifying Monaghan, he has to use metaphor extensively. The soil is represented as a thief, a cheat, a depriver, a liar, a burglar; it is seen as one who ‘flung a ditch’ on his vision; as one who weighed down his feet to prevent his flight into the world of poetic imagination.
In harsh metaphor after harsh metaphor, he pours out a sustained and strident angry tirade against the place where he feels his youth was wasted and his potential inhibited and stunted. Monaghan and the farming way of life is a thief, ‘the laugh from my love you thieved’. It is a cheat, it dealt falsely with him, ‘you took the gay child of my passion and gave me your clod conceived’. It gave him poison for perfume, ‘you perfumed my clothes with weasel-itch’. It is a liar, ‘you told me the plough was immortal’. The soil and the rural way of life are seen as a robber, ‘you burgled my bank of youth’. It tried to blind his vision and limit his potential, ‘you flung a ditch on my vision of beauty love and truth’.
To summarise, Kavanagh is bitterly attacking and blaming Monaghan and the drudgery of farm life. It stole the fun and humour of his youth and gave him instead the ‘clod-conceived’, which suggests perhaps, practical, pragmatic ideas about crops and cattle. His ambition and self-belief were ruined. He was aware of his own potential; he believed that he had ‘the stride of Apollo’ but Monaghan dragged him down and ‘clogged the feet of my boyhood’.
Monaghan flung a ditch on his vision. It limited and confined him, instead of providing inspiration it fed him ‘on swinish food’. This is a particularly harsh metaphor, suggesting that the whole atmosphere of farming life was totally without any aesthetic dimension. The people among whom he lived his life are represented as ‘cowards’ brood’. This seems to suggest that they were slave-minded and without the courage to break out of their dull, drab routine. Hardly fit company for a poet!
We have seen how Kavanagh’s bitterness is shown in the harsh metaphors which he uses to describe his victimisation. The tone of the poem – in particular the first five stanzas – is extremely bitter. Perhaps it could best be described as accusatory. Notice the recurring accusations in the repeated ‘you’: ‘you thieved’, ‘you took’, ‘you clogged’, ‘you told’, ‘you fed’, ‘you perfumed’, ‘you flung’, ‘you burgled’. We all know that if you want to start an argument the best word to use to begin it is ‘you’!
However, the poet is unable to sustain this tirade to the bitter end and in the final three stanzas he relents and his great love for his native place surfaces at last. The accusatory ‘you’ occurs no more and now he is sadly reflective, almost nostalgic (which suggests that the poem is written from a distance in both time and place). He mentions the hallowed place names of his native place with reverence, almost as if in a religious litany: ‘Mullahinsha, Drummeril, Black Shanco’. He is, after all, mourning what might have been. At a very human level he is regretting the romances that never formed part of his young manhood. Wherever he looks in Monaghan he sees ‘dead loves’ that were born for him. These represent not only the romantic loves that never happened in that barren place but also all his unfulfilled potential as a poet.
‘Oh, can I still stroke the monster’s back or write with unpoisoned pen…’
The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2015 annual report for this blog.
Here’s an excerpt:
The concert hall at the Sydney Opera House holds 2,700 people. This blog was viewed about 16,000 times in 2015. If it were a concert at Sydney Opera House, it would take about 6 sold-out performances for that many people to see it.
I came away from this novel knowing, like the fakir of old, that I was merely touching the flank of the elephant. So, my review, if such it is, like all reviews is limited and very subjective. I’m reminded here of the acerbic comment of John B. Keane, the great playwright from Listowel, County Kerry, who once remarked about critics and reviewers of his plays, that, “They are like eunuchs – they see it happening each night in front of their eyes, but they can’t do it themselves”.
The chief narrator of this novel is called U. He is an anthropologist, an ethnographer working for a nameless, faceless Corporation and he is answerable only to the almighty Peyman (sic). As an anthropologist, U doesn’t like Corporations: “Forget family, or ethnic or religious groupings: corporations have supplanted all these as the primary structure of the modern tribe.” U’s assorted, seemingly unconnected, ramblings, dreams, visions and hallucinations are presented to us, the reader, as learned treatise/thesis/dissertation/official report with their accompanying sections and clauses and sub-clauses.
U is a loner, he is obsessive, highly intelligent and a perfect cipher for our modern age. He is, of course, an expert in all things IT, and is surrounded by the latest gadgetry at all times, laptops, phones, TV’s, servers. He spends his days in the bowels of this giant Corporation, clicking and scrolling and buffering his way to new, seemingly unconnected, pieces of information, which he then gathers in dossiers for inclusion in his Great Report. This report has been commissioned by his boss, Peyman, and the mysterious promoters of the Koob-Sassen Project.
Like many a modern protagonist before him, U’s life is narrow and relatively unexciting. The novel has a number of recurring touchstone motifs; his only friend Petr, his workplace colleague Daniel, his lover Madison and his obsessive building of dossiers on oil slick occurrences across the globe, coupled with the strange recurring incidents of parachutists being killed when their chutes don’t open.
Despite its formal appearance and structure, the novel often reads like a dramatic monologue, a very modern stream of consciousness, akin to Joyce’s, Finnegan’s Wake. There are long, almost Biblical-like tracts of visions, revelations, fantasies and dreams – and the ever-present references to The Great Report. So, despite appearing like a report, what we have here is a narrator who has the skills and the training of an academic report writer who decides to cut loose and in the guise of a report, he writes a novel of substance – what we are presented with here, therefore, is a novel masquerading as a report!
In Chapter 11, U recounts a very germane anecdote, which may go far to explaining this conundrum and also the mercurial mindset of the novel’s narrator: How come this very official looking Report/Treatise/Thesis is full of dream sequences, chance meetings and sometimes barely credible events? U tells us that in his book, Tristes Tropiques, his hero, Levi-Strauss (with a hyphen!), the famous anthropologist, speaks of having spent months with the Nambikwara tribe deep in the tropical jungle, with no prospect of an early egress, marooned by the onset of the rainy season, rivers flooded and un-navigable, all food, wine, bottled water, cigarettes consumed or traded. Then bored out of his skull, he says he fell prey to what he called “a mental disorder” that can sometimes affect anthropologists – he started to compose an epic drama on the back of the sheets of paper containing his research notes. If I could use a rather dated analogy: what U produces here is a vinyl B side – while he psyches himself to compile his Great Report, which will define his career, and be the report to beat all other reports; while he flounders in the urban jungles of Stockholm or New York or London, waiting for inspiration and motivation and for this bout of procrastination to abate and before The Big Idea for The Great Report takes hold – he gives us Satin Island!
U has been patiently waiting for someone like Tom McCarthy to come along and put him under the microscope for some time now. Who is he? He is an urban anthropologist of the NOW, the Present, The Contemporary. He is, like the Jesuits of old, masters of the art of discernment: he is essentially a Discerner of the Zeitgeist. He tells us himself: “I am an anthropologist. Structure of kinship; systems of exchange, barter and gift; symbolic operation lurking on the flip side of the habitual and the banal: identifying these, prising them out and holding them up, kicking and wriggling, to the light – that’s my racket.” He tells us that his modus operandi is to feed, “vanguard theory, almost always from the left side of the spectrum, back into the corporate machine”. He sees his role as one of purveying cultural insight. By this he means, ‘that we unpick the fibre of a culture, it’s weft and warp – the situation it throws up, the beliefs that underpin and nourish it – and let a client in on how they can best get traction on this fibre so that they can introduce into the weave their own fine, silken (Satin?) thread, strategically embroider or detail it with a mini-narrative, i.e. sell their product’.
U is a proponent, maybe the inventor of the term Present-Tense AnthropologyTM, “an anthropology that bathes in presence, and in nowness – bathed in it as in a deep, bubbling and nymph-saturated well”. In Chapter 9 he goes to a conference in Frankfurt to deliver a paper, “on the anthropology of The Contemporary”. He delivers his paper and gets an under-whelming response from those attending. Typical of his character, he returns to his underground lair in London and in a powerful dream-like sequence delivers the paper he should have delivered in Frankfurt to great imagined acclaim – his fifteen minutes of fame?
Throughout the novel we are treated to glimpses of U’s viewpoint and his wry humour. By his own admission, anthropologists are two-a-penny, “A famous anthropologist, even one with a real book out, is about as well known as a third-division footballer”. As already mentioned, he is a firm believer in the Present, the Now. According to U, “the Future is the biggest shaggy dog story of all”. Elsewhere he gives us this chilling reminder of our Now world: “Walk down any stretch of street, and you’re being filmed by three cameras at once – and even if you aren’t the phone you carry in your pocket pinpoints and logs your location at each given moment. Each website that you visit, every click-through, every keystroke is archived: even if you hit delete, wipe, empty trash, it’s still lodged somewhere, in some fold or enclave, some occluded avenue of circuitry”.
So, U, is both a product and a student of our age and this novel is aimed at the many bright, highly qualified, trapped individuals, who do the work for faceless Corporations, quietly in the background in their little well organised, disconnected cadres, in their underground offices, the underworld of bandwidth, servers, computers, cables, bits and bytes and megabytes, memory banks, satellite dishes – and of course, the constant curse of buffering!
As you can see, my focus has been, and rightly so, on U, the main protagonist. Where then does the title, Satin Island, come from? If anything the novel should be titled, Staten Island, but maybe that’s already out there! Satin fits in with his overall obsession with the soft, velvety, viscosity of oil and the earlier references to the weave and warp and weft of the work of an anthropologist. Anyway, the title comes to U in “a splendid dream” in Chapter 12! In this dream he flies (like Icarus?) over a harbour, by a city. Later, he describes beautifully the frenetic movement around, “the half-completed Freedom Towers” where, “the thrum of a sight-seeing helicopter…. its glass nose sniffing the ground…… the intermittent beep-beep-beep of reversing buses broke up the chopper blades deep gut-vibrating frequencies”. He makes a rather pointless journey to Battery Park and South Ferry to take the ferry to Staten Island only to balk at the very last moment, deciding, rather annoyingly, not to take the ferry after all.
However, I hope you can see that I’ve enjoyed reading Satin Island by Tom McCarthy. Jonathan Cape pulled out all the stops here. The book feels good, and it looks good and oily and velvety! I even liked the typeset Dante MT – all these things are vitally important for booklovers and readers! There are odd moments in the novel, let’s be honest, when you feel like the little boy who announces that the Emperor has no clothes – but these are very rare. I haven’t been as excited about a shortlisted Booker novel since Seamus Deane’s, Reading in the Dark, in 1996 – so my run of honourable runners-up continues! Tom McCarthy’s novel is innovative, well crafted and challenging. It contains great modern insights, great humour and the odd ‘epiphanic tingling’ along the way.
It is, in effect, a novel for the Google Generation. (In fact, how did he write the novel without mentioning that corporate word!). It is written for all those restless readers who scroll and search and tweet and like and befriend online; those users of WiFi and 3G and 4G – their iPhone and iPad at the ready to comment, to blog, to email their Nowness to the world.
I predict this novel will be a runaway success in the airport bookstores at Torino-Caselle and all the other homogeneous airport hubs around our restless world, wherever people like U and his contemporaries bide their time between connecting flights!
This novel is breaking new ground, a breath of fresh air, at times a tour de force. I highly recommend you to be bold and to venture forth and feel the elephant’s flank!
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