aybe Steinbeck’s dog Toby knew Of Mice and Men would become one of the most challenged books when he “made confetti” of the first draft.[1] Probably not. But even Steinbeck jokingly wondered whether the setter pup “may have been acting critically.”[2]

And indeed, Of Mice and Men consistently winds up on banned book lists. But, why is Of Mice and Men banned? Like a lot of banned books, Of Mice and Men is frequently challenged for “profanity,” and “offensive language.”[3] It’s been banned for similar reasons somewhere in the United States for decades.

Challenges in the 1970s came from (among other places) Oil City, Pennsylvania; Syracuse, Indiana; and Grand Blanc, Michigan. In 1983, the chair of the Knoxville, Tennessee school board vowed to eradicate all “filthy books” from the local school system, beginning with Of Mice and Men.[4] An Iowa City, Iowa parent challenged the book in 1991 because she didn’t want her daughter to “talk like a migrant worker” when she finished school.[5] And, it was still among the top ten most challenged books in 2020.[6]

Bannings for vulgarity continue. But, why has Of Mice and Men become so controversial? More recent challenges to Steinbeck’s novella include “racist language.”[7] Contemporary objections also involve statements that are “defamatory” to women and the disabled.[8]

Set in California during the Great Depression, Of Mice and Men has also been challenged because it contains “morbid and depressing themes.”[9] A 2015 challenger found it “too ‘negative,’ and ‘dark,’” further stating that the work “is neither a quality story nor a page turner.”[10] Not surprisingly, I beg to differ.

As challenges for “negativity” and “depressing themes” suggest, some people clearly consider literature’s function to be serving up “vicarious ‘happy endings,’” to sugar coat the hard truths of real life.[11] The best writers and readers, however, understand that literature can also be strong medicine – bitter perhaps, but necessary to continued social and emotional health.[12] Needless to say, Of Mice and Men is a dose of this medicine.

“In every bit of honest writing in the world,” Steinbeck noted, “there is a base theme. Try to understand [people], if you understand each other you will be kind to each other.”[13] This sentiment not only underscores concepts addressed elsewhere on this site, more importantly it’s the polar opposite of the thinking behind concerted efforts to ban books that promote diversity.

Steinbeck described his “whole work drive” as being aimed at “making people understand each other.”[14]  And, the understanding engendered by Steinbeck’s novella runs deep, which makes it a perfect example of how novels are like a layer cake. By that I mean it contains several levels of meaning and perspectives of interpretation.

Of Mice and Men addresses the human condition on the social/historical level, the mythological level, as well as through a psychological filter. In fact, Steinbeck’s book has so much to offer that this essay will be posted in three segments.  Let’s dig into the first installment.
…

It’s a Regular Greek Tragedy.

It all begins with why Of Mice and Men is called Of Mice and Men. Steinbeck’s novella is named for a line in Robert Burns’ 1785 poem To a Mouse, On Turning Her Up In Her Nest With The Plough. The mouse in Burns’ poem embodies the all-too-often futile hope, and fruitless planning that earthly creatures put into the future. Like most Tragic figures, Burns’ mouse is a tangible expression of the fear and misery a being experiences when compelled to vie with forces incomprehensibly bigger than itself.[15]

But Mousie, thou art no thy-lane, In proving foresight may be vain The best laid schemes o’ Mice and Men Gang aft agley, An’ lea’e us nought but grief an’ pain, For promis’d joy! (lines 36-41)

But mouse-friend, you are not along in proving foresight may be vain: The best-laid schemes of Mice and Men Go oft awry, And leave us only grief and pain, For promised joy!  [16]

…
Steinbeck signals from the outset of his novella that mice signify inevitable failure. George is described in mouse-like terms, as “small and quick, dark of face, with restless eyes and sharp, strong features.”[17] And Lennie keeps a dead mouse in his pocket. Lennie carries a mouse in his pocket because he loves to pet soft, furry things. But despite how much he cares for them (or perhaps because he cares so much), no matter how hard he tries Lennie just can’t control his incredible strength, and inevitably kills them by handling them too roughly.[18]

As noted above, one reason Of Mice and Men has “evoked controversy and censorious action” is because it’s “painful” to read.[19] And, I don’t mean that it’s difficult to understand. It hurts to read Of Mice and Men. And that’s because it’s a Tragedy, in the “classic Aristotelian/Shakespearean sense.”[20] Bearing that in mind, it’s very telling that Steinbeck wrote Of Mice and Men in an experimental form he called a “playable novel,” a novel that could be “played from the lines, or a play that could be read.”[21]

It isn’t only that the work’s form parallels that of Tragedy. Of Mice and Men is consistent with Tragedy’s emphasis on plot that revolve around conflicts between opposing if not irreconcilable impulses: mortals and gods for example, law and nature, or individuals and states. And, needless to say, tragedies never end well. The narrative typically culminates in the degradation or destruction of a key individual, coalition, or society.

Though early tragedies were often set in the mythic past, they were purposely (albeit indirectly) intended to promote public debate about current interests and the contemporary condition of the state.  In short, for the Greeks tragedies were a form of public education. They were meant to horrify and admonish the citizenry.  By shocking and unsettling the audience, tragedies forced discussions of what needed to happen in order to avoid such a fate.  So, they weren’t advocating resignation, or conveying a fatalistic message. Tragedies were intended to serve as a warning, and function as a call to action.[22]

Consistent with early tragedies, Of Mice and Men shows “humanity’s achievement of greatness through and in spite of defeat.”[23] Steinbeck’s novella, however, contains a deceptively simple dramatic structure, one lacking in the grandiose gestures typically associated with the tragic form. The work’s structure may make it readily adaptable to the stage, but there’s no grand design. There are no heroes, or villains in the traditional, Aristotelian sense.[24] As Steinbeck’s working title, Something That Happened, aptly suggests, events in the story simply occur.[25]

But that doesn’t mean Steinbeck’s underlying message is simply that’s the way the cookie crumbles. Though Of Mice and Men is less blatantly a social novel than Grapes of Wrath or In Dubious Battle (Steinbeck’s strike novel), it addresses the elusiveness of the American Dream. It also comments on the false hope of economic prosperity that is frequently dangled in front of middle and lower classes. And Lennie, as Steinbeck specifically states, represents “the inarticulate and powerful yearning of all men” (rather than the “insanity” he is typically associated with).[26]
…

The Wall of Background Behind Of Mice and Men

Though he doesn’t explicitly indicate the historical or social context of his novella, Steinbeck refers to a “wall of background” behind Of Mice and Men.[27] Following the Civil War, a large floating labor class developed in the United States. And, according to a 1917 survey of national labor conditions, “probably no more striking example of extremely seasonal industries exist[ed] than in California.”[28] The report also claims that “the seasonal irregularity of employment [was] so great that there [had] grown up a large class of migratory homeless laborers.”[29] A source associated with the Federal Industrial Relations Commissions indicated that “there is a migratory class of labor in California because there must be. Without them the industries on which California’s fame depends could not exist.”[30]

The conventional wisdom of the day maintained that personal choice was the reason itinerants were on the road. And, that personal failing lead to a life of transience and temporary work. Though noted labor researcher Frederick C. Mills didn’t disregard this factor, he concluded that the “whip of economic necessity” was the primary reason for the existence of the large itinerant class in the state. In Mills’ words (from a 1914 journal he kept while investigating working conditions in California’s Central Valley disguised as a migrant worker), “the constitution of California industry demands an immense reserve labor force of migratory, seasonal workers.”[31]

Farmworkers’ wages were exceedingly low. The living quarters supplied with employment were squalid. And, advancement opportunities were all but non-existent. Even the most ambitious and determined worker typically met with failure, and took to roving out of necessity. Being a farmworker was to be among California’s disenfranchised, a degraded, powerless, and ill-paid fraternity.[32]

Like the “bindle-stiffs” Steinbeck himself worked with “for quite a spell,” George and Lennie never get the little piece of land they keep talking about.[33] And Crooks, the black stablebuck on the ranch, comments on how George and Lennie are just like all the other workers he sees coming through:

I seen hunderds of men come by on the road an’ on the ranches, with their bindles on their back an’ that same damn thing in their heads. Hunderds of them. They come, an’ they quit an’ go on; an’ every damn one of ‘em’s got a little piece of land in his head. An’ never a God damn one of ‘em ever gets it. Just like heaven. Ever’body wants a little piece of lan’. I read plenty of books out here. Nobody never gets to heaven, and nobody gets no land. It’s just in their head. They’re all the time talkin’ about it, but it’s jus’ in their head.   [34]

The idea of owning a little piece of land has taken root in many workers’ heads, but according to Crooks, none of them ever achieves that dream.

Crooks himself embodies another stone in Steinbeck’s “wall of background.” He’s a living reminder of America’s slave-holding economy. Crooks’ twisted back is evidence of the human cost associated with that economy. In case we miss this message, Steinbeck drives his point home with rattling halter chains.[35]

Then there’s Crooks’ living quarters. Not wanted in the bunkhouse, Crooks’ room is separate from the other men. And to drive Steinbeck’s point home once again, there’s a manure pile directly under the window. It’s a striking and powerful depiction of racism – which, needless to say, is a byproduct of the slave-holding economy we continue to grapple with.[36]

Curley’s nameless wife is also defined as property. She’s described (as being heavily made up and wearing red mules adorned with ostrich feathers), but is only ever referred to as “Curley’s wife.”[37] She’s lumped together with the most powerless of the workers, the other chattel of the ranch. So, it’s no coincidence that she’s the one who spells out Lennie’s value within this economic structure, when she calls him a “Machine.”[38]
…

The Potential for Tragic Nobility Isn’t Limited to Kings.

Steinbeck’s blunt approach and rough language, which consistently gets Of Mice and Men banned, are part of his precise reporting of this reality, of this particular time, place, and environment. The point being… this is true to life. “For too long,” Steinbeck wrote to his godmother in 1939, “the language of books was different from the language of men. To the men I write about profanity is adornment and ornament, and is never vulgar and I try to write it so.”[39]

These “dirty details” democratize the realm of Tragedy. Tragedies have traditionally revolved around Kings and other “Great Ones,” (such as Oedipus, or Job). But, Steinbeck makes the very American point that all men are created equal, that Tragedy exists even among the lowly. Even a George, or a Lennie, has the potential for tragic nobility.[40]

As Steinbeck points out in a 1938 issue of Stage magazine:

Of Mice and Men may seem to be unrelieved tragedy, but it is not. A careful reading will show that while the audience knows, against its hopes, that the dream (of Lennie’s) will not come true, the protagonists must, during the play [book] become convinced that it will come true. Everyone in the world has a dream he knows can’t come off but he spends his life hoping it may. This is at once sadness, the greatness, and the triumph of our species. And this belief on stage [within the novella] must go from skepticism to possibility to probability before it is nipped off by whatever the modern word for fate is. And in hopelessness – George is able to rise to greatness – to kill his friend to save him. George is a hero and only heroes are worth writing about. [41]

So, George is a modernist Hero. He’s the little man, who makes the only gesture of control at his disposal, and sacrifices what he’ll lose anyway.[42]
…

Walk a Mile in the Shoes of the Powerless

Steinbeck, as noted earlier, believed that honest literature was about trying to understand our fellow human beings, “what makes them up, and what keeps them going.”[43] And, Of Mice and Men, like all good literature, evokes empathy in the reader. By depicting the lived realities of the economies he examines and their resultant classicism, racism, and sexism – in admittedly ugly but candid terms –  he encourages us to walk a mile (as the saying goes) in the shoes of those shaped by the conditions of these economic structures.

Through his characters, Steinbeck appeals to the reader to feel these workers’ desperation and bitter loneliness. He invites us to recognize their dreams of a better life. And he admonishes us to not only consider the real-world moral issues embodied in his characters’ experience, but to confront them.
…

In Conclusion

As pointed out in several places on This Book is Banned, literature shines a light on societal ills. Like the Tragedies of Ancient Greece, contemporary literature urges us to rethink and improve the world we live in. This social/historical layer within Of Mice and Men shines a light on the social issues engendered by an economic structure that creates and benefits from a class of disenfranchised workers. That’s the condition of the state Steinbeck’s Tragedy warns us about.  Consistent with the Ancient Tragedies, Steinbeck writes in the hope of inspiring public debate, and a call to action for society to self-correct.

That’s my take on John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men– what’s yours?
Check out this Discussion Guide to get you started.

#John Steinbeck     #banned     #social commentary     #published 1930s

Endnotes:

[1] Gannett, Lewis. “John Steinbeck: Novelist at Work.” The Atlantic Monthly. (December 1945), 58.
[2] Gannett, 58.
[3] “Banned: Of Mice and Men.” American Experience. www.pbs.org ; ALA. “Top 10 Most Challenged Books Lists.” (Of Mice and Men banned).
[4] Sova, 239.
[5] Sova, 239.
[6] ALA. “Top 10 Most Challenged Books of 2020.” Banned & Challenged Books: A Website of the ALA Office for Intellectual (Of Mice and Men banned). Freedom. https://www.ala.org/advocacy/bbooks/frequentlychallengedbooks/top10
[7] ALA. “Banned & Challenged Classics.” Banned & Challenged Books: A Website of the ALA Office for Intellectual (Of Mice and Men banned). Freedom. https://www.ala.org/advocacy/bbooks/frequentlychallengedbooks/classics
[8] ALA. “Banned & Challenged Classics.” (Of Mice and Men banned).
[9]ALA. “Banned & Challenged Classics.”  (Of Mice and Men banned).
[10] Schaub, Michael. “John Steinbeck’s ‘Of Mice and Men’ survives censorship attempt in Idaho.” Los Angeles Times. (June 2, 2015).
[11] Scarseth, Thomas. “A Teachable Good Book: ‘Of Mice and Men.’” In Censored Books: Critical Viewpoints. (Pp 388- 394.) Edited by Nicholas J. Karolides et al. (Lanham, Maryland: The Scarecrow Press, Inc., 2001), 388.
[12] Scarseth, 388.
[13] Shillinglaw, Susan. “Introduction.” Of Mice and Men. (New York: Penguin Books, 1994), 6.
[14] Gannett, 59.
[15] Reinking, Brian. “Robert Burns’s Mouse In Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men and Miller’s Death of a Salesman.” The Arthur Miller Journal. Vol. 8, Number 1 (Spring 2013), 15, 21.
[16] Burch, Michael R. “Robert Burns: Modern English Translations and Original Poems, Songs, Quotes, Epigrams and Bio.” The HyperTexts. 
http://www.thehypertexts.com/robert%20burns%20translations%20modern%20english.htm
[17] Steinbeck, John. “Of Mice and Men.” The Portable Steinbeck. (New York: Penguin Books, 1981), 228.
[18] Lisca, Peter. The Wide World of John Steinbeck. (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1981), 136.
[19] Scarseth, Thomas. “A Teachable Good Book: ‘Of Mice and Men.’” In Censored Books: Critical Viewpoints. (Pp 388-394) Edited by Nicholas J. Karolides et al. (Lanham, Maryland: The Scarecrow Press, Inc., 2002), 388.
[20] Scarseth, 388.
[21] Steinbeck, John. Stage Magazine, January 1938.
[22] Brands, Hal & Charles Edel. The Lessons of Tragedy: Statecraft and World Order. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019), 8-10.
[23] Scarseth, 388.
[24] Doyle, Brian Leahy. “Tragedy and the Non-teleological in ‘Of Mice and Men.’” The Steinbeck Review. Vol. 3, Number 2 (Fall 2006), 81.
[25] Parini, Jay. “Of Bindlestiffs, Bad Times, Mice and Men.” New York Times. September 27, 1992.
[26] Gannett, Lewis. “John Steinbeck: Novelist at Work.” The Atlantic Monthly. (December 1945), 58.
[27] Heavilin, Barbara A. “’The wall of background’: Cultural, Political, and Literary Contexts of Steinbeck’s ‘Of Mice and Men.’” The Steinbeck Review. Vol. 15, Number 1, 2018, (pp. 1-16), 1.
[28] Woirol, Gregory R. “Men on the Road: Early Twentieth-Century Surveys of Itinerant Labor in California.” California History. Vol. 70, No. 2 (Summer 1991), 192.
[29] Woirol, 192.
[30] Fitch, John A. “Old and New Labor Problems in California.” The Survey. Volume 32, April 1914 – September 1914), 610.
[31] Woirol, Gregory R. “Men on the Road: Early Twentieth-Century Surveys of Itinerant Labor in California.” California History. Vol. 70, No. 2 (Summer 1991), 198; Mills, Frederick C. “The Hobo and the Migratory Casual on the Road.” Mills, Frederick C. Mills papers, AA.
[32] Shillinglaw, Susan. “Introduction.” Of Mice and Men. (New York: Penguin, 1998), 9.
[33] Parini, Jay. “Of Bindlestiffs, Bad Times, Mice and Men.” New York Times. September 27, 1992.
[34] Steinbeck, “Of Mice and Men,” 293.
[35] Owens, Louis. “Deadly Kids, Stinking Dogs, and Heroes: The Best Laid Plans in Steinbeck’s ‘Of Mice and Men.’” Western American Literature. Vol. 37, No. 3 (Fall 2002), 325.
[36] Hart, Richard E. “Moral Experience in ‘Of Mice and Men’: Challenges and Reflections.” The Steinbeck Review. Vol. 1, No. 2 (Fall 2004), 40.
[37] Steinbeck Of Mice and Men, 254.
[38] Steinbeck Of Mice and Men, 298; Owens, Louis. “Deadly Kids, Stinking Dogs, and Heroes: The Best Laid Plans in Steinbeck’s ‘Of Mice and Men.’” Western American Literature. Vol. 37, No. 3 (Fall 2002), 325.
[39] Scarseth, 389; Shillinglaw, 19.
[40] Scarseth, 389.
[41] John Steinbeck. Stage. January 1938.
[42] Owens “Deadly Kids,” 322.
[43] Hart, 40.

Images:

First-edition dust jacket cover of Of Mice and Men (1937). Illustrated by Ross MacDonald. Published by Covici-Friede. – Scan via Heritage Auctions Lot #36344. Cropped from the original image and lightly retouched., Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=91868578

It’s a Regular Greek Tragedy. Dionysus mask. Louvre Museum, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Dionysos_mask_Louvre_Myr347.jpg

The Wall of Background Behind Of Mice and Men:
Lange, Dorothea, photographer. On U.S. 101 near San Luis Obispo, California. Itinerant worker. Not the old “Bindle-Stiff” type. United States San Luis Obispo San Luis Obispo County California, 1939. Feb. Photograph. https://www.loc.gov/item/2017771237/

The Potential for Tragic Nobility Isn’t Limited to Kings:
Lange, Dorothea, photographer. Migrant agricultural worker. Near Holtville, California. Imperial County California Holtville United States, 1937. Feb. Photograph. https://www.loc.gov/item/2017769658/.

Walk a Mile in the Shoes of the Powerless. Lange, Dorothea, photographer. Migrant agricultural workers, idle in town during the potato harvest. Shafter, California. United States Kern County California Shafter, 1938. June. Photograph. Public Domain via Library of Congress. . https://www.loc.gov/item/2017770608/.

laughterhouse-Five revolves around Billy Pilgrim, who like Vonnegut, was a POW in Dresden when it was decimated by Allied firebombing during World War Two.[1] Billy has “come unstuck in time.”[2] And to complicate matters further, he is abducted by aliens, two-foot-tall creatures, who are shaped like toilet plungers, from the planet Tralfamadore.[3]

Why was Slaughterhouse-Five banned? Kurt Vonnegut’s searingly sarcastic, darkly funny, science fiction-infused war story is considered one of the greatest anti-war novels of all time. Needless to say, it includes a good dose of rough language, the kind soldiers have been known to use. Bearing both of these things in mind, it’s no surprise that Vonnegut’s novel has been challenged at least eighteen times, with “obscene language,” and “anti-American” sentiment or “lack of patriotism,” consistently among the objections.[4] But as always, some challenges were more successful than others.

A petition to remove Slaughterhouse-Five (among other books) from the junior high and high school libraries of Island Trees Union Free Public School District, made it to the US Supreme Court. Fortunately, citing the First Amendment, the court found that these books could not be removed from the school district’s libraries.[5]

On the other hand, there’s Drake, North Dakota, a banning that got Vonnegut’s personal attention. In 1973, school officials voted to withdraw Slaughterhouse-Five from the curriculum. Most students, however, didn’t want to give up their copy of the novel. So, lockers were searched, books confiscated, and all 32 copies were ultimately burned in the school’s furnace.[6]

The event made national headlines. And Vonnegut sent a biting letter to the chairman of the Drake School Board, who apparently couldn’t fathom what all the fuss was about. In his typical no-holds-barred style, Vonnegut stated what to many of us is obvious:

If you were to bother to read my books, to behave as educated persons would, you would learn that they are not sexy, and do not argue in favor of wildness of any kind. They beg that people be kinder and more responsible than they often are. It is true that some of the characters speak coarsely. That is because people speak coarsely in real life. Especially soldiers and hardworking men speak coarsely, and even our most sheltered children know that.[7]

Vonnegut concluded his letter by summing up the stand against censorship book burning like only he can:

Perhaps you will learn from this that books are sacred to free men for very good reasons, and that wars have been fought against nations which hate books and burn them… it was a rotten lesson you taught young people in a free society when you denounced and then burned books—books you haven’t even read. You should also resolve to expose your children to all sorts of opinions and information in order that they will be better equipped to make decisions and survive.[8]

To Vonnegut’s point, this book is definitely more than just a stockpile of salty language. But, why is Slaughterhouse-Five important? Like all literature, it’s a snapshot of the culture that produced it. As noted in an earlier post, authors and their works present, analyze, and shed light on the social maladies of their day. When readers look beyond Slaughterhouse Five’s rough language, it’s obvious that this book addresses the devastating aftereffects of war. And the novel’s time-traveling, non-linear structure mimics a debilitating psychological condition, one our soldiers struggle with all too often as a result of their war experience.
_____

No parts for
Frank Sinatra or John Wayne.

Science-fiction tropes may carry Slaughterhouse-Five’s narrative, but Vonnegut’s novel tells the very real tale of a verifiable historical event. In the book’s opening chapter, however, Vonnegut makes it clear that he wrote about the firebombing of Dresden because of its historical significance, rather than simply because it made for an exciting personal war story.[9]

But, Vonnegut doesn’t write from the romanticized, gung-ho perspective prevalent in post-World War Two culture. As he tells us in the novel’s autobiographical first chapter, after an uncomfortable conversation with his war-buddy’s wife (Mary O’Hare, to whom Slaughterhouse-Five is dedicated), he realized that the book he was about to write would add to the cultural mythology that perpetuates war and glamorizes young men’s participation in them.[10] So, Vonnegut made her a promise, vowing that if he ever finished his book and it was made into a movie, there would be no parts for actors like Frank Sinatra or John Wayne. There would be no roles for “glamorous, war loving, dirty old men,” who “make war look just wonderful, so we’ll have a lot more of them.”[11]

Consequently, Vonnegut’s novel doesn’t praise the British bombers who carried out the raid, justify American involvement, or support World War Two generally for that matter. Instead, he wrote about hungry and sick prisoners of war. He tells us about a good man who survives the bombing but is executed for picking a teapot out of the rubble.[12] And as Vonnegut points out in the novel, “there are almost no characters in this story, and almost no dramatic confrontations.”[13] He wrote it this way because “one of the main effects of war, after all, is that people are discouraged from being characters,” by which he means being seen as human beings.[14]
_____

Why is Slaughterhouse-Five’s
1969 publication date significant?

As also mentioned in a previous post, the period a book was written in can tell us a lot. And Slaughterhouse-Five’s 1969 publication date, nearly twenty-five years after Vonnegut’s release from a repatriation camp in France, is definitely noteworthy.[15] It’s significant for a couple of reasons. First, because dissent toward the Vietnam war finally freed writers to report on World War Two events that “made war look so ugly.”[16] The time frame is also pertinent because it is during this period that Mental Health professionals began defining the symptoms of PTSD, and advocating for an official diagnosis for this debilitating effect of war.[17] This tidbit of medical history is relevant because Billy Pilgrim, Slaughterhouse-Five’s haunted protagonist, appears to be “a text-book sufferer of PTSD.”[18]

Some significant insight into PTSD is that it’s caused by more than the trauma itself. The “psychosocial atmosphere” of the society soldiers are returning to can, and often does, hinder the process of coping with traumatizing events.[19] And this situation can be observed in Slaughterhouse-Five. When Billy comes home after the war, the environment in America isn’t conducive to working through the trauma he experienced as a soldier.

Shortly after he returns from the war, Billy resumes optometry school. By the middle of his final year, he has himself committed to a veterans’ hospital for non-violent mental patients. And though the doctors agree that Billy was indeed “going crazy” (as Vonnegut describes it), “they didn’t think it had anything to do with the war.”[20] Billy’s doctors were certain his issues could only have stemmed from childhood experiences.

This scene reflects the medical history noted above. PTSD wasn’t even on the medical community’s radar until the the Vietnam war. And it wasn’t recognized as a diagnosable psychological disorder until 1980.[21]

As Vonnegut’s remarks about Hollywood films suggest, prior to the emergence of the social movement that opposed the Vietnam war, American culture considered battle experience to have a positive, maturing effect on young men.[22] Billy’s son, Robert, embodies this notion. He was a sixteen-year-old alcoholic who flunked out of high school. But after a couple tours in Vietnam, “he was all straightened out now.”[23] It’s no coincidence that Robert is a Green Beret in the Marine Corps. A very famous film titled The Green Berets had been released just the year before Slaughterhouse-Five was published.  And it starred the selfsame John Wayne that Mary O’Hare called out as bearing responsibility for glamorizing war.

There’s also the gung-ho, political American mindset that kept information about Dresden quiet for so many years. Vonnegut put this attitude in the mouth of Professor Rumfoord, Billy’s hospital roommate following the airplane crash that killed everyone but Billy. When asked why Dresden would be kept a secret for so many years, Rumfoord answered, “For fear that a lot of bleeding hearts… might not think it was such a wonderful thing to do.”[24]

The culture that emerges from these commonly held perspectives prevented the negative effects of wartime experience and resultant PTSD from being taken seriously.[25] But as Rumfoord was finally forced to acknowledge that Billy had indeed been in Dresden during the Allied firebombing, PTSD was finally recognized as a trauma-related condition.
_____

Billy Pilgrim, “unstuck in time”,
a text-book case of PTSD.

Vonnegut himself describes Slaughterhouse-Five as being “jumbled and jangled.”[26] And his non-linear structure resembles the most common symptom of PTSD, “re-experiencing… when a person involuntarily and vividly relives the traumatic event.” [27] This can occur through nightmares, repetitive images and sensations, or it can take the form of flashbacks.[28]

One form of re-experiencing is reflected in Vonnegut’s repetition of particular phrases. These phrases function as both a psychological and narrative linking device, repeatedly returning both Billy and the reader to the war. One example is the oft-repeated image of “blue and ivory feet,” which Billy first saw on corpses while being marched to a POW camp.[29] There’s also the frequently referenced “smell of roses and mustard gas,” whose first chronological encounter occurred in the corpse mines of Dresden.[30]

And then, there’s Vonnegut’s protagonist, Billy Pilgrim, who he describes as having “come unstuck in time.”[31] Billy time travels, spontaneously and frequently. And the fact that Billy has no control over what part of his life he’ll find himself in, echoes the flashbacks experienced by many who suffer from PTSD.

Flashbacks occur in cases of PTSD because the process of memory consolidation is short-circuited. Familiar, non-stressful events are automatically assimilated and the information in our brain’s “active memory storage” is rapidly eliminated. But that’s not the case with traumatic events.[32] As amazing as our brains are, they have a limited capacity for processing. And information associated with extraordinary, stressful events can’t be processed rapidly, so it remains in active memory storage and continues to run in the background, if you will. When a traumatic memory is triggered, it inserts itself into active consciousness, like pop-ups on websites if you don’t have an ad-blocker.[33]

Specific triggers, things that remind Billy of the war, prompt his time travel/flashbacks. For example, the siren announcing high noon on the firehouse across the street “scared the hell out of him,” and catapults him back in time: “Billy closed his eyes. When he opened them, he was back in World War Two again.”[34] Another triggering instance occurs when Billy was in the mental ward, and his room-mate is reading a book:

Billy fell asleep under his blanket. When he woke up again, he was tied to the bed in the hospital back in prison. He opened one eye, saw poor old Edgar Derby reading The Red Badge of Courage by candlelight.[35]

Like the repeated phrases mentioned above, Billy’s time travel/flashbacks also function as a linking device, repeatedly returning both Billy and the reader to the war.

A great big secret somewhere inside.

The barbershop quartet at Billy’s anniversary party also triggers a war-related memory. But this time, his response is very different. Rather than having a flashback/time traveling:

His mouth filled with the taste of lemonade, and his face became grotesque, as though he really were being stretched on the torture engine called the rack. He looked so peculiar that several people commented on it solicitously when the song was done. They thought he might have been having a heart attack… [36]

While coming unstuck in time is the result of a memory that has been partially processed, the barbershop quartet triggers Billy’s response to a memory that had been suppressed. So, even Billy himself didn’t understand why the song evoked such anguish. He finally realizes that the barbershop quartet reminded him of the expressions on the faces of four gobsmacked German guards as they take in the sight of the freshly devastated Dresden.[37] When everyone, guards and prisoners alike, emerged from the meat locker they were sheltering in:

… the sky was black with smoke. The sun was an angry little pinhead. Dresden was like the moon now, nothing but minerals. The stones were hot. Everybody else in the neighborhood was dead.[38]

The bombing of Dresden is the epicenter of Billy’s trauma. As such, it was not just too frightening to relive, but too painful to even remember. So he suppressed the memory altogether, that is until it was triggered by the barbershop quartet.[39]
_____

What’s with the Tralfamadorians?

Billy’s roommate in the mental hospital, Eliot Rosewater, introduced Billy to the science fiction books of Kilgore Trout. Rosewater had been an infantry captain in the war, and he and Billy were both feeling the “sense of dislocation and absurdity” frequently experienced by survivors of atrocity, a sensibility that destroys their previous assumption of a rational universe.[40]  So, as Vonnegut specifically tells us, Billy and Rosewater use science fiction to “re-invent themselves and their universe.”[41]

One of the books Billy read while he was in the mental hospital was titled Maniacs in the Fourth Dimension. It helped Billy understand why his doctors couldn’t fix what was wrong with him. According to Trout’s book, “mental diseases couldn’t be treated because the causes of the diseases were all in the fourth dimension.”[42] So, Billy’s three-dimensional Earthling doctors weren’t actually incompetent. They couldn’t identify the cause of his problems, because they were unable to see them. Rather like the way the psychosocial atmosphere in America hindered Mental Health professionals from identifying PTSD prior to the Vietnam era.

The Tralfamadorian concept of time offers Billy an explanation for his flashbacks. According to the Tralfamadorians, the notion that moments occur one after another, and are gone forever once they have past, is merely an illusion we have here on Earth. Tralfamadorians can:

…look at all the different moments just the way we can look at a stretch of the Rocky Mountains, for instance. They can see how permanent all the moments are, and they can look at any moment that interests them.[43]

This is an apt description what happens in a flashback. All moments are active. As mentioned earlier, the brain hasn’t finished processing traumatic memories and removed them from active memory storage. And when a particular moment is triggered, indicating interest in that moment, the subject (re-)experiences it.

As a result of their understanding of time, when Tralfamadorians see a corpse they merely think the dead person is in a bad state at that precise moment. That same person is in fine shape in plenty of other moments. A passage within Slaughterhouse-Five that overlaps the moment when Billy’s entire company was killed with a moment of camaraderie during boot camp, indicates the psychological benefits of seeing time in this way.

Billy’s fellow soldiers were merely “theoretically dead.”[44]  And these “theoretical corpses” were still able to laugh and eat “a hearty noontime meal.”[45] Recalling the incident some years later, “Billy was struck by what a Tralfamadorian adventure with death that had been, to be dead and to eat at the same time.”[46] In short, understanding time as the Tralfamadorians do provides Billy with the tools to get a handle on his condition. These tools also allow him to cope with the vast amount of death he witnessed in the war, which caused his condition in the first place.
_____

Why are aliens
intertwined with Billy’s PTSD?

Once again, Vonnegut’s use of aliens reflects what was going in American culture when he was writing his novel. At the time Slaughterhouse-Five was published, the Roswell incident had been in American culture for about twenty years. And reports of alien encounters were beginning to crop up. These alien abduction stories indicate that, during this period, science fiction has gone beyond merely being a genre of fiction to become a way of looking at the world.[47]

It’s interesting to note that the first widely publicized account came from someone who, like Billy Pilgrim, was a World War Two veteran. The fact that this abductee said the alien in charge reminded him of “an evil-faced German Nazi” officer is intriguing indeed.[48] This shared characteristic with Billy Pilgrim is especially compelling, given that he also noted a similarity between the “precision of movement” the alien crew exhibited when they moved as a group, and German soldiers.[49]

Studies of alien abduction accounts indicate that, along with other phobias and aversions, subjects commonly experience a confused temporality and gaps in time. These symptoms are frequently related to trauma, which as we have seen, often disrupts memory assimilation. In order for the subject to protect themselves from remembering the event that created their psychic wound, these gaps in time demand to be filled.[50] After the Roswell incident “proved” the existence of extraterrestrials, an alien abduction story is the perfect way to account for this missing time.
_____

In Conclusion.

Slaughterhouse-Five is clearly more than a jumbled bag of sarcastic anti-American rhetoric, sprinkled with a good dose of rough language. Like all literature, Vonnegut’s novel reflects what was going on in the culture that produced it. Even if, like PTSD prior to the Vietnam era, it doesn’t have a name yet. This book does more than just talk about the devastating after-effects of war, however. It gives engaged readers a very small taste of what it’s like to try and make sense of the world when suffering from this debilitating psychological condition.

The moral of Slaughterhouse-Five is simple, War is Hell. By showing us how damaging trauma is, especially on the scale endured as a result of World War Two, Vonnegut does indeed make the case for why people need to be kinder and more responsible than they often are.

That’s my take on Slaughterhouse Five – what’s yours?
Check out this discussion guide to get you started.

    #book burning      #post-war social commentary     #banned books    #PTSD    #published 1960s

Endnotes:

[1] Powers, Kevin. “Forward.” Slaughterhouse-Five. (New York: Modern Library, 2019), xi.
[2] Vonnegut, Kurt. Slaughterhouse-Five. (New York: Modern Library, 2019), 25.
[3] Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five, 28.
[4] Morais, Betsy. “The Neverending Campaign to Ban “Slaughterhouse-Five.’” The Atlantic, August 12, 2011; Henriksen, Megan. “Kurt Vonnegut, ‘Slaughterhouse-Five.’” The Banned Books Project @Carnegie Mellon University. September 12, 2019.
[5] Board of Education, Island Trees Union Free School District No. 26 et al., Petitioners, v. Steven A. PICO, by his next friend Frances Pico et al. https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/457/853.
[6] Johnson, Hannah. “40 years later, the resentment still smolders.” The Bismarck Tribune. Nov. 10, 2013; Stevens, William K. “Dakota Town Dumfounded at Criticism of Book Burning by Order of the school Board.” The New York Times, Nov. 16, 1973.
[7] Vonnegut, Kurt. Palm Sunday: An Autobiographical Collage. (New York: Dial Press Trade Paperbacks, 2011), 4-5.
[8] Vonnegut, Palm Sunday, 6.
[9] Laufert, Wayne. “From the Slaughter.” The Humanist.com (Feb. 19, 2019).
[10] Kunze, Peter C. “For the Boys: Masculinity, Gray Comedy, and the Vietnam War in ‘Slaughterhouse-Five.’” Studies in American Humor. New Series 3, No. 26, Special Issue: Kurt Vonnegut and Humor (2012), 45.
[11] Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five, 17, 16.
[12] Laufert, “From the Slaughter.”
[13] Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five, 168.
[14] Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five, 168.
[15] Solly, Mellan. “Kurt Vonnegut’s Unpublished World War II Scrapbook Reveals Origins of ‘Slaughterhouse-Five.’” Smithsonianmag.com (Dec. 14, 2018).
[16] “‘Slaughterhouse-Five’ at 50.” 2003 Interview with Renee Montagne. NPR radio. (June 6, 2019).
[17] Scott, Wilbur J. “PTSD in DSM-III: A Case in the Politics of Diagnosis and Disease.” Social Problems, Vol 37, No. 3 (Aug., 1990).
[18] Kavanagh, Ciaran. “Diagnosing Kurt Vonnegut: A Response to Susanne Vees-Gulani on the Subject of Slaughterhouse-Five.” IJAS (Irish Journal of American Studies.) Online, No. 5 (2016), 14.
[19]  Kleber, Rolf J., Charles R. Figley, and Bertold P. R. Gersons. Beyond Trauma: Cultural and Societal Dynamics. The Plenum Series on Stress and Coping. (New York: Plenum, 1995), 2.
[20] Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five, 103.
[21] Friedman, Matthew J. A Brief History of the PTSD Diagnosis. PTSD: National Center or PTSD.
[22] Bracken, Patrick J. “Post-modernity and post-traumatic stress disorder.” Social science & Medicine. Vol 53 (2001), 734.
[23] Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five, 194.
[24] Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five, 195.
[25] Bracken, Post-modernity and post-traumatic stress disorder, 735.
[26] Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five, 21.
[27] Symptoms: Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/post-traumatic-stress-disorder-ptsd/symptoms/
[28] Symptoms: Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).
[29] Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five, 68.
[30] Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five, 219; Kavanagh, Ciaran. “Diagnosing Kurt Vonnegut: A Response to Susanne Vees-Gulani on the Subject of Slaughterhouse-Five.” IJAS (Irish Journal of American Studies.) Online, No. 5 (2016), 14.
[31] Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five, 25.
[32] Horowitz, Mardi J. Stress Response Syndromes: PTSD, Grief, Adjustment, and Dissociative Disorders. (Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson, Inc., 2011), 84.
[33] Horowitz, 84-85.
[34] Kavanaugh, 14; Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five, 60.
[35] Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five, 108.
[36] Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five, 177.
[37] Kavanaugh, 14-15.
[38] Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five, 182.
[39] Kavanaugh, 14-15.
[40] Lifton, Robert J. “Beyond Atrocity.” Saturday Review. (March 27, 1971), 23.
[41] Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five, 104.
[42] Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five, 107.
[43] Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five, 29.
[44] Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five, 33.
[45] Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five, 33.
[46] Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five, 34.
[47] Luckhurst, Roger. “The Science-Fictionalization of Trauma: Remarks on Narratives of Alien Abduction.” Science Fiction Studies. Vol. 21, No. 1 (March, 1998), 29.
[48] Friedman, Stanton T. and Kathleen Marden. Captured!: The Betty and Barney Hill UFO Experience. (Franklin Lakes, NJ: New Page Books, 2007), 136.
[49] Friedman, 108.
[50] Luckhurst, 37.

Images:

Cover – 1st edition. Vonnegut, Kurt. Slaughterhouse-Five.  (New York: Delacorte Press, 1969). Jacket design by Paul Bacon” is found on the left jacket flap. (For jurisdictions that define copyright term on the date of the author’s death: according to this article, Bacon died in 2015.) – AbeBooks (direct link to jpg)., Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=80843456

No Parts for John Wayne or Frank Sinatra. “The Longest Day.” trailer screenshot (20th Century Fox), Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Billy Pilgrim, a Text-book Case of PTSD. Photo by Ahmad Ossayli on Unsplash https://unsplash.com/photos/laJW5pp-6Yw?utm_source=unsplash&utm_medium=referral&utm_content=creditShareLink

A Great Big Secret Somewhere Inside. Photo by Edge2Edge Media on Unsplash  https://unsplash.com/photos/x21KgBfOd_4?utm_source=unsplash&utm_medium=referral&utm_content=creditShareLink

Why are Aliens Intertwined with Billy’s PTSD? Photo by Stephen Leonardi on Unsplash https://unsplash.com/photos/sMPRCsoUM4A?utm_source=unsplash&utm_medium=referral&utm_content=creditShareLink

nlike a lot of other books, there’s no short answer as to why The Scarlet Letter was banned. Whenever Hawthorne’s work has been challenged, the objections have come from all directions. That’s because Nathaniel Hawthorne had a complicated relationship with his subject matter. Needless to say, Hawthorne is inextricably linked with Puritanism. He wrote The Scarlet Letter, after all.

When we read a book, it’s important to consider the author and their historical context.  And, when we read Hawthorne, it’s important to understand that his relationship with Puritanism falls squarely in the love/hate category. That’s especially apparent in The Scarlet Letter.

It’s no secret that Hawthorne was haunted by his Puritan lineage. He was so bothered, he added the letter W to his name to separate himself from his Puritan forefathers.[1] It’s easy to see why. His great, great, great grandfather, Major William Hathorne, was infamous as a “bitter persecutor” of Quakers, having them “scourged out of town.”[2] Hathorne is mostly remembered for ordering “Anne Coleman and four of her friends” to be whipped, while tied to a cart and forced to walk the 60 miles from Salem to Boston.[3]  And William’s son, John, “made himself conspicuous” as a “witch judge” and chief interrogator during the Salem Witch Trials.[4]

Hawthorne talks about the ancestral guilt he carries as a result of their actions in The Custom House, the opening chapter of The Scarlet Letter. He ends the passage by praying that any family curse caused by their actions “may be now and henceforth removed.”[5] These feelings are undoubtedly the source of what Herman Melville described as the “mystical blackness” that pervades Hawthorne’s work.[6]

On the other hand, Hawthorne still wasn’t inclined to embrace the religious shift that had occurred in New England during the nineteenth century, toward individual experience and an optimistic faith in the perfectibility of human beings.[7] His Puritan ancestry gave Hawthorne a sense of rootedness, “a home-feeling with the past.”[8] And he may not have been a “churchly man,” but his heritage gave him an appreciation for the culture and moral foundation that emerged from Puritan doctrine.[9] His very nature, it’s been said, was imbued with “the temperamental earnestness of the Puritan.”[10]

It’s no surprise, then, that multiple and often paradoxical perspectives are common in Hawthorne’s works. In fact, Hawthorne’s technique has been referred to as “the device of multiple choice.”[11] Hawthorne himself described The Scarlet Letter as “turning different sides” of the same idea “to the reader’s eye.”[12] So, it should be even less surprising that The Scarlet Letter has been banned and challenged for contradictory reasons as well.

For example, one literary critic reviewing The Scarlet Letter the year it was published thought Hawthorne’s depiction of Puritanism was too severe.  He didn’t say Hawthorne was wrong. He just wondered why, “of all features of the period,” Hawthorne chose practices that “reflect most discredit” on the Puritans.[13]

Another early critic, however, thought Hester’s punishment wasn’t painful and obvious enough. Merely being condemned to wear the scarlet letter didn’t make Hester contrite. It didn’t make her repent. And Hawthorne didn’t “excite the horror of his readers” enough to keep them from following in Hester and Dimmesdale’s footsteps.[14]

So, it isn’t just the passage of time that causes contemporary readers to see oppressive patriarchy (like the Seattle teacher who tweeted he’d “rather die” than teach The Scarlet Letter), when some nineteenth-century critics found what we would call feminism.[15] It isn’t caused by cultural shift. And it’s more than Hester’s “light punishment” that lead to objections about how the book advocates women’s rights. Reverend Arthur Cleveland Coxe specifically expressed concern that Hawthorne’s book encouraged a message way too close to views expressed at the first National Woman’s Rights Convention, held in Worcester, Massachusetts the same year The Scarlet Letter was published.[16]

Granted, we’re more on the lookout for feminist themes these days. But, they were clearly in the text all along. And, they’re right beside passages that seem to say Hester should accept her fate, and fall in line with patriarchal Puritan society.

It is true, however, that the most consistent objection to The Scarlet Letter has been the topic of adultery. The notion that adultery is quite simply not a “fit subject for popular literature” didn’t begin with the 1961 challenge in Michigan, or the Arizona challenge in 1967.[17] That mindset has been around since 1850. And there’ll probably always be someone who takes offense at Hawthorne’s use of adultery as a vehicle for examining his multiple perspectives and paradoxical themes. Unfortunately, this mindset squashes any real understanding of what The Scarlet Letter has to say. And this superficial (mis)reading begins with the title.

After all, if the focus of Hawthorne’s book was the scandalous behavior of an adulterous woman, he would’ve titled it Hester Prynne, or A Fallen Woman.[18] That would have been more consistent with the novels of adultery that were popular in nineteenth-century literature, like Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, or Madame Bovary by Flaubert.[19] While these novels revolve around the theme of “love against the world,” Hawthorne calling his work The Scarlet Letter tells the reader that the letter’s function as symbol is actually the central subject of the book.[20]

This reading is reinforced by the fact that Hester and Dimmesdale’s adulterous act isn’t depicted (even in nineteenth-century terms), and the word adultery never appears in the text. Yes, requiring that a capital A be stitched to your clothes a historically accurate penalty for adultery in Puritan Massachusetts. But, the law is precise about its size and placement. Hester embellishing the letter with gold threat would not have been tolerated.  And other aspects of the punishment Hawthorne depicts don’t line up with the statute’s requirements.[21] Hawthorne is clearly using the scarlet letter as a symbol, a word that does appear in his book some twenty-four times, specifically in reference to the A on Hester’s bosom.[22]  The question at the heart of Hawthorne’s work, then, is “What does the scarlet A actually mean?”
___

The Custom House.

 The opening chapter of the book provides a cryptic key, so to speak, to unlocking Hawthorne’s symbolism, enabling readers to see that The Scarlet Letter is about more than a misbehaving minister. By locating the red cloth letter that inspired his work in Salem’s Custom House, wrapped in a package from before the Revolutionary War, Hawthorne establishes a connection between seventeenth-century Puritan New England and nineteenth-century American culture.

In this context, the A becomes a cultural artifact, one that simultaneously expresses Hawthorne’s culture as well as the one that produced it.[23] Hawthorne reaches back through the A to America’s myth of national origins and does what we continue to do, return to the Puritans to reclaim a sense of purpose, while also demonstrating progress. The A embodies the shift from Puritanism to the Revolution, as well as America’s continued development from that time forward.[24]

The American Revolution prompted social changes just as significant as the political changes it brought about. The spirit that triggered the Revolution, with its declaration of inalienable rights, self-evident truths, and the equal creation of all, undoubtedly played a role in the decline of Puritanism and its foundational Calvinist doctrine, a theology that emphasizes the depravity of humankind.[25]  Hawthorne considers this transition from the religious perspective, a psychological outlook, as well as a historical viewpoint, all of which are reflected in the book.
___

Dimmesdale looks back,
and Hester is forward looking.

Founders of new ethics are invariably deemed sinful/heretical, because they challenge the authority of an existing/old ethic, a collective whose aim is to maintain equilibrium. And that’s the case in The Scarlet Letter. Hester Prynne, who is forced to literally wear a label identifying her as sinful, represents a new ethic. And Arthur Dimmesdale is a concrete expression of the American Puritanism that Hester challenges. Not only is Dimmesdale a Puritan minister, he embodies the psychological consequences associated with trying to adhere to such an authoritarian ethic. [26]

Guilt stemming from sinful acts is frequently identified as a major theme in The Scarlet Letter, but it’s more complicated than that. Two basic psychological mechanisms are at work within an authoritarian ethic like Puritanism (with its harshly implemented moral Laws and publicly enforced taboos), suppression, and repression. Suppression is the process of consciously pushing tendencies that don’t align with the ethical system out of our awareness. And the best-known forms of this technique are discipline and asceticism.[27]

Hawthorne is known as a master of psychological insight, and he tells us it’s “essential” to Dimmesdale “to feel the pressure of a faith about him.”[28] And we see Dimmesdale use both discipline and asceticism to keep himself in check. He exhibits discipline when he tells Pearl that he won’t appear publicly with her and Hester in the town square the next day:

“Nay; not so, my little Pearl,” answered the minister; for, with the new energy of the moment, all the dread of public exposure, that had so long been the anguish of his life, had returned upon him; and he was already trembling at the conjunction in which—with a strange joy, nevertheless—he now found himself.[29]

As much as Dimmesdale might wish he could claim his place alongside Hester and Pearl, he doesn’t dare fly in the face of Puritanism’s moral Law. And suppressing that impulse becomes a pleasant experience in itself. It’s also revealed that Dimmesdale’s conflicted soul not only leads him to whip himself with a “bloody scourge,” but fast to the point of collapse as “act[s] of penance.”[30]

While suppression operates on the conscious level, repression functions on the unconscious level. Inclinations that are at odds with the dominant ethic are rejected from the conscious mind. These tendencies may become unconscious, but according to depth psychology, they “lead an active underground life of their own.”[31] Needless to say, nothing good can come from this situation.

What does happen is that two psychic systems develop within the personality, one an outgrowth of suppression, and the other a byproduct of repression. Suppression leads to a “façade personality,” a mask that signals we’re conforming to the dominant ethic of the age, and hides our true nature.[32]  Though it’s easy to interpret Dimmesdale’s actions as mere hypocrisy, this is what occurs when he hides his guilt. [33]  The scene at the scaffold when Hester is first released from prison, demonstrates a façade personality at work:

“Hester Prynne,” said he, leaning over the balcony and looking down steadfastly into her eyes, “thou hearest what this good man says, and seest the accountability under which I labor. If thou feelest it to be for thy soul’s peace, and that thy earthly punishment will thereby be made more effectual to salvation, I charge thee to speak out the name of thy fellow-sinner and fellow-sufferer! Be not silent from any mistaken pity and tenderness for him.[34]

Dimmesdale makes his true feelings known. But he does so through a mask that signals to everyone but Hester that he’s conforming to the strict Puritan ethic.

The other psychic system that develops is a shadow figure, which is a byproduct of repression. Taboo impulses are rejected so emphatically they become psychologically severed as “not me,” and as mentioned above, take on a life of their own. Chillingworth embodies this shadow figure.[35]  As such, he’s fully aware of what Dimmesdale is repressing. And his mission is to keep the torture of living under such an authoritarian ethic “always at red heat,” which literally drains the life out of Dimmesdale like the blood-sucking leech Hawthorne describes Chillingworth as.[36]

While Dimmesdale is an expression of American Puritanism, Hester looks toward a new ethic, and the social shifts that result from it. Like we said earlier, founders of new ethics are consistently deemed heretical. And Hawthorne associates Hester Prynne with Anne Hutchinson, who was expelled from Massachusetts Bay Colony during the seventeenth century. Hutchinson was banished for her role in the “Antinomian controversy,” a theological conflict that was essentially between power and freedom of conscience.[37]

By associating Hester with Hutchinson, Hawthorne indicates that Hester’s real crime is indeed heresy rather than simply breaching Puritanism’s rigid moral code (though she did that as well). A passage stating that Hester “assumed a freedom of speculation” our Puritan forefathers would have considered “a deadlier crime than that stigmatized by the scarlet letter” confirms this interpretation.[38] In associating Hester with Hutchinson, Hawthorne also characterizes her heresy as being antinomian in nature.[39]

At its root, antinomianism means “against or opposed to the law.”[40] In a Christian context, antinomianism embraces the existence of an “inner light” within every individual, which presumes a spirituality based on inner experience with the Holy Spirit rather than conformity to religious laws.[41] Hester’s antinomian tendencies are evident in her declaration to Dimmesdale, where she’s clearly judging the validity of their relationship through her conscience and inner spiritual experience rather than the Puritan power structure and religious Law:

What we did had a consecration of its own. We felt it so! We said so to each other! Hast though forgotten it?[42]

Antinomianism’s “inner light” has been described as an “ancestor” to the philosophy of self-reliance held by nineteenth-century antinomians like Ralph Waldo Emerson and his circle of Transcendentalists. [43] Critics of unthinking conformity (religious or otherwise), the Transcendentalists urged each person to find, as Emerson put it, “an original relation to the universe.”[44] It’s a complex word, Transcendentalism, especially for such a simple idea – that men and women (in equal measure) have knowledge about the world around them that goes beyond what they can see, touch, hear, taste, or feel (transcends it, in other words). And, that people can trust their own intuition to know what is right.[45]  Antinomianism’s “inner light” has clearly been influenced by the post-Revolutionary spirit mentioned earlier (with its secular notion of self-evident truths, declaration of inalienable rights, and the equal creation of all), resulting in these Transcendentalist principles.

Hawthorne became acquainted with the Transcendentalist circle during the years he and his family spent in free-thinking and reform-minded Concord, which brings us to Margaret Fuller and her influence on The Scarlet Letter.[46]  Fuller is best known for her feminist work Woman in the Nineteenth Century, and she inspired Hawthorne’s “dark heroines,” the first of which was Hester Prynne.[47] In the chapter titled Another View of Hester, Hawthorne follows Fuller’s description of three stages in the advancement of women toward self-realization and social equality. The first stage is legal and institutional. Second is revised concepts about gender. And the third phase is female character itself, to primarily live in and for her own development.[48] According to Hester:

As a first step, the whole system of society is to be torn down, and built up anew. Then, the very nature of the opposite sex, or its long hereditary habit, which has become like nature, is to be essentially modified, before woman can be allowed to assume what seems a fair and suitable position. Finally, all other difficulties being obviated, woman cannot take advantage of these preliminary reforms, until she herself shall have undergone a still mightier change; in which, perhaps, the ethereal essence, wherein she has her truest lie, will be found to have evaporated.[49]

Those who knew Margaret Fuller best, described her as “The Friend:”

This was her vocation. She bore at her girdle a golden key to unlock all caskets of confidence. Into whatever home she entered she brought a benediction of truth, justice, tolerance, and honor.[50]

Consistent with her forward-looking role, by the end of The Scarlet Letter, this characterization also applies to Hester Prynne, marking the acceptance of the nineteenth century’s reform-minded ethic of individual experience and self-reliance.

[Women] came to Hester’s cottage, demanding why they were so wretched, and what the remedy! Hester comforted and counselled them, as best she might. She assured them, too, of her firm belief, that, at some brighter period, when the world should have grown ripe for it, in Heaven’s own time, a new truth would be revealed, in order to establish the whole relation between man and woman on a surer ground of mutual happiness.[51]
___

Pearl: Transition Personified.

Symbolically speaking, children typically represent the future. Though Pearl is often associated with evil, it is the process of transition that she personifies. She embodies the chaotic liminal stage between one stable mode of being and another, when we are no longer in one mode, but not yet in another. We are “betwixt and between,” in this an old ethic and a new one. [52] Hester’s concerns about her daughter reflect the anxiety often experienced by those on the cusp of a new ethic, dreading the worst possible consequences while holding onto glimpses of the best possible outcome.[53]

[Hester] remembered—betwixt a smile and a shudder—the talk of the neighboring towns-people; who, seeking vainly elsewhere for the child’s paternity, and observing some of her odd attributes, had given out that poor little Pearl was a demon offspring; such as, ever since old Catholic times, had occasionally been seen on earth, through the agency of their mother’s sin, and to promote some foul and wicked purpose. Luther, according to the scandal of his monkish enemies, was a brat of that hellish breed.[54]

The new ethic alluded to by mentioning Luther is, of course, nothing less than the establishment of Protestantism itself. Pearl, however, specifically represents the transition between seventeenth-century Puritanism, and the new, nineteenth-century ethic. She is, after all, the daughter of Arthur Dimmesdale and Hester Prynne:

Her nature appeared to possess depth, too, as well as variety; but—or else Hester’s fears deceived her—it lacked reference and adaptation to the world into which she was born. The child could not be made amenable to rules. In giving her existence, a great law had been broken; and the result was a being whose elements were perhaps beautiful and brilliant, but all in disorder. [55]

As Hawthorne shows us, Pearl possesses Dimmesdale’s depth of character, but also has Hester’s antinomian nature. As a child, however, she’s developing and evolving, like the young country of America itself.
___

The love plot parallels the shift in American culture.

The arc of Hawthorne’s love story reflects the shift in American culture that occurred between the conflicting ethics that Dimmesdale and Hester embody. The tale begins in Boston, the very colony established by John Winthrop, and the Puritan forefathers credited with founding America, those we still envision in black cloaks and steeple-crowned hats.  And Hawthorne explicitly states that at this point in America’s history, Boston is a theocracy, a form of government where religion and law are “thoroughly interfused.”[56]

We’re introduced to Hester as she is released from prison, and crosses the threshold of its heavy oaken door, a significant symbol indicating change. Hawthorne makes it clear that her thinking (and therefore the ethic she embodies) conflicts with the strict, authoritarian Puritan doctrine. After all, Hester is being released from prison, where (not coincidently) she gave birth to baby Pearl (and all that she embodies). In this scene, we also learn that Dimmesdale is an integral part of the theocratic machinery. And Hawthorne drops enough hints that we know he’s the father of Hester’s baby.

Hawthorne spends the next segment of the narrative examining the differing ethics at work, and their psychological repercussions. The love story peaks with the scene in the forest between Hester and Dimmesdale, when she proposes that they put the past seven years behind them, leave Boston, and start a new life somewhere else:

Begin all anew! Hast thou exhausted possibility in the failure of this one trial? Not so! The future is yet full of trial and success. There is happiness to be enjoyed! There is good to be done![57]

Hester’s plan involves more than a future with Dimmesdale. Symbolically, her proposal amounts to a re-founding of America on the basis of nineteenth-century principles – development of the self, individual experience and self-reliance, as well as the new morality and corresponding social forms they give rise to.[58]

If real progress is to take place, however, Pearl must come to terms with Dimmesdale, which she finally does:

Pearl kissed [Dimmesdale’s] lips. A spell was broken. The great scene of grief, in which the wild infant bore a part, had developed all her sympathies; and as her tears fell upon her father’s cheek, they were the pledge that she would grow up amid human joy and sorrow, nor forever do battle with the world, but be a woman in it. Towards her mother, too, Pearl’s errand as a messenger of anguish was all fulfilled.[59]

With Pearl’s kiss, seventeenth-century Puritanism and the nineteenth-century’s antinomian ethic of self-reliance are symbolically married, if you will.[60] And with that, Dimmesdale passes away, just like the era defined by Puritanism ultimately did. Signifying Puritanism’s continued influence on America, Chillingworth bequeaths “a great deal of property, both here and in England” (the birthplace of Puritanism) to Pearl.[61] And it’s no coincidence that the top two figures of the Puritan hierarchy were executors of the estate.

In Hester’s return to Boston after many years away, she is doing what Americans continue to do (especially given that she crosses the threshold back into her old cottage wearing the scarlet letter on her bosom). She’s reaching back through the A to America’s myth of national origins, and returning to the Puritans to reclaim a sense of purpose, while also demonstrating progress.

Finally, the tombstone Hester ultimately shares with Dimmesdale is engraved with an escutcheon, the shield that forms the foundation for coats of arms. And Hawthorne tells us that the motto etched into it serves as a “brief description of our now concluded legend:” [62]

On a field, sable, the letter A. gules [63]

…

Sable and gules are terms used in heraldry for the colors black and red. As coats of arms are intended to do, this phrase crystalizes the cultural history of its owner.[64] The sable/black stands for the Puritanism America is grounded in, the doctrine that produced what Hawthorne describes as “black-browed” followers, and future generations continue to associate with black cloaks and steeple-crowned hats.[65] And the A once again functions as a cultural artifact, only this time not as a token of shame, but as a crest representing progress toward the nineteenth-century ethic of individual experience and self-reliance.
___

In Conclusion.

So, what does Hawthorne’s A actually stand for? Is it the adultery so many parents have found objectionable in their challenges? Or is the feminist message, with its implied antinomianism that nineteenth-century critics took issue with? Or does the A stand for America itself?

Like all well-constructed symbols, there’s a lot packed into Hawthorne’s scarlet A. So, consistent with his multiple-choice style, the answer is a paradoxical yes. Hawthorne’s A is for – Adultery, Antinomianism, and America itself.

That’s my take on Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter– what’s yours?
Check out this discussion guide to get you started.

#Hawthorne      #symbol    #witch trials   #betwixt & between   #banned   #liminal     #Puritan

Endnotes:

[1] James, Henry. “Hawthorne.” In English Men of Letters. Edited by John Morley. (London: Macmillan and Co., 1879), 6.
[2] Brooks, Rebecca Beatrice. “The Life of Nathaniel Hawthorne.” History of Massachusetts Blog. Sept 15, 2011; “The Paternal Ancestors of Nathaniel Hawthorne: Introduction.” Hawthorne In Salem. hawthorneinsalem.org; Hawthorne, Nathaniel. The Scarlet Letter. (New York: Penguin Books, 2016), 11.
[3] Moore, Margaret. The Salem World of Nathaniel Hawthorne. (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 2001), 31; In 1662 “Robert Pike Halts a Quaker Persecution in Massachusetts.” New England Historical Society. https://www.newenglandhistoricalsociety.com/1662-robert-pike-halts-quaker-persecution-massachusetts/
[4] Hawthorne-The Scarlet Letter, 11; “The Paternal Ancestors of Nathaniel Hawthorne: Introduction.”
[5] Hawthorne-The Scarlet Letter, 11.
[6] Melville, Herman. “Hawthorne and his Mosses.” Herman Melville. Edited by Harrison Hayford. (New York: The Library of America, 1984), 1159.
[7] Howells, W. D. “The Personality of Hawthorne.” The North American Review. Vol. 177, No. 565. (Dec. 1903), 882.
[8] Hawthorne, Nathaniel. The Scarlet Letter. (New York: Penguin Books, 2016), 10.
[9] Milder, Robert. “‘The Scarlet Letter’ and Its Discontents.” Nathaniel Hawthorne Review. Vol. 22, No. 1 (Spring 1996), 21.
[10] Wendell, Barrett. A Literary History of America. (New York: Scribner’s Sons, 1900), 433.
[11] Matthieson, F. O. American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1941), 276.
[12] Fields, James T. Yesterdays with Authors. (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1893), 51
[13] Coxe, Arthur Cleveland. “The Writings of Hawthorne.” The Church Review. January, 1851. Vol. 3, No. 4., 506.
[14] Sova, Dawn B. Banned Books: Literature Suppressed on Social Grounds. (New York: Facts On File, Inc., 2006), 254; Brownson, Orestes. “The Scarlet Letter.” Brownson Quarterly Review. October, 1850.
[15] Gurdon, Meghan Cox. “Even Homer Gets Mobbed; A Massachusetts school has banned ‘The Odyssey.’” Wall Street Journal (Online). Dec. 27, 2020;
[16] Coxe, 510.
[17] Brownson, Orestes. “The Scarlet Letter.” Brownson Quarterly Review. October, 1850; Sova, 254.
[18] Milder, Robert. “Nathaniel Hawthorne.” The Cambridge Companion to American Novelists. Edited by Timothy Parrish. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 14.
[19] Perotta, Tom. “Foreward.” The Scarlet Letter. (New York: Penguin Books, 2016), ix.
[20] Bercovitch, Sacvan. “The A-Politics of Ambiguity in ‘The Scarlet Letter.’” New Literary History. Vol. 19, No. 3. (Spring, 1988), 631, 632; Milder- “Nathaniel Hawthorne,” 14.
[21] “Scarlet Letter.” Massachusetts Law Updates. Nov. 30, 2013.
[22] Carrez, Stephanie. “Symbol and Interpretation in Hawthorne’s ‘Scarlet Letter’.” Hawthorne In Salem. http://www.hawthorneinsalem.org/page/12218/
[23] Bercovitch- “The A-Politics of Ambiguity in ‘The Scarlet Letter,’” 630.
[24] Bercovitch- “The A-Politics of Ambiguity in ‘The Scarlet Letter,’” 630; Bercovitch – “The Scarlet Letter: A Twice-Told Tale,” 4; Bercovitch- “Hawthorne’s A-Morality of Compromise.” Representations. No. 24, Special Issue: America Reconstructed, 1840-1940 (Autumn, 1988), 12.
[25] Noll, Mark. A History of Christianity in The United States and Canada. (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1992), 148.
[26] Sarracino, Carmine. “‘The Scarlet Letter’ and a New Ethic.” College Literature. Vol. 10, No. 1 (Winter, 1983).
[27] Neumann, Erich. Depth Psychology and a New Ethic. Translated by Eugene Rolfe. (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1973), 33.
[28] Hawthorne- The Scarlet Letter, 114.
[29] Hawthorne- The Scarlet Letter, 141.
[30] Hawthorne- The Scarlet Letter, 134.
[31] Neumann, 35.
[32] Neumann, 41.
[33] Sarracino, 52.
[34] Hawthorne- The Scarlet Letter, 63.
[35] Sarracino, 52.
[36] Hawthorne- The Scarlet Letter, 239.
[37] Hall, David D. ed. The Antinomian Controversy, 1636-1638: A Documentary History. (Durham: Duke University Press, 1990).
[38] Hawathorne- The Scarlet Letter, 152.
[39] Khomina, Anna. “The Banishment of Anne Hutchinson.” The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History. (Nov. 17, 2016).
[40] Hall, 3.
[41] Pokol, Agnes. “The Sociological Dimensions of The Scarlet Letter, Hawthorne as a Social Critic on Democracy and the Woman question.”
[42] Hawthorne-The Scarlet Letter, 181.
[43] Pokol.
[44] Pokol; Emerson, Ralph Waldo. “Nature.” Ralph Waldo Emerson: A Critical Edition of the Major Works. Edited by Richard Poirier. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 2.
[45] “Transcendentalism, An American Philosophy.” U.S. History: Pre-Columbian to the New Millennium. www.ushistory.org.
[46] Milder, “Introduction.” The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne. (New York: Penguin Books, 2016), xiii.
[47] Milder- “‘The Scarlet Letter’ and Its Discontents,” 11.
[48] Milder- “Introduction,” xxiv; Milder- “‘The Scarlet Letter’ and Its Discontents,” 12.
[49] Hawthorne- The Scarlet Letter, 153.
[50] Fuller, Margaret; Channing, W. H.; Emerson, Ralph Waldo; Clarke, James Freeman. The Autobiography of Margaret Fuller Ossoli. Vol. 1&2. (Madison & Adams Press, Kindle Edition), 326.
[51] Hawthorne- The Scarlet Letter, 245.[52] Turner, Victor. “Betwixt and Between: The Liminal Period in Rites of Passage.” Betwixt & Between: Patterns of Masculine and Feminine Initiation. Edited by Lois Carus Mahdi, Steven Foster, Meredith Little. (La Salle, Illinois: Open Court, 1987), 7.
[53] Sarracino, 57.
[54] Hawthorne- The Scarlet Letter, 92.
[55] Hawthorne- The Scarlet Letter, 84.
[56] Hawthorne- The Scarlet Letter, 47.
[57] Hawthorne- The Scarlet Letter, 184.
[58] Milder- “Nathaniel Hawthorne,” 14-15.
[59] Hawthorne- The Scarlet Letter, 238.
[60] Sarracino, 58.
[61] Hawthorne- The Scarlet Letter, 243.
[62] Hawthorne- The Scarlet Letter, 246.
[63] Hawthorne- The Scarlet Letter, 246.
[64] International Heraldry & Heralds.
[65] Hawthorne- The Scarlet Letter, 11, 217.

Images:

Cover. Hawthorne, Nathaniel. The Scarlet Letter. (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1895).

Nathaniel Hawthorne portrait.  Nathaniel Hawthorne. , ca. 1860. [to 1865] Photograph. https://www.loc.gov/item/2017892968/.

Anne Hutchinson Statue. Curbed Boston. https://boston.curbed.com/maps/boston-statues-of-women

Margaret Fuller portrait. Josiah Johnson Hawes, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/39/Margaret_Fuller.tif

Illustrated images are taken from: Hawthorne, Nathaniel. The Scarlet Letter. (Boston: James R. Osgood and Company, 1878).

hat’s up with the brouhaha that perpetually revolves around this book? Why was The Catcher in the Rye banned? In short, Salinger’s work challenged the status quo. And it did so in an era defined by conformity. So, the outcome is pretty predictable. As a New York Times columnist once put it, The Catcher in the Rye has been “yanked out of American schools more than almost any other title.”[1] And the challenges come fast and furious.

The earliest attempt to remove The Catcher in the Rye from high school reading materials occurred in 1954, and took place in Marin County, California. Shortly after that, a similar effort was made to restrict students’ reading of the book in Los Angeles County. The following year, it was censored in Baltimore, Boston, Buffalo, and Port Huron as well. In 1956, a group known as The National Organization for Decent Literature labeled The Catcher in the Rye  objectionable.[2] At this point, Catcher had also been banned in Fairmont, McMechen, St. Louis, and Wheeling, West Virginia. Efforts to ban Salinger’s work continued to expand.[3]
.

And the hits just keep on coming.

Between 1961 and 1965, there were eighteen separate attempts to ban The Catcher in the Rye from high school campuses, creating enough controversy to draw the attention of national newspapers.[4] But challenges haven’t been limited to the decades immediately following the novel’s publication – the hits just keep on coming! According to the office of Intellectual Freedom, the novel is “a perennial No. 1 on the censorship hit list,” and has remained on the American Library Association’s annual Banned Book report well into the 21^st century.[5]
_________

What’s the rub, anyway?

Why is The Catcher in the Rye so controversial? Attacks on Catcher revolve around a number of concerns. Grievances usually have to do with language challengers consider offensive – one parent cited 785 “profanities.”[6] Objections frequently involve blasphemy. Or a general “family values” kind of complaint, like the undermining of parental authority. To top things off, Holden Caulfield’s criticism of “home life, [the] teaching profession, religion, and so forth” was summed up as an assault on patriotism, with Catcher labeled downright un-American.[7] Holden Caulfield, challengers charge, is quite simply not a good role model for teen-age readers.[8]

But, is Salinger’s protagonist intended to be a role model? If these concerned citizens realized that literature is a powerful platform for examining societal ills, they would have understood that depicting such behavior doesn’t necessarily mean the author is endorsing it. In fact, quite the opposite. When read merely for plot, The Catcher in the Rye appears to be nothing more than the story of a teenage boy having trouble transitioning to adulthood. However, the inappropriate behavior Holden Caulfield engages in, and the way he expresses himself have a rhetorical purpose. And when read accordingly, they reflect the shifting societal landscape Salinger sees in postwar America. Holden is grappling with the same kinds of questions the challengers’ own children are facing. Holden Caulfield is not, in fact, intended to be a role model. Because Salinger’s work is about much more than the antics of a rebellious teenager.

Given the kinds of complaints behind the banning of Salinger’s novel, it is no surprise that one of its challenges was led by a woman who had not read, and declared she would never read, The Catcher in the Rye.[9]  What is surprising is that someone who hasn’t even read a particular book has the capacity to restrict others’ access to it.

What these censors fail to realize is that there’s more to The Catcher in the Rye than “Holden Caulfield is a bad boy with a potty mouth.” Having said that, why is Catcher important? And what’s Holden is so cranked up about in the first place? Come to find out, Holden Caulfield is a twentieth-century Jeremiah._________

Holden Caulfield:
Twentieth-century Jeremiah.

During the post-World War II period when popular culture was trumpeting American ideals, Salinger was writing about the realities of the social experience in America, those obscured by a society consumed with image and material goals. Though The Catcher in the Rye has resonated with teenage readers as an expression of adolescent alienation for generations, it isn’t just about raging against the establishment. As Salinger’s biographers note, he was “not just another nihilist; and Holden [is] not just another lost boy.”[10] When read for more than plot, both the book and the boy exhibit a spiritual nature. Holden isn’t just running away from adulthood. He seeks to transcend a materially obsessed culture.

Salinger didn’t set out to write an anti-American diatribe, as The Catcher in the Rye has been labeled by those attempting to ban it. He was actually writing within the most American of literary forms, the jeremiad, to convey a message of reform. The jeremiad is a rhetorical method that was named for the prophet Jeremiah and used by the Puritans, one designed to keep American society in line with its ideals by calling attention to its flaws.[11]

An essential fact about The Catcher in the Rye, is that Holden does not reject historically American values. What he does is criticize the flawed way they’re enacted in modern society, and berate the replacement of morality with conformity.[12]  As his sister Phoebe points out to him, Holden has the Robert Burns line of poetry wrong, an incorrect recollection that gives us the novel’s title: it’s “if a body meet a body,” rather than “if a body catch a body.” What Holden’s misremembering tells us is that he’s not “looking for love in all the wrong places,” but as with all “Jeremiahs” (and maybe a few bullfrogs), he wants to save society from a corrupt and deteriorating culture.[13]
_______

It’s about more than teen-age angst.

On its face, The Catcher in the Rye is about an immature teenage boy unable to come to terms with his impending adulthood. And more often than not, it is this perspective that’s taught in schools. Sure, high school students can relate to that narrative. But “life is hard, and Holden needs to get himself together,” is a cursory reading of the novel at best.

The book has also been described as “a story about a boy whose little brother has died,” with Holden’s negative perspective on the world seen as a manifestation of his grief.[14] This interpretation does indeed delve beneath the surface narrative. And it is enlightening. But there’s still more to Catcher than the psychology behind Holden’s actions.

Others have read Salinger’s work through the lens of his World War II-induced Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. But, what’s the point of writing that book? For therapeutic purposes, perhaps? Holden’s exchange with Mr. Antolini suggests such a possibility, that he may be able to help himself by helping others with his novel. It is true that we are all “broken” in one way or another, and Catcher is most certainly relatable on that level. But, the self-imposed exile Salinger is so famous for suggests a purpose other than reaching out to other “irreparably damaged” people with a healing message.[15]

I would argue that The Catcher in the Rye is a re-fashioned jeremiad. Not only because this interpretation considers the author and his historical context, but because, as Lionel Trilling points out, “literary situations [are] cultural situations.”[16] Understanding Salinger’s work as a jeremiad takes “the animus of the author” into account.[17] That is, what he wants to see happen as a result of people reading his book.
_________

What the heck is a Jeremiad?

Considered America’s first distinct literary genre, the jeremiad is a political sermon that, as mentioned above, takes its tone from the biblical prophet Jeremiah. It’s a mode of public exhortation used by the New England Puritans through the close of the eighteenth century for the purpose of social revitalization. In other words, the American jeremiad is a call for America to self-correct.[18]

These days, in industrialized societies like ours, it’s genres such as film, popular music, and literature that serve to expose injustices, inefficiencies, and immoralities in social structures. These modes influence culture by getting us to think about the shortcomings in our society. This leads to new insights, which in turn take root and reshape cultural expectations.[19]
_________

There’s a long history of literature as jeremiad.

Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye belongs to a lineage of American writers who have inherited and re-fashioned the jeremiad genre, authors who produced literature thick with spiritual protest.[20] Harriett Beecher Stowe’s abolitionist novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin, for example, lambastes the country’s great sin of slavery, (and resulted in active resistance to the Fugitive Slave Act).[21] Henry David Thoreau’s essay Life Without Principle decries America’s narrow focus on making money, as well as the superficial nature of media, that “blunt[s]” a person’s sense of what is right.[22] Then there’s John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath, which laments the widespread foreclosures and subsequent homelessness caused by the “double whammy” of the Depression and the Dust Bowl. This work takes aim at “American greed, waste, and spongy morality.[23] And the lineage continues right up through Salinger and beyond.

Given Holden Caulfield’s constant judgement of the world as he sees it, The Catcher in the Rye is nothing if not the “catalogue of iniquities” inherent to the jeremiad form.[24] Interestingly, the fact that Catcher’s critique of mainstream American goals has led to it being labeled “un-American” parallels the history of the American jeremiad itself.[25]

The Puritans failed to realize how their self-denunciations would sound to non-New England ears. And they were nothing short of shocked when others took their jeremiads at face value, which prompted leaders from competing charters to proclaim New England “a sink of iniquity.”[26] Bearing this in mind, it became necessary to explain that the jeremiad was a rhetorical exercise, intended as motivation to live up to American ideals.

A similar reproach is echoed in Sinclair Lewis’ declaration, “I love America… I love it, but I don’t like it,” a sentiment that also runs through the following passage from The Catcher in the Rye[27]:

But you’re wrong about that hating business. I mean about hating football players and all. You really are. I don’t hate too many guys. What I may do, I may hate them for a little while, like this guy Stradlater I knew at Pencey, and this other boy, Robert Ackley. I hated them once in a while – I admit it – but it doesn’t last too long, is what I mean. After a while, if I didn’t see them, if they didn’t come in the room, or if I didn’t see them in the dining room for a couple of meals, I sort of missed them. I mean I sort of missed them.[28]

Though Holden does indeed lambaste his classmates, as this passage shows he doesn’t carry any ongoing animosity toward them, or football players generally. Rather, his indictments call out particular behaviors commonplace in the larger society.
_________

What makes Holden Caulfield a “Jeremiah”?

Holden expresses a fear that he’s disappearing as he crosses from one side of the road or street to the other, an image that bookends the narrative. This symbolizes his sense of diminishing authenticity within American society. As Perry Miller argues in his work on the American jeremiad, since the days of Jonathan Edwards (a fiery eighteenth-century minister referred to as the last Puritan), western civilization has put reflections about the larger meaning of existence aside.[29] We have distracted ourselves with materialism and concerns for image, pursuits that do nothing to address the ills of society. And it is this demise of American ideals that Allie Caulfield’s death signifies, an interpretation underscored by Holden’s prophetic appeal, “Allie, don’t let me disappear,” when crossing the street toward the end of the novel.[30]

And, Holden Caulfield’s iconic red hunting hat is the most important symbol in The Catcher in the Rye. It alludes to the “hunters” mentioned in the book of Jeremiah, invading nations invoked as divine retribution for Israel’s failure to heed the prophet’s warnings.[31] The hat’s color is significant because red is the traditional color of forewarning, or signaling alarm. Fire trucks and ambulance lights both flash red, as do those at railroad crossings. In keeping with what the hat symbolizes, Holden’s reference to it as a “people hunting hat” indicates that he is “taking aim” as it were, to expose their hypocrisy and “phoniness.” To read it as a call for actual violence is a failure to engage the novel’s symbolic language. Needless to say, no one escapes Holden’s critical eye.
_________

What are Holden’s Puritanical ideals?

Though the fervor of Holden’s accusations is typically attributed to him being a “disaffected teen,” his targets align with themes common in the colonial pulpit, specifically, being tempted by profits and pleasures, false dealing with God, and the corruption of children.[32]

Regarding profits, Holden makes it very clear that he considers his older brother to have sold-out. D. B. used to write short stories, including Holden’s favorite about a boy so proud of buying a goldfish with his own money, that he wouldn’t let anyone else see it. But now, D. B.’s a Hollywood screenwriter who buys extravagant cars for all to see. These days, it’s more about greed and image than writing good stories.[33]

The Christmas pageant at Radio City also takes a hit. The holiday has been reduced to nothing more than a means of chasing profit. Angels emerge from gift-wrapped boxes, and “guys carrying crucifies and stuff all over the place,” all while singing Oh, Come All Ye Faithful. In typical irreverent fashion, Holden calls out the crass commercialization of a subject that should be approached with reverence and respect, proclaiming “Jesus probably would’ve puked if He could see it—all those fancy costumes and all.”[34]

Holden specifically addresses false dealing with God in a story revolving around Ossenburger, a Pencey donor speaking at a school event. Ossenburger is an alumnus who “made a pot of dough in the undertaking business” with a nation-wide franchise of cut-rate funeral parlors, sufficient wealth to bankroll the dormitories commemorated with his name. During school chapel, Ossenburger urges students to talk to Jesus all the time, which he himself does (or so he says), even while driving his Cadillac. Holden’s remark about Ossenburger “shifting into first gear and asking Jesus to send him a few more stiffs,” targets hypocritical relationships with God, those based on show rather than piety and service.[35]

And where pleasures are concerned, unlike his “unscrupulous” classmate Stadlater who doesn’t even remember his dates’ names correctly, Holden aspires to spend time with girls he can relate to on an emotional or intellectual level. [36] Preferring a well-rounded relationship, Holden states, “If you really don’t like a girl, you shouldn’t horse around with her at all.”[37]

The corruption of children is a particular hotspot for Holden Caulfield. Discovering obscene graffiti on the wall of his sister’s grade school drives him “damn near crazy.” He is irate thinking about how “some dirty kid” would tell Phoebe and her classmates what the offensive phrase means. And how, given their young age, the act portrayed would be confusing and nothing less than disturbing.[38]

The very name of Salinger’s book refers to Holden’s need to protect “little kids.” But how so, what does the title of The Catcher in the Rye mean? In the context of the titular metaphor, he envisions himself patrolling a field of rye, and catching the children who are playing there should they start to go over the “crazy cliff,” typically understood as adulthood.[39] From Holden’s prophetic view, adulthood would require the corruption of these children to be in line with a degraded society, consumed with image and material goals rather than traditional American ideals.
_________

The Jeremiad: Not just an
“Undying Monotonous Wail.”[40]

Despite its catalogue of iniquities, the American jeremiad’s distinctiveness doesn’t lie in the intensity of its complaint, but precisely the opposite. At the heart of this genre is an unwavering optimism in the American ideal. Which, as scholar Sacvan Bercovitch maintains, grows more emphatic “from one generation to the next.”[41]

Which is why Phoebe Caulfield enters the picture when she does. She embodies the “next” generation Bercovitch is referring to. The fact that Phoebe is the only character throughout the novel who actually listens to what Holden has to say is significant, in that she’s the one who “hears” his prophetic message.[42] And Holden allows her to wear his hunting hat, which establishes Phoebe as successor to Holden’s mission. Finally, Holden literally sets Phoebe in motion with a ticket for the carousel, where she optimistically sets her sights on the golden ring, an obvious symbol for the American ideal. The proverbial torch has been passed, with Phoebe carrying Holden’s mission forward.
_________

In Conclusion.

Reading The Catcher in the Rye as a re-fashioned jeremiad, we understand that Salinger’s intent was not to malign America. Very far from it. Like the Puritan jeremiads whose message was also misunderstood, Catcher urges America to remember the ideals on which it was founded, principles we appear to have forgotten, and to self-correct. What Salinger hoped to accomplish is that the readers of his novel would make that happen. But like the question of whether or not Holden will apply himself in school next year, it’s up to us to engage the endeavor.

That’s my take on J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye – what’s yours?
Check out this Discussion Guide to get you started.

#post-war social commentary         #banned        #Puritan          #published 1950s

Endnotes:

[1] Quindlen, Anna. “Public & Private; Dirty Pictures.” The New York Times. April 22, 1990.­­
[2] Whitfield, Stephen J. “Cherished and Cursed: Toward a Social History of the Catcher in the Rye.” The New England Quarterly, Vol. 70, No. 4 (Dec., 1997), 575.
[3] Steinle, Pamela Hunt. In Cold Fear: The Catcher in the Rye Censorship Controversies and Postwar American Character. (Columbus: Ohio State University, 2002), 73, 52.
[4] Steinle, 61.
[5] Mydans, Seth. “In a Small Town, a Battle Over a Book.” The New York Times, (Sept. 3, 1989).
[6] Whitfield, 575.
[7] Laser, Marvin and Fruman, Norman. “Not Suitable for Temple City.” in Studies in J. D. Salinger: Reviews, Essays, and Critiques of The Catcher in the Rye, and other Fiction. Edited by Marvin Laser and Norman Fruman. (New York: The Odyssey Press, 1963), 127.
[8] Mydans.
[9] Mydans.
[10] Shields, David and Salerno, Shane. Salinger. (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2013), 265.
[11] Bercovitch, Sacvan. The American Jeremiad. (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2012), xli; Miller, Perry. Errand Into the Wilderness. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984), 10.
[12] Steinle, Pamela. “If a Body Catch a Body: The Catcher in the Rye Censorship Debate as Expression of Nuclear Culture.” Popular Culture and Political Change in Modern America. Contemporary Literary Criticism. Vol. 138, 2001.
[13] Mallette, Wanda; Morrison, Bob; Ryan, Patti. “Lookin’ for Love.” Urban Cowboy Soundtrack. (Hollywood: Full Moon, 1980); Shields and Salerno, 265.
[14] Menard, Louis. “Holden at Fifty: The Catcher in the Rye and what it spawned.” The New Yorker. (September 24, 2001).
[15] Shields and Salerno, 243.
[16] Trilling, Lionel. “On the Teaching of Modern Literature.” First published as “On the Modern Element in Modern Literature.” Partisan Review, January-February 1961.
[17] Trilling.
[18] Bercovitch, Sacvan. The American Jeremiad. (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2012), xli; Miller, Perry. Errand Into the Wilderness. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984), 10.
[19] Turner, Victor.  From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play. (New York: Performing Arts Journal Publications, 1982), 40-45; Turner, Victor. “Liminal to Liminoid, in Play, Flow, and Ritual: An Essay in Comparative Symbology.” Rice Institute Pamphlet – Rice University Studies, 60, no. 3 (1974), 71.
[20] Bercovitch, Sacvan. The Rites of Assent: Transformations in the symbolic Construction of America. (New York: Routledge, 1993), 18.
[21] Senior, Nassau William. American Slavery: A Reprint of an Article on “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.” (London: Longman, Brown, Green, Longmans & Roberts, 1856), 2.
[22] Thoreau, Henry David. Life Without Principle. (London: The Simple Life Press, 1905), 29.
[23] Shillinglaw, Susan. “John Steinbeck, American Writer.” The Steinbeck Institute.
[24] Tolchin, Karen R. Part Blood, Part Ketchup: Coming of Age in American Literature and Film. (New York: Lexington Books, 2007), 38; Bercovitch (2012), 6-7.
[25] Laser, Marvin and Fruman, Norman. “Not Suitable for Temple City.” in Studies in J. D. Salinger: Reviews, Essays, and Critiques of The Cather in the Rye, and other Fiction. Edited by Marvin Laser and Norman Fruman. (New York: The Odyssey Press, 1963), 127.
[26] Miller, Perry. The New England Mind: From Colony to Province. (London: The Belknap Press, 1981), 173-174.
[27] Miller, Perry. “The Incorruptible Sinclair Lewis.” The Responsibility of Mind in a civilization of machines. Edited by John Crowell and Stanford J. Searl, Jr. (Amherst: The University of Massachusetts Press, 1979), 121.
[28] Salinger, J.D. The Catcher in the Rye. (New York: Little Brown and Co., 1991), 187.
[29] Rowe, Joyce. “Holden Caulfield and American Protest.” In New Essays on The Catcher in the Rye. Edited by Jack Salzman. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 88; Van Engen, Abram C. City on a Hill. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2020), 248; Brand, David C. Profile of the Last Puritan: Jonathan Edwards, Self-love, and the Dawn of the Beatific. (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1991).
[30] Salinger, 198.
[31] Ellicott’s Commentary for English Readers. https://biblehub.com/commentaries/jeremiah/16-16.htm; The New Oxford Annotated Bible. Edited by Michael D. Coogen. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), Jeremiah 3:12-23, Jeremiah 27, Jeremiah 6:13.
[32] Tolchin, 41; Bercovitch (2012), 4.
[33] Salinger, 16.
[34] Salinger, 137.
[35] Salinger, 16.
[36] Salinger, 31.
[37] Salinger, 62.
[38] Salinger, 201.
[39] Salinger, 173.
[40] Bercovitch (2012), 5.
[41] Bercovitch (2012), 6.
[42] Moore, Robert P. “The World of Holden.” The English Journal. Vol. 54, No. 3 (March 1965), 160.

Images:
.
1 The Catcher in the Rye cover from the 1985 Bantam edition. Public Domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Catcher-in-the-rye-red-cover.jpg   Cropped by User.

2 Rembrandt van Rijn. Jeremiah Lamenting the Destruction of Jerusalem. 1630. Public Domain via Rijkjsmuseum.nl/nl  http://hdl.handle.net/10934/RM0001.COLLECT.5242

3 Cotton Mather. By Peter Pelham, artist – http://www.columbia.edu/itc/law/witt/images/lect3/, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=80525

4 Holden Caulfield’s red hunting hat. Clipartmax.com  https://www.clipartmax.com/png/middle/121-1213961_the-red-hunging-hat-2-discussion-posts-kate-said-red-hunting-hat.png  (The original image has been flopped.)

5 First-edition cover of The Catcher in the Rye (1951). Public Domain. Source, Nate D. Sanders auctions (direct link to jpg) via Wikimedia Commons. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:The_Catcher_in_the_Rye_
(1951,_first_edition_cover).jpg
Original image retouched by uploader, and cropped by current user.

They finally started coming for the information

Just as they once went after music

Put a parental warning sticker over my mouth

and the mouth of every writer out there

To Kill a Mockingbird and Lady Chatterly’s Lover

are cast back in the fire

Howl and Tropic of Cancer

are back in court upon appeal

The busybodies are out for blood

out for ink

and out after all the silly misfits

.

Evil deeds have hidden behind

noble language so long

they are now transparent

But now it stands

with the possibility of every Missouri librarian

facing anything

from a $500 fine to a year behind bars

No one has that kinda money

or that kinda time

.

It all comes down to small people

wanting big power

Maybe the biggest of all

The power to control the mind

To limit what goes in

Because these parents already have

the lives of their children

mapped out

And know who they want

living in their neighborhoods

.

A perfect little life

all planned out

And there’s no room

in a perfect little life

for questioning

all the little plans

.

Author Bio:

Daniel W. Wright is an award-nominated poet and fiction writer. He most recently wrote the foreword for Sacred Decay: The Art of Lauren Marx (Dark Horse, 2021). He is the author of eight collections of poetry, including Love Letters from the Underground (Spartan Press, 2021), Rodeo of the Soul (Spartan Press, 2019), and Murder City Special (Bad Jacket, 2017). His work has appeared in print journals such as The Literary Parrot, BUK100, 365 Days, and Gasconade Review, as well as online journals such as Book of Matches. He currently resides in St. Louis, MO, where you can usually find him in a bar or a bookstore. 

#On Censorship      #Banned       #Guest Essayists

Author photo by Gabrielle Blanton
Doll photo by Yousef Bagheri on Unsplash

he idea for The Lottery popped into Shirley Jackson’s head on the way home from the market, as she pushed her daughter up the hill in the stroller that also held the day’s groceries. The narrative was fairly clear in her mind, and once she got home putting it on paper went “quickly and easily, moving from beginning to end without pause.”[1]

Jackson’s story seems to have been inspired by a typical, “all-American,” domestic situation. A mother and her young child making preparations for the family’s evening meal – what could be more benevolent than that? So, what made such a story so controversial? Why was The Lottery banned?

The story Jackson wrote that afternoon ends with a famously shocking plot twist, one that provoked controversy the instant it appeared in The New Yorker. The Lottery has been described as a story that “demands a reaction from its reader,” and boy, did readers react![2] Hundreds cancelled their subscriptions.[3] Many of them took Jackson’s story for a factual report. And vehement letters addressed directly to Jackson filled the mailroom, describing her story as “perverted,” “horrible and gruesome,” not to mention “in incredibly bad taste.”[4]

Reasons why The Lottery is routinely banned by public schools fall along similar lines. Jackson’s work was challenged at the Salem-Keizer School District in Oregon for its depiction of “morbid and grotesque ideas.”[5] It was challenged in Webster City, Iowa for being “like Friday the 13^th.” The school administrator specifically took offense to the story’s insinuation “that a child is stoning a parent.”[6]

Those who set out to ban The Lottery from school curriculums saw it as an attack on the family by way of undermined traditions. Challengers interviewed for an article in the journal Social Education expressed concern that reading Jackson’s story causes students “to question their values, traditions, and religious beliefs.”[7] And that instilling these thoughts in young readers’ minds is a subtle means of destroying the family unit.

These challengers may not be taking The Lottery as factual reporting, the way many who cancelled their New Yorker subscriptions did. But like those disgruntled subscribers, their objections are the result of a shallow, deficient interpretation of Jackson’s iconic story, of not thinking past the narrative much less their noses.

Though challengers’ observation about The Lottery questioning tradition isn’t inaccurate, it is terribly misguided. The point Jackson makes is more nuanced, and significantly more profound than a call to spit in the eye of tradition out of sheer defiance. The real question here is not, “how could she?!” but “why does Jackson advocate questioning tradition?” And no… it isn’t a devious plan to destroy the American family.
_________

Shirley Jackson’s Raw Materials.

 Who knows what was going through Shirley Jackson’s head as she walked home from the market, just before she put her daughter Joanne in the playpen, the frozen vegetables in the freezer, and The Lottery down on paper. What was so compelling that the story flowed “quickly and easily, moving from beginning to end without pause?”[8]

It might have been the feeling of being a “frozen out” faculty wife by the townspeople where she lived, or the painful awareness of anti-Semitism Jackson had acquired from personal experience.[9] Perhaps it was the anthropology book her husband recently brought home, or the witchcraft she’d been interested in since college. Maybe the motivating factor was world events, the disturbing revelations about  the Holocaust that emerged from the Nuremberg trials just a couple years earlier.[10] These were the raw materials that went into the making of The Lottery, to be sure. And they most certainly inform the shape the work takes. But what must have really been on Jackson’s mind as this story poured forth, was the notion that ordinary people are capable of horrific acts. She as much as says so in the San Francisco Chronicle:

I suppose I hoped, by setting a particularly brutal ancient rite in the present and in my own village, to shock the story’s readers with a graphic dramatization of the pointless violence and general inhumanity in their own lives.[11]

And shock them she did. Significantly, Jackson’s story came out while American citizens were still trying to process the distressing reports about the Nazis’ persecution of Europe’s Jews, Romani people, and other victims. Many Americans were confidently insisting that nothing like that could ever happen here. Then along comes The Lottery, with a disturbing ending that blows a hole in American complacency – straight into the mailboxes of The New Yorker subscribers, no less.[12]

The juxtaposition of ritual murder with modern small-town America is pretty jarring. Especially when the ritual murder is carried out by stoning. As noted, this narrative certainly packs an emotional wallop. And when read for more than plot, when attention is paid to The Lottery’s structure and the symbolism Jackson employs, we see a summary of humankind’s savage past, as well as what her husband referred to as an “anatomy of our times.”[13] And what becomes clear is that humanity is not at the mercy of a “murky, savage id.”[14] No, we are the victim of an unexamined culture and unchanging traditions which, like the lottery in Jackson’s story, actually engenders a cruelty not rooted in our inherent makeup. [15] That is Jackson’s message. It’s also the very real horror within The Lottery.
_________

What Does the Three-Legged Stool Symbolize?

The obvious similarity between the village’s lottery and scapegoat traditions has been pointed out on many occasions. And this parallel gives us insight into the symbolic nature of the three-legged stool that’s placed in the center of the village square. Significantly, it is on this stool that the “the black wooden box,” the mechanism for conducting the lottery, rests.[16] The three-legged stool embodies examples of scapegoating, the raw materials mentioned above that inform The Lottery and its symbolism. One leg stands for the ancient scapegoat ritual itself, which Jackson had become familiar with through the anthropology book her husband brought home. Another leg signifies the Salem Witch Trials, made all the more relevant given her interest in witchcraft and magic. And the third leg represents the Nazi-perpetrated Holocaust, still fresh in the minds of the entire world.
_________

What are the Origins of Scapegoating?

At its root, the scapegoat tradition is about purging evil, clearing out the ills that have been plaguing the community that is performing the rite. And the scapegoat is literally the vehicle for carrying this evil away. Scapegoating rituals can be found in many cultures, but the term comes from a rite in the biblical book of Leviticus. As in The Lottery, the sacrifice is chosen by lots, in this case a goat. The animal is symbolically marked with the inequities of the people and sent off into the wilderness. Hence, “(e)scape” goat. The goat doesn’t get too far, though, because it’s someone’s job to follow him and drive him off a cliff – backwards. The poor guy never sees it coming. The goat is clearly destroyed, and with it, the evil he was carrying.[17]

But not all scapegoats are goats. In some cultures, they’re human. When it comes to human sacrifice, the first civilization that comes to mind is probably the Aztecs, but they’re certainly not the only ones. Accounts exist from around the world and across the ages, from Ancient Greece to as late as the nineteenth century in the Pacific Islands.[18]  Whatever shape the scapegoat takes, the “general clearance of evil” described above (the purpose most often associated with the scapegoat tradition), occurred periodically. For agrarian cultures, that was typically at a time that coincided with planting or harvest.[19] Though June 27^th doesn’t strictly align with either of those agricultural events, Mr. Warner’s maxim “Lottery in June, corn be heavy soon” is clearly a nod in that direction.[20]

Though the practice of sacrificing human scapegoats is no longer ritualized, that doesn’t mean it no longer happens. The witchcraft hysteria that continues to inform New England culture, and the Salem Witch Trials specifically, are nothing if not scapegoating. Women labeled as witches (the operative word being labeled), were executed in order to purge their village of Satanic influence. And the Nazi’s effort to purify Germany by “exterminating” Jews, the Romani people and other groups, is scapegoating by industrial means. These are certainly not the only examples of human scapegoating that have taken place after the Age of Enlightenment, but they are the ones that inform The Lottery.
_________

Scapegoating in the Salem Witch Trials.

Jackson never explicitly tells the reader where the lottery takes place. And there’s a reason for that. If she did, her story would no longer be about “anytown America.” But the clues she gives us about the village are important to our understanding of The Lottery beyond simple ambiance. It’s a small farming community of about 300 people. And most of the population has a family name with Anglo-Saxon origins. The last detail Jackson gives us is that the land yields an abundance of stones, a fact critical to the story beyond the obvious reason. These clues suggest that New England is the locale of the story. When taken in total, this information points to the region’s history of witch trials and persecutions, especially when the village’s patriarchal power structure gets thrown into the mix. And the fact that critical scenes in in a young adult book Jackson wrote about witchcraft hysteria (The Witchcraft of Salem Village) parallel scenarios in The Lottery, substantiates an intended allusion to witch trials.[21]

An important parallel between Massachusetts during the witchcraft hysteria and the village where Jackson lived is the power dynamic between genders. In both cases, the targeted women respond to the pressure of male authority by betraying other women. It’s a classic “divide and conquer” scenario. The way this plays out in The Lottery is a testament to how successfully the male-dominated order has been imposed on the village’s women.[22] Tessie’s right when she claims that the lottery wasn’t fair. But not because they didn’t give her husband “enough time to choose.”[23] It wasn’t fair, intentionally or not, because the system was designed from a patriarchal perspective.

So, how does the lottery work? The village’s lottery seems random to all but the most meticulous of readers because, by and large, we still accept being classified by surname (in other words, our father’s name) as the standard. Drawing lots according to the household/ father’s name skews the odds toward “women of a certain age,” especially those with few, or female children. In terms of avoiding the black dot, younger is better because a woman’s children are still at home. Having more children dilutes the possibility of drawing the black dot. And having a lot of boys is better still because they won’t marry out of the family and increase their mother’s risk as she ages. Tessie’s betrayal of her married daughter, by insisting that she take her chances with the Hutchinsons, is born of this inequity.[24]

Our trip through the lottery process in Jackson’s village reveals a parallel between the demographic most at risk in The Lottery, and the women most frequently persecuted as witches. The witch trials of Puritan Massachusetts were founded on a patriarchal interpretation of the myth of Eve and her role in The Fall. A second layer of patriarchal thought deems her, and by extension all women, more susceptible to the demonic than men – at least according to a couple of Dominican inquisitors from 1486. And women labeled as witches (the operative word being labeled), were executed in an effort to purify their village of Satanic influence.

The group most vulnerable to accusations of witchcraft was women between forty and sixty. That’s the same segment of society most likely to draw the black dot in The Lottery. In Puritan Massachusetts, accusations of witchcraft served to crush a particular class of women, insufficiently docile women who failed to fit into their assigned role of submissive helpmeet, those who spoke their minds or attempted to run their own affairs.[25]

So, why was Tessie Hutchinson stoned to death The Lottery? Tessie is precisely this type of woman. She shows up late and must weave her way through the crowd to reach her husband, who had been waiting quite some time for her to arrive. Tessie barks at her husband to “get up there,” when it’s his turn to select a slip of paper from the wooden box.[26]  And she certainly isn’t docile when she shouts and yells, challenging the fairness of the lottery and by extension male authority.

Unfortunately for Tessie, much like the women of Puritan Massachusetts,[27] the other women in the village seem to have internalized the ominous lesson they were intended to learn, which is to keep their places in the established order.[28] For, it’s only women Jackson calls out by name as charging toward Tessie, stones in hand as the story ends.
_________

More Scapegoating in the Holocaust.

News from the Nuremberg trials, and revelations about the Holocaust were fresh in everyone’s mind. The horrific stories were more personal for Jackson than many Americans because, as the wife of a Jewish husband, she had first-hand experience with anti-Semitism. And though Jackson consistently refused to give a concise explanation of The Lottery, she did tell a friend that the story has to do with anti-Semitism.[29]

The scapegoating the Nazis employed on this colossal scale was an outcome of the ideological (mis)appropriation of Germany’s mythological heritage. The original concept was grounded in the idea that a proper nation, or Volk, requires a particular holistic unity. This totality must be comprised of a natural environment, a language and history rooted in a deep past and rural population, and the expression of that history in an indigenous mythology. The culture that emerged from this sentiment became radicalized, crystallizing as völkisch nationalism in the first third of the 20^th century. [30] Anyone perceived as not fulfilling all aspects of this unity was painted as an enemy. And in an effort to “purify” the Volk, those deemed outsiders were targeted. Though Jews were considered the primary enemy, the Romani people and a number of other groups were also among those who collectively fulfilled the role of scapegoat.[31]

Jackson’s story echoes the reported experience of Holocaust survivors in several respects. Let’s start with the hard truth that children are not exempt in either scenario. Like the little girl who wore the red coat in the film Schindler’s List, Davy Hutchinson is at risk as much as everybody else. And that reality is about as disturbing and heart wrenching as it gets.

But more significant in terms of The Lottery’s narrative and its structure, is the fact that the ritual murder in The Lottery is alluded to, although not seen by the reader. Like the execution of survivors’ family members, the act of stoning in The Lottery isn’t witnessed directly. Consequently, in both instances, the focus becomes the very personal experience of the selection process, which needless to say determines between “death or reprieve.”[32] Which is why everyone sighs when little Davy’s paper was blank.

The Lottery’s narrative is the selection process. Jackson’s story is essentially a detailed description of the mechanics of the village’s lottery. And the following high points of that process sound an awful lot like the frequent selections that took place in concentration camps. Flanked by Mr. Graves and Mr. Martin, Mr. Summers declares the lottery open. “A sudden hush fell on the crowd as Mr. Summers cleared this throat and looked at the list. ‘All ready?’ he called.”[33] Once it was determined that this year’s victim would come from the Hutchinson household, each member of the family is called forth as they anxiously draw their individual lots.

This scenario is strikingly similar to the selection process Elie Weisel recounts in Night, the autobiographical account of his experience in both Auschwitz and Buchenwald:

 Three SS officers surrounded the notorious Dr. Mengele, the very same who had received us in Birkenau. The Blockälteste [barracks leader] attempted a smile. He asked us: “Ready?” Yes, we were ready. So were the SS doctors. Dr. Mengele was holding a list: our numbers. He nodded to the Blockälteste: we can begin! As if this were a game… I had one thought: not to have my number taken down and not to show my left arm.[34]

There are enough accounts of the numerous and varied atrocities visited upon the people that comprise the Nazis’ collective scapegoat to fill a library, and they have. Yet, Weisel’s testimony to what occurred in the camps makes it clear that the most terrible word, the one feared more than any other, was selection.[35] Jackson’s villagers must feel the same way about the term lottery.
_________

The Lottery’s Deteriorating Ritual.

Jackson points out that the original box the villagers used for the lottery had been “lost long ago.” The fact that it was lost, rather than destroyed by termites for example or burned in a barn fire, suggests that over time the villagers have been turning away from the antiquated pagan beliefs this ritual is clearly grounded in. There was once a ritual salute. The lottery official no longer stands “just so.” He doesn’t sing the “tuneless chant” anymore.[36] And at one time there might have been something about him walking among the people… maybe. But these days, the lottery is something to be rushed through so everyone can “get home for noon dinner.”

This evolution of the village’s ritual reveals that the appearance of progress in society is an illusion. Letting go of antiquated pagan beliefs makes it appear that the people in the village have become more enlightened. But, they haven’t. As Jackson put it, “although the villagers had forgotten the ritual and lost the original black box, they still remembered to use stones.”[37] The point being, though the villagers have let go of most aspects of this pagan ritual they are not actually more civilized. The brutality at its core remains fully intact. And to drive that point home, what the tradition has evolved into, is simply an excuse for violence.

The most damning thing about this situation is that collectively, the townspeople could bring the lottery to an end. But, like the citizens of Salem who get drawn into the cycle of accusation rather than question church tradition, they don’t. They perpetuate this annual murder by teaching it to the younger generations. Someone not only helps Davy Hutchinson draw his slip of paper, they place stones in his little hand. And they do so simply for the sake of upholding tradition. We know this is the only motivation for continuing the lottery, because Old Man Warner’s only response to Mrs. Adams’ suggestion to give it up is nothing more substantial than, “there’s always been a lottery.”[38]
_________

In Conclusion

It’s no accident that Jackson chose stoning rather than a modern, mechanized method of ritual murder à la Nazi Germany, or the hanging employed in The Salem Witch Trials for that matter. She elected to use stoning, because pelting someone to death with rocks is as primitive as it gets. The symbolism is double-edged. Stoning not only speaks to the antiquity of the scapegoat tradition, most importantly it’s a statement about the current state of humanity. Jackson’s choice of stoning is her not too subtle way of saying we’re just as savage as we ever were.

Jackson paints a pretty dismal picture. She seems to be saying that these villagers (and by that she means the whole of humankind) will never be free of their primitive nature. At least, not until enough of them have been affected adversely enough by the horror of their tradition that they reject it and, as Mrs. Adams implies, destroy the box altogether. Or they fashion a new box, one that reflects their current social conditions and sustains them rather than pitting them against each other.[39] Until that happens, Tessie Hutchinson may be the only loser, but no one is a winner.

Frank Baum set out to write a “modernized fairy tale” for the children of his day.[1] According to the Library of Congress, he did more than simply accomplish his goal. He ended up producing “America’s greatest and best-loved homegrown fairytale.”[2]  So, it seems inconceivable that certain parents and teachers have been trying to ban The Wonderful Wizard of Oz since its publication in 1900.[3]

Well, they have. In 1928, public libraries across the country pulled the books from their shelves.[4] ­­­Why was The Wonderful Wizard of Oz banned? Reasons range from Baum’s “wonder tale” being “untrue to life” (isn’t that the point of a wonder tale), to the use of witchcraft, to its portrayal of a strong female protagonist.[5]

One of the most publicized cases against The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, however, occurred in 1986. A group of Fundamentalist Christian families from Tennessee got together and tried to have the book removed from the public school syllabus. Baum’s work was among a number of books that the families felt promoted “occultism, secular humanism, evolution, disobedience to parents, pacifism, and feminism.”[6]

The families specifically disapproved of Baum’s characterization of some witches as good, because as we all know witches are in fact bad, very, very bad. One mother worried that reading this book would cause her children to be “seduced into godless supernaturalism.”[7] The federal judge who presided over the case ruled that children of the parents who brought the suit could be excused from lessons about Baum’s book. But the families weren’t happy with such a limited outcome. They wanted to make sure that no students were reading The Wonderful Wizard of Oz in class. So, they appealed the judge’s decision to the United States Supreme Court. Thankfully, the justices refused to hear the case.[8]

Objections to Baum’s book are clearly based on a literal, and therefore anemic reading of Baum’s book, a level Hermann Hesse describes as reading “naïvely.”[9] If these families had considered anything about who L. Frank Baum was or when he was writing, they would have seen a slice of American history reflected in the work’s imagery. And if they’d been familiar with the notion of symbolic language, they would have realized that literal magic is not what Baum was talking about.

They would’ve discovered what makes The Wonderful Wizard of Oz so special. There’s more to Baum’s book than “girl power!” and “pointy-hatted witches are a really a thing.” There is a deeper meaning behind The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. The fantastic creatures that inhabit Oz are not just the trappings of a wonder tale. The Scarecrow, Tin Woodman, and Cowardly Lion are more than just new friends Dorothy makes along the way. And the trials they endure serve a purpose other than simple adventure. Baum’s philosophy for writing successful children’s stories points the way to understanding why The Wonderful Wizard of Oz is more than just a fun story. __________

Oz, a land Betwixt & Between.

According to Baum, “Many authors have an idea that to write a story about children is to write a children’s story. No notion could be more erroneous. Perhaps one out of a hundred alleged children’s stories possess elements of interest to the real child – but that is a liberal estimate.”[10] Maybe so. But whether his comment is statistically accurate or not, the following excerpt from Baum’s article What Children Want reveals his philosophy for writing (undeniably successful) children’s books:

It is said that a child learns more during the first five years of its life than in the succeeding fifty years. This may well be true, for all the marvels of life and the wonders of the universe are brought to its notice and registered upon the sensitive film of its mind in those years when it first begins to understand it is a component part of mighty creation. The very realization of existence is sufficient to set every childish nerve tingling with excitement, and when the mind has absorbed the astonishing circumstances of its environment there comes a time when comprehension pauses, to resume more deliberately the practical details of worldly experience. Thus the amazed child, wild-eyed, eager, nervous and filled with unalloyed vigor, steps upon the threshold of real life…  Positively the child cannot be satisfied with inanities in its story books. It craves marvels – fairy tales, adventures, surprising and unreal occurrences; gorgeousness, color and kaleidoscopic succession of inspiring incident.[11]

In short, children’s books should engage their imaginations and promote wonder, like when a little one “tak[es] its first peep at the world’s wonderland.”[12] More importantly, Baum’s article gives us insight into why The Land of Oz evokes a sense of wonder and fascination, and engages his intended audience the way it clearly has. It isn’t just because Baum was an excellent storyteller. Oz is chockful of marvels, adventure, and dreamlike happenings because it is a liminal realm, one that’s “betwixt & between.”[13] The Land of Oz is betwixt & between because the structure of Baum’s work parallels the pattern within rites of passage.

What are rites of passage?  Think Bar Mitzvahs, and weddings. Rites of passage bring about the transition from one “mode of being” to another.[14] For example, the shift from childhood to adulthood in the case of bar mitzvahs. Or the switch from the mode of being single to the state of being married that a wedding produces. Dorothy’s transition, however, is from the mode when a child lacks the understanding that they’re “a component part of mighty creation,” to the point when they deliberately embrace “the practical details of worldly experience.”[15] This transformation ultimately prepares children to “step upon the threshold of real life.”[16] (Keep in mind that the Dorothy Gage in Baum’s book is significantly younger than Judy Garland’s portrayal in the 1939 film.)
__

How Do Rites of Passage Work?

Rites of Passage contain the following three sub-categories:

.
The first and last stages are self-explanatory. They detach the subject from their old place in society, and return them, inwardly transformed, to their new station in life. As to the middle phase, the term “liminal” comes from limen, the Latin for “threshold,” indicating the “transition between.”[17]

Though all three stages are present in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, Baum primarily focuses on the liminal phase. Unlike the movie, all we get in the book is mere snippets of Kansas, just enough to anchor the story and show how fantastic Oz is by comparison. Oz’s fanciful nature is significant because liminality is by definition an unpredictable state. It’s a “realm of pure possibility,” between the two stable points (signified here by Kansas) that bookend the progression from one mode of being to another.[18] __________

What is Liminality?

During the liminal phase, the subject develops an awareness that changes their “inmost nature.”[19] They acquire knowledge that prepares them for their new status. In the context of Baum’s article, this knowledge consists of “the marvels of life and the wonders of the universe” that are brought to a child’s notice and “registered upon the sensitive film” of their mind.[20] Consistent with both the fantastic nature of liminality as well as the Baum excerpt above, everything in Kansas is colorless like the “great gray prairie” (even Aunt Em), but The Land of Oz is:

 …a country of marvelous beauty. There were lovely patches of green sward all about, with stately trees bearing rich and luscious fruits. Banks of gorgeous flowers were on every hand, and birds with rare and brilliant plumage sang and fluttered in the trees and bushes. A little way off was a small brook, rushing and sparkling along between green banks, and murmuring in a voice very grateful to a little girl who had lived so long on the dry, gray prairies. While she stood looking eagerly at the strange and beautiful sights, she noticed coming toward her a group of the queerest people she had ever seen.[21]

The Witch of the North’s response to Dorothy’s question about the existence of witches in Oz reinforces its liminal status. The Good Witch explains that “in the civilized countries I believe there are no witches left, nor wizards, nor sorceresses, nor magicians. But, you see, the Land of Oz has never been civilized.[22] In other words, Oz does not represent one of the stable points within Dorothy’s transition. As noted, those are represented by Kansas.

Instead, The Land of Oz is topsy-turvy and chaotic, the defining characteristics of liminality. Oz is also “cut off from all the rest of the world,” which parallels the isolation of ritual subjects from the larger community during the liminal stage of their initiation. “Therefore,” the Witch of the North states, “we still have witches and wizards amongst us.”[23]  Because liminality is where the transformative magic happens. __________

Oz as Liminal Space.

Ritual devices, things like masks, figurines, and body paint used by traditional societies during the liminal phase in rites of passage, are created by taking cultural elements out of their usual contexts and re-configuring them into something new, something that doesn’t exist in reality. Though these materials can be monstrous, the point is less about terrifying initiates out of their wits, than it is about making them “vividly and rapidly aware” of important aspects of their culture.[24] The purpose of these devices is to startle initiates into thinking about objects, relationships, and aspects of their environment they have taken for granted up to this point. Or, in the context of Baum’s article, “marvels of life and wonders of the universe” that hadn’t registered in their minds before.

The fanciful characters in The Land of Oz are consistent with this recombination of elements, confirming Oz’s liminality. A living scarecrow and talking lion are just for starters, not to mention the bear-tiger combo called the Kalidah, flying monkeys, and combative trees. Then there are the field mice organized as a monarchy, people who are made of porcelain, and the Quadlings who have no arms but a spring-loaded head. If these don’t say liminality, I don’t know what does!

But why does alluding to liminality make Baum such a successful writer of children’s books? Because doing so taps into what his young audience is experiencing during this stage of their development. As Baum notes, the fresh “realization of existence” sets every nerve “tingling with excitement.”[25] He may have found it surprising that other adults “so evidently fail to grasp” the mentality of those taking their “first peep” at the world, but Baum clearly understood their mindset.[26]

Since Baum’s aim was to write a wonder tale for the children of his day, it’s understandable that The Wonderful Wizard of Oz reflects the culture he, and they, experienced. Symbolism associated with the stages in Dorothy’s transition are inspired by Baum’s life experience. For example, westward expansion was significant in nineteenth-century America, with a lot of people moving into tornado-prone areas. Seeing the west as a place “where an intelligent man may profit,” Baum was among them.[27]  He published a newspaper called the Aberdeen Saturday Pioneer, and one article he wrote involved a tornado that launched a pig hiding in a buggy a distance of 300 feet. Happily, the pig was uninjured, but more importantly Baum had the inspiration for Dorothy and Toto’s arrival in Oz.[28]

Needless to say, the cyclone that sets the story in motion represents the separation phase within rites of passage. The twister literally detaches Dorothy from the dry, colorless Kansas prairie, and symbolically speaking, the mode when a child lacks the understanding that they’re “a component part of mighty creation.” When the cyclone hits, Dorothy is taking shelter in the family’s empty farmhouse. Being alone in an empty house is a common dream symbol for an old personality structure, which underscores the symbolic link to Dorothy’s childhood development.[29] __________

Entering the Liminal Stage.

Upon landing in Oz (on top of the Wicked Witch of the East to be precise), Dorothy enters the liminal stage of her transition. And she is promptly greeted by the Witch of the North, who functions as the village elder responsible for shepherding an initiate through their rite of passage. Much has been written about Baum’s connection to Theosophy, an esoteric movement that emerged in the late nineteenth century. The Witch of the North parallels the wisdom’s “world Mother,” who in a very real sense, takes “all the women of the world” under Her charge.[30] Which is precisely what she does with Dorothy.

Naturally, the witch’s association with the North suggests a connection to the Pole Star, which according to Theosophy keeps a “watchful eye” on the “Imperishable Sacred Land” around the North Pole.[31] Consistent with this imagery, the Witch of the North gives Dorothy a protective talisman – a kiss on the forehead. The kiss is clearly a nod to what is known in Theosophy as “Dangma’s opened eye,” the inner spiritual eye of an advanced student.[32]

The Witch of the North ultimately sends Dorothy to the City of Emeralds, in the hope of an audience with the Great Wizard. But not before she puts on the silver shoes that previously belonged to the Witch of the East, which marks Dorothy’s acceptance of her role in this rite of passage. The road that will lead Dorothy to the City of Emeralds is famously paved with yellow brick, an image that recalls Baum’s years at military school in Peekskill, NY., a manufacturing center of Dutch paving bricks, which are bright yellow in color.[33] __________

A Fellowship of Initiates. 

The liminal stage within rites of passage includes a series of trials. These tests serve to determine if the subject is ready to assume their new standing in the community. In collective rites (especially from childhood to adulthood), they are also intended to promote a bond among initiates. The fellowship that forms during this period surpasses distinctions of rank, age, kinship position, and in some cultures even gender.[34]

The Scarecrow is, of course, the first of Dorothy’s new-found companions. And meeting him is significant because he’s the first being Dorothy comes across who embodies the recombining of elements inherent in the liminal phase. She’s obviously getting deeper into liminality. After traveling together for a few hours, the road begins to get rough, and “the farther they went the more dismal and lonesome the country became.”[35] It’s clear she’s about to encounter the testing aspect of liminality, especially since the pair come to a great dark forest which is a traditional threshold symbol, as well as a place of testing and initiation.[36]

In keeping with the “comradeship” that forms as a result of the trials within the liminal phase, the Tin Woodman and the Lion join Dorothy’s party during her journey through the forest. The Scarecrow is reconfigured from Baum’s childhood nightmares, but he also reflects the significance of American farmers during this period.[37] The Tin Woodman looks like a display Baum put together for a hardware store during his days as a window dresser. But more importantly, being a mechanical man, he signifies the rapid industrialization of the times. In the context of liminal recombining, he is the grafting of twentieth-century technology to the fairy tale tradition.[38] The Cowardly Lion’s very nature, and ability to speak deem him a liminal character. And he’s been said to represent orator and politician William Jennings Bryan.[39] __________

Dorothy’s Trials.

Consistent with the forest’s capacity as a testing ground, the group’s progress is thwarted when they come upon a great gulf that blocks their path. After some considerable thought as to what they should do, the Scarecrow devises a plan to build a makeshift bridge.

Just as Dorothy and company start to cross the bridge, a pair of Kalidahs, “monstrous beasts” with incredibly sharp claws, comes charging toward them.[40] But after some roaring and wielding of the Tin Woodman’s axe, the troop manages to send the “ugly, snarling brutes” to the bottom of the gulf.[41]

The “Deadly Poppy Field” is yet another trial the group faces.[42] The Queen of the Mice owes Dorothy and friends a favor for saving her from a wildcat. So, the queen gathers her people to help rescue the Lion, who has succumbed to the poppies’ stupefying fragrance.[43]

Next Comes the Ordeal.

Many cultures describe rites of passage as “growing” a child into an adult.[44] Which is why they typically include an ordeal of some sort, one that signifies the dissolution of the initiate’s previous state.[45] Needless to say Dorothy’s ordeal is to kill the Witch of the West. The fact that there’s no road to the Witch of the West’s castle underscores the distinction between this undertaking, and the tests Dorothy and friends encountered in the forest. But after several run-ins with the witch’s minions, including the famous encounter with flying monkeys, Dorothy accomplishes her task.  And given that the purpose of such liminal ordeals is dissolution of the initiate’s previous state, it’s only fitting that Dorothy succeeds in her ordeal by melting the Witch away to a “brown… shapeless mass,” which she promptly sweeps “out the door.”[46]

After wrapping up a few loose ends with the Winkies, Dorothy and company return to Emerald City. Because the Scarecrow, the Tin Woodman, and the Cowardly Lion are from the Land of Oz, the tokens the Wizard gives them are enough to achieve new status. Dorothy, on the other hand, needs to get back to Kansas in order to carry out the final, re-incorporation phase of her rite of passage. But the Wizard is proven to be a fraud, and unable to send Dorothy home.

So, at the suggestion of the guardian of Emerald City’s gate, the group is off to ask Glinda, Witch of the South, for help. As Oz scholar Michael Patrick Hearns suggests, the adventures that take place on their way to Glinda’s castle allow Dorothy’s companions to utilize their new skills, and embrace their hard-won status.[47] Dorothy, on the other hand, remains betwixt & between.

And Finally, On to Re-incorporation.

Shortly after the troop arrives at her castle, Glinda advises Dorothy that all she has to do is “knock the heels” of her Silver Shoes together three times, and command them to carry her wherever she wishes to go.[48] And before Dorothy knows it, she’s back in Kansas, sitting in front of her family’s new farmhouse, “built after the cyclone had carried away the old one.”[49]  While the house that Dorothy was carried away in symbolizes her old personality structure, this one represents the new mode of being Dorothy has just attained. And Aunt Em “folding the little girl in her arms,” constitutes rites of incorporation.[50]

Dorothy has completed her transition. We know this for a couple of reasons. First, she has shed the silver shoes she’d been wearing throughout her journey in Oz. But more importantly, in that it’s developmentally significant, prior to the cyclone Dorothy didn’t engage with either Uncle Henry or Aunt Em. In fact, Baum explicitly states that her only interaction was with Toto, which signifies her lack of understanding that she’s “a component part of mighty creation.”[51]

So, their hug isn’t about Dorothy’s new-found appreciation for Aunt Em. Dorothy has loved Aunt Em from the beginning. Not only was Dorothy concerned that Em would be worrying about her, returning to Em was the entire motivation for Dorothy’s journey. After taking out the Witch of the West, Dorothy could have claimed the Yellow Castle for herself and lived quite comfortably with her friends in Oz forever. Instead, she returned to Emerald City to claim the Wizard’s promise to send her back to Kansas.

What Dorothy’s hug for Em does signify, is that her mind “has absorbed the astonishing circumstances of [her] environment.” Dorothy is deliberately (and quite literally) embracing “the practical details of worldly experience,” the world of the broad Kansas prairie, where the days are filled with activities like milking cows and watering the cabbages.

In Conclusion.

Dorothy may have returned to Kansas, but she isn’t right back where she started. She has been transformed. She is now, as Baum described it, “filled with unalloyed vigor” and ready to step “upon the threshold” of life.[52] And Dorothy’s transition to this new mode of being was brought about by her journey through liminality, as signified by Oz, a land betwixt & between. The Wonderful Wizard of Oz is indeed a wonder tale. And the realization that it’s more than just a fun ride on an adventurous narrative makes it even more wonderous.

That’s my take on The Wonderful Wizard of Oz – what’s yours?
Check out this discussion guide to get you started.

Download L. Frank Baum’s wonder tale here.

#banned books       #witchcraft      #liminal      #published 1900    #betwixt & between          #rite of passage

Endnotes:

[1] Baum, L. Frank, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. (New York: Harper Collins, 1987), 1.
[2] The Wizard of Oz: An American Fairy Tale. Library of Congress Exhibitions.
[3] Field, Hana. “Years of Censoring ‘Oz.’” Chicago Tribune. (May 8, 2000).
[4] Rosenthal, Kristina. The University of Tulsa Special Collections.
[5] Baum, 1; “Dorothy the Librarian.” Life Magazine. (Feb. 16, 1959), 47; Field.
[6] Taylor, Stuart. “Justices Refuse to Hear Tennessee Case on Bible and Textbooks.” The New York Times. (Feb. 23, 1988).
[7] The Gazette (Montreal). (Oct. 25, 1986).
[8] Taylor.[9] Hesse, Hermann. “On Reading Books.” in My Beliefs: Essays on Life and Art. Edited by Theodore Ziolkowski, translated by Denver Lindley. (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1974), 101.
[10] Baum, Frank L. “What Children Want.” Chicago Evening Post. (November 27, 1902).
[11] Baum What Children Want.
[12] Baum What Children Want.
[13] Turner, Victor. “Betwixt and Between: The Liminal Period in Rites of Passage.” Betwixt & Between: Patterns of Masculine and Feminine Initiation. Edited by Lois Carus Mahdi, Steven Foster, Meredith Little. (La Salle, Illinois: Open Court, 1987), 7.
[14] Van Gennep, Arnold. The Rites of Passage. Translated by Monika B. Vizedom and Gabrielle L. Caffee. (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1960), 10; Eliade, Mircea. Rites and Symbols of Initiation: The Mysteries of Birth and Rebirth. Translated by Willard R. Trask. (New York: Harper & Row, 1958), xiii.
[15] Baum What Children Want.
[16] Baum What Children Want.
[17] Turner, Victor. From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play. (New York: Performing Arts Journal Publications, 1982), 41.
[18] Turner, Victor. The Forest of Symbols: Aspects of Ndembu Ritual. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1967), 97; Turner, Victor. “Betwixt and Between: The Liminal Period in Rites of Passage.” Betwixt & Between: Patterns of Masculine and Feminine Initiation. Edited by Lois Carus Mahdi, Steven Foster, Meredith Little. (La Salle, Illinois: Open Court, 1987), 7.
[19] Turner Betwixt and Between, 11.
[20] Baum What Children Want.
[21] Baum Oz, 22.
[22] Baum Oz, 28.
[23] Baum Oz, 28.
[24] Turner Betwixt and Between, 14.
[25] Baum What Children Want.
[26] Baum What Children Want.
[27] Koupal, Nancy Tystad. “The Wonderful Wizard of the West. L. Frank Baum in South Dakota, 1888-91.” Great Plains Quarterly. (Fall 1989), 204.
[28] Schwartz, Evan I. “Matilda Joslyn Gage-the Unlikely Inspiration for the Wizard of Oz.” Historynet.com
[29] Jones, Raya A. “A Discovery of Meaning: The case of C. G. Jung’s house dream.” Working Paper 79. School of Social Sciences. Cardiff University, 9; Peterson, Deb. “The Hero’s Journey: Refusing The Call to Adventure.” ThoughtCo.com.
[30] Leadbeater, C. W. The World Mother As Symbol and Fact. (Madras, India: The Theosophical Publishing House, 1928), 1-2.
[31] Blavatsky, H. P. The Secret Doctrine Vol. II-Anthropogeneis, (New York: The Theosophical Publishing Co, 1888), 6, 400, 6.
[32] Blavatsky Secret Doctrine, 6, 400, 6.
[33] Schwartz, Evan. Finding Oz: How L. Frank Baum Discovered the Great American Story. (New York: Houghton, Mifflin, 2009), 13.
[34] Turner Forest of Symbols, 100-101.
[35] Baum Oz, 51-52.
[36] Cooper, J. C. An Encyclopaedia of Traditional Symbols. (High Holborn: Thames and Hudson, 1987), 72.
[37] Gourley, Catherine. Media Wizards: A Behind-the-scenes Look at Media Manipulations. (Brookfield, Connecticut: Twenty-First Century Books, 1999), 7.
[38] Haas, Joseph. “A Little Bit of ‘Oz’ in Northern Indiana.” Indiana Times, May 3, 1965; Gardner, Martin and Russell B. Nye editors. The Wizard of Oz and Who He Was. (East Lansing: Michigan University Press, 1994), 7.
[39] Littlefield, Henry M. “The Wizard of Oz: Parable on Populism.” American Quarterly, Vol. 16, No.1, 53.
[40] Baum Oz, 93.
[41] Baum Oz, 94-97.
[42] Baum Oz, 102.
[43] Baum Oz, 122.
[44] Turner Forest of Symbols, 101-102.
[45] Turner, Victor. The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure. (New York: Cornell University Press, 1969), 103.
[46] Baum Oz, 182.
[47] Hearn, Michael Patrick. The Annotated Wizard of Oz. (New York: Norton, 2000), 313.
[48] Baum Oz, 303.
[49] Baum Oz, 305.
[50] Baum Oz, 307.
[51] Baum What Children Want.
[52] Baum What Children Want.

Images:

Title page. Baum, L. Frank. Illustrated by William Wallace Denslow. The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. (New York: Geo. M. Hill Co, 1900). Public domain. Source: Electronic Text Center, University of Virginia Library  via Wikimedia https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:The_Wonderful_Wizard_of_Oz,_006.png
Image has been retouched by user.

All other illustrations from Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz:
 Baum, L. Frank. Illustrated by William Wallace Denslow. The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. (New York: Geo. M. Hill Co, 1900). Public domain.
Source: Library of Congress Children’s Book Selections. https://www.loc.gov/free-to-use     Item number- https://lccn.loc.gov/03032405

Rites of Passage table constructed by author.

he Giver is about Jonas, an eleven-year-old boy who lives in a futuristic society where life appears to be nothing less than idyllic. If everything in this world is so perfect, what‘s the rub? Why was The Giver banned? Why has it been one of the most controversial books since its release in 1993?[1]

Like most books about so-called utopias, this society has a dark underbelly. And the most frequent reason for the book’s ongoing challenges is the claim that it’s “unsuited” to the middle-schoolers it is primarily assigned to.[2] Parents of a 2007 challenge summed up this sentiment with their characterization of Lowry’s book as “too dark” for preteens.[3]

The novel’s first notable banning came in 1994, when California parents complained about passages that deal with sexual awakening.[4] In 1995, a Kansas parent challenged The Giver over references to suicide and murder, as well as a perceived “degradation of motherhood and adolescence.”[5] In 1999, it was challenged in both Ohio and Florida by parents offended by mentions of suicide, infanticide, and euthanasia.[6] Challengers in 2007 added “adolescent pill-popping” to the list of objections.[7] The Giver continues to appear on the American Library Association’s list of 100 most banned and challenged books for all the same reasons.

Granted, the society Lowry created contains some dark elements. There’s a reason for that. These dark elements prompt the reader to think about topics like ethics, democracy, and human interdependence. As one teacher points out, “there’s a lot of strength and power” in discussing questions like “what makes a good society?” and “what is my role in society?” with middle-schoolers. They’re beginning to grapple with such issues.[8] So, is The Giver really too dark for preteens? No. It’s just dark enough to spark a conversation about what kind of world they’ll want to build when their generation takes the reins.

Despite some challengers’ misguided ideas, The Giver is not a portal to the dark side. In fact, a careful reading like the one that follows, reveals that it’s a lesson in how to avoid going to the dark side.
———-

Liberal Arts — Rx for the Human Condition.

“You and I are the only ones with access to the books.”[9] This comment by The Giver seems like a throwaway line having more to do with his apprentice’s future living arrangements than anything. But it isn’t. This typically overlooked remark is actually the key to unlocking Lois Lowry’s novel, especially when considered alongside a similar statement made by The Giver later in the book… “Jonas, you and I are the only one who have feelings.”[10]

How are access to books and having feelings related? Ursula K. Le Guin sums it up nicely:

We read books to find out who we are. What other people, real or imaginary, do and think and feel—or have done and thought and felt; or might do and think and feel—is an essential guide to our understanding of what we ourselves are and may become… And a person who had never listened to nor read a tale or myth or parable or story, would remain ignorant of his own emotional and spiritual heights and depths, would not know quite fully what it is to be human. For the story—from Rumpelstiltskin to War and Peace—is one of the basic tools invented by the mind of man, for the purpose of gaining understanding.[11]

One example of the way literature broadens our horizons can be found in James Baldwin’s anecdote about a time when he was very young. He “assumed that no one had ever been born who was only five feet six inches tall, or been born poor, or been born ugly.”[12] “No one,” he believed, “had ever suffered” the way he did.[13] Then, after reading Dostoevsky, he realized that such concerns are common, if not universal. Baldwin described this realization as a “liberation,” one that empowered him to take charge of his life and write about such social issues, which lead him to become the cultural icon he is today.[14]
———-

The Seductive World of The Giver.

Lois Lowry set out to seduce the reader with a world that “seems familiar, comfortable, and safe.”[15] On its face this unnamed community is an orderly and peaceful place where life appears to be nothing less than idyllic. Lowry got rid of everything she “fear[s] and dislike[s],” things like poverty, pain, inequality. And according to one of her young fans, the cherry on top of this utopian sundae is that the people in this world don’t even “have to do the dishes.”[16]

All that sounds great! However… the very word utopia indicates that they don’t exist. The term is derived from the Greek ou-topos meaning “no place” or “nowhere.” It was coined by Thomas More for his sixteenth-century book of the same name, as a pun on the nearly identical Greek word eu-topos, or “good place.”[17] So, Jonas’ world may be void of poverty, pain, and inequality, but what else is it missing?

Music, theatre, and art are all conspicuously absent. There’s no literature either, none of the novels, plays, poetry, or histories that address the human condition, broaden our horizons, and keep cultural memory alive. The Giver shows us what happens to society when a Liberal Arts education is deemed frivolous, when the Humanities and fine arts are cast aside, disciplines that produced the likes of our Founding Fathers among others. It’s an important and relevant message. Rather, a warning given our obsession with STEM studies over the past several decades to the neglect of a Liberal Arts Education.

According to a recent study, the downturn in Humanities degrees appears to be a global phenomenon. The Humanities’ share of bachelor’s degrees conferred in OECD (Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development) countries is at its smallest number since a complete accounting of Humanities degrees first became possible, in 1987. And the United States ranks below the OECD average – not only at the bachelor’s level, but for advanced degrees as well. [18]

Albert Einstein himself advocated a Liberal Arts education. He said, “it is not enough to teach a man a specialty,” noting “through it he may become a kind of useful machine, but not a harmoniously developed personality.”[19] Einstein also pointed out that “overemphasis” on merely finding a job, and “premature specialization on the ground of immediate usefulness, kill the spirit on which all cultural life depends,” including the technological insights STEM studies are intended to produce.[20] Einstein goes on to say that students “must acquire a vivid sense of the beautiful and of the morally good.”[21] Because ultimately, they “must learn to understand the motives of human beings, their illusions and their sufferings in order to acquire a proper relationship to individual fellow men and to the community.”[22]

It was clear to Einstein then and continues to be true today, neglecting the humanities is doubly destructive. Not only does an education lacking in these disciplines stunt the growth and development of the human person, it unleashes technology with no ethical constraints. We see both of these disastrous developments in The Giver.
———-

When the Humanities are Neglected.

No one in The Giver’s world has experienced the universal emotional response to powerful music, like that produced by Beethoven, Wagner, or Nine Inch Nails, or Johnny Cash for that matter.[23] Nor have the citizens in this literally colorless community, where everything appears in black and white like a 1950s T.V. show, felt awestruck while gazing on a painting by the likes of DaVinci, Rembrandt, O’Keefe, or Basquiat. These arts are nonexistent, as are the emotions they evoke. This stunted emotional development is symbolized by the daily pill all citizens are required to take at the onset of sexual “stirrings,” a drug clearly designed to keep all emotions at bay.[24]

As Lowry’s protagonist Jonas points out, the only books in his dwelling are the “necessary reference volumes” that occupy a shelf in every household: “a dictionary, and the thick community volume containing descriptions of every office, factory, building, and committee. And The Book of Rules, of course.”[25]

Given this selection of books, Jonas’ community is undoubtedly well-organized and efficient. For example, all children in a given age-group dress identically, in clothing that reflects their stage of development and indicates their age.  The universal mode of transportation is the bicycle, and every child receives one in their ninth year. And the Department of Bicycle Repair keeps every bike in tip-top shape for the entire life of its owner. Every adolescent is assigned a job, one they’ll do for the rest of their working lives. Jobs are chosen by community elders according to each young adult’s proficiency and aptitude. From this point on, a student’s schooling consists exclusively of training for their future occupations.

This system does indeed produce capable workers. Like The Giver, says, “Everyone is well trained for his job.”[26] But as noted earlier, literature, or any other art for that matter, is non-existent in this society. There is nothing to cultivate an appreciation for the difference between “earning a living” and actually living.[27] And without the cultural memories and emotions that literature nurtures, as The Giver goes on to say, “it’s all meaningless.”[28]

The job Jonas was assigned, Receiver-in-Training, is like no other. He’d been selected as successor to the outgoing Receiver of Memories, a position of great honor. Through a bit of magical realism, the Receiver holds the collective memory of the entire world. But it’s time for the Receiver to pass these memories to Jonas. Therefore, he is now called The Giver. And by way of the same magical realism that allows him to hold an entire world’s memories, The Giver transfers these memories to Jonas through touch.

After receiving several memories from The Giver, Jonas realizes that he’s developed a new depth of feeling. His emotions are no longer the shallow sentiments dissected each night with endless talk and “precise language.”[29] He now understands that maternal love could be deeper than the anemic variety his mother has been conditioned to feel, more than simply a question of whether she “enjoy[s] him” – which she assures Jonas she does. And a father’s love is not limited to taking pride in his child’s accomplishments – which Jonas’ father confirms that he does. Jonas has experienced the physical sensations that come with emotions like joy and grief. He can truly say that he feels “such love” for his friends Asher and Fiona.[30] Sadly, he also understands that they can’t “feel it back.”[31]
———-

And Back and Back and Back.[32]

During his first session as Receiver-in-training, Jonas was surprised and confused by the concept of previous generations. Bewildered, he tells The Giver, “I thought there was only us. I thought there was only now.”[33] He had never thought beyond his own nose so to speak. It never occurred to Jonas that his parents must have also had parents, never mind pondering questions about how or why his community developed the way it did, and how it may change in the future.

This scenario reflects the shortsighted perspective, and diminished understanding of the world that develops without a grasp of History. No matter who we are, where we live, or what we do for a living, studying history helps us understand how our world came to be, which in turn gives us insight into our place in society. Connecting with history also makes the world come alive. It fills us with curiosity, as it did for Jonas who suddenly had a string of questions: “Why don’t we have snow, and sleds, and hills? And when did we, in the past? Did my parents have sleds when they were young?”[34]

But history’s function doesn’t end with connecting the present to the past. Understanding how our society came to be doesn’t just give us insight into today’s world, it also helps us deal with the societal shifts that will inevitably occur in the future. In short, knowledge of history is a through line from the past-to the present-to the future. Bearing this in mind, the “releases” that take place in Jonas’ world, euthanizing the elderly and certain infants, reflect the severed connection to both the past and the future that occurs when history is deemed a frivolous subject. Once again, The Giver’s dystopian society exhibits the deficiencies that arise from an education lacking in the humanities.

On their face these euthanizations (which prompt virtually every banning of The Giver) embody the technologies that have been used unethically over the course of history. At a speaking engagement for Lowry’s book Number the Stars, a woman sighed loudly and asked “Why do we have to tell this Holocaust thing over and over? Is it really necessary?”[35] Lowry quoted her German daughter-in-law, who asserts “No one knows better than we Germans that we must tell this again and again.”[36]

Familiarity with the history of such atrocities and understanding the environment that produced them, is the first step toward preventing them from happening again. And realizing that such barbarity occurred can shed light on present-day circumstances. For example, knowing that smallpox-laden blankets were delivered to indigenous tribes as a means of quashing Indian resistance makes it easier to understand the Native American’s ardent response to the pandemic currently wreaking havoc in our nation.[37]

Finally, the study of philosophy is increasingly seen as nothing more than “navel-gazing.” Unfortunately, a failure to understand ethics increases the possibility that a technology like the euthanasia seen in The Giver’s world will be turned on the weak, sick, or non-conforming in our own. We’ve seen it before – but you have to be acquainted with history to know that.
———-

The Road to Elsewhere.

As indicated above, The Giver passes “knowledge, history, memories, color, pain, laughter, love, and truth” along to Jonas.[38] The same thing happens every time we open a book. And like Jonas’ daily visits to The Giver do for him, the more books we read the more our horizons are expanded.

After a year of studying with The Giver, Jonas sees the river that borders the community differently. Prior to his training as Receiver of Memories Jonas only saw in black and white. Now he sees “all of the light and color” the river contains.[39] He now understands there’s an “Elsewhere” that the river came from, and an “Elsewhere” that the water is heading toward. Jonas has also learned enough about history and ethics that, like the middle-school students who read this book, he is asking questions like “what makes a good society”? And as a result, Jonas reaches the conclusion that his world isn’t what it could, or should be. But here’s the important thing… he’s inspired to do something about it.

Jonas realizes that the citizens of his community would benefit greatly if they shared the memories The Receiver of Memory now holds for them. They would acquire the sorely missed wisdom that comes with such knowledge. Together, Jonas and The Giver devise a plan to make the memories he carries go back to the people. It’ll be tricky and dangerous to pull off. And it will be painful for the community at first, but The Giver will help them integrate the difficult memories, as he had done with Jonas.

Unfortunately, things don’t go as planned. A sudden decision to “release” the infant Jonas had been helping care for forces him to slip out in the middle of night, baby in tow and ill-prepared for their journey. And this turn of events is symbolically significant.

It’s no coincidence that Jonas and Gabriel both have pale eyes, not to mention The Giver. Readers often ask if Jonas and Gabriel are brothers, or if The Giver is Jonas’ father. Given the way families are formed in Lowry’s book, this is certainly a practical explanation for why these three share the same eye color.  When we engage Lowry’s symbolism, however, we see that pale eyes signify a capacity for empathy, and the emotional development that Humanities nurture.

It’s also no coincidence that three generations are represented. The past is embodied in The Giver, whose abilities were severely restricted by The Committee of Elders. Jonas, of course personifies the present, with the infant Gabriel signifying the future Jonas is attempting to rescue from a dystopian past.

The process of returning the memories to the community, however, does work just as Jonas and The Giver anticipated. Through the same magical realism Lowry used when The Giver transferred memories to him, Jonas begins to “shed” these memories once he and Gabriel get beyond the bounds of the community.[40] As a result, the color, trees, wildflowers, and animals that had long been missing in his world, return to the landscape. Finally, after walking (apparently in circles) for days, at a point when it appears that he and Gabriel are going to die from starvation and exposure, they crest a snow-covered hill and come upon a place Jonas recognizes… from a memory of his own. It is familiar but different, he could see lights, red, yellow, and blue ones, twinkling on trees as they shine through the windows of places where families “created and kept memories, where they celebrated love.”[41] And Jonas could hear something he’d never heard before, something he knew must be music. “He heard people singing.”[42]
———-

In Conclusion.

With the return of memories long held by The Receiver, the people of Jonas’ world have clearly realized a thing or two about actually living. This final scene embodies what The Giver has to say about the significance of the humanities and the importance of a Liberal Arts education, an insight crystalized in Steve Jobs’ oft-quoted remark:

Technology alone is not enough. It’s technology married with liberal arts, married with the humanities, that yields the result that makes our hearts sing.[43]

As The Giver makes clear, the Humanities are central to cultural heritage, not to mention critical to our development as human beings. To quote Kurt Vonnegut, they “make your soul grow.” [44] But unlike the memories Jonas returned to the people, insights the humanities have to offer don’t magically take root in our minds. Which is why it’s crucial that Liberal Arts programs be supported rather than allowed to languish in the shadow of STEM studies. Lowry’s novel gives us a glimpse of what happens if we don’t.