arnold Dover Beach 125
CONTEXTS FOR RESEARCH
harles dikens, From Hard Times (p.682)
friedrih engels, From The Condition of the Working Class
inEngland (p.687)
james eli adams, Narrating Nature: Darwin (p.690)
In the selection from Charles Dickens’s Hard Times, we see children’s schooling
figured merely as the transmission and recitation of bare facts — a purely utilitar-
ian model of education strongly opposed by both Dickens and Matthew Arnold.
Students in the college classroom will likely have experienced a range of educa-
tional settings, including regular standardized testing, and this story might pro-
voke interesting discussion on familiar or valued teaching and learning models.
Dickens’s parody is led by two extremely educated educators, Thomas Gradgrind
and Mr.M’Choakumchild, whose chief faults appear to be an inability to teach.
At one point in the story, Sissy (otherwise known as girl number twenty), whose
father works with horses, is called on to define what a horse is. Any reader would
recognize the difficulty of such a question, and Sissy struggles to come up with
a satisfactory explanation. When she hesitates, Mr.Gradgrind determines she
must not know what a horse is and calls on another student, Bitzer. Bitzer is able
to give a fact- based answer, which endears him to Mr. Gradgrind. Having a
father who rides and works with horses, Sissy no doubt has a much richer under-
standing of “horseness” than the others, but it is Bitzer’s response that the school-
master favors because he relies on more scientific- sounding details.
Later in the story, Dickens adds a bit of his own commentary, lamenting that
if M’Choakumchild “had only learned a little less, how infinitely better he
mighthave taught much more!” This line points to the larger theme of the story:
that education should not necessarily be fact based but rather should prepare
students to be active thinkers in the world. M’Choakumchild had spent so much
time learning mathematics, foreign languages, history, and so on that he had had
no time to study how to teach. These educators are, in effect, reproducing the
kind of rote- based educations they received. Their second question to the chil-
dren inquires as to whether they would paper a room with horses or carpet a
room with flowers. The hilarity of this line of questioning suggests the inanity of
the whole enterprise — for all their emphasis on facts, they aren’t actually inter-
ested in them. Instead, facts come to mean a stunting of imagination and creativ-
ity. Their ludicrous reaction to the children’s answers emphasizes that although
they might think they have the students’ best interests at heart, this is an educa-
tional model ridiculous in the extreme.
The selection from Friedrich Engels’s The Condition of the Working Class
in England focuses specifically on slums in Manchester near the tanneries and
other factories on the Irk River. Such areas, once hidden from passersby, are
made slightly more visible by the railway and, despite their dense population,
feature completely inhospitable conditions. Engels includes rich descriptions of
the deplorable conditions there, often stringing together lists of adjectives and
verbs to show the wretchedness of the area. The water, into which various sewers
and refuse from the factories empty, is particularly disgusting. Of the Irk, he
writes, “At the bottom flows, or rather stagnates, the Irk, a narrow, coal- black,
126 Love
foul- smelling stream, full of debris and refuse, which it deposits on the shallower
right bank.” Engels’s description stands in stark contrast to the calm sea and fair
moon of Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach.” The “long line of spray” (7) Arnold
observes in the English Channel is not, readers might imagine, an experience
we would have had viewing the Irk.
Engels’s focus on the area’s living conditions anticipates his later work with
Marx, in that he is concerned with the permanence of such poverty. There seems
to be little opportunity for any positive change, and the dwellings themselves are
managed by people in positions of power and mostly hidden away from outsiders.
He sees a stark contrast here between the “haves” and the “ have- nots,” questioning
later in the piece, “How can people wash when they have only the dirty Irk water at
hand, while pumps and water pipes can be found in decent parts of the city alone?”
Although Engels’s critique of the area is clear in his descriptions throughout, his
frustration arguably comes to a head when he writes, “Enough!” This final para–
graph takes to task those who might blame the poor for their poverty and hints that
these conditions exist so that others can maintain their wealth and circumstance.
In this excerpt from James Eli Adams’s “Narrating Nature: Darwin,” we
learn that Darwin’s theory of evolution was not necessarily new — rather, it was
in keeping with a range of related developments in understanding how natural
forces function. And these scientific discoveries also had economic implications.
Adams explains that Herbert Spencer used Darwin’s theory to coin the phrase
“survival of the fittest” in regard to social competition. This application is likely
familiar to readers, including the idea that people in positions of wealth or power
are there because they have better survival skills. If we help the poor, the reason-
ing goes, we are messing with the social order natural selection has ordained.
This conception of class, readers might also recall, stands in contrast to the kind
of society described in Friedrich Engels’s The Condition of the Working Class in
England, where the poor’s living conditions are not a result of their lack of “fit-
tedness” or inherent unsuitability for social and economic life.
Darwin’s theory of evolution, as with other discoveries of the time, had mani–
fold implications for religious Victorians as well. For example, Matthew Arnold’s
“Dover Beach” seems to reflect the kind of anxiety Adams hints at regarding the
relationship between evolution and faith. Although Arnold was no doubt open to
Chapter11
Freedom and Confinement (p.693)
OPPRESSIVE TRADITIONS: STORIES (p.695)
SHIRLEY JACKSON
The Lottery (p.696)
You might ask for a show of hands before reading “The Lottery” by Shirley
Jackson, swearing to secrecy students who have read the story before. Consider
reading the story aloud in class so that students encountering it for the first time
get the full effect of the surprising ending. At the end of the reading, ask students
where they first began to suspect that something is amiss. For some, questions may
arise in the second paragraph, as boys begin to collect stones; however, this infor–
mation is presented in the context of summer vacation, and its implications are
not clear. Because the tradition is called a “lottery” and the atmosphere is that of
a summer picnic, we are lulled into thinking that the event will be a trivial one.
We are thrown off by details of Mr.Summers’s qualifications to lead the cere–
mony and by Mrs.Hutchinson’s casual comment, “Clean forgot what day it was.”
What we understand later as a highly ironic detail seems at first reading to indi–
cate that the event is not really important. Not until we hear Tessie Hutchinson
protesting about the fairness of the drawing do we realize something bad may be
happening. For a few of us, the fact that someone is being ritually and arbitrarily
executed does not become evident until the first stone hits.
As we meet the characters of the story, the fresh- scrubbed normality of the
town is emphasized. We first meet Bobby Martin and Harry Jones, whose names
are very ordinary. And we are told that Delacroix, a name that sounds French and
therefore foreign, has a particularly American pronunciation: Dellacroy.
Mr. Summers seems to have a cheerful name, evoking the time of year and
perhaps throwing the reader off guard with its implications of a harmless, sea-
sonal celebration. We may not notice early in the story that it is Mr.Graves who
helps to carry the equipment for an event we later know will lead to yet another
grave in the community’s cemetery. Old Man Warner, someone who is known
by his age and his link to tradition, warns against letting tradition lapse, remind-
ing citizens that the ritual has something to do with the fertility of the land, as
the saying “lottery in June, corn be heavy soon” implies.
Although the publication date of Shirley Jackson’s short story precedes by
several years the 1952 production of Arthur Miller’s play The Crucible, both
authors may draw on the Salem witch trials of the late 1600s, and both may be
influenced by the earlier trial of heretic Anne Hutchinson (1591–1643). Jackson
invites a parallel to the historical figure in the last name of the condemned
woman, Mrs.Hutchinson. Anne Hutchinson was a woman preacher labeled in
128 Freedom and Confinement
the 1600s as a “Jezebel” who was infecting women in the Massachusetts Bay
Colony with “abominable” ideas regarding their dignity and rights. Massachusetts
governor John Winthrop considered Hutchinson’s ideas antithetical to tradi-
tional gender roles and to orthodox Puritan religious ideas, and he brought
Hutchinson to civil trial in Boston in 1637 before the General Court of
Massachusetts. Winthrop presided at the proceedings. Anne, like Jackson’s
Tessie Hutchinson, defended herself. When she claimed that God revealed
himself to her, directly, she was charged with heresy, excommunicated from the
Boston church, and exiled from the colony. She fled to the more tolerant Rhode
Island and eventually to NewYork. Jackson, by giving her fictional character the
same last name as a woman who fell victim to a most bitter abuse of power and
tradition in colonial America, casts a baleful eye on the very foundations of
American culture. Perhaps critics recognize the subversive power of Jackson’s
story when they mention scapegoating, man’s inherent evil, and the destructive
consequence of hanging on to ancient and outdated rituals as principal themes.
Because more than sixty years have passed since “The Lottery” was first pub–
lished, the impact of the story’s ending seems less shocking to us than it did to its
first readers. Most of us have seen movies and read books with similar themes, and
we have challenged previously unexamined values and traditions during civil
rights, antiwar, and women’s movements. However, in 1948, World WarII was
only three years in the past, and the United States was entering the conservative
Cold War era (some readers may note a similar conservatism directly following
September11, 2001). It seemed unpatriotic and disturbing to question tradition,
to portray decent, small- town citizens of middle America as capable of the mind–
less violence recently seen in Europe under Nazi domination or the abuses of the
Stalinist regime in the Soviet Union. At the beginning of the Cold War, images
of the United States as the savior of the world were almost unquestioned. “It can’t
happen here” was considered by many to be truth rather than cliché.
Student readers, as aware of the mistakes of their own parents as those par-
ents were aware of the sins of previous generations, may be inclined to say, “It
can’t happen now.” Many twenty- first- century readers believe as strongly in
“progress” as any of their ancestors, and students often write papers that empha-
size how far we have come, failing to question the assumptions of their own
generation. Americans in the early twenty- first century excuse or deny sugges-
tions that prisoners confined at Guantánamo are tortured and mistreated:
Americans don’t do such things. Although they know about Nazi persecutions of
the past, many students do not know about the Srebrenica massacre that took
place in Bosnia during the last decade of the twentieth century, in which eight
thousand unarmed Bosnian Muslim men and boys were systematically mur-
blake The Tyger 129
tradition seems natural or self- evident, we should examine it more closely as a
red flag for ideology.
CAITLIN HORROCKS
The Sleep (p.703)
“The Sleep,” a short story by author Caitlin Horrocks, narrates a small town’s deci–
sion to begin hibernating over the winter months. Wracked by economic hardship,
harsh winter weather, and personal angst, the citizens of Bounty are trying to find
new ways of simply getting by. Al Rasmussen, the man who first begins the trend,
decides to try sleeping through part of the winter after his wife is killed in a car
crash. Others begin to follow suit when he and his children awake refreshed and
rested from their two months of sleep. Everyone notices that even the Rasmussens’
eyes change: they look “like departure.” As the story progresses, the hibernations
grow from one family sleeping for two months to nearly the entire town sleeping
for five. Hibernating becomes part of the town’s collective identity.
Despite the potentially problematic nature of sleeping away half the year —
some people die and others miss out on life events, for example — the narrator and
the townspeople overall find this a change for the better. They believe that finding
a new way to survive the winter shows an Old- World “persistence” that echoes the
hardy and resilient nature of their ancestors. Repeatedly, the narrator comments on
the citizens’ pride in their town, even when buildings start to fall apart over the
months of disuse: “It was built for function, not ornament, and as long as it func–
tioned the way we wanted, we shouldn’t be ashamed.” Too, with the town’s children
dreaming away the colder months, Bounty’s inhabitants have much more to look
forward to and are perhaps less likely to want to one day leave town. The narrator
admits that before the sleep, they “feared [their children’s] boredom.” But the sleep
erases old hurts and blunts old wants. People seem to wake up content. In a town
that is essentially dying, sleeping and dreaming allow them to both escape and
remain. They can dream better lives and sleep away pain and blame without having
to walk away from the land their ancestors settled. In the end, the narrator remarks
that they are “better neighbors in warm beds than [they] ever were awake.” This
suggests that the sleep has also become a way to process and work through (or avoid)
problems. Although they do make their hibernation a communal experience by
sharing space and food, in living through dreams they also avoid the kinds of chal–
lenges entailed in participating in an otherwise struggling community.
FREEDOM FOR ANIMALS: POEMS (p.715)
WILLIAM BLAKE
The Tyger (p.715)
Most college students have read or heard of William Blake’s “Tyger! Tyger! burn-
ing bright / In the forests of the night,” and many know the first stanza by heart.
They may be relieved to read a poem that seems simple, is familiar, and actually
130 Freedom and Confinement
rhymes. This, they think, will be easy. Yet Blake is among the most difficult of
poets, with a complex spirituality and imagery that run counter to the clichés
and platitudes with which his Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience tend
to be read by inexperienced readers, and even by their teachers. This poem war-
rants being read aloud, with energy — even a sense of fear — beneath its surface.
Imagine encountering a real tiger in its own environment, feeling the squeezing
in your chest, your heartbeat, the lump in your throat, your gut and bladder
threatening to loosen. Think of the times in dreams when you have wanted to
run away or scream but found your legs paralyzed and your vocal cords useless.
While our introduction points out that poems about animals are really poems
about humans and that we project our own emotions onto animals, Blake comes
close to showing the tiger as a force of nature, something beyond anthropomor-
phism. Here, the series of questions conveys wonder and terror, and it is best not
to consider them to be rhetorical questions. We might ask a group of readers if
they think the speaker imagines he knows the answer to his questions. Arguably,
it is a better poem if he does not expect an answer and sincerely does not know.
What sort of force could invent such a creature? He can’t even imagine,
nor — he implies — can we.
In fact, the phrase “fearful symmetry” may be an oxymoron. Humans think
of symmetry as something designed; the work of a human mind (or a mind some-
thing like a human mind); something cool, objective, and planned. Yet this
symmetry is “fearful” — it is perceived somewhere deeper in the brain than the
frontal lobe, which logically thinks things through, a place where emotion and
memory are inaccessible to the conscious mind but nevertheless drive our bodies
to fight or flee before we even know why. The stripes of the tiger are symmetrical,
certainly, but there’s more to the symmetry than the design of orange, black, and
white. Blake’s speaker imagines the creation of such a creature. Though he
doesn’t use the word god — Blake’s theology is complex, and his creator is not the
god that religious readers of most backgrounds assume — the poem’s speaker
implies that the tiger is somehow made in the image of its creator, who therefore
must be breathtakingly fearsome and filled with unfathomable energy and tire-
less power. At times, this creator seems to be a cosmic blacksmith. The poet’s
purpose surely is to force the reader to consider possible answers to his questions
and to inspire awe when the questions prove unanswerable. This poem is often
coupled with “The Lamb,” in which the speaker asks the lamb the same sort of
question. The gentle image of the lamb’s creator seems nurturing and harmless.
Even though the animals in Blake’s poems are addressed as if they could answer
the questions, arguably it is the creator of these creatures who is anthropomor-
phized. The speaker asks if the creator smiled at creating the tiger. (Most artists
would be proud to have created something so awesome.) If we apply the ques-
tions to human beings, imagining a person who has such a range of gentleness
and power is moving. Perhaps we’d like to become such a person. Not only is the
creator terrifying for being able to invent and build such a work of art, and ver-
satile enough to create such vastly different animals, but this cosmic artist or
smith has also been bold enough to “dare” such a thing. The sense of the tiger
as “other” is enhanced by the change of verbs. We might imagine that we could
understand the lamb, but the tiger is beyond human comprehension. We could
never get into the head of something so different from us; therefore, its creator
lawrene Snake 131
may be equally inaccessible. The word holy (in its older meanings) is not too
strong a term. On the other hand, are human beings, who sometimes kill and eat
other creatures, more like the tiger or the lamb? Perhaps it is only an illusion that
the tiger is qualitatively different from humans. And while Blake’s poem assumes
a creator, many of the students in our class do not. Does this distance them from
the wonder implied in Blake’s poem or draw them closer to a natural world of
which they feel a part? Whether or not Blake intends to ask a philosophical ques-
tion, his poem raises many issues to consider.
D.H.LAWRENCE
Snake (p.717)
Students interested in exploring the deeper meanings of D. H. Lawrence’s
“Snake” will find many critical studies. Since the snake is a phallic symbol in
many cultures — even to some ways of thinking an archetypal symbol connected
universally with male sexuality — the poem invites Freudian readings, and
undergraduates are often surprised to find analyses of Lawrence’s Oedipus com-
plex as they look for interpretations of the poem. A reading of his novel Sons and
Lovers may convince them that this is a reasonable assumption, though some
Lawrence scholars contend that he had written his way through the worst of his
feelings about his father by the time he wrote “Snake” on a trip to Sicily in 1913.
In a personal letter, Lawrence himself once wrote that human beings are freed
by “phallic consciousness . . . [which is] the root of poetry, lived or sung.” For
Lawrence, sex was at the core of everything human, and such interpretations can
usually be supported with ample evidence.
Critics who focus on Lawrence’s ideas about women see in the poem’s
approach to nature an impulse similar to his desire for relationships in which the
woman does not become submerged in the man but finds her own passion and
integrity. This is a nature poem, but Lawrence tries his best to fight the cultural
demands to subdue nature, to kill the symbol of evil. Lawrence privileges nature
over received conventions in his work. He admires poets such as William Blake
and John Keats, whose work is characterized by structure, but Lawrence wanted
to catch a sense of experience in the present rather than “recollected in tranquil-
lity” as William Wordsworth taught. Readers will find this sense of immediacy in
“Snake” as the speaker argues with himself throughout the poem, then acts
impulsively, and ends with his spiritual task unfinished.
Critic Ross Murfin maintains that it is impossible for Lawrence or any other
writer after John Milton’s Paradise Lost to view a snake without making a con-
scious or subconscious intertextual connection with the biblical serpent and
Satan. Murfin sees Lawrence as unsuccessfully trying to break free of this and
other cultural connotations to interact with the snake in a natural way. Before
reading the poem, we might have students brainstorm or free- associate their own
connotations for words such as snake, serpent, and python, and invite them to
relate stories of encounters with snakes on camping trips or growing up in rural
areas. Some may think of expressions such as snake in the grass to describe some-
one who turns on us unexpectedly. We may recall the folktale of the “bosom
serpent” in which a man befriends a snake only to have his kindness repaid with
132 Freedom and Confinement
a poisonous bite. The moral is that we must be careful whom we “pick up” and
take to our hearts. But some may connect Lawrence’s presence on a Mediterranean
island with Greek stories that link the python with Apollo and his oracle at
Delphi, endowing the place where the god killed the snake with supernatural
wisdom and power. The python is usually taken to represent an earlier religion
connected with mother earth and supplanted by the male god Apollo. Lawrence
would have known this.
Those of us who were fascinated with snakes as children recall a mixture of
fear and attraction that attaches to no other animal with the same intensity.
Lawrence reflects this ambivalence in his poem. He tells us that “the voice of [his]
education” says to kill the snake. He feels “afraid” of the snake but “honoured” to
be sought out by it. He hints at mythical allusions, the snake disappearing into the
underworld to be crowned as king. The nearness of the volcano and the snake’s
withdrawal into the darkness of the earth remind us of hell and the biblical (or
Miltonic) connections of Satan and the serpent. Lawrence hears thevoice of logic
and science first, telling him that “black snakes are innocent, the gold are venom–
ous.” Then he hears the cultural voices that try to shame him into proving his
manhood by killing the snake. Since the Bible speaks of the “enmity” between
man and the snake, perhaps this is the voice of Judeo- Christian religion that
Lawrence so strongly resists in his work and his life. It is the snake’s “Deliberately
going into the blackness” that impels him to throw something at it. The horror
that the speaker of the poem feels has something to do with the blackness rather
than with the snake, which he has continued to admire. Perhaps for Lawrence this
withdrawal is a rejection of relationship and of life, but he blames his reaction to
it on the “voices of [his] accursed human education.” He feels that he has
momentarily done something unworthy. He uses words such as paltry, vulgar,
mean, and pettiness to describe his action, comparing his throwing a log at the
snake to the shooting of the albatross in Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s The Rime of
the Ancient Mariner.
Reading portions of Coleridge’s poem in class will help students unfamiliar
with it understand the allusion. The ancient mariner must wear the dead seabird
around his neck until he has learned to appreciate the wonders of nature; he is
finally released from his penance when, near the point of death from thirst, he
takes joy in the beauty of the luminescent sea snakes. Some readers see
Lawrence’s judgment of his action as exaggerated and quite different from the
action of Coleridge’s ancient mariner. The narrator of “Snake” is thoughtful
about nature and does not seem unthinking or unfeeling at all. But he denies the
snake his natural behavior, sees the darkness of the earth as a horror, and recoils
from the union of the snake and the earth, with its sexual connotations. Perhaps
this is his sin that must be expiated. He has lapsed from faith in nature because
of the temptations whispered in his ear by the “voices of education.” The biblical
story wherein the serpent is the tempter is thus reversed. Lawrence’s use of the
word and to begin many of his sentences recalls the syntax of the King James
Bible. This usage also gives the poem a sense of ongoing thought and spontane-
ity that contributes to Lawrence’s purpose of communicating the present
moment as it is happening.
Comparing Lawrence’s snake to Blake’s tiger, we find similar evocations of
the emotions human beings feel in the presence of creatures possessing the
bishop The Fish 133
ELIZABETH BISHOP
The Fish (p.720)
Elizabeth Bishop is known for her precise observations and evocations of objects
in the world. She begins with something concrete and specific, as she does in
“The Fish,” and lets the imagery carry the meaning. She doesn’t tell us what to
think about it but simply paints the picture for her readers to interpret. For
instructors using this anthology in a writing class, Bishop’s poem provides an
opportunity to discuss diction, syntax, and descriptive techniques. Students may
notice that “The Fish” is really a sort of fish story, a narrative about the one that
got away, or rather the one that the narrator allowed to get away. It has unity,
beginning with a straightforward statement of what happened and describing a
series of observations that culminate in the narrator’s letting the fish go. The
details of the story build until she notices evidence that this fish has already been
caught five other times. This leads to what most critics have agreed is an epiph-
any, a sudden insight into reality spurred by some ordinary object or incident.
There is a flash of joyful recognition as the concrete details converge for the
speaker as “rainbow, rainbow, rainbow!”
We can ask students to look at the poem’s diction, plotting words along a lad–
der of abstraction. For example, the word tremendous is fairly abstract and general,
since readers’ images of the fish may range from a foot long to something like the
great white shark of the movie Jaws. When the poet says that the fish’s “brown skin
134 Freedom and Confinement
hung in strips / like ancient wall- paper,” the image is more concrete, and the
images that different readers have will come closer to being the same. Students
can also be asked to find similes and metaphors such as that of the wallpaper and
to look for other ways that the writer provides precise descriptions. When she says
that the fish “hung a grunting weight,” several senses come into play, since we see
the fish but also feel the tug of holding it and hear the sound of grunting — whether
from the fish or the fisher is unclear. Color plays an important role, too, coming
together in the penultimate line with the rainbow. The phonetic qualities of
words are important to poetic diction. We can read closely to find alliteration
(“tarnished tinfoil,” for example), assonance (“ full- blown roses” or “green weed”
or “frayed and wavering”), or unexpected rhymes and vocal echoes (such as “shal–
lower, and yellowed” or “backed and packed” or the unexpected couplet of lines
46 and 47 ending with “jaw” and “saw”). Students should also consider the syntax
of the poem. The poet uses straightforward declarative sentences at first. There’s
a breathless quality to the series of short parallel sentences of lines 5 through 9.
But the sentences get longer and more complex as the poem proceeds and the
speaker becomes absorbed in her minute descriptions. She seems almost to look
through a magnifying glass.
As the speaker observes the fish more closely in the course of the poem, her
attitude changes. At first, the fish is a fairly abstract and undifferentiated weight,
though the word venerable hints that the fish is elderly and worthy of respect,
foreshadowing the insight that is to come. Gradually, the fish becomes even
more real as the speaker mentally dissects it. Finally, the fish becomes personi-
fied, the old fishing lines in his jaw becoming “a five- haired beard of wisdom.”
Although her description is precise and seemingly unemotional before the out-
burst of passion at the end, the details she chooses to give reflect her values. The
evidence of hard- won survival that the fish exhibits moves her. From her early
description of him as “battered” to his “frightening gills, / fresh and crisp with
blood” through many other images of his age and endurance, we finally come to
the old fishing lines that prove his struggle to survive. She also values the preci-
sion of nature’s machinery. For example, she is fascinated with “the mechanism
of his jaw.” She values the aesthetic, even when seen in the imagined internal
organs of a fish; she sees beauty with an artist’s eye. (We might note that Bishop
was a painter as well as a writer.) When the poem’s speaker uses the word victory,
she refers to the fish but may also refer to herself. But rather than the victory of
catching the grand old fish that myths are built on, hers is the victory of epiph-
any, of being struck by beauty and the will to live epitomized by the brave old
fish. One critic has ironically termed Bishop’s fish an “old man of the sea,” allud-
ing to Ernest Hemingway’s character who tenaciously holds on to his catch,
another symbol of endurance.
In a sense, the whole poem is about seeing. But the writer begins to make
this explicit when she looks into the eyes of the fish in line 34. His eyes are like
“tarnished tinfoil / seen through the lenses / of old scratched isinglass.” Isinglass
was used as a cheap substitute for window glass before the invention of plastics
and is translucent rather than transparent. One sees through such a glass darkly.
Like the other images of the poem, this one emphasizes age and endurance. The
fish does not return her gaze. But later the speaker says that she “stared and
stared.” The rainbow itself has to do with visual perception, the breaking up of
hrystos Today Was a Bad Day like TB 135
light into the colors of the spectrum. The speaker refers to the fish as he. Perhaps
the only reason for the fish being male is the convenience of his having a beard
made up of fishing lines. We have to admit, however, that if the fish were female,
we might find her pathetic rather than enduring. The warrants for this reaction
are worth discussing.
TRAPPED IN STEREOTYPES: POEMS (p.723)
CHRYSTOS
Today Was a Bad Day like TB (p.724)
The diseases of Europe preceded Europeans to the shores of mainland North
America, spread by travelers from the islands where contact first took place.
Measles was especially deadly. Some historians maintain that explorers and set–
tlers from Europe found little resistance because so many of the indigenous
nations of the eastern seaboard of the Americas had been decimated by epidem–
ics, leaving large areas seemingly uninhabited and ready for the taking. Native
Americans have been particularly susceptible to tuberculosis, and as the disease
reappeared with new force in the 1990s, statistics revealed that new cases num–
bered 16.5 per 100,000 people among Native Americans in 1995. The rate means
136 Freedom and Confinement
that this ethnic group has more than twice the risk of the general population in
the United States of contracting TB and five times the risk of non- Hispanic
whites. So when Menominee poet and activist Chrystos says in her title “Today
Was a Bad Day like TB,” the simile has added meaning. Tuberculosis was given
to Chrystos’s people unintentionally by whites who intruded into a land already
occupied, spreading their diseases before them. And as she sees it, whites continue
to intrude. Moreover, they continue to take what does not belong to them and fail
to see the cultural significance of the customs and artifacts they appropriate.
European attitudes toward the first people of the Americas have been char-
acterized by misreadings based on arrogance and self- interest. The earliest ste-
reotypes portrayed Indians as primitive, uncivilized, and simple, having no real
language with which to communicate complex ideas and thus incapable of
philosophy or metaphysical thought. They were considered ignorant heathens in
need of salvation, teaching, and paternalistic protection. This misconception
soon gave way to the stereotype of the bloodthirsty savage, as competition for
land and alliances of native groups with rival European powers made demoniza-
tion a more useful construct. At the same time, the romantic ideas of philoso-
phers such as Rousseau led many to regard non- Europeans as noble savages
living in perfect harmony with nature, a stereotype that continues to oversimplify
Native American culture in the minds of many enthusiastic onlookers. More
recently, Native Americans have been characterized in popular thought as vic-
tims robbed of their culture and dignity, unable to cope with the modern world
but cut off from their traditions. Perhaps each of these stereotypes began with a
grain of truth — clichés usually do. But the stereotypes are also fallacious over-
simplifications or overgeneralizations about a group whose history, culture, and
degree of involvement in mainstream society are heterogeneous and complex.
Some members of this diverse ethnic group prefer the term Native American,
but others insist on being called American Indians or on using specific group
names: Choctaw, Laguna Pueblo, and so forth. Richard Rodriguez insists that, far
from vanishing as a racial and ethnic group, Indians live on in the faces and many
of the customs of Hispanic Americans. Chrystos, who did not grow up on a reser–
vation and calls herself an Urban Indian, has chosen as a political act to discard
all of the European ancestry of her mother’s family and to fully identify herself as
a Menominee like her father. Growing up feeling like an outsider, she moves to
the inside of the Native American group and fights to retain the distinctiveness of
the traditions that remain. She angrily battles against the theft of items of culture
for economic gain in “Today Was a Bad Day like TB” and in other texts. In
“Vision: Bundle” she rages, “They have our bundles split open in museums / our
dresses & shirts at auctions / our languages on tape / our stories in locked rare
book libraries / our dances on film / The only part of us they can’t steal / is what
we know.” A “bundle” is a sacred religious object. To tear it apart is comparable
to desecrating an altar or any other holy object. This sort of ignorance and insen–
sitivity makes Chrystos sick, and she compares her rage to tuberculosis.
Some academics who are members of Native American groups argue that
there can be no written Native American literature because tradition requires
that stories and chants remain oral and within the clans to which they belong.
They insist that such precious and sacred things should not be shared with out-
siders. To Chrystos, those who buy or sell the trappings of Native American
erdrih Dear John Wayne 137
culture and history, which often have profound religious or ancestral significance,
merit contempt even if their motives are based on admiration. Many middle-
class whites feel as if they do not have a culture of their own and romantically
seek to become linked in some way to the traditions of indigenous peoples.
Chrystos is angry that such people appropriate the symbols without doing the
work of learning what they mean. A person who has an “Indian grandma back in
time” does not have a right to “own” and desecrate his or her heritage. According
to Chrystos, someone who has discarded the memories of the ancestors and
failed to pass them on has opted out of the group by passing into the mainstream
through assimilation. The targets of Chrystos’s anger do nothing concrete to help
Indian people in need, continuing instead the European tradition of taking
unthinkingly. The poet’s assumptions imply that underneath ignorance lie arro-
gance and selfishness. Individuals who clap during a Lakota dance see the dance
as a performance done for their pleasure rather than as the celebration of some-
thing spiritual. Their behavior brings to mind the initial European images of
Native Americans as incapable of understanding metaphysical concepts. It also
reflects the self- centered belief that the white onlookers are the reason for the
dance and that other groups exist only in relation to them.
When the speaker retches, trying to “get it out,” she compares her rage to
tuberculosis. But the disease does not go away as she painfully coughs up her
own body fluids. Like a bacillus, the harm done by the destroyers of native cul-
ture cannot be expelled. They are the result of the same sort of invasive callous-
ness. Students should not deceive themselves that Chrystos is speaking
metaphorically when she expresses rage toward all whites. Yes, she is angry. Even
the punctuation and the structure of the poem deliberately subvert the rules of
LOuISE ERDRICH
Dear John Wayne (p.725)
Although college students usually recognize photographs of John Wayne and
perhaps have seen his old movies on television or video, we no longer can
assume that everyone will understand the cultural connotations evoked by his
138 Freedom and Confinement
name. Children of the 1950s and 1960s, even in the effete East, came home
from school to serialized Westerns on newly acquired black- and- white television
sets. They went en masse on Saturdays to matinees at movie theaters with
names such as “The Bijou” to throw popcorn and whoop as ancestors circled
their wagons against the brutal savages who swept down from the mountaintops,
making hearts thump with terror. The cavalry would arrive just in time, raising
long guns to bloodlessly pick off the feathered demons as they raced by on their
horses, shooting their flaming arrows at the Conestoga wagons and the innocent
blond women and children cowering below. Little boys would ask for cowboy
hats and cap pistols for Christmas, and Christmas morning smelled like brim–
stone as they joyfully shot at Indians skulking behind the decorated tree. On
television, Wagon Train continued the story of the trek west, where Indians were
a constant menace. In an earlier American time and place, Walt Disney’s ver–
sion of Davy Crockett and television’s manly Daniel Boone — both played by
actor Fess Parker, thus confusing American history for a generation — fought
scowling, painted, and shaven Mohawks, though occasionally there were
friendly Indians willing to help the innocent settlers. Tonto offered solemn
assistance to the heroic Lone Ranger, and everyone read about Squanto and
Sacagawea at school.
Some movies categorized Indians as wise and friendly or wild and hot-
headed, depending on their willingness to accommodate white expansion.
Sometimes the white hero would raise issues with misguided government offi-
cials, standing up for Native Americans who were apparently unable to speak for
themselves. But mostly — everyone could repeat the proverb — “the only good
Indian was a dead Indian.” John Wayne, shown in Technicolor in the theaters at
night or on the huge outdoor screen at the drive- in movie, was the hero for teen-
agers, grown-ups, and the few lucky kids whose parents took them out in the
evenings. But his name is linked inextricably with all the other images, a 1950s
version of the heroic, manly struggle to conquer the West for the good guys. It
was no coincidence that the same face represented the American victory in
World War II or the heroic figure standing against the Communist threat to
everything wholesome and fine. It was so romantic when he turned the sassy
Maureen O’Hara over his knee and spanked her to show who was boss! America
was tall, blue- eyed, unquestionably male, and unconquerable. This is what
everyone knew without a doubt, and few doubted whose side God was on.
As the speaker of Louise Erdrich’s poem watches the larger- than- life images
of John Wayne fighting the stereotypical enemies, impossible to identify as
belonging to a specific Indian nation, she realizes as a Native American that she
is not the intended audience for this picture. Until recently, when they went to
the movies, African Americans saw no representations of buffalo soldiers riding
to the rescue of their fellowU.S. cavalrymen, and Native Americans saw only
misleading and demeaning images of people who looked like them. As the cul–
ture presented heroes for emulation and self- identification, and for the economic
benefit of producers and advertisers, the message to minorities was clear: you are
inferior. When Thurgood Marshall presented his case to the U.S. Supreme
Court against the “separate but equal” doctrine that justified the segregation of
African Americans, he used as evidence of its destructiveness an experiment in
which little girls were asked to choose the prettiest doll. Presented with white
erdrih Dear John Wayne 139
dolls and dolls that were black like themselves, children almost always chose the
white doll as the best representation of human beauty. A culture that privileged
whiteness as the ideal had told these children that they could not measure up
unless they could become whiter. The same principle is at work as children
decide what qualities determine manliness, or even define humanity itself. The
visual images of television and motion pictures are especially effective in com–
municating the values of a culture, even unintentionally, since the audience
tends to simply absorb them rather than think consciously about the assumptions
viewers are internalizing. Native American children watching a John Wayne
movie are as likely as anyone else to identify with the hero. But how are they to
deal with the message that the only good Indian is a dead Indian? Do they accept
the evaluation of inferiority or brutality and even behave in ways that lead to
self- destruction? Do they deny their heritage and try to be as white as possible?
Or do they protect themselves by treating it all as a big joke, at least on the out-
side, rolling on the hood of the car and “slipping in the hot spilled butter,” as in
lines 24–25?
Born in 1954 in Minnesota, Chippewa writer Louise Erdrich was a young
child during the Cold War, when such movies were at the peak of their influence.
Americans had already taken such assumptions about the inherent inferiority of
people of color into battle in Korea and soon would find their confidence in such
beliefs challenged by the Vietnam War. Erdrich becomes no longer part of the
intended audience for the movie when she begins to read the images closely and
to enter into dialogue with the text she sees on the screen and surrounding her at
the drive- in theater. Critical thinking is antithetical to stereotyping. As America
was forced to reevaluate its warrants during the late 1960s and the following
decades, and many Native Americans became active in seeking political change
and redress of grievances, movies attempted to challenge stereotypes. Often, how–
ever, high- budget films exchanged one stereotype for another. In Dances with
Wolves, for example, the Native Americans are noble savages rather than blood–
thirsty ones, but the blue- eyed Kevin Costner is still thestar. As Native Americans
take the opportunity to speak for themselves, as the Spokane/Coeur d’Alene poet
Sherman Alexie does in the 1998 film Smoke Signals, the human complexity of
their lives will perhaps become clear to more people, and Native American chil–
dren may find more realistic role models.
Louise Erdrich uses multilayered language to question stereotypes. The
teenagers sit on the hood of a Pontiac, a model of automobile that evokes the
1950s and creates some verisimilitude. We might not notice at first reading that
the car is named for an Ottawa chief who fought the British at Detroit in the
eighteenth century and then went on to make an alliance with them. How many
of our students have ever heard of Pontiac’s War? A name that might have been
well known if Native Americans were deciding the content of history books is
trivialized into a gimmick for selling cars. The “ slow- burning spirals” that create
smoke to deter insects also capture the drive- in experience for older adults who
were part of it as children or adolescents, but college students may need explana-
tions. Even so, this image too carries a double meaning, since smoke signals used
by Indians were a movie cliché.
Furthermore, Erdrich echoes the image of smoke and fire throughout the
poem. The spirals are “ slow- burning,” as anger and resentment may be. The
140 Freedom and Confinement
“ smoke- screen” literally fails to repel the mosquitoes. But we are aware of many
smoke screens that were set up to deceive Native Americans as their lands were
stolen. Her juxtaposition of statements about mosquitoes and statements about
Indians creates a metaphorical connection between the two as pesky creatures
that get in the way. The hordes of Indians are not individuals in the movie but
are an indiscriminate “bunch”; they seem more like inanimate objects superim-
posed on the landscape or weapons of mass destruction than people. Erdrich
ironically describes them as “barring progress.”
The poem implies that ownership of land is a European American concept
and distinguishes between the selfish lust for land and real understanding of it.
Seeing with one’s eyes is not the same as seeing with one’s heart. The forces of
western expansion, as represented by John Wayne on the screen, selfishly assume
their right to anything they see, but under the surface they are willing to destroy
the souls of people to get what they want. Erdrich’s speaker hears John Wayne
say “we’ve got them / where we want them, drunk, running.” Alcoholism is a com-
plex medical and social issue among Native Americans. Though not entirely
stemming from low self- esteem, the disease thrives on internalized self- hatred
and contempt, and prejudiced images of drunk Indians in popular culture do not
make it an easy addiction to battle. The use of the word running might remind
some readers of the ending of Ralph Ellison’s “Battle Royal” (p.1148), in which
the note in the protagonist’s dream says, “Keep This Nigger- Boy Running.” The
point of both texts is the same: that those in power have a stake in keeping
minorities in a position of inferiority. What John Wayne actually thought, con-
sciously, is beside the point. People can justify actions to get what they desire,
whether they want to settle on “unoccupied” land and thus must kill or weaken
the pesky Indians who protest, or to create a box- office success by promoting
images that implicitly label groups as outsiders and promote destructive
stereotypes.
All people learn subconsciously what the insider groups expect of them and
either accept these dictates unquestioningly or find ways to resist through critical
thinking. Many people sleep through history class, and their only sense of their
identity as Americans comes through visual media. Students may debate the
extent to which film studios have a responsibility to provide positive portrayals of
ethnic diversity in America. Perhaps we do not want filmmakers to teach us who
we are. Most people do not realize, however, the degree to which this already
happens. Deliberate propaganda hardly seems the answer. Encouraging and
funding outsider groups to write their own history on film to provide multiple
alternate views may be the most effective approach.
Whereas Chrystos in “Today Was a Bad Day like TB” projects a bitter and
angry attitude, Louise Erdrich’s tone in “Dear John Wayne” is more objective
and ironic. She is angry, as well, but focuses on reading the implications of the
text of oppression rather than centering on her own response to it. Both poets
challenge white readers to look underneath the surface of their careless actions
and stereotypes to see the harm they do through ignorance and the selfish
assumption that everything is theirs for the taking. Both think that whites see
Indians as cardboard cutouts or symbols rather than as real individuals with a
particular heritage that is of value in its own context. In Erdrich’s poem, the John
Wayne type sees land as his right, while the white characters in Chrystos’s poem
okita In Response to Executive Order 9066 141
DWIGHT OKITA
In Response to Executive Order 9066 (p.727)
Quickly scanning through Executive Order 9066, issued by President
Franklin D. Roosevelt on February 19, 1942, the reader might believe that a
benevolent government wished to do a favor for Americans of Japanese descent.
Internment in concentration camps is not mentioned. Instead, military officials
are instructed to “prescribe military areas . . . from which any or all persons may
be excluded,” with no specific indication of what people are intended. Anyone
the military considers a threat may be kept out of “military areas” as defined by
“the appropriate Military Commanders.” This is to be done to prevent “espio-
nage and . . . sabotage to national defense material, national defense premises,
and national defense utilities.” There is no indication in the order that such
categories include the prosperous farms and businesses of Japanese Americans
who had spent years carving out lives for their families in California, Oregon,
Washington, and Hawaii. It is not surprising that it came as a shock to some fami-
lies when they found themselves first in makeshift stalls or shacks thrown up on
racetracks, fairgrounds, and livestock enclosures, and later in deserted areas that
amounted to prison camps. Executive Order 9066 states in two separate places
that the people excluded from sensitive areas must be provided with “medical
aid, hospitalization, food, clothing, transportation, use of land, shelter, and other
supplies, equipment, utilities, facilities, and services.” But food was often spoiled
and inedible. When internees of one camp protested the theft of food by guards,
many were injured and two were killed. Barbed wire and guard towers sur-
rounded the camps, and those trying to escape could be shot. In his 1995 novel
Snow Falling on Cedars, David Guterson imagines how it might have been: “He
remembered Manzanar, the dust in the barracks, in the tar- papered shacks and
cafeteria; even the bread tasted gritty. They’d worked tending eggplants and let-
tuces in the camp garden. They’d been paid little, the hours were long, they’d
142 Freedom and Confinement
been told it was their duty to work hard” (page 162). Many sons and husbands
also felt it was their duty to serve their country, the United States, in the war.
They fought, even while their families were imprisoned as potential saboteurs.
The school writings of children who were interned in the camps reveal physical
discomfort, mixed with cheerful trust in the goodness of life. They complain
about the cold or the heat, the sandstorms, the fence, and the cramped condi-
tions requiring whole families to share one room. But they enjoy the outdoors as
children might on a camping vacation and wax eloquent about “the good drink-
ing water, the free food, the free electricity and free water.” Unlike their parents,
they did not have to be concerned about what would happen when it was time
to resume their lives. Even before the war, laws prohibited free and clear owner-
ship of property by Asian immigrants, and many were cheated out of years of
hard work when their internment made their homes, lands, and businesses avail-
able to looters and opportunists. In 1980, theU.S.government officially apolo-
gized to the internees still living, about half of those who had endured the
camps. A commission reported that “the promulgation of Executive Order 9066
was not justified by military necessity, and the decisions which followed from
it . . . were not driven by analysis of military conditions. The broad historical
causes which shaped these decisions were race prejudice, war hysteria, and a
failure of political leadership.”
In the first stanza of “In Response to Executive Order 9066,” Dwight Okita’s
young female speaker tells the relocation officials that she has packed “three
packets of tomato seeds” in preparation for her journey. She introduces her
friend Denise, who calls tomatoes “love apples.” When the speaker’s father says
“they won’t grow” in the internment camps, the obvious connection is that love
probably can’t survive there either. Although the next three stanzas continue to
describe the speaker’s relationship with her white friend, a friend who abandons
her as a result of prejudice, the tomatoes are not mentioned again until the final
stanza, thus framing the poem with a metaphoric image. Once the seeds of
friendship have been planted, young Miss Ozawa claims, they will come to frui-
tion, given time. The assumption seems optimistic about the ability of love to
overcome hate, given time. Perhaps this is based on naiveté. After all, her letter
begins with a polite acceptance of the government’s “invitation,” as if it were a
vacation. She is being a good girl when she packs her galoshes, since this is the
sort of thing a mother might remind her to pack. This is ironic if she is going to
Manzanar or another desert camp, however, and again implies that she doesn’t
grasp the situation. But Denise is naive as well, accepting the assumptions of her
elders that Japanese Americans will be more loyal to Japan than to America.
Furthermore, no Japanese American was convicted of espionage against the
United States through the whole course of World WarII, a fact that cannot be
wholly attributed to concentration camps, since none in Hawaii were interned
and many Japanese Americans served heroically in the U.S. military. It is an
especially effective device to have a young girl speak about such prejudice, since
the audience can empathize with someone who is obviously no danger to her
country. Both content and style — concrete words such as hot dogs or messy
room, for example — indicate that she is American rather than Japanese. Her
friend’s rejection seems doubly hurtful because the injustice is so clear. Because
the bombing of Pearl Harbor came as such a shock, many Americans could not
mora Legal Alien 143
believe that the Japanese had been able to carry it out without help from collabo-
rators in Hawaii. There was great fear that such an attack would be mounted
against the West Coast of the United States. Nevertheless, as government studies
maintain, the main reason for internment seems to be the visibility of people
who looked like the enemy. “Japs” became demonized as a racial group, while
animosity toward the enemy in Europe, so like mainstream Americans in appear-
ance and culture, tended to be focused on the figures of Adolf Hitler, Benito
Mussolini, and their followers, rather than all ethnic Germans or Italians.
Chrystos in “Today Was a Bad Day like TB” is furious at the betrayal of her
culture by those who sell Native American possessions to whites who reveal their
unconscious biases by misusing the artifacts. Her tone is bitter as she takes the
insider stance as a member of a group that has been wronged, condemning the
outsiders — the whites — who fail to understand. The speaker of Dwight Okita’s
“In Response to Executive Order 9066” does not condemn. Her tone is innocent
and hopeful in the face of betrayal. Her friend’s prejudice bewilders her. Okita’s
use of a naive narrator allows the reader to know more about the reality of the
situation than she does. He may be speaking in the voice of his mother as a young
girl; she and other family members were interned during World WarII and then
moved to make a new life in Chicago after losing all their possessions as a result.
The voice seems authentic, but we can only guess at Dwight Okita’s emotions.
PAT MORA
Legal Alien (p.729)
Pat Mora’s poem “Legal Alien” expresses irony even in its title, as so often the
opposite term, “illegal alien,” makes the news. The speaker is legitimate; how-
ever, her status brings its own issues. She lives in the space in between; rather
than living in the margins, the speaker is actually in the middle, as in the space
where two circles overlap in a Venn diagram. At first glance, most readers would
consider being bilingual an advantage, offering access to the best of two worlds.
Mora gives a hint of the divisiveness of being “ Bi- lingual” and “ Bi- cultural” by
inserting a hyphen in each word, implying that the person who is bilingual and
144 Freedom and Confinement
bicultural is split in two. She also capitalizes the words, as if they were proper
names or nationalities, in a poem in which few words are capitalized. The poem
consists of one complex sentence with conversational quotations and parentheti-
cal comments woven into it. Referring to herself as “American but hyphenated,”
the speaker frames her poem with hyphenated words, those of the first line and
the final word, “ Bi- laterally.” This final word has political connotations; it is a
word often used to describe a truce or other agreement to which both sides agree.
But the speaker feels “ pre- judged” by both sides; perhaps the only point the two
sides of her ethnicity can agree upon concerns her position, one in which she
can never be right.
Being bilingual and bicultural carries certain advantages. The speaker is able
to function in two cultures, is “able to sit in a paneled office” — that is, has the
distinct advantage of being gainfully employed — and is able to enjoy the advan–
tages of Mexican culture represented by being able to order food, itself an eco–
nomic plus. The poem can be read closely for differences between her references
to being Mexican and her references to being American. For example, the
English question “How’s life?” is answered by the Spanish sentence for “They’re
driving me crazy.” Though she doesn’t use ellos, the word they is embedded in
the plural form of the verb están. To whom does she refer when she says that they
are driving her crazy — two cultures or two sides of her own personality? She is