larly offensive, according to these thinkers, when a non-Jew like Sylvia Plath in “Dad-
dy” (p. 335) or Anne Sexton in “After Auschwitz” appropriates the specific agonies of the
Holocaust for imagery and symbolism directed toward more universal concerns. Oth-
ers, however, feel that because the voices of Holocaust victims have been silenced
forever by their deaths, someone must express the experience with them in mind,
ing. But her short second stanza that introduces the personified death may explain the
hyperbole of the first stanza. Here she retreats into understatement, and the contrast is
chilling. An immense but trivialized horror has taken place, and death does not care.
The bitter anger of the third stanza condemns all of humanity, and although we find
ourselves nodding as we recall the Nazi atrocities, we may suddenly remember that
man—humankind—includes the tortured resistance fighter whose primary sin has
been leading children to safety, as in Marianne Cohn’s case. Are they included in the
creature unworthy of living? If so, doesn’t the voice of this poem speak not for the vic-
tims of the Holocaust but in the spirit of their murderers? But the counterpoint is re-
peated in the fourth stanza, as death is vulgarly unconcerned about the ranting of the
speaker. In the fifth stanza, Sexton’s speaker takes Adorno’s admonition several steps
further, again calling upon what seems to be hyperbole, though we suspect by now
that she means it seriously. Adorno argues that art after Auschwitz is barbaric, and Sex-
ton’s poem seems to ask, “Well, what isn’t barbaric after Auschwitz?” How can we pos-
sibly live—do the simple, everyday things or the profound, beautiful ones—if we think
about what humankind has been capable of doing? God should wipe us off the face of
the earth, she implies. And as if she suddenly realizes the unspoken implication, the
narrator of the poem takes back her curse, turning it into a prayer. Seen as a response
to Adorno, perhaps the poem means to say to the philosopher, “Yes, you are right. Art
is barbaric after Auschwitz. But so is everything else. Do we really want to give it all
up?”
If she doesn’t mean the curse she speaks “aloud,” repeating parallel words and
phrases like an incantation, her purpose may be to express the horror and guilt all
human beings must feel when confronted with our capacity for brutality. Maybe the
destruction of humanity should take place, but the speaker may be, like most of her
readers, reluctant to let go of life. Although Sexton eventually committed suicide, she
fought against the compulsion to do so for many years, even beginning her career as a
poet as therapy to literally keep herself alive. The poem has a quality of attempted
suicide about it. She has taken the sleeping pills one by one, then panicked and called
the hotline at the sight of the empty bottle. When asked if certain images in the poem
should be changed because they are offensive, students usually agree that the situation
to which she responds merits strong and blunt language. Her inclusion of words that
parents use to admire a newborn baby—the “small pink toes” and “miraculous
fingers”—make it clear that it is all of humanity that she sees as evil. Some readers
find this disturbing. Most would gladly see the Nazis condemned, but not the babies.
Sexton’s speaker does not let us off the “black . . . hook” of her anger. We are all
covered in excrement, as she sees it. Her shrill tone, which may offend some readers,
is mitigated by the alternating of the three long harangues with three understated, one-
sentence stanzas that we can imagine spoken through the teeth. In two of these, death
puts things into perspective, as he “looks on with a casual eye,” while in the third, the
narrator calls upon “the Lord not to hear.” The personified death is arbitrary,
unfeeling, and nasty; but so is man.
Student readers often prefer straightforward expressions of anger like that in “After
Auschwitz” to more subtle evocations of grief like Nelly Sachs’s “Chorus of the
Rescued” or Marianne Cohn’s “I Shall Betray Tomorrow.” But in this cluster on
remembering the death camps, we need to ask why Sexton’s narrator, as a distant
outside observer of Auschwitz, depends on hyperbole and explicit images of evil,
whereas Sachs’s rescued ones and Cohn’s tortured prisoner use anguished but less
exaggerated images. Perhaps it is best not to change any of the multiple voices that
poets have used to speak out against the Holocaust in the texts of this cluster. Readers
will differ as they choose the one that comes closest to expressing their feelings about
the Holocaust. Students often like Martin Niemöller, Anne Sexton, and Karen
Gershon because their language and straightforward approaches are accessible
without a great deal of literary interpretation. Sachs is a Nobel Prize–winning writer,
and we would invite readers to explore her poetry in depth. She makes every word and
image count, metaphorically and symbolically, as she compresses imagined
experience and emotion into a few short lines. But the emotions she evokes are both
historically specific and universal at the same time, and any reader willing to give her
the time will be rewarded. Rather than being barbaric, the poetry of Sachs, after
Auschwitz, speaks in the voices of many human beings who need to be heard.
A CREATIVE CONFINEMENT: A COLLECTION OF POEMS
BY EMILY DICKINSON (p. 698)
EMILY DICKINSON
Wild Nights—Wild Nights! (p. 698)
When pulling together the poetry of Emily Dickinson for publication after her death,
Thomas Wentworth Higginson wrote, “One poem only I dread a little to print—that
wonderful ‘Wild Nights,’—lest the malignant read into it more than that virgin recluse
ever dreamed of putting there.” However, he went on to say that the poem was too
good to leave out. So what is so dangerously sexy about this poem? Some readers have
argued that the experience is a mystical one, especially given the capitalized “Thee” in
the final line: perhaps Dickinson speaks of God? Others take the maritime imagery
seriously: does “Thee” signify a personified sea? Most readers, however, sense passion-
ate, erotic intensity underlying Dickinson’s words, though the deceptively simple, con-
trasting metaphors have proven difficult to unravel. Are “wild nights” something to be
desired, symbolizing sexual abandon? Or does the speaker refer to restless lack of
sleep, tossing and turning with unfulfilled desire, something she could bear once in a
while if she were often sheltered in the safety of a lover’s arms? A “luxury” is some-
thing extra, icing on the cake. Keeping this definition in mind, the more desirable
relationship is a quiet one, and the “wild nights” would be a “luxury” beyond a safe
harbor that is not wild at all.
handwritten manuscript of this poem, the word Ah is followed by an exclamation
point rather than a comma. This punctuation invites a reading of sexual climax at this
point in the poem, and the sea is often seen as an image of sexual consummation.
Perhaps the speaker wishes to stay in the lover’s arms all night in the afterglow of this
moment of passion; or she may wish for marriage in contrast to brief, secret
encounters. The image of mooring indicates peace and permanence, in contrast to the
wildness and the winds of fleeting desire.
EMILY DICKINSON
Tell all the Truth but tell it slant— (p. 700)
The term slant, in its adjectival form, is typically understood as meaning “sloped” or
even “tilted.” At the very least, a slant implies an angle, or something neither horizon-
tal nor vertical in orientation. So what might this mean for truth or for storytelling? In
“Tell all the Truth but tell it slant—,” poet Emily Dickinson argues for a sideways,
sloped, or even tilted approach to truth. By this she seems to mean that for truth to
have resonance for listeners, for us to actually make sense of it, it cannot be in its pur-
est or most direct form. Dickinson compares truth to lightning, in that as children we
needed to become accustomed to seeing its bright, jagged shape across the sky. Truth,
too, must come to us a bit more indirectly so that we can take it in. We need time to
let it grow. Like too bright a light, she explains, the truth can dazzle us into blindness,
EMILY DICKINSON
Success is counted sweetest (p. 700)
We are most thankful, and best able to savor, that which we have previously been de-
nied. That seems to be the central message of Emily Dickinson’s “Success is counted
sweetest,” and readers will likely be able to come up with a number of examples from
personal experience. This is an undeniable paradox, however, as those most apprecia-
tive are the ones most in need (and thus least likely to have that need resolved). People
who have always had plenty are arguably less able to appreciate the bounty, just as, in
Dickinson’s words, a dying man is better able to appreciate the “distant strains of tri-
umph” than the winning army.
EMILY DICKINSON
My Life had Stood—a Loaded Gun (p. 701)
The significance of the “loaded gun” in Emily Dickinson’s “My Life had Stood—a
Loaded Gun” has been long debated by literary critics. Whether spiritual or romantic
in nature, the gun serves as a locus point in this tightly-written poem, and the gun’s
utility is tied directly to its “Owner” or “Master.” We might read the gun as referring to
Dickinson herself, which would highlight her dependence on others, even her aliena-
tion from the human experience, given that the gun does not have “the power to die.”
The loaded gun doesn’t have the freedom to make decisions; its role is adjacent to or
in service of others.
Given Dickinson’s relatively quiet life and prolific written work, readers might al-
so imagine the gun as a pen being manipulated or used by a writer for her own ends. If
we apply the poem’s gun-related imagery to a writer’s pen, particularly in the final
stanza, we see that poetry becomes a vehicle for not just self-expression but also deep
joy, protection, and even power. And from a woman writing in the nineteenth century,
this power is one to be feared, especially if the pen does not mince words—and can
exist indefinitely through its poetic production.
WHERE TRADITION IS A TRAP: STORIES (p. 703)
SHIRLEY JACKSON
The Lottery (p. 704)
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 sto-
ry 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 para-
graph, as boys begin to collect stones; however, this information 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. Sum-
mers’s qualifications to lead the ceremony 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 indicate 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 ritu-
ally 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, seasonal 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
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 New York. 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 published,
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 War II was only three years in the
past, and the United States was entering the conservative Cold War era (a similar
conservatism directly followed September 11, 2001). It seemed unpatriotic and
disturbing to question tradition, to portray decent, small-town citizens of Middle
America as capable of the mindless 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 parents
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 emphasize how far we have come,
failing to question the assumptions of their own generation. Americans in the early
twenty-first century excuse or deny suggestions 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
ALEXANDER WEINSTEIN
Rocket Night (p. 710)
Reminiscent of Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery,” Alexander Weinstein’s “Rocket
Night” chronicles an elementary school’s yearly tradition of sending one unfortunate
and ill-fated child into outer space. While the short story does not frame the ritual as a
sacrifice—the school packs the rocket with some limited water and food tablets, as
well as a microphone—no one anticipates the child’s return. The narrator’s descrip-
tion of the process emphasizes key class distinctions, from the unlucky child’s thrifted
clothing to his parents’ dated cars and hopeless demeanors. Noting the “smear of cup-
cake frosting on the corner of [the child’s] mouth,” the narrator reflects that the chil-
dren “had chosen well.” This line’s significance lies in its mention of both personal
habits, like knowing to wipe one’s mouth after eating, and the other children’s role in
the selection process. School-age peers choose the space-bound child, which suggests
the community’s investment in reinscribing their values and biases (if not brutality)
onto the next generation.
Readers will likely find the narrator’s casual tone chilling, and the story offers little
evidence that anyone recognizes a problem with Rocket Night. Indeed, the parents
“sighed with awe” at the sight of the rocket taking off. The splendid show fully eclipses
the reality of the sacrificed passenger, and the event’s description hints at a probable dis-
connect in our understanding of modern technology’s human consequences. Some
DREAMS OF ESCAPE: STORIES (p. 714)
KATE CHOPIN
The Story of an Hour (p. 714)
“The Story of an Hour” was published after the Kate Chopin’s death in 1904. Readers
today are often as disturbed by Mrs. Mallard’s emotions as Chopin’s early readers
were. Today, we hear students complain that if she felt so confined in her marriage,
she should have just left. Readers at its first publication would have understood her
unquestioning loyalty to her marriage while she knew her husband was alive but
would have chided her for not adapting to her lot as a married woman. They might
also point out that to be alone did not mean she would have the power to make her
own decisions. Most widows, even if their financial means were considerable, would
have found their husbands’ estates in the hands of male executors.
It is interesting, however, that Kate Chopin’s working title for her novel The
Awakening was A Solitary Life. To Chopin, the very real difficulties—even dangers—
of being a woman alone in the nineteenth century were more tolerable than the emo-
tional confinement of most marriages. Divorce was inconceivable to most women
around the turn of the twentieth century, although Chopin had less reason to be fear-
ful of women’s freedom than most. Her great-great-grandmother had been the first
woman in St. Louis to receive a legal separation from her husband and had gone on to
raise her five children and run a shipping business alone. Kate Chopin grew up sur-
rounded by such strong women and in 1882 became a widow, with six children, after
twelve years of marriage. Furthermore, her marriage was characterized by an unusual
amount of freedom, with Oscar Chopin apparently not complaining about her smok-
ing, riding streetcars, and walking alone through the streets of New Orleans, actions
that scandalized “respectable” people.
“The Story of an Hour” may have its model more in the club women of St. Louis
than in the Creole society of Louisiana. In either place, Louise Mallard may have
been uncomfortably recognizable, as she would be in some circles today. Married
people sometimes fantasize about the death of a spouse, but the thought seems not to
have occurred to Mrs. Mallard until the events of the story.
Students sometimes judge the protagonist of this story harshly, seeing her as shal-
low and selfish, ignorant of the true meaning of love. To do this, however, is to miss
Although some readers might wish to know something of Mrs. Mallard’s life
before or to hear the family’s reaction to her death, the story’s length seems
appropriate to its title and its theme. It might, anticipating a Hemingway story about
marriage, be called “The Short Happy Life of Louise Mallard,” because her time as a
free woman is so brief. The brevity of the story nevertheless allows us to see Mrs.
Mallard as a dynamic character and to follow her quickly changing reactions first to
her loss, then to her freedom, and finally to the loss of freedom that leads to her death.
Some students will imagine that Mrs. Mallard is thinking about having a love affair or
spending money without having to ask her husband’s permission, but we should
encourage them to go beyond such easy answers. Many students have experienced
unwanted control from boyfriends or girlfriends. Although the status of women and
the constraints of marriage have changed, even today, when in relationships, we
sometimes intrude into areas our partners would prefer to keep private, feeling that
even their thoughts belong to us. We want to control their movements and to tell
them how they should feel. It is this intrusion that she is now freed from, and it is her
autonomy, her self-determination, that she anticipates. The loss of her newfound self
precipitates her death, and the reader understands the irony when the doctor says she
has died of joy at her husband’s return.
KIRSTIN VALDEZ QUADE
The Manzanos (p. 717)
Kirstin Valdez Quade’s short story “The Manzanos” is told through the eyes of eleven-
year-old Ofelia Alma Zamora. Readers learn from the start that Ofelia suffers from an
undiagnosed—and fatal—ailment resulting from the gaze of an evil eye, or ojo. While
Ofelia initially marked the ojo as coming from her mother’s boyfriend, the man who
took her away from Ofelia, she concludes at the end of the story that the evil eye must
have been hers all along. In wanting her mother so badly, she must have cursed herself.
Setting is particularly important to Quade’s story; although Ofelia once asked that
they move to a busier town, Estancia, her grandfather has imparted to her the im-
portance of Cuipas and their family’s land. It is important, she understands, that they
stay until Cuipas itself dies. The Manzanos of the story’s title are mountains that sepa-
rate Cuipas from Albuquerque, and these mountains frequently figure in Ofelia’s im-
agination. On their drive back from Albuquerque at the story’s end, she and her grand-
father stop to watch several wild horses who have come near the highway for food and
water. Folks speculate that these horses are the descendants of horses lost by inhabit-
ants long ago, and it isn’t a stretch to imagine the two horses Ofelia spots as symbolic
of her and grandfather: fending for themselves, names lost, sticking to the places that
matter most to them.
ESCAPING CONFINEMENT: CRITICAL COMMENTARIES ON A STORY
(p. 719)
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
Signs and Symbols (p. 729)
Vladimir Nabokov’s “Signs and Symbols” offers insights into the lives of an older cou-
ple whose son has been institutionalized for his suicide attempts. The story, told large-
ly from the mother’s perspective, chronicles the parents’ attempt to visit their son on
his birthday, and they bring with them “a basket with ten different fruit jellies in ten
little jars” as a birthday gift. Although interpretations of this gift’s significance vary, the
fruit jellies do bookend this short story in ways that are hard to miss. Some critics read
the jelly jars as tempting readers with the same kind of “referential mania” the son is
said to suffer from. Initially labeled a “delicate and innocent trifle,” the jars seem to
take on special significance as they reappear later, their “eloquent labels” spelled out
by the father. Perhaps he, too, is looking for meaning in their names?
The parents worry about the jelly jars being mislaid at the hospital, and unable to
visit their son in the end, they bring the jars home. Their house keys are then mislaid,
and in the final section of the story, they receive two misdialed telephone calls and a
third whose caller is never identified. The story concludes ambiguously. Although the
parents come to the decision to bring their son home to care for themselves, that third
mysterious phone call leaves open the possibility that he has succeeded in committing
suicide. Readers are left with a hope and dread not unlike that which the parents
CRITICAL COMMENTARIES
WAYNE GOODMAN, From Forum: High Pressure: Psychosis, Performance, Schizophrenia,
Literature (p. 734)
BRIAN BOYD, From Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years (p. 735)
MICHAEL WOOD, From Consulting the Oracle (p. 736)
Wayne Goodman, Brian Boyd, and Michael Wood suggest interpretations of the third
phone call in Nabokov’s “Signs and Symbols” that range from speculations about the
son’s escape, hints of his suicide, and the likelihood of another misdialed telephone
call. Goodman, who reads the third phone call as one informing the parents that their
son has either left the hospital grounds or escaped the world by committing suicide, is
not a literary critic by trade, but rather a psychiatrist and professor. Goodman’s reading
provides an interesting alternative to the suicide question, for he relies on the ambigu-
ous line about the son being determined to “tear a hole in his world” to suggest anoth-
er avenue of “escape”; and in doing so, ignores the story’s “signs and symbols” that
suggest the end must be a hopeless one. We learn in Nabokov’s story that the hospital
itself is a miserable place, and horribly understaffed, so the idea that that the institu-
tionalized son might gain his freedom somehow is a tantalizing prospect.
Boyd and Wood are similarly concerned with the story’s ending, but while Boyd
imagines a “pattern of tender meaning” revealed in the story, a “painstaking design”
LITERATURE AND CURRENT ISSUES: DOES OUR HAPPINESS DEPEND
ON OTHERS’ MISERY? (p. 738)
URSULA K. LE GUIN
The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas (p. 739)
Ursula K. Le Guin’s ‘‘The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas,’’ published in 1973,
describes the ‘‘bright- towered’’ city of Omelas and its dark secret: The complex, even
enviable, happiness of its citizens comes at the expense of an imprisoned and abused
child. While everyone knows of this child’s wretched existence——indeed, many come
to visit and witness his or her misery——most return to their lives in Omelas with a
richer capacity for happiness. The narrator explains that the ‘‘trying of their generosity
and the acceptance of their helplessness’’ are ‘‘the true source of the splendor of their
lives.’’ And their lives, to be sure, seem splendid. For the first several paragraphs, read-
ers are treated to detailed passages about not only the beauty and utter perfection of
Omelas——fine weather, spirited horses, sweet air and music——but also the nature of
Not all are able to accept the child’s treatment, however, and there are some who
leave Omelas for some distant, unnamed place. Readers can well imagine why one
might feel compelled to leave, though it may be harder to imagine why concerned
citizens don’t simply help the child. Why leave him or her behind to suffer? Does
leaving make the situation any better? The narrator mentions at several points that
guilt has no place within the walls of Omelas; so we might see those who ‘‘walk away’’
as bearing the guilt or shame that the city’s citizens refuse to accept. We might then
ask, however, whether walking away is truly a rejection or Omelas’s tradition or a kind
of tacit acceptance.
ARGUMENTS ON THE ISSUE
DAVID BROOKS, The Child in the Basement (p. 744)
JOHN R. EHRENFELD, The Error of Trying to Measure
Good and Bad (p. 747)
Columnist David Brooks’s “The Child in the Basement” is a contemporary response
to Ursula LeGuin’s “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas.” Brooks notes that
there are a number of ways to interpret Le Guin’s short story, including reading it as a