Working my way through the list slowly but surely.  You might find something on here you enjoy!  Bolded books are the ones I’ve already read.  Got any suggestions to add to the list?
1. The Lord of the Rings, (Trilogy) JRR Tolkien

2. Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen

3. His Dark Materials, Philip Pullman

4. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams

5. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, JK Rowling

6. To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee

7. Winnie the Pooh, AA Milne

8. Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell

9. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, CS Lewis

10. Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë

11. Catch-22, Joseph Heller

12. Wuthering Heights, Emily Brontë

13. Birdsong, Sebastian Faulks

14. Rebecca, Daphne du Maurier

15. The Catcher in the Rye, JD Salinger

16. The Wind in the Willows, Kenneth Grahame

17. Great Expectations, Charles Dickens

18. Little Women, Louisa May Alcott

19. Captain Corelli’s Mandolin, Louis de Bernieres

20. War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy

21. Gone with the Wind, Margaret Mitchell

22. Harry Potter And The Philosopher’s Stone, JK Rowling

23. Harry Potter And The Chamber Of Secrets, JK Rowling

24. Harry Potter And The Prisoner Of Azkaban, JK Rowling

25. The Hobbit, JRR Tolkien

26. Tess Of The D’Urbervilles, Thomas Hardy

27. Middlemarch, George Eliot

28. A Prayer For Owen Meany, John Irving

29. The Grapes Of Wrath, John Steinbeck

30. Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland, Lewis Carroll

31. The Story Of Tracy Beaker, Jacqueline Wilson

32. One Hundred Years Of Solitude, Gabriel García Márquez

33. The Pillars Of The Earth, Ken Follett

34. David Copperfield, Charles Dickens

35. Charlie And The Chocolate Factory, Roald Dahl

36. Treasure Island, Robert Louis Stevenson

37. A Town Like Alice, Nevil Shute

38. Persuasion, Jane Austen

39. Dune, Frank Herbert

40. Emma, Jane Austen

41. Anne Of Green Gables, LM Montgomery

42. Watership Down, Richard Adams

43. The Great Gatsby, F Scott Fitzgerald

44. The Count Of Monte Cristo, Alexandre Dumas

45. Brideshead Revisited, Evelyn Waugh

46. Animal Farm, George Orwell

47. A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens

48. Far From The Madding Crowd, Thomas Hardy

49. Goodnight Mister Tom, Michelle Magorian

50. The Shell Seekers, Rosamunde Pilcher

51. The Secret Garden, Frances Hodgson Burnett

52. Of Mice And Men, John Steinbeck

53. The Stand, Stephen King

54. Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy

55. A Suitable Boy, Vikram Seth

56. The BFG, Roald Dahl

57. Swallows And Amazons, Arthur Ransome

58. Black Beauty, Anna Sewell

59. Artemis Fowl, Eoin Colfer

60. Crime And Punishment, Fyodor Dostoyevsky

61. Noughts And Crosses, Malorie Blackman

62. Memoirs Of A Geisha, Arthur Golden

63. A Tale Of Two Cities, Charles Dickens

64. The Thorn Birds, Colleen McCollough

65. Mort, Terry Pratchett

66. The Magic Faraway Tree, Enid Blyton

67. The Magus, John Fowles

68. Good Omens, Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman

69. Guards! Guards!, Terry Pratchett

70. Lord Of The Flies, William Golding

71. Perfume, Patrick Süskind

72. The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, Robert Tressell

73. Night Watch, Terry Pratchett

74. Matilda, Roald Dahl

75. Bridget Jones’s Diary, Helen Fielding

76. The Secret History, Donna Tartt

77. The Woman In White, Wilkie Collins

78. Ulysses, James Joyce

79. Bleak House, Charles Dickens

80. Double Act, Jacqueline Wilson

81. The Twits, Roald Dahl

82. I Capture The Castle, Dodie Smith

83. Holes, Louis Sachar

84. Gormenghast, Mervyn Peake

85. The God Of Small Things, Arundhati Roy

86. Vicky Angel, Jacqueline Wilson

87. Brave New World, Aldous Huxley88. Cold Comfort Farm, Stella Gibbons

89. Magician, Raymond E Feist

90. On The Road, Jack Kerouac

91. The Godfather, Mario Puzo

92. The Clan Of The Cave Bear, Jean M Auel

93. The Colour Of Magic, Terry Pratchett

94. The Alchemist, Paulo Coelho

95. Katherine, Anya Seton

96. Kane And Abel, Jeffrey Archer

97. Love In The Time Of Cholera, Gabriel García Márquez

98. Girls In Love, Jacqueline Wilson

99. The Princess Diaries, Meg Cabot

100. Midnight’s Children, Salman Rushdie

101. Roll of Thunder, Hear Me Cry, Mildred D. Taylor

102. The Lottery, Shirley Jackson

103. The Canterbury Tales, Geoffrey Chaucer

104. A Wrinkle in Time, Madeleine L’Engle

105. The Diary of Anne Frank, Anne Frank

106. James and the Giant Peach, Roald Dahl

107. The History of God, Karen Armstrong

108. I Heard the Owl Call My Name, Margaret Craven

109. God Is Red, Vine Deloria

110. Sioux Indian Religion, Raymond J. DeMallie & Douglas R. Parks

111. Touch the Earth, T.C. McLuhan

112. Horse Soldiers, Douglas Stanton

113. Analects of Confucius

114. The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith

115. Game of Thrones series

116. The Lovely Bones, Alice Sebold

117. Stardust, Neil Gaiman

118. American Gods, Neil Gaiman

119. The Guernsey and Potato Peel Pie Literary Society, Shaffer, Mary Ann, Barrows, Annie

120. The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, Anne Brontë

121. The Odyseey, Homer

Subtitled “A Study of Provincial Life,” the novel is set in the fictitious Midlands town of Middlemarch during the period 1830–32. Middlemarch is a novel about social and political reform. But it’s also a novel about love and marriage. And about trying and failing. And about second chances. It is, in other words, a huge and wide-ranging novel. And I do mean huge (by the standards of the average US citizen): the edition I used (the 1984 First Modern Library Edition) is 795 pages long. That’s a lot of pages, but then, Eliot had a lot to say.  It has multiple plots with a large cast of characters, and in addition to its distinct though interlocking narratives it pursues a number of underlying themes, including the status of women, the nature of marriage, idealism and self-interest, religion and hypocrisy, political reform, and education. The pace is leisurely, the tone is mildly didactic (with an authorial voice that occasionally bursts through the narrative), and the canvas is very broad.

The length of the novel actually forced Eliot’s agent (and long-time lover), George Henry Lewes, to invent a new way to publish it. For most of the 19th-century, novels were published in one of two ways – either broken into installments of one or two chapters to be printed in a magazine (like Charles Dickens’s novels), or published in 3-volume hardbacks (called triple deckers). But Middlemarch was too big to fit into three volumes, and publishing it a chapter or two at a time would take forever. So Lewes arranged to have it printed in eight installments over the course of sixteen months to get people hooked on the story, and then to print it altogether in four volumes. This was a great move by Lewes – Middlemarch sold like crazy, and confirmed Eliot’s reputation as the greatest living English novelist.

Although it has some comical characters (Mr. Brooke, the “tiny aunt” Miss Noble) and comically named characters (Mrs. Dollop), Middlemarch is a work of realism. Through the voices and opinions of different characters we become aware of various broad issues of the day: the Great Reform Bill, the beginnings of the railways, the death of King George IV and the succession of his brother, the Duke of Clarence (who became King William IV). We learn something of the state of contemporary medical science. We also encounter the deeply reactionary mindset within a settled community facing the prospect of what to many is unwelcome change.

Her intention with the novel was to analyze recent political, social, and economic threads through a series of personal accounts. The characters and stories told within the novel are meant to show how people are affected by historical change while it happens, and how progress happens in people’s lives. Eliot manages to weave in the Catholic emancipation, the death of George IV, the dissolution of Parliament in 1831, the outbreak of cholera in 1832, and the passage of the Reform Bill later that year. Eliot manages to weave these things into the concerns of the characters and the narrative; they are not the focus of the novel, but are balanced with the novel’s literary concerns.

One of the most widespread concerns in the novel is change, and how people react to it. All the historical concerns in the novel are involved in this, as are people’s reactions under stress, and to progress in their society. Eliot is able to show people acting naturally in close detail, and present criticism on them, while still allowing the readers to form their own opinion of them. Overall, every character in this novel is human; each of them can be liked or disliked according to their personal foibles and flaws. But Eliot’s point is that we, like they, are human; we can only judge them as we judge ourselves. She is not totally impartial in the narrative, which would be impossible in making criticisms; but there is still plenty of room for people to make up their own minds, and interpret the characters in their own way.

Eliot’s stated goal with writing this novel, along with her others, was to give her readers “a clearer conception and a more active admiration of those vital elements which bind men together and give a higher worthiness to their existence,” according to a letter of 1868 that she wrote. The novel, especially the characters of Dorothea and Farebrother, are very much influenced by Eliot’s personal belief in the religion of humanity. Her views of marriage are also interjected into the novel; Eliot was not favorable about society’s ideas of gender roles and marriage, hence her depictions of Rosamond and Lydgate’s marital troubles.

The novel is very much concerned with women’s roles, women’s lives, and how they should be changed. However, it also exposes Eliot’s ambivalence on the subject. Although she had no children and lived with her lover, George Lewes, without being married, at the same time she believed that women should be married, and had obligations to their husbands and children. The novel advocates change in women’s roles, and in their spheres of influence; but, at the same time, no woman is happy who isn’t married, and in a solid partnership with her husband. This tension in Eliot’s personal views forms the struggles that Rosamond, Dorothea, and Celia face, and determines the outcome of their unions according to their character and effectiveness.

If there is one metaphor that serves to sum up the way people and society work in Middlemarch, it is a web. Just as Rosamond and Lydgate spin their own web and get caught in it, every character is bound in a huge web, and if one pulls one way or another, the web shifts, and someone is affected. Things and people are inextricable connected and an event, like Featherstone’s funeral, can have a very palpable meaning to someone who has no involvement, like Dorothea. Middlemarch is a very carefully woven work of social commentary and human analysis, with many living, breathing characters who are as real as the historical time period they inhabit.

The eight “books” which compose the novel are not autonomous entities, but merely reflect the form of the original serialization. A short prelude introduces the idea of the latter-day St. Theresa, presaging the character Dorothea; a postscript or “finale” after the eighth book gives the post-novel fates of the main characters, minus the fate of the Bulstrodes, which is left to our imagination.

In my opinion, one of the most memorable passages in the book is stated by Dorothea to Mr. Farebrother and Sir James Chettam regarding the tarnished reputation of Dr. Lydgate:

“People glorify all sorts of bravery except the bravery they might show on behalf of their nearest neighbors”  (pg 699, para. 1)  This was quite profound to me, and encouraged me to admire this character despite her quirks.

An oddity for me were the mysterious initials “E.M.” that appeared randomly on the bottom of the pages only on the right-hand side of the book (being the odd numbers).  There was no rhyme or reason for the spacing of the initials on the pages.  When the page numbers were inserted into a program, no numerical consistencies or patterns could be detected.  Also, an oddity, is that this book was located BEA 823.8 in the library, which was strange to me, as well.

In general Middlemarch has retained its popularity and status as one of the masterpieces of English fiction, although some reviewers have expressed dissatisfaction at the destiny recorded for Dorothea. In separate centuries, Florence Nightingale and Kate Millet both remarked on the eventual subordination of Dorothea’s own dreams to those of her admirer, Ladislaw; however, Virginia Woolf gave the book unstinting praise, describing Middlemarch as “the magnificent book that, with all its imperfections, is one of the few English novels written for grown-up people.”  Martin Amis and Julian Barnes have cited it as probably the greatest novel in the English language.  The book was a fairly good read using above average vocabulary, but not at a level so overwhelming to the average reader.

Captain Corelli’s Mandolin, released simultaneously as Corelli’s Mandolin in the United States, is a 1994 Louis de Bernières’ novel, imbued with a mythical weight and a delightful tragicomic lightness that bursts with tenderness and wit.  It takes place on the island of Cephallonia (Kefalonia) during the Italian and German occupation of World War II. The main characters are Antonio Corelli, an Italian captain, and Pelagia, the daughter of the local physician, Dr. Iannis. An important event in the novel is the massacre of Italian troops by the Germans in September 1943 — the Italian Acqui Division had refused to surrender and fought the Germans for nine days before running out of ammunition. Some 1,500 Italian soldiers died in the fighting, 5,000 were massacred after surrendering and the rest shipped to Germany — although 3,000 drowned when the ship carrying them hit a mine or were bombed by the British.

“New empires were now lapping against the shores of the old.  In a short time it would no longer be a question of the conflagration of a valley and the death by fire of lizards, hedgehogs, and locusts; it would be a question of the incineration of Jews and homosexuals, gypsies and the mentally afflicted.  It would be a case of Guernica and Abyssinia writ large across the skies of Europe and North Africa, Singapore and Korea.  The self-anointed superior races, drunk on Darwin and nationalist hyperbole, besotted with eugenics and beguiled by myth, were winding up machines of genocide that soon would be unleashed upon a world already weary to the heart of such infinite foolery and contemptible vainglory.”  (Pg. 17, para. 1)

Captain Corelli’s Mandolin has a complicated, episodic structure that leaps from quiet island life to the rantings of Mussolini, Saint’s Day celebrations, soul-destroying war in Albania, politicians’ musings in Athens, treatises on Greek history and the hallucinations of a sick soldier. It is told sometimes in the first person, sometimes in the third, and the style varies between stream of consciousness, social comedy, epistle, wretched confessional, and coldly factual historical account. The variety of style and subject encompassed make it hard to summarize it, not that I would, as I feel it would allow you to expect the twists and turns.  But I will tell you that the story takes us to a tightly-knit community, with the attendant cast of quirky characters, refusing to be dominated by its “conquerors.” This is the story of love found, betrayed, lost, and at long last found again.

Corelli’s Mandolin is not in the least a simple love story. It is a portrait of a fiercely proud and independent little community rebelling in what small ways it can. It is a snapshot of the horrors endured by the men in combat during the Second World War. It is a damning commentary on the grandiose lack of sense among the leaders who would mold the world to fit their petty desires. It is a witty, charming, intelligent tale that possesses the reader to finish without stopping. It is a tragic story of star-crossed lovers given one more chance at happiness after a lifetime of loss, and it is worth every moment you spend turning its pages.

“How the mighty have fallen!  He was a meteor who had turned out to be an incandescent fart.  All our commanders were incandescent farts… “ (Pg. 104, para. 1)

While most WWII stories seem to portray the Germans or the Italians as a whole, this novel meshed people of different personalities, different religions, different political viewpoints, different nationalities, and different ethnicities into one intricate story, showing how they interacted and were intertwined forever.  Marxists lived peacefully with Royalists and Communists.  The Italian Occupiers lived smartly with the Greek Occupied.  The religious lived tolerably with the not-so-religious.

“Empedocles said that God is a circle whose centre is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere.  If that is true, then I don’t need to go to church.  And I don’t need to believe the same things as you to see that you have a purpose.” (Pg. 53, para 3)

It also made perfectly clear that the effects of war were far reaching, beyond merely the physical.  It didn’t matter what side you are on, or what role you played.

“We found that there is also a wild excitement when the tension of waiting is done with, and that sometimes this transforms itself into a kind of demented sadism once an action is commenced.  You cannot always blame soldiers for their atrocities, because I can tell you from experience that they are the natural consequences of the inferno of relief that comes from not having to think any more.  Atrocities are sometimes nothing less than the vengeance of the tormented.  Catharsis is the world I was looking for.  A Greek word.” (Pg. 61, para. 2)

I have read many accounts of the Second World War, been to concentration camps, and watched WWII movies, and I don’t believe that I’ve seen one mention of Greece in any of them.  It is easy for one to forget that there were more battlegrounds than just Germany, Austria, Italy, or Poland in this war.  How the occupied populations dealt with the brutality of the Nazis is no different, though, nor was the general opinion of the people about the Nazis.  The admirable human quality of perseverance was a streak of iron throughout the Cephallonian population.  Like a plant regrowing after a case of bad pruning, the effects of war can be seen in the masses, as they are memories that will never be forgotten.

“The islanders remember that the Germans were not human beings.  They were automata without principles, machines finely tuned in the art of pillage and brutality, without any passion except the love of strength, and without belief except in their natural right to grind an inferior race beneath the heel.” (Pg. 358, para. 2)

“She thought about war, and felt her heart grow heavy, reflecting that in the old days men were the playthings of the gods, and had advanced no further than to become the toys of other men who thought that they themselves were gods.” (Pg. 88, para 2)

In the end, everyone lost.  The Greeks were betrayed by the British.  The Nazis were betrayed by the Italians.  The Italian Army was betrayed by their leaders.  As it is with even our Army today, those in control cannot (or will not) see what is going on in the field, and haven’t a clue to the reality that the Soldiers must face, and nor do they care.   Decisions are made based on politics and self-interest, not for the welfare of the Soldiers or the people, or even our country.

This novel was written upon a backbone of truth.  And it is fascinating to imagine who might be the inspiration for the characters within the novel.  Any time anyone writes about historical times, there is bound to be similarities in the characters of both history and the novel.  While de Bernières has denied that the character of Corelli is based on Amos Pampaloni who was then an Italian artillery captain in Cephellonia, it is acknowledged that there are many similarities in their stories. Pampaloni survived execution, joined ELAS, the Partisans in the Greek civil war, and fought with them in Epirus for 14 months. Pampaloni was interviewed by The Guardian newspaper in 2000 and expressed the view that the novel was unduly critical of the Greek left.

The novel also shows some similarities to Bandiera bianca a Cefalonia, a novel by Marcello Venturi published in 1963, translated in English as The White Flag (1969).  I wonder, though, can there really be no similarities if writing about a single delicate event as on an island?

I have ordered the movie from the library for one of our movie nights.  I see that it has Nicholas Cage in it (smiles).

“All of Greece is bursting with pride and gratitude for our men who are greater than Achilles and Agamemnon put together.” (Pg. 106, para. 1)

The widely acclaimed story, considered by many to be the author’s masterpiece, was first published in Spanish in 1967, and subsequently has been translated into thirty-seven languages and has sold more than 20 million copies. The magical realist style and thematic substance of One Hundred Years of Solitude established it as an important, representative novel of the literary Latin American Boom of the 1960s and 1970s, that was stylistically influenced by Modernism (European and North American), and the Cuban Vanguardia (Vanguard) literary movement.

There is a legend Gabriel Garcia Marquez likes to tell about the writing of his most famous novel, One Hundred Years of Solitude. He claims that he wrote the book barricaded in his study in Mexico, after receiving a vision. One day, while he and his wife and children were in their car driving to Acapulco, he saw that he “had to tell [his] story the way his grandmother used to tell hers, and that [he] was to start from that afternoon in which a father took his child to discover ice.” He made an abrupt U-turn on the highway, the car never made it to Acapulco, and he locked himself in his study. Fifteen months later, he emerged with the manuscript, only to meet his wife holding a stack of bills. They traded papers, and she put the manuscript in the mail to his publisher.

Like everything Marquez writes, there is some truth and much fiction in this tale. The truth in the tale is that One Hundred Years of Solitude is a very personal book for the author. It would not have been written if he had not experienced the childhood he had. Marquez grew up with his maternal grandparents in Aracataca, Colombia. His grandparents were cousins who moved to Aracataca from Riohacha at the end of the War of a Thousand Days (1899-1902), a few years before a leafstorm. Marquez’s childhood anecdotes tell of a big house full of ghosts, conversations in code, and relatives who could foretell their own deaths. It was also a house filled with guests and social events, shaded by almond trees and bursting with flowers. When Marquez’s grandfather died, Marquez was sent to live with his parents. In his grandfather’s absence, his grandmother, who was blind, could no longer keep up the house. It fell into a state of ruin, and red ants destroyed the trees and flowers. Also early in his childhood, Marquez witnessed the massacre of striking banana workers at a plantation named Macondo at a train station. The government made every attempt to block information from the public and pacify the foreign plantation owners. Marquez was horrified, and even more horrified when he reached high school and learned that the event had been deleted from his history textbook.

Careful readers of One Hundred Years of Solitude will recognize many of these elements in the book; there is no doubt that if Marquez had not grown up in Aracataca and had a keen ear, the novel would not exist. On one hand, the context for the book is Marquez’s own personal nostalgia for childhood, for his grandparents, for a big house filled with ghosts and laughter. On the other hand, the context for the book is Marquez’s political beliefs and the oft-brutal realities of growing up in a particularly tumultuous developing country. Growing up in Colombia, which has a long and tragic socioeconomic history, Marquez learned about politics and economics early on. In his conversations with other Latin American writers the Mexican novelist Carlos Fuentes was one of the writers who gave Marquez extensive feedback and advice on the early chapters of Solitude he developed his own theoretical views about writing and politics. He often claims “The first duty of a writer is to write well”implying that writing must not be polemical but there is no doubt that the economic history of Latin America, which is a history of inequality and exploitation, has had a crucial impact on all of his writing.

Marquez’s approach to writing One Hundred Years of Solitude combining his own memories and imagination with focused aesthetics and an eye for the tragic history of his country has had an immeasurable impact on writers of color worldwide. Coming at the time it did, in the midst of a boom in Latin American writing, it was immediately recognized as one of the finest, if not the finest, offerings from that period. More importantly, it crossed every boundary to becoming an international bestseller and worldwide phenomenon. Even Latin American writers who found fault with it could not deny that it had directed the attentions of the literary world to Latin America. The book was an immediate commercial and critical success when it appeared in 1967, and has since been translated into 26 languages and sold millions of copies worldwide.

Other writers of color from different traditions followed in Marquez’s footsteps to draw attention to their own countries and struggles. As critic Regina James says, “Solitude represented the marginal and the primitive, yet it neither adopted the superior perspective of the Western anthropologist nor imitated an imagined, alien innocence.  Many writers recognized their own ambivalent and difficult relationships with a traditional culture. In much of the world, the unimaginably old coexists with the unbearably new.  For writers conscious of straddling two cultures, nostalgia for a simpler, primitive past vies with wonder at the persistence of habits of thought, patterns of life, and modes of belief that surely ought to be extinct, mere harmless fossils. Garcia Marquez turned puzzlement or outrage into ironic wonder, and he enhanced the strangeness of the real” Today, we see his influence in such celebrated writers as America’s Toni Morrison, India (and England)’s Salman Rushdie, and Trinidad’s V.S. Naipaul.

            One Hundred Years of Solitude is the story of seven generations of the Buendía Family in the town of Macondo. The founding patriarch of Macondo, José Arcadio Buendía, and Úrsula, his wife (and first cousin), leave Riohacha, Colombia, to find a better life and a new home. One night of their emigration journey, whilst camping on a riverbank, José Arcadio Buendía dreams of “Macondo”, a city of mirrors that reflected the world in and about it. Upon awakening, he decides to found Macondo at the river side; after days of wandering the jungle, José Arcadio Buendía’s founding of Macondo is utopic.

Founding patriarch José Arcadio Buendía believes Macondo to be surrounded by water, and from that island, he invents the world according to his perceptions.  Soon after its foundation, Macondo becomes a town frequented by unusual and extraordinary events that involve the generations of the Buendía family, who are unable or unwilling to escape their periodic (mostly) self-inflicted misfortunes. Ultimately, a hurricane destroys Macondo, the city of mirrors; just the cyclical turmoil inherent to Macondo. At the end of the story, a Buendía man deciphers an encrypted cipher that generations of Buendía family men had failed to decipher. The secret message informed the recipient of every fortune and misfortune lived by the Buendía Family generations.

The critical interpretation of Colombian history that is the novel One Hundred Years of Solitude draws from the nationally agreed-upon history to establish the world of Macondo, where a man’s will to power allows him to invent the world according to his perceptions.

Before the Spanish colonization of the Americas by “right of conquest”, the northern region of South America that is contemporary Colombia had no culture akin to that of the (Peruvian) Incas, the (Central American) Mayas, or the (Mexican) Aztecs.  That region was populated by the Tairona and Chibcha Indian tribes, who were organized as clans, from which derived the local monarchy who governed pre–Hispanic “Colombia”.  In 1509, Vasco Núñez de Balboa established the first settlement and is now named the first city of Colombia, as an advanced guard of the Spanish invasion and conquest.  The founding of Macondo by the patriarchal Buendía Family is metaphor of the colonization of the future “Colombia”.

A dominant theme in One Hundred Years of Solitude is the inevitable and inescapable repetition of history in Macondo. The protagonists are controlled by their pasts and the complexity of time. Throughout the novel the characters are visited by ghosts. “The ghosts are symbols of the past and the haunting nature it has over Macondo. The ghosts and the displaced repetition that they evoke are, in fact, firmly grounded in the particular development of Latin American history”.  “Ideological transfiguration ensured that Macondo and the Buendías always were ghosts to some extent, alienated and estranged from their own history, not only victims of the harsh reality of dependence and underdevelopment but also of the ideological illusions that haunt and reinforce such social conditions.

The fate of Macondo is both doomed and predetermined from its very existence. “Fatalism is a metaphor for the particular part that ideology has played in maintaining historical dependence, by locking the interpretation of Latin American history into certain patterns that deny alternative possibilities.  The narrative seemingly confirms fatalism in order to illustrate the feeling of entrapment that ideology can performatively create.

García Márquez uses colors as symbols. Yellow and gold are the most frequently used colors and they are symbols of imperialism and the Spanish Siglo de Oro. Gold signifies a search for economic wealth, whereas yellow represents death, change, and destruction.

The glass city is an image that comes to José Arcadio Buendía in a dream. It is the reason for the location of the founding of Macondo, but it is also a symbol of the ill fate of Macondo. Higgins writes that, “By the final page, however, the city of mirrors has become a city of mirages. Macondo thus represents the dream of a brave new world that America seemed to promise and that was cruelly proved illusory by the subsequent course of history”  Images such as the glass city and the ice factory represent how Latin America already has its history outlined and is, therefore, fated for destruction.

Overall, there is an underlying pattern of Latin American history in One Hundred Years of Solitude. It could be said that the novel is one of a number of texts that “Latin American culture has created to understand itself”.  In this sense, the novel can be conceived as a linear archive. This archive narrates the story of a Latin America discovered by European explorers, which had its historical entity developed by the printing press. The Archive is a symbol of the literature that is the foundation of Latin American history and also a decoding instrument. Melquíades, the keeper of the historical archive in the novel, represents both the whimsical and the literary.  Finally, “the world of One Hundred Years of Solitude is a place where beliefs and metaphors become forms of fact, and where more ordinary facts become uncertain”

“The rise and fall birth and death of the mythical but intensely real Macondo, and the glories and disasters of the wonderful Buendía family; make up an intensely brilliant chronicle of humankind’s comedies and tragedies.  All the many varieties of life are captured here:  inventively, amusingly, magnetically, sadly, humorously, luminously, truthfully.”

Critics often cite certain works by García Márquez, such as A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings and One Hundred Years of Solitude, as exemplary of magical realism, a style of writing in which the supernatural is presented as mundane, and the mundane as supernatural or extraordinary. The term was coined by German art critic Franz Roh in 1925.

The novel presents a fictional story in a fictional setting. The extraordinary events and characters are fabricated. However the message that García Márquez intends to deliver explains a true history. García Márquez utilizes his fantastic story as an expression of reality. “In One Hundred Years of Solitude, myth and history overlap. The myth acts as a vehicle to transmit history to the reader. García Márquez’s novel can furthermore be referred to as anthropology, where truth is found in language and myth. What is real and what is fiction are indistinguishable. There are three main mythical elements of the novel: classical stories alluding to foundations and origins, characters resembling mythical heroes, and supernatural elements”.  Magical realism is inherent in the novel-achieved by the constant intertwining of the ordinary with the extraordinary. This magical realism strikes at one’s traditional sense of naturalistic fiction. There is something clearly magical about the world of Macondo. It is a state of mind as much as, or more than, a geographical place. For example, one learns very little about its actual physical layout. Furthermore, once in it, the reader must be prepared to meet whatever the imagination of the author presents to him or her.

García Márquez achieves a perfect blend of the real with the magical through the masterful use of tone and narration. By maintaining the same tone throughout the novel, García Márquez makes the extraordinary blend with the ordinary. His condensation of and lackadaisical manner in describing events causes the extraordinary to seem less remarkable than it actually is, thereby perfectly blending the real with the magical.  Reinforcing this effect is the unastonished tone in which the book is written. This tone restricts the ability of the reader to question the events of the novel, however, it also causes the reader to call into question the limits of reality.  Furthermore, maintaining the same narrator throughout the novel familiarizes the reader with his voice and causes he or she to become accustomed to the extraordinary events in the novel.

Critics often classify Marquez’s writing as “magic realism” because of his combination of the real and the fantastic. The novel carefully balances realistic elements of life, like poverty and housecleaning, with outrageous instances, like a levitating priest. There are many purposes of this. One is to introduce the reader to Marquez’s Colombia, where myths, portents, and legends exist side by side with technology and modernity. Another reason for this is lead the reader to question what is real and what is fantastic, especially in the realm of politics. It is to force to question the absurdity of our everyday lives.

With regards to the subjectivity of experienced reality, we can see that although the realism and the magic that One Hundred Years of Solitude includes seem at first to be opposites, they are, in fact, perfectly reconcilable. Both are necessary in order to convey Márquez’s particular conception of the world. Márquez’s novel reflects reality not as it is experienced by one observer, but as it is individually experienced by those with different backgrounds. These multiple perspectives are especially appropriate to the unique reality of Latin America—caught between modernity and pre-industrialization; torn by civil war, and ravaged by imperialism—where the experiences of people vary much more than they might in a more homogenous society. Magical realism conveys a reality that incorporates the magic that superstition and religion infuse into the world.

This novel treats biblical narratives and native Latin American mythology as historically credible. This approach may stem from the sense, shared by some Latin American authors, that important and powerful strains of magic running through ordinary lives fall victim to the Western emphasis on logic and reason. If García Márquez seems to confuse reality and fiction, it is only because, from some perspectives, fiction may be truer than reality, and vice versa. For instance, in places like Márquez’s hometown, which witnessed a massacre much like that of the workers in Macondo, unthinkable horrors may be a common sight. Real life, then, begins to seem like a fantasy that is both terrifying and fascinating, and Márquez’s novel is an attempt to recreate and to capture that sense of real life

Jose Arcadio Buendia, Amaranta, Ursula, Aureliano, Jose Arcadio Segundo–are left completely alone, even forgotten, for years at a time. Buendia men named Aureliano are said to have a “solitary” air. And the town itself is isolated and alienated from the outside world. At the very end of the book, the narrator concludes that the Buendias are a race condemned to solitude, and therefore they will not get a second chance. Marquez intends for the theme of solitude to be read in many different ways. It is a protest against the practice of the Western world to “condemn” people of color to solitude, denying them access to the resources of the developed world. It is also a comment on the nature of man a comment that too much solitude can be destructive both to individuals and to society at large.

            One Hundred Years of Solitude contains several ideas concerning time. Although the story can be read as a linear progression of events, both when considering individual lives and Macondo’s history, García Márquez allows room for several other interpretations of time.  He reiterates the metaphor of history as a circular phenomenon through the repetition of names and characteristics belonging to the Buendía family.  Over six generations, all the José Arcadios possess inquisitive and rational dispositions as well as enormous physical strength. The Aurelianos, meanwhile, lean towards insularity and quietude. This repetition of traits reproduces the history of the individual characters and, ultimately, a history of the town as a succession of the same mistakes ad infinitum due to some endogenous hubris in our nature.

The novel explores the issue of timelessness or eternity even within the framework of mortal existence. A major trope with which it accomplishes this task is the alchemist’s laboratory in the Buendía family home. The laboratory was first designed by Melquíades near the start of the story and remains essentially unchanged throughout its course. It is a place where the male Buendía characters can indulge their will to solitude, whether through attempts to deconstruct the world with reason as in the case of José Arcadio Buendía, or by the endless creation and destruction of golden fish as in the case of his son Colonel Aureliano Buendía. Furthermore, a sense of inevitability prevails throughout the text. This is a feeling that regardless of what way one looks at time, its encompassing nature is the one truthful admission.

On the other hand, it is important to keep in mind that One Hundred Years of Solitude, while basically chronological and “linear” enough in its broad outlines, also shows abundant zigzags in time, both flashbacks of matters past and long leaps towards future events. One example of this is the youthful amour between Meme and Mauricio Babilonia, which is already in full swing before we are informed about the origins of the affair.

For the characters in the novel, time alternatively moves quickly and stagnates for years. In general, children grow up quickly, but when they are adults particularly the male adults time abandons them, leaving them to sit with their own nostalgia and bitterness for years on end. Time abandons Colonel Aureliano Buendia after the civil wars, and Jose Arcadio Segundo, both of them locked in Melquiades’ laboratory, refusing to join the living, moving world. In her later years when Ursula considers her family, time appears to be moving in a circle. New children turn out to be like their ancestors, only horribly exaggerated in some flaw or strength. Time is indeed moving in a circle in this book, but instead of expanding outward it is collapsing in on the Buendia family as their eventual demise draws closer. Marquez’s point is that time moves in circles and cycles, and people are not always progressing.

From the names that return generation after generation to the repetition of personalities and events, time in One Hundred Years of Solitude refuses to divide neatly into past, present, and future, and we must, therefore, acknowledge this inseparability.  Úrsula Iguarán is always the first to notice that time in Macondo is not finite, but, rather, moves forward over and over again. Sometimes, this simultaneity of time leads to amnesia, when people cannot see the past any more than they can see the future. Other times the future becomes as easy to recall as the past. The prophecies of Melquíades prove that events in time are continuous: from the beginning of the novel, the old gypsy was able to see its end, as if the various events were all occurring at once. Similarly, the presence of the ghosts of Melquíades and José Arcadio Buendía shows that the past in which those men lived has become one with the present.

Perhaps the most dominant theme in the book is that of solitude. Macondo was founded in the remote jungles of the Colombian rainforest. The solitude of the town is representative of the colonial period in Latin American history, where outposts and colonies were, for all intents and purposes, not interconnected. Isolated from the rest of the world, the Buendías grow to be increasingly solitary and selfish. With every member of the family living only for himself or herself, the Buendías become representative of the aristocratic, land-owning elite who came to dominate Latin America in keeping with the sense of Latin American history symbolized in the novel.  This egocentricity is embodied, especially, in the characters of Aureliano, who lives in a private world of his own, and Remedios, who destroys the lives of four men enamored by her beauty.  Throughout the novel it seems as if no character can find true love or escape the destructiveness of their own egocentricity.

A recurring theme in One Hundred Years of Solitude is the Buendía family’s propensity toward incest. The patriarch of the family, Jose Arcadio Buendía, is the first of numerous Buendías to intermarry when he marries his first cousin, Úrsula. It is worth noting that this initial, incestuous act can be viewed as an “original sin”, however it will not be the last one.  Furthermore, the fact that “throughout the novel the family is haunted by the fear of punishment in the form of the birth of a monstrous child with a pig’s tail” can be attributed to this initial, and the recurring acts of incest among the Buendías.

Incest is also a secondary theme of solitude. It plays an enormous role in the novel, from the very beginning with Ursula’s warning that children born of incestuous relationships may be born with the tails of pigs. And indeed, at the very end of the novel, a Buendia is born with the tail of a pig. For most families, incest is not a great threat. The fact that it is something the Buendias have to keep dodging marks them as a family unable to escape the family homestead, unable to look outside themselves.  They are too solitary. Essentially, incest is the practice of keeping family members within the familyso it marks the Buendias as too disengaged from the world around them.

The selfishness of the Buendía family is eventually broken by the once superficial Aureliano Segundo and Petra Cotes, who discover a sense of mutual solidarity and the joy of helping others in need during Macondo’s economic crisis.  This pair even finds love, and their pattern is repeated by Aureliano Babilonia and Amaranta Úrsula.  Eventually, Aureliano and Amaranta decide to have a child, and the latter is convinced that it will represent a fresh start for the once-conceited Buendía family.  However, the child turns out to be the perpetually feared monster with the pig’s tail.  An interesting note:  The words “solitude” or “solitary” appear on almost every page of this novel.

Nonetheless, the appearance of love represents a shift in Macondo, albeit one that leads to its destruction. “The emergence of love in the novel to displace the traditional egoism of the Buendías reflects the emergence of socialist values as a political force in Latin America, a force that will sweep away the Buendías and the order they represent.”  The ending to One Hundred Years of Solitude could be a wishful prediction by García Márquez, a well-known socialist, regarding the future of Latin America.

In Solitude, organized religion is often the subject of jokes and satire. One of the novel’s most unsympathetic characters, Fernanda del Carpio, is a fervent Catholic who thinks nothing of putting her own child in a convent and forgetting about her. Macondo’s priest, Father Nicador, is trotted out again and again for comic relief. In general, organized religion is regarded with skepticism. The characters who follow the path of God in an unconventional, but moral, way, like Ursula, are treated with more dignity and respect.

The novel follows the town of Macondo from its founding to its demise. In between, there is prosperity, growth, war and civil strife, modernity and progress, and a cataclysmic event that leads to its downfall and eventual demise. Some critics have noted that the book also follows the trajectory of classical Greek civilization, with its careful recording of how and when science, art, and politics come to Macondo. This contributes to Solitude‘s appearance as a “total novel,” with everything contained in it. It also contributes to Marquez’s overall vision of Macondo as a lens through which all human history and all human nature can be seen.

Although language is in an unripe, Garden-of-Eden state at the beginning of One Hundred Years of Solitude, when most things in the newborn world are still unnamed, its function quickly becomes more complex. Various languages fill the novel, including the Guajiro -language that the children learn, the multilingual tattoos that cover José Arcadio’s body, the Latin spoken by José Arcadio Buendía, and the final Sanskrit translation of Melquíades’s prophecies. In fact, this final act of translation can be seen as the most significant act in the book, since it seems to be the one that makes the book’s existence possible and gives life to the characters and story within.

What realism is there in this “power of reading and of language”?   As García Márquez makes reading the final apocalyptic force that destroys Macondo and calls attention to his own task as a writer, he also reminds us that our reading provides the fundamental first breath to every action that takes place in One Hundred Years of Solitude. While the novel can be thought of as something with one clear, predetermined meaning, García Márquez asks his reader to acknowledge the fact that every act of reading is also an interpretation, and that such interpretations can have weighty consequences. Aureliano (II), then, does not just take the manuscripts’ meanings for granted, but, in addition, he must also translate and interpret them and ultimately precipitate the destruction of the town.

            One Hundred Years of Solitude draws on many of the basic narratives of the Bible, and its characters can be seen as allegorical of some major biblical figures. The novel recounts the creation of Macondo and its earliest Edenic days of innocence, and continues until its apocalyptic end, with a cleansing flood in between. We can see José Arcadio Buendía’s downfall—his loss of sanity—as a result of his quest for knowledge. He and his wife, Ursula Iguarán, represent the biblical Adam and Eve, who were exiled from Eden after eating from the Tree of Knowledge. The entire novel functions as a metaphor for human history and an extended commentary on human nature. On the one hand, their story, taken literally as applying to the fictional Buendías, evokes immense pathos. But as representatives of the human race, the Buendías personify solitude and inevitable tragedy, together with the elusive possibility of happiness, as chronicled by the Bible.

Specifically, Márquez mentions the Book of Genesis. From the very first paragraph, the narrator gives readers the impression that Macondo is akin to the Garden of Eden. The preponderance of plagues that the town suffers through (insomnia, rain) are also biblical; as is the flood that rains on Macondo in an effort to rid the town of wicked men. By consciously echoing the Book of Genesis, Marquez is alerting us that this is his attempt to rewrite the history of the world and the human race, in a novel that has everything in it.

At least two definite plagues come to Macondo: the insomnia plague and the rains that last for almost five years. Critics go back and forth on whether or not the invasion of the foreign businessmen constitutes a third plague, although they certainly bring death and destruction with them. The first of these plagues very nearly causes Macondo to lose its memory; the second of these plagues brings about the eventual downfall of the town. Essentially, both plagues are dangerous because they prevent Macondo from staying in touch with reality and the world around them by plunging them into nostalgia and erasing the town’s memory.

The twisted and meandering world of politics is under a great deal of scrutiny in this novel, particularly the chapters that deal with Colonel Aureliano Buendia. The world of politics is a gloomy one. There is little difference between the Liberals and the Conservatives; both parties kill and exploit the people. Although Marquez has a definite anti-capitalist bent, his purpose in portraying the politics of the region is not to be polemical. Instead, he comments on how the nature of Latin American politics is towards absurdity, denial, and never-ending repetitions of tragedy.

This theme is particularly important for the chapters dealing with the banana plantation. In the span of only a few years, Macondo is transformed from a sleepy backwater to a frighteningly modern town via the influences of technology, economic exploitation and foreign invasion. But the arrival of new machines and farming techniques do not make Macondo a better place to live in, in fact things only get worse. The point of this is that modern technology is meaningless without a concurrent improvement in ethics, and “progress” turns brutal without a plan to lessen economic inequality.

Although a lesser theme in the novel, important patterns surface regarding the theme of women’s sexuality. In general, the women who have unconventional relationships Rebeca, Petra Cotes, Amaranta Ursula are happier and more sympathetic than the women who cling to society’s standards of behavior Amaranta and Fernanda del Carpio. The fact that Aureliano Segundo’s coupling with Petra Cotes dramatically increases the proliferation of his animals is a signal that free love can be healthy for society at large.

While the characters in One Hundred Years of Solitude consider total forgetfulness a danger, they, ironically, also seem to consider memory a burden. About half of the novel’s characters speak of the weight of having too many memories while the rest seem to be amnesiacs. Rebeca’s overabundance of memory causes her to lock herself in her house after her husband’s death, and to live there with the memory of friends rather than the presence of people. For her, the nostalgia of better days gone by prevents her from existing in a changing world. The opposite of her character can be found in Colonel Aureliano Buendía, who has almost no memories at all. He lives in an endlessly repeating present, melting down and then recreating his collection of little gold fishes. Nostalgia and amnesia are the dual diseases of the Buendía clan, one tying its victims to the past, the other trapping them in the present. Thus afflicted, the Buendías are doomed to repeat the same cycles until they consume themselves, and they are never able to move into the future.

Gypsies are present in One Hundred Years of Solitude primarily to act as links. They function to offer transitions from contrasting or unrelated events and characters. Every few years, especially in the early days of Macondo, a pack of wandering gypsies arrives, turning the town into something like a carnival and displaying the wares that they have brought with them. Before Macondo has a road to civilization, they are the town’s only contact with the outside world. They bring both technology—inventions that Melquíades displays—and magic—magic carpets and other wonders. Gypsies, then, serve as versatile literary devices that also blur the line between fantasy and reality, especially when they connect Macondo and the outside world, magic and science, and even the past and present.

Frequently throughout the book, there was mention of the “little gold fishes”.  The meaning of the thousands of little gold fishes that Colonel Aureliano Buendía makes shifts over time. At first, these fishes represent Aureliano’s artistic nature and, by extension, the artistic nature of all the Aurelianos. Soon, however, they acquire a greater significance, marking the ways in which Aureliano has affected the world. His seventeen sons, for example, are each given a little gold fish, and, in this case, the fishes represent Aureliano’s effect on the world through his sons. In another instance, they are used as passkeys when messengers for the Liberals use them to prove their allegiance. Many years later, however, the fishes become collector’s items, merely relics of a once-great leader. This attitude disgusts Aureliano because he recognizes that people are using him as a figurehead, a mythological hero that represents whatever they want it to represent. When he begins to understand that the little gold fishes no longer are symbolic of him personally, but instead of a mistaken ideal, he stops making new fishes and starts to melt down the old ones again and again.

The railroad represents the arrival of the modern world in Macondo. This devastating turn leads to the development of a banana plantation and the ensuing massacre of three thousand workers. The railroad also represents the period when Macondo is connected most closely with the outside world. After the banana plantations close down, the railroad falls into disrepair and the train ceases even to stop in Macondo anymore. The advent of the railroad is a turning point. Before it comes, Macondo grows bigger and thrives; afterward, Macondo quickly disintegrates, folding back into isolation and eventually expiring.

At first, the English encyclopedia that Meme receives from her American friend is a symbol for the way the American plantation owners are taking over Macondo. When Meme, a descendant of the town’s founders, begins to learn English, the foreigners’ encroachment on Macondo’s culture becomes obvious. The concrete threat posed by the encyclopedia is later lessened when Aureliano Segundo uses it to tell his children stories. Because he does not speak English, Aureliano Segundo makes up stories to go with the pictures. By creating the possibility for multiple interpretations of the text, he unwittingly diffuses the encyclopedia’s danger.

I had to laugh when the golden chamber pot was mentioned, and to think of the formal thought of “my sh*t doesn’t stink!”  It was brought by Fernanda del Carpio to Macondo from her home and is, for her, a marker of her lofty status; she believes that she was destined to be a queen. But while the gold of the chamber pot is associated with royalty, the function of the chamber pot is, of course, associated with defecation: a sign of the real value of Fernanda’s snooty condescension. Later, when José Arcadio (II) tries to sell the chamber pot, he finds that it is not really solid gold, but, rather, gold-plated. Again, this revelation represents the hollowness of Fernanda’s pride and the flimsiness of cheap cover-ups.

The mention of the Treaty of Neerlandia was, for me, a bit of solid ground for me to stand on with this novel.  It was a little chaotic, and I was struggling to figure out where this story was taking place, besides being in the new Americas.  To me, it gave a backbone of reality to place this unbelievable story about things that could have possibly taken place.  So to do the book justice, I must, therefore, tell you a little about the history of the area and the time period during which the story takes place.

The Thousand Days’ War (1899–1902) (Spanish: Guerra de los Mil Días), was a civil armed conflict in the newly created Republic of Colombia, (including its then province of Panama) between the Conservative Party, the Liberal Party and its radical factions. In 1899 the ruling conservatives were accused of maintaining power through fraudulent elections. The situation was worsened by an economic crisis caused by falling coffee prices in the international market, which mainly affected the opposition Liberal Party, which had lost power.

Throughout the 19th century, Colombia was a country filled with political instability, which was the factor that evolved into the main cause of the war in 1886. This was the year in which the 1863 constitution was suppressed and replaced by a more centralist and conservative document. The 1863 constitution had been criticized as a result of federalist excesses during the period in which the Liberal radicals were in power.

With Regeneración (Regeneration) period and the creation of the 1886 constitution, the centralist regime only managed to aggravate the political problems. Some departments soon began to complain about these problems to the central government. In the economic field, poor political decisions also led to economic problems.  The detonating factor of the war was simply the confrontation between the Liberals and Conservatives, as much among them as within their respective parties. The Conservatives had used fraudulent elections to remain in power, and this led to much anger amongst the opposition. On top of increasingly hostile political environment, President Manuel Antonio Sanclemente was too ill to rule the country, leading to a power-vacuum in the country. The political environment and the increasingly dire economic situation created a powder-keg that required only the smallest light to set it off.

The intended date for the beginning of the civil war was October 20, 1899. However, due to the imprudence of some of the Liberal generals who wished to begin the war on October 17, it was moved forward. The reaction of many Liberals was hesitant, since they believed that they did not have sufficient numbers or organization. Despite this, the rebellion began in the municipality of Socorro, Santander, and the rebels awaited military reinforcements from Venezuela.

The Conservative government, however, did not simply stand idle while all of this was occurring. They prepared a military force to be sent to Bucaramanga, the capital of Santander. The force never arrived, however, because the troops refused to accept payment in “tickets”, which the government had to use due to the dire economic situation. No one expected, or was prepared for, a war that would last three years and would bring disastrous ruin to the country. With time, the war spread to every corner of Colombia.

The first Liberal defeats came early in the war, with the Conservative victory at the battle of Magdalena River on October 24. However, the Conservatives were in a delicate situation as well. The Conservative side had split into two factions, the Historical and National, in a frenetic attempt to bring order to the country. First, they removed president Sanclemente and replaced him with Jose Manuel Marroquin. In response, the Liberals nominated Gabriel Vargas Santos for the presidency.

With the advance of the war, it became more repressive and cruel. The population was even driven to take part in each side in more fanatical ways, in spite of the efforts of each party to gain victories (which soon were revealed to be illusionary).  Without a doubt, the battles of Peralonso and Palonegro (in Santander) showed the country the magnitude of the damages that the war was causing. At Peralonso, the Liberals achieved victory under the leadership of Rafael Uribe Uribe. At Palonegro (May 26, 1900) the Conservatives halted the enemy in what was an extraordinarily bloody encounter.  After Palonegro, the war became devoid of sense and of meaning for the parties. With their defeat, the Liberals as well were split into two different factions, this time pacifists and the warmongers. The Nationals of the Conservative side believed it was time to end the war, which by this time was focused in the province of Panama and on the coast of the Caribbean Sea.

With that decision, internationalization of the war was avoided, which Venezuela wished to do through its president Cipriano Castro (who held to Uribe Uribe as President of Colombia). Conservative troops under the command of Marroquín managed to cut Venezuelan aid to the Liberals (July 29), who at this time were suffering defeats at the hands of the Conservative General Juan B. Tovar. General Uribe saw that the Liberals would not be able to defeat the Conservatives, and therefore was inclined to surrender, albeit with certain conditions.

The peace treaty was signed on the Neerlandia plantation on October 24, 1902, although the fighting lasted until November of that year in Panama. From late 1901, fighting between the ships Admiral Padilla (Liberal) and the Lautaro (of Chilean property, lent to the conservatives), the latter of which was defeated in front of City of Panama on January 20, 1902.  Later the threat came from the American navy, sent by the government of Theodore Roosevelt to protect the United States’ future interests in the construction of the Panama Canal. The Liberals under the command of General Benjamin Herrera were then forced to lay down their arms.

The definitive peace treaty was signed on the American battleship Wisconsin on November 21, 1902. The Liberals were represented by general Lucas Caballero Barrera, who was in charge of the united army of Cauca and Panama, and Colonel Eusebio A. Morales, who was representing General Benjamin Herrera. The Conservatives were represented by General Víctor M. Salazar, governor of the department of Panama, and general Alfredo Vázquez Cobo, chief of staff of the Conservative army on the Atlantic Coast, the Pacific, and Panama. Together, representing the entire government, they signed the end of the war.

Although One Hundred Years of Solitude has come to be considered one of, if not the, most influential Latin American texts of all time, the novel and Gabriel García Márquez have both received occasional criticisms. Stylistically, Harold Bloom remarked that “My primary impression, in the act of rereading One Hundred Years of Solitude, is a kind of aesthetic battle fatigue, since every page is rammed full of life beyond the capacity of any single reader to absorb… There are no wasted sentences, no mere transitions, in this novel, and you must notice everything at the moment you read it.”  Additionally, David Haberly alleges that García Márquez may have borrowed themes from several works, such as William Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha, Virginia Woolf’s Orlando: A Biography, Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year, and Chateaubriand’s Atala.”

Tess of the d’Urbervilles: A Pure Woman Faithfully Presented

He began the novel in 1889, but, in spite of his reputation, Hardy had difficulty finding a periodical willing to publish the book when he offered it for serialization to London’s leading reviews. The subject matter—a milkmaid who is seduced by the son of her employer and who thus is not considered a pure and chaste woman by the rest of society, then married and rejected by another, and who eventually murders the first one—was considered unfit for publications which young people might read.  The novel questions society’s sexual mores through this compassionate portrayed heroine.  It was rejected by several periodicals from July to December.  To appease potential publishers, Hardy took the novel apart, rewrote some scenes and added others. In due course, a publisher was secured.  It initially appeared in a censored and serialized version, published by the British illustrated newspaper, The Graphic, in December.  When it came time to publish the novel in book form, Hardy reassembled it as it was originally conceived.  Though now considered an important work of English literature, the book received mixed reviews when it first appeared, in part because it challenged the sexual mores of Hardy’s day.  They denounced his frank—for the time—depiction of sex, criticism of organized religion, and dark pessimism.   Although it is now considered a major work of fiction, the poor reception of Tess and Jude the Obscure precipitated Thomas Hardy’s transition from writing fiction to poetry. Nevertheless, the novel was commercially successful and assured Hardy’s financial security.  Today, the novel is praised as a courageous call for righting many of the ills Hardy found in Victorian society and as a link between the late-Victorian literature of the end of the nineteenth century and that of the modern era.  The original manuscript is on display at the British Library, showing that it was originally titled “Daughter of the d’Urbervilles.”

When Tess of the d’Urbervilles appeared in 1891, Thomas Hardy was one of England’s leading men of letters. He had already authored several well-known novels, including The Return of the Native, and numerous short stories. Tess brought him notoriety—it was considered quite scandalous—and fortune. Despite this success, the novel was one of Hardy’s last. He was deeply wounded by some of the particularly personal attacks he received from reviewers of the book. In 1892, he wrote in one of his notebooks, quoted in The Later Years of Thomas Hardy, 1892-1928, compiled by Florence Emily Hardy, “Well, if this sort of thing continues no more novel-writing for me. A man must be a fool to deliberately stand up to be shot at.” 

Tess of the d’Urbervilles deals with several significant contemporary subjects for Hardy, including the struggles of religious belief that occurred during Hardy’s lifetime. Hardy was largely influenced by the Oxford movement, a spiritual movement involving extremely devout thinking and actions. Hardy’s family members were primarily orthodox Christians and Hardy himself considered entering the clergy, as did many of his relatives. Yet Hardy eventually abandoned his devout faith in God based on the scientific advances of his contemporaries, including most prominently Darwin’s On the Origin of Species. Hardy’s own religious experiences can thus be seen in the character of Angel Clare, who resists the conservative religious beliefs of his parents to take a more religious and secular view of philosophy.

The novel also reflects Hardy’s preoccupation with social class that continues through his novels. Hardy had connections to both the working and the upper class, but felt that he belonged to neither. This is reflected in the pessimism contained in Tess of the d’Urbervilles toward the chances for Tess to ascend in society and Angel’s precarious position as neither a member of the upper class nor a working person equivalent to his fellow milkers at Talbothays. Again, like Angel Clare, Thomas Hardy found himself torn between different social spheres with which he could not fully align himself. Tess of the d’Urbervilles reflects that divide.

Tess of the d’Urbervilles presents complex pictures of both the importance of social class in nineteenth-century England and the difficulty of defining class in any simple way. Certainly the Durbeyfields are a powerful emblem of the way in which class is no longer evaluated in Victorian times as it would have been in the Middle Ages—that is, by blood alone, with no attention paid to fortune or worldly success. Indubitably the Durbeyfields have purity of blood, yet for the parson and nearly everyone else in the novel, this fact amounts to nothing more than a piece of genealogical trivia. In the Victorian context, cash matters more than lineage, which explains how Simon Stokes, Alec’s father, was smoothly able to use his large fortune to purchase a lustrous family name and transform his clan into the Stoke-d’Urbervilles. The d’Urbervilles pass for what the Durbeyfields truly are—authentic nobility—simply because definitions of class have changed. The issue of class confusion even affects the Clare clan, whose most promising son, Angel, is intent on becoming a farmer and marrying a milkmaid, thus bypassing the traditional privileges of a Cambridge education and a parsonage. His willingness to work side by side with the farm laborers helps endear him to Tess, and their acquaintance would not have been possible if he were a more traditional and elitist aristocrat. Thus, the three main characters in the Angel-Tess-Alec triangle are all strongly marked by confusion regarding their respective social classes, an issue that is one of the main concerns of the novel.

Hardy’s writing often illustrates the “ache of modernism”, and this theme is notable in Tess, which, as one critic noted, portrays “the energy of traditional ways and the strength of the forces that are destroying them”. Hardy describes modern farm machinery with infernal imagery; also, at the dairy, he notes that the milk sent to the city must be watered down because the townspeople cannot stomach whole milk. Angel’s middle-class fastidiousness makes him reject Tess, a woman whom Hardy often portrays as a sort of Wessex Eve, in harmony with the natural world. When he parts from her and goes to Brazil, the handsome young man gets so sick that he is reduced to a “mere yellow skeleton.” All these instances are typically interpreted as indications of the negative consequences of man’s separation from nature, both in the creation of destructive machinery and in the inability to rejoice in pure nature.

The society of Tess of the d’Urbervilles is basically focused on the rural workers in farm and village. Within the novel, towns exist only very peripherally, while the middle-class and gentry hardly impinge, except for the male protagonists who are themselves uprooted from their normal community.  This rural community is the one in which Hardy grew up, and with which he continued to associate himself, though his portrayal of the rural workers is much less optimistic than in earlier novels such as Far from the Madding Crowd. Echoing the real economic constraints of the 1890s, Hardy depicts agricultural laborers primarily in a grave position of loss:  losing power and control over their own lives, losing stability and security, and losing community and common land.  Traditionally, in the days before the Enclosure Acts (the majority enacted by Parliament between 1750 and 1830), those living on the land had had access to common land, from which they could support themselves. They may have owed labor to landlords etc., but there was some degree of permanence and independence in many of their lives (see Agricultural and social conditions).

With drastic changes in farming methods and because of the rural depression at the beginning of the nineteenth century, much of this common land was lost. Dorset was one of the worst hit of the English counties. Workers usually owned little beyond a yard and a site on an allotment on which to grow food (Ch 50). They were employed by farmers, and their contracts were often only for a year or even quarter year.  ‘Hiring fairs’, where laborers would present themselves for employment, became very significant, but such workers were very much at the mercy of the farmers and the economic conditions.  There was little social welfare, only a harshly administered Poor Law (enacted 1834) that often broke families up.  All this Hardy shows us, especially in the latter half of Tess of the d’Urbervilles. The workers at Flintcombe-Ash present themselves at a hiring fair, held at Candlemas (Ch 46), in readiness for Old Lady Day, from which is when new contracts were dated (Ch 51, 52).  The growth of the tied cottage system, when accommodation went with a job, also made life for rural workers less secure. Once the job was lost, then the cottage was too, causing further impermanence and loss of control (Ch 38).

Unfairness dominates the lives of Tess and her family to such an extent that it begins to seem like a general aspect of human existence in Tess of the d’Urbervilles. Tess does not mean to kill Prince, but she is punished anyway, just as she is unfairly punished for her own rape by Alec. Nor is there justice waiting in heaven. Christianity teaches that there is compensation in the afterlife for unhappiness suffered in this life, but the only devout Christian encountered in the novel may be the reverend, Mr. Clare, who seems more or less content in his life anyway. For others in their misery, Christianity offers little solace of heavenly justice. Mrs. Durbeyfield never mentions otherworldly rewards. The converted Alec preaches heavenly justice for earthly sinners, but his faith seems shallow and insincere. Generally, the moral atmosphere of the novel is not Christian justice at all, but pagan injustice. The forces that rule human life are absolutely unpredictable and not necessarily well-disposed to us. The pre-Christian rituals practiced by the farm workers at the opening of the novel, and Tess’s final rest at Stonehenge at the end, remind us of a world where the gods are not just and fair, but whimsical and uncaring. When the narrator concludes the novel with the statement that “‘Justice’ was done, and the President of the Immortals (in the Aeschylean phrase) had ended his sport with Tess,” we are reminded that justice must be put in ironic quotation marks, since it is not really just at all. What passes for “Justice” is in fact one of the pagan gods enjoying a bit of “sport,” or a frivolous game.

One of the recurrent themes of the novel is the way in which men can dominate women, exerting a power over them linked primarily to their maleness. Sometimes this command is purposeful, in the man’s full knowledge of his exploitation, as when Alec acknowledges how bad he is for seducing Tess for his own momentary pleasure. Alec’s act of abuse, the most life-altering event that Tess experiences in the novel, is clearly the most serious instance of male domination over a female. But there are other, less blatant examples of women’s passivity toward dominant men. When, after Angel reveals that he prefers Tess, Tess’s friend Retty attempts suicide and her friend Marian becomes an alcoholic, which makes their earlier schoolgirl-type crushes on Angel seem disturbing. This devotion is not merely fanciful love, but unhealthy obsession. These girls appear utterly dominated by a desire for a man who, we are told explicitly, does not even realize that they are interested in him. This sort of unconscious male domination of women is perhaps even more unsettling than Alec’s outward and self-conscious cruelty.

Even Angel’s love for Tess, as pure and gentle as it seems, dominates her in an unhealthy way. Angel substitutes an idealized picture of Tess’s country purity for the real-life woman that he continually refuses to get to know. When Angel calls Tess names like “Daughter of Nature” and “Artemis,” we feel that he may be denying her true self in favor of a mental image that he prefers. Thus, her identity and experiences are suppressed, albeit unknowingly. This pattern of male domination is finally reversed with Tess’s murder of Alec, in which, for the first time in the novel, a woman takes active steps against a man. Of course, this act only leads to even greater suppression of a woman by men, when the crowd of male police officers arrest Tess at Stonehenge. Nevertheless, for just a moment, the accepted pattern of submissive women bowing to dominant men is interrupted, and Tess’s act seems heroic.

Another important theme of the novel is the sexual double standard to which Tess falls victim; despite being, in Hardy’s view, a truly good woman, she is despised by society after losing her virginity before marriage. Hardy plays the role of Tess’s only true friend and advocate, pointedly subtitling the book “a pure woman faithfully presented” and prefacing it with Shakespeare’s words from The Two Gentlemen of Verona: “Poor wounded name! My bosom as a bed/ Shall lodge thee.” However, although Hardy clearly means to criticize Victorian notions of female purity, the double standard also makes the heroine’s tragedy possible, and thus serves as a mechanism of Tess’s broader fate. Hardy variously hints that Tess must suffer either to atone for the misdeeds of her ancestors, or to provide temporary amusement for the gods, or because she possesses some small but lethal character flaw inherited from the ancient clan.

From numerous pagan and neo-Biblical references made about her, Tess has been viewed variously as an Earth goddess or as a sacrificial victim.  Early in the novel, she participates in a festival for Ceres, the goddess of the harvest, and when she performs a baptism she chooses a passage from Genesis, the book of creation, over more traditional New Testament verses. At the end, when Tess and Angel come to Stonehenge, commonly believed in Hardy’s time to be a pagan temple, she willingly lies down on an altar, thus fulfilling her destiny as a human sacrifice.

This symbolism may help explain Tess as a personification of nature — lovely, fecund, and exploitable — while animal imagery throughout the novel strengthens the association. Examples are numerous: Tess’s misfortunes begin when she falls asleep while driving Prince to market, thus causing the horse’s death; at Trantridge, she becomes a poultry-keeper; she and Angel fall in love amid cows in the fertile Froom valley; and on the road to Flintcombe-Ashe, she kills some wounded pheasants to end their suffering. In any event, Tess emerges as a character not because of this symbolism but because “Hardy’s feelings for Tess were strong, perhaps stronger than for any of his other invented personages.”

Images of birds recur throughout the novel, evoking or contradicting their traditional spiritual association with a higher realm of transcendence. Both the Christian dove of peace and the Romantic songbirds of Keats and Shelley, which symbolize sublime heights, lead us to expect that birds will have positive meaning in this novel. Tess occasionally hears birdcalls on her frequent hikes across the countryside; their free expressiveness stands in stark contrast to Tess’s silent and constrained existence as a wronged and disgraced girl. When Tess goes to work for Mrs. d’Urberville, she is surprised to find that the old woman’s pet finches are frequently released to fly free throughout the room. These birds offer images of hope and liberation. Yet there is irony attached to birds as well, making us doubt whether these images of hope and freedom are illusory. Mrs. d’Urberville’s birds leave little white spots on the upholstery, which presumably some servant—perhaps Tess herself—will have to clean. It may be that freedom for one creature entails hardship for another, just as Alec’s free enjoyment of Tess’s body leads her to a lifetime of suffering. In the end, when Tess encounters the pheasants maimed by hunters and lying in agony, birds no longer seem free, but rather oppressed and submissive. These pheasants are no Romantic songbirds hovering far above the Earth—they are victims of earthly violence, condemned to suffer down below and never fly again.

The Genesis story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden is evoked repeatedly throughout Tess of the d’Urbervilles, giving the novel a broader metaphysical and philosophical dimension. The roles of Eve and the serpent in paradise are clearly delineated: Angel is the noble Adam newly born, while Tess is the indecisive and troubled Eve. When Tess gazes upon Angel in chapter 27, “she regarded him as Eve at her second waking might have regarded Adam.”Alec, with his open avowal that he is bad to the bone, is the conniving Satan. He seduces Tess under a tree, giving her sexual knowledge in return for her lost innocence. The very name of the forest where this seduction occurs, the Chase, suggests how Eve will be chased from Eden for her sins. This guilt, which will never be erased, is known in Christian theology as the original sin that all humans have inherited. Just as John Durbeyfield is told in Chapter I that “you don’t live anywhere,”and his family is evicted after his death at the end of the novel, their homelessness evokes the human exile from Eden. Original sin suggests that humans have fallen from their once great status to a lower station in life, just as the d’Urbervilles have devolved into the modern Durbeyfields. This Story of the Fall—or of the “Pure Drop,”to recall the name of a pub in Tess’s home village—is much more than a social fall. It is an explanation of how all of us humans—not only Tess—never quite seem to live up to our expectations, and are never able to inhabit the places of grandeur we feel we deserve.

The transformation of the d’Urbervilles into the Durbeyfields is one example of the common phenomenon of renaming, or variant naming, in the novel. Names matter in this novel. Tess knows and accepts that she is a lowly Durbeyfield, but part of her still believes, as her parents also believe, that her aristocratic original name should be restored. John Durbeyfield goes a step further than Tess, and actually renames himself Sir John, as his tombstone epitaph shows. Another character who renames himself is Simon Stokes, Angel’s father, who purchased a family tree and made himself Simon Stoke-d’Urberville. The question raised by all these cases of name changing, whether successful or merely imagined, is the extent to which an altered name brings with it an altered identity. Alec acts notoriously ungentlemanly throughout the novel, but by the end, when he appears at the d’Urberville family vault, his lordly and commanding bearing make him seem almost deserving of the name his father has bought, like a spoiled medieval nobleman. Hardy’s interest in name changes makes reality itself seem changeable according to whims of human perspective. The village of Blakemore, as we are reminded twice in chapters 1 and 2, is also known as Blackmoor, and indeed Hardy famously renames the southern English countryside as “Wessex.” He imposes a fictional map on a real place, with names altered correspondingly. Reality may not be as solid as the names people confer upon it.

When Tess dozes off in the wagon and loses control, the resulting death of the Durbeyfield horse, Prince, spurs Tess to seek aid from the d’Urbervilles, setting the events of the novel in motion. The horse’s demise is thus a powerful plot motivator, and its name a potent symbol of Tess’s own claims to aristocracy. Like the horse, Tess herself bears a high-class name, but is doomed to a lowly life of physical labor. Interestingly, Prince’s death occurs right after Tess dreams of ancient knights, having just heard the news that her family is aristocratic. Moreover, the horse is pierced by the forward-jutting piece of metal on a mail coach, which is reminiscent of a wound one might receive in a medieval joust. In an odd way, Tess’s dream of medieval glory comes true, and her horse dies a heroic death. Yet her dream of meeting a prince while she kills her own Prince, and with him her family’s only means of financial sustenance, is a tragic foreshadowing of her own story. The death of the horse symbolizes the sacrifice of real-world goods, such as a useful animal or even her own honor, through excessive fantasizing about a better world.

A double-edged symbol of both the majestic grandeur and the lifeless hollowness of the aristocratic family name that the Durbeyfields learn they possess, the d’Urberville family vault represents both the glory of life and the end of life. Since Tess herself moves from passivity to active murder by the end of the novel, attaining a kind of personal grandeur even as she brings death to others and to herself, the double symbolism of the vault makes it a powerful site for the culminating meeting between Alec and Tess. Alec brings Tess both his lofty name and, indirectly, her own death later; it is natural that he meets her in the vault in d’Urberville Aisle, where she reads her own name inscribed in stone and feels the presence of death. Yet the vault that sounds so glamorous when rhapsodized over by John Durbeyfield in chapter 1 seems, by the end, strangely hollow and meaningless. When Alec stomps on the floor of the vault, it produces only a hollow echo, as if its basic emptiness is a complement to its visual grandeur. When Tess is executed, her ancestors are said to snooze on in their crypts, as if uncaring even about the fate of a member of their own majestic family. Perhaps the secret of the family crypt is that its grandiosity is ultimately meaningless.

Rather surprising for a novel that seems set so solidly in rural England, the narration shifts very briefly to Brazil when Angel takes leave of Tess and heads off to establish a career in farming. Even more exotic for a Victorian English reader than America or Australia, Brazil is the country in which Robinson Crusoe made his fortune and it seems to promise a better life far from the humdrum familiar world. Brazil is thus more than a geographical entity on the map in this novel: it symbolizes a fantasyland, a place where dreams come true. As Angel’s name suggests, he is a lofty visionary who lacks some experience with the real world, despite all his mechanical know-how in farm management. He may be able to milk cows, but he does not yet know how to tell the difference between an exotic dream and an everyday reality, so inevitably his experience in the imagined dream world of Brazil is a disaster that he barely survives. His fiasco teaches him that ideals do not exist in life, and this lesson helps him reevaluate his disappointment with Tess’s imperfections, her failure to incarnate the ideal he expected her to be. For Angel, Brazil symbolizes the impossibility of ideals, but also forgiveness and acceptance of life in spite of those disappointed ideals.

When Tess of the d’Urbervilles was first published in 1891, there was a huge debate about whether Hardy should have described Tess as pure. According to conventional Victorian morality (based on the teachings of the church) no one who had engaged in pre-marital sex could be described as ‘pure’. Rather they were to be seen as ‘fallen’ into sexual sin – mistresses and prostitutes were commonly described as ‘fallen women’ and shunned by polite society (although their male partners were not!).

At the beginning of the twenty-first century, readers are more likely to be troubled by Tess’s murder of Alec, rather than her sexual experiences. It would seem an act of gratuitous violence. Why could she not just walk out on him?  Only by reading the novel in Hardy’s terms, rather than their own, can one appreciate that there is a deeper level on which to discuss the issue, involving intentions, desires and human endurance. This is where the universality of the novel lies. This contextual awareness is also necessary in order to understand Hardy’s masculine construction of femininity in general and female sexuality in particular.  He sets the stage early when Angel tells her if Alec were to die…

Hardy establishes Tess’s purity in a number of ways.  The first was through omission.  Hardy does not actually provide the details of the worst things that happened to Tess.  In fact, her violation by Alec in Ch. 11 was not quite understood by me to be an actual rape until doing research into metaphorical analysis.  Hardy does not quite go into much detail regarding the period of living with Alec immediately afterwards in Ch. 12.  Quite vague is the letter holding Tess’s confession to Angel before they marry in Ch. 33.  Nor does he quite go into much detail during her confession to Angel face to face on their wedding night in Ch. 34.  Again, vagueness prevails during her arguments against Christianity that help cause Alec to lose his faith and how she was persuaded to live with Alec again, and, ultimately, the act of murdering Alec.  It might seem that Hardy was bound by convention not to be explicit, but it is much more probable he used these limitations to exploit ambiguity. This is a much more modern way of writing, forcing the reader to reconstruct events and then challenging this reconstruction. It also spares us the grisly details, so that a more idealized vision of Tess may be maintained.

In revising the text, Hardy makes the men seem worse by bringing out the flaws of Alec and Angel.  An element of force is added to Alec’s seduction to make it seem as though it could have been rape (in the initial serialization, Alec involved her in a bogus marriage).  His conversion was made to seem more superficial by not only his willingness to drop it so rapidly, but by the foreshadowing of Angel of his opinion of Alec upon the mention of his father’s interaction with the before mentioned character.  I must admit that I became very disenchanted with Angel after he rejected Tess after she forgave his indiscretions when his hypocrisy is so emphasized.  It is my opinion, however, that the potential difficulty of making the men more evil is to make Tess seem more a victim rather than establishing her purity.  Hardy does not deny Tess has weaknesses, but when Tess blames herself excessively, the reader tends to defend her against herself, as she shoulders the blame for not only Prince’s death in Ch.4, but also for feeling condemned by the sign-writer in Ch. 12.  Hardy places further emphasis on her self-condemnation as he brings increased attention to her feelings of guilt in Ch. 13. 

Hardy creates a number of dramatic situations which symbolically reinforce Tess’s innocence over her victimhood.  The length to which she sought the baptism for her dying baby in Ch. 14, her endurance of Angel’s sleepwalking and her own burial in Ch. 37, her acceptance of her purgatorial sufferings at Flintcombe-Ash in chapters 42 and 43, the reveling in her idyllic stay with Angel in the New Forest in Ch. 57, and her ultimate final self-sacrifice at Stonehenge in Ch. 58 are but a few of the more memorable displays of her innocence, her purity.  In terms of symbolic color imagery, Hardy associates Tess with images and descriptions of white in particular, though the presence of red increasingly haunts her.

Direct comments about Tess’s virtue are made either by Hardy as narrator or other characters.  For example, chapter 36 contains Angel’s assertions to his mother supported with Hardy’s comments, and chapter 40 voiced Izz’s confession of Tess’s love for Angel during their carriage ride to the station.  So often, Tess’s virtues are emphasized throughout the book, with multiple chapters harboring Tess’s sense of responsibility for her hapless family.  In chapter 22, as the reader witnesses her attempts to evade a union with Clare, she attempts to commend the other girls to Angel.  Several times we witness her patient acceptance of Angel’s judgment linked to her loyalty, resignation and renunciation, all of which are regarded as female virtues by the Victorians.  Even her refusal to pity herself in chapter 41 can be viewed as a virtue.  

Hardy does not deny Tess has weaknesses, but when Tess blames herself excessively, the reader tends to defend her against herself, as she shoulders the blame for not only Prince’s death in Ch.4, but also for feeling condemned by the sign-writer in Ch. 12.  Hardy places further emphasis on her self-condemnation as he brings increased attention to her feelings of guilt in Ch. 13. 

Some religions operate around the system of sacrificing either an animal or human victim, either to appease the gods worshipped or to gain some benefit. Such sacrifices usually have to be physically or morally spotless, and on them are laid the wrongdoing or sin of the whole community which they then ‘pay for’ with their lives.  People who have died, though guiltless of any crime and usually against their will are often referred to as ‘innocent victims’.  However, in the Christian faith, Jesus Christ is seen as the ultimate, willing sacrifice, choosing death rather than being forced into it. (For an account of Jesus’ trial, crucifixion and resurrection, see Luke 22:47-71, Luke 23:1-56 and Luke 24:1-12).  How Hardy means Tess to be regarded is somewhat conflicting.  There are contrasting views.  On one hand, he expresses that Tess is merely a tragic victim. Tess passively accepts her fate in chapters 7 and 8 when she allows her needs to be sacrificed for the sake of her family, just like she passively accepts Angel’s judgment of her in chapters 35 and 36 as the “laying on” of sin.  We, as the reader, feel that Tess is the victim of Alec’s ruthless pursuit in Ch. 47.    She is subject to the forces of convention and prejudice in society working against her.  She dies on an altar at Stonehenge, where previously victims of Sun worship may have been sacrificed.  And in the end, Hardy suggests “The President of the Immortals” is also against her.

But on the other hand, Hardy shows that Tess is not merely a tragic victim.  She does make choices.  She chooses to go with Alec, and she delays in confessing to Angel.  It is a possibility that Tess’s fatal flaw is an “acquiescence in chance” for being the reason that she is not “spotless”, as displayed in Ch. 37.  She is not portrayed as a one-dimensional victim, but as a complex individual who undergoes a process of suffering and punishment, which ultimately refines and develops her character. 

Perhaps Tess can be viewed as a representative of a powerless group.  Historicist and Marxist interpretations make Tess a type or example of social groups that were being victimized at the time of writing.  Thus, Tess could be seen as typical of the rural working class which became more and more powerless as they lost the security of employment and housing.

To feminist interpretations, Tess typifies women in Victorian society in that she is the victim of not only Alec’s privileged predatory instincts and made an “object” of desire, but also that of Angel, by failing to uphold his unreal idealism of her.  She has no recourse against either.  It’s also suggested that at some deeper level, she could possibly claim to the victim of Hardy himself, who was determined to pursue her to death.

Hardy was always fascinated by women and seems to have had an intuitive understanding of them, despite his deteriorating relationship with his wife, Emma. His own relationship with his mother was very close. In Tess of the d’Urbervilles, he demonstrates an awareness of female society and of how it functions.  Although men’s and women’s worlds are much the same among the working rural communities Tess inhabits, there are significant differences and inequalities to which Hardy draws our attention.  The club-walking (Ch 2) at the beginning of the novel, which forms our first introduction to Tess, is basically just for women, though its very existence is under threat and, elsewhere, it appears, women’s clubs have disappeared. The event seems a mixture of female ritual and social event, the wearing of white symbolizing innocence, virginity and purity. Men are allowed in at a later stage and then it could be seen as a courtship dance. Tess is certainly upset at not having Angel to dance with.

Tess works in the poultry house for Mrs d’Urberville (Ch 9). Working with poultry was typically woman’s work, but the idea of the cockerel and hens symbolically re-enacts Alec’s lordship over the women who surround him or who work on his estate. That said, the Trantridge community seems mixed in every other regard (Ch 10).  The harvesting of Ch 14 appears a communal event, yet the men and women have a degree of separation in approach, dress and specific jobs. This is reinforced in Ch 47, 48. Alec has a sense of Farmer Groby getting Tess to do ‘men’s work’ on the machine and protests about this. Groby, of course, is revenging himself on Tess and Tess is helpless to prevent it.  At Talbothays, the dairy work is equally divided between men and women and thus seems the perfectly balanced rural community (Ch 17). What Hardy fails to mention is that the men and the women would have been paid at different rates.  Hardy only briefly mentions middle-class women such as Mrs Clare and Mercy Chant. They would not have had access to many work opportunities. Grace Melbury in The Woodlanders is another example: she has little to do except wait for a husband, even though her father owns an agricultural business.

Tess has received a typical village school education, which was available equally to boys and girls up to the age of ten (raised to eleven in 1893) (Ch 3). Girls were offered their one escape from rural work and class, since the best students could continue their schooling, then train to be teachers, as Hardy’s two sisters did, one becoming a headmistress. Such an opportunity is there for Tess, but for her family’s inability to grasp the right opportunities. However, education has modified Tess’s rural dialect, and she would have had the opportunity to become a domestic servant because of this (Ch 41). This would have been worse paid than agricultural labor but was slightly more permanent and generally lighter work.  By contrast, the only education denied Angel is a university one. Both he and Alec would have had a male middle-class education, which would have fitted them for their status as gentlemen.

Hardy makes other significant comments about women, especially their psychology, in terms of powers of recuperation (Ch 16). Women have traditionally formed friendships in the face of suffering. Tess is part of a quartet of lovelorn dairymaids.  Their hopeless infatuation might seem melodramatic but it did a few things that must be mentioned.  It helps define the quality of Tess’s love, gives a context to her inner conflict, brings out her natural superiority to the other girls, and provides Tess with an opportunity for renunciation and demonstration of loyalty.  The four girls remain loyal to each other, even as they become individualized.  By contrast, the village girls of Marlott form no real support system for Tess and she soon becomes isolated from them (Ch 13).

In Tess of the d’Urbervilles, Hardy establishes a theme of marginality in Tess through expression of the differences in her character and through her potential.  He shows that Tess differs not only from her family in terms of responsibility and guilt, but also from the villagers in terms of her ancestry, especially in her pride, even though she has friends there.  He shows that Tess is intelligent and has enough education to become a teacher.  She marries an educated member of the gentry, potentially a gentleman farmer.   She eventually slides into the position of the mistress of a wealthy man.  But despite that all these potentials are enough to set her apart from her companions, she is hindered from translating potential into reality.  She fails to enter a new social class.

I am drawn to the concepts of coincidence, fate and destiny in Hardy’s novels because they seem central to the way in which he makes his plots work. However, Hardy was not a systematic philosopher, so it is not helpful to try to extract a coherent ‘worldview’ from his use of these ideas.  Any novel has to use coincidence to some extent, whether it be to tie up a plot, resolve mysteries or secrets, to bring characters together, or even to create ironies and surprises.  Coincidences, of themselves, are neutral. It is how they affect the characters that matters. In fiction, any coincidence has to be made to work and to turn the plot in one direction or another.  Hardy’s coincidences may appear to be happy at the outset, but ironically they often turn out badly.  There is a necessity of coincidences with a limited cast.  Hardy has very few characters in Tess, dispersed over a period of five years and an area of some fifty miles by thirty miles. Realistically, the chances of three people meeting and re-meeting in such circumstances are very low, yet such a coincidence is never impossible. Given these parameters, it could be said that Hardy uses coincidence to the minimum in Tess. Only a few times do we find the coincidences a little far-fetched, for example the Darch girls turning up on the farm at Flintcombe-Ash. The one big coincidence is re-meeting Alec, as in Ch. 44 had it occur. But within the narrative arc, he is a past that has to be faced and resolved.

In The Mayor of Casterbridge, Hardy says that ‘character is destiny’. George Eliot said a similar thing in Mill on the Floss, except she used the word ‘fate’- as does Alec in Ch 8. He claims that it was ‘my fate’ to have a vicious horse; it is clearly in his character to possess such an animal.  It could be said that it is Tess’s characteristic lack of resolve which makes ‘coincidences’ affect her so greatly, such as how easily she is discouraged from reaching Angel’s parents and is turned back by the coincidence of overhearing his brothers and Mercy (Ch 44).  The same argument could be applied to when she pushes the letter to Angel under the carpet. Could it be that, at some subconscious level, she did not want Angel to get the letter? She perhaps wanted it ‘brushed under the carpet’.  An ironic novelist such as Hardy exploits such alternative explanations but refuses to guide his readers. Thus, a tension between writer and reader is set up.    

‘Fate’ has a more impersonal connotation than ‘destiny’, and is usually perceived as a more hostile force. That is why, as the coincidences stack up against Tess, the reader perhaps feels there is some malevolent force against her. Hardy emphasizes this idea with his comment on Tess’s execution, that ‘the President of the Immortals … had ended his sport with Tess.’  Hardy uses various prefiguring devices, such as omens, to prepare us for such patterns of malevolence working through apparent coincidences (though this denies that there is a role for chance and coincidence!). At times, the character of Time itself seems to act as fate. Hardy writes:  ‘thus Time destroys its own Romances’ (Ch 49).

The Red Pony, an episodic novella written by American writer John Steinbeck in 1933, is a classic story about an immature young boy faced with the realities of birth and death. The first three chapters were published separately in magazines from 1933–1936.  Steinbeck began The Red Pony fairly early in his career; his letters indicate he was working on a pony story in 1933, and the first two sections of the story sequence, “The Gift” and “The Great Mountains,” were published in the North American Review in November and December of that year. The third section, “The Promise,” did not appear in Harpers until 1937, and these three parts were published in a slim volume in 1937 by Covici Friede. “The Leader of the People,” the final section, was not added until the publication of his story collection The Long Valley in 1938. But manuscript and textual evidence suggests that the later sections were written some time before their publication, not very long after the first two stories. The four sections are connected by common characters, settings, and themes, forming a clearly unified story sequence, which was published separately as The Red Pony in 1945. A modestly successful movie version, for which Steinbeck wrote the screenplay, followed in 1949.

The Red Pony—which some critics believe represents one of Steinbeck’s best works—is divided into four separate sections, unlike standard chapters. The sections are held together by common characters, location, and themes, and they follow a similar time line, but the continuation of story line is not as smooth as the transition between normal chapters of a novel. They all follow the trials of Jody Tiflin, however, as he progresses through the rites of passage from young boy to young man.  Although “The Red Pony” may at first glance appear to be a light tale for young readers, it is actually considerably deeper in application and scope, dealing with feelings of rage, sorrow, and futility. A particularly interesting aspect of “The Red Pony” is John Steinbeck’s use of incompletion to add depth and feeling to the stories.  This story sequence traces Jody’s initiation into adult life with both realism and sensitivity, a balance that Steinbeck did not always achieve. The vision of characters caught up in the harsh world of nature is balanced by their deep human concerns and commitments.  Each story about Jody and his life on his father’s California ranch embodies an important moral lesson.  All the stories take place on the Tiflin ranch in the Salinas Valley, California. Steinbeck’s evocation of the vital beauty of the ranch setting matches his work in Of Mice and Men, and his symbols grow naturally out of this setting. The setting stresses the end of the frontier and of the American dream; in a sense Jody’s maturation matches that of modern America.

In the first story, titled “The Gift”.  It concerns Jody’s red pony, which he names Gabilan after the nearby mountain range. The pony soon becomes a symbol of the boy’s growing maturity and his developing knowledge of the natural world. Later he carelessly leaves the pony out in the rain, and it takes cold and dies despite Billy Buck’s efforts to save it. Thus Jody learns of nature’s cruel indifference to human wishes.  He learns that even the incredibly experienced Billy Buck can be wrong, and that something as exciting and promising as a new horse can end in tragedy.

In the second section, “The Great Mountains,” Jody learns that he can better sympathize with a stranger than his mature, grown-up father can, and that he has a desire to explore that his father doesn’t understand.  The Tiflin ranch is visited by a former resident, Gitano, an aged Mexican-American laborer raised in a hacienda that is no longer standing. Old Gitano has come home to die. Carl persuades Ruth that they cannot take Old Gitano in, but their dialogue proves pointless. Jody spends time with him, learning from the quiet man.  Stealing a broken-down nag significantly named Easter, the old man rides off into the mountains to die in dignity which holds the young boy’s fascination. Again, Jody discovers some of the complex, harsh reality of adult life.

In “The Promise,” the third story, Jody learns of the intricate connections between life and death, when he is once again confronted with death, but this time he learns that sometimes life comes from death.  In order to get his son another colt, Carl breeds one of the mares. Jody is responsible for the care of that mare, and works hard at his chores to pay for the cost.  The thrill soon wears off, and the waiting bothers Jody who also fears the horse handler will do something which will lead to the death of the foal.  But the birth is complicated one and decisions must be made.  Feeling responsible for the tragedy in the death of Gabilan, Billy Buck goes to extreme lengths to ensure Jody gets his cold, and must kill the mare to save the colt.  Jody is horrified at the brutality of the circumstances, even though he gets what he wants.

The themes of death and life converge naturally in the first three stories, preparing readers for the final section of the sequence.  He learns that his father’s sternness and temper can get him into trouble, and that tales of adventure do not add up to a successful, happy life, which complicates his longing to leave the ranch.  The final story is “The Leader of the People.” This story brings the sequence to an end with another vision of death and change. Jody’s grandfather comes to visit, retelling his timeworn stories of the great wagon crossing. Carl Tiflin cruelly hurts the old man by revealing that nobody except Jody is really interested in these repetitious tales. The grandfather realizes that Carl is right, but later he tells Jody that the adventurous stories were not the point, that his message was “Westering” itself. For the grandfather, “Westering” is a force like the frontier, the source of American identity; now with the close of the frontier, “Westering” has ended. Westerners have degenerated to petty landholders such as Carl Tiflin and aging cowboys such as Billy Buck. From the cruel words of his father to his grandfather, Jody has to once again take a look at his life, who he is, and who he will become.  In his grandfather’s ramblings, Jody discovers a sense of mature purpose, and by the conclusion of the sequence he, too, can hope to be a leader of the people. 

Tied up with the theme of Jody’s coming-of-age is his changing relationship with his father. As the book opens, we see Carl Tiflin as a man who keeps his emotions hidden. When he does say something kind to Jody it thrills the boy in a way that shows such praise is rare. Jody can see his father only as a powerful man, a sort of mammoth, powerful distant, object. As the stories progress their relationship changes. Through the threat and promise of adventure inherent in Gitano, Jody begins to see that his own imagination is far more powerful than his father’s and that his dreams and his father’s dreams do not in any way coincide. As Jody grows up he is forced to face his differences with his father and to see his father as a person of faults and limitations. The arrival of Jody’s grandfather in the fourth story, further shows Carl’s coldness, and the sympathy of the boy for the old man shows what is lacking in his relationship with his father: sympathy, and a desire for adventure.

Throughout The Red Pony, as in his other works, Steinbeck uses spare language to describe both the physical landscape and the actions of his characters. He does not delve into his characters interior lives and instead tries to portray that life through their exterior words and actions. This combination of unadorned prose style and an insistence on representing only what can be seen or heard or felt is a feature of the realism movement, of which Steinbeck is one of the foremost stylists.

A writer of great talent, sensitivity, and imagination, John Steinbeck entered into the mood of the country in the late 1930s with an extraordinary responsiveness. The Depression had elicited a reevaluation of American culture, a reassessment of the American dream; a harsh realism of observation was balanced by a warm emphasis on human dignity. Literature and the other arts joined social, economic, and political thought in contrasting traditional American ideals with the bleak reality of bread lines and shantytowns.  The literary qualities in The Red Pony typify the style that won Steinbeck immense popularity. Rising to prominence at the height of the Depression, Steinbeck seemed to reflect the mood of the era with his bare lines of simple prose.  During World War II, when people began to realize how complicated the world had become, Steinbeck’s development as a novelist faltered, and he never recovered his artistic momentum. Even East of Eden, the work he thought his masterpiece, proved a critical failure although a popular success. Since his death, Steinbeck has remained widely read, both in America and abroad. His critical reputation has enjoyed a modest revival, and will most likely continue to develop, for few writers have better.

Steinbeck derives his literary power from his use of symbolism for ironic effect. The symbolic images in the plot allow the reader to perceive the significance of an event on a much deeper level than do the characters. The pony in The Red Pony, for example, functions as a symbol of Jody’s boyhood and innocence as well as a symbol of his future. When the pony dies, the reader experiences a sense of loss, because the pony’s death represents Jody’s loss of innocence. But while the reader understands that Jody’s life has been dramatically altered by the death of the pony, Jody, ironically, grieves for his pony without the ability to fully see the death in a larger context.

Perhaps the major symbol of dislocation was the Dust Bowl. The American garden became a wasteland from which its dispossessed farmers fled. The arts in the 1930’s focused on these harsh images and tried to find in them the human dimensions which promised a new beginning.

Over the course of the four sections of this book, the protagonist, Jody Tiflin, goes through several experiences that force him to encounter many difficult emotions. In the process of dealing with the harsh realities of life, Jody changes from a naive young boy into a responsible and maturing young man. Many ancient cultures have specific ceremonies for inducting a young boy into the realm of grown men. These ceremonies are often referred to as rites of passage. In modern cultures, even though the ceremony is less traditional or formalized, young boys and girls still experience, sometimes randomly, certain types of rituals that mark them for life. In urban settings, in the absence of strong family relationships, this rite of passage might be experienced through membership in a gang. Biologically, every young boy and girl goes through physical changes that signal the onset of adulthood.

Interestingly, The Red Pony is throughout a study of contrasts and pairs. The wonderful red pony colt Galiban reflects Black Demon, the marred colt whose birth was the death of its mother. The Galiban Mountains themselves reflect the fearful, unexplored mountains to the West. The old man Gitano reflects Jody’s Grandfather, in that both old men are rejected by Carl Tiflin, and both of the men were explorers, Gitano of the mountain ranges to the West and Grandfather of the Westering himself. Carl Tiflin and Billy Buck contrast each other, with Carl Tiflin being hard and shy at the same time, while Billy Buck seems to show more interest and care for Jody.

The Red Pony is perhaps the height of John Steinbeck’s use of incompletion. The stories that it contains have no happy ending. Jody does not end up matured by his experience as so many other similar books, “The Yearling,” for example, would have it appear. John Steinbeck refuses to sentimentalize. Though the passages may seem sad or emotional this is purely reader response. Steinbeck takes care to portray the scenes with a sterile, detached distance, a matter of fact attitude.

It is this tone and mood in particular that make “The Red Pony” a great work of art. John Steinbeck’s writing style is perhaps even more thought-provoking, even more evocative than if he had purposely directed the passages in a sentimental direction or used them to promote some external purpose or fairy tale ending. For this reason I highly enjoyed “The Red Pony” as a piece of classic literature and a work of art. I recommend it to all readers.

A number of famous readers have commented on the novel. The St. Petersburg Times noted that “News reports said that [President Barack Obama] bought two classics from young readers, Harper Lee’s To Kill A Mockingbird and John Steinbeck’s The Red Pony.”  In an interview with Eric Clapton, Billboard complimented the novel by stating that The Red Pony, [by] John Steinbeck, [is a] wrenching story of adolescent initiation into the world of death, birth, and disappointment.”  However, Eric Clapton later complained that “[t]he [book] just made me want to commit suicide.  The Red Pony, I could not believe this book. It broke my heart, and I thought there is no happy ending to anything.”  Clapton did some research to see why an author would write about a story like this and criticized those types of authors by saying that they are “alcoholic, damaged people with a poisoned viewpoint on life.”  He added that “as much as it was incredibly exciting and death-defying to read, it was not necessarily very good for the growth of one’s spirit.”

It is through The Red Pony, which Jody receives as a gift from his father, that he learns about death. This is a painful experience for a shy young boy who is so proud of his pony that he invites friends home from school just to look at the small horse. Likewise, it is through other animals that populate this book that Jody also learns about sex, old age, sickness, and birth. He is gently guided through his journey from boy to man with the help of a ranch hand named Billy Buck, who is reputed to know more about horses than any man around. However, even Billy cannot defy nature and must learn that he cannot make promises that he cannot keep. Through Billy and Jody’s mother, Jody learns compassion and understanding. Jody’s father is not as open to other people, but Steinbeck takes care not to depict Jody’s father as a villain. Steinbeck treats all his characters fairly and fleshes out their personalities to their fullest extent possible within the confines of his stories.

Jody Tifflin begins this novel as a thoughtful but somewhat malicious boy who daydreams by the mossy spring tub yet destroys a small bird then dissects and discards it with the same regard he crushes a melon and hides the evidence. By then end of the story cycle, however, he has learned what it means to be a grown man through his experiences with death. His first great lesson comes when Gabilan the pony dies under his care. Next, his fascination with the mountains and the old man Gitano lead him to consider his own mortality. The turning point comes in “The Promise” when he learns that life and death are “inseparably bound together.” Finally, his appreciation for his grandfather teaches him empathy and the value of respect. Jody’s offer to comfort his grandfather with a glass of lemonade, and the gesture of mature respect for another’s feelings that the gesture contains, demonstrates that the boy is beginning to view the world as a man. In order to reach that point, however, he first had to understand that man is powerless against death and acceptance of this condition is the essence of manhood.

The stories that comprise The Red Pony are suffused with examples of man’s powerlessness against the laws of nature. Billy Buck’s failed attempt to save the pony’s life teaches Jody that even the ministrations of the man whose abilities he admires coupled with his own vigil and care cannot circumvent death. Even the buzzard that he kills in senseless anger fails to acknowledge the boy’s desire for revenge. His experience with Gitano – who unfalteringly claims that he will stay on the ranch because he was born there but departs on the old horse Easter – causes the boy to consider that much of a man’s life is immutable and unknown like the mountains into which the old man and the horse retire. When Billy Buck must kill Nellie to save her colt Jody comprehends that his friend has been forced to sacrifice a life in order to keep his promise to deliver another safely. And finally Jody learns that the passage of time eclipses an individual man’s work when he empathizes with his grandfather’s obsession with the past.  He is shown through all of this that nature is indifferent to man.

From a personal point of view, I felt that the beginning was similar to My Friend Flicka, a 1941 novel by Mary O’Hara.  It kept my attention, but I was very disappointed in the manner of which it ended.  It made evoked the feeling that it had to be less than 100 pages, which I felt detracted from the piece.  I can see why it didn’t make BBC’s Top 100 Books List of 2011.

Of Mice and Men

Based on Steinbeck’s own experiences as a bindlestiff in the 1920s (before the arrival of the Okies he would vividly describe in The Grapes of Wrath), the title is taken from Robert Burns’ eighteenth-century poem “To a Mouse“, which features a couplet that has become widely known and quoted: “The best laid schemes o’ mice an’ men / Gang aft agley.” (The best laid schemes of mice and men / Go oft awry.)  That last phrase, written in Scottish dialect, translates as “often go wrong.” As will become clear, the quotation relates directly to our two protagonists, who do indeed have a “scheme” to get out of the cycle of poverty and alienation that is the migrant worker’s lot: they plan to purchase a farm of their own and work on it themselves. Lennie visualizes this future possibility as near to heaven – he can imagine nothing better than life with “the rabbits.” Their action in the novel is largely motivated by a desire to achieve the independence of this farm life.

Required reading in many schools, Of Mice and Men has been a frequent target of censors for vulgarity and what some consider offensive language; consequently, it appears on the American Library Association’s list of the Most Challenged Books of 21st Century.

John Steinbeck’s enduring popularity is largely the result of his ability to weave a complicated fictional reality from simple elements – simple language, simple characters, simple techniques. One of the techniques he uses consistently is the juxtaposition of the human and the natural worlds. He often – as in The Grapes of Wrath – alternates short natural vignettes with the parallel struggles of humankind. Of Mice and Men, as is clear from the title alone, features this parallelism as well. It is a novel about the natural world – “of mice” – and the social world – “and men.” The relationship between these two worlds is not one of conflict but of comparison; he invites us to witness the similarities between the human and animal worlds.

Poverty, in Burns’ work as well as Steinbeck, draws the human and the natural worlds closer together. During the Great Depression, in which the novel is set, workers were thrust from relative comfort to fend for themselves in a cruel and uncaring world. They face the original challenges of nature – to feed themselves, to fight for their stake. Poverty has reduced them to animals – Lennie a ponderous, powerful, imbecilic bear; George a quiet, scheming, scrappy rodent of a man. Notice how frequently the two men, particularly Lennie, are described in animal similes: Lennie drags his feet “the way a bear drags his paws” (2) and drinks from the pool “like a horse” (3). Lennie even fantasizes about living in a cave like a bear.

Of course, Lennie’s vision of nature is hardly realistic; he thinks of nature as full of fluffy and cute playthings. He has no notion of the darkness in the natural world, the competition and the cruelty. He wouldn’t have the faintest notion how to feed himself without George. In this too the men balance each other: George sees the world through suspicious eyes. He sees only the darkness where Lennie sees only the light. George may complain about how burdensome it is to care for Lennie, but this complaint seems to ring hollow: in truth, George needs Lennie’s innocence as much as Lennie needs George’s experience. They compliment each other, complete each other. Together, they are more than the solitary and miserable nobodies making their migrant wages during the Depression. Together, they have hope and solidarity.

George’s complaint – “Life would be so easy without Lennie” – and Lennie’s counter-complaint – “I could just live in a cave and leave George alone” – are not really sincere. They are staged, hollow threats, like the threats of parents and children (“I’ll pull this car over right now, mister!”). Similarly, George’s story about how “things are going to be,” with rabbits and a vegetable garden and the fat of the land, also has a formulaic quality, like a child’s bedtime story. Children (like Lennie) love to hear the same tale repeated countless times; even when they have the story memorized, they love to talk along, anticipating the major turns in the story and correcting their parents if they leave out any details. “The rabbits” is Lennie’s bedtime story, and while George isn’t exactly a parent to Lennie, he is nevertheless parental. George is Lennie’s guardian – and in guarding Lennie, George is in effect guarding innocence itself.

Steinbeck’s plots are as simple and finely honed as his characters. Each topic discussed – the woman who mistakenly thought that Lennie was trying to rape her, the mice that Lennie crushes with affection, George’s order that Lennie return to the campsite if anything goes wrong – will come into play later on in the book. The reader should keep these in mind as the book is read.

The novel as a whole shares many elements with stage drama. Steinbeck often uses a single room as a setting for a scene, as he uses the bunk house in the beginning. This technique allows him to introduce a wide variety of characters quickly without using a narrator – the characters talk about each other, interact, and even describe each other (as when Candy talks about Curley being a “little guy”), all of which facilitates relatively rich characterization in a relatively short number of pages.  This stage technique applies to Steinbeck’s descriptions as well as his dialogue. Consider the description of Candy’s dog at the close of the chapter: “[The dog] gazed about with mild, half-blind eyes. He sniffed, and then lay down and put his head between his paws [etc.].” Steinbeck’s language is completely shorn of emotion; he simply describes the animal’s actions as a playwright might write stage directions.

This “dramatic” technique gives Steinbeck’s story a portentous quality. On one level, he is simply describing an evening among itinerant workers in a realistic way; on another level, the actions and personae of these workers take on a larger, almost mythic significance. Just as in dramatic works of the same period – such as Thornton Wilder’s Our Town – Steinbeck blends the workaday with the highly stylized, bringing out the eternal, allegorical character of everyday life. Thus Curley comes to represent all petty, embittered men; Crooks stands in for the persecution and the suffering of all African Americans; George is the eternal cynic-with-a-heart-of-gold and Lennie personifies clumsy innocence. The characters are types, or even archetypes, as much as they are individuals – a technique more popularly associated with plays and films than with literary fiction.

This stage technique also allows Steinbeck to build tension quickly without exposition. The atmosphere soon becomes hostile and uncomfortable as they arrive at the bunkhouse: George suspects that his bed is infested, the Boss suspects that George and Lennie are trying to pull a fast one, Candy is miserable and decrepit, Curley is looking for a fight, Curley’s wife is vamping around suspiciously. Lennie, in his instinctive, animalistic way, captures the foreboding tone of the Chapter when he bursts out, “I don’t like this place, George. This ain’t no good place.” Right away, there are several points of inevitable conflict, most of them hinging on the character of Curley, who seems to rub everyone the wrong way. The only positive character thus encountered at the ranch in the beginning is Slim, who is also the character described at greatest length; but even Slim comes off as life-hardened – the first fact we learn about him is that he has drowned four out of his nine new puppies. One should immediately recognize how completely out-of-place Lennie is in this hostile, gloomy environment: he is innocent, naive, clumsy and childish in the midst of a bunch of shrewd, ugly, lonely, conniving men.

And Steinbeck’s novel certainly features men rather than women. The only woman with any important role in the novel (aside from the memory of Lennie’s Aunt Clara) is Curley’s Wife, a lonely and desperate “tramp,” to use Candy’s word, who is every bit as meddlesome as Curley fears. Steinbeck’s attitude toward her, at least at this stage in the novel, is hardly sympathetic. She doesn’t even receive a name, she dresses garishly and talks provocatively. There is more than a whiff of sexism in her depiction. However, Steinbeck is careful to hint as a possible motive for her behavior even at this early stage. She is, after all, stuck with the most loathsome imaginable husband, Curley – who apparently keeps her confined in their house whenever possible, who obnoxiously brags about their sex life (exemplified by the grotesque image of the Vaseline-filled glove), and who cannot be good company. Curley married her because she was flashy, and now her flashiness causes him nothing but distress. She is stuck in a loveless – and perhaps, despite Curley’s bragging to the contrary, a sexless – marriage, and can be pitied for seeking other company. 

Steinbeck references hands often and variedly throughout the book. On the most basic level, hands are crucial to the work of the farm – these men, after all, live by their labor. They also function metaphorically. Curley, especially, is repeatedly described as “handy,” a term that Candy uses to mean “good at fighting.” His hands are further connected to his sex life – his Vaseline-filled glove creates an association between his hand and his sexual organ (why else, after all, would one soften up one’s hand?). This association becomes especially important as the tension that is established at the Vaseline-filled glove’s mention spills over into crisis soon.

It’s amazing how Steinbeck carefully controls the events, weaving even the smallest detail into a rich whole. The atmosphere remains gloomy as the action progresses from the account of Lennie and George’s near-lynching, to the shooting of Candy’s dog, to the fight between Curley and Lennie – with one exceptional spot of light, George’s monologue “about the rabbits” and Candy’s offer to finance their dream.

To take these events as they occur, the near-lynching in Weed provides another instance of the danger of women. Again, Steinbeck gives voice to attitudes that are sexist at best. He already showed Curley’s wife acting just as desperately vampy as her reputation; here he piles on examples of the danger and misunderstanding that comes from sex. The woman in the red dress in Weed (whose pretty dress “provokes” Lennie into action) clearly resembles Curley’s garishly attired wife. And George tells of another man, Andy Cushman, who landed in the San Quention penitentiary after succumbing to “a tart” (pg. 62). Women equal danger in Steinbeck’s masculine dramatic world.

The only good women, George suggests (pg. 61), are those whose sexual motives one knows – either because they are totally desexualized, like Lennie’s Aunt Clara, or completely sexualized, like the whores at Susy’s and Clara’s. Indeed, Steinbeck’s double use of the name “Clara” (which means “clear,” suggesting that the social and sexual roles of these two women are transparent) links the one model of womanhood – motherliness – with its opposite – whoredom. Figures like the woman in the red dress, or Curley’s wife, who seem to exist between these two extremes, at once off-limits and up-for-grabs, are presented as dangerous, especially for a man as sexually innocent yet powerful as Lennie. He is as dangerous to them as they are to him – they are like the pet mice and rabbits that Lennie loves literally to death, soft and easily crushed. (Steinbeck heightens the association between the women and the small cuddly creatures at several points, for instance when he writes that the woman in the red dress “rabbit[ed]” to the lawmen with her accusation of Lennie (pg. 46).) I suppose one can certainly take issue with Steinbeck’s depiction of women, but their role in the work as kindling for trouble seems quite clear.

The shooting of Candy’s dog draws a parallel between the old swamper and George and Lennie. Indeed, Candy and his dog come off as an “old timer” version of the younger duo. Just as Lennie is an incredible worker, so too Candy’s dog was once “the best damn sheep dog I ever saw” (pg. 49). And just as the other men cannot understand the bond that keeps an apparently hale and clever man like George yoked to the burdensome, infantile Lennie, so too the men cannot understand Candy’s sentimental companionship with his now-decrepit and stinking dog. Steinbeck strengthens their parallel bonds of companionship with continued associations of Lennie and dogs – he is absolutely attached to his puppy; he obeys George’s commands unthinkingly, as a dog obeys an owner; and George’s commands often directly resemble commands one gives a dog, such as when he sics George on Curley.

Candy thus emerges as the only character in the bunk house who has something approaching George and Lennie’s preference for social (and perhaps socialist) companionship over isolated individualism. Their thematic link makes his eagerness to join George and Lennie in their farm life natural and understandable. Candy, unlike the others, displays an interest in others and hope for the future. His sympathetic nature comes through even in his decision to allow his dog’s death. Candy only relents to their request to put the dog out of its misery when they frame the argument in terms of the dog’s suffering, and even this request is not granted easily.  Yet Candy does finally relent to the men, for despite his similarities to George and Lennie, Candy is an inherently passive character. He relents to others’ decisions easily, incapable of fully standing up for his own beliefs. He allows another man to shoot his dog, despite his repeated insistence that he wants to keep the old hound. (The shooting of the dog in the back of the head, a supposedly painless maneuver, foreshadows later events in the story.)

In the world Of Mice and Men describes, Candy’s dog represents the fate awaiting anyone who has outlived his or her purpose. Once a fine sheepdog, useful on the ranch, Candy’s mutt is now debilitated by age. Candy’s sentimental attachment to the animal—his plea that Carlson let the dog live for no other reason than that Candy raised it from a puppy—means nothing at all on the ranch. Although Carlson promises to kill the dog painlessly, his insistence that the old animal must die supports a cruel natural law that the strong will dispose of the weak. Candy internalizes this lesson, for he fears that he himself is nearing an age when he will no longer be useful at the ranch, and therefore no longer welcome.

“A dragfooted sheepdog, gray of muzzle, and with pale, blind old eyes” (pg. 26), Candy’s dog is a far cry from his sheepherding days. Carlson says to Candy, in regard to the dog: “Got no teeth, he’s all stiff with rheumatism. He ain’t no good to you, Candy. An’ he ain’t no good to himself. Why’n't you shoot him, Candy?” (pg. 49). And Candy is left with no other option, but to shoot his longtime companion. This sub-plot is an obvious metaphor for what George must do to Lennie, who proves to be no good to George and no good to himself. Steinbeck re-emphasizes the significance of Candy’s dog when Candy says to George that he wishes someone would shoot him when he’s no longer any good. And when Carlson’s gun goes off, Lennie is the only other man not inside the bunk house, Steinbeck having placed him outside with the dog, away from the other men, his gun shot saved for the novel’s end.

The tragic fate of Candy’s dog reminds us that the rest of the bunk house society – including even Slim – cannot understand or tolerate sentimental attachment to a weak creature. This is no world for Candy’s dog, and it appears to be no world for Lennie either. Steinbeck even subtly suggests that their now-realistic dream of co-owning a plot of land might also be too dreamy for the hard truths of the world. When Candy decides to collaborate with them and the idea of owning a farm becomes tangible, none of the men know how to respond. For George and Lennie their dream serves as a diversion from the travails of everyday life and not as a realistic goal.

The farm that George constantly describes to Lennie—those few acres of land on which they will grow their own food and tend their own livestock—is one of the most powerful symbols in the book. It seduces not only the other characters but also the reader, who, like the men, wants to believe in the possibility of the free, idyllic life it promises. Candy is immediately drawn in by the dream, and even the cynical Crooks hopes that Lennie and George will let him live there too. A paradise for men who want to be masters of their own lives, the farm represents the possibility of freedom, self-reliance, and protection from the cruelties of the world.

Turning to the fight between Lennie and Curley, we see first-hand that there is a deep and ruthless capacity for violence in the generally docile Lennie. This violence is sometimes casual and inadvertent – as in his accidental killing of the mice in his pockets – and sometimes an explosion of directed rage, as when he crushes Curley’s hand. Lennie seems willing to kill to protect the things he loves, whether George or the rabbits or what have you. His violence is child-like – or dog-like: the sudden ferocity of an otherwise affectionate pet. His casual declaration that he will snap the necks of any cats who attempt to kill the rabbits on his fantasy farm is shocking – we know that he means exactly what he says. I compare him to my beloved Ivan, a Rottweiler who attacked to protect me.  I was forced to put him down because of his ferocious love and protection. 

When George gives him permission to fight back against Curley, Lennie cannot control his capacity for violence. He only stops crushing Curley’s hand when George issues a direct order – leading one to wonder how he would behave in a similar situation is George were not there to control him. The fight between Curley and Lennie fulfills the foreshadowed confrontation between the two characters, but it does not resolve the situation. We know Curley well enough to sense that his spoken resolution to pretend the incident didn’t happen – to pretend he caught his hand in “a machine” – rings hollow.

By the way, Lennie’s crushing of Curley’s hand – an unusual form of fighting, to say the least – is highly significant. We’ve already seen how Curley’s hand is associated with his sexuality – he keeps one hand soft for his wife. Thus the injury he sustains resonates with his (already uneasy) sense of sexual prowess. Lennie has, metaphorically at least, crushed more than the man’s hand – he has also crushed his very manhood. Lennie cannot understand the significance of this gesture, but the others – or, at least, the reader – can. Lennie has unwittingly unmanned his rival and indirectly revealed his superior physical (and sexual) prowess. Thus Steinbeck lays the foundation for a conflict that directly links Lennie, Curley, and Curley’s sexual object, his wife.

Steinbeck has already implicitly contrasted the lonesome, individualistic existence of most of the farmhands with the more collective, communal attitude of George, Lennie and Candy. This contrast becomes still more marked as the book progresses. Indeed, as Crooks, Candy and Lennie – the three mentally or physically impaired “outcasts” of the farm – discuss their dream of living “of the fat of the land” one can sense a strong whiff of socialism. For a moment, they imagine a life of freedom from prejudice and racism, in which each man works for “just his keep” regardless of color or disability (pg. 84).

Four of Steinbeck’s characters are handicapped: Candy is missing a hand, Crooks has a crooked spine, Lennie is mentally slow, and Curley acquires a mangled hand in the course of the novel. They are physical manisfestations of one of the novel’s major themes: the schemes of men go awry. Here, to re-iterate the point, Steinbeck has the actual bodies of his characters go awry. It is as if nature herself is often doomed to errors in her scheme. And whether they be caused at birth, or by a horse, or by another man, the physical deformities occur regardless of the handicapped person’s will or desire to be otherwise, just as George and Lennie’s dream goes wrong despite how much they want it to be fulfilled.

It’s fitting that the three virtual servants of the farm – the black man, the swamper, and the mentally disabled workhorse – collaborate in this dream. They are, metaphorically, the proletariat – the downtrodden workers of society – linking to form a socialist utopia. Or, at least, fantasizing about such a link. It’s possible to go quite far with this socialist reading the more one knows about Marxist theory. One might look at Crooks’ description of his past – when he had a farm of his own (pg. 81) – as a socialist “utopian past” from which the inequalities of capitalism have torn the worker. One might even consider George a kind of middle-class revolutionary leading the proletariat from their downtrodden position to a reunion with the natural cycles of labor. Of course, one ought to keep in mind that their revolution remains very small-scale – they desire merely to alter their own lives, not the lives of humanity at large – and nebulous. But as the others leave his room, Crooks has utterly abandoned his dream of farm life.

It’s also necessary to note that this fantasy farm does not seem to include women. Indeed, Curley’s wife eventually emerges as both more complex and more loathsome than before. She is, on the one hand, much more than a one-dimensional harlot; at the same time, though, she represents a clear interruption of the socialist fantasy that the three men entertain. Indeed, she literally interrupts them at the height of their fantasizing. She is the snake – or, more to the point, the Eve – in the garden, the fact of life that makes a peaceful farm life so difficult, if not impossible, to obtain.  At the same time, at least she knows herself. We are allowed a glimpse into Curley’s wife’s discontent, and her frustration with life in some ways mirrors that of the three enfeebled men who have been left behind. She is especially comparable to Crooks; both are obviously intelligent and perceptive of themselves as well as others, and both contain a deep bitterness stemming from their mistreatment. The one is mistreated because he is black, the other because she is a woman. Both have a bleak and accurate insight into the fundamental nastiness of people. Curley’s wife understands the deep-laden competitive urge for possessing women which tears men apart, and she knows that she is cast as the villain in this eternal game of one-upmanship.

However, she is also quick to act the villainous part. She knows how to use the unfairness of life to her advantage, which becomes disturbingly clear when she dangles the threat of crying rape in front of Crooks. She knows that as a black man he would be lynched if she told the others that he’d even tried to rape her, and she wields this power to her advantage. Ultimately, though, she is revealed as frightened of her husband as she sneaks off to her house. Curley’s wife has been trapped by life, and however brazen and manipulative she may be, she is ultimately one of the comparatively powerless figures in the novel. She is therefore, perhaps, an object of the reader’s sympathy.

As we near the climax of the novel, note how carefully Steinbeck has continued to develop the most conflict-laden thematic threads in the action. Curley’s wife – the source of so much tension on the farm – and Lennie – who is capable of unthinking and brutal (if innocent) violence – have finally come into contact. Again, their relationship is subtly sexual. Curley’s wife flirtatiously refers to Lennie as “Machine” (pg. 88) – revealing that she knows how her husband’s hand was crushed and hinting that she “likes machines.” Lennie is utterly incapable of dealing with this sort of flirtation. He is presented as a mere animal, drawn to Curley’s wife by dumb instinct. Her effect on the horses as she exits clearly resonates with her effect on Lennie: “[W]hile she went through the barn, the halter chains rattled, and some horses snorted and some stamped their feet” (pg. 90). Lennie, who is both gentle and terribly dangerous, is at her mercy – which means, ultimately, that she is at his, though she doesn’t know it yet.

After he finds the body of Curley’s wife, George notes that though Lennie does many “bad things,” he never acts out of “meanness,” only out of an inability to understand the world or control himself. George’s choice of words is apt. Not only does “meanness” suggest “cruelty” – as in the childhood use of the word in the common phrase, “You’re mean.” “Meanness” also suggests small-mindedness or pettiness. Many of the characters in the novel act out of self-interested malice. Lennie never does. He acts with the best intentions at almost every turn; indeed (and despite his name) he has a simplicity of soul that contrasts starkly with the “smallness” of others. The word also suggests another variation – “meaning.” Lennie doesn’t mean to do bad things – they simply happen to him. He acts badly without intending to act at all.

Indeed, Lennie’s crime is a fundamental inability to understand the frailty of others. He literally loves things to death. His puppy is soft, so he pets it to death. Only George understands him fully, knows his childish mixture of innocence and dangerousness. Others, including Curley’s wife, treat him as a sort of sounding board for their own complaints and fantasies. Their failure to understand the danger that goes along with Lennie’s obvious innocence results in the “bad things” that Lennie does. Crooks is just barely able to defuse Lennie’s capacity for violent rage in the preceding chapter. Curley’s wife, in this chapter, is not so lucky.

But then, the events ought to surprise no one, really. They certainly don’t surprise George or Slim, who are instantly able to determine from a look at Curley’s wife that Lennie is the culprit and that he acted out of confused panic, just as he did at Weed. Lennie, like an animal, doesn’t understand his actions as morally wrong. Rather, he thinks of them simply in terms of George’s approval. Like a dog who feels a mixture of fear and love for his master, Lennie is both fiercely loyal to George and terrified of upsetting his friend. He knows instinctively that he has done something wrong both in killing the puppy and in killing Curley’s wife. For Lennie, however, the two actions are roughly equivalent – in both cases, he simply feels that he risks losing George’s permission to tend the rabbits. The question of the intrinsic value of human life never enters his thinking.

The dead mouse and the dead puppy, these two soft, furry creatures that Lennie accidentally kills, are both metaphors and foreshadowing devices. As metaphors, they serve as a physical representation of what will happen to George and Lennie’s dream: they (Lennie in particular) will destroy it. Lennie never intends to kill the thing he loves, the soft things he wants more than anything, but they die on him nonetheless. The dead mouse is also an allusion to the novel’s title, a reminder that dreams will go wrong, even the desire to pet a mouse. And because bad things come in threes, Lennie’s two accidental killings of animals foreshadow the final killing of Curley’s wife, an accident that seals his fate and ruins the dream for him, George, and Candy.It’s important to note that Lennie’s puppy is one of several symbols that represent the victory of the strong over the weak. Lennie kills the puppy accidentally, as he has killed many mice before, by virtue of his failure to recognize his own strength. Although no other character can match Lennie’s physical strength, the huge Lennie will soon meet a fate similar to that of his small puppy. Like an innocent animal, Lennie is unaware of the vicious, predatory powers that surround him.

Curley’s wife, as Steinbeck depicts her, does not share Lennie’s innocence. Steinbeck rests a measure of blame for the killing on the victim herself. Again and again, Lennie’s intrusion in the affairs of Curley and Curley’s wife have been tinged with sex, and her offer to let Lennie touch her hair may be construed as a sexual advance. She even prefaces the offer by complaining of loneliness and dissatisfaction in her marriage. However sincere and pitiable these complaints may be, she is ultimately a self-absorbed, manipulative figure in the scene. She fails to understand the danger of Lennie – despite the evidence of his violent power in her husband’s mutilated hand – and instead interprets his conflict with her husband and his fear of encountering her through a prism of vanity. She assumes that Lennie is her husband’s babyish rival – a harmless admirer. Thus she “leads him on,” to use the age-old misogynistic excuse for rape.

The full extent of the misogyny latent in the portrayal of Curley’s wife comes following her death. Steinbeck describes her as having more life and vitality as a dead than a living character. The trope of finding beauty in a young woman’s corpse is a very old one in Western literature – it can be found in countless texts, such as the dead Ophelia in Hamlet, or the dead maidens of Edgar Allen Poe’s lyric poems. The basic idea in Steinbeck’s description of Curley’s wife’s corpse is that in death her beauty can finally be appreciated apart from her conniving, duplicitous personality. It is as though he casts her sentience itself as her worst characteristic. In this way, she is completely objectified – reduced, in death, to the grotesque ideal of the silent and docile woman she never was in life. A modern reader has every reason to find this depiction objectionable.

Indeed, to pile indignity upon indignity, the final time we encounter her corpse occurs when Candy curses at it, calling her a tramp and a tart. Even in death she is nothing more than a scapegoat; and even her own husband fails to mourn her. Perhaps unintentionally, Steinbeck thus illustrates perfectly the horrible atmosphere of neglect and abuse that perhaps led her to act out in the first place. She was never considered as a person, only as Curley’s problematic trophy.

We have seen so many threads of the story come together already, and the final plot movement of the story has a similarly inevitable trajectory. Steinbeck invites the reader to recall several additional associations in order to piece together the tragic resolution to come. We recall George’s order from the beginning of the book – that if any trouble goes down, Lennie is to hide in the bushes near their original campsite. Thus we know that George has deliberately misled the posse by claiming that Lennie is likely headed south. Moreover, Carlton’s missing Luger is highly significant. That was, after all, the gun that was used to shoot Candy’s old sheep dog. The men assume that Lennie has stolen the weapon for his own protection – again revealing how little they understand Lennie, who is absolutely incapable of such calculation. The reader knows better, however.

Steinbeck’s careful control of setting in the novel is especially clear in the last scene, which finds us back at the beginning – at the brush near the Salinas River. As he did in the opening chapter, Steinbeck begins with a description of nature. Once again, this nature vignette resonates with the themes of the novel. We see the casual violence of nature – the stork devouring the water snake – and we see Lennie’s nonchalant integration into this atmosphere as he stoops and drinks with his lips like a thirsty dog.

The content of Lennie’s thoughts, and of Lennie and George’s eventual conversation, also mirrors the opening. Lennie repeats the child-like, ritualistic cycle of separation and reconciliation that has seemingly marked his relationship with George for years. Once again he hears George complain that he could live it up if not for Lennie; once again he offers to leave George and live in the hills; once again he gets George to tell him about their rabbit utopia.

However, these similarities – the setting and the content – only ultimately emphasize how much has changed since the novel’s opening. Where George was once full of life – angry and forgiving – now he is a husk of himself, bereft of emotion as he goes through his monologues. What was once a plausible – if far-fetched – fantasy has disintegrated into delusion. He knows what must happen, even as Lennie goes on believing in the rabbits. Whereas in the beginning, we see George and Lennie’s “best laid plans,” here at the end, we have irrefutable evidence that, just as Robert Burns’ poem predicts, these plans have gone awry.

Emphasizing the delusional nature of Lennie’s point-of-view, Steinbeck adapts his one experimental narrative gesture in the novel, choosing to depict two hallucinations – first Aunt Clara, and then (more ludicrous still) a giant sardonic rabbit. It is unclear whether we are supposed to understand these hallucinations to be one-time phenomena or regularly recurring. (By the way, the reader may find it a bit unbelievable that this gentle giant, who everywhere else proves incapable of understanding figurative language, is able to imaginatively generate such colorful self-chastisements as “you ain’t worth a greased jack-pin to ram you into hell” (pg. 112).)

Either way, the last scene represents our closest approach to Lennie’s experience – his simultaneous fear and love of authority figures, his relentless obsession with the rabbits, and his constant (if confused) regret that he never fails to act in a confused and problematic way. Lennie, social pack animal that he is, has a deep-seated need for discipline and forgiveness. His self-chastisement is quite moving, both because it reveals a degree of self-understanding in Lennie and because it suggests that he is regularly and brutally upset with himself. His remorse hardly counts as a conscience – at no point does he register that he has committed murder, only that he has done yet another inscrutable “bad thing” – but it makes a claim on the reader’s sympathy nevertheless.

George’s mercy killing of Lennie neatly parallels the earlier events, when Candy allowed Carlson to shoot his malodorous old dog. Steinbeck is even careful to involve the same Luger in each killing. Whereas the meek and passive Candy proved unable to do the job himself, George shows no such weakness. As has been proven beyond a reasonable doubt at this point, Lennie’s lethal innocence is not compatible with the world. He cannot learn to change his ways – he cannot even understand why the “bad things” he has done are bad. The fate he would meet at Curley’s (mutilated) hands – likely a drawn-out, vengeful lynching – is enough to convince George that his only real option is to make Lennie’s death as quick and painless as possible.

At the novel’s end, a few haunting questions remain. Why, after all, is George so attached to Lennie? What did he gain from the infantile and troublesome giant’s companionship? Many theories have emerged over the years, as readers and critics have speculated that George is somehow specifically in Aunt Clara’s debt, that George and Lennie are actually related after all, or even that George and Lennie are in love – romantically, not merely as friends. However, before (or at least alongside) such speculation, it’s important to note that Steinbeck deliberately chooses to leave this central question murky. In a novel so carefully wrought in all other respects, this central motivational ambiguity stands as a deliberate and unsolvable mystery.

`           The simple answer may be that in the callous world of the itinerant laborer, the constant loyalty and companionship of a man like Lennie acts as an antidote to alienation. Lennie, paradoxically, represents the instinctual innocence in life. Writers as diverse as William Blake in his Songs of Innocence or Mark Twain in The Mysterious Stranger have explored the interesting ways in which innocence is not, in fact, altogether innocent. Divorced from a sense of good and evil, the truly innocent are capable of performing acts of apparent cruelty without remorse. Lennie is just such an innocent. He tempers George’s worldly weariness with the constant presence of discovery and hope even as he plagues George’s life with the threat of misunderstanding and ignorant folly. In many ways, Lennie completes George. And as his hollow despair at the close of the novel suggests, George ultimately needs Lennie’s innocence just as much as Lennie depends on George’s experience.

When discussing the thematics of Steinbeck’s novel, we would do well to first examine the title, which is an allusion to a line of Robert Burns, a Scottish poet: “The best laid schemes o’ mice an’ men gang aft aglay.” Translated into modern English, the verse reads: “The best laid schemes of mice and men often go awry.” This cynical statement is at the heart of the novel’s action and serves as a foreshadowing prophecy of all that is to come. For, indeed, the novels two main characters do have a scheme, a specific dream of changing their current way of life in order to have their own place and work only for themselves. The tragedy, of course, lies in the fact that no matter how elaborately our heroes plan, regardless of how intensely they hope and dream, their plan does not find fulfillment.

Of Mice and Men teaches a grim lesson about the nature of human existence. Nearly all of the characters, including George, Lennie, Candy, Crooks, and Curley’s wife, admit, at one time or another, to having a profound sense of loneliness and isolation, which is a significant factor in the lives of these characters. Each desires the comfort of a friend, but will settle for the attentive ear of a stranger.  George sets the tone for these confessions early in the novella when he reminds Lennie that the life of a ranch-hand is among the loneliest of lives. Men like George who migrate from farm to farm rarely have anyone to look to for companionship and protection. As the story develops, Candy, Crooks, and Curley’s wife all confess their deep loneliness. The fact that they admit to complete strangers their fear of being cast off shows their desperation.  Candy is lonely after his dog is gone.  The companionship of George and Lennie is the result of loneliness.  Despite the need for companionship, Steinbeck emphasizes how the nature of loneliness is sustained though the barriers established from acting inhuman to one another. Curley’s wife admits to Candy, Crooks, and Lennie that she is unhappily married.  She is lonely because her husband is not the friend she hoped for.  Therefore, she deals with her loneliness by flirting with the men on the ranch, which causes Curley to increase his abusiveness and jealousy, which causes all the ranch hands to avoid her.  Crooks tells Lennie that life is no good without a companion to turn to in times of confusion and need.  He states the theme candidly as “A guy goes nuts if he ain’t got nobody. Don’t make no difference who the guy is, long’s he’s with you.”  Crooks’s barrier results from being barred from the bunkhouse by restraining him to the stable; his bitterness is partially broken, however, through Lennie’s ignorance.  Each of these characters searches for a friend, someone to help them measure the world, as Crooks says. In the end, however, companionship of his kind seems unattainable.  I found it interesting that the author further reinforces this theme through subtle methods by situating the story near the town of Soledad, which means “solitude” in Spanish.

The characters are rendered helpless by their isolation, and yet, even at their weakest, they seek to destroy those who are even weaker than they. Perhaps the most powerful example of this cruel tendency is when Crooks criticizes Lennie’s dream of the farm and his dependence on George. Having just admitted his own vulnerabilities—he is a black man with a crooked back who longs for companionship—Crooks zeroes in on Lennie’s own weaknesses.  In scenes such as this one, Steinbeck records a profound human truth: oppression does not come only from the hands of the strong or the powerful. Crooks seems at his strongest when he has nearly reduced Lennie to tears for fear that something bad has happened to George, just as Curley’s wife feels most powerful when she threatens to have Crooks lynched. The novella suggests that the most visible kind of strength—that used to oppress others—is itself born of weakness

Steinbeck explores different types of strength and weakness throughout the novella. The first, and most obvious, is physical strength. As the story opens, Steinbeck shows how Lennie possesses physical strength beyond his control, as when he cannot help killing the mice. Great physical strength is, like money, quite valuable to men in George and Lennie’s circumstances. Curley, as a symbol of authority on the ranch and a champion boxer, makes this clear immediately by using his brutish strength and violent temper to intimidate the men and his wife.  Physical strength is not the only force that oppresses the men in the book. It is the rigid, predatory human tendencies, not Curley, that defeat Lennie and George in the end. Lennie’s physical size and strength prove powerless; in the face of these universal laws, he is utterly defenseless and therefore disposable.

Steinbeck’s characters are often powerless, due to intellectual, economic, and social circumstances. Lennie possesses the greatest physical strength of any character, which should therefore establish a sense of respect as he is employed as a ranch hand. However, his intellectual handicap undercuts this and results in his powerlessness. Economic powerlessness is established as many of the ranch hands are victims of the Great Depression. As George, Candy and Crooks are positive, action- oriented characters, they wish to purchase a homestead, but because of the Depression, they are unable to generate enough money. Lennie is the only one who is basically unable to take care of himself, but the other characters would do this in the improved circumstances they seek. Since they can not do so, the real danger of Lennie’s mental handicap comes to the fore.

One of the reasons that the tragic end of George and Lennie’s friendship has such a profound impact is that one senses that the friends have, by the end of the novella, lost a dream larger than themselves. The farm on which George and Lennie plan to live—a place that no one ever reaches—has a magnetic quality, as Crooks points out. After hearing a description of only a few sentences, Candy is completely drawn in by its magic. Crooks has witnessed countless men fall under the same silly spell, and still he cannot help but ask Lennie if he can have a patch of garden to hoe there. The men in Of Mice and Men desire to come together in a way that would allow them to be like brothers to one another. That is, they want to live with one another’s best interests in mind, to protect each other, and to know that there is someone in the world dedicated to protecting them. Given the harsh, lonely conditions under which these men live, it should come as no surprise that they idealize friendships between men in such a way.

Another key element is the companionship between George and Lennie. The two men are not unique for wanting a place and a life of their own, but they are unique in that they have each other. Their companionship contrasts the loneliness that surrounds them-the loneliness of the homeless ranch worker, the loneliness of the outcast black man, the loneliness of the subjected woman, the loneliness of the old, helpless cripple-and it arouses curiosity in the characters that they encounter, Slim included. And indeed, the reader becomes curious as to their friendship as well. And can we call it friendship? Lennie would call George a friend, but George would perhaps be hard-pressed to admit the same of Lennie. As he tells Slim, he has simply become so used to having Lennie around that he “can’t get rid of him” (pg. 45). Despite his annoyance, George also demonstrates protectiveness, patience, and pride when it comes to Lennie. He is perhaps motivated to stay with Lennie by a sense of guilt, or responsibility, or pity, or a desire to not be alone himself. Most likely it is a combination of all of these motivations. Yet it seems strange that George would choose to remain with Lennie, given the danger that Lennie causes for the both of them. George is not blind to the fact that life would be easier without Lennie, and he often yearns for independence when Lennie becomes troublesome, creating a major source of tension in the novel. This tension is not resolved until the final gunshot by the riverside, when the strain of Lennie’s company makes it impossible for George to survive with his companion.

George is often in the habit of playing solitaire, a card game that requires only one person, while he is in the bunk house. He never asks Lennie to play cards with him because he knows that Lennie would be incapable of such a mental task. Solitaire, which means alone, is a metaphor for the loneliness of the characters in the novel, who have no one but themselves. It is also a metaphor for George’s desire to be “solitaire,” to be no longer burdened with Lennie’s company, and his constant playing of the game foreshadows his eventual decision to become a solitary man.

Ultimately, however, the world is too harsh and predatory a place to sustain such relationships. Lennie and George, who come closest to achieving this ideal of brotherhood, are forced to separate tragically. With this, a rare friendship vanishes, but the rest of the world—represented by Curley and Carlson, who watch George stumble away with grief from his friend’s dead body—fails to acknowledge or appreciate it.  The presence of Fate is felt most heavily as the characters’ aspirations are destroyed as George is unable to protect Lennie (who is a real danger). Steinbeck presents this as “something that happened” or as his friend coined for him “non-teleological thinking” or “is thinking”, which postulates a non-judgmental point of view.  By killing Lennie, George eliminates a monumental burden and a threat to his own life (Lennie, of course, never threatened George directly, but his actions endangered the life of George, who took responsibility for him). The tragedy is that George, in effect, is forced to shoot both his companion, who made him different from the other lonely workers, as well as his own dream and admit that it has gone hopelessly awry. His new burden is now hopelessness and loneliness, the life of the homeless ranch worker. Slim’s comfort at the end (“You hadda George” (pg. 118)) indicates the sad truth that one has to surrender one’s dreams in order to survive, not the easiest thing to do in America, the Land of Promise.)  For George, the hope of such companionship dies with Lennie, and true to his original estimation, he will go through life alone.

This is a novel of defeated hope and the harsh reality of the American Dream. Most of the characters in Of Mice and Men admit, at one point or another, to dreaming of a different life. Before her death, Curley’s wife confesses her desire to be a movie star. Crooks, bitter as he is, allows himself the pleasant fantasy of hoeing a patch of garden on Lennie’s farm one day, and Candy latches on desperately to George’s vision of owning a couple of acres. Before the action of the story begins, circumstances have robbed most of the characters of these wishes. Curley’s wife, for instance, has resigned herself to an unfulfilling marriage. What makes all of these dreams typically American is that the dreamers wish for untarnished happiness, for the freedom to follow their own desires. George and Lennie are poor homeless migrant workers, doomed to a life of wandering and toil in which they are never able to reap the fruits of their labor. Their desires may not seem so unfamiliar to any other American: a place of their own, the opportunity to work for themselves and harvest what they sow with no one to take anything from them or give them orders. George and Lennie’s dream of owning a farm, which would enable them to sustain themselves, and, most important, offer them protection from an inhospitable world, represents a prototypically American ideal.  They Lennie desperately cling to the notion that they are different from other workers who drift from ranch to ranch because, unlike the others, they have a future and each other. But characters like Crooks and Curley’s wife serve as reminders that George and Lennie are no different from anyone who wants something of his or her own.  Their journey, which awakens George to the impossibility of this dream, sadly proves that the bitter Crooks is right: such paradises of freedom, contentment, and safety are not to be found in this world.  Just as any other citizen who found themselves in the midst of America’s most trying times, I honestly feel that today’s average citizen can also fully comprehend the ramifications of the impossibility of the great American Dream.

All the characters (all the ones that Steinbeck has developed, at least) wish to change their lives in some fashion, but none are capable of doing so; they all have dreams, and it is only the dream that varies from person to person. George aspires to independence, to be his own boss, to have a homestead, and most importantly to be “somebody”. Lennie aspires to be with George on his independent homestead, and to quench his fixation on soft objects.  Candy aspires to reassert his responsibility lost with the death of his dog, and for security for his old age — on George’s homestead.  Curley’s wife has already had her dream of being an actress pass her by and now must live a life of empty hope of ever obtaining the fame that is forever lost since she married Curley. Crooks’ situation hints at a much deeper oppression than that of the white worker in America-the oppression of the black people. Through Crooks, Steinbeck exposes the bitterness, the anger, and the helplessness of the black American who struggles to be recognized as a human being, let alone have a place of his own. Crooks aspires to a small homestead where he can express self-respect, acceptance, and security.  Crooks’ hopelessness underlies that of George’s and Lennie’s and Candy’s and Curley’s wife’s. But all share the despair of wanting to change the way they live and attain something better. Even Slim, despite his Zen-like wisdom and confidence, has nothing to call his own and will, by every indication, remain a migrant worker until his death. Slim differs from the others in the fact that he does not seem to want something outside of what he has, he is not beaten by a dream, he has not laid any schemes. Slim seems to have somehow reached the sad conclusion indicated by the novel’s title, that to dream leads to despair.

Despite the portrayal of women in Of Mice and Men being limited and unflattering, we can feel a strong presence of what Steinbeck portrays as the “corrupting power of women”. We learn early on that Lennie and George are on the run from the previous ranch where they worked, due to encountering trouble there with a woman. Misunderstanding Lennie’s love of soft things, a woman accused him of rape for touching her dress. George berates Lennie for his behavior, but is convinced that women are always the cause of such trouble. Their enticing sexuality, he believes, tempts men to behave in ways they would otherwise not.

A visit to the “flophouse” (a cheap hotel, or brothel) is enough of women for George, and he has no desire for a female companion or wife. Curley’s wife, the only woman to appear in Of Mice and Men, seems initially to support George’s view of marriage. Dissatisfied with her marriage to a brutish man and bored with life on the ranch, she is constantly looking for excitement or trouble. In one of her more revealing moments, she threatens to have the black stable-hand lynched if he complains about her to the boss. Her insistence on flirting with Lennie seals her unfortunate fate. Although Steinbeck does, finally, offer a sympathetic view of Curley’s wife by allowing her to voice her unhappiness and her own dream for a better life, women have no place in the author’s idealized vision of a world structured around the brotherly bonds of men.

Of Mice and Men was Steinbeck’s first attempt at writing in the form of novel-play termed a “play-novelette” by one critic. Structured in three acts of two chapters each, it is intended to be both a novella and a script for a play. He wanted to write a novel that could be played from its lines, or a play that could be read like a novel.

Steinbeck originally titled it Something That Happened (referring to the events of the book as “something that happened” because nobody can be really blamed for the tragedy that unfolds in the story), however, he changed the title after reading Robert Burns’s poem To a Mouse.  Burns’s poem tells of the regret the narrator feels for having destroyed the home of a mouse while plowing his field.

A fun trivia question:  Steinbeck wrote this book and The Grapes of Wrath in what is now Monte Sereno, California. An early draft of the novel was eaten by Steinbeck’s dog.

Attaining the greatest positive response of any of his works up to that time, Steinbeck’s novella was chosen as a Book of the Month Club selection before it was published. Praise for the work came from many notable critics, including Maxine Garrard (Enquirer-Sun), Christopher Morley, and Harry Thornton Moore (New Republic).  New York Times critic Ralph Thompson described the novel as a “grand little book, for all its ultimate melodrama.”  It also appeared again on the BBC’s Top 100 Books List of 2011.

The novella has been banned from various US public and school libraries or curricula for allegedly “promoting euthanasia”, “condoning racial slurs”, being “anti-business”, containing profanity, and generally containing “vulgar” and “offensive language”.  Many of the bans and restrictions have been lifted and it remains required reading in many other American, Australian, Irish, British, New Zealand and Canadian high schools. As a result of being a frequent target of censors, Of Mice and Men appears on the American Library Association’s list of the Most Challenged Books of 21st Century (number 4).

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. . . .”

A Tale of Two Cities (1859) is a novel by Charles Dickens, set in London and Paris before and during the French Revolution. With well over 200 million copies sold, it ranks among the most famous works in the history of fictional literature.  Even if you have not ventured to read it, more than likely the opening line is familiar to you.

A Tale of Two Cities is one of only two works of historical fiction by Charles Dickens (Barnaby Rudge is the other one). It has fewer characters and sub-plots than a typical Charles Dickens novel. The author’s primary historical source was The French Revolution: A History by Thomas Carlyle: Charles Dickens wrote in his Preface to Tale that “no one can hope to add anything to the philosophy of Mr. Carlyle’s wonderful book”.  While Dickens is renowned for his humor, A Tale of Two Cities is one of his least comical books. Dickens also uses as humor in the book to show different points of view. The book is full of tragic situations, leaving little room for intended humor provided by Dickens.

The novel depicts the plight of the French peasantry demoralized by the French aristocracy in the years leading up to the revolution, the corresponding brutality demonstrated by the revolutionaries toward the former aristocrats in the early years of the revolution, and many unflattering social parallels with life in London during the same time period. It follows the lives of several protagonists through these events. The most notable are Charles Darnay and Sydney Carton. Darnay is a French once-aristocrat who falls victim to the indiscriminate wrath of the revolution despite his virtuous nature, and Carton is a dissipated British barrister who endeavors to redeem his ill-spent life out of his unrequited love for Darnay’s wife, Lucie Manette.

The 45-chapter novel was published in 31 weekly installments in Dickens’ new literary periodical titled All the Year Round. From April 1859 to November 1859, Dickens also republished the chapters as eight monthly sections in green covers. Dickens’ previous novels had appeared only as monthly installments. The first weekly installment of A Tale of Two Cities ran in the first issue of All the Year Round on 30 April 1859. The last ran thirty weeks later, on 26 November.

Dickens uses literal translations of French idioms for characters who can’t speak English, such as “What the devil do you do in that galley there?!!” and “Where is my husband? —Here you see me.” Again, Dickens animatedly adds the flavor of the various dialects to this text, but what was disturbing most to me was the multitude of typographical errors present in the text.  Whether it be from the literal French translations, the dialects, or the typos, Penguin Classics edition of the novel notes that “Not all readers have regarded the experiment as a success.”

With A Tale of Two Cities, Dickens asserts his belief in the possibility of resurrection and transformation, both on a personal level and on a societal level.  In Dickens’ England, resurrection always sat firmly in a Christian context. Most broadly, Sydney Carton is resurrected in spirit at the novel’s close (even as he, paradoxically, gives up his physical life to save Darnay’s—just as in Christian belief, Christ died for the sins of the world.) More concretely, “The First Book ” deals with the rebirth of Dr. Manette from the living death of his incarceration.

Resurrection appears for the first time when Mr. Lorry replies to the message carried by Jerry Cruncher with the words “Recalled to Life”. Resurrection also appears during Mr. Lorry’s coach ride to Dover, as he constantly ponders a hypothetical conversation with Dr. Manette: (“Buried how long?” “Almost eighteen years.” … “You know that you are recalled to life?” “They tell me so.”).  He believes he is helping with Dr. Manette’s revival and imagines himself “digging” up Dr. Manette from his grave.   As this statement implies, the doctor’s eighteen-year imprisonment has constituted a death of sorts. Lucie’s love enables Manette’s spiritual renewal, and her maternal cradling of him on her breast reinforces this notion of rebirth.

Resurrection is the main overriding theme in this novel, and manifests both literally and figuratively. In Jarvis Lorry’s thoughts of Dr. Manette, resurrection is first spotted as a theme. It is also the last theme: Carton’s sacrifice. Dickens originally wanted to call the entire novel Recalled to Life. (This instead became the title of the first of the novel’s three “books”.)  Book I became titled “Recalled to Life” and embodies the rediscover of Doctor Manette, who has been jailed in the Bastille for eighteen years.  Code for the secret mission to rescue him from Paris, is the simple phrase “recalled to life,” which starts Mr. Lorry thinking about the fact that the prisoner has been out of society long enough to have been considered dead.

Jerry is also part of the recurring theme: he himself is involved in death and resurrection in ways the reader does not yet know. The first piece of foreshadowing comes in his remark to himself: “You’d be in a blazing bad way, if recalling to life was to come into fashion, Jerry!” The black humor of this statement becomes obvious only much later on. Five years later, one cloudy and very dark night (in June 1780), Mr. Lorry reawakens the reader’s interest in the mystery by telling Jerry it is “Almost a night … to bring the dead out of their graves”. Jerry responds firmly that he has never seen the night do that.  It turns out that Jerry Cruncher’s involvement with the theme of resurrection is that he is what the Victorians called a “Resurrection Man”, one who (illegally) digs up dead bodies to sell to medical men (there was no legal way to procure cadavers for study at that time).  Although his trade of digging up dead bodies and selling their parts seems gruesome, it provides him with the crucial knowledge that a spy named Roger Cly has been literally resurrected—in that he was never buried at all.

Connected to the theme of the possibility of resurrection is the notion that sacrifice is necessary to achieve happiness. Dickens examines this second theme, again, on both a national and personal level. For example, the revolutionaries prove that a new, egalitarian French republic can come about only with a heavy and terrible cost—personal loves and loyalties must be sacrificed for the good of the nation. Also, when Darnay is arrested for the second time, in the Third Book, Chapter 7, the guard who seizes him reminds Manette of the primacy of state interests over personal loyalties. Moreover, Madame Defarge gives her husband a similar lesson when she chastises him for his devotion to Manette—an emotion that, in her opinion, only clouds his obligation to the revolutionary cause. Most important, Carton’s transformation into a man of moral worth depends upon his sacrificing of his former self. In choosing to die for his friends, Carton not only enables their happiness but also ensures his spiritual rebirth.

The opposite of resurrection is of course death. Death and resurrection appear often in the novel. Dickens is angered that in France and England, courts hand out death sentences for insignificant crimes. In France, peasants are even put to death without any trial, at the whim of a noble. The Marquis tells Darnay with pleasure that “[I]n the next room (my bedroom), one fellow … was poniarded on the spot for professing some insolent delicacy respecting his daughter—his daughter!”  Interestingly, the demolition of Dr. Manette’s shoe-making workbench by Miss Pross and Mr. Lorry is described as “the burning of the body”.  It seems clear that this is a rare case where death or destruction (the opposite of resurrection) has a positive connotation, since the “burning” helps liberate the doctor from the memory of his long imprisonment. But Dickens’ description of this kind and healing act is strikingly odd:

“So wicked do destruction and secrecy appear to honest minds, that Mr. Lorry and Miss Pross, while engaged in the commission of their deed and in the removal of its traces, almost felt, and almost looked, like accomplices in a horrible crime.”

Sydney Carton’s martyrdom atones for all his past wrongdoings. He even finds God during the last few days of his life, repeating Christ’s soothing words, “I am the resurrection and the life”.  The most important “resurrections” in this novel are those of Charles Darnay.  Carton’s resemblance to him saves him from being convicted and executed in England, and then, the same resemblance allows the latter to switch places with him in the Conciergerie.  Darnay is rescued at the last moment and recalled to life; Carton chooses death and resurrection to a life better than that which he has ever known: “it was the peacefullest man’s face ever beheld there … he looked sublime and prophetic“.  These resurrections are surrounded with heavily religious language that compares Carton’s sacrifice of his own life for others’ sins to Christ’s sacrifice on the cross.  The narrative suggests that Sydney Carton’s death secures a new, peaceful life for Lucie Manette, Charles Darnay, and even Carton himself. By delivering himself to the guillotine, Carton ascends to the plane of heroism, becoming a Christ-like figure whose death serves to save the lives of others. His own life thus gains meaning and value. Moreover, the final pages of the novel suggest that, like Christ, Carton will be resurrected—Carton is reborn in the hearts of those he has died to save. Similarly, the text implies that the death of the old regime in France prepares the way for the beautiful and renewed Paris that Carton supposedly envisions from the guillotine. Although Carton spends most of the novel in a life of indolence and apathy, the supreme selflessness of his final act speaks to a human capacity for change. Although the novel dedicates much time to describing the atrocities committed both by the aristocracy and by the outraged peasants, it ultimately expresses the belief that this violence will give way to a new and better society.  In the broadest sense, at the end of the novel Dickens ultimately foresees a resurrected social order in France, rising from the ashes of the old one.

Hans Biedermann writes that water “is the fundamental symbol of all the energy of the unconscious—an energy that can be dangerous when it overflows its proper limits (a frequent dream sequence).”  This symbolism suits Dickens’ novel; in A Tale of Two Cities, the frequent images of water stand for the building anger of the peasant mob, an anger that Dickens sympathizes with to a point, but ultimately finds irrational and even animalistic.  Early in the book, Dickens suggests this when he writes, “[T]he sea did what it liked, and what it liked was destruction.”  The sea here represents the coming mob of revolutionaries. After Gaspard murders the Marquis, he is “hanged there forty feet high—and is left hanging, poisoning the water.”  The poisoning of the well represents the bitter impact of Gaspard’s execution on the collective feeling of the peasants.

After Gaspard’s death, the storming of the Bastille is led (from the St. Antoine neighborhood, at least) by the Defarges; “As a whirlpool of boiling waters has a centre point, so, all this raging circled around Defarge’s wine shop, and every human drop in the cauldron had a tendency to be sucked towards the vortex…”  The crowd is envisioned as a sea. “With a roar that sounded as if all the breath in France had been shaped into a detested word [the word Bastille], the living sea rose, wave upon wave, depth upon depth, and overflowed the city…”

Darnay’s jailer is described as “unwholesomely bloated in both face and person, as to look like a man who had been drowned and filled with water.” Later, during the Reign of Terror, the revolution had grown “so much more wicked and distracted … that the rivers of the South were encumbered with bodies of the violently drowned by night…” Later a crowd is “swelling and overflowing out into the adjacent streets … the Carmagnole absorbed them every one and whirled them away.”

During the fight with Miss Pross, Madame Defarge clings to her with “more than the hold of a drowning woman”. Commentators on the novel have noted the irony that Madame Defarge is killed by her own gun, and perhaps Dickens means by the above quote to suggest that such vicious vengefulness as Madame Defarge’s will eventually destroy even its perpetrators.

So many read the novel in a Freudian light, as exalting the (British) superego over the (French) id. Yet in Carton’s last walk, he watches an eddy that “turned and turned purposeless, until the stream absorbed it, and carried it onto the sea“—his fulfillment, while masochistic and superego-driven, is nonetheless an ecstatic union with the subconscious.

As is common in English literature, good and evil are symbolized with light and darkness. Lucie Manette is the light and Madame Defarge is darkness. Darkness represents uncertainty, fear and peril. It is dark when Mr. Lorry rides to Dover; it is dark in the prisons; dark shadows follow Madame Defarge; dark, gloomy doldrums disturb Dr. Manette; his capture and captivity are shrouded in darkness; the Marquis’s estate is burned in the dark of night; Jerry Cruncher raids graves in the darkness; Charles’s second arrest also occurs at night. Both Lucie and Mr. Lorry feel the dark threat that is Madame Defarge. “That dreadful woman seems to throw a shadow on me,” remarks Lucie. Although Mr. Lorry tries to comfort her, “the shadow of the manner of these Defarges was dark upon himself“. Madame Defarge is “like a shadow over the white road“, the snow symbolizing purity and Madame Defarge’s darkness corruption. Dickens also compares the dark color of blood to the pure white snow: ”The blood takes on the shade of the crimes of its shedders”.

Throughout the novel, Dickens approaches his historical subject with some ambivalence. While he supports the revolutionary cause, he often points to the evil of the revolutionaries themselves.  Charles Dickens was a champion of the maltreated poor because of his terrible experience when he was forced to work in a factory as a child.  His sympathies, however, lie only up to a point with the revolutionaries; he condemns the mob madness which soon sets in. When madmen and -women massacre eleven hundred detainees in one night and hustle back to sharpen their weapons on the grindstone, they display “eyes which any unbrutalized beholder would have given twenty years of life, to petrify with a well-directed gun“.  Dickens deeply sympathizes with the plight of the French peasantry and emphasizes their need for liberation. The several chapters that deal with the Marquis Evrémonde successfully paint a picture of a vicious aristocracy that shamelessly exploits and oppresses the nation’s poor. Although Dickens condemns this oppression, however, he also condemns the peasants’ strategies in overcoming it. For in fighting cruelty with cruelty, the peasants effect no true revolution; rather, they only perpetuate the violence that they themselves have suffered. Dickens makes his stance clear in his suspicious and cautionary depictions of the mobs. The scenes in which the people sharpen their weapons at the grindstone and dance the grisly Carmagnole come across as deeply macabre. Dickens’s most concise and relevant view of revolution comes in the final chapter, in which he notes the slippery slope down from the oppressed to the oppressor: “Sow the same seed of rapacious license and oppression over again, and it will surely yield the same fruit according to its kind.” Though Dickens sees the French Revolution as a great symbol of transformation and resurrection, he emphasizes that its violent means were ultimately antithetical to its end.

The reader is shown the poor are brutalized in France and England alike. As crime proliferates, the executioner in England is “stringing up long rows of miscellaneous criminals; now hanging housebreaker … now burning people in the hand” or hanging a broke man for stealing sixpence. In France, a boy is sentenced to have his hands removed and be burned alive, only because he did not kneel down in the rain before a parade of monks passing some fifty yards away. At the lavish residence of Monseigneur, we find “brazen ecclesiastics of the worst world worldly, with sensual eyes, loose tongues, and looser lives … Military officers destitute of military knowledge … [and] Doctors who made great fortunes … for imaginary disorders“.  (This incident is fictional, but is based on a true story related by Voltaire in a famous pamphlet, An Account of the Death of the Chevalier de la Barre.)

The Marquis recalls with pleasure the days when his family had the right of life and death over their slaves, “when many such dogs were taken out to be hanged“. He won’t even allow a widow to put up a board bearing her dead husband’s name, to discern his resting place from all the others. He orders Madame Defarge’s sick brother-in-law to heave a cart all day and allay frogs at night to exacerbate the young man’s illness and hasten his death. 

In England, even banks endorse unbalanced sentences: a man may be condemned to death for nicking a horse or opening a letter. Conditions in the prisons are dreadful. “Most kinds of debauchery and villainy were practiced, and … dire diseases were bred“, and sometimes killing the judge before the accused.  So riled is Dickens at the brutality of English law that he depicts some of its punishments with sarcasm: “the whipping-post, another dear old institution, very humanizing and softening to behold in action“. He faults the law for not seeking reform: “Whatever is, is right” is the dictum of the Old Bailey.  The gruesome portrayal of quartering highlights its atrocity.

Without entirely forgiving him, Dickens understands that Jerry Cruncher robs graves only to feed his son, and reminds the reader that Mr. Lorry is more likely to rebuke Jerry for his humble social status than anything else. Jerry reminds Mr. Lorry that doctors, men of the cloth, undertakers and watchmen are also conspirators in the selling of bodies.

Dickens wants his readers to be careful that the same revolution that so damaged France will not happen in Britain, which (at least at the beginning of the book) is shown to be nearly as unjust as France. But his warning is addressed not to the British lower classes, but to the aristocracy. He repeatedly uses the metaphor of sowing and reaping; if the aristocracy continues to plant the seeds of a revolution through behaving unjustly, they can be certain of harvesting that revolution in time. The lower classes do not have any agency in this metaphor: they simply react to the behavior of the aristocracy. In this sense it can be said that while Dickens sympathizes with the poor, he identifies with the rich: they are the book’s audience, its “us” and not its “them”. “Crush humanity out of shape once more, under similar hammers, and it will twist itself into the same tortured forms. Sow the same seed of rapacious license and oppression over again, and it will surely yield the same fruit according to its kind“.

With the people starving and begging the Marquis for food; his uncharitable response is to let the people eat grass; the people are left with nothing but onions to eat and are forced to starve while the nobles are living lavishly upon the people’s backs. Every time the nobles refer to the life of the peasants it is only to destroy or humiliate the poor.

Class struggle is a theme inevitable in a novel concerning the French Revolution. Dickens chooses a side, ultimately showing opposition to the Revolution due to the ruthless and uncontrolled force of its aroused mobs. Even so, the story of the Marquis’s rape of the peasant along, with other details of aristocratic mistreatment of the lower classes, provide some justification for the goals of the French mob. In the end, he portrays the mob as having moved beyond the pale to a degree beyond what happened in England; the French mob acts with such force that it resembles a natural element like fire or water.

This historical novel carefully marks the passage of time, and the introductory sentences of chapters often contain specific references to years or months. Keeping track of time is important because time carries out fate, which is an extremely important presence.  From the first chapter, which describes trees waiting to be formed into guillotines in France, Dickens describes the revolution as something inevitable. Individual characters also feel the pull of fate. For example, Darnay feels himself drawn back to France as if under the influence of a magnet. Lucie’s presentiment that the noise of feet echoing in her home portends some future intrusion correctly predicts what is bound to happen–Darnay’s past does catch up with him, and he must pay for the wrongs of his ancestors. Fate operates ominously rather than optimistically among the characters in the novel, especially given Madame Defarge’s representation as one of the mythical Fates connecting the future to darkness.

From the very title of A Tale of Two Cities, Dickens signals that this is a novel about duality. The novel’s opening words (“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. . . .”) immediately establish the centrality of doubles to the narrative.  Everything from the settings (London, Paris), to the people, come in pairs. The pairs are occasionally related together. Dickens positions various characters as doubles as well, thus heightening the various themes within the novel.  A crucial incidence of related doubling involves the resemblance between Charles Darnay and Sydney Carton, a similarity that drives the plot. Dickens’s doubling technique functions not only to draw oppositions, but to reveal hidden parallels. Carton, for example, initially seems a foil to Darnay; Darnay as a figure reminds him of what he could have been but has failed to become. By the end of the novel, however, Carton transforms himself from a good-for-nothing to a hero whose goodness equals or even surpasses that of the honorable Darnay. While the two men’s physical resemblance initially serves only to underscore Carton’s moral inferiority to Darnay, it ultimately enables Carton’s supremely self-elevating deed, allowing him to disguise himself as the condemned Darnay and die in his place. As Carton goes to the guillotine in his double’s stead, he raises himself up to, or above, Darnay’s virtuous status.  The pairs are more often oppositional, just as in the dichotomous opening: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.” For example, the loving and nurturing Lucie’s physical and moral brightness is played off against the bloodthirsty Madame Defarge’s darkness and hate.  Dickens then uses this opposition to make judgments and thematic assertions. Thus, for example, while Lucie’s love initiates her father’s spiritual transformation and renewal, proving the possibility of resurrection, Madame Defarge’s vengefulness only propagates an infinite cycle of oppression, showing violence to be self-perpetuating.

The theme of reversals is played out in Dickens’ novel.  The two main ways we can see this is through the role reversals of society and of good and evil.  One of the primary effects of the upheaval caused by the French Revolution was due to its literally revolutionary influence; it turned society upside down and banged it on its head. When Darnay returns to France, he observes that the noblemen are in prison, while criminals are their jailors. The replacement of Darnay with Carton at the end of the novel is another reversal, illustrating that a bad man can replace a good man in such a revolutionary society.

The novel focuses attention on the preservation of family groups. The first manifestation of this theme occurs in Lucie’s trip to meet her father in Paris. Although she worries that he will seem like a ghost rather than her father, the possibility of a reunion is enough to make her undertake the long trip. After Lucie marries Charles Darnay, the novel tends to be concerned with their struggle to keep their family together. When Darnay laments his own death sentence, it is for the sake of his family, not for his own sake. The final triumph is the sacrifice of Carton, a man who is unattached to any sort of family, who thus preserves the group consisting of the Doctor, Lucie, her husband, and her children.

The theme of social injustice is intertwined with the theme of class struggle, because those who feel the negative effects of injustice begin to struggle against it. Dickens maintains a complex perspective on the French Revolution because although he did not particularly sympathize with the gruesome and often irrational results, he certainly sympathized with the unrest of the lower orders of society. Dickens vividly paints the aristocratic maltreatment of the lower classes, such as when Monseigneur only briefly stops to toss a coin toward the father of a child whom he has just run over. Because the situation in France was so dire, Dickens portrays the plight of the working class in England as rather difficult, though slightly less difficult than in other works such as Hard Times or Oliver Twist, which also emphasize social injustice.

Shadows dominate the novel, creating a mood of thick obscurity and grave foreboding. An aura of gloom and apprehension surrounds the first images of the actual story—the mail coach’s journey in the dark and Jerry Cruncher’s emergence from the mist. The introduction of Lucie Manette to Jarvis Lorry furthers this motif, as Lucie stands in a room so darkened and awash with shadows that the candlelight seems buried in the dark panels of the walls. This atmosphere contributes to the mystery surrounding Lorry’s mission to Paris and Manette’s imprisonment. It also manifests Dickens’s observations about the shadowy depths of the human heart. As illustrated in the chapter with the appropriate subheading “The Night Shadows,” every living person carries profound secrets and mysteries that will never see the light of day. Shadows continue to fall across the entire novel. The vengeful Madame Defarge casts a shadow on Lucie and all of her hopes, as emphasized in Book III, Chapter 5. As Lucie stands in the pure, fresh snow, Madame Defarge passes by “like a shadow over the white road.” In addition, the letter that Defarge uses to condemn Darnay to death throws a crippling shadow over the entire family; fittingly, the chapter that reveals the letter’s contents bears the subheading “The Substance of the Shadow.”

Imprisonment wasn’t always physical.  Some of it was mental, emotional, in the metaphorical sense.  Almost all of the characters in A Tale of Two Cities fight against some form of imprisonment. For Darnay and Manette, this struggle is quite literal. Both serve significant sentences in French jails. Still, as the novel demonstrates, the memories of what one has experienced prove no less confining than the walls of prison. Manette, for example, finds himself trapped, at times, by the recollection of life in the Bastille and can do nothing but revert, trembling, to his pathetic shoemaking compulsion. Similarly, Carton spends much of the novel struggling against the confines of his own personality, dissatisfied with a life that he regards as worthless.

Dickens was a master at symbolism.  With his depiction of a broken wine cask outside Defarge’s wine shop, and with his portrayal of the passing peasants’ scrambles to lap up the spilling wine, Dickens creates a symbol for the desperate quality of the people’s hunger. This hunger is both the literal hunger for food—the French peasants were starving in their poverty—and the metaphorical hunger for political freedoms. On the surface, the scene shows the peasants in their desperation to satiate the first of these hungers. But it also evokes the violent measures that the peasants take in striving to satisfy their more metaphorical cravings. For instance, the narrative directly associates the wine with blood, noting that some of the peasants have acquired “a tigerish smear about the mouth” and portraying a drunken figure scrawling the word “blood” on the wall with a wine-dipped finger. Indeed, the blood of aristocrats later spills at the hands of a mob in these same streets.

Throughout the novel, Dickens sharply criticizes this mob mentality, which he condemns for perpetrating the very cruelty and oppression from which the revolutionaries hope to free themselves. The scene surrounding the wine cask is the novel’s first tableau of the mob in action. The mindless frenzy with which these peasants scoop up the fallen liquid prefigures the scene at the grindstone, where the revolutionaries sharpen their weapons (Book III, Chapter 2), as well as the dancing of the macabre Carmagnole (Book III, Chapter 5).

The consistent mentioning of Madame Defarge’s knitting always got me.  Madame Defarge’s knitting constitutes a whole network of symbols. Into her needlework she stitches a registry, or list of names, of all those condemned to die in the name of a new republic. But on a metaphoric level, the knitting constitutes a symbol in itself, representing the stealthy, cold-blooded vengefulness of the revolutionaries. As Madame Defarge sits quietly knitting, she appears harmless and quaint. In fact, however, she sentences her victims to death. Similarly, the French peasants may appear simple and humble figures, but they eventually rise up to massacre their oppressors.

Dickens’s knitting imagery also emphasizes an association between vengefulness and fate, which, in Greek mythology, is traditionally linked to knitting or weaving. The Fates, three sisters who control human life, busy themselves with the tasks of weavers or seamstresses: one sister spins the web of life, another measures it, and the last cuts it. Madame Defarge’s knitting thus becomes a symbol of her victims’ fate—death at the hands of a wrathful peasantry.

The Marquis Evrémonde is less a believable character than an archetype of an evil and corrupt social order. He is completely indifferent to the lives of the peasants whom he exploits, as evidenced by his lack of sympathy for the father of the child whom his carriage tramples to death. As such, the Marquis stands as a symbol of the ruthless aristocratic cruelty that the French Revolution seeks to overcome.

Some have argued that in A Tale of Two Cities Dickens reflects on his recently begun affair with eighteen-year-old actress Ellen Ternan, which was possibly asexual but certainly romantic. Lucie Manette resembles Ternan physically, and some have seen “a sort of implied emotional incest” in the relationship between Dr. Manette and his daughter.

After starring in a play by Wilkie Collins entitled The Frozen Deep, Dickens was first inspired to write A Tale of Two Cities. In the play, Dickens played the part of a man who sacrifices his own life so that his rival may have the woman they both love; the love triangle in the play became the basis for the relationships between Charles Darnay, Lucie Manette, and Sydney Carton in Tale.

Sydney Carton and Charles Darnay may also bear importantly on Dickens’ personal life. The plot hinges on the near-perfect resemblance between Sydney Carton and Charles Darnay; the two look so alike that Carton twice saves Darnay through the inability of others to tell them apart. It is implied that Carton and Darnay not only look alike, but they have the same “genetic” endowments (to use a term that Dickens would not have known): Carton is Darnay made bad. Carton suggests as much:

‘Do you particularly like the man [Darnay]?’ he muttered, at his own image [which he is regarding in a mirror]; ‘why should you particularly like a man who resembles you? There is nothing in you to like; you know that. Ah, confound you! What a change you have made in yourself! A good reason for talking to a man, that he shows you what you have fallen away from and what you might have been! Change places with him, and would you have been looked at by those blue eyes [belonging to Lucie Manette] as he was, and commiserated by that agitated face as he was? Come on, and have it out in plain words! You hate the fellow.’

Many have felt that Carton and Darnay are doppelgängers, which Eric Rabkin defines as a pair “of characters that together, represent one psychological persona in the narrative”.  If so, they would prefigure such works as Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Darnay is worthy and respectable but dull (at least to most modern readers), Carton disreputable but magnetic.

One can only suspect whose psychological persona it is that Carton and Darnay together embody (if they do), but it is often thought to be the psyche of Dickens himself. Dickens was quite aware that between them, Carton and Darnay shared his own initials.

The book was written and published in early Victorian-era Britain when it was experiencing a nostalgic interest in its forgotten Christmas traditions, and at the time when new customs such as the Christmas tree and greeting cards were being introduced. Dickens’ sources for the tale appear to be many and varied but are principally the humiliating experiences of his childhood, his sympathy for the poor, and various Christmas stories and fairy tales.

The tale has been viewed as an indictment of nineteenth century industrial capitalism and was adapted several times to the stage, and has been credited with restoring the holiday to one of merriment and festivity in Britain and America after a period of sobriety and somberness.  Illustrated by John Leech, A Christmas Carol remains popular, has never been out of print, and has been adapted to film, opera, and other media.

In the middle 19th century, a nostalgic interest in pre-Cromwell Christmas traditions swept Victorian England following the publications of Davies Gilbert’s Some Ancient Christmas Carols (1822), William B. Sandys’s Selection of Christmas Carols, Ancient and Modern (1833), and Thomas K. Hervey’s The Book of Christmas (1837). That interest was further stimulated by Prince Albert, Queen Victoria’s German-born husband. Prince Albert’s introduction of the Christmas tree in 1841, the first Christmas card in 1843, and a revival in carol singing.  Hervey’s study on Christmas customs attributed their passing to social change and the urbanization of England.

Dickens’ Carol was one of the greatest influences in rejuvenating the old Christmas traditions of England, but, while it brings to the reader images of light, joy, warmth and life, it also brings strong and unforgettable images of darkness, despair, coldness, sadness and death.  Scrooge himself is the embodiment of winter, and, just as winter is followed by spring and the renewal of life, so too is Scrooge’s cold, pinched heart restored to the innocent goodwill he had known in his childhood and youth.

Dickens was not the first author to celebrate the Christmas season in literature, but it was he who superimposed his secular vision of the holiday upon the public.  The forces that impelled Dickens to create a powerful, impressive, and enduring tale were the profoundly humiliating experiences of his childhood, the plight of the poor and their children during the boom decades of the 1830s and 1840s, Washington Irving’s stories of the traditional old English Christmas, fairy tales and nursery stories, as well as satirical essays and religious tracts. 

While Dickens’ humiliating childhood experiences are not directly described in A Christmas Carol, his conflicting feelings for his father as a result of those experiences are principally responsible for the dual personality of the tale’s protagonist, Ebenezer Scrooge. In 1824, Dickens’ father was imprisoned in the Marshalsea and twelve-year-old Charles was forced to take lodgings nearby, pawn his collection of books, leave school, and accept employment in a blacking factory. The boy had a deep sense of class and intellectual superiority and was entirely uncomfortable in the presence of factory workers who referred to him as “the young gentleman”. He developed nervous fits. When his father was released at the end of a three-month stint, young Dickens was forced to continue working in the factory, which only grieved and humiliated him further. He despaired of ever recovering his former happy life. The devastating impact of the period wounded him psychologically, colored his work, and haunted his entire life with disturbing memories. Dickens both loved and demonized his father, and it was this psychological conflict that was responsible for the two radically different Scrooges in the tale – one Scrooge, a cold, stingy, and greedy semi-recluse, and the other Scrooge, a benevolent, sociable man whose generosity and goodwill toward all men earn for him a near-saintly reputation.  It was during this terrible period in Dickens’ childhood that he observed the lives of the men, women, and children in the most impoverished areas of London and witnessed the social injustices they suffered.

Dickens was keenly touched by the lot of poor children in the middle decades of the 19th century. In early 1843, he toured the Cornish tin mines where he saw children working in appalling conditions. The suffering he witnessed there was reinforced by a visit to the Field Lane Ragged School, one of several London schools set up for the education of the capital’s half-starved, illiterate street children.  Inspired by the February 1843 parliamentary report exposing the effects of the Industrial Revolution upon poor children called Second Report of the Children’s Employment Commission, Dickens planned in May 1843 to publish an inexpensive political pamphlet tentatively titled, “An Appeal to the People of England, on behalf of the Poor Man’s Child” but changed his mind, deferring the pamphlet’s production until the end of the year.  He wrote to Dr. Southwood Smith, one of eighty-four commissioners responsible for the Second Report, about his change in plans: “[Y]ou will certainly feel that a Sledge hammer has come down with twenty times the force – twenty thousand times the force – I could exert by following out my first idea.” The pamphlet would become A Christmas Carol.

Social Commentary–particularly those statements directed at the Poor Laws governing the lower classes during Dickens’ time–plays an important but not a central role in A Christmas Carol. Dickens often uses Scrooge as a mouthpiece to express the more callous justifications and excuses used to defend the harsh treatment of the poor. Malthus’ theory that anyone who could not support himself did not have a right to live is a good example of these outrageous claims. Asked whether he wishes to support a charity, Scrooge replies that he does support charities–prisons and workhouses, which are all the charity the poor need. Dickens harshly criticizes these attitudes and presents a highly sympathetic view of the poor through his depiction of the Cratchits. On the whole, however, the numerous messages of A Christmas Carol expand far beyond this narrow political critique of Victorian society.  Dickens blames the huge class stratification of Victorian England on the selfishness of the rich and, implicitly, on the Poor Laws that keep down the underclass. Scrooge is the obvious symbol of the greedy Victorian rich, while the Cratchits represent the working poor. But Dickens goes beyond sentimental portraits and reveals the underbelly of the city, notably in Stave Four. Even in the scene of the thieving workers divvying up the dead Scrooge’s possessions, the accountability for their actions is put on Scrooge‹had he not been such a miser, they would not have resorted to stealing from him. When the children of Ignorance and Want crawl out from under the robes of the Ghost of Christmas Present, the ghost sends a message to Scrooge, and the same is given to the Victorian reader: to help out those in Want, and beware of Ignorance in oneself and others.

Other likely influences were a visit made by Dickens to the Western Penitentiary in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania from March 20-22, 1842; the decade-long fascination on both sides of the Atlantic with spiritualism; fairy tales and nursery stories (which Dickens regarded as stories of conversion and transformation); contemporary religious tracts about conversion; and the works of Douglas Jerrold in general, but especially “The Beauties of the Police” (1843), a satirical and melodramatic essay about a father and his child forcibly separated in a workhouse, and another satirical essay by Jerrold which may have had a direct influence on Dickens’ conception of Scrooge called “How Mr. Chokepear keeps a merry Christmas” (Punch, 1841).

A Christmas Carol is a fairly straightforward allegory built on an episodic narrative structure in which each of the main passages has a fixed, obvious symbolic meaning. The book is divided into five sections (Dickens labels them Staves in reference to the musical notation staff–a Christmas carol, after all, is a song), with each of the middle three Staves revolving around a visitation by one of the three famous spirits. The three spirit-guides, along with each of their tales, carry out a thematic function–the Ghost of Christmas Past, with his glowing head, represents memory; the Ghost of Christmas Present represents charity, empathy, and the Christmas spirit; and the reaper-like Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come represents the fear of death. Scrooge, with his Bah! Humbug! attitude, embodies all that dampens Christmas spirit–greed, selfishness, indifference, and a lack of consideration for one’s fellow man.

With A Christmas Carol, Dickens hopes to illustrate how self-serving, insensitive people can be converted into charitable, caring, and socially conscious members of society through the intercession of moralizing quasi-religious lessons. Warmth, generosity, and overall goodwill, overcome Scrooge’s bitter apathy as he encounters and learns from his memory, the ability to empathize, and his fear of death. Memory serves to remind Scrooge of a time when he still felt emotionally connected to other people, before he closed himself off in an austere state of alienation. Empathy enables Scrooge to sympathize with and understand those less fortunate than himself, people like Tiny Tim and Bob Cratchit. The fear of death hints at imminent moral reckoning–the promise of punishment and reward.

With each Ghost’s tale functioning as a parable, A Christmas Carol advances the Christian moral ideals associated with Christmas–generosity, kindness, and universal love for your community–and of Victorian England in general. But is it fair to limit the view to Christianity, as if Christians are the only ones who can have moral ideas associated with this time of year?  I think not.  The book also offers a distinctly modern view of Christmas, less concerned with solemn religious ceremony and defined by more joyous traditions–the sharing of gifts, festive celebrations, displays of prosperity. The book also contains a political edge, most evident in Dickens’ development of the bustling, struggling Cratchit family, who are a compelling, if one-dimensional, representation of the plight of the poor. Dickens, with every intention of tugging on your heartstrings, paints the Cratchits as a destitute family that finds a way to express profound gratitude for its emotional riches. Dickens carries this sentiment even further with the tragic figure of the pure-hearted, crippled Cratchit son, Tiny Tim. Scrooge’s emotive connection to Tiny Tim dramatically underscores his revelatory acceptance of the Christmas ideal. Scrooge begins to break through his emotional barricade in Stave Three as he expresses pity for Tiny Tim. The reader, upon hearing the usually uncaring miser inquire into Tim’s fate, begins to believe Scrooge has a chance at salvation. Scrooge’s path to redemption culminates with his figurative “adoption” of Tiny Tim, acting as “a second father” to the little boy.

A Christmas Carol is an allegory in that it features events and characters with a clear, fixed symbolic meaning. In the novella, Scrooge represents all the values that are opposed to the idea of Christmas–greed, selfishness, and a lack of goodwill toward one’s fellow man. The Ghost of Christmas Past, with his glowing head symbolizing the mind, represents memory; the Ghost of Christmas Present represents generosity, empathy, and the Christmas spirit; and the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come represents the fear of death and moral reckoning. The Cratchits represent the poor, whom Dickens portrays with warmth and sympathy while seeking to draw attention to their plight.

Time is very important in A Christmas Carol, which is structurally centered around distinct elements of Past, Present, and Future. But, the time scheme of the story itself seems to make little sense. On Christmas Eve, Jacob Marley’s ghost tells Scrooge that he will be visited by three ghosts on three successive nights. On Christmas morning, Scrooge awakes, having already been visited by all three ghosts. The three nights seem to be compressed into a single night. The presence of the spirits apparently bends the normal flow of time. A view further supported b y the fact that Scrooge goes to bed at two o’clock in the morning after Marley’s visitation and awakes at midnight the same night–two hours after he fell asleep. Dickens uses the tem poral inconsistencies to emphasize the supernatural powers of the spirits–when they are around, normal earthly standards, including the flow of time, have no effect.

A Christmas Carol is foremost an allegory of redemption (while many texts say it is specifically a “Christian” allegory, I beg to differ) about, as Fred says, the “kind, forgiving, charitable, pleasant time” of Christmas. Scrooge is a skinflint businessman who represents the greediest impulses of Victorian England’s rich. He subscribes to the guidelines of the Poor Laws, which oppress the underclass, and has no warmth in his spirit for anything but money. Cratchit is the underclass’s representative, a humble, powerless man who has no choice but to kowtow to his employer’s demands.  But above all, A Christmas Carol is a celebration of Christmas and the good it inspires. At Christmas time, people forget their petty quotidian disputes, selfish tendencies, and workaholic schedules in favor of friendship, charity, and celebration. Several representatives of these virtues stand out in Dickens’s cast. Fred is a model of good cheer, while Fezziwig adds to this the dimensions of being a tremendous friend and generous employer. Tiny Tim’s courage and selflessness in the face of his ill health are also noteworthy, as is the loving nature of the entire Cratchit family. Scrooge learns the lessons of the Christmas spirit through his visions of Christmases past, present, and future; in each he sees either the ill effects his miserly nature has wrought or the good tidings that others bring about through their love and kindness.

Yet underneath the simple Christian allegory, Dickens investigates the complicated nature of time in a capitalist system. The references to signifiers of time are numerous in the chapter; the bells ring to herald Marley’s arrival, and even the repetitive discussion of Marley’s death at the beginning emphasizes the present tense in which Scrooge is stuck.

Why the present tense? Capitalism functions in the now. Always aware of the clock, of how much time has passed and how much is left, capitalism is foremost concerned with what can be done at the present to accumulate money. Scrooge believes Christmas time is simply “capitalist time,” to coin a phrase, whereas Fred believes it constitutes a departure from capitalist time.

Scrooge’s temporal problem, then, is his inability to hold a more humane version of the present tense. Moreover, he is unable to combine the three tenses past, present, and future into a singular redemptive vision of humanity. Scrooge foreshadows the concept of the epiphany when he asks for all three ghosts at once; perhaps the epiphany somehow depends on time in such a universal way.  At the beginning of the novella, Scrooge seems aware of only the present tense, the tense of capitalism. The now is the time to make or lose money, and the past and future exist only to serve the present. Dickens’s attention to clocks and bells reinforces Scrooge’s mania with time.

However, Scrooge is redeemed when he learns to integrate the past, present, and future into his worldview. He steps out of the capitalist obsession with the present tense and into a timeless framework in which qualities like generosity and love cannot be quantified. His appreciation of the three tenses also comes in one fell swoop, overnight, and suggests that the epiphany, the sudden revelation of a profound meaning in life, encapsulates all three tenses.

Dickens also structures A Christmas Carol with the musical notation of five “staves.” Dickens’s choice to call his story a song emphasizes the communal theme carolers rarely sing alone, after all and perhaps to underscore the temporal theme at play, since songs are temporal forms that rely on repetition of the chorus.

While we are meant to believe that the visitation of the ghosts is actually happening, it is perhaps more important to think of them and the scenes they reveal of Scrooge’s life as products of Scrooge’s imagination. Provoked by the sudden thought in his old age that his life has possibly been for naught, he reconsiders what Christmas means to him.

This type of instantaneous, life-changing thought can be called an epiphany, and Dickens suggests that epiphanies require the mind to integrate all three major tenses the past, present, and future into a coherent, unified tense. For all intents and purposes, it does not matter that the Ghost of Christmas Past has visited Scrooge; Scrooge may simply be reliving his life through his memory, and the Ghost is merely a convenient symbol for memory. (Indeed, the Ghost looks like both an old man and a child, underscoring the elderly Scrooge’s flashback to his childhood.)

The Ghost provokes Scrooge’s redemption from miser to a good, charitable Christian. He has two strategies: he reminds Scrooge of his own loneliness, and gives Scrooge models of intimacy to which he should aspire. Scrooge gains empathy for the neglected (and, implicitly, the poor, who are otherwise neglected by the rich) when the Ghost reminds Scrooge of his own neglected childhood, inspiring him to want to give to the caroling boy he neglected.

On the other hand, Fezziwig is the paragon of friendship, and his scene makes Scrooge reflect on his own callous treatment of his employees. Finally, the Ghost shows Scrooge how money has interfered with his potential romance and the joys of family life. All of these scenes expose how money has driven a wedge between Scrooge and others, and his loneliness, which he seems to have repressed for years, is returning in profound new ways.

We have seen little attention paid to the religious ceremony of Christmas. Instead, Dickens focuses on the celebratory nature of Christmas while the Christian ideals of love and sacrifice are underscored. Lavish descriptions of large dinners and raucous accounts of games dominate this stave, since eating and playing imply pleasure for both the individual and the community. Dickens wants to show that giving does not deplete the giver, but rather enriches him.

The set piece of the stave is the Cratchit family dinner. Love trumps poverty in Dickens’s sentimental portrait of the Cratchits, but he adds a dark note at the end when he reveals Tiny Tim will die unless the future is changed. Another foreshadowed element is the “Doom” written across the Ignorant boy’s brow. In both cases, the Ghost suggests that Scrooge has a stake in changing the future.

A Christmas Carol, then, celebrates the potentiality for redemption in everyone, promotes the idea that it is never too late to learn to love, and elevates the importance of free will. By doing so, Dickens provides hope for English Victorian society to close the chasm between the Haves and Have-Nots and overturn the unjust Poor Laws that keep the underclass enchained.

The Ghost’s brief life span of one day also reminds Scrooge, and the reader, that we must act quickly if we are to change the present. Unlike before, when Scrooge was concerned with the present only insofar as it was related to the transaction of money, he is starting to see it in “seize the day” terms as an opportunity to change the lives of the less fortunate, right now.

Dickens continues his development of the theme of free will over determinism. Scrooge understands that the future he is shown is alterable and that he can change his fate. Again, this idea celebrates the potential for redemption in anyone and urges people to change their ill ways right now as opposed to later.

Dickens also focuses on the ways a person has influence beyond his or her lifetime. What cheers up Bob after Tiny Tim’s death is that his son’s memory will live on and remind them of the good in the world. Conversely, the only joy Scrooge’s life will provide for others after it is over is through their acquisition of his material goods or release from debt, not through his memory.

Scrooge finally has the redemptive epiphany he has been gradually learning throughout his travels in the past, present, and future. However, an epiphany, by definition, is a sudden revelation. How can we call Scrooge’s adventure, which supposedly stretches over three days, an epiphany? As we will see in Stave Five, all of the ghostly visits took place over just one night. Just as Scrooge learns to assimilate the past, present, and future into his life, the three different temporal ghosts have come to Scrooge in one time frame, perhaps even all at once. For Dickens, then, the epiphany is a sudden revelation that encompasses all time.

The two other definitions of epiphany have associations with A Christmas Carol. Epiphany, on January 6, is the festival commemorating the coming of the Magi as the first manifestation of Christ to the Gentiles. Epiphany also means an appearance or manifestation especially of a divine being, and the ghosts certainly fit into this category.

In addition, the silent Ghost of Christmas Yet To Come looks much like the Grim Reaper and has similarly divine powers in his final judgment of human lives. Those who lead good lives like Tiny Tim will go to heaven and be commemorated on earth, while those who lead bad lives like Scrooge will go to hell and be scorned on earth.

A great deal of symmetry ties up A Christmas Carol after Scrooge’s conversion. Scrooge does right by everyone he previously wronged in Stave One; the portly gentleman, the Cratchits (note how he even asks Cratchit to put more coal on the fire after he previously made him shiver in the cold), and Fred, not to mention everyone else in the city.  The greatest pleasure in A Christmas Carol is watching Scrooge’s transformation from money-pinching grouch to generous gentleman. His redemption, a major motif in Christian art, is made possible through free will. While Scrooge is shown visions of the future, he states (and his statement is borne out in Stave Five) that they are only visions of things that “May” be, not what “Will” be. He has the power to change the future with his present actions, and Dickens tries to impart this sense of free will to the reader; if Scrooge can change, then so can anyone.

As discussed in the analysis of Stave Four, all the ghosts have visited Scrooge in one night, not three. This pleasant surprise allows Scrooge to start his giving ways on Christmas Day, and promotes the idea that he has had an overnight epiphany. After suffering through a hellish nightmare, he wakes up a happy, charitable, and redeemed man. Anyone can change his behavior for the better, Dickens implies, as can any society.

Dickens began to write A Christmas Carol in October 1843, and completed the book in six weeks with the final pages written in the beginning of December. As the result of a feud with his publisher over the meager earnings on his previous novel, Martin Chuzzlewit, Dickens declined a lump-sum payment for the tale, chose a percentage of the profits in hopes of making more money thereby, and published the work at his own expense.  High production costs however brought him a mere £230 (equal to £19,128 today) rather than the £1,000 (equal to £83,164 today) he expected and needed, as his wife was once again pregnant.

Bound in red cloth with gilt-edged pages, the book was published in London by Chapman and Hall, and released on 17 December 1843.  Four expensive, hand-coloured etchings and four black and white wood engravings by John Leech accompanied the text.  Production was not without problems. The drab olive endpapers were replaced for the second printing with yellow endpapers, but, once replaced, clashed with the title page which was then redone.

Modestly priced at five shillings (equal to £20.79 today), the first run of 6,000 copies sold out by Christmas Eve and the book continued to sell well into the New Year.  By May 1844, a seventh edition had sold out. In all, twenty-four editions ran in its original form.  In spite of the disappointing profits for the author, the book was a huge artistic success with most critics responding positively.

Dickens wrote in the wake of British government changes to the welfare system known as the Poor Laws, changes which required among other things, welfare applicants to work on treadmills. Dickens asks, in effect, for people to recognize the plight of those whom the Industrial Revolution has displaced and driven into poverty, and the obligation of society to provide for them humanely. Failure to do so, the writer implies through the personification of Ignorance and Want as ghastly children, will result in an unnamed “Doom” for those who, like Scrooge, believe their wealth and status qualifies them to sit in judgment of the poor rather than to assist them.

Some critics like Restad have suggested that Scrooge’s redemption underscores what they see as the conservative, individualistic, and patriarchal aspects of Dickens’s ‘Carol philosophy’, which propounded the idea of a more fortunate individual willingly looking after a less fortunate one. Personal moral conscience and individual action led in effect to a form of ‘noblesse oblige’ which was expected of those individuals of means.