George F. Babbitt
First Appearance: Babbitt
Date of First Appearance: 1922
Author: Sinclair Lewis (1885–1951)
This society stuff is like any other hobby; if you devote yourself to it, you get on.
Three years before Jay Gatsby pursued his own version of the American dream, George F. Babbitt was discovering that the dream isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. When we first meet him he’s not rich; however, as a top-notch Realtor who helps clients buy and flip properties in order to make quick and outrageous profits, he’s reached an enviable level of middle-class affluence. He has a wife, three children, a servant, and a five-year-old Dutch colonial house in an upscale suburban subdivision of Zenith (pop. 361,000), where every second house has a bedroom “precisely like his.” The house has “the best of taste, the best of inexpensive rugs, a simple and laudable architecture, and the latest conveniences.” Electricity in 1920 was still new enough that it too was a sign of affluence, as was the cigar lighter in his car that impressed clients. Babbitt has “enormous and poetic admiration, though very little understanding, of all mechanical devices. They were his symbols of truth and beauty,” those gadgets—an outward, measurable sign of his success.
Babbitt considers himself sophisticated because he graduated from college, plays golf, smokes cigarettes, and takes a room with a private bath whenever he goes to Chicago. With a large head, thinning brown hair, and glasses, he’s a “plump, smooth, efficient, up-to-the-minute and otherwise perfected modern” who, like other successful businessmen in his community, is expected to join at least one and preferably two or three businessmen’s organizations. “It was the thing to do.” Besides, lodge brothers often became customers, and it gave ordinary fellows the chance to acquire a title like “High Worthy Recording Scribe” or “Grand Hoogow.” And, of course, “it permitted the swaddled American husband to stay away from home for one evening a week” when he could “shoot pool and talk man-talk and be obscene and valiant.” Babbitt is a member of the Elks Lodge, Zenith Athletic Club, the local Realtors’ association, and the Boosters’ Club. Known for his oratory, he “spoke well—and often—at these orgies of commercial righteousness about the realtor’s function as a seer of the future development of the community.”
Critics were quick to compliment Sinclair Lewis for his creation of a believable flesh-and-blood character, but Babbitt is also a brilliant satire of the pre-Depression self-made man—someone who remains familiar to this day. As literary giant H. L. Mencken observed, Babbitt is a typical American businessman driven not by his own desires, but by what others in the community will think of him. A Republican precinct leader and mover and shaker in the local Presbyterian church, “his politics is communal politics, mob politics, herd politics; his religion is a public rite wholly without subjective significance,” Mencken noted. The novel struck a nerve with Rotarian and Elks Lodge America, and some community organizations fought back against the image Babbitt conveyed by taking out radio and newspaper ads to tout the positive things that businessmen’s organizations have done for the country. Eight years later, the controversy would inspire the Swedish Academy to make Lewis the first American to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. At the ceremony, Lewis was praised for his bold criticism of American institutions, his satirical eye, and his rich characters, with George F. Babbitt especially singled out.
For all the commotion, Babbitt is still a typical husband who complains about guest towels that can’t be used and fusses over having to dress for dinner. He’s also an average father: “affectionate, bullying, opinionated, ignorant, and rather wistful. Like most parents, he enjoyed the game of waiting till the victim was clearly wrong, then virtuously pouncing.” Though he’s a good provider, he resents the consumer-driven, keep-up-with-the-Joneses mentality of his family, who are suddenly nagging him to buy a sedan to replace the open car they drive—just because it’s the latest status symbol—even though a part of him considers doing so, and for the same reason.
As a Realtor he’s seen his share of (and “treasured”) beautiful women, but he never “hazarded respectability by adventuring”—though lately he has been dreaming about a fairy girl, “so slim, so white, so eager.” In his dreams, this presumably teenage girl’s “dear and tranquil hand caressed his cheek”; with her he feels warmly loved in a way he no longer feels with his wife. The dreams are just the beginning of a growing restlessness that disrupts his life. Once excited about attending highbrow affairs, he now finds them tedious. He becomes annoyed by other couple’s nagging complaints or predictable conversations. He lies about how entertaining parties are and finds an excuse to spend three weeks with a good friend in Maine, away from family and social obligations. And he satisfies a growing, suppressed urge to rebel against conformity by taking in a burlesque show and drinking so much Prohibition-era alcohol that he ends up singing out loud and arguing with a man who calls him a “bum singer.” “Say!” Babbitt says. “I know what was the trouble! Somebody went and put alcohol in my booze last night.”
People start to talk, but the reverend still asks him and two other pillars of society to elevate their Sunday school program from fourth to first in the city because, “there’s no reason why we should take anybody’s dust.” Babbitt’s solution? He institutes a “system of military ranks” in which he himself gets to be a colonel, and the Sunday school climbs into second place. For a time that success increases his standing at the Elks, Athletic Club, and Boosters, but soon his emerging “liberal” behavior hurts his business. His stenographer even quits to work for a more upstanding competitor. When Babbitt’s good friend is imprisoned for shooting his wife, Babbitt is given some time alone to question his values while his wife and daughter head east for a spell. “What did he want? Wealth? Social position? Travel? Servants? Yes, but only incidentally.” He does know that he wants his friend back again, “and from that he stumbled into the admission that he wanted the fairy girl—in the flesh.” He yearns to be “one of those Bohemians you read about” and goes a little crazy, flirting with workers, servants, and other people’s wives, then finally having an affair with one of his clients. That sets tongues wagging, but what pushes Babbitt even further off the social register is his response to a telephone worker strike that affects all the businesses in town. Though his colleagues call the protesters “bomb-throwing socialists” and dismiss the broadsides claiming they’re not paid a livable wage as “all lies and fake figures,” Babbitt interjects, “Oh rats, they look just about like you and me, and I certainly didn’t notice any bombs.” His liberal streak would be short-lived.
Eventually, “the independence seeped out of him and he walked the streets alone, afraid of men’s cynical eyes and the incessant hiss of whispering.” Babbitt finds the price of individualism to be too high, and he returns to the fold of conformity. He has a poignant reconciliation with his wife, and when he speaks again at the Boosters meeting, “he knew by the cheer that he was secure again and popular.” So much for the myth of American individualism.
Bibliography
Babbitt (1922)
Works Cited
Mencken, H. L. “Portrait of an American Citizen.” Smart Set 69 (October 1922).
The Sinclair Lewis Society. “FAQ 3: Why Did Sinclair Lewis Win the Nobel Prize?” Accessed October 17, 2018. https://english.illinoisstate.edu/sinclairlewis/sinclair_lewis/faq/faq3.shtml.
—JP
Frodo Baggins
First Appearance: The Fellowship of the Ring: Being the First Part of the Lord of the Rings
Date of First Appearance: 1954
Author: J. R. R. Tolkien (1892–1973)
You say the ring is dangerous, far more dangerous than I can guess. In what way?
“Frodo Lives!”
In the sixties that slogan appeared on buttons, T-shirts, bumper stickers, and backpacks, all because the counterculture movement embraced J. R. R. Tolkien’s reluctant hero. In him, politicized hippies in America found an inspiration for their own epic task of trying to force cultural change and end an unpopular war in Vietnam. It wasn’t exactly the same thing as inheriting a powerful ring, then traveling to a faraway land to destroy it and defeat the forces of evil. But it felt close. Like them, Frodo was just an ordinary person who found himself pushed by circumstances into putting himself on the line for the greater good.
Frodo Baggins is a short “stout little fellow with red cheeks,” cleft chin, and the characteristic big feet of hobbits that have never worn shoes. He’s also an orphan, and that makes him a perfect quester because he’s not leaving any loved ones behind. As a relation of Bilbo Baggins, one of the only hobbits ever to travel beyond the Shire, he’s heard his share of stories about Middle-earth. When Bilbo surprises everyone by disappearing after his 111th birthday, he leaves Bag End manor and all his belongings to Frodo, the eldest of his younger cousins whom he adopted as his heir. And Frodo takes possession of the ring left for him in an envelope the day he turns thirty-three—the age the Bible tells us Christ was when he embarked upon his mission.
In the novel, when the wizard Gandalf returns years later, it’s to tell the hobbit he must leave at once. The Elven-ring, one of the Great Rings of Power, had been responsible for Cousin Bilbo’s long life. But while the ring also has the power to make the wearer invisible, as Gandalf explains, any mortal who keeps one of the Great Rings “does not die, but he does not grow or obtain more life, he merely continues, until at last every minute is weariness.” The ring that Frodo inherited is the Master-ring, the “One Ring to rule them all,” which the Dark Lord Sauron lost many ages ago. The only way to keep Sauron from getting the ring that would help him enslave this entire fantasy world is for the ring-bearer to take the ring to Mount Doom in the land of Mordor and throw it back into the lava from which Sauron originally crafted it. The catch—besides Sauron’s Black Riders seeking to destroy the ring-bearer and bring the ring back to their master—is that if the ring is worn or kept close to the ring-bearer’s body, it can make him moody, distrustful, irrational, possessive, greedy, scheming, power hungry—even homicidal. Yet our meek hero willingly accepts the burden and continues to shoulder that burden, even as he can feel the ring’s power and though it scares him.
Frodo is a refreshingly different kind of hero because he’s not just reluctant—he’s afraid. In fact, Frodo seems a timid fellow by nature, afraid to cross a certain farmer’s land, for example, because he’s terrified of him and his dogs. Having avoided that farm for years, he’s anxious about crossing it to start his journey. Later, he’s even tempted to put on the ring (which makes the wearer invisible) just to get out of an annoying, trivial situation. Besides lacking the hero’s skills and temperament, Frodo also isn’t the stand-alone champion we typically associate with heroic deeds. He needs (and gets) lots of help, so while the ring-bearer himself must be the one to destroy the ring, it really does take a team effort. Three hobbits accompany him on his journey, as well as Gandalf, a ranger they call Strider (who’s really Aragorn, heir to a kingdom), a Captain of Gondor, a dwarf warrior, and an elven prince. They help Frodo but also oppose him at times when they’ve gotten too close to that ring. Early in the journey Frodo is seriously wounded by the Black Riders, and it’s Strider/Aragorn who fights them off and takes him to a nearby elven refuge. Later, when Frodo and fellow hobbit Sam are separated from the rest and capture Gollum, who had possessed the ring before Bilbo found it, Gollum betrays them and leads them into a cave where a giant spider injects Frodo with venom. With Frodo incapacitated and darned near lifeless, it’s Sam who steps up and takes the lead, even finding the strength to carry Frodo for much of the time.
Frodo’s heroism at first lies in what he’s able to endure. Gandalf notices it when Frodo is first seriously wounded. “You were beginning to fade,” he tells him. “But you have some strength in you, my dear hobbit!” Later, seriously wounded again, Frodo admits, “I am tired, weary, I haven’t a hope left. But I have to go on trying to get to the Mountain, as long as I can move. The ring is enough. This extra weight is killing me. It must go.” At times Frodo crawls when Sam is too tired to carry him, and when Gollum attacks in ambush in a last-ditch attempt to get his “precious” back again, Frodo fights back “with a fury that amazed Sam and Gollum also.” Even as he gets close to accomplishing his mission, Frodo, affected by the ring, vows to keep it until it’s wrestled from him, and afterward Frodo is “pale and worn, and yet himself again; and in his eyes there was peace now . . . his burden was taken away.”
After the ring is destroyed and Frodo and the other hobbits are honored and presented with swords, they return to the Shire and find that a “chief” has taken over with his bands of Shirriffs bullying the hobbits and enforcing unfair rules. When the men tell Frodo they’re going to arrest him for destroying a barrier and other infractions, he says, “Don’t be absurd! I am going where I please, and in my own time.” He adds, “Your day is over, and all other ruffians.” A battle will later restore the Shire, but while Frodo leads, he does so without a sword in his hand. His “chief part had been to prevent the hobbits in their wrath at their losses, from slaying those of their enemies who threw down their weapons.” He was, as the hippies would later appreciate, a pacifist at heart.
One of the best-selling novels ever, The Lord of the Rings has sold more than 150 million copies. Initially broken up into three installments at the publisher’s behest, it was released in 1968 as a single volume that further popularized Tolkien and his characters. In 1999, Amazon.com customers voted The Lord of the Rings the Book of the Millennium, while in 2003 it was voted No. 1 in a BBC reader survey of the Top 200 Novels in the UK. There have been radio and theatrical adaptations, but Tolkien and his characters’ pop-culture status was most reinforced by Peter Jackson’s blockbuster movie trilogy, which starred Elijah Wood as a blue-eyed version of Frodo. Collectively the films earned thirty-seven Academy Award nominations and nineteen Oscars—including an unprecedented eleven nominations and eleven wins for the third climactic installment, The Return of the King.
Bibliography
The Fellowship of the Ring: Being the First Part of the Lord of the Rings (1954)
The Two Towers: Being the Second Part of the Lord of the Rings (1954)
The Return of the King: Being the Third Part of the Lord of the Rings (1955)
The Lord of the Rings (1968)
The Silmarillion (published posthumously, 1977)
Unfinished Tales (published posthumously, 1980)
—JP
Lily Bart
First Appearance: The House of Mirth
Date of First Appearance: 1905
Author: Edith Wharton (1862–1937)
She was so evidently the victim of the civilization which had produced her, that the links of her bracelet seemed like manacles chaining her to her fate.
The old adage “Money makes the world go around” is truer than we would like it to be, especially for a good number of female literary characters, and this ends up being especially valid in Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth. As Virginia Woolf so eloquently summed up in her feminist text A Room of One’s Own (1929), there are two essentials for female autonomy: having an independent space and sufficient funds to sustain oneself. Wharton’s heroine Lily Bart is unable to obtain these two necessities and consequently becomes a tragic victim to her purse’s lack of financial heft, her dependency upon a man to provide this, and the conflict between what she knows she needs but cannot stomach in order to survive. Lily will not succeed at the vocation in which she was born and well trained to flourish—marriage to the richest available man in New York’s turn-of-the-century high society—and she will pay the ultimate price for her failure.
Wharton knew this society well, having grown up in the midst of its stifling elitism, and she created Lily Bart as a vivid example of the double standard under which women of that social realm are forced to operate or are often crushed. Men, if they aren’t independently wealthy, have choices about how to sustain themselves. Lily’s love interest, Lawrence Selden, has chosen law as a profession viewed slightly undesirable in this class but respectable enough for a gentleman without a sufficient trust fund, while her only acceptable path is marriage. Using their similar circumstances but examining them from opposite gender platforms, Wharton will frame the dilemma under which Lily must maneuver as she watches Selden survive unburdened by restrictions while she falls victim to them.
Lily Bart fully understands what is at stake. As her last name hints, she will be expected to barter her beauty, trained charm, and social panache to land the best marriage prospect, and this implies looking at dollar signs rather than focusing on the desired object of Cupid’s arrows. Wharton builds the world of her not-so-mirthful symbolic house with a clear sense of what economist and sociologist Thorstein Veblen explains in his The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899) as this social stratum’s practice of “conspicuous leisure,” which inevitably also engages in “conspicuous consumption” to sustain such a lifestyle. Lily resides at the outskirts of this realm, having grown up with parents, now dead, who once had large enough means to establish themselves as members of the crème de la crème but whose coffers no longer possess sufficient funds to maintain a position for their daughter without an influx of outside funds; that is, a rich husband for Lily. She knows that to land a good prospect she will have to play society’s game, following its rules by also being conspicuously idle and fashioned to compete as a desirable product on a high-end market where much is at stake.
Both Lily and Selden are utterly aware of the price for playing in this circle, and he notes to himself, “She must have cost a great deal to make, that a great many dull and ugly people must, in some way have been sacrificed to produce her.” She is clearly a commodity for sale to the highest bidder as long as she retains the fine qualities a buyer might desire. One of Wharton’s original titles, A Moment’s Ornament, underscored this sense, but the assessment is obvious and becomes even more coarse as Selden discusses characteristics that “distinguish her from the herd of her sex.” He emphasizes superficiality and describes Lily “as though a fine glaze of beauty and fastidiousness had been applied to vulgar clay.” Her friend Carrie Fisher will astutely note later, “She had been fashioned to adorn and delight. . . . And was it her fault that the purely decorative mission is less easily and harmoniously fulfilled among social beings than in the world of nature? That it is apt to be hampered by material necessities or complicated by moral scruples?” Under such circumstances, Lily plays a game where failing to be victorious has many layers of consequence.
Knowing that Lily understands, accepts, and carries out her role in this milieu makes her an interesting character with ample area for a great novelist like Wharton to adorn the story. Lily almost literally becomes a shiny object in a storefront display window as she engages in the tableaux vivants or “living pictures” event her circle of acquaintances creates to replicate paintings done by old master artists. Lily chooses Joshua Reynolds’s portrait of a woman, “Mrs. Lloyd,” wearing a revealing gossamer gown as she carves her husband’s name on a tree, a choice that speaks volumes about the woman as an objet d’art. Lily’s re-creation generates a great deal of attention, but negatively so in both sexes’ reactions. The women see her unscrupulously flaunting herself by revealing too much flesh, and the men view Lily as highly sexualized and therefore interesting for the wrong reasons. As she had earlier acknowledged, “I have to calculate and contrive, and retreat and advance, as if I were going through an intricate dance, where one misstep would throw me hopelessly out of time,” and this slipup becomes the first significant rung in the descent of her reputation and ability to market herself at the level for which she is aiming, and at the age of twenty-nine, the clock is rapidly ticking.
Edith Wharton clearly sympathizes with Lily’s plight, and in her memoir A Backward Glance (1934), she remarks that a “frivolous society can acquire dramatic significance only through what its frivolity destroys. Its tragic implication lies in its power of debasing people and ideals.” This poisonous capacity and willingness to destroy Lily gain her sympathy from readers, compounded by the fact that “at heart, she despises the things she’s trying for.” What makes us finally compassionate rather than seeing her as a shallow gold digger is that she will pull herself back time and again from the brink of a chance to save herself in a well-placed marriage because it will not be a union of love.
When Lily’s reputation has been ruined, she finds herself unsuited for any income-producing work and she takes a drug to induce sleep from which she does not wake. The question is whether her death is accidental or a suicide, but a previously undiscovered Wharton letter found a decade ago seems to be her definitive answer. In correspondence with a friend she writes, “I have a heroine to get rid of, and want some points on the best way of disposing of her.” She continues by asking, “What soporific, or nerve-calming drug, would a nervous and worried young lady in the smart set be likely to take to, & what would be its effects if deliberately taken with the intent to kill herself?” Wharton’s intent for Lily is clear, and we are left with yet another fictional female to mourn.
Bibliography
The House of Mirth (1905)
Works Cited
McGrath, Charles. “Wharton Letter Reopens a Mystery.” New York Times, November 21, 2007.
Veblen, Thorstein. The Theory of the Leisure Class: An Economic Study of Institutions. New York: Macmillan, 1899.
Wharton, Edith. A Backward Glance. New York: D. Appleton, 1934.
Woolf, Virginia. A Room of One’s Own. London: Hogarth, 1929.
—GS
Big Brother
First Appearance: Nineteen Eighty-Four
Date of First Appearance: 1949
Author: George Orwell (1903–1950)
[Winston Smith] picked up the children’s history book and looked at the portrait of Big Brother which formed its frontispiece. The hypnotic eyes gazed into his own. It was as though some huge force were pressing down upon you—something that penetrated inside your skull, battering against your brain, frightening you out of your beliefs, persuading you, almost, to deny the evidence of your senses. In the end the Party would announce that two and two made five, and you would have to believe it.
It feels safe to say that no other villain in literature has lent his name to a frivolous reality TV show in which generally unlikable people are forced to live with each other for the amusement of audiences tuning in from home. Yet that’s exactly the fate of Big Brother, who began life as a fearsome symbol of totalitarian rule in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four but is more familiar today as the title of an entertainment franchise broadcast around the globe whose main appeal is voyeurism. At least in one sense, though, Big Brother’s devolution makes sense: he has always been more of a concept than a person. Even before his alliterative name slipped into the vernacular as a code word for government surveillance—one of so many Orwell neologisms in this dystopian novel to do so that “Orwellian” itself became an adjective—the putative leader of the Party ruling Oceania existed in the novel as little more than a face. Granted, that face is blasted on huge screens, resembling either Hitler or Joseph Stalin with its black mustache and hair, but he never steps into a scene the way that other famous man behind the curtain, the Wizard of Oz, is forced to. Big Brother is an image, rather, one that stands for the worst abuses of propaganda by brainwashing the masses and dictating reality.
Big Brother’s name is specifically mentioned only seventy-six times in this 328-page novel. Yet, much like the ominous slogan BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU that is plastered everywhere throughout Airstrip One (the former Great Britain), his presence is inescapable. Even the everyman protagonist Winston Smith, a clerk in the Ministry of Truth who tries to maintain a skeptical distance from government dictums, finds himself swept up in the hysteria his image can provoke. In an early scene, Smith watches an anti-Semitic state denunciation of Emmanuel Goldstein, the so-called Enemy of the People, on a program called Two Minutes Hate. Smith is repulsed by the crowd jeering at Goldstein’s image (especially by a child yelling, “Swine!”), but his hatred of Big Brother suddenly shifts to unexpected adoration as he sees the Party leader as invincible and fearless, the lone force able to stand up against “the hordes.” The shift is a sign of how fluidly the animosity that Two Minutes Hate whips up can shift from target to target, and how expertly propaganda can shape the reactions even of resisters. Smith may not scream, “My Saviour!” at the screen as some in the crowd do, but he has to join in chanting Big Brother’s name with it, or else his ambivalence will give away his true feelings. Yet even as he finds this ritual “sub-human,” the “general delirium” that the Party’s figurehead generates infects him against his will.
Orwell doesn’t use the term “cult of personality” in Nineteen Eighty-Four, but that’s clearly what he’s cautioning against with “B-B,” as he is affectionately known by worshippers. The heretical question that sows discord throughout the novel is whether a historical person named Big Brother actually exists—or if he ever did. In private moments, Smith tries to remember exactly when he first heard that name, but he can’t call upon any knowledge outside official Party history. It insists that Big Brother has always been the “leader and guardian” of the revolution that installed “Ingsoc” (or English socialism) as the official state ideology some two decades earlier, but since Smith’s job at the Ministry of Truth is to revise history by rewriting old articles from the Times, he knows not to trust official sources. It’s suggested later that Big Brother is simply a controlling principle, a “guise” by which the Party engenders both fear and love, which individuals inspire more than faceless organizations. Much later, Smith is detained at the ironically titled Ministry of Love and interrogated by O’Brien, the Thought Police agent whose job is to trick potential subversives into revealing their disloyalty, and then torturing them to cure the “insanity” of not accepting Party dogma. Smith specifically asks if Big Brother exists in the same way he exists—in other words, as a real person. O’Brien’s reply is chilling: “You don’t exist.”
It’s worth asking why we’ve chosen Big Brother and not Smith as the novel’s most memorable character. In stories of totalitarian oppression, readers’ sympathies naturally go toward the freethinker who stands up for the sanctity of the individual. After his private denunciation of the cheering crowd, Smith purchases a diary and hides in a blind spot in his living quarters from Big Brother’s omnipresent telescreen to record his opposition: DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER. He soon commences an affair with another secret rebel, Julia, risking imprisonment because sex in Oceania for any other reason than procreation is illegal. Eventually, O’Brien invites the duo to study Goldstein’s illegal tract, The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism, and to join a subversive group called the Brotherhood, which is dedicated to leading a proletarian revolution to overthrow Ingsoc.
As it turns out, the invitation is a setup, and both Winston and Julia are tortured. Smith is thus less a hero than a victim of the system who is brutalized into submission. In the novel’s most terrifying moment, O’Brien breaks him in Room 101, the chamber where everyone’s worst nightmare is inflicted upon them. The torturer straps a mask attached to a cage of rats to Smith’s face, leading a terrified Winston to denounce Julia, screaming, “Not me!” and begging that his torturer loosen the rats on her instead. Orwell wants us to understand that, despite what literature and myth may celebrate, there is no “last man,” no unconquerable emissary of humanism to pin one’s hopes for the future on. Nor is Smith a martyr. In our last glimpse of him, he sits in a café watching Big Brother announce Oceania’s victory over its enemy, Eurasia, all thoughts of resistance wiped from his mind. He accepts the Party’s insistence that 2 + 2 = 5 and feels deep loyalty for Oceania’s leader. “He loved Big Brother,” the novel ends.
If not Smith then, why not O’Brien? In many ways, he is the most interesting character in Nineteen Eighty-Four. Most significantly, he is no ideologue. He bluntly tells Winston that the Party’s only interest is power, not a set of ideals, for power is an end, not a means. The image of the future, he insists, is a boot stamping a face, and the only love will be blind loyalty to Big Brother. During the torture scenes, O’Brien also plays the role of a stern, punishing father figure, making Winston want to please him. The torturer also has an uncanny ability to read Winston’s thoughts, knowing when he lies. He has studied humanity so he can destroy it.
Ultimately, though, calling O’Brien the most fascinating character betrays the torturer’s own message that the individual is only a cell in a collective organism. Big Brother may only be the face of the organism, but existing as an abstraction allows him to exist everywhere. Besides, while the average person probably can’t name Winston Smith’s nemesis, everyone has heard of Big Brother—and not just because of the TV show. The name has become a convenient code word for our fears of the panopticon, the all-seeing state, and invasions into privacy.
What we don’t admit enough—and what Orwell feared most—was how many among the masses are perfectly content with this omniscient sibling poking into the deepest, most individualistic corners of our mind.
Bibliography
Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949)
—KC
Mary Katherine Blackwood
First Appearance: We Have Always Lived in the Castle
Date of First Appearance: 1962
Author: Shirley Jackson (1916–1965)
What place would be better for us than this? Who wants us outside? The world is full of terrible people.
“I dislike washing myself, and dogs, and noise. I like my sister Constance, and Richard Plantagenet, and Amanita phalloides, the death-cup mushroom,” eighteen-year-old Mary Katherine Blackwood says, casually adding, “everyone else in my family is dead.”
That’s not quite true. Six years ago her mother, father, brother, and aunt all died at the dinner table after ingesting sugar that was laced with arsenic. Mary Katherine—Merricat for short—had been sent to her room without supper, as was often the case. Miraculously, Uncle Julian survived, and Merricat’s older sister Constance, who took no sugar, was charged with murder. Though Constance did curious things like scrubbing the sugar bowl clean and telling police her family deserved to die, eventually she was acquitted in a trial that rocked the community. Now, Uncle Julian is in a wheelchair living in a room off the kitchen and writing his account of the “most sensational poisoning case of the century.” He can’t leave the house, and Constance is unwilling. But Merricat goes to town each week to bring back food and new library books, braving the children’s chanted nursery-rhyme taunts each time:
Merricat, said Connie, would you like a cup of tea?
Oh no, said Merricat, you’ll poison me.
Merricat, said Connie, would you like to go to sleep?
Down in the boneyard ten feet deep!
Merricat is extremely protective—and possessive—of her twenty-eight-year-old sister and wishes she could whisk her away from the villagers’ cruel resentments. “I really only want a winged horse, anyway. We could fly you to the moon and back, my horse and I.” Such fairy-tale overtones make their story seem almost fable-like. “When I was small I thought Constance was a fairy princess,” Merricat says. “She was the most precious person in my world, always,” and she remains such—so much that every Wednesday Merricat walks the perimeter of their property, mends any gaps in the fence, and checks to see if the gates are locked. A believer in rituals and superstitions, Merricat also creates “safeguards” to ward off anything, including unwanted change. She buries things all over the yard—a box of silver dollars near the creek, a doll and her baby teeth (thinking they might sprout one day into dragons) in the long field—and she nails a book to the tree in the pine woods, convinced that as long as they remained where she put them “nothing could get in to harm us.”
We Have Always Lived in the Castle would be considered “southern gothic” if it weren’t for the fact that author Shirley Jackson grew up in San Francisco, studied at Syracuse University, and settled in Vermont. But in her fiction, nothing is as tranquil or reasonable as it seems, and that goes double for Merricat, the narrator of this novel published just three years before the reclusive Jackson died of heart failure at the young age of forty-eight.
As a reviewer for the Guardian noted, “Merricat is a troubled young woman” who marks her days with “little OCD rituals.” She’s odd and eccentric, to be sure, but Merricat is also a rewardingly nuanced and subtle character whose menace unfolds so innocently, so gradually, and so matter-of-factly between the lines of her story that it’s one of literature’s more fascinating—enough for Stephen King to acknowledge it as an influence.
Merricat is always trying to remind herself to be kinder to Uncle Julian, whose room is just off the kitchen. Since the trial, Constance and Merricat weekly clean the whole house, but the only rooms the three of them ever use are the kitchen and back bedrooms. Outside, because the front of the house has a long lane that ends near the village and highway, the three family members tend to stay on the back lawn and adjacent vegetable garden that Constance tends, where no one in the village can see them.
Merricat tells us that Constance “always touched foodstuffs with quiet respect,” but adds that she herself was not allowed to help prepare food or gather mushrooms, though she did carry vegetables in from the garden or apples from the old trees. Likewise, she was not allowed to wash the dishes, but she could carry them. The list of what Merricat is “allowed” or “not allowed” to do is long enough to suggest that not all is perfectly normal with her. Is it post-traumatic stress syndrome? Was she like this before the family tragedy? Later, when Constance’s best friend comes to visit and brings another person with her, Merricat gets quietly upset: “I’ll send them away. She knows better than this.” At first we wonder how fragile Constance is, until the women leave and Constance gently tells her little sister, “Kind of a weak first step. It’s going to be fine, Merricat.” More clues, dropped like a trail of bread crumbs, lead us to realize that Merricat is the bigger concern.
Is she a danger to herself or others? One episode suggests so. When Merricat finds a nest of baby snakes near the creek and kills them because, she says, “I dislike snakes and Constance had never asked me not to,” readers get a full sense of the innocent menace she represents. Like a fairy-tale witch, Merricat devises “three powerful words, words of strong protection” that, if never spoken aloud, no change would come: “Melody,” “Gloucester,” and “Pegasus.” But after the book she had nailed to a tree falls down, soon afterward their cousin, Charles, comes and asserts himself, displacing Merricat by taking over the grocery shopping. “You’ll have to find something else for her to do, Connie,” he says, but Merricat’s response is to begin reciting the properties of the Amanita phalloides (“You stop that,” he says) and ends with her concluding, “Death occurs between five and ten days after eating” (“I don’t think that’s very funny”). Later, when he suggests that she will be the one who is gone a month from now, Merricat goes into her father’s old room and hammers “with a shoe at the mirror” until it cracks. After Charles unearths her box of silver dollars, it annoys her that he didn’t even bother to fill in the hole again. “‘Don’t blame me,’ I said to the hole; I would have to find something else to bury here and I wished it could be Charles.”
This modern fairy tale ends when Merricat sets the upstairs on fire to destroy the value of the house, thinking then Charles might leave. The villagers gather, some shouting, “Let it burn.” After the fire is doused, an angry mob throws rocks at the house and enters, breaking things as they go and sending the two sisters running upstairs to hide. Later, guilty villagers will leave food at the front door, but one mother tells her boy to stay clear of the house. “The ladies don’t like little boys. . . . They’d hold you down and make you eat candy full of poison.” With the fire having burned out the roof, Merricat seems happy. “Our house was a castle, turreted and open to the sky.” And she muses, “I wonder if I could eat a child if I had the chance.”
Bibliography
We Have Always Lived in the Castle (1962)
Work Cited
Barnett, David. “We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson—A House of Ordinary Horror.” Guardian, December 21, 2015. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/dec/21/we-have-always-lived-in-the-castle-by-shirley-jackson-a-house-of-ordinary-horror.
—JP
Molly Bloom
First Appearance: Ulysses
Date of First Appearance: 1922
Author: James Joyce (1882–1941)
He said the day we were lying among the rhododendrons on Howth head in the grey tweed suit and his straw hat the day I got him to propose to me yes first I gave him the bit of seedcake out of my mouth and it was leapyear like now yes 16 years ago my God after that long kiss I near lost my breath yes he said I was a flower of the mountain yes so we are flowers all a womans body yes.
Not many characters can be boiled down to a single word, but Molly Bloom, the thirty-four-year-old, opera-singer wife of Leopold Bloom in James Joyce’s Ulysses, can: Yes.
That affirmation begins and ends her spotlight chapter, which closes Joyce’s modernist landmark. Molly is the novel’s earth goddess, the embodiment of fleshly pleasure who stands in contrast to the sterile intellectualism of her husband and Ulysses’s third central character, Stephen Dedalus. The irony is that while Molly is associated with the body, she exists mostly in the ruminations of other characters who greatly misread her and in her own whirlpooling thoughts about love and marriage, the quintessential example of “stream of consciousness” narration. Physically, she is present only twice in the text, first when Leopold Bloom’s odyssey begins in chapter 4 (“Calypso”) and then when he returns home to 7 Eccles Street in the penultimate chapter 17 (“Ithaca”). Nevertheless, her presence challenges other characters’ reductive ideas of women’s sexuality by testifying to the complexity of femininity.
Not that Molly is pure as snow. Ulysses retells Homer’s Odyssey by drawing ironic parallels between the warrior-king’s epic adventures after the Trojan War and the minutiae of modern life on a single day (June 16, 1904) in Dublin, Ireland. Leopold Bloom is a mock-heroic everyman, with Dedalus an adoptive version of Odysseus’s son, Telemachus. Molly is Penelope, the king’s loyal wife who resists the advances of suitors when her husband is presumed dead. Only Molly isn’t loyal: June 4 is the day she commits adultery with concert promoter Hugh “Blazes” Boylan, who rather ungenerously leaves behind incriminating crumbs in the Blooms’ marital sheets.
Whether Boylan is Molly’s first dalliance is unclear. Because Bloom itemizes a list of romantic rivals for her affection, critics have claimed she’s had as many as twenty-six lovers; others insist that Boylan is her first, possibly her second. Either way, Molly commits adultery to snap Leopold back to passion after exactly ten years, five months, and eighteen days without consummating their intimacy, dating back to the death of their son, Rudy, who lived only eleven days. (The Blooms’ surviving child, Milly, is fifteen and an aspiring photographer.)
Mrs. Bloom is no intellectual. She misinterprets metempsychosis as “met him pike hoses,” prompting her to ask Leopold, “Met him where?” Yet Molly has a streetwise awareness of men’s foibles. Awakened in the early hours of June 5 when her husband stumbles into their bed to kiss the “plump mellow yellow smellow melons of her rump,” she suspects from his request for breakfast in bed that he’s orgasmed during his peregrinations. (He has indeed—by masturbating.) Because her thoughts are associational instead of linear, she bounces from thinking of her volatile romp with Boylan to memories of past suitors, whether the tenor Bartell d’Arcy or Lieutenant Gardner, who died in the Boer War. A train whistle leads her mind to her childhood on Gibraltar and a love letter she received from Lieutenant Mulvey. She compares her childhood to her daughter’s, expressing jealousy over Milly’s beauty, which Molly is losing. The sudden start of her period reassures her Boylan didn’t impregnate her that afternoon. She regrets her advertising-salesman husband’s shaky finances and defends him against the condescension of others who think he’s dull. Molly also considers an affair with Dedalus. Thinking of buying flowers to prepare for a visit from her husband’s surrogate son segues into memories of the day Bloom proposed to her at Howth Head, calling her his “flower of the mountain”: “I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.”
Readers familiar with Joyce’s biography often assume Molly is his tribute to Nora Barnacle, his partner for nearly forty years. (The pair weren’t legally married until 1931, by which point they had raised two surviving children.) Ulysses takes place on the exact day the pair first shared sexual contact—and, at the risk of being too explicit, June 16, 1904, commemorates the most significant hand job in literary history. The raunchier thoughts that drift through Molly’s mind also echo the startlingly scatological love letters Joyce and Nora traded in 1909 when he left their expatriate home in Trieste to seek a publisher for his epochal story collection Dubliners (1914).
Several differences separate Nora and Molly, though: Molly is half-Spanish, born on Gibraltar, and Nora wasn’t a singer. Nor, Nora insisted, was she as fat as Molly, who at 160 pounds fears turning matronly. Yet in one crucial way Nora inspired her counterpart. Her letters to Joyce eschewed punctuation and capitalization, resembling one long sentence. Her husband melded her style with the extreme form of interior monologue known as stream of consciousness, in which a character’s random thoughts are presented in all their swirling, unedited immediacy. A challenging read, Molly’s monologue runs eight paragraphs, with a period only at the end of the fourth and eighth to create a sense of balance and proportion.
Many commentators hailed Joyce for accurately representing women’s minds, but Nora demurred—as have latter-day feminists, who consider Molly a man’s vision of a woman. The charge seems undeniable given his description of the five-minute orgasm Boylan gives her, which makes her want to shout obscenities, “like fuck or shit or anything,” or in her dismissal of other women as “a dreadful lot of bitches.” Joyce didn’t help his case by declaring that as the “clou” or axis of the novel Molly’s monologue was built around four cardinal points: “the female breasts, arse, womb, and cunt.” So much for the female brain!
Representative or not, Molly’s lewd language was one reason Ulysses was banned in America until 1933. That year U.S. District Court judge John M. Woolsey ruled the book’s intent was literary, not lascivious, a decision upheld by his appeals court counterpart, Augustus Hand, who described Molly’s soliloquy as “pitiful and tragic, rather than lustful.” That’s certainly been the judgment of fans, who are drawn more to those ebullient yeses than to Mrs. Bloom’s willingness to let her husband “stick his tongue 7 miles up my hole” to satisfy his derriere obsession. Homages to Ulysses’s concluding lines are countless. Most notably, British songstress Kate Bush’s 1989 hit song “The Sensual World” borrows Molly’s imagery for a lilting paean to desire. (Originally, Bush requested permission to sing the final passage, but Joyce’s estate refused until 2011, when the songwriter rerecorded the melody with the original text as “Flower of the Mountain.”)
Especially because modernist literature tends toward bleak despair, Molly’s yeses are a rare but powerful affirmation of the uplift of romance.
Bibliography
Ulysses (1922)
—KC
James Bond
First Appearance: Casino Royale
Date of First Appearance: 1953
Author: Ian Fleming (1908–1964)
The only secret side of the business is the addresses of these people.
“Bond, James Bond.”
That’s how Britain’s top postwar secret agent introduces himself, though after appearing in twenty-four internationally distributed blockbuster films he’s a character who needs no introduction. Even people who haven’t read the books or seen the movies seem to know that James Bond, a.k.a. Agent 007, is a suave womanizer, a resourceful escape artist, an expert gambler, a wine and spirits connoisseur, a fast-driving lover of expensive sports cars, and a cool-under-pressure man of action who likes his martinis shaken and doesn’t mind if the women who stir him happen to be working for the opposition.
The world’s most famous spy was created on January 15, 1952, by Ian Fleming, who pounded away at his typewriter in the living room of his “Goldeneye” Jamaica estate and finished his first Bond novel, Casino Royale, a little more than two months later. According to biographer Andrew Lycett, 007 was a composite based on naval attachés and spies whom Commander Fleming encountered while working a desk job for naval intelligence. Over a fourteen-year period he wrote twelve Bond novels, which collectively sold more than 100 million and were subsequently made into films played by seven different actors: Sean Connery (six films, 1962–1971, plus an independently produced 1983 remake), George Lazenby (one film, 1969), Roger Moore (seven films, 1973–1985), Timothy Dalton (two films, 1987–1989), Pierce Brosnan (four films, 1995–2002), and Daniel Craig (four films, 2006–2015). Fans usually don’t count a poorly received 1967 parody starring David Niven.
Fleming originally intended Bond to be a dull man, much like himself, so he gave him what he told the New Yorker was “the dullest name I ever heard”—the name of an American ornithologist who wrote the definitive field guide to Caribbean birds, a book owned by avid bird-watcher Fleming. But he also gave his alter ego some of the traits that he lacked, such as a job in the field, superior fighting skills, and an easy directness with women. Bond was based on Fleming’s knowledge of the spy school near Guildford and the exploits of an agent-friend in Bucharest, which in 1940 was “the spy capital of Central Europe,” according to his biographer. Described by the beautiful Vesper Lynd as “very good looking,” Bond reminded her of Hoagy Carmichael, “but there is something cold and ruthless in his . . .” An explosion cuts her off in midsentence, though readers get the point. Bond is ruggedly handsome. Nothing rattles him, not even a bomb. He’s tough and can endure all manner of torture. Sophisticated as well, in Casino Royale he smokes a special blend of Morland cigarettes and drinks dry martinis. Fleming even gives the recipe: “Three measures of Gordons, one of vodka, half a measure of Kina Lillet. Shake it until it’s ice cold, then add a large thin slice of lemon peel.”
Fleming gave readers a comprehensive look at his secret agent in From Russia with Love, taken from a SMERSH file on Bond: dark, clean-cut face with a three-inch scar showing whitely down the sunburned skin of the right cheek; black hair, firm jaw, slim build; all-round athlete; knows judo; high tolerance of pain; expert pistol shot, boxer, knife thrower; speaks English, French, and German; and carries a .25 Beretta automatic holstered under his left arm. His vices? Smokes heavily; drinks, but not to excess; and women. Not thought to accept bribes. In an era of double agents and Red Scare paranoia, that last detail was not insignificant. Bond had integrity, and his vices were manly ones, not flaws of character. Everything he did was high stakes, whether it involved nuclear weapons, a game of baccarat, vehicular chases, or flirtations with femmes fatales.
It would be a mistake to call James Bond the first spy—that was Johnny Fedora, who appeared in the 1951 novel Secret Ministry—but not unreasonable to call him the prototype for every spy novel to follow. Bond’s character was dynamic, especially showcased within a now-familiar formula: exotic locations, Bond “girls,” cat-and-mouse games with agents and evil masterminds, unique henchmen who invariably fight or torture Bond, deadly gadgets provided by Q Branch, frequent partnerships with CIA agent Felix Leiter, and a tongue-in-cheek cynical tone that made Bond the perfect hero for an unsettling post–World War II world. (“I can’t let them get away with it. These are killers. They’ll be off killing someone else tomorrow. . . . Besides, they ruined my shirt!”)
Bond was uniquely of his time, but he also allowed readers to escape the stress of living in a world dominated by two nuclear superpowers—one reason, perhaps, why President Kennedy and his brother Bobby were fans. Bond, whose code name refers to the World War I German diplomatic code cracked by Blinker Hall, personified strength, cunning, and calmness. At a time when fear was driving people to build backyard bomb shelters and Sen. Joseph McCarthy was ferreting out alleged Communists and Soviet spies in Hollywood, Bond was the cool hero people needed to believe was working behind the scenes to keep everyone safe—even if his opponents were often independent criminal organizations looking to incite war between the U.S. and USSR in order to emerge as the dominant world power.
Like the western heroes John Wayne popularized after the Second World War, Bond was a man’s man, even appearing in Playboy magazine (“The Hildebrand Rarity,” March 1960). Yet his brand of sexism (“Women were for recreation. On a job, they got in the way and fogged things up with sex and hurt feelings and all the emotional baggage they carried around”) was also embraced by women of the time, perhaps because it was a small price to pay for the kind of strength that he projected. Bond appeared in the women’s magazine Cosmopolitan as well (“Quantum of Solace,” May 1959)—something almost mind-boggling, given that “Bond saw luck as a woman, to be softly wooed or brutally ravaged” and in the seventh novel beds a lesbian who explains that before him she “never met a man before.”
In fiction, Bond wasn’t just a “real man.” He was also a real human, more so than the cinematic counterpart audiences first encountered in Dr. No (1962). In the Casino Royale novel, for example, after witnessing the chaotic aftermath of a bomb blast, “Bond felt himself starting to vomit.” Later, after being tortured for days, he worries that he might not be able to sexually “rise” to the next occasion. In the movies, Bond is cool both inside and out; while the Bond of the novels keeps his composure, inside he’s often seething, as when the villainous Goldfinger successfully negotiates a sand trap in a high-stakes game. The movie Bond is an iron man, but the Bond of the novels sometimes needs Benzedrine to keep going. It’s the superhuman movie Bond that pop culture has toasted with James Bond’s 007 Special Blend beer/malt liquor and celebrated with merchandise of all kinds.
The Bond books have been translated into twelve languages, and since Fleming’s 1964 death his estate has enlisted seven different writers to continue the Bond and related series. And with MGM continuing to churn out Bond films, this Cold War hero remains hot as ever.
Bibliography
Casino Royale (Jonathan Cape, 1953)
Live and Let Die (Jonathan Cape, 1954)
Moonraker (Jonathan Cape, 1955)
Diamonds Are Forever (Jonathan Cape, 1956)
From Russia with Love (Jonathan Cape, 1957)
Dr. No (Jonathan Cape, 1958)
Goldfinger (Jonathan Cape, 1959)
“Quantum of Solace” (Cosmopolitan, May 1959)
“From a View to a Kill” (Daily Express, September 21–25, 1959)
“The Hildebrand Rarity” (Playboy, March 1960)
“The Double Take” (a.k.a. “Risico,” Daily Express, April 11–15, 1960)
For Your Eyes Only (Jonathan Cape, 1960)
Thunderball (Jonathan Cape, 1961)
The Spy Who Loved Me (Jonathan Cape, 1962)
On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (Jonathan Cape, 1963)
“007 in New York” (New York Herald Tribune, October 1963)
“The Property of a Lady” (Playboy, January 1964)
You Only Live Twice (Jonathan Cape, 1964)
The Man with the Golden Gun (Jonathan Cape, 1965)
Octopussy and the Living Daylights (Jonathan Cape, 1966)
Works Cited
Hellman, Geoffrey T. “Talk of the Town: Bond’s Creator.” New Yorker, April 21, 1962, 32.
Lycett, Andrew. Ian Fleming. New York: St. Martin’s, 1995.
—JP
Philbert Bono
First Appearance: The Powwow Highway
Date of First Appearance: 1979
Author: David Seals (1947–2017)
We are making with a raiding party to New Mexico to rescue a maiden from the savages. Wanna come?
Everyone in Lame Deer, the agency village of the Northern Cheyenne in Montana, knew the old Buick had many owners before Philbert Bono’s cousin traded it to him in 1978 for two ounces of marijuana and an old horse saddle. But with Philbert riding his “war pony,” the rusted-out car that can’t go over forty-five miles per hour on the freeway becomes a part of tribal legend, along with Philbert himself.
As film critic Roger Ebert wrote after seeing the 1989 film version of David Seals’s The Powwow Highway, “Anyone who can name his 1964 Buick ‘Protector’ and talk to it like a pony has a philosophy we can learn from.” Ebert added, “One of the reasons we go to movies is to meet people we have not met before. It will be a long time before I forget [Gary] Farmer, who disappears into the Philbert role so completely we almost think he is this simple, openhearted man” beneath whose simplicity lurks “a serene profundity.” It’s not just the actor, of course. Philbert Bono—whose name means “good nut”—is strong comic-heroic character.
At six foot four, Philbert is a “great giant of an Indian” who wears his waist-long black hair tied “in a single greasy braid.” Aside from a down vest and two beaded barrettes, he dresses all in denim. Philbert was born fat, and at thirty-three he’s still fat. Readers meet him long after the childhood taunts and rejections he endured at Mission School, where he technically never passed beyond first grade. They might have shipped him off to a school for the mentally handicapped, except that his mother knew he wasn’t “mental” and so did the whole town. He was just “stupid,” and the kids called him “Crackers” because of it.
Philbert would be a sympathetic character without that backstory, as it’s hard not to appreciate a man who sees a war pony in a beat-up Buick and approaches life as Philbert does. As the narrator explains, “Philbert had conquered failure with doggedness. He plowed through poverty with thoughts of wealth. He overcame depression by simply denying its existence.” Powered by beer, marijuana, and junk food, Philbert gravitates toward good times with friends. He’s not a seeker, we’re told, because he’s happy in his own skin and has a childlike innocence, a basic goodness, an ultrapositive mind-set, and an earnest desire to learn the old ways of the Cheyenne—even if the rest of the tribe thinks he’s marching to the beat of a sadly outdated drummer. That’s made perfectly clear when he goes to see tribal elder Aunt Harriet to obtain wisdom, and she’s more interested in her television “stories” than in telling the stories of her people. As he leaves disappointed, she calls out to him (“Hey Fat Philbert”) and shares a quote her grandmother heard from an uncle, who had heard it from Dull Knife: “Keep your pony out of my garden.” Then she cackles. It may be a joke and utter nonsense to her, but to Philbert, whose Indian name is Whirlwind, the old ways are something to ponder, just as throughout the novel he contemplates the magic-but-tragic history of his people and other Plains tribes.
Not bright, not athletic, but genial and helpful as all hell? Those are the qualities of a sidekick, not a hero, and readers expect Philbert to settle into a sidekick’s role when Cheyenne golden boy Buddy Red Bow hops into Philbert’s Buick and tells him that his sister, Bonnie Red Bow, has been arrested on a drug charge. They need to drive to Santa Fe to post bail and get her out of New Mexico, and he’s got gas money—money the tribe gave him to buy breeding bulls. For Buddy, a Vietnam War veteran and previously active member of the American Indian Movement, it’s a simple drive-there-and-back shell game: write out a check for Bonnie’s bail, then write a different check for the bulls, and by the time that first check bounces they will have transported Bonnie safely across state lines. It doesn’t happen that way because Philbert is the hero and he has a more spiritual journey in mind, starting with gathering power before going on a “war party.” Philbert is earnest about living as the Old Ones did, though he’s such an unlikely Cheyenne to lead a war party that one of the spirits of the Old Ones who watch from a sacred mountain near Fort Robinson, where many Native Americans were imprisoned or killed, remarks, “Not exactly the second coming, but who’s counting?” Another Old One quips, “Could have been worse.”
Philbert may be comic, but he’s serious in his pursuit of a communal spiritual renewal, beginning with himself. He feels a growing determination to keep the old ways alive because he sees value in them. He prays after acquiring Protector, and he has a vision as his ancestors once did—though, in true comic-hero fashion, that vision comes after downing a case of beer and smoking an ounce of marijuana. Yet throughout the novel Philbert is taken increasingly more seriously as he becomes focused on the old ways and becomes himself transformed. Others notice, especially Buddy, who joins Philbert when he wades into a river to chant before they begin their journey to Santa Fe. On the road, when Buddy is sleeping, instead of following the signs for Santa Fe, Philbert impulsively detours toward Bear Butte, the sacred mountain of the Cheyenne, because he felt called to the Black Hills by “some great power” and “it was heavy shit, like the Ten Commandments.” Along the way Philbert will continue to detour in the direction of sites that are sacred to the American Indian, gathering such tokens for his sacred medicine bundle as small rocks that he finds in his pocket or stuck to him after visiting a site. Whether he’s singing the truths of Bear Butte at a powwow dance (after which the dancers “exploded in an involuntary unity”), attacking a snowplow that buried his Protector and the Indians inside it, or, in a later novel, crashing a police roadblock, Philbert isn’t just fat . . . he carries weight.
Children love Philbert for the stories he tells them and the way he plays with them on their level—a natural-born tribal storyteller—but for Philbert those stories aren’t relics. They’re keys to a meaningful present. He becomes Wihio the trickster, creator of the universe, when he saves the day by wandering into the basement of the Santa Fe police station and filling his pockets with seized currency, then tying a rope from the bars of the jail to Protector’s bumper and breaking Bonnie free, Old West–style.
Hailed as an underground classic, The Powwow Highway was published in a limited edition in 1979 by a small press but quickly went into multiple printings and then a mass-market paperback release after the film came out. Though Seals—a writer, actor, American Indian activist, and founder of the Bear Butte Council—died in 2017, his alter ego lives on as a testimony that you can get there from here, if your heart is pure and you trust in the powers that gave you life.
Bibliography
The Powwow Highway (1979)
Sweet Medicine (1992)
Work Cited
Ebert, Roger. “Powwow Highway.” Review of The Powwow Highway, by David Seals. RogertEbert.com. April 28, 1989. https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/powwow-highway-1989.
—JP
Emma Bovary
First Appearance: Madame Bovary
Date of First Appearance: 1857
Author: Gustave Flaubert (1821–1880)
Love must come suddenly, with great outbursts and lightnings—a hurricane of the skies, which falls upon life, revolutionizes it, roots up the will like a leaf, and sweeps the whole heart into the abyss.
Of the sisterhood of nineteenth-century heroines destroyed by their desire to love passionately—Anna Karenina, Tess Durbeyfield, Edna Pontellier, among others—Emma Bovary has always been the most divisive. As the provincial wife of a kind but unambitious country doctor, she cultivates florid ideas of love by reading tawdry romances. After two disappointing extramarital affairs that don’t live up to the promise of her books, she tries to satisfy her longings with a wild spending spree, stocking up on a wealth of luxury items that can’t begin to satisfy her insatiable yearning. Upon sinking her family into ruinous debt, she kills herself by eating arsenic. The conflation of love and acquisition makes her a wickedly satirical embodiment of the bourgeoisie’s gluttonous consumer hungers, a symbol of the trashy materialism of the middle class. Her gruesome suicide, which leaves her corpse oozing black liquid, is described so explicitly that it seems invasive, an almost clinical debunking of her self-absorbed illusions and petty vanities.
Yet her author also famously declared, “Madame Bovary, c’est moi,” suggesting how much Flaubert projected his own Romanticism into Emma’s unrequited desires. His identification with the character calls attention to the empathy the novel appears to encourage for this adulterous wife by refusing to judge her with the outright condemnations that writers of the time interjected into their fiction. “I do not want my book to contain a single subjective reaction, not a single reflection by the author,” Flaubert insisted when writing the novel. “Nowhere in my book must the author express his emotions or his opinions.” While contemporaries portrayed their doomed romantics as pitiable victims, Madame Bovary gives audiences the space to either hate or love its titular character. What makes Emma memorable is how often she provokes readers to one or the other extreme; reactions to her rarely take the middle ground. People either hate her, or they are her.
Flaubert subtitled the book Mœurs de province (“Customs of the Province,” but usually translated as “Scenes from Provincial Life”) and dramatized Madame Bovary’s tragedy through three central locations. Part 1 mostly takes place in the small town of Tostes, where Charles Bovary assumes the post of a “health officer”—a far less prestigious position than that of a doctor—and on a remote farm meets Emma Rouault, a young woman educated in a convent but now stuck tending to her aged father. When Charles’s older wife suddenly passes away, he and Emma marry, but the new Madame Bovary quickly finds marriage as tedious as rural housekeeping. After a chance invitation to attend an aristocratic ball, Emma grows sick from discontent with her unglamorous environs. To make her happy, Charles relocates the family, which now includes a daughter, to the village of Yonville-l’Abbaye, whose tastes are typified by the opportunistic pharmacist Homais.
In part 2, Emma grows infatuated with the naïve law student Léon Dupuis, who flees to Paris for fear of acting on his attraction to a married woman. In his absence Madame Bovary succumbs to the charms of the unrepentant womanizer Rodolphe Boulanger, who seduces her (at a county fair, no less) only to reject her when she grows needy. Emma once again falls into a deep depression, which Charles attempts to cure by taking her to an opera in the larger city of Rouen. There Emma is by chance reunited with Léon, who has grown worldlier and more assertive since leaving Yonville.
After consummating their mutual attraction during a scandalous six-hour cab ride in part 3, the pair embark on a flagrant affair. Illicit excitement soon turns routine, however, and Emma discovers that adultery contains “all the platitudes of marriage.” In her disillusionment, she falls prey to the merchant Lheureux, who takes advantage of her not sexually but financially by encouraging her to buy furniture and clothes on credit. When both Léon and Rodolphe reject her pleas to borrow money to pay her debts—and after her various male admirers in Yonville turn her down (though one offers a loan in return for sex)—she commits suicide to escape her shame. Her death devastates Charles and dooms Berthe, their daughter, to life as a mill worker. As if to confirm that only the cynical and duplicitous survive, Flaubert’s final line reveals that Homais has been awarded the medal of the Legion of Honor, France’s highest civic award. Ostensibly the long-coveted honor is for public service, but the conniving apothecary actually receives it for helping the local prefect win election. The message is simple: The world is not for romantics.
In dramatizing Emma’s desires, Flaubert delved so deeply into her thoughts that he foregrounded a narrative technique that previous writers had used intuitively without bothering to name it. Known today as discours indirect libre (free indirect discourse), the device presents a character’s unspoken feelings without attribution tags such as “she thought that,” achieving an immediacy that fuses the voice of the character and narrator and renders authorial intent ambiguous. To quote the novel’s most notorious example, when Emma first sleeps with Rodolphe, Flaubert writes, “So at last she was to know those joys of love, that fever of happiness of which she had despaired! She was entering upon marvels where all would be passion, ecstasy, delirium.” In such moments it’s unclear whether Flaubert paraphrases Emma’s thoughts in his own words or whether he himself believes that she is “entering upon marvels,” not just condoning but celebrating her passion and ecstasy. Depending on how the reader interprets it, the passage is sincere, or it’s ironic; free indirect discourse effectively serves as a mirror that reflects to audiences either the sympathy or the moral judgment with which they react to Emma’s thoughts.
Flaubert’s refusal to censure his heroine for committing adultery landed Madame Bovary in an obscenity trial in 1857. The prosecutor, Ernest Pinard, even quoted the line cited above, declaring, “Who can condemn the woman in the book? Nobody. . . . Would you condemn her in the name of the author’s conscience? I do not know what the author’s conscience thinks.” The rigorous objectivity or “impersonality” achieved both through free indirect discourse and the writer’s devotion to le mot juste (the right word) made Flaubert a god to later generations of aestheticians, many of whom had nothing in common with Emma Bovary. Even Ezra Pound—a poet not exactly known for romantic ardor—idolized the author of Madame Bovary: “His true Penelope [muse] was Flaubert,” Pound wrote in his poetic declaration of independence, Hugh Selwyn Mauberley (1920).
As for Emma herself, she endures as a Rosetta stone for our mixed feelings about sentimentality, passion, and all those messy emotional wants that tend to embarrass us. Judging Madame Bovary is easy. Yet anyone who has stumbled into an affair or even grown infatuated with another person, daydreaming of what love and gratification they might lavish on us, will recognize in her our own susceptibility to constant craving. If Madame Bovary isn’t us, then we are likely either dullards like Charles or schemers like Homais the grandstanding glad-hander.
And that means that while life might be safer and saner, it would be a lot less romantic, too.
Bibliography
Madame Bovary (1857)
—KC
Jean Brodie
First Appearance: The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
Date of First Appearance: 1961
Author: Muriel Spark (1918–2006)
I have frequently told you . . . that my prime has truly begun. One’s prime is elusive. You little girls, when you grow up, must be on the alert to recognize your prime at whatever time of your life it may occur. You must then live it to the full.
Muriel Spark’s The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie belongs to a persistent if overlooked genre about teachers’ effect on student lives. Whether in novels such as James Hilton’s Goodbye, Mr. Chips (1934), E. R. Braithwaite’s To Sir, with Love (1959), Bel Kaufman’s Up the Down Staircase (1964), Pat Conroy’s memoir The Water Is Wide (1972), or in movies like Dead Poets Society (1989) and Mona Lisa Smile (2003), these narratives pit flamboyant, unconventional educators against small-minded administrators and parents who fear that any subject unique or rebellious—like literature!—will subvert middle-class values.
Spark’s short, crystalline novel is the rare example that critiques the pedagogues rather than the petty bureaucrats. To wit: Not many other teachers in this genre sing Mussolini’s praises or spend their holidays admiring Hitler’s good work in Germany. Set in Spark’s native Edinburgh, Scotland, in the 1930s when some Europeans were indeed infatuated with Fascist strongmen, the novel asks whether the sway charismatic teachers hold over young minds is healthy. The book makes it clear Miss Brodie is a self-absorbed quack, but it also treats her tragically, offering her as a tribute to all the lonely people who live vicariously through art and other people.
At first, Miss Brodie seems like every humanities-leaning student’s dream teacher. She believes art and religion are more valuable than science and math. She skips lesson plans to recount tears-inducing stories about the fiancé she lost in the Great War. She insists that education is about “leading out” or developing talents already inside students instead of stuffing them full of bland facts.
Yet Miss Brodie also plays favorites. She gathers around her a group she insists is exceptional—the “crème de la crème,” she boasts—though none of her girls seems particularly extraordinary. Other students dismiss “the Brodie set” as snobs who undermine the collective spirit at the Marcia Blaine School for Girls.
Among Miss Brodie’s chosen few, Sandy Stranger provides the narrative consciousness through which readers slowly recognize the magnetic teacher’s flaws. Through strategically placed flashbacks we see how Miss Brodie made Sandy and her other pet students dependent on her approval. Spark also flashes forward to the 1940s and 1950s to reveal how in adulthood the girls regard their teacher. Sandy equates Miss Brodie with the theological limitations of Calvinism, which insists that God in his omnipotence selects for salvation those he blesses out of nothing more than favoritism, providing no opportunity to earn grace. The teacher’s callousness is evident in her treatment of the so-called dimmest of the set, Mary Macgregor, who suffers her abuse in silence. Even after Mary dies in a hotel fire at twenty-four, entirely unprepared to face an emergency, Miss Brodie can find nothing nice to say about her.
Another girl, Joyce Emily Hammond, is so beguiled by her teacher’s romantic vision of Fascism she runs away to fight in the Spanish Civil War and is promptly killed in a train attack. Even after World War II, the worst Miss Brodie can say about Hitler is that he “was rather naughty.” While other girls such as Eunice Gardiner look back at her as a harmless eccentric, Sandy struggles with the complex resentment she harbors toward the woman. It remains unresolved even after Miss Brodie dies from cancer at fifty-six, alone in a retirement home, and after Sandy joins a convent and transforms herself into Sister Helena of the Transfiguration.
The brilliance of Spark’s plot lies in the way her skipping back and forth in time reveals major plot twists while building suspense over the motives behind crucial character actions. We discover halfway through the story, almost offhandedly, that Sandy is the member of the set who betrays Miss Brodie in 1939 to the school’s headmistress, Miss Mackay, costing the teacher her job. Ostensibly, the reason for the firing is Miss Brodie’s Fascist sympathies, which by the outset of World War II are considered seditious. But not until far deeper in the book are the true reasons revealed. As the girls grow up, they discover Miss Brodie is in love with their art teacher, Teddy Lloyd. Because Teddy is married, she transfers her attention to the music teacher, Gordon Lowther, who is cowed by the knowledge he is the far less interesting choice.
When Mr. Lowther unexpectedly throws Miss Brodie over for a woman as dull as he is, the spinster attempts to engineer a vicarious love affair between Teddy and the beautiful but dispassionate Rose, with Sandy as her confidant. Mr. Lloyd paints portrait after portrait of the two girls, but Miss Brodie’s features creep into the imagery, suggesting his longing for her. Sandy soon seduces Teddy, though not out of jealousy of Rose. Her affair is a simple act of rebellion against her mentor, an attempt to prove the limits of Miss Brodie’s omnipotence. When the teacher seems unperturbed by her pupil’s assertion of will, Sandy reports her politics to Miss Mackay. Only years later when another of the now-grown girls visits her at her convent does the woman now known as Sister Helena discover that Miss Brodie told other members of the set before her death that she suspected Sandy was the culprit.
Part of what makes The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie so intriguing is Spark’s refusal to clarify Sandy’s feelings toward her teacher. Sister Helena’s repeated insistence that the girls didn’t owe Miss Brodie their absolute loyalty seems evasive. Her reasons for entering the convent are ambiguous enough to wonder whether she is serving an unconscious penance for her actions or hiding behind religion to escape responsibility for them. Yet in the end the character who captures the popular imagination is not the novel’s Judas figure but its victim. Most former students have a Miss Brodie in their lives, a teacher who once seemed larger than life but who with time and reflection shrinks in grandeur in front of our eyes until we recognize the power they wielded over us substituted for the unfulfilled parts of their lives. The pathos of the novel lies in the emphasis on that word “prime”: The more Miss Brodie asserts she is in hers, the more we realize she has never really had one.
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie was adapted into a moderately successful London play in 1966 that enjoyed a Broadway run two years later. Its script became the basis for a hit 1969 film that won Maggie Smith her first Academy Award for Best Actress. The movie remains highly regarded thanks to Smith’s commanding performance, but it sacrifices Spark’s flash-forwards for straightforward chronology, diluting the suspense (and softening Sandy, played by Pamela Franklin). The novel’s Miss Brodie is kookier and more clueless in her hauteur—the kind of influence we look back upon later in life and wonder, “How were we ever so young we fell for that?”
Bibliography
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961)
—KC
Aureliano Buendía
First Appearance: Cien Años de Soledad—One Hundred Years of Solitude
Date of First Appearance: in Spanish (1967), in English (1970)
Author: Gabriel García Márquez (1927–2014)
Look at this mess we’ve found ourselves in, all because we invited a gringo to eat a banana.
If one book can be described as the novel of crossover moving Gabriel García Márquez from a popular Latin American writer to a man of international acclaim and from less notoriety to literary stardom, it would be One Hundred Years of Solitude. This tour-de-force tome is largely responsible for Márquez receiving the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1982 and making the family name of Buendía as identifiable as any other among fictional characters. It also does not hurt that there was an inordinate number of Buendías over the course of 100 years with names so nearly indistinguishable from each other that a genealogy chart is necessary to keep them separate. Thankfully, Márquez provides this helpful tool at the front of the book, but even so, keeping track is no easy task as we read through the hundreds of pages illuminating the family’s history-filled century. To use Aureliano Buendía as an example, he has one son Aureliano José with a woman in his hometown of Macondo, Colombia, seventeen other sons all named Aureliano conceived by seventeen different women during his years away at war, a great-nephew Aureliano Segundo, and yet two more Aurelianos in another generation. Márquez marks a century of complexity in the Buendía family’s strange journey and in the original Aureliano, who is equally a complicated man complexly evoked in this epic novel.
One Hundred Years of Solitude begins with a statement about Aureliano Buendía rather than introducing his father José Arcadio, whose journey to and in the founding of Macondo actually sets in place the rest of the story’s action. In a passage noted as one of the great opening lines in fiction, Márquez writes, “Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.” The duality of his personality—the steely coldness of facing death with calm resolve and the nostalgia of an experience shared with his father—are melded here into a singular significant point. Beyond relevance to a particular flash in time, Márquez brilliantly uses this scene to make a statement about the circularity of history and memory and the ability to bring them together at crucial moments, and insignificant ones for that matter. He does so, perhaps, to emphasize Aureliano’s centrality in the family alongside his grander participation in the national history—the inner essential circle’s connection to the larger sphere. Márquez also acknowledged in his Nobel acceptance speech the grandness of life and human tenacity in saying, “To oppression, plundering and abandonment, we respond with life. Neither floods nor plagues, famines nor cataclysms, nor even the eternal wars of century upon century, have been able to subdue the persistent advantage of life over death.” Aureliano, and frankly most of his family, show this to be true through the family’s intrepid endurance.
Aureliano Buendía, called Colonel Aureliano Buendía through most of the book, begins life as an intelligent, shy, and reticent child who even in the womb was said to have cried. He also exhibits an ability to see the future, including his intended but aborted death by firing squad, and such visions may explain his desire to sequester himself both in his youth and when he returns from war. As a boy, he takes up goldsmithing and spends endless hours melting gold coins, shaping the metal into fish with scales, inserting small jewels for eyes, and then selling the pieces for more gold coins to repeat the cycle. Later when he comes back from two decades of combat, he will continue this activity as an avocation to calm his nerves and a means of isolating himself from others. The reclusive side of Aureliano shows a personality differing from the battle-fierce warrior who led more than thirty rebellions during the course of the Colombian war, except that even during those years he develops the eccentric practice of marking a chalk circle around himself to keep others out of his personal space, perhaps for fear of his safety, but just as likely because of the fear of his isolation being breeched.
Even so, Aureliano also sought solace in his loneliness, but his failure to intuitively understand what true connection entails creates more trauma through his choice for a wife. Oddly, and creepily, he chooses a nine-year-old girl named Remedios, whom he may believe to be the remedy for his cloistered life. He must wait several years before she can physically become a wife, and even when she reaches puberty at around the age of twelve, she is clearly still emotionally a young girl who knows nothing about being a spouse or a companion. She retains her dolls as the intimate objects of connection in the marriage, and she dies early of some unclear internal illness, likely a pregnancy wrought on a girl too young to carry a child to full term. Beyond what our sensibilities see as an unsavory sexual coupling, Aureliano’s choice marks another of his failures to crack “the hard shell of his solitude” and connect on a satisfying level with those around him.
Aureliano becomes both more deeply introspective and nostalgic as he ages, yet also increasingly emotionally distant. Márquez writes of him, “He was preserved against imminent old age by a vitality that had something to do with the coldness of his insides,” but in an effort to flee from “the chill that was to accompany him until death, he sought a last refuge in Macondo in the warmth of his oldest memories.” In this way, he tries to keep painful memories at bay while paradoxically embracing feelings that bring back a warmth from the past. Like his father, he will die in the yard outside the family home, only to be found later, rather than in his bed surrounded by family, but they will at least be near.
The Buendía family tree is complicated, each member is uniquely inimitable, and every life is one of interior solitariness in some fashion or another. For Márquez, Aureliano Buendía is the amalgamation of this and the intersection of familial and national past, present, and future with its grand cycles, complex genealogy, and complicated interwoven plots. Márquez greatly admired William Faulkner’s work of a similar nature and theme, and he took to heart Faulkner’s phrase “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” One Hundred Years of Solitude substantiates that belief in his own work. He incorporates a strong sense of realism blended with the Latin American concept of magical realism that is his heritage and part of the stories his grandmother told to him, and from her, he learned for his own tales that “what I had to do was believe in them myself and write them with the same expression with which my grandmother told them: with a brick face.” He succeeded.
Bibliography
One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967)
Work Cited
Márquez, Gabriel García. Interview by Peter H. Stone. “Gabriel García Márquez: The Art of Fiction No. 69.” Paris Review, 82 (Winter 1981).
—GS
Nathaniel “Natty” Bumppo
First Appearance: The Pioneers, or The Sources of the Susquehanna
Date of First Appearance: 1823
Author: James Fenimore Cooper (1789–1851)
Should we distrust the man because his manners are not our manners, and that his skin is dark?
In the 1992 film adaptation of James Fenimore Cooper’s novel The Last of the Mohicans, actor Daniel Day-Lewis cries out, “I will find you” as a British colonel’s daughter is captured by a hostile Indian tribe who then escape with her into the vast American wilderness. Day-Lewis’s presence looms large on the screen and amplifies the great white hunter persona that was immensely popular in American frontier folklore, and frankly still is. Cooper no doubt had in mind Daniel Boone (1734–1820), Davy Crockett (1786–1836), and other real-life woodsmen folk heroes representing the rugged pioneer spirit and embodying the skills of a soon-to-be dying breed. The story captures this idealized figure and era and is part of a novel series collectively titled the Leatherstocking Tales, chronicling the path of protagonist Nathaniel “Natty” Bumppo, best known as Hawkeye, as his life parallels the gradual demise of the American frontier.
Cooper’s central character goes by many names throughout his journey—Hawkeye, Pathfinder, Deerslayer, Trapper, Leather-stocking, and Long Rifle—each related to a specific role in the volume in which he appears. At his prime, he is described as being “six feet tall in his moccasins, thin and wiry,” with amazing physical strength and endurance. Hawkeye cuts an impressive path with his dexterity in the woods, and he is a fearless hunter, crack shot with a long rifle, an expert scout and trapper, a fierce warrior, and a man who is able to meld into the world of the Indians he admires and white settlers and military often at odds with them. Hawkeye, though white, has been mostly raised among the Indians, but as a man with a foot in those often adversarial worlds, he must straddle a treacherous path. Both sides see him as a man of honor and one whom they can trust.
Hawkeye is simpatico with friendly Indian tribes, particularly the Delawares who serve as a synecdoche of what the future holds for the Indian race. The elder chief Chingachgook watches as his only son Uncas is killed in battle and knows that the tribe will become extinct upon his own death. The demise of the frontiersman is also Hawkeye’s future, along with the vanishing of the frontier itself, and he must journey far from where he had begun as a young man in upstate New York in order to go past the edges of civilization. He will die on the prairies of the Midwest as a symbolic last man of his frontier breed, though he in some way anticipates the rugged men of the Wild West that follow.
In spite of criticism that Cooper’s writing style was cumbersome, his dialogue awkward, and plots slowly paced, his hero was hailed as a pathfinder and a trailblazer, not just of the forest, but of his time as well; Hawkeye was viewed as the nineteenth-century literary equivalent of today’s rock stars. Famed artist N. C. Wyeth lent his artistic talent to illustrating the 1919 deluxe edition of the book that became essential reading for American boys. An international audience also clambered to know more about the frontier that had long vanished on their continents, and they were especially interested in tales about its indigenous population and the woodsman who both battled and befriended them. Europeans found that these tales linked to their own interest and idealization of the romanticized, uncivilized man who by living simply outside of society remains untethered to, and thus uncorrupted by, its evil influence. The Deerslayer’s opening borrowed from Lord Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage suggests, “There is a pleasure in the pathless woods,” and America’s vast forestland, viewed as a New World Eden with Hawkeye as the guide to its mysteries, held great fascination for them. D. H. Lawrence would describe the world Cooper had created through artistic terms as “some of the loveliest, most glamorous pictures in all literature.”
That American frontiersman, even though his demise follows the conquest of the West, lends some of his qualities to the new pioneers of the twentieth century, and he had borrowed some of his characteristics from the past. “The Thrilling Detective Website” notes in particular that “Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales form a major link between the chivalric tradition of the Arthurian legends as a woodsy sort of King Arthur trying to keep a heavily forested Camelot from the extinction he knows is coming, and the myth of the American frontiersman/private eye as knight (cf: Marlowe, Chandler, Archer, etc., etc., etc.).” By adjusting the geography and replacing the vast, dangerous forests with “the new urban wilderness of the mean streets,” one can make the leap from Hawkeye, commander of the woods, to Hawkeye, private eye, a man whose skills for survival in a violent world are much the same: a mastery of his weaponry, an ability to track people through a forest of clues, and a willingness to put personal safety on the line to save victims in danger.
Hawkeye has also permeated pop culture in a number of notable ways. He was featured in at least seven films, television shows, or series, including the popular Day-Lewis movie. Hawkeye has also brought his skill as a hunter and warrior to the Classics Illustrated and Marvel comic book versions of The Last of the Mohicans, where an adventure-seeking audience who might have missed him in Cooper’s books could be added to his list of fans. And even a comic book remix has been brought further up to speed with the Natty Bumppo–inspired Hawkeye in the Avengers series “Tales of Suspense #57” as a “reluctant villain” battling Iron Man. Though he has certainly evolved in appearance from Cooper’s frontiersman, he bears the name and his bow and arrows harken back to the forest more than a cityscape. Hawkeye’s immediate popularity in this genre soon moved Stan Lee and artist Don Heck to make him a permanent member of the Avenger team. Meanwhile, in the 1968 book by Richard Hooker, MASH: A Novel about Three Army Doctors, and film and TV series it inspired, the main character Hawkeye Pierce reveals that he got his nickname from Cooper’s Hawkeye in The Last of the Mohicans—the only book his father had ever read. And finally, without stretching our imaginations too far, we can see strong traces of Hawkeye as Luke Skywalker trading in the long rifle for a lightsaber.
Cooper’s idealized pioneer Hawkeye remains a beloved archetype who reminds us of the doctrine of nature and the value of a self-sustained individual. His adventures may ultimately be a dirge for a lost way of life, but they also bring us closer to understanding the need to restore man’s harmony with nature as a spiritual salve for the troubled soul. We see his close communication with the so-called noble savage populating the American continent of old as a harkening back to a more Edenic oneness with our primordial past. That, and Hawkeye is just one supermacho dude in buckskin whose romping through the vast forests brings back to life a distant memory that had been left in a well-worn book in need of dusting off.
Bibliography
The Pioneers, or The Sources of the Susquehanna (1823)
The Last of the Mohicans: A Narrative of 1757 (1826)
The Prairie: A Tale (1827)
The Pathfinder, or The Inland Sea (1840)
The Deerslayer, or The First War Path (1841)
Works Cited
Lawrence, D. H. Studies in Classic American Literature. New York: Thomas Seltzer, 1923.
Mann, Michael, dir. The Last of the Mohicans. Twentieth Century Fox, 1992.
“Natty ‘Hawkeye’ Bumppo.” The Thrilling Detective. Accessed October 2, 2018. http://www.thrillingdetective.com/bumppo.html.
—GS