Papa (The Man)
First Appearance: The Road
Date of First Appearance: 2006
Author: Cormac McCarthy (1933–)
You have to carry the fire . . . inside you. It was always there. I can see it.
Few postapocalyptic novels are as grim and unrelenting as Cormac McCarthy’s 2006 Pulitzer Prize–winning story of a father and son wandering south to find the sea after an unnamed catastrophe destroys civilization. Written in a minimalist yet poetic style that gives the story the gravity of a parable, the book captures better than any other in its genre the sheer tediousness of surviving in a world where nothing matters but the barest essentials of existence: food, shelter, and avoiding predators. Even names are a luxury in this ash-blanketed landscape. The two main characters are known only as “the man” and “the boy.” The latter refers to his father as “Papa,” but his love and admiration are an innocence that will become a vulnerability if he doesn’t learn to guard himself against evil. The man is sick and knows he’s likely to die before his son reaches adulthood. The best he can do for the child is bequeath him the knowledge to continue on. Yet despite the grueling struggle to persist, the father also understands that staying alive isn’t enough. The boy and the world alike need a value system to live for. As he insists to his son, even in a posthuman environment there must be goodness.
McCarthy sets us up to read The Road as a story of heroism, of a father going to extraordinary ends to protect his child. On the surface, the man is the last knight, susceptible to temptation and despair yet never abandoning his quest, a Fisher King redeeming the land that won’t be renewed. The medieval references aren’t inappropriate considering that in draft the book was originally titled The Grail. In this regard, the novel appeals to our desire to believe that parents won’t abandon us—at least, that our father figures won’t abandon us, given that the man’s wife and the boy’s mother commits suicide very soon after the unnamed cataclysmic event—perhaps a nuclear bomb, perhaps a meteorite—transforms the world at precisely 1:17 one morning years earlier into an “ashen scabland.”
The novel’s most dramatic moments certainly demonstrate the father’s resilient commitment to the boy. In one action sequence a menacing forager happens upon them in the woods and draws a knife before the man shoots him in the head, spending one of the only two bullets they have for protection. The stranger belongs to a marauding group of cannibals traveling by truck and plundering any stragglers they come across; from the father’s tense exchange with the scavenger it’s clear the gang will kill them, probably after raping the child. When the father later returns to where the dead man’s body should lie, he discovers nothing but bones and a pool of guts—the truck people eat their own corpses. The father’s struggle is to reassure the boy that the two of them aren’t the only good guys left in the world.
Despite the man’s heroism, he can’t protect the child from discovering the depths of depravity to which humanity has sunk. In one horrific episode, the travelers come across a plantation house where they discover humans chained in a cellar, stored as livestock. The Road’s most gruesome moment occurs when they discover the remains of a fire with a headless, gutted infant skewered on a spit. “I’m sorry” is all the father can say.
Yet as much as McCarthy dramatizes the father’s struggle to protect the boy, the novel makes it clear very quickly that the man is dependent on the child. His desperate love for his son reflects his need to believe that the child is a vessel of hope. He describes the boy as his “warrant,” his purpose. If the child isn’t God’s word, he tells himself, God never existed. Elsewhere he refers to his son as his “golden chalice.” As he later confesses to himself, the boy is all that stands between him and death. His belief stands in contrast even to the survivors they encounter who haven’t succumbed to cannibalism. When the man and the boy meet an old man in the road who calls himself Ely—a version of the biblical prophet Eli—the Buddha-like figure declares, “There is no God and we are his prophets.” The man needs his son so he doesn’t fall into a similar state of despair and long for death.
In several scenes, the grueling journey—its pace hobbled by cold, hunger, and diarrhea—pushes the man beyond his limits, and the child must remind him of the need to maintain hope. In one scene, the father refuses to help a man burned by lightning in the road, much to the boy’s confusion and tears. Later, the boy breaks down crying when the man refuses to allow him to write a note for people who might follow in their tracks. The father worries the note might lead the bad guys to them, then realizes the child thinks all people have gone bad and that they’ll always be alone and isolated. Elsewhere, the father and son overtake a thief who has stolen their cart of foodstuffs and clothing and the man angrily strips the pilferer of everything he possesses, abandoning him naked in the road. His anger upsets the boy, who begs his father to show the stranger one bit of charity. The father refuses, insisting the thief didn’t show them any mercy. Exhausted, he chides the child for questioning his decisions, insisting the boy isn’t the one who has to worry about them. “Yes, I am,” the boy replies. “I am the one.”
In such moments, McCarthy makes it clear that the child is a Christ figure. In a world where the “last host of Christendom” can expire as easily as a snowflake, the man must save the child to save himself. Despite his failings, he does so until hit in the leg by an arrow from a stranger in a window the pair innocently passes. The wound depletes the man’s energy, and in his final words he tells the child he must “carry the light”—a responsibility the boy seems likely to uphold after a surrogate family adopts him, and he speaks to his father’s memory as if he’s speaking to God.
Bibliography
The Road (2006)
—KC
Peter Pan
First Appearance: The Little White Bird
Date of First Appearance: 1902
Author: J. M. Barrie (1860–1937)
Never is an awfully long time.
“I’ll never grow up, never grow up, never grow up. Not me!” Perhaps the most memorable line from Disney’s 1953 Peter Pan animated musical takes its cue from author J. M. Barrie’s 1904 play with its alternate title The Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up. This sentiment taps into two important psychological touchpoints—a wish to retain a childlike state of innocence and the realization that this idealized Shangri-La is impossible to sustain. Unless, of course, you’re Peter Pan. Add to Peter’s perpetual youth, his magical ability to fly, the pixie dust–trailing fairy Tinkerbell, the Darling family children headed by pseudo–mother figure Wendy and guarded by a nanny-substituting Saint Bernard, a band of Lost Boys, a sundry cast of runaways and otherwise caricatured outcasts, an evil pirate captain and swashbuckling shipmates, and a man-eating crocodile, and you’ve got the makings of a classic children’s tale.
The popularity Barrie experienced with multiple play and novel versions of Peter Pan from 1902 to 1911 made clear the public’s appetite for the whimsical fairy tale and its eternal boy. Generations since then have first heard, then read, and then shared with their children the story of Peter, and the proliferation of retellings from every possible angle and medium has solidified his rise to iconic status. Starting with Disney’s mid-twentieth-century version, Peter Pan has been animated in print and film and brought to life onstage and on television in a Pan renaissance accelerating since 2000 with many well-known Hollywood stars and producers tying their names to the story’s variant plots and emphasis. Peter has, in fact, transcended from simply being a novel protagonist to expanded roles as a Broadway and box office hit and a pop-media star with all the glittery fame that ensues.
Disney’s cheerful but formulaic version set the standard for many renditions to follow that showcased Peter as a bossy, confident, self-involved teenage boy who wears a simple tunic, tights, and pointy shoes and hat—a nod to the earlier Robin Hood image propelling young males to wear medieval-style clothing and engage in mock sword fights in their backyards. The pretend Nottingham Forest shifts to Neverland, or Never Never Land in some versions, and Robin’s band of merry men become updated as Peter’s Lost Boys. This look is so iconic, in fact, that it became the prototype for an often-donned Halloween costume gender-neutralized perhaps to follow the popular practice of using a small female adult as the lead role in plays and live-action television versions. Children festooned as Peter can even stoke up on the pseudo-healthy Peter Pan peanut butter with twenty-first-century crunchy and reduced-fat versions before brandishing their swords to raid neighborhood candy stashes, a.k.a. pirates’ booty.
What has been all but lost to contemporary audiences, however, is the evolution of Peter Pan’s character, and the circumstances of his origin may shed some light on why he continues to be so endearing more than a century after his creation. In the earliest rendition, The Little White Bird, Peter is a seven-day-old baby described as half-bird—perhaps the initial source of his ability to fly—who escapes out an open window and wanders into Kensington Park where he first meets fairies. Upon his homecoming he finds the window closed, but he can see his mother has replaced him with a new baby, so he flees to the park again, never to return. In most subsequent versions, Peter flies back to an open London window, this time at the home of the Darlings, but he always retreats to Neverland and his orphaned status despite the family’s offer to adopt him as well as the tribe of Lost Boys, who also decline to embrace a permanent family.
On its surface, Peter Pan presents its namesake with the escapist adventure of a boy’s imagination and a joyful respite from the restrictions of childhood and parental rules. Peter gleefully exclaims, “I’m youth, I’m joy, I’m a little bird that has broken out of the egg.” What young boy or girl hasn’t dreamed of becoming a temporary fugitive from bothersome adults, bedtime imprisonments, and a dutiful life? As such, Peter’s tale of escape will likely remain standard repertoire long into the future as we engage in the willful suspension of disbelief required to fully engulf ourselves in Neverland’s promise of freedom. Even if only for a fleeting moment, we eagerly accept Peter’s edict to “think of all the joy you’ll find when you leave the world behind and bid your cares goodbye.”
As with most enduring children’s tales, however, adult themes lurk just below the threshold of their ebullient surface, and the story of Peter Pan is no exception. He is not just the leader of the Lost Boys, he is the original Lost Boy, and in spite of his eternal freedom from the fetters of accountability, he is also essentially stuck in time. In a sort of repeated Groundhog Day, he will have to endure watching generations come and go as he remains unendingly youthful. Wendy will grow into womanhood and have children of her own, and they will in turn have children, and “all children, except one, [will] grow up,” if we exempt the Peter of Steven Spielberg’s 1991 revisionist Hook, where Robin Williams plays the grown-up boy who has himself become a father.
Relative to Barrie’s earliest embodiment of Peter, the origins of his last name might readily be traced to the Greek Pan, a mythical god of rustic creatures said to be half-animal. Like the fictional Greeks Oedipus and Electra, whose names have been appropriated as psychoanalytical terms by Freud and Jung, respectively, contemporary clinical practitioners have unofficially linked Peter’s behavior and his name to men who fail to accept the yoke of male maturation. The Peter Pan syndrome’s badge of dishonor highlights the shadowy side of his legacy and the consequences of failing to embrace life’s natural progression.
Barrie’s story is, in fact, darker than contemporary interpretations. Captain Hook is bedeviled by his nemesis the crocodile with its ticking alarm clock—an easy symbol of death to which he inevitably succumbs. At one point Peter also proclaims, “To die will be an awfully big adventure,” signaling that Peter might welcome death as a release. Cultural adaptations and the need for contemporary pleasantness in children’s tales shifted to a much “happily-ever-after” aura with Peter exclaiming in several later versions, “To live would be an awfully big adventure,” and thus a lane opens for ever-expanding approaches to what Peter might do or whom he might be in the infinite time allowed him as an immortal soul.
Peter Pan’s legacy provides much more than the popular tale of youthful impetuousness and invincibility. He has become a deeply embedded cultural icon speaking perhaps as much to adulthood’s fears and losses as to childhood’s dreams. But whether Peter represents a heroic figure or a rebel with an ambiguous or absent cause, he is a mainstay in the collective memory of generations growing up with post–Industrial Revolution’s fear of lost worlds and lost innocence.
Bibliography
The Little White Bird (1902)
Peter Pan, or The Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up (play) (1904)
Peter in Kensington Gardens (1906)
When Wendy Grew Up—An Afterthought (1908)
Peter and Wendy (1911)
—GS
Piggy
First Appearance: Lord of the Flies
Date of First Appearance: 1954
Author: William Golding (1911–1993)
It’s them that haven’t no common sense that make trouble on this island.
In 1954, when an atomic-fallout monster named Godzilla was stomping movie-set skyscrapers, William Golding published a dystopian novel about British schoolboys trying to survive on a deserted island following the crash of their evacuation plane not long after an A-bomb had been dropped. The obvious antiwar message aside, what shocked readers of Lord of the Flies was Golding’s bleak view of human nature—that with no adults on the island the boys instinctively would form their own society but quickly devolve into primitive savagery.
“Kill the beast. Cut her throat. Spill her blood,” the choirboys turned hunters chant, and each time they have the chance to kill one of the island’s wild pigs they do so with increasing brutality, ecstasy, and fierce tribalism. They go from timidly poking at a vine-ensnared piglet with their handmade spears and knives to working together as a group to butcher them, then celebrate with bloodthirsty chants and gleeful reenactments. “I cut the pig’s throat,” brags Jack, the leader of the hunters, while after another kill they laugh at how one spear penetrated: “Right up her ass!” By novel’s end they will put a pig’s head on a sharpened stick—a symbol of their savagery they dub Lord of the Flies (a translation of “Beelzebub,” the Philistine god).
Ironically, the most hauntingly memorable character in the book is named Piggy, a “very fat” boy with a “button nose” and glasses who, as his nickname suggests, provides a parallel target for the boys’ aggressiveness and cruelty. As with the island pigs, it begins gradually, but steadily escalates. When we first meet him, Piggy has a hard time keeping up with his fit companion Ralph as they walk through the jungle—especially since, as he tells Ralph with “a tone of pride,” he was the only boy in his school who had asthma (“Ass-mar?” Ralph ridicules; “Sucks to your ass-mar!”). “And I’ve been wearing specs since I was three.” Even twelve-year-old Ralph, who will become the closest thing to a friend that Piggy will find on the island, treats him poorly from the start, thinking of him in piglike terms (“in a few seconds the fat boy’s grunts were behind him”). And he laughs and shouts, “Piggy! Piggy!” when the boy whispers the nickname kids called him back at his school. Orphaned, he tells Ralph, “I used to live with my auntie. She kept a candy store. I used to get ever so many candies. As many as I liked.” Later Ralph will violate the boy’s confidence by telling everyone his name is “Piggy,” though Piggy had begged him not to tell any other survivors they might encounter. Evoking reader sympathy from the very beginning, Piggy strikes a chord in anyone who’s ever been or has known a child who was picked on.
In a novel that’s full of symbols, Piggy is also connected to each of them on some level. When Ralph sees something in the lagoon, it’s Piggy who identifies the object and its use: “I seen one like that before. On someone’s back wall. A conch he called it. He used to blow it and then his mum would come. It’s ever so valuable.” Piggy is the one to suggest blowing it to call others to a meeting and coaches Ralph until he gets more than a “low farting noise” out of it. The conch becomes the boys’ symbol of power. Whoever holds it gets to speak—though Piggy ironically will be denied that right (“Shut up, Fatty!”) because he’s the fat kid, the kid with glasses, the kid with asthma, the smart kid that everyone picks on, the one with all the ideas but not the bearing to be chief.
Throughout the novel, Piggy is the voice of reason, the voice of logic, as his glasses symbolize. When Ralph says his military dad will rescue them because somebody at the airport will tell him about the crash, Piggy says, “Not them. Didn’t you hear what the pilot said? About the atom bomb? They’re all dead. . . . This is an island. Nobody don’t know we’re here. . . . We may stay here till we die,” he says, prophetically. Piggy’s glasses reflect the sun and are associated with light. Later, when the boys try to build a signal fire to attract the attention of any passing ships or planes, they realize that they can use Piggy’s glasses to start the fire, and those glasses become synonymous with that flame and take on importance beyond the intellectualism they typically suggest. But the boys take and use his glasses without his permission, and that becomes another act of bullying, another violation. As the others grow wilder and paint their faces, Piggy remains “the only boy on the island whose hair never seemed to grow”—long hair being a symbol for wildness.
But Piggy isn’t just a passive victim who shrinks from his tormentors. He states his opinions despite the consequences. When Jack abandons the rescue fire to go hunting, Piggy chastises him for blowing a chance to signal a passing ship—“You didn’t ought to have let that fire out. You said you’d keep the smoke going”—but absorbs a vicious punch to the gut that follows, and a blow to the face that breaks one lens of his glasses. On another occasion, when the assembly refuses to give a small boy a chance to speak and they laugh after making him cry, Piggy stands up for the boy, shouting, “Let him have the conch! Let him have it!” In another instance, when the boys grow fearful talking about a “beast” one of the children claims to have seen, Piggy scoffs, “Nuts!” and indignantly says, “I don’t believe in no ghosts—ever!” That prompts another abusive response from Jack, who wrestles the conch shell away from him: “Who cares what you believe—Fatty!”
Twice Lord of the Flies was adapted for film, and twice it fell short of capturing the power of the novel’s descriptions and horrific implications. A good but not great black-and-white version was made just nine years after the book was published, and even an R-rated color version made in 1990 was no match for readers’ imaginations, with the addition of F-bombs doing little to add impact. Elsewhere in pop culture, Iron Maiden released a rock song titled “Lord of the Flies” and goth-rock band Nosferatu cut an album with the same title, but mostly it’s the novel and the characters themselves that have resonated for all these years.
Though not intended as young adult fiction, Lord of the Flies has been read primarily by students of all ages and has had an undeniable influence on the young adult fiction genre. As Golding acknowledged in an interview with Young Entertainment, “The Hunger Games trilogy does an excellent job of reframing a lot of the same issues I wrote about in Lord of the Flies.” The novel remains chilling because, as Golding suggests, bullying remains an inhuman part of human nature.
Bibliography
Lord of the Flies (1954)
Work Cited
Laub, Mordechai. “William-Golding-Lord-of-the-Flies-Interview.” Young Entertainment, September 17, 2014. https://youngentertainmentmag.com/william-golding-lord-of-the-flies-interview/.
—JP
Billy Pilgrim
First Appearance: Slaughterhouse-Five, or The Children’s Crusade: A Duty-Dance with Death
Date of First Appearance: 1969
Author: Kurt Vonnegut (1922–2007)
Among the things Billy Pilgrim could not change were the past, the present, and the future.
“I’m just a poor, wayfaring stranger. A traveler through this world of woe. And there’s no sickness toil or danger, in that bright world to which I go.” These opening lines to a popular American gospel/folk lyric could be the theme song of Billy Pilgrim, Kurt Vonnegut’s most iconic character, who lives up to his surname as a wanderer through the landscape of war and its aftermath while shifting in and out of time between this earth and a world beyond. Vonnegut’s extended title, Slaughterhouse-Five, or The Children’s Crusade: A Duty-Dance with Death, is expansive enough to allow speculation about what makes Billy tick. Is he a Christ or Antichrist figure, a war or antiwar hero, a lunatic or a person maintaining sanity in a creative way, a prophet holding secrets to life or a person who has gone off the rails? These questions suggest the complexity Vonnegut creates in this strange, hard-to-classify novel, and they perhaps offer clues to why Billy Pilgrim becomes a counterculture hero for the turbulent age into which he emerges at the book’s 1969 publication date. His absurdist experience provides a grand metaphor, a glimpse into the existential quandary about the meaning of life and man’s inhumanity toward man. And if all that is too heavy, Vonnegut serves up Billy’s angst in typical sardonic humor, so the reading goes down easier.
Slaughterhouse-Five can be both deeply probing and elusive, but one thing seems clear. Billy Pilgrim is neither a war hero in the traditional sense, nor an antiwar hero. He is simply a survivor, an optometrist whose vision about life is hypersensitive though he fails to act upon his insights, and he becomes a nonhero floating through life passively acted upon rather than being actively engaged. He doesn’t save women and children during the bombing of Dresden. After the cataclysm, Billy simply emerges from the underground meat slaughterhouse where he is working as a prisoner of war. He doesn’t rescue victims from the rubble; he collects corpses as part of his prisoner duties.
At the end of the war Vonnegut’s soldier finds himself, or loses himself, by becoming “unstuck” in time and perhaps untethered to reality, but whether he is sane or not isn’t the central point. The crux of the matter rests on Billy’s ability to exist in the midst of modernist angst and chaos in a postwar generation. And the beauty of Billy’s delayed debut—the novel’s publication nearly a quarter century after the end of World War II—is that for his reading audience Billy’s relevance isn’t postwar at all; it lies at the heart of a cultural crisis immediately consequential to a new generation. If we allow the life on a written page to have a vital existence through those who embrace it, Billy provides a living example of what the counterculture of the turbulent 1960s and 1970s Vietnam War protests could glom onto for their own antiwar revolution. As one writer so aptly put it, Vonnegut uses Billy, as Michael Crichton notes, “to lift the lid of the garbage can, and dispassionately examine the contents.” He leaves the reader to fill in the passion that the aftermath of incendiary bombs has sucked out of Billy.
Whether Billy’s experiences are real with actual time travel and alien abduction to the planet Tralfamadore or a symptom of what we now call post-traumatic stress syndrome, either way what happens to Billy is symptomatic of his trauma. From the outset, Vonnegut uses the novel’s title to clue us in to Billy’s postwar struggle and his efforts to learn how to exist in a world that had enlisted children to wage a crusade over religious ideals, where a new group of war wagers had blown up complete innocents for no vital strategic value. Billy gets that human existence is an unavoidable duty-dance with death, except in the Tralfamadorian sense where death can be undone by simply moving to another spot in time because it is only one point on a fluid continuum. Such a plot mitigates the horror of war or death, which need not be an inevitable end to existence. When Billy’s daughter asks what his military experience had been like, he thinks to himself, “Everything was beautiful, and nothing hurt.” The statement dramatically counters his real experience and highlights one of Billy’s coping mechanisms—to simply replace reality with fantasy when verisimilitude is too overwhelming. He believes it would make a perfect epitaph for a tombstone—a marker that the body now lying beneath the stone had nothing but good to say about life; that is, if he weren’t dead.
Billy echoes an earlier Vonnegut character from Mother Night who says, “It’s all I’ve seen, all I’ve been through that makes it damn nearly impossible to say anything. I’ve lost the knack of making sense. I speak gibberish to the civilized world, and it replies in kind.” In Vonnegut’s view, transferred from that novel to Slaughterhouse-Five and to Billy, actively generating mass death through engagement in war is a human debacle of mind-boggling proportion. And even though Billy is an assistant chaplain in his official military capacity, religion offers no solace. It merely functions as an institution that seems not only resigned to human suffering, it instead teaches that pain is all part of a vast eternal plan to whip humans into shape in order to earn a better life elsewhere in some distant heaven.
The only way to live in the absurdity of such a universe is to be either creative or passive. Billy seems to be both, and he coins the phrase “So it goes,” which appears more than 100 times in the novel as his antidote to the inexplicable. One hundred and thirty-five thousand residents of a beautiful historic city are annihilated, a man is shot dead for stealing a teapot, a nation glamorizes war by making movies with handsome male leads like John Wayne and Frank Sinatra as heroes, mothers worry that their sleeping babies will grow up to be soldiers, aliens capture humans and put them on exhibit in a distant planet’s zoo, an optometrist is assassinated for no apparent reason. And “so it goes” in Billy Pilgrim’s world.
At one point, Billy watches a movie of the war played in reverse in his head. The brilliance of this— the idea that a stupid, ugly, and deadly set of actions could be rewound to be undone—is perhaps the point where Tralfamadorian circular time or bopping back and forth in chronology has its origins. But even if such reversal were possible, the world’s population is still human. In a POW scene early in the book, an American soldier called out of line and punished for an insignificant action asks, “Why me?” The response he gets from the German guard is “Vy you? Vy anybody?” As the novel closes, Vonnegut skips back to the end of the war and the release of prisoners. Billy hears the birds singing to each other, and one says to him, “Poo-tee-weet.” It is about as useful an explanation for the human condition as anything offered in this century, and Billy Pilgrim knows it.
Bibliography
Slaughterhouse-Five (1969)
Works Cited
Crichton, Michael. “Slaughterhouse-Five.” In The Critic as Artist: Essays on Books 1920–1972, edited by Gilbert A. Harrison, 100–107. New York: Liveright, 1972.
Vonnegut, Kurt. Mother Night. Greenwich, CT: Fawcett, 1962.
—GS
Fleur Pillager
First Appearance: “Fleur” in Esquire
Date of First Appearance: August 1986
Author: Louise Erdrich (1954–)
I’m going to slice you open and take out your guts and hang them on the walls. Then I’m going back home to live on the land you took.
Fleur Pillager isn’t as well known as others in this book. Although mentioned or described in seven novels, she’s mostly featured in Tracks (1988) and Four Souls (2004). We first meet her in an excerpt from Tracks that was published in the August 1986 Esquire and reprinted in O. Henry Prize Stories, 1987. Drawing upon her Chippewa heritage, Louise Erdrich created a character that’s rich even for the wonderfully varied cast she revisits in her loosely connected novels. And Fleur is easily one of the most mystical and fiercest females in literature.
How mystical and fierce?
Kirkus Reviews called Fleur “a water-witch, whose ease in love and revenge and self-confidence makes her a frighteningly awesome presence to most men and women.”
In The Beet Queen, published a month after the Esquire story, Fleur is an old woman—someone her own great-granddaughter considers “spooky.” She comes from a Chippewa family rumored to know the secret ways to “cure or kill.” Raised on the shores of Matchimanito Lake, Fleur drowned twice before adulthood—first as a child, and again as a teenager, each time coming back to life. It was rumored that Misshepeshu, the spirit of the lake, grabbed her both times and had his way with her the second time. Two men who first saved her disappeared soon afterward. When she fell in the lake as a fifteen-year-old, she washed ashore, “her skin a dull dead gray,” and the man attending to her heard her hiss, “You take my place.” He became so afraid that afterward he wouldn’t leave his house . . . and drowned when he slipped and fell in a new bathtub his sons had brought him. “Men stayed clear of Fleur Pillager after the second drowning,” reports Pauline Puyat, one of two narrators in Tracks. “Even though she was good-looking, nobody dared to court her because it was clear that Misshepeshu, the water man, the monster, wanted her for himself.”
Fleur is a consummate survivor. When the other Tracks narrator, tribal elder Nanapush, goes to the Pillager cabin to check on the family following a tuberculosis epidemic, he finds all Pillagers dead except for seventeen-year-old Fleur, who is feverish and “wild as a filthy wolf, a big bony girl whose sudden bursts of strength and snarling” terrifies the tribal policeman who accompanies him.
Fleur transforms into a bear in several of the novels, and Pauline recounts how after Fleur went out one night, she followed the girl’s tracks in the morning and saw where her bare feet had changed into the claws and pads of a bear. Animal transformations are part of the Chippewa world, and such episodes further establish Fleur as a force to be reckoned with. Her fury is fully unleashed in the nearby town of Argus, where she had gone to earn money to pay her family’s government land allotment fees. There she works at a butcher shop with white men who see something in her that “made their brains hum.” Fleur stuns them one day by pulling up a chair to join their poker game—something women just didn’t do. When they see she can “stack and riffle, divide the cards, spill them to each player in a blur, rake and shuffle again,” it further agitates the men. One night after she stuffs her winnings inside her dress, the men beat and rape her—though she fights the whole time and makes eye contact with Pauline, whom she spies hiding in the shadows, silently watching. The next day, a mysterious tornado tears through the town, destroying the butcher shop and killing her three assailants.
One suspects that in Fleur’s mind that squared things, because when she returns home and Nanapush asks about a story Pauline has been telling, she smiles and says, “Uncle, the Puyat lies.” As Erdrich told one interviewer, Pauline is “afraid of Fleur, as many women who allow themselves to be controlled are threatened by women who do as they please.” Fleur isn’t just strong—she’s headstrong, and not afraid to live by herself at the cabin, chopping wood, shooting game, and catching fish. Even when she takes a lover named Eli who begins living with her at the cabin, it’s on her terms—though one suspects it amuses her, too, to give gossips more to talk about and create a certain uncertainty about the father of the baby she’s carrying after Argus. Though a jealous Pauline uses “love medicine” to bewitch Eli so he has an affair with a younger Chippewa woman, Fleur’s response is classic: She lets him back in the cabin but refuses to cook, clean, or touch or talk to him. It drives him crazy. Eventually she will fully accept him, but on her own terms. When Eli’s mother, Margaret, moves in with them, Fleur shows a different kind of stubborn strength. After her “mother-in-law” is attacked and shamed by men who shave her head, Fleur curses the men, and one of them does, in fact, die. To further show her support, Fleur shaves her own head to match Margaret’s—an act of proud solidarity and defiance. But Fleur also has what Nanapush recognizes as “the mysterious self-contempt of the survivor.”
Readers see Fleur in times of weakness, too, as when she nearly dies in childbirth and copes with depression after a second baby is stillborn. Then, upon learning that the money she gave Margaret and her son, Nector, to pay her land fees was instead used to pay their own, Fleur clutches a boulder to her chest and walks into the lake, drowning a third time—though Eli revives her and she hisses, “Nector will take my place!” The drowning gives her renewed strength for revenge. The day before the white men take possession of the land, Fleur quietly, secretly takes an ax to every tree on the property. Then, in Four Souls (2004), after sending her daughter Lulu off to government school, she plots an elaborate revenge on the man most responsible, hiring on as his family’s laundress in order to get close. When she realizes the man is unwell, she first nurses him back to health because “she wanted the man healthy so she could destroy him fresh.”
Fleur’s flaw—aside from being a vigilante-style scourge—is an arrogance that “held her back” sometimes. When she finally does put a knife to the man’s throat and says, “I am the woman whose land you stole,” she realizes he’s stolen so many family parcels from young women that he truly can’t remember her. But when he promises to divorce his wife and marry her and do anything she wants, the opportunistic Fleur spares his life, lives with him in Minneapolis society, raises a “surprise” child by him, and when his empire crumbles, returns to the reservation in search of healing. That is, she does to him what he has been doing to women all along. Fleur’s lives—for she has many—are fascinating and her character so sensitive to justice that Father Damien, assigned to minister Christianity to the Chippewa, thinks fondly of her and even goes to Pillager island when it’s time for him to die . . . hoping to see Fleur once more.
Bibliography
Love Medicine (1984)
The Beet Queen (1986)
Tracks (1988)
The Bingo Palace (1994)
The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse (2001)
Four Souls (2004)
The Painted Drum (2005)
Works Cited
Beidler, Peter G., and Gay Barton. A Reader’s Guide to the Novels of Louise Erdrich. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2006.
Chavkin, Allan, and Nancy Feyl Chavkin. “An Interview with Louise Erdrich.” In Conversations with Louise Erdrich and Michael Dorris, edited by Allan Chavkin and Nancy Feyl Chavkin, 220–53. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1994.
“Tracks, by Louise Erdrich.” Kirkus Reviews, August 15, 1988. Posted online September 22, 2011. https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/louise-erdrich/tracks-6/.
—JP
Hercule Poirot
First Appearance: The Mysterious Affair at Styles
Date of First Appearance: 1920
Author: Agatha Christie (1890–1976)
I do not approve of murder.
Hercule Poirot in his short five-feet-four-inch, perfectly coiffed and mustachioed, impeccably dressed self, stands toe to toe with Sherlock Holmes and alongside Miss Jane Marple in the triumvirate of famous British sleuths, though he would be the first to say he is Belgian—being English would have put him too directly in competition with Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s famous investigator. Poirot resides primarily in England after the first Great War, however, and is the precursor to his elderly fictional relative, Miss Jane Marple, also Christie’s brainchild. In the popular detective genre, one could not possess a better pedigree. Between 1920 and 1975, this Belgian PI was the star of thirty-three novels, one play, and more than sixty short stories, and his escapades make up a good portion of the more than 2 billion (yes, billion) copies of Christie’s crime-solving mysteries worldwide sales, ranking third only to the Bible and Shakespeare.
Throughout his career, Poirot distinguishes himself with his flamboyant persona, complete with an idiosyncratic accent, an old-fashioned and overstyled but immaculate wardrobe, and a curled and waxed handlebar mustache, yet it is his preferred investigative style that ultimately solidifies his place as one of the greats in nineteenth-century detective fiction. Though keen forensic work and meticulous crime scene investigation are important, and he isn’t above occasionally snooping in drawers, he prefers a more cerebral approach for his professional methodology, and he prides himself on using “the little gray cells” of brain matter he sees as his most effective tool and his superpower. When criticized for a seeming lack of engagement, he retorts, “You have the mistaken idea implanted in your head that a detective is necessarily a man who puts on a false beard and hides behind a pillar! The false beard, it is vieux jeu, and shadowing is only done by the lowest branch of my profession. The Hercule Poirots, my friend, need only to sit back in a chair and think.”
His investigation starts with the key question of why a crime has been committed, and he favors a psychological approach in getting to the bottom of the quandary about the “who” in the “whodunit” equation. Poirot doesn’t regard assumptions, often sees oppositional evidence as telling—love hiding hate, hate concealing passionate connection, indifference shrouding supreme interest—and his keen sense of how humans think and act propels him to supersleuth status. He notes that “there is always a danger of accepting facts as proved, which are really nothing of the kind,” and he bows to no one’s inspection of these but his own. His arrogance is off-putting but also backed up by his success, which is not to be disputed.
Sometimes Poirot takes his show on the road, notably in two of the most popular stories from Christie’s series—Murder on the Orient Express (1934) and Death on the Nile (1937). Murder committed in the claustrophobic/no-escape-hatch setting of a train and a ship, coupled with the movement through an exotic foreign backdrop, heightens the dramatic tension that makes for great escapist fiction. During much of his career Poirot is on the move solving murders on land, air, and sea; on trains, planes, and boats; and in any number of places one can be murdered—Egypt, Eastern Europe, Mesopotamia, Jordan, to name a few.
As we would expect, the tales of Hercule Poirot are not limited to the page, and they make for equally satisfying thrillers for filmgoers, television audiences, and theatergoers. He debuted on-screen in the 1931 film Alibi, which had been adapted from an earlier play, and he appeared in various flicks for the next few decades. Poirot made his biggest media splashes starting in the sixties with Tony Randall’s portrayal of him in The ABC Murders (1966), followed by British actor Albert Finney appearing as Poirot in Orient Express (1974) with a star-studded cast that guaranteed attention paid if the Christie/Poirot combination were not already enough draw. Sean Connery, John Gielgud, Vanessa Redgrave, Michael York, Anthony Perkins, Lauren Bacall, and Ingrid Bergman with an Oscar-winning performance cinched the movie’s box office draw. This success was followed by British actor of Russian descent Peter Ustinov playing the lead in 1978’s Death on the Nile, once again with an all-star cast, this time featuring Bette Davis, David Niven, Mia Farrow, Angela Lansbury, and Jack Ward. In total, more than twenty actors have played the famous investigator, including David Suchet who filled those patent leather shoes in the television series Agatha Christie: Poirot, which had a remarkable twenty-five-year run from 1989 until 2013.
Hercule Poirot made his swan song appearance in terms of Agatha Christie’s contributions in the appropriately named 1975 novel Curtain, closing with the famed detective’s death. Christie confessed that Poirot had gotten a little cocky and allowed himself to become “an egocentric creep,” so his exit was a literary murder of sorts, though he was old so she had at least softened the approaching blow, and we know who did it. The New York Times treated his demise as if he were a real person and placed the announcement on the front page under the headline “Hercule Poirot Is Dead; Famed Belgian Detective.” In a perfectly deadpanned tone of solemnity and respect, the article honored his memory by saying: “Mr. Poirot achieved fame as a private investigator after he retired as a member of the Belgian police force in 1904. His career, as chronicled in the novels of Dame Agatha Christie, his creator, was one of the most illustrious in fiction.” The tribute went on to say that though he had suffered declining health in the recent years, he could be seen at a local nursing home “wearing a wig and false mustaches to mask the signs of age that offended his vanity. In his active days, he was always impeccably dressed.” This last statement would have made the always fastidious detective proud. As Gentleman’s Gazette noted, “It seems likely that a little dust would cause the quaint, dandified Belgian gentleman more pain than a bullet wound,” and circumstantial evidence would seem to bear this out.
Popular fictional characters often refuse to stay dead, and Poirot is no exception. Author Sophie Hannah has published The Mystery of Three Quarters: The New Hercule Poirot Mystery (2018) authorized by the Agatha Christie estate because apparently there are more murders to be solved and money to be made. Poirot had at one point confessed, “It is my weakness, it has always been my weakness, to desire to show off,” so one has to believe he wouldn’t mind having more chances to do so. Perhaps as amazingly prolific as Christie was, but because she had grown tired of writing about him herself, it’s not beyond the realm of possibility that she would be happy to have the help.
Bibliography
Short-story collections have the abbreviation “ss.”
The Mysterious Affair at Styles (1920)
The Murder on the Links (1923)
Poirot Investigates (1924, ss)
The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (1926)
The Big Four (1927)
The Mystery of the Blue Train (1928)
Black Coffee (1930 play; novel adapted from play, 1998)
Peril at End House (1932)
Lord Edgware Dies (1933) also published as Thirteen at Dinner
Murder on the Orient Express (1934) also published as Murder in the Calais Coach
Three Act Tragedy (1935) also published as Murder in Three Acts
Death in the Clouds (1935) also published as Death in the Air
The A. B. C. Murders (1936) also published as The Alphabet Murders
Murder in Mesopotamia (1936)
Cards on the Table (1936)
Dumb Witness (1937) also published as Poirot Loses a Client
Death on the Nile (1937) also published as Murder on the Nile and as Hidden Horizon
Murder in the Mews (1937, ss) also published as Dead Man’s Mirror
Appointment with Death (1938)
Hercule Poirot’s Christmas (1938) also published as Murder for Christmas and as A Holiday for Murder
The Regatta Mystery and Other Stories (1939, ss)
Sad Cypress (1940)
One, Two, Buckle My Shoe (1940) also published as Overdose of Death and as The Patriotic Murders
Evil under the Sun (1941)
Five Little Pigs (1942) also published as Murder in Retrospect
The Hollow (1946) also published as Murder after Hours
The Labours of Hercules (1947, ss)
Taken at the Flood (1948) also published as There Is a Tide
The Under Dog and Other Stories (1951, ss)
Mrs. McGinty’s Dead (1952) also published as Blood Will Tell
After the Funeral (1952) also published as Funerals Are Fatal
Hickory Dickory Dock (1955) also published as Hickory Dickory Death
Dead Man’s Folly (1956)
Cat among the Pigeons (1959)
The Adventure of the Christmas Pudding (1960, ss)
Double Sin and Other Stories (1961, ss)
The Clocks (1963)
Third Girl (1966)
Hallowe’en Party (1969)
Elephants Can Remember (1972)
Poirot’s Early Cases (1974, ss)
Curtain (written about 1940, published 1975)
Problem at Pollensa Bay and Other Stories (1991, ss)
Works Cited
Bolin, Alice. “Miss Marple vs. the Mansplainers: Agatha Christie’s Feminist Detective Hero.” Electric Lit, May 15, 2015.
Christie, Agatha. Dumb Witness. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1937.
———. Five Little Pigs. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1942.
Laskaug, Thomas. “Hercule Poirot Is Dead; Famed Belgian Detective.” New York Times. August 6, 1975.
Schneider, Sven Raphael. “Hercule Poirot and His Suits, Overcoats and Dressing Gowns.” Gentleman’s Gazette, December 30, 2011.
—GS
Edna Pontellier
First Appearance: The Awakening
Date of First Appearance: 1899
Author: Kate Chopin (1850–1904)
I would give up the unessential; I would give my money, I would give my life for my children; but I wouldn’t give myself.
“She grew daring and reckless, overestimating her strength. She wanted to swim far out, where no woman had swum before.” These two lines from Kate Chopin’s 1899 publication of The Awakening, originally titled A Solitary Soul, say so much in such few words about her central character Edna Pontellier and the unexpected path she will choose. Mrs. Pontellier steps onto the fictional stage after three prominent novels by nineteenth-century male authors had centered on the suicide of a female protagonist: Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (1857), Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina (1878), and Stephen Crane’s Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (1893). Public captivation with the subject seemed clear if the three earlier books’ popularity were any gauge, but it wasn’t until Chopin’s novel that a female author tackled such a delicate and uncomfortable topic in full. This is not surprising, as the few women writers who were publishing in the century tended to focus on a more domesticated theme. In the male-authored books on the subject, two of the females had committed suicide after failed adulterous affairs, and one after having resorted to prostitution when her family rejected her. Even though these works projected a sympathetic view of women’s traumas, death was the inevitable end for their sins against the social order. Proper ladies would not write about such a topic, but Chopin wasn’t a proper lady by the standards of her day. She was a cigar-smoking, non-sidesaddle-horseback-riding divorcée who preferred the company of men. She also chose for her protagonist Edna Pontellier to reject the role of wife and mother. Like her male counterparts’ treatment of female suicides, Chopin’s lady would have to pay the price to appease the general readership, but in that action, Edna claims herself in a way that will many decades later make her a feminist emblem, a symbolic country in which to plant their flag.
One might ask why a wife and mother who chooses to commit suicide rather than continue in these roles is a memorable character for anything other than making a horrible choice. Criticism both at the time of the novel’s publication, and lingering still, sees Edna as a prime example of self-centeredness. It’s hard not to agree in some respects. Chopin makes it clear that her husband Leonce is not a wife beater, but a kind and considerate husband, if a somewhat less-than-passionate one. Her two sons are not uncontrollable monsters, and she has help taking care of them and her household. She and the children vacation through the summer at a lush Grand Isle resort away from the heat of New Orleans while Leonce remains in the city to work, only escaping on weekends to join them. Even so, let’s face it, not everyone is cut out to be a mother, or a housewife no less, and for females in particular, marriage naturally followed by motherhood was really the only acceptable woman’s vocation, like it or not. The alternative was spinsterhood, which was always projected as a sad and often sordid existence. Edna made the choice any respectable woman of her generation would make.
Chopin places Edna in the middle of two extreme female role models. The first is Mademoiselle Reisz, who is an independent woman and musician living a somewhat shabby life but a free one, existing on her own earnings. As Edna shows signs of wanting to explore her creative side, Mlle Reisz wisely advises that “to succeed, the artist must possess the courageous soul . . . the soul that dares and defies.” Her words are a warning as much as they are advice because she understands the personal strength necessary to live outside the confines of expectation. Madame Adele Ratignolle represents the second and more conventional model for what Edna should aspire to be. She is the supreme example of motherhood and its self-abnegation. In the midst of an agonizing birth scene Edna has been called to attend, and as she inwardly rebels against the “ways of nature” and its “scene of torture,” Adele, without being conscious of the effect her words will have, reminds Edna to “think of the children. . . . Remember the children!” For Edna, little middle ground seems possible between these two extremes.
As Edna contemplates her growing discontent, “she wanted something to happen—something, anything: she did not know what.” She finds two escapes from her life, one socially acceptable to a point, and the other, completely unacceptable. She comes to realize she would like to paint, and in fact she takes it up in earnest. There is one problem: How does she sustain herself financially in this way? It is not a lucrative profession for most men, and certainly not for women. Edna refuses to use her husband’s money to escape from him, but she will no longer be one of his possessions either. Her second independent activity is to engage in extramarital relationships, the first one through heavy flirting that evolves into infatuation and then love but no physical relationship, and the second, a strictly sexual liaison with a known rake who opens Edna’s eyes to passion but fails to pair it with romance. She slowly realizes that neither husband nor her lovers provide the “taste of life’s delirium” she seeks.
Edna also realizes that her children are not a source of happiness, and the joy of motherhood all women are by nature supposed to embrace eludes her. In fact, “the children appeared before her like antagonists who had overcome her, who had overpowered and sought to drag her into the soul’s slavery for the rest of her days.” This emotion goes way past postpartum depression, describing a heavy maternal angst to which she is only just becoming fully awakened. As Edna in the last few pages of the novel moves toward her final act veiled as a potential accidental drowning, though all signs point toward conscious choice, in her last thoughts of them she says, “But they need not have thought that they could possess her, body and soul.” With that, Edna swims past the point of no return. Lest we think of her as heartless and completely void of love, she had earlier confessed to Adele that she would “give her life for her children,” but she would never give herself. The sadness is that she sees no compromise here either.
Edna had earlier in the summer learned to swim and reveled in the freedom of that activity. The sea becomes the symbolic warm and salty amniotic fluid of the womb that gives birth to her initial sense of freedom and provides the soft and gentle “close embrace” of death as she realizes she is not strong enough to seize such a luxurious possession as herself. Edna’s suicide, and that she saw no way to find herself except to lose herself, was shocking at the time and remains jolting more than a century later, but her experience also serves as a stark reminder of the struggle to maintain a sovereignty when female identity has for so long been tied to something other than selfhood.
Bibliography
The Awakening (1899)
—GS
Alexander Portnoy
First Appearance: “A Jewish Patient Begins His Analysis” in Esquire
Date of First Appearance: April 1967
Author: Philip Roth (1933–2018)
I am marked like a road map from head to toe with my repressions. You can travel the length and breadth of my body over superhighways of shame and inhibition and fear.
“I’d love to meet him, but I wouldn’t want to shake his hand.”
Jacqueline Susann cracked that joke to Johnny Carson on The Tonight Show in 1969, irked that reviewers compared her sexy blockbuster The Love Machine to her surprise competition for the top of the best seller lists, Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint. Susann aimed the quip at her rival writer, but it applies equally to the book’s thirty-three-year-old narrator, Alexander Portnoy. Because Portnoy’s Complaint sparked a tornado of both titters and condemnation over its graphic descriptions of onanism, its protagonist holds the dubious distinction of being literature’s most famous masturbator.
Yet Portnoy is memorable for more than taking a—err—hands-on approach to his identity crisis. He remains among the most obsessive self-loathers in fiction, his neuroses indicative of both the repressive conformity of middle-class Jewish American culture and the confusing freedoms of the 1960s’ sexual revolution. Bawdy and self-lacerating, Portnoy’s Complaint—first excerpted in Esquire, Partisan Review, and New American Review in 1967—holds the unlikely honor of being American literature’s most complex analysis of shame and guilt this side of Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter (1850), a novel with which it has absolutely nothing else in common. Despite its demeaning treatment of women, it remains a landmark in American humor, bridging the gap between the literary monologue and stand-up comedy.
Portnoy’s Complaint unfolds in the form of a therapy session, its hero directly addressing his psychologist, Dr. Spielvogel, from the analyst’s couch. Outwardly, the patient is an accomplished civil servant as New York City’s assistant commissioner for human opportunity; behind closed doors, he compulsively indulges his sexual appetites, convinced that the pressure to be publicly successful denies him inner pleasures he feels excruciating guilt for even desiring. As befits Roth’s satirical disdain for Freud (“Let’s put the Id back in Yid!” Portnoy declares at several points), the chief culprit of the character’s angst is his mother, Sophie. Often misjudged as a stereotypically suffocating Jewish mother, Mrs. Portnoy is both overweening and overprotective, making her son dependent on approval he yearns to rebel against. Well into Alex’s adolescence she bangs on the bathroom door, asking about the condition of his “poopie” while reprimanding him (wrongly) for eating diarrhea-inducing french fries at his after-school hangout. Portnoy’s father, Jack, is more remote, suffering from constipation and serving as a symbol of the Jewish assimilation into the American mainstream Portnoy wants to flout.
Between his mother’s omnipresence and his father’s cowed humility, Portnoy finds his only avenue for self-expression in (to quote a chapter title) “whacking off.” And lo, the amount of semen one must wade through in this novel! Portnoy describes “firing [his] wad” into all manner of receptacles, from toilets to cored apples to his sister’s brassiere. Most notoriously, he confesses to violating a slice of liver intended for the family dinner table. At another point Portnoy shoots himself in the eye with his own emission.
The comedy turns darker—more chauvinistic—after Alex loses his virginity and becomes addicted to seducing women. His first sexual contact is with Bubbles Girardi, an eighteen-year-old high school dropout who bequeaths manual stimulation on inexperienced teenagers—but only if they ejaculate within fifty strokes. In college he dates Kay Campbell, who inaugurates the novel’s unsettling habit of dubbing women with derogatory nicknames. Kay is “The Pumpkin,” an Iowa coed who takes Portnoy home for Thanksgiving, where he realizes that despite their shared intellectual interests she will never convert to Judaism. All of Alex’s conquests are shikses, or gentile women. In bedding them, Portnoy enacts a double form of rebellion, rejecting his parents’ prohibitions against “consorting with Christian girls”—another chapter title—and asserting through his virility his prowess at penetrating, literally and figuratively, anti-Semitic goyim culture. After the Pumpkin comes “The Pilgrim,” Sarah Abbott Maulsby, whose uptight New England refinement Portnoy wants to sully to assuage his bitter feelings of Jewish exclusion. Their relationship roars to a stop over Portnoy’s insistence she perform fellatio.
The woman bearing the brunt of his animus, though, is Mary Jane Reed, a.k.a. “The Monkey,” so named because of some unspecified sex act she admits to performing before meeting Alex. Mary Jane’s rural West Virginia background allows Portnoy to feel intellectually superior while embarrassing him deeply; in her willingness to cede to his sexual wants the Monkey appears to crave his denigration, though she claims she gives in because she loves him, which repulses Alex. As Portnoy comes to realize, he cannot reconcile the idea of love and sex because the former connotes responsibility and attachment, while the latter is simply a form of power. His ultimate act of humiliating the Monkey happens during a tour of Italy when he hires a prostitute for a threesome. He subsequently abandons Mary Jane when she threatens to leap off a balcony unless he marries her.
Only when Portnoy visits Israel does he begin to understand his condition. First he seduces a female lieutenant in the Jewish army, discovering to his horror that he’s impotent. He next picks up Naomi, whom he calls “The Jewish Pumpkin” before dubbing her “The Heroine” because she’s the one who finally forces him to confront his callowness. Naomi insists that Portnoy hides behind self-deprecation to avoid accepting his Jewish heritage and becoming a real man. Her rejection—which leaves Portnoy curled on the floor, clinging to her leg and begging to perform cunnilingus to prove himself—doesn’t cure his inner conflict, but it does send him to Dr. Spielvogel for treatment. The story ends with a long rant in which Portnoy tries to exorcise his anger at society’s arbitrary prohibitions (such as tearing off mattress tags) without succumbing to self-indulgent, destructive rebellion (like screaming “Up society’s ass, Copper!” at authorities, which he longs to do). The monologue climaxes in a primal scream that leads to the literal “punch line,” in which Dr. Spielvogel signals, despite Portnoy’s voluble confession, that the healing journey has only just begun: “So . . . now vee may perhaps to begin. Yes?”
In later years, Roth would describe Portnoy as a creative breakthrough that allowed him to abandon literary décor and “let it rip” with profanity and explicit sex, elevating obscenity to art. The book’s notoriety drove sales up to 400,000 hardbacks in its first year alone and nearly 4 million paperbacks by the mid-1970s, turning Roth into a celebrity outside of literary circles. Yet the novel also inspired bruising, hyperbolic condemnation, especially from Jewish intellectuals. Gershom Scholem claimed Portnoy’s Complaint did more damage to Jews than the “Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion,” the spurious bible of anti-Semitism. Irving Howe said the greatest insult one could give it was to read it twice. Despite their objections, the novel became a touchstone of the era’s obsession with sex.
What is remarkable is how little Portnoy’s voice has aged. Reading the novel on its fiftieth anniversary is like listening to an expertly delivered comedy routine that could be delivered today. Profane in his self-deprecation, Alexander Portnoy is a case study in self-flagellation, even when he’s not whacking off.
Bibliography
Portnoy’s Complaint (1969)
Works Cited
Howe, Irving. “Philip Roth Reconsidered.” Commentary December 1972: 69–77.
Scholem, Gershom. “Portnoy’s Complaint.” Trans. E. E. Siskin. CCARJ (Central Conference of American Rabbis Journal), June 1970: 56–58.
—KC
Harry Potter
First Appearance: Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone
Date of First Appearance: 1997
Author: J. K. Rowling (1965– )
Well, we’ve never had a great Defense Against the Dark Arts teacher, have we?
Only one character in this book has his own theme park world, and that’s J. K. Rowling’s boy hero, Harry Potter. The Wizarding World of Harry Potter at Universal Orlando Resort, Universal Studios Hollywood, and Universal Studios Japan features a facsimile of the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, where young Harry and his witch/wizard friends studied magic. Visitors can ride a replica Hogwarts Express train that transported gifted youngsters from the Muggle (nonmagical) world to Hogwarts, and they can wave interactive wands as they explore sections of Diagon Alley and other re-creations from the books and popular film series. The immersive “worlds” were an instant success, with attendance at the Hollywood park increasing 60 percent when the Potter attraction opened.
If that doesn’t make Harry Potter seem like a pop-culture phenomenon, consider this: According to fan site Pottermore, more than 500 million Harry Potter books have been sold worldwide in eighty languages, with the last volume, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, setting a Guinness World Record for the most novels sold on the day of release. In the U.S. alone, that final volume had a first printing of 12 million copies, with midnight book-release parties prompting long lines. And the Warner Bros. film series is the third highest grossing, behind only Marvel Universe and Star Wars. Though it may seem like a footnote by comparison, some universities are now offering courses on the Harry Potter books, and at least three volumes of academic criticism have been published in addition to the dozens of fan books and guides.
Though written for young readers, the Potter fantasies are also popular with adults, perhaps because the main character is as surprisingly complex as any in literature. Rowling said that Harry was in her head for seventeen years and “feels like this ghostly son in my life . . . a prism through which I view death, in its many forms.” Harry is an appealing combination of ordinary young man and reluctant savior, and because of the latter he must deal with more deaths than most characters or readers. He loses his parents, his godfather, two beloved mentors, several classmates, cherished friends, and even his wizard’s owl, Hedwig—all because they were close to Harry, the archetypal “chosen one.” From the age of one, when the evil wizard Voldemort killed Harry’s magical parents and tried to kill him as well, Harry becomes known throughout the wizarding world as “The Boy Who Lived”—the only one to survive the Killing Curse, with a scar on his forehead the shape of a lightning bolt to prove it. That fateful night, wizards secretly took him to his Muggle aunt Petunia to be raised beyond the Dark Lord’s penetrating vision.
In the Potter books, Voldemort, like Hitler, is obsessed with racial purity. He and his followers wish to exterminate all Mudbloods (witches and wizards with Muggle blood). In other parallels to Nazi Germany, Voldemort’s followers remove a diversity fountain and install a might-makes-right statue in its place, they replace liberal Hogwarts faculty with their own teachers and fascist rules, and they replace knowledge with propaganda. The books, which begin when Harry gets an invitation to attend Hogwarts at age eleven, start out light but grow increasingly darker and more violent. Harry is a quiet and generally shy lad who soon realizes if he doesn’t act, if he doesn’t follow his destiny, many more people will die. Gradually he develops his magical powers and, because of recurring visions that connect him to Voldemort, begins to understand his special status. In addition to having the same coming-of-age character arc as many young heroes—he is seventeen in the last installment—a second arc tracks his growth as prime wizard, and a third has him gradually understanding and accepting that he must die in order to kill Voldemort.
All of this makes Harry an interesting character, but he’s also a likable one who comes across like the boy next door. As late as the fifth book he’s described as “a skinny, black-haired, bespectacled boy who had the pinched, slightly unhealthy look of someone who has grown a lot in a short space of time. His jeans were torn and dirty, his T-shirt baggy and faded, and the soles of his trainers were peeling away from the uppers.” Harry doesn’t just look average, he’s also ordinary in other respects. He’s not the best student, and he’s not good at everything he attempts. He has a hot temper, and there are many times when he’d rather hang out with friends or play Quidditch than be “the chosen one.” When he comes late to a potions class and is told to grab a textbook from the shelves, he finds one in which a student calling himself the “Half-Blood Prince” made corrections that turn out to be, well, correct. Does Harry show the teacher? No. In what could be construed as a form of cheating, he pilfers the book and continues to use it in order to excel in the class. Things like that make him interestingly human.
Teachers generally try not to favor him, but the other students have grown up hearing about the legendary Harry Potter, and frankly some of them are sick of it. So he also has resentment and rivalries to contend with, and as his hormones kick in he has crushes and relationship confusion, along with friends to confide in—chief among them the brainy Hermione Granger and the easily embarrassed Ron Weasley. Rowling said that while Hogwarts headmaster Albus Dumbledore is the character she’d most love to have dinner with and Hermione is the one most like her, her favorite character is still Harry. And he’s certainly the novel’s richest character, because he grows and matures throughout the books in far more depth than the others, and readers have full access to his psychological and emotional struggles.
As Harry bonds with Dumbledore, readers will recognize the Arthur-Merlin archetype at work, but later another archetype surfaces when Harry becomes instrumental in leading an underground student rebellion called Dumbledore’s Army; he becomes a revolutionary figure, and the fascist establishment Ministry of Magic prints posters labeling Potter as “Undesirable #1.” Rowling said that, for her, “absolute heroism is rebuilding after that kind of trauma, and I can think of nothing more noble than he’s actually living what Dumbledore preached.”
Harry, of course, defeats Voldemort, but Daniel Radcliffe, who played Potter in the eight films (the seventh book was split in half), said he thought the young wizard’s biggest achievement was that he “created an appetite for literature.” Even nonreaders became readers because of Harry. Though Christian parents worried unnecessarily that the Potter books would become a gateway into the world of the occult, as one Christian writer explained, the books deal with values that are solid models of citizenship, such as “friendship, family, self-sacrifice, temptations and the dangers of giving in, courage, the power of love, facing fears, the deepest desires of our hearts, growing up, bullying, protecting the innocent, dealing with injustice, helping those who are enslaved, racial bigotry, class snobbery, international cooperation, life and death, hatred, torture, tyranny, and terrorism—all relevant issues in today’s world.”
Bibliography
Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (1997)
Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (1998)
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (1999)
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (2000)
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (2003)
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (2005)
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (2007)
Works Cited
Associated Press. “Harry Potter Is a Modern Phenomenon.” Today, July 2, 2007. http://www.today.com/id/19491516/ns/today-today_entertainment/t/harry-potter-modern-phenomenon/#.W4C68H5Om-o.
Burkhart, Gina. A Parent’s Guide to Harry Potter. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 2005.
“A Conversation between JK Rowling and Daniel Radcliffe.” YouTube video, 53:03. Posted September 22, 2013, by HarryPotterAdmirer. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7BdVHWz1DPU.
Flood, Alison. “JK Rowling Reveals Her Favourite Harry Potter Character.” Guardian, May 16, 2011. https://www.theguardian.com/childrens-books-site/2011/may/16/jk-rowling-favourite-harry-potter-character.
Niles, Robert. “The Power of Magic: USH Attendance up 60% after Potter.” Theme Park Insider. April 27, 2017. https://www.themeparkinsider.com/flume/201704/5551/.
Pottermore News Team. “500 Million Harry Potter Books Have Now Been Sold Worldwide.” Pottermore.com. February 1, 2018. https://www.pottermore.com/news/500-million-harry-potter-books-have-now-been-sold-worldwide.
Wood, Jennifer M. “10 Highest-Grossing Movie Franchises of All Time.” Mental Floss, April 30, 2018. http://mentalfloss.com/article/70920/10-highest-grossing-movie-franchises-all-time.
—JP
Hester Prynne
First Appearance: The Scarlet Letter
Date of First Appearance: 1850
Author: Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804–1864)
Why are we taught to be ashamed—of love?
Old classics never die; they just keep haunting high school English classes as students might testify of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, published in 1850. Contemporary readers often find the language only a tad less antiquated than Shakespeare’s, and on its surface the novel seems to have little in common with twenty-first-century teenagers, except perhaps the topic of unwanted pregnancy and the havoc it wreaks on one’s social life. So why make them read the book? Because Hester Prynne is one of the rock stars of fiction, and she needs no qualifiers of literary period, gender, or nationality to hold her own against any protagonist on a ranked list. As one website recently put it, “Hester is our homegirl.” This phrase may not translate well a century from now, but the qualities that make Hester an enduring figure will.
As Hester emerges from a seventeenth-century Boston prison at the novel’s opening carrying a three-month-old child, she exudes dignity and grace in the face of all that would rob her of both. Much to the surprise of the dour townspeople who expect to see a broken woman, her statuesque figure and stunning beauty make “a halo of the misfortune and ignominy in which she was enveloped.” Hawthorne sure knows how to embellish a phrase! Hester’s beauty has not only withstood the months of dismal incarceration, she has transcended her punishment, and the narrator goes so far as to say that if a stray Papist were to be wandering in this Puritan burg, he might be reminded of the Madonna herself holding the holy child. Not bad for an adulterous woman clutching the object of her sin to her breast.
Emblazoned upon the chest of her simple Puritan frock Hester Prynne has attached a fantastically embroidered scarlet “A” sure to draw attention. That letter forever linked to her has become arguably one of the three most identifiable symbols in all of literature, in company with Gatsby’s green light and the white whale Moby-Dick. We are never told in the novel, nor do we need to be, that Hester has committed adultery; the proof is evident for all to see because she has lived unaccompanied by her husband for the past two years. What is equally clear is that Hester takes the nearly intolerable walk of shame, head held high and with a muted but almost haughty look of self-possession. Her body language validates acceptance of the punishment without apology for the crime.
So why in the mid-nineteenth century does Hawthorne create this seventeenth-century narrative of female woe? As a matter of possible historical inspiration, in 1845 his friend and fellow transcendentalist Margaret Fuller published her feminist work Woman in the Nineteenth Century, and in 1848 Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton held the first women’s rights conference. If we are to believe the novel’s preface, “The Custom House,” we know that Hawthorne’s literary persona discovers a package bearing the red “A” along with a narrative relaying the curious circumstances of a woman’s life. This seems a contrived authentication for a tale he is about to weave, but we do know that Hawthorne’s great-great-grandfather John Hathorne had been a judge at the Salem witch trials, one of America’s darkest hours of disgrace and wrongful accusation, and the younger Hawthorne was presumably ashamed enough to change the spelling of his name to diminish the connection.
If we believe Hawthorne’s personal shame, we understand more fully his deep-seated need to make Hester a sympathetic figure. Her years of penance become steadily more self-induced than forced upon her. She silently points to the letter to remind passersby not to sully themselves through association with her. She shuns all social interaction but administers mercy to those in need. Hester tolerates cruel censure for an act she did not commit alone, and she protects the identity of the two men who continue to wrong her—the husband who mysteriously appears the day of her public shaming and demands silence so he can secretly exact slow torture upon the man who cuckolded him, and the Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale who wallows in his own guilt at not acknowledging his paternity and complicity. Because of Hester’s honorable response to her punishment, fellow Bostonians come to believe the scarlet letter “A” means “able” or “angel,” and in the end we might only find fault with her not for the act of adultery but for her failure to denounce both her husband for his cruel and silent revenge, and her lover for his cowardice and self-absorption.
The history of public humiliation no doubt goes back as far as the chronicling of human nature, but from Hawthorne’s novel forward, Hester and the scarlet letter have become synonymous with using such sentencing not to punctuate a crime so much as to humiliate the perpetrator. With all-too-frequent regularity, newspaper headlines echo Hester’s scarlet letter with judges ordering convicted defendants to stand in public holding a sign describing their transgressions. Florida even had on its books until 2002 a so-called Scarlet Letter law requiring unwed pregnant women to publish names of their sexual partners so potential fathers might be identified before babies could be put up for adoption.
But through all this discussion of sin, we neglect an important element in Hester. She is a young and beautiful woman, capable of deep physical and emotional passion. However ill advised, her love for Arthur Dimmesdale extends presumably beyond the grave, though with his dying breath he robs her of even this hope by declaring the vanity of such ignominious thoughts. Remaining true to him, and to her own nature, Hester gets the last word, and returns to the scene of the crime to be buried next to the man whom she would not let disavow her, even in death.
John Updike, at first glance, might be an unlikely source for discussion about Hester Prynne, but he found her so inescapable to a contemporary discussion of sex that he wrote a twentieth-century revisionist trilogy—one book for each of The Scarlet Letter’s three central characters—where in Hester’s updated tale the title’s single letter S. evokes the connection. Updike reminds us that Hester is a sexual being, irrepressible and “a mythic version of every woman’s attempt to integrate her sexuality with societal demands.” Such a tribute speaks to the engagement Hawthorne’s Mistress Prynne continues to create as a symbol in our cultural psyche.
More than four centuries dead in historic context and more than a century and a half since her fictional debut, Hester still haunts us. Her unjust punishment resonates. Her desire to be understood and accepted for who she is and not identified only for what she has done tugs at our own personal episodes of mistreatment, no doubt far less severe, but wounding nonetheless. And above all else, the dignity with which Hester bears this incongruity is the true example Hawthorne sets. In The Scarlet Letter Hester claims, “This badge hath taught me—it daily teaches me,” and the beauty is that it can daily teach us as well the lessons of tolerance and forgiveness not always easily found or practiced.
Bibliography
The Scarlet Letter (1850)
Works Cited
Fuller, Margaret. Woman in the Nineteenth Century. New York: Greeley and McElrath, 1845.
Updike, John. Interview by Andrea Seabrook. “Hester Prynne: Sinner, Victim, Object, Winner.” NPR, All Things Considered, March 2, 2008.
—GS