ROBINSON CRUSOE - Daniel Defoe – 1719

Robinson Crusoe is an Englishman from the town of York in the seventeenth century, the
youngest son of a merchant of German origin. Encouraged by his father to study law,
Crusoe expresses his wish to go to sea instead. His family is against Crusoe going out to
sea, and his father explains that it is better to seek a modest, secure life for oneself. Initially,
Robinson is committed to obeying his father, but he eventually succumbs to temptation and
embarks on a ship bound for London with a friend. When a storm causes the near deaths of
Crusoe and his friend, the friend is dissuaded from sea travel, but Crusoe still goes on to
set himself up as merchant on a ship leaving London. This trip is financially successful, and
Crusoe plans another, leaving his early profits in the care of a friendly widow. The second
voyage does not prove as fortunate: the ship is seized by Moorish pirates, and Crusoe is
enslaved to a potentate in the North African town of Sallee. While on a fishing expedition,
he and a slave boy break free and sail down the African coast. A kindly Portuguese captain
picks them up, buys the slave boy from Crusoe, and takes Crusoe to Brazil. In Brazil,
Crusoe establishes himself as a plantation owner and soon becomes successful. Eager for
slave labor and its economic advantages, he embarks on a slave-gathering expedition to
West Africa but ends up shipwrecked off of the coast of Trinidad.

Crusoe soon learns he is the sole survivor of the expedition and seeks shelter and food for
himself. He returns to the wreck’s remains twelve times to salvage guns, powder, food, and
other items. Onshore, he finds goats he can graze for meat and builds himself a shelter. He
erects a cross that he inscribes with the date of his arrival, September 1, 1659, and makes
a notch every day in order never to lose track of time. He also keeps a journal of his
household activities, noting his attempts to make candles, his lucky discovery of sprouting
grain, and his construction of a cellar, among other events. In June 1660, he falls ill and
hallucinates that an angel visits, warning him to repent. Drinking tobacco-steeped rum,
Crusoe experiences a religious illumination and realizes that God has delivered him from
his earlier sins. After recovering, Crusoe makes a survey of the area and discovers he is on
an island. He finds a pleasant valley abounding in grapes, where he builds a shady retreat.
Crusoe begins to feel more optimistic about being on the island, describing himself as its
“king.” He trains a pet parrot, takes a goat as a pet, and develops skills in basket weaving,
bread making, and pottery. He cuts down an enormous cedar tree and builds a huge canoe
from its trunk, but he discovers that he cannot move it to the sea. After building a smaller
boat, he rows around the island but nearly perishes when swept away by a powerful
current. Reaching shore, he hears his parrot calling his name and is thankful for being
saved once again. He spends several years in peace.

One day Crusoe is shocked to discover a man’s footprint on the beach. He first assumes
the footprint is the devil’s, then decides it must belong to one of the cannibals said to live in
the region. Terrified, he arms himself and remains on the lookout for cannibals. He also
builds an underground cellar in which to herd his goats at night and devises a way to cook
underground. One evening he hears gunshots, and the next day he is able to see a ship
wrecked on his coast. It is empty when he arrives on the scene to investigate. Crusoe once
again thanks Providence for having been saved. Soon afterward, Crusoe discovers that the
shore has been strewn with human carnage, apparently the remains of a cannibal feast. He
is alarmed and continues to be vigilant. Later Crusoe catches sight of thirty cannibals
heading for shore with their victims. One of the victims is killed. Another one, waiting to be
slaughtered, suddenly breaks free and runs toward Crusoe’s dwelling. Crusoe protects him,
killing one of the pursuers and injuring the other, whom the victim finally kills. Well-armed,
Crusoe defeats most of the cannibals onshore. The victim vows total submission to Crusoe
in gratitude for his liberation. Crusoe names him Friday, to commemorate the day on which
his life was saved, and takes him as his servant.

Finding Friday cheerful and intelligent, Crusoe teaches him some English words and some
elementary Christian concepts. Friday, in turn, explains that the cannibals are divided into
distinct nations and that they only eat their enemies. Friday also informs Crusoe that the
cannibals saved the men from the shipwreck Crusoe witnessed earlier, and that those men,
Spaniards, are living nearby. Friday expresses a longing to return to his people, and Crusoe
is upset at the prospect of losing Friday. Crusoe then entertains the idea of making contact
with the Spaniards, and Friday admits that he would rather die than lose Crusoe. The two
build a boat to visit the cannibals’ land together. Before they have a chance to leave, they
are surprised by the arrival of twenty-one cannibals in canoes. The cannibals are holding
three victims, one of whom is in European dress. Friday and Crusoe kill most of the
cannibals and release the European, a Spaniard. Friday is overjoyed to discover that
another of the rescued victims is his father. The four men return to Crusoe’s dwelling for
food and rest. Crusoe prepares to welcome them into his community permanently. He
sends Friday’s father and the Spaniard out in a canoe to explore the nearby land.

Eight days later, the sight of an approaching English ship alarms Friday. Crusoe is
suspicious. Friday and Crusoe watch as eleven men take three captives onshore in a boat.
Nine of the men explore the land, leaving two to guard the captives. Friday and Crusoe
overpower these men and release the captives, one of whom is the captain of the ship,
which has been taken in a mutiny. Shouting to the remaining mutineers from different
points, Friday and Crusoe confuse and tire the men by making them run from place to
place. Eventually they confront the mutineers, telling them that all may escape with their
lives except the ringleader. The men surrender. Crusoe and the captain pretend that the
island is an imperial territory and that the governor has spared their lives in order to send
them all to England to face justice. Keeping five men as hostages, Crusoe sends the other
men out to seize the ship. When the ship is brought in, Crusoe nearly faints.

On December 19, 1686, Crusoe boards the ship to return to England. There, he finds his
family is deceased except for two sisters. His widow friend has kept Crusoe’s money safe,
and after traveling to Lisbon, Crusoe learns from the Portuguese captain that his plantations
in Brazil have been highly profitable. He arranges to sell his Brazilian lands. Wary of sea
travel, Crusoe attempts to return to England by land but is threatened by bad weather and
wild animals in northern Spain. Finally arriving back in England, Crusoe receives word that
the sale of his plantations has been completed and that he has made a considerable
fortune. After donating a portion to the widow and his sisters, Crusoe is restless and
considers returning to Brazil, but he is dissuaded by the thought that he would have to
become Catholic. He marries, and his wife dies. Crusoe finally departs for the East Indies
as a trader in 1694. He revisits his island, finding that the Spaniards are governing it well
and that it has become a prosperous colony.

Character List
Robinson Crusoe
The novel’s protagonist and narrator. Crusoe begins the novel as a young middle-class
man in York in search of a career. He father recommends the law, but Crusoe yearns for a
life at sea, and his subsequent rebellion and decision to become a merchant is the starting
point for the whole adventure that follows. His vague but recurring feelings of guilt over his
disobedience color the first part of the first half of the story and show us how deep Crusoe’s
religious fear is. Crusoe is steady and plodding in everything he does, and his
perseverance ensures his survival through storms, enslavement, and a twenty-eight-year
isolation on a desert island.

Friday
A twenty-six-year-old Caribbean native and cannibal who converts to Protestantism under
Crusoe’s tutelage. Friday becomes Crusoe’s servant after Crusoe saves his life when
Friday is about to be eaten by other cannibals. Friday never appears to resist or resent his
new servitude, and he may sincerely view it as appropriate compensation for having his life
saved. But whatever Friday’s response may be, his servitude has become a symbol of
imperialist oppression throughout the modern world. Friday’s overall charisma works
against the emotional deadness that many readers find in Crusoe.

The Portuguese Captain

The sea captain who picks up Crusoe and the slave boy Xury from their boat after they
escape from their Moorish captors and float down the African coast. The Portuguese
captain takes Crusoe to Brazil and thus inaugurates Crusoe’s new life as plantation owner.
The Portuguese captain is never named—unlike Xury, for example—and his anonymity
suggests a certain uninteresting blandness in his role in the novel. He is polite, personable,
and extremely generous to Crusoe, buying the animal skins and the slave boy from Crusoe
at well over market value. He is loyal as well, taking care of Crusoe’s Brazilian investments
even after a twenty-eight-year absence. His role in Crusoe’s life is crucial, since he both
arranges for Crusoe’s new career as a plantation owner and helps Crusoe cash in on the
profits later.

The Spaniard
One of the men from the Spanish ship that is wrecked off Crusoe’s island, and whose crew
is rescued by the cannibals and taken to a neighboring island. The Spaniard is doomed to
be eaten as a ritual victim of the cannibals when Crusoe saves him. In exchange, he
becomes a new “subject” in Crusoe’s “kingdom,” at least according to Crusoe. The
Spaniard is never fleshed out much as a character in Crusoe’s narrative, an example of the
odd impersonal attitude often notable in Crusoe.

Xury
A nonwhite (Arab or Black) slave boy only briefly introduced during the period of Crusoe’s
enslavement in Sallee. When Crusoe escapes with two other slaves in a boat, he forces
one to swim to shore but keeps Xury on board, showing a certain trust toward the boy. Xury
never betrays that trust. Nevertheless, when the Portuguese captain eventually picks them
up, Crusoe sells Xury to the captain. Xury’s sale shows us the racist double standards
sometimes apparent in Crusoe’s behavior.

The Widow
Appearing briefly, but on two separate occasions in the novel, the widow keeps
Crusoe’s 200 pounds safe in England throughout all his thirty-five years of journeying. She
returns it loyally to Crusoe upon his return to England and, like the Portuguese captain and
Friday, reminds us of the goodwill and trustworthiness of which humans can be capable,
whether European or not.

Themes
The Ambivalence of Mastery
Crusoe’s success in mastering his situation, overcoming his obstacles, and controlling his
environment shows the condition of mastery in a positive light, at least at the beginning of
the novel. Crusoe lands in an inhospitable environment and makes it his home. His taming
and domestication of wild goats and parrots with Crusoe as their master illustrates his
newfound control. Moreover, Crusoe’s mastery over nature makes him a master of his fate
and of himself. Early in the novel, he frequently blames himself for disobeying his father’s
advice or blames the destiny that drove him to sea. But in the later part of the novel, Crusoe
stops viewing himself as a passive victim and strikes a new note of self-determination. In
building a home for himself on the island, he finds that he is master of his life—he suffers a
hard fate and still finds prosperity.

But this theme of mastery becomes more complex and less positive after Friday’s arrival,
when the idea of mastery comes to apply more to unfair relationships between humans. In
Chapter XXIII, Crusoe teaches Friday the word “[m]aster” even before teaching him “yes”
and “no,” and indeed he lets him “know that was to be [Crusoe’s] name.” Crusoe never
entertains the idea of considering Friday a friend or equal—for some reason, superiority
comes instinctively to him. We further question Crusoe’s right to be called “[m]aster” when
he later refers to himself as “king” over the natives and Europeans, who are his “subjects.”
In short, while Crusoe seems praiseworthy in mastering his fate, the praiseworthiness of his
mastery over his fellow humans is more doubtful. Defoe explores the link between the two
in his depiction of the colonial mind.

The Necessity of Repentance

Crusoe’s experiences constitute not simply an adventure story in which thrilling things
happen, but also a moral tale illustrating the right and wrong ways to live one’s life. This
moral and religious dimension of the tale is indicated in the Preface, which states that
Crusoe’s story is being published to instruct others in God’s wisdom, and one vital part of
this wisdom is the importance of repenting one’s sins. While it is important to be grateful for
God’s miracles, as Crusoe is when his grain sprouts, it is not enough simply to express
gratitude or even to pray to God, as Crusoe does several times with few results. Crusoe
needs repentance most, as he learns from the fiery angelic figure that comes to him during
a feverish hallucination and says, “Seeing all these things have not brought thee to
repentance, now thou shalt die.” Crusoe believes that his major sin is his rebellious
behavior toward his father, which he refers to as his “original sin,” akin to Adam and Eve’s
first disobedience of God. This biblical reference also suggests that Crusoe’s exile from
civilization represents Adam and Eve’s expulsion from Eden.

For Crusoe, repentance consists of acknowledging his wretchedness and his absolute
dependence on the Lord. This admission marks a turning point in Crusoe’s spiritual
consciousness, and is almost a born-again experience for him. After repentance, he
complains much less about his sad fate and views the island more positively. Later, when
Crusoe is rescued and his fortune restored, he compares himself to Job, who also regained
divine favor. Ironically, this view of the necessity of repentance ends up justifying sin:
Crusoe may never have learned to repent if he had never sinfully disobeyed his father in
the first place. Thus, as powerful as the theme of repentance is in the novel, it is
nevertheless complex and ambiguous.

The Importance of Self-Awareness

Crusoe’s arrival on the island does not make him revert to a brute existence controlled by
animal instincts, and, unlike animals, he remains conscious of himself at all times. Indeed,
his island existence actually deepens his self-awareness as he withdraws from the external
social world and turns inward. The idea that the individual must keep a careful reckoning of
the state of his own soul is a key point in the Presbyterian doctrine that Defoe took seriously
all his life. We see that in his normal day-to-day activities, Crusoe keeps accounts of
himself enthusiastically and in various ways. For example, it is significant that Crusoe’s
makeshift calendar does not simply mark the passing of days, but instead more
egocentrically marks the days he has spent on the island: it is about him, a sort of self-
conscious or autobiographical calendar with him at its center. Similarly, Crusoe obsessively
keeps a journal to record his daily activities, even when they amount to nothing more than
finding a few pieces of wood on the beach or waiting inside while it rains. Crusoe feels the
importance of staying aware of his situation at all times. We can also sense Crusoe’s
impulse toward self-awareness in the fact that he teaches his parrot to say the words, “Poor
Robin Crusoe. . . . Where have you been?” This sort of self-examining thought is natural for
anyone alone on a desert island, but it is given a strange intensity when we recall that
Crusoe has spent months teaching the bird to say it back to him. Crusoe teaches nature
itself to voice his own self-awareness.

Symbols
The Footprint
Crusoe’s shocking discovery of a single footprint on the sand in Chapter XVIII is one of the
most famous moments in the novel, and it symbolizes our hero’s conflicted feelings about
human companionship. Crusoe has earlier confessed how much he misses companionship,
yet the evidence of a man on his island sends him into a panic. Immediately he interprets
the footprint negatively, as the print of the devil or of an aggressor. He never for a moment
entertains hope that it could belong to an angel or another European who could rescue or
befriend him. This instinctively negative and fearful attitude toward others makes us
consider the possibility that Crusoe may not want to return to human society after all, and
that the isolation he is experiencing may actually be his ideal state.

The Cross
Concerned that he will “lose [his] reckoning of time” in Chapter VII, Crusoe marks the
passing of days “with [his] knife upon a large post, in capital letters, and making it into a
great cross . . . set[s] it up on the shore where [he] first landed. . . .” The large size and
capital letters show us how important this cross is to Crusoe as a timekeeping device and
thus also as a way of relating himself to the larger social world where dates and calendars
still matter. But the cross is also a symbol of his own new existence on the island, just as
the Christian cross is a symbol of the Christian’s new life in Christ after baptism, an
immersion in water like Crusoe’s shipwreck experience. Yet Crusoe’s large cross seems
somewhat blasphemous in making no reference to Christ. Instead, it is a memorial to
Crusoe himself, underscoring how completely he has become the center of his own life.
Crusoe’s Bower
On a scouting tour around the island, Crusoe discovers a delightful valley in which he
decides to build a country retreat or “bower” in Chapter XII. This bower contrasts sharply
with Crusoe’s first residence, since it is built not for the practical purpose of shelter or
storage, but simply for pleasure: “because I was so enamoured of the place.” Crusoe is no
longer focused solely on survival, which by this point in the novel is more or less secure.
Now, for the first time since his arrival, he thinks in terms of “pleasantness.” Thus, the
bower symbolizes a radical improvement in Crusoe’s attitude toward his time on the island.
Island life is no longer necessarily a disaster to suffer through, but may be an opportunity
for enjoyment—just as, for the Presbyterian, life may be enjoyed only after hard work has
been finished and repentance achieved.

WUTHERING HEIGHTS – Emily Bronte - 1847

In the late winter months of 1801, a man named Lockwood rents a manor house called
Thrushcross Grange in the isolated moor country of England. Here, he meets his dour
landlord, Heathcliff, a wealthy man who lives in the ancient manor of Wuthering Heights,
four miles away from the Grange. In this wild, stormy countryside, Lockwood asks his
housekeeper, Nelly Dean, to tell him the story of Heathcliff and the strange denizens of
Wuthering Heights. Nelly consents, and Lockwood writes down his recollections of her tale
in his diary; these written recollections form the main part of Wuthering Heights.
Nelly remembers her childhood. As a young girl, she works as a servant at Wuthering
Heights for the owner of the manor, Mr. Earnshaw, and his family. One day, Mr. Earnshaw
goes to Liverpool and returns home with an orphan boy whom he will raise with his own
children. At first, the Earnshaw children—a boy named Hindley and his younger
sister Catherine—detest the dark-skinned Heathcliff. But Catherine quickly comes to love
him, and the two soon grow inseparable, spending their days playing on the moors. After
his wife’s death, Mr. Earnshaw grows to prefer Heathcliff to his own son, and when Hindley
continues his cruelty to Heathcliff, Mr. Earnshaw sends Hindley away to college, keeping
Heathcliff nearby.
Three years later, Mr. Earnshaw dies, and Hindley inherits Wuthering Heights. He returns
with a wife, Frances, and immediately seeks revenge on Heathcliff. Once an orphan, later a
pampered and favored son, Heathcliff now finds himself treated as a common laborer,
forced to work in the fields. Heathcliff continues his close relationship with Catherine,
however. One night they wander to Thrushcross Grange, hoping to
tease Edgar and Isabella Linton, the cowardly, snobbish children who live there. Catherine
is bitten by a dog and is forced to stay at the Grange to recuperate for five weeks, during
which time Mrs. Linton works to make her a proper young lady. By the time Catherine
returns, she has become infatuated with Edgar, and her relationship with Heathcliff grows
more complicated.
When Frances dies after giving birth to a baby boy named Hareton, Hindley descends into
the depths of alcoholism, and behaves even more cruelly and abusively toward Heathcliff.
Eventually, Catherine’s desire for social advancement prompts her to become engaged to
Edgar Linton, despite her overpowering love for Heathcliff. Heathcliff runs away from
Wuthering Heights, staying away for three years, and returning shortly after Catherine and
Edgar’s marriage.
When Heathcliff returns, he immediately sets about seeking revenge on all who have
wronged him. Having come into a vast and mysterious wealth, he deviously lends money to
the drunken Hindley, knowing that Hindley will increase his debts and fall into deeper
despondency. When Hindley dies, Heathcliff inherits the manor. He also places himself in
line to inherit Thrushcross Grange by marrying Isabella Linton, whom he treats very cruelly.
Catherine becomes ill, gives birth to a daughter, and dies. Heathcliff begs her spirit to
remain on Earth—she may take whatever form she will, she may haunt him, drive him
mad—just as long as she does not leave him alone. Shortly thereafter, Isabella flees to
London and gives birth to Heathcliff’s son, named Linton after her family. She keeps the
boy with her there.

Thirteen years pass, during which Nelly Dean serves as Catherine’s daughter’s nursemaid
at Thrushcross Grange. Young Cathy is beautiful and headstrong like her mother, but her
temperament is modified by her father’s gentler influence. Cathy grows up at the Grange
with no knowledge of Wuthering Heights; one day, however, wandering through the moors,
she discovers the manor, meets Hareton, and plays together with him. Soon afterwards,
Isabella dies, and Linton comes to live with Heathcliff. Heathcliff treats his sickly, whining
son even more cruelly than he treated the boy’s mother.

Three years later, Cathy meets Heathcliff on the moors, and makes a visit to Wuthering
Heights to meet Linton. She and Linton begin a secret romance conducted entirely through
letters. When Nelly destroys Cathy's collection of letters, the girl begins sneaking out at
night to spend time with her frail young lover, who asks her to come back and nurse him
back to health. However, it quickly becomes apparent that Linton is pursuing Cathy only
because Heathcliff is forcing him to; Heathcliff hopes that if Cathy marries Linton, his legal
claim upon Thrushcross Grange—and his revenge upon Edgar Linton—will be complete.

One day, as Edgar Linton grows ill and nears death, Heathcliff lures Nelly and Cathy back
to Wuthering Heights, and holds them prisoner until Cathy marries Linton. Soon after the
marriage, Edgar dies, and his death is quickly followed by the death of the sickly Linton.
Heathcliff now controls both Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross Grange. He forces Cathy
to live at Wuthering Heights and act as a common servant, while he rents Thrushcross
Grange to Lockwood.

Nelly’s story ends as she reaches the present. Lockwood, appalled, ends his tenancy at
Thrushcross Grange and returns to London. However, six months later, he pays a visit to
Nelly, and learns of further developments in the story. Although Cathy originally mocked
Hareton’s ignorance and illiteracy (in an act of retribution, Heathcliff ended Hareton’s
education after Hindley died), Cathy grows to love Hareton as they live together at
Wuthering Heights. Heathcliff becomes more and more obsessed with the memory of the
elder Catherine, to the extent that he begins speaking to her ghost. Everything he sees
reminds him of her. Shortly after a night spent walking on the moors, Heathcliff dies.
Hareton and Cathy inherit Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross Grange, and they plan to be
married on the next New Year’s Day. After hearing the end of the story, Lockwood goes to
visit the graves of Catherine and Heathcliff.
Chronology
The story of Wuthering Heights is told through flashbacks recorded in diary entries, and
events are often presented out of chronological order—Lockwood’s narrative takes place
after Nelly’s narrative, for instance, but is interspersed with Nelly’s story in his journal.
Nevertheless, the novel contains enough clues to enable an approximate reconstruction of
its chronology, which was elaborately designed by Emily Brontë. For instance, Lockwood’s
diary entries are recorded in the late months of 1801 and in September 1802; in 1801, Nelly
tells Lockwood that she has lived at Thrushcross Grange for eighteen years, since
Catherine’s marriage to Edgar, which must then have occurred in 1783.
We know that Catherine was engaged to Edgar for three years, and that Nelly was twenty-
two when they were engaged, so the engagement must have taken place in 1780, and
Nelly must have been born in 1758. Since Nelly is a few years older than Catherine, and
since Lockwood comments that Heathcliff is about forty years old in 1801, it stands to
reason that Heathcliff and Catherine were born around 1761, three years after Nelly. There
are several other clues like this in the novel (such as Hareton’s birth, which occurs in June,
1778). The following chronology is based on those clues, and should closely approximate
the timing of the novel’s important events. A “~” before a date indicates that it cannot be
precisely determined from the evidence in the novel, but only closely estimated.

1500: The stone above the front door of Wuthering Heights, bearing the name of Hareton
Earnshaw, is inscribed, possibly to mark the completion of the house.
1758: Nelly is born.
~1761: Heathcliff and Catherine are born.
~1767: Mr. Earnshaw brings Heathcliff to live at Wuthering Heights.
1774: Mr. Earnshaw sends Hindley away to college.
1777: Mr. Earnshaw dies; Hindley and Frances take possession of Wuthering Heights;
Catherine first visits Thrushcross Grange around Christmastime.
1778: Hareton is born in June; Frances dies; Hindley begins his slide into alcoholism.
1780: Catherine becomes engaged to Edgar Linton; Heathcliff leaves Wuthering Heights.
1783: Catherine and Edgar are married; Heathcliff arrives at Thrushcross Grange in
September.
1784: Heathcliff and Isabella elope in the early part of the year; Catherine becomes ill with
brain fever; her daughter Cathy is born late in the year; Catherine dies.
1785: Early in the year, Isabella flees Wuthering Heights and settles in London; Linton is
born.
~1785: Hindley dies; Heathcliff inherits Wuthering Heights.
~1797: Young Cathy meets Hareton and visits Wuthering Heights for the first time; Linton
comes from London after Isabella dies (in late 1797 or early 1798).
1800: Cathy stages her romance with Linton in the winter.
1801: Early in the year, Cathy is imprisoned by Heathcliff and forced to marry Linton; Edgar
Linton dies; Linton dies; Heathcliff assumes control of Thrushcross Grange. Late in the
year, Lockwood rents the Grange from Heathcliff and begins his tenancy. In a winter storm,
Lockwood takes ill and begins conversing with Nelly Dean.
1801-1802: During the winter, Nelly narrates her story for Lockwood.
1802: In spring, Lockwood returns to London; Cathy and Hareton fall in love; Heathcliff
dies; Lockwood returns in September and hears the end of the story from Nelly.
1803: On New Year’s Day, Cathy and Hareton plan to be married.
Character List
Heathcliff
An orphan brought to live at Wuthering Heights by Mr. Earnshaw, Heathcliff falls into an
intense, unbreakable love with Mr. Earnshaw’s daughter Catherine. After Mr. Earnshaw
dies, his resentful son Hindley abuses Heathcliff and treats him as a servant. Because of
her desire for social prominence, Catherine marries Edgar Linton instead of Heathcliff.
Heathcliff’s humiliation and misery prompt him to spend most of the rest of his life seeking
revenge on Hindley, his beloved Catherine, and their respective children (Hareton and
young Cathy). A powerful, fierce, and often cruel man, Heathcliff acquires a fortune and
uses his extraordinary powers of will to acquire both Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross
Grange, the estate of Edgar Linton.

Catherine Earnshaw
The daughter of Mr. Earnshaw and his wife, Catherine falls powerfully in love with
Heathcliff, the orphan Mr. Earnshaw brings home from Liverpool. Catherine loves Heathcliff
so intensely that she claims they are the same person. However, her desire for social
advancement motivates her to marry Edgar Linton instead. Catherine is free-spirited,
beautiful, spoiled, and often arrogant. She is given to fits of temper, and she is torn between
her wild passion for Heathcliff and her social ambition. She brings misery to both of the men
who love her.

Edgar Linton
Well-bred but rather spoiled as a boy, Edgar Linton grows into a tender, constant, but
cowardly man. He is almost the ideal gentleman: Catherine accurately describes him as
“handsome,” “pleasant to be with,” “cheerful,” and “rich.” However, this full assortment of
gentlemanly characteristics, along with his civilized virtues, proves useless in Edgar’s
clashes with his foil, Heathcliff, who gains power over his wife, sister, and daughter.

Lockwood
Lockwood’s narration forms a frame around Nelly’s; he serves as an intermediary between
Nelly and the reader. A somewhat vain and presumptuous gentleman, he deals very
clumsily with the inhabitants of Wuthering Heights. Lockwood comes from a more
domesticated region of England, and he finds himself at a loss when he witnesses the
strange household’s disregard for the social conventions that have always structured his
world. As a narrator, his vanity and unfamiliarity with the story occasionally lead him to
misunderstand events.

Nelly Dean
Nelly Dean (known formally as Ellen Dean) serves as the chief narrator of Wuthering
Heights. A sensible, intelligent, and compassionate woman, she grew up essentially
alongside Hindley and Catherine Earnshaw and is deeply involved in the story she tells.
She has strong feelings for the characters in her story, and these feelings complicate her
narration.

Isabella Linton
Edgar Linton’s sister, who falls in love with Heathcliff and marries him. She sees Heathcliff
as a romantic figure, like a character in a novel. Ultimately, she ruins her life by falling in
love with him. He never returns her feelings and treats her as a mere tool in his quest for
revenge on the Linton family.

Cathy Linton
The daughter of Edgar Linton and the first Catherine. The first Catherine begins her life as
an Earnshaw and ends it as a Linton; her daughter, referred to for clarity's sake in this
SparkNote as Cathy, begins as a Linton and, assuming that she marries Hareton after the
end of the story, goes on to become an Earnshaw. The mother and the daughter share not
only a name, but also a tendency toward headstrong behavior, impetuousness, and
occasional arrogance. However, Edgar’s influence seems to have tempered young Cathy's
character, and she is a gentler and more compassionate creature than her mother.

Hareton Earnshaw
The son of Hindley and Frances Earnshaw, Hareton is Catherine’s nephew. After Hindley’s
death, Heathcliff assumes custody of Hareton, and raises him as an uneducated field
worker, just as Hindley had done to Heathcliff himself. Thus Heathcliff uses Hareton to seek
revenge on Hindley. Illiterate and quick-tempered, Hareton is easily humiliated, but shows a
good heart and a deep desire to improve himself. At the end of the novel, he marries Cathy.

Linton Heathcliff
Heathcliff’s son by Isabella. Weak, sniveling, demanding, and constantly ill, Linton is raised
in London by his mother and does not meet his father until he is thirteen years old, when he
goes to live with him after his mother’s death. Heathcliff despises Linton, treats him
contemptuously, and, by forcing him to marry Cathy, uses him to cement his control over
Thrushcross Grange after Edgar Linton’s death. Linton himself dies not long after this
marriage.

Hindley Earnshaw
Catherine’s brother, and Mr. Earnshaw’s son. Hindley resents it when Heathcliff is brought
to live at Wuthering Heights. After his father dies and he inherits the estate, Hindley begins
to abuse the young Heathcliff, terminating his education and forcing him to work in the
fields. When Hindley’s wife Frances dies shortly after giving birth to their son Hareton, he
lapses into alcoholism and dissipation.

Mr. Earnshaw
Catherine and Hindley’s father. Mr. Earnshaw adopts Heathcliff and brings him to live at
Wuthering Heights. Mr. Earnshaw prefers Heathcliff to Hindley but nevertheless bequeaths
Wuthering Heights to Hindley when he dies.

Mrs. Earnshaw
Catherine and Hindley’s mother, who neither likes nor trusts the orphan Heathcliff when he
is brought to live at her house. She dies shortly after Heathcliff’s arrival at Wuthering
Heights.

Joseph
A long-winded, fanatically religious, elderly servant at Wuthering Heights. Joseph is
strange, stubborn, and unkind, and he speaks with a thick Yorkshire accent.
Frances Earnshaw
Hindley’s simpering, silly wife, who treats Heathcliff cruelly. She dies shortly after giving
birth to Hareton.

Mr. Linton
Edgar and Isabella’s father and the proprietor of Thrushcross Grange when Heathcliff and
Catherine are children. An established member of the gentry, he raises his son and
daughter to be well-mannered young people.

Mrs. Linton
Mr. Linton’s somewhat snobbish wife, who does not like Heathcliff to be allowed near her
children, Edgar and Isabella. She teaches Catherine to act like a gentle-woman, thereby
instilling her with social ambitions.

Zillah
The housekeeper at Wuthering Heights during the latter stages of the narrative.

Mr. Green
Edgar Linton’s lawyer, who arrives too late to hear Edgar’s final instruction to change his
will, which would have prevented Heathcliff from obtaining control over Thrushcross
Grange.

Themes
The Destructiveness of a Love That Never Changes
Catherine and Heathcliff’s passion for one another seems to be the center of Wuthering
Heights, given that it is stronger and more lasting than any other emotion displayed in the
novel, and that it is the source of most of the major conflicts that structure the novel’s plot.
As she tells Catherine and Heathcliff’s story, Nelly criticizes both of them harshly,
condemning their passion as immoral, but this passion is obviously one of the most
compelling and memorable aspects of the book.

It is not easy to decide whether Brontë intends the reader to condemn these lovers as
blameworthy or to idealize them as romantic heroes whose love transcends social norms
and conventional morality. The book is actually structured around two parallel love stories,
the first half of the novel centering on the love between Catherine and Heathcliff, while the
less dramatic second half features the developing love between young Cathy and Hareton.
In contrast to the first, the latter tale ends happily, restoring peace and order to Wuthering
Heights and Thrushcross Grange.

The differences between the two love stories contribute to the reader’s understanding of
why each ends the way it does. The most important feature of Cathy and Hareton’s love
story is that it involves growth and change. Early in the novel Hareton seems irredeemably
brutal, savage, and illiterate, but over time he becomes a loyal friend to Cathy and learns to
read. When Cathy first meets Hareton he seems completely alien to her world, yet her
attitude also evolves from contempt to love.
Catherine and Heathcliff’s love, on the other hand, is rooted in their childhood and is
marked by the refusal to change. In choosing to marry Edgar, Catherine seeks a more
genteel life, but she refuses to adapt to her role as wife, either by sacrificing Heathcliff or
embracing Edgar. In Chapter XII she suggests to Nelly that the years since she was twelve
years old and her father died have been like a blank to her, and she longs to return to the
moors of her childhood. Heathcliff, for his part, possesses a seemingly superhuman ability
to maintain the same attitude and to nurse the same grudges over many years. Moreover,
Catherine and Heathcliff’s love is based on their shared perception that they are identical.
Catherine declares, famously, “I am Heathcliff,” while Heathcliff, upon Catherine’s death,
wails that he cannot live without his “soul,” meaning Catherine. Their love denies difference,
and is strangely asexual. The two do not kiss in dark corners or arrange secret trysts, as
adulterers do.
Given that Catherine and Heathcliff’s love is based upon their refusal to change over time
or embrace difference in others, it is fitting that the disastrous problems of their generation
are overcome not by some climactic reversal, but simply by the inexorable passage of time,
and the rise of a new and distinct generation. Ultimately, Wuthering Heights presents a
vision of life as a process of change, and celebrates this process over and against the
romantic intensity of its principal characters.

The Precariousness of Social Class

As members of the gentry, the Earnshaws and the Lintons occupy a somewhat precarious
place within the hierarchy of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century British society. At
the top of British society was the royalty, followed by the aristocracy, then by the gentry,
and then by the lower classes, who made up the vast majority of the population. Although
the gentry, or upper middle class, possessed servants and often large estates, they held a
nonetheless fragile social position. The social status of aristocrats was a formal and settled
matter, because aristocrats had official titles.

Members of the gentry, however, held no titles, and their status was thus subject to change.
A man might see himself as a gentleman but find, to his embarrassment, that his neighbors
did not share this view. A discussion of whether or not a man was really a gentleman would
consider such questions as how much land he owned, how many tenants and servants he
had, how he spoke, whether he kept horses and a carriage, and whether his money came
from land or “trade”—gentlemen scorned banking and commercial activities.

Considerations of class status often crucially inform the characters’ motivations

in Wuthering Heights. Catherine’s decision to marry Edgar so that she will be “the greatest
woman of the neighborhood” is only the most obvious example. The Lintons are relatively
firm in their gentry status but nonetheless take great pains to prove this status through their
behaviors. The Earnshaws, on the other hand, rest on much shakier ground socially. They
do not have a carriage, they have less land, and their house, as Lockwood remarks with
great puzzlement, resembles that of a “homely, northern farmer” and not that of a
gentleman. The shifting nature of social status is demonstrated most strikingly in
Heathcliff’s trajectory from homeless waif to young gentleman-by-adoption to common
laborer to gentleman again (although the status-conscious Lockwood remarks that
Heathcliff is only a gentleman in “dress and manners”).
The Futility of Revenge
Revenge is a central focus of Heathcliff’s life and, in fact, drives most of the decisions he
makes later in the novel. Though Heathcliff gains some bitter satisfaction through causing
pain for others, he does not achieve any personal happiness. Instead, his single-minded
pursuit of revenge leaves him empty and exhausted. After being tormented by Hindley as a
child, Heathcliff becomes obsessed with the idea of getting revenge. By taking advantage of
Hindley’s debt, Heathcliff gains control of Wuthering Heights and becomes the master of
the house, a great irony considering he was once forced to work there as a de facto
servant.

Heathcliff seeks further revenge on Hindley by raising Hareton, who should have grown up
to be a gentleman and a landowner, like a common servant, forcing on the boy the same
indignity Hindley had once heaped on Heathcliff. Heathcliff is fully aware of his cruelty. As
he explains to Nelly, he understands and desire Hareton’s suffering: “I know what he suffers
now, for instance, exactly—it is merely a beginning of what he shall suffer, though.”
Moreover, Heathcliff has the perverse pleasure of knowing Hareton loves and respects him
no matter how badly he treats him.

Heathcliff eventually achieves his entire plan of revenge, including marrying Cathy and
Linton so that he also gains control of the Grange. However, Heathcliff’s death, alone and
desperate for his lost love, represents the futility of his struggle. Though he achieved his
desired revenge on those, living and dead, who had wronged him, he remains unfulfilled in
his true desire—to be reunited with Catherine, which can only be achieved in death.

Injustice Versus the Necessity of the Class System

Social class is presented as an ambivalent theme in the novel. On one hand, Brontë seems
to argue that social class is an arbitrary distinction that prevents people from being happy.
On the other, she shows disruptions to social class as negative forces that have to be
eliminated in order for peace and order to be restored. As a young child, the fact that
Heathcliff is treated differently simply because of his family background seems to be clearly
unfair. Nelly tries to console him by suggesting that he imagine the background he might
have: “I would frame high notions of my birth and the thoughts of what I was should give me
courage and dignity to support the oppressions of a little farmer.” This consolation is
particularly poignant coming from a servant who also has to reconcile herself with her own
class position even though she is essential to everyone’s lives.

However, while Brontë seems to be sympathetic to Heathcliff’s frustration with the class
system, she also implies that he goes too far when he tries to disrupt it and insert himself.
Nelly pointedly calls Hareton “the last of the ancient Earnshaw stock” and later refers to him
as someone who “should be the first gentleman of the neighborhood.” When Heathcliff dies,
Joseph thanks God that “the lawful master and the ancient stock were restored to their
rights.” Interestingly, it is servants who express the strongest support for proper inheritance
and tradition. Peace and happiness are restored to both houses only when Heathcliff and
his son have passed away, and Hareton and Cathy are united as the inheritors of the Linton
and Earnshaw legacies. Heathcliff achieves his vision of lying next to the elder Catherine
for eternity, but he has to be wiped out of the class system if anyone can lead happy and
peaceful live
Symbols
Moors
The constant emphasis on landscape within the text of Wuthering Heights endows the
setting with symbolic importance. This landscape is comprised primarily of moors: wide,
wild expanses, high but somewhat soggy, and thus infertile. Moorland cannot be cultivated,
and its uniformity makes navigation difficult. It features particularly waterlogged patches in
which people could potentially drown. (This possibility is mentioned several times
in Wuthering Heights.) Thus, the moors serve very well as symbols of the wild threat posed
by nature. As the setting for the beginnings of Catherine and Heathcliff’s bond (the two play
on the moors during childhood), the moorland transfers its symbolic associations onto the
love affair.

Windows
The two large estates within the book create a pocket world of sorts, where little, if anything,
lies beyond their existence. Thus, windows both literal and figurative serve to showcase
what exists on the other side while still keeping the characters trapped. Heathcliff can see
that the chance of escaping to a higher social class is something impossible for himself, but
achievable for Catherine; figuratively he exists on one side of the window, and she on the
other. Yet Catherine too is held back, in her case physically. When she is sick in Chapter
XII, closed windows keep her isolated and away from Heathcliff, despite her desperation to
open them so she can feel closer to him, signifying her inability to be with him due to
outside forces, like social class, that keep them apart. Thus, windows can offer hope for
something different, and also serve as a mirror that shows just how affixed in place and
trapped the characters really are.Windows also serve as a veil between life and death. At
the start of the novel, for example, Lockwood hears a branch tapping on a window, and
then sees Catherine’s ghost trying to enter through it. Her apparition is trying to rejoin the
space that she can no longer inhabit in death. The reader also sees this echoed in more
literal terms: characters often witness, or are witnessed by others, with windows as the
common thread to expand the scope of the world. An example of appears occurs early in
Heathcliff and Catherine’s childhood, when they peek through the window at Thrushcross
Grange and see the magnificence of the ornate place around them. The ongoing
generations and cyclical trappings are finally liberated at the end of the novel, as in death,
Heathcliff and Catherine need no longer be at the mercy of physical barriers.

Ghosts
Ghosts appear throughout Wuthering Heights, as they do in most other works of Gothic
fiction, yet Brontë always presents them in such a way that whether they really exist
remains ambiguous. Thus the world of the novel can always be interpreted as a realistic
one. Certain ghosts—such as Catherine’s spirit when it appears to Lockwood in Chapter
III—may be explained as nightmares. The villagers’ alleged sightings of Heathcliff’s ghost in
Chapter XXXIV could be dismissed as unverified superstition. Whether or not the ghosts
are “real,” they symbolize the manifestation of the past within the present, and the way
memory stays with people, permeating their day-to-day lives.
THE RETURN OF THE NATIVE – Thomas Hardy - 1878
The novel opens with the action of the plot already underway. The reddleman Diggory Venn
rides onto the heath with Thomasin Yeobright in the back of his wagon: her marriage to
Damon Wildeve was delayed by an error in the marriage certificate, and Thomasin
collapsed. We soon learn that Wildeve orchestrated the error himself. He is infatuated with
Eustacia Vye, and is, at least to some extent, using Thomasin as a device to make Eustacia
jealous. When Venn learns of the romance between Eustacia and Wildeve, his own love for
Thomasin induces him to intervene on her behalf, which he will continue to do throughout
the novel. But Venn's attempts to persuade Eustacia to allow Wildeve to marry Thomasin,
like his own marriage proposal to Thomasin, are unsuccessful.

Into this confused tangle of lovers comes Clym Yeobright, Thomasin's cousin and the son
of the strong-willed widow Mrs. Yeobright, who also serves as a guardian to Thomasin.
Eustacia sees in the urbane Clym an escape from the hated heath. Even before she meets
him, Eustacia convinces herself to fall in love with Clym, breaking off her romance with
Wildeve, who then marries Thomasin. Chance and Eustacia's machinations bring Clym and
her together, and they begin a courtship that will eventually end in their marriage, despite
the strong objections of Mrs. Yeobright. Once Wildeve hears of Eustacia's marriage, he
again begins to desire her, although he is already married to Thomasin.

In marrying Eustacia, Clym distances himself from his mother. Yet distance soon begins to
grow between the newlyweds as well. Eustacia's dreams of moving to Paris are rejected by
Clym, who wants to start a school in his native country. Wildeve inherits a substantial
fortune, and he and the unhappy Eustacia once again begin to spend time together: first at
a country dance, where they are seen by the omnipresent observer Diggory Venn, and then
later when Wildeve visits Eustacia at home while Clym is asleep. During this visit, Mrs.
Yeobright knocks at the door; she has come hoping for a reconciliation with the couple.
Eustacia, however, in her confusion and fear at being discovered with Wildeve, does not
allow Mrs. Yeobright to enter the house: heart-broken and feeling rejected by her son, she
succumbs to heat and snakebite on the walk home, and dies.

Clym blames himself for the death of his mother; he and Eustacia separate when he learns
of the role that Eustacia played in Mrs. Yeobright's death, and of her continued relations
with Wildeve. Eustacia plans an escape from the heath, and Wildeve agrees to help her. On
a stormy night, the action comes to a climax: on her way to meet Wildeve, Eustacia drowns.
Trying to save her, Wildeve drowns as well. Only through heroic efforts does Diggory Venn
save Clym from the same fate. The last part of the novel sees the growth of an affectionate
relationship, and an eventual marriage, between Thomasin and Diggory. Clym, much
reduced by his travails and by weak eyesight brought on by overly arduous studies,
becomes a wandering preacher, taken only half-seriously by the locals.

Character List
Clym Yeobright
The "Native" of the novel's title, Clym is the son of Mrs. Yeobright and the cousin of
Thomasin Yeobright. He goes abroad to work as a diamond merchant in Paris, but comes
home when he realizes that his ambition is not towards material wealth. He is pursued by
Eustacia Vye, and eventually marries her, but their marriage turns sour when her ambition
to move to Paris conflicts with his plan to stay on Egdon Heath and teach school. Clym is
intelligent, cultured and deeply introspective. He is patient and generous, but also deeply
determined, and fierce when angered: it is this determination that leads to his eventual split
with his mother, and separation from Eustacia. At the end of the novel, weakened by a
degenerative eye condition and by the trauma of losing his mother and Eustacia--for whose
deaths he blames himself--he becomes an itinerant preacher, sermonizing about simple
moral topics.

Diggory Venn
Throughout most of the novel, Venn works as a semi-nomadic "reddleman": he travels
throughout the region selling the dye that farmers use to mark their sheep. As a
consequence of his exposure to the dye, his entire body and everything he owns are dyed
red. Entirely red, camping out on the heath in his wagon, and emerging mysteriously from
time to time, Venn functions as an image of the heath incarnated. He watches over
Thomasin Yeobright's interests throughout the novel, but also preserves his own interests:
he has long been in love with her, and at the end of the novel they marry. Venn is very
clever and insightful, and can be a devious schemer.

Eustacia Vye
Born in the busy port town of Budmouth and transplanted to Egdon Heath to live with her
grandfather, Eustacia despises the heath, and searches for a way to escape. However,
even as she hates the heath, Eustacia seems in her deep, brooding passion, to be a part of
its wild nature. She has an amorous relationship with Damon Wildeve, but enters into a
tragic marriage with Clym Yeobright when she realizes that he is the more interesting, and
urbane, of the two men.

Damon Wildeve
A local innkeeper, Damon is described as a "lady-killer." At the start of the novel, he puts off
his marriage to Thomasin Yeobright in order to pursue a relationship with the woman he
truly wants, Eustacia Vye; when he is jilted by Eustacia, however, he marries Thomasin,
and has a daughter with her. He drowns at the end of the novel just before making an
escape with Eustacia. He is interested throughout in possession rather than love.

Thomasin Yeobright
Clym Yeobright's cousin and Mrs. Yeobright's niece and ward. Thomasin is an innocent and
goodhearted, if somewhat vacuous, woman who seems genuinely to care for Damon
Wildeve--who, however, is merely using her to make Eustacia Vye jealous. She eventually
marries Wildeve--over the objections of her aunt--and has a child, which she names
Eustacia. At the end of the novel, she marries Diggory Venn, who has long loved her.

Mrs. Yeobright
Clym Yeobright's mother, and Thomasin Yeobright's aunt and guardian. A proper, class-
conscious, proud woman, Mrs. Yeobright objects to the marriage of both her charges; as it
turns out, she is entirely correct. She dies when, exhausted, she is bitten by an adder on
the heath, believing that Clym has utterly rejected her. The daughter of a parson, Mrs.
Yeobright considers herself--and is considered--of a higher class than the local laborers.
Christian Cantle
An awkward, superstitious young man who works for Mrs. Yeobright. Christian provides
comic relief throughout the novel with his dolorous over-certainty that he will never marry
and his petty phobias. He fails in his mission to bring Thomasin her inheritance, thus
contributing to the degeneration of the family relationships.

Captain Vye
Eustacia's grandfather and guardian, a former captain in the British navy. A reclusive and
silent man.

Johnny Nonsuch
The son of Susan Nonsuch. The boy has the knack of being in the right place at the right
time: he reports Eustacia and Damon Wildeve's tryst to Diggory Venn, and is also the one
who tells Clym Yeobright of his mother's damning last words.

Charley
A local youth who works for the Vyes, and who falls hopelessly in love with Eustacia.

Local laborers
Local laborers whose simple dialect and observance of local customs form the cultural
backdrop for the novel.

HARD TIMES - Charles Dickens – 1854

Thomas Gradgrind, a wealthy, retired merchant in the industrial city of Coketown, England,
devotes his life to a philosophy of rationalism, self-interest, and fact. He raises his oldest
children, Louisa and Tom, according to this philosophy and never allows them to engage in
fanciful or imaginative pursuits. He founds a school and charitably takes in one of the
students, the kindly and imaginative Sissy Jupe, after the disappearance of her father, a
circus entertainer.

As the Gradgrind children grow older, Tom becomes a dissipated, self-interested hedonist,
and Louisa struggles with deep inner confusion, feeling as though she is missing something
important in her life. Eventually Louisa marries Gradgrind’s friend Josiah Bounderby, a
wealthy factory owner and banker more than twice her age. Bounderby continually trumpets
his role as a self-made man who was abandoned in the gutter by his mother as an infant.
Tom is apprenticed at the Bounderby bank, and Sissy remains at the Gradgrind home to
care for the younger children.

In the meantime, an impoverished “Hand”—Dickens’s term for the lowest laborers in

Coketown’s factories—named Stephen Blackpool struggles with his love for Rachael,
another poor factory worker. He is unable to marry her because he is already married to a
horrible, drunken woman who disappears for months and even years at a time. Stephen
visits Bounderby to ask about a divorce but learns that only the wealthy can obtain them.
Outside Bounderby’s home, he meets Mrs. Pegler, a strange old woman with an
inexplicable devotion to Bounderby.
James Harthouse, a wealthy young sophisticate from London, arrives in Coketown to begin
a political career as a disciple of Gradgrind, who is now a Member of Parliament. He
immediately takes an interest in Louisa and decides to try to seduce her. With the unspoken
aid of Mrs. Sparsit, a former aristocrat who has fallen on hard times and now works for
Bounderby, he sets about trying to corrupt Louisa.

The Hands, exhorted by a crooked union spokesman named Slackbridge, try to form a
union. Only Stephen refuses to join because he feels that a union strike would only
increase tensions between employers and employees. He is cast out by the other Hands
and fired by Bounderby when he refuses to spy on them. Louisa, impressed with Stephen’s
integrity, visits him before he leaves Coketown and helps him with some money. Tom
accompanies her and tells Stephen that if he waits outside the bank for several consecutive
nights, help will come to him. Stephen does so, but no help arrives. Eventually he packs up
and leaves Coketown, hoping to find agricultural work in the country. Not long after that, the
bank is robbed, and the lone suspect is Stephen, the vanished Hand who was seen
loitering outside the bank for several nights just before disappearing from the city.

Mrs. Sparsit witnesses Harthouse declaring his love for Louisa, and Louisa agrees to meet
him in Coketown later that night. However, Louisa instead flees to her father’s house, where
she miserably confides to Gradgrind that her upbringing has left her married to a man she
does not love, disconnected from her feelings, deeply unhappy, and possibly in love with
Harthouse. She collapses to the floor, and Gradgrind, struck dumb with self-reproach,
begins to realize the imperfections in his philosophy of rational self-interest.

Sissy, who loves Louisa deeply, visits Harthouse and convinces him to leave Coketown
forever. Bounderby, furious that his wife has left him, redoubles his efforts to capture
Stephen. When Stephen tries to return to clear his good name, he falls into a mining pit
called Old Hell Shaft. Rachael and Louisa discover him, but he dies soon after an emotional
farewell to Rachael. Gradgrind and Louisa realize that Tom is really responsible for robbing
the bank, and they arrange to sneak him out of England with the help of the circus
performers with whom Sissy spent her early childhood. They are nearly successful, but are
stopped by Bitzer, a young man who went to Gradgrind’s school and who embodies all the
qualities of the detached rationalism that Gradgrind once espoused, but who now sees its
limits. Sleary, the lisping circus proprietor, arranges for Tom to slip out of Bitzer’s grasp,
and the young robber escapes from England after all.

Mrs. Sparsit, anxious to help Bounderby find the robbers, drags Mrs. Pegler—a known
associate of Stephen Blackpool—in to see Bounderby, thinking Mrs. Pegler is a potential
witness. Bounderby recoils, and it is revealed that Mrs. Pegler is really his loving mother,
whom he has forbidden to visit him: Bounderby is not a self-made man after all. Angrily,
Bounderby fires Mrs. Sparsit and sends her away to her hostile relatives. Five years later,
he will die alone in the streets of Coketown. Gradgrind gives up his philosophy of fact and
devotes his political power to helping the poor. Tom realizes the error of his ways but dies
without ever seeing his family again. While Sissy marries and has a large and loving family,
Louisa never again marries and never has children. Nevertheless, Louisa is loved by
Sissy’s family and learns at last how to feel sympathy for her fellow human beings.
Character List
Thomas Gradgrind
A wealthy, retired merchant in Coketown, England; he later becomes a Member of
Parliament. Mr. Gradgrind espouses a philosophy of rationalism, self-interest, and cold,
hard fact. He describes himself as an “eminently practical” man, and he tries to raise his
children—Louisa, Tom, Jane, Adam Smith, and Malthus—to be equally practical by
forbidding the development of their imaginations and emotions.

Louisa
Gradgrind’s daughter, later Bounderby’s wife. Confused by her coldhearted upbringing,
Louisa feels disconnected from her emotions and alienated from other people. While she
vaguely recognizes that her father’s system of education has deprived her childhood of all
joy, Louisa cannot actively invoke her emotions or connect with others. Thus she marries
Bounderby to please her father, even though she does not love her husband. Indeed, the
only person she loves completely is her brother Tom.

Thomas Gradgrind Jr
Gradgrind’s eldest son and an apprentice at Bounderby’s bank, who is generally called
Tom. Tom reacts to his strict upbringing by becoming a dissipated, hedonistic, hypocritical
young man. Although he appreciates his sister’s affection, Tom cannot return it entirely—he
loves money and gambling even more than he loves Louisa. These vices lead him to rob
Bounderby’s bank and implicate Stephen as the robbery’s prime suspect.

Josiah Bounderby
Gradgrind’s friend and later Louisa’s husband. Bounderby claims to be a self-made man
and boastfully describes being abandoned by his mother as a young boy. From his
childhood poverty he has risen to become a banker and factory owner in Coketown, known
by everyone for his wealth and power. His true upbringing, by caring and devoted parents,
indicates that his social mobility is a hoax and calls into question the whole notion of social
mobility in nineteenth-century England.

Cecelia Jupe
The daughter of a clown in Sleary’s circus. Sissy is taken in by Gradgrind when her father
disappears. Sissy serves as a foil, or contrast, to Louisa: while Sissy is imaginative and
compassionate, Louisa is rational and, for the most part, unfeeling. Sissy embodies the
Victorian femininity that counterbalances mechanization and industry. Through Sissy’s
interaction with her, Louisa is able to explore her more sensitive, feminine sides.

Mrs. Sparsit
Bounderby’s housekeeper, who goes to live at the bank apartments when Bounderby
marries Louisa. Once a member of the aristocratic elite, Mrs. Sparsit fell on hard times after
the collapse of her marriage. A selfish, manipulative, dishonest woman, Mrs. Sparsit
cherishes secret hopes of ruining Bounderby’s marriage so that she can marry him herself.
Mrs. Sparsit’s aristocratic background is emphasized by the narrator’s frequent allusions to
her “Roman” and “Coriolanian” appearance.
Stephen Blackpool
A “Hand” (low-level worker) in Bounderby’s factory. Stephen loves Rachael but is unable to
marry her because he is already married, albeit to a horrible, drunken woman. A man of
great honesty, compassion, and integrity, Stephen maintains his moral ideals even when he
is shunned by his fellow workers and fired by Bounderby. Stephen’s values are similar to
those endorsed by the narrator.

Rachael
A simple, honest Hand who loves Stephen Blackpool. To Stephen, she represents domestic
happiness and moral purity.

James Harthouse
A sophisticated and manipulative young London gentleman who comes to Coketown to
enter politics as a disciple of Gradgrind, simply because he thinks it might alleviate his
boredom. In his constant search for a new form of amusement, Harthouse quickly becomes
attracted to Louisa and resolves to seduce her.

Mr. Sleary
The lisping proprietor of the circus where Sissy’s father was an entertainer. Later, Mr.
Sleary hides Tom Gradgrind and helps him flee the country. Mr. Sleary and his troop of
entertainers value laughter and fantasy whereas Mr. Gradgrind values rationality and fact.

Bitzer
Bitzer is one of the successes produced by Gradgrind’s rationalistic system of education.
Initially a bully at Gradgrind’s school, Bitzer later becomes an employee and a spy at
Bounderby’s bank. An uncharacteristically pale character and unrelenting disciple of fact,
Bitzer almost stops Tom from fleeing after it is discovered that Tom is the true bank robber.

Mr. McChoakumchild
The unpleasant teacher at Gradgrind’s school. As his name suggests, McChoakumchild is
not overly fond of children, and stifles or chokes their imaginations and feelings.

Mrs. Pegler
Bounderby’s mother, unbeknownst as such to all except herself and Bounderby. Mrs.
Pegler makes an annual visit to Coketown in order to admire her son’s prosperity from a
safe distance. Mrs. Pegler’s appearance uncovers the hoax that her son Bounderby has
been attesting throughout the story, which is that he is a self-made man who was
abandoned as a child.

Mrs. Gradgrind
Gradgrind’s whiny, anemic wife, who constantly tells her children to study their “ologies”
and complains that she’ll “never hear the end” of any complaint. Although Mrs. Gradgrind
does not share her husband’s interest in facts, she lacks the energy and the imagination to
oppose his system of education.
Slackbridge
The crooked orator who convinces the Hands to unionize and turns them against Stephen
Blackpool when he refuses to join the union.

Jane Gradgrind
Gradgrind’s younger daughter; Louisa and Tom’s sister. Because Sissy largely raises her,
Jane is a happier little girl than her sister, Louisa.

Themes
The Mechanization of Human Beings
Hard Times suggests that nineteenth-century England’s overzealous adoption of
industrialization threatens to turn human beings into machines by thwarting the
development of their emotions and imaginations. This suggestion comes forth largely
through the actions of Gradgrind and his follower, Bounderby: as the former educates the
young children of his family and his school in the ways of fact, the latter treats the workers
in his factory as emotionless objects that are easily exploited for his own self-interest. In
Chapter 5 of the first book, the narrator draws a parallel between the factory Hands and the
Gradgrind children—both lead monotonous, uniform existences, untouched by pleasure.
Consequently, their fantasies and feelings are dulled, and they become almost mechanical
themselves.
The mechanizing effects of industrialization are compounded by Mr. Gradgrind’s philosophy
of rational self-interest. Mr. Gradgrind believes that human nature can be measured,
quantified, and governed entirely by rational rules. Indeed, his school attempts to turn
children into little machines that behave according to such rules. Dickens’s primary goal
in Hard Times is to illustrate the dangers of allowing humans to become like machines,
suggesting that without compassion and imagination, life would be unbearable. Indeed,
Louisa feels precisely this suffering when she returns to her father’s house and tells him
that something has been missing in her life, so much so that she finds herself in an
unhappy marriage and may be in love with someone else. While she does not actually
behave in a dishonorable way, since she stops her interaction with Harthouse before she
has a socially ruinous affair with him, Louisa realizes that her life is unbearable and that she
must do something drastic for her own survival. Appealing to her father with the utmost
honesty, Louisa is able to make him realize and admit that his philosophies on life and
methods of child rearing are to blame for Louisa’s detachment from others.

The Opposition Between Fact and Fancy

While Mr. Gradgrind insists that his children should always stick to the facts, Hard
Times not only suggests that fancy is as important as fact, but it continually calls into
question the difference between fact and fancy. Dickens suggests that what constitutes so-
called fact is a matter of perspective or opinion. For example, Bounderby believes that
factory employees are lazy good-for-nothings who expect to be fed “from a golden spoon.”
The Hands, in contrast, see themselves as hardworking and as unfairly exploited by their
employers. These sets of facts cannot be reconciled because they depend upon
perspective. While Bounderby declares that “[w]hat is called Taste is only another name for
Fact,” Dickens implies that fact is a question of taste or personal belief.
As a novelist, Dickens is naturally interested in illustrating that fiction cannot be excluded
from a fact-filled, mechanical society. Gradgrind’s children, however, grow up in an
environment where all flights of fancy are discouraged, and they end up with serious social
dysfunctions as a result. Tom becomes a hedonist who has little regard for others, while
Louisa remains unable to connect with others even though she has the desire to do so. On
the other hand, Sissy, who grew up with the circus, constantly indulges in the fancy
forbidden to the Gradgrinds, and lovingly raises Louisa and Tom’s sister in a way more
complete than the upbringing of either of the older siblings. Just as fiction cannot be
excluded from fact, fact is also necessary for a balanced life. If Gradgrind had not adopted
her, Sissy would have no guidance, and her future might be precarious. As a result, the
youngest Gradgrind daughter, raised both by the factual Gradgrind and the fanciful Sissy,
represents the best of both worlds.

The Importance of Femininity

During the Victorian era, women were commonly associated with supposedly feminine traits
like compassion, moral purity, and emotional sensitivity. Hard Times suggests that because
they possess these traits, women can counteract the mechanizing effects of
industrialization. For instance, when Stephen feels depressed about the monotony of his life
as a factory worker, Rachael’s gentle fortitude inspires him to keep going. He sums up her
virtues by referring to her as his guiding angel. Similarly, Sissy introduces love into the
Gradgrind household, ultimately teaching Louisa how to recognize her emotions. Indeed,
Dickens suggests that Mr. Gradgrind’s philosophy of self-interest and calculating rationality
has prevented Louisa from developing her natural feminine traits. Perhaps Mrs. Gradgrind’s
inability to exercise her femininity allows Gradgrind to overemphasize the importance of fact
in the rearing of his children. On his part, Bounderby ensures that his rigidity will remain
untouched since he marries the cold, emotionless product of Mr. and Mrs. Gradgrind’s
marriage. Through the various female characters in the novel, Dickens suggests that
feminine compassion is necessary to restore social harmony.

Symbols
Staircase
When Mrs. Sparsit notices that Louisa and Harthouse are spending a lot of time together,
she imagines that Louisa is running down a long staircase into a “dark pit of shame and ruin
at the bottom.” This imaginary staircase represents her belief that Louisa is going to elope
with Harthouse and consequently ruin her reputation forever. Mrs. Sparsit has long
resented Bounderby’s marriage to the young Louisa, as she hoped to marry him herself; so
she is very pleased by Louisa’s apparent indiscretion. Through the staircase, Dickens
reveals the manipulative and censorious side of Mrs. Sparsit’s character. He also suggests
that Mrs. Sparsit’s self-interest causes her to misinterpret the situation. Rather than ending
up in a pit of shame by having an affair with Harthouse, Louisa actually returns home to her
father.

Pegasus
Mr. Sleary’s circus entertainers stay at an inn called the Pegasus Arms. Inside this inn is a
“theatrical” pegasus, a model of a flying horse with “golden stars stuck on all over him.” The
pegasus represents a world of fantasy and beauty from which the young Gradgrind children
are excluded. While Mr. Gradgrind informs the pupils at his school that wallpaper with
horses on it is unrealistic simply because horses do not in fact live on walls, the circus folk
live in a world in which horses dance the polka and flying horses can be imagined, even if
they do not, in fact, exist. The very name of the inn reveals the contrast between the
imaginative and joyful world of the circus and Mr. Gradgrind’s belief in the importance of
fact.

Smoke Serpents
At a literal level, the streams of smoke that fill the skies above Coketown are the effects of
industrialization. However, these smoke serpents also represent the moral blindness of
factory owners like Bounderby. Because he is so concerned with making as much profit as
he possibly can, Bounderby interprets the serpents of smoke as a positive sign that the
factories are producing goods and profit. Thus, he not only fails to see the smoke as a form
of unhealthy pollution, but he also fails to recognize his own abuse of the Hands in his
factories. The smoke becomes a moral smoke screen that prevents him from noticing his
workers’ miserable poverty. Through its associations with evil, the word “serpents” evokes
the moral obscurity that the smoke creates.

Fire
When Louisa is first introduced, in Chapter 3 of Book the First, the narrator explains that
inside her is a “fire with nothing to burn, a starved imagination keeping life in itself
somehow.” This description suggests that although Louisa seems coldly rational, she has
not succumbed entirely to her father’s prohibition against wondering and imagining. Her
inner fire symbolizes the warmth created by her secret fancies in her otherwise lonely,
mechanized existence. Consequently, it is significant that Louisa often gazes into the
fireplace when she is alone, as if she sees things in the flames that others—like her rigid
father and brother—cannot see. However, there is another kind of inner fire in Hard
Times—the fires that keep the factories running, providing heat and power for the
machines. Fire is thus both a destructive and a life-giving force. Even Louisa’s inner fire,
her imaginative tendencies, eventually becomes destructive: her repressed emotions
eventually begin to burn “within her like an unwholesome fire.” Through this symbol,
Dickens evokes the importance of imagination as a force that can counteract the
mechanization of human nature.

Gulliver’s Travels – Jonathan Swift – 1726

Gulliver’s Travels recounts the story of Lemuel Gulliver, a practical-minded Englishman
trained as a surgeon who takes to the seas when his business fails. In a deadpan first-
person narrative that rarely shows any signs of self-reflection or deep emotional response,
Gulliver narrates the adventures that befall him on these travels.
Gulliver’s adventure in Lilliput begins when he wakes after his shipwreck to find himself
bound by innumerable tiny threads and addressed by tiny captors who are in awe of him
but fiercely protective of their kingdom. They are not afraid to use violence against Gulliver,
though their arrows are little more than pinpricks. But overall, they are hospitable, risking
famine in their land by feeding Gulliver, who consumes more food than a thousand
Lilliputians combined could. Gulliver is taken into the capital city by a vast wagon the
Lilliputians have specially built. He is presented to the emperor, who is entertained by
Gulliver, just as Gulliver is flattered by the attention of royalty. Eventually Gulliver becomes
a national resource, used by the army in its war against the people of Blefuscu, whom the
Lilliputians hate for doctrinal differences concerning the proper way to crack eggs. But
things change when Gulliver is convicted of treason for putting out a fire in the royal palace
with his urine and is condemned to be shot in the eyes and starved to death. Gulliver
escapes to Blefuscu, where he is able to repair a boat he finds and set sail for England.

After staying in England with his wife and family for two months, Gulliver undertakes his
next sea voyage, which takes him to a land of giants called Brobdingnag. Here, a field
worker discovers him. The farmer initially treats him as little more than an animal, keeping
him for amusement. The farmer eventually sells Gulliver to the queen, who makes him a
courtly diversion and is entertained by his musical talents. Social life is easy for Gulliver
after his discovery by the court, but not particularly enjoyable. Gulliver is often repulsed by
the physicality of the Brobdingnagians, whose ordinary flaws are many times magnified by
their huge size. Thus, when a couple of courtly ladies let him play on their naked bodies, he
is not attracted to them but rather disgusted by their enormous skin pores and the sound of
their torrential urination. He is generally startled by the ignorance of the people here—even
the king knows nothing about politics. More unsettling findings in Brobdingnag come in the
form of various animals of the realm that endanger his life. Even Brobdingnagian insects
leave slimy trails on his food that make eating difficult. On a trip to the frontier,
accompanying the royal couple, Gulliver leaves Brobdingnag when his cage is plucked up
by an eagle and dropped into the sea.

Next, Gulliver sets sail again and, after an attack by pirates, ends up in Laputa, where a
floating island inhabited by theoreticians and academics oppresses the land below, called
Balnibarbi. The scientific research undertaken in Laputa and in Balnibarbi seems totally
inane and impractical, and its residents too appear wholly out of touch with reality. Taking a
short side trip to Glubbdubdrib, Gulliver is able to witness the conjuring up of figures from
history, such as Julius Caesar and other military leaders, whom he finds much less
impressive than in books. After visiting the Luggnaggians and the Struldbrugs, the latter of
which are senile immortals who prove that age does not bring wisdom, he is able to sail to
Japan and from there back to England.

Finally, on his fourth journey, Gulliver sets out as captain of a ship, but after the mutiny of
his crew and a long confinement in his cabin, he arrives in an unknown land. This land is
populated by Houyhnhnms, rational-thinking horses who rule, and by Yahoos, brutish
humanlike creatures who serve the Houyhnhnms. Gulliver sets about learning their
language, and when he can speak he narrates his voyages to them and explains the
constitution of England. He is treated with great courtesy and kindness by the horses and is
enlightened by his many conversations with them and by his exposure to their noble
culture. He wants to stay with the Houyhnhnms, but his bared body reveals to the horses
that he is very much like a Yahoo, and he is banished. Gulliver is grief-stricken but agrees
to leave. He fashions a canoe and makes his way to a nearby island, where he is picked up
by a Portuguese ship captain who treats him well, though Gulliver cannot help now seeing
the captain—and all humans—as shamefully Yahoolike. Gulliver then concludes his
narrative with a claim that the lands he has visited belong by rights to England, as her
colonies, even though he questions the whole idea of colonialism.

Character List
Gulliver
The narrator and protagonist of the story. Although Lemuel Gulliver’s vivid and detailed
style of narration makes it clear that he is intelligent and well educated, his perceptions are
naïve and gullible. He has virtually no emotional life, or at least no awareness of it, and his
comments are strictly factual.

Richard Sympson
Gulliver’s cousin, self-proclaimed intimate friend, and the editor and publisher of Gulliver’s
Travels.
.
Mary Burton Gulliver
Gulliver’s wife for whom Gulliver appears to have little, if any, affection. The most important
facts about her in Gulliver’s mind are her social origin and the income she generates.

James Bates
An eminent London surgeon under whom Gulliver serves as an apprentice after graduating
from Cambridge.

The Lilliputians and the Blefuscudians

Two races of miniature people whom Gulliver meets on his first voyage. The two races
have been in a longstanding war with each over the interpretation of a reference in their
common holy scripture to the proper way to eat eggs.

The Emperor
The ruler of Lilliput. Like all Lilliputians, the emperor is fewer than six inches tall. His power
and majesty impress Gulliver deeply, but to us he appears both laughable and sinister.

The Brobdingnagians
Giants whom Gulliver meets on his second voyage. Brobdingnagians are basically a
reasonable and kindly people governed by a sense of justice, though they tend to treat
Gulliver as a plaything.

The Queen of Brobdingnag

The queen of Brobdingnag, who is so delighted by Gulliver’s beauty and charms that she
agrees to buy him from the farmer for 1,000 pieces of gold.

The King of Brobdingnag

The king of Brobdingnag, whose thoughtfulness and intellectual prowess mark him as a
contrast to the emperor of Lilliput.

The Farmer
Gulliver’s first master in Brobdingnag. Generally, the farmer represents the average
Brobdingnagian of no great gifts or intelligence, wielding an extraordinary power over
Gulliver simply by virtue of his immense size.

Glumdalclitch
The farmer’s nine-year-old daughter, who is forty feet tall. Glumdalclitch becomes Gulliver’s
friend and nursemaid, a function she performs with great seriousness and attentiveness.
The Laputans
Absentminded intellectuals who live on the floating island of Laputa, encountered by
Gulliver on his third voyage. During Gulliver’s stay among them, they do not mistreat him,
but are generally unpleasant and dismiss him as intellectually deficient.

Lord Munodi
A lord of Lagado, capital of the underdeveloped land beneath Laputa, who hosts Gulliver
and gives him a tour of the country on Gulliver’s third voyage.

The Yahoos
Unkempt humanlike beasts who live in servitude to the Houyhnhnms.

The Houyhnhnms
Rational horses who maintain a simple, peaceful society governed by reason and
truthfulness. They are the masters of the Yahoos, the savage humanlike creatures in
Houyhnhnmland.

Gulliver’s Houyhnhnm Master

The Houyhnhnm who first discovers Gulliver and takes him into his own home.

Don Pedro de Mendez

The Portuguese captain who takes Gulliver back to Europe after he is forced to leave the
land of the Houyhnhnms.

Abraham Pannell
The commander of the ship on which Gulliver first sails, the Swallow. Traveling to the
Levant, or the eastern Mediterranean, and beyond, Gulliver spends three and a half years
on Pannell’s ship. Virtually nothing is mentioned about Pannell, which heightens our sense
that Gulliver’s fascination with exotic types is not matched by any interest in his fellow
countrymen.

William Prichard
The master of the Antelope, the ship on which Gulliver embarks for the South Seas at the
outset of his first journey, in 1699. When the Antelope sinks, Gulliver is washed ashore on
Lilliput. No details are given about the personality of Prichard, and he is not important in
Gulliver’s life or in the unfolding of the novel’s plot. That Gulliver takes pains to name him
accurately reinforces our impression that he is obsessive about facts but not always reliable
in assessing overall significance.

Flimnap
The Lord High Treasurer of Lilliput, who conceives a jealous hatred for Gulliver when he
starts believing that his wife is having an affair with him.
Reldresal
The Principal Secretary of Private Affairs in Lilliput, who explains to Gulliver the history of
the political tensions between the two principal parties in the realm, the High-Heels and the
Low-Heels.

Skyresh Bolgolam
The High Admiral of Lilliput, who is the only member of the administration to oppose
Gulliver’s liberation. Gulliver imagines that Skyresh’s enmity is simply personal, though
there is no apparent reason for such hostility.

The Tramecksans
Also known as the High-Heels, a Lilliputian political group reminiscent of the British Tories.
Tramecksan policies are said to be more agreeable to the ancient constitution of Lilliput,
and while the High-Heels appear greater in number than the Low-Heels, their power is
lesser. Unlike the king, the crown prince is believed to sympathize with the Tramecksan,
wearing one low heel and one high heel, causing him to limp slightly.

The Slamecksans
The Low-Heels, a Lilliputian political group reminiscent of the British Whigs. The king has
ordained that all governmental administrators must be selected from this party, much to the
resentment of the High-Heels of the realm. Thus, while there are fewer Slamecksan than
Tramecksan in Lilliput, their political power is greater. The king’s own sympathies with the
Slamecksan are evident in the slightly lower heels he wears at court.

Themes
Might versus Right
Gulliver’s Travels implicitly poses the question of whether physical power or moral
righteousness should be the governing factor in social life. Gulliver experiences the
advantages of physical might both as one who has it, as a giant in Lilliput where he can
defeat the Blefuscudian navy by virtue of his immense size, and as one who does not have
it, as a miniature visitor to Brobdingnag where he is harassed by the hugeness of
everything from insects to household pets. His first encounter with another society is one of
entrapment, when he is physically tied down by the Lilliputians; later, in Brobdingnag, he is
enslaved by a farmer. He also observes physical force used against others, as with the
Houyhnhnms’ chaining up of the Yahoos.
But alongside the use of physical force, there are also many claims to power based on
moral correctness. The whole point of the egg controversy that has set Lilliput against
Blefuscu is not merely a cultural difference but, instead, a religious and moral issue related
to the proper interpretation of a passage in their holy book. This difference of opinion seems
to justify, in their eyes at least, the warfare it has sparked. Similarly, the use of physical
force against the Yahoos is justified for the Houyhnhnms by their sense of moral superiority:
they are cleaner, better behaved, and more rational. But overall, the novel tends to show
that claims to rule on the basis of moral righteousness are often just as arbitrary as, and
sometimes simply disguises for, simple physical subjugation. The Laputans keep the lower
land of Balnibarbi in check through force because they believe themselves to be more
rational, even though we might see them as absurd and unpleasant. Similarly, the ruling
elite of Balnibarbi believes itself to be in the right in driving Lord Munodi from power,
although we perceive that Munodi is the rational party. Claims to moral superiority are, in
the end, as hard to justify as the random use of physical force to dominate others.

The Individual Versus Society

Like many narratives about voyages to nonexistent lands, Gulliver’s Travels explores the
idea of utopia—an imaginary model of the ideal community. The idea of a utopia is an
ancient one, going back at least as far as the description in Plato’s The Republic of a city-
state governed by the wise and expressed most famously in English by Thomas
More’s Utopia. Swift nods to both works in his own narrative, though his attitude toward
utopia is much more skeptical, and one of the main aspects he points out about famous
historical utopias is the tendency to privilege the collective group over the individual. The
children of Plato’s The Republic are raised communally, with no knowledge of their
biological parents, in the understanding that this system enhances social fairness. Swift has
the Lilliputians similarly raise their offspring collectively, but its results are not exactly
utopian, since Lilliput is torn by conspiracies, jealousies, and backstabbing.
The Houyhnhnms also practice strict family planning, dictating that the parents of two
females should exchange a child with a family of two males, so that the male-to-female ratio
is perfectly maintained. Indeed, they come closer to the utopian ideal than the Lilliputians in
their wisdom and rational simplicity. But there is something unsettling about the
Houyhnhnms’ indistinct personalities and about how they are the only social group that
Gulliver encounters who do not have proper names. Despite minor physical differences,
they are all so good and rational that they are more or less interchangeable, without
individual identities. In their absolute fusion with their society and lack of individuality, they
are in a sense the exact opposite of Gulliver, who has hardly any sense of belonging to his
native society and exists only as an individual eternally wandering the seas. Gulliver’s
intense grief when forced to leave the Houyhnhnms may have something to do with his
longing for union with a community in which he can lose his human identity. In any case,
such a union is impossible for him, since he is not a horse, and all the other societies he
visits make him feel alienated as well.

Gulliver’s Travels could in fact be described as one of the first novels of modern alienation,
focusing on an individual’s repeated failures to integrate into societies to which he does not
belong. England itself is not much of a homeland for Gulliver, and, with his surgeon’s
business unprofitable and his father’s estate insufficient to support him, he may be right to
feel alienated from it. He never speaks fondly or nostalgically about England, and every
time he returns home, he is quick to leave again. Gulliver never complains explicitly about
feeling lonely, but the embittered and antisocial misanthrope we see at the end of the novel
is clearly a profoundly isolated individual. Thus, if Swift’s satire mocks the excesses of
communal life, it may also mock the excesses of individualism in its portrait of a miserable
and lonely Gulliver talking to his horses at home in England.

The Limits of Human Understanding

The idea that humans are not meant to know everything and that all understanding has a
natural limit is important in Gulliver’s Travels. Swift singles out theoretical knowledge in
particular for attack: his portrait of the disagreeable and self-centered Laputans, who show
blatant contempt for those who are not sunk in private theorizing, is a clear satire against
those who pride themselves on knowledge above all else. Practical knowledge is also
satirized when it does not produce results, as in the academy of Balnibarbi, where the
experiments for extracting sunbeams from cucumbers amount to nothing. Swift insists that
there is a realm of understanding into which humans are simply not supposed to venture.
Thus his depictions of rational societies, like Brobdingnag and Houyhnhnmland, emphasize
not these people’s knowledge or understanding of abstract ideas but their ability to live their
lives in a wise and steady way.

The Brobdingnagian king knows shockingly little about the abstractions of political science,
yet his country seems prosperous and well governed. Similarly, the Houyhnhnms know little
about arcane subjects like astronomy, though they know how long a month is by observing
the moon, since that knowledge has a practical effect on their well-being. Aspiring to higher
fields of knowledge would be meaningless to them and would interfere with their happiness.
In such contexts, it appears that living a happy and well-ordered life seems to be the very
thing for which Swift thinks knowledge is useful.

Swift also emphasizes the importance of self-understanding. Gulliver is initially remarkably

lacking in self-reflection and self-awareness. He makes no mention of his emotions,
passions, dreams, or aspirations, and he shows no interest in describing his own
psychology to us. Accordingly, he may strike us as frustratingly hollow or empty, though it is
likely that his personal emptiness is part of the overall meaning of the novel. By the end, he
has come close to a kind of twisted self-knowledge in his deranged belief that he is a
Yahoo. His revulsion with the human condition, shown in his shabby treatment of the
generous Don Pedro, extends to himself as well, so that he ends the novel in a thinly
disguised state of self-hatred. Swift may thus be saying that self-knowledge has its
necessary limits just as theoretical knowledge does, and that if we look too closely at
ourselves we might not be able to carry on living happily.

Symbols
Lilliputians
The Lilliputians symbolize humankind’s wildly excessive pride in its own puny existence.
Swift fully intends the irony of representing the tiniest race visited by Gulliver as by far the
most vainglorious and smug, both collectively and individually. There is surely no character
more odious in all of Gulliver’s travels than the noxious Skyresh. There is more backbiting
and conspiracy in Lilliput than anywhere else, and more of the pettiness of small minds who
imagine themselves to be grand. Gulliver is a naïve consumer of the Lilliputians’ grandiose
imaginings: he is flattered by the attention of their royal family and cowed by their threats of
punishment, forgetting that they have no real physical power over him. Their formally
worded condemnation of Gulliver on grounds of treason is a model of pompous and self-
important verbiage, but it works quite effectively on the naïve Gulliver.

The Lilliputians show off not only to Gulliver but to themselves as well. There is no mention
of armies proudly marching in any of the other societies Gulliver visits—only in Lilliput and
neighboring Blefuscu are the six-inch inhabitants possessed of the need to show off their
patriotic glories with such displays. When the Lilliputian emperor requests that Gulliver
serve as a kind of makeshift Arch of Triumph for the troops to pass under, it is a pathetic
reminder that their grand parade—in full view of Gulliver’s nether regions—is supremely
silly, a basically absurd way to boost the collective ego of the nation. Indeed, the war with
Blefuscu is itself an absurdity springing from wounded vanity, since the cause is not a
material concern like disputed territory but, rather, the proper interpretation of scripture by
the emperor’s forebears and the hurt feelings resulting from the disagreement. All in all, the
Lilliputians symbolize misplaced human pride, and point out Gulliver’s inability to diagnose it
correctly.

Brobdingnagians
The Brobdingnagians symbolize the private, personal, and physical side of humans when
examined up close and in great detail. The philosophical era of the Enlightenment tended to
overlook the routines of everyday life and the sordid or tedious little facts of existence, but
in Brobdingnag such facts become very important for Gulliver, sometimes matters of life
and death. An eighteenth-century philosopher could afford to ignore the fly buzzing around
his head or the skin pores on his servant girl, but in his shrunken state Gulliver is forced to
pay great attention to such things. He is forced take the domestic sphere seriously as well.
In other lands it is difficult for Gulliver, being such an outsider, to get glimpses of family
relations or private affairs, but in Brobdingnag he is treated as a doll or a plaything, and
thus is made privy to the urination of housemaids and the sexual lives of women.

The Brobdingnagians do not symbolize a solely negative human characteristic, as the

Laputans do. They are not merely ridiculous—some aspects of them are disgusting, like
their gigantic stench and the excrement left by their insects, but others are noble, like the
queen’s goodwill toward Gulliver and the king’s commonsense views of politics. More than
anything else, the Brobdingnagians symbolize a dimension of human existence visible at
close range, under close scrutiny.

Laputans
The Laputans represent the folly of theoretical knowledge that has no relation to human life
and no use in the actual world. As a profound cultural conservative, Swift was a critic of the
newfangled ideas springing up around him at the dawn of the 18th-century Enlightenment,
a period of great intellectual experimentation and theorization. He much preferred the
traditional knowledge that had been tested over centuries. Laputa symbolizes the absurdity
of knowledge that has never been tested or applied, the ludicrous side of Enlightenment
intellectualism. Even down below in Balnibarbi, where the local academy is more inclined to
practical application, knowledge is not made socially useful as Swift demands. Indeed,
theoretical knowledge there has proven positively disastrous, resulting in the ruin of
agriculture and architecture and the impoverishment of the population.

Even up above, the pursuit of theoretical understanding has not improved the lot of the
Laputans. They have few material worries, dependent as they are upon the Balnibarbians
below. But they are tormented by worries about the trajectories of comets and other
astronomical speculations: their theories have not made them wise, but neurotic and
disagreeable. The Laputans do not symbolize reason itself but rather the pursuit of a form
of knowledge that is not directly related to the improvement of human life.

Houyhnhnms
The Houyhnhnms represent an ideal of rational existence, a life governed by sense and
moderation of which philosophers since Plato have long dreamed. Indeed, there are echoes
of Plato’s Republic in the Houyhnhnms’ rejection of light entertainment and vain displays of
luxury, their appeal to reason rather than any holy writings as the criterion for proper action,
and their communal approach to family planning. As in Plato’s ideal community, the
Houyhnhnms have no need to lie nor any word for lying. They do not use force but only
strong exhortation. Their subjugation of the Yahoos appears more necessary than cruel and
perhaps the best way to deal with an unfortunate blot on their otherwise ideal society. In
these ways and others, the Houyhnhnms seem like model citizens, and Gulliver’s intense
grief when he is forced to leave them suggests that they have made an impact on him
greater than that of any other society he has visited. His derangement on Don Pedro’s ship,
in which he snubs the generous man as a Yahoo-like creature, implies that he strongly
identifies with the Houyhnhnms.
But we may be less ready than Gulliver to take the Houyhnhnms as ideals of human
existence. They have no names in the narrative nor any need for names, since they are
virtually interchangeable, with little individual identity. Their lives seem harmonious and
happy, although quite lacking in vigor, challenge, and excitement. Indeed, this apparent
ease may be why Swift chooses to make them horses rather than human types like every
other group in the novel. He may be hinting, to those more insightful than Gulliver, that the
Houyhnhnms should not be considered human ideals at all. In any case, they symbolize a
standard of rational existence to be either espoused or rejected by both Gulliver and us.

England
As the site of his father’s disappointingly “small estate” and Gulliver’s failing business,
England seems to symbolize deficiency or insufficiency, at least in the financial sense that
matters most to Gulliver. England is passed over very quickly in the first paragraph of
Chapter 1, as if to show that it is simply there as the starting point to be left quickly behind.
Gulliver seems to have very few nationalistic or patriotic feelings about England, and he
rarely mentions his homeland on his travels. In this sense, Gulliver’s Travels is quite unlike
other travel narratives like The Odyssey, in which Odysseus misses his homeland and
laments his wanderings. England is where Gulliver’s wife and family live, but they too are
hardly mentioned. Yet Swift chooses to have Gulliver return home after each of his four
journeys instead of having him continue on one long trip to four different places, so that
England is kept constantly in the picture and given a steady, unspoken importance.
By the end of the fourth journey, England is brought more explicitly into the fabric
of Gulliver’s Travels when Gulliver, in his neurotic state, starts confusing Houyhnhnmland
with his homeland, referring to Englishmen as Yahoos. The distinction between native and
foreign thus unravels—the Houyhnhnms and Yahoos are not just races populating a
faraway land but rather types that Gulliver projects upon those around him. The possibility
thus arises that all the races Gulliver encounters could be versions of the English and that
his travels merely allow him to see various aspects of human nature more clearly.

JANE EYRE – CHARLOTTE BRONTE - 1847

Jane Eyre is a young orphan being raised by Mrs. Reed, her cruel, wealthy aunt. A servant
named Bessie provides Jane with some of the few kindnesses she receives, telling her
stories and singing songs to her. One day, as punishment for fighting with her bullying
cousin John Reed, Jane’s aunt imprisons Jane in the red-room, the room in which
Jane’s Uncle Reed died. While locked in, Jane, believing that she sees her uncle’s ghost,
screams and faints. She wakes to find herself in the care of Bessie and the kindly
apothecary Mr. Lloyd, who suggests to Mrs. Reed that Jane be sent away to school. To
Jane’s delight, Mrs. Reed concurs.
Once at the Lowood School, Jane finds that her life is far from idyllic. The school’s
headmaster is Mr. Brocklehurst, a cruel, hypocritical, and abusive man. Brocklehurst
preaches a doctrine of poverty and privation to his students while using the school’s funds
to provide a wealthy and opulent lifestyle for his own family. At Lowood, Jane befriends a
young girl named Helen Burns, whose strong, martyrlike attitude toward the school’s
miseries is both helpful and displeasing to Jane. A massive typhus epidemic sweeps
Lowood, and Helen dies of consumption. The epidemic also results in the departure of Mr.
Brocklehurst by attracting attention to the insalubrious conditions at Lowood. After a group
of more sympathetic gentlemen takes Brocklehurst’s place, Jane’s life improves
dramatically. She spends eight more years at Lowood, six as a student and two as a
teacher.
After teaching for two years, Jane yearns for new experiences. She accepts a governess
position at a manor called Thornfield, where she teaches a lively French girl
named Adèle. The distinguished housekeeper Mrs. Fairfax presides over the estate. Jane’s
employer at Thornfield is a dark, impassioned man named Rochester, with whom Jane
finds herself falling secretly in love. She saves Rochester from a fire one night, which he
claims was started by a drunken servant named Grace Poole. But because Grace Poole
continues to work at Thornfield, Jane concludes that she has not been told the entire story.
Jane sinks into despondency when Rochester brings home a beautiful but vicious woman
named Blanche Ingram. Jane expects Rochester to propose to Blanche. But Rochester
instead proposes to Jane, who accepts almost disbelievingly.
The wedding day arrives, and as Jane and Mr. Rochester prepare to exchange their vows,
the voice of Mr. Mason cries out that Rochester already has a wife. Mason introduces
himself as the brother of that wife—a woman named Bertha. Mr. Mason testifies that
Bertha, whom Rochester married when he was a young man in Jamaica, is still alive.
Rochester does not deny Mason’s claims, but he explains that Bertha has gone mad. He
takes the wedding party back to Thornfield, where they witness the insane Bertha Mason
scurrying around on all fours and growling like an animal. Rochester keeps Bertha hidden
on the third story of Thornfield and pays Grace Poole to keep his wife under control. Bertha
was the real cause of the mysterious fire earlier in the story. Knowing that it is impossible
for her to be with Rochester, Jane flees Thornfield.
Penniless and hungry, Jane is forced to sleep outdoors and beg for food. At last, three
siblings who live in a manor alternatively called Marsh End and Moor House take her in.
Their names are Mary, Diana, and St. John (pronounced “Sinjin”) Rivers, and Jane quickly
becomes friends with them. St. John is a clergyman, and he finds Jane a job teaching at a
charity school in Morton. He surprises her one day by declaring that her uncle, John Eyre,
has died and left her a large fortune: 20,000 pounds. When Jane asks how he received this
news, he shocks her further by declaring that her uncle was also his uncle: Jane and the
Riverses are cousins. Jane immediately decides to share her inheritance equally with her
three newfound relatives.
St. John decides to travel to India as a missionary, and he urges Jane to accompany him—
as his wife. Jane agrees to go to India but refuses to marry her cousin because she does
not love him. St. John pressures her to reconsider, and she nearly gives in. However, she
realizes that she cannot abandon forever the man she truly loves when one night she hears
Rochester’s voice calling her name over the moors. Jane immediately hurries back to
Thornfield and finds that it has been burned to the ground by Bertha Mason, who lost her
life in the fire. Rochester saved the servants but lost his eyesight and one of his hands.
Jane travels on to Rochester’s new residence, Ferndean, where he lives with two servants
named John and Mary.

At Ferndean, Rochester and Jane rebuild their relationship and soon marry. At the end of
her story, Jane writes that she has been married for ten blissful years and that she and
Rochester enjoy perfect equality in their life together. She says that after two years of
blindness, Rochester regained sight in one eye and was able to behold their first son at his
birth.

Character List
Jane Eyre
The protagonist and narrator of the novel, Jane is an intelligent, honest, plain-featured
young girl forced to contend with oppression, inequality, and hardship. Although she meets
with a series of individuals who threaten her autonomy, Jane repeatedly succeeds at
asserting herself and maintains her principles of justice, human dignity, and morality. She
also values intellectual and emotional fulfillment. Her strong belief in gender and social
equality challenges the Victorian prejudices against women and the poor.

Edward Rochester
Jane’s employer and the master of Thornfield, Rochester is a wealthy, passionate man with
a dark secret that provides much of the novel’s suspense. Rochester is unconventional,
ready to set aside polite manners, propriety, and consideration of social class in order to
interact with Jane frankly and directly. He is rash and impetuous and has spent much of his
adult life roaming about Europe in an attempt to avoid the consequences of his youthful
indiscretions. His problems are partly the result of his own recklessness, but he is a
sympathetic figure because he has suffered for so long as a result of his early marriage to
Bertha.

St. John Rivers

Along with his sisters, Mary and Diana, St. John (pronounced “Sinjin”) serves as Jane’s
benefactor after she runs away from Thornfield, giving her food and shelter. The minister at
Morton, St. John is cold, reserved, and often controlling in his interactions with others.
Because he is entirely alienated from his feelings and devoted solely to an austere
ambition, St. John serves as a foil to Edward Rochester.

Mrs. Reed
Mrs. Reed is Jane’s cruel aunt, who raises her at Gateshead Hall until Jane is sent away to
school at age ten. Later in her life, Jane attempts reconciliation with her aunt, but the old
woman continues to resent her because her husband had always loved Jane more than his
own children.

Bessie Lee
The maid at Gateshead, Bessie is the only figure in Jane’s childhood who regularly treats
her kindly, telling her stories and singing her songs. Bessie later marries Robert Leaven,
the Reeds’ coachman.

Mr. Lloyd
Mr. Lloyd is the Reeds’ apothecary, who suggests that Jane be sent away to school.
Always kind to Jane, Mr. Lloyd writes a letter to Miss Temple confirming Jane’s story about
her childhood and clearing Jane of Mrs. Reed’s charge that she is a liar.
Georgiana Reed
Georgiana Reed is Jane’s cousin and one of Mrs. Reed’s two daughters. The beautiful
Georgiana treats Jane cruelly when they are children, but later in their lives she befriends
her cousin and confides in her. Georgiana attempts to elope with a man named Lord Edwin
Vere, but her sister, Eliza, alerts Mrs. Reed of the arrangement and sabotages the plan.
After Mrs. Reed dies, Georgiana marries a wealthy man.

Eliza Reed
Eliza Reed is Jane’s cousin and one of Mrs. Reed’s two daughters (along with her sister,
Georgiana). Not as beautiful as her sister, Eliza devotes herself somewhat self-righteously
to the church and eventually goes to a convent in France where she becomes the Mother
Superior.

John Reed
John Reed is Jane’s cousin, Mrs. Reed’s son, and brother to Eliza and Georgiana. John
treats Jane with appalling cruelty during their childhood and later falls into a life of drinking
and gambling. John commits suicide midway through the novel when his mother ceases to
pay his debts for him.

Helen Burns
Helen Burns is Jane’s close friend at the Lowood School. She endures her miserable life
there with a passive dignity that Jane cannot understand. Helen dies of consumption in
Jane’s arms.

Mr. Brocklehurst
The cruel, hypocritical master of the Lowood School, Mr. Brocklehurst preaches a doctrine
of privation, while stealing from the school to support his luxurious lifestyle. After a typhus
epidemic sweeps Lowood, Brocklehurst’s shifty and dishonest practices are brought to light
and he is publicly discredited.

Maria Temple
Maria Temple is a kind teacher at Lowood, who treats Jane and Helen with respect and
compassion. Along with Bessie Lee, she serves as one of Jane’s first positive female role
models. Miss Temple helps clear Jane of Mrs. Reed’s accusations against her.

Miss Scatcherd
Jane’s sour and vicious teacher at Lowood, Miss Scatcherd behaves with particular cruelty
toward Helen.

Alice Fairfax
Alice Fairfax is the housekeeper at Thornfield Hall. She is the first to tell Jane that the
mysterious laughter often heard echoing through the halls is, in fact, the laughter of Grace
Poole—a lie that Rochester himself often repeats.
Bertha Mason
Rochester’s clandestine wife, Bertha Mason is a formerly beautiful and wealthy Creole
woman who has become insane, violent, and bestial. She lives locked in a secret room on
the third story of Thornfield and is guarded by Grace Poole, whose occasional bouts of
inebriation sometimes enable Bertha to escape. Bertha eventually burns down Thornfield,
plunging to her death in the flames.

Grace Poole
Grace Poole is Bertha Mason’s keeper at Thornfield, whose drunken carelessness
frequently allows Bertha to escape. When Jane first arrives at Thornfield, Mrs. Fairfax
attributes to Grace all evidence of Bertha’s misdeeds.

Adèle Varens
Jane’s pupil at Thornfield, Adèle Varens is a lively though somewhat spoiled child from
France. Rochester brought her to Thornfield after her mother, Celine, abandoned her.
Although Celine was once Rochester’s mistress, he does not believe himself to be Adèle’s
father.

Celine Varens
Celine Varens is a French opera dancer with whom Rochester once had an affair. Although
Rochester does not believe Celine’s claims that he fathered her daughter Adèle, he
nonetheless brought the girl to England when Celine abandoned her. Rochester had broken
off his relationship with Celine after learning that Celine was unfaithful to him and interested
only in his money.

Sophie
Sophie is Adèle’s French nurse at Thornfield.

Richard Mason
Richard Mason is Bertha’s brother. During a visit to Thornfield, he is injured by his mad
sister. After learning of Rochester’s intent to marry Jane, Mason arrives with the solicitor
Briggs in order to thwart the wedding and reveal the truth of Rochester’s prior marriage.

Mr. Briggs
John Eyre’s attorney, Mr. Briggs helps Richard Mason prevent Jane’s wedding to
Rochester when he learns of the existence of Bertha Mason, Rochester’s wife. After John
Eyre’s death, Briggs searches for Jane in order to give her her inheritance.

Blanche Ingram
Blanche Ingram is a beautiful socialite who despises Jane and hopes to marry Rochester
for his money.
Diana Rivers
Diana Rivers is Jane’s cousin, and the sister of St. John and Mary. Diana is a kind and
intelligent person, and she urges Jane not to go to India with St. John. She serves as a
model for Jane of an intellectually gifted and independent woman.

Mary Rivers
Mary Rivers is Jane’s cousin, the sister of St. John and Diana. Mary is a kind and intelligent
young woman who is forced to work as a governess after her father loses his fortune. Like
her sister, she serves as a model for Jane of an independent woman who is also able to
maintain close relationships with others and a sense of meaning in her life.

Rosamond Oliver
Rosamond is the beautiful daughter of Mr. Oliver, Morton’s wealthiest inhabitant.
Rosamond gives money to the school in Morton where Jane works. Although she is in love
with St. John, she becomes engaged to the wealthy Mr. Granby.

John Eyre
John Eyre is Jane’s uncle, who leaves her his vast fortune of 20,000 pounds.

Uncle Reed
Uncle Reed is Mrs. Reed’s late husband. In her childhood, Jane believes that she feels the
presence of his ghost. Because he was always fond of Jane and her mother (his sister),
Uncle Reed made his wife promise that she would raise Jane as her own child. It is a
promise that Mrs. Reed does not keep.

Themes
Love Versus Autonomy
Jane Eyre is very much the story of a quest to be loved. Jane searches, not just for
romantic love, but also for a sense of being valued, of belonging. Thus Jane says to Helen
Burns: “to gain some real affection from you, or Miss Temple, or any other whom I truly
love, I would willingly submit to have the bone of my arm broken, or to let a bull toss me, or
to stand behind a kicking horse, and let it dash its hoof at my chest” (Chapter 8). Yet, over
the course of the book, Jane must learn how to gain love without sacrificing and harming
herself in the process.
Her fear of losing her autonomy motivates her refusal of Rochester’s marriage proposal.
Jane believes that “marrying” Rochester while he remains legally tied to Bertha would mean
rendering herself a mistress and sacrificing her own integrity for the sake of emotional
gratification. On the other hand, her life at Moor House tests her in the opposite manner.
There, she enjoys economic independence and engages in worthwhile and useful work,
teaching the poor; yet she lacks emotional sustenance. Although St. John proposes
marriage, offering her a partnership built around a common purpose, Jane knows their
marriage would remain loveless.

Nonetheless, the events of Jane’s stay at Moor House are necessary tests of Jane’s
autonomy. Only after proving her self-sufficiency to herself can she marry Rochester and
not be asymmetrically dependent upon him as her “master.” The marriage can be one
between equals. As Jane says: “I am my husband’s life as fully as he is mine. . . . To be
together is for us to be at once as free as in solitude, as gay as in company. . . . We are
precisely suited in character—perfect concord is the result” (Chapter 38).

Religion
Throughout the novel, Jane struggles to find the right balance between moral duty and
earthly pleasure, between obligation to her spirit and attention to her body. She encounters
three main religious figures: Mr. Brocklehurst, Helen Burns, and St. John Rivers. Each
represents a model of religion that Jane ultimately rejects as she forms her own ideas about
faith and principle, and their practical consequences.

Mr. Brocklehurst illustrates the dangers and hypocrisies that Charlotte Brontë perceived in
the nineteenth-century Evangelical movement. Mr. Brocklehurst adopts the rhetoric of
Evangelicalism when he claims to be purging his students of pride, but his method of
subjecting them to various privations and humiliations, like when he orders that the naturally
curly hair of one of Jane’s classmates be cut so as to lie straight, is entirely un-Christian. Of
course, Brocklehurst’s proscriptions are difficult to follow, and his hypocritical support of his
own luxuriously wealthy family at the expense of the Lowood students shows Brontë’s
wariness of the Evangelical movement. Helen Burns’s meek and forbearing mode of
Christianity, on the other hand, is too passive for Jane to adopt as her own, although she
loves and admires Helen for it.

Many chapters later, St. John Rivers provides another model of Christian behavior. His is a
Christianity of ambition, glory, and extreme self-importance. St. John urges Jane to sacrifice
her emotional deeds for the fulfillment of her moral duty, offering her a way of life that would
require her to be disloyal to her own self.

Although Jane ends up rejecting all three models of religion, she does not abandon
morality, spiritualism, or a belief in a Christian God. When her wedding is interrupted, she
prays to God for solace (Chapter 26). As she wanders the heath, poor and starving, she
puts her survival in the hands of God (Chapter 28). She strongly objects to Rochester’s
lustful immorality, and she refuses to consider living with him while church and state still
deem him married to another woman. Even so, Jane can barely bring herself to leave the
only love she has ever known. She credits God with helping her to escape what she knows
would have been an immoral life (Chapter 27).

Jane ultimately finds a comfortable middle ground. Her spiritual understanding is not hateful
and oppressive like Brocklehurst’s, nor does it require retreat from the everyday world as
Helen’s and St. John’s religions do. For Jane, religion helps curb immoderate passions, and
it spurs one on to worldly efforts and achievements. These achievements include full self-
knowledge and complete faith in God.

Social Class
Jane Eyre is critical of Victorian England’s strict social hierarchy. Brontë’s exploration of the
complicated social position of governesses is perhaps the novel’s most important treatment
of this theme. Like Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights, Jane is a figure of ambiguous class
standing and, consequently, a source of extreme tension for the characters around her.
Jane’s manners, sophistication, and education are those of an aristocrat, because Victorian
governesses, who tutored children in etiquette as well as academics, were expected to
possess the “culture” of the aristocracy. Yet, as paid employees, they were more or less
treated as servants; thus, Jane remains penniless and powerless while at Thornfield. Jane’s
understanding of the double standard crystallizes when she becomes aware of her feelings
for Rochester; she is his intellectual, but not his social, equal. Even before the crisis
surrounding Bertha Mason, Jane is hesitant to marry Rochester because she senses that
she would feel indebted to him for “condescending” to marry her. Jane’s distress, which
appears most strongly in Chapter 17, seems to be Brontë’s critique of Victorian class
attitudes.
Jane herself speaks out against class prejudice at certain moments in the book. For
example, in Chapter 23 she chastises Rochester: “Do you think, because I am poor,
obscure, plain, and little, I am soulless and heartless? You think wrong!—I have as much
soul as you—and full as much heart! And if God had gifted me with some beauty and much
wealth, I should have made it as hard for you to leave me, as it is now for me to leave you.”
However, it is also important to note that nowhere in Jane Eyre are society’s boundaries
bent. Ultimately, Jane is only able to marry Rochester as his equal because she has almost
magically come into her own inheritance from her uncle.

Gender Relations
Jane struggles continually to achieve equality and to overcome oppression. In addition to
class hierarchy, she must fight against patriarchal domination—against those who believe
women to be inferior to men and try to treat them as such. Three central male figures
threaten her desire for equality and dignity: Mr. Brocklehurst, Edward Rochester, and St.
John Rivers. All three are misogynistic on some level. Each tries to keep Jane in a
submissive position, where she is unable to express her own thoughts and feelings. In her
quest for independence and self-knowledge, Jane must escape Brocklehurst, reject St.
John, and come to Rochester only after ensuring that they may marry as equals. This last
condition is met once Jane proves herself able to function, through the time she spends at
Moor House, in a community and in a family. She will not depend solely on Rochester for
love and she can be financially independent. Furthermore, Rochester is blind at the novel’s
end and thus dependent upon Jane to be his “prop and guide.” In Chapter 12, Jane
articulates what was for her time a radically feminist philosophy:

Women are supposed to be very calm generally: but women feel just as men feel; they
need exercise for their faculties, and a field for their efforts as much as their brothers do;
they suffer from too rigid a restraint, too absolute a stagnation, precisely as men would
suffer; and it is narrow-minded in their more privileged fellow-creatures to say that they
ought to confine themselves to making puddings and knitting stockings, to playing on the
piano and embroidering bags. It is thoughtless to condemn them, or laugh at them, if they
seek to do more or learn more than custom has pronounced necessary for their sex.

Home and Belonging

Throughout the novel, Jane defines her idea of home as a place where she both belongs
and can be useful. When the Reeds’ apothecary, Mr. Lloyd, questions whether Jane is
happy to live at Gateshead, Jane emphasizes that it is not her house because she has no
right to be there. In the first chapter, Jane describes herself as “a discord” at Gateshead
because her temperament doesn’t match that of the Reeds, and “useless” because the fact
that she doesn’t fit in with the family keeps her from adding to the happiness of the
household. Further, Jane’s sense of alienation is compounded because no one loves Jane
at Gateshead, and she has no one to love in return. At Lowood, Jane seeks to find work
elsewhere after Miss Temple’s departure, mainly because she believes it was Miss Temple
that made Lowood homey. Without the person she loves most, Jane’s usefulness is no
longer enough to constitute Lowood as home. Later, at Thornfield, Jane shares such a
deep emotional connection with Rochester that she declares him to be her “only home,” but
she leaves Rochester because living with him would contribute to his sin and damage his
soul. After learning about Bertha Mason, she feels morally useless around him. By novel’s
end, when Jane finally returns to Rochester, she can at last be useful him, in part because
he now must depend on Jane for his eyesight. Jane’s desire to belong is connected to her
desire to be valuable to another person, and these desires drive her decisions throughout
the entire novel.

Anxiety and Uncertainty

Brontë draws on frightening Gothic imagery to highlight anxiety and uncertainty surrounding
Jane’s place in the world, especially by describing the supernatural. The reader’s first
encounter with the Gothic and supernatural is the terrifying red-room. Uncle Reed may not
literally haunt the room, but his connection to the room haunts Jane as a reminder of the
unfulfilled promise that she would have a home at Gateshead and the reality that Uncle
Reed cannot ensure that she will be loved. Later, the storm that splits the chestnut tree
where Rochester and Jane kiss creates a portentous atmosphere, as if nature itself objects
to their marriage. This occurrence serves to warn Jane that despite appearances, her
happiness with Rochester is not truly secure. Further, many scholars have identified Bertha
as a Gothic double of Jane, or a physical manifestation of the violent passions and anger
that Jane possessed in her younger years. This connection between Bertha and Jane
highlights anxieties around Jane becoming Rochester’s bride. Even without knowledge of
Bertha, Jane worries Rochester will tire of her, and their marriage would upend rigid
Victorian social class structure by having a governess marry her master. In this way,
Bertha’s looming presence expresses Jane’s fear about their impending marriage and the
ambiguity of Jane’s social position.

Symbols
Bertha Mason
Bertha Mason is a complex presence in Jane Eyre. She impedes Jane’s happiness, but she
also catalyses the growth of Jane’s self-understanding. The mystery surrounding Bertha
establishes suspense and terror to the plot and the atmosphere. Further, Bertha serves as
a remnant and reminder of Rochester’s youthful libertinism.
Yet Bertha can also be interpreted as a symbol. Some critics have read her as a statement
about the way Britain feared and psychologically “locked away” the other cultures it
encountered at the height of its imperialism. Others have seen her as a symbolic
representation of the “trapped” Victorian wife, who is expected never to travel or work
outside the house and becomes ever more frenzied as she finds no outlet for her frustration
and anxiety. Within the story, then, Bertha’s insanity could serve as a warning to Jane of
what complete surrender to Rochester could bring about.

One could also see Bertha as a manifestation of Jane’s subconscious feelings—

specifically, of her rage against oppressive social and gender norms. Jane declares her
love for Rochester, but she also secretly fears marriage to him and feels the need to rage
against the imprisonment it could become for her. Jane never manifests this fear or anger,
but Bertha does. Thus Bertha tears up the bridal veil, and it is Bertha’s existence that
indeed stops the wedding from going forth. And, when Thornfield comes to represent a
state of servitude and submission for Jane, Bertha burns it to the ground. Throughout the
novel, Jane describes her inner spirit as fiery, her inner landscape as a “ridge of lighted
heath” (Chapter 4). Bertha seems to be the outward manifestation of Jane’s interior fire.
Bertha expresses the feelings that Jane must keep in check.

The Red-Room
The red-room can be viewed as a symbol of what Jane must overcome in her struggles to
find freedom, happiness, and a sense of belonging. In the red-room, Jane’s position of exile
and imprisonment first becomes clear. Although Jane is eventually freed from the room, she
continues to be socially ostracized, financially trapped, and excluded from love; her sense
of independence and her freedom of self-expression are constantly threatened.

The red-room’s importance as a symbol continues throughout the novel. It reappears as a

memory whenever Jane makes a connection between her current situation and that first
feeling of being ridiculed. Thus she recalls the room when she is humiliated at Lowood. She
also thinks of the room on the night that she decides to leave Thornfield after Rochester
has tried to convince her to become an undignified mistress. Her destitute condition upon
her departure from Thornfield also threatens emotional and intellectual imprisonment, as
does St. John’s marriage proposal. Only after Jane has asserted herself, gained financial
independence, and found a spiritual family—which turns out to be her real family—can she
wed Rochester and find freedom in and through marriage.

The Split Chestnut Tree

The split chestnut tree in the orchard at Thornfield Hall symbolizes both the eventual
breaking off of Jane and Rochester’s marriage and the atypical nature of their relationship
at the end of the novel. The large tree, which rests in an Eden-like grove, bears witness to
Rochester’s marriage proposal and Jane’s acceptance only to be struck by lightning during
a harsh storm later that same night. This destruction, along with the ominous mood that the
wind and rain establish, suggests that the marriage is doomed to fail. The idyllic quality of
the orchard and the strength of the old tree, both of which represent the couple’s hopes for
their relationship, quickly disappear. Although the reader is unaware of Bertha Mason at
this point in the novel, the fiery lightning strike even speaks to the role that her presence
plays in the breaking off of their engagement.

An alternative reading of the split chestnut tree suggests that it serves as a representation
of the dramatic changes that will ultimately befall their relationship once Rochester loses his
vision in Bertha’s fire. Much like the tree, Jane and Rochester are very different individuals
and have a new dynamic by the end of the novel. Jane must fill the role of caretaker and
provider to support her husband rather than the other way around. Rochester even goes so
far as to compare himself to the tree, claiming in Chapter 37 that his disability renders him
“no better than the old lightning-struck chestnut-tree in Thornfield orchard.” The fact that
this detail reoccurs so late in the novel speaks to its significance as a symbol for the myriad
changes and challenges the couple will face.

Genre
Structurally, Jane Eyre most closely resembles a bildungsroman. The word
“bildungsroman” literally means “novel of education” in German, and accordingly, this genre
follows the education and maturation of its sensitive and philosophical protagonist. Jane
Eyre follows Jane as she literally grows up, and also as she emotionally grows into herself
and takes ownership of her ideas and philosophies. From the very beginning, Jane
Eyre establishes that Jane’s life is profoundly shaped by her struggle against those with
more power. Throughout most of the novel, Jane wrestles with her commitment to her own
integrity and desire to satisfy her passions. By novel’s end, Jane finally finds freedom by
coming to terms with all the conflicting elements of her life. As is typical of the
bildungsroman genre, it is this acceptance that reveals Jane’s maturity.

TO THE LIGHTHOUSE - Virginia Wolf - 1927

To the Lighthouse is divided into three sections: “The Window,” “Time Passes,” and “The
Lighthouse.” Each section is fragmented into stream-of-consciousness contributions from
various narrators.
“The Window” opens just before the start of World War I. Mr. Ramsay and Mrs. Ramsay
bring their eight children to their summer home in the Hebrides (a group of islands west of
Scotland). Across the bay from their house stands a large lighthouse. Six-year-old James
Ramsay wants desperately to go to the lighthouse, and Mrs. Ramsay tells him that they will
go the next day if the weather permits. James reacts gleefully, but Mr. Ramsay tells him
coldly that the weather looks to be foul. James resents his father and believes that he
enjoys being cruel to James and his siblings.

The Ramsays host a number of guests, including the dour Charles Tansley, who admires
Mr. Ramsay’s work as a metaphysical philosopher. Also at the house is Lily Briscoe, a
young painter who begins a portrait of Mrs. Ramsay. Mrs. Ramsay wants Lily to marry
William Bankes, an old friend of the Ramsays, but Lily resolves to remain single. Mrs.
Ramsay does manage to arrange another marriage, however, between Paul Rayley and
Minta Doyle, two of their acquaintances.

During the course of the afternoon, Paul proposes to Minta, Lily begins her painting, Mrs.
Ramsay soothes the resentful James, and Mr. Ramsay frets over his shortcomings as a
philosopher, periodically turning to Mrs. Ramsay for comfort. That evening, the Ramsays
host a seemingly ill-fated dinner party. Paul and Minta are late returning from their walk on
the beach with two of the Ramsays’ children. Lily bristles at outspoken comments made by
Charles Tansley, who suggests that women can neither paint nor write. Mr. Ramsay reacts
rudely when Augustus Carmichael, a poet, asks for a second plate of soup. As the night
draws on, however, these missteps right themselves, and the guests come together to
make a memorable evening.

The joy, however, like the party itself, cannot last, and as Mrs. Ramsay leaves her guests in
the dining room, she reflects that the event has already slipped into the past. Later, she
joins her husband in the parlor. The couple sits quietly together, until Mr. Ramsay’s
characteristic insecurities interrupt their peace. He wants his wife to tell him that she loves
him. Mrs. Ramsay is not one to make such pronouncements, but she concedes to his point
made earlier in the day that the weather will be too rough for a trip to the lighthouse the next
day. Mr. Ramsay thus knows that Mrs. Ramsay loves him. Night falls, and one night quickly
becomes another.

Time passes more quickly as the novel enters the “Time Passes” segment. War breaks out
across Europe. Mrs. Ramsay dies suddenly one night. Andrew Ramsay, her oldest son, is
killed in battle, and his sister Prue dies from an illness related to childbirth. The family no
longer vacations at its summerhouse, which falls into a state of disrepair. Weeds take over
the garden and spiders nest in the house. Ten years pass before the family returns. Mrs.
McNab, the housekeeper, employs a few other women to help set the house in order. They
rescue the house from oblivion and decay, and everything is in order when Lily Briscoe
returns.

In “The Lighthouse” section, time returns to the slow detail of shifting points of view, similar
in style to “The Window.” Mr. Ramsay declares that he and James and Cam, one of his
daughters, will journey to the lighthouse. On the morning of the voyage, delays throw him
into a fit of temper. He appeals to Lily for sympathy, but, unlike Mrs. Ramsay, she is unable
to provide him with what he needs. The Ramsays set off, and Lily takes her place on the
lawn, determined to complete a painting she started but abandoned on her last visit. James
and Cam bristle at their father’s blustery behavior and are embarrassed by his constant
self-pity. Still, as the boat reaches its destination, the children feel a fondness for him. Even
James, whose skill as a sailor Mr. Ramsay praises, experiences a moment of connection
with his father, though James so willfully resents him. Across the bay, Lily puts the finishing
touch on her painting. She makes a definitive stroke on the canvas and puts her brush
down, finally having achieved her vision.

Character List
Mrs. Ramsay
Mr. Ramsay’s wife. A beautiful and loving woman, Mrs. Ramsay is a wonderful hostess who
takes pride in making memorable experiences for the guests at the family’s summer home
on the Isle of Skye. Affirming traditional gender roles wholeheartedly, she lavishes
particular attention on her male guests, who she believes have delicate egos and need
constant support and sympathy. She is a dutiful and loving wife but often struggles with her
husband’s difficult moods and selfishness. Without fail, however, she triumphs through
these difficult times and demonstrates an ability to make something significant and lasting
from the most ephemeral of circumstances, such as a dinner party.

Mr. Ramsay
Mrs. Ramsay’s husband, and a prominent metaphysical philosopher. Mr. Ramsay loves his
family but often acts like something of a tyrant. He tends to be selfish and harsh due to his
persistent personal and professional anxieties. He fears, more than anything, that his work
is insignificant in the grand scheme of things and that he will not be remembered by future
generations. Well aware of how blessed he is to have such a wonderful family, he
nevertheless tends to punish his wife, children, and guests by demanding their constant
sympathy, attention, and support.
Lily Briscoe
A young, single painter who befriends the Ramsays on the Isle of Skye. Like Mr. Ramsay,
Lily is plagued by fears that her work lacks worth. She begins a portrait of Mrs. Ramsay at
the beginning of the novel but has trouble finishing it. The opinions of men like Charles
Tansley, who insists that women cannot paint or write, threaten to undermine her
confidence.

James Ramsay
The Ramsays’ youngest son. James loves his mother deeply and feels a murderous
antipathy toward his father, with whom he must compete for Mrs. Ramsay’s love and
affection. At the beginning of the novel, Mr. Ramsay refuses the six-year-old James’s
request to go to the lighthouse, saying that the weather will be foul and not permit it. Ten
years later, James finally makes the journey with his father and his sister Cam. By this time,
he has grown into a willful and moody young man who has much in common with his father,
whom he detests.

Charles Tansley
A young philosopher and pupil of Mr. Ramsay who stays with the Ramsays on the Isle of
Skye. Tansley is a prickly and unpleasant man who harbors deep insecurities regarding his
humble background. He often insults other people, particularly women such as Lily, whose
talent and accomplishments he constantly calls into question. His bad behavior, like Mr.
Ramsay’s, is motivated by his need for reassurance.

Paul Rayley
A young friend of the Ramsays who visits them on the Isle of Skye. Paul is a kind,
impressionable young man who follows Mrs. Ramsay’s wishes in marrying Minta Doyle.

Minta Doyle
A flighty young woman who visits the Ramsays on the Isle of Skye. Minta marries Paul
Rayley at Mrs. Ramsay’s wishes.

William Bankes
A botanist and old friend of the Ramsays who stays on the Isle of Skye. Bankes is a kind
and mellow man whom Mrs. Ramsay hopes will marry Lily Briscoe. Although he never
marries her, Bankes and Lily remain close friends.

Augustus Carmichael
An opium-using poet who visits the Ramsays on the Isle of Skye. Carmichael languishes in
literary obscurity until his verse becomes popular during the war.

Andrew Ramsay
The oldest of the Ramsays’ sons. Andrew is a competent, independent young man, and he
looks forward to a career as a mathematician.
Jasper Ramsay
One of the Ramsays’ sons. Jasper, to his mother’s chagrin, enjoys shooting birds.

Roger Ramsay
One of the Ramsays’ sons. Roger is wild and adventurous, like his sister Nancy.

Prue Ramsay
The oldest Ramsay girl, a beautiful young woman. Mrs. Ramsay delights in contemplating
Prue’s marriage, which she believes will be blissful.

Rose Ramsay
One of the Ramsays’ daughters. Rose has a talent for making things beautiful. She
arranges the fruit for her mother’s dinner party and picks out her mother’s jewelry.

Nancy Ramsay
One of the Ramsays’ daughters. Nancy accompanies Paul Rayley and Minta Doyle on their
trip to the beach. Like her brother Roger, she is a wild adventurer.

Cam Ramsay
One of the Ramsays’ daughters. As a young girl, Cam is mischievous. She sails with James
and Mr. Ramsay to the lighthouse in the novel’s final section.

Mrs. McNab
An elderly woman who takes care of the Ramsays’ house on the Isle of Skye, restoring it
after ten years of abandonment during and after World War I.

Macalister
The fisherman who accompanies the Ramsays to the lighthouse. Macalister relates stories
of shipwreck and maritime adventure to Mr. Ramsay and compliments James on his
handling of the boat while James lands it at the lighthouse.

Macalister’s boy
The fisherman’s boy. He rows James, Cam, and Mr. Ramsay to the lighthouse.

Themes
The Transience of Life and Work
Mr. Ramsay and Mrs. Ramsay take completely different approaches to life: he relies on his
intellect, while she depends on her emotions. But they share the knowledge that the world
around them is transient—that nothing lasts forever. Mr. Ramsay reflects that even the
most enduring of reputations, such as Shakespeare’s, are doomed to eventual oblivion.
This realization accounts for the bitter aspect of his character. Frustrated by the inevitable
demise of his own body of work and envious of the few geniuses who will outlast him, he
plots to found a school of philosophy that argues that the world is designed for the average,
unadorned man, for the “liftman in the Tube” rather than for the rare immortal writer.

Mrs. Ramsay is as keenly aware as her husband of the passage of time and of mortality.
She recoils, for instance, at the notion of James growing into an adult, registers the world’s
many dangers, and knows that no one, not even her husband, can protect her from them.
Her reaction to this knowledge is markedly different from her husband’s. Whereas Mr.
Ramsay is bowed by the weight of his own demise, Mrs. Ramsay is fueled with the need to
make precious and memorable whatever time she has on earth. Such crafted moments,
she reflects, offer the only hope of something that endures.

Art as a Means of Preservation

In the face of an existence that is inherently without order or meaning, Mr. and Mrs.
Ramsay employ different strategies for making their lives significant. Mr. Ramsay devotes
himself to his progression through the course of human thought, while Mrs. Ramsay
cultivates memorable experiences from social interactions. Neither of these strategies,
however, proves an adequate means of preserving one’s experience. After all, Mr. Ramsay
fails to obtain the philosophical understanding he so desperately desires, and Mrs. -
Ramsay’s life, though filled with moments that have the shine and resilience of rubies,
ends. Only Lily Briscoe finds a way to preserve her experience, and that way is through her
art. As Lily begins her portrait of Mrs. Ramsay at the beginning of the novel, Woolf notes
the scope of the project: Lily means to order and connect elements that have no necessary
relation in the world—“hedges and houses and mothers and children.” By the end of the
novel, ten years later, Lily finishes the painting she started, which stands as a moment of
clarity wrested from confusion. Art is, perhaps, the only hope of surety in a world destined
and determined to change: for, while mourning Mrs. Ramsay’s death and painting on the
lawn, Lily reflects that “nothing stays, all changes; but not words, not paint.”

The Subjective Nature of Reality

Toward the end of the novel, Lily reflects that in order to see Mrs. Ramsay clearly—to
understand her character completely—she would need at least fifty pairs of eyes; only then
would she be privy to every possible angle and nuance. The truth, according to this
assertion, rests in the accumulation of different, even opposing vantage points. Woolf’s
technique in structuring the story mirrors Lily’s assertion. She is committed to creating a
sense of the world that not only depends upon the private perceptions of her characters but
is also nothing more than the accumulation of those perceptions. To try to reimagine the
story as told from a single character’s perspective or—in the tradition of the Victorian
novelists—from the author’s perspective is to realize the radical scope and difficulty of
Woolf’s project.
The Restorative Effects of Beauty
At the beginning of the novel, both Mr. Ramsay and Lily Briscoe are drawn out of moments
of irritation by an image of extreme beauty. The image, in both cases, is a vision of Mrs.
Ramsay, who, as she sits reading with James, is a sight powerful enough to incite “rapture”
in William Bankes. Beauty retains this soothing effect throughout the novel: something as
trifling as a large but very beautiful arrangement of fruit can, for a moment, assuage the
discomfort of the guests at Mrs. Ramsay’s dinner party.
Lily later complicates the notion of beauty as restorative by suggesting that beauty has the
unfortunate consequence of simplifying the truth. Her impression of Mrs. Ramsay, she
believes, is compromised by a determination to view her as beautiful and to smooth over
her complexities and faults. Nevertheless, Lily continues on her quest to “still” or “freeze” a
moment from life and make it beautiful. Although the vision of an isolated moment is
necessarily incomplete, it is lasting and, as such, endlessly seductive to her.

Symbols
The Lighthouse
Lying across the bay and meaning something different and intimately personal to each
character, the lighthouse is at once inaccessible, illuminating, and infinitely interpretable. As
the destination from which the novel takes its title, the lighthouse suggests that the
destinations that seem surest are most unobtainable. Just as Mr. Ramsay is certain of his
wife’s love for him and aims to hear her speak words to that end in “The Window,” Mrs.
Ramsay finds these words impossible to say. These failed attempts to arrive at some sort of
solid ground, like Lily’s first try at painting Mrs. Ramsay or Mrs. Ramsay’s attempt to see
Paul and Minta married, result only in more attempts, further excursions rather than rest.
The lighthouse stands as a potent symbol of this lack of attainability. James arrives only to
realize that it is not at all the mist-shrouded destination of his childhood. Instead, he is
made to reconcile two competing and contradictory images of the tower—how it appeared
to him when he was a boy and how it appears to him now that he is a man. He decides that
both of these images contribute to the essence of the lighthouse—that nothing is ever only
one thing—a sentiment that echoes the novel’s determination to arrive at truth through
varied and contradictory vantage points.

Lily’s Painting
Lily’s painting represents a struggle against gender convention, represented by Charles
Tansley’s statement that women can’t paint or write. Lily’s desire to express Mrs. Ramsay’s
essence as a wife and mother in the painting mimics the impulse among modern women to
know and understand intimately the gendered experiences of the women who came before
them. Lily’s composition attempts to discover and comprehend Mrs. Ramsay’s beauty just
as Woolf’s construction of Mrs. Ramsay’s character reflects her attempts to access and
portray her own mother.

The painting also represents dedication to a feminine artistic vision, expressed through
Lily’s anxiety over showing it to William Bankes. In deciding that completing the painting
regardless of what happens to it is the most important thing, Lily makes the choice to
establish her own artistic voice. In the end, she decides that her vision depends on balance
and synthesis: how to bring together disparate things in harmony. In this respect, her
project mirrors Woolf’s writing, which synthesizes the perceptions of her many characters to
come to a balanced and truthful portrait of the world.

The Ramsays’ House

The Ramsays’ house is a stage where Woolf and her characters explain their beliefs and
observations. During her dinner party, Mrs. Ramsay sees her house display her own inner
notions of shabbiness and her inability to preserve beauty. In the “Time Passes” section,
the ravages of war and destruction and the passage of time are reflected in the condition of
the house rather than in the emotional development or observable aging of the characters.
The house stands in for the collective consciousness of those who stay in it. At times the
characters long to escape it, while at other times it serves as refuge. From the dinner party
to the journey to the lighthouse, Woolf shows the house from every angle, and its structure
and contents mirror the interior of the characters who inhabit it.

The Sea
References to the sea appear throughout the novel. Broadly, the ever-changing, ever-
moving waves parallel the constant forward movement of time and the changes it brings.
Woolf describes the sea lovingly and beautifully, but her most evocative depictions of it
point to its violence. As a force that brings destruction, has the power to decimate islands,
and, as Mr. Ramsay reflects, “eats away the ground we stand on,” the sea is a powerful
reminder of the impermanence and delicacy of human life and accomplishments.

The Boar’s Skull

After her dinner party, Mrs. Ramsay retires upstairs to find the children wide-awake,
bothered by the boar’s skull that hangs on the nursery wall. The presence of the skull acts
as a disturbing reminder that death is always at hand, even (or perhaps especially) during
life’s most blissful moments.

The Fruit Basket

Rose arranges a fruit basket for her mother’s dinner party that serves to draw the
partygoers out of their private suffering and unite them. Although Augustus Carmichael and
Mrs. Ramsay appreciate the arrangement differently—he rips a bloom from it; she refuses
to disturb it—the pair is brought harmoniously, if briefly, together. The basket testifies both
to the “frozen” quality of beauty that Lily describes and to beauty’s seductive and soothing
quality.

THE COLOR PURPLE - ALICE WALKER - 1982

Celie, the protagonist and narrator of The Color Purple, is a poor, uneducated, fourteen-
year-old black girl living in rural Georgia. Celie starts writing letters to God because her
father, Alphonso, beats and rapes her. Alphonso has already impregnated Celie once. Celie
gave birth to a girl, whom her father stole and presumably killed in the woods. Celie has a
second child, a boy, whom her father also steals. Celie’s mother becomes seriously ill and
dies. Alphonso brings home a new wife but continues to abuse Celie.
Celie and her bright, pretty younger sister, Nettie, learn that a man known only as Mr.
______ wants to marry Nettie. Mr. ______ has a lover named Shug Avery, a sultry lounge
singer whose photograph fascinates Celie. Alphonso refuses to let Nettie marry, and
instead offers Mr. ______ the “ugly” Celie as a bride. Mr. ______ eventually accepts the
offer, and takes Celie into a difficult and joyless married life. Nettie runs away from
Alphonso and takes refuge at Celie’s house. Mr. ______ still desires Nettie, and when he
advances on her she flees for her own safety. Never hearing from Nettie again, Celie
assumes she is dead.

Mr. ______’s sister Kate feels sorry for Celie, and tells her to fight back against Mr. ______
rather than submit to his abuses. Harpo, Mr. ______’s son, falls in love with a large, spunky
girl named Sofia. Shug Avery comes to town to sing at a local bar, but Celie is not allowed
to go see her. Sofia becomes pregnant and marries Harpo. Celie is amazed by Sofia’s
defiance in the face of Harpo’s and Mr. ______’s attempts to treat Sofia as an inferior.
Harpo’s attempts to beat Sofia into submission consistently fail, as Sofia is by far the
physically stronger of the two.

Shug falls ill and Mr. ______ takes her into his house. Shug is initially rude to Celie, but the
two women become friends as Celie takes charge of nursing Shug. Celie finds herself
infatuated with Shug and attracted to her sexually. Frustrated with Harpo’s consistent
attempts to subordinate her, Sofia moves out, taking her children. Several months later,
Harpo opens a juke joint where Shug sings nightly. Celie grows confused over her feelings
toward Shug.

Shug decides to stay when she learns that Mr. ______ beats Celie when Shug is away.
Shug and Celie’s relationship grows intimate, and Shug begins to ask Celie questions about
sex. Sofia returns for a visit and promptly gets in a fight with Harpo’s new girlfriend, Squeak.
In town one day, the mayor’s wife, Miss Millie, asks Sofia to work as her maid. Sofia
answers with a sassy “Hell no.” When the mayor slaps Sofia for her insubordination, she
returns the blow, knocking the mayor down. Sofia is sent to jail. Squeak’s attempts to get
Sofia freed are futile. Sofia is sentenced to work for twelve years as the mayor’s maid.

Shug returns with a new husband, Grady. Despite her marriage, Shug instigates a sexual
relationship with Celie, and the two frequently share the same bed. One night Shug asks
Celie about her sister. Celie assumes Nettie is dead because she had promised to write to
Celie but never did. Shug says she has seen Mr. ______ hide away numerous mysterious
letters that have arrived in the mail. Shug manages to get her hands on one of these letters,
and they find it is from Nettie. Searching through Mr. ______’s trunk, Celie and Shug find
dozens of letters that Nettie has sent to Celie over the years. Overcome with emotion, Celie
reads the letters in order, wondering how to keep herself from killing Mr. ______.

The letters indicate that Nettie befriended a missionary couple, Samuel and Corrine, and
traveled with them to Africa to do ministry work. Samuel and Corrine have two adopted
children, Olivia and Adam. Nettie and Corrine become close friends, but Corrine, noticing
that her adopted children resemble Nettie, wonders if Nettie and Samuel have a secret
past. Increasingly suspicious, Corrine tries to limit Nettie’s role within her family.

Nettie becomes disillusioned with her missionary experience, as she finds the Africans self-
centered and obstinate. Corrine becomes ill with a fever. Nettie asks Samuel to tell her how
he adopted Olivia and Adam. Based on Samuel’s story, Nettie realizes that the two children
are actually Celie’s biological children, alive after all. Nettie also learns that Alphonso is
really only Nettie and Celie’s step-father, not their real father. Their real father was a
storeowner whom white men lynched because they resented his success. Alphonso told
Celie and Nettie he was their real father because he wanted to inherit the house and
property that was once their mother’s.

Nettie confesses to Samuel and Corrine that she is in fact their children’s biological aunt.
The gravely ill Corrine refuses to believe Nettie. Corrine dies, but accepts Nettie’s story and
feels reconciled just before her death. Meanwhile, Celie visits Alphonso, who -confirms
Nettie’s story, admitting that he is only the women’s stepfather. Celie begins to lose some of
her faith in God, but Shug tries to get her to reimagine God in her own way, rather than in
the traditional image of the old, bearded white man.

The mayor releases Sofia from her servitude six months early. At dinner one night, Celie
finally releases her pent-up rage, angrily cursing Mr. ______ for his years of abuse. Shug
announces that she and Celie are moving to Tennessee, and Squeak decides to go with
them. In Tennessee, Celie spends her time designing and sewing individually tailored pairs
of pants, eventually turning her hobby into a business. Celie returns to Georgia for a visit,
and finds that Mr. ______ has reformed his ways and that Alphonso has died. Alphonso’s
house and land are now hers, so she moves there.

Meanwhile, Nettie and Samuel marry and prepare to return to America. Before they leave,
Samuel’s son, Adam, marries Tashi, a native African girl. Following African tradition, Tashi
undergoes the painful rituals of female circumcision and facial scarring. In solidarity, Adam
undergoes the same facial scarring ritual.

Celie and Mr. ______ reconcile and begin to genuinely enjoy each other’s company. Now
independent financially, spiritually, and emotionally, Celie is no longer bothered by Shug’s
passing flings with younger men. Sofia remarries Harpo and now works in Celie’s clothing
store. Nettie finally returns to America with Samuel and the children. Emotionally drained
but exhilarated by the reunion with her sister, Celie notes that though she and Nettie are
now old, she has never in her life felt younger.

Character List
Celie
The protagonist and narrator of The Color Purple. Celie is a poor, uneducated Black woman
with a sad personal history. She survives a stepfather who rapes her and steals her babies
and also survives an abusive husband. As an adult, Celie befriends and finds intimacy with
a blues singer, Shug Avery, who gradually helps Celie find her voice. By the end of the
novel, Celie is a happy, independent, and self-confident woman.

Nettie
Celie’s younger sister, whom Mr. ______ initially wanted to marry. Nettie runs from
Alphonso to Mr. ______, and later runs away from Mr. ______. She meets a husband-and-
wife pair of missionaries, Samuel and Corrine. With them, she moves to Africa to preach.
Nettie becomes the caretaker of Samuel and Corrine’s adopted children (who, Nettie later
learns, are Celie’s biological children, whom Celie and Nettie’s stepfather stole and
subsequently sold) and faithfully writes letters to Celie for decades. Nettie’s experiences in
Africa broaden the novel’s scope, introducing issues of imperialism and pan-African
struggles.

Mr. ______
Celie’s husband, who abuses her for years. Mr. ______ , whose first name is Albert, pines
away for Shug during his marriage to Celie and hides Nettie’s letters to Celie in his trunk for
decades. After Celie finally defies Mr. ______ , denouncing him for his abuse, he
undergoes a deep personal transformation, reassessing his life and eventually becoming
friends with Celie.
Shug Avery
A sultry blues singer who first appears as Mr. ______’s mistress. Shug becomes Celie’s
friend and eventually her lover, all the while remaining a gentle mentor who helps Celie
evolve into an independent and assertive woman. Shug does not at first appear to be the
mothering kind, yet she nurtures Celie physically, spiritually, and emotionally. Shug gives
Celie the idea of sewing pants for a living.

Harpo
Mr. ______’s eldest son. Many of Harpo’s actions overturn stereotypical gender roles. He
confesses to Celie about his love for Sofia, cries in her arms, enjoys cooking and
housework, kisses his children, and marries an independent woman, Sofia. However, Mr.
______’s expectations of stereotypical male dominance convince Harpo that he needs to
beat Sofia. His efforts at abusing Sofia fail, since she is much stronger than he is. At the
end of the novel, Harpo reforms his ways, and he and Sofia reconcile and save their
marriage.

Sofia
A large, fiercely independent woman who befriends Celie and marries Harpo. Sofia refuses
to submit to whites, men, or anyone else who tries to dominate her. After defying the town’s
mayor, Sofia is sentenced to twelve years in jail, but the sentence is later commuted to
twelve years labor as the mayor’s maid. The hardship Sofia endures serves as a reminder
of the costs of resistance and the difficulties of combating cultural and institutional racism.

Squeak (Mary Agnes)

Harpo’s lover after Sofia leaves him. As a person of mixed Black and white ancestry,
Squeak highlights the complex nature of racial identification. Although abused like many of
the women in the novel, Squeak eventually undergoes a transformation much like Celie’s.
She demands to be called by her real name, Mary Agnes, and she pursues a singing
career.

Alphonso
Celie and Nettie’s stepfather, who the sisters think is their real father until Nettie learns the
truth years later. When Celie is young, Alphonso rapes and abuses her until she moves out
of the house. Unlike Mr. ______ and Harpo, who are transformed, Alphonso remains an
abuser until his death. Celie inherits her house and property after Alphonso dies.

Samuel
A minister who, along with his wife, Corrine, adopts Celie’s biological children, Olivia and
Adam. A wise, spiritually mature Black intellectual committed to “the uplift of black people
everywhere,” Samuel takes Corrine, Nettie, and the children to Africa for missionary work.
He tells Nettie the story that makes her realize Alphonso is her stepfather rather than her
biological father. After Corrine’s death, Samuel marries Nettie.

Corrine
Samuel’s wife. After moving to Africa, Corrine grows increasingly suspicious and jealous of
Nettie’s role in her family, convinced that Nettie and Samuel have had an affair. While still in
Africa, Corrine dies from a fever, opening the opportunity for Nettie and Samuel to marry.
Olivia
Celie and Alphonso’s biological daughter, who is adopted by Samuel and Corrine. Olivia
develops a close sisterly relationship with Tashi, an Olinka village girl. This friendship,
which crosses cultural boundaries, serves as an example of the strength of relationships
between women.

Adam
Celie and Alphonso’s biological son, who, like Olivia, is adopted by Samuel and Corrine.
Adam falls in love with Tashi, a young Olinka girl. By marrying Tashi, Adam symbolically
bridges Africa and America, and his respect for and deference to her subverts patriarchal
notions that women are subordinate to men.

Tashi
An Olinka village girl who befriends Olivia and marries Adam. Tashi defies white imperialist
culture and embodies the struggle of traditional cultural values against colonization. She
chooses to undergo two painful African traditions—facial scarring and genital mutilation—as
a way to physically differentiate her culture from imperialist culture.

Miss Millie
The wife of the mayor of the town where Celie lives. Miss Millie is racist and
condescending, but she admires the cleanliness and good manners of Sofia’s children, so
she asks Sofia to be her maid. Sofia replies, “Hell no,” and is sent first to jail, then to Miss
Millie’s, where she ends up working as her maid after all.

Eleanor Jane
The mayor’s daughter. Eleanor Jane develops a strong attachment to Sofia and turns to her
for emotional support. However, Sofia does not reciprocate Eleanor Jane’s feelings
because of the years of mistreatment she suffered at the hands of Eleanor Jane’s parents.
Toward the end of the novel, Eleanor Jane finally begins to understand the injustices Sofia
and other Black people have suffered. She attempts to atone for her part in the unjust
treatment of Sofia by caring for Sofia’s daughter Henrietta.

Grady
Shug’s husband. Grady is a loving and sweet man, but also a womanizer. He spends
Shug’s money flamboyantly and frequently smokes marijuana. When Grady and Squeak
begin an affair, Shug seems relieved to be rid of any responsibility to her relationship with
Grady.

Kate
One of Mr. ______’s sisters. Kate urges Celie to stand up for herself and defy Mr. ______’s
abuses.

Themes
The Power of Narrative and Voice
Walker emphasizes throughout the novel that the ability to express one’s thoughts and
feelings is crucial to developing a sense of self. Initially, Celie is completely unable to resist
those who abuse her. Remembering Alphonso’s warning that she “better not never tell
nobody but God” about his abuse of her, Celie feels that the only way to persevere is to
remain silent and invisible. Celie is essentially an object, an entirely passive party who has
no power to assert herself through action or words. Her letters to God, in which she begins
to pour out her story, become her only outlet. However, because she is so unaccustomed to
articulating her experience, her narrative is initially muddled despite her best efforts at
transparency.

In Shug and Sofia, Celie finds sympathetic ears and learns lessons that enable her to find
her voice. In renaming Celie a “virgin,” Shug shows Celie that she can create her own
narrative, a new interpretation of herself and her history that counters the interpretations
forced upon her. Gradually Celie begins to flesh out more of her story by telling it to Shug.
However, it is not until Celie and Shug discover Nettie’s letters that Celie finally has enough
knowledge of herself to form her own powerful narrative. Celie’s forceful assertion of this
newfound power, her cursing of Mr. ______ for his years of abuse, is the novel’s climax.
Celie’s story dumbfounds and eventually humbles Mr. ______, causing him to reassess and
change his own life.

Though Walker clearly wishes to emphasize the power of narrative and speech to assert
selfhood and resist oppression, the novel acknowledges that such resistance can be risky.
Sofia’s forceful outburst in response to Miss Millie’s invitation to be her maid costs her
twelve years of her life. Sofia regains her freedom eventually, so she is not totally defeated,
but she pays a high price for her words.

The Power of Strong Female Relationships

Throughout The Color Purple, Walker portrays female friendships as a means for women to
summon the courage to tell stories. In turn, these stories allow women to resist oppression
and dominance. Relationships among women form a refuge, providing reciprocal love in a
world filled with male violence.
Female ties take many forms: some are motherly or sisterly, some are in the form of mentor
and pupil, some are sexual, and some are simply friendships. Sofia claims that her ability to
fight comes from her strong relationships with her sisters. Nettie’s relationship with Celie
anchors her through years of living in the unfamiliar culture of Africa. Samuel notes that the
strong relationships among Olinka women are the only thing that makes polygamy bearable
for them. Most important, Celie’s ties to Shug bring about Celie’s gradual redemption and
her attainment of a sense of self.

The Cyclical Nature of Racism and Sexism

Almost none of the abusers in Walker’s novel are stereotypical, one-dimensional monsters
whom we can dismiss as purely evil. Those who perpetuate violence are themselves
victims, often of sexism, racism, or paternalism. Harpo, for example, beats Sofia only after
his father implies that Sofia’s resistance makes Harpo less of a man. Mr. ______ is violent
and mistreats his family much like his own tyrantlike father treated him. Celie advises Harpo
to beat Sofia because she is jealous of Sofia’s strength and assertiveness.

The characters are largely aware of the cyclical nature of harmful behavior. For instance,
Sofia tells Eleanor Jane that societal influence makes it almost inevitable that her baby boy
will grow up to be a racist. Only by forcefully talking back to the men who abuse them and
showing them a new way of doing things do the women of the novel break these cycles of
sexism and violence, causing the men who abused them to stop and reexamine their ways.

The Disruption of Traditional Gender Roles

Many characters in the novel break the boundaries of traditional male or female gender
roles. Sofia’s strength and sass, Shug’s sexual assertiveness, and Harpo’s insecurity are
major examples of such disparity between a character’s gender and the traits he or she
displays. This blurring of gender traits and roles sometimes involves sexual ambiguity, as
we see in the sexual relationship that develops between Celie and Shug.

Disruption of gender roles sometimes causes problems. Harpo’s insecurity about his
masculinity leads to marital problems and his attempts to beat Sofia. Likewise, Shug’s
confident sexuality and resistance to male domination cause her to be labeled a tramp.
Throughout the novel, Walker wishes to emphasize that gender and sexuality are not as
simple as we may believe. Her novel subverts and defies the traditional ways in which we
understand women to be women and men to be men.

Symbols
Sewing and Quilts
In general, sewing in The Color Purple symbolizes the power women can gain from
productively channeling their creative energy. After Sofia and Celie argue about the advice
Celie has given Harpo, Sofia signals a truce by suggesting they make a quilt. The quilt,
composed of diverse patterns sewn together, symbolizes diverse people coming together in
unity. Like a patchwork quilt, the community of love that surrounds Celie at the end of the
novel incorporates men and women who are bonded by family and friendship, and who
have different gender roles, sexual orientations, and talents. Another important instance of
sewing in the novel is Celie’s pants-sewing business. With Shug’s help, Celie overturns the
idea that sewing is marginal and unimportant women’s labor, and she turns it into a
lucrative, empowering source of economic independence.

God
In the early parts of the novel, Celie sees God as her listener and helping hand, yet Celie
does not have a clear understanding of who God is. She knows deep down that her image
of God as a white patriarch “don’t seem quite right,” but she says it’s all she has. Shug
invites Celie to imagine God as something radically different, as an “it” that delights in
creation and just wants human beings to love what it has created. Eventually, Celie stops
thinking of God as she stops thinking of the other men in her life—she “git man off her
eyeball” and tells God off, writing, “You must be sleep.” But after Celie has chased her
patriarchal God away and come up with a new concept of God, she writes in her last letter,
“Dear God. Dear stars, dear trees, dear sky, dear peoples. Dear Everything. Dear God.”
This reimagining of God on her own terms symbolizes Celie’s move from an object of
someone else’s care to an independent woman. It also indicates that her voice is now
sufficiently empowered to create her own narrative.

Letters
The Color Purple is an epistolary novel, so letters—whether they’re to God or to one of
Celie’s friends or relatives—play a pivotal role in communication. But the novel’s format is
not the only reason why letters are a meaningful object within the narrative. Celie and Nettie
both use letters to convey their life journeys, their hopes and fears, and their self-
discoveries, even though both women assume to some degree that no one is actually
reading their words. Celie also uses letters to convey pivotal emotions that she can’t bring
herself to say out loud. When she argues with Shug over her fling with Germaine, Celie
stops talking and starts writing her responses to Shug down on paper. In this sense, letters,
or even the written word in general, become a symbol of self-expression and identity. They
represent unadulterated truth and the inner workings of the soul. Additionally, because
letters in The Color Purple are often written to an ambiguous figure—like God, or a long-lost
sister who likely will never read them—they also serve to connect characters like Celie and
Nettie to a sense of belonging and kinship that they don’t have in their current lives. The
letters become a symbolic way to communicate with family, ancestry, and a greater
power—a connection that is particularly profound and important, considering the novel’s
focus on Black Americans and their complicated relationship with the homeland from which
they were taken.

THE OLD MAN AND THE SEA – EARNEST HEMINGWAY-

1952
The Old Man and the Sea is the story of an epic struggle between an old, seasoned
fisherman and the greatest catch of his life. For eighty-four days, Santiago, an aged Cuban
fisherman, has set out to sea and returned empty-handed. So conspicuously unlucky is he
that the parents of his young, devoted apprentice and friend, Manolin, have forced the boy
to leave the old man in order to fish in a more prosperous boat. Nevertheless, the boy
continues to care for the old man upon his return each night. He helps the old man tote his
gear to his ramshackle hut, secures food for him, and discusses the latest developments in
American baseball, especially the trials of the old man’s hero, Joe DiMaggio. Santiago is
confident that his unproductive streak will soon come to an end, and he resolves to sail out
farther than usual the following day.
On the eighty-fifth day of his unlucky streak, Santiago does as promised, sailing his skiff far
beyond the island’s shallow coastal waters and venturing into the Gulf Stream. He prepares
his lines and drops them. At noon, a big fish, which he knows is a marlin, takes the bait that
Santiago has placed one hundred fathoms deep in the waters. The old man expertly hooks
the fish, but he cannot pull it in. Instead, the fish begins to pull the boat.

Unable to tie the line fast to the boat for fear the fish would snap a taut line, the old man
bears the strain of the line with his shoulders, back, and hands, ready to give slack should
the marlin make a run. The fish pulls the boat all through the day, through the night, through
another day, and through another night. It swims steadily northwest until at last it tires and
swims east with the current. The entire time, Santiago endures constant pain from the
fishing line. Whenever the fish lunges, leaps, or makes a dash for freedom, the cord cuts
Santiago badly. Although wounded and weary, the old man feels a deep empathy and
admiration for the marlin, his brother in suffering, strength, and resolve.

On the third day the fish tires, and Santiago, sleep-deprived, aching, and nearly delirious,
manages to pull the marlin in close enough to kill it with a harpoon thrust. Dead beside the
skiff, the marlin is the largest Santiago has ever seen. He lashes it to his boat, raises the
small mast, and sets sail for home. While Santiago is excited by the price that the marlin will
bring at market, he is more concerned that the people who will eat the fish are unworthy of
its greatness.

As Santiago sails on with the fish, the marlin’s blood leaves a trail in the water and attracts
sharks. The first to attack is a great mako shark, which Santiago manages to slay with the
harpoon. In the struggle, the old man loses the harpoon and lengths of valuable rope, which
leaves him vulnerable to other shark attacks. The old man fights off the successive vicious
predators as best he can, stabbing at them with a crude spear he makes by lashing a knife
to an oar, and even clubbing them with the boat’s tiller. Although he kills several sharks,
more and more appear, and by the time night falls, Santiago’s continued fight against the
scavengers is useless. They devour the marlin’s precious meat, leaving only skeleton,
head, and tail. Santiago chastises himself for going “out too far,” and for sacrificing his great
and worthy opponent. He arrives home before daybreak, stumbles back to his shack, and
sleeps very deeply.

The next morning, a crowd of amazed fishermen gathers around the skeletal carcass of the
fish, which is still lashed to the boat. Knowing nothing of the old man’s struggle, tourists at a
nearby café observe the remains of the giant marlin and mistake it for a shark. Manolin,
who has been worried sick over the old man’s absence, is moved to tears when he finds
Santiago safe in his bed. The boy fetches the old man some coffee and the daily papers
with the baseball scores, and watches him sleep. When the old man wakes, the two agree
to fish as partners once more. The old man returns to sleep and dreams his usual dream of
lions at play on the beaches of Africa.

Character List
Santiago
The old man of the novella’s title, Santiago is a Cuban fisherman who has had an extended
run of bad luck. Despite his expertise, he has been unable to catch a fish for eighty-four
days. He is humble, yet exhibits a justified pride in his abilities. His knowledge of the sea
and its creatures, and of his craft, is unparalleled and helps him preserve a sense of hope
regardless of circumstance. Throughout his life, Santiago has been presented with contests
to test his strength and endurance. The marlin with which he struggles for three days
represents his greatest challenge. Paradoxically, although Santiago ultimately loses the
fish, the marlin is also his greatest victory.

The Marlin
Santiago hooks the marlin, which we learn at the end of the novella measures eighteen
feet, on the first afternoon of his fishing expedition. Because of the marlin’s great size,
Santiago is unable to pull the fish in, and the two become engaged in a kind of tug-of-war
that often seems more like an alliance than a struggle. The fishing line serves as a symbol
of the fraternal connection Santiago feels with the fish. When the captured marlin is later
destroyed by sharks, Santiago feels destroyed as well. Like Santiago, the marlin is implicitly
compared to Christ.

Manolin
A boy presumably in his adolescence, Manolin is Santiago’s apprentice and devoted
attendant. The old man first took him out on a boat when he was merely five years old. Due
to Santiago’s recent bad luck, Manolin’s parents have forced the boy to go out on a different
fishing boat. Manolin, however, still cares deeply for the old man, to whom he continues to
look as a mentor. His love for Santiago is unmistakable as the two discuss baseball and as
the young boy recruits help from villagers to improve the old man’s impoverished
conditions.

Joe DiMaggio
Although DiMaggio never appears in the novel, he plays a significant role nonetheless.
Santiago worships him as a model of strength and commitment, and his thoughts turn
toward DiMaggio whenever he needs to reassure himself of his own strength. Despite a
painful bone spur that might have crippled another player, DiMaggio went on to secure a
triumphant career. He was a center fielder for the New York Yankees from 1936 to 1951,
and is often considered the best all-around player ever at that position.

Perico
Perico, the reader assumes, owns the bodega in Santiago’s village. He never appears in
the novel, but he serves an important role in the fisherman’s life by providing him with
newspapers that report the baseball scores. This act establishes him as a kind man who
helps the aging Santiago.

Martin
Like Perico, Martin, a café owner in Santiago’s village, does not appear in the story. The
reader learns of him through Manolin, who often goes to Martin for Santiago’s supper. As
the old man says, Martin is a man of frequent kindness who deserves to be repaid.

Themes
The Honor in Struggle, Defeat & Death
From the very first paragraph, Santiago is characterized as someone struggling against
defeat. He has gone eighty-four days without catching a fish—he will soon pass his own
record of eighty-seven days. Almost as a reminder of Santiago’s struggle, the sail of his
skiff resembles “the flag of permanent defeat.” But the old man refuses defeat at every turn:
he resolves to sail out beyond the other fishermen to where the biggest fish promise to be.
He lands the marlin, tying his record of eighty-seven days after a brutal three-day fight, and
he continues to ward off sharks from stealing his prey, even though he knows the battle is
useless.

Because Santiago is pitted against the creatures of the sea, some readers choose to view
the tale as a chronicle of man’s battle against the natural world, but the novella is, more
accurately, the story of man’s place within nature. Both Santiago and the marlin display
qualities of pride, honor, and bravery, and both are subject to the same eternal law: they
must kill or be killed. As Santiago reflects when he watches the weary warbler fly toward
shore, where it will inevitably meet the hawk, the world is filled with predators, and no living
thing can escape the inevitable struggle that will lead to its death. Santiago lives according
to his own observation: “man is not made for defeat . . . [a] man can be destroyed but not
defeated.” In Hemingway’s portrait of the world, death is inevitable, but the best men (and
animals) will nonetheless refuse to give in to its power. Accordingly, man and fish will
struggle to the death, just as hungry sharks will lay waste to an old man’s trophy catch.
The novel suggests that it is possible to transcend this natural law. In fact, the very
inevitability of destruction creates the terms that allow a worthy man or beast to transcend
it. It is precisely through the effort to battle the inevitable that a man can prove himself.
Indeed, a man can prove this determination over and over through the worthiness of the
opponents he chooses to face. Santiago finds the marlin worthy of a fight, just as he once
found “the great negro of Cienfuegos” worthy. His admiration for these opponents brings
love and respect into an equation with death, as their destruction becomes a point of honor
and bravery that confirms Santiago’s heroic qualities. One might characterize the equation
as the working out of the statement “Because I love you, I have to kill you.” Alternately, one
might draw a parallel to the poet John Keats and his insistence that beauty can only be
comprehended in the moment before death, as beauty bows to destruction. Santiago,
though destroyed at the end of the novella, is never defeated. Instead, he emerges as a
hero. Santiago’s struggle does not enable him to change man’s place in the world. Rather,
it enables him to meet his most dignified destiny.

Pride as the Source of Greatness & Determination

Many parallels exist between Santiago and the classic heroes of the ancient world. In
addition to exhibiting terrific strength, bravery, and moral certainty, those heroes usually
possess a tragic flaw—a quality that, though admirable, leads to their eventual downfall. If
pride is Santiago’s fatal flaw, he is keenly aware of it. After sharks have destroyed the
marlin, the old man apologizes again and again to his worthy opponent. He has ruined them
both, he concedes, by sailing beyond the usual boundaries of fishermen. Indeed, his last
word on the subject comes when he asks himself the reason for his undoing and decides,
“Nothing . . . I went out too far.”

While it is certainly true that Santiago’s eighty-four-day run of bad luck is an affront to his
pride as a masterful fisherman, and that his attempt to bear out his skills by sailing far into
the gulf waters leads to disaster, Hemingway does not condemn his protagonist for being
full of pride. On the contrary, Santiago stands as proof that pride motivates men to
greatness. Because the old man acknowledges that he killed the mighty marlin largely out
of pride, and because his capture of the marlin leads in turn to his heroic transcendence of
defeat, pride becomes the source of Santiago’s greatest strength. Without a ferocious
sense of pride, that battle would never have been fought, or more likely, it would have been
abandoned before the end.

Santiago’s pride also motivates his desire to transcend the destructive forces of nature.
Throughout the novel, no matter how baleful his circumstances become, the old man
exhibits an unflagging determination to catch the marlin and bring it to shore. When the first
shark arrives, Santiago’s resolve is mentioned twice in the space of just a few paragraphs.
First we are told that the old man “was full of resolution but he had little hope.” Then,
sentences later, the narrator says, “He hit [the shark] without hope but with resolution.” The
old man meets every challenge with the same unwavering determination: he is willing to die
in order to bring in the marlin, and he is willing to die in order to battle the feeding sharks. It
is this conscious decision to act, to fight, to never give up that enables Santiago to avoid
defeat. Although he returns to Havana without the trophy of his long battle, he returns with
the knowledge that he has acquitted himself proudly and manfully. Hemingway seems to
suggest that victory is not a prerequisite for honor. Instead, glory depends upon one having
the pride to see a struggle through to its end, regardless of the outcome. Even if the old
man had returned with the marlin intact, his moment of glory, like the marlin’s meat, would
have been short-lived. The glory and honor Santiago accrues comes not from his battle
itself but from his pride and determination to fight.

Kinship & Connection

Throughout the story, Santiago fosters a myriad of connections with others, despite the
solitary nature of fishing and Santiago’s own particular seclusion. For instance, he forms a
deeply spiritual connection with the very marlin he wishes to catch. Though it’s easy to
imagine most hunters think of their prey as purely that, Santiago respects the marlin and
feels grateful for its persistence, and even shows a willingness to die in the marlin’s stead,
should the marlin persist. The act of catching the marlin comes to feel less like an individual
need, and more like a collaborative experience in which both are active participants, even
partners.

Santiago also finds connection with Joe DiMaggio. Providing both a moral compass and a
framework for understanding the true nature of resilience, thoughts of DiMaggio bring
Santiago comfort; he feels a kingship for this man he’s never met and imagines what it
might be like to bring DiMaggio fishing while discussing baseball with Manolin, who likewise
offers Santiago a sense of community. The bond they have is formed through fishing, and
although Manolin has been forbidden from working with Santiago, it’s clear from how they
reminisce about their time together that they mean a great deal to one another. After all,
“The old man had taught the boy to fish and the boy loved him.”

Symbols
The Marlin
Magnificent and glorious, the marlin symbolizes the ideal opponent. In a world in which
“everything kills everything else in some way,” Santiago feels genuinely lucky to find himself
matched against a creature that brings out the best in him: his strength, courage, love, and
respect.

Joe DiMaggio
For Santiago, Joe DiMaggio serves as the ultimate inspiration. The iconic baseball legend
symbolizes persistence and resilience, and his suffering parallels Santiago’s. Through each
hardship, Santiago thinks about DiMaggio returning to baseball despite his painful bone
spurs, and the knowledge that DiMaggio was able to endure enables Santiago to do so,
too. He holds his idol in such high esteem that he wonders how DiMaggio, whose father
was a fisherman, would fare against the marlin. Santiago posits that he too must have
grown up poor, and feels DiMaggio would understand him. Seeing something of himself in
DiMaggio, Santiago uses the man as an ongoing litmus test by which to judge his own
efforts, motivating himself to continually strive, and to stay disciplined. This hero worship
can be thought to be empowering rather than pitiable, as it allows Santiago to hold himself
up to the highest standards possible.

The Shovel-Nosed Sharks

The shovel-nosed sharks are little more than moving appetites that thoughtlessly and
gracelessly attack the marlin. As opponents of the old man, they stand in bold contrast to
the marlin, which is worthy of Santiago’s effort and strength. They symbolize and embody
the destructive laws of the universe and attest to the fact that those laws can be
transcended only when equals fight to the death. Because they are base predators,
Santiago wins no glory from battling them.

CATCHER IN A RYE - J.D SALINGER - 1951

The Catcher in the Rye is set around the 1950s and is narrated by a young man
named Holden Caulfield. Holden is not specific about his location while he’s telling the
story, but he makes it clear that he is undergoing treatment in a mental hospital or
sanatorium. The events he narrates take place in the few days between the end of the fall
school term and Christmas, when Holden is sixteen years old.
Holden’s story begins on the Saturday following the end of classes at the Pencey prep
school in Agerstown, Pennsylvania. Pencey is Holden’s fourth school; he has already failed
out of three others. At Pencey, he has failed four out of five of his classes and has received
notice that he is being expelled, but he is not scheduled to return home to Manhattan until
Wednesday. He visits his elderly history teacher, Spencer, to say goodbye, but when
Spencer tries to reprimand him for his poor academic performance, Holden becomes
annoyed.
Back in the dormitory, Holden is further irritated by his unhygienic neighbor, Ackley, and by
his own roommate, Stradlater. Stradlater spends the evening on a date with Jane
Gallagher, a girl whom Holden used to date and whom he still admires. During the course
of the evening, Holden grows increasingly nervous about Stradlater’s taking Jane out, and
when Stradlater returns, Holden questions him insistently about whether he tried to have
sex with her. Stradlater teases Holden, who flies into a rage and attacks Stradlater.
Stradlater pins Holden down and bloodies his nose. Holden decides that he’s had enough
of Pencey and will go to Manhattan three days early, stay in a hotel, and not tell his parents
that he is back.
On the train to New York, Holden meets the mother of one of his fellow Pencey students.
Though he thinks this student is a complete “bastard,” he tells the woman made-up stories
about how shy her son is and how well respected he is at school. When he arrives at Penn
Station, he goes into a phone booth and considers calling several people, but for various
reasons he decides against it. He gets in a cab and asks the cab driver where the ducks in
Central Park go when the lagoon freezes, but his question annoys the driver. Holden has
the cab driver take him to the Edmont Hotel, where he checks himself in.

From his room at the Edmont, Holden can see into the rooms of some of the guests in the
opposite wing. He observes a man putting on silk stockings, high heels, a bra, a corset, and
an evening gown. He also sees a man and a woman in another room taking turns spitting
mouthfuls of their drinks into each other’s faces and laughing hysterically. He interprets the
couple’s behavior as a form of sexual play and is both upset and aroused by it. After
smoking a couple of cigarettes, he calls Faith Cavendish, a woman he has never met but
whose number he got from an acquaintance at Princeton. Holden thinks he remembers
hearing that she used to be a stripper, and he believes he can persuade her to have sex
with him. He calls her, and though she is at first annoyed to be called at such a late hour by
a complete stranger, she eventually suggests that they meet the next day. Holden doesn’t
want to wait that long and winds up hanging up without arranging a meeting.

Holden goes downstairs to the Lavender Room and sits at a table, but the waiter realizes
he’s a minor and refuses to serve him. He flirts with three women in their thirties, who seem
like they’re from out of town and are mostly interested in catching a glimpse of a celebrity.
Nevertheless, Holden dances with them and feels that he is “half in love” with the blonde
one after seeing how well she dances. After making some wisecracks about his age, they
leave, letting him pay their entire tab.

As Holden goes out to the lobby, he starts to think about Jane Gallagher and, in a
flashback, recounts how he got to know her. They met while spending a summer vacation
in Maine, played golf and checkers, and held hands at the movies. One afternoon, during a
game of checkers, her stepfather came onto the porch where they were playing, and when
he left Jane began to cry. Holden had moved to sit beside her and kissed her all over her
face, but she wouldn’t let him kiss her on the mouth. That was the closest they came to
“necking.”

Holden leaves the Edmont and takes a cab to Ernie’s jazz club in Greenwich Village. Again,
he asks the cab driver where the ducks in Central Park go in the winter, and this cabbie is
even more irritable than the first one. Holden sits alone at a table in Ernie’s and observes
the other patrons with distaste. He runs into Lillian Simmons, one of his older brother’s
former girlfriends, who invites him to sit with her and her date. Holden says he has to meet
someone, leaves, and walks back to the Edmont.

Maurice, the elevator operator at the Edmont, offers to send a prostitute to Holden’s room
for five dollars, and Holden agrees. A young woman, identifying herself as “Sunny,” arrives
at his door. She pulls off her dress, but Holden starts to feel “peculiar” and tries to make
conversation with her. He claims that he recently underwent a spinal operation and isn’t
sufficiently recovered to have sex with her, but he offers to pay her anyway. She sits on his
lap and talks dirty to him, but he insists on paying her five dollars and showing her the door.
Sunny returns with Maurice, who demands another five dollars from Holden. When Holden
refuses to pay, Maurice punches him in the stomach and leaves him on the floor, while
Sunny takes five dollars from his wallet. Holden goes to bed.

He wakes up at ten o’clock on Sunday and calls Sally Hayes, an attractive girl whom he has
dated in the past. They arrange to meet for a matinee showing of a Broadway play. He eats
breakfast at a sandwich bar, where he converses with two nuns about Romeo and Juliet.
He gives the nuns ten dollars. He tries to telephone Jane Gallagher, but her mother
answers the phone, and he hangs up. He takes a cab to Central Park to look for his
younger sister, Phoebe, but she isn’t there. He helps one of Phoebe’s schoolmates tighten
her skate, and the girl tells him that Phoebe might be in the Museum of Natural History.
Though he knows that Phoebe’s class wouldn’t be at the museum on a Sunday, he goes
there anyway, but when he gets there he decides not to go in and instead takes a cab to
the Biltmore Hotel to meet Sally.
Holden and Sally go to the play, and Holden is annoyed that Sally talks with a boy she
knows from Andover afterward. At Sally’s suggestion, they go to Radio City to ice skate.
They both skate poorly and decide to get a table instead. Holden tries to explain to Sally
why he is unhappy at school, and actually urges her to run away with him to Massachusetts
or Vermont and live in a cabin. When she refuses, he calls her a “pain in the ass” and
laughs at her when she reacts angrily. She refuses to listen to his apologies and leaves.

Holden calls Jane again, but there is no answer. He calls Carl Luce, a young man who had
been Holden’s student advisor at the Whooton School and who is now a student at
Columbia University. Luce arranges to meet him for a drink after dinner, and Holden goes
to a movie at Radio City to kill time. Holden and Luce meet at the Wicker Bar in the Seton
Hotel. At Whooton, Luce had spoken frankly with some of the boys about sex, and Holden
tries to draw him into a conversation about it once more. Luce grows irritated by Holden’s
juvenile remarks about gay men and about Luce’s Chinese girlfriend, and he makes an
excuse to leave early. Holden continues to drink Scotch and listen to the pianist and singer.
Quite drunk, Holden telephones Sally Hayes and babbles about their Christmas Eve plans.
Then he goes to the lagoon in Central Park, where he used to watch the ducks as a child. It
takes him a long time to find it, and by the time he does, he is freezing cold. He then
decides to sneak into his own apartment building and wake his sister, Phoebe. He is forced
to admit to Phoebe that he was kicked out of school, which makes her mad at him. When
he tries to explain why he hates school, she accuses him of not liking anything. He tells her
his fantasy of being “the catcher in the rye,” a person who catches little children as they are
about to fall off of a cliff. Phoebe tells him that he has misremembered the poem that he
took the image from: Robert Burns’s poem says “if a body meet a body, coming through the
rye,” not “catch a body.”

Holden calls his former English teacher, Mr. Antolini, who tells Holden he can come to his
apartment. Mr. Antolini asks Holden about his expulsion and tries to counsel him about his
future. Holden can’t hide his sleepiness, and Mr. Antolini puts him to bed on the couch.
Holden awakens to find Mr. Antolini stroking his forehead. Thinking that Mr. Antolini is
making a sexual overture, Holden hastily excuses himself and leaves, sleeping for a few
hours on a bench at Grand Central Station.
Holden goes to Phoebe’s school and sends her a note saying that he is leaving home for
good and that she should meet him at lunchtime at the museum. When Phoebe arrives, she
is carrying a suitcase full of clothes, and she asks Holden to take her with him. He refuses
angrily, and she cries and then refuses to speak to him. Knowing she will follow him, he
walks to the zoo, and then takes her across the park to a carousel. He buys her a ticket and
watches her ride it. It starts to rain heavily, but Holden is so happy watching his sister ride
the carousel that he is close to tears.

Holden ends his narrative here, telling the reader that he is not going to tell the story of how
he went home and got “sick.” He plans to go to a new school in the fall and is cautiously
optimistic about his future.

Character List
Holden Caulfield
The protagonist and narrator of the novel, Holden is a sixteen-year-old junior who has just
been expelled for academic failure from a school called Pencey Prep. Although he is
intelligent and sensitive, Holden narrates in a cynical and jaded voice. He finds the
hypocrisy and ugliness of the world around him almost unbearable, and through his
cynicism he tries to protect himself from the pain and disappointment of the adult world.
However, the criticisms that Holden aims at people around him are also aimed at himself.
He is uncomfortable with his own weaknesses, and at times displays as much phoniness,
meanness, and superficiality as anyone else in the book. As the novel opens, Holden
stands poised on the cliff separating childhood from adulthood. His inability to successfully
negotiate the chasm leaves him on the verge of emotional collapse.
Stradlater
Holden’s roommate at Pencey Prep. Stradlater is handsome, self-satisfied, and popular, but
Holden calls him a “secret slob,” because he appears well groomed, but his toiletries, such
as his razor, are disgustingly unclean. Stradlater is sexually active and quite experienced
for a prep school student, which is why Holden also calls him a “sexy bastard.”

Phoebe Caulfield
Phoebe is Holden’s ten-year-old sister, whom he loves dearly. Although she is six years
younger than Holden, she listens to what he says and understands him more than most
other people do. Phoebe is intelligent, neat, and a wonderful dancer, and her childish
innocence is one of Holden’s only consistent sources of happiness throughout the novel. At
times, she exhibits great maturity and even chastises Holden for his immaturity. Like Mr.
Antolini, Phoebe seems to recognize that Holden is his own worst enemy.

Mr. Spencer
Holden’s history teacher at Pencey Prep, who unsuccessfully tries to shake Holden out of
his academic apathy.

Carl Luce
A student at Columbia who was Holden’s student advisor at the Whooton School. Luce is
three years older than Holden and has a great deal of sexual experience. At Whooton, he
was a source of knowledge about sex for the younger students, and Holden tries to get him
to talk about sex at their meeting.

Mr. Antolini
Holden’s former English teacher at the Elkton Hills School. Mr. Antolini now teaches at New
York University. He is young, clever, sympathetic, and likable, and Holden respects him.
Holden sometimes finds him a bit too clever, but he looks to him for guidance. Mr. Antolini
drinks heavily and potentially makes a sexual pass at Holden.

Allie Caulfield
Holden’s younger brother. Allie dies of leukemia three years before the start of the novel.
Allie was a brilliant, friendly, red-headed boy—according to Holden, he was the smartest of
the Caulfields. Holden is tormented by Allie’s death and carries around a baseball glove on
which Allie used to write poems in green ink.

D. B. Caulfield
Holden’s older brother. D. B. wrote a volume of short stories that Holden admires very
much, but Holden feels that D. B. prostitutes his talents by writing for Hollywood movies.

Jane Gallagher
A girl with whom Holden spent a lot of time one summer, when their families stayed in
neighboring summer houses in Maine. Jane never actually appears in The Catcher in the
Rye, but she is extremely important to Holden, because she is one of the few girls whom he
both respects and finds attractive.

Sally Hayes
A very attractive girl whom Holden has known and dated for a long time. Though Sally is
well read, Holden claims that she is “stupid,” although it is difficult to tell whether this
judgment is based in reality or merely in Holden’s ambivalence about being sexually
attracted to her. She is certainly more conventional than Holden in her tastes and manners.

Ackley
Holden’s next-door neighbor in his dorm at Pencey Prep. Ackley is a pimply, insecure boy
with terrible dental hygiene. He often barges into Holden’s room and acts completely
oblivious to Holden’s hints that he should leave. Holden believes that Ackley makes up
elaborate lies about his sexual experience.

Maurice
The elevator operator at the Edmont Hotel, who procures a prostitute for Holden.

Sunny
The prostitute whom Holden hires through Maurice. She is one of a number of women in
the book with whom Holden clumsily attempts to connect.

Themes
Alienation as a Form of Self-Protection
Throughout the novel, Holden seems to be excluded from and victimized by the world
around him. As he says to Mr. Spencer, he feels trapped on “the other side” of life, and he
continually attempts to find his way in a world in which he feels he doesn’t belong. As the
novel progresses, we begin to perceive that Holden’s alienation is his way of protecting
himself. Just as he wears his hunting hat (see “Symbols,” below) to advertise his
uniqueness, he uses his isolation as proof that he is better than everyone else around him
and therefore above interacting with them. The truth is that interactions with other people
usually confuse and overwhelm him, and his cynical sense of superiority serves as a type of
self-protection. Thus, Holden’s alienation is the source of what little stability he has in his
life.

As readers, we can see that Holden’s alienation is the cause of most of his pain. He never
addresses his own emotions directly, nor does he attempt to discover the source of his
troubles. He desperately needs human contact and love, but his protective wall of bitterness
prevents him from looking for such interaction. Alienation is both the source of Holden’s
strength and the source of his problems. For example, his loneliness propels him into his
date with Sally Hayes, but his need for isolation causes him to insult her and drive her
away. Similarly, he longs for the meaningful connection he once had with Jane Gallagher,
but he is too frightened to make any real effort to contact her. He depends upon his
alienation, but it destroys him.
The Painfulness of Growing Up
According to most analyses, The Catcher in the Rye is a bildungsroman, a novel about a
young character’s growth into maturity. While it is appropriate to discuss the novel in such
terms, Holden Caulfield is an unusual protagonist for a bildungsroman because his central
goal is to resist the process of maturity itself. As his thoughts about the Museum of Natural
History demonstrate, Holden fears change and is overwhelmed by complexity. He wants
everything to be easily understandable and eternally fixed, like the statues of Eskimos and
Indians in the museum. He is frightened because he is guilty of the sins he criticizes in
others, and because he can’t understand everything around him. But he refuses to
acknowledge this fear, expressing it only in a few instances—for example, when he talks
about sex and admits that “[s]ex is something I just don’t understand. I swear to God I don’t”
(Chapter 9).
Instead of acknowledging that adulthood scares and mystifies him, Holden invents a
fantasy that adulthood is a world of superficiality and hypocrisy (“phoniness”), while
childhood is a world of innocence, curiosity, and honesty. Nothing reveals his image of
these two worlds better than his fantasy about the catcher in the rye: he imagines childhood
as an idyllic field of rye in which children romp and play; adulthood, for the children of this
world, is equivalent to death—a fatal fall over the edge of a cliff. His created understandings
of childhood and adulthood allow Holden to cut himself off from the world by covering
himself with a protective armor of cynicism. But as the book progresses, Holden’s
experiences, particularly his encounters with Mr. Antolini and Phoebe, reveal the
shallowness of his conceptions.

The Phoniness of the Adult World

“Phoniness,” which is probably the most famous phrase from The Catcher in the Rye, is
one of Holden’s favorite concepts. It is his catch-all for describing the superficiality,
hypocrisy, pretension, and shallowness that he encounters in the world around him. In
Chapter 22, just before he reveals his fantasy of the catcher in the rye, Holden explains that
adults are inevitably phonies, and, what’s worse, they can’t see their own phoniness.
Phoniness, for Holden, stands as an emblem of everything that’s wrong in the world around
him and provides an excuse for him to withdraw into his cynical isolation. Though
oversimplified, Holden’s observations are not entirely inaccurate. Holden can be a highly
insightful narrator, and he is very aware of superficial behavior in those around him.
Throughout the novel he encounters many characters who do seem affected, pretentious,
or superficial—Sally Hayes, Carl Luce, Maurice and Sunny, and even Mr. Spencer stand
out as examples. Some characters, like Maurice and Sunny, are genuinely harmful.
However, although Holden expends so much energy searching for phoniness in others, he
never directly observes his own phoniness. His deceptions are generally pointless or cruel
and he notes that he is a compulsive liar. For example, on the train to New York, Holden
perpetrates a needless prank on Mrs. Morrow. He’d like us to believe that he is a paragon
of virtue in a world of phoniness, but that simply isn’t the case. Although he’d like to believe
that the world is a simple place, and that virtue and innocence rest on one side of the fence
while superficiality and phoniness rest on the other, Holden is his own counterevidence.
The world is not as simple as he’d like—and needs—it to be; even he cannot adhere to the
same black-and-white standards with which he judges other people.

Religion
As with most other things in his life, Holden has ambivalent feelings about religion. Religion
entices him because he thinks it may offer a spiritual anchor in an otherwise confusing and
depressing world. Holden yearns for such an anchor throughout the novel. He frequently
imagines that a relationship with a young woman may cure his loneliness, but female
companionship never works out for him. As an alternative, Holden occasionally thinks about
Jesus. Jesus appeals to Holden for a couple of reasons. First, Jesus is not a phony. Holden
asserts as much when he exclaims that Jesus “would’ve puked” had he witnessed the
commercialization of Christmas. Second, Jesus privileges social outcasts. Holden makes
note of this when he recalls the story of Jesus curing a lunatic’s madness. Holden, who
frequently calls himself a “madman,” imagines that Jesus could also cure him. However,
despite Holden’s desire for spiritual grounding, organized religion repulses him. In Holden’s
view, rituals, theology, and dogma are imposed from outside and therefore turn people into
phonies. So even though Holden respects Jesus as a spiritual figure, he rejects the religion
founded on his name.

Inaction
One of the biggest issues holding Holden back is his persistent inability to take action.
Holden’s inaction indicates a failure both to let go of past trauma and to move toward a
more resilient future. With regard to the past, Holden cannot relinquish the memory of his
dead brother. Holden’s refusal to let go of Allie’s memory finds an echo in Chapter 5, when
he can’t bring himself to let go of a snowball he’s made. Instead of throwing the snowball,
he holds on to it and packs in more snow, making it hard and dense. The dense snowball
may mirror Holden’s tight knot of emotional anguish, and his inability to let the snowball go
echoes his inability to make peace with his brother’s death. The pain associated with Allie’s
passing interferes with Holden’s ability to take action in other ways as well. Take, for
example, the scene where Holden attempts to punch Stradlater with his right fist. Holden
knows this fist is weak, because he injured it when he broke the windows in the garage
after Allie died. Using this fist to throw a punch is therefore self-defeating and leads to
Stradlater punching him.

Just as it relates to the pain of his past, Holden’s inaction also relates to his fear of the
future. Frequently in the book Holden describes the world of adults as being full of rules and
conventions that make people into phonies. But his constant criticism of adults covers up a
deeper resistance to growing up. This resistance becomes clear in Holden’s failed attempts
at sexual connection. Even though he frequently thinks and talks about sex, all of Holden’s
encounters with women in the book are disastrous. Perhaps most telling is the scene with
the prostitute Sunny. Holden cannot bring himself to have sex with her, just one of several
failed sexual encounters he’s experienced. In a narrow sense, this episode shows Holden’s
hang-ups about sexuality. More generally, it also shows how Holden’s inability to act links to
his broader resistance to growing up. His refusal to grow up endangers his future ability to
become more resilient and take action despite the world’s many shortcomings.

Appearances
Holden categorizes people in two groups: those who care about appearances and those
who don’t. Those who belong to the first category strike Holden as “hotshots” and
“phonies,” who privilege looks over personality. Holden feels surrounded by such people.
He notes, for instance, that his mother works hard to cultivate her “terrific taste,” and his
aunt has a penchant for pomp in her charity work. He also encounters a number of other
wealthy and good-looking people over the course of the book, including Stradlater, Carl
Luce, and Mr. Antolini. For Holden, Stradlater exemplifies the hollowness of appearances.
Holden explains that even though Stradlater always looks good on the outside, he’s actually
a “secret slob” whose stuff is dirty and in disarray. By contrast, Holden sees himself as
someone who privileges substance over style. He insists, for instance, that he doesn’t care
about his own appearance. At one point he exclaims, “I didn’t give a damn how I looked.”
However, his self-consciousness about putting the flaps down on his hunting cap, for
example, reveal that he, too, is secretly concerned with appearances.

Performance
Just as Holden sets up an opposition between style and substance, he also sets up an
opposition between performance and authenticity. For Holden, performance is closely
linked to notions of appearance and phoniness, and no one epitomizes the artificiality of
performance better than professional actors. Holden dislikes actors mainly because they
pretend to be other people. But he also takes issue with actors because their success is
based on how well they show off their talent. Holden seems to believe that the more they
show off their talent, the phonier they get. Acting therefore has a corrupting power. Holden
seems to think that most people are actors of sorts, exaggerating who they are in order to
please an imaginary audience. Such exaggeration leads to artificiality and the failure to be a
“real” person. But if everything is a performance and hence inauthentic, then what does
authenticity actually look like? Even though Holden privileges an idea of authenticity, he
never explicitly defines it, which indicates he’s chasing after something that may not
actually exist.

Perhaps surprisingly, given his criticism of performance, Holden cannot exempt himself
from the charge of inauthenticity. This is evident as early as Chapter 4, when he gleefully
proclaims his need to act out for attention: “All I need’s an audience. I’m an exhibitionist.”
Whether tap dancing for Stradlater in the dorm bathroom, taking on the alter ego of
Rudolph Schmidt on the train to New York, or trying to play it cool in city bars, Holden
performs and exaggerates constantly. He even admits to exaggerating his own immaturity.
As he notes in Chapter 2, “I act quite young for my age sometimes. I was sixteen then, and
I’m seventeen now, and some times I act like I’m about thirteen.” Holden makes a similar
performance during his encounter with Carl Luce, who comments on Holden’s persistent
immaturity and repeatedly asks him, “When are you going to grow up?” Throughout The
Catcher in the Rye, then, Holden is an actor in search of a sympathetic audience.

Symbols
The “Catcher in the Rye”
As the source of the book’s title, this symbol merits close inspection. It first appears in
Chapter 16, when a kid Holden admires for walking in the street rather than on the sidewalk
is singing the Robert Burns song “Comin’ Thro’ the Rye.” In Chapter 22, when Phoebe asks
Holden what he wants to do with his life, he replies with his image, from the song, of a
“catcher in the rye.” Holden imagines a field of rye perched high on a cliff, full of children
romping and playing. He says he would like to protect the children from falling off the edge
of the cliff by “catching” them if they were on the verge of tumbling over. As Phoebe points
out, Holden has misheard the lyric. He thinks the line is “If a body catch a body comin’
through the rye,” but the actual lyric is “If a body meet a body, coming through the rye.” The
song “Comin’ Thro’ the Rye” asks if it is wrong for two people to have a romantic encounter
out in the fields, away from the public eye, even if they don’t plan to have a commitment to
one another. It is highly ironic that the word “meet” refers to an encounter that leads to
recreational sex, because the word that Holden substitutes—“catch”—takes on the exact
opposite meaning in his mind. Holden wants to catch children before they fall out of
innocence into knowledge of the adult world, including knowledge of sex.

Holden’s Red Hunting Hat

The red hunting hat is one of the most recognizable symbols from twentieth-century
American literature. It is inseparable from our image of Holden, with good reason: it is a
symbol of his uniqueness and individuality. The hat is outlandish, and it shows that Holden
desires to be different from everyone around him. At the same time, he is very self-
conscious about the hat—he always mentions when he is wearing it, and he often doesn’t
wear it if he is going to be around people he knows. The presence of the hat, therefore,
mirrors the central conflict in the book: Holden’s need for isolation versus his need for
companionship. It is worth noting that the hat’s color, red, is the same as that of Allie’s and
Phoebe’s hair. Perhaps Holden associates it with the innocence and purity he believes
these characters represent and wears it as a way to connect to them. He never explicitly
comments on the hat’s significance other than to mention its unusual appearance.

The Museum of Natural History

Holden tells us the symbolic meaning of the museum’s displays: they appeal to him
because they are frozen and unchanging. He also mentions that he is troubled by the fact
that he has changed every time he returns to them. The museum represents the world
Holden wishes he could live in: it’s the world of his “catcher in the rye” fantasy, a world
where nothing ever changes, where everything is simple, understandable, and infinite.
Holden is terrified by the unpredictable challenges of the world—he hates conflict, he is
confused by Allie’s senseless death, and he fears interaction with other people.

The Ducks in the Central Park Lagoon

Holden’s curiosity about where the ducks go during the winter reveals a genuine, more
youthful side to his character. For most of the book, he sounds like a grumpy old man who
is angry at the world, but his search for the ducks represents the curiosity of youth and a
joyful willingness to encounter the mysteries of the world. It is a memorable moment,
because Holden clearly lacks such willingness in other aspects of his life. The ducks and
their pond are symbolic in several ways. Their mysterious perseverance in the face of an
inhospitable environment resonates with Holden’s understanding of his own situation. In
addition, the ducks prove that some vanishings are only temporary. Traumatized and made
acutely aware of the fragility of life by his brother Allie’s death, Holden is terrified by the idea
of change and disappearance. The ducks vanish every winter, but they return every spring,
thus symbolizing change that isn’t permanent, but cyclical. Finally, the pond itself becomes
a minor metaphor for the world as Holden sees it, because it is “partly frozen and partly not
frozen.” The pond is in transition between two states, just as Holden is in transition between
childhood and adulthood.

Genre
Bildungsroman
The Catcher in the Rye is a bildungsroman in that it follows an important experience in the
young protagonist’s life, is told in flashback, and describes the protagonist attempting to
transition from childhood to adulthood. Bildungsromans, taken from the German words for
“novel” and “education,” are coming-of-age stories that utilize child or teenage protagonists
to develop ideas about what it means to be a moral and spiritually mature person. In The
Catcher in the Rye, Holden relates the events of a week the previous year when he faced
numerous spiritual and psychological challenges after being kicked out of his prep school.
Told almost entirely in flashback, the novel features extended interior monologue and
dialogue, and minimal external action. Bildungsromans also frequently feature adult
characters who act as antagonists toward the main character, presenting models of
maturity the protagonist may accept or reject. In The Catcher in the Rye, Holden
encounters many adults, almost all of whom he rejects as “phonies.” Holden must create
his own model of how to be a moral person in the adult world.

Realism
In The Catcher in the Rye, Salinger draws on realism, which is a literary tradition that uses
slang, dialect, class distinctions, and real-world locations to present an accurate picture of a
specific time and place. In The Catcher in the Rye, Holden uses slang such as “phony,”
“crumby,” and “corny,” tying the story to post-World War II America. The class-based
dialects of characters such as the prostitute, Sunny, and her pimp, Maurice create an
awareness of class in the novel. Details like Holden’s camel hair coat and mention of the
fact his teacher, Mr. Spencer, doesn’t have a maid mark Holden as upper class, but when
he ventures into New York he meets other characters, such as his cab driver, whose
speech and mannerisms mark them as from different classes. Salinger also uses several
recognizable locations, for example Central Park and the Natural History Museum, to
ground his novel in the familiar and make it feel realistic and possible.
Literary Satire
Despite being a bildungsroman, The Catcher in the Rye also contains elements that critique
the genre, making it a literary satire as well. Literary satire exaggerates and tweaks
conventions of a genre to comment on limitations or problems within the genre. Holden
presents a small slice of his life story, preferring to leave out the details of his birth, his
childhood, and “all that David Copperfield kind of crap.” Charles Dickens’s David
Copperfield is a more traditional type of bildungsroman, and by referencing Dickens’s book
on the first page, Holden alerts us that he is aware of our expectations for his story, and
does not intend to fulfill them. The typical bildungsroman leaves little room for ambiguity: by
the end of the narrative, the character has changed, often dramatically and almost always
for the better. The Catcher in the Rye offers a messier, more realistic narrative featuring a
protagonist who resists change of any kind. By presenting a more complicated and
ambiguous story of personal change and growth, Salinger’s novel challenges the
conventions of the genre itself.

TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD – HARPER LEE - 1960

Scout Finch lives with her brother, Jem, and their widowed father, Atticus, in the sleepy
Alabama town of Maycomb. Maycomb is suffering through the Great Depression, but
Atticus is a prominent lawyer and the Finch family is reasonably well off in comparison to
the rest of society. One summer, Jem and Scout befriend a boy named Dill, who has come
to live in their neighborhood for the summer, and the trio acts out stories together.
Eventually, Dill becomes fascinated with the spooky house on their street called the Radley
Place. The house is owned by Mr. Nathan Radley, whose brother, Arthur (nicknamed Boo),
has lived there for years without venturing outside.
Scout goes to school for the first time that fall and detests it. She and Jem find gifts
apparently left for them in a knothole of a tree on the Radley property. Dill returns the
following summer, and he, Scout, and Jem begin to act out the story of Boo Radley. Atticus
puts a stop to their antics, urging the children to try to see life from another person’s
perspective before making judgments. But, on Dill’s last night in Maycomb for the summer,
the three sneak onto the Radley property, where Nathan Radley shoots at them. Jem loses
his pants in the ensuing escape. When he returns for them, he finds them mended and
hung over the fence.

The next winter, Jem and Scout find more presents in the tree, presumably left by the
mysterious Boo. Nathan Radley eventually plugs the knothole with cement. Shortly
thereafter, a fire breaks out in another neighbor’s house, and during the fire someone slips
a blanket on Scout’s shoulders as she watches the blaze. Convinced that Boo did it, Jem
tells Atticus about the mended pants and the presents.

To the consternation of Maycomb’s racist white community, Atticus agrees to defend a

Black man named Tom Robinson, who has been accused of raping a white woman.
Because of Atticus’s decision, Jem and Scout are subjected to abuse from other children,
even when they celebrate Christmas at the family compound on Finch’s Landing. Calpurnia,
the Finches’ Black cook, takes them to the local Black church, where the warm and close-
knit community largely embraces the children.
Atticus’s sister, Alexandra, comes to live with the Finches the next summer. Dill, who is
supposed to live with his “new father” in another town, runs away and comes to Maycomb.
Tom Robinson’s trial begins, and when the accused man is placed in the local jail, a mob
gathers to lynch him. Atticus faces the mob down the night before the trial. Jem and Scout,
who have sneaked out of the house, soon join him. Scout recognizes one of the men, and
her polite questioning about his son shames him into dispersing the mob.

At the trial itself, the children sit in the “colored balcony” with the town’s Black citizens.
Atticus provides clear evidence that the accusers, Mayella Ewell and her father, Bob, are
lying: in fact, Mayella propositioned Tom Robinson, was caught by her father, and then
accused Tom of rape to cover her shame and guilt. Atticus provides impressive evidence
that the marks on Mayella’s face are from wounds that her father inflicted; upon discovering
her with Tom, he called her a whore and beat her. Yet, despite the significant evidence
pointing to Tom’s innocence, the all-white jury convicts him. The innocent Tom later tries to
escape from prison and is shot to death. In the aftermath of the trial, Jem’s faith in justice is
badly shaken, and he lapses into despondency and doubt.

Despite the verdict, Bob Ewell feels that Atticus and the judge have made a fool out of him,
and he vows revenge. He menaces Tom Robinson’s widow, tries to break into the judge’s
house, and finally attacks Jem and Scout as they walk home from a Halloween party. Boo
Radley intervenes, however, saving the children and stabbing Ewell fatally during the
struggle. Boo carries the wounded Jem back to Atticus’s house, where the sheriff, in order
to protect Boo, insists that Ewell tripped over a tree root and fell on his own knife. After
sitting with Scout for a while, Boo disappears once more into the Radley house.

Later, Scout feels as though she can finally imagine what life is like for Boo. He has
become a human being to her at last. With this realization, Scout embraces her father’s
advice to practice sympathy and understanding and demonstrates that her experiences with
hatred and prejudice will not sully her faith in human goodness.
Character List
Scout Finch
The narrator and protagonist of the story. Jean Louise “Scout” Finch lives with her father,
Atticus, her brother, Jem, and their Black cook, Calpurnia, in Maycomb. She is intelligent
and, by the standards of her time and place, a tomboy. Scout has a combative streak and a
basic faith in the goodness of the people in her community. As the novel progresses, this
faith is tested by the hatred and prejudice that emerge during Tom Robinson’s trial. Scout
eventually develops a more grown-up perspective that enables her to appreciate human
goodness without ignoring human evil.

Atticus Finch
Scout and Jem’s father, a lawyer in Maycomb descended from an old local family. A
widower with a dry sense of humor, Atticus has instilled in his children his strong sense of
morality and justice. He is one of the few residents of Maycomb committed to racial
equality. When he agrees to defend Tom Robinson, a Black man charged with raping a
white woman, he exposes himself and his family to the anger of the white community. With
his strongly held convictions, wisdom, and empathy, Atticus functions as the novel’s moral
backbone.

Jem Finch
Scout’s brother and constant playmate at the beginning of the story. Jeremy Atticus “Jem”
Finch is something of a typical American boy, refusing to back down from dares and
fantasizing about playing football. Four years older than Scout, he gradually separates
himself from her games, but he remains her close companion and protector throughout the
novel. Jem moves into adolescence during the story, and his ideals are shaken badly by the
evil and injustice that he perceives during the trial of Tom Robinson.

Arthur “Boo” Radley

A recluse who never sets foot outside his house, Boo dominates the imaginations of Jem,
Scout, and Dill. He is a powerful symbol of goodness swathed in an initial shroud of
creepiness, leaving little presents for Scout and Jem and emerging at an opportune
moment to save the children. An intelligent child emotionally damaged by his cruel father,
Boo provides an example of the threat that evil poses to innocence and goodness. He is
one of the novel’s “mockingbirds,” a good person injured by the evil of mankind.

Calpurnia
The Finches’ Black cook. Calpurnia is a stern disciplinarian and the children’s bridge
between the white world and her own Black community.

Bob Ewell
A drunken, mostly unemployed member of Maycomb’s poorest family. In his knowingly
wrongful accusation that Tom Robinson raped his daughter, Ewell represents the dark side
of the South: ignorance, poverty, squalor, and hate-filled racial prejudice.
Charles Baker “Dill” Harris
Jem and Scout’s summer neighbor and friend. Dill is a diminutive, confident boy with an
active imagination. He becomes fascinated with Boo Radley and represents the perspective
of childhood innocence throughout the novel.

Miss Maudie Atkinson

The Finches’ neighbor, a sharp-tongued widow, and an old friend of the family. Miss
Maudie is almost the same age as Atticus’s younger brother, Jack. She shares Atticus’s
passion for justice and is the children’s best friend among Maycomb’s adults.

Aunt Alexandra
Atticus’s sister, a strong-willed woman with a fierce devotion to her family. Alexandra is the
perfect Southern lady, and her commitment to propriety and tradition often leads her to
clash with Scout.

Mayella Ewell
Bob Ewell’s abused, lonely, unhappy daughter. Though one can pity Mayella because of
her overbearing father, one cannot pardon her for her shameful indictment of Tom
Robinson.

Tom Robinson
The Black field hand accused of rape. Tom is one of the novel’s “mockingbirds,” an
important symbol of innocence destroyed by evil.

Link Deas
Tom Robinson’s employer. In his willingness to look past race and praise the integrity of
Tom’s character, Deas epitomizes the opposite of prejudice.

Mrs. Henry Lafayette Dubose

An elderly, ill-tempered, racist woman who lives near the Finches. Although Jem believes
that Mrs. Dubose is a thoroughly bad woman, Atticus admires her for the courage with
which she battles her morphine addiction.

Nathan Radley
Boo Radley’s older brother. Scout thinks that Nathan is similar to the deceased Mr. Radley,
Boo and Nathan’s father. Nathan cruelly cuts off an important element of Boo’s relationship
with Jem and Scout when he plugs up the knothole in which Boo leaves presents for the
children.

Heck Tate
The sheriff of Maycomb and a major witness at Tom Robinson’s trial. Heck is a decent man
who tries to protect the innocent from danger.

Mr. Underwood
The publisher of Maycomb’s newspaper. Mr. Underwood respects Atticus and proves to be
his ally.
Mr. Dolphus Raymond
A wealthy white man who lives with his Black mistress and multiracial children. Raymond
pretends to be a drunk so that the citizens of Maycomb will have an explanation for his
behavior. In reality, he is simply jaded by the hypocrisy of white society and prefers living
among Black people.

Mr. Walter Cunningham

A poor farmer and part of the mob that seeks to lynch Tom Robinson at the jail. Mr.
Cunningham displays his human goodness when Scout’s politeness compels him to
disperse the men at the jail.

Walter Cunningham
Son of Mr. Walter Cunningham and classmate of Scout. Walter cannot afford lunch one day
at school and accidentally gets Scout in trouble.

Themes
The Coexistence of Good and Evil
The most important theme of To Kill a Mockingbird is the book’s exploration of the moral
nature of human beings—that is, whether people are essentially good or essentially evil.
The novel approaches this question by dramatizing Scout and Jem’s transition from a
perspective of childhood innocence, in which they assume that people are good because
they have never seen evil, to a more adult perspective, in which they have confronted evil
and must incorporate it into their understanding of the world. As a result of this portrayal of
the transition from innocence to experience, one of the book’s important subthemes
involves the threat that hatred, prejudice, and ignorance pose to the innocent: people such
as Tom Robinson and Boo Radley are not prepared for the evil that they encounter, and, as
a result, they are destroyed. Even Jem is victimized to an extent by his discovery of the evil
of racism during and after the trial. Whereas Scout is able to maintain her basic faith in
human nature despite Tom’s conviction, Jem’s faith in justice and in humanity is badly
damaged, and he retreats into a state of disillusionment.
The moral voice of To Kill a Mockingbird is embodied by Atticus Finch, who is virtually
unique in the novel in that he has experienced and understood evil without losing his faith in
the human capacity for goodness. Atticus understands that, rather than being simply
creatures of good or creatures of evil, most people have both good and bad qualities. The
important thing is to appreciate the good qualities and understand the bad qualities by
treating others with sympathy and trying to see life from their perspective. He tries to teach
this ultimate moral lesson to Jem and Scout to show them that it is possible to live with
conscience without losing hope or becoming cynical. In this way, Atticus is able to admire
Mrs. Dubose’s courage even while deploring her racism. Scout’s progress as a character in
the novel is defined by her gradual development toward understanding Atticus’s lessons,
culminating when, in the final chapters, Scout at last sees Boo Radley as a human being.
Her newfound ability to view the world from his perspective ensures that she will not
become jaded as she loses her innocence.

The Importance of Moral Education

Because exploration of the novel’s larger moral questions takes place within the
perspective of children, the education of children is necessarily involved in the development
of all of the novel’s themes. In a sense, the plot of the story charts Scout’s moral education,
and the theme of how children are educated—how they are taught to move from innocence
to adulthood—recurs throughout the novel (at the end of the book, Scout even says that
she has learned practically everything except algebra). This theme is explored most
powerfully through the relationship between Atticus and his children, as he devotes himself
to instilling a social conscience in Jem and Scout. The scenes at school provide a direct
counterpoint to Atticus’s effective education of his children: Scout is frequently confronted
with teachers who are either frustratingly unsympathetic to children’s needs or morally
hypocritical. As is true of To Kill a Mockingbird’s other moral themes, the novel’s conclusion
about education is that the most important lessons are those of sympathy and
understanding, and that a sympathetic, understanding approach is the best way to teach
these lessons. In this way, Atticus’s ability to put himself in his children’s shoes makes him
an excellent teacher, while Miss Caroline’s rigid commitment to the educational techniques
that she learned in college makes her ineffective and even dangerous.

The Existence of Social Inequality

Differences in social status are explored largely through the overcomplicated social
hierarchy of Maycomb, the ins and outs of which constantly baffle the children. The
relatively well-off Finches stand near the top of Maycomb’s social hierarchy, with most of
the townspeople beneath them. Country farmers like the Cunninghams lie below the
townspeople, and the Ewells rest below the Cunninghams. But the Black community in
Maycomb, despite its abundance of admirable qualities, squats below even the Ewells,
enabling Bob Ewell to make up for his own lack of importance by persecuting Tom
Robinson. These rigid social divisions that make up so much of the adult world are revealed
in the book to be both irrational and destructive. For example, Scout cannot understand
why Aunt Alexandra refuses to let her consort with young Walter Cunningham. Lee uses
the children’s perplexity at the unpleasant layering of Maycomb society to critique the role
of class status and, ultimately, prejudice in human interaction.

Prejudice
Discussions about prejudice in general, and racism in particular, are at the heart of To Kill a
Mockingbird. Conflicts over racism drive some of the most compelling and memorable
scenes in the novel. Racial conflict causes the two dramatic deaths that occur in the story.
On one level, To Kill a Mockingbird represents a simplistic and moralistic view of racial
prejudice. White people who are racist are bad, and white people who are not racist are
good. Atticus risks his reputation, his position in the community, and ultimately the safety of
his children because he is not racist, and therefore good. Bob Ewell falsely accuses a Black
man of rape, spits on Atticus publicly, and attempts to murder a child because he is racist,
and therefore bad. To Kill a Mockingbird does attempt to look at some of the complexities of
living in a racist society. Both Scout and Jem confront everything from unpleasantness to
murderous hostility as they learn how their family’s resistance to racial prejudice has
positioned them against the community at large.
The treatment of prejudice in To Kill a Mockingbird is not only simplistic in terms of morality,
but also in terms of perspective. To read the novel one would think racism is a problem that
exists between educated, financially stable, moral white people, and ignorant, dirt poor,
vicious white people. The Black characters in the novel are rarely given voice on the topic
of racism. When they do speak it is largely in terms of gratitude for the good white people of
town and not in terms of anger, frustration, resistance, or hostility towards the culture of
racism. When the author does present Black characters as trying to resist racist abuses,
she shows them doing so by avoiding or retreating, as when Tom Robinson attempts to
escape from prison or when Helen Robinson walks through the woods to avoid going past
the Ewell house. Black characters in the novel never respond to racism actively and barely
respond to it reactively. When a Black character is critical of white people, as when Lula
challenges Calpurnia for bringing Jem and Scout to the Black church, she is ostracized by
the rest of the Black community, suggesting her complaints against white people are
unfounded.

Law
Though the trial of Tom Robinson takes up only about one tenth of the book, it represents
the narrative center around which the rest of the novel revolves. This trial seems intended
as an indictment of the legal system, at the least as it exists of within the town of Maycomb.
Procedurally, the judge carries out the trial properly. The lawyers select the jury through
normal means, and both the defense and prosecution to make their cases. But the all-white
jury does not interpret the evidence according to the law, but rather applies their own
prejudices to determine the outcome of the case. Tom Robinson’s guilty verdict exemplifies
the limitations of the law, and asks the reader to reconsider the meaning of the word “fair” in
the phrase “a fair trial.” While Atticus understands that the legal system is flawed, he firmly
believes in the legal process. At the same time, Atticus believes the law should be applied
differently to different people. He explains to Scout that because she has a good life full of
opportunities she should have to obey the law fully, but he suggests that there are others
who have much more difficult lives and far fewer opportunities, and that there are times
when it is just to let those people break the law in small ways so that they are not overly
harmed by the law’s application.

Lying
There are two lies at the heart of To Kill a Mockingbird. Mayella Ewell says that Tom
Robinson raped her, and Heck Tate says that Bob Ewell accidentally stabbed himself. The
first lie destroys an innocent man who occupies a precarious social position in Maycomb
because of his race. The second lie prevents the destruction of an innocent man who
occupies a precarious social position in Maycomb because of his extreme reclusiveness.
Taken together, the two lies reflect how deception can be used to harm or to protect. The
two lies also reveal how the most vulnerable members of society can be the most deeply
affected by the stories people tell about them. Social status also determines who is allowed
to tell a lie. During the trial, prosecutor Horace Gilmer confronts Tom Robinson, asking Tom
if he is accusing Mayella Ewell of lying. Even though Tom knows full well that Mayella is
lying, he cannot say so because in Maycomb the lies of a white woman carry more weight
than the truth told by a Black man. Atticus, on the other hand, who is white, male, and of a
higher class status than Mayella, can accuse her of lying when he suggests that it was
really Mayella’s father, not Tom, who beat her.

Symbols
Mockingbirds
The title of To Kill a Mockingbird has very little literal connection to the plot, but it carries a
great deal of symbolic weight in the book. In this story of innocents destroyed by evil, the
“mockingbird” comes to represent the idea of innocence. Thus, to kill a mockingbird is to
destroy innocence. Throughout the book, a number of characters (Jem, Tom Robinson, Dill,
Boo Radley, Mr. Raymond) can be identified as mockingbirds—innocents who have been
injured or destroyed through contact with evil. This connection between the novel’s title and
its main theme is made explicit several times in the novel: after Tom Robinson is shot, Mr.
Underwood compares his death to “the senseless slaughter of songbirds,” and at the end of
the book Scout thinks that hurting Boo Radley would be like “shootin’ a mockingbird.” Most
important, Miss Maudie explains to Scout: “Mockingbirds don’t do one thing but . . . sing
their hearts out for us. That’s why it’s a sin to kill a mockingbird.” That Jem and Scout’s last
name is Finch (another type of small bird) indicates that they are particularly vulnerable in
the racist world of Maycomb, which often treats the fragile innocence of childhood harshly.

Boo Radley
As the novel progresses, the children’s changing attitude toward Boo Radley is an
important measurement of their development from innocence toward a grown-up moral
perspective. At the beginning of the book, Boo is merely a source of childhood superstition.
As he leaves Jem and Scout gifts and mends Jem’s pants, he gradually becomes
increasingly and intriguingly real to them. At the end of the novel, he becomes fully human
to Scout, illustrating that she has developed into a sympathetic and understanding
individual. Boo, an intelligent child ruined by a cruel father, is one of the book’s most
important mockingbirds; he is also an important symbol of the good that exists within
people. Despite the pain that Boo has suffered, the purity of his heart rules his interaction
with the children. In saving Jem and Scout from Bob Ewell, Boo proves the ultimate symbol
of good.

Front Porches
Throughout the novel, front porches appear again and again as a symbol of the liminal
space, or transitional space, between the private sphere of the home and the public sphere
of the streets of Maycomb. Almost every character’s house is adorned with a front porch,
and many of them, such as Miss Maudie, Mrs. Dubose, and Mr. Avery, spend significant
amounts of time sitting out on their porches. As a result, the front porch becomes a space
where the tensions between personal beliefs and public discourse become particularly
evident. Mrs. Dubose publicizes her critical opinion of Atticus from the comfort of her front
porch, a group of men, including Mr. Tate and Mr. Deas, question Atticus’s decision to take
the case while he stands on his own front porch, and Miss Stephanie spreads gossip about
the children’s presence at the trial on Miss Maudie’s front porch. All of these scenarios
represent a mixture of opinion and actual events, giving way to a form of public gossip that
feels deeply personal. Perhaps the most significant front porch scene occurs in the final
chapter of the novel when Scout walks Boo Radley back to his home. She explains to the
reader that “just standing on the Radley porch was enough” to learn who he really was, a
man who, despite his invisibility, never failed to look out for Jem and Scout. In this instance,
the space of the front porch helps Scout decipher the relationship between Boo’s public
actions and his private life.

Genre
Southern Gothic
Courtroom Drama
Bildungsroman

DEATH OF A SALESMAN - ARTHUR MILLER - 1949

As a flute melody plays, Willy Loman returns to his home in Brooklyn one night, exhausted
from a failed sales trip. His wife, Linda, tries to persuade him to ask his boss, Howard
Wagner, to let him work in New York so that he won’t have to travel. Willy says that he will
talk to Howard the next day. Willy complains that Biff, his older son who has come back
home to visit, has yet to make something of himself. Linda scolds Willy for being so critical,
and Willy goes to the kitchen for a snack.
As Willy talks to himself in the kitchen, Biff and his younger brother, Happy, who is also
visiting, reminisce about their adolescence and discuss their father’s babbling, which often
includes criticism of Biff’s failure to live up to Willy’s expectations. As Biff and Happy,
dissatisfied with their lives, fantasize about buying a ranch out West, Willy becomes
immersed in a daydream. He praises his sons, now younger, who are washing his car. The
young Biff, a high school football star, and the young Happy appear. They interact
affectionately with their father, who has just returned from a business trip. Willy confides in
Biff and Happy that he is going to open his own business one day, bigger than that owned
by his neighbor, Charley. Charley’s son, Bernard, enters looking for Biff, who must study for
math class in order to avoid failing. Willy points out to his sons that although Bernard is
smart, he is not “well liked,” which will hurt him in the long run.
A younger Linda enters, and the boys leave to do some chores. Willy boasts of a
phenomenally successful sales trip, but Linda coaxes him into revealing that his trip was
actually only meagerly successful. Willy complains that he soon won’t be able to make all of
the payments on their appliances and car. He complains that people don’t like him and that
he’s not good at his job. As Linda consoles him, he hears the laughter of his mistress. He
approaches The Woman, who is still laughing, and engages in another reminiscent
daydream. Willy and The Woman flirt, and she thanks him for giving her stockings.

The Woman disappears, and Willy fades back into his prior daydream, in the kitchen. Linda,
now mending stockings, reassures him. He scolds her mending and orders her to throw the
stockings out. Bernard bursts in, again looking for Biff. Linda reminds Willy that Biff has to
return a football that he stole, and she adds that Biff is too rough with the neighborhood
girls. Willy hears The Woman laugh and explodes at Bernard and Linda. Both leave, and
though the daydream ends, Willy continues to mutter to himself. The older Happy comes
downstairs and tries to quiet Willy. Agitated, Willy shouts his regret about not going to
Alaska with his brother, Ben, who eventually found a diamond mine in Africa and became
rich. Charley, having heard the commotion, enters. Happy goes off to bed, and Willy and
Charley begin to play cards. Charley offers Willy a job, but Willy, insulted, refuses it. As they
argue, Willy imagines that Ben enters. Willy accidentally calls Charley Ben. Ben inspects
Willy’s house and tells him that he has to catch a train soon to look at properties in Alaska.
As Willy talks to Ben about the prospect of going to Alaska, Charley, seeing no one there,
gets confused and questions Willy. Willy yells at Charley, who leaves. The younger Linda
enters and Ben meets her. Willy asks Ben impatiently about his life. Ben recounts his
travels and talks about their father. As Ben is about to leave, Willy daydreams further, and
Charley and Bernard rush in to tell him that Biff and Happy are stealing lumber. Although
Ben eventually leaves, Willy continues to talk to him.

Back in the present, the older Linda enters to find Willy outside. Biff and Happy come
downstairs and discuss Willy’s condition with their mother. Linda scolds Biff for judging Willy
harshly. Biff tells her that he knows Willy is a fake, but he refuses to elaborate. Linda
mentions that Willy has tried to commit suicide. Happy grows angry and rebukes Biff for his
failure in the business world. Willy enters and yells at Biff. Happy intervenes and eventually
proposes that he and Biff go into the sporting goods business together. Willy immediately
brightens and gives Biff a host of tips about asking for a loan from one of Biff’s old
employers, Bill Oliver. After more arguing and reconciliation, everyone finally goes to bed.

Act II opens with Willy enjoying the breakfast that Linda has made for him. Willy ponders
the bright-seeming future before getting angry again about his expensive appliances. Linda
informs Willy that Biff and Happy are taking him out to dinner that night. Excited, Willy
announces that he is going to make Howard Wagner give him a New York job. The phone
rings, and Linda chats with Biff, reminding him to be nice to his father at the restaurant that
night.

As the lights fade on Linda, they come up on Howard playing with a wire recorder in his
office. Willy tries to broach the subject of working in New York, but Howard interrupts him
and makes him listen to his kids and wife on the wire recorder. When Willy finally gets a
word in, Howard rejects his plea. Willy launches into a lengthy recalling of how a legendary
salesman named Dave Singleman inspired him to go into sales. Howard leaves and Willy
gets angry. Howard soon re-enters and tells Willy to take some time off. Howard leaves and
Ben enters, inviting Willy to join him in Alaska. The younger Linda enters and reminds Willy
of his sons and job. The young Biff enters, and Willy praises Biff’s prospects and the fact
that he is well liked.

Ben leaves and Bernard rushes in, eagerly awaiting Biff’s big football game. Willy speaks
optimistically to Biff about the game. Charley enters and teases Willy about the game. As
Willy chases Charley off, the lights rise on a different part of the stage. Willy continues
yelling from offstage, and Jenny, Charley’s secretary, asks a grown-up Bernard to quiet him
down. Willy enters and prattles on about a “very big deal” that Biff is working on. Daunted
by Bernard’s success (he mentions to Willy that he is going to Washington to fight a case),
Willy asks Bernard why Biff turned out to be such a failure. Bernard asks Willy what
happened in Boston that made Biff decide not to go to summer school. Willy defensively
tells Bernard not to blame him.

Charley enters and sees Bernard off. When Willy asks for more money than Charley usually
loans him, Charley again offers Willy a job. Willy again refuses and eventually tells Charley
that he was fired. Charley scolds Willy for always needing to be liked and angrily gives him
the money. Calling Charley his only friend, Willy exits on the verge of tears.

At Frank’s Chop House, Happy helps Stanley, a waiter, prepare a table. They ogle and chat
up a girl, Miss Forsythe, who enters the restaurant. Biff enters, and Happy introduces him to
Miss Forsythe, continuing to flirt with her. Miss Forsythe, a call girl, leaves to telephone
another call girl (at Happy’s request), and Biff spills out that he waited six hours for Bill
Oliver and Oliver didn’t even recognize him. Upset at his father’s unrelenting misconception
that he, Biff, was a salesman for Oliver, Biff plans to relieve Willy of his illusions. Willy
enters, and Biff tries gently, at first, to tell him what happened at Oliver’s office. Willy blurts
out that he was fired. Stunned, Biff again tries to let Willy down easily. Happy cuts in with
remarks suggesting Biff’s success, and Willy eagerly awaits the good news.

Biff finally explodes at Willy for being unwilling to listen. The young Bernard runs in shouting
for Linda, and Biff, Happy, and Willy start to argue. As Biff explains what happened, their
conversation recedes into the background. The young Bernard tells Linda that Biff failed
math. The restaurant conversation comes back into focus and Willy criticizes Biff for failing
math. Willy then hears the voice of the hotel operator in Boston and shouts that he is not in
his room. Biff scrambles to quiet Willy and claims that Oliver is talking to his partner about
giving Biff the money. Willy’s renewed interest and probing questions irk Biff more, and he
screams at Willy. Willy hears The Woman laugh and he shouts back at Biff, hitting him and
staggering. Miss Forsythe enters with another call girl, Letta. Biff helps Willy to the
washroom and, finding Happy flirting with the girls, argues with him about Willy. Biff storms
out, and Happy follows with the girls.

Willy and The Woman enter, dressing themselves and flirting. The door knocks and Willy
hurries The Woman into the bathroom. Willy answers the door; the young Biff enters and
tells Willy that he failed math. Willy tries to usher him out of the room, but Biff imitates his
math teacher’s lisp, which elicits laughter from Willy and The Woman. Willy tries to cover up
his indiscretion, but Biff refuses to believe his stories and storms out, dejected, calling Willy
a “phony little fake.” Back in the restaurant, Stanley helps Willy up. Willy asks him where he
can find a seed store. Stanley gives him directions to one, and Willy hurries off.

The light comes up on the Loman kitchen, where Happy enters looking for Willy. He moves
into the living room and sees Linda. Biff comes inside and Linda scolds the boys and slaps
away the flowers in Happy’s hand. She yells at them for abandoning Willy. Happy attempts
to appease her, but Biff goes in search of Willy. He finds Willy planting seeds in the garden
with a flashlight. Willy is consulting Ben about a $20,000 proposition. Biff approaches him to
say goodbye and tries to bring him inside. Willy moves into the house, followed by Biff, and
becomes angry again about Biff’s failure. Happy tries to calm Biff, but Biff and Willy erupt in
fury at each other. Biff starts to sob, which touches Willy. Everyone goes to bed except
Willy, who renews his conversation with Ben, elated at how great Biff will be with $20,000 of
insurance money. Linda soon calls out for Willy but gets no response. Biff and Happy listen
as well. They hear Willy’s car speed away.

In the requiem, Linda and Happy stand in shock after Willy’s poorly attended funeral. Biff
states that Willy had the wrong dreams. Charley defends Willy as a victim of his profession.
Ready to leave, Biff invites Happy to go back out West with him. Happy declares that he will
stick it out in New York to validate Willy’s death. Linda asks Willy for forgiveness for being
unable to cry. She begins to sob, repeating “We’re free. . . .” All exit, and the flute melody is
heard as the curtain falls.

Character List
Willy Loman
An insecure, self-deluded traveling salesman. Willy believes wholeheartedly in the
American Dream of easy success and wealth, but he never achieves it. Nor do his sons
fulfill his hope that they will succeed where he has failed. When Willy’s illusions begin to fail
under the pressing realities of his life, his mental health begins to unravel. The
overwhelming tensions caused by this disparity, as well as those caused by the societal
imperatives that drive Willy, form the essential conflict of Death of a Salesman.
Biff Loman
Willy’s thirty-four-year-old elder son. Biff led a charmed life in high school as a football star
with scholarship prospects, good male friends, and fawning female admirers. He failed
math, however, and did not have enough credits to graduate. Since then, his kleptomania
has gotten him fired from every job that he has held. Biff represents Willy’s vulnerable,
poetic, tragic side. He cannot ignore his instincts, which tell him to abandon Willy’s
paralyzing dreams and move out West to work with his hands. He ultimately fails to
reconcile his life with Willy’s expectations of him.

Happy Loman
Willy’s thirty-two-year-old younger son. Happy has lived in Biff’s shadow all of his life, but
he compensates by nurturing his relentless sex drive and professional ambition. Happy
represents Willy’s sense of self-importance, ambition, and blind servitude to societal
expectations. Although he works as an assistant to an assistant buyer in a department
store, Happy presents himself as supremely important. Additionally, he practices bad
business ethics and sleeps with the girlfriends of his superiors.

Linda Loman
Willy’s loyal, loving wife. Linda suffers through Willy’s grandiose dreams and self-delusions.
Occasionally, she seems to be taken in by Willy’s self-deluded hopes for future glory and
success, but at other times, she seems far more realistic and less fragile than her husband.
She has nurtured the family through all of Willy’s misguided attempts at success, and her
emotional strength and perseverance support Willy until his collapse.

Charley
Willy’s next-door neighbor. Charley owns a successful business and his son, Bernard, is a
wealthy, important lawyer. Willy is jealous of Charley’s success. Charley gives Willy money
to pay his bills, and Willy reveals at one point, choking back tears, that Charley is his only
friend.

Bernard
Bernard is Charley’s son and an important, successful lawyer. Although Willy used to mock
Bernard for studying hard, Bernard always loved Willy’s sons dearly and regarded Biff as a
hero. Bernard’s success is difficult for Willy to accept because his own sons’ lives do not
measure up.

Ben
Willy’s wealthy older brother. Ben has recently died and appears only in Willy’s
“daydreams.” Willy regards Ben as a symbol of the success that he so desperately craves
for himself and his sons.

The Woman
Willy’s mistress when Happy and Biff were in high school. The Woman’s attention and
admiration boost Willy’s fragile ego. When Biff catches Willy in his hotel room with The
Woman, he loses faith in his father, and his dream of passing math and going to college
dies.
Howard Wagner
Willy’s boss. Howard inherited the company from his father, whom Willy regarded as “a
masterful man” and “a prince.” Though much younger than Willy, Howard treats Willy with
condescension and eventually fires him, despite Willy’s wounded assertions that he named
Howard at his birth.

Stanley
A waiter at Frank’s Chop House. Stanley and Happy seem to be friends, or at least
acquaintances, and they banter about and ogle Miss Forsythe together before Biff and Willy
arrive at the restaurant.

Miss Forsythe and Letta

Two young women whom Happy and Biff meet at Frank’s Chop House. It seems likely that
Miss Forsythe and Letta are prostitutes, judging from Happy’s repeated comments about
their moral character and the fact that they are “on call.”

Jenny
Charley’s secretary.

Themes
The American Dream
Willy believes wholeheartedly in what he considers the promise of the American Dream—
that a “well liked” and “personally attractive” man in business will indubitably and deservedly
acquire the material comforts offered by modern American life. Oddly, his fixation with the
superficial qualities of attractiveness and likeability is at odds with a more gritty, more
rewarding understanding of the American Dream that identifies hard work without complaint
as the key to success. Willy’s interpretation of likeability is superficial—he childishly dislikes
Bernard because he considers Bernard a nerd. Willy’s blind faith in his stunted version of
the American Dream leads to his rapid psychological decline when he is unable to accept
the disparity between the Dream and his own life.

Abandonment
Willy’s life charts a course from one abandonment to the next, leaving him in greater
despair each time. Willy’s father leaves him and Ben when Willy is very young, leaving Willy
neither a tangible (money) nor an intangible (history) legacy. Ben eventually departs for
Alaska, leaving Willy to lose himself in a warped vision of the American Dream. Likely a
result of these early experiences, Willy develops a fear of abandonment, which makes him
want his family to conform to the American Dream. His efforts to raise perfect sons,
however, reflect his inability to understand reality. The young Biff, whom Willy considers the
embodiment of promise, drops Willy and Willy’s zealous ambitions for him when he finds
out about Willy’s adultery. Biff’s ongoing inability to succeed in business furthers his
estrangement from Willy. When, at Frank’s Chop House, Willy finally believes that Biff is on
the cusp of greatness, Biff shatters Willy’s illusions and, along with Happy, abandons the
deluded, babbling Willy in the washroom.
Betrayal
Willy’s primary obsession throughout the play is what he considers to be Biff’s betrayal of
his ambitions for him. Willy believes that he has every right to expect Biff to fulfill the
promise inherent in him. When Biff walks out on Willy’s ambitions for him, Willy takes this
rejection as a personal affront (he associates it with “insult” and “spite”). Willy, after all, is a
salesman, and Biff’s ego-crushing rebuff ultimately reflects Willy’s inability to sell him on the
American Dream—the product in which Willy himself believes most faithfully. Willy assumes
that Biff’s betrayal stems from Biff’s discovery of Willy’s affair with The Woman—a betrayal
of Linda’s love. Whereas Willy feels that Biff has betrayed him, Biff feels that Willy, a “phony
little fake,” has betrayed him with his unending stream of ego-stroking lies.

Symbols
Seeds
Seeds represent for Willy the opportunity to prove the worth of his labor, both as a
salesman and a father. His desperate, nocturnal attempt to grow vegetables signifies his
shame about barely being able to put food on the table and having nothing to leave his
children when he passes. Willy feels that he has worked hard but fears that he will not be
able to help his offspring any more than his own abandoning father helped him. The seeds
also symbolize Willy’s sense of failure with Biff. Despite the American Dream’s formula for
success, which Willy considers infallible, Willy’s efforts to cultivate and nurture Biff went
awry. Realizing that his all-American football star has turned into a lazy bum, Willy takes
Biff’s failure and lack of ambition as a reflection of his abilities as a father.

Diamonds
To Willy, diamonds represent tangible wealth and, hence, both validation of one’s labor
(and life) and the ability to pass material goods on to one’s offspring, two things that Willy
desperately craves. Correlatively, diamonds, the discovery of which made Ben a fortune,
symbolize Willy’s failure as a salesman. Despite Willy’s belief in the American Dream, a
belief unwavering to the extent that he passed up the opportunity to go with Ben to Alaska,
the Dream’s promise of financial security has eluded Willy. At the end of the play, Ben
encourages Willy to enter the “jungle” finally and retrieve this elusive diamond—that is, to
kill himself for insurance money in order to make his life meaningful.

Linda’s and The Woman’s Stockings

Willy’s strange obsession with the condition of Linda’s stockings foreshadows his later
flashback to Biff’s discovery of him and The Woman in their Boston hotel room. The
teenage Biff accuses Willy of giving away Linda’s stockings to The Woman. Stockings
assume a metaphorical weight as the symbol of betrayal and sexual infidelity. New
stockings are important for both Willy’s pride in being financially successful and thus able to
provide for his family and for Willy’s ability to ease his guilt about, and suppress the
memory of, his betrayal of Linda and Biff.

The Rubber Hose

The rubber hose is a stage prop that reminds the audience of Willy’s desperate attempts at
suicide. He has apparently attempted to kill himself by inhaling gas, which is, ironically, the
very substance essential to one of the most basic elements with which he must equip his
home for his family’s health and comfort—heat. Literal death by inhaling gas parallels the
metaphorical death that Willy feels in his struggle to afford such a basic necessity.

A STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE - Tennessee Williams -

1947
Blanche DuBois, a schoolteacher from Laurel, Mississippi, arrives at the New Orleans
apartment of her sister, Stella Kowalski. Despite the fact that Blanche seems to have fallen
out of close contact with Stella, she intends to stay at Stella’s apartment for an unspecified
but likely lengthy period of time, given the large trunk she has with her. Blanche tells Stella
that she lost Belle Reve, their ancestral home, following the death of all their remaining
relatives. She also mentions that she has been given a leave of absence from her teaching
position because of her bad nerves.
Though Blanche does not seem to have enough money to afford a hotel, she is disdainful of
the cramped quarters of the Kowalskis’ two-room apartment and of the apartment’s location
in a noisy, diverse, working-class neighborhood. Blanche’s social condescension wins her
the instant dislike of Stella’s husband, an auto-parts supply man of Polish descent
named Stanley Kowalski. It is clear that Stella was happy to leave behind her the social
pretensions of her background in exchange for the sexual gratification she gets from her
husband; she even is pregnant with his baby. Stanley immediately distrusts Blanche to the
extent that he suspects her of having cheated Stella out of her share of the family
inheritance. In the process of defending herself to Stanley, Blanche reveals that Belle Reve
was lost due to a foreclosed mortgage, a disclosure that signifies the dire nature of
Blanche’s financial circumstances. Blanche’s heavy drinking, which she attempts to conceal
from her sister and brother-in-law, is another sign that all is not well with Blanche.
The unhappiness that accompanies the animal magnetism of Stella and Stanley’s marriage
reveals itself when Stanley hosts a drunken poker game with his male friends at the
apartment. Blanche gets under Stanley’s skin, especially when she starts to win the
affections of his close friend Mitch. After Mitch has been absent for a while, speaking with
Blanche in the bedroom, Stanley erupts, storms into the bedroom, and throws the radio out
of the window. When Stella yells at Stanley and defends Blanche, Stanley beats her. The
men pull him off, the poker game breaks up, and Blanche and Stella escape to their
upstairs neighbor Eunice’s apartment. A short while later, Stanley is remorseful and cries
up to Stella to forgive him. To Blanche’s alarm, Stella returns to Stanley and embraces him
passionately. Mitch meets Blanche outside of the Kowalski flat and comforts her in her
distress.
The next day, Blanche tries to convince Stella to leave Stanley for a better man whose
social status equals Stella’s. Blanche suggests that she and Stella contact a millionaire
named Shep Huntleigh for help escaping from New Orleans; when Stella laughs at her,
Blanche reveals that she is completely broke. Stanley walks in as Blanche is making fun of
him and secretly overhears Blanche and Stella’s conversation. Later, he threatens Blanche
with hints that he has heard rumors of her disreputable past. She is visibly dismayed.

While Blanche is alone in the apartment one evening, waiting for Mitch to pick her up for a
date, a teenage boy comes by to collect money for the newspaper. Blanche doesn’t have
any money for him, but she hits on him and gives him a lustful kiss. Soon after the boy
departs, Mitch arrives, and they go on their date. When Blanche returns, she is exhausted
and clearly has been uneasy for the entire night about the rumors Stanley mentioned
earlier. In a surprisingly sincere heart-to-heart discussion with Mitch, Blanche reveals the
greatest tragedy of her past. Years ago, her young husband committed suicide after she
discovered and chastised him for his homosexuality. Mitch describes his own loss of a
former love, and he tells Blanche that they need each other.

When the next scene begins, about one month has passed. It is the afternoon of Blanche’s
birthday. Stella is preparing a dinner for Blanche, Mitch, Stanley, and herself, when Stanley
comes in to tell her that he has learned news of Blanche’s sordid past. He says that after
losing the DuBois mansion, Blanche moved into a fleabag motel from which she was
eventually evicted because of her numerous sexual liaisons. Also, she was fired from her
job as a schoolteacher because the principal discovered that she was having an affair with
a teenage student. Stella is horrified to learn that Stanley has told Mitch these stories about
Blanche.

The birthday dinner comes and goes, but Mitch never arrives. Stanley indicates to Blanche
that he is aware of her past. For a birthday present, he gives her a one-way bus ticket back
to Laurel. Stanley’s cruelty so disturbs Stella that it appears the Kowalski household is
about to break up, but the onset of Stella’s labor prevents the imminent fight.

Several hours later, Blanche, drunk, sits alone in the apartment. Mitch, also drunk, arrives
and repeats all he’s learned from Stanley. Eventually Blanche confesses that the stories are
true, but she also reveals the need for human affection she felt after her husband’s death.
Mitch tells Blanche that he can never marry her, saying she isn’t fit to live in the same
house as his mother. Having learned that Blanche is not the chaste lady she pretended to
be, Mitch tries to have sex with Blanche, but she forces him to leave by yelling “Fire!” to
attract the attention of passersby outside.

Later, Stanley returns from the hospital to find Blanche even more drunk. She tells him that
she will soon be leaving New Orleans with her former suitor Shep Huntleigh, who is now a
millionaire. Stanley knows that Blanche’s story is entirely in her imagination, but he is so
happy about his baby that he proposes they each celebrate their good fortune. Blanche
spurns Stanley, and things grow contentious. When she tries to step past him, he refuses to
move out of her way. Blanche becomes terrified to the point that she smashes a bottle on
the table and threatens to smash Stanley in the face. Stanley grabs her arm and says that
it’s time for the “date” they’ve had set up since Blanche’s arrival. Blanche resists, but
Stanley uses his physical strength to overcome her, and he carries her to bed. The pulsing
music indicates that Stanley rapes Blanche.

The next scene takes place weeks later, as Stella and her neighbor Eunice pack Blanche’s
bags. Blanche is in the bath, and Stanley plays poker with his buddies in the front room. A
doctor will arrive soon to take Blanche to an insane asylum, but Blanche believes she is
leaving to join her millionaire. Stella confesses to Eunice that she simply cannot allow
herself to believe Blanche’s assertion that Stanley raped her. When Blanche emerges from
the bathroom, her deluded talk makes it clear that she has lost her grip on reality.

The doctor arrives with a nurse, and Blanche initially panics and struggles against them
when they try to take her away. Stanley and his friends fight to subdue Blanche, while
Eunice holds Stella back to keep her from interfering. Mitch begins to cry. Finally, the doctor
approaches Blanche in a gentle manner and convinces her to leave with him. She allows
him to lead her away and does not look back or say goodbye as she goes. Stella sobs with
her child in her arms, and Stanley comforts her with loving words and caresses.

Character List
Blanche DuBois
Stella’s older sister, who was a high school English teacher in Laurel, Mississippi, until she
was forced to leave her post. Blanche is a loquacious and fragile woman around the age of
thirty. After losing Belle Reve, the DuBois family home, Blanche arrives in New Orleans at
the Kowalski apartment and eventually reveals that she is completely destitute. Though she
has strong sexual urges and has had many lovers, she puts on the airs of a woman who
has never known indignity. She avoids reality, preferring to live in her own imagination. As
the play progresses, Blanche’s instability grows along with her misfortune. Stanley sees
through Blanche and finds out the details of her past, destroying her relationship with his
friend Mitch. Stanley also destroys what’s left of Blanche by raping her and then having her
committed to an insane asylum.

Stella Kowalski
Blanche’s younger sister, about twenty-five years old and of a mild disposition that visibly
sets her apart from her more vulgar neighbors. Stella possesses the same timeworn
aristocratic heritage as Blanche, but she jumped the sinking ship in her late teens and left
Mississippi for New Orleans. There, Stella married lower-class Stanley, with whom she
shares a robust sexual relationship. Stella’s union with Stanley is both animal and spiritual,
violent but renewing. After Blanche’s arrival, Stella is torn between her sister and her
husband. Eventually, she stands by Stanley, perhaps in part because she gives birth to his
child near the play’s end. While she loves and pities Blanche, she cannot bring herself to
believe Blanche’s accusations that Stanley dislikes Blanche, and she eventually dismisses
Blanche’s claim that Stanley raped her. Stella’s denial of reality at the play’s end shows that
she has more in common with her sister than she thinks.

Stanley Kowalski
The husband of Stella. Stanley is the epitome of vital force. He is loyal to his friends,
passionate to his wife, and heartlessly cruel to Blanche. With his Polish ancestry, he
represents the new, heterogeneous America. He sees himself as a social leveler, and
wishes to destroy Blanche’s social pretensions. Around thirty years of age, Stanley, who
fought in World War II, now works as an auto-parts salesman. Practicality is his forte, and
he has no patience for Blanche’s distortions of the truth. He lacks ideals and imagination.
By the play’s end, he is a disturbing degenerate: he beats his wife and rapes his sister-in-
law. Horrifyingly, he shows no remorse. Yet, Blanche is an outcast from society, while
Stanley is the proud family man.

Harold “Mitch” Mitchell

Stanley’s army friend, coworker, and poker buddy, who courts Blanche until he finds out
that she lied to him about her sordid past. Mitch, like Stanley, is around thirty years of age.
Though he is clumsy, sweaty, and has unrefined interests like muscle building, Mitch is
more sensitive and more gentlemanly than Stanley and his other friends, perhaps because
he lives with his mother, who is slowly dying. Blanche and Mitch are an unlikely match:
Mitch doesn’t fit the bill of the chivalric hero, the man Blanche dreams will come to rescue
her. Nevertheless, they bond over their lost loves, and when the doctor takes Blanche away
against her will, Mitch is the only person present besides Stella who despairs over the
tragedy.

Eunice
Stella’s friend, upstairs neighbor, and landlady. Eunice and her husband, Steve, represent
the low-class, carnal life that Stella has chosen for herself. Like Stella, Eunice accepts her
husband’s affections despite his physical abuse of her. At the end of the play, when Stella
hesitates to stay with Stanley at Blanche’s expense, Eunice forbids Stella to question her
decision and tells her she has no choice but to disbelieve Blanche.

Allan Grey
The young man with poetic aspirations whom Blanche fell in love with and married as a
teenager. One afternoon, she discovered Allan in bed with an older male friend. That
evening at a ball, after she announced her disgust at his homosexuality, he ran outside and
shot himself in the head. Allan’s death, which marked the end of Blanche’s sexual
innocence, has haunted her ever since. Long dead by the time of the play’s action, Allan
never appears onstage.

A Young Collector
A teenager who comes to the Kowalskis’ door to collect for the newspaper when Blanche is
home alone. The boy leaves bewildered after Blanche hits on him and gives him a
passionate farewell kiss. He embodies Blanche’s obsession with youth and presumably
reminds her of her teenage love, the young poet Allan Grey, whom she married and lost to
suicide. Blanche’s flirtation with the newspaper collector also displays her unhealthy sexual
preoccupation with teenage boys, which we learn of later in the play.

Shep Huntleigh
A former suitor of Blanche’s whom she met again a year before her arrival in New Orleans
while vacationing in Miami. Despite the fact that Shep is married, Blanche hopes he will
provide the financial support for her and Stella to escape from Stanley. As Blanche’s mental
stability deteriorates, her fantasy that Shep is coming to sweep her away becomes more
and more real to her. Shep never appears onstage.

Steve
Stanley’s poker buddy who lives upstairs with his wife, Eunice. Like Stanley, Steve is a
brutish, hot-blooded, physically fit male and an abusive husband.

Pablo
Stanley’s poker buddy. Like Stanley and Steve, Steve is physically fit and brutish. Pablo is
Hispanic, and his friendship with Steve, Stanley, and Mitch emphasizes the culturally
diverse nature of their neighborhood.

An Unnamed Black Woman

In Scene One, the unnamed Black woman is sitting on the steps talking to Eunice when
Blanche arrives, and she finds Stanley’s openly sexual gestures toward Stella hilarious.
Later, in Scene Ten, we see her scurrying across the stage in the night as she rifles through
a prostitute’s lost handbag.
A Doctor
At the play’s finale, the doctor arrives to whisk Blanche off to an asylum. He and the nurse
initially seem to be heartless institutional caretakers, but, in the end, the doctor appears
more kindly as he takes off his jacket and leads Blanche away. This image of the doctor
ironically conforms to Blanche’s notions of the chivalric Southern gentleman who will offer
her salvation.

A Mexican Woman
A vendor of Mexican funeral decorations who frightens Blanche by issuing the plaintive call
“Flores para los muertos,” which means “Flowers for the dead.”

A Nurse
Also called the “Matron,” she accompanies the doctor to collect Blanche and bring her to an
institution. She possesses a severe, unfeminine manner and has a talent for subduing
hysterical patients.

Shaw
A supply man who is Stanley’s coworker and his source for stories of Blanche’s
disreputable past in Laurel, Mississippi. Shaw travels regularly through Laurel.

Prostitute
Moments before Stanley rapes Blanche, the back wall of the Kowalskis’ apartment
becomes transparent, and Blanche sees a prostitute in the street being pursued by a male
drunkard. The prostitute’s situation evokes Blanche’s own predicament. After the prostitute
and the drunkard pass, the Black woman scurries by with the prostitute’s lost handbag in
hand.

Themes
Fantasy’s Inability to Overcome Reality
Although Williams’s protagonist in A Streetcar Named Desire is the romantic Blanche
DuBois, the play is a work of social realism. Blanche explains to Mitch that she fibs because
she refuses to accept the hand fate has dealt her. Lying to herself and to others allows her
to make life appear as it should be rather than as it is. Stanley, a practical man firmly
grounded in the physical world, disdains Blanche’s fabrications and does everything he can
to unravel them. The antagonistic relationship between Blanche and Stanley is a struggle
between appearances and reality. It propels the play’s plot and creates an overarching
tension. Ultimately, Blanche’s attempts to remake her own and Stella’s existences—to
rejuvenate her life and to save Stella from a life with Stanley—fail.
One of the main ways Williams dramatizes fantasy’s inability to overcome reality is through
an exploration of the boundary between exterior and interior. The set of the play consists of
the two-room Kowalski apartment and the surrounding street. Williams’s use of a flexible
set that allows the street to be seen at the same time as the interior of the home expresses
the notion that the home is not a domestic sanctuary. The Kowalskis’ apartment cannot be
a self-defined world that is impermeable to greater reality. The characters leave and enter
the apartment throughout the play, often bringing with them the problems they encounter in
the larger environment. For example, Blanche refuses to leave her prejudices against the
working class behind her at the door. The most notable instance of this effect occurs just
before Stanley rapes Blanche, when the back wall of the apartment becomes transparent to
show the struggles occurring on the street, foreshadowing the violation that is about to take
place in the Kowalskis’ home.

Though reality triumphs over fantasy in A Streetcar Named Desire, Williams suggests that
fantasy is an important and useful tool. At the end of the play, Blanche’s retreat into her
own private fantasies enables her to partially shield herself from reality’s harsh blows.
Blanche’s insanity emerges as she retreats fully into herself, leaving the objective world
behind in order to avoid accepting reality. In order to escape fully, however, Blanche must
come to perceive the exterior world as that which she imagines in her head. Thus, objective
reality is not an antidote to Blanche’s fantasy world; rather, Blanche adapts the exterior
world to fit her delusions. In both the physical and the psychological realms, the boundary
between fantasy and reality is permeable. Blanche’s final, deluded happiness suggests
that, to some extent, fantasy is a vital force at play in every individual’s experience, despite
reality’s inevitable triumph.

The Relationship between Sex and Death

Blanche’s fear of death manifests itself in her fears of aging and of lost beauty. She refuses
to tell anyone her true age or to appear in harsh light that will reveal her faded looks. She
seems to believe that by continually asserting her sexuality, especially toward men younger
than herself, she will be able to avoid death and return to the world of teenage bliss she
experienced before her husband’s suicide.

However, beginning in Scene One, Williams suggests that Blanche’s sexual history is in
fact a cause of her downfall. When she first arrives at the Kowalskis’, Blanche says she
rode a streetcar named Desire, then transferred to a streetcar named Cemeteries, which
brought her to a street named Elysian Fields. This journey, the precursor to the play,
allegorically represents the trajectory of Blanche’s life. The Elysian Fields are the land of
the dead in Greek mythology. Blanche’s lifelong pursuit of her sexual desires has led to her
eviction from Belle Reve, her ostracism from Laurel, and, at the end of the play, her
expulsion from society at large.

Sex leads to death for others Blanche knows as well. Throughout the play, Blanche is
haunted by the deaths of her ancestors, which she attributes to their “epic fornications.” Her
husband’s suicide results from her disapproval of his homosexuality. The message is that
indulging one’s desire in the form of unrestrained promiscuity leads to forced departures
and unwanted ends. In Scene Nine, when the Mexican woman appears selling “flowers for
the dead,” Blanche reacts with horror because the woman announces Blanche’s fate. Her
fall into madness can be read as the ending brought about by her dual flaws—her inability
to act appropriately on her desire and her desperate fear of human mortality. Sex and death
are intricately and fatally linked in Blanche’s experience.

Dependence on Men
A Streetcar Named Desire presents a sharp critique of the way the institutions and attitudes
of postwar America placed restrictions on women’s lives. Williams uses Blanche’s and
Stella’s dependence on men to expose and critique the treatment of women during the
transition from the old to the new South. Both Blanche and Stella see male companions as
their only means to achieve happiness, and they depend on men for both their sustenance
and their self-image. Blanche recognizes that Stella could be happier without her physically
abusive husband, Stanley. Yet, the alternative Blanche proposes—contacting Shep
Huntleigh for financial support—still involves complete dependence on men. When Stella
chooses to remain with Stanley, she chooses to rely on, love, and believe in a man instead
of her sister. Williams does not necessarily criticize Stella—he makes it quite clear that
Stanley represents a much more secure future than Blanche does.

For herself, Blanche sees marriage to Mitch as her means of escaping destitution. Men’s
exploitation of Blanche’s sexuality has left her with a poor reputation. This reputation makes
Blanche an unattractive marriage prospect, but, because she is destitute, Blanche sees
marriage as her only possibility for survival. When Mitch rejects Blanche because of
Stanley’s gossip about her reputation, Blanche immediately thinks of another man—the
millionaire Shep Huntleigh—who might rescue her. Because Blanche cannot see around
her dependence on men, she has no realistic conception of how to rescue herself. Blanche
does not realize that her dependence on men will lead to her downfall rather than her
salvation. By relying on men, Blanche puts her fate in the hands of others.

Symbols
Shadows and Cries
As Blanche and Stanley begin to quarrel in Scene Ten, various oddly shaped shadows
begin to appear on the wall behind her. Discordant noises and jungle cries also occur as
Blanche begins to descend into madness. All of these effects combine to dramatize
Blanche’s final breakdown and departure from reality in the face of Stanley’s physical
threat. When she loses her sanity in her final struggle against Stanley, Blanche retreats
entirely into her own world. Whereas she originally colors her perception of reality according
to her wishes, at this point in the play she ignores reality altogether.

The Varsouviana Polka

The Varsouviana is the polka tune to which Blanche and her young husband, Allan Grey,
were dancing when she last saw him alive. Earlier that day, she had walked in on him in
bed with an older male friend. The three of them then went out dancing together, pretending
that nothing had happened. In the middle of the Varsouviana, Blanche turned to Allen and
told him that he “disgusted” her. He ran away and shot himself in the head.

The polka music plays at various points in A Streetcar Named Desire, when Blanche is
feeling remorse for Allen’s death. The first time we hear it is in Scene One, when Stanley
meets Blanche and asks her about her husband. Its second appearance occurs when
Blanche tells Mitch the story of Allen Grey. From this point on, the polka plays increasingly
often, and it always drives Blanche to distraction. She tells Mitch that it ends only after she
hears the sound of a gunshot in her head.
The polka and the moment it evokes represent Blanche’s loss of innocence. The suicide of
the young husband Blanche loved dearly was the event that triggered her mental decline.
Since then, Blanche hears the Varsouviana whenever she panics and loses her grip on
reality.

“It’s Only a Paper Moon”

In Scene Seven, Blanche sings this popular ballad while she bathes. The song’s lyrics
describe the way love turns the world into a “phony” fantasy. The speaker in the song says
that if both lovers believe in their imagined reality, then it’s no longer “make-believe.” These
lyrics sum up Blanche’s approach to life. She believes that her fibbing is only her means of
enjoying a better way of life and is therefore essentially harmless.

As Blanche sits in the tub singing “It’s Only a Paper Moon,” Stanley tells Stella the details of
Blanche’s sexually corrupt past. Williams ironically juxtaposes Blanche’s fantastical
understanding of herself with Stanley’s description of Blanche’s real nature. In reality,
Blanche is a sham who feigns propriety and sexual modesty. Once Mitch learns the truth
about Blanche, he can no longer believe in Blanche’s tricks and lies.

Meat
In Scene One, Stanley throws a package of meat at his adoring Stella for her to catch. The
action sends Eunice and the Black woman into peals of laughter. Presumably, they’ve
picked up on the sexual innuendo behind Stanley’s gesture. In hurling the meat at Stella,
Stanley states the sexual proprietorship he holds over her. Stella’s delight in catching
Stanley’s meat signifies her sexual infatuation with him.