tesina individual and social isolation as a consequence of human

UNIVERSIDAD VERACRUZANA
FACULTAD DE IDIOMAS
TESINA
INDIVIDUAL AND SOCIAL ISOLATION AS A
CONSEQUENCE OF HUMAN INTERACTION IN
FAULKNER’S LIGHT IN AUGUST AND STEINBECK’S OF
MICE AND MEN
PARA OBTENER EL TÍTULO DE LICENCIADO EN
LENGUA INGLESA
PRESENTA:
CARLOS AMADOR ESPINOSA TORRES
DIRECTOR:
MTRO. VÍCTOR HUGO VÁSQUEZ RENTERÍA
ASESOR DE LENGUA:
LIC. JULIO AGUILAR MORALES
XALAPA, VERACRUZ
0
JULIO 2013
Mi dedicatoria para mi amiga, fiel y confidente Alicia Araujo. Más que una abuela.
Una heroína.
A mis padres y hermana, Susana, Amador y Karla por todo su valioso apoyo a este
proyecto de vida.
A Víctor Hugo, un amigo, un ejemplo.
A Julio y Fernando, por su paciencia y dedicación a este trabajo.
Gracias.
1
Abstract
Throughout this paper, the subject of matter will focus on the complexity of studying
individual and social Isolation from the perspective of two modern pieces of work in
American Literature. The first, an analysis of Light in August (1932) by William Faulkner
addressed to find the theme of isolation in individuals due to their failure when interacting
with other people. On the other hand we shall compare it with Steinbeck’s Of Mice and
Men (1937) which issues concerned to the character’s social isolation in the story may rise
in some individuals whom do not seem too far from our reality as human beings. Therefore,
literary characters must be taken as instruments in order to analyze their behaviors based on
theorical studies concerned to the depiction of isolation in Literature. This paper aims to
establish similarities and differences between both works and their relationship with other
texts within Modern American Literature by being members of “The Lost Generation”
during the first half of the twentieth century.
Keywords: Isolation, Alienation, Loneliness, Solitude, American 20th Century Literature,
Modern literature, individuals, society.
2
Individual and Social Isolation as a Consequence
of Human Interaction in Faulkner’s Light in
August and Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men
INTRODUCTION ................................................................................................................................. 4
CHAPTER 1: “DEFINING CONCEPTS” ............................................................................................ 8
1.1 CONLIFFE AND HIS DEPICTION OF ISOLATION IN LITERATURE ...................................... 8
1.2 BIORDI & NICHOLSON’S SOCIAL ISOLATION .................................................................... 10
1.3 ALIENATION IN AMERICAN LITERATURE ........................................................................... 13
CHAPTER 2: “INDIVIDUAL AND SOCIAL ISOLATION IN TWO MODERN AMERICAN NOVELS:
THE CASE OF WILLIAM FAULKNER’S LIGHT IN AUGUST AND JOHN STEINBECK’S OF MICE
AND MEN” ........................................................................................................................................ 17
2.1 INTRODUCTION TO THE THEME OF ISOLATION IN LITERATURE ................................. 17
2.2 THE THEME OF ISOLATION IN THE MODERN AMERICAN NOVEL .................................. 19
2.3 WILLIAM FAULKNER’S LIGHT IN AUGUST HISTORICAL BACKGROUND ....................... 24
2.4 JOHN STEINBECK’S OF MICE AND MEN BACKGROUND ................................................. 27
CHAPTER 3: “A PRACTICAL STUDY: ISOLATION IN FAULKNER’S AND STEINBECK’S
CHARACTERS”................................................................................................................................ 30
3.1 JOE CHRISTMAS’ INDIVIDUAL ISOLATION IN LIGHT IN AUGUST .................................... 30
3.2 GEORGE AND LENNY’S SOCIAL ISOLATION IN OF MICE AND MEN ............................... 36
CONCLUSION .................................................................................................................................. 42
REFERENCES .................................................................................................................................. 44
3
INTRODUCTION
We are born alone, we live alone, we die alone; only through our love and
friendship can we create the illusion for the
moment that we are not alone.
Orson Welles
The themes of isolation and social isolation are often described as a negative human
condition in Literature portraying individuals who are exposed to experiment feelings of
either solitude or loneliness through their lives. From William’s Shakespeare classic tragic
heroes -Hamlet, Othello, Macbeth- to modern American isolaters –Huckleberry Finn, Jay
Gatsby, Holden Caulfield - the idea of being isolated or alienated from one self’s network
and society have always been a subject of matter for certain pieces of literature as universal
ideas are explored by writers and non-writers. According to one of the specialists in the
literary field with his study On Isolation, Mark Conliffe says that its origins in Literature
can be traced back since biblical times when St. Matthew (4: 1-11) described Jesus’
isolation to the Holy city in order to avoid to be tempted by the Wilderness, “Then the devil
took him to the holy city and had him stand on the highest point of the temple.” (2006: 11)
Although little research has been addressed to deal about this topic, we are concerned to
find the theme of isolation in two modern American novels as our main objective for this
paper; the case of William Faulkner’s character Joe Christmas in Light in August (1932)
and George and Lenny’s social isolation in John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men (1937) that
will be based on theorical aspects and their respective work’s criticism. Hence, we shall
identify, compare, discuss and analyze the reasons that led them to his isolation or how they
4
gradually became isolated in both stories. In the first chapter, we will use texts written by
Sidney Finkelstein, Biordi & Nicholson and Mary Lystad that will support our theoretical
framework as well as Conliffe’s. Thus, we shall focus our attention on philosophical,
psychological and sociological studies in order to reveal the reasons of this social
phenomenon and its close relationship with literature. Also, we will compare it among
similar concepts often confused such as alienation, estrangement, solitude or loneliness
which certainly are all related to our object of matter but sharing a slight difference
between them. Therefore, we won’t try to get any deeper due to the complexity of the
theme for itself concerning to other social sciences.
The second part has been aimed to give a general overview of the theme of isolation in
Universal Literature as well as in Modern American Literature specifically, literary
movement originated towards the end of the ninetieth century and beginning of the
twentieth according to critic Malcolm Bradbury in Childs and Fowler (2005: 145) One of
the groundbreaking writers of the era, Ernest Hemmingway, discusses the origins of
modern American Literature stated in a quote dedicated to Mark Twain’s novel The
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn which says: “All modern American Literature comes from
one book by Mark Twain called “Huckleberry Finn.” All American writing comes from
that. There was nothing before. There has been nothing as good since.”1 As an artistic
movement developed through the twentieth century, many modern revolutionary novelists
of the period such as James Joyce, Marcel Proust, John Dos Passos, Virginia Woolf and
William Faulkner challenged the way writers used to perceive the world during an age of
1
Rasmussen, Kent, R., (2005) Critical Companion to Mark Twain: A literary reference to His life and Work.
Facts On File, Inc. United States of America. p, 199.
5
transition for western societies in all senses; they began to work on innovative literary
techniques (stream of consciousness, interior monologue, juxtaposition, use of myths, etc.)
that will be the main contribution to post-modernist writers. Many novels, novellas, short
stories and poems were written based on naturalist, existentialist and realistic ideas
previously developed by western philosophers and psychologists (Marx, Engels,
Kierkegaard, Freud, Jung, Nietzsche, etc.) whose radical works were very important to
break with traditional beliefs often portrayed in literature.
Also for this chapter, professor Peter Childs will define, in general terms, Modernism as a
new cultural movement in the world of arts moving to a dehumanization of their world as
described in T.S Eliot’s poem The Waste Land in 1922. Moreover, several socio-economic,
cultural, historical and political conditions in the United States will be given in order to
prove the reasons that turned many people to their isolation in the past of this country Civil War, World War I, the Jazz Age and the Wall Street Crash of 1929 or also known as
the Great Depression- as a consequence of meaningful events in the novel’s background.
Therefore, we ought to contextualize them in William Faulkner’s Light in August (1932)
and John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men (1937) as well as including several more works
which are also related to the theme of isolation within this kind of literature.
The last chapter will be divided into two different sections, the first one dedicated to Joe
Christmas’ individual isolation in Faulkner’s Light in August and the second one to George
and Lenny’s social isolation in Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men whom seem to share their
isolation with several more characters included in the story even when interacting
themselves (Candy, Slim, Crooks, Curley and Curley’s wife.) Furthermore, a proper
analysis for each work will be supported on critical essays that also deal with some aspects
6
related to those of isolation in Faulkner’s novel; Nathalie Virgintino’s essay Joe Christmas
and the Search for Identity in William Faulkner’s Light in August (2011) and Bernice B.
Miller’s doctoral thesis William Faulkner’s Thomas Sutpen, Quentin Compson, Joe
Christmas: A Study of the Hero-Archetype (1977) both will be used in order to find these
themes in the character Joe Christmas . For Steinbeck’s novel we will use Fredrik
Eliasson’s essay Naturalism and Friendship in Of Mice and Men (2010) as well as Michel
J. Meyer’s essay titled One is the loneliest number: Steinbeck’s Paradoxical Attraction and
Repulsion to Isolation/Solitude included in his self- edited version of The Essential
Criticism of John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men (2009). Finally, a personal opinion about
the theme of isolation in Literature and modern life will close this paper as well as stating
the reasons that led our characters (Joe Christmas, George and Lenny) to his isolation in
their respective novels.
7
CHAPTER 1
“DEFINING CONCEPTS”
“If I find myself in the middle of a desert and my car has broken
down, I am both separated from my usual wholes, but I am
neither alienated nor estranged. I am only isolated. Despite the
fact that I am alone, my activities in isolation will be conditioned
by what I know, by what I take from the past or my roots, not
just by present surroundings.”
-Mark Conliffe, On Isolation-
1.1 CONLIFFE AND HIS DEPICTION OF ISOLATION IN LITERATURE
The theme of isolation in Literature has been a subject matter for many teachers, critics and
students who are also concerned about this “social problem” in the field of social studies as
well as novels, short-stories, essays, poems or plays that depict feelings of solitude,
loneliness or alienation often portrayed in the characters’ personality. Professor Mark R.
Conliffe depicts the theme of isolation in Raymond Carver’s short stories by introducing us
to the theme of isolation into a literary-social context. In his essay On Isolation (2006) as a
Russian literature teacher, he recalls the origins of this psychological individual process in
literature during the nineteenth century mostly in western societies by saying that in
Dostoyevsky’s A Writer’s Diary (1876) he observes how people have cut themselves off
from the past and how they are in danger of destroying the sources that could provide for
their future. (2006: 1) Conliffe emphasizes how the individual willingly detaches himself
from the whole, yet suffers for it. He notes, too, that developments in society are harming
its unity, yet society fails to guard itself and individuals remain detached. Moreover,
8
Conliffe points out how Dostoyevsky achieved this temporal and spatial isolation’s
description which was defined by Russian society in the 1870’s decade. (p.2) However, this
is not the only place where isolation is embraced by members of a certain society; Conliffe
highlights four more writers who also share Dostoyevsky’s condition in literature: Homer,
William Shakespeare, Herman Melville and Virginia Woolf.
According to Conliffe, disassociation and separation are the two main forces why
individuals have decided to be isolated. Human beings live, work, and play in groups but to
be separated from the whole of humanity can disorient us, debilitate us, and even make us
question about our place in this world. Sometimes isolation can bring positive or negative
results to the individual, Conliffe discusses that “people seek isolation to think, to rest and
to recover. They are isolated to consider their actions, to prepare for an event, or to heal
their suffering body, mind or soul.” (p.3). He shares the idea with psychologist Anthony
Storr in his work Solitude: A return to the self (1988) who defines “isolation” as:
An individual can choose isolation and can be isolated by forces outside
his control. Obviously, isolation can be active and passive. The separation
is not just physical, but can be social and mental, too… The causes,
motives, and definition of each particular isolation shape his separation
from the whole.2
These are fundamental behaviors based on personal circumstances that can turn an
individual to his isolation; the feeling of being placed apart from society -or even from
ourselves- can be sometimes voluntary or involuntary. Nevertheless, there are three similar
concepts related to the term “isolation” that share a slightly difference in their meaning: to
2
Conliffe, Mark. (1999) Isolation and Russian fiction, 1877-1890: Garshin, Chekhov and Korolenko.
Graduate Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures in the University of Toronto. p, 16
9
be an outsider, a stranger or alienated are read as being separate, but not that any force has
established this separation. From the point of view that labels them, there is no sense that
they have been made to be apart. An outsider, stranger, or an alienated person can be
spotted readily, but the isolated one is isolated on account of earlier stages of association
and separation. This implies a temporal distinction that allows for the process of isolation to
occur. Despite the isolated individual's loneliness, its process characterizes for having once
belonged to a certain group of people or his roots in the past. The literary depiction in the
dictionary as a intransitive verb, stresses out that to isolate is to take away something or
someone from the larger unit. Therefore, outsiders, strangers and aliened people can choose
to be isolated by separating from a whole –voluntary or involuntary- because he or she once
felt part of a group, but the outsider, stranger, or alien have different ideals to “isolators”
which we shall discuss them in the next sections.
1.2 BIORDI & NICHOLSON’S SOCIAL ISOLATION
Now that we have already an idea of what isolation may refer to in a literary context,
Sociologists, Anthropologists and Healthcare researchers would contribute for this section
to the development of the social concept of isolation as a consequence of human interaction
within a certain group of people, society or community. As it has been discussed in the
previous chapter, to be considered individually isolated, it requires that the individual was
segregated at least once voluntary or involuntary from a whole– group of people, places or
objects- which he does not feel to belong, also called estrangement. In order to study these
behaviors, Biordi and Nicholson (2009) present us their research Social Isolation, which
has been designed to understand this psychological phenomenon at social levels often
manifested in adult people around world societies. They begin to analyze the key word
10
“Belonging” as a multi-dimensional social force of relatedness to persons, places or objects
which we are connected with. They state that “if belonging is connectedness, then social
isolation is distancing of an individual, psychologically, or physically or both, from his or
her network of desired or needed relationships with other persons.” (p.85) They continue
arguing that healthcare literature has portrayed social isolation as typically accompanied by
feelings related to loss or marginality. “Apartness or aloneness, often described as solitude,
may also be part of the concept of social isolation, in that is a distancing from one’s
network, but this state may be accompanied by more positive feelings and is often
voluntary initiated by the isolate.”
3
However, Lin (1986) recognizes four layers in the
nature of isolation as a social concept: First, the outermost layer is community, where one
feels integrated or isolated from the larger social structure. Secondly, organizations or
social groups whom we interact with (work, school, church, etc.) in our lifetime followed
by a layer closer to the person, that is, confidantes (friends, family or significant others).
Finally, the innermost layer is that one related to the individual as a human being and his
intellectual ability, or the senses which to establish and interpret relationships. (1986: 86)
While attempting to adapt this social phenomenon into Modern American Literature, it can
be identified in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel The Great Gatsby (1925) where the protagonist
of the story – Jay Gatsby- can be deduced to cover the four layers of isolation described by
Lin who lives isolated from his society/community at a Big Mansion in Long Island, New
York. He is socially isolated from the aristocracy (division between West Egg and East
Egg) detached from the woman he loves (Daisy Buchanan), besides emotionally isolated.
Geographically, characters live in the mist of both sides of the island due to the social status
3
Ibid.
11
they belong to; the “West Egg” side represents a place of wealthy families reigned by
money and corruption. In the other hand, the “East Egg” side is generally described as less
sophisticated and more innocent kind of people who have not been consumed yet by
material possessions, money and greed. By far the most representative novelists of the Jazz
Age, Francis Scott Fitzgerald writes his third novel named The Great Gatsby dealing with
themes of isolation and social isolation as in his two previous novels This Side of the
Paradise (1920) and The Beautiful and the Damned (1922). His unique talent to describe
Gatsby’s environment during the twenties is described as an isolated human being whose
will to squander money and desire for Daisy’s love is never regarded. Set out in his New
York, the story is told mostly from Gatsby’s neighbor point of view (Nick Carraway); a
young man whose failure to deal with female relationships (Jordan Baker) is achieved.
Marriage, capitalism and social class struggles are only a few reasons to be physically and
mentally isolated from the old American aristocratic society at his big mansion.
Nevertheless Gatsby’s fancy parties are just an excuse to avoid his loneliness, as well as the
narrator reveals his fear of loneliness when he mentions his thirtieth birthday, the fear of
aging seems to be tied up to his fear of isolation.
It was seven o’clock when we got into the coupe with him and started for
Long Island. Tom talked incessantly, exulting and laughing, but his voice
was remote from Jordan and me as the foreign clamor on the sidewalk or the
tumult of the elevated overhead. Human sympathy has its limits, and we
were content to let all their tragic arguments fade with city lights behind.
Thirty – the promise of a decade of loneliness, a thinning list of single men
to know, a thinning brief-case of enthusiasm, thinning hair. But there was
Jordan beside me, who, unlike Daisy, was too wise ever to carry wellforgotten dreams from age to age. As we passed over the dark bridge her
12
wan face fell lazily against my coat’s shoulder and the formidable stroke of
thirty died away with the reassuring pressure of her hand.
(Fitzgerald, 1925: p.143)
Poetically, in this passage Fitzgerald reveals the social isolation atmosphere of New York’s
Long Island throughout his social characters’ prose, Gatsby’s fatal destiny and Nick’s fear
of aging seems to be linked with external aspects of American society instead of
existentialist theories which contributed to such human behaviors.
1.3 ALIENATION IN AMERICAN LITERATURE
This is where another similar concept emerges: the term alienation has gained its prominent
place in the fields of psychological and sociological thinking, as well as contemporary
studies which have been directed to analyze human relationships. According to researcher
Mary H. Lystad in Social Aspects of Alienation: An annotated Bibliography (1969), she
defines alienation as a social phenomenon by stating that:
Alienation is seen as a sign of personal dissatisfaction with certain structural
elements of society; it has been related particularly to economic and
political elements. The dissatisfaction has been defined in the more recent
studies in terms of expression by individual of feelings of powerlessness,
meaningless, normlessness, social isolation, and self-estrangement. (p. 90)
From her point of view, it can be deduced that alienation expresses itself in different ways
by different people. Some individuals feel discomforted towards society and they decide to
become alienated. The self-estrangement that Lystad mentions at the end of her quote refers
to Karl Marx’s early idea of individualization as being separated from human nature
aspects (or relationships) as a consequence of living in a society stratified into social
13
classes. In his Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 powerful capitalists
systems are said to facilitate “the worker’s alienation from his product not only that his
labor becomes an object, an external existence, but that it exists outside him, independently,
as something alien to him, and that it becomes a power on its own confronting him; it
means that the life which he has conferred on the object confronts him as something hostile
and alien (Finkelstein, 1985: 108). Hence, these socio-economic conditions developed by
the United States of America during the first half of the twentieth century facilitated the
individual’s disassociation from his/her work who lived in a country that still possesses one
of the most powerful economic systems in the planet. In addition, American critic Sidney
Finkelstein also discusses Marx’s theories which say that “the very power of money capital,
both in its capacity to “multiply itself” and its position as the purchaser of all other values,
makes it a force for alienation and impoverishment of life.” (p.141) As well as marriage,
race, overpower and a “humanized nature” are other forces that contribute to the
individual’s alienation from society according to Finkelstein’s ideas; “estrangement and
alienation enter into the most intimate of relationships, the family. Here, where people are
at their closest to one another, the very form taken by the ties that bind them, breed
antagonisms.” (p. 143) Family ties are conditioned by and reflect the power of money in
their private property possessions. Finkelstein assures that when exploitation is combined
with the plunder or oppression of a national group, the alienation is expressed in
chauvinistic “monster” images, found not only in common speech but in respected art
works. He remarks that “people of exploited regions are presented as sub-human, and the
presentation is no less inhuman when masked in supposedly “kindly” comic caricatures. So
it with the Negroes in the United States.” (p.140) As one of the main communist
philosophers throughout the nineteenth century, Marx sees how individuals “as a result man
14
(the worker) no longer feels himself to be freely active in any but his animal functions –
eating, drinking, procreating, or at most in his dwelling and in dressing-up, etc.; and his
human functions he no longer feels himself to be anything but an animal.” (p.111) Since
Light in August (1932) and Of Mice and Men (1937) were published in the midst of the
Wall Street Crash of 1929 or the Great Depression years, they do reflect several socioeconomic and cultural issues in their novels -implicitly or explicitly- that may have led
many people to their isolation. For instance, in Steinbeck’s novel The Grapes of Wrath
(1939) the writer introduce the audience to the Joad’s family, a group of immigrant workers
trying to survive alienated in the years of the Great Depression moving out from Oklahoma
to California in the search of the “American Dream”. Through his prose, he criticizes the
capitalist system of production and sees only segregated individuals (I) instead of a whole
(we) at the end of chapter 14 when he says:
If you who own the things people must have could understand this, you
might preserve yourself. If you could separate causes from results, if you
could know that Paine, Marx, Jefferson, Lenin, were results, not causes, you
might survive. But that you cannot know. For the quality of owning freezes
you forever into “I”, and cuts you off from the “We.”
(Steinbeck, 1939: 148)
However, Finkelstein expresses his personal view about alienation based on previous
Marx’s and Engel’s ideas by saying that the awareness of alienation differs from class
antagonism, or the awareness of the exploited of how and by whom they are exploited. He
says that alienation:
It is a psychological phenomenon, an internal conflict; hostility felt toward
something seemingly outside oneself which is linked to oneself, a barrier
15
erected which is actually no defense but an impoverishment of oneself.
Engendered by the distortions of life in an exploitive society, it affects both
exploiters and exploited.
(Finkelstein, 1985: 137)
Therefore, an example of a possible existence of an internal conflict or hostility felt toward
society can be screen in Herman Melville’s short novel Bartleby the Scrivener: A Story of
Wall Street (1853) and its character who establishes physical and mental barriers between
society (the workers) and himself, creating his own isolation in the building where they
work. Bartleby voluntary decides to be alienated from society through the narrator’s prose
who describes it to as a man dealing with an internal conflict with himself, showing
hostility towards society and becoming physically impoverished until his last days of life.
The barrier between him and the other workers that can be translated in his famous
sentence: “would prefer not to.” Bartleby’s loneliness leads him to the point that he lives
by himself in the building where he works having no other place to go and no one to talk to.
If we want to look any deeper to the themes of isolation, social isolation and alienation in
literature, we shall identify them in the next chapters.
16
CHAPTER 2
“INDIVIDUAL AND SOCIAL ISOLATION IN TWO
MODERN AMERICAN NOVELS: THE CASE OF WILLIAM
FAULKNER’S LIGHT IN AUGUST AND JOHN
STEINBECK’S OF MICE AND MEN”
2.1 INTRODUCTION TO THE THEME OF ISOLATION IN LITERATURE
Isolation is a constant human condition in Literature that generally portrays the individual’s
physical or moral impoverishment of life which is often culminated by the character’s death
as Conliffe well said in the previous chapter (1.1) Certainly, there are many novels,
novellas, poems, tales and plays that also deal with the theme of isolation in Literature as a
consequence of human interaction, but there are three special pieces of work that fostered
the decision to carry out this research: Mary Shelley’ Frankenstein or the Modern
Prometheus (1818), Leo Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich (1886) and Franz Kafka’s The
Metamorphosis (1915). English, Russian and Czech writers dedicate their novels to develop
this psychological process based on their main characters’ personality as in the cases of
Victor Frankenstein, Ivan Ilich and Gregor Samsa- all of them sharing his isolation within
Literature expressed in different ways. Dr. Victor Frankenstein’s voluntary decision to be
isolated from his relatives and friends in order to create a “monster” in his laboratory
parallels the idea with the Greek myth of Prometheus; he who gives the fire to humanity
(arts, knowledge and wisdom) but sentenced to be eternally punished by Zeus where each
day an eagle would peck out his liver, only to regrow the next day because of his
17
immortality as a God. This “horrible creature” despises his own creator as well as he does
for humanity in motions of misanthropic theories; the existence of a personal internal
conflict within himself towards society certainly proves Finkelstein’s statement about his
own perspective of the term alienation in the previous chapter, but in this case the barrier is
erected between humanity and the creature, wishing that only Frankenstein’s death will set
him free. In Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich the protagonist is severely damaged by his
constant search for identity in a bureaucratic Russian society even though he is physically
and morally destroyed by an unknown disease located in his kidneys, leading him to the
point of spending the last three days of his life agonizing individually isolated locked in his
room. These human feelings were often mixed with mythic significance or religious
allusions which created a new literary style in Europe called “Romance” through the 19th
century. Kathryn VanSpanckeren (2006) defines the term [Romance] as dark and
forbidding, indicating how difficult it is to create an identity without a stable society. Most
of the romantic heroes die in the end.” (p. 37) This can be certainly demonstrated in Mary
Shelley’s and Ivan Tolstoy’s novels as their main characters die in the end. Also, an
uncertain emotional-physical conflict in Kafka’s The Metamorphosis alienates Gregor
Samsa’s life from his family and his work, after the “transformation” he tries to avoid any
contact with the outside world except for his sister’s company who takes care of him only
for a while, but then she becomes tired of it. Gregor soon realizes that he is just a burden
for his family and decides to die wishing that only his death will set his family free and
bound to prosperity as well as in Ivan IIyich’s and Victor Frankenstein’s case. Claimed by
Finkelstein an existentialist writer, Franz Kafka has been said to belong to the group of
modern writers who based plenty of their works on philosophical and psychological
western theories just as he embraces from Marx’s theories about humans adopting animal
18
functions and vice versa becoming socially isolated (1.3). Due to such mental behaviors of
isolation expressed in romantic and early modern writers we ought to contextualize them
now in our aimed novels for this study: Faulkner’s Light in August (1932) and Steinbeck’s
Of Mice and Men (1937), both corresponding to this literary genre in American literature
tradition through the 20th century.
2.2 THE THEME OF ISOLATION IN THE MODERN AMERICAN NOVEL
As it was said in the previous chapter, the theme of isolation in fiction has been a broad
subject of matter for scholars, critics and students who have discussed the influence of
psychological, philosophical and sociological thinking developed throughout the 19th
century in the “open West” by Marx, Freud, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Jung and several more
intellectuals who helped to consolidate the basis for the modernist revolution towards the
beginning of the 20th; the demoralization of modern life based on societies ruled by greed,
power and corruption seem apparently to alienate the nature of human beings between the
transition of centuries and continents. Therefore, controversies have aroused in order to
delimitate the strict period of time in which modernist novelists are often situated in the
history of American fiction; the length and its mere relevance to the history of this country
in literature shall be presented according to some critical views. Moreover, several socioeconomic and political circumstances around Europe and the United States that
theoretically framed the individual’s decision to remain isolated within modernist literature
will be discussed also in the following lines.
However, these novelists, poets and dramatists turned for inspiration to earlier literary
rebels during the “American Renaissance” as romantic writers -Hawthorne, Emerson,
19
Whitman, Melville, Dickinson- and all kind of artists saw themselves revolting against the
"Age of Reason" and its traditional values. For instance, Puritan and Christian religious
misconceptions by Hawthorne’s female character Hester Prynne in The Scarlett Letter
(1850) are conceived through the act of adultery; people was sentenced to be mentally and
physically punished by her inner sins which are accompanied by feelings of solitude,
estrangement and failure to cope with human relationships through Hawthorne’s prose.
Back in the 1860’s, the American Civil War empowered modernist writers to describe the
atrocities of this racial conflict all over the Deep South area by trying to break with
traditional beliefs, slavery and social inequality around the population. In Mark Twain’s
novel The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1882) the author exposes the main character’s
isolation to the problems of self-identity, race and stereotype models in American society
right after the second half of the 19th century. As a wanderer boy, Huck flees from his
drunkard father in search of his own identity and establishes a friendship with Jim, a Negro
slave who persuades freedom and morality by the end of the book. In spite of his
contrasting writing styles, two icons of modern American fiction, Ernest Hemmingway and
William Faulkner do recognize Mark Twain as the greatest modern American novelist as
well as the pioneer of this literary movement towards the end of the ninetieth century.
(2006: 8) However in Europe, early modernist writers such as Henry James, Joseph Conrad,
D.H. Lawrence and James Joyce embraced in their writings new literary aesthetics
previously developed by Balzac, Tolstoy and Flaubert; the beginning of realism and
naturalism in western culture ends with the fall of “romantic heroes” at the end of this
century.
20
Nevertheless, humanity moved towards the beginning of the 20th century as new writers
experimented in content and style; Malcolm Bradbury in Childs’ Modernism (2008)
summarizes the term by defining that “modernist art is in most critical usage, reckoned to
be art of what Harold Rosenburg calls “the tradition of the new.” So it can be disputed
when it starts (French symbolism; decadence; the break-up of naturalism, surrealism) and
whether it has ended. Also it is regarded as a time bound concept (to say 1890 to 1930) or a
timeless one (p.2). Bradbury states that some of the major modernist writers (James,
Conrad, Mann, Gide, Kafka, Svevo, Joyce, Musil and Faulkner in fiction; Strindberg,
Pirandello, Wedekind and Brecht, in drama; Mallarmé, Yeats, Eliot, Pound, Rilke,
Apollinaire and Stevens in poetry) whose works are aesthetically radical, contained striking
technical innovation, emphasize spatial or “fugal” as opposed to chronological form, tend
towards ironic modes, and involve a certain “dehumanization of art” at that time.4
In the other hand, Miller, Wood and Dwyer (1989) do recognize “The Modern Temper” in
American literary tradition as the period of time from 1915 to 1945 which encompassed
two of the most eventful and memorable decades in the history of this country– The Jazz
Age in the 1920’s and the Great Depression of the 1930’s. However before the end of the
1910’s, a decade of liberal American critics and writers too such as Sherwood Anderson,
Sinclair Lewis and H.L Mencken discovered a new generation of young novelists emerging
from the hostilities of World War I referred by Gertrude Stein in Hemmingway’s novel A
Moveable Feast (1964) as The Lost Generation, all of them in search of new ways of style
divided between revolutionary societies. Ernest Hemmingway, Francis Scott Fitzgerald,
John Dos Passos, Thomas Wolfe, William Faulkner and John Steinbeck consummated the
4
Ibid.
21
essence of these two important decades in modern American literature tradition from 1920to 1940. The physical and psychological damages experienced after war, the socioeconomic depression around the country captured in social class struggles; religious
convictions, gender inequalities, corruption and racial discrimination constructed the
dehumanization of his world as artists. Nevertheless, some modernist artists found
themselves alienated as expatriate writers between Europe and the United States during the
1920’s decade -claimed by critics Miller, Wood and Dwyer (1989: 54) to be one of the
richest periods in modern American fiction- as in the case of T.S Eliot’s poem The Waste
Land (1922) where “we can trace those themes of isolation, alienation, decadence and
meaningless human relationships through his poetry.” McCoy and Harlan (1992) state that
“Eliot’s poem depicts modern society as being in the infertile part of the cycle; human
beings are isolated, and sexual relations are sterile and meaningless. Because of the variety
and relative obscurity of Eliot’s allusions, “readers must work through the poem’s footnotes
several times to appreciate it, but the general impression of isolation, decadence, and
sterility comes through every reading.”
5
Therefore, the famous roaring twenties settled
down in the United States and marked a decade of excessive consumption, ideas against
industrialism and materialism as well as radical political views especially at the northeast
side of the country. For instance, the cosmopolitan island of Manhattan, New York served
as the main scenery for two representative novels of the Jazz Age published in the same
year:
Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925) and John Dos Passos’s Manhattan
Transfer (1925). Both describe the alienated lifestyle of individuals whose characters (often
based on real people) remain physically and mentally isolated due to the capitalist system
of production overpowered by the invention of the machine. A year later, Hemmingway’s
5
McCoy & Harlan. 1992. English Literature from 1785. Harper Collins. New York, U.S.A. p, 266
22
novel The Sun Also Rises (1926) will contribute to early modernist masterpieces dealing
with those themes related to loss, marginality and oppressed individuals who suffer the
mental and physical damages experience after war through his alter ego character Jack
Barnes. A new generation of upcoming intellectuals accompanied by innovative literary
techniques developed in western civilizations, was the surface for American writers who
could possibly release their early works while their staying in France at Sylvia Beach’s
bookstore Shakespeare and Company. Addressed for having previously published the first
edition of James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922), - one of the most universally recognized novels of
modernist literature – she also is known for having published works by D.H Lawrence,
Hemmingway, T.S Eliot, Ezra Pound and several more writers. According to critic Alfred
Kazin in Our Native Grounds: An Interpretation of Modern American Prose Literature the
years of the “Lost Generation” end up with the resurgence of literary naturalism in the
United States at the time of the Great Depression in the 1930’s, this global socio-economic
crisis after World War I brought a new sense of realism for militant American novelists
who felt threatened and oppressed by their own society since the end of 1929. Unlike many
social novels, this generation of young writers could capture the biggest three tragedies of
American history – the Civil War, World War I and the Great Depression – with such
human sensibility and imagination that would consolidate them as the greatest modern
American novelists within a period of ten years (1929- 1939). Powerful novels like The
Sound and the Fury (1929), The U.S.A trilogy and The Grapes of Wrath (1939) would
change the course of literature in the history of the United States due to the social impact
that these works produced on readers and the displaying of innovative writing styles
attached to their prose. It is also very important to mention that the two aimed novels for
this study, Light in August (1932) and Of Mice and Men (1937), belong to this decade of
23
American literacy in the years of the Great Depression. They ought to be contextualized
separately in the next sections in order to better understand the novel’s literary significance
as well as providing their respective historical background.
2.3 WILLIAM FAULKNER’S LIGHT IN AUGUST HISTORICAL
BACKGROUND
“I decline to accept the end of man... I refuse to accept this. I
believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is
immortal, not because he alone among the creatures has an
inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable
of compassion and sacrifice and endurance…”
William Faulkner in his Nobel Prize Speech in 1949
The events presented in Light in August (1932) – originally written to be titled Dark House
- reflect the complexity of Faulkner’s writing style achieved in his two major previous
novels: The Sound and the Fury (1929) and As I lay Dying (1930), however critic Joseph
W. Reed, Jr. (1973: 63) considers Light in August to be more “character-dominated” as in
no other Faulkner’s book – not even The Sound and the Fury or As I Lay Dying. Joe
Christmas, Lena Grove, Byron Bunch, Joanna Burden and Reverend Gail Hightower are
just a few literary entities whose isolation is severely affected by their past/present actions
that the author bear in their minds through his stream-of-consciousness technique. Light in
August represents aesthetically a challenge to Faulknerian readers due to complex way in
which actions are narrated in the book; the use of flashbacks by its characters in the present
deliberately create a novel filled with symbolisms, biblical allusions, myths and Civil War
stories that framed this tragicomedy of Southern life in the 20th century. Critics Fowler &
Abadie (1991) introduce the novelist and his work by saying:
24
William Faulkner is the greatest writer the South has produced. In twenty –
century American fiction, in capturing the rich variety and disorder of
American life, no one else has come anywhere close to the depths of
intensity and comprehensiveness of Faulkner’s imagination. But if ever an
American writer took subject filled to overflowing with war, violence, pain,
cruelty, exclusion, servitude, impoverishment, racial pride, hatred and
resentment of the rest of the country, defeat, deceit, and delusions of
everlasting power over others, it was Faulkner. (p.3)
In most part of Faulkner’s early fiction, he built a group of family dynasties in order to
resemble the myth of the defeated Deep South -in terms of what Nietzsche might have
called it as the genealogy of imagination- and its people around his Yoknapatawpha series:
Sartoris (1929), The Sound and the Fury (1929), As I lay Dying (1930), Sanctuary (1931)
Light in August (1932) and Absalóm Absalom!, (1936) referred by Alfred Kazin (1993) as
the most successful writing processes in Faulkner’s career from 1929 to 1936. The
Compson, Sartoris, Bundren and Sutpen families are decadent southern structures through
his novels whose members are condemned to self-destruction and disgrace by themselves;
adultery, incest, misogyny, misanthropy and racial pride are just a few symptoms that
Faulkner prints to his archetypal male anti-heroes like Quentin Compson in The Sound and
the Fury or Thomas Sutpen in Absalom, Absalom!. However in Light in August it is not Joe
Christmas’ family who condemns him to avoid a lynching in Mottstown as a result of his
brutal crimes, but it is his own society of Jefferson, Mississippi and the captain of the State
National Guard who triggers his defeat.
This is why the novel moves forward chronologically and each of its discrete parts go
backwards in order to identify the character’s isolation. Reed, Jr. states that “None of
Faulkner’s other books –not even Absalom, Absalom!- reveals so consistent a set of
25
reversed parts” (1973: 68) Therefore, the novel opens with Lena Grove in pregnancy; the
audience learns how she got pregnant and how she begins an endless search for the father Lucas Burch or Joe Brown- moving alone from Alabama to the town of Jefferson,
Mississippi apparently in the early 1930’s. The burning house appears in the narrative
before the crime does in the same day that Byron Bunch met Lena Grove at the sawmill,
place where Lucas Burch and Joe Christmas became work partners. Then, Joe wanderings
just prior to the killing of Joanna are traced back before any of the causes for his fitful
“thinking” or his psychosis can be seen in chapters ten through twelve. At the mid-section,
the reader learns the reason of Reverend Hightower’s deep alienation and the causes that
led him isolated through Faulkner’s prose; Civil War stories and religious misconceptions
between Calvinistic and Christian philosophies in his early years seem to be associated to
this mental process in Hightower’s mind. By the end of the book, we can see Joe
Christmas’s fatal destiny in the hands of Percy Grimm, the man who kills and castrates him
before Lena Grove and Byron Bunch are seen for the last time fleeing to Tennessee as the
novel closes. In the next chapter, several more relevant episodes would be closely analyzed
concerning to Joe Christmas’ individual isolation in the story according to the novel’s
criticism and the text for itself.
26
2.4 JOHN STEINBECK’S OF MICE AND MEN BACKGROUND
“Guys like us, that work on ranches, are the loneliest guys in the
world. They got no family. They don´t belong no place. They come
to a ranch an’ work up a stake and then they go inta town and blow
their stake, and the first thing you know they’re pounding their tail
on some other ranch. They ain’t got nothing to look ahead to…”
John Steinbeck -Of Mice and Men-
John Steinbeck is well-known as one of the greatest story tellers in modern American
writing to capture the moral and economic depression that the United States accomplished
due to the Stock Market Crash of 1929. Considered by Fredrik Eliasson in his thesis
Naturalism and Friendship in Of Mice and Men (2009) to be heavy influenced by realistic
and naturalist European novelists of the 19th century -Tolstoi, Dostoyevsky and Zola- as
well as embracing western philosophical doctrines developed by Darwin, Marx and Stalin,
frame the art of his writing. John Steinbeck is regarded for his contribution to the
resurgence of the naturalistic novel in the United States during the 1930’s decade for early
novels like Tortilla Flat (1935), In Dubious Battle (1936), Of Mice and Men (1937) and
The Grapes of Wrath (1939) according to critic Alfred Kazin (1993: 374). In these novels
we can see the versatility, simplicity, love, passion and human sensibility that he did show
for his people and the land that surrounded his life across the Salinas Valley in California.
His short novel Of Mice and Men takes place in the town of Soledad –word in Spanish
which means loneliness or solitude- where he talks about the lives of two migrant ranch
workers and truly friends, George and Lenny, who struggle to survive emotionally and
economically to the critical situation around the country in search of the American Dream,
being described by James Adams in Eliasson’s thesis:
27
As that dream of a land in which life should be better and richer and fuller
for everyone, with opportunity for each according to ability or
achievement… It is not a dream of motor cars and high wages merely, but a
dream of social order in which each man and each woman shall be able to
attain to the fullest stature of which they are innately capable, and be
recognized by other for what they are, regardless of the fortuitous
circumstances of birth or position.
(Adams, 1931: 404)
Historically, the southwestern territory of the United States started to spread along the
country after the war gained against Mexico in the 1840’s, adding the states of Texas,
Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, Nevada and the north part of California to the map. Also,
immigrants from Europe, Asia and other countries after World War I (1914-1918) saw the
opportunities to settle down on his own “dream land” where industrialized cities started to
grow, but agriculture and farming became the most concentration of labour in the country
at that time. These situations were undertaken by Steinbeck’s writing in The Grapes of
Wrath where Tom Joad and his family are forced to leave their land in search of a better life
and work opportunities for them and some other Okies moving out from Oklahoma to
California in the midst of the Dust Bowl. The loss of ethics and moral values in American
society during the 1930’s represented the transformation between political ideologies and
economical changes that the novel involves through his plot. Private property increased and
his workers remained alienated from family, friends and even themselves as Marx’s
theories point out to the causes of isolation because of the capitalist mode of production in
the United States as well as for its imperialism. (1.2).
Derived from a Robert Burns’ poem “To a Mouse”, Steinbeck titles his sixth novel Of Mice
and Men, the story of two inseparable friends whose dream to possess their own land and
28
animals is never fulfilled as the tragic end of the story reaches. George had promised to his
mentally disabled friend to own a “dream land” together before he forcibly shoots him:
“We’ll have a cow,” said George. “An’ we’ll have maybe a pig an’
chickens… an´ down the flat we’ll have a… little piece of alfalfa- “For the
rabbits,” Lennie shouted. “For the rabbits,” George repeated. “And I get to
tend the rabbits.” -“An’ you get to tend the rabbits.”- Lennie giggled with
happiness. “An’ live on the fatta lan’. “Yes”- George said.
(Steinbeck, 1939: 99)
Yet, the impossibility of the American Dream is conveyed through Lenny’s destiny in the
hands of his beloved friend. In the 1992 film adaptation, we can watch those isolated rural
landscapes and old farms of California pictured by Steinbeck’s naturalist prose using the
authentic language that he developed through his writing. Secondary characters such as
Candy, Slim, Crooks, Curley and his wife can be seen as isolaters too, but in George and
Lenny’s case there seems to be a special connection between them that determines their
social isolation in the story, as well as in many Steinbeck’s works: friendship and love for
humanity can save us from being isolated. In the next chapter, we ought to analyze George
and Lenny’s social isolation based on critics and the text for itself.
29
CHAPTER 3
“A PRACTICAL STUDY: ISOLATION IN FAULKNER’S
AND STEINBECK’S CHARACTERS”
“It is easy in the world to live after the world’s opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our
own, but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowds keeps with the perfect sweetness of
the independence of solitude.”
Henry David Thoreau –Walden-
3.1 JOE CHRISTMAS’ INDIVIDUAL ISOLATION IN LIGHT IN AUGUST
One of the most controversial characters in William Faulkner’s Light in August might be
the “existentialist anti-hero” Joe Christmas; he is an alienated mixed-blood individual
presenting an inner conflict with himself and towards society whose isolation in the story
approaches many theoretical facts previously studied. First, the act of non-belonging to a
certain group of people or community that Biordi and Nicholson (2009) mentioned in the
first chapter connects to the idea of Joe’s failure to cope with neither black nor white
societies in the town of Jefferson, Mississippi and its surroundings. Secondly, Finkelstein
(1965) attaches Faulkner’s literary alienation to the myth of the southern “Negro” after the
Civil War in the United States. As a result of this conflict, racial segregation grew among
the Deep South area dividing more than Northern and Southern states, the Confederacy and
the Union; social barriers that empowered his individualization against society were
established between white and black people. His black “heroes” or the “good” figures of his
books can be seen such as in the character Dilsey –an slave servant- and her family taking
30
care of the Compson family in The Sound and the Fury or Lucas Beauchamp in Intruder in
the Dust who is proud to count himself as one of the McCaslin family for whom he had
served as a slave. However, Finkelstein assures that the “bad” ones are those “who seek
independence and want to live in his own way like white people and get rid of slavery.”
(1965:189-190). In the case of Light in August, the “marginal man” arises from preestablished traditions based on slavery in order to find his own identity and freedom as a
human being.
Therefore in Light in August, Joe Christmas is depicted sometimes as a white man, but he is
also claimed to possess Negro “blood” in his veins which causes his downfall. He murders
a white woman, is tracked down by white men and finally devoured by his own society.
The District Attorney in town and considered to be one of Faulkner’s mouthpieces through
the story; the character Gavin Stevens speaks out his mind in chapter nineteen moments
after Joe’s murder:
But his blood would not be quiet, let him save it. It would not be either one
or the other and let his body save itself. Because the black blood drove him
first to the negro cabin. And then the white blood drove him out of there, as
it was the black blood which snatched up the pistol and the white blood
would not let him fire it.
(Faulkner, 1932: 449)
As the novel starts off we Joe Christmas can be seen as an alienated human being, a
foreigner or a stranger depicted for the first time by Byron Bunch at the planning mill, “but
there was definitely something rootles about him, as though no town nor city was his, no
street, no walls, no square of earth his home.” (LIA: 31) Furthermore Joe’s origins are not
merely revealed by the author, but using intentionally Byron Bunch’s gossip to introduce
31
Joe’s grandparents to Reverend Gail Hightower at his dark-lonesome room, Ms. Hines and
old Doc Hines recall the day that their daughter -Milly Hines- died after giving birth to her
fatherless son. His grandparent describes Joe’s father as a “fellow who had nigger blood
with a circus, or maybe Mexican” that abandoned him (p.374). Eupheus Hines is a religious
fanatic or “an old mad man” who curses his grandson’s destiny by putting him into an
orphanage after a Christmas night where he is referred as a nigger, but his response is “I
ain´t a nigger” (p.384). His lack of identity leads him to be treated as a nigger by the other
orphans as well as during the scene when the dietitian catches Joe eating toothpaste, the
dietitian says to him, “Spying on me! You little nigger bastard!” (p.122). Then, Joe is sent
to a place which is described as “the one for niggers” causing his physical isolation from
either black or white people since early age. According to Virgintino, Joe is “rejected as
White, as Negro, as a human being and is treated as a thing, he attempts to give meaning to
his life by insisting on his right to be human, to be himself.” (2011: 2) Certainly, Joe is
thought to be an outcast of Southern society because of his mixed-blood no matter how
much amount of Negro blood he has, he undoubtedly creates an inner conflict within
himself and towards the people of Jefferson who do not accept him.
Divided between race and identity at the age of five, Joe McEachern –one of his several
names in the book- is adopted by a strict Calvinist fanatic and his wife; who literally beat
their religion into the boy by means of physical punishment. In chapter seven, Simon
McEachern tries to teach him to pray but he refuses to do it, “Repeat your catechism,” (LIA:
150). As a consequence he physically punishes his foster son for not obeying him. Joe’s
misanthropy towards humanity and especially for the McEachern’s family allows him to
escape from the small farm and to kill his foster father with a chair at a dance. Here,
32
Faulkner embodies the Greek tragedy of Oedipus -developed by Freudian psychology- in
Joe’s killing, but instead of marrying Ms. McEachern, Joe steals some money from her and
then flees for freedom at the age of seventeen. During his experience at Freedman Town, he
shows his isolation from either white or black society when he passes through the empty
streets as a foreigner or outcast in Faulkner’s poetic prose: “In the wide, empty, shadowbrooded street he looked like a phantom, a spirit, strayed out of his own world, and lost.”
(p.114)
Joe is unable to get any sexual affair with the prostitute Bobbie Allen because of “his black
blood”, therefore the complex of misogyny starts to affect Joe’s female relationships in her
voice: “He told me himself he was a nigger! The son of a bitch! ” (p.218) Towards the end
of chapter ten and after fifteen years of wandering alone in the streets, Joe walks into
Joanna Burden’s isolated house where they begin an intimate relationship at the crucial
moment that she feeds him: “If it is just food you want, you will find that” (p.231). As her
name suggests it, she is a forty one year-old white woman burdened by her family past,
religion, traditional beliefs and sex roles which represented the southern women archetype
against men in modern society:
She lives in the big house, a woman of middle age. She has lived in the
house since she was born, yet she is still a stranger, a foreigner whose
people moved in from the North during Reconstruction. A Yankee, a lover
of Negroes, about whom in the town and out of it, there is still talk of queer
relations with negroes, despite the fact that it is now sixty years since her
grandfather and her brother were killed on the square by an ex-slave owner
over a question of negro votes in a state election. But it still lingers about
her and about the place: something dark and outlandish and threatful, even
though she is but a woman and but the descendent of them whom the
33
ancestors of the town had reason (or thought that they had) to hate and
dread. But it is there: the descendants of both in their relationship to one
another’s ghosts, with between them the phantom of the old spilled blood
and the old horror and anger and fear.
(Faulkner, 1932: 46-47)
The humanist female stereotype that Faulkner embodies in Joanna Burden assimilates the
failure of marriage –as a social institution or romantic tragedy- with Joe Christmas for
several reasons that should be mentioned in the next lines. Through chapters eleven and
twelve we learn how Joanna hooks the man’s attention for sexual intercourse in spite of his
“black blood” when she cooks for him and lets him in to her bedroom. Later on, she grabs
Joe’s attention when telling him about her violent family past among Civil War stories and
Calvinistic family patterns which led her isolated in Jefferson for more than forty years.
However in the second phase of their romance, “it could not be called a honeymoon”
(p.258) she gradually becomes a nymphomaniac and her physical/mental health
impoverishes.
Now and then she appointed trysts beneath certain shrubs about the grounds,
where he would find her naked, or with her clothing half torn to ribbons
upon her, in the wild throes of nymphomania, her body gleaming in the slow
shifting from one to another of such formally erotic attitudes and gestures as
a Beardsley of the time of Petronious might have drawn. She would be wild
then, in the close, breathing halfdark without walls, with her wild hair, each
strand of which would seem to come alive like octopus tentacles, and her
wild hands and her breathing: “Negro! Negro! Negro!”
(Faulkner, 1932: 260)
34
However, the reader is not told exactly the reasons that corrupt Joanna’s life and her
relationship with Joe Christmas, but Faulkner’s use of rhetoric as a literary style intends to
develop this psychological problem reflected on his myths. As it had been previously
discussed, the religious fanaticism over Calvinistic theologies inherited by Joanna’s
northern ancestors, suggests the Total Depravity that goes through her unconscious mind
before she offers herself to send Joe to a “nigger college” where he could become a lawyer,
“Tell niggers that I am a nigger too?” (p.277) Nevertheless, he violently refuses this
proposal by insulting and striking her; in both cases suffering and punishment are necessary
to redeem themselves as sinners according to Miller’s statement: “To triumph by reaching
individuation, one must suffer and sacrifice.” (1977: 139) In addition, she forces Joe to pray
against his will once again in order to find their salvation. Tragically, she tries to kill him
but this is never granted by God’s grace and instead of, Joe cuts her throat and sets the
house on fire to be eternally doomed and condemned to suffer in solitude. After years of
wandering, Joe is finally caught, imprisoned and almost lynched by a mob in Mottstown
stirred up by his own grandfather –Doc Hines- who claims his crucifixion. Unexpectedly,
he manages to escape heading to Hightower’s place where he buries his own grave in the
hands of the State Guard of Jefferson, Percy Grimm. At the end of chapter nineteen, this
white man kills Joe and later castrates him ending up with his isolation in front of
Hightower’s eyes when Grimm says: “Now you’ll let white women alone, even in hell.”
(LIA: 464) Even though it is believed that Jesus Christ died at the age of thirty three, it is
also assumed by Faulknerian critics that Joe Christmas (for his initials J.C.) was killed at
the same age as Jesus Christ symbolizing the salvation of humanity and more specifically
the town of Jefferson, Mississippi through his death. His archetypal resurrection or rebirth
in the story can be reflected upon the idea of Lena’s fatherless child conception towards the
35
end of the book assembling the day that Milly Hines gave birth to her son –Joe Christmasat the same place where Lena’s baby is born in the present. Very similar to the execution
and consummation of Clyde Griffiths in Theodore Dreiser’s An American tragedy (1925) or
Meursault in Albert Camus’ The Stranger (1942), Joe Christmas is the existentialist antihero in American Southern society who does not feel comfortable against the absurdity of
reality often based on people’s judgments concerned to those of race, money, sex and
religion ironically. Throughout the twenty one episodes that Light in August presents as a
whole piece and not for its chaotic structure analysis, the novel portrays artistically the
human condition exposed to feelings of isolation due to personal circumstances that make
us forget the plot of the story and start wondering about the meaning of existence in our
lives even if the text was written more than a half of century ago.
3.2 GEORGE AND LENNY’S SOCIAL ISOLATION IN OF MICE AND MEN
John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men is a novella written during the early years of the Great
Depression in the United States that successfully portrays the impossibility of individuals to
reach the American Dream in modern society through his isolated characters. Steinbeck
tells the story of two immigrant workers and friends, George and Lenny, who travel alone
wishing to possess their own land and have a better life together free and independent. As
Adams (1931) already described in the introductory section of this chapter, the “America
Dream” represented a world of opportunities and technological developments for citizens
of this country to progress, but unfortunately not for everyone. Many dissident individuals
–including writers and non-writers- became disassociated, separated, or alienated from his
36
social networks because of the invention of the machine and its products incorporated to
modern life. In addition, Finkelstein claims that “individuals are estranged by the
distortions of an exploitive modern society divided into stratified classes; it affects both
exploiters and exploited.” (1965: 137) However, George and Lenny as a social entity or
personal community, have to face several socio-economic boundaries in their way to see a
common “dream” come true in spite of the Capitalist system of production embraced by the
government of the United States at that time. In Of Mice and Men, George, Lenny, Candy,
Slim and Crooks are just a few exploited ranch-workers who serve the ranch owner or
better known in the story as “The Boss.” His son Curley and his wife symbolize the failure
of middle-class marriage overpowered by their heavy loneliness. He treats his wife merely
as an object, but not as a human being. In response, she mistrusts him and fantasies to
become a famous actress in order to be accepted by others. According to Eliasson’s essay,
the importance of friendship is the only way in which these characters may not feel alone
towards certain situations in the story that may trigger their social isolation. He says that
“migrant life was lonely, rootless, unforgiving and without guarantee. Migrant workers had
a tough time during the depression and had had for a long time… What George says
illustrates the socio conditions of the novel. Workers were usually just seen as workers and
nothing more; as George says: the optimism of the roaring 20’s is gone.” (2009: 17)
Even though George and Lenny are physically and mentally different, their bond can be
characterized as more than just a couple of good friends, they support emotionally each
other against negative circumstances. For instance, in the beginning of the novel
Steinbeck’s naturalist scenery describe them physically:
37
The first man [George] was a small and quick, dark of face, with restless
eyes and sharp, strong features. Every part of him was defined: small
strong hands, slender arms, a thin and bony nose. Behind him walked his
opposite, a huge man, shapeless of face, with large, pale eyes, with wide,
sloping shoulders; and he walked heavily, dragging his feet a little, the
way a bear drags his paws. His arms did not swing at his sides, but hung
loosely.
(Steinbeck, 1937: 10)
Moreover, George is described as a quick-witted man as well as Lenny’s protector. The
animal imagery that Steinbeck draws to George’s mental disabled friend can be seen as a
physically strong man, but weakened by his love for soft things and petting. After George
notices that Lenny has killed a mouse with his big bare hands while petting it, they are
chased and lost by a group of local residents in the ranch they used to work in Weed.
George’s ability to get Lenny out of trouble strengthens their friendship when Lenny
attempted to touch a woman’s red dress, but they manage to escape from that house when
George says, “Well, how the hell did she know you jus’ wanted to feel her dress? She jerks
back and you hold on like it was a mouse. She yells and we got to hide in an irrigation ditch
all day with guys lookin’ for us, and we got to sneak out in the dark and get outta the
country.” (OMAM: 18) Despite Lenny’s good intentions, they become socially isolated
different to those who “belong no place” as they have a common future when George tells
Lenny:
Guys like us, that work on ranches, are the loneliest guys in the world. They
got no family. They don´t belong no place. They come to a ranch an’ work
up a stake and then they go inta town and blow their stake, and the first
38
thing you know they’re pounding their tail on some other ranch. They ain’t
got nothing to look ahead to.
(Steinbeck, 1937: 19-20)
George and Lenny’s brotherhood demonstrates the power of friendship that exists between
them in order to avoid feelings of either loneliness or solitude when Lenny replies, “But not
us! An’ why? Because… because I got you to look after me, and you got me to look after
you, and that’s why.” (OMAM: 20) At the end of this chapter, George and Lenny’s
narrative dream to “live off the fatta the lan’ and have rabbits”6 closes this memorable
episode of the novel. In the first section of this paper, Biordi and Nicholson (2009: 85)
stated that the phenomenon of isolation is typically accompanied “by feelings of loss,
marginality, solitude or apartness, but the distancing from one’s network may also bring
positive feelings voluntary prompted by the isolator” depending on each circumstances.
Therefore, George and Lenny travel together in order to find a job in the town of Soledad,
California where they achieved to meet several more ranch workers whom they apparently
establish a relationship. The old swamper, Candy wants to share George and Lenny’s
dream, but they refuse to accept his proposal. Crooks, as in the case of Joe Christmas, is a
negro stable buck individually isolated who can also be seen as a victim of racism. Nobody
at the ranch shows interest in establishing any kind of relationship with him due to his
black skin color except when Lenny gets to know him in chapter four. Crooks has failed to
cope with white people, “Cause I’m black. They play cards in there, but I can’t play
because I’m black. They say I stink. Well, I tell you, you all of you stink to me.” (OMAM:
66-67) and he is isolated because he has no friends and no one to talk to living alone in his
bunkhouse. Moreover, Crooks is depicted by Steinbeck as one of the loneliest characters in
6
Ibid.
39
the story, remarking the importance of friendship and human interaction that he draws in
this character who finds in books his only companionship.
However, the only one who seems to fully understand George and Lenny’s bond is Slim
towards the end of the book when George shoots his truly friend in the back of the head. He
knows what Lenny has done to Curley’s wife and the loss of Lenny in some way represents
a loss of something within George himself, but also feels freed from his company. Slim
understands their close relationship when he sits beside of him while Curley and Carlson
stand still wondering why George is down. Determinism is completed after Lenny’s death
and George remains individually isolated on his own as the novel finishes. Critic Michael J.
Meyer says in his essay One is the Loneliest Number: Steinbeck’s Paradoxical Attraction
and Repulsion to Isolation/Solitude that “as with George and Lenny, Steinbeck suggests
that feelings of isolation or loneliness are often based on perceived differences and centers
his portraits of the other “lonely” and isolated people in his novel primarily on an
individual’s physical or mental deformities, emphasizing how prejudices based on race and
gender mistakenly magnified until brotherhood is superseded by the “Otherhood” (2009:
303) The decay of moral values and corruption in American society was based on the
socio-economic instability (individualization versus socialization; capitalism versus
communism) that stirred the detachment of individuals during the 1930’s decade. These
events may have possibly turned many people to a deep state of isolation or loneliness
including Steinbeck’s himself as a writer while declared in a letter written to his friend John
Murphy in 1961 the author says:
Once the words go down, you are alone and committed. It’s as final as a
plea in court from which there is no retraction. That’s the lonely time. Nine
40
tenths of a writer’s life do not admit of any companionship nor friend nor
associate. And until one makes peace with loneliness and accepts it as part
of the profession, as celibacy is a part of the priesthood, until then there are
times of dreadful dread.
(Steinbeck, 1975: 859)
As Conliffe mentions in his essay On Isolation, this phenomenon can also bring positive
effects to the isolated. It may inspire creative imagination that in the future helps to develop
an individual’s confidence in himself. He states that “the isolated one may consider the past
and the future, but his being present –his contending with his “nowness”- prompts such
reflections.” (2009: 4) Steinbeck’s isolation in writing demonstrates the ambiguity he saw
in human attitudes, emotions and attributes that he expressed in letters to his friends and
editors Covici, Benchley, Sheffield and several more. Therefore he sees the duality of
isolation and its possible connotations – negative or positive – depending on the
circumstances of each individual and how he or she deals with it, but definitely one of his
biggest fears in his career was to become popular, “As Steinbeck climbed the ladder
towards becoming number one in the field of literature, he discovered that his rise in
popularity and critical acclaim was accompanied by a growing sense of isolation and
loneliness.” (Meyer, 2009: 291) By and large, the themes of isolation, alienation and
loneliness in Of Mice and Men may represent the nature of human feelings in real life as
well as our capacity to interpret, deal or conceal relationships with people that surround our
world.
41
CONCLUSION
The human condition of isolation in literature has been studied by psychologists,
philosophers, sociologists and critics around the world who have aimed to find theoretical
aspects of this “social problem” often portrayed in fiction -novels, short stories, tales, plays,
poems- and non-fiction. At the beginning of this paper, Conliffe, Finkelstein, Biordi and
Nicholson mentioned several fundamental aspects of isolation as a consequence of human
interaction based on their own perspectives. For instance, Conliffe points out that the
process of isolation may be voluntary or involuntary initiated by two main powerful forces
that crash against our world; these are disassociation and separation. Naturally, to be
considered isolated, he says, one must have been removed or estranged at least once from a
group of people (work, church, school), community or any society due to personal reasons.
Moreover Finkelstein proved that race, sex, marriage, family, religion and powerful
economic systems are essential ways to separate an individual from his family, things, or
places creating an internal conflict within himself/herself and possibly towards society. As
a result, the impoverishment of one self’s life during this process is said to affect one’s
physical and mental health while being isolated, but it can certainly sometimes bring
positive aspects to the isolated person such as his literary isolation. The English
psychiatrist, Anthony Starr argues that “the capacity to be alone is a valuable resource
when changes of mental attitude are required. After major alterations in circumstances,
fundamental reappraisal of the significance and meaning of existence may be needed…”)
7
Also, the fact of non-belonging to a certain group of people that Biordi and Nicholson
7
Storr, Anthony. 1988. Solitude: A Return to the Self. New York: Ballantine Book, p. 29.
42
mentioned in this section, is severely contributed to the lack of self’s identity as in the case
of William Faulkner’s existentialist anti-hero Joe Christmas. He is isolated from American
Southern society because of his race and values depicted by the town as a “nigger”.
Virgintino claims that “through his actions, readers can interpret how society can influence
and affect identity and the human experience.” (2011: 4) We also analyzed historical events
around the globe that revolutionized modern societies towards the beginning of the 20th
century when the theme of isolation in literature became prominent by critics and writers.
World War I, the Jazz Age and the Great Depression in the United States of America
dehumanized the concept of art to some members of The Lost Generation in three
important decades of literary production in American tradition (1910-1940). I realized how
European and American modernist novelists were inspired by 19th century Western
philosophies as well as earlier manifestations of this movement in fiction (Mark Twain,
Herman Melville, Henry James, James Joyce, Joseph Conrad, Virginia Woolf, etc.). Even
though the theme of isolation in English language became popular through the 20th century,
its origins can be traced to William Shakespeare’s tragic heroes like Hamlet, Macbeth and
Othello or even since Biblical times when St. Mathew described Jesus’ spiritual isolation
from the Devil written in the Holy Bible. In addition, I learned how George and Lenny’s
social isolation in Of Mice and Men is affected by migrant life during the Depression years
(1930’s) as a consequence of human interaction often based on people’s judgments about
race, social class, sex and religion. As Faulkner said in his Nobel Prize Speech in 1949,
“the only thing worth writing about is the human heart in conflict with itself” and the theme
of isolation is definitely one of those tasks as human beings that only through literature,
friendship and freedom can we create in our reality that we are not alone for that moment.
43
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