Short . Stories
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National Advisory Board Jennifer Hood: Young Adult/Reference Librarian, Cumberland Public Library, Cumberland, Rhode Island. Certified teacher, Rhode Island. Member of the New England Library Association, Rhode Island Library Association, and the Rhode Island Educational Media Association. Christopher Maloney: Head Reference Librarian, Ocean City Free Public Library, Ocean City, New Jersey. Member of the American Library Association and the New Jersey Library Association. Board member of the South Jersey Library Cooperative. Kathleen Preston: Head of Reference, New City Library, New City, New York. Member of the American Library Association. Received B.A. and M.L.S. from University of Albany. Patricia Sarles: Library Media Specialist, Canarsie
High School, Brooklyn, New York. Expert Guide in Biography/Memoir for thf website About.com (http://biography.aboui com). Author of short stories and book rtoiew Received B.A., M.A. (anthropology^ an M.L.S. from Rutgers University. Heidi Stohs: Instructor in Language Arts, gradt ;s 10-12, Solomon High School, Solomc*n, Kansas. Received B.S. from Kansas St,ate University; M.A. from Fort Hays Slate University. Barbara Wencl: Library Media Specialist, COmo Park Senior High School, St. Paul, Minnesota. Teacher of secondary social studies and hi story, St. Paul, Minnesota. ReceivedB.S. andM.Ed. from University of Minnesota; received media certification from University of Wisconsin. Educator and media specialist with over 30 years experience.
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PDF Not Available Due to Copyright Terms
Table of Contents Guest Foreword "Why Study Literature At All?" Thomas E. Barden
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Introduction
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Literary Chronology
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Acknowledgments
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Contributors
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The Birds Daphne du Maurier
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Black Is My Favorite Color Bernard Malamud
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Dharma Vikram Chandra
. 46
The Diamond Mine Willa Gather
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The Gold of Tomas Vargas Isabel Allende
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Katherine Anne Porter
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Henne Fire Isaac Bashevis Singer
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The Invalid's Story Mark Twain
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Kitchen Banana Yoshimoto
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Rip Van Winkle Washington Irving
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Menagerie, a Child's Fable Charles Johnson
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Rules of the Game Amy Tan
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The Woman Who Came at Six O'Clock 275 Gabriel Garcia Marquez
The Purloined Letter Edgar Allan Poe
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Glossary of Literary Terms
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Cumulative Author/Title Index
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Nationality/Ethnicity Index
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Subject/Theme Index
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Why Study Literature At All? Short Stories for Students is designed to provide readers with information and discussion about a wide range of important contemporary and historical works of short fiction, and it does that job very well. However, I want to use this guest foreword to address a question that it does not take up. It is a fundamental question that is often ignored in high school and college English classes as well as research texts, and one that causes frustration among students at all levels, namely—why study literature at all? Isn't it enough to read a story, enjoy it, and go about one's business? My answer (to be expected from a literary professional, I suppose) is no. It is not enough. It is a start; but it is not enough. Here's why. First, literature is the only part of the educational curriculum that deals directly with the actual world of lived experience. The philosopher Edmund Husserl used the apt German term die Lebenswelt, "the living world," to denote this realm. All the other content areas of the modern American educational system avoid the subjective, present reality of everyday life. Science (both the natural and the social varieties) objectifies, the fine arts create and/or perform, history reconstructs. Only literary study persists in posing those questions we all asked before our schooling taught us to give up on them. Only literature gives credibility to personal perceptions, feelings, dreams, and the "stream of consciousness" that is our inner voice. Literature wonders about infinity, wonders why God permits evil, wonders what will happen to us after we die.
Literature admits that we get our hearts broken, that people sometimes cheat and get away with it, that the world is a strange and probably incomprehensible place. Literature, in other words, takes on all the big and small issues of what it means to be human. So my first answer is that of the humanist—we should read literature and study it and take it seriously because it enriches us as human beings. We develop our moral imagination, our capacity to sympathize with other people, and our ability to understand our existence through the experience of fiction. My second answer is more practical. By studying literature we can learn how to explore and analyze texts. Fiction may be about die Lebenswelt, but it is a construct of words put together in a certain order by an artist using the medium of language. By examining and studying those constructions, we can learn about language as a medium. We can become more sophisticated about word associations and connotations, about the manipulation of symbols, and about style and atmosphere. We can grasp how ambiguous language is and how important context and texture is to meaning. In our first encounter with a work of literature, of course, we are not supposed to catch all of these things. We are spellbound, just as the writer wanted us to be. It is as serious students of the writer's art that we begin to see how the tricks are done. Seeing the tricks, which is another way of saying "developing analytical and close reading
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skills," is important above and beyond its intrinsic literary educational value. These skills transfer to other fields and enhance critical thinking of any kind. Understanding how language is used to construct texts is powerful knowledge. It makes engineers better problem solvers, lawyers better advocates and courtroom practitioners, politicians better rhetoricians, marketing and advertising agents better sellers, and citizens more aware consumers as well as better participants in democracy. This last point is especially important, because rhetorical skill works both ways—when we learn how language is manipulated in the making of texts the result is that we become less susceptible when language is used to manipulate us. My third reason is related to the second. When we begin to see literature as created artifacts of language, we become more sensitive to good writing in general. We get a stronger sense of the importance of individual words, even the sounds of words and word combinations. We begin to understand Mark Twain's delicious proverb—"The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug." Getting beyond the "enjoyment only" stage of literature gets us closer to becoming makers of word art ourselves. I am not saying that studying fiction will turn every student into a Faulkner or a Shakespeare. But it will make us more adaptable and effective writers, even if our art form ends up being the office memo or the corporate annual report. Studying short stories, then, can help students become better readers, better writers, and even
better human beings. But I want to close with a warning. If your study and exploration of the craft, history, context, symbolism, or anything else about a story starts to rob it of the magic you felt when you first read it, it is time to stop. Take a break, study another subject, shoot some hoops, or go for a run. Love of reading is too important to be ruined by school. The early twentieth century writer Willa Gather, in her novel My Antonia, has her narrator Jack Burden tell a story that he and Antonia heard from two old Russian immigrants when they were teenagers. These immigrants, Pavel and Peter, told about an incident from their youth back in Russia that the narrator could recall in vivid detail thirty years later. It was a harrowing story of a wedding party starting home in sleds and being chased by starving wolves. Hundreds of wolves attacked the group's sleds one by one as they sped across the snow trying to reach their village. In a horrible revelation, the old Russians revealed that the groom eventually threw his own bride to the wolves to save himself. There was even a hint that one of the old immigrants might have been the groom mentioned in the story. Gather has her narrator conclude with his feelings about the story. "We did not tell Pavel's secret to anyone, but guarded it jealously—as if the wolves of the Ukraine had gathered that night long ago, and the wedding party had been sacrificed, just to give us a painful and peculiar pleasure." That feeling, that painful and peculiar pleasure, is the most important thing about literature. Study and research should enhance that feeling and never be allowed to overwhelm it. Thomas E. Burden Professor of English and Director of Graduate English Studies The University of Toledo
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Introduction Purpose of the Book The purpose of Short Stories for Students (SSfS) is to provide readers with a guide to understanding, enjoying, and studying short stories by giving them easy access to information about the work. Part of Gale's "For Students" Literature line, SSfS is specifically designed to meet the curricular needs of high school and undergraduate college students and their teachers, as well as the interests of general readers and researchers considering specific short fiction. While each volume contains entries on "classic" stories frequently studied in classrooms, there are also entries containing hard-to-find information on contemporary stories, including works by multicultural, international, and women writers. The information covered in each entry includes an introduction to the story and the story's author; a plot summary, to help readers unravel and understand the events in the work; descriptions of important characters, including explanation of a given character's role in the narrative as well as discussion about that character's relationship to other characters in the story; analysis of important themes in the story; and an explanation of important literary techniques and movements as they are demonstrated in the work. In addition to this material, which helps the readers analyze the story itself, students are also provided with important information on the literary and historical background informing each work.
This includes a historical context essay, a box comparing the time or place the story was written to modern Western culture, a critical overview essay, and excerpts from critical essays on the story or author. A unique feature of SSfS is a specially commissioned critical essay on each story, targeted toward the student reader. To further aid the student in studying and enjoying each story, information on media adaptations is provided (if available), as well as reading suggestions for works of fiction and nonfiction on similar themes and topics. Classroom aids include ideas for research papers and lists of critical sources that provide additional material on the work.
Selection Criteria The titles for each volume of SSfS were selected by surveying numerous sources on teaching literature and analyzing course curricula for various school districts. Some of the sources surveyed include: literature anthologies, Reading Lists for College-Bound Students: The Books Most Recommended by America's Top Colleges; Teaching the Short Story: A Guide to Using Stories from around the World, by the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE); and "A Study of High School Literature Anthologies," conducted by Arthur Applebee at the Center for the Learning and Teaching of Literature and sponsored by the National Endowment for the Arts and the Office of Educational Research and Improvement.
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Input was also solicited from our advisory board, as well as educators from various areas. From these discussions, it was determined that each volume should have a mix of "classic" stories (those works commonly taught in literature classes) and contemporary stories for which information is often hard to find. Because of the interest in expanding the canon of literature, an emphasis was also placed on including works by international, multicultural, and women authors. Our advisory board members—educational professionals—helped pare down the list for each volume. Works not selected for the present volume were noted as possibilities for future volumes. As always, the editor welcomes suggestions for titles to be included in future volumes.
How Each Entry Is Organized Each entry, or chapter, in SSfS focuses on one story. Each entry heading lists the title of the story, the author's name, and the date of the story's publication. The following elements are contained in each entry: • Introduction: a brief overview of the story which provides information about its first appearance, its literary standing, any controversies surrounding the work, and major conflicts or themes within the work. • Author Biography: this section includes basic facts about the author's life, and focuses on events and times in the author's life that may have inspired the story in question. • Plot Summary: a description of the events in the story. Lengthy summaries are broken down with subheads. • Characters: an alphabetical listing of the characters who appear in the story. Each character name is followed by a brief to an extensive description of the character's role in the story, as well as discussion of the character's actions, relationships, and possible motivation. Characters are listed alphabetically by last name. If a character is unnamed—for instance, the narrator in "The Eatonville Anthology"—the character is listed as "The Narrator" and alphabetized as ' 'Narrator." If a character's first name is the only one given, the name will appear alphabetically by that name. • Themes: a thorough overview of how the topics, themes, and issues are addressed within the story. Each theme discussed appears in a sepa-
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rate subhead, and is easily accessed through the boldface entries in the Subject/Theme Index. • Style: this section addresses important style elements of the story, such as setting, point of view, and narration; important literary devices used, such as imagery, foreshadowing, symbolism; and, if applicable, genres to which the work might have belonged, such as Gothicism or Romanticism. Literary terms are explained within the entry, but can also be found in the Glossary. • Historical Context: this section outlines the social, political, and cultural climate in which the author lived and the work was created. This section may include descriptions of related historical events, pertinent aspects of daily life in the culture, and the artistic and literary sensibilities of the time in which the work was written. If the story is historical in nature, information regarding the time in which the story is set is also included. Long sections are broken down with helpful subheads. • Critical Overview: this section provides background on the critical reputation of the author and the story, including bannings or any other public controversies surrounding the work. For older works, this section may include a history of how the story was first received and how perceptions of it may have changed over the years; for more recent works, direct quotes from early reviews may also be included. • Criticism: an essay commissioned by SSfS which specifically deals with the story and is written specifically for the student audience, as well as excerpts from previously published criticism on the work (if available). • Sources: an alphabetical list of critical material used in compiling the entry, with bibliographical information. • Further Reading: an alphabetical list of other critical sources which may prove useful for the student. It includes bibliographical information and a brief annotation. In addition, each entry contains the following highlighted sections, set apart from the main text as sidebars: • Media Adaptations: if available, a list of film and television adaptations of the story, including source information. The list also includes stage adaptations, audio recordings, musical adaptations, etc.
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• Topics for Further Study: a list of potential study questions or research topics dealing with the story. This section includes questions related to other disciplines the student may be studying, such as American history, world history, science, math, government, business, geography, economics, psychology, etc. • Compare and Contrast: an "at-a-glance" comparison of the cultural and historical differences between the author's time and culture and late twentieth century or early twenty-first century Western culture. This box includes pertinent parallels between the major scientific, political, and cultural movements of the time or place the story was written, the time or place the story was set (if a historical work), and modern Western culture. Works written after 1990 may not have this box. • What Do I Read Next?: a list of works that might complement the featured story or serve as a contrast to it. This includes works by the same author and others, works of fiction and nonfiction, and works from various genres, cultures, and eras.
Other Features SSfS includes' 'Why Study Literature At All?," a foreword by Thomas E. Harden, Professor of English and Director of Graduate English Studies at the University of Toledo. This essay provides a number of very fundamental reasons for studying literature and, therefore, reasons why a book such as SSfS, designed to facilitate the study of literture, is useful. A Cumulative Author/Title Index lists the authors and titles covered in each volume of the SSfS series. A Cumulative Nationality/Ethnicity Index breaks down the authors and titles covered in each volume of the SSfS series by nationality and ethnicity.
Citing Short Stories for Students When writing papers, students who quote directly from any volume of SSfS may use the following general forms to document their source. These examples are based on MLA style; teachers may request that students adhere to a different style, thus, the following examples may be adapted as needed. When citing text from SSfS that is not attributed to a particular author (for example, the Themes, Style, Historical Context sections, etc.), the following format may be used: "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calavaras County." Short Stories for Students. Ed. Kathleen Wilson. Vol. 1. Detroit: Gale, 1997. 19-20.
When quoting the specially commissioned essay from SSfS (usually the first essay under the Criticism subhead), the following format may be used: Korb, Rena. Critical Essay on "Children of the Sea." Short Stories for Students. Ed. Kathleen Wilson. Vol. I.Detroit: Gale, 1997. 42.
When quoting a journal or newspaper essay that is reprinted in a volume of Short Stories for Students, the following form may be used: Schmidt, Paul. "The Deadpan on Simon Wheeler." Southwest Review Vol. XLI, No. 3 (Summer, 1956), 270-77; excerpted and reprinted in Short Stories for Students, Vol. 1, ed. Kathleen Wilson (Detroit: Gale, 1997), pp. 29-31.
When quoting material from a book that is reprinted in a volume of SSfS, the following form may be used: Bell-Villada, Gene H.' "The Master of Short Forms," in Garcia Marquez: The Man and His Work. University of North Carolina Press, 1990 pp. 119-36; excerpted and reprinted in Short Stories for Students, Vol. 1, ed. Kathleen Wilson (Detroit: Gale, 1997), pp. 89-90.
We Welcome Your Suggestions
A Subject/Theme Index, specific to each volume, provides easy reference for users who may be studying a particular subject or theme rather than a single work. Significant subjects from events to broad themes are included, and the entries pointing to the specific theme discussions in each entry are indicated in boldface.
The editor of Short Stories for Students welcomes your comments and ideas. Readers who wish to suggest short stories to appear in future volumes, or who have other suggestions, are cordially invited to contact the editor. You may contact the editor via E-mail at:
[email protected]. Or write to the editor at:
Each entry may include illustrations, including photo of the author, stills from film adaptations (if available), maps, and/or photos of key historical events.
Editor, Short Stories for Students The Gale Group 27500 Drake Road Farmington Hills, MI 48331-3535
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Literary Chronology 1783: Washington Irving is born on April 3 in New York City in same the year that the American Revolution formally ends. 1809: Edgar Allan Poe is born on January 19 in Boston, Massachusetts. 1819: Washington Irving's "Rip Van Winkle" is published. 1835: Mark Twain (born Samuel Langhorne Clemens) is born on November 30 in the village of Florida, Missouri. 1844: Edgar Allan Poe's "The Purloined Letter" is published.
1907: Daphne du Maurier is born on May 13 in London, England. 1910: Mark Twain dies on April 21 in his home near Redding, Connecticut. 1914: Bernard Malamud is born on April 28 in Brooklyn, New York, to Russian Jewish immigrant parents. 1916: Willa Gather's "The Diamond Mine" is published. 1922: Willa Gather receives a Pulitzer Prize for One of Ours. 1927: Katherine Anne Porter's "He" is published.
1849: Edgar Allan Poe dies on October 3, perhaps from a brain lesion, although critics speculate about other causes. 1859: Washington Irving dies on November 23. 1873: Willa Gather is born on December 7 in Back Creek Valley, Virginia. 1882: Mark Twain's "The Invalid's Story" is published. 1890: Katherine Anne Porter (born Gallic Russell Porter) is born on May 15 in Indian Creek, Texas. 1904: Isaac Bashevis Singer (born Icek-Hersz Zynger) is born on July 14 in Radzymin, Poland.
1928: Gabriel Garcfa Marquez is born on March 6 in Aracataca, Colombia. 1942: Isabel Allende is born on August 2 in Lima, Peru, daughter of Chilean diplomat, Tomas Allende. 1947: Willa Gather dies from a cerebral hemorrhage on April 24 in New York City. 1948: Charles Johnson is born on April 23 in Evanston, Illinois. 1950: Gabriel Garcfa Marquez's "The Woman Who Came at Six O'Clock" is published. 1952: Daphne du Maurier's "The Birds" is published.
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1952: Amy Tan is born on February 19 in Oakland, California, two and a half years after her parents emigrated from China. 1961: Vikram Chandra is born on July 23 in New Delhi, India. 1963: Bernard Malamud's "Black Is My Favorite Color" is published. 1964: Mahoko "Banana" Yoshimoto is born on July 24 in Tokyo, Japan. 1966: {Catherine Anne Porter receives a Pulitzer Prize for The Collected Stories of Katherine Anne Porter. 1967: Bernard Malamud receives a Pulitzer Prize for The Fixer. 1968: Isaac Bashevis Singer's "Henne Fire" is published. 1978: Isaac Bashevis Singer receives the Nobel Prize for literature.
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1980: Katherine Anne Porter dies from cancer on September 18 in Silver Springs, Maryland. 1982: Gabriel Garcia Marquez receives the Nobel Prize for literature. 1984: Charles Johnson's "Menagerie, a Child's Fable" is published. 1986: Bernard Malamud dies from natural causes on March 18. 1988: Banana Yoshimoto's "Kitchen" is published. 1989: Daphne du Maurier dies on April 19 in her beloved Cornwall. 1989: Amy Tan's "Rules of the Game" is published. 1990: Isabel Allende's "The Gold of Tomas Vargas" is published. 1991: Isaac Bashevis Singer dies after a series of strokes on July 24 in Surfside, Florida. 1994: Vikram Chandra's "Dharma" is published.
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Acknowledgments The editors wish to thank the copyright holders of the excerpted criticism included in this volume and the permissions managers of many book and magazine publishing companies for assisting us in securing reproduction rights. We are also grateful to the staffs of the Detroit Public Library, the Library of Congress, the University of Detroit Mercy Library, Wayne State University Purdy/Kresge Library Complex, and the University of Michigan Libraries for making their resources available to us. Following is a list of the copyright holders who have granted us permission to reproduce material in this volume of Short Stories for Students (SSfS). Every effort has been made to trace copyright, but if omissions have been made, please let us know. COPYRIGHTED MATERIALS IN SSfS, VOLUME 16, WERE REPRODUCED FROM THE FOLLOWING PERIODICALS: Gather Studies, \. 2, 1993. Copyright (c) 1993 by the University of Nebraska Press. Reproduced by permission of the University of Nebraska Press.— Mark Twain Journal, v. xxi, Winter, 1981-1982. Reproduced by permission.—Modern Fiction Studies, v. 28, 1982. Reproduced by permission.—New York Review of Books, v. xl, August 12, 1993. Copyright (c) 1993 by NYRV, Inc. Reproduced by permission. COPYRIGHTED MATERIALS IN SSfS, VOLUME 16, WERE REPRODUCED FROM THE FOLLOWING BOOKS:
Alter, Iska. From "The Broader Canvas: Malamud, the Blacks, and the Jews," in The Good Man's Dilemma. AMS Press, Inc., 1981. Copyright (c) 1981 by AMS Press, Inc. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission.—Buranelli, Vincent. From "Fiction Themes," in Edgar Allan Poe. Twayne Publishers, 1977. Copyright (c) 1977 by Twayne Publishers. All rights reserved.—Gerber, Philip. From "Gather's Shorter Fiction: 1892-1948," in Willa Gather. Twayne Publishers, 1995. Copyright (c) 1995 by Twayne Publishers. All rights reserved.— Kelly, Richard. From "The World of the Macabre: The Short Stories," in Daphne du Maurier. Twayne Publishers, 1987. Copyright (c) 1987 by Twayne Publishers. All rights reserved.—Martin, Terence. From "Rip, Ichabod, and the American Imagination," in Washington Irving: The Critical Reaction. AMS Press, Inc., 1993. Copyright (c) 1993 by AMS Press, Inc. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission.—Meyering, Sheryl L. From "The Diamond Mine," in A Reader"s Guide to the Short Stones of Willa Gather. G. K. Hall and Co., 1994. Copyright (c) 1994 by G.K. Hall and Co. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission.—Wilson, James D. From "The Invalid's Story," in A Reader's Guide to the Short Stories of Mark Twain. G. K. Hall and Co., 1987. Copyright (c) 1987 by G. K. Hall and Co. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission.—Young, Philip. From "Fallen from Time: The Mythic 'Rip Van Winkle,'" in Washington Irving: The Critical Reaction. AMS Press, Inc.,
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1993. Copyright (c) 1993 by AMS Press, Inc. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission. PHOTOGRAPHS AND ILLUSTRATIONS APPEARING IN SSfS, VOLUME 16, WERE RECEIVED FROM THE FOLLOWING SOURCES: Allende, Isabel. From a cover of The Stories of Eva Luna. By Isabel Allende. Bantam Books, Inc., 1992. Cover art (c) 1991 by Leo and Diane Dillon. Reproduced by permission of Bantam Books, Inc., a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc.—Allende, Isabel, photograph by William C. Gordon. Reproduced by permission of Isabel Allende.—Gather, Willa, photograph. Hulton/ Getty Images. Reproduced by permission.—Chandra, Vikram, photograph by Jerry Bauer. Reproduced by permission.—Du Maurier, Daphne, photograph. Popperfoto/Getty Images. Reproduced by permission.—Dust Bowl, photograph. AP/Wide World Photos. Reproduced by permission.—Eastman, George, photograph. Hulton/Getty Images. Repro-
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duced by permission.—Garcia Marquez, Gabriel, photograph. AP/Wide World Photos. Reproduced by permission.—Group of Elderly Chinese men playing Chinese chess, photograph by Richard Bickel. Corbis. Reproduced by permission.—Indian Troops, photograph by David Kennedy. Corbis Images. Reproduced by permission.—Irving, Washington, photograph. The National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution.—Malamud, Bernard, photograph by Jerry Bauer. Reproduced by permission.—Man dressed as Sherlock Holmes, photograph. Getty Images. Reproduced by permission.—McClure's Magazine (cover). Special Collections Library, University of Michigan. Reproduced by permission.— Poe, Edgar Allan, photograph. AP/Wide World Photos. Reproduced by permission.—Porter, Katherine Anne, photograph by Paul Porter. AP/Wide World Photos. Reproduced by permission.—Singer, Isaac Bashevis, photograph. UPI/Corbis-Bettmann. Reproduced by permission.—Tan, Amy Ruth, photograph. Getty Images. Reproduced by permission.— Twain, Mark, photograph. The Library of Congress.
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Contributors Bryan Aubrey: Aubrey holds a Ph.D. in English and has published many articles on twentiethcentury literature. Entry on Dharma. Original essay on Dharma.
and creative writing and focuses her writing on literary themes. Entry on He. Original essays on The GoldofTomds Vargas, He, and Kitchen.
Cynthia Bily: Bily teaches writing and literature at Adrian College. Entry on Rip Van Winkle. Original essay on Rip Van Winkle.
Beth Kattelnian: Kattelman holds a Ph.D. in theatre from Ohio State University. Original essay on The Birds.
Liz Brent: Brent has a Ph.D. in American Culture from the University of Michigan and works as a freelance writer. Entry on Menagerie, a Child's Fable. Original essay on Menagerie, a Child's Fable.
David Kelly: Kelly is an instructor of creative writing and literature at Oakton Community College in Illinois. Original essays on Dharma and Rules of the Game.
Kate Covintree: Covintree is a graduate of Randolph-Macon Women's College with a degree in English. Original essay on Rules of the Game. Douglas Dupler: Dupler has taught college English and has published numerous articles. Entry on Kitchen. Original essay on Kitchen. Erik France: France is a librarian and college counselor, and he also teaches at University Liggett School and Macomb Community College near Detroit, Michigan. Original essay on Dharma. Curt Guyette: Guyette has a bachelor's degree in English from the University of Pittsburgh. Original essay on The Birds. Joyce Hart: Hart has degrees in English literature
Laura Kryhoski: Kryhoski is a former English as a Second Language (ESL) teacher and is currently a freelance writer. Original essay on Kitchen. Uma Kukathas: Kukathas is a freelance writer and editor. Original essay on The Woman Who Came at Six O 'Clock. Deneka Candace MacDonald: MacDonald is an instructor of English literature and media. Original essay on The Birds. Josh Ozersky: Ozersky is a critic and essayist. Original essays on Henne Fire and Rip Van Winkle. Wendy Perkins: Perkins teaches American literature and film and has published several essays on American and British authors. Entry on The Birds. Original essay on The Birds.
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Ryan D. Poquette: Poquette has a bachelor's degree in English and specializes in writing about literature. Entries on Black Is My Favorite Color, The Diamond Mine, The Gold of Tomds Vargas, The Invalid's Story, The Purloined Letter, Rules of the Game, and The Woman Who Came at Six O'Clock. Original essays on Black Is My Favorite Color, The Diamond Mine, The Gold of Tomds Vargas, The Invalid's Story, The Purloined Letter, Rules of the Game, and The Woman Who Came at Six O'Clock. Michelle Prebilic: Prebilic is an independent author who writes children's literature. She holds
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degrees in psychology and business. Original essay on Menagerie, a Child's Fable. Susan Sanderson: Sanderson holds a Master of Fine Arts degree in fiction writing and is an independent writer. Entry on Henne Fire. Original essays on Henne Fire and The Woman Who Came at Six O'Clock. Paul Witcover: Witcover is an editor and writer whose fiction, book reviews, and critical essays appear regularly in print magazines and online media. Original essays on Black Is My Favorite Color and Menagerie, a Child's Fable.
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The Birds After its publication in 1952 in her short story collection The Apple Tree, "The Birds" became one of Daphne du Maurier's most celebrated works. The story presents an unrelenting portrait of terror and a compelling analogy of the atmosphere of fear generated in America and Europe during the Cold War years.
Daphne du Maurier
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Covering only a few days in the life of a family living on the Cornish coast of England, "The Birds" examines what would happen if animals traditionally regarded as symbols of peace and freedom began to ruthlessly attack humans. The story opens in the middle of the night when farm worker Nat Hocken wakes to an insistent tapping at his window. Du Maurier quickly increases the tension and horror as Nat's family suffers several vicious attacks by hordes of swarming birds, seemingly bent on destruction. Richard Kelly, in his article on du Maurier for Twayne 's English Authors Series Online notes,' 'by limiting the focus of her story upon Nat Hocken and his family, du Maurier manages to convey the effect of a believable claustrophobic nightmare." This sense of claustrophobia is heightened by the story's references to the bombing raids England endured during World War II and the paranoid atmosphere created by the threat of nuclear holocaust during the middle of the twentieth century. Eleven years after it was written, the story was turned into a popular film version by Alfred Hitchcock.
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Author Biography Daphne du Maurier was born on May 13, 1907, in London, England to Gerald (an actor and manager) and Muriel (an actress) du Maurier. Her grandfather was artist and author George du Maurier (Peter Ibbetson in 1891 and Trilby in 1894). As a child, Daphne enjoyed reading and indulging in games of fantasy, which helped develop her literary talents. She lived in Cornwall throughout most of her life, first in her parents' summer home near Plymouth and later in Menabilly, a nearby seventeenthcentury estate. The gothic landscape of Cornwall, the setting for the legends of King Arthur, Tristan and Iseult, and many pirate tales, inspired her work and often became the landscape of her own fiction, most notably in her novels Jamaica Inn (1936), Frenchman's Creek (1941), The House on the Strand (1969), and the short story "The Birds." She would also write a history of the area in 1967. Wayne Templeton, in his article on du Maurier for Dictionary of Literary Biography, notes that during her adolescence, she "began to experience an intense desire to be a boy." Templeton reasons that these feelings suggested an "awakening of lesbian tendencies in an era when many people, including homosexuals themselves, believed that one person in a homosexual relationship must have female inclinations, the other male." In later years, she would often pretend to be a boy named Eric Avon. Due to the stigma that was attached to homosexuality, du Maurier suppressed her sexual tendencies, but often noted to friends that she kept a "boy in a box." These masculine leanings influenced her novels and stories, which were often dominated by a male narrator. She began her literary career in 1925 when she started writing dark, pessimistic verse and short stories that were clearly influenced by Katherine Mansfield, Guy de Maupassant, and Somerset Maugham. Her first two publications, the short stories "And Now to God the Father" and "A Difference in Temperament," appeared in 1929 in The Bystander, a periodical edited by her uncle, William Beaumont. While she was staying with her parents in their home in Cornwall, the twenty-four-year-old Daphne penned her first novel, The Loving Spirit, a historical romance that became a best-seller and also earned critical praise. The book inspired Frederick ' 'Boy'' Browning, a major in the Grenadier Guards, to meet her, and soon, the couple was married.
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Templeton notes,' 'while du Maurier would confess to being deeply in love with several women during her life, she would never admit, even to herself, that she was bisexual." Her literary reputation as an important new talent was solidified by the publication of her fourth novel, Jamaica Inn (1936). Critics noted her similarities to the gothic novels of the Bronte sisters, Jane Eyre (1847) and Wuthering Heights (1847). When Rebecca appeared, however, in 1938, critics determined that she had established her own literary voice. Her short story collections were also well received, especially The Apple Tree: A Short Novel and Some Stories (1952), published in America as Kiss Me Again, Stranger (1953) and as The Birds and Other Stories (1963); and Not After Midnight, and Other Stories (1971), republished as Don't Look Now (1971). Successful film versions have been made of several of her novels and stories, including Rebecca, "The Birds," and "Don't Look Now.'' Du Maurier was awarded the National Book Award in 1938 for Rebecca and given the title Dame Commander by the Order of the British Empire in 1969. She died on April 19, 1989, in her beloved Cornwall.
Plot Summary The story opens on the third of December on the Cornish coast of England. The weather has changed overnight from a mild autumn to a cold, harsh winter. The narrator introduces Nat Hocken, who supports his wife and two children through his government pension and through work at a neighboring farm. While watching the sky, Nat notes that the birds appear more restless than usual. Mr. Trigg, who owns the farm where Nat works, attributes the birds' unusual behavior to the coming hard winter. That night, while all of his family sleeps, Nat hears a tapping at his bedroom window. As he opens it, he feels something jabbing at his hand. He sees a bird fly away and notices that his hand is bleeding. Soon after he returns to bed, the tapping returns, this time with more force. When he opens the window, a dozen birds go after his face, drawing more blood. After an intense struggle, he is able to beat them off, and they fly away. Soon after, he hears his daughter scream in the next room. When he rushes in, he
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finds a swarm of birds attacking the children. Again, he is eventually able to fight them off, though many dead birds are left behind. After the attack, Nat tries to calm and comfort his family, explaining that the harsh winter has disturbed the birds and that they came into the house because they were frightened and lost and wanted shelter. His wife, though, notes that the weather has changed too quickly for the birds to be affected by it. Nat finds his own comfort in the order of the kitchen, with everything in its proper place. The next morning, Nat walks his daughter Jill to the bus stop and then stops at the Trigg's farm to "satisfy himself that all was well." Mrs. Trigg, the farmer's wife, thinks Nat has exaggerated his story about the attack since she and her husband have had no trouble with the birds. Nat returns home and removes the dead birds from the children's room. As he looks out at the sea, he sees thousands of gulls amassing on the waves. When he returns to the house, his wife informs him that she heard several reports on the radio of bird attacks occurring all over the country, including London. He tells her about the thousands of gulls in the sea, waiting, he insists, to launch an assault. In order to protect them during the night, Nat boards up the windows and the chimney. When he notes that the gulls have risen from the waves in silent circles in the sky, he runs to the bus stop to meet Jill. When the birds start to swarm overhead, Nat begins to run, pulling a frightened Jill behind him. At home the family huddles in the kitchen, listening to the sounds of birds scraping and smashing against the boarded windows, trying to get in. They hear on the radio that a national emergency has been declared due to the attacks. In a few hours, the attack subsides when the tide ebbs. Nat notes that the birds have been splitting the wood barricades and so reinforces them with furniture and with the dead bodies of birds who have smashed themselves against them. During the next attack, which begins a few hours later, the birds break into the children's room, and Nat finds that the emergency radio system has gone dead. When the attack subsides, the family ventures out to the Trigg's farm to gather supplies, continually watched by the land birds who are waiting for the gulls to begin the next onslaught. They find the dead bodies of Mr. and Mrs. Trigg as well as Jim, their cow hand. Nat notes that no smoke is coming
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from the chimneys of the other houses in the area and regrets that he did not take the other children home with him. After gathering up food and fuel from the farm, the family returns home and the attack soon begins again. The story closes with Nat listening to the "tearing sound of splintering wood."
Characters Jill Hocken Jill is used to heighten the story's tension, but her character is more fully developed than that of her brother. She is quite scared of the birds throughout most of the story, especially when she sees her brother and her father's injuries. She also picks up on her parents' apprehension, which compounds her fears. However, she also exhibits a childlike resilience when, the day after the first attack, she plays with youthful unconcern, dancing'' ahead of her father and "chasing the leaves" on the way to the bus. She and her brother find enjoyment during the bumpy ride home from the Trigg farm.
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Media Adaptations Alfred Hitchcock directed and produced The Birds for Universal Pictures in 1963. Evan Hunter wrote the screenplay based on du Maurier's story. The film stars Tippi Hedren, Rod Taylor, and Jessica Tandy. The television film The Birds II: Land's End, aired in 1994 as a sequel to The Birds.
Johnny Hocken Johnny, like his sister, is used to heighten the story's tension and to illustrate one of its main themes. His initial injury fills his parents with dread and compels them to do whatever they can to protect their children. He, like Jill, displays a child's resiliency.
Mrs. Hocken Mrs. Hocken appears as a stereotypical' 'weak woman'' and is not very fleshed out; perhaps this is why du Maurier never gives her a name. While she does comfort her children and often tries to shield them from fearful thoughts, she appears almost as afraid as they and displays a childlike sense of insecurity and terror. She refuses to stay in the house with the children when Nat decides to go for supplies, and she never displays the confidence in their survival that her husband has.
Nat Hocken Nat Hocken's wartime disability provides him with a pension. As a result, he only needs to work part time at the Trigg's farm to support his wife and two children. Trigg gives him the lighter jobs at the farm, which he carries out efficiently. Nat gains the reputation for being a solitary man. In between his chores on the farm, he often stops to gaze out at the sea that surrounds the farmland on either side and watch the movement of the birds. His nature allows him to be keenly observant of his surroundings. He is the first in the area to take
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the threat of the birds seriously, since he has always carefully monitored their behavior. He quickly takes stock of the situation, sensing that the nighttime attack will not be the last and determines the materials and supplies he and his family will need to survive. Nat is also a realist. He immediately understands the dangerous situation he and his family are in and the difficulties the authorities will face in trying to get rid of the birds. Nat keeps a cool head under pressure, focussing solely on how to protect his family both physically and emotionally. When the birds break into the children's bedroom, he immediately pushes the children out before he begins his battle with the birds. When he sees the gulls swarming inland, his first thought is his daughter's safety, and so he runs to the bus stop to fetch her. At home, he continually tries to comfort and reassure his family that no harm will come to them as he sets up barricades around the house. Even at the end of the story, with little hope of rescue, cut off from neighbors and the outside worlds, Nat does not succumb to his fears. He continues to try everything he can to survive. His empathy emerges as he comforts his family and protects them from further distress. He does not tell them that the birds have broken into the bedroom and he cheers his children when they hear birds dropping dead outside the door. In an effort to distract them, he tries to make a game of the experience for Jill and Johnny, explaining that they will be camping out in the kitchen for the night. When he notes that no smoke is coming out of his neighbors' chimneys, he berates himself for not bringing all the children home with him so that he could protect them.
Jim Jim takes care of the cows on the Trigg's farm. He does not like Nat because of his reputation for reading books and acting "superior." Thus, he shows no desire to converse with him when Nat comes to warn his neighbors about the birds. Jim does not believe Nat's story since "it took time for anything to penetrate Jim's head." He is killed when the birds attack the Trigg's farm.
Mr. Trigg Mr. Trigg owns the farm on which Nat works. When Nat tries to convince him about the impending danger, he and his wife treat "the whole business as he would an elaborate joke." Trigg represents the average citizen who would not take this
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type of threat seriously, due to their complacency, their confidence in the authorities to protect them, and in their own resilience. He assures Nat that he will shoot the birds out of the sky and invites him to come over the next morning to enjoy "a gull breakfast." As a result, Trigg does not take any steps to protect himself or his wife, and the birds kill them both.
Mrs. Trigg Like her husband, Mrs. Trigg does not believe Nat's story.
Themes Survival At its heart,' 'The Birds'' is a story of survival. The plot and the thematic foci begin and end with Nat Hocken's struggle to survive the bird attacks. Du Maurier frames the story with these attacks, opening with a sole bird pecking at Nat's bedroom window and ending with a swarm bombarding the Hocken's home, seemingly desperate to get to the family huddling inside. Thus, Nat's main activity during the duration of the story is to protect himself and his family against this dangerous onslaught. The cool-headed Nat works carefully and methodically to insure his family's survival. After the first attack, he boards up the windows, noting that they are the birds' easiest point of entry. He then reinforces the doors and blocks the chimney. Even during the frightening attacks, Nat continually focuses on survival, determining what he must do when the assault subsides. During each break, he summons his courage and ventures out into the open with little protection in order to repair the breaks in the barricades he has constructed or to gather food and fuel in preparation for the next attack.
Parenting Nat's determination to protect his children supersedes his own instinct for self-preservation. At the beginning of the story, his daughter's scream causes him to rush into his children's room to find that a swarm of gulls have broken in. His only concern is for the safety of his offspring, and he immediately pushes them out of the room before he begins to fight off the birds. The next day when he
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Topics for Further Study • Alfred Hitchcock based his film version o f ' 'The Birds" in part on two separate incidents in California when large groups of gulls broke into homes and smashed into car windows, as noted by Camille Paglia in her critical assessment of the film. Research these incidents and any others you can find on documented bird attacks. How realistic are the attacks in the story as compared to the real-life incidents? How could the behavior of the birds be explained? • While Hitchcock maintained the tension of the story in his film version, he dramatically changed the plot. Do you think a successful film version could be made that would retain most of the story's plot elements? How would you go about filming a more accurate version of the story? • Americans on the home front never had to live through the bombing raids that the British endured during World War II. Research the psychological effect these raids had on the population. • In the story, the government can find no way to control or get rid of the birds. Investigate possible ways authorities could have stopped the attacks or at least protected the victims.
observes a mass of gulls moving inland, he rushes to his daughter's bus stop, determined to protect her. After he deposits her safely in his neighbor's car, he returns home on foot. Just as he approaches his door, he again is viciously attacked by another onslaught of birds. Nat also attends to his children's emotional needs. Throughout the story, he tries to calm their fears by diverting their attention from their winged assailants. He directs them to the daily rituals of family life and encourages his wife to prepare their favorite treats. When the birds begin to break into the upstairs bedrooms, he barricades his family downstairs, enticing them with the chance to have an exciting camp out in the kitchen.
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Gender Roles During the family's struggle to survive, Nat and his wife fall into stereotypical gender roles, which some scholars, most notably Margaret Forster in her acclaimed biography of du Maurier, attribute to the author's ambiguous sexuality. Nat is the one who takes charge of the protection of the family while his wife, who is never given a name by du Maurier, most often cowers in the background with her children. Mrs. Hocken does tend to the children by dressing Johnny's wound and preparing their meals, but she often seems as terror-stricken as they are. When Nat decides to leave the house to look for food and fuel after an attack has subsided, his wife is so filled with terror that she refuses to stay behind with the children. The portrait of her subservience and weakness is reinforced when Nat has to order her to stay back when he explores the Trigg's farmhouse. At first, she tries to follow, but Nat's firmness causes her to retreat back to her children.
Style Setting Du Maurier uses the setting to reinforce a sense of menace. Her descriptions of the weather and the elements suggest that these forces are working in tandem with the birds. Nat notes the abrupt change in the weather, which he considers ' 'unnatural'' and "queer" the night before the first attack. He exclaims that' 'never had he known such cold'' as the wind seems to "cut him to the bone" much like the birds plan to do. The sea and the wind appear to be empathetic to the birds, almost as though they are participants in the attacks. Nat notes ' 'there was some law the birds obeyed, and it was all to do with the east wind and the tide." The gulls "ride the seas" before they come into land, and their attacks are timed by the tides. After the birds dive-bomb the Hocken's house, the wind sweeps away their broken carcasses.
Tone The unrelenting threat of the birds creates a continual atmosphere of terror in the story. The tone is set quickly during the first night of attacks when the birds break into the children's room. The incident fills Nat with fear not only for his own survival, but, more importantly to him, the survival of his family. The level of terror rises as each avenue of assistance is cut off. Initially, the family is sure that
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they can receive help from their neighbors and from the government. Yet after the radio goes dead and they hear planes crashing in the distance, they gradually become aware that they are on their own, a realization that is reinforced when they find the dead bodies of their neighbors. The atmosphere of terror reaches its most intense point at the end of the story when the family huddles together in the kitchen, listening to the sounds of the birds splintering the wooden barricades, turning on the wireless to hear only silence, and recognizing that they are completely alone.
Historical Context The Cold War Soon after World War II, when Russian leader Joseph Stalin set up satellite communist states in Eastern Europe and Asia, the "cold war" began, ushering in a new age of warfare and fear, triggered by several circumstances: the emergence of the United States and the USSR as superpowers, each country's ability to use the atomic bomb, and the conflict between communist expansion and the determination to keep it in check. Each side amassed stockpiles of nuclear weapons that could not only annihilate each country, but the world. Both sides declared the other the enemy and redoubled their commitment to fight for their own ideology and political and economic dominance. As China fell to communism in 1949 and Russia crushed the Hungarian revolution in 1956, the United States appointed itself as a sort of world police, and the Cold War accelerated. In 1950, the United States resolved to help South Korea repel communist forces in North Korea. By 1953,33,629 American soldiers had been killed in the Korean war. The Cold War caused anxiety among Europeans and Americans fearing annihilation by Russians and the spread of communism. Citizens were encouraged to stereotype all Russians as barbarians and atheists who were plotting to overthrow their governments and brainwash their citizens. The fear that communism would spread to the United States led to suspicion and paranoia. Many suspected communists or communist sympathizers saw their lives ruined. This "Red Scare" intensified with the indictment of ex-government official Alger Hiss (1950) and Julius and Ethel Rosenberg (1951) for passing
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Compare ft Contrast • 1950s: Fear of a Russian attack with nuclear bombs prompts Americans and Europeans to build air raid shelters and conduct emergency drills.
ernment and academia; for his recklessness, he is censured by the U.S. Senate in 1954.
Today: With the overthrow of communism in the USSR, the Cold War has ended, yet the same level of fear exists in America, generated by the threat of terrorism.
• 1950s: America sends troops to South Korea to help the government wage a war against communist North Korea.
• 1950s: Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy conducts hearings from 1950 to 1954 intended to detect communist penetration of American gov-
defense secrets to the Russians. Soon, the country would be engaged in a determined and often hysterical witch-hunt for communists, led by Senator Joe McCarthy and the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). (In 1954, McCarthy was censured by the Senate for his unethical behavior during the Committee sessions.) By the time of McCarthy's death in 1957, almost six million Americans had been investigated by government agencies because of their suspected communist sympathies, yet only a few had been indicted. In response to the cold war threat, Americans and Europeans built bomb shelters and conducted air raid drills, which frightened school children and heightened the atmosphere of paranoia and mistrust.
Horror Story The horror story has been an important genre in British and American literature for the last two hundred years and provides a notable link to the gothic novel. Subjects popular with horror stories include murder, suicide, torture, and madness. The stories can involve ghosts, vampires, and demons and the practices of exorcism, witchcraft, and voodoo. The thrust of the horror story involves testing the central characters' courage and endurance as they experience physical as well as psychological danger. The terror that fills them can result from
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Today: Racial profiling is being considered as a tool to help combat the threat of terrorism.
Today: America is engaged in a war against terrorism. In 2002, that war centers on Afghanistan as U.S. troops, aided by the British, overthrow the Taliban.
emotional chaos and push them to the edge of sanity and barbarism. These stories reflect the attempt to understand deeply rooted and primitive urges and fears as they are linked to concepts of death, punishment, and evil. Elements of the horrific occur in classical literature as far back as Virgil's Aeneid and Lucan's Pharsalia through the Elizabethan and Jacobean tragedies, to the Gothic novel and short story in the nineteenth century. Early stories in this genre focused on the terrors of eternal damnation as outlined by various religious doctrines and on the secular "hell" of madhouses and prisons. Twentieth-century horror stories examined punishment as well as the dark recesses of the mind. Notable authors in this genre include E. T. A. Hoffman ("Die Elixiere des Teufels" and "Ignaz Denner"), Edgar Allan Poe ("The Tell-Tale Heart" and "The Black Cat"), Henry James ("The Turn of the Screw"), Ambrose Bierce( "The Man and the Snake" and "A Watcher by the Dead"), and contemporary writer Stephen King.
Critical Overview By the time her short story collection The Apple Tree: A Short Novel and Some Stories (1952),
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published in America as Kiss Me Again, Stranger (1953) and later as The Birds, and Other Stories (1963) appeared, du Maurier was a well established commercial success. As Nina Auerbach notes in her article on the author for British Writers, du Maurier did not receive much attention from scholars who deemed her work ' 'too readable to be literary." The publication of The Apple Tree: A Short Novel and Some Stories in 1952, which contained her masterful short story "The Birds," however, earned her praise from critics as well as the public. After the publication of Not After Midnight, and Other Stories (1971), republished as Don't Look Now (1971), along with the appearance of Margaret Forster's biography in 1993, du Maurier's literary reputation grew to the point that many scholars now echo Auerbach's assessment that she is "an author of extraordinary range and frequent brilliance." Sylvia Berkman, in her review of Kiss Me Again, Stranger for the New York Herald Tribune Book Review, singled out "The Birds" in the collection, praising how du Maurier builds up her harrowing account of the birds' attacks ' 'with intensifying accurate detail." Yet, Berkman insists that the story's references to the Cold War "dissipate the full impact of a stark and terrifying tale." In his article for The New York Times Book Review, John Barkham notes that du Maurier delights in baffling her readers with ' 'her mysteries." Barkham calls "The Birds" "a masterpiece of horror." Richard Kelly, in his overview of du Maurier for the Reference Guide to English Literature, claims that the story, along with Rebecca and Don't Look Now, "stand out among her works as landmarks in the development of the modern gothic tale."
Criticism Wendy Perkins Perkins teaches American literature and film and has published several essays on American and British authors. In the following essay, Perkins compares du Maurier's short story "The Birds" with Alfred Hitchcock's film version. In 1963, Universal Pictures released Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds to public and critical acclaim. Evan Hunter's screenplay loosely adapted Daphne du Maurier's short story, transplanting the location
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from the Cornish coast of England to the seaside town of Bodega Bay and changing a major thematic direction. In du Maurier's tale, the bird attacks and the characters' responses to them emerge as a political statement on the paranoid atmosphere that existed in Europe and America during the Cold War in the 1950s and 1960s. Hitchcock's version discarded this topical theme and opted instead for a portrait of the main character's psychosexual power struggle, heightened and redirected by the bird attacks. Both story and film, however, offer gripping portraits of humans struggling helplessly against the darker forces of nature. In her review of Kiss Me Again, Stranger for the New York Herald Tribune Book Review, Sylvia Berkman complains that du Maurier's story is "marred by unresolved duality of intent." She insists that the author's "turning of this material also into a political fable, with the overt references to control from Russia and aid from America . . . dissipates the full impact of a stark and terrifying tale." Berkman, however, fails to note that by placing the story into a Cold War context, du Maurier increases the story's sense of isolation and doom. The bird attacks as an analogy for nuclear destruction compound the characters' fears of complete and inevitable destruction. Du Maurier begins her political framework when, after the first bird attack, Nat visits the Triggs' farm to see if anyone there had had a similar experience. The Triggs and their hired hand Jim note that they have not been attacked and consider Nat's story to be either an exaggeration or a nightmare. Their inability to recognize impending danger from the skies reminds Nat of the air raids England suffered through during World War II, which he had also endured. Many ignored the air raid sirens, failing to take appropriate precautions and seek shelter, and so were subsequently killed by German bombs. Du Maurier plants another reference to the bombing campaign when Nat later notes, as his family huddles in the kitchen during another attack, that the experience is just like being in an air raid shelter. The threat becomes intensified by the narrator's suggestion that during their attacks, several of the birds become suicide bombers, calling to mind the Japanese kamikaze fighters during World War II. The memory of his past experiences during World War II coupled with the political realities of the present magnify Nat's terror as a new threat comes from the sky. Cold War fears of communist invasion emerge in the story when, after several
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What Do I Read Next? • Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights (1847), a tale of love and death on the moors of Yorkshire, has been long considered one of the finest novels in the gothic tradition. • Charlotte Bronte, Emily's sister, earned accolades for Jane Eyre(\ 847). Her novel focuses on a governess who comes to live in an estate owned by the mysterious Mr. Rochester. • Du Maurier's collection, Not After Midnight,
people have been attacked, many insist that the Russians have poisoned the birds, prompting their bloodthirsty behavior. The BBC's declaration of a national emergency before all communication is cut off increases the sense of inevitable destruction. Richard Kelly, in his article on du Maurier for Twayne 's English Authors Series Online, concludes that the Hocken family "becomes a microcosm of an apparent worldwide disaster, and the conclusion of the story clearly suggests that the birds will destroy all the people on earth." Deciding that du Maurier's short story could not be expanded into a feature length film, Alfred Hitchcock added a new plot line, that of the romantic relationship between the film's two main characters, rich socialite Melanie Daniels (played by Tippi Hedren) and lawyer Mitch Brenner (played by Rod Taylor). The action begins when Melanie drives to Mitch's home in Bodega Bay and she becomes embroiled in a battle of wills and wits not only with Mitch, but also with his mother, with whom he lives, and his ex-girlfriend. These antagonistic relationships are dramatically altered by the bird attacks, which are quite similar in design and intensity to those in the short story. At the beginning of the film, Melanie appears as an independent, self-assertive woman who determines to establish a romantic union with Mitch. She initially becomes the sexual aggressor in the relationship, discovering where Mitch lives and subse-
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and Other Stories (1971), republished in America as Don't Look Now (1971) includes one of her most successful stories.' 'Don't Look Now'' traces a young couple's struggle to cope with the death of their daughter. • Du Maurier's Rebecca, published in 1938, chronicles the life of a young, frail woman who must face the ghosts of the past in an isolated mansion on the Cornish coast.
quently delivering a pair of lovebirds for his sister Cathy's birthday in an effort to make an impression on him. Mitch lives with his mother and Cathy, as Melanie discovers when she asks a resident for directions and is told the address of Lydia Brenner and "the two kids." This description reflects the suggestion of an oedipal relationship between Mitch and his mother, who appears grasping and manipulative, and who obviously feels threatened by Melanie. Lydia has previously been successful at destroying her son's romantic relationships, as his ex-girlfriend Annie notes. Ironically, Annie tries to discount the Freudian implications of their relationship when she remarks, "with all due respect to Oedipus," Lydia is not a "jealous woman" or a "clinging, possessive mother" but merely fears ' 'being abandoned.'' Yet, as Camille Paglia notes in her analysis of the film, Hitchcock admitted in his assessment of Lydia that she has been ' 'substituting her son for her husband." The suggestion of Mitch's attachment to his mother is reinforced by the fact that, as Paglia has observed, Lydia and Melanie look "remarkably alike." The ensuing power struggle between Lydia and Melanie for Mitch's attention is interrupted and redirected by a gathering of birds. Melanie is attacked by a lone gull as she pilots a boat to Mitch's dock, but, the next day, it escalates to a flock of birds attacking Cathy and her friends during a birthday party. This incident begins to change Melanie's role as sexual aggressor to a more tradi-
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While the story and the film follow different plot lines, the tone and the impetus for the narrative in the film stay remarkably true to the original: a nightmarish vision of a disordered universe where man's traditional hierarchical position in nature is reversed."
tional role of maternal protector, as she comforts Cathy, in effect usurping Lydia's position. This maternal relationship is reinforced later as she tries to calm Cathy after sparrows invade the house through the chimney and terrorize her and Lydia to the point that Lydia appears numbed and quite fragile. Relationships shift one more time at the end of the film when Melanie becomes trapped in the attic with a flock of frenzied birds that viciously attack her. After Mitch eventually pulls her out, she appears to be in a catatonic state, her aggressive will successfully broken. At this point, Lydia reassumes her maternal role and helps guide Melanie out of the house and into Mitch's car. Lydia appears victorious as she cradles the now submissive woman who has tried to interfere with the Brenner family's loyalties to its matriarch. Yet her cradling of the broken Melanie suggests that Lydia will now welcome her into the family in her more passive role. While the story and the film follow different plot lines, the tone and the impetus for the narrative in the film stay remarkably true to the original: a nightmarish vision of a disordered universe where man's traditional hierarchical position in nature is reversed. Nature conspires against the Hockens and the Brenners as it appears to aid the birds in their attacks. In both, the sea seems to work in conjunction with the birds. In the story, the gulls ride the waves, waiting for the tide to signal the next attack. In the film, the pet store saleswoman notes, a few
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hours before the gull assaults Melanie in the boat, that ' 'there must be a storm at sea. That can drive them inland." The predatory nature of the birds becomes evident in both works. Nat insists that the attacks have been logically planned: the gulls go after humans in the country, and the larger birds cover the cities. Prior to one attack, Nat notices gulls circling overhead ' 'as though they waited upon some signal. As though some decision had yet to be given. The order was not clear." Mitch recognizes the same type of "instinct to destroy mankind with all the deft precision of machines'' after the gull assaults Melanie. He exclaims,' 'it seemed to swoop down at you deliberately," just like the swarm of birds do the next day during Cathy's party. The characters respond to the crisis in similar ways. In each, a family is bombarded by a swarm of birds that invades a family's home and terrorizes the occupants. Hitchcock echoes the political backdrop of du Maurier's story when he explains that this incident in the film was based on the bombing of London during World War II, which his mother endured. In each, a main character is trapped alone in part of the house, struggling to survive the onslaught of the murderous birds. The pace in both quickens as the characters and readers/audience experience unrelenting terror while watching the birds amass, preparing for the next offensive. Nat carefully watches the waves where the birds sit, waiting for nature to signal their movements. Melanie waits outside the schoolhouse for Cathy while, one by one, a swarm of blackbirds gather ominously on the jungle-gym in the playground. The characters either reinforce or revert to traditional roles during the crisis. Throughout the attacks, Nat assumes the dominant role of protector as he pushes his children out of their bedroom after the birds have broken in, and he runs to the bus stop to pick up his daughter. Meanwhile, his wife alternates between cowering in the corner of her kitchen and comforting her terrified children. The presence of children also gives the characters in the film an opportunity to revert to conventional behavior. After the attacks begin, Melanie noticeably softens as her primary concern becomes Cathy's welfare. Yet it is Mitch who becomes the family's ultimate protector as he rescues Melanie from the attic and drives his family away from their invaded home. In her preface to The Breaking Point, du Maurier writes,' 'There comes a moment in the life of every
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individual when reality must be faced. When this happens, it is as though a link between emotion and reason is stretched to the limit of endurance, and sometimes snaps." All the adult women, Mrs. Hocken, Lydia, and Melanie, snap to some degree while the men stay focused on what is necessary for survival. Thus, both author and filmmaker suggest that, when faced with physical danger, men, out of necessity, assume the dominant role, a very traditional point of view made more complex by the nature and consequences of the threat. Hitchcock most likely included a romantic plot line to help insure the film's success, yet his divergence from du Maurier's story becomes a successful and thought-provoking extension of the author's themes. By grounding their works in an apocalyptic vision of the destruction of mankind, both present compelling studies of human behavior. Source: Wendy Perkins, Critical Essay on "The Birds," in Short Stories for Students, The Gale Group, 2002.
Beth Kattelman Kattelman holds a Ph.D. in theatre from Ohio State University. In this essay, Kattelman discusses the literary techniques du Manner uses to create the horrific effect of her short story.
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. . . du Maurier's story is a very compact, effective shocker that utilizes some traditional techniques of the horror genre to create a haunting, powerful impact upon the reader."
were the suicides, the divers, the ones with broken necks. Wherever he looked he saw dead birds." They hear through his ears: "At last the beating of the wings about him lessened and then withdrew, and through the density of the blanket he was aware of light. He waited, listened; there was no sound except the fretful crying of one of the children from the bedroom beyond." The reader is there in the room with Nat.
What would happen if nature purposefully turned against the human race? This simple premise is the basis for Daphne du Maurier's taut, tension-filled short-story "The Birds." In a few short pages, du Maurier takes the reader on a journey through a desperate fight for survival against a savage, unnatural world. How does du Maurier successfully achieve such a horrific effect in so few pages? She does so by masterfully employing some traditional techniques that are characteristic of the horror genre.
This "parallel journey" is a common technique of the horror genre. Horror writers often place readers in the middle of the same situation that engulfs the protagonist. In his book The Philosophy of Horror, Noel Carroll notes that' 'Horror appears to be one of those genres in which the emotive responses of the audience ideally, run parallel to the emotions of the characters. Indeed in works of horror the responses of the characters often seem to cue the emotional responses of the audiences." Thus, the short story writer provides clues as to how the reader should react through descriptions of the characters' reactions.
One technique du Maurier uses is that of focusing the tale solely upon the character of Nat Hocken. Although other characters appear in the tale, they are relatively inconsequential. "The Birds" is definitely Nat's story, and du Maurier takes the reader on a journey right along with him. The story never cuts away from what Nat is thinking, feeling, or doing, and thus, the reader gains a strong sense of identification with the main character. The description of Nat's actions and intentions allows readers to place themselves "in Nat's shoes," thus experiencing the fear and horror exactly as he does. They see through his eyes: "There were dead birds everywhere. Under the windows, against the walls. These
Du Maurier provides numerous examples of this technique in "The Birds." For instance, after the first major attack in the children's room, du Maurier notes how Nat is "shocked and horrified." She also lets the reader know that he is "sickened" at the site of the dead bird carcasses littering the floor. These descriptors play upon the reader's emotional state, drawing them into the situation and placing them right next to Nat in his struggle for survival. As the story progresses du Maurier provides even more information about Nat's experiences, describing not only his mental and emotional state, but his physical state, as well: "The terrible, fluttering wings. He could feel the blood on his
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hands, his wrists, his neck. Each stab of a swooping beak tore his flesh." The reader is meant to vicariously feel what Nat is experiencing and du Maurier's adept use of description helps achieve this end. In addition to taking the reader upon a parallel journey with the protagonist, du Marnier uses another common technique of the horror genre; she turns a common, familiar, "human-friendly" item into a cold-blooded killing-machine. By turning the "known" into the "unknown," the horrific effect is heightened. As Carroll states in his book,' 'Horror is generated in part by the apprehension of something that defies categorization in virtue of our standing or commonplace ways of conceptualizing the order of things." In other words, horror is created when ordinary, everyday objects look or behave in ways that are unfamiliar. They move outside the bounds of recognition, either in form or in behavior, and into an unknown realm. This cuts to the very heart of human apprehension. As the famous horror writer H. P. Lovecraft notes in "The Appeal of the Unknown," "The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown." Human beings make sense of their world through categorization. Knowledge is power, and familiarity with something or someone provides a sense of comfort. Horror writers shatter this comfort by forcing a reader to look at the familiar in a new and different light, thus disorienting them. The disorientation creates fear and apprehension, and ultimately causes the emotion we have come to know as horror. Writers can create this disorientation a variety of ways. They may conjure up a monster or a presence, which does not exist in the real world, or they may alter familiar creatures so that they look and/or behave differently than anything that can be found in common experience. The latter is what du Maurier does in "The Birds.'' She creates her horrific effect by fashioning a threat out of creatures that are well-known and considered benign by most human beings. Birds are usually thought to be beautiful, sweet creatures. They serenade mankind with sweet songs and are a symbol of peace and love. It is presumed that birds are not endowed with any malicious intent and that they will always behave as expected. These beliefs are very reassuring. When the known world goes awry, however, the impact can be shocking.
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By turning these everyday creatures into savage killing-machines, du Maurier creates a stronger effect than she might have achieved if she had chosen a fantastic or supernatural predator. Birds serve as a much more plausible threat, thus creating a very powerful story. After all, it is much easier to believe that the needle-beaked crow circling overhead might suddenly swoop down and viciously attack you than to expect Godzilla to show up in your back yard. Du Maurier even emphasizes the commonality of the birds in her story. During Nat's conversation with Mrs. Trigg, she suggests that the attacking birds have been blown in from the Arctic circle. He assures her that this is not the case, however: ' 'No, they were the birds you see about here every day." By investing innocent, omnipresent creatures with a malicious, evil intent, the horror is made more immediate for the reader. It's an effective technique and one that has been used repeatedly by many of the great horror-masters. For example, in Cujo, Stephen King turned a loving family pet into a vicious killer, and there are numerous stories in which the most angelic-looking child is turned into the embodiment of evil, as in William Peter Blatty's The Exorcist. In "The Birds," du Maurier repeatedly juxtaposes the ordinary rituals of hearth and home with the extraordinarily threatening occurrences that are taking place outside. This is a third technique that serves to heighten the tension of this tale. Throughout the story, Nat tries to maintain some semblance of order and normality as a way to allay his family's fears and to retain his own sanity. He believes that if he and his family can focus upon parts of their world that are still familiar, perhaps order will be restored and things will revert back to normal. Du Maurier gives the reader several descriptions of Nat's need to hold on to the well-known parts of his world:' 'he knelt down, raked out the old embers and relit the fire. The glowing sticks brought normality, the steaming kettle and the brown teapot comfort and security." The more Nat tries to cover up his rising fear and hysteria, however, the more he telegraphs it to the reader. The warm, familiar world of Nat's home stands in stark contrast to the cold, evil swarms of birds that are circling outside. Nat assures his family that as long as the radio is playing or the fire is burning, things will be all right. The reader knows, however, that Nat's reassurances to his wife and
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children are hollow and that things are probably not going to be ' 'all right'' as he keeps insisting. The radio will go silent and the fire will eventually go out. Du Maurier's story is a very compact, effective shocker that utilizes some traditional techniques of the horror genre to create a haunting, powerful impact upon the reader. She takes the reader on a parallel journey with the protagonist, turns the known into the unknown, and juxtaposes the comfort of traditional family life against the deadly force of nature gone awry. She also adds one extra ' 'shocker'' at the end of her tale. Adding to the horrific lingering effect of the story is the unresolved ending. Instead of providing a nice tidy conclusion for the story, she brings it to an abrupt halt and never provides a justification for why the events have occurred. The reader is left "hanging" and wondering, right along with Nat. Du Maurier does not let the reader off the hook by explaining away the birds' bizarre behavior or by suggesting a plausible solution by which the human race might save itself. Instead, she forces Nat and the reader to remain in a claustrophobic house where all they can do is sit, listen, and wait for the inevitable terror that's certain to return. Source: Beth Kattelman, Critical Essay on "The Birds," in Short Stories for Students, The Gale Group, 2002.
Deneka Candace MacDonald MacDonald is an instructor of English Literature and media. In this essay, MacDonald considers du Maurier's text as a reflection on nature versus culture, the human condition, and feminist principles. In the latter part of the twentieth century, with recurring environmental disasters of every imaginable kind, scholars, pseudo scholars, and the like began to take a marked interest in the growing binary relationship between humankind and animals, or more to the point, between culture and nature. Moreover, this theme of cultural distress has been reflected in contemporary fiction, which often personifies natural enemies of humankind on a variety of levels. Full of striking warfare metaphors, poignant spatial imagery, and provoking references to the "other," Daphne du Maurier's "The Birds" is a clever fictional addition to this growing concern with the phenomenon of nature versus culture. Du Maurier begins her tale with a marked indicator of the role nature will play in her story:
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.... the birds are representative of othered beings, not even the traditionally foreign others of the historical period (Russia), but local others, minorities and marginalized beings who have joined together to become one powerful force in the face of previous control and power."
"On December the third the wind changed overnight and it was winter." With this dramatic change in the weather, the birds begin to loom in the sky, illustrating their powerful presence and foreshadowing the dread that awaits Ned Hocken, his family, and ultimately, humankind. It is this relationship between human and nature that du Maurier is primarily concerned with as she immediately sets up a powerful dichotomy between the two: "the figure of the farmer silhouetted on the driving-seat, the whole machine and the man upon it would be lost momentarily in the great cloud of wheeling, crying birds." This initial image of the farmer astride his machine, battling a ' 'cloud'' of birds, is the first in a series of disturbing motifs that continue throughout the story; the message is clear: man/machine cannot successfully battle nature/the birds. Indeed, as "The Birds" continues, readers learn that nature works deliberately against man; it is nature's tides (the flood tide) that bring the vicious bird attacks, just as it is the ice cold wind that chips against Nat's hands, discouraging him as he works to defend his home. Images of war, carnage, and holocaust soon become linked with the open geography of the farm as well as the closed confined spaces of Nat's home. As he runs for shelter and protection from the raid in the gaping sky, Nat notes that the birds become bolder with each diving attempt at his body: They kept coming at him from the air, silent save for the beating wings. The terrible fluttering of the birds. He could feel the blood on his hands, his wrists, his
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neck. Each stab of a swooping beak tore his flesh. If only he could keep them from his eyes. Nothing else mattered.
In addition to the boldness of the birds, it becomes apparent that some of the birds are selfless, attacking for the greater cause "with no thought for themselves." Nat looks on in horror as the suicidal, dive-bombing birds miss him, crashing, "bruised and broken, on the ground": "The wings folded suddenly to its body. It dropped like a stone.... They heard the thud of the gannet as it fell." To his dismay, Nat discovers that man-made products such as windows are not sufficient protection against nature's anger. Frantically, he turns to natural products, first wood to board the windows and doors, and then the gruesome bloodied bodies of the dead birds themselves to insulate the broken boards and windows. He reasons that "the bodies would have to be clawed at, pecked, and dragged aside, before the living birds gained purchase on the sills and attacked the panes." This image of carnage immediately following the first major bird attack foreshadows further warlike imagery for the story. The birds have literally become an army, their corpses used as a repugnant defense. Further, both the black, cold weather and the viciousness of the birds themselves are attributed to Russian influence, just as Mrs. Trigg's indifference to the problem is ' 'like air-raids in the war,'' reflecting a cold war attitude. Nat's wife, too, reflects this mentality: "Won't America do something? They've always been our allies, haven't they? Surely America will do something?" Later, holocaust images are abundant when Nat neglects to keep the kitchen fire alight. He becomes frenzied as he attempts to pull the "smouldering helpless bodies of the birds caught by fire" from the chimney, unable to think of anything else, unable to heed the cries from his family in the background. When it is over, the kitchen fills with the smell of burning feathers from the ' 'heaped singed bodies of the birds." However, the battle with nature and culture stretches beyond Nat's small farm home in England but to the rest of the country (and the world by implication). Thus, the wireless radio ends its final transmission with the national anthem after its warning of the unnatural behavior of the birds. The telephones go "dead" during the night while the birds attack, and Nat discovers Mr. Trigg's body
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beside the telephone, indicating that he made a failed attempt to telephone for help before the birds gorged on his body. Clearly, mechanical developments in technology are no match for nature's birds. In addition, man's attempt to launch an ' 'air raid'' on the beasts fails when the birds attack the aircraft, infecting their propellers and sending them crashing into the farmland. Even the wind seems to come alive as it reclaims the dead birds, "sweeping them away" back into the sea during Nat's attempt to bury their bloodied bodies. Nat and his family are forced to hide, afraid and hunted as the birds launch a systematic attack, in the small confined space of their manmade cottage. The wide open spaces of the farm and the sea are occupied by the birds and are, therefore, unsafe for humanity. The story ends with a poignant analogy between nature and culture: "Nat listened to the tearing sound of splintering wood. . . . the stabbing beaks, the piercing eyes, now giving them this instinct to destroy mankind with all the deft precision of machines." Consequently, as Gina Wisker notes in her article "Don't Look Now," "the unease she [du Maurier] leaves us with develop[s] into fully fledged refusals of closure, and celebratory transgressions." Indeed, the people in ' 'The Birds'' will not be rescued. There will be no happy ending. They will die. Despite the fact that critics, including the biographer Nina Auerbach in Daphne du Maurier: Haunted Heiress, have plainly confirmed du Maurier's non-feminist status, her work clearly reflects some of the same issues which feminism explores. Further, as du Maurier challenged mainstream assumptions in her own life, experimenting in lesbian relationships and challenging the traditional roles of gender, it is perhaps not surprising that' 'The Birds'' openly and cleverly addresses the motif of otherness. As Anne Williams notes in The Horror, The Horror: Recent Studies in Gothic Fiction, ' 'Ever since its origins in the late eighteenth century, the Gothic has provided Anglo-American culture with a space of monstrous 'otherness.'" Throughout "The Birds," there is the suggestion that the birds that attack Nat Hocken and others are strange relentless beings who must be from outside the natural order of things. Nat initially tells his children not to worry, that the birds "aren't the birds, maybe, from here around. They've been
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driven down from up country." This notion is reiterated by Mrs. Triggs later when she says, "I suppose the weather brought them.... Foreign birds maybe, from the Arctic circle." Not only does this reinforce the already blatant cold war imagery in the story, but it also points to comfortable accusatory "othering" within the text. The vicious attack of the birds has come from elsewhere; local birds would never turn on the local people. Ironically, the reader discovers that these are local birds. Further, they are several species of local birds: "robins, finches, sparrows, blue tits, larks, and bramblings, birds that by nature's law kept to their own flock and their own territory, and now joining one with another in their urge for battle." Most importantly here, as Nat notes, these are birds, who, "by nature's law" would not normally band together. Metaphorically, on one level, the birds represent Mother Nature as she works to bring the birds of many species together in an angry army to attack and punish humanity. On another level, the birds are representative of othered beings, not even the traditionally foreign others of the historical period (Russia), but local others, minorities and marginalized beings who have joined together to become one powerful force in the face of previous control and power. They attack the farmer and the farm hands, the patriarchal inhabitants of nature's land who have reaped her resources. As Wisker notes: It exposes hidden fears and lurking perversities derived from disgust at difference... at the Other, at the abject, the 'not I,' rejected otherness. . .. The abject also involves anything monstrous and animal like which can take over and destroy.
Thus, the birds will not be stopped; they will not remit. They are relentless, acting with the nature's floods, timing their attacks to coincide with the ebb and flow of the tides.
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ally represent peace, freedom, and spirituality—but with something distinctly sinister about them: "but even when they fed it was as though they did so without hunger, without desire. Restlessness drove them to the skies again." Particularly, this story reflects the teetering between reason and sanity in the character Nat Hocken. Indeed, as Carol LeMasters notes in Roles of a Lifetime, "[du Maurier's] view of humanity proved darker than anything her literary forbears could have envisioned." Thus, although Nat is ' 'aware of misgiving without cause,'' he attempts to remain entirely reasonable for much of the story, assuring his family and himself that there are logical reasons for the strange unnatural behavior of the birds. He states that "it must have been fright that made them act the way they did," or that "the east wind brought them in. They were frightened and lost, they wanted shelter." Nat's reasonable explanations are confirmed by the wireless that recounts the "suspected reason of cold and hunger" as the bird's motivation for attack. Nat's fear of the bird phenomenon can be seen clearly in his overcompensation to detail in the task of preparing the home. He is decidedly ' 'over practical" throughout the ordeal. He immediately heeds the wireless instructions to protect his home, busily setting about the property boarding up windows, filling the chimney bases, and awaiting further news from the radio. He keeps himself occupied, thinking of food supplies, how many candles they will need, whether or not they have enough batteries and coal for the fire, etc., and where and when they can gather more.
' The Birds'' is one of many stories in which du Maurier explores the workings of the mind. As a woman interested in the inner struggle with internal evil and the disturbing images of the unconscious mind, du Maurier often explores the notion of horror from these perspectives. Thus, a crucial theme in ' 'The Birds'' is the relationship between reason and insanity. The story is expertly constructed to play upon both the characters' and the readers' ability to reason in the midst of unreasonable behavior.
However, as he battles nature's ice cold wind and goes about his tasks, his own musings about the attacks are full of self-doubt. He is certain that Mr. Trigg's "shooting match" with the birds will fail, and curses the man for not having the insight to defend his home. Eventually, Nat begins to ascribe human attributes of consciousness, greed, viciousness, and awareness to the army of birds attacking his home: '"they've got reasoning powers,' he thought, 'they know it's hard to break in here. They'll try elsewhere.'" Moreover, while Nat is initially confident that the authorities will solve this crisis with nature, he begins to doubt their competence: "someone high up had lost his head."
Du Maurier presents the reader with ordinary birds—seemingly harmless animals who tradition-
Finally, as the birds ravenously hunt him and his family, he becomes less rational. Nat eventually
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resists reason and embraces the terror of the birds. As he lights his last cigarette and watches the empty packet burn, he is resolved to his fate. Wisker notes that du Maurier herself says it best when she acknowledges, in a private letter: "The evil in us comes to the surface. Unless we recognize it in time, accept it, understand it, we are all destroyed, just as the people in "The Birds" were destroyed." Source: Deneka Candace MacDonald, Critical Essay on "The Birds," in Short Stories for Students, The Gale Group, 2002.
Curt Guyette Guyette has a bachelor's degree in English from the University of Pittsburgh. In the following essay, Guyette examines the influence of the Cold War and nuclear proliferation on du Maurier's story. In her short story "The Birds," author Daphne du Maurier creates a chilling piece of fiction that haunts the imagination by vividly conjuring up innate primal fears. Her stark depiction of a family huddled inside their house as hordes of vicious birds relentlessly attack is truly the stuff of which nightmares are made. When explored at a deeper level, however, this piece can be interpreted as something much more than just a macabre scenario involving birds gone berserk. Looked at closely, du Maurier's story can be seen as a cautionary tale about man's tendency to wage war and the profound dread plaguing a civilization perched on the brink of annihilation because of that trait. Published as part of a collection of stories in 1952, "The Birds" was written when the psychological wounds of World War II were still fresh, and the Cold War between western democracies and the Soviet Union was already well under way. As a native of Britain, du Maurier was keenly aware of the terror wrought by the German bombing raids that besieged England. Married to a British army officer who commanded an airborne division, she lived with the constant knowledge that one day there could be a knock on the door informing her that she had become a widow and that her small children were fatherless. But the end of the war did not bring a sense of peace or stability, neither for du Maurier nor the rest of the world. The images of mushroom clouds erupting from atom bombs dropped on Japan continued to cast their troubling shadows across the planet as the arms race with the Soviets escalated and the specter of nuclear conflict hovered. Such a conflict threatened not only humanity, but all life on
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earth. As a result, for the first time in history, man's unique tendency toward war had culminated in weapons of mass destruction that posed a direct threat to the entire natural world. Just as the world suddenly changed forever at that instant the first atomic bomb exploded over Hiroshima to usher in the nuclear age, the change portending doom is equally swift and unexpected as the story of "The Birds" begins. The world changes literally overnight as the mild, mellow days of autumn are transformed, immediately becoming cold and harsh as a foreboding wind begins to blow in from the east. The land freezes hard as stone in a matter of hours. "Black winter had descended in a single night," writes du Maurier. The story's central character, Nat Hocken, is a war veteran suffering from a disability. Because he works part-time at a farm, Nat is very much in touch with the rhythms of nature. Living near the ocean, he takes pleasure in watching the seasonal rituals that dictate the migration patterns of the many different kinds of birds that inhabit the area along the British sea coast that's home to Nat and his family. It is while Nat is working in the fields that he first senses something odd about the birds gathering around him. There are many more of them than normal, and they seem unusually agitated. Nat thinks of them as a "warning" that winter is approaching. When the weather turns with a shift in the wind that night, the coinciding attack of birds is immediate. First it is just one small bird fluttering against the bedroom window of Nat and his wife, but even it draws blood. Before the night is through, Nat is battling fiercely to protect his young children from the swarm of birds that have flooded into their room. As the sun rises and the birds flee, Nat surveys the carnage and sees several dozen dead birds of many different varieties. It is more proof that something unnatural is occurring because, under normal circumstances, these birds would have "kept to their own flock and their own territory ... It is as though a madness seized them, with the east wind," Nat tells his wife. References to the "east wind" are frequent throughout the story. Ensuring that the significance of that is not lost on readers, du Maurier is even more explicit when referring to the source of this sudden cold. Mrs. Trigg, the wife of the farmer Nat works for, asks him specifically if he thinks the razor sharp wind is blowing in from Russia. Later in
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the story, after the birds have made their first attack, the farmer tells Nat, "They're saying in town the Russians have done it. The Russians have poisoned the birds." It is a stark example of the kind of cold war paranoia that was proliferating during the 1950s. But that threat is not enough to instill caution in the farmer. Ignoring advice to board up his windows to fend off attack, he thinks a gun will allow him to handle any threat the birds might pose. Nat sees the farmer's dismissive attitude toward precautionary measures as similar to that of people who failed to acknowledge the onset of the second world war. There are numerous references to World War II throughout the story. As it turns out though, the postwar attack of birds seem to be an even more formidable enemy than the Axis powers were. The British planes that successfully fought off the Germans prove useless against the small winged creatures willing to thrust themselves into engines, causing the aircraft to crash and explode. Likewise, the massive warships that helped the British and their allies beat back the forces of fascism are powerless against this new terror. From Nat's vantage point, the only weapon that might be of use is poison gas, which may kill the birds but would (like nuclear fallout) leave behind a world so "contaminated" that it would be uninhabitable. This sense of futility reflects du Maurier's personal philosophy regarding war. According to Margaret Forster's biography Daphne Du Maurier: The Secret Life of the Renowned Storyteller, the author saw all armed conflict as a fruitless endeavor. As she wrote to a friend regarding the war: "What carnage there is going to be ... and what will have been achieved? Nothing." Forster also described a time during the middle of World War II when du Maurier looked at her young son and pessimistically thought about the terrible fighting and how his generation will all be "doing the same in twenty years' time, and it made her shudder." That same sort of dire outlook permeates ' 'The Birds." In Twentieth Century Romance and Historical Writers, Richard Kelly writes about the struggle Nat Hocken and his family endure when they see "nature turn upon them . . . The end result," observes Kelly about the attack, "is that human beings are forced to act like animals themselves, with survival as their solitary goal." Whether the Hocken family will prevail is something that's left to doubt. As "The Birds" draws to a close, the family is huddled inside their kitchen as if it were an air raid shelter, with food and
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. . . for the first time in history, man's unique tendency toward war had culminated in weapons of mass destruction that posed a direct threat to the entire natural world,"
fire wood in short supply. The radio is silent, and they are shut off from the outside world as hordes of birds stab at the windows and claw at the roof with their talons. Indeed, the family's survival is very much in question. What brought them to that point is what du Maurier described as a new-born instinct "to destroy mankind with all the deft precision of machines." As the Hocken family is forced to live like animals, the birds in this story display a type of intellect usually associated with humans. From the outset, Nat notices that the birds gather to attack in organized "formations," like so many war planes. It is as if they were on specific missions, acting under orders from some unseen high command, with some flocks being assigned cities to attack while others are given rural areas to assault with their kamikaze-like bombardments. "They've got reasoning powers,'' thinks Nat. And that may be the ultimate horror story: a world in which nature, threatened with annihilation by the awesome destructive powers of modern technology, retaliates by assuming a characteristic that otherwise makes man unique—the ability to ruthlessly and systematically wage all-out war. Source: Curt Guyette, Critical Essay on "The Birds," in Short Stones for Students, The Gale Group, 2002.
Richard Kelly In the following essay excerpt, Kelly explores du Maurier's treatment of the "breaking point" between emotion and reason and the effect this has on the characters in ' 'The Birds.'' Although some of du Maurier's novels, such as The House on the Strand and The Flight of the Falcon, acknowledge the workings of the unconscious mind, most of her short stories focus upon this sixth sense
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and explore the region of the mind that borders upon reason and madness, the natural and the supernatural. In her preface to The Breaking Point, du Maurier writes,' There comes a moment in the life of every individual when reality must be faced. When this happens, it is as though a link between emotion and reason is stretched to the limit of endurance, and sometimes snaps." Two of her tales that study this breaking point, "The Birds," and "Don't Look Now," have been indelibly etched upon millions of minds through the enormously popular films by Alfred Hitchcock and Nicholas Roeg. ' The Birds'' is an excellent short story that has been turned into a very bad motion picture. "On December the third the wind changed overnight and it was winter," the story opens. This sudden shift in the weather sets the tone for the catastrophic change in the natural order of things to follow. The tale focuses upon an English farmer, Nat Hocken, his wife and children. As the cold begins to bite into both the land and Nat's body, he notices that there are more birds than usual, both over the sea and land. That night he hears pecking at the windows of his home. The birds are trying to get in, and when he goes to investigate the noise one of them pecks at his eyes. Some fifty birds then fly through the open window in his children's room, and he manages to kill most of them amidst the hysterical cries of the children. The next day the family discusses the bizarre occurrence. Nat explains that the east wind must have affected the behavior of the birds and caused them to seek shelter in his house. When his daughter, Jill, says that they tried to peck at her brother's eyes, Nat again offers a rational explanation. "Fright made them do that. They didn't know where they were, in the dark bedroom." Later that day, Nat sees what he thinks are white caps out at sea, but they turn out to be hundreds of thousands of gulls: "They rose and fell in the trough of the seas, heads to the wind, like a mighty fleet at anchor, waiting on the tide." When he returns home his wife informs him that there was an announcement on the radio stating that "its everywhere. In London, all over the country. Something has happened to the birds." A later bulletin says that "That flocks of birds have caused dislocation in all areas." "Dislocation" is a key word in this story, for it identifies the fundamental disruption in the natural order of things. Man, who is ordained to have dominion over the birds and the beasts, suddenly
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has his authority threatened. There is not only a dislocation in the great chain of being but within people's minds. Reason and serenity are displaced by fear and panic in this unexpected reversion to a Darwinian world of the survival of the fittest. Realizing that neither the government nor the military could do anything to help at this point, Nat assumes the thinking of a survivalist: "Each householder must look after his own." Life within his small farmhouse takes on the character of Londoners during the airraids: the family huddles together, food is carefully accounted for, windows and other openings are sealed up, as they prepare for the invasion. The next day the birds continue to gather ominously in the sky and in the fields. On his way home Nat is viciously attacked by a gull, and during his panic a dozen other gulls join in. ' 'If he could only keep them from his eyes. They had not learnt yet how to cling to a shoulder, how to rip clothing, how to dive in mass upon the head, upon the body. But with each dive, with each attack, they became bolder." Safe at home again, Nat has his wounds treated by his wife, and his children become terrified at the sight of the blood. The battle is now in earnest. The parents do their best to keep the children distracted, but their gut fear shows in their faces and in their actions. That night thousands of birds assault the house, breaking the windows, screaming down the chimney. Using all of his energy and resourcefulness, Nat manages to get his family through the harrowing hours. Daylight brings a degree of safety, for the birds seem to settle quietly in the fields. Nat goes to the home of his neighbor, the Triggs, to see if he can get some food for his family and discovers the mutilated bodies of the couple. Mr. Trigg is lying next to his telephone, and his wife, an umbrella and a few dead birds at her side, is lying on her bedroom floor. Nat gathers up some food and returns home. This time he barricades his house with barbed wire around the boarded windows and chimney. He works feverishly as his wife and children sleep and then joins them in the hope that his small world is secure. The story ends with Nat lighting up his last cigarette and listening to the attack of the birds: The smaller birds were at the window now. He recognized the light tap-tapping of their beaks, and the soft brush of their wings. The hawks ignored the windows. They concentrated their attack upon the door. Nat listened to the tearing sound of splintering wood, and wondered how many millions of years
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The were stored in those little brains, behind the stabbing beaks, the piercing eyes, now giving them this instinct to destroy mankind with all the deft precision of machines.
By limiting the focus of her story upon Nat Hocken and his family du Maurier manages to convey the effect of a believable claustrophobic nightmare. The birds may be attacking people throughout the world, but du Maurier wisely keeps the story within the confines of one person's family (though, of course, Nat hears reports of the birds turning predatory in London). The Hocken family becomes a microcosm of an apparent world-wide disaster, and the conclusion of the story clearly suggests that the birds will destroy all the people on earth. During recent years there have been stories and films featuring everything from rabbits to ants as man's final enemy. Du Maurier's story, however, was something of a shocker at the time, and her choice of birds as the destroyers was particularly effective. Birds have long been associated with peacefulness, beauty, freedom, spirituality, music, and poetry. Unlike ants, frogs, rats, bees and the other assortments of creatures that go on the rampage in contemporary science fiction tales, birds are attractive and elusive creatures. By making them relentless, almost calculating predators, du Maurier revolutionizes the traditional symbolism of birds, and her story conjures up the nightmarish imagery of the paintings by Hieronymus Bosch, in which grotesque birds with stabbing beaks threaten the rational order of things. Du Maurier plays upon the archetypal fear of having one's eyes pierced by having Nat several times throughout the story exclaim in the midst of an attack that he must protect his eyes. One other nice touch in the story is that du Maurier does not offer some pseudo-scientific explanation for the birds' behavior. Given an ordered and reasonable world, her characters attempt to explain the phenomena in terms they can understand—a shift in the weather or migration patterns. They gradually discover, however, that their life-long assumptions about reason and order do not apply, that their world has suddenly become absurd, a bad dream in which rules of logic and common sense no longer work. The end result is that human beings are forced to act like animals themselves, with survival as their solitary goal. Alfred Hitchcock became interested in du Maurier's story after he read the headlines of a Santa Cruz newspaper: "A Sea Bird Invasion Hits
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Birds
'Dislocation' is a key word in this story, for it identifies the fundamental disruption in the natural order of things. Man, who is ordained to have dominion over the birds and the beasts, suddenly has his authority threatened."
Coastal Homes." Realizing that there was no plot or character development in the short story, Hitchcock knew he would have to get someone, preferably a novelist, who could expand the story and make it suitable for a film. He turned to the novelist Evan Hunter. Hunter's final story line is as follows: A rich San Francisco socialite named Melanie Daniels (played by Tippi Hedren) meets a brash young lawyer named Mitch Brenner (played by Rod Taylor) in a pet shop. Despite Mitch's arrogant manner, Melanie is attracted to him, and she travels by boat to his home in Bodega Bay to deliver a pair of love birds his young sister wanted. Returning to town, Melanie is attacked by a swooping gull that wounds her head. Later she accepts an invitation to Mitch's home for dinner, despite his mother's disapproval of her. The birds in the area, meantime, show signs of erratic behavior. Melanie goes to help out at the sister's birthday party the next day, and during the party a flock of gulls attacks the children. The school teacher, Annie Hay worth (played by Suzanne Pleshette), was formerly in love with Mitch and provides the love triangle. The violence increases as a flock of sparrows pours into the house through the chimney. A neighboring farmer and his wife are pecked to death; another attack leads to an explosion of a gasoline tank; and Annie is killed while trying to protect her students. Finally, Melanie, Mitch, his mother and sister, barricade the house against a brutal onslaught of birds. During a lull the next day, Mitch gets his car, and he drives the terrified group away slowly down a road surrounded by birds.
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Hitchcock did not want any stars in his film. He told Hunter, "I'm the star, the birds are the stars— and you're the star." Apart from the famous stage actress Jessica Tandy, who played the mother, there were no well-known actors in the film. Hitchcock chose Suzanne Pleshette, a newcomer, over Anne Bancroft for the role of the school-teacher. He gave Tippi Hedren and Rod Taylor their first leading roles. A great expense of time and money went into the birds themselves: mechanical birds, animated birds, and real birds. Two men, wearing protective gloves, threw live birds at Tippi Hedren during the climatic scene. Hours were spent in shooting this scene in a caged room as Hedren attempted to act under the constant bombardment of feathers and beaks. Once a frightened bird left a deep gash on her lower eye lid, and the terror in the cage became more than mere acting. If a lesser figure than Hitchcock had produced this film it is doubtful that it would have received such enormous notoriety. It is without a doubt the worse film version of a du Marnier story. Evan Hunter's script is largely devoted to the dull and unbelievable love story between Mitch and Melanie. The audience must sit through over an hour of poor acting and vapid dialogue before the birds get their chance to star. The nightmare effect of du Maurier's story is diminished beyond recall, with the exception of one excellent scene in which Melanie sits outside the school house waiting for Mitch's sister. As she sits there smoking a cigarette, a jungle-gym set in the background ominously fills up with large blackbirds. Brenda Gill, in the New Yorker, observes that the film "doesn't arouse suspense, which is, of course, what justifies and transforms the sadism that lies at the heart of every thriller. Here the sadism is all too nakedly, repellently present.... If this picture is a hit, the Audubon Society has an ugly public-relations problem on its hands." Most of the major newspapers and magazines attacked this film with the vehemence of the predatory birds themselves. Before long, the critics were busily attacking each other. Gary Arnold in Moviegoer ridicules the opinions of Peter Bogdanovich and Andrew Sarris, who contend that The Birds is Hitchcock's greatest artistic achievement. Arnold observes that Evan Hunter's script lies at the heart of the film's failure: "Since the people in the film are so shallow, so lacking in the qualities and complexities of human beings, the birds themselves lose a good deal of force both as terrorizers and possible symbols.
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Assaulting vacant, passive, cardboard figures proves very little, I think, about what men are like or what they may have in store for themselves." ... The autobiographical fable embedded within this tale, then, argues that du Maurier's wide experience, her best-selling novels, and her concessions to Hollywood are all meritorious. The elitist writers may have the adulation of the snobbish literary establishment but real life moves on a lower, more powerful plane, and the elitist will one day come to realize that. In most of her short fiction du Maurier is primarily interested in conclusions and in the events that lead to those conclusions. Character, atmosphere, language, social commentary—all are of secondary interest to her as she plunges her undefined characters into a sequence of events that inextricably lead them to a predestined, usually surprising, fate. Her stories present life in neat, tidy little packages. Her characters are manipulated by their contrived future, their every gesture and word leading to a preconceived conclusion. Du Maurier's best stories avoid this easy pattern in favor of a more complex, ambiguous view of life. "The Birds," ' 'Don't Look Now," ' 'The Way of the Cross,'' and "Ganymede" are four of her most convincing and entertaining stories. Like Rebecca and The Parasites, two of her best novels, they convey a cogent sense of the terror and comedy of ordinary human life. Source: Richard Kelly, "The World of the Macabre: The Short Stories," in Daphne du Maurier, Twayne Publishers, 1987, pp. 123-40.
Sources Auerbach, Nina, "Daphne du Maurier," in British Writers, Scribner's, 1996, pp. 133-49. , Daphne du Maurier: Haunted Heiress, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000. Barkham, John, "The Macabre and the Unexpected," in the New York Times Book Review, March 8, 1953, p. 5. Berkman, Sylvia, "A Skilled Hand Weaves a Net of Horror," in the New York Herald Tribune Book Review, March 15, 1953, p. 4. Carroll, Noel, The Philosophy of Horror, Routledge, 1990, pp. 17, 126-27. Forster, Margaret, Daphne du Maurier: The Secret Life of the Renowned Storyteller, Doubleday, 1993, p. 184.
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Kelly, Richard, "Daphne du Maurier: Chapter 6: The World of the Macabre: The Short Stories," in Twayne's English Authors Series Online, G. K. Hall, 1999. , "du Maurier, Daphne," in Reference Guide to English Literature, Vol. 1, Introductions, Writers A-G, 2d ed., edited by D. L. Kirkpatrick, St. James Press, 1991, pp. 515-16. , "du Maurier, Daphne," in Twentieth-Century Romance and Historical Writers, 3d ed., edited by Aruna Vasudevan, St. James Press, 1994, pp. 201-02. LeMasters, Carol, "Roles of a Lifetime," in The Gay and Lesbian Review, Vol. 7, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000, p. 48. Lovecraft, H. P.,' 'The Appeal of the Unknown,'' in Horror, Greenhaven Press, 2001, p. 29. Paglia, Camille, The Birds: BFI Film Classics, British Film Institute, 1998. Templeton, Wayne, "Daphne du Maurier," in Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vol. 191: British Novelists Between the Wars, Gale, 1998, pp. 85-94. Williams, Anne,' 'Daphne du Maurier: Writing, Identity, and the Gothic Imagination," in The Horror, The Horror: Recent Studies In Gothic Fiction, Vol. 46, No. 3, John Hopkins University Press, 2000, p. 790.
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Wisker, Gina, "Don't Look Now," in Journal of Gender Studies, Vol. 8, University of Hull, 1999, pp. 19, 21-22.
Further Readiner Forster, Margaret, Daphne du Maurier: The Secret Life of the Renowned Storyteller, Doubleday, 1993. Forster's biography renewed critical interest in du Maurier and offered insight into how her relationships with the women and men in her life were reflected in her works. Harris, June, "du Maurier, Daphne," in Contemporary Popular Writers, edited by Dave Mote, St. James Press, 1997, pp. 127-29. This overview offers a brief but comprehensive look at du Maurier's major themes and style. Horner, Avril, and Sue Zlosnik, Daphne du Maurier: Writing, Identity and the Gothic Imagination, St. Martin's Press, 1998. This thoughtful critique places du Maurier's fiction in the gothic tradition.
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Black Is My Favorite Color Bernard Malamud 1963
Bernard Malamud's ''Black Is My Favorite Color'' was first published in the Reporter on July 18,1963. It has since been reprinted in several short story collections, the first being Idiots First, also in 1963. Eight years before' 'Black is My Favorite Color'' was published, African-American Rosa Parks refused to give up her bus seat to a white man, igniting the Civil Rights movement that reached its height at the same time Malamud was writing his story. The outcry for racial equality that characterized the 1950s and 1960s influenced much literature, including Malamud's. In particular, "Black Is My Favorite Color'' picked up on the tense relations between the Jewish-American and African-American communities. The story concerns Nat Lime, a fortyish, white, Jewish bachelor in Harlem who repeatedly tries to integrate himself into the African-American community by dating black women, hiring black personnel in his liquor store, and trying to do good deeds for blacks wherever possible. All of his efforts end up backfiring, as his status as a white, Jewish man continually alienates him from all African Americans. Critics have interpreted the cynical tone of Malamud's story to mean that the author thought the attempts at racial integration at the heart of the Civil Rights movement were hopeless. The story featured a harsh realism, which was a dramatic departure from the mythical style that Malamud had become famous for with novels like 1952's The Natural, his
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first and still his best-known book. Malamud is often praised for his short stories, and several critics consider' 'Black Is My Favorite Color'' to be one of his best. A current version of the story can be found in The Complete Stories, published after the author's death by The Noonday Press in 1997. Malamud is also known for his first short story collection, The Magic Barrel (1958), which won the National Book Award for fiction.
Author Biography Bernard Malamud was born in Brooklyn, New York, on April 28, 1914, to Russian Jewish immigrant parents who owned and operated a grocery store. Although his parents had little education and knew very little about the arts, Malamud found his way into the prestigious Erasmus Hall High School in Brooklyn. He published his early short stories in the school's literary magazine, The Erasmian. After earning a bachelor's degree from the City College of New York in 1936 and his master's degree from Columbia University in 1942, Malamud taught night classes at Erasmus Hall. During this time period, inspired by World War II and the nightmares of the Holocaust, Malamud examined his own Jewish heritage. The beliefs and views he garnered from his studies and his self-reflection influenced his writing throughout his lifetime.
Bernard Malamud
For the next decade, Malamud taught high school while publishing his short stories in magazines. In 1949, the author accepted an English position at Oregon State, where he taught for the next twelve years. During this time, he published some of his best-known works, including his first two novels, The Natural and The Assistant, drawing heavily upon his parents' background as grocery store owners.
Plot Summary
In the early 1960s, the tensions between blacks and whites in New York inspired Malamud to write his short story, "Black Is My Favorite Color." The story, in which the protagonist strives for racial equality, was published in 1963, in the same year that the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. gave his famous ' 'I Have a Dream" speech during his peaceful march on Washington. Malamud is not only considered one of the top Jewish-American writers, but one of America's greatest writers, period. His award-winning works are noted for their exploration of the Jewish-American experience, often in ways that mix realistic and
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fantastic elements. He received the National Book Award in fiction in 1959 for his short story collection The Magic Barrel and in 1967 for his novel The Fixer. The latter also earned the Pulitzer Prize in fiction that same year. Malamud died of natural causes on March 18, 1986.
Charity Quietness ' 'Black Is My Favorite Color'' starts out with a description by Nat Lime, the narrator, of his cleaning lady, Charity Quietness, who eats her lunch by herself in the bathroom in Nat's Harlem apartment. Although Nat, a forty-four year old Jewish bachelor, has invited Charity to eat lunch with him in the past, she insists on eating in the bathroom. Nat says that this is his fate with colored people, a term he uses through the story. Nat explains that, despite this fate, black is his favorite color and that he is drawn to colored people. He talks about the liquor store that he runs in Harlem and claims that, although he has tried several times to show his affection for black people, he has not had any reciprocity.
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Nat's Childhood Nat uses the current situation with Charity Quietness as a springboard to discuss his earliest memories of colored people. The first colored person that Nat met was Buster Wilson, when Nat and his family moved near a black neighborhood in Brooklyn. His family had lived in Manhattan, but Nat's father, a cutter by trade, developed arthritis in his hands and could no longer work. As a result, Nat's mother started selling paper bags from a pushcart, which was just enough to support them in Brooklyn. Nat recalls seeing Buster, a young colored boy around his age, playing marbles by himself. Nat wants to become his friend, but Buster does not give him the opportunity. Nat talks about Buster's father, whose alcoholism affects his work as a barber. Even though Nat and his family are poor, he notes that Buster and the other colored people in his block are much worse off. Nat likes the parties that the colored people have, and he watches the black girls through the windows when he walks by their tenements. However, he notes that the parties bring drinking and rights, and he recalls some of the brutal fights he has seen, including one where Buster's father gets in a fistfight. The police break up the fight and beat everybody with their nightsticks, including Buster's father. One day, Nat steals fifteen cents from his mother and, in a conciliatory gesture, offers to take Buster to the movies. Buster accepts and even goes several more times with Nat—who pays for other items, as well, like candy. One day, unprovoked, Buster hits Nat in the teeth and calls him a Jew in a derogatory manner. Their friendship abruptly ends.
Ornita Harris Later in life, Nat meets Mrs. Ornita Harris, a young black widow. Ornita accidentally drops her glove one day, and when Nat picks it up for her, she tells Nat that she does not accept favors from white men. Ornita comes into Nat's liquor store a week later. She does not recognize him at first, but when she does, she apologizes for her behavior regarding the glove. Nat offers her a discount on her bottle of Scotch, which she accepts. Ornita comes into Nat's store every two weeks for liquor, and each time, Nat gives her a discount. As Nat recounts the memory, he notes that Ornita was attractive in the ways that he likes. Over time, Nat learns that Ornita's husband was a skyscraper window cleaner who fell fifteen stories when his safety belt broke. After his death,
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Ornita began working as a manicurist. Nat tells Ornita that he is a bachelor and that he lives with his mother, who has cancer. Although Ornita is resistant, Nat finally convinces Ornita to go on a date with him that summer. The date is very uncomfortable, and the two do not feel closer at the end of the night. Ornita will not let Nat take her back to Harlem, so he calls her a cab instead. Ornita questions why they are even bothering to date each other, but Nat convinces her to go on another date with him. At the end of this date, the two sleep together; Nat says that he fell in love with Ornita that night. That same week, Nat gets held up in his liquor store by two black men, one of whom cracks Nat on the head with his gun. Nat is in the hospital for a little while, during which time Ornita comes to visit him and offer comfort. When Nat is released from the hospital, his mother is dead. He mourns her loss by himself at first, but after a week, he goes to Ornita and proposes to her. Ornita declines his offer, explaining that she is unsure that the interracial marriage would work. Over the next several weeks, the two date a few times a week, and, as Nat talks more about marriage, he slowly convinces Ornita to accept his proposal. Nat begins to make preparations to sell his business so the two can move to San Francisco, where interracial marriages are more accepted. One night, however, as Nat is walking Ornita back to her house, three young black men with switchblades stop them. The young men do not listen to Nat's claims that he helps blacks out by employing them at good wages. Instead, they stereotype him, calling him a Jew landlord, and tell him, in very derogatory terms, that he cannot sleep with Ornita anymore. One of the men slaps Ornita, and when Nat hits the young man, all three of the young men knock Nat into the gutter, take his wallet, and run.
Kicked in the Teeth Nat tries to follow Ornita home, but she is distraught and walks home on her own. She cancels their date the next night, and when Nat calls her, she says that the interracial marriage will not work. While recounting the demise of his relationship with Ornita, Nat recalls a situation where he tried to help a blind black man across the street. The blind man claimed that he could tell Nat was white. At the same time, a colored woman pushed Nat out of the way—and into a fire hydrant—and brusquely said
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that she would help the blind man. Nat comes to an understanding of the impossibility of his situation, that despite his intentions, when he tries to show affection, he gets kicked in the teeth for his efforts. At the end of the story, Nat returns from his reminiscence to the present moment of the story—Charity Quietness eating her lunch in the bathroom. Frustrated, he yells at her to come out.
old white, Jewish bachelor who claims to have always had an attraction to black people. Nat begins his tale by talking about his maid, Charity Quietness, who insists on eating her lunch in Nat's bathroom, separate from him. Nat provides his history with black people, starting with the first black person he tried to befriend: Buster Wilson, a boy who lived in Nat's Brooklyn neighborhood. Nat coaxes Buster into going to the movies with him on several occasions, but the friendship ends when Buster hits Nat and calls him a Jew in a derogatory manner.
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Nat does not have much more luck with Mrs. Ornita Harris, a widow. Nat tries to be nice to Ornita when he first meets her, but she mistakes chivalry for charity and tells him she does not like white men doing her favors. He meets her again in his liquor store, where she is more cordial. He gives her a discount on her order, and after she visits his liquor store a few more times, Nat and Ornita begin to date. Nat becomes very interested in her, and he believes that he has fallen in love with her after the first time they sleep together. Ornita does not reciprocate his feelings right away; in fact, it takes a while before she can even feel comfortable around him.
Mrs. Ornita Harris Mrs. Ornita Harris is a young, black widow who dates Nat, a white Jewish man, but who cannot bring herself to marry him. Ornita meets Nat when he picks up a glove she has dropped. She is rude to him, telling him that she does not need his favors, but when they meet a week later in Nat's liquor store, she is more cordial. Nat gives her a discount on her order, and she begins to come in every couple weeks. Ornita and Nat start dating, but there is a discomfort between them. She tells Nat that their dates are pointless, but she continues dating him. The first night they sleep together, Nat thinks he has fallen in love with her. After Nat gets held up at his store by two black men, landing him in the hospital, Ornita comes to visit him. Shortly thereafter, Nat proposes to Ornita, but she refuses his offer. They continue to date one another, however, and as Nat talks more about the possibility of marriage, Ornita warms up to the idea. One night, as Nat is walking Ornita back to her house, three young black men stop them. The men are very rude and say some very indecent things about the interracial couple. One of the men slaps Ornita. Nat hits the man, and all three men proceed to knock Nat into the gutter, take his wallet, and flee the scene. Nat tries to console Ornita, but she is distraught, and she calls off the wedding plans, claiming that it will never work.
Nat's store gets held up by two black men, one of whom knocks Nat out with his gun. While he is in the hospital, Ornita comes to visit him. When he gets out of the hospital, he proposes to Ornita, but she is reluctant at first. As they begin to date more seriously, she warms up to the idea of marriage. Nat makes plans to sell his liquor store so they can move to San Francisco, where interracial marriages are more accepted. One night, after Nat and Ornita enjoy a troublefree dinner with one of Nat's friends, three young black men stop them as they are walking home. The three men express outrage at the fact that a black woman is with Nat, a white Jewish man. One of them slaps her, prompting her to scream and Nat to hit him. Soon Nat finds himself in the gutter without his wallet, and Ornita refuses his offer to continue walking her home. Moreover, she calls off the engagement and stops dating him. As the story ends, Nat comes back to the present situation, with Charity Quietness eating her lunch in the bathroom. Frustrated, he tells her to come out.
Nathan Lime The narrator, Nathan Lime, known to most of the story's characters as "Nat," is a forty-four year
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Nathan's Father Nathan's father has to quit working when his arthritis gets too bad, which forces the family to move from Manhattan to Brooklyn. He dies when Nathan is only thirteen.
Nathan's Mother Nathan's mother supports the family after her husband's arthritis gets so bad that he cannot work anymore. When they move from Manhattan to Brooklyn, she earns a living by selling paper bags from a pushcart. Nathan's mother is the one who says that if he ever forgets he is a Jew, a non-Jewish person will remind him that he is one, which happens repeatedly to Nathan in his relations with black people. Nathan's mother lives with her son, and, over the course of the story, she dies from cancer. Nathan gets the news when he gets out of the hospital.
Charity Quietness Charity Quietness is Nat's cleaning lady, who starts coming in once a week to clean his apartment. The first time she comes to clean, Nat invites her to eat lunch with him. She tries, but pretty soon, she takes her lunch into the bathroom and eats it there, as she does at the beginning of the story. After Nat has narrated his tale, and illustrated how he always tries to help blacks and gets nothing but pain for his troubles, he comes back to present-day, where Charity is still in the bathroom, although he soon yells at her to come out.
Buster Wilson Buster Wilson is the first black person whom Nat tries to befriend; like future attempts, this relationship fails miserably. Nat notices Buster after Nat's family moves into Buster's neighborhood. He tries to befriend him, but Buster ignores him. Finally, he gets Buster to go to a movie with him. After several such social outings, Buster punches Nat in the mouth, calling him a Jew in a derogatory way.
Mr. Wilson Buster's father is a barber who likes to get drunk and fight at parties; on one occasion, the young Nat witnesses him being beaten up by the police. It is at this point that Nat offers to take Buster to the movies.
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rhemes Racial Inequality From the very beginning of the story, when "Charity Quietness sits in the toilet," eating her eggs, while Nat eats in the kitchen, the divide between African Americans and Caucasians plays a major role in the story. Nat recalls how he invited Charity to eat with him in the kitchen when she first came to work as his cleaning woman. Charity is only able to take "a small bite" out of one of her eggs. At that point, as Nat says, "she stopped chewing and she got up and carried the eggs in a cup to the bathroom, and since then she eats there." This divide between cultures is even more apparent when Nat recalls the ' 'rundown," ' 'Negro houses'' that are located in the middle of a ' 'not-sohot white neighborhood." As Nat says, "In those days though I had little myself I was old enough to know who was better off, and the whole block of colored houses made me feel bad in the daylight." Even as a child, Nat knows that he is better off than African Americans. Nevertheless, he tries to ignore this, and he starts a friendship with Buster, a black boy in the neighborhood. He is unsuccessful at first, until Buster's father gets taken away by the police for fighting, and Nat offers to take Buster to the movies. However, Nat remarks that even though he pays for Buster's movies and candy and shares his comic books with Buster, "we never got to be friends. Maybe because it was a one-way proposition—from me to him." Even as an adult, Nat is unable to get most people to see past his skin and his comparatively privileged status. When some black street thugs stop him and his African-American lover, Ornita, Nat tries to tell them, "we're all brothers. I'm a reliable merchant in the neighborhood." The young men ignore his statements and tell him that he talks "like a Jew landlord . . . Fifty a week for a single room," and "No charge fo the rats." Although he hires black workers, dates black women, and does many favors for black people, none of this matters in the eyes of these three African Americans.
African Americans Nat is drawn to African-American culture, but he is repeatedly refused the acceptance he desires
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Topics for Further Study • Many regard Rosa Parks's refusal to give up her bus seat in 1955 as the official beginning of the Civil Rights movement, even though it was not the first civil rights protest. Research civil rights events that occurred before December 1,1955— including individual, group, and governmentsponsored actions—that also contributed to the rise of the movement. Plot these events on both a map and a time line. Where and when did most of these events take place? • Martin Luther King Jr. advocated a nonviolent approach to dissolving racial inequalities. One of his contemporaries, Malcolm Little, known as Malcolm X, was commonly viewed by whites as an aggressor; in truth, the issue was more complex than that. Research the life stories of both men and compare their philosophies on civil rights. • Research the history of interracial relationships
in San Francisco, where, as Nat remarks in the story, such relationships were not as taboo as they were in New York in the 1960s. Why was it easier for interracial couples in San Francisco? What kinds of problems might interracial couples have still faced? • Although many fields of employment were closed to African Americans in the 1950s and 1960s, some African Americans were successful at transcending the boundaries. Research one African American from a scientific or professional field who achieved success during this time period, and write a short biography about him or her. • Find three urban artists from the twentieth century, and review at least two paintings by each. What are the common themes in their art? How do the individual artists differ in their approaches?
from African Americans. After Charity refuses to eat with Nat, instead eating her lunch in the bathroom, Nat says, "It's my fate with colored people." He goes on to say that, despite this kind of treatment, "black is still my favorite color." Nat says he's "tried more than once" to show black people "what was in my heart toward them," but that "the language of the heart either is a dead language or else nobody understands it the way you speak it." He even goes so far as to say, "If I wasn't white my first choice would be black."
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In fact, based on the pattern of Nat's life as he tells it, the reader is led to assume that Nat does wish he was black. As a child in Brooklyn, Nat hangs around the poor black houses as much as he can. His first attractions to girls come from the trips by these houses. "The young girls, with their pretty dresses and ribbons in their hair, caught me in my throat when I saw them through the windows." Later, he dates Ornita Harris, an African-American woman, and feels himself fall in love with her. She ulti-
With Ornita, Nat tries to have an interracial relationship, something that he knows will draw looks from others. However, on their first date, Nat recalls that "Nobody was surprised when they saw us, nobody looked at us like we were against the law." Still, in the 1960s, at the height of the Civil Rights movement, when interracial relationships were seen by most whites and blacks as bad, this is a concern for Nat. It is also a concern for Ornita; so when Nat proposes marriage to her, he says that they could move to San Francisco, which is more sup-
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mately refuses to marry him, however, because Nat is not African American, and she believes that their racial differences are too great. As Nat's mother warned him when she was alive, "if you ever forget you are a Jew a goy [non-Jew] will remind you." In the end, mother knows best, and the African-American community, to which Nat desperately tries to gain acceptance, remains closed to him.
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portive of interracial relationships: "I was there for a week in the Second War and I saw white and colored living together," says Nat. Ornita says no to the marriage proposal at first, mainly because, though her husband is dead, he still lives on in her memory, and she says that he "woulda killed me" for marrying a white man. Ornita also brings up the issue of children, saying "Were you looking forward to half-Jewish polka dots?" Nat is undeterred by this, however, saying simply that he "was looking forward to children." Nat wants to look past skin color and focus on their feelings for each other, but Ornita is unsure. When she does finally start to warm up to the idea, Nat sets up a dinner at the house of one of his friends, who is supportive of the interracial relationship.' 'It wasn't a bad time and they told us to come again," says Nat. Even Ornita is feeling good, but it does not last for long. On their way home, the two are stopped by three young black men, who do not like seeing Ornita with a white man. They threaten Ornita, and Nat tries to step in to defend her, but it is no good. They slap her and knock him down. Although Nat brushes the incident off, it is a pivotal moment for Ornita, who calls off any plans for a wedding. Nat pleads with her, saying they can move away so they "wouldn't have the kind of trouble that we had." But Ornita likes her family and wants to stay where she is. Even though there is the promise of San Francisco, Nat can do nothing to save the relationship.
Violence Malamud includes many violent episodes in his story, and it is significant that most of the violence is instigated by African Americans. When Nat is young, he notes that, although he likes the parties in the black houses, ' 'with the parties came drinking and fights." Nat remembers one fight in particular, when Buster's dad "chased another black man in the street with a half-inch chisel." When Buster's dad catches the man and stabs him, young Nat notices that the other man is ' 'bleeding through his suit" and wishes he could "pour it back in the man." When the police come, Buster's father tries to run away, "but a cop ran after him and cracked him on his Homburg hat with a club, right on the front porch." Violence even happens between children, as when Nat recalls one day with Buster when, out of nowhere,' 'he hit me in the teeth." Nat experiences
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other physical abuse in the story at the hands of African Americans, such as when he is held up at his store by "two big men—both black—with revolvers." One of them hits Nat "over the ear with his gun. I stayed in the hospital a couple of weeks." Similarly, at the end of the story, some black street punks threaten to shave all of Ornita's hair off as punishment for being with Nat. When one of the punks slaps her, Nat hits him back, and ' 'the next I knew I was laying in the gutter with a pain in my head." The violence expressed by the African Americans in the story provides yet another barrier between them and Nat, who is generally a peaceful guy. He does not understand, and is even ' 'frightened' ' by the violence he sees in the black neighborhood as a kid. Unfortunately, in this story and in the real life society it reflected, violence was a side effect of racial inequality, and since Nat is on the privileged side of this racial divide, he will never understand it.
Style Point of View This was the first story that Malamud wrote in the first-person point of view—characterized by the use of "my" and "I"—which is a more personal style of telling a story. It also gives the story more impact, since the narrator is communicating his or her thoughts and feelings directly to the reader, as opposed to using a third-person narrative "voice" to guide the telling of the tale. For example, when Nat Lime says in the beginning that "I was still feeling not so hot after Ornita left,'' he then characterizes himself as a "bachelor with a daily growing bald spot on the back of my head'' and that' 'I could lose frankly fifteen pounds," the readers are getting a very personal view of him. Nat is heartbroken that Ornita, his love, has left him, and he is feeling very self-conscious about his hair loss and his weight. If the story were told by an omniscient narrator, who could see inside Nat's head and let the reader know that "he was still feeling not so hot," and that "he felt he could lose frankly fifteen pounds," the emotion would not be as strong. However, even though stories narrated in the first person are more personal, when a writer uses a
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third-person, omniscient (all-knowing) narrator, the kind that Malamud had used in his other stories up to this point, the writer has more freedom. An omniscient narrator can go inside any character's head and reveal any knowledge to the reader. In a first-person narrative, however, other characters are seen only in light of the protagonist's perspective. For example, when Nat first proposes to Ornita, she says no. After more pressure from him, she finally gets to the point where she says maybe. As Nat says, ' 'Maybe is maybe so I'll wait. The way she said it, it was closer to yes." Nat thinks that he can tell how Ornita is feeling, but since there is no omniscient narrator, the reader can never know for sure. So in the end, there are advantages and disadvantages to both types of narration. The first-person narration works for Malamud in this story, however, because he is not as concerned with letting the reader know how the other characters felt as he is in giving Nat's perspective on why he has not had any success in integrating himself into the African-American community.
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From this point on, the majority of the story is one large flashback, told in past tense, where Nat goes back into his past to show the reader other examples where his good intentions have been spurned by African Americans. At the end of the story, after he has recounted how Ornita left him and he was spurned by a black blind man whom he tried to help, Nat thinks:' 'That's how it is. I give my heart and they kick me in the teeth." Immediately after this thought, Nat yanks the reader back into the present, where Charity is still in the bathroom eating her eggs. Nat is pretty frustrated after recounting all of his negative experiences, and he yells at Charity to come out of the bathroom. By splitting the present-tense event of Charity in the bathroom into two pieces, the reader is able to understand better the frustration that Nat feels when he yells at her, as well as to gain a perspective on the unwitting perpetuation of the anger and tension between the races.
Description Tense Malamud also experiments with tense, the way in which a writer uses verbs to denote time or duration. Authors write in past tense when they want to communicate how something ' 'happened,'' in present tense when they want to show how something "is happening," or future tense, when they want to say how something "will happen." The tense of a story helps to determine how the reader reacts to the tale. Most fiction is told in past tense, where the narrator recounts something that has happened. Present tense is more rare because it tells of something that is happening right now, and most readers find it easier to believe a tale if it is something that has already happened. In "Black Is My Favorite Color," however, the story is framed by two halves of a situation that is going on in Nat's present. The story starts, ' 'Charity Quietness sits in the toilet eating her two hard-boiled eggs while I'm having my ham sandwich and coffee in the kitchen." After this first, brief look at the segregation between Nat and Charity, in which Nat gives details about Charity and about himself, Malamud launches into the past tense. Nat talks about the first time he met Charity, when he ' 'made the mistake to ask her to sit down at the kitchen table with me and eat her lunch." As Nat thinks about how Charity has refused to do so, it sparks some general thinking from him, about how this is representative of his life.
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Malamud is a master when it comes to evoking images in his readers' minds. In this story, his stark, realistic depictions of life in Brooklyn in the 1920s are very telling. "We didn't starve but nobody ate chicken unless we were sick, or the chicken was." With this line, Nat communicates to the reader that his family was really poor. Unless they are sick and need chicken noodle soup, the only way his family ever eats chicken is if there's something wrong with it and nobody else wants it. Malamud's descriptions are particularly gritty when describing the AfricanAmerican experience. Nat, when describing how much worse it was for African Americans, says: ' The Negro houses looked to me like they had been born and died there, dead not long after the beginning of the world." Malamud evokes an image of death and decay, giving the reader a better picture of how bad the houses look, and underscoring the feeling of decay in the story.
Historical Context Ghettoes After both World Wars, blacks from the Southern United States migrated north in large numbers.
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Compare & Contrast • 1960s: Motown music, a simple, catchy, distinctly African-American sound, dominates the pop charts. Its performers, all African Americans, find acceptance from white audiences. Today: Rap music, which began as a distinctly African-American sound, inspires white performers such as Eminem, a rap artist who takes the medium to new heights with his critically favored songs. • 1960s: Massive inequalities between races fuel the Civil Rights movement, which is in full force. Today: Although great strides have been made
Most were only able to find low-paying, unskilled labor positions which only provided enough money to live in crowded, inner-city slums known as ghettoes. These urban neighborhoods, like the one where Ornita lives in the story, were characterized by their dilapidated buildings and high crime rates. The ghettoes were segregated by race. In ' 'Black Is My Favorite Color," Nat, a white man, owns a business in the ghetto but does not live there, where people are often so poor that extended families live together in one cramped residence—as is the case with Ornita, who lives with her brother's family. Instead, Nat has an apartment by himself in a nicer section of the city, where he even pays a black cleaning woman to come in and take care of his place once a week.
The Civil Rights Movement Begins Although the tensions of racial inequality had been brewing for a long time, they came to a head on December 1,1955, in Montgomery, Alabama, when an African-American woman named Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat, in the front of a bus, to a white man. This simple act of defiance—it was against Montgomery's law for a black person to sit in the forward section of a city bus—got Parks
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through civil rights awareness and legislation, inequalities between races still exist in America. • 1960s: Many northern cities contain ghettoes, rundown slums that host specific minority groups, which typically have high crime rates. These lower-income areas help to segregate blacks from whites. Today: Most major American cities have lowerincome sections, which can host an ethnically diverse group of residents. These areas help to segregate working-class Americans from those in the middle and upper classes, who typically live in suburbs.
arrested and jailed. The resulting outcry from the African-American community included a boycott of Montgomery city buses that drew national attention. In addition, Parks's bravery inspired Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., whose passionate speeches in Montgomery earned him a national reputation.
"I Have a Dream" Following his success in Montgomery, Reverend King traveled the United States for the next several years, giving speeches and spreading his message of nonviolent protest, a method of protest he had learned from studying the teachings of India's spiritual leader, Mahatma Gandhi. In the fall of 1963, King organized a civil rights march on Washington, where he delivered his famous "I Have a Dream" speech. In it, King promoted the type of racial integration that Nat dreams of in "Black Is My Favorite Color," where whites and blacks exist in harmony. King became a martyr for the Civil Rights movement when he was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee, on April 4, 1968.
African-American Performers Although African Americans were shut out of many fields of employment up through the 1950s
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and 1960s, entertainment was one area where blacks were able to match or exceed the achievements of whites. In 1955, African-American jazz trumpeter Miles Davis was widely recognized as the leading jazz musician of his time, which was the first time ever that a black man had held this distinction. The same year, African American Chuck Berry's popular rock and roll tune ' 'Maybellene'' hit number one on the rhythm and blues charts and also scored in the Top Ten on the pop charts, as did many of his subsequent songs. In 1959, former boxer Berry Gordy helped to found Motown, a coalition of recording, distribution, publishing, and management businesses in Detroit devoted to promoting African-American music in the mainstream. The distinct "Motown Sound" that resulted from this enterprise dominated the charts through the mid1960s, with acts like The Temptations, Little Stevie Wonder, and the Supremes appealing to black and white audiences alike. On a similar note, in 1960, African American Chubby Checker created a national dance craze when he sang his version of Hank Ballard's song "The Twist" on American Bandstand. Checker's version reached the top spot on the pop charts, and his dance by the same name was adopted by white teens, and soon after by their parents, who helped to propel the song to the top of the charts once again.
Critical Overview ' 'Black Is My Favorite Color'' appeared for the first time in the Reporter on July 18, 1963. Later that year, it was published in Idiots First, Malamud's second short story collection. His first collection, The Magic Barrel, won the National Book Award for fiction, and many critics continue to praise these short stories as Malamud's best. However, both Idiots First and "Black Is My Favorite Color" have received their fair share of good criticism since they were published. In fact, Sidney Richman, in his 1966 book, Bernard Malamud, stated that the story was ' 'not only one of the best stories in the entire collection but one which deserves to stand with some of the finer pieces in The Magic Barrel." Richman also heralded the story's "striking departure from the earlier work,"
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noting that the story was the first time in Malamud's career that he employed a first-person narrator, and remarking on the absence of fantasy, which had been present in Malamud's earlier work. "Malamud seems to be pitting his vision against a firmer reality, to be working with objective experience in a way he had never done before," said Richman. Over the years, many critics have focused on the overt racial themes in the story. In his essay, "Women, Children, and Idiots First: Transformation Psychology," in Bernard Malamud and the Critics (1970), Samuel Irving Bellman asked whether or not Malamud had a "special point" in his "reconstructionist view of society, whereby nonJews turn into Jews. . . . much to their discomfort." Bellman believed the answer was "yes," that Malamud was trying to say "the world is losing its oxygen and becoming unfit to live in." In this poisoned world, "people grow desperate in their plight'' and ' 'make a pitiful spectacle as they fight a losing battle." Critics have also noted the story's relation to Malamud's other works. As Jeffrey Helterman noted in 1978 in his entry on Malamud for the Dictionary of Literary Biography, the story "explores the blackJewish relations that would become the primary concern of The Tenants." Helterman was also one of several critics who remarked on the futile nature of Nat's efforts, since "the narrator can never penetrate into the alien culture." As Helterman said about Nat,' 'he tries to help a black blind man home only to discover that even a blind man can tell he is white." On a similar note, a year after Helterman's critique was published, Robert Solotaroff called "Black Is My Favorite Color" one of Malamud's "understandably painful stories . . . in which the generous, or at least justifiable, intentions of decent people are frustrated." Criticism on Malamud experienced a surge in the 1980s, when Malamud selected several of his stories, including "Black Is My Favorite Color," for publication in his Stories of Bernard Malamud. Many critics praised this collection as they had Malamud's previous collections. Robert Alter of The New York Times Book Review noted that Malamud's "real gift is for the short story, for the spare, rigorous etching of solitary figures caught in the stress of adversity." Likewise, Paul Gray of
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Time magazine said that "the book not only offers substantial evidence that Malamud's stories are better than his novels; it makes the distinction seem irrelevant." And Marcia G. Fuchs of the Library Journal said of the book that ' 'this is the master storyteller at his best—unforgettable, colorful characters caught in pathos mundane and cosmic, treated with humor, compassion, humanity." Of course, not all critics loved the story, or the collection. Gene Lyons of Newsweek said that the stories in the collection were ' 'not entirely successful, despite a seriousness, steadfastness and simple integrity that one cannot help but admire." Specifically, he noted that "Black Is My Favorite Color" was "badly dated at best." And Richard Oilman, in his 1986 article for The New Republic, said that he felt Malamud was ' 'weakest when he sought or fell into too direct a way to our emotions, when he was most self-consciously 'humane.' I think of stories like 'Black Is My Favorite Color.'" In 1997, eleven years after Malamud's death, his publisher released one final collection, The Complete Stories, which also received praise from critics. As the title suggests, this contained all of Malamud's short fiction in the chronological order in which the stories were written, not published. As Amy Boaz of the Library Journal noted about this arrangement, "displayed thus, Malamud's skill is consistently sound, effected quietly through disciplined pacing and dignified characters."
Criticism Ryan D, Poquette Poquette has a bachelor's degree in English and specializes in writing about literature. In the following essay, Poquette discusses Malamud's use of a first-person narrator to disguise the narrator's flaws in Malamud's story. Upon first reading Malamud's ' 'Black Is My Favorite Color," readers may be tempted to feel sorry for the protagonist, Nat Lime, a white, Jewish bachelor who has spent nearly four decades of his life trying— and failing—to find acceptance within the New
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York African-American community. Nat does so by performing good deeds for, and attempting to develop relationships with, black people. Indeed, Robert Solotaroff referred to the story as one of Malamud's ' 'understandably painful'' tales,' 'in which the generous, or at least justifiable, intentions of decent people are frustrated." However, when one looks past Nat's self-pitying narration and begins to examine both his actions and his faulty perception of them, Nat's intentions appear neither generous nor justifiable, and the reasons for his lack of acceptance becomes clear. In 1963, when Malamud wrote "Black Is My Favorite Color," he made a striking departure from his other works. As Sidney Richman noted in his 1966 book, Bernard Malamud, the story was "the first time in his writing career that he has entirely forsaken the omniscient point of view." There are some very good reasons why Malamud did this. First, stories narrated in the first person are more personal, since the reader hears a character's thoughts directly, instead of having them filtered by a nameless, third-party voice. Because of this, Nat's account of his life and struggle has more impact on the reader. At the same time, Malamud uses this selfpitying narration to mask several unpleasant facts about Nat, which, when taken collectively, paint Nat in an entirely different light than the way he describes himself to the reader. As Nat remarks in the beginning of the story, incidents like his black cleaning woman refusing to eat in the same room with him signify his ' 'fate with colored people." He tells the reader that "black is my favorite color," although "you wouldn't know it from my luck." Throughout the story, Nat communicates to the reader that his motives have been pure in his attempts to help African Americans, and that he has been repeatedly mistreated: "That's how it is. I give my heart and they kick me in the teeth," he notes at the end of the story. However, perceptive readers who are willing to dig under Nat's self-pitying narration and examine his actions, as well as certain intentionally conspicuous words and phrases that Malamud uses, will realize that Nat's good intentions are misguided and that he fails to understand the true plight of the African-American community. Nat thinks that he is a good person because he treats African Americans as equals, saying that "there's only one human color and that's the color of blood." However, Nat does do special favors for black people wherever
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What Do I Read Next? • America and I: Short Stories by American Jewish Women Writers, published by Beacon Press in 1990, contains selections from female Jewish writers from five generations. Edited by Joyce Antler, it is a dynamic chronicle of twentiethcentury Jewish-American women's literature and features some of last century's finest short story writers. • Saul Bellow, a Jewish-American contemporary of Malamud, received the National Book Award for fiction for his book, The Adventures ofAugie March. The story concerns the title character, a young Jew in a working-class Chicago neighborhood who is forced to embark upon a number of odd jobs when the depression hits. Critics hailed the work for its originality and for its positive message that life is worth living. • Best Contemporary Jewish Writing, edited by Michael Lerner and published by Jossey-Bass in 2001, collects poetry, fiction, essays, and memoirs from the top contemporary Jewish writers. The works in the book date from 1994 to 2000. The essays explore Jewish identity, spirituality, scripture, the Holocaust, conflicts in Israel, and Jewish culture.
ways in her life. The book was published by Riverhead Books in 1997. • Malamud's The Assistant, originally published in 1957 by Farrar, Strauss, is about an ItalianAmerican drifter who gets a job working for a humble Jewish grocer. When he falls in love with the storekeeper's daughter, he is forced to reexamine his moral and spiritual beliefs. • Malamud's The Tenants, published in 1971 by Farrar, Strauss, details the struggles between Harry, a minor Jewish novelist who agonizes over finishing a novel—which is about a writer who cannot finish a novel—while living in an apartment building that the landlord wants to tear down. A black writer, Willie, moves into the building, sparking a bitter rivalry between the two writers. The book is currently out of print, but it is one of Malamud's major works and can be found in many libraries.
• In Aliens in America, Sandra Tsing Loh, a girl who was born to a Chinese father and German mother, writes many comic, autobiographical tales about how her parents' separate cultures have blended in unique and almost implausible
• Love's Revolution: Interracial Marriage, written by Maria P. P. Root and published by Temple University Press in 2001, chronicles the social changes that have led to the growth and acceptance of interracial marriages. Root, a clinical psychologist, interviewed about two hundred people from a wide variety of racial and ethnic backgrounds for her study, and their stories and views permeate the book, which also includes a section that details the specific challenges that interracial couples face.
possible. This desire to be charitable is hinted at in the first line of the story, with the very name of the character, "Charity Quietness." This odd name catches the reader's attention. As Malamud shows that while Nat's ' 'charitable'' acts seem good on the surface, underneath their quiet exterior lurks his real reason for doing them—to feel better about himself. His drive begins in early childhood, when Nat notices the worn-out houses owned by African Americans in his neighborhood and says, "In those
days though I had little myself I was old enough to know who was better off, and the whole block of colored houses made me feel bad in the daylight." As a child, Nat knows he is not as poor as people like Buster, an African American who is Nat's age, and he feels guilty about it. This guilt manifests itself in many acts that Nat thinks are well-meaning or charitable, such as taking Buster to the movies, buying him candy, and letting him borrow Nat's comic books.
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. . . Ornita falls from her high place when she is
However, in his obsessive quest to be charitable to African Americans, Nat also blinds himself to how he may be hurting others, including his own family. For example, when Nat funds the first of the movie trips with Buster, he does it by stealing "fifteen cents from my mother's pocketbook." This misguided attempt at helping Buster is potentially harmful to Nat and his own family, who themselves are so poor that "nobody ate chicken unless we were sick, or the chicken was."
A prime example of Nat's misguided charity is Ornita Harris. Nat first meets Ornita at a bus stop, when he picks up "her green glove that she had dropped on the wet sidewalk." Ornita is very rude to Nat, saying that she '' 'don't like white men trying to do me favors.'" A week later, she comes into Nat's liquor store "for a bottle of Scotch." Nat tells her he would like to give her a discount, but he does not want to offend her. Ornita recognizes him and apologizes for her behavior regarding the dropped glove. As it turns out,' 'she took the discount. I gave her a dollar off,'' says Nat, which would have been a sizeable discount in the 1960s, when a dollar was worth much more than it is today. The result? Ornita starts coming in "every two weeks for a fifth of Haig & Haig,'' and each time he gives her the large discount. As Nat says, his ' 'colored'' helpers look at him when he tells them to give Ornita the discount, but Nat says he "had nothing to be ashamed." However, many times Ornita comes into the store and does not talk but just pays for her alcohol,' 'less discount," and walks out. On these occasions, Nat notes that "her eyes were tired and she didn't look to me like a happy woman."
When he is an adult, Nat tries to be charitable to African Americans through his business. However, once again he is blinded to the potential hurt he could be causing to people, in this case blacks themselves. Nat's choice to run a liquor store itself shows that he has not been paying attention to the negative effects of alcohol on African Americans. Although Nat does not realize it, his role as a liquor store owner helps maintain the oppression of those whom he is trying to help. When Nat is looking back on his childhood, he notes how Buster, the black boy he is trying to befriend, is the son of a barber. But Nat remembers that Buster's father was "too drunk to stay a barber." This implies strongly that one of the reasons why Buster must live in a house that is so rundown it looks like it ' 'had been born and died there, dead not long after the beginning of the world," is because Buster's father cannot hold down a job due to his alcoholism. This was a common problem, and still is, in urban areas, where people can lose hope and sometimes turn to alcohol as an escape. Nat's store in Harlem helps to feed that problem in the African-American community, especially since he gives "discounts to certain custom-
Nat is unaware of his misguided actions, which stem in large part from his lack of awareness of the full meaning of the African-American plight. The fact is, Nat is a privileged white man, and, as such, blatantly enjoys comforts that African Americans do not. As referenced above, Nat steals from his mom's purse for movies—one assumes that there is no money in Buster's house to steal, even if he wanted to, since he wears the same "brown wool sweater, one arm half unraveled." When Nat is an adult, this superiority is evident in other ways. For example, when Nat is held up, he has enough money to stay "in the hospital a couple of weeks" and notes that as far as the robbery goes, "I was insured." However, for black people like Ornita, life is not so easy. After the death of her husband, "a window cleaner on the big buildings" who "fell fifteen stories," Ornita "got a job as a manicurist in a Times Square barbershop." Ornita has to provide for herself because, even when her husband was alive, he did not make enough to pay for the life insurance that would have protected her after his death.
slapped by the black youths, reminding her that the white world is not hers. The fall is devastating for Ornita, whose black world does not give her Nat's white safety nets—money, mobility, and opportunity."
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ers," meaning his African-American customers. Nat sees this as a kind gesture, but his "charity" only makes it easier for his African-American customers to buy more alcohol.
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Perhaps the biggest privilege Nat has is his ability to pick up extra residences as necessary. When Nat wants a private room for him and Ornita to share on their dates—so that they do not bother his mother, who lives with him—he rents a "furnished room," in addition to the three-room apartment he's already renting. Meanwhile, Ornita, like most black people in the ghetto, cannot even afford one residence on her own. She lives "with her brother's family." Nat does not fully understand why his role as a white man—who enjoys these special privileges— would keep him and Ornita apart, and near the end of the story, even Ornita has forgotten their differences and warmed up to the idea of marriage to Nat. After having an enjoyable dinner with some of Nat's friends, Nat and Ornita are forced to take the subway back to Ornita's neighborhood ' 'because of a twenty-four hour taxi strike.'' Nat and Ornita both having had a great time at dinner, he notes that she "looked relaxed, wonderful." However, this calm is shattered when three young, African-American street punks stop Nat and Ornita while they are walking from the subway to her house. The men, angry that Ornita is with a white man, threaten her, and she says she will "scream long and loud" if they try anything. The men do not listen. Nat says, ' 'They slapped her. I never heard such a scream. Like her husband was falling fifteen stories." This is a very odd way to describe a scream. Nat references the scream again when Ornita is saying goodbye to him at the subway, after she has refused to let him walk her to her home. ' 'Her face was gray and I still remembered her scream," says Nat. There is something about the quality of the scream that sticks in Nat's mind, although he does not understand it completely. This odd scream that Nat mentions twice is another clue from Malamud. For Ornita, her long, sorrowful scream, which invokes an image of her husband's death, coincides with revelation. She now realizes that she cannot marry Nat. She had talked herself into marrying the white man, a person who is from a higher class than she is, but she cannot last at this new height. Like her husband, who fell fifteen stories to his death when his safety belt broke, Ornita falls from her high place when she is slapped by the black youths, reminding her that the white world is not hers. The fall is devastating for Ornita, whose black world does not give her Nat's white safety nets—money, mobility, and opportunity.
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After the incident, Nat tries to plead with Ornita, letting her know that they could avoid the problem, saying "if we got married and moved away we wouldn't have the kind of trouble that we had. We wouldn't come in that neighborhood anymore." But Ornita is unconvinced, saying that she has "family there and don't want to move anyplace else." In fact, Ornita cannot move anywhere else. For Nat, who has the privilege of renting extra rooms for his dating life or picking up and moving to another state if he chooses, life will always be different; he will always have choices. In the end, it is this profound misunderstanding of the true plight of African Americans, along with his failure to recognize the selfish nature of his "charitable" acts, that will reinforce Nat's outsider status. As Edward A. Abramson noted in Bernard Malamud Revisited, ' 'Ultimately, Nat Lime cannot overcome the superior position that he, as a white man, holds in society; the black world is closed to him, and each race is going in a different direction." Even in the end, this a fact that Nat just doesn't comprehend as he screams at Charity Quietness to come out of the bathroom. Source: Ryan D. Poquette, Critical Essay on "Black Is My Favorite Color," in Short Stories for Students, The Gale Group, 2002.
Paul Witcover Witcover is an editor and writer whose fiction, book reviews, and critical essays appear regularly in print magazines and online media. In the following essay, Witcover discusses fantasy, realism, and race in Bernard Malamud's short story. Bernard Malamud was a writer whose work explored questions and themes of Jewishness in a humanistic and often fantastic fashion. Jewish identity and experience had both a specific and a universal meaning for Malamud. He filled his fiction with characters like Nat Lime, from the short story "Black Is My Favorite Color,"—characters who, while retaining their essential Jewishness, also represent humanity in general. As Malamud noted in a 1968 interview with the Jerusalem Post quoted by critics Leslie and Joyce Field in the introduction to Bernard Malamud: A Collection of Critical Essays, "[personally, I handle the Jew as a symbol of the tragic experience of man existentially. I try to see the Jew as universal man." He then proceeded to make one of his most famous statements: "Every man is a Jew though he may not know it." In an interview with the Fields appearing in the same collection, Malamud offered a sobering clarifica-
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tion of this statement, calling i t ' 'a metaphoric way of indicating how history, sooner or later, treats all men." The shadow of the Holocaust hangs heavy over these words, as indeed it does over all of Malamud's work. In a world where the Holocaust is possible, the real and the fantastic are one. In "Malamud's Grace: Humanism With and Without Tears," an homage to Malamud published after Malamud's death in 1986, critic Richard Oilman honored the synchronistic quality of the author's vision: "He was neither a realist nor a fantasist. He was both. I don't mean he alternated between reality and fantasy, but that at his best the line between the two was obliterated." More than that, Malamud recognized that this was true not only at the far-flung frontiers of human experience, such as the Holocaust or slavery, but within the seemingly mundane and trivial precincts of everyday life as well. "Black Is My Favorite Color" appeared in Malamud's second collection of short fiction, Idiots First, published in 1963. Critics are sharply divided over the quality of this story, which is set primarily in the Harlem section of New York City and features, as its main character and narrator, a middleaged Jewish liquor store owner named Nat Lime who, despite lifelong feelings of friendship, and more, for African-American people, has experienced a disappointing history of relationships with them. Oilman, for example, finds the story to be among Malamud's weakest, "brought down by predictable sentiment." Sidney Richman, however, in his book-length critical study Bernard Malamud expresses the opposite opinion, calling the "comic and terrifying'' tale ' 'not only one of the best stories in the entire collection, but one which deserves to stand with some of the finer pieces in The Magic Barrel." If there is one point on which all the critics agree, it is that' 'Black Is My Favorite Color'' is not a fantasy. In fact, Iska Alter, in her study of social criticism in Malamud's fiction, The Good Man's Dilemma, calls the story "quintessential realism." A brief review of the relationship between American Jews and African Americans helps to situate the story's characters and plot in a historical context. The relationship has its roots in slavery: African-American slaves in the American South found much to identify with in the Bible's depiction of the Egyptian bondage of the Jews and God's intervention, through Moses, to end it. Indeed, to give but one example, the escaped slave Harriet Tubman (1820-1913) was compared to Moses for
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her extraordinary efforts in leading other slaves to freedom by means of the Underground Railroad. Spiritual songs provide more evidence of how deeply and personally enslaved African Americans took the Jewish experience to heart, finding, through religious song, both a parallel to their own oppression and a powerful stimulus for their dreams of freedom. The Jews, who, long before the evil of the Nazis, had been coming to the United States as refugees from European countries in which they and their ancestors had endured centuries of officially sanctioned and enforced anti-Semitic policies that exploded periodically in murderous pogroms, were not blind to this parallel. The cruelties and injustices heaped upon blacks in the United States by the white Christian males, who constituted the dominant power structure, undoubtedly reminded Jewish Americans of the horrors they had come to America to escape. Many—though by no means all—felt a sacred obligation, one deeply rooted in Jewish faith and culture, to help the slaves win their freedom. Jews were among supporters of the cause of abolition, later taking leading roles in the struggle for civil rights; the NAACP, for example, was founded in 1909 by black and Jewish leaders. Although Jews enjoyed substantial advantages in American society that blacks did not, based on differences of skin color, education, and economic position, to say nothing of having come to the United States voluntarily, many blacks nevertheless recognized that, as far as the ruling class of white Christian males was concerned, Jews, though not black, were not quite white, either. Thus, a strong natural alliance took shape between these two oppressed minorities, one that reached its apogee in the modern civil rights movement that began in the mid-1950s. By the early 1960s, American Jews were traveling south by the hundreds to register voters and join protest marches and sit-ins, sharing hardships, beatings, arrests, and worse alongside blacks. Cracks in the African-American-Jewish alliance were already starting to form, however, due in part to the economic and cultural success of Jews within the American mainstream. Many African Americans resented this success, and not entirely without reason, as the success came at their expense. The social and economic stresses of the United States' intensifying involvement in Vietnam only widened these cracks. Even before Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination in 1968, militant factions such as the Black
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Panthers had rejected his path of nonviolence, preaching, instead, a variety of doctrines that embraced the concept of Black Power and frequently involved racial animosity, separatism, and anti-Semitism. Partly in response to this, and partly as a result of a reawakened sense of Jewish identity brought about by still-fresh memories of the Holocaust and by the Arab/Israeli conflicts of the era, the moral compass of many American Jews began to swing increasingly toward Israel and the battles being fought there. The old alliance between African Americans and Jews was finished, and, though it never completely collapsed in the remaining years of the century as many had feared (or hoped) it would, neither did it return to what it had once been. Malamud wrote ' 'Black Is My Favorite Color'' in 1963, the year that Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his famous ' 'I Have a Dream'' speech on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. But while King spoke hopefully of a future of racial harmony in which men and women would be judged not by the color of their skins but on the content of their character, Malamud was sounding a far more pessimistic note. The story, as related by Nat Lime ("forty-four, a bachelor with a daily growing bald spot"), is—or at least appears to be—a simple one of disappointed love. It opens in Nat's apartment in the Upper West Side of New York City, where he is having his lunch in the kitchen: a ham sandwich and cup of coffee. Meanwhile, his cleaning lady, a woman with the unusual name of Charity Quietness, is eating her lunch in the bathroom. Such a name is a sure tip-off that "Black Is My Favorite Color" is not, in fact, "quintessential realism." It is a hybrid fiction containing both real and fantastic elements. The name Charity Quietness alludes to a verse from the Old Testament Book of Isaiah, which can be translated from the Hebrew: "The work of charity shall be peace and the effect of charity quietness and confidence forever'' (Isaiah 32:17). Malamud intends the name to be partially ironic, for charity of the sort practiced by Nat results in the opposite of peace and quietness. In an allegorical manner, the character of Charity Quietness is a personification of the qualities of peace and quiet, qualities attributed to godliness, just as she, the cleaning lady named Charity Quietness, comes to Nat from "Father Divine." Here, however, such qualities as charity and quietness, even—or perhaps especially—when they come from God, are not offered freely as gifts, but are either bestowed for obedience to divine will or withheld as punishment for disobedience. The God
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, In a world where the Holocaust is possible, the real and the fantastic are one."
of this story, at least, is very much the vengeful patriarch of the Old Testament, as Malamud makes abundantly clear through his use of allegory and allusion. The name Nat Lime has allegorical significance as well. Nat, besides being an allusion to Hawthorne, one of Malamud's favorite writers, suggests Nathan, the Old Testament prophet, and indeed Malamud's story, according to Alter, writing in his article ' The Broader Canvas: Malamud, the Blacks, and the Jews," "strikes with the uncommon force of prophecy." As with many of the Old Testament prophets, Nat's message—to which he himself, ironically, is deaf—is as tart and sour as a lime. Nat explains that when Charity first started cleaning for him, he ' 'made the mistake to ask her to sit down at the kitchen table with me and eat her lunch'' of hard-boiled eggs, but "after a minute she stopped chewing and she got up and carried the eggs in a cup to the bathroom, and since then she eats there.'' Nothing he says can convince Charity to eat in the kitchen, not even when he volunteers to eat elsewhere himself. "That's how it goes," he says, "only don't get the idea of ghettos. If there's a ghetto I'm the one that's in it." Nat's words, which indirectly affirm that Charity is black while simultaneously denying that he is prejudiced against her for that reason, may strike readers as self-pityingly histrionic, but they will turn out to be truer than he knows. It is important to remember in this regard that the word "ghetto"— which in America refers to inner-city slum areas populated by poor minorities, usually black and/or Hispanic—originated centuries ago in Europe, where it referred to special zones within cities to which Jews were restricted by law; the Nazis took this idea, as they did so many others, to its horrific extreme, creating Jewish ghettos that were merely waiting rooms for the concentration camps built for the Final Solution; that genocidal history, in turn, was seized upon in the 1960s, and later by left-wing intellectuals and activists in the United States and elsewhere, including some in the African-American
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community, as a metaphor for what was taking place in American ghettos, with their high crime rates, poor medical care, and other killing burdens of institutional neglect and racism. Thus, when Nat uses the word here, he is not, as may first appear to be the case, appropriating the African-American experience; while that may be part of what is indeed going on, centuries of Jewish experience give all Jews, even in America, a legitimate right to apply this emotionally charged word to their own experience, though not, of course, at the expense of denying its meaning to African Americans (and vice versa). Shared custody of a word like ghetto, which is often consecrated in the minds of African Americans and Jews alike by their respective histories of spilled blood and cruel victimization, is complicated and fraught with the potential for violent misunderstanding.
dentally, should not be confused with Malamud. Malamud may be the author of "Black Is My Favorite Color," but the storyteller is his narrator, the fictional Nat Lime. Can readers trust what Nat is telling them? Will he lie to readers consciously or unconsciously? Will he lie to himself? Malamud has already provided readers with the answer to the first question.
Significantly, Nat never directly refers to Charity as an African-American woman in the long opening paragraph; he does so only indirectly, in the phrase about ghettos already noted, and again, more explicitly but still indirectly, at the end of the paragraph, in a final sentence that strikes the same histrionic tone: "It's my fate with colored people." Nat reveals two other important pieces of information about himself in the opening paragraph. The first is that his mother is dead and that Charity's eyes remind him of his mother's before she died. The second is that about a year and a half ago, a woman named Ornita "left," by which readers assume, as indeed turns out to be the case, that a woman with whom Nat was romantically involved broke off their relationship at that time, though readers do not yet know the reasons why. Readers have also grown accustomed to Nat's way of talking to readers by the end of the first paragraph; Nat is talking directly to readers, telling them his story as surely as if they were sitting at the kitchen table with him. In fact, although the story Nat tells moves around in time and place, the circumstances of the telling remain the same throughout: Nat sits in the kitchen, Charity in the bathroom. Indeed, the story ends by forcefully reminding readers of that fact. What readers notice about Nat's way of talking is that he has a tendency toward self-deprecating, selfdramatizing turns of phrase, as well as a habit of avoiding certain details, such as race, by mentioning them only indirectly, if at all. This is useful to know because a reader's reaction to stories often depends not only on how they are told, but on who is doing the telling. In other words, to judge a story, one must first judge the storyteller. That personage, inci-
Nevertheless, Nat feels he has ' 'some kind of a talent" for appreciating other colors or races of humanity, especially African Americans. "If I wasn't white," he says, "my first choice would be black." Notice that he classifies himself by skin color, as a white, a member of the dominant race, rather than by religion or culture—as a Jew. Readers can assume from the fact that Nat is eating a ham sandwich in the opening paragraph that he is not a strictly observant Jew, though he is observant enough to sit shivah when his mother dies. What's interesting is that, just as he does not directly refer to Charity Quietness's race, neither does he directly refer to his own Jewishness. While Malamud has beautifully crafted Nat's speech patterns and turns of phrase to make the fact of his Jewishness plain, just as Charity's race is implicit in her name, it is still a significant omission on Nat's part. Nat often refers to his "bald spot," but he has an even larger blind spot.
Nat owns and operates a profitable liquor store in Harlem. Despite the fact that ' 'black is still my favorite color," he has no close African-American friends (or, as far as readers can tell, any white ones, either), though he is quick to note that the fault isn't necessarily mine. If they knew what was in my heart toward them, but how can you tell that to anybody nowadays? I've tried more than once but the language of the heart either is a dead language or else nobody understands it the way you speak it.
Continuing his story, Nat remarks that "[w]here Charity Quietness eats her eggs"—in other words, the bathroom, or, as he refers to it throughout the story, "the toilet"—reminds him of a boyhood acquaintance named Buster Wilson. It seems strange, to say the least, that a toilet should remind someone of a person. Readers cannot help but wonder why. Nat does not explain himself, but if readers are reading attentively, they will notice the implicit riddle in his choice of words and attempt to solve it. And Malamud, as a conscientious writer, supplies the clues readers need. Presented with the image of an African-American woman eating in the toilet, Nat thinks of a black boy he once knew. Why? One possibility is that "blackness" carries an uncon-
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scious association for Nat of a function far more common in bathrooms than eating: namely, excreting. Could the association of toilets with excreting and excrement, in addition to Charity's presence there, be what brings Buster to mind? Perhaps this association, which slips out in Nat's prose without conscious thought or reflection, reveals a lot about his attitudes toward black people, attitudes that he keeps hidden from himself . . . but not from them. But is there proof that this is, in fact, what has taken place in Nat's mind?
his blind spot. Charity and Buster have snubbed Nat's sincere, if clumsy, offers of friendship, yet Nat is incapable of seeing the extent to which he bears some part of the responsibility for those snubs. What may be worse, he is also incapable of appreciating the weight of history that lies behind not only the snubs but his own overtures as well. "His naivete compounds the usual conflicts between blacks and Jews in America," writes Kathleen G. Ochshorn in The Heart's Essential Landscape: Bernard Malamud's Hero.
When Nat was a boy, Buster lived in the black neighborhood next door to Nat's own "not-so-hot white neighborhood" in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn. Young Nat was fascinated by the lives of his black neighbors, which seemed exotic, frightening, and, above all, alive. "I think I thought, Brother, if there can be like this, what can't there be? I mean I caught an early idea what life was about." Newly moved from Manhattan, and with no white or Jewish friends of his own, Nat determines to make friends with Buster, a black kid who, like him, spends much of his time alone. Stealing money from his mother's purse, Nat treats Buster to movies, candy, and books. It never strikes Nat that Buster may resent these overtures, interpreting them as charity or, worse, attempts to buy the friendship that is Buster's right to give or n o t . . . never strikes him, that is, until Buster does, punching him in the mouth one day without warning. When Nat, fighting back tears, asks why Buster has hit him, the boy replies, with a venomous crudity that comes as unexpectedly as Buster's fist: "Because you a Jew bastard. Take your Jew movies and your Jew candy and shove them up your Jew [a ]."
Now readers come to the heart of the story as Nat's mind leads him circuitously—from Charity's quiet, peaceful snub, through the toilet and what takes place there, to Buster's violent, anti-Semitic snub—back to the woman mentioned fleetingly in the opening paragraph: Ornita. Or, as she is now introduced, Mrs. Ornita Harris
This is the first moment that the word "Jew" appears in the story (no less than four times in two sentences), and it is also the first time that Nat is explicitly identified as a Jew—an identification that, significantly, comes as an insult from a black person rather than from his own lips. The hateful language that the African-American boy, Buster, employs, and the action he invites Nat to perform involving food and the part of the body used for excreting, sets up the unconscious mental link that, years later, results in the seemingly baffling, but actually quite logical, association the adult Nat makes between the toilet in which a black woman is eating her lunch and Buster. Without rubbing our noses in it, Malamud has given readers an example, if readers are alert enough to spot it, of how Nat's unconscious mind works, a glimpse, as it were, into
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a slim woman, dark, but not the most dark, about thirty years I would say, also well built, with a combination nice legs and a good-size bosom that 1 like. Her face was pretty, with big eyes and high cheekbones, but lips a little thick and nose a little broad.
In other words, Ornita is an attractive AfricanAmerican woman, though in respect to certain physical features, as the unconscious racism of Nat's language reveals, a little too black. Ornita is a widow who works as a manicurist in Times Square but lives in Harlem not far from Nat's liquor store. In an echo of his behavior with Buster, Nat gives Ornita a discount on the liquor she buys in order to win her friendship. Over time, as they talk, she tells him of her husband, a window cleaner who fell fifteen stories to his death after his safety harness broke, and he tells her of his mother, with whom he lives and who is dying of cancer. Finally, they go on a date. By doing so, Ornita and Nat are acting in open defiance not just of the prejudices of their own groups, but of the larger (and whiter) American society. Even in cosmopolitan New York City, for a black woman and a Jewish man to go on a date in the early 1960s took guts; indeed, the combination could have provoked violent responses in some neighborhoods of the city even forty years later. Yet, without deprecating the bravery involved, it must be noted that their social rebellion is carefully circumscribed: Nat takes Ornita to the bohemian Greenwich Village, where "[n]obody was surprised when they saw us, nobody looked at us like we were against the law."
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They go out again a month later. This time, Nat has rented a room, and they sleep together. The striptease of racial signifiers in Nat's description of this scene is noteworthy: Under her purple dress she wore a black slip, and when she took that off she had white underwear. When she took off the white underwear she was black again. But I know where the next white was, if you want to call it white.
To fall in love with Ornita, which he genuinely does, Nat has to see her as both African American and white, that is, as exotic and familiar, forbidden and permitted. Not only that, but by possessing Ornita, Nat seeks to achieve his own unconscious fantasy, which is to enjoy the vibrant emotional life he has myopically and naively associated with blacks ever since the days of Buster Wilson while still retaining the social and economic advantages of being white: "If I wasn't white, my first choice would be black." This seems too easy for him to say, being a white man. Nat's simplistic fantasy cannot withstand reality. The first intrusion of reality occurs when two black men rob Nat's liquor store, putting him in the hospital for two weeks. His mother succumbs to cancer while he is there. The robbery, and his mother's death, are symbolic warnings that Nat chooses to ignore. When he leaves the hospital, he asks Ornita to marry him: "We're both honest people and if you love me like I love you it won't be such a bad time." Ornita is hesitant, but, little by little, Nat wins her over. Then reality intrudes a second time, more violently still. While Nat is walking Ornita home one night in Harlem, three black men—"maybe they were boys," Nat says, linking them by his use of the word to Buster Wilson—block their way. What follows is predictable and grotesque. When Nat tries to defuse the situation by insisting that all men are brothers and identifying himself "as a reliable merchant in the neighborhood," the response is an angry one: "You talk like a Jew landlord." Nat denies it, providing the address of his liquor store and adding that he pays his two black clerks "good wages as well as I give discounts to certain customers." The mix of romantic naivete, ignorance, unthinking arrogance, and unconscious racism behind Nat's illusions about black people has never been so clearly on display. He cannot see that, to the black men, he is an agent of white oppression who sells them liquor at a discount in order to keep them drunk and downtrodden; he does not grasp that simply by being with Ornita, he is threatening to rob these men
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of the only possession they have left: their manhood. It surprises no one but Nat when they strike Ornita. She screams, he says, "[l]ike her husband was falling fifteen stories." When he defends her, he is beaten and robbed. Ornita's scream is not from physical pain alone but is linked explicitly to her husband's death. In striking her, the men have forced her to relive that death; in a sense, they have accused her of being unfaithful to him . . . and to her race. They are representatives of black solidarity in the face of white oppression, and Ornita's scream is one of anguished recognition that, through love, she has betrayed both husband and race. The next day, she tells Nat that she cannot marry him even though she loves him. When Nat goes to Harlem to try and convince her to change her mind, she has already left for a long visit to relatives in the South. To Nat, Ornita's decision is the culmination of a long line of snubs and punches. Readers realize that he feels considerable bitterness toward her and all blacks. This is demonstrated by the way Nat ends his story. He relates an incident in which he takes the arm of a blind black man on the street.' 'I can tell you're white," the black man says, and then Nat is pushed roughly aside by a black woman who helps the man in his stead. Nat's offer of charity has been spurned yet again.' 'That's how it is," he complains bitterly. "I give my heart and they kick me in my teeth." But is this realistic? Or has Malamud brought a small seasoning of fantasy into his story? While it may be possible for a blind man to tell a person's race or color by touch alone, or perhaps smell, there is a sense of the uncanny about this incident, as if God has interceded to demonstrate the utter hopelessness of blacks and Jews, the Biblical sons of Ham and sons of Shem, ever knowing the peace, quietness or confidence that comes of charity. However, there is more. In the very last line of the story, Nat yells for Charity Quietness to "come out of that [g d ] toilet!" The story has come full circle, returned to its beginning, with one important difference. At the outset of the story, Nat is resigned to Charity eating in the bathroom while he eats in the kitchen, but by the end, readers see that the anger he feels toward black people for what he perceives as a history of unprovoked meanness and snubs, stoked by the betrayals of Buster and, finally, Ornita, is now directed at Charity. If anyone is to suffer retribution for those perceived injuries, it will be she—and, by extension, other African Americans—just as Nat has suffered real injuries at
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the hands of African Americans because he is Jewish. Blacks and Jews locked in a cycle of intensifying misunderstanding, of good intentions gone bad and bad intentions gone worse: that is the pessimistic prophecy of Nat's story. Yet there is still one more element to be considered, and it renders the prophecy infinitely grimmer. In the first paragraph of the story, Nat mentions that Charity has ' 'a quiet face that the light shines out of, and Mama had such eyes before she died." Malamud is setting up the possibility that Charity Quietness is more than a cleaning lady, more even than a human being. Charity speaks a single line in the story, and it is this:'' 'Peace,' she says to me. 'Father reached on down and took me right up in Heaven.'" How does one make sense of this statement? On a realistic level, one could interpret it to mean a reference to the church through which Nat employs her services, Father Divine. Yet that is not satisfying. Clearly, Malamud means more. The tone of Charity's single line is that of angelic annunciation. She is associated with Nat's dead mother by virtue of her eyes, and the statement that Father, or God, reached down and took her up into Heaven seems to indicate that she, too, might be dead. By an interesting coincidence, readers are also given a single line of dialogue from Nat's mother, which he recalls as he is mourning her death: ' 'Nathan, she said, if you ever forget you are a Jew a goy will remind you." The word "goy" is a Yiddish term for Gentile or nonJew, sometimes used by Jews in a disparaging sense. Technically, African American are goys, and certainly, in this story, it is African Americans who remind Nat again and again that he is a Jew. "Mama," Nat responds as though addressing her spirit, "rest in peace on this subject. But if I do something you don't like, remember, on earth it's harder than where you are." Has Nat done something that his mother, in heaven, does not like? And has she returned to Earth as an angel, a black woman named Charity Quietness, to set him straight? In 1955, Malamud wrote a story called ' 'Angel Levine'' about a black angel sent to a white Jewish man. There the Jew comes to accept that an angel can be black, and the story ends on an optimistically humane (if rather condescending) note with a black feather from the angel turning white. But returning to this fantastic conceit eight years later in ' 'Black Is My Favorite Color," Malamud does not allow himself such a hopeful and trite conclusion; indeed, it is as if he has returned to the theme to set the record straight. If one accepts that Charity Quietness is an angel, and is Nat's mother returned from Heaven,
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one must conclude that the situation portrayed between blacks and Jews has the divine stamp of approval, and that in attempting to forge friendships, and more, with blacks throughout his life, Nat has gone against both the ways of man and God. While some transcendent reconciliation may be possible in Heaven, as the blackness of Charity Quietness seems to suggest, on earth that will not occur, and it is a kind of blasphemy even to wish it. Though he may be foolish, and though Nat's attraction to African Americans is tinged with unacknowledged racism, there is something admirable and poignant in Nat's persistence in trying to break through to a genuine connection based on "the language of the heart," even in the face of repeated and, because it is against God's unfathomable will, inevitable failure. If there is a such a thing as Jewish existentialism, this is it. In the next novel that Malamud wrote on the subject of American blacks and Jews, The Tenant (1971), there would be less to admire in the struggles of his characters. In the book, a black writer and a Jewish writer, representing all blacks and Jews, resolve their differences with an axe to the brain and a knife to the genitals in an apocalyptic confrontation whose sole witness is left crying out the word "mercy" over and over again to an indifferent earth and a silent Heaven. Source: Paul Witcover, Critical Essay on "Black Is My Favorite Color," in Short Stories for Students, The Gale Group, 2002.
Iska Alter In the following essay excerpt, Alter explores the racial pessimism present in ' 'Black Is My Favorite Color," focusing on the story's "ironic discrepancy between desire and reality.'' When we examine "Black Is My Favorite Color," we can see the further disintegration of traditional egalitarianism in the face of history. The idealism concerning the possibilities of racial harmony that dominates the surface of ' 'Angel Levine" is the motive force behind the civil rights movement of the early nineteen sixties. Blacks and whites together ("We shall not be moved" ) integrated lunch counters, picketed Woolworth's, rode freedom buses South, desegregated schools, were bombed, hosed, bitten by dogs, jailed, beaten, sometimes murdered. Under pressure exerted by both races, the institutions of government and society seemed increasingly responsive to the demands for justice, ready to redeem the pledges of the American Revolution owed to its black citizens. On
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i He is a Jewish liquor dealer feeding off the need to dream, the desire to escape, a man who gives discounts to his better customers, thereby keeping them sedated and desensitized."
a hot, steamy day in August, 1963, Martin Luther King told a rainbow gathering of honorable, optimistic people massed before the Lincoln Memorial of a dream as old as hope. And "We Shall Overcome" became the nation's new anthem. Given this atmosphere, the pessimism of "Black Is My Favorite Color'' strikes with the uncommon force of prophecy. It is the story of the sweet-sour existence of the aptly named Nat Lime as he unsuccessfully attempts to counter through love the deepening hostility of blacks to all manifestations of white domination. He is a man who inhabits a black society in which the most preliminary human overtures are often seen as a purposeful extension of the white man's power. However, this unhappy portrait may be regarded as an overt extension of the underlying pressures noted in "Angel Levine." It is also worth observing at this point that while "Angel Levine" is a fantasy whose very form accentuates the implausible but humane conclusion, ' 'Black Is My Favorite Color" is quintessential realism, thereby reinforcing the truth of its unhappy ending. The title itself does not seem to imply the unconscious sense of Jewish moral superiority of ' 'Angel Levine,'' but rather a capacity to accept and love human difference. "I got an eye for color. I appreciate. Who wants," says Nat Lime, "everybody to be the same?" But "Black Is My Favorite Color'' as a title serves, in fact, to emphasize the ironic discrepancy between desire and reality that so dominates a story which opens in an environment of willed isolation and deliberately blurred identities: ' 'Charity Sweetness sits in the toilet eating her two hardboiled eggs while I'm having my ham sandwich and coffee in the kitchen. That's how it goes only don't get the idea of ghettoes. If there's a ghetto I'm the one that's in it." And it is the black
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maid who rejects the idea of community in the ritual act of breaking bread, sensing perhaps not the impulse to equality but the patronizing white employer, for whom she does housework: ' 'The first time Charity Sweetness came in to clean . . . I made the mistake to ask her to sit down at the kitchen table with me and eat her lunch.... So she cooked up her two hardboiled eggs and sat down and took a small bite out of one of them. But after a minute she stopped chewing and she got up and carried the eggs in a cup in the bathroom and since then she eats there." Nat Lime's bewildered readiness to accept "colored people" makes this intentional segregation an understandable gesture. In ' 'Angle Levine,'' the author tries to establish at least the appearance of brotherhood by creating a similarity of class. Nat Lime in "Black Is My Favorite Color'' is clearly an exploitative presence in Harlem, no longer a replica of the white milieu, but hostile territory. He is a Jewish liquor dealer feeding off the need to dream, the desire to escape, a man who gives discounts to his better customers, thereby keeping them sedated and desensitized. In describing the problems caused by the liquor traffic in the ghetto, Lenora Berson says: "Of all the enterprises that have exploited the poor, none has encouraged more atrocious social fallout than the liquor trade, which includes alcoholism, sexual promiscuity, family instability, violence, brutality and the improvident use of limited funds." And though Nat asserts that "personally for me there's only one human color and that's the color of blood," his vocabulary throughout the story reveals a preoccupation with the divisions that race creates. Blackness has always represented for Nat Lime the extremes of experience unavailable to a nice Jewish boy who at the age of forty was still dutifully living with his mother, and who can innocently claim ' Tm the kind of man when I think of love I'm thinking of marriage." Black lives, in both social and psychic terms, express the limits to which the human spirit can be stretched and still survive: Any Negro who wishes to live must live with danger from his first day, and no experience can ever be casual to him . . . knowing in the cells of his existence that life was war, nothing but war, . .. could rarely afford the sophisticated inhibitions of civilization and so he kept for his survival the art of the primitive, he lived in the enormous present. . . . Hated from the outside and therefore hating himself, the Negro was forced into exploring all those moral wildernesses of
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civilized life. . . . The Negro chose to move instead in that other direction where all situations are equally valid, and in the worst of perversion, promiscuity, pimpery, drug addiction, rape, razor-slash, bottlebreak . . . the Negro discovered and elaborated a morality of the bottom.
Although this is surely Norman Mailer's fantasy about black existence, as James Baldwin points out, it is nonetheless significant that it is precisely this rhetorical stance that becomes part of revolutionary black nationalism as it evolves in the late sixties and early seventies. Eldridge Cleaver put it succinctly: "The term outlaw appealed to m e . . . . I was an 'outlaw.' I had stepped outside of the white man's law, which I repudiated with scorn and selfsatisfaction, I became a law unto m y s e l f . . . . " As a child, Nat Lime was poor in a marginal white neighborhood, but the blacks were poorer still, their environment a perpetual reminder of the constancy of death: "the Negro houses looked to me like they had been born and died there, dead not long after the beginning of the world." And Nat is fully aware of the edge his whiteness confers, feeling a prick of conscience that must eventually be acknowledged: "In those days though I had little myself I was old enough to know who was better off, and the whole block of colored houses made me feel bad in the daylight." Black existence defines the complexity of human experience, providing for Nat a sense of what life is really like: "brother, if there can be like this, what can't there be?" This assumption naively and unwittingly exhibits that inherited sense of superiority to their poverty, coupled with a fear of the excesses of that black world. But Nat is also admitting an attraction to a world pulsating with vitality, a confession, perhaps, of an absent element in his own personality, a revelation seen by one of life's voyeurs: "Sometimes I was afraid to walk by the houses when they were dark and quiet.... I liked it better when they had parties at night and everybody had a good time. The musicians played their banjos and saxophones and the houses shook with the music and laughing." Violence, so integral to the black milieu he observes and an inevitable component of behavior under conditions of internal and external stress, horrifies Nat to the point of denying its necessary presence: "I was frightened by the blood and wanted to pour it back in the man who was bleeding.... I personally couldn't stand it, I was scared of the human race." Yet for the young Nat Lime, it is Buster Wilson's self-containment, his ability to
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confront his world of blood and to remain apparently untouched by its pain, that is an ineluctable part of his fascination: "but I remember Buster watching without any expression in his eyes." Blackness also represents the seductiveness of open sensuality, "the young girls, with their pretty dresses and ribbons . . . caught me in my throat when I saw them through the windows." It is therefore not surprising that it is only a black woman who excites Nat, saying of Ornita Harris' obvious sexual attractiveness and exoticism: "She was a slim woman, dark but not the most dark, about thirty years . .. also well built, with a combination nice legs and a good-size bosom that I like. Her face was pretty, with big eyes and high cheek bones, but lips a little thick.... That was the night she wore a purple dress and I thought to myself, my God, what colors. Who paints that picture paints a masterpiece. Everybody looked at us but I had pleasure.'' Yet the physical presence of her sexuality is described as white: "Under her purple dress she wore a black slip, and when she took that off she had white underwear. When she took off the white underwear she was black again. But I know where the next white was ..." Given Nat Lime's complex but ambiguous responses, it is not surprising that his efforts to establish actual relationships with blacks fail, leaving the human contract unfulfilled. His putative friendship with Buster is part envy, part guilt, an effort that barely recognizes Buster as a human being. He envies Buster's independence, "I liked his type. Buster did everything alone." Nat Lime's underlying attitudes at this point, and through the entire story, resemble those which Norman Podhoretz described in his famous essay, "My Negro Problem—And Ours'': What counted for me about Negro kids of my own age was that they were "bad boys." There were plenty of bad boys among the whites . . . but the Negroes were really bad, bad in a way that beckoned to one, and made one feel inadequate. We all went home every day for a lunch of spinach-and-potatoes; they roamed around during lunch hour, munching on candy bars.... We rarely played hookey, or got into serious trouble in school, for all our streetcorner bravado; they were defiant, forever staying out (to do what delicious things?), forever making disturbances in class and in the halls, forever being sent to the principal and returning uncowed. But most important of all, they were tough; beautifully, enviably tough, not giving a damn for anyone or anything.... To hell with the whole of the adult world that held us in its grip and that we never had the courage to rebel against. .. .
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This is what I saw and envied and feared in the Negro....
Nat is ashamed of his whiteness, the sign of his responsibility for the conditions which determine the contours of Buster's life. But when Buster invites him into his home, Nat only wishes to escape the impoverished reality of what he sees there, ' 'it smelled so heavy, so impossible, I died till I got out of there. What I saw in the way of furniture I won't mention—the best was falling apart in pieces." So Nat mitigates his guilt by giving Buster those fragments of whiteness he can afford to part with, assuming, of course, that Buster wants those emblems of conscience: "I stole an extra fifteen cents from my mother's pocketbook and I ran back and asked Buster if he wanted to go to the movies . . . which includes my invitations to go with me, my (poor mother's) movie money, Hershey chocolate bars, watermelon slices, even my best Nick Carter and Merriwell books that I spent hours picking up in junk shops, and that he never gave me back." His affair with Ornita Harris, however, seems an honest attempt to accept her blackness and to love at last. Yet strain and ambivalence are always present. His initial rebellion is a pallid one, minimizing risk and courting safety. On their first date, he takes her to Greenwich Village, a bohemian environment which willingly tolerates interracialism. He will not take her home to meet his dying mother— that is too great a chance to take. They have their first sexual encounter in a rented room. Only when his mother and the tradition she embodies ("Nathan," she said,' 'if you ever forget you are a Jew a goy will remind you") is dead, can his rebellion become more overt and seek society: he sells his mother's bed; he invites Ornita into his home; he takes her to meet carefully chosen, liberal friends; he proposes marriage. But this time it is the black community that will not sanction such a union because it is a relationship that seems to reenact the sexual pattern of slavery: the black woman considered only as an object to be manipulated by the white man's lust, no matter how strong are Nat's protestations of love and affection. Significantly, it is at this juncture that the young black men, serving as the active agents of community disapproval, choose to remind Nat of his position as economic exploiter: "You talk like a Jew landlord," said the green hat. "Fifty a week for a single room." "No charge fo' the rats," said the half-inch brim.
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In this atmosphere, shaped by overt hostility, unspoken anger, and unconscious ambivalence, the reassuring notion that love can solve all problems seems unworkable. Nat is incapable of understanding the continued refusals his giving impulse has met with, because he is trapped by the complicated ambiguities of his own responses. He cannot see that to be defined solely in terms of the experiences inaccessible to the white man, to be wanted only as the complement to an incomplete self, is sufficient cause for rejection. Nor is he conscious of his social and political situation in an environment that regards him as the enemy, where even a blind man senses his whiteness and spurns his help. Nat Lime is finally left in his bewilderment to confront a locked door behind which Charity Sweetness sits in splendid isolation. Indeed the world has become a series of locked doors through which love cannot enter, for ' 'the language of the heart either is a dead language or else nobody understands the way you speak it." Source: Iska Alter, "The Broader Canvas: Malamud, the Blacks, and the Jews,'' in The Good Man's Dilemma: Social Criticism in the Fiction of Bernard Malamud, AMS Press, Inc., 1981, pp. 62-82.
Sources Abramson, Edward A., Bernard Malamud Revisited, Twayne Publishers, 1993, p. 90. Alter, Iska, "The Broader Canvas: Malamud, the Blacks, and the Jews," in The Good Man's Dilemma: Social Criticism in the Fiction of Bernard Malamud, AMS Press, Inc., 1981, p. 68. Alter, Robert, "Ordinary Anguish," in the New York Times Book Review, October 16, 1983, pp. 1, 35-6. Bellman, Samuel Irving, "Women, Children, and Idiots First: Transformation Psychology," in Bernard Malamud and the Critics, New York University Press, 1970, pp. 19-20. Boaz, Amy, Review of The Complete Stories, in Library Journal, July 1997, p. 129. Field, Leslie A., and Joyce W. Field, "An Interview with Bernard Malamud," in Bernard Malamud: A Collection of Critical Essays, edited by Leslie A. Field and Joyce W. Field, Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1975, p. 11. , "Introduction—Malamud, Mercy, and Menschlechtkeit," in Bernard Malamud: A Collection of Critical Essays, edited by Leslie A. Field and Joyce W. Field, Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1975, p. 7. Fuchs, Marcia G., Review of The Stories of Bernard Malamud, in Library Journal, December 1, 1983, p. 2262.
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Oilman, Richard, "Malamud's Grace: Humanism with and without Tears," in the New Republic, Vol. 194, No. 19, May 12, 1986, pp. 40-1. Gray, Paul, "Heroism without Sentiment," in Time, October 17, 1983, p. 92. Helterman, Jeffrey, "Bernard Malamud," in Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vol. 2: American Novelists Since World War II, edited by Jeffrey Helterman and Richard Layman, Gale Research, 1978, pp. 291-303. Lyons, Gene, "A Chosen People," in Newsweek, October 17, 1983, pp. 86-87. Malamud, Bernard, "Black Is My Favorite Color," in The Complete Stories, edited by Robert Giroux, Noonday Press, 1997, pp. 331-39. Ochshorn, Kathleen G., "Idiots First: Shared Suffering on a Sinking Ship," in The Heart's Essential Landscape: Bernard Malamud's Hero, Peter Lang, 1990, p. 124. Richman, Sidney, Bernard Malamud, Twayne Publishers, Inc., 1966, p. 134-35,138. Solotaroff, Robert, "Bernard Malamud," in American Writers, Supp. 1, Vol. 2, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1979, pp. 427-53.
Further Reading Avery, Evelyn, ed., The Magic Worlds of Bernard Malamud, SUNY Series in Modern Jewish Literature and Culture, State University of New York Press, 2001.
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Evelyn Avery, an important scholar on Malamud, has collected essays on the author's fiction by various literary scholars. The book covers a wide range of subjects, from Zen Buddhism to Yiddish archetypes. Bloom, Harold, ed., Bernard Malamud, Modern Critical Views, Chelsea House Publications, 2000. This book is a collection of critical selections about Bernard Malamud, which includes an introductory essay by Bloom, editor's notes on each of the individual analyses, bibliographies on Malamud, notes about each of the contributing critics, and chronologies. Levine, Rhonda F., Class, Networks, and Identity, Rowman & Littlefield Publishing, 2001. This book details how a group of Jewish refugees who emigrated to America from Nazi Germany began to dominate cattle-dealing in South Central New York, while trying to maintain their Jewish identity in the predominantly Christian communities. Levine examines the unique role Jewish women played in managing this transition to the United States by helping their husbands accumulate capital within their new country and working to recreate a German Jewish Community. Sio-Castineira, Begona, The Short Stories of Bernard Malamud: In Search of Jewish Post-Immigrant Identity, Peter Lang Publishing, 1998. The author examines ten of the short stories found in Malamud's 1983 collection, The Short Stories of Bernard Malamud, paying particular attention to the spiritual situation of the modern Jewish American and focusing on the complex structure of the selected tales.
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Dharma Vikram Chandra
1994
Vikram Chandra's story ' 'Dharma'' is set in Bombay, India, and revolves around Major General Jago Antia, a senior officer in the Indian Army. Jago Antia has built up a legendary career in the military and he is universally admired and respected by the junior officers. But when he resigns from the army because of an incurable ' 'phantom'' pain in his leg that had been amputated twenty years earlier, he returns to his empty family home in Bombay. There he discovers that he faces a test quite different from those he is used to encountering in army life: the house is haunted, and Jago Antia must somehow face up to the ghosts of his past. Chandra uses this premise to tell a modern ghost story while at the same time providing an intriguing twist to the venerable ghost story genre. "Dharma" is a story not only about ghosts. It is also about duty (which is roughly what the title "Dharma," an Indian word, means), acceptance, and the peculiar ways in which past and present interact in the mind of a single individual. First published in Paris Review in 1994 and included as one of five stories in Chandra's collection, Love and Longing in Bombay (1997), "Dharma" is an unusual contribution to the growing body of Indian literature written in English that has been published over the last two decades.
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Author Biography Vikram Chandra was born on July 23, 1961, in New Delhi, India, the son of Navin (a company president) and Kamna (a screenwriter, playwright, and author) Chandra. He received most of his secondary education at Mayo College, a boarding school in Ajmer, Rajasthan, where his work was published in the school's literary magazine. After attending St. Xavier's College in Bombay for a short period, Chandra came to the United States as an undergraduate student in the early 1980s. In 1984, he graduated from Pomona College in Claremont, near Los Angeles, with a Bachelor of Arts degree (magna cum laude) in English, with a concentration in creative writing. Chandra then attended the Film School at Columbia University in New York, dropping out halfway through the program in order to begin work on a novel. He enrolled in a Master of Arts degree program at Johns Hopkins University, where he studied with John Barth. He also founded Letters and Light, a computer programming and consulting firm. His clients included oil companies, nonprofit organizations, and the Houston Zoo. Chandra graduated from Johns Hopkins University in 1987 and, at the suggestion of Barth, went to study under Donald Barthelme, who was head of the writing program at the University of Houston in Texas. Chandra regards Barthelme as his most important teacher. Chandra became an adjunct professor at the University of Houston, from 1987 to 1993, and he also received a master of fine arts degree from that university in 1992. He was a visiting writer at George Washington University, Washington, D.C., from 1994 to 1995, and it was during this period that his short story "Dharma" was published in the Paris Review and won that journal's Discovery Prize. Chandra's first novel, Red Earth and Pouring Rain: A Novel, which took him six years to write, was published in 1995. It won the David Higham Prize in Fiction from the Book Trust, London, England, in 1995 and the Commonwealth Writers Prize: Best First Book in 1996. Chandra commented that the form of the story was inspired by the stories he had grown up with from the long Indian epics and popular Indian movies. Two volumes of short stories followed in quick succession: Tales of Love and Longing (1996), and Love and Longing in Bombay: Stories (1997). Love
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and Longing in Bombay was short-listed for the Guardian Fiction Prize and was included in ' 'Notable Books of 1997" by the New York Times Book Review. Chandra was also author of the television series ' 'City of Gold'' produced in Bombay in 1996. Chandra currently divides his time between Bombay and Washington, D.C., where he teaches creative writing at George Washington University.
Plot Summary ' 'Dharma'' begins in a bar in Bombay, India, called the Fisherman's Rest. The young narrator, who works for a software company, describes a thin, white-haired old man named Subramaniam, who is often to be seen at the bar. Subramaniam had been joint secretary of the Ministry of Defence, where he had worked for forty-one years, and was now retired. Ramani introduces the narrator to Subramaniam. Ramani is telling the group about an old house in the city that cannot be sold because people believe it is haunted. The narrator pours scorn on this idea and laments the fact that educated men and women can believe in such things. But then Subramaniam speaks up in a small, whispery voice
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and says he knew a man once who met a ghost. He then tells the story. Subramaniam's story begins with fifty-yearold Major General Jago Antia, who is in charge of fighting an insurgency. (Jago is a nickname given to him early in his military career; his real name is Jehangir.) Jago Antia has had a distinguished military career which has made him famous, and he is revered by the men under his command. The day of his fiftieth birthday, Jago Antia feels an ache in his missing leg, which had been amputated twenty years earlier. The pain does not go away and he is unable to sleep. Reluctantly, he takes medication but the pain only gets worse. Feeling that he can no longer function at the high standard he expects of himself, he resigns his command. He then travels back from Calcutta to his family home in Bombay. It is an old house, now lived in only by the old housekeeper, Amir Khan. Jago Antia's parents are dead and since he has no intention of living in the house for long, he tells Amir Khan that he plans to sell it. That night as Jago Antia tries to sleep, he hears a voice. At first he thinks it belongs to Amir Khan, but he nonetheless gets out of bed and goes to investigate. He walks to the hallway and then climbs the staircase. He hears the voice again and realizes it is too young to be Amir Khan. Then he senses something moving and hears the swish of feet on the ground. On the floor he sees the shape of shoes, which are making footprints as they approach him. Initially he freezes, but then convinces himself that what he saw was a trick of the light. He continues to ascend the staircase but he feels an icy chill, hears the voice again and then collapses and slides down the stairs. He reaches the bottom and sits there, frightened, until dawn. For three days he paces up and down at the bottom of the stairs. Meanwhile his longtime batman, Thapa, arrives at the house. Jago Antia inquires about selling the house but his lawyer, Tody walla, says it is impossible because there is "something" there. Thapa suggests bringing in an exorcist who can remove it. Jago Antia tries to convince himself that this is all nonsense, but that night he hears the voice again. He and the terrified Thapa ascend the stairs to investigate. Jago Antia reaches the balcony, and the voice comes from around a corner, saying, with a sob, "Where shall I go?" Jago Antia backs away and falls. The narrative then flashes back to the time when Jago Antia loses his leg. He parachutes down
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with his Indian forces to the town of Sylhet where they are opposed by Pakistani troops. (The war is most likely the one that was fought in 1971, when India supported what was then East Pakistan, now Bangladesh, in its struggle for independence from West Pakistan. Sylhet is located in Bangladesh.) As Jago Antia and his men move into the burning city, he steps on a mine that explodes. His men carry him into a house, and, as he forces himself to sit up, he sees that his right leg is destroyed below the knee. He orders the nursing assistant to cut it off, but the man tells him that there is no instrument available to carry out his command. Jago Antia's radioman, Jung, will not do it either, so Jago Antia asks him for his kukri (knife), and cuts off his leg himself. Then he takes command of the battle once more, giving instructions over the radio. Returning to the story's present, Jago Antia wakes and, for a while, does not know where he is. Then a doctor comes and tells him there are no injuries following his fall. Two days later, the exorcist, a man named Thakker, comes and performs a ceremony. He reports that the strange entity is very strong and immovable—it is a child that is looking for something. He says that he cannot remove it. Only someone who knows it and is from its family can help it. That person must go naked and alone and meet it and ask it what it wants. That night, Jago Antia ascends the stairs. He knows who it is who waits for him. As he reaches the balcony he peers into his mother's room, and memories of his childhood begin to return. He remembers walking down the stairs with his mother and father to where his family is gathered. His dead brother Sohrab, whom he always called Soli, has been laid out and draped in a white sheet. Jago Antia moves down the corridor, feeling the presence of the ghost all around him. He reaches the room that used to be both his and Soli's room. He goes in and sits on the bed. More memories of childhood flood in—of how he and Soli had once fought; of how he, Jehangir, had lost; and of how Soli was fearless and a leader. Then he remembers a Sunday afternoon in which they were visited by his favorite uncle, the soldier, Burjor Mama. Trembling, Jago Antia ascends another flight of stairs, following the ghost. Obeying the injunction to be naked, he removes his plastic leg. Memories of Burjor Mama buying the boys a kite come. They run to the roof with it.
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As Jago Antia continues to ascend, he recalls a terrible incident. As the boys quarrel about who is to fly the kite, Soli falls three feet to the lower level of the roof and is killed. Jago Antia hears the ghostly voice again and asks, "What do you want?" More memories of the accident rush into his mind. At dawn, Jago Antia again asks the ghost what it wants. He sees a boy, who turns to face him. The boy is wearing a uniform of olive green and asks again,' 'Where shall I go?'' Jago Antia then remembers his seventh birthday party, his first since Soli died. His parents wanted to give him a present, but he did not want anything. Then he said that he wanted a uniform. Jago Antia looks at the boy as he approaches and sees the letters above the pocket: J. ANTIA. It is himself. Then he sees the boy clearly, and he also sees the whole course of his own life. He tells the boy that he is already at home, implying that he does not need to go anywhere. Coming up the stairs, Thapa and Amir Khan approach Jago Antia. Jago Antia says that the ghost has gone and when they ask who it was, he says, "Someone I didn't know before." He leans on their shoulders and descends the stairs. He feels free and happy. The story ends with the three men sitting on the porch drinking tea.
Characters Major General Jago Antia Major General Jago Antia, whose given name was Jehangir, is the principal character in the story. He is a man of iron self-discipline and strong will power, but he is also lonely. Following the death of his brother, Soli, he decides, when still a young boy, that he wants to go into the military. He excels at military academy, winning a gold medal for best cadet and goes on to an extremely successful career in the army. He wins many medals and becomes famous for his tactical skills. But when he is about thirty, he leads an attack by the Indian Army on the town of Sylhet, which is held by Pakistani forces, and his leg is shattered by a mine. He amputates the leg below the knee himself. His handicap does not impair his military career, however, and the loss of his leg becomes part of the legend that surrounds him. Even at the age of fifty, he is able to shame men twenty years younger than he by his ability to traverse jungle terrain.
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When Jago Antia is troubled by a persistent pain in his missing leg, he realizes that it is impairing his efficiency at his job. Fearing that he will soon make a mistake that will get some of his young soldiers killed, he resigns from his command. After his resignation and his return to his family home in Bombay, Jago Antia faces what might be seen as his toughest test. He must come to terms with his boyhood self, which returns in the form of a ghost, and with the course his adult life took. As with all the other challenges Jago Antia has faced in his life, he rises to the task, and after encountering the ghost of his youthful self, he finds the peace that had formerly eluded him.
Jung Jung is the nineteen-year-old radioman in the Indian Para Brigade under Jago Antia's command. When Jago Antia is wounded at the battle for the city of Sylhet, Jung cannot bring himself to obey Jago Antia's command to amputate his commander's leg, but he hands over his knife so that Jago Antia can do the job himself.
Amir Khan Amir Khan is the old housekeeper at Jago Antia's family home. He has a thin neck, with a white beard "that gave him the appearance of a heron."
Burjor Mama Burjor Mama is Jago Antia's uncle, his mother's younger brother. Jago Antia remembers him from his boyhood. Burjor Mama is a soldier and the favorite uncle of Jehangir and Soli. He is a man of unceasing energy who takes the boys out on many trips. He also buys them a kite, and it is while playing with the kite that Soli meets with his fatal accident.
The Narrator The narrator is the unnamed man at the beginning of the story who describes his meeting with Subramaniam at the Fisherman's Rest. The narrator works for a software company and prides himself on being very modern in his outlook. When he hears the ghost story that Subramaniam tells, it contradicts his entire way of seeing the world.
Sohrab See Soli
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Soli Soli is Jago Antia's older brother. He is a born leader, a boy who would always win in fights against the neighborhood boys. He is also a promising young cricketer. He dies while still a young boy after falling from a roof while flying a kite.
Subramaniam Subramaniam is a thin, old man with white hair who spends much of his time in a bar called the Fisherman's Rest. He is retired from the Ministry of Defence, where he worked for over forty years. He speaks in a small, whispery voice, and it is he who tells the story of Jago Antia and the ghost.
Thakker Thakker is a middle-aged sales manager from a large electronics company. He also serves as an exorcist and performs a religious ceremony aimed at removing the ghost from Jago Antia's house. He informs Jago Antia that the ghost is that of a child and cannot be moved, except by a member of its own family.
Thapa Thapa is a small, round man who is Jago Antia's batman, or servant. The two men have known each other for thirty years and their relationship is a close one. It is Thapa who arranges for the exorcist to come to the house and try to remove the ghost.
Todywalla Todywalla is the attorney consulted by Jago Antia about the sale of the haunted house. Todywalla says that the house cannot be sold because there is "something" in it and no one will buy it.
Themes Duty and Acceptance The title of the story is a Sanskrit word that means literally "right action." It is commonly translated into English as "duty" and also "righteousness," but both these are narrower concepts than implied by the Sanskrit term. According to Indian philosopher Radhakrishnan, in The Hindu View of Life, the word dharma comes from the root dhr, to hold. Dharma means "that which holds a thing and maintains it in being."
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Every form of life, every person and every group, has its dharma. In practical terms, dharma refers to a mode of activity that maintains life on the path of spiritual evolution and righteousness. For example, if a man has great musical talent and becomes a violinist, he is pursuing his dharma—the mode of activity that best suits his specific abilities. If he were to ignore his real calling and pursue some other profession or occupation, he would not be following his dharma. However, not every person understands clearly his or her dharma, the activity that fulfills the criterion of' 'right action'' in their specific situation in life. And even when a person is living in accordance with his dharma, he may still have some regrets or misgivings about other paths in life not taken. In this lies the key to understanding the subtleties of the story ' 'Dharma." It is a story about the mysterious ways through which a person becomes who he is and chooses his life purpose. It is also about acceptance of one's duty and one's destiny, whatever that may be. The theme becomes apparent in the climactic moment when Jago Antia finally comes face to face with the ghost of his childhood self. After this encounter, he acquires knowledge and acceptance. What Jago Antia sees in the child that is, or was, himself are the seeds of all the qualities that he later expressed in his life:' 'his vicious and ravenous strength, his courage and his devotion, his silence and his pain, his whole misshapen and magnificent life." This life began to take the shape that it did when Jago Antia was a seven-year-old boy, and was still called by his given name, Jehangir. The crucial moment is his seventh birthday party, his first since the death of his brother, Soli. When pressed by his parents to say what gift he wishes for, Jehangir can at first think of nothing to say. Then he suddenly asks for a uniform. Obviously he is remembering the uniform that his favorite uncle, Burjor Mama, wore. The young Jehangir had lain on the bed beside the uniform and absorbed its peculiar smell. The name B. MEHTA (his uncle's name) was sewn into his uniform above the breast pocket, just as J. ANTIA appears on the pocket of the uniform that the child-ghost is wearing. From that point on, Jehangir's future was determined—he wore a uniform with all it implies— even though at the time he could hardly have realized the implications of his request. Sure enough, as soon as he was old enough, he joined the Indian military. Why did he ask for a uniform? Perhaps as a
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Topics for Further Study • In "Dharma," Jago Antia leads Indian forces against those of Pakistan during the war between India and Pakistan in 1971. Research this war. What was the cause? What was the outcome? Why did India support East Pakistan, now Bangladesh? Why is there continuing hostility between India and Pakistan today? • Read a ghost story by another author and compare it to "Dharma." Which is the more successful as a ghost story and why? • One of the reasons Chandra writes stories is to express a variety of, what he called, ' 'visions of
child he absorbed from his uncle a dim sense of dharma, that it was his duty to follow the uncle he loved into uniform. In this sense, he was following a family dharma. It is this realization that gives Jago Antia the sense of peace and acceptance with which the story ends: in spite of all the difficulties he experienced in life, he knows that he was following his duty or dharma throughout his long and successful military career, and in that he can be happy. But this explanation does not do full justice to the subtlety of the theme, since there is an ambiguous quality to Jago Antia's final realizations about "his whole misshapen and magnificent life." The words "misshapen" and "magnificent" do not sit well together, and the keyword here may well be "misshapen." It suggests that something about this "magnificent" life was not quite right, and it is certainly an odd word to use if Jago Antia's final realization was solely that his life had been lived in accordance with his dharma. If that was so, how could it be described as misshapen? Of course, the word "misshapen" might apply to any human life, since it is rare for anyone to live a life that entirely conforms in every respect to the person's desires and goals. But the use of the word may imply more than this, that Jago Antia's life was misshapen in some more fundamental regard, mag-
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the world." What vision of the world is conveyed by "Dharma?" What worldview is implied by a belief in ghosts? Is a belief in ghosts and other supernatural phenomena incompatible with a scientific worldview? • Watch a video of the 2000 movie The Kid, in which the adult character, played by Bruce Willis, encounters his childhood self. Are there any parallels in this movie to the story told in "Dharma?" If you were able to encounter your seven-year-old self, as Jago Antia does in the story, what do you think he or she might say to you? And what would you say to him or her?
nificent though it might have been in many respects. The image conjured up by "misshapen" is in stark contrast to the way, as a child, Jehangir stands up straight as he looks at his parents and asks for a uniform. Something, somewhere, went wrong with his life. Certainly, Jago Antia is not a man who exhibits much joy in life. He is highly self-disciplined and deeply respected by his men, but perhaps this came at the cost of his personal enjoyment of things. He is a lonely figure, an austere individual exhibiting a high degree of control over his emotions and his responses to events in his life. His comment at the end of the story, after he has recognized the ghost as his child-self, suggests that he now realizes that the life he has lived, and is still living, is somehow offcourse, but it cannot be changed now. ' 'He knew he was still and forever Jago Antia, that for him it was too late for anything but a kind of solitude." Perhaps Jago Antia became the sort of man he did—of stern character, unyielding in the demands he made of himself—because of feelings of guilt over the death of his brother Soli. Or perhaps it was from a desire to please his parents by excelling at whatever he did, just as Soli had done. Whatever was the cause, the implication is that since every choice made in life closes off other possibilities,
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when seven-year-old Jehangir chose a uniform, he cut himself off from an aspect of his own nature— that part of himself that might have done many things other than serve in the military. He might have expressed many different qualities than those that found an outlet in the life he did in fact live. To use the jargon of popular psychology, Jago Antia leaves his "inner child" behind. This lost ghostchild has remained quite unknown to Jago Antia, a fact that is conveyed by the difference in their names: the boy is called Jehangir, but the adult is known only by the nickname Jago, which was bestowed on him in the military academy. When Jago Antia finally encounters his childhood self, he realizes the paradoxical nature of his life, at once "misshapen" and "magnificent," and he accepts it. Knowledge and acceptance exorcise the ghost and change the man, which is why the final scene is a contented one. Jago Antia is shown enjoying fellowship with those who are technically his social inferiors; he is able to laugh and to enjoy the simple pleasure of drinking a cup of tea—a scene that one suspects has not happened very often in his life.
For example, this is the incident in which Jaga Antia steps on a mine: He started off confidently across the street, and then all the sound in the world vanished, leaving a smooth silence, he had no recollection of being thrown, but now he was falling through the air, down, he felt distinctly the impact of the ground, but again there was nothing, no sound.
This technique is used again frequently when Jago Antia encounters the ghost: And then he was at the bottom of a flight of stairs, he knew he had to go up, because it had gone before him, and now he stumbled because the pain came, and it was full of fear, he went up, one two three, and then leaned over, choking.
Using run-on sentences in this way is appropriate for the situation as it expresses the idea of thoughts rushing quickly through a frightened mind. It is also appropriate that the thoughts belong to Jago Antia, who is normally such a controlled, selfdisciplined individual. It shows that he is being taken out of his normal orderly forms of thinking and acting.
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