Civil Disobedience

Bloom's Literary Themes
Alienation
The American Dream
Civil Disobedience
Dark Humor
Death and Dying
Enslavement and Emancipation
Exploration and Colonization
The Grotesque
The Hero’s Journey
Human Sexuality
The Labyrinth
Rebirth and Renewal
Sin and Redemption
The Sublime
The Taboo
The Trickster
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Bloom’s Literary Themes
C I V I L D I S O B ED I EN C E
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Bloom’s Literary Themes
C I V I L D I S O B ED I EN C E
Edited and with an introduction by

Harold Bloom
Sterling Professor of the Humanities
Yale University
Volume Editor
Blake Hobby
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Bloom’s Literary Themes: Civil Disobedience
Copyright ©2010 by Infobase Publishing
Introduction ©2010 by Harold Bloom
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Bloom’s literary themes. Civil disobedience / edited and with an introduction by
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, Contents .
Series Introduction by Harold Bloom:

Themes and Metaphors xi
Volume Introduction by Harold Bloom xv
1984 (George Orwell) 1

“Of Man’s Last Disobedience: Zamiatin’s We
and Orwell’s 1984” by Gorman Beauchamp, in
Comparative Literature Studies (1973)
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Mark Twain) 21

“Civil Disobedience and the Ending of Mark Twain’s
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” by Robert C.
Evans
Antigone (Sophocles) 31
“Antigone’s Unwritten Laws” by Victor Ehrenberg, in
Sophocles and Pericles (1954)
The Plays of Aristophanes 49

“Aristophanes and His Contemporaries” by Alfred
and Maurice Croiset, in Abridged History of Greek
Literature (1904)
“Bartleby, the Scrivener” (Herman Melville) 59

“A Second Look at ‘Bartleby’ ” by Egbert S. Oliver, in
College English (1945)
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viii Contents
Billy Budd (Herman Melville) 73

“Billy Budd ” by Milton R. Stern, in The Fine Hammered
Steel of Herman Melville (1957)
Brave New World (Aldous Huxley) 89

“State versus the Individual: Civil Disobedience in
Brave New World ” by Jake Pollerd
“Civil Disobedience” (Henry David Thoreau) 101

“Writing in the Dark” by Alfred Kazin, in Henry
David Thoreau: Studies and Commentaries (1972)
Crime and Punishment (Fyodor Dostoevsky) 117

“Crime and Punishment Draws the Line” by Claudia
Verhoeven
The Crucible (Arthur Miller) 129

“Civil Disobedience in Arthur Miller’s The Crucible” by
Joshua E. Polster
Fahrenheit 451 (Ray Bradbury) 141

“ ‘And the Leaves of the Tree Were for the Healing of
the Nations’: Reading and Civil Disobedience in Ray
Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451” by Alina Gerall and Blake
Hobby
The Poetry of Langston Hughes 151

“Langston Hughes: Rhetoric and Protest” by Margaret
A. Reid, in The Langston Hughes Review (1984)
Invisible Man (Ralph Ellison) 163

“Where Is the Civil in the Invisible Man’s
Disobedience?” by Brian E. Butler
Julius Caesar (William Shakespeare) 175

“Julius Caesar” by Stopford A. Brooke, in Ten More
Plays of Shakespeare (1913)
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Contents ix
“Letter from a Birmingham Jail” (Martin Luther King, Jr.) 197

“The American Dream Unfulfilled: Martin Luther
King, Jr. and the ‘Letter from Birmingham Jail’ ” by
James A. Colaiaco, in Phylon (1984)
The Speeches of Malcolm X 213

“Rhetorical Resistance and the Conscience of the
World: Civil Disobedience in the Speeches of
Malcolm X” by John Becker
Native Son (Richard Wright) 225

“Richard Wright and Albert Camus: The Literature of
Revolt” by Steven J. Rubin, in International Fiction
Review (1981)
The Prince (Niccolò Machiavelli) 233

“Civil Disobedience in The Prince” by Raymond
Angelo Belliotti
The Scarlet Letter (Nathaniel Hawthorne) 243

“Civil Disobedience and Realpolitik in Nathaniel
Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter” by Robert C. Evans
The Trial (Franz Kafka) 253

“Franz Kafka’s The Trial and Civil Disobedience” by
Michael D. Sollars
Acknowledgments 263
Index 265
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, Series Introduction by Harold Bloom: .
Themes and Metaphors
1. Topos and Trope

What we now call a theme or topic or subject initially was named a
topos, ancient Greek for “place.” Literary topoi are commonplaces, but
also arguments or assertions. A topos can be regarded as literal when
opposed to a trope or turning which is figurative and which can be a
metaphor or some related departure from the literal: ironies, synec-
doches (part for whole), metonymies (representations by contiguity)
or hyperboles (overstatements). Themes and metaphors engender one
another in all significant literary compositions.
As a theoretician of the relation between the matter and the
rhetoric of high literature, I tend to define metaphor as a figure of
desire rather than a figure of knowledge. We welcome literary meta-
phor because it enables fictions to persuade us of beautiful untrue
things, as Oscar Wilde phrased it. Literary topoi can be regarded as
places where we store information, in order to amplify the themes
that interest us.
This series of volumes, Bloom’s Literary Themes, offers students and
general readers helpful essays on such perpetually crucial topics as the
Hero’s Journey, the Labyrinth, the Sublime, Death and Dying, the
Taboo, the Trickster and many more. These subjects are chosen for
their prevalence yet also for their centrality. They express the whole
concern of human existence now in the twenty-first century of the
Common Era. Some of the topics would have seemed odd at another
time, another land: the American Dream, Enslavement and Emanci-
pation, Civil Disobedience.
I suspect though that our current preoccupations would have
existed always and everywhere, under other names. Tropes change
across the centuries: The irony of one age is rarely the irony of
xi
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xii Series Introduction by Harold Bloom
another. But the themes of great literature, though immensely

varied, undergo transmemberment and show up barely disguised in
different contexts. The power of imaginative literature relies upon
three constants: aesthetic splendor, cognitive power, wisdom. These
are not bound by societal constraints or resentments, and ultimately
are universals, and so not culture-bound. Shakespeare, except for
the world’s scriptures, is the one universal author, whether he is read
and played in Bulgaria or Indonesia or wherever. His supremacy at
creating human beings breaks through even the barrier of language
and puts everyone on his stage. This means that the matter of his
work has migrated everywhere, reinforcing the common places we
all inhabit in his themes.
2. Contest as Both Theme and Trope

Great writing or the Sublime rarely emanates directly from themes
since all authors are mediated by forerunners and by contemporary
rivals. Nietzsche enhanced our awareness of the agonistic foundations
of ancient Greek literature and culture, from Hesiod’s contest with
Homer on to the Hellenistic critic Longinus in his treatise On the
Sublime. Even Shakespeare had to begin by overcoming Christopher
Marlowe, only a few months his senior. William Faulkner stemmed
from the Polish-English novelist Joseph Conrad, and our best living
author of prose fiction, Philip Roth, is inconceivable without his
descent from the major Jewish literary phenomenon of the twentieth
century, Franz Kafka of Prague, who wrote the most lucid German
since Goethe.
The contest with past achievement is the hidden theme of all
major canonical literature in Western tradition. Literary influence is
both an overwhelming metaphor for literature itself, and a common
topic for all criticism, whether or not the critic knows her immersion
in the incessant flood.
Every theme in this series touches upon a contest with anteriority,
whether with the presence of death, the hero’s quest, the overcoming
of taboos, or all of the other concerns, volume by volume. From
Monteverdi through Bach to Stravinsky, or from the Italian Renais-
sance through the agon of Matisse and Picasso, the history of all the
arts demonstrates the same patterns as literature’s thematic struggle
with itself. Our country’s great original art, jazz, is illuminated by what
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Series Introduction by Harold Bloom xiii
the great creators called “cutting contests,” from Louis Armstrong and
Duke Ellington on to the emergence of Charlie Parker’s Bop or revi-
sionist jazz.
A literary theme, however authentic, would come to nothing
without rhetorical eloquence or mastery of metaphor. But to experi-
ence the study of the common places of invention is an apt training in
the apprehension of aesthetic value in poetry and in prose.
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, Volume Introduction by Harold Bloom .
As a term, “civil disobedience” for most of us evokes the activists

of the twentieth century who followed Thoreau: Mahatma Gandhi,
Nelson Mandela, Martin Luther King, Jr., and our protestors down
to the present moment. Yet its literary history is far richer than Henry
David Thoreau, and goes back to Sophocles, Aristophanes, Machia-
velli, Shakespeare, Milton, Melville, Hawthorne, Dostoyevsky, Kafka,
and Ralph Waldo Ellison.
What possibly can unite figures so diverse as Antigone, Hamlet,
Milton’s Samson, Bartleby the Scrivener, Hester Prynne, Svidrigailov,
Joseph K., and Ellison’s Invisible Man? I hold aside, for now, the
literary master of civil disobedience, my hero Sir John Falstaff. When
rhetoric and dramatic representation replace civic action and suffering,
civil disobedience can begin to mean everything and nothing. Anti-
gone asserts a private ethic against the state, yet the ironist Hamlet
disdains assertion and questions even his own questionings. Milton’s
Samson like blind Milton himself asserts the God within against all
outward authority.
Melville’s Bartleby would prefer not to, and declines explana-
tion, while Hester Prynne stubbornly will outwait all of male society.
The most fascinating of all is Crime and Punishment’s Svidrigailov,
who ends himself with a pistol-shot to his forehead while cheerfully
explaining to a policeman that he is “Going to America!”
What literature can teach us is that our sociopolitical ideas of
civil disobedience are too limited in imagination. Svidrigailov the
nihilist refused to teach us anything but the wise comedian Falstaff
is our Montaigne-like Socrates, and he provides us with the ultimate
demand that animates all civil disobedience, everywhere: “Give me
life.”
xv

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1984
(George Orwell)
,.
“Of Man’s Last Disobedience:
Zamiatin’s We and Orwell’s 1984 ”
by Gorman Beauchamp, in
Comparative Literature Studies (1973)
Introduction
Gorman Beauchamp argues that both Eugene Zamiatin’s We
and George Orwell’s 1984 are dystopian novels in which
individuals perform acts of civil disobedience. According to
Beauchamp, these individuals mirror Adam’s disobedience
in the Garden of Eden. Beauchamp describes how literary
characters in these novels rebel against a tyrannical, God-like
state and, in doing so, fall from grace in dystopias that are
grotesque metaphorical Edens. Beauchamp articulates how
this rebellion mirrors the world as described by Freud’s Civi-
lization and Its Discontents, in which modern human beings,
constricted and suppressed by the social order, find their
source of discontent in civilization’s utopian dreams.
f
Beauchamp, Gorman. “Of Man’s Last Disobedience: Zamiatin’s We and Orwell’s

1984.” Comparative Literature Studies 10.4 (Dec 1973) 285–301.

2 George Orwell
Utopia can be defined as civilization-only-more-so: that is, as a system-

atic intensification of the restraints upon which all society rests.1 All
civilization is predicated on order, regulation, some degree of regi-
mentation—limitations that conflict with man’s natural or instinctual
drives and result in the phenomenon Freud called repression. Because
repression is the inevitable cost exacted for civilization, man will, on
an instinctual, subconscious level, always remain its enemy. Primitive
man, Freud argues, was psychically “better off knowing no restraints on
instinct. To counterbalance this, his prospects of enjoying . . . happiness
for any length of time were very slender. Civilized man has exchanged
a portion of his possibilities for happiness for a portion of security.”2
In the tradition of rationally planned utopias, from Plato’s Republic
to B. F. Skinner’s Walden Two, the ideal has been to enlarge that “portion
of security” by increasing the degree of civilization—to reorder society
into a more harmonious, efficient (but more regimented, repressed)
whole, in which each “unit” plays only his socially determined role.
Lewis Mumford has likened the utopian model to the military one:
“total control from above, absolute obedience from below,” whether
the “above” be occupied by philosopher kings or behavioral engineers.
The price of utopia, he says, is total submission to a central authority,
forced labor, lifetime specialization, and inflexible regimentation.3 A
reader familiar with Freud’s psychosocial theory, set out most fully in
Civilization and Its Discontents, will recognize the utopian ideal as but
a more systematic, rigorous application of civilization’s existing prohi-
bitions and restraints—will recognize, that is, that the dreamworld of
chiliastic social planners can be realized only at further, and extreme,
expense of individual, instinctual freedom.4
The claims of utopianism are essentially religious ones. In the
vacuum created by the breakup of “the medieval synthesis,” a Weltan-
schauung that subsumed all social activity in one embracing theocen-
tric enterprise overseen by the Church, there grew up anew secularized
religion that dominated men’s lives: étatisme, or worship of the State.
The State, as the Church’s successor, became the object of what Paul
Tillich has called “ultimate concern”—became, that is, the supreme
value in men’s lives to which all other values are subordinated. When
a people makes the nation its ultimate concern, he wrote, “it demands
that all other concerns, economic well-being, health and life, family,
aesthetic and cognitive truth, justice and humanity, be sacrificed . . .
Everything is centered in the only god, the nation.”5 Utopianism is
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1984 3
the most extreme form of étatisme, claiming for the State a godlike
efficacy. Like its predecessor in divinity, the State offers salvation, not
in the next world, however, but in this; not through eschatology, but
through utopianism.6 The State can effect the millennium, but only, of
course, if its creatures obey its dictates. The new god is not less jealous
than the old, and, like the old, aspires to omniscience and omnipo-
tence, for only with such divine powers can it know of and punish the
deviations of the sinner who would resist its enforced salvation. Thus
even the most benevolently intended utopias are, by the very nature
of their claims, totalitarian, demanding the ultimate concern of their
subjects and asserting ultimate control of their destinies.7
The dream of social redemption through the State, dawning
with such bright hopes in the decade of the French Revolution and
growing ever brighter through the nineteenth century, became for
many in the twentieth century a nightmare. The reasons are historical:
the rise of messianic totalitarian regimes, whose utopianistic schemas
resulted not in man’s salvation but his damnation. The more humane
among utopian thinkers would claim Nazism and Stalinist Commu-
nism to be aberrations, bastards rather than true heirs of Plato and
More and Wells; but Mumford has argued—correctly, I believe—that
these regimes arose logically from the assumptions of venerable
utopian ideals:
Isolation, stratification, fixation, regimentation, standardization,

militarism—one or more of these attributes enter into the
conception of the utopian city, as expounded by the Greeks.
And these same features, in open or disguised form, remain
even in the supposedly more democratic utopias of the
nineteenth century. . . . In the end, utopia merges into the
dystopia of the twentieth century; and one suddenly realizes
that the distance between the positive ideal and the negative
one was never so great as the advocates or admirers of utopia
had professed.8
Such a realization underlies the emergence of a distinctly twentieth-

century literary subgenre, the dystopian novel, a roman à thése whose
purpose, clearly ideological, is to assert the ultimate value of man’s
instinctual freedom over the putatively melioristic repression of
utopian civilization.9

4 George Orwell
In two dystopian novels in particular—Eugene Zamiatin’s We

and George Orwell’s 1984—the central conflict of the individual’s
rebellion against the State reenacts the Christian myth of man’s first
disobedience, Adam’s against God. For in each novel there is a god
figure, the embodiment of the State, who demands absolute adora-
tion and obedience. And in each there is an Adam-like protagonist
who, for love of an Eve, defies this god by asserting his instinctual
freedom and thus “falls” from the utopianistic new Eden. This mythic
conflict—Adam rebelling against the étatist god figure—is a fictional
manifestation of the psychic conflict that Freud posited between the
individual and society.
Freud shared, on the one hand, the belief of Dostoevsky’s Grand
Inquisitor that man needed, and wanted, a dominant figure to rule and
protect him. The “coercive characteristic of group formation” Freud
traced back to “the fact of their origin from the primal horde. The leader
of the group is still the dread primal father; the group still wishes to be
governed by unrestricted force; it has an extreme passion for authority,
. . . a thirst for obedience.”10 This political führer is “loved” in the same
ambivalent way the personal father is “loved”; and, as Philip Rieff
points out, “Freud’s belief that politics is founded on the group’s erotic
relation with authority is made concrete by his claim that authority
is always personified.” Love for this power-as-person, then, constitutes
“the most fundamental source of authority.”11 In dystopian fiction,
the embodiment of the state is always such a figure: Zamiatin’s Well-
Doer, Orwell’s Big Brother, Huxley’s World Controller, even Forster’s
Machine (in “The Machine Stops”), all of them incarnations of the
Grand Inquisitor. And no clearer confirmation of the “displacement”
of Eros which Freud saw underlying all authority can be found than
in the erotic language Orwell’s disobedient Adam uses to express his
ultimate submission: “I love Big Brother.” In the megacivilization of
utopia, man’s whole duty is to love the führer and serve him.
On the other hand, however, Freud himself had little faith in the
efficacy of utopias. Dostoevsky’s implacable dystopian, the Under-
ground Man, accused utopians of wanting to convert society into
a human anthill, but man’s instincts—his desire to follow “his own
foolish will”—would (he asserted) thwart all their efforts to regiment
him. Freud, employing a similar insect metaphor, agreed: “It does not
seem as though any influence could induce a man to change, his nature
into a termite’s. No doubt he will always defend his claim to individual

1984 5
liberty against the will of the group.”12 His “urge to freedom” is

forever pitted against the coercive unity of society, so that the conflict
between the individual, “I,” and the group or State, “We,” appears
from a Freudian vantage point irreconcilable.
“I do not want to be ‘I,’” cried Bakunin a century ago; “I want to be
‘We.’” His sentiment informs utopianism, historical as well as fictional,
so that in the dream-turned-nightmare world of Koestler’s Darkness
at Noon, the I has become suspect, a “grammatical fiction.” “The
Party did not recognize its existence. The definition of the individual
was: a multitude of one million divided by one million.”13 Whatever
encourages individualism, “I-ness,” is the enemy, for it separates the
one from the many, man from the godlike State. Prime among such
estranging emotions is sexuality: in the new Edens, as in the old, the
serpent that seduces man into disobedience is sexual, Adam’s love
for Eve. “Present-day civilization makes it plain,” Freud points out
in Civilization and Its Discontents, “that it does not like sexuality as a
source of pleasure in its own right and is only prepared to tolerate it
because there is so far no substitute for it as a means of propagating
the human race.”14 (In Brave New World, of course, a substitute has
been found: the bottled baby.) Elsewhere, Freud explains the reason
for this animus:
Sexual impulsions are unfavorable to the formation of groups. . . .

The more important sexual love became for the ego, and the
more it developed the characteristics of being in love, the more
urgently it required to be limited to two people. . . . Two people
coming together for the purpose of sexual satisfaction, in so far
as they seek solitude, are making a demonstration against the
herd instinct, the group feeling. . . .
In the great artificial groups, the church and the army,
there is no room for woman as the sexual object. The love
relation between man and woman remains outside these
organizations. . . . Even in a person who has in other respects
become absorbed in a group, the directly sexual impulsions
preserve a little of his individual activity. If they become too
strong, they disintegrate every group formation.15
This conflict, then, that Freud postulated between the individual and
civilization adumbrates the central struggle in the dystopian novel:

6 George Orwell
“the dreadful father,” a secularized god demanding total allegiance

and obedience to the utopian decalogue, challenged by the individual’s
instinctual will to freedom. And particularly with respect to the sexual
nature of that challenge, the conflict recapitulates the myth of Adam’s
rebellion against God. With this background, let us turn to an exami-
nation of the dystopian versions of paradise lost, We and 1984.
“Put me in a System and you negate me,” Kierkegaard declared; “I
am not just a mathematical symbol—I am.” This affirmation underlies
Zamiatin’s We, a satirical depiction of a futuristic United State whose
members have become, almost literally, mathematical symbols: they
have no names and are known only by their numbers, indeed are called
Numbers. Sealed off from the natural world in a glass-walled city, they
function as interchangeable parts of one vast machine, regulated by a
Table of Hours: “Every morning, with six-wheeled precision, at the
same hour, at the same minute, we wake up, millions of us at once. At
the very same hour, millions like one, we begin our work, and millions
like one, we finish it. United in a single body with a million hands, at
the very same second, designated by the Tables, we carry the spoons
to our mouths; at the very same second we all go out to walk, go to
the auditorium, to the halls for Taylor exercises, and then to bed.”16
Zamiatin’s imagination has projected the ideal of utopian organization
to its logical extreme: “A magnificent celebration of the victory of all
over one, of the sum over the individual ” (p. 44).
In the United State, not surprisingly, freedom is equated with sin.
Employing the Eden metaphor, one Number explains:
That legend referred to us of today, did it not? Yes. Only think

of it for a moment. There were two in paradise and the choice
was offered to them: happiness without freedom or freedom
without happiness. No other choice. . . . They, fools that they
were, chose freedom. Naturally, for centuries afterward they
longed for fetters, for the fetters of yore. . . . For centuries! And
only we found the way to regain happiness. . . . The ancient god
and we, side by side at the same table! We helped god defeat the
devil definitely and finally. It was he, the devil, who led people
to transgression, to taste pernicious freedom—he, the cunning
serpent. And we came along, planted a boot on his head, and
. . . squash! Down with him! Paradise again! We returned to the
simple-mindedness of Adam and Eve. (p. 59)

1984 7
The god who oversees this paradise regained is the Well-Doer, a

remote, ironclad figure who emerges annually to be reelected on the
Day of Unanimity: “This was always the most magnificent moment of
our celebration: all would remain sitting motionless, joyfully bowing
their heads under the salutary yoke of that Number of Numbers”
(p. 134) as “He descend[ed] to us from the sky, He—the new
Jehovah—in an aero, He, as wise and lovingly cruel as the Jehovah of
the ancients” (p. 131).
Since all Eros in this utopian anthill is channeled into worship of
the Well-Doer, there are no marriages nor families, and all children
become property of the State; so that having precluded all emotional
ties and “having identified itself with man’s only permissible aspira-
tion,” as one writer notes, the State “emerges as the only possible
object of man’s affection, thus fulfilling his need for emotional rela-
tionships.”17 In a State striving for a monopoly on love, sex is suspect,
tolerated as a necessary evil, but strictly controlled:
Naturally, having conquered hunger . . . , the United State

directed its attack against the second ruler of the world, against
love. At last this element was conquered, that is, organized
and put into a mathematical formula. . . . You are carefully
examined in the laboratory of the Sexual Department where
they find the content of the sexual hormones in your blood, and
they accordingly make out for you a Table of sexual days. Then
you file an application to enjoy the services of Number so and
so, or Number so and so. (p. 22)
On these occasions, one “received a certificate permitting the use of

curtains. This right exists in our State only on sexual days. Normally we
live surrounded by transparent walls . . . beneath the eyes of everyone”
(p. 19). Not content with such restrictions, the State is seeking ways
to reduce the number of sexual days, for these moments of privacy are
subversive of its group values, impediments to total We-ness.
In his prelapsarian state at the novel’s outset, the protagonist, D-
503, is perfectly content in this new, de-eroticized Eden: he has his
work as a designer of spacecraft, a sweetly simple sex partner, and his
love for the State, for the Well-Doer. He prizes his non-freedom: “It is
pleasant to feel that somebody’s penetrating eye is watching you from
behind your shoulder, lovingly guarding you from the most minute

8 George Orwell
mistake, from the most minute incorrect step” (p. 63). Like all good
Numbers, D-503 knows that We is of God, I is of the devil, and the
reports he hears of a secret organization that “aims at liberation from
the beneficent yoke of the State” (p. 34) puzzle and upset him. But just
as the United State has not succeeded in eradicating every vestige of
desire for freedom for all its Numbers, neither has D-503 succeeded
in eradicating all trace of his instinctual, irrational, “animal” nature. His
hands are covered with hair, “a stupid atavism,” and he hates having
anyone look at them; yet this atavism portends deeper, unconscious
desires—Freud’s instinctual drives—that are soon stirred to life in him.
He is tempted to taste the forbidden fruit of love, and he falls.
The Eve who seduces him to experience his own sexuality, and
concomitantly his individuality, is a dark, enigmatic Number, I-330.
D-503’s first encounter with this mysterious woman “had a strange
effect on me, like an irrational component of an equation which you
cannot eliminate” (p. 10). He becomes fascinated, however, with his
temptress, is lured by her to a secret rendezvous, offered a “forbidden
fruit,” which is liquor (“drink this charming poison with me”), and
succumbs: “Suddenly her arms were around my neck . . . her lips grew
into mine, even somewhere much deeper, much more terrible” (p. 53).
The experience proves a shattering one:
I became glass-like and saw within myself. There were two

selves in me. One, the former D-503, Number D-503; and the
other. . . . Before, that other used to show his hairy paws from
time to time, but now that whole other self left his shell. The
shell was breaking. . . . (p. 54)
The other (unconscious) self emerging from the shell its civilization
had constructed around it begins now to dream, a state symptomatic
among the Numbers of mental disorder. And, indeed, by the utopian
standard of the United State, D-503 has become “sick.”18
I felt myself. To feel one’s self, to be conscious of one’s personality,

is the lot of an eye inflamed by a cinder, or an infected finger,
or a bad tooth. A healthy eye, or finger, or tooth is not felt; it is
non-existent, as it were. Is it not clear, then, that consciousness
of oneself is sickness? (p. 121)

1984 9
The question is, of course, ironic, since D-503’s “sickness” constitutes

for Zamiatin the essence of being human, that which separates man
from the robot. And sexuality he presents as the force that liberates
consciousness, frees man from civilization’s ultrarepression of his
instincts, and gives rise to individuality, to imagination. “I know that I
have imagination,” the postlapsarian Adam realizes, “that is what my
illness consists of. And more than that: I know that it is a wonderful
illness—one does not want to be cured, simply does not want to!” (p.
78). Elsewhere Zamiatin wrote that “there are two priceless foun-
tainheads in man: brains and sex. From the first proceeds all science,
from the second all art. And to cut off all art from yourself or to force
it into your brain would mean to cut off . . . well, yes.”19 In a society
that has forced all art into the brain—whose poetry is all in praise of
mathematics and whose “immortal tragedy” is entitled He Who Comes
Late to Work!—the personal, passionate emotions are considered
dangerously subversive: thus the attempt to emasculate the Numbers,
to cut off . . . well, yes.
I-330’s rebellion against utopia’s repression is overtly political: she
belongs to the secret underground movement (MEPHI, derived from
Mephistopheles) dedicated to overthrowing the Well-Doer, to tearing
down the Wall “so that the green wind may blow over the earth, from
end to end” (p. 145). D-503’s rebellion, however, is purely instinctual,
that of a man blindly following his heart: “I want to be with I-330. I
want her every minute, every second, to be with me, with no one else.
All that I wrote about Unanimity is of no value. . . . For I know (be it
sacrilege, yet it is the truth) that a Glorious Day is possible only with
her and only when we are side by side” (p. 130). Passion has restored
to D-503 his sexuality and, with it, consciousness, imagination, I-ness;
thus disintegrating in him, in Freud’s words, “the herd instinct, the
group feeling.” Willing now to do anything to keep her love, Adam
follows his Eve into rebellion against God. He agrees to turn over to
the MEPHI the spacecraft he has built, to be used to destroy the Wall
and topple the Well-Doer.
But their plan fails, thwarted by the Gestapo-like Bureau of
Guardians, and D-503 is forced to undergo the Great Operation, a
fantasiectomy that serves to numericalize completely the wayward
sinners against the State. The proclamation issued by the Well-Doer
epitomizes Zamiatin’s view of utopia:

10 George Orwell
The latest discovery of our State science is that there is a center

for fancy—a miserable little nervous knot in the lower region
of the frontal lobe of the brain. A triple treatment of the knot
with X-rays will cure you of fancy,
Forever!
You are perfect; you are mechanized; the road to one-
hundred-per-cent happiness is open! Hasten then all of you,
young and old, hasten to undergo the Great Operation! Long
Live the Great Operation! Long live the United State! Long
Live the Well-Doer. (p. 167)
His “fancy” removed, D-503 reverts to perfect Numberhood: docile,

content, unable to feel love for any but the Well-Doer; again a
smoothly functioning part of We. Sitting beside the Well-Doer, D-
503 now watches I-330 tortured to death and knows it to be right, “for
reason must prevail” (p. 218). Rebellion has been rendered impossible
in the utopian Eden; his has been man’s last disobedience.
The influence of Zamiatin’s work on 1984 is pronounced and
pervasive; indeed, one critic has called We Orwell’s Holinshed.20 Many
of the features of the United State reappear in Orwell’s Oceania, not
least of which is the systematic repression of the sexual drives. Thus
the rebellion of the individual against the State, in 1984 as in We, is
presented as a sexual one, the struggle for instinctual freedom against
the enforced conformity of an omniscient, omnipotent étatisme.
Orwell’s Winston Smith, like Zamiatin’s D-503, is the last Adam,
reenacting the myth of the Fall, following his Eve into disobedience
against God.
The topography of Oceania is well enough known that I need
not dwell on it: the telescreens, Big Brother’s electronic eyes that
are always “watching you”; the phenomena of newspeak and double-
think and blackwhite; the ubiquitous slogans proclaiming war to be
peace and freedom slavery. Nor need I stress the dystopian nature of
Orwell’s vision of utopia at dead end, all its perverted values terroristi-
cally enforced by the Ministry of Love.21 What should be pointed out,
however, is the remarkably precise way in which Orwell has embodied,
in the conditioned hysteria of love for Big Brother, Freud’s theory
of eroticism displaced. In the daily Two-Minute Hate (the Oceanic
equivalent of prayer), the telescreens project the image of Gold-
stein, the satan of this State, against whom the increasingly frenzied

1984 11
faithful hurl their hatred. Then (Winston recounts of one such Hate)
“drawing a sigh of relief from everybody, the hostile figure melted
into the face of Big Brother . . . full of power and mysterious calm,
and so vast that it filled the screen . . . The little sandy-haired woman
had flung herself over the chair in front of her. With a tremendous
murmur that sounded like ‘My savior!’ she extended her arms to the
screen.”22 Julia, Winston’s Eve, explains “the inner meaning of the
Party’s sexual puritanism.”
It was not merely that the sex instinct created a world of its own
which was outside the Party’s control and which therefore had
to be destroyed if possible. What was more important was that
sexual privation induced hysteria, which was desirable because
it could be transformed into war fever and hero worship. The
way she put it was:
“When you make love you’re using up energy; and
afterwards you feel happy and don’t give a damn for anyone.
They can’t bear you to feel like that. They want you to be
bursting with energy all the time. All this marching up and
down and cheering and waving flags is simply sex gone sour. If
you’re happy inside yourself, why should you get excited about
Big Brother?” (pp. 110–11)
In order to ensure that the Oceanians do get excited about Big

Brother—displace, that is, eroticism from its natural object, another
individual, to the State—the Party attempts in every way “to remove
all pleasure from the sex act. . . . The only recognized purpose of
marriage was to beget children for the service of the Party. Sexual
intercourse was to be looked on as a slightly disgusting operation, like
having an enema” (p. 57). Thus the Party instigated organizations like
the Junior Anti-Sex League, a sort of celibate Scouts, whose chastity,
like that of medieval monks and nuns, demonstrated their superior
love for and loyalty to their god. For the Party’s ultimate aim, as the
Inquisitorial figure O’Brien explains to Winston, is the total abolition
of the sex instinct: “We shall abolish the orgasm. Our neurologists
are at work upon it now . . . There will be no love, except love for Big
Brother” (p. 220). Even more clearly than in Zamiatin’s United State,
the rulers of Oceania have grasped the threat to utopianism posed by
man’s sexuality and are moving drastically to destroy or displace it.

12 George Orwell
As Adam in this perverted paradise, where the only love

allowed is the love for Big Brother, Winston differs from D-503
and their biblical archetype in one important respect: even before
he is tempted into erotic rebellion, he already hates the führer. In
his furtively kept journal, he has written, over and over again, the
phrase “DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER.” Guilty though he is of
thoughtcrime (Oceanians, like Christians, are culpable not only for
what they do but also for what they think), Winston falls into overt
rebellion only when he falls in love. In this respect, the biblical myth
and the novel’s mythos are the same: it is an Eve who lures Adam to
sin against God.
This sin—Julia and Winston’s—consists essentially of an emotion.
They have illicit rendezvous, they attempt to join the Brotherhood
(the probably nonexistent underground resistance movement led by
the probably nonexistent Goldstein), but their real lese majesty is
simply being in love, giving free rein to their instinctual eroticism.
Julia, Winston realizes, is thoroughly apolitical, “a rebel only from the
waist down”; she falls asleep while he reads her Goldstein’s banned
expose of Ingsoc, the philosophy of Oceanic étatisme. But because the
whole duty of citizens is to love Big Brother, their love for one another
is perforce politically subversive. “Their embrace had been a battle,
their climax a victory. It was a blow struck against the Party. It was
a political act” (p. 105). Thus when they are arrested by the Thought
Police, it is not their lives but their love that must be extinguished.
Julia and Winston had all along known that they were doomed,
would sooner or later be caught, yet they had held onto the belief that
“they can’t get inside you” and therefore that their love was inviolable,
something beyond the power of even the State to destroy. O’Brien sets
about to demonstrate to Winston that it is not. In the long, excruci-
ating torture sessions that make up the last third of the book, O’Brien
systematically undercuts and refutes every belief Winston held, beats
and brainwashes away every trace of human dignity, until he is left
with only one vestige of his humanity, his love for Julia.
“Can you think of a single degradation that has not happened

to you?”
Winston had stopped weeping, though the tears were still
in his eyes. He looked up at O’Brien.
“I have not betrayed Julia,” he said.

1984 13
O’Brien looked down at him thoughtfully. “No,” he

said, “no; that is perfectly true. You have not betrayed Julia.”
. . . Never did O’Brien fail to understand what was said to
him. Anyone else on earth would have answered promptly
that he had betrayed Julia. For what was there that they had
not screwed out of him under torture? He had told them
everything he knew about her, her habits, her character, her
past life; he had confessed in the most trivial detail everything
that had happened at their meetings, all that he had said to her
and she to him . . . everything. And yet, in the sense in which
he intended the word, he had not betrayed her. He had not
stopped loving her; his feelings toward her had remained the
same. O’Brien had seen what he meant without the need of
explanation. (p. 225)
Winston hopes to be shot quickly, so that he will die still hating Big
Brother, still loving Julia. But O’Brien understands this, too. It is not
Winston’s life he wants, but his soul, what is “inside him.” Winston
thus must be made to betray Julia, for only then can he be made to
love Big Brother—must be emptied of one love to be filled with
another. So he is taken to Room 101.
“The thing in Room 101,” O’Brien explains, “is the worst thing in
the world,” each man’s innermost fear. “In your case the worst thing
in the world happens to be rats” (p. 233). The threat of having his
face devoured by the squealing rats sends Winston into sheer panic,
a panic that, as O’Brien had said, was beyond courage or cowardice,
beyond all rational choice.
He suddenly understood that in the whole world there was just

one person to whom he could transfer his punishment—one
body that could be thrust between himself and the rats. And
he was shouting frantically, over and over:
“Do it to Julia! Do it to Julia! Not to me! Julia!” (p. 236)
As George Woodcock noted, each dystopian writer stresses “the

particular aspects of the trends toward Utopia which seem to him
most dangerous.” For Zamiatin these were technological, for Orwell
they were bureaucratic, “the fear of man’s being turned into a mind-
less robot by predominantly political means.”23 Thus while D-503,

14 George Orwell
technologically lobotomized, sits in contented approval as I-330 is put

to death, Winston, psychologically terrorized by a brutally perfected
totalitarianism, is reduced to an even more appalling fate: screaming
for Julia’s death to save his own life. They have gotten inside him and
destroyed his love.
The State’s total victory is made evident when, “rehabilitated” and
released from prison, Winston encounters Julia again and feels toward
her—as she toward him—only guilt-induced antipathy. This loss of
love leaves Winston emptied of personality, malleable, defenseless
against the State whose purpose, O’Brien had explained, was to tear
the human mind to pieces and put it together in a shape of the State’s
own choosing. With Winston their success is complete:
He gazed up at the enormous face. Forty years it had taken

him to learn what kind of smile was hidden beneath the dark
mustache. O cruel, needless misunderstanding! O stubborn,
self-willed exile from the loving breast! Two gin-scented
tears trickled down the side of his nose. But it was all right,
everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won
the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother (p. 245).
During one of the torture sessions O’Brien had announced, “if

you are a man, Winston, you are the last man. Your kind is extinct;
we are the inheritors” (p. 222). Winston’s, like D-503’s, is man’s last
disobedience; there will be no more Adams and no more Eves in
utopia.
Those more humanistically than theologically inclined have
tended—perversely, no doubt—to see in Adam’s Fall something
heroic. Despite scriptural intent, they admire in his refusal to forsake
Eve, in his following her into disobedience against God, that spark
of Promethean grandeur, that unyielding pride of the rebel. From
a Freudian perspective, as we have seen, Adam’s Fall embodies the
eternal struggle of the instinctual against civilization (the “security” of
paradise), of the individual against the father-god; in more explicitly
political terms, the myth serves as symbol of the erotic rebel who puts
love, and thus self, above the State. In this sense Aeneas, who deserts
Dido at the gods’ command to remember his duty to Rome, stands as
Adam’s antithesis, as the perfect étatist hero.

1984 15
Given the archetypal nature of the myth of the Fall, it is hardly

surprising that dystopian novelists should adapt it in terms of the new
étatist theology, for it contains the essential elements of the conflict
between the individual and utopia. Because the dystopian novel is
necessarily futuristic (not so much prediction as warning), its redaction
of the myth is Janus-like, facing backward and forward: the cast of
characters is that of Genesis, the drama follows its accustomed course,
yet the outcome is fundamentally different, a denouement possible
only in the twentieth century. For only in the twentieth century has
the possibility arisen that men could be made incapable of falling from
some programmed paradise. Through conditioning or drugs, through
physiological alteration or subliminal suggestion or technological coer-
cion or sophisticated terrorism, or some combination of all of these,
Adam’s erotic rebellion could be rendered impossible. Man would be
obedient to the State because he could not be otherwise.24
The history of our century lends credence to such fears. We have
witnessed the rise of messianic regimes that pretend, in Hannah
Arendt’s words, “to have found a way to establish the rule of justice
on earth,” that essential promise of utopianism. The very phrasing
of Miss Arendt’s description of totalitarianism’s goal—to impose on
men “a band of iron which holds them so tightly together that it is
as though their plurality had disappeared into One Man of gigantic
proportions”—parallels that of the dystopian writers.25 History
reflects fiction, and vice versa. The critics who censure the dystopians
for despairing of the resiliency of the human spirit, its innate will
to freedom, have shown less understanding of the potentialities of
totalitarian control than have those they criticize. As Miss Arendt
has perceived, totalitarianism is an unprecedented phenomenon in
human history, more frightening just because more total than any
previous form of tyranny. Orwell understood the historically unique
threat it posed:
The terrifying thing about modern dictatorships is that

they are something entirely unprecedented. Their end cannot
be foreseen. In the past every tyranny was sooner or later
overthrown, or at least resisted, because of “human nature,”
which as a matter of course desired liberty. But we cannot be
at all certain that “human nature” is constant. It may be just as

16 George Orwell
possible to produce a breed of men who do not wish for liberty

as to produce a breed of hornless cows. The Inquisition failed,
but then the Inquisition had not the resources of the modern
state. The radio, press-censorship, standardized education and
the secret police have altered everything. Mass-suggestion is
a science of the last twenty years, and we do not know how
successful it will be.26
The control techniques enumerated in this passage written in 1939

already seem to us primitive as oxcarts: the technology for tyranny is
infinitely more sophisticated today. And tomorrow . . . ?
The dystopian novel, to warn against such a totalitarian tomorrow,
posits the existence of utopia: a world where Eros is reserved for the
State alone, where Adam will have no Eve, where Eden will be ines-
capable, where the Fall will be as unimaginable as freedom. Utopia’s
dawning will signal an end to man’s disobedience, and paradise, alas,
will be regained.
NOTES
1. By “utopia” I should be understood to mean not every sort of
escapist eudaemonia where a miraculously rewrought mankind
lolls about in effortless contentment but only those imagined
societies that offer a systematic program for reshaping man’s
nature and restructuring his social relationships. In other
words, for an image of man remade to be legitimately utopian,
an at least theoretically viable methodology for effecting this
remaking must be explicit, whether a political methodology (as
in Plato) or a psychological methodology (as in Skinner).
2. Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, in The
Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund
Freud, trans. James Strachey, XXI (London, 1961), 115. This
work is the locus classicus of Freud’s views on the individual’s
conflict with civilization, but also see The Future of an Illusion,
also in the Standard Edition, XXI, 5–20, and the studies
of two neo-Freudian social thinkers: Norman O. Brown,
Life against Death: The Psychoanalytic Meaning of History
(Middletown, Conn., 1959), and Herbert Marcuse, Eros and

1984 17
Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud (New York,

1962).
3. Lewis Mumford, “Utopia, the City and the Machine,” Daedalus,
94 (1965), 258.
4. The best known of contemporary utopians, B. F. Skinner,
would, of course, dismiss the idea that man has an innate
nature. His mouthpiece in Walden Two (New York, 1962), says,
for instance: “What do you say to the design of personalities?
Would that interest you? The control of temperament? Give
me the specifications, and I’ll give you the man!” (p. 292). The
assumption here—one common, implicitly or explicitly, to all
utopians—is that the human personality is limitlessly plastic, to
be molded to whatever shape society desires. Freud’s emphasis
on an innate, biological donnée, however, as Lionel Trilling has
pointed out, “proposes to us that culture is not all-powerful. It
suggests that there is a residue of human quality beyond the
reach of culture to control”; Beyond Culture (New York, 1968),
p. 113. For Skinner’s own estimation of his differences with
Freud, see his essay “Critique of Psychoanalytic Concepts and
Theories,” in Science and Theory in Psychoanalysis, ed. Irwin G.
Sarason (Princeton, N.J., 1965), pp. 137–49.
5. Paul Tillich, Dynamics of Faith (New York, 1958), pp. 1–2. See
also J. L. Talmon, The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy (New
York, 1960), pp. 21–24 et passim.
6. See Martin Buber, Paths in Utopia, trans. R. F. C. Hull (Boston,
1958), pp. 7–9; and Judith Shklar, “Political Theory in Utopia,”
Daedalus, 94 (1965), 370.
7. No utopian society was more benevolently intended than that
of Sir Thomas More, nor more rigorously democratic, yet even
there the State directs all major and most minor aspects of its
citizens’ lives. For example: “Now you can see how nowhere is
there any license to waste time, nowhere any pretext to evade
work—no wine shop, no alehouse, no brothel anywhere, no
opportunity for corruption, no lurking hole, no secret meeting
place. On the contrary, being under the eyes of all, people are
bound either to be performing the usual labor or to be enjoying
their leisure in a fashion not without decency”; Utopia, trans.
Edward Surtz, S. J. (New Haven, Conn., 1964), pp. 82–83

18 George Orwell
(my italics). “Under the eyes of all” foreshadows the Guardians

and glass houses of We and the telescreens and “Big Brother is
watching you” slogan of 1984.
8. Mumford, “Utopia, the City and the Machine,” p. 277.
9. On the factors giving rise to dystopianism, see George
Woodcock, “Utopias in Negative,” Sewanee Review, 64 (1956),
81–97; and Irving Howe, “The Fiction of Anti-Utopia,” The
Decline of the New (New York, 1970), pp. 66–71.
10. Sigmund Freud, Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, also
in the Standard Edition, XVIII (1955), 127.
11. Philip Rieff, Freud: The Mind of the Moralist (Garden City, N.Y.,
1961), p. 257.
12. Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, p. 96. See also Paul
Roazen, Freud: Political and Social Thought (New York, 1970), p.
159; “Freud thought deep within man there was an unbreakable
nucleus, a central portion of the self ineluctably in opposition
to society. Freud once wrote that ‘for most people there is a
limit beyond which their constitution cannot comply with
the demands of civilization.’ In that sense, ‘every individual is
virtually an enemy of civilization.’”
13. Arthur Koestler, Darkness at Noon, trans. Daphne Hardy (New
York, 1970), p. 208. This point is made ad nauseam in Ayn
Rand’s execrably written but mercifully brief dystopian fiction,
Anthem.
14. Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, p. 105.
15. Freud, Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, pp. 140–41
(see note 10 above). For Plato’s parallel view on this matter, see
A. E. Taylor, Plato: The Man and His Works (New York, 1956),
p. 278.
16. Eugene Zamiatin, We, trans. Gregory Zilboorg (New York,
1959), p. 13. Page references are hereafter cited in the text.
17. Christopher Collins, “Zamiatin, Wells, and the Utopian Literary
Tradition,” Slavonic and East European Review, 44 (1966), 358.
18. The sentiment, language, and metaphor here and elsewhere
clearly echo Dostoevsky’s Underground Man. See Robert L.
Jackson, Dostoevsky’s Underground Man in Russian Literature
(The Hague, 1958), pp. 150–57.
19. Eugene Zamiatin, quoted by Alex M. Shane, The Life and Works
of Evgenij Zamiatin (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1968), p. 142.

1984 19
20. Christopher Hollis, A Study of George Orwell (London, 1956),

p. 199. For the most instructive discussions of Orwell’s debt
to Zamiatin, and their differences, see Woodcock, “Utopias
in Negative” (note 9 above); Isaac Deutscher, “1984—The
Mysticism of Cruelty,” Heretics and Renegades (London, 1955),
pp. 35–50; and Jürgen Rühle, Literature and Revolution, trans.
Jean Steinberg (New York, 1969), pp. 38–40. Orwell himself
wrote an appreciative review of We in his column in the Tribune
(London), 4 January 1946.
21. George Kateb in Utopia and its Enemies (New York, 1963), pp.
235–36, argues that Oceania ought not to be considered even
a negative utopia, for O’Brien “describes the political system
of 1984 as ‘ . . . the exact opposite of the hedonistic utopias
that old reformers imagined.’” Kateb has a point, but it is
rather strained and overly formalistic. Orwell’s vision of the
future is clearly intended to show utopian messianism gone
sour, reflecting the historical reality of our century. Consider
the reflection of Koestler’s Rubashov: “Nobody foresaw the
new mass movements, the great political landslides, nor the
twisted roads, the bewildering stages which the Revolutionary
State was to go through; at that time one believed that the
gates of Utopia stood open, and that mankind stood on its
threshold” (p. 106). For an excellent account of the dashing of
these bright hopes, see Sir Isaiah Berlin’s essay, “Political Ideas
in the Twentieth Century,” Four Essays on Liberty (New York,
1969), pp. 1–40.
22. George Orwell, 1984 (New York, New American Library, n.d.),
p. 17. Page references are hereafter cited in the text.
23. Woodcock, “Utopias in Negative,” pp. 91–92.
24. The evidence for this contention may never be deemed
conclusive by skeptics, yet that a wide variety of control
techniques is being perfected is indisputable: there are, for
example, José Delgado’s experiments with cerebral electrodes,
Georges Unger’s isolation and chemical duplication of a
“memory molecule,” the behavior-modifying drugs already
administered to “problem” children (to 5 to 10 percent of
Washington’s school population, for instance), and so on. See
also Aldous Huxley, Brave New World Revisited (New York,
1965); Seymour Farber and Roger Wilson, eds., Control of the

20 George Orwell
Mind (New York, 1961); and Perry London, Behavior Control

(New York, 1971).
25. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (Cleveland and
New York, 1958), pp. 465–66.
26. George Orwell, The Collected Essays, Journalism, and Letters of
George Orwell, vol. 1, An Age Like This (New York, 1968), pp.
380–81.

THE ADVENTURES OF HUCKLEBERRY FINN
(MARK TWAIN)
,.
“Civil Disobedience and the Ending of Mark
Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn”
by Robert C. Evans, Auburn
University at Montgomery
In the simplest sense, any act of civil disobedience is rooted in a prior

act of obedience to individual conscience. Persons who choose to
disobey the laws of their lands or the moral teachings of their culture
do so because they feel an obligation to higher kinds of law or to supe-
rior sorts of ethics, whether those are rooted in religious belief, natural
“instincts,” or some profound sense of sympathy or empathy for others.
Conscience, then, is key: The person who practices civil disobedience
obeys his own conscience, instead of society’s conscience. And—just as
significantly—he does so not primarily on his own behalf but on behalf
of his unselfish allegiance to others or to some lofty moral principle.
His chief commitment is not to himself, but to someone or something
more important, such as God, other persons, or an ethical ideal.
Viewed in these terms, Mark Twain’s novel The Adventures of
Huckleberry Finn presents a number of characters who are capable of
genuine civil disobedience and a number who are not. Huck and Jim,
obviously, do possess this capacity; Huck’s father, the Duke and the
Dauphin, and (more ambiguously) Tom Sawyer do not. The famous
scene in which, after much agonizing, Huck decides not to obey the
conventional morality of his culture—which would dictate that he
report the location of Jim, the runaway slave, to Miss Watson, Jim’s
21

22 Mark Twain
owner—but instead decides to obey his own humane impulses (269–

71), is a prime example of Huck’s capacity for ideal civil disobedience.
The Duke and Dauphin, on the other hand, never act from anything
other than selfish motives. They break many laws and violate many
standards of civil behavior, but they never do so on behalf of any prin-
ciple higher than personal self-interest. Tom Sawyer is a more compli-
cated case. In the final chapters of the book, he does go to elaborate
lengths to free Jim by disobeying the adults who have imprisoned
Jim, and he does persuade Huck to cooperate in his schemes. In the
end, Jim is finally freed, but the effect of Tom’s highly complicated
“evasion” scheme often leaves many readers highly dissatisfied. Huck,
the book, and Twain may seem (in the eyes of many readers) to lose
moral stature in the final chapters.
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is a book that poses real moral
dilemmas not only for its titular hero, but also (especially in its final
chapters) for its readers. Viewing the novel as an extended meditation
on the themes of conscience and civil disobedience can help us grasp
more fully the subtlety of Twain’s phrasing and characterizations, as
well as better understand the novel’s ending and more deeply appre-
ciate the ways the novel is designed to trace the moral development
of young Huck and also encourage and test the moral development
of the reader. The concluding chapters are deliberately disturbing and
unsettling; they are designed, in part, to test how carefully we have
read the novel and how well we have understood and absorbed the
“lessons” implied throughout. The conclusion of the novel is written
in a way that frustrates any simple, straightforward, or conventionally
satisfying response. Instead, the audience is tested, not only ethically
but in terms of its ability to read closely, thoughtfully, and insightfully.
By the time we reach the final chapters of Huckleberry Finn, we should
be reading with a kind of alertness and sensitivity that can make the
conclusion seem deliberately provocative rather than disappointingly
lax. In the ethical problems posed by the final chapters, Twain leaves
us with no simple or easy affirmations. Instead, he puts us to the test.
I.
One episode early in the book that is especially relevant to the themes
of personal conscience and civil disobedience is the scene in Chapter 6
in which Pap Finn, Huck’s drunken and ne’er-do-well father, protests

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn 23
vociferously against the “ govment” (33). One might assume that any
attack on governmental authority is a text-book example of at least
potential civil disobedience, but Twain makes it clear that Pap is
motivated not by any claims of selfless conscience but by pure and
naked self-interest. Pap is angry that Huck—who has been adopted
by the Widow Douglas and whose money is under the protection
of Judge Thatcher—has slipped out of his fathers total control. Pap
excoriates the “ govment ” because he thinks it has robbed him of a
piece of valuable personal property (“ a mans own son ”), and indeed
he speaks of Huck almost as if Huck were a slave: “Yes, just as that
man has got that son raised at last, and ready to go to work and begin
to do suthin for him and give him a rest, the law up and goes for him.
And they call that govment! ” (33). Pap Finn may be protesting against
the law, but he does so only because the law has failed to benefit his
very narrow self-interests; it has (he thinks) denied him his “ prop-
erty ” and trampled on his “ rights ” (33). Paps treatment of Huck as
a kind of slave is made even more obvious when Pap next objects to
the governments excessively lenient treatment of a “ free nigger ” (34).
Twain describes how Pap beats Huck and keeps him locked up (29),
much as Jim is beaten and imprisoned later in the book. Moreover,
Pap condemns Huck for being well dressed and “ educated ” (24) in
much the same way that he later condemns an educated and well-
dressed “ free nigger ” (33–34). Pap, then, despite his protests against
the “ govment,” is hardly an exemplar of civil disobedience. He is not
motivated by conscience, by concern for others, or by obedience to
some higher principle. He is utterly selfish, and his attack on the “ free
nigger ” is one of the many moments in this novel in which Twain
obviously mocks racism and satirizes racial prejudice. Pap expresses
contempt for education, but one of his own chief functions in the
novel is to help educate readers about the idiocy and viciousness of
racial prejudice and about the injustice and irrationality of slavery.
By presenting such a blatantly unattractive advocate of racism and
slavery, Twain condemns both.
In contrast to Pap, Huck’s biological father, is Jim, who eventu-
ally becomes Huck’s surrogate father. Jim has a highly developed
conscience and is very capable of genuine civil disobedience. Jim
proves his willingness to break the law, of course, when he runs away
after overhearing that Miss Watson may be intending to sell him (53).
Huck, having himself just escaped from a kind of slavery, now adheres

24 Mark Twain
to his own private vow and to his own sense of personal honesty by
repeatedly promising not to reveal Jim’s secret (53–54). Both the boy
and the man, then, are already engaged in acts of civil disobedience,
and Huck is already acting on behalf of another and at the behest
of his own conscience. Although Jim may seem at first to be acting
here mainly to protect himself, eventually it becomes clear that one
of his chief motives is to win the freedom of his wife and children. In
Chapter 16, he explains to Huck that the first thing he intends to do
when he gets to a free state is to work to earn enough money to “buy
his wife; and then they would both work to buy the two children; and
if [the children’s] master wouldn’t sell them, they’d get an abolitionist
to go and steal them” (124). Jim is perfectly willing to disobey the law if
doing so is the only way he can help others; his personal flight toward
freedom is fundamentally a way of making sure that he can eventually
free his family. Huck is shocked by such talk; it troubles his conscience,
but by this point the irony of Huck’s references to his conscience is
clear. We realize that by violating the laws and teachings of his society,
Huck is actually doing the right thing. We understand that by trans-
gressing against the kind of “conscience” society has tried to instill in
him, he is actually obeying a higher kind of conscience. When Huck
eventually decides that he would rather “ go to hell” than turn Jim in
(271), the irony of his words is obvious. By choosing civil disobedi-
ence, Huck obeys a higher, truer kind of conscience and is adhering
to a higher, truer kind of law. Here and repeatedly throughout the
book (see, for example, HF 104–05, 201–02, and 289–90), both Huck
and Jim are depicted as characters who are capable of learning from
their own mistakes, empathizing with others, and acting on the behalf
of others. Both the boy and the man are capable not only of under-
standing but of practicing ideal civil disobedience.
II.
It is the sudden reappearance of Tom Sawyer, in the novel’s final
chapters, that has disappointed numerous readers of Twain’s novel.
The enormously complicated “evasion” scheme cooked up by Tom
to free Jim from captivity (which is accepted by Huck and, perforce,
by Jim as well) has struck many readers not only as overlong (and
thus as tedious and tiresome) but also as morally disappointing and
aesthetically ineffective (see, for example, Leonard et al.). Many

readers wish that Huck had taken a more active hand in freeing Jim
more quickly and with far less rigmarole; many readers feel that Tom,
Huck, and even Twain are guilty of demeaning Jim by treating him
as an amusing plaything rather than as the dignified human being
the rest of the novel often shows him to be. The final chapters have
become a major source of critical controversy, and few are the critics
who feel entirely happy with Twain’s artistry or moral judgment in
this section of the novel.
However, the final chapters of Huck Finn can also be read as delib-
erately unsettling, disturbing, and provocative. By the time one reaches
Chapter 33, which describes Tom’s arrival at the Phelps farm (where
Jim is being held captive), a thoughtful reader is in a position (thanks
to everything that has preceded that chapter) to appreciate the text’s
rich resonances and multiple ironies. Twain doesn’t need to spell out
the ironies and moral “lessons” these chapters present; an alert reader
will be able to infer them for himself.
When Tom first meets Huck (who Tom, along with practically
everyone else who knows Huck, thinks is dead), Tom immediately
suspects that he is dealing with a ghost—which is precisely the same
as Jim’s reaction when he first encounters Huck on Jackson’s Island
in Chapter 8 (51). Our sense of any fundamental human similarity
between Jim and Tom is soon subverted, however, when Tom begins
concocting his elaborate, self-centered, and therefore bogus plan for
civil disobedience—a plan that is a shallow parody of the genuinely
selfless acts of actual or planned civil disobedience by Huck and Jim
that have gone before.
Indeed, Tom’s plea to the supposedly ghostly Huck (“ Don’t you
play nothing on me, because I wouldn’t on you” (283) ) seems espe-
cially ironic, because it is only a few lines later that Tom deliberately
does “ play” something on Huck by failing to reveal the crucial fact
that the imprisoned Jim was freed months ago in the will of the now-
dead Miss Watson. Instead of simply and plainly telling Huck that
Jim is already legally free, Tom stops himself and goes “to studying”
(284), much as Huck himself had “studied a minute” earlier in the
book (270), right before he decided that he would rather go to hell
than betray Jim. The ironic parallel between these two scenes (one
boy chooses to act on Jim’s behalf; the other chooses to treat Jim as a
plaything) is enhanced all the more when Tom next volunteers to help
Huck steal Jim. This offer would seem to be an admirable act of civil

26 Mark Twain
disobedience (an act motivated by conscience and selfless empathy)

if it did not turn out to be grounded merely in a desire for selfish
adventure. Astute readers can appreciate the full irony of his offer and
can particularly appreciate the irony of his insistence, in responding
to Huck, that “ I ain’t joking, either” (284) when it is later revealed
that Tom, of course, is joking.The joke is not only on Huck and (more
cruelly) on Jim but also on Twain’s readers. What seems a plan for
selfless civil disobedience is eventually revealed to be a scheme of self-
indulgent entertainment.
There are many ironies in Huck’s reactions when Tom explains
his elaborate scheme to “free” the already-free Jim. Huck expresses
amazement that “Tom Sawyer was in earnest” (292); ironically, it
later becomes clear that Tom both is and is not “in earnest”: he is in
earnest in the sense that he does indeed intend to proceed with his
complicated plan, but he is also not in earnest, because he knows that
the plan is not really necessary; in fact, he plans to trick both Huck
and Jim. Likewise, when Huck remarks that Tom is “knowing, and
not ignorant,” his words have an ironic double (or triple) edge that
Huck himself probably does not intend. Tom is indeed “knowing” (in
the sense that he knows that Jim is already free); he is also “knowing”
in the sense that he has in fact been raised to know right from wrong
(but chooses to violate those moral standards here); but he is also
“ignorant” in the way he ignores Jim’s best interests in pursuit of his
own desire for adventure.
In fact, alert readers of the novel should, by this time, already be
feeling some misgivings about the complexities of Tom’s plan. That
plan, as Huck has already conceded, stands a good chance of getting
them all “killed” ( Jim included). Thus, when Huck next says that Tom
was raised to be “not mean, but kind,” readers might begin to suspect
the irony (probably unintended by Huck) of Huck’s words. By this
point we should already be suspecting that Tom’s plan will not prove
especially “kind” to Jim (although its true meanness will not become
apparent until later). Similar irony appears in Huck’s claim that Tom,
“without any more pride, or rightness, or feeling” is choosing “to stoop
to this business [of freeing Jim], and make himself a shame, and his
family a shame, before everybody” (292). The ironies here are thick and
rich, for Tom is motivated by “pride” of precisely the wrong sort, and
he is also in fact ignoring both “rightness” and “feeling,” and his later
conduct will indeed prove shameful in many respects. Huck says that

Tom’s conduct is “outrageous” (293) and readers will have to agree, but
not in the sense Huck intends. Similarly, when Huck next says that
he wanted to act as Tom’s “true friend” and urge him to “save himself,”
readers cannot help but note, after reading the novel’s conclusion, how
false a friend Tom himself turns out to be (both to Huck and to Jim),
and how implicitly selfish his conduct. As Tom himself asks Huck,
with probably unintended irony, “ Don’t you reckon I know what I’m
about? Don’t I generly know what I’m about?” (293). Tom does know
what he’s about (i.e., lying both to Huck and to Jim), and it is precisely
that fact that makes his conduct so troubling.
As these examples illustrate, readers alert to the moral complexi-
ties of the final chapters will perceive many more resonances in Twain’s
language than are immediately obvious. One effect of the complexity
of Tom’s plans is to enhance our sense of the complexity of Twain’s
artistic design. The novel is more, not less, aesthetically sophisticated
thanks to Tom’s evasion; certainly it provokes (and even demands) a
more active kind of reading than a simpler and less morally disturbing
ending would have elicited. Some of the complexities that Twain
achieves can be glimpsed in Chapter 42, which focuses on the nearly
tragic aftermath of the evasion’s collapse. By this point, Tom has
been shot, and Jim, because of his unwillingness to desert Tom in his
time of need, has been recaptured and brutalized. By this point, too,
the ironies built into the text have become so blatant, so blindingly
obvious, that they must have been intentional. In fact, the existence
of such transparent ironies strongly suggests that the whole design of
the entire “evasion” section is deliberately ironical. Chapter 42 seems
intended to provoke such clear outrage in any morally sensitive reader
that it is difficult to believe that this was not Twain’s precise purpose
in composing the whole last portion of the book.
Thus, when Twain (via Huck) reports that some of the white
captors “wanted to hang Jim . . . [for] making such a raft of trouble,
and keeping a whole family scared most to death for days and nights”
(352), the outrage that this statement provokes in any morally sensi-
tive reader is both undeniable and double-edged: Not only do the
captors seem cruel, but the phrasing implicitly reminds us that it was
Tom, not Jim, who was responsible for scaring the Phelps family, and
indeed for all the other pain caused by the scheme. Any reader who
may, before this point, have simply been enjoying Tom’s cleverness
and ingenuity now is suddenly brought up short by the possibility that

28 Mark Twain
Jim may die due to Tom’s schemes gone bad. Most readers, however,
will have become morally uncomfortable with Tom’s cleverness long
before now, and that is precisely the effect Twain intended. What
began as a lark for Tom now is darkly dangerous, and Twain’s irony
is patently obvious. Similarly ironic is the ensuing report that some
of the whites “said, don’t do it [i.e., hang Jim], it wouldn’t answer at
all”—advice that at first seems rooted in basic decency and empathy
until the sentence concludes as follows: “he ain’t our nigger, and his
owner would turn up and make us pay for him, sure” (352). Once again
the irony is stunning, and the clearly implied indictment of the whites’
racism and materialism impossible to overlook.
The sophistication of the syntax in the sentence just quoted—a
sentence in which Twain first seems to suggest that the whites are
decently motivated and then undercuts any optimistic assump-
tions about their character—is soon mimicked in another sentence.
Huck reports that the disappointed whites “cussed Jim considerable,
though”—an outcome that seems mild in contrast to the abandoned
plan of hanging; but then the sentence continues as follows: “and
[they] gave him a cuff or two, side of the head, once in a while” (352).
The cruelty of these farmers, who probably consider themselves “good”
men and “good” Christians in normal life, is clearly ironic. So, too, are
the conduct and statements of the kindly doctor who initially treats
Tom’s wound. At first he commends Jim for his faithfulness to Tom,
commenting, “ I liked the nigger for that,” but then he continues: “ I tell
you, gentlemen, a nigger like that is worth a thousand dollars—and
kind treatment, too” (353). This sentence is skillfully constructed:
it seems to begin with genuinely kind (if patronizing) sentiments,
then it switches to naked materialism, and then it switches back to
apparent kindness. The sentence is typical of the complex aesthetic
and moral effects Twain achieves in the final chapters of Huckleberry
Finn, especially in Chapter 42. There are many more examples of this,
but by now the basic point is clear: The “evasion” chapters in general,
and Chapter 42 in particular, seem to have been designed by Twain
to provoke an ever-increasing sense of moral outrage and revulsion in
his readers concerning the treatment of Jim. Readers who have paid
attention to earlier depictions of moral behavior (by such characters
as Huck and Jim) and immoral behavior (by such characters as Pap
Finn and the Duke and Dauphin) will now be in a good position to
notice the subtle ironies embedded in the “evasion” chapters almost

from the start. Readers who are reading the book for a second time
will be especially well positioned to notice and appreciate those subtle
ironies. And, by the time we reach the second half of Chapter 42, the
ironies have become so numerous and so insistent that they are almost
impossible to ignore.
Huckleberry Finn is a novel in which the potential for true acts
of conscience—and thus for true civil disobedience—is presented
both straightforwardly and in parody. Huck and Jim (in particular)
are revealed, in the first two-thirds of the book, as characters who are
capable of truly conscientious behavior and therefore of genuine civil
disobedience. In contrast, Pap Finn and Tom Sawyer are presented
as characters who are more than willing to break rules and disobey
laws, but only for corrupt or self-serving purposes. Part of what makes
Huckleberry Finn such a morally complex book is its depiction of the
ways in which Huck, by acquiescing so fully in Tom’s schemes in the
final chapters, loses some of the respect he has previously won from
readers impressed by his acts of genuine civil disobedience. It is Huck
himself, of course, who, as the narrator of the novel, depicts himself as
partly the unwitting dupe of Tom’s schemes, but partly also as Tom’s
willing accomplice. And it is also Huck, as narrator, who constructs
the book in such a way that finally makes Jim, and Jim alone, seem
the true embodiment of genuine conscience in a novel in which
conscience is such a major and explicit theme.
WORKS CITED AND CONSULTED

Leonard, James S., Thomas A. Tenney, and Thadious M. Davis, eds. Satire or
Evasion? Black Perspectives on Huckleberry Finn. Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 1992.
Twain, Mark. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Edited by Victor Fischer and
Lin Salamo. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001.

ANTIGONE
(SOPHOCLES)
,.
“Antigone’s Unwritten Laws”
by Victor Ehrenberg,
in Sophocles and Pericles (1954)
Introduction
In this chapter from his book-length study of Sophoclean
drama and the development of secular law in ancient Greece,
Victor Ehrenberg asserts that Antigone is one of the earliest
texts to deal with the conflict between rationally derived human
law and the divinely given “unwritten” law. The discrepancy
between human law and the “unwritten” dictates of conscience
is, as Thoreau makes quite clear in his landmark essay, at the
heart of any act of civil disobedience. Though careful not to
reduce Sophocles’ characters and their conflicts to a personi-
fied clash of ideas, Ehrenberg writes that the conflict between
Antigone and Creon is a conflict between “two fundamental
concepts of the order of the world”: Antigone piously honors
the “unwritten law” of the gods by burying her brother; Creon,
by preventing the performance of burial rites and punishing
Antigone for carrying them out, insists on the primacy of
human authority and law over irrationality, cultural tradition,
and the edicts of the gods. Thus Antigone, in accord with her
Ehrenberg, Victor. Sophocles and Pericles. Oxford: Oxford Blackwell, 1954. 28–
37, 54–61.
31

32 Sophocles
moral conscience, disobeys the civil authority of Creon, who,

in turn, disobeys the authority of the gods.
f
Death and the dead impose on living men and women the most sacred
duties, and these duties are in the very centre of the eternal and divine
laws. It is in no way accidental that the sacred rites due to the dead play
a prominent part in several of Sophocles’ plays. When the Atridae give
orders that Ajax’s body shall remain unburied they outrage the ‘laws of
the gods’.1 Zeus, ‘unforgetting Erinys and fulfilling Dike’, would have
punished them, had not Odysseus prevented the crime (1390ff ). Simi-
larly, whatever interpretation is given to the struggle between Antigone
and Creon, her reference to the ‘unwritten laws’ is the point on which
it is focused. This is the earliest extant, and at the same time the most
famous, example of the unwritten laws, which above all include the
sacred rituals and obligations owed to the dead by their kith and kin.
They were the laws ‘which Hades desires’ (519), and Antigone, in her
conflict with the law and the ruler of the State, appeals to them.2 To
bury the dead is not a demand of human ethics, nor even a general rule
of human society. It is necessary in order to avoid religious pollution.
No one can be more eager to avoid pollution—of the State as well as of
himself—than Creon when Antigone’s death is concerned (775f, 889).
He thinks differently in the case of Polyneices because he who led an
army against Thebes is a traitor to his country.
According to Athenian law, no man convicted of treason was
allowed to be buried in Attic soil.3 Although the law had hardly
been applied for some time, the audience would probably feel that
the Atridae in Ajax and Creon in Antigone in acting as they did had
some justification. Ajax who had desired to kill the Greek leaders, and
Polyneices who had attacked his native city, were traitors and there-
fore might have to suffer the evil due to them.4 On the other hand,
in Ajax there can really be no question that right is not on the side of
the Atridae. Although that does not mean that Creon must be equally
wrong, it leaves no doubt about the moral issue. The religious duty to
bury a body, a duty particularly of the kinsfolk, was quite definite, and
Creon’s announcement made it even impossible to bury Polyneices
outside Theban territory. In war, a defeated invader would usually take
his dead with him; when this could not be done it was appropriate for

Antigone 33
the victors to bury them, as the Athenians did after Marathon. We

realize that the purely legal conflict might appear somewhat confused.
There were, in a sense, good reasons on both sides, and at least partially
it will have been this very fact that caused Sophocles to choose this
example to express his firm conviction, and to bring it home to his
audience, that divine law was predominant over all political law.
It seems certain that the question of how to dispose of the dead
was of particular interest to the Greeks of the fifth century. Other-
wise, it would be hard to explain why Herodotus (III 38) selected this
special subject when he wanted to show the power of the nomoi, and
how every people took their own laws as alone valid and ‘beautiful’.
Thus, the power of the laws was absolute (πάντων βαςιλεύς); but each
set of laws, applicable to one people only, became relative. What to
Sophocles was a matter of sacred tradition, was equally powerful
and yet only a varying custom and mere convention to his friend
Herodotus. Their, and their contemporaries’, thoughts were much
concerned with the conception of nomos in its different meanings.
Sophocles, with his complete and fundamental devotion to religious
traditions and standards, must have felt sore about any ‘scientific’ or
relativist conception of nomos; to him the sanctity of the dead was at
the very core of the matter. No doubt, the subject was most suitable
to achieve dramatic tension and effects; it was also a matter of wide
interest and discussion. Above all, however, to choose this theme
meant to put the issue on the most fundamental basis. It was appro-
priate that the sacred rituals of burial were the battlefield on which
religion as a whole was to be defended.
The unwritten laws which command the burial of the dead express
ancient sacred duties of kinship and of piety. Burial, under normal
conditions, was primarily a family matter. Antigone buried her brother;
Ajax will be buried by Tecmessa and Teucrus. But this duty of the next
of kin is not the motive that induces Odysseus to speak in favour of
the burial; the point is, in fact, not mentioned at all. That ought to be
sufficient to prevent us from believing that the impulse which caused
Antigone to act as she did was ‘sisterly love’ or family duty. From all we
can see in Sophocles’ plays it is clear that the unwritten laws were not
confined to family traditions or to the question of burial. They were the
rules of the divine order of the world. For that very reason, however,
they were particularly manifest in all matters of sacred traditions, and

34 Sophocles
it would be almost natural if our evidence concentrated on the smaller

communities in which such sacred traditions were most intensely alive:
the family, the phratry, the deme. The deme was, in fact, responsible for
the performance of a burial when the family neglected their duty.5
If that is typical of Athens, it is not of Antigone. She performs the
burial, or rather that symbolic and ceremonial act which is taken for
it, because the gods demand it, and not so much because she loves her
brother. The demands of kinship are not an expression of family love,
but of religious tradition. Antigone’s personal feeling of what is her
sisterly duty is overshadowed by the general principle for which she
stands.6 Principle, of course, is a cold and abstract word. What it really
means is expressed in every word of her replies to Creon, most superbly
in the famous line which should not be degraded by applying it merely
to her and Creon’s feelings towards the dead brothers, that untranslat-
able line of confident and passionate womanhood (523): “I am made
not to join in hatred but to join in love.”7
This is also the voice of obedience to the eternal divine laws. If
we understand ‘love’ without all the later undertones of erotics or
charity—neither eros nor agapê—if we take it, as it is called here, as
philia, then we are approaching one of the forces active in the concept
of Antigone’s unwritten laws. In φιλία, as opposed to ‘hatred’ or
‘enmity’ (it is the same word in Greek), nearer to friendship than to
love, we recognize the bond between human beings which was one of
the foundations of Greek society, and which for Creon means some-
thing almost political. ‘The unwritten and unfailing laws of the gods,’
proclaimed by Zeus and ‘Dike, dwelling with the nether gods’, are
opposed as eternal and divine to Creon’s proclamations (κηρύγματα)
which are mere decrees by a human ruler. Those laws of Antigone
‘live for ever, were not born to-day or yesterday, and nobody knows
whence they sprang’ (456f ). These famous words, full of emotion and
belief, clearly indicate something that is essential, fundamental and
universal. ‘I was not like, by fear of any man’s pride, to pay penalty
before the gods for breaking these laws’ (458f ). On these laws Anti-
gone’s world is founded. She mentions Zeus and Dike, and the latter
is described as one of the deities of the realm of the dead. With the
two gods she describes the whole extent of the world to which she
belongs and the laws of which she obeys, the world reaching from
Olympus to Hades.8 There is no place in the Universe where the
unwritten laws are not valid.9

Antigone 35
Universal and fundamental as the unwritten laws is therefore also

the nature of Antigone’s conflict with Creon. It has found many and
very varied interpretations. In contrast to most attempts at explana-
tion by earlier generations we nowadays realize that Antigone is one
of the tragedies most difficult to understand. None of the many single
and simple formulas supposed to cover the issue has been generally
accepted.10 When recently the full importance and the tragedy of
Creon was realized, it was at once over-emphasized, and the deeper
sense of the whole play again, as we believe, misunderstood.11 We are
aware that also in the following discussion important aspects of the
play will be neglected, but at the same time some of the explanations
previously proposed will be covered. We believe that the conflict
between Antigone and Creon is more than simply a fight between
two powerful human beings. Alive and great and independent as
Sophocles’ characters are, they always stand for more than themselves.
‘They cannot be understood by psychology only, for Sophocles is not
interested in psychology for its own sake.’12 It seems just as funda-
mental a mistake to explain the Antigone merely as a conflict of two
characters as to see in the play nothing but a contest of ideas. Family
and State, mysticism and rationalism, private conscience and public
law—as far as there is some truth in these or in other contrasting
concepts, it is all included in the conflict between two fundamental
concepts of the order of the world.
These concepts are clearly not only individual ideas, originating in
the minds and souls of the two opponents. We realize that Antigone’s
and Creon’s lives, minds, characters are separated by an unbridgeable
chasm, and labels such as ‘conflict of duties’ or ‘contest of will’ remain
inadequate. Personal emotions or experiences are all subject to the
struggle of the two concepts of the meaning of life. Antigone believes
in a divine order of the world; Creon relies on human laws and stan-
dards, whether of individual man or the State.13
This is indeed the framework of most of Sophocles’ plots.14 The
struggle between the leading characters can end in nothing but
disaster, not because of the stubbornness and single-mindedness
of their natures, but because there is no chance of reconciling the
world of men with that of the gods, the world of Creon with that
of Antigone. This exclusive contrast has been explained by the
mysterious affinities of either sex—woman, family, religion on the
one side; man, State, power on the other. There may be a deep truth

36 Sophocles
in this background picture, but it is not Sophocles’ truth. Nor is Th

Antigone a Joan of Arc, a martyr who hears divine voices. It will full of
suffice to repeat that Creon stands for the world of man-made may k
politics, and Antigone for that of divine guidance and order. It was its gu
the essential error in Hegel’s penetrating interpretation of Antigone the ci
that he believed in a higher unity of the two worlds instead of their servic
complete incompatibility. Hegel’s mistake was to take Sophocles for to Ioc
a Hegelian.15 Antigone has to perish so that Creon’s world will meet choru
with destruction. It is by the ultimate greatness and value of man ‘No lo
that the divine order prevails, the order which is Antigone’s and, we Th
may say, Sophocles’ order. laws,
does t
Unwritten Laws convic
by ete
We have anticipated what is still to be shown: that Sophocles, through submi
the mouth of Antigone, who nevertheless retains her great and unique under
character, 16 expressed his own views on life and world. The corroborative and b
evidence from other plays is irrefutable. The ‘greatest laws’ which Electra rules.
observes in her unwavering hatred of her father’s murderers, ‘winning orderi
the highest reward through reverence for Zeus’ (El. 1093f ), although ical co
they can even justify matricide, are the same as ‘the old laws by right of denied
which ancient Dike sits enthroned with Zeus’, the laws which Oedipus there
invokes to support his merciless curse of Polyneices (OC. 1381f ) who In
had hoped to win his father’s forgiveness and support by invoking ‘Aidôs made
sitting with Zeus as partner of his throne’ (1267).17 Punishment awaits slight
those who break the sacred laws of reverence and justice. Zeus values law wa
piety towards the gods above everything; ‘it does not die with men, it matio
never perishes whether men live or die’ (Ph. 1441ff ). and u
If we ask what are the eternal laws, the poet gives us at least one in a w
circumstantial, though not precise, answer: the famous choral song in certain
Oedipus Tyrannus (865ff ). Here ‘the laws set up on high’ are called the just b
laws of ‘reverent purity in every word and deed’, words which fix the the sa
place of the laws in the sphere of religion and ritual. ‘They were born explai
in Heaven, Olympus alone is their father; they were not brought forth used t
by the mortal nature of man, nor shall forgetfulness ever put them to was p
sleep. A god is great in them, and he does not grow old.’ The prayer of was p
the chorus is for a life lived in accordance with these laws. Described huma
as they are with beautiful and passionate emphasis, they are laws of howev
divine origin, Olympian laws, comprehensive and universal. Durin

Antigone 37
The stanzas following depict the sinner against these laws, the man
full of hybris which ‘begets the tyrant’. The chorus prays that the Polis
may keep its old traditions. The god must remain the State’s prostates,
its guardian and leader. For if this is not so, if impiety takes hold of
the city, then, the chorus sings, ‘what need I dance?’ (896). Then its
service in honour of the gods has become senseless. In obvious retort
to Iocaste’s sceptical utterances on the value of Apollo’s oracles, the
chorus appeals to Zeus to show his power and the truth of the oracles:
‘No longer Apollo is honoured, worship is dead.’ 18
The song does not repeat the striking mention of the unwritten
laws, but their spirit could hardly be made more manifest. Not only
does the poet stress, once more and with words of the most emphatic
conviction, that the world in general as well as the Polis are ruled
by eternal and divine laws, and that the political ruler who does not
submit to them will become unjust and a tyrant. We can also discover,
under the beautiful veil of poetry, the features of a code of belief
and behaviour which is opposed to all only man-made beliefs and
rules. The eternal laws are the rules of a world, of a kosmos, of divine
ordering and man’s pious devotion, not of human morality and polit-
ical common sense. When the Sophists discovered ‘natural law’, they
denied the traditional (and Sophocles’) divine order. For Sophocles
there was only Oneness, unity: nature was divine, physis was nomos.
In opposing the unwritten laws to Creon’s decree Sophocles
made what could perhaps be called a logical mistake. Not the
slightest hint is given, and it is in itself entirely unlikely, that Creon’s
law was written law.19 It was a κήρυγμα, a pronunciamento or procla-
mation. Taken quite literally, there was no conflict between written
and unwritten laws. Sophocles uses the expression agrapta nomima
in a way suggesting that it was not a newly invented phrase. It is
certain that in fifth-century Greece most laws were regarded as valid
just because they were written.20 Creon’s decree is fundamentally of
the same kind, and Sophocles’ mistake (if we may call it so) is easily
explained. He did not invent either the phrase or the matter, but he
used the concept in his own way and to his own purposes; in fact, it
was probably he who gave it its most forceful expression. Heraclitus
was perhaps the first to speak of one divine law from which all
human laws derive. He coined a striking phrase for the idea which,
however vaguely, was generally held, that all law was of divine origin.
During the sixth and the fifth centuries, with the growing separation

38 Sophocles
of legislation and jurisdiction from religion—that is to say, above

all, with the growth of democracy and democratic law-making—the
Greeks came to realize the difference between divine and human law,
and became aware of some of its implications.21 Nomos, ‘Law’ as a
general rule, as a moral obligation and command, as a power above
human standards, was seen as something distinct from the nomoi,
the particular laws of a State. Witness, for instance, Pindar’s enig-
matic fragment of the ‘Nomos, king of all’ (frg. 169 = 152 Bowra), or
Empedocles’ to men panton nomimon (frg. 135), ‘the law of all things
that is extended without break through the wide-ruling heaven and
the boundless light’, a law that echoes the commandment ‘Thou shalt
not kill’. We can trace various forms of the idea of a universal law or
of a plural of universal laws, though there was no generally accepted,
or at least predominant, doctrine.22
The phrase Unwritten Laws, though it too may have various
meanings, reflects a popular version of the same idea. We must be
careful not to assume that Plato’s statement about the popular use
of the phrase (ta kaloumena upo ton pollon agrapha nomima) (Laws
793 A) was true for a period a century earlier, although he speaks
like Sophocles of νόμιμα and not, as was more common, of νόμοι.
On the other hand, there is no evidence to show that the phrase
was invented by one of the outstanding thinkers, say Protagoras.23
A popular origin seems far more likely. To Sophocles the unwritten
laws are sacred and eternal laws through which the divine powers
rule the world. They are not confined to any particular community,
and are distinct from all merely human law. An integral and, in
fact, dominating part of the poet’s thought and belief, they were
bound to meet with consent as well as opposition. The choral song
of Oedipus Tyrannus, with its emphatic rebuke to those who did not
believe in the divine origin of the laws and their holy nature, cannot
be understood unless Sophocles wrote it while fully aware of such
opposing views. It is, unless we are grossly in error, the poet’s reply to
an opponent, or at least to contrary convictions. It cannot have been
a negligible opposition to which Sophocles replied in such a striking
fashion. He says so himself: it is human greatness in particular that
is in danger of breaking or neglecting the laws of the divine order.
What, in the beginning, we said of unwritten laws in general is
indeed true of those of Antigone or of the ‘laws set up on high’: they
are a claim and a challenge.24

Antigone 39
SOPHOCLEAN RULERS
The maxims which King Creon proclaims in his first speech as well as
further on are the words of a man who takes the principles of ruling
seriously. He will follow good counsels and therefore grant free speech
(178), he puts State and country above everything (182ff ), and when
he announces his fateful decree he claims to be governed by purely
patriotic and moral motives (207f ). To him it is therefore criminal
and wanton to transgress the laws set up by the rulers of the State,
even though these laws may be petty and unjust (481, 663ff ). He
struggles for πειθαρχία, obedience to the ruler, against anarchy (672,
676). The point in all this is not so much whether he is sincere and
remains faithful to his principles (though this too is important), but
the fact that Creon’s maxims, if taken at their face value, are morally
sound but reveal the complete lack of any divine sanction. He lives in
a world in which the gods have no say, a world of purely human and
political standards.
We have emphasized before that the deepest roots of the conflict
between Antigone and Creon are to be found in the complete incom-
patibility of their spiritual worlds. Creon is neither simply ‘the typical
tyrant’ nor just the representative of the State. In either view there is,
of course, some truth, and that is why the one or other has often been
claimed as the one and only fact which explains Creon. Tyrant and
State-bound though he is, the basis of his ‘political’ position is that
he lives in a world alien and opposed to that of Antigone. To him
religious duties are secondary to the supreme sovereignty of the State
(e.g. 745, 775ff ) and to the standards of human and political ethics
(207ff, 514ff, 730ff ). He wants to prevent the pollution of the city
(776), because the unharmed greatness of the State is his chief aim,
but his claim that men cannot pollute the gods (1044) is a household
thought, well known from Euripides, of those who are fighting the
old religion; they put the divine powers, if they still acknowledge
them, so high above the human level that the link between men and
gods breaks and the gods are powerless and meaningless.
Creon denies the very foundations of religion when he refuses to
admit the right of honouring those in Hades (780). The order of the
world includes necessarily the dead, but only in so far as the living,
and in particular the rulers among men, consent. The gods of the
State, as Creon understands them, follow the principles of patriotism

40 Sophocles
and government. The hostile brother has become a hostile political

exile, and the enemy of the State is also the enemy of the gods (199ff,
280ff ); this State-absolutism culminates in the blasphemy that even
the possible pollution of heaven shall not deter Creon from doing what
he considers right (1040). Thus, the ruler’s lack of piety, a theme first
put forth in a saying of Agamemnon in Ajax (1350, see p. 53), is illus-
trated in various aspects. Creon acts as he does, not so much because
of a personal whim or his individual character, but as a result of what
is typical of an autocratic and a-religious ruler. We shall have to come
back to this theme more than once. The tyrant is by necessity impious,
just as Otanes (in Her. III 80, 3) claims that a man is corrupted by
the advantages of his position as a tyrant.25 The time of Sophocles
and Herodotus had become aware of the demoralizing influence of
absolute power, and that was something different from the democratic
hatred of tyranny. The world in which Creon lives is narrow and blind,
though his belief in it may be sincere. The poet leaves no doubt that
this world is bound to be destroyed by the divine order.26
It is for this reason that time and again the fight between order
and order which the woman and the man are fighting as fierce soldiers
is measured by the criterion of their sense and wisdom. ‘Think,’ ‘under-
stand’ (φρόνησον) is Ismene’s first word when she tries to dissuade
Antigone from her purpose which is ‘senseless’. With the same word
Teiresias tries to lead Creon back to the right way (1023). Antigone
ironically affirms that she will suffer for her ill counsel (δυσβουλία,
95), and the chorus calls her attitude thoughtlessness (383), rashness
(853) and ‘folly of speech and madness of heart’ (603). It is of folly
and madness that Antigone and Creon accuse one another (469f,
492). Their opposites, good counsel and sane thought, are the first
qualities necessary for the true ruler, and the decisive scenes before the
disaster are dominated by the fact that Creon is lacking just in these
qualities which he strongly claims to possess.27 Creon ‘learns’ at last
(cf. 992, 1023), but he learns too late (1270ff, 1348ff ), and his under-
standing only follows his fear (1095ff ). Antigone’s pious crime (74) is
contrasted with Creon’s ‘impiety’ (1348). When the chorus meditates
that ‘to be reverent is piety,’ but power ought to be respected (827f ),
this is an opportunist’s compromise against which the last words
of Antigone before she goes to die (943) and the last words of the
whole play (1348ff ) stand out: ‘Wisdom is the supreme part of happi-
ness. Irreverence towards the gods must never occur. Great words of

Antigone 41
haughty men are punished with great blows, and thus teach wisdom
to old age.’ These passages are forceful enough to leave no doubt about
the true meaning of the issue. Piety and wisdom are one, for true
wisdom realizes the divine order of the world.
There is no question of being more or less prudent and wise. All
attempts to make Antigone’s lack of wisdom, her rashness and stub-
bornness, the real cause of her tragedy, are utterly mistaken. Her ‘lack
of wisdom’ is, in fact, true wisdom, although her singlemindedness is
accessory to her personal disaster. What Sophocles fights is wisdom as
purely human reason and intellect. There is, on the one side, a young
girl, heart and soul at one with the divine order of the world, bound
to her kith and kin by strong emotion as well as sacred tradition, and
with the heroic devotion that only a woman is able to display. There
is, on the other side, an old man, proud of his brain as well as his
power, relying on nobody and nothing but himself as the ruler and
representative of the State, blind and blasphemous, but convinced of
the truth and value of his political law (though, as eventually shown,
not in the same degree) as Antigone is of her unwritten laws. Behind
and beyond the two characters the fundamental contrast can always
be seen.
One or two examples will make it clear that some of the obvious
‘truths’ about this tragedy are only part of the truth. There can be
no doubt, for instance, that the contrast between family and State is
of importance. In the notorious and much disputed lines (905ff ) in
which Sophocles reflects one of Herodotus’ stories, Antigone makes a
strange, though no less significant, attempt at justifying her action by
emphasizing that she had to break the law of the State because she
was faithful to the law of ‘love’ between brother and sister, the sacred
obligations of close kinship, of that tie of blood which, if lost, can
never be restored.28 The very fact, however, that in these lines of poor
poetry but strong reasoning, Antigone, up to a point, acknowledges
the duty of obedience to the State makes it quite clear that it is not
the State as such that is opposed to the demands of the family, but
that State only which neglects the higher laws of piety.
Another example is even closer to our particular questions. Creon
certainly is a tyrant. His doctrinairism, his extreme trust in his own
infallibility, his sudden fits of rage, his blind actions, his readiness in
suspecting treason—all these may be called qualities, at least some
undoubtedly typical qualities, of a tyrant. The whole atmosphere

42 Sophocles
of court and city is such that we are all the time aware of a ‘tyran-
nical’ or, to say the least, of a forceful and violent ruler. The effects
of his personality on the citizens of the chorus are manifest, and the
slightly comical figure of the guard shows the impact of the tyrant on
an ordinary human being who, above all, wants to save his own skin.
There is probably none of the famous tyrants of history to whom we
could compare Creon, but a tyrant he is. We can perhaps say that the
picture which the fifth century had in general of a tyrant was largely
that of a man who set his own power and ambition over and against
any other claim, in particular the claim of justice, and served his own
aims and desires irrespectively of any moral standards. As soon as this
picture rose above the level of merely popular opinions, it provided
material to be shaped by the more extreme theories of the Sophists.
Sophocles drew up a character, not a mere résumé of certain doctrines.
His deep psychological insight is, for instance, displayed in the way
Creon expresses his hatred of the idea of being overcome by a woman;
it is the outburst of a man who wants to compensate for some inward
weakness by special manliness and cruelty (484f, 525, 579, 756). But
that man would still be a tyrant. Creon, however, is at the same time
something else.
If his decree were only the result of tyrannical arbitrariness, it
would not mean very much, and Antigone would not be the great
tragedy it is. Melodramatic tyrants like Lycus in Euripides’ Heracles
are impossible in a Sophoclean play. Creon is, in fact, the legitimate
king, and this very fact is the basis of both his position in the State
and his own proud consciousness of this position. He has a firm and
genuine, if narrow, belief in the supreme importance of the State. As
the State has become absolute, it is only natural that the head of the
State is absolute as well. L’État c’est moi is the inevitable expression of
totalitarian absolutism. In identifying himself with the State (738),
Creon displays a genuine will to strengthen it (191); equally genuine
is the ethical force which compels him—without any prospect of
personal or general advantage—to distinguish between the dead man
who fought for his city, and the other who fought against it (207ff ).
It is his honest conviction that only wanton insolence will break the
existing laws of the State (481). The same man who holds the citizens
in such fear that they dare not speak their own mind (504ff, 690ff )
proclaims that he regards it as a sign of a bad ruler not to listen to
anybody’s free speech and good counsel (178ff ). He has conceived a

Antigone 43
programme of government full of excellent principles, but his deeds

differ from his words. Nevertheless he is no hypocrite.
If it were so obvious as some scholars believe that he is ‘maske-
rading’ or, in fact, lying, he and, indeed, his conflict with Antigone
would be without true interest, an elementary tale in black and white
which would never be tragic in the way Sophocles contemplated
tragedy. Nor is it sufficient to say that Sophocles deals with Creon in a
kind of obvious irony which would cause every spectator immediately
to realize that he describes the typical doctrinaire and his foolish belief
in his own unlimited competence. There is irony indeed, but it is the
irony of that higher wisdom which looks at human efforts sub specie
aeternitatis, and thus regards them as inevitably futile and tragic.
The connection between Creon’s maxims and his decree is loose
enough even in his own words. He does not defend his action by
proclaiming his principles, but he recites Polonius-like the principles
in which he believes,29 and merely adds that he had given his decree
‘in accord with them’ (192). There is room enough to doubt whether
it was in any way in the interest of the State to leave Polyneices
unburied; but that is off the point. Creon with all his principles is
the State, and to him no doubt and no problem can arise. When, as
Virginia Woolf once pointed out, the spectator at the end of the play
feels even sympathy with Creon, this is so, not because of any trick of
the poet’s, but because the man, however mistaken in his outlook and
outrageous in his methods, is a victim of his principles as well as his
misdeeds and has become human under the final blows of fate.
Creon has his standards, but none outside the State, and as he
identifies himself with the State, none outside his own mind and
reason. When the chorus replies to his announcement (211), the men
dare not oppose him, but they realize the crucial point. ‘This is thy
pleasure, for thou hast power to use any law, both for the dead and for
those alive.’ They know in their hearts that this is all wrong; but they
submit. The will of the ruler has become the law of the State, and it
is encroaching upon a field outside politics. The ‘tyrant’ Creon, who
demands obedience even in unjust matters (666f ), is more than merely
an autocrat. In his conviction, the State is omnipotent and absolute,
overriding even the demands of tradition and religion. It is ‘totali-
tarian’. Creon does not deny the gods. Even in expressing his own will
as the will of the State he believes that he follows the will of the gods.
Totalitarian politics are by their very nature antagonistic to the claims

44 Sophocles
of religion and the demands of private conscience. Sophocles, though

without the experiences of the twentieth century a.d., realized this.30
He was no politician. His tragedies are political only in the sense that
they are ‘Polis-minded’ or ‘Polis-bound’, keeping apart from everyday
politics. Sophocles fulfilled public duties, but his outlook was unpo-
litical because it was more than political. Yet, as he saw life as a whole
he fully recognized the part played in life by politics.
We can underline this description of the poet’s insight by a char-
acteristic and important inference from Antigone which has not yet
been mentioned. Two strong attempts are made to dissuade Creon
from his decision to kill Antigone, the first by Haemon, the second
by Teiresias. Haemon’s plea is addressed to the king rather than the
father, and eventually he uses the typical political arguments of the
Polis against tyranny. Creon feels safe on that ground; it is that of
his own world of politics, and the thought that the citizens might
object to his action does not arouse any fear in him; this, after all,
is a question of power. His absolutism finally turns against his
proclaimed principles, and at the same time makes him incapable of
understanding his son’s deep sincerity. Teiresias, on the other hand,
threatens him with disaster because the pollution spreads and the
gods of the nether world are offended. At that moment, Antigone
and Haemon are already dead, and disaster is bound to come to
Creon himself. The gods are not going to act; for that, it is too late
just as it is too late for Creon to repent. But Teiresias’ intervention is
nevertheless necessary because it has to bring about Creon’s change
of mind.31 Teiresias is the natural adviser of the king, the man who
is able to convey to him the divine knowledge which he has learnt
by his prophetic insight. The part played in public life by soothsayers
and interpreters of oracles is reflected in this figure, but he is at the
same time the voice which announces the impending disaster, the
voice of the divine order which the king has violated. As later in OT.,
‘the blind prophet is the one who sees, and the clear-eyed sceptics
are those who are blind’.32 Creon gives in completely and almost
without hesitation. He feels the menace of a world he had despised,
in which he is not at home. There is a weakness in the boastful tyrant
to which this sudden change is due, and this weakness is disclosed
at the moment when Creon realizes that his narrow world has been
overcome. From the psychological as well as the theatrical point of
view the rapid change in Creon’s mind may be unsatisfactory; but

Antigone 45
it reveals the more clearly the poet’s intention to emphasize the

fundamental issue and to show the weakness of Creon’s world. A
few words of the holy prophet who speaks the divine truth achieve
what no political reasoning or human pleading could do, and the
whole artificial building of human pride and human reason falls
shattered to the ground.
NOTES
1. Aj. 1129ff, 1343
2. I believe that the uniform reading of the mss. is right, and not
the correction by more recent scholars.
3. Thuc. I 126, 12. 138, 6. Plut. Sol. 12, 4, and especially Xen. hell.
I 7, 22. Cf. W. Vischer, Kleine Schriften II, 632ff.
4. Ant. 10
5. Dem. XLIII 57f. I owe this quotation to Bowra, [Sophoclean
Tragedy (1944)] 92. But according to him (98ff ) the unwritten
laws, at least ‘in ordinary life and among more ordinary people’,
were concerned mainly with the ties of family. Apart from the
vagueness of what he calls ‘ordinary’, I do not think his view
is supported, as he claims, by the discussion of Socrates and
Hippias in Xen. mem. IV 4, 19f, about incest between parents
and children. This (hardly ‘ordinary’) example is used to show
the relevance of only one of the three commandments [ . . . ]
6. Bowra, 96, writes: ‘She does the last services to Polyneices
because she loves him and because the gods demand it’. I think
the order of these two motives ought to be reversed. Cf. also
Mary R. Glover, CR. 42 (1928), 97ff.
7. Cf. A. Lesky, Hermes 80 (1952), 95ff. But the curious analogy
Aj. 1376ff should not be quite forgotten.
8. Cf. Reinhardt [Sophokles (1947)], 86. The argument is confirmed
by the fact that it is Dike, usually πάρεδρος Διός (cf. my
Rechtsidee im frühen Griechentum. 67ff ), who has become the
representative of the nether world.
9. It would be in accordance with this essential fact if the lines
853ff are to be understood as Lesky understands them (l.c.
91ff ) that Antigone, ‘overcoming the menace of human power,
has boldly advanced to the throne of Dike’. But I am not sure
whether his interpretation is right. [ . . . ]

46 Sophocles
10. Cf., e.g., Jebb: ‘The simplicity of the plot due to the clearness
with which two principles are opposed to each other . . . the
duty of obeying the State’s laws . . . and . . . the duty of listening
to the private conscience’. An awe-inspiring survey of all, or at
least most of, the interpretations of the play is given by Mrs.
M. K. Flickinger in her otherwise quite unimportant thesis,
“The ‘AMAPTIA of Sophocles’ Antigone’ (Iowa Studies in Class.
Phil. II, 1935). Cf. also L. Bieler, Antigones Schuld (1937).
11. That is what in my view happened to the subtle interpretation
by H. D. F. Kitto, Greek Tragedy (1950), 123ff. Whitman, on the
other hand, rather disappointingly, sees ‘nothing tragic or even
morally interesting about Creon’ ([Sophocles (1951)] p. 90).
12. Quoted from my Aspects of the Ancient World. [Oxford: Basil
Blackwell, 1946] 149.
13. The same essential contrast can be found, e.g., between
Sophocles’ and Euripides’ Heracles tragedies; cf. my Aspects, 164.
14. Cf. Bowra, 366: ‘The conflict in Sophoclean tragedy is mainly
between divine and human purposes’; cf. also p. 380.
15. Bowra, 65f, partly following A. C. Bradley, tries to show that
Hegel did not ‘maintain that Creon and Antigone were equally
right in the eyes of their creator’, but used Antigone as an
illustration only of his general view of human existence. I cannot
accept this distinction. When Hegel chose Antigone to confirm
his philosophy, the play was for him a reality. The poet, in Hegel’s
view, expressed in his way the idea of a higher morality which
the philosopher put into his general formula: ‘Es ist nur die
Einseitigkeit, gegen die die Gerechtigkeit auftritt’. Does Sir
Maurice believe that Hegel attributed to Sophocles’ own verdict
onesidedness rather than justice? Cf. also the discussion of
Bradley’s views by Waldock, [Sophocles the Dramatist (1951)] 28ff.
16. Reinhardt, 84.
17. If the text in Ant. 797 is sound, Eros is called by the chorus
‘sitting in power beside the great laws’. These must be the
unwritten laws; but with quite a different meaning the chorus
in 802 exclaims: ‘I myself too am moved beyond the laws,’ by
pity—as Haemon was by love.
18. It is necessary to mention here Whitman’s view which, if
accepted, would invalidate much of our argument. He sees in
the words of the chorus only ‘a popular reflection’, showing

Antigone 47
‘the somewhat confused morality of the bourgeoisie’ (135).

I cannot accept an interpretation in which the great song
with its praise of the eternal laws, anticipated and echoed as
it is by many other passages and in particular by Antigone’s
passionate pleading, is regarded as an expression of ordinary
popular beliefs at variance with Sophocles’ own beliefs, while,
for instance, the almost incidental words of Hyllus against the
gods in a moment of deepest suffering (Trach. 1266), words
of which Whitman says himself that ‘the outcry against the
insufficiency of the gods arises most directly from the sense of
the insufficiency of men’, are taken as a reflection of Sophocles’
own fundamental views about the gods. Moreover, if it is true,
as we believe, that the song in OT. is aware of opposing views,
Whitman’s interpretation would mean that Sophocles’ chorus
reacted most strongly against the poet’s deepest convictions! We
do not deny that the chorus here reflects public opinion; but
who are we to maintain that Sophocles was fundamentally at
variance with it? Whitman makes the mistake of assuming that
the chorus never expresses the true views of the poet because it
sometimes (e.g. Phil. 833ff, 850ff ) does not.
19. In another passage we learn that Creon who had fought for the
public law ‘set forth’ (481) has eventually to submit to what is
called ‘the established laws’ (1113). The distinctions are far from
being clear; cf. also Ai. 1246f.
20. The Wade-Gery objection (CQ. 38, 1944, 7, n. 5) misses my
point.
21. The history of the meaning and importance of θεσμός and
νόμος during the sixth century reflects these facts. Cf. my
Rechtsidee im frühen Griechentum, ch. 3. We are, of course, not
speaking of a distinction between sacred and profane law; as
far as that distinction existed it remained within the limits of
human, that is to say, State, law.
22. Hirzel ([Hirzel, R. ‘Agraphos Nomos’, Abhandl. Sächs. Ges. d.
Wiss., Phil.-hist. Kl., XX, 1900]) provides rich material and
illuminating interpretations, though he frequently neglects the
historical and chronological connections.
23. Cf. I. Düring, Eranos 44 (1946), 99.
24. They thus become a vehicle of expression for that general
attitude which, e.g., Turolla [in Saggio sulla poesia di Sofocle

48 Sophocles
(1934)] characterizes when, contrasting the poet in his middle

age, the author of Ajax, Antigone, OT. and Trachiniae, with the
later Sophocles, he calls the former ‘l’apologeta’.
25. This is stressed and expounded by G. Vlastos in a forthcoming
paper on ‘Isonomia’, of which, by kindness of the author, I have
seen a draft. [See now AJP. 1953.]
26. Cf. Reinhardt, 88, and elsewhere. I cannot accept the view
expressed by W. Schadewaldt, Aias und Antigone (1929), 82ff,
that Antigone’s death is, at least partly, the punishment for
the wrong she is supposed to have done to the Polis. What
to some extent justifies Creon, does not necessarily condemn
Antigone to a similar extent, and Polis and Polis may mean very
different things. It seems that Hegel’s monumental, if erroneous,
interpretation will reappear, as it does in Schadewaldt’s view, as
long as the discussion goes on. In general cf. also M. Tierney,
Studies 1943, 327.
27. See lines 1015, 1050f, 1090, 1242, 1261, 1269, 1339—176ff,
207; cf. the chorus 682.
28. Cf. Webster [Introduction to Sophocles (1935)], 99. Reinhardt, 92f.
Bowra, 93ff.
29. The lines are repeated with equal sincerity and complete lack of
irony by Demosthenes (19, 247), just as a modern headmaster
might (and once did) repeat to his pupils Polonius’ advice to
Laërtes.
30. Of course, he did not condemn the Polis as such, though he
objected to a totalitarian policy. Whitman’s statement (233)
that Creon ‘embodies the moral atrophy of civic institutions’,
as contrasted with Antigone presenting ‘the ideal of individual
moral perception’, uses modern and misleading notions, while at
the same time putting nineteenth-century views into twentieth-
century language.
31. Cf. Whitman, 96: ‘we did not need the gods to tell us Antigone
was right, though doubtless Creon did’.
32. H. D. F. Kitto, Greek Tragedy (1939), 137. The sentence is left
out in the second edition.

T HE PLAYS OF ARISTOPHANES
,.
“Aristophanes and His Contemporaries”
by Alfred and Maurice Croiset, in Abridged
History of Greek Literature (1904)
Introduction
In their summary of Aristophanes’ life and accomplishments,
Alfred and Maurice Croiset give us a valuable picture of the
dramatist, his satirical comedies, and their relation to the
political life of Athens. The Croisets, after discussing his
extant plays, describe Aristophanes as a civil disobedient,
a playwright who could not let the rhetorical manipulation of
Athenians by demagogues pass without speaking against
them. While the Croisets note the occasional injustice of Aris-
tophanes’ fictional portraits of these demagogues, his form
of civil disobedience, both satirical and dramatic, “brought to
light the secret viciousness of their policy, or better, that of all
policy which cannot live without public approval, thinks itself
justified in flattering public opinion, and in deceiving it for the
sake of retaining power.”
f
Croiset, Alfred and Croiset, Maurice. “Aristophanes and His Contemporaries.”

Abridged History of Greek Literature. New York: MacMillan, 1904. 248–55.
49

50 Aristophanes
1. LIFE OF ARISTOPHANES, AND HIS WORKS.

THE EXTANT PLAYS.1—
The work of Aristophanes is fairly well known, but not his personality,
except for the declarations that he gave the public in his parabases. The
only events of his life, however, seem to have been the production of
his dramas. Hence it is impossible to separate the biography of the
poet from the account of his works.
He was born about 450 b.c., and his parents were free-born Athe-
nians, possessors of a small estate at Aegina, which they managed as
cleruchs. Aristophanes was a talented youth. While still very young he
brought out, in 427, his first play, now lost, the Banqueters of Heracles
(Daitaleis), which won the second prize. Already a moralist and a
sharp critic of the new tendencies, he followed the fashion of the day
in making his plays educational. The next year, in 426, in another play
now lost, the Babylonians, with true juvenile audacity, he attacked the
demagogues, and particularly Cleon. This brought on him an exciting
lawsuit, from which he appears to have come off victorious. He was,
however, neither intimidated nor discouraged. In 425 he presented
the Acharnians, the oldest of his extant comedies, which, though in
competition with Cratinus and Eupolis, raised him to the first rank.
In it he represents a sturdy peasant, Dicaeopolis, whom the war has
forced to leave his estate and take refuge in the city. The good fellow
wants peace at any price, and as he is the only one who wants it, he
concludes a treaty on his own behalf. The charcoal-burners of Acha-
rnae, who form the chorus, hasten to attack the traitor; but he succeeds
in convincing them that he is right. Then, in a series of joyous scenes,
we see him reaping the benefits of peace, buying, selling, and making
merry, whereas the others suffer from hunger and the miseries of war.
The play is excellent from end to end because of the gayety of its
invention, its movement, its surprises, the renewal of its interest, and
the poetic hardihood manifest at every instant.
Aristophanes brought out these first plays with the collaboration
of a certain Callistratus, who undertook to make ready for the repre-
sentation and direct it. There is reason to believe, however, that Aris-
tophanes did not conceal his own authorship. It seems reasonable to
interpret thus a rather obscure fact, which he himself attests; namely
that, to the end of his life, he was accustomed frequently to employ
either this same Callistratus or another man—a certain Philonides.

But in 424 he himself took charge of the representation of the

Knights, the most violent attack he had made against the demagogue
Cleon. Cleon had just won an unexpected victory at Sphacteria.
Notwithstanding this, the young poet did not hesitate to turn to
ridicule the favor Cleon was enjoying with the people. The Athenians
laughed not only at their favorite, but also at themselves; and the play
was a success. Under the name of Demos, he personified the people,
in whose hands all power was vested; credulous old Demos was being
duped by those who flattered him. He disgraced his faithful servants,
in whom we recognize Nicias and Demosthenes, and substituted for
them a cozening Paphlagonian, who while preying upon him pretends
to be devoted to him. The rascal, of course, is Cleon. The disgraced
servants attempt to raise a rival to the old man’s favorite in the person
of the sausage-seller Agoracritus. Impudent, ignorant, brawling, he
finally supplants Cleon by the use of the same means that Cleon used.
Demos, restored to reason, regains his youth with his senses. The strife
of Agoracritus against Cleon forms the subject of the drama. It has
not the gayety nor the rustic grace of the Acharnians, yet atones for
this with a satiric and comic force not found so fully in any other play.
The Athenian judges assigned it the first prize.
The next year, 423, Aristophanes, again taking up the theme
treated in his Babylonians, satirized, in the Clouds, the sophists and the
new education. Strepsiades, a humble peasant, laborious and thrifty,
has a prodigal son who cannot pay his debts. The father is eager to
learn rhetoric, which he regards as the art of eluding his creditors by
deceiving the judges. This art is typified in Socrates, who is trans-
formed for the occasion into a charlatan. But Strepsiades is too thick-
headed to understand the lesson that he receives; and so he sends his
son to study in his place. The son, Phidippides, when educated, mocks
at and beats his father—such are the fruits of this much-lauded educa-
tion. Strepsiades, converted and furious, sets fire to Socrates’s school.
The Clouds, who give their name to the play and form its chorus,
represent the mazes before which philosophers bow in worship. The
play obtained only the third prize. The author, more surprised than
discouraged, rewrote it, but does not seem to have presented it again.
The second edition is what we possess. The role of Strepsiades is excel-
lent, giving the chief value to the drama. That of Socrates is only a
gross slander; and though amusing, its injustice is offensive. It shows
at least how far contemporary opinion was deceived by appearances in

52 Aristophanes
appreciating the great man. If the comedy did not contribute directly
to his condemnation twenty-five years after, it would be rash to assert
that it did not make ready for it indirectly by the false, odious image
it created and kept alive in the public mind.
The Wasps, played in 422, seems to have had a less general aim.
Aristophanes in this play derides the mania for lawsuits that had
taken possession of the Athenians; but behind the somewhat thin
veil, he sees and discloses the policy of the demagogues, who turn the
leisure time of the people and the worst elements in its disposition to
their own account. It is really still Cleon who is being censured. An
old man named Philocleon is madly fond of lawsuits; around him
buzzes the chorus of Wasps, representing the old heliasts whose sting
is always threatening and who promote and profit by his folly. His
son Bdelycleon undertakes to correct him. This difficult undertaking
constitutes the real action of the play. Philocleon and his associates
are finally converted. After that, the old man, free from the trouble of
sitting in court, leads a joyous life. The play is vividly developed, full
of spirit and of amusing incidents. It suggested to Racine some of the
most successful portions of his Plaideurs.
The Peace, brought out in 421, was later rewritten. We have only
the first edition. The subject is the same as that of the Acharnians, but
the form is much inferior. The vine-dresser Trygaeus, weary of the war,
mounts to Olympus on the back of a horned beetle and brings back
Peace, whom he induces to dwell in his home, notwithstanding the
opposition of certain lunatics. The action is uninteresting, and grows
cold beneath the allegory. But the play is full of choice passages, all
animate with the poetic charm of the country. Between 424 and 421
appeared also two lost plays, the Laborers and the Merchant Vessels, in
which the poet pleaded for the cessation of hostilities.
From 421 to 414 there is a lacuna in the chronological series of
his works; but we have no reason to believe that he maintained silence
during this period. The years must have been occupied with plays that
have not been transmitted to us. The series begins again in 414 with
the Amphiaraus, of which, however, nothing is extant; and the Birds,
which has been preserved. In this second group of plays the satire is
generally less harsh and, above all, less personal.
The Birds is a charming fantasy mingled with satire, but without
any marked general purpose. Two Athenians, Pithetaerus and Euel-
pidus, weary of living in a city where the courts are in session from

morning to night, go away to find the birds, make an agreement with

them, and induce them to build a new city between heaven and earth,
called Nephelococcygia. The intriguers down below would fain win
admission, but are driven away with clubs. The gods try unsuccessfully
to govern the city; negotiations are entered into, and finally Pithe-
taerus assigns himself the kingdom, despite the claims of Zeus. All
this is daring invention, as poetic as it is capricious and ingenious. The
moral purpose, if there is one, consists chiefly in unmasking certain
impostors and charlatans; but the poet seems to aim rather at amusing
than at instructing his public.
Two years later, in 411, the Lysistrata was brought out, and also
the Thesmophoriazusae (Θεσμοφοριάζουσαι). In the former, the poet
once more pleaded against the war. This time the women demanded
peace, or rather forced it by abandoning their husbands. The
conspiracy is led by Lysistrata, who gives her name to the comedy.
No other of the poet’s plays is so bold in plot or incident, yet in no
other is the action better managed. The aim of the Thesmophoriazusae
is to turn Euripides into ridicule. By his attacks against women, the
tragic poet is supposed to have offended them greatly. To spy out and
amuse himself with their discussions, his father-in-law, Mnesilochus,
disguised as a woman, slips in among the women of Athens, who are
celebrating the festival of Demeter. There he meets with countless
dangers, from which his son-in-law, the adroit Euripides, extricates
him with great difficulty. The drama is spirited, but Aristophanes
has neglected to give a summary of his griefs against Euripides. It
is a game in satire rather than a satire proper—a series of skirmishes
rather than a regular attack.
This second series was closed by the Frogs, one of the most impor-
tant of Aristophanes’s plays. It won the first prize at the Lenaean
festival of 405. Here there is represented a formal judicial trial of
Euripides and his art. He had just died, a year after Sophocles; the
tragic poet Agatho was in Macedon; and Bacchus, patron of the
theatre, is represented as anxious about the fate of tragedy. But he has
no poet. Impelled by his fears, he decides to go and seek one among
the dead. Whom shall he bring? He hesitates between Aeschylus
and Euripides. A competition takes place; the two rivals mutually
attack each other; thus all their art is criticised from the moral as well
as the poetic point of view. Euripides is shown to be a sophist who
has corrupted tragedy, degraded ideals, troubled men’s spirits, and

54 Aristophanes
compromised good morality. Bacchus chooses Aeschylus and brings

him back in triumph to the earth.
The years following were somewhat unfavorable to comedy. The
close of the Peloponnesian War had left Athens under a burden.
When the democracy was reestablished, the city took breath, but
public spirit had not the same vigor as before. Comedy underwent a
transformation. Though in his youth the poet was the incarnation of
exuberant fancy and venturesomeness, he was obliged in his old age
to conform to the new regime. This he did with a remarkable accom-
modation of spirit; yet he produced no masterpieces comparable to
those of his earlier years.
In 392, he presented the Ecclesiazusae, an attack against contempo-
rary theories. In this play the women of Athens, led by Praxagora, are
represented as having got control of the assembly and having passed
a vote establishing the principles of absolute communism. They abol-
ished all rights of property and of the family. The theme of the play
is the consequences that ensue. These are vividly portrayed. One no
longer finds harsh satire directed against the powers of the day. The
poet attacks a scholastic system, a chimera. Does he have specially in
view a certain school, for example that of Plato, as has been supposed?
He has not told us and we do not know. There is the same tendency in
the Plutus, of which the first edition was brought out in 408, and the
second, rewritten, in 388. The extant version is the second edition. A
sturdy fellow, Chremylus, having found the god of riches, a blind god
as everybody knows, takes him to the temple of Asclepias, gets him
healed, and maintains him in his own home. In consequence a whole
group of honest people, his neighbors and himself, become rich and
devote themselves to banqueting. Under this guise is given a view of
the ever recurring social question; and the intervention of Poverty, in a
celebrated scene in which she extols her merits, gives the play a moral
tone, that is unfortunately diminished and obscured by the final scene.
This was probably the last comedy that Aristophanes presented in
his own name. He is said to have composed also the Cocalus and the
Eolosicon, plays that have been lost. At the time they were represented
as the works of his son Ararus, for whom he wished thus to win public
favor. The former was, even at this early date, a comedy of intrigue; the
latter, a parody.
Aristophanes died soon after this event. His anonymous biogra-
pher tells us that Plato composed for him this epitaph, “The Graces,

brings seeking a temple which should not perish, chose the soul of Aris-
tophanes.” Besides the eleven plays that we possess and those that
y. The we have mentioned, he composed a number of others, of which we
urden. have only titles and fragments. The total appears to have been at
h, but least forty.
went a
ion of
ld age
2. His General Tendencies. His Views:
ccom-
Political, Social, and Literary. His Religion.—
ble to The first question that arises when one tries to appreciate this series
of remarkable works is, How far can they be taken seriously? When
empo- taken together they suggest the idea of a system of political, social,
ra, are and literary views from which might be deduced a doctrine. One is
passed tempted to regard Aristophanes as a thinker well able to judge of
abol- affairs in his time, whose opinion merits much consideration. Is this
e play really the case? Behind these brilliant invectives are we to look for
ne no a clearly defined policy, an established creed, and a criticism resting
y. The upon known principles?
ally in If so, then surely Aristophanes would need to be regarded as a
posed? devotee of tradition, the resolute enemy of innovation. One would
ncy in be obliged to suppose that from his youth, before he was twenty, he
nd the showed a constant inclination toward the past as against the future;
ion. A and that, devoted to the ancient ideals which were being abandoned
nd god more and more, he did not cease to defend them and attack all that
ts him tended to corrupt them. And though in itself this would not appear
whole improbable, yet it seems that one should then be able to deduce
h and from his criticism a number of affirmations that would constitute his
iew of doctrine. But as soon as one seeks these, it is seen to be impossible
ty, in a to formulate them. Aristophanes censures democracy; is he, then, a
moral partisan of aristocratic institutions, and would he institute a current
scene. of opinion tending to reestablish them? There is nothing in his plays
ted in that permits us to suppose this. What he censures is certain men
nd the and certain abuses; he lashes and turns to ridicule Cleon, Lamachus,
sented Hyperbolus, Cleophon, and even makes sport of Pericles after his
public death. He shows how the people are deceived and sometimes whee-
ue; the dled by them. Does he, therefore, think that the state would be better
governed by other masters? Really, we do not know. He denounces the
iogra- impiety of the sophists, the dangerous subtleties of their instruction,
Graces, the perilous seductions of that rhetoric which obliterates the sense of

56 Aristophanes
justice. Would he have wished men to abstain from learning the art
of language and to return outright to the old education? [O]r did he
mean simply to point out some deplorable excesses while advocating
necessary changes? He has not said. The resolute adversary of Eurip-
ides, did he sustain the same relation to all contemporary poetry? It
would appear not; for he at least admired the style of the poet whom
he derided. As for religion, if he pretended to defend it against the
theorists who advocated atheism, this was certainly not because he had
a scrupulous respect for the gods. It is well known with what infor-
mality he treated them in more than one passage. All this, it must be
confessed, does not give us the idea that he was a theologian, nor even
a believer. We see, indeed, what he attacked; but when we endeavor to
say precisely what he defended, we are at a loss.
May it not be that really he never comprehended himself, and
possibly never felt the need of doing so? Let us consider how he was
reared. From youth his instincts, which were only the consciousness
of his rare powers, carried him toward comedy. His education was
obtained while listening to the plays of Cratinus and his contempo-
raries, meditating upon them, and trying to imitate them. As soon as
he began to think for himself, his thought was in a way moulded upon
theirs. In trying to imitate their art, he adopted also their spirit, which
was inseparable from it—a spirit of satire, opposition, and mockery
at extravagance. The processes of the profession were therefore early
adapted to the spontaneous trend of his genius, which was then just
what it was later; and therefore he never became anxious to search
for the true and the ideal. To seize upon the ridiculous and display it
before all eyes, that was his calling. All his insight, natural good sense,
and wit were used to disclose this, as was his poetic fancy and talent
in exaggerating and adapting it for the stage. Characters thus formed
do not have doctrines; for they are strangers to disinterested research.
They have tendencies, whose principal element is the instinct of what
their art demands and of what is most fitted to bring out the brilliance
of their powers.
Must we say then, on the other hand, that the comedies of Aris-
tophanes lack seriousness? We cannot go so far. When he attacks
contemporary statesmen, it is true we cannot accept his testimony,
because it is that of a pamphleteer and professional satirist. We have no
reason for thinking him juster in this than he was when he portrayed
Euripides. But he is just to as great an extent, and this makes his

he art account worth attention. For, in criticising Euripides, if he sees only

did he his defects and exaggerates them beyond all reason, he does evince, by
cating the essential justice of his remarks, undoubted clearsightedness. And
Eurip- this is true of all his censures. That he calumniated Pericles, Cleon,
try? It and many others, we do not doubt. But in attributing to them inten-
whom tions that they did not have and acts that they did not perform, he
st the more than once perceived and brought to light the secret viciousness
he had of their policy, or better, that of all policy which cannot live without
infor- public approval, thinks itself justified in flattering public opinion, and
ust be in deceiving it for the sake of retaining power. It would be much more
r even unjust on the whole to degrade him to the rank of a simple jester than
vor to to raise him to that of a philosopher or political economist. Very keen
good sense constituted the moral worth of his dramas; and even if it
f, and did not keep him from prejudice and injustice, it caused him to bring
he was constantly to light truths whose particular application may have been
usness doubtful, but whose eventual correctness is beyond dispute.
n was [ . . . ]
empo-
oon as
d upon
Notes
which 1. Editions: Bekker, 5 vols., with Latin notes and translation,
ockery London, 1829; G. Dindorf, Aristophanis Comaediae, with
e early fragments, excursus, notes, and scholia, 4 vols., Oxford, 1835–
en just 1839; Bergk, Aristophanis Comaediae, 2 vols., Leipsic, Teubner,
search 1852 and 1872; Meineke, Leipsic, 1860; Blaydes, Aristophanis
play it Comaediae, with notes and the scholia, 12 vols, Halle, 1880–
sense, 1899; von Velsen u. Zacher, Aristophanis Comaediae, Leipsic,
talent 1869–1897. Dindorf ’s text, with a Latin translation, is found
ormed in the Didot Collection, Aristophanis Comaediae, Paris, 1839,
search. in a volume containing also the fragments; the scholia form
f what a separate volume. Th. Kock, Ausgewāhlte Komŏdien des
liance Aristophanes, with introduction and notes, Berlin, 1876.
Biographies and Ancient Testimony: The anonymous Lives
Aris- collected at the beginning of the Didot edition of the Scholia
ttacks Graeca in Aristophanem.
mony, Translations: French prose, by Poyard, Paris, 1898; and by
ave no Brotier, 2 vols., Paris, 1898. English translation of six plays, by
trayed B. B. Rogers, London, 1852–1902. The Works of Aristophanes, by
es his J.H. Frere, 2nd ed., New York, 1874.

58 Aristophanes
Consult: [ . . . The] article Aristophanes in Pauly-Wissowa,

Realencyclopädie; Deschanel, Études sur Aristophane, Paris, 1867;
Th. Kock, Aristophanes als Dichter und Politiker, in Rheinisches
Museum, 39, 1884, p. 119 ff.; Müller-Strübing, Aristophanes und
die historische Kritik, Leipsic, 1873.

“BARTLEBY, THE SCRIVENER”
(HERMAN MELVILLE)
,.
“A Second Look at ‘Bartleby’ ”
by Egbert S. Oliver, in College English (1945)
Introduction
In “A Second Look at ‘Bartleby,’ ” Egbert Oliver argues that
Melville constructed his short story’s protagonist as a carica-
ture of Henry David Thoreau, whose desire to remain “aloof”
from society is “carried to its logical and absurd conclusion.”
Egbert tries to demonstrate that certain passages from
Thoreau’s essay “On Civil Disobedience” correspond to the
situation of Bartleby and his eventual disappearance into The
Tombs. For Egbert, Bartleby’s mantra, “I prefer not to,” is a
distillation of Thoreau’s call to civil disobedience and radical
individualism, one that, during the course of the narrative, is
revealed to be both untenable and absurd.
f
Herman Melville’s “Bartleby” has received little attention from the

Melville critics or commentators, even though it stands as one of the
two examples of his writing for 1853, the year following the writing
and publication of Pierre, and at the beginning of his period of lesser
Oliver, Egbert S. “A Second Look at ‘Bartleby.’” College English 6.8 (May 1945):
431–439.
59

60 Herman Melville
prose writing before his long silence. Its position relative to his other
work, if no other reason suffices, should assure it some attention,
and it has not been entirely overlooked. In fact, a greater unanimity
regarding it prevails among those Melville commentators who have
mentioned it than on any of his major works. Two conclusions have
several times been drawn regarding it, substantially in the same way:
(1) that it is a good story and (2) that it is a picture of Melville’s mind,
both at the time the story was published and indicating what his atti-
tude was to become.
John Freeman, the English biographer of Melville, asserted that,
while the other stories in The Piazza Tales are comparatively insig-
nificant, two of them, “Bartleby” and “Benito Cereno,” are superb.
“Bartleby,” he wrote, “is an exercise in unrelieved pathos, the pathos of
an exile in city life, faint counterpart of Melville’s own isolation and
gathering silence.” Raymond Weaver, to whom admirers of Melville
will be forever indebted for his competent critical and biographical
work, reserves his highest praise of The Piazza Tales for “Benito
Cereno” and “The Encantadas.” But he does recognize the importance
and value of this volume of stories in gaining a view of Melville as
an artist: “They are of prime importance, not only for their inherent
qualities as works of art, but because of the very peculiar position they
hold in Melville’s development both as an artist and as a man.” Weaver
included “Bartleby” in the volume Shorter Novels of Herman Melville,
which he edited with a very fine Introduction. “And for twenty years,”
Weaver wrote, in the course of a biographical comment, “morning and
evening, between 26th Street and the foot of Gansevoort Street, East
River, an inconspicuous and elderly private citizen—a man whose
history had been partly told and partly foreshadowed in Bartleby the
Scrivener—walked with his own private thoughts.”
Lewis Mumford, in his biography, saw in even more detail the
mirrored view of Melville’s mind in Bartleby’s withdrawal from life.
Mumford wrote:
Bartleby is a good story in itself: it also affords us a glimpse

of Melville’s own drift of mind in this miserable year: the
point of the story plainly indicates Melville’s present dilemma.
People would admit him to their circle and give him bread and
employment only if he would abandon his inner purpose: to
this his answer was—I would prefer not to.

“Bartleby, the Scrivener” 61
This latter clause is Bartleby’s answer, frequently repeated.

Mumford supposes that Melville’s persistence in minding his own
spiritual affairs alienated those who could help him, made them
impatient,
for in the end, they foresaw they would be obliged to throw

him off, and he would find himself in prison, not in the visible
prison for restraining criminals, but in the pervasive prison of
dull routine and meaningless activity. When that happened there
would be no use assuring him that he lived in a kindly world of
blue sky and green grass. “I know where I am!” Whether or not
Melville consciously projected his own intuition of his fate, there
is no doubt in my mind [this is Mumford’s statement] that, as
early as 1853, he was already formulating his answer. To those
kind, pragmatic friends and relatives who suggested that he go
into business and make a good living, or at least write the sort of
books that the public would read—it amounts to pretty much the
same thing—he kept on giving one stereotyped and monotonous
answer: I would prefer not to. The dead-wall reverie would end in
a resolution as blank and forbidding as the wall that faced him: a
bleak face, a tight wounded mouth, the little blue eyes more dim,
remote, and obstinate than ever: I would prefer not to!
“Bartleby” is the story of a man who gradually withdrew within

himself, cutting off, one by one, the bonds of human fellowship and
association until he stood alone, completely—blank and silent. His
attitude toward life was a gradually progressive nonviolent nonco-
operation—even while he attached himself as a parasite to his
employer and benevolent guardian. (This, the reader must be assured,
is an inadequate and unfriendly summing-up of “Bartleby,” which will
be modified before this essay is finished.) I should like to suggest that
the germ of the character Bartleby came not from Melville’s search-
ings of his own relationship to society or from any bitterness in his
hardening heart but from an external contemporary source, namely,
Thoreau’s withdrawal from society.
Melville, so far as I know, does not mention Thoreau directly by
name in any of his writing, whether his literary work, letters, or various
journal jottings. He mentions Emerson several times; he reviewed
Cooper for the magazines; he has some comment to make on Dana,

62 Herman Melville
Irving, and many minor writers. He, of course, has much comment on
Hawthorne, with whom he was closely associated for a year and a half,
and the various writers of the Duyckinck circle. However, his omis-
sion of Thoreau’s name—while he was naming other writers—did not
mean that he was ignoring Thoreau.
In 1850 Melville borrowed Thoreau’s Merrimack from Evert
Duyckinck’s private library. He had ample opportunity to know much
about Thoreau. His interest in Emerson in 1849 might have prompted
him to ask Duyckinck for Thoreau’s Week on the Concord and Merri-
mack Rivers. His friendship with the Hawthornes in the Berkshires
in 1850 and 1851 certainly gave him occasion to hear of the various
Concord characters. Hawthorne was for a time strongly attracted
toward Thoreau. He greatly admired his workmanship and his skill
in handling a small boat. Thoreau was, as Hawthorne tells us in his
Notebooks, an occasional guest of the Hawthornes and a companion of
Nathaniel in field and stream. Mrs. Hawthorne and her sister, Eliza-
beth Palmer Peabody, showed great interest in the American writers,
especially in the Concord writers.
Hawthorne lived in Concord during the time of Thoreau’s resi-
dence in the cabin by Walden Pond, his so-called hermitage, and
Thoreau’s experiment in withdrawing from society was probably
discussed between the Melvilles and Hawthornes on occasion or on
many occasions during their period of close relationship. However, even
supposing that no one who knew Thoreau ever expressed an opinion
of him to Melville—a most unlikely supposition—still Melville had
ample opportunity to get the basis for his “Bartleby” from the so-called
hermit of Walden Pond. He had available to him a published source
which he used both in general outline and in some detail.
In 1849 Sophia Peabody Hawthorne’s sister, a prominent member
of the Transcendentalist group, Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, edited a
book called Aesthetic Papers. This volume, which Melville undoubtedly
had a chance to see in the Hawthorne home1 if he did not himself
have a copy of it, contained one of Hawthorne’s longer historical
tales, “Main-Street,” Emerson’s essay, “War,” and an essay by Thoreau,
“Resistance to Civil Government.” This essay, now generally known
as “On the Duty of Civil Disobedience,” is known to all readers of
Thoreau and is considered to have influenced Gandhi’s activities in
South Africa and India. It also served as a basis for Bartleby, who long
preceded Gandhi in passive nonco-operation.

Thoreau argues that the American government—the government

of slavery, engaged in the Mexican War unjustly—was such that a man
“cannot without disgrace be associated with it. I cannot for an instant
recognize that political organization as my government which is the
slave’s government also.” Why do not people who want the Union
dissolved, he asks, “dissolve it themselves—the union between them-
selves and the State?” “The proper place to-day, the only place which
Massachusetts has provided for her freer and less desponding spirits,
is in her prisons, to be put out and locked out of the State by her own
act, as they have already put themselves out by their principles.”
In this essay Thoreau tells the story of his own withdrawal from
organized society and of his imprisonment for nonco-operation. “Pay,
or be locked up in the jail,” the state said. “I declined to pay.” This is
like Bartleby’s often reiterated “I would prefer not to.” Thoreau did not
wish to pay a tax to aid in supporting the church. At the request of the
selectmen, he gave them a formal statement:
“Know all men by these presents, that I, Henry Thoreau,

do not wish to be regarded as a member of any incorporated
society which I have not joined.” This I gave to the town clerk;
and he has it. The State, having thus learned that I did not
wish to be regarded as a member of that church, has never
made a like demand on me since. . . . If I had known how to
name them, I should then have signed off in detail from all the
societies which I never signed on to; but I did not know where
to find a complete list.
Thoreau then tells of his night in jail for not paying his poll tax.
Here are some passages which suggested much to Melville. Thoreau
says with a defiance which Melville must have admired: “I was not
born to be forced. I will breathe after my own fashion.” Bartleby’s
associates, his neighbors, his jailors even, did not know what to make
of him, and Thoreau had found the same reaction of bewilderment.
“They plainly did not know how to treat me. . . . for they thought that
my chief desire was to stand the other side of that stone wall.”
The kernel of Thoreau’s thought is this: “It is for no particular item
in the tax-bill that I refuse to pay it. I simply wish to refuse allegiance
to the State, to withdraw and stand aloof from it effectually.” This is
the kind of challenge which intrigued Melville and set his mind to

64 Herman Melville
working out implications. Here is a man who lives in society, certainly

to a real extent dependent upon it, yet withdrawing, aloof. Bartleby,
when asked to join in co-operative tasks, replies, “I would prefer not
to.” He gives no reasons. He simply wishes to refuse. Thoreau’s advice
is explicit. He is encouraging a withdrawal from life, even an attaching
of one’s self to others, as he had built his cabin on Emerson’s land.
“You must hire or squat somewhere, and raise but a small crop, and
eat that soon. You must live within yourself, and depend upon yourself,
always tucked up and ready for a start, and not have many affairs.”
This is just the kind of practice which makes of Bartleby’s life a cipher,
a zero: Squat somewhere, and live within yourself. “I can afford to
refuse allegiance to Massachusetts,” Thoreau boasts, “and her right
to my property and life.” Melville quietly writes a satire to show that
one cannot afford such a boast: to squat somewhere and live within
yourself is to refrain from living.
Bartleby in many ways, both outwardly and inwardly, parallels
Thoreau. Bartleby was a scrivener, that is, a writer, a copyist. When
once asked what he was doing, Thoreau replied, “Keeping a journal.”
He, too, was a scrivener, a writer. In fact, Melville was undoubtedly
aware that Thoreau was generally accused of being a “copyist” himself,
a copyer of Emerson, as Lowell pictures him in A Fable for Critics.
Melville may or may not ever have seen Thoreau, but his first brief
glance at Bartleby and the comment it called forth might have been
made by many observers on seeing Thoreau. Bartleby, “a motionless
young man,” stood at the door. “I can see that figure now—pallidly
neat, pitiably respectable, incurably forlorn!”
Bartleby is installed as scrivener in the law office in a manner such as
to leave him within call, yet out of sight of his employer. “And thus, in a
manner, privacy and society were conjoined.” Even as Thoreau was, while
close to Concord, yet isolated from it, out of sight behind the screen of
green trees, so also Bartleby was installed in a hermitage behind a high
green folding screen near his employer’s desk. The new scrivener at first
worked industriously: “As if long famishing for something to copy, he
seemed to gorge himself on my documents. There was no pause for
digestion. He ran a day and night line, copying by sun-light and by
candle-light.” Melville may well have remembered the myriad classical
allusions, references, quotations in the Week. Probably he was aware of
Thoreau’s lack of humor and local reputation for aloofness when he said
of Bartleby: “But he wrote on silently, palely, mechanically.”

When Bartleby’s copy is to be verified with the original, a type of

work involving the joint labors of two or more men, Bartleby declines
to help. “I would prefer not to,” is his response. He is steadfast in his
refusal. To the question “Why do you refuse?” he but answers, “I would
prefer not to.”
The three office clerks represent the variety of public opinion
toward such a withdrawal from co-operative work. The employer
appeals to them to support him in urging the adamant Bartleby to
join in the work.
“Am I right?” he asks.
“With submission, sir,” said Turkey, in his blandest tone, “I think
you are.”
“I think I should kick him out of the office,” is Nippers’ view.
“I think, sir, he’s a little luny,” replied Ginger Nut with a grin.
But Bartleby has his way. He does not choose to help verify
copy. Others must do his work, the work which normally would be
expected of him. Thoreau lived on Emerson’s land by Walden Pond.
He borrowed Alcott’s ax. Someone else paid his tax to keep him out
of prison. “In fact,” Thoreau wrote in his essay, “I quietly declare war
with the State, after my fashion, though I will still make what use and
get what advantage of her I can, as is usual in such cases.”
Melville was so fond of good food, good drink, and good fellow-
ship that the vagaries in Thoreau’s diet offered themselves as subject
for jest. Bartleby remained in his “hermitage,” his little corner of the
office, even at mealtime. He was in the office first in the morning and
last at night. In fact, he—like the camel which thrust its nose in the
tent—took up quarters in the office. If he were to make his withdrawal
effective, it must depend on someone else. He did not go out for food.
Food must be brought to him. Ginger Nut, the office boy, is regularly
sent out to return with a bag of ginger nuts, a dry, hard cookie.
He lives, then, on ginger-nuts, thought I; never eats a

dinner, properly speaking; he must be a vegetarian, then; but no;
he never eats even vegetables, he eats nothing but ginger-nuts.
My mind then ran on in reveries concerning the probable effects
upon the human constitution of living entirely on ginger-nuts.
Bartleby’s firm position, that of refusing to assist in verifying

copy, is accepted by his employer with a tolerant ease. The eccentric

66 Herman Melville
scrivener was perfectly harmless in his passivity. Moreover, “it is

plain he intends no insolence; his aspect sufficiently evinces that his
eccentricities are involuntary.” But the strange willfulness of Bartleby
expresses itself in additional ways. At first he will not verify copy—“I
would prefer not to,” is his way of putting it. Then he also would prefer
not to go to the post office to look for mail. He refuses to do an errand
even within the office. In fact, he declines to hold his finger on a string
to aid in tying a knot.
Shall I acknowledge it? The conclusion of this whole

business was, that it soon became a fixed fact of my chambers,
that a pale young scrivener, by the name of Bartleby, had a
desk there; that he copied for me . . . ; but he was permanently
exempt from examining the work done by him . . . ; moreover,
said Bartleby was never, on any account, to be dispatched on
the most trivial errand of any sort; and that even if entreated to
take upon him such a matter, it was generally understood that
he would “prefer not to”—in other words, that he would refuse
point-blank.
He is progressively living within himself!

This is Melville’s picture of the Thoreau he abstracted from “Resis-
tance to Civil Government,” probably embellished and enlarged by
Melville’s conversations with Nathaniel and Mrs. Hawthorne. Bartleby
is a reductio ad absurdum of the convictions Thoreau expressed: “I
declined to pay.” “. . . . I can afford to refuse allegiance. . . .” “I, Henry
Thoreau, do not wish to be regarded as a member of any incorporated
society which I have not joined.” “I was not born to be forced. I will
breathe after my own fashion.” “It is for no particular item in the
tax-bill that I refuse to pay it. I simply wish to refuse allegiance to
the State, to withdraw and stand aloof from it effectually.” Bartleby,
too, simply wished to refuse. He stood aloof. He never gave reasons.
He never argued. He embodied passive nonco-operation. He was a
squatter, and he lived within himself.
Bartleby takes up quarters in the office—even his employer does
not know when—spending his days and nights there, eating and
sleeping there, attending to his personal toilet and laundry there. He
takes over the offices, requesting the employer to come in only during
working hours. But the employer-narrator of the story is not outraged

by such usurpation. He is rather overwhelmed by the thought of

Bartleby’s loneliness, the solitude of his life.
Such an aspect of Thoreau’s professed withdrawal from society
and life alone in a cabin would have strongly impressed the compan-
ionable, sociable Melville. For he himself, too, was feeling the loneli-
ness of the life at Arrowhead, away from the many friends he had
enjoyed in New York. In I850 and again in 1851 his New York friends
had visited him. The Hawthornes had lived but a few miles away
over the hills, and he had been meeting new friends. But in 1852
the Hawthornes were gone from the Berkshires; the Duyckincks and
their circle of friends did not come again; Melville was feeling the
loneliness of his new life. He had been feted in London, dined and
entertained in New York, a popular author; but now even his neigh-
bors were a little suspicious of him, and he was cut off from fellow-
ship, by distance, by poverty, and by the feeling that his literary work
was no longer given approval. It may well be that Melville’s own sense
of isolation entered into the employer’s feeling toward Bartleby:
For the first time in my life a feeling of overpowering

stinging melancholy seized me. Before, I had never experienced
aught but a not unpleasing sadness. The bond of a common
humanity now drew me irresistibly to gloom. A fraternal
melancholy! For both I and Bartleby were sons of Adam. . . .
What I saw that morning persuaded me that the scrivener was
the victim of innate and incurable disorder. I might give alms
to his body; but his body did not pain him; it was his soul that
suffered, and his soul I could not reach.
With all kindness the employer attempts to establish a fellow-

communion with Bartleby. But Bartleby prefers not to talk, to answer
questions, to say anything of himself or his circumstances. He even
decides to do no more writing: “I have given up copying,” he says.
Now, doing no work, he was completely a squatter in the office. More
than that, cut off from everyone, he was but a squatter in the universe,
absolutely alone, “a bit of wreck in the mid-Atlantic.”
Still he refuses to leave the office. Melville sees and enjoys the
wry humor in such a situation. Bartleby is withdrawn from all social
contacts, he is living within himself, but his very presence demon-
strates the absurdity of his situation. Bartleby’s employer contemplates

68 Herman Melville
the possibilities of an assumption on his own part. If Bartleby assumes

that he has no relationships with or obligations to society, why not
have society in turn assume that this assuming ex-scrivener did not
exist? He thinks:
I might enter my office in a great hurry, and pretending

not to see Bartleby at all, walk straight against him as if he
were air. Such a proceeding would in a singular degree have
the appearance of a home-thrust. It was hardly possible that
Bartleby could withstand such an application of the doctrine
of assumptions.
But he decides against such direct action, instead accosting

Bartleby with some impatience.
“What earthly right have you to stay here? Do you pay any
rent? Do you pay any taxes? Or is this property yours?”
He answered nothing.
“Are you ready to go on and write now? . . . In a word, will
you do anything at all, to give a colouring to your refusal to
depart the premises?”
He silently retired into his hermitage.
Thoreau, in speaking of his experience in Concord jail in “Resis-

tance to Civil Government,” mentions how his fellow-prisoner occu-
pied one window while he looked out the other and concludes, “I saw
that if one stayed there long, his principal business would be to look
out the window.” Bartleby does find in his self-imprisonment that he
leaves himself nothing to do but look out the window, in his case, a
window opening on a blank wall. “I noticed,” the employer observes,
“that Bartleby did nothing but stand at his window in his dead-wall
revery.” Again: “Bartleby remained standing at his window in one of
his profoundest dead-wall reveries.”
Bartleby is established as a fixture in the office, as a piece of furni-
ture, harmless, useless, silent. There the story reaches its extreme appli-
cation, but for one turning. The employer was reconciled to Bartleby;
the office workers were reconciled to him; he was accepted as a squatter
and so might have continued. But the outside world, clients and visiting

lawyers, did not understand Bartleby or the strange relationship—or

lack of relationship—existing between him and the other people whose
destiny it was to occupy the same bit of the world he inhabited. Other
people, outsiders, made remarks. They thought the situation queer. The
employer was becoming the subject of gossip.
“I resolved to gather all my faculties together, and forever rid me
of this intolerable incubus.” Go he must. But he would not go! “Since
he will not quit me, I must quit him.” However, even this stratagem is
not enough to save him from the man of no obligation, the man who
had withdrawn from everything. Bartleby remains in the emptied
quarters. “You are responsible for the man you left there,” the next
tenant says accusingly to Bartleby’s benefactor.
Bartleby—this man who would not feel the importance of human
ties, who had cut himself off from all social contacts (so he foolishly
imagined)—soon had the entire building, even the street, in a state
of indignant excitement. Locked out of the offices, he persisted “in
haunting the building generally, sitting upon the banisters of the stairs
by day, and sleeping in the entry by night. Everybody is concerned;
clients are leaving the offices; some fears are entertained of a mob;
something you must do, and that without delay.” This urgent chal-
lenge is hurled at the former employer, who had hoped to rid himself
of Bartleby. But organized society could not dispense with Bartleby as
easily as Bartleby could dispense with society.
The logical absurdity of Bartleby’s position is emphasized in
one brief conversation—brief, yet so much the longest of Bartleby’s
remarks as to appear loquacious.
“What are you doing here, Bartleby?” said I.

“Sitting upon the banister,” he mildly replied. . . .
“Would you like to re-engage in copying for someone?”
“No; I would prefer not to make any change.”
“Would you like a clerkship in a dry-goods store?”
“There is too much confinement about that. . . . But I am
not particular.”
“Too much confinement,” I cried. “Why, you keep yourself
confined all the time!”
“I would prefer not to take a clerkship,” he rejoined, as if to
settle that little item at once.

70 Herman Melville
Bartender? No. Collecting bills for a merchant? No. Travel to

Europe as a companion? No, but I am not particular! “I like to be
stationary.”
Bartleby gets that privilege in jail. Even as Henry Thoreau went
quietly to the Concord jail with Constable Sam Staples, so, too, did
Bartleby.
As I afterward learned, the poor scrivener, when told that

he must be conducted to the Tombs, offered not the slightest
obstacle, but, in his pale, unmoving way, silently acquiesced.
Some of the compassionate and curious bystanders joined
the party; and headed by one of the constables arm in arm with
Bartleby, the silent procession filed its way through all the noise,
and heat, and joy of the roaring thoroughfares at noon.
Melville’s plan of telling the story of Bartleby does not permit him
to contemplate the thoughts of that prison inmate, as Thoreau could
reveal his own thoughts in like circumstance. But Bartleby is found by
his benefactor “standing all alone in the quietest of the yards, his face
toward a high wall,” much as Thoreau “stood considering the walls of
solid stone.” Thoreau wrote: “They plainly did not know how to treat
me, but behaved like persons who are underbred. In every threat and
in every compliment there was a blunder; for they thought that my
chief desire was to stand the other side of that stone wall.” Bartleby
might well have said—or thought—the same. Melville in narrative
form presents the ill-timed compliment and the underbred commen-
tator, the loquacious grubman.
Bartleby avoids every attempt to establish relationships with him.
He moves away even from food and takes up a position “fronting the
dead wall.” This is the ultimate in his withdrawal: he ceases to eat and
is soon at peace, asleep “with kings and counsellors.”
Such is the end to the kind of individualism Thoreau portrayed in
“Resistance to Civil Government”—the end carried to its logical and
absurd conclusion. “I declined to pay,” said Thoreau, “I was not born to
be forced. I will breathe after my own fashion.” “Depend upon your-
self.” When Thoreau declined to pay, someone else paid for him, as he
acknowledges in the essay. Melville was attracted by paradox. He often
wished to imagine an example worked out to its logical conclusion. He
certainly admired some of the heroic stubbornness of Thoreau even as

he is often very sympathetic with Bartleby. But that admiration does

not prevent his seeing the absurdity of some of Thoreau’s extreme
pronouncements in this essay.
Thoreau wishes to choose what he will do and what he will not do.
He prefers not to do some things. Let that “preferring not to” become
progressively more extended. What then? Moreover, someone makes
up for the deficiency. Who paid Thoreau’s tax? On whose land did he
live? Who acted as his benefactor?
In “Bartleby,” Melville has a reference to the notorious New York
murder where Colt killed Adams in a fit of imprudent resentment
and anger. He then makes the application that even self-interest—if
no better reason can be found—demands a charitable attitude. “A
new commandment give I unto you, that ye love one another.” Even
though Melville must have been intrigued by his character Bartleby
and admired the self-sufficiency of the man, yet he shows us the impli-
cations of such an independent course of action. Bartleby became less
and less a man until there was nothing left of him. There can be no
such thing as an effective life of aloofness. When Thoreau wrote, “I
simply wish to refuse allegiance to the State, to withdraw and stand
aloof from it effectually,” he was but expressing an absurdity.
Thoreau could write, as he did in his journal for January 16, 1852:
“Here was one [Bill Wheeler] who went alone, did no work, and had
no relatives that I knew of, was not ambitious that I could see, did
not depend on the good opinion of men.” If Melville had seen this
sentence he would have asked, with a raised eyebrow or a sly wink:
“No relatives? Not even a mother? Or a father? No work? On whose
efforts does he depend, even if he does not depend on opinions?”
In April of that year before Melville was to write “Bartleby,”
Thoreau confided to his journal: “Society, man, has no prize to offer
me that can tempt me; not one. . . . When I am most myself and
see the clearest, men are least to be seen. . . .” “Bartleby” seems to be
written in answer to such thought as this. The pathos of “Bartleby”
need not blind us to the implications of the story. Try as you will, you
cannot cut yourself off from society, and to persist in such a direction
can only destroy the individual.
It is possible that Melville, who enjoyed a pun almost as well as he
enjoyed enigmas and puzzling allusions generally, may have had a sly
reference to Thoreau’s extended use of ancient and oriental literature
in his suggestion that “Bartleby had been a subordinate clerk in the

72 Herman Melville
Dead Letter Office at Washington, from which he had been suddenly

removed by a change in the administration.”
Melville had ample opportunity to know a great deal about
Henry Thoreau and his various experiments in individualism and
in depending on himself. He read some of Thoreau’s writing: prob-
ably he read the three installments of “A Yankee in Canada,” which
early in 1853 appeared in Putnam’s Magazine, the magazine in which
“Bartleby” appeared in November of that year. In “Bartleby” he paid
his respects to the kind of social attitude represented by Thoreau’s
two-year “hermitage” by Walden Pond, by his note of withdrawal from
organized society, by his refusal to pay his taxes, by his acceptance of a
situation in which he lived at the expense of another man, permitting
another’s paying of his taxes to keep him from jail. “Bartleby” indeed is
interesting as a story. It is also interesting as a revelation of Melville’s
mind and method of writing during 1853. It is an important clue
pointing toward Melville’s wholesome sanity, his objective searching
of social relationships, his active interest in his contemporaries and
their writings. In “Bartleby” we see him looking outward, not in any
spirit of despairing rebellion searching his own heart.
NOTES
1. The copy of Aesthetic Papers which I have in hand for this study,
curiously enough, came from the library of Oliver Wendell
Holmes, Melville’s friend and neighbor in the Berkshires. It
is owned by the V. L. Parrington branch of the University of
Washington Library.

ddenly
about
m and
prob-
Billy Budd
which (Herman Melville)
which
e paid ,.
oreau’s
l from “Billy Budd ”
ce of a by Milton R. Stern, in The Fine Hammered
mitting Steel of Herman Melville (1957)
deed is
lville’s
t clue
rching Introduction
es and In Billy Budd, Melville presents a conflict between moral
in any conscience and the law, one where the innocent Billy Budd
is falsely accused. Like Judas in the New Testament, Captain
Claggart betrays the Christ-like Budd. But when Billy’s stutter
keeps him from responding during the investigation Captain
Vere performs, Budd lashes out uncontrollably, defying
study,
maritime law and becoming the subject of a court martial. In
l
executing Billy, Vere holds fast to the sanctity of law. As this
It
excerpt from Milton R. Stern’s The Fine Hammered Steel of
of
Herman Melville illustrates, the conflict between conscience
and the laws of man are central to understanding Billy Budd’s
act of civil disobedience.
f
Translated Cross, hast thou withdrawn,
Dim paling too at every dawn,
With symbols vain once counted wise,
And gods declined to heraldries?
Stern, Milton R. “Billy Budd.” The Fine Hammered Steel of Herman Melville.
Urbana, IL: U of Illinois P, 1957. 206–39.
73

74 Herman Melville
* * *
The atheist cycles—must they be?
Fomenters as forefathers we?
—Clarel
Morally, philosophically, emotionally, socially, Melville’s search for

the complete man is not the search for the knightly hero, but for the
Governor. The Governor must repress man’s anarchic atheism and
must reorient man’s frantic activities.
The quester is an atheist because he denies history and thereby
rejects man’s only possible God. The quietist is an atheist because he
denies human commitments and thereby rejects possibility itself. The
banded world is an atheist because it denies reality and thereby rejects
the true nature of God and of man’s potentialities. All these confidence
men-atheists have one denial in common: they reject man. They deny
man because they cannot recognize the importance of man-self and
the subordinate position of one-self; they cannot recognize anything
by means of the naturalistic perception wherein the importance of
man’s morality shrinks on a cosmic scale, and the importance of
man’s morality grows on the social and historical scale. Thus they all
perpetuate a crazy history of crime and error. Sacrifice of self to ideal
is not self-sacrifice at all, Melville has suggested, but rather it is that
indulgence of self which is the ultimate romantic selfishness. What is
needed is a tactically wise, if often distasteful and unspectacular, sacri-
fice of self to the historical moment. Except for King Media, Melville
so far has given us no one willing or able to practice this particularly
contemporary, larger-and-smaller-than-traditional sacrifice. In Billy
Budd he does.
The nature of the governor and the nature of the sacrifice demand
an emphasis not on individualism, certainly, or self-expression per
se, but on control—which is at the center of Melville’s political
classicism.
Melville introduces the need for planning by slyly setting the
reader at ease with a promise of “that pleasure which is wickedly said
to be in [literary] sinning.” With such a sin Melville announces that
he is “going to err into . . . a bypath” which turns out, after all, to be
the direct road into the center of this “inside narrative.” Enticed into
the bypath, “anybody who can hold the Present at its worth without
being inappreciative of the Past,” finds in “the solitary old hulk at

Billy Budd 75
Portsmouth, Nelson’s Victory” a symbol of the conditions of victory,

of good government, and of the ruler who recognizes the need for
altruistic yet impersonal self-sacrifice to the realities of history.
There are some, perhaps, who while not altogether

inaccessible [to the beauty of the past] . . . may yet on behalf
of the new order, be disposed to parry it; and this to the extent
of iconoclasm, if need be. For example, prompted by the sight
of the star inserted into the Victory’s quarter-deck designating
the spot where the Great Sailor fell, these martial utilitarians
may suggest considerations implying that Nelson’s ornate
publication of his person in battle was not only unnecessary,
but not military, nay, savored of foolhardiness and vanity. They
may add, too, that at Trafalgar it was in effect nothing less
than a challenge to death; and death came; and that but for his
bravado the victorious admiral might possibly have survived the
battle, and so, instead of having his sagacious dying injunction
overruled by his immediate successor in command he himself
when the contest was decided might have brought his shattered
fleet to anchor, a proceeding which might have averted the
deplorable loss of life by shipwreck in the elemental tempest
that followed the martial one.
Well, should we set aside the more disputable point whether
for various reasons it was possible to anchor the fleet, then
plausibly enough the Benthamites of war may urge the above.
But the might have been is but boggy ground to build on.
And certainly in foresight as to the larger issue of an encounter,
and anxious preparation for it—buoying the deadly way and
mapping it out, as at Copenhagen—few commanders have
been so painstakingly circumspect as this same reckless declarer
of his person in fight.
Personal prudence even when dictated by quite other than
selfish considerations is surely no special virtue in a military
man; while an excessive love of glory, impassioning a less
burning impulse the honest sense of duty, is the first. If the
name Wellington is not so much a trumpet to the blood as
the simpler name Nelson, the reason for this may perhaps be
inferred from the above. Alfred in his funeral ode on the victor
of Waterloo ventures not to call him the greatest soldier of all

76 Herman Melville
time, though in the same ode he invokes Nelson as “the greatest

sailor since the world began.”
At Trafalgar Nelson on the brink of opening the fight sat
down and wrote his last brief will and testament. If under the
presentiment of the most magnificent of all victories to be
crowned by his own glorious death, a sort of priestly motive
led him to dress his person in the jewelled vouchers of his own
shining deeds; if thus to have adorned himself for the altar and
the sacrifice were indeed vainglory, then affectation and fustian
is each more heroic line in the great epics and dramas, since
in such lines the poet but embodies in verse those exaltations
of sentiment that a nature like Nelson, the opportunity being
given, vitalizes into acts. [pp. 822–24]
The goal at the end of this bypath is a statement of the kind

of heroism that, unlike the quester’s courage, may lead to salvation,
and that the reader is led to expect to find in the other Great Sailor,
Captain Vere. Practical recognition of actualities is not attacked in this
brief excursion—“the might have been is but boggy ground to build
on.” Both cheap hindsight and absolutist evaluations are tossed aside
with the rejection of any should-have-been or might-be or must-be
that does not grow out of the conditioning historical facts which
inevitably become a particular historical result. Hand in hand with
this rejection is the attack on “martial utilitarians,” who, in this context,
are the dry tacticians who can see tactics only. Strategy, empiricism,
tactics, Melville says here, while of prime importance, cannot be
divorced from the greatest communal aspirations—“the larger issue.”
The fact of the existence of aspiration, and recognition of larger issues,
makes it necessary to reckon with human nobility and heroism as
factors in tactical action. The nonrational gloriousness of which man
is capable cannot be denied—indeed must be depended upon—in
strategy which is to win the greatest human victories. In attacking the
might-have-been and the Benthamites of war, Melville attacks the
function of head minus heart, the power politics minus the informing
vision. And because the informing vision is a social, historical vision,
and because man is at once unbelievably heroic and unbelievably blind
and base, the leader must combine Machiavellian circumspect fore-
sight with the glorious and heartful act. The Machiavellian prudence
channels and controls blind, base man, and the glorious act vitalizes

Billy Budd 77
the controlled and channeled man into the proper acts in which his
inspired heroism can victoriously operate. The hero thus is a political
and moral administrator. The standing in one’s fullest magnificence
upon the beleaguered quarter-deck of the state stems not from the
personal and pathetically heroic idealism of the quester, but from the
social and tactical vision of the leader who recognizes that the histor-
ical moment demands the sacrifice of self to the possible victory that
the combined head and heart may achieve. Thus the shrewdly heroic
Nelson, who deliberately and purposefully went out, in the shining
medals of his honor, to tempt death.
Thus too, this modern Nelson-hero-Administrator is, like the
quester, self-consuming. But unlike the quester, he consumes himself
as an inspiration which will result in victory concerning the larger,
social issue. He places himself on the altar of “the honest sense of
duty,” making his very using up of one-self a man-self triumph which
saves rather than destroys the ship. And the difference between the
Nelson-Vere-captain and the Ahab-captain exists most centrally in
this matter of the empirically, communally, historically centered rather
than the idealistically, self-centered predisposition. Indeed, “few
commanders have been so painstakingly circumspect as this same
reckless declarer of his person in fight,” and “while an excessive love of
glory . . . is the first . . . special virtue in a military man,” Nelson’s love
of glory was no more motivated by Ahabian glory, or vainglory, than
his painstaking circumspection was motivated by “personal prudence.”
The implication is that the gloriousness itself, which was always
there, would never have been displayed had it not been the tactical
move which resulted in the preservation and triumph of the human
community, had it not been the socially conscious, altruistic “exalta-
tions of sentiment . . . vitalized into acts.” So too, Vere’s captaincy is
not the glory that leads the Ahab-led Ishmael to utter the Solomonic
“All is vanity. ALL.” Not at all vain, when Vere is ashore
in the garb of a civilian scarce any one would have taken him for
a sailor, more especially that he never garnished unprofessional
talk with nautical terms, and grave in his bearing, evinced little
appreciation of mere humor. It was not out of keeping with
those traits that on a passage when nothing demanded his
paramount action, he was the most undemonstrative of men.
Any landsman observing this gentleman not conspicuous by his

78 Herman Melville
stature and wearing no pronounced insignia, emerging from his

cabin retreat to the open deck and noting the silent deference
of the officers retiring to leeward, might have taken him for
the King’s guest, a civilian aboard the King’s ship, some highly
honorable discreet envoy on his way to an important post. But
in fact this unobtrusiveness of demeanor may have proceeded
from a certain unaffected modesty of manhood sometimes
accompanying a resolute nature, a modesty evinced at all times
not calling for pronounced action, and which shown in any rank
of life suggests a virtue aristocratic in kind. [p. 826]
The preparation for Vere made by the Nelson “divergence” exists in

more than the nature of self-sacrifice. Not only must Nelson sacrifice
the most gloriously beautiful self in order to insure the historically
possible larger issue, but so also must Vere, in the rejection of the
might-have-been, do the same. But in addition, just as there is no
one left to whom Nelson can delegate the proper conduct of the ship
of state (“his sagacious dying injunction overruled by his immediate
successor”) so there is no one left to whom Vere can delegate the
proper power and insight. In the perfectly complete parallel between
Nelson and Vere, Melville says that if human society can win a victory
over itself, no one man can insure the perpetuity of the outcome.
Perhaps the governor must be a community of rule. Perhaps, indeed,
lasting victory cannot be achieved from the top down at all. Not only
is there the implicit rejection of the great-man theory along with the
recognition of the identity of the truly great man, but there is the
frustrating irony which places destiny in the hands of the general,
common man. Because of his blindness, general, common man cannot
be led by his nobility (the administrator’s self-sacrifice provides the
leadership) and there is no avenue left open to the gregarious advance-
ment, which is the only lasting one. Because in Billy Budd Melville
comes most closely to grips with the problem of rule, the political
alternative to his metaphysical rejections, and because the facts of his
experience showed him no solution to the problem, Billy Budd has the
angry, bitter, frustrated tone which too few readers have noticed in
their agreement to call the story a testament of acceptance.
Melville orients the elements of Vere’s sacrifice as historically
as he does Nelson’s. He sets up the conditions of Vere’s choice in a
specific moment which extends to the general history of order and

Billy Budd 79
community versus anarchic atheism, in Melville’s sense, and atom-

istic individualism.
[ ...]
Vere, like Claggart, must confront Baby Budd with an ultimate
rejection. With pained love rather than with envious hatred Vere
must reject what Budd represents to him. As administrator of the
society whose order Claggart’s machinations have threatened, Vere
must condemn the actual as well as the representative Budd. To
Claggart, Billy represents the false appearances of the world and is
a hateful idea. To the Dansker, Billy represents an anomaly and is a
curiosity. To Vere, Billy represents the human heart, and is a beautiful
but inoperative idea. Like all Melvillean lures and doubloons, Billy,
to the reader, is the totality of all the perceptions of the individual
characters. Pragmatically, because he too rejects (albeit reluctantly)
the idea and condemns the man, Vere is Claggart. But this is only a
surface similarity. The sorrowful man whose wisdom was tutored by
experience is also within Vere, so that Claggart, in his initial being,
is Vere. It is history that has formed Vere’s being. It is Claggart who
represents the history which Vere recognizes in order to destroy it.
Claggart is the reason just as Billy is the reason, that the brass buttons
must take precedence over the primal heart. Claggart is the reason
presented by the evils of history which he finally comes to represent,
the gun which Vere uses because he hates the gun; Billy is the reason
presented by the very definition of the primal heart, the innocence
which must always be at the mercy of the gun and is unable to recog-
nize the evils of history in order to use the evils of history in order
to destroy the evils of history. Thus Budd and Claggart are at once
the idealistic side of the polarities presented in the “Preface.” They
are externalizations of Vere, and it is this that makes him the central
character. Billy is associated with Vere’s beautifully motivated self;
Claggart is associated with Vere’s harshly necessary tactical self. The
difference between Claggart as a being and Claggart as part of Vere
is the difference between self-absorption on the one hand and self-
dissection, self-control, self-subordination on the other. That is, Vere
controls and uses—unlike Claggart he does not become—the hideous
truth that both he and Claggart see. Vere controls and uses—unlike
Billy he does not become—the ideal love and innocence and good-
ness that both he and Billy know. The war between Claggart and Billy
is the internal war between heart and mind which constantly tears

80 Herman Melville
Vere apart in his merger of the two. He needs both; he loves one and
hates the activities of the other. He takes his identity from the recog-
nition of what he and Claggart share in common; yet the motivation
for his identity is but the desire for the goodness that is the Billy Budd
within him. That is, if there is a continuum, a common denominator
in humanity, it is the human heart, which desires goodness. But the
goodness is redefined by different conditions, so that understanding
of conditions, or tactics, is the only method man has with which to
identify himself with his underlying self, his heart. Tactics, historical
lessons, identity, must all be relearned in each historical moment
by each generation. That is the historical identity that dies, like the
individual being. But each generation gives birth to new generations,
passing on the mystery of the heart-yearning, the aspiration (which
is the idealism that makes Melville partly Ahab), along with the
historical conditions which the dead identities have created and from
which the new men must gain their identities by learning to cope with
them (which is the empiricism and materialism that makes Melville
Vere). His heart, along with the consequences of history, Vere inevi-
tably leaves as his human heritage to the future. The human heart and
the future are heirs of the history he leaves. His own historical identity
he cannot leave: the others are inescapable heirlooms, but this must be
earned. And the heart of Vere, the inevitable child that each genera-
tion leaves to each next generation as part of being human, the heart
is the area of Billy’s relationship to Vere.
Vere, “the austere devotee of military duty letting himself melt back
into what remains primeval in our formalized humanity may in the
end have caught Billy to his heart even as Abraham may have caught
young Isaac on the brink of resolutely offering him up in obedience
to the exacting behest.” Biblical reference of course reemphasizes the
fact and nature of Vere’s sacrifice. But it also suggests the nature of
Billy’s relationship to Vere. And Billy, as part of Vere, is suggested in
more than the Abraham-Isaac analogy. “Billy Budd was a foundling,
a presumable bye-blow, and, evidently, no ignoble one. Noble descent
was as evident in him as in a blood horse.” And without really intro-
ducing anyone else but Claggart, the Dansker, and Vere, Melville
hints, “for Billy, as will shortly be seen, his entire family was practically
invested in himself ” [italics mine]. The Dansker is old enough to be
Billy’s father, but he is not noble. Claggart has a certain nobility, but
not the right kind, certainly, and he is only “five-and-thirty” besides.

Billy Budd 81
But Vere is truly noble, Melville points out more than once, and as
for age, “he was old enough to have been Billy’s father.” The possi-
bility that Baby is Vere’s own natural offspring, the goodness of Vere’s
own heart, not only sharpens the significance of Vere’s sacrifice, but
strengthens the thematic consideration of the administrator as the
hero, or the only interested God available to man. And even in the
extremity of the only choice open to him, when he is robbed of all
that his son symbolizes by all that the Satan-gun-thief symbolizes,
Vere forces himself to behave according to the need for preservation
of the humanity he commands and for which he alone is responsible.
For as Father of the Adam who falls and the Christ who is sacrificed,
Vere is the only anthropocentric God. He knows that he must control
destinies and decide fates in order to gain the goal of the indestruc-
tible human heart, and immediately he reverts to the only means for
gaining the proper destiny, and he becomes the tactician. He exercises
the proper prudence. He forearms against the possible mutinous
effect of the court-martial decision. Realizing that intentions make no
difference, Vere succeeds in preventing an undesirable consequence of
his act. Claggart met the unanticipated consequence of Billy’s fist, for
all his misdirected personal prudence. His monomania prevented his
seeing the wider symbolism, the social vision, that characterizes Vere’s
every act, and while Claggart’s prudence can only result in chaos,
Vere’s might result in reformation. In this is the note of affirmation
that Melville strikes, finally, in his last book: though intentions make
no difference in the consequences of an act, the direction of thought
which forms the intentions creates a different kind of act which, in its
administration, brings different consequences.
Vere necessarily kills the chronometrical Christ for man’s own
good, so that the death of the false Messiah may bring a redemptive
horological paradise on earth. For if Billy, in the chronometrical act
of killing Claggart, were allowed to set the example for the world, the
effect would be tacit permission for the mutiny and the spontaneous,
individualistic, idealistic, atheistic anarchy which brings chaos again.
Baby Christ learned the lesson Father Vere had to teach him. As Billy’s
beautifully good and heartbreakingly innocent relationship with that
paradox, a man-of-war’s chaplain, makes clear, he is too much the
primitive child to comprehend anything intellectually. His “sailor way
of taking clerical discourse is not wholly unlike the way in which the
pioneer of Christianity full of transcendent miracles was received

82 Herman Melville
long ago on tropic isles by any superior savage so called.” Robbed of

complete innocence by evil, by the fact of the gun (when he lies in
the darbies, his glimmering whiteness is now “more or less soiled”),
he can only understand what is good and right with the goodness and
rightness of his helpless heart. And his “God bless Captain Vere!” is
the “I forgive you Father, for you know what you must do,” which not
only emphasizes Budd’s goodness but which also emphasizes Vere’s
stature. Billy does not stutter now, but makes the one clear and final
statement of the chronometrical innocence by which he lived. He is
the Christ who still turns the other cheek to the man-of-war world,
and, except for his new knowledge, takes his crucifixion as he took his
impressment. And Vere, while recognizing that Billy leads to hope-
lessly inoperative behavior, also recognizes in Billy the heartful good-
ness of the primal human heritage. And when Billy blesses Vere, at
“the pronounced words and the spontaneous echo that voluminously
rebounded them, Captain Vere, either through stoic self-control or
a sort of momentary paralysis induced by emotional shock, stood
rigidly erect as a musket in the ship-armorer’s rack.” Even the simile
works. At the moment that he kills the elemental goodness in man,
Vere’s reaction is both emotional shock and self-control. On the one
hand he has his clearest perception of just what it is he kills, and at
the same time realizes that if he had to, he would do it all over again.
Necessarily he becomes the appearance not of the primal thing inside
him, which he sacrifices, but of the gun, the thief-emblem of the world
he must preserve, use, and change in order to preclude the conditions
of sacrifice. Indeed, when Billy lies in the chains, he lies on the gun
deck, which is given the religious imagery of a cathedral—with the
gun-bays as the confessionals. Lest the ironic bitterness be lost even
here, Melville hints that it is even as Christ hanging between the two
thieves that the Baby is “now lying between the two guns, as nipped
in the vice of fate.”
When Vere dies, he calls his primal identity, his son-self of
the indestructible human heart. Removed finally from the rigors of
the gun-bearing world and from the pressures of control and from the
self-devouring and self-killing sterility of command, he would relax
into the something primeval within him and rejoin the perfection of
man’s heartfelt aspirations. His historical identity cannot continue.
But the human heart does. So Vere goes home. He calls “Billy Budd,
Billy Budd.” And his call is an exhortation and a welcome. “That

Billy Budd 83
these were not the accents of remorse, would seem clear from what
the attendant said to the Indomitable’s senior officer of marines who
as the most reluctant to condemn of the members of the drumhead
court, too well knew though here he kept the knowledge to himself,
who Billy Budd was.” Yet, this quotation reintroduces the bitterness
which is the closing note of Billy Budd ’s irony. On the one hand the
officer of marines is a good and heartful man, but a man without
Vere’s historical identity. There is the possibility that this officer does
not know Billy’s identity any more than Millthorpe knew Plinlimmon
or Pierre. Or there is the possibility that in his very heartfulness, the
officer of marines, like some of the other crew members, idolized Billy.
In this case too, the cycle would be repeated if the man Vere leaves
behind him is an embryonic quester. In any case, probably both ironies
are intended, for the net result is the final irony that it is the military
officer who bears the memory of the chaos-bringing yet primally good
Christ. Thus Melville reintroduces the motif of delegated authority.
Man, like the Polynesian, is primarily good and primarily blind. The
obscuring smoke of the chaos in which man has seasoned himself
and his history must be pierced. But even the true hero, who correctly
boards in the smoke, cannot as one man redeem the world, for his
own historical identity, with all that is involved within it, is the one
thing that can not be delegated in time. And, Melville adds, the effec-
tive identity must be ready in advance, for “Forty years after a battle it
is easy for a non-combatant to reason about how it ought to have been
fought. It is another thing personally under fire to direct the fighting
while involved in the obscuring smoke of it. Much so with respect to
other emergencies involving considerations both practical and moral,
and when it is imperative promptly to act . . . Little ween the snug
card-players in the cabin of the responsibilities of the sleepless man
on the bridge.”
That the lessons are lost and that the cycle continues all over again
is evident in three “digressions” tacked on to the end of the “inside”
narrative.1 The first is the section wherein Vere is killed by the ship
named—the Atheiste. The Atheiste continues the wrongs of history, for
it takes over from a name which is reminiscent of Isabel’s mother and
her other-worldly associations: this French ship had formerly been
the St. Louis. The wrongs of the prerevolutionary nation are translated
into the wrongs of the postrevolutionary nation—one kind of atheist
becomes another kind of atheist under new name and management.

84 Herman Melville
And those who deny the peace of the world and the true welfare of
mankind are those who kill Vere. The paradox is that the seamen of
France kill the man whose goals are identical with those for which the
tactically misdirected French Revolution had been fought. Vere had
always known that men on both sides, wanting but the same good-
ness for which the human heart hungers, after all, cut each other down
in the actualities of all the warfare attendant upon the wrong direc-
tions to the common peace and welfare. No final resolution has been
effected, for Vere can re-inform so that reformation may be possible;
but he himself, limited by time, cannot regenerate.
The second “digression” is the News from the Mediterranean which
appears in an authorized “naval chronicle of the time.” The account
reports the official version, wherein Claggart is the good but wronged
man, and wherein Billy is the villain. Thus appearances for their own
sake are preserved. There is even an inversion of origins in the account.
Claggart, the alien, is pictured as the true patriot, and Billy, the true-
born Englishman, is made suspect of association with all the dimly
French origins that actually characterized Claggart. The very basis of
proper behavior is inverted. The official account could never admit
that the strong arm of order enforcement itself could allow the officer
to be the villain and the impressed man the saint. This is order for its
own sake, command for the sake of prerogative, appearances for the
protection of privilege. This kind of preservation of official appear-
ances is a mindless thing. It is cast and bureaucracy, but it is not the
good administration that carries with it the true motives for Vere’s
siding with official law. The administrator is no God merely by virtue
of his position. If he is heartless or mindless, he can offer only official
preference, not truth, and he becomes as much a perpetuator of the
wrongs of history as was the dictatorial Mrs. Glendinning or the early
king Media.
The third “digression” is most basic to the story, and it comprises
the conversation of the Purser and the Surgeon together with the
ballad of “Billy in the Darbies.”
Neither the Purser nor the Surgeon are the men to explain what
happened at Billy’s execution. The Purser is a ruddy and rotund little
accountant of a man who in a few words is presented as a man of
no mind, insight, or imagination. The Surgeon is the worst kind of
pontificator upon dry facts, being able to cope with experience only
in the measurable quantities of what is already known, and avoiding

Billy Budd 85
all the very real problems which he cannot explain. Neither of these
men are capable of aspiration or of evaluating new experience or of
re-evaluating the old. Theirs is the meaningless empiricism of the
circumscribed prudential. These two men tell the reader that Billy did
not die as hanged men always die. There was no spasmodic move-
ment of the corpse. For neither of these men can Billy be a symbol,
be anything but a corpse. It is in the irony of presenting the picture of
Billy’s death through the eyes of men who cannot evaluate what they
see that the suggestion is established that Billy is not a corpse. The
meaning of this suggestion is intensified in the Ballad. Members of
the Indomitable’s crew revere Billy’s memory and follow the progress
of the yard on which Billy was hung, for “to them a chip of it was
as a piece of the Cross.” Billy’s memory is perpetuated in a kind of
Passion-hymn which is narrated in the first person, as if from Billy’s
point of view. The narrative action of the Ballad seems to be taking
place in Billy’s mind while he lies in the darbies, just before the execu-
tion. But the last two sentences bring the shock of recognition of a
type, the realization that this is the voice of the “dead” man in the
deep . . . dormant . . . waiting.
. . . Sentry, are you there?

Just ease these darbies at the wrist,
and roll me over fair.
I am sleepy, and the oozy weeds about me twist.
Billy never died. The aspiring yearning and goodness of man’s heart
is indestructible. So too, as Vere’s defeat indicates, is history. Either
heartfulness will continue in a new history made by men like Vere, or
history will remain unchanged and heartfulness will continue as the
chaos of the French Revolution or as the predisposition which will
prompt another quester. The furious hopefulness of the work is in
the indestructibility of human aspiration. The furious hopelessness of
the work is that nothing but the wrong channels for that aspiration
remain. So the human heart will continue to be the trap of the lure,
the primitive perfection, the chronometrical Adam-Christ, who still
exists in the deeps of human history and experience, mired by the
oozy weeds and events of the man-of-war world. As lure, it can do
nothing to pave the mire and raze the weeds, can be nothing but that
which the quester will follow, at which the Satan will spring, by which

86 Herman Melville
the ship-world’s common “people” will be deceived, and the cycle will
continue . . . and continue . . . and continue.
This last book is not an “acceptance” either of God or of expedi-
ency for its own sake. Billy Budd accepts only what all the books before
it accepted: that if history is the determinant of society, so too society
is the determinant of history; that if man is not the cosmic creator
and killer, he is at least his own social and individual creator and killer.
Billy Budd accepts not an absolute fate to which man must bow, but
rather it offers the bitterness of the proposition that man may never
create the kind of fate that he can place at his own disposal. But for
the method for attaining the yearnings of the heart, even in defeat,
Melville could easily be entirely characterized by the bitter fatalism
which characterized his civil war poem, “The Conflict of Convictions,”
in which he wrote,
Power unanointed may come—

Dominion (unsought by the free)
And the Iron Dome,
Stronger for stress and strain,
Fling her huge shadow athwart the main;
But the Founder’s dream shall flee.
Age after age shall be
As age after age has been,
(From man’s changeless heart their way they win);
And death be busy with all who strive—
Death with silent negative.
Yea and Nay—
Each Hath His Say;
But God He Keeps The Middle Way.
None Was By
When He Spread The Sky:
Wisdom Is Vain, And Prophesy.
Melville was not able to deduce a changed history from the facts of
his times, and therefore could not create a Captain Vere who was in
charge of not one ship but all of society—for having then created
the proper leader, he would have had to create the picture of the
Utopian good society, a task for which in his history and his realism
Melville could find no justification. It is the mass of men, the society,

Billy Budd 87
that holds the choice of fates; so Vere, as hero, could not be allowed
to triumph, and he had to die. As an artist Melville was too honest
a symbolist—too honest a liar—too realistically immersed in the
destructive element of reflection upon truth to create a shallow happy
ending of the universally reformed society, which would be a decep-
tion to the facts of his world and time. Like Joyce, Melville was trying
to create the uncreated conscience of his human race. And he could
find that conscience properly directed only in a man like Vere, for
the conscience, the morality, and the act could not be divorced one
from the other. It is only the Vere who can lead the Jarl and Samoa
and Lucy and Starbuck and Bulkington through the correct courses
of conscious and heartfelt action, no matter how official and heart-
denying those actions might appear to be. It is this implicit prescrip-
tion for behavior, together with the God-time-zero which facelessly
puts forth the face of all the infinite possibilities of phenomena, that
accounts for the dualities and “ambiguities,” in all their modifications,
in the enormous world of Herman Melville.
NOTES
1. My “digressions” are not arranged as Melville lists his. After the
“digressions” of the conversation between the Purser and the
Surgeon, and the sea burial of Billy, the narrator goes on to say
that the further “digressions” of the sequel to the story can be
told in three additional short chapters.

BRAVE NEW WORLD
(ALDOUS HUXLEY)
,.
“State versus the Individual:
Civil Disobedience in Brave New World ”
by Jake Pollerd, Queen Mary,
University of London
At the time of writing Brave New World (1932), Aldous Huxley feared
industrial capitalism would “standardize the human individual”:
Physically and mentally each one of us is unique. Any culture

which, in the interests of efficiency or in the name of some
political or religious dogma, seeks to standardize the human
individual, commits an outrage against man’s biological nature.
(Brave New World Revisited 36)
In Brave New World Huxley creates just such a place, a place where a
global federation of World Controllers force genetically engineered,
behaviorally conditioned, and narcotically controlled citizens into
conformity. In such a place, to think and act independently is to
commit civil disobedience. Against this background of human homo-
geneity and conformity, Huxley’s chief characters—Bernard Marx,
Helmholtz Watson, and John the Savage—assert their individuality
and challenge the insipid values the World State enshrines. All three
defy civil order. And, whether they succeed or fail in their efforts, they
proffer resistance, becoming models of civil disobedience.
89

90 Aldous Huxley
In the opening chapters, Huxley deftly sketches out the sinister

new methods of human manufacture practiced in the World State.
The Director of Hatcheries and Conditioning explains to a group
of students how ova are harvested, fertilized, and subjected to
Bokanovsky’s Process, whereby an embryo is made to divide not
once (which would result in twins) but many times, yielding up to
ninety-six identical human beings. In conjunction with Podsnap’s
Technique (which radically accelerates the ripening process), a single
ovary can be made to produce on average “eleven thousand brothers
and sisters in a hundred and fifty batches of identical twins.” The
“principle of mass production,” the Director tells his students, has
been “applied to biology” (5). In the year A.F. 632, the bible or
foundational text on which the state is based is My Life and Work
(1922) by the industrialist Henry Ford (A.F. stands for After Ford).
Huxley was appalled by the dehumanizing new efficiency schemes
pioneered by Ford and Frederick Winslow Taylor, which sought to
lash men to the Procrustean bed of the shop-floor or machine, so
that each worker was given, in the words of Ford, “not a square inch,
and certainly not a square foot, more than he requires” (My Life and
Work, quoted in Sexton 90). Huxley takes Ford’s aim to its logical
extreme in Brave New World, wherein not only are human beings
biologically engineered to meet the physical requirements of the job
they are predestined to perform (hence the embryos of “chemical
workers” are “trained in the toleration of lead, caustic soda, tar [and]
chlorine” (13) ), but also the lower castes are specifically manufac-
tured to fit the machines with which they will work. For instance, in
the helicopter lighting-sets factory:
One hundred and seven heat-conditioned Epsilon Senegalese

were working in the foundry. Thirty-three Delta females, long-
headed, sandy, with narrow pelvises, and all within 20 millimetres
of 1 metre 69 centimetres tall, were cutting screws. In the
assembling room, the dynamos were being put together by two
sets of Gamma-Plus dwarfs. The two low work-tables faced one
another; between crawled the conveyor with its load of separate
parts; forty-seven blond heads were confronted by forty-seven
brown ones. Forty-seven snubs by forty-seven hooks; forty-seven
receding by forty-seven prognathous chins. (138)

Brave New World 91
After the embryos mature and are “decanted,” the resultant infants
are raised by the state, which subjects them to a rigorous process
of psychological conditioning, thereby ensuring that its citizens are
perfectly satisfied with their caste and unthinkingly uphold the values
of the World State. In spite of these comprehensive precautions, a
few individuals, such as Bernard Marx, slip through the net. Due
to the presence of alcohol in his blood-surrogate (that at any rate is
the rumor) the Alpha Plus Bernard has the physique of a diminutive
Gamma, which leaves him feeling painfully self-conscious and inad-
equate, since Alphas are conditioned to be tall and muscular. “Hence
the laughter,” the narrator notes,
of the women to whom he made proposals, the practical

joking of his equals among the men. The mockery made
him feel an outsider; and feeling like an outsider he behaved
like one, which increased the prejudice against him and
intensified the contempt and hostility aroused by his physical
defects. Which in turn increased his sense of being alien and
alone. (55–56)
Bernard’s individuality leads him to adopt several heretical prac-

tices, such as spending time alone, refusing to take soma (the state-
sponsored drug), and shunning conventional leisure pursuits (such as
Centrifugal Bumble-puppy and Musical Bridge). As a sleep-teaching
specialist, Bernard perceives the extent to which people are “enslaved
by [their] conditioning” (78). For instance, the moral imperative to be
sexually promiscuous largely derives from having had the hypnotic
proverb “everyone belongs to everyone else” drummed into the uncon-
scious of every child sixty-two thousand times (34).
The World State is so constituted that its citizens need not
live in fear of strong emotion, since the causes—namely the family,
monogamous relationships, sickness, old age, religion, and art—have
been eradicated in the name of social stability. The World Controller
Mustapha Mond explains that without technology half the present
population would starve to death, therefore the wheels of the machine
“must keep on turning,” and there “must be men to tend them . . . sane
men, obedient men, stable in contentment,” rather than men deranged
by love, guilt, and the Oedipus complex (36).

92 Aldous Huxley
Recognizing that “[f ]eeling lurks in that interval of time between

desire and its consummation,” the World State places a moral
premium on infantile self-indulgence (37). Hence the would-be rebel
Bernard Marx tries his hand at self-denial by attempting not to sleep
with Lenina on their first date. Bernard finds that while the spirit is
willing the flesh is weak; however, he has the presence of mind to sulk
about it afterward: “I want to know what passion is,” he tells Lenina,
“I want to feel something strongly” (81).
The only person who understands him is his friend, Helmholtz
Watson, who lectures at the College of Emotional Engineering. But
while Bernard’s resentful sense of isolation derives from his failure to
conform, Helmholtz is a Renaissance man whose sexual, social, and
athletic success sets him apart from his fellow Alphas. Despite their
differences, “[w]hat the two men shared was the knowledge that they
were individuals” (58). Perhaps unsurprisingly, Helmholtz proves to
be more successful at self-denial than Bernard, and he reports that
his newfound chastity has led him to believe that he has “something
important to say and the power to say it” (59). The problem is that
in A.F. 632 there’s no such thing as art or literature, and Helmholtz
cannot express his latent violence and originality by writing “an article
about a Community Sing, or the latest improvement in scent organs”
(60). Nonetheless, Helmholtz writes a poem about solitude and reads
it to his scandalized students, who report him to the Principal.
For Huxley, art was the apotheosis of individualism, and he was
consequently concerned that art and literature were being standard-
ized by new technologies, such as the cinema, which relied on the
principles of mass production. “The higher the degree of standardiza-
tion in popular literature and art,” writes Huxley in “The Outlook for
American Culture” (1927),
the greater the profit for the manufacturer. The economic policy
of the mass-producers of spiritual goods is to secure the greatest
number of buyers for the fewest possible products. Their
tendency, therefore, is to disseminate ideas and art of lowest
quality. (Aldous Huxley: Complete Essays, vol. 3 190)
This development was as regrettable for the guardians of high art as

it was for the passive consumers of popular culture. In “Pleasures”
(1923), Huxley noted that:

Brave New World 93
The working hours of the day are already, for the great majority
of human beings, occupied in the performance of purely
mechanical tasks in which no mental effort, no individuality, no
initiative are required. And now, in the hours of leisure, we turn
to distractions as mechanically stereotyped and demanding
as little intelligence and initiative as does our work. (On the
Margin 50–1)
The egregious vulgarity of the mechanized amusements in Brave

New World, such as sexophone music, the feelies and the scent organ,
reflect Huxley’s anxieties about the future of art. Furthermore, in A.F.
632, not only is literature incompatible with the Fordian culture of
mass consumption—“You can’t consume much if you sit still and read
books,” observes Mustapha Mond (42)—the stultifying blandness
and moronic happiness of the World State has rendered it incompre-
hensible. You “can’t make tragedies,” Mond affirms,
without social instability. The world’s stable now. People are

happy; they get what they want, and they never want what they
can’t get. They’re well off; they’re safe; they’re never ill; they’re
not afraid of death; they’re blissfully ignorant of passion and
old age; they’re plagued with no mothers or fathers; they’ve got
no wives or children, or lovers to feel strongly about; they’re
so conditioned that they can’t help behaving as they ought to
behave. (193–194)
Thus while the poet in Helmholtz Watson admires the language

of Romeo and Juliet, he finds the extravagant emotions of the play
inherently rise and fall. Moreover, it is only subversive ascetics such
as Helmholtz who attempt to write poetry, since art demands the
sublimation of the instincts, whereas the World State is predicated on
a culture of instant gratification (Firchow 314).
The most uncompromising individual in Brave New World is
undoubtedly the Savage. When Bernard meets him in the “Savage
Reservation” he feels a strong affinity with him, since John, by virtue
of his complexion (both his parents are Brave New Worlders), is
even more of an outsider in Malpais than Bernard is in the World
State; and just as Bernard secretly longs to conform to his society,
so John wishes to participate in the rituals and rites from which he

94 Aldous Huxley
is excluded. John’s values have been shaped by his exposure to The

Complete Works of William Shakespeare and the polytheistic religion
practised in Malpais, in which Jesus Christ is worshipped alongside
Zuni gods, such as Awonawilona, and the Navaho deity Estsanatlehi.
He is therefore appalled by the empty hedonism promoted by the
Fordian state and its mass-produced automatons. After witnessing the
grotesque Gammas and Deltas employed at the helicopter lighting-
sets factory, John recalls the eponymous quote from The Tempest (“O
brave new world that has such people in it”) that he had uttered before
leaving Malpais, thinking that the New World would be filled with
morally spotless beauties like his idealized love object, Lenina, and the
mocking gap between his innocent expectations and the sordid reality
causes him to be sick (139).
It is perhaps ironic that the numerous people who have campaigned
to have Brave New World removed from the school curriculum in the
United States have alleged that the book advocates sexual promiscuity
and attacks marriage, religion, and the family. While Huxley unabash-
edly exploits the comic potential of a society in which “everyone
belongs to everyone else,” he cannot be accused of endorsing its values.
In “Personality and Discontinuity of Mind” (1927), Huxley writes:
the youngest of our contemporaries seem to be entirely

uncivilized. And they admit their savagery in these matters, they
abandon themselves to it. “Savagery” is perhaps the wrong word;
for savages are co-ordinated within a rigid framework of taboos.
Our modern savages have no taboos of any sort. They copulate
with the casual promiscuousness of dogs; they make use of every
violent emotion-producing sensation for its own sake, because it
gives a momentary thrill. (Proper Studies 258–259)
Hence the Savage, whose morality is grounded both in tribal taboos

and a version of Christianity (marriage is practised in Malpais), is
more civilized than the savages of the World State. In the same essay,
Huxley disparages the modern “unifying principle” of “social effi-
ciency,” which has replaced the old religious ethics, and which prizes
those qualities, such as avarice, which are associated with material
wealth (253–255). In Brave New World, Huxley imagines the moral
fallout of a society in which Fordism has replaced religion: “All
crosses,” says Mustapha Mond in his history lesson, “had their tops

Brave New World 95
cut and became T’s” in order to commemorate the T-model Ford (45).
The Solidarity Services are necessary substitutes for religion and are
administered in the same instrumental manner as a Violent Passion
Surrogate. Huxley is not lampooning the Eucharist when he depicts
Bernard’s group passing “the loving cup of strawberry ice-cream
soma,” rather he is mocking the poverty of the ceremony the state
has contrived to take its place (70). In the appendix to The Devils of
Loudun (1952), Huxley writes that man has always felt the urge to
transcend his personality, and that in the absence of “upward self-
transcendence” through religion, he has readily embraced the path of
“downward self-transcendence” through music, dance, sex, and drugs.
Given that the Brave New Worlders worship Henry Ford, they must
make do with Community Sings, casual sex, and soma.
Rather than succumbing to the customs of the New World, John
holds himself aloof. For instance, he refuses to take soma, and, despite
his passion for Lenina, he spurns her sexual advances. The tension
between John’s stubborn individualism and the “swarming indistin-
guishable sameness” he sees in the World State is thrown into sharp
relief by Linda’s death (183). On a guided tour of Eton, the Provost
informs John: “Death conditioning begins at eighteen months. Every
tot spends two mornings a week in a Hospital for the Dying,” where
they are desensitized to death with the aid of sweets and toys (142).
But for John death is a “sacred mystery,” and he is therefore outraged
by the intrusion of a Bokanovsky group of Deltas into the ward where
his mother, who has been on a continuous soma holiday since her
return from Malpais, lies dying:
an interminable stream of identical eight-year-old male twins

was pouring into the room. Twin after twin, twin after twin,
they came—a nightmare. Their faces, their repeated face—for
there was only one between the lot of them—puggishly stared,
all nostrils and pale goggling eyes. Their uniform was khaki. All
their mouths hung open. Squealing and chattering they entered.
In a moment, it seemed, the ward was maggoty with them. They
swarmed between the beds, clambered over, crawled under, peeped
into the television boxes, made faces at the patients (177).
When the Savage weeps over Linda’s death, the nurse is aghast at
his “disgusting outcry—as though death were something terrible,

96 Aldous Huxley
as though anyone mattered as much as all that!” (181). Her reaction

is a result of there being neither love nor families in A.F. 632: in a
communal society such as theirs there are no individuals (notwith-
standing exceptions to the rule such as Bernard and Helmholtz) and
therefore everyone is replaceable.
As John watches the hospital employees queuing up for their soma
ration, he reflects that “Linda had been a slave,” both a slave to soma
(the large doses she’d been taking had shortened her life), and a slave
to her conditioning, and that in order to avenge her death he must
empower others to “live in freedom” (185). He stages his revolt by
interrupting the work and exhorting the bewildered Deltas to throw
off the shackles of soma and become free and human as opposed to
enslaved insects. By the time Bernard and Helmholtz arrive at the
hospital, John has precipitated a riot by throwing the soma rations
out of the window. Although the police quickly quell the uprising, it
equates to a rite of passage for John (who has been unable to prove his
manhood in Malpais) and Helmholtz, who rushes to his side, while
the cowardly Bernard is reduced to shouting for help.
For their part in the revolt, as well as their unorthodox behaviour,
Bernard and Helmholtz are exiled to the Falkland Islands, where they
can associate with other individuals unfit for conformity. Thoreau might
well have regarded these islands of individualism as a congenial environ-
ment, for in “Civil Disobedience” he dreams of a state that recognizes
the value of the “individual,” one that “would not think it inconsistent
with its own repose, if a few were to live aloof from it, not meddling
with it, nor embraced by it” (242–243). Although John petitions the
World Controller to join his friends, he is forced to remain in England
to continue the “experiment” (214). The famous debate between the
Savage and Mustapha Mond illustrates the fundamental incompat-
ibility between the former’s ethical beliefs, which are founded on reli-
gion and art, and the amoral technocracy of the World State, which has
sacrificed religion and art on the altar of stability and happiness. It’s
not that John objects to happiness per se, it’s more that, as an individual,
he reserves the right to be unhappy if he so desires, rather than having
happiness imposed from above. He balks at being coddled by the state,
which simply eliminates danger, sickness, and all potential causes of
unhappiness, such as romantic and familial love, rather than allowing its
citizens to choose. “I want God,” he tells Mond, “I want poetry, I want
real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin” (211).

Brave New World 97
It should not be imagined, however, that Huxley wholeheart-

edly endorses the Savage’s worldview; it is merely the lesser of two
evils. In his 1946 foreword to the book, he notes that if he were
to rewrite the novel, he would include a “third alternative” to the
existing choice between the “insanity” of utopia in the New World
and the “lunacy” of primitivism in the Savage Reservation, namely a
small-scale mystical community along the lines of Pala, the utopia he
was to describe in his final novel, Island (1962). John is not meant to
represent, as some critics have claimed, the noble savage. This concept
became popular in the eighteenth century, when a number of philoso-
phers, such as Claude Helvétius and John Locke, posited that man
was innately virtuous, as opposed to originally sinful (the orthodox
Christian position), and argued that inequality was the product of
environment. Huxley, on the other hand, believed that inequality,
such as the demonstrable differences in intelligence, had more to do
with heredity, and disagreed with William Godwin and Percy Shelley,
who held that the original nobility and virtue of primitive man had
been corrupted by civilization (see Huxley’s essays “Inequality” and
“The Future of the Past”). Hence in Brave New World there is nothing
innately virtuous or noble about the savages of Malpais: The men
treat Linda ( John’s mother) like a prostitute, the women whip her
for sleeping with their men, and John is ostracized by their children.
Moreover, as already noted, both John’s parents come from the World
State, and, in addition to being partially educated by Linda, he has
been exposed to the civilizing influence of Shakespeare, and therefore
he cannot be regarded as a savage.
Furthermore, Huxley objected to the primitivism of people such
as D.H. Lawrence, who advocated a reversion to noble savagery as
an antidote to mechanistic modern life. In “Science and Civiliza-
tion” (1932), Huxley argues that since applied science has “allowed
the world’s population to double itself in about three generations,”
the answer is not, as Tolstoy and Lawrence suggest, to abandon
science and return to nature, but to have more “science, well applied.”
Science, he notes, is a morally neutral tool: In the hands of human-
ists, it will be employed to realize “the highest human aspirations,”
as can be seen in Island, in which science plays a beneficent role,
whereas in the hands of capitalists science will be used “to make the
world safe for political economy—to train up a race, not of perfect
human beings, but of perfect mass-producers and mass-consumers,”

98 Aldous Huxley
and this is precisely what has happened in Brave New World (The
Hidden Huxley 106–108).
In an effort “to escape further contamination by the filth of civi-
lized life” (218), John retreats to the country to live as a hermit. In an
abandoned lighthouse in Surrey, he attempts to create a Walden-esque
life of self-sufficiency: “By next spring, his garden would be producing
enough to be independent of the outside world” (218). Indeed, John is
an instinctive transcendentalist who senses the divine in the English
countryside. It is a noteworthy feature of the New World that even
among the upper castes (who are not conditioned to hate the country),
the natural world is perceived as uncanny. In order to move closer to
God, John embarks on a course of physical austerities. The would-be
censors of Brave New World often invoke the Savage’s self-flagellation
as an example of the book’s immorality, but as Huxley points out in
Heaven and Hell (1956), self-flagellation was an orthodox form of
penance in the medieval and Early Modern eras, and helped to induce
“visionary and mystical experience” in its practitioners (120). But the
Brave New Worlders, being ignorant of the very concepts of God and
sin and atonement, cannot help but interpret the practice in a sexual
light, and shatter John’s solitude by arriving en masse after having
witnessed him whipping himself in The Savage of Surrey. In the face
of their collective will—they surround him chanting “Orgy-porgy,”
dancing, and “beating one another in six-eight time” (228)—John
is unable to maintain his individuality, and, abandoning the path of
upward self-transcendence, he gives in to the state-approved road of
soma, herd intoxication, and group sex. Overcome with remorse at
having betrayed the religious and romantic ideals that rendered him
an individual, both in England and Malpais, he commits suicide. Here,
as Albert Camus does in The Myth of Sisyphus, Huxley asks what makes
a life worth living. While for Camus choosing to live means forever
pushing a rock and accepting life as fundamentally absurd, for Huxley
living means choosing, creating, performing—all the acts and gestures
that make us unique. And, at least for the three questioning protago-
nists caught in a social world where voice, expression, and individuality
are denied, in electing to either assimilate or die they defy what tyrants
dictate. In an inhumane world such as the dystopia Huxley creates, we
find little chance of exercising foundational human rights and little
toleration of the attempts made at civil disobedience.

Brave New World 99
WORKS CITED
Firchow, Peter. “Science and Civilization in Huxley’s Brave New World.”
Contemporary Literature 16.3 (Summer 1975): 301–316.
Huxley, Aldous. Brave New World. London: Vintage, 2004.
. Brave New World Revisited. London: Chatto & Windus, 1972.
. The Devils of Loudun. London: Vintage, 2005.
. “The Future of the Past.” Aldous Huxley: Complete Essays. Edited by
Robert S. Baker and James Sexton. Vol. 2, 1926–1929. Chicago: Ivan R.
Dee, 2000. 90–93.
. Heaven and Hell. London: Grafton, 1977.
. Island. London: Vintage, 2005.
. On the Margin: Notes and Essays. London: Chatto & Windus, 1948.
. “The Outlook for American Culture: Some Reflections in a Machine
Age.” Aldous Huxley: Complete Essays. Edited by Robert S. Baker and
James Sexton. Vol. 3, 1930–1935. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2001. 187–193.
. Proper Studies. London: Chatto & Windus, 1927.
. “Science and Civilization.” The Hidden Huxley: Contempt and
Compassion for the Masses 1920–36. Edited by David Bradshaw. London:
Faber & Faber, 1994. 106–114.
Sexton, James. “Brave New World and the Rationalization of Industry.” Critical
Essays on Aldous Huxley. Edited by Jerome Meckier. New York and
London: G.K. Hall & Co., 1996. 88–100.
Thoreau, Henry David. “Civil Disobedience.” Walden and Civil Disobedience.
Edited by Owen Thomas. New York: Norton & Co., 1966. 224–243.

“Civil Disobedience”
(Henry David Thoreau)
,.
“Writing in the Dark”
by Alfred Kazin, in Henry David Thoreau:
Studies and Commentaries (1972)
Introduction
In “Writing in the Dark,” Alfred Kazin discusses Thoreau’s
essay “Civil Disobedience” and its relation to his life and
works. Kazin provides many insights into Thoreau’s distinctly
literary mode of living, which he calls one of the “most tragic
examples in history of a man trying to live his life by writing it.”
Kazin argues that Thoreau’s belief in his ability to construct
life through words rests upon a strong faith in the “spiritual
power” and sovereignty of the individual. This spiritual power,
according to Kazin, is what guides Thoreau’s civil disobedi-
ence. Ruminating on the significance of “Civil Disobedience”
in the age of the modern, “All-Demanding State,” Kazin
concludes that Thoreau’s example “ . . . does not help us
in the face of the state power which we both need for our
welfare and dread for its power over lives.”
f
Kazin, Alfred. “Writing in the Dark.” Henry David Thoreau: Studies and
Commentaries. Edited by Walter Harding et al. Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh
Dickinson UP, 1972. 34–52.
101

102 Henry David Thoreau
In the Morgan Library in New York one can see the box that Thoreau
built to hold his journals. This work runs to thirty-nine manuscript
volumes and fourteen published volumes. It contains nearly two
million words, more than 7000 printed pages. I do not know if it is
the longest journal ever kept; probably not, for Thoreau, who kept it
assiduously from the time he was twenty, died before he was forty-five,
probably of the struggle I am about to describe. But of one thing about
this journal I am sure; it is one of the most fanatical, most arduous,
most tragic examples in history of a man trying to live his life by
writing it—of a man seeking to shape his life, to make it, by words, as
if words alone would not merely report his life but become his life by
the fiercest control that language can exert.
The greatest part of Thoreau’s life was writing, and this is probably
true of many writers, especially in our time, when so many writers are
interested not merely in composing certain books but in making a
career out of literature. But what makes Thoreau’s case so singular, and
gives such an unnatural severity to his journal itself, is that the work
of art he was seeking to create was really himself—his life was the
explicit existence that he tried to make out of words. The act of writing
became for him not a withdrawal from life, a compensation for life, a
higher form of life—all of which it has been for so many writers since
Romanticism identified the act of composition with personal salva-
tion. It became a symbolic form of living, a way of living, his way of
living. Writing was this close to living, parallel to living, you might say,
because the only subject of Thoreau’s life was himself. He transcribed
his life directly onto paper—by which I do not mean that he reported
it actually, but that he sought to capture experience in just one form:
the sensations and thoughts of a man walking about all day long. To
this commonplace daily round he was restricted by his own literal
experience, for he did not wish in the slightest to invent anything
and was incapable of doing so. But he was also restricted by the fact
that he had no experience to report except being a writer and looking
for topics. Thoreau never married. Wherever possible, as one can tell
from his most famous book, he lived alone; but since this was in fact
not always possible, for many members of his family kept together by
not marrying and also had the family’s pencil business to keep them
together, he went about alone and became a naturalist in his own idio-
syncratic style, an observer who could find material on every hillside,
a “self-appointed inspector of snow-storms and rain-storms.” He had

“Civil Disobedience” 103
his favorite classics to quote from in his journal, books that he used as
quotations because they were of the greatest practical use to him; he
had this large family, full of eccentrics like himself whom he needed
to get away from, and he had a few friends—associates of his ideas
rather than intimate friends—notably his employer and sometime
patron, Emerson, with whom his journal records the endless friction
that was so necessary in his relation with even the most forbearing
individualists in New England. Otherwise Thoreau might have
felt that he was betraying his ideal life, the life that nobody would
conceive for himself but himself, that he lived only in the epiphanies
of his journal, that nobody could live except with himself alone.
Since books were really personal instruments, and friends were
invariably, sooner or later, to betray his design for life, this left for
subject matter, in a book of two million words, what one might call
the American God, the only God left to these wholly self-dependent
transcendentalists in the New England of the 1840s—Nature.
Thoreau told Moncure Conway that he found in Emerson “a world
where truths existed with the same perfection as the objects he
studied in external nature, his ideals real and exact.” Nature, by which
Emerson meant everything outside the writer for him to explore and
to describe—Nature for Thoreau became the landscape, mostly around
Concord, that he could always walk into. It served as the daily occa-
sion of Thoreau’s journal, the matter that tied Thoreau to the world
outside, that became the world, and that safely gave him something
to write about each day. Nature gave him the outside jobs he took as
a surveyor from time to time to get some money and to keep him in
some practical relation to his town and his neighbors. Nature even
made him a “naturalist,” a collector of specimens and Indian relics,
a student of the weather and of every minute change in the hillsides
that he came to know with the familiarity that another man might
have felt about the body of his wife.
But above all Nature was himself revealed in Nature, it was the
great permissiveness in which he found himself every day. Nature was
perfect freedom, Nature was constant health and interest, Nature was
the perfection of visible existence, the ideal friend, the perfect because
always predictable experience—it was ease and hope and thought such
as no family, and certainly no woman, would ever provide. Nature was
God, because God to Thoreau meant not the Totally Other, what is
most unlike us—but perfect satisfaction.

That is what God had begun to mean to Emerson and other proud
evangels of the new romantic faith that God lives in us and as us—that
God is manifested by the power and trust we feel ourselves. Emerson
was the oracle of a faith that only he could fully understand, because
it rested on his gift for finding God in and through himself. Emerson’s
faith was pure inspiration; without his presence to give testimony, the
intuition’s access to the higher mysteries, or what Coleridge had called
“reason,” had to be painfully approximated by secondary faculties
like the “understanding.” Emerson was thus the unique case among
modern writers of a spiritual genius whose role was essentially public,
such as the founders of religion have played. Without his incompa-
rable face, his living voice, Emerson on the printed page was never to
inspire in later generations what the magnetism of his presence had
created in his own day—a grateful sense on the part of many of his
auditors that here was the founder, the oracle, the teacher of his tribe.
Emerson, a very gifted writer, was first of all the appointed leader who
comes in at the beginning, sounds a new hope and purpose, out of
himself passes spiritual strength to the people.
Thoreau’s life was entirely private and was lived, you might say,
for himself alone. Except for his explosive political concern about the
growing power of the slave interest, which was getting such an influence
over the United States government that Thoreau properly discerned in
it a threat to his absolute freedom as well as an aff ront to his wholly
personal Christianity, he was, of course, not merely indifferent to the
State but contemptuous of it. He was interested in “society” only as
an anthropologist of sorts taking notes on his Concord neighbors and
their peculiar ways. His God was private to himself and really not to
be taught to, or shared with, anyone else. You might say it was imagi-
native pure power, Henry Thoreau’s most perfection acquisition, in a
narrow life that sought only a few acquisitions, and these the brightest
and purest—pure morality, pure love, pure creation in the pages of his
journal he rewrote each night from the notes taken on his walks.
God was not a person; He was the meaning you caught in the
woods as you passed. But of course other poets of nature were saying
this in the first half of the nineteenth century in England, Germany,
and the United States. What Thoreau was saying, in prose of excep-
tional vibration, was that he had this God, this immanence in the
woods, for and to himself whenever he wanted to; that he had only
to walk out every afternoon (having spent the morning rewriting his

field notes for his formal journal), to walk into the woods, to sit on the
cliffs and look out over the Concord River and Conantum hills, for
the perfect satisfaction to return again. As late as 1857, he could write
in his journal: “ . . . cold and solitude are friends of mine . . . I come to
my solitary woodland walk as the homesick go home. This stillness,
solitude, wildness of nature is a kind of thoroughwort or boneset, to
my intellect. This is what I go out to seek. It is as if I always met in
those places some grand, serene, immortal, infinitely encouraging,
though invisible companion, and walked with him.”
The satisfaction lay first of all in the daily, easy access to revela-
tion, for sauntering—a word which Thoreau playfully derived from
à la sainté terre, to the holy land—his mind dreamily overran what
he saw even when he was most assiduously playing the inspector
of snowstorms and rainstorms, overran it and filled up the spaces
with evidence of design, growth, meaning. If you constantly note the
minute changes in plants and animals, you create the figure of Nature
as a single organism with the irresistible tendency to explain herself
to you. The visible surface of things then shines with the truth of the
evolutionary moral that Emerson had so contentedly taken away from
his visit to the Botanical Garden in Paris on July 13, 1833, of which he
wrote—“Not a form so grotesque, so savage, nor so beautiful but is an
expression of some property inherent in man the observer,—an occult
relation between the very scorpions and man. I feel the centipede in
me,—cayman, carp, eagle, and fox. I am moved by strange sympathies;
I say continually ‘I will be a naturalist.’” Thoreau’s sympathies with
the rough and the wild were so intense that he hauntingly identified
himself with other forms of life, but they also dumbly and pleas-
ingly arranged themselves to an eye that could not have been more
unlike the professional naturalist’s disinterestedness and experimental
method. Thoreau sought ecstasy.
This perfect satisfaction could not always be found; there were
inevitable days of bleakness, dissatisfaction, and weakness. But
Thoreau, using nature and God as instruments of personal power and
happiness, was able to create on paper his own life of satisfaction, to
retain in words the aura of some bygone ecstasy he had found through
nature. He was able, thus, to make a life by writing it. This was his great
instrument, a prose that always took the form of personal experience,
a prose created wholly out of remembrance and its transfiguration, a
prose in which the word sought not only to commemorate a thing but

to replace it. What had been lost could always be found again on the
page, and what had merely been wished for could be described as if
it were remembered. Memory was Thoreau’s imagination to the point
where it relived the original so intensely that it replaced it as style. The
dreaming mind of the writer, remembering his life, created it.
But this called for the most relentless control over life by style,
by an attentiveness to the uses of words that quite wore him out, by
calculated epigrams, puns, paradoxes, plays on words, ingenuities,
quotations, that, as he complained in his journal of 1854, were his
faults of style. He had practiced these “faults of style” so long that
he had become weary of his own strategy, for even the most devoted
reader of Thoreau is likely to see through his literary tricks. But these
“tricks,” or “faults of style,” are the essence of Thoreau’s genius and
the reason for his enduring appeal. They have an extraordinary ability
to evoke the moment, the instant flash of experience, to give us the
taste of existence itself. They give us the glory of a moment—single,
concrete, singular.
Thoreau was always, I think, a young man, and certainly oriented,
as Thornton Wilder put it, to childhood. He addressed his most famous
book to “poor students,” and his most admiring readers, whether they
are young or not, always recognize the inner feeling of youth in his
pages—the absoluteness of his impatience with authority and his all
too conscious revolt against it, the natural vagabondage, the faith in
some infinite world just over the next horizon. Students recognize in
Henry Thoreau a classic near their own age and condition.
All his feelings are absolutes, as his political ideals will be. There
is none of that subtlety, that odd and winning two-handedness, that
one finds in Emerson’s simultaneous obligation to both his deepest
insights and to the social world he thinks in. Thoreau wrote in his
journal for 1851 that “no experience which I have today comes up
to, or is comparable with, the experiences of my boyhood . . . As far
back as I can remember I have unconsciously referred to the experi-
ences of a previous state of existence . . . Formerly, methought, nature
developed as I developed, and grew up with me. My life was ecstasy.
In youth, before I lost any of my senses, I can remember that I was all
alive, and inhabited my body with inexpressible satisfaction.”
This happiness is what Thoreau’s admirers turn to him for—it is a
special consonance of feeling between the pilgrim and his landscape.
And it was not so much written as rewritten; whatever the moment

originally was, his expression of it was forged, fabricated, worked

over and over, soldered together, you might say, from fragmentary
responses, to make those single sentences that were Thoreau’s highest
achievement, and indeed, his highest aim. For in such sentences, and
not just by those sentences, a man could live. Transcendentalism rested
on style. Each of Thoreau’s sentences is a culmination of his life, the
fruit of his hallucinated attachment to the visible world; each was a
precious particle of existence, existence pure, the life of Thoreau at
the very heart. Each was victory over the long, unconscious loneli-
ness; and how many people, with far more happiness in others than
Thoreau ever wanted or expected, can say that their life is all victory?
how many can anticipate a succession of victories? In the end was the
word, always the word:
When I was four years old, as I well remember, I was

brought from Boston to this my native town, through these
very woods and fields, to the pond. It is one of the oldest
scenes stamped on my memory. And tonight my flute has
waked the echoes over that very water. The pines still stand
here older than I; or, if some have fallen, I have cooked my
supper with their stumps, and a new growth is rising all
around, preparing another aspect for new infant eyes. Almost
the same johnwort springs from the same perennial root in
this pasture, and even I have at length helped to clothe that
fabulous landscape of my infant dreams, and one of the results
of my presence and influence is seen in these bean leaves, corn
blades, and potato vines.
A student once wrote in a paper on Thoreau: “This man, too

honest, too physically aware to fashion an imagined scene, . . .
searched to exhaustion a scene that sometimes appeared empty.” But
another student, as if to answer this, noted that after writing Walden
Thoreau could look about him, as we do today when we visit Walden
Pond, with the feeling that this environment had been changed by
his writing the book. Thoreau did create and recreate Walden Pond;
the total attachment to that bit of land, from the hut which became
for him, Ellery Channing said, the wooden inkstand in which he
lived—this attachment is as total and single in its all-absorbing atten-
tiveness as a baby’s to its mother, as a prisoner to his cell. Walden is

the record of a love blind to everything but what it can gather from
that love, to everything but the force of its will. That is why those to
whom their own will still stands supreme, to whom freedom is the
freedom of their will, solitary but sovereign, can recognize in Walden
the youthful climate of feeling that is touched by doom but not by
tragedy—to whom death seems easier than any blow whatever from
the social compact.
For youth the center of the world is itself, and the center is bright
with the excitement of the will. There is no drama like that of being
young, for then each experience can be overwhelming. Thoreau knew
how to be young. He knew, as he said, how to live deep and suck
all the marrow out of life. “I went to the woods because I wished to
live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I
could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, to
discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life,
living is so dear; nor did I wish to practise resignation, unless it was
quite necessary.” That is youth speaking, for only youth thinks that it
can live by deliberation, that a man’s whole happiness can be planned
like a day off, that perfect satisfaction can be achieved without any
friction whatever, without friends, without sex, with a God who is
always and only the perfect friend, and all this in relation to a piece of
land, a pond, practicing the gospel of perfection. Yet only youth ever
feels so alone, and being alone, burns to create its life—where so many
people merely spend theirs. Thoreau’s greatness lies in his genius for
evoking the moment, in sentence after sentence each of which is like
a moment. For only the individual in the most private accesses of his
experience knows what a moment is; it is a unit too small for history,
too precious for society. It belongs only to the private consciousness.
And Thoreau’s predominating aim was to save his life, not to spend
it, to be as economical about his life as his maiden aunts were about
the sugar in the boarding house they ran. He wanted to live, to live
supremely, and always on his own terms, saving his life for still higher
things as he went.
Here is where the State comes in. Nature, as we know, Thoreau
could always transcendentalize. No storms or solitude or discomfort
could turn him out of his fanatical control there. He felt at home in
the world of savages. If he was in any sense the scientist he occasion-
ally wanted to be, it was when he felt superior and untouched by
dumb things in nature. The only object in nature that seems genuinely

to have frightened him was Mount Katahdin in Maine. Describing

the night he spent on the summit, he significantly confessed: “I stand
in awe of my body, this matter to which I am bound has become so
strange to me. I fear not spirits, ghosts, of which I am one . . . but
I fear bodies, I tremble to meet them. What is this Titan that has
possession of me? Talk of our life in nature—daily to be shown matter,
to come in contact with it—rocks, trees, wind on our cheeks! the solid
earth, the actual world! the common sense! Contact! Contact! Who are
we? where are we?”
Still, he could always get off that mountain and return to the
village of which he said, “I could write a book called Concord,” and
which he began to see wholly as the book he was writing in his journal.
But the State, which to begin with was represented by other men he
could not always ignore—this was to become the Other that he could
not domesticate as he did God, Nature, and other men’s books. In
chapter 8 of Walden, “The Village,” he describes his arrest ( July, 1846)
as he was on his way to the cobbler’s. He was arrested for not paying
the poll tax that in those days was still exacted by the state in behalf
of the church. Thoreau’s father had been enrolled in the church, and
Thoreau’s own name should not have been on the roll. He spent a
peaceful, dreamy night in jail. In “Civil Disobedience” he reports that
“the night in prison was novel and interesting enough . . . It was like
travelling into a far country, such as I had never expected to behold,
to lie there for one night . . . It was to see my native village in the
light of the Middle Ages, and our Concord was turned into a Rhine
stream, and visions of knights and castles passed before me.” At the
suggestion of the Concord selectmen, he filed a statement after he had
demanded that his name be dropped from the church rolls: know all
men by these presents that i, henry thoreau, do not wish to
be regarded as a member of any incorporated society which
i have not joined. The experience was not a traumatic one, and on
being released he “returned to the woods in season to get my dinner
of huckleberries on Fair Haven Hill.” But he says truly, “I was never
molested by any person but those who represented the State.”
In Walden Thoreau was to say of his prison experience that it
showed the inability of society to stand “odd fellows” like himself. In
the essay “Civil Disobedience,” 1849, he was to say in a most superior
way that the State supposed “I was mere flesh and blood and bones,
to be locked up,” and since it could not recognize that his immortal

spirit was free, “I saw that the State was half-witted, that it was timid
as a lone woman with her silver spoons . . . and I lost all my remaining
respect for it, and pitied it.”
But what gives “Civil Disobedience” its urgency is that between
1846, when he was arrested for a tax he should have paid in 1840,
and 1848, when he wrote it, the State had ceased to be his friend
the Concord sheriff, Sam Staples, who so pleasantly took him off to the
local hoosegow, but the United States government, which, under the
leadership of imperialists like President James Polk and the Southern
planters who were determined to add new land for their cotton
culture, was making war on Mexico and would take away half its terri-
tory in the form of California, Texas, Arizona, and New Mexico. The
Mexican War was openly one for plunder, as Lincoln and many other
Americans charged. But it was the first significant shock to Thoreau’s
rather complacent position that the individual can be free, as free as he
likes, in and for himself, though his neighbors think him odd. Oddity,
however, was no longer enough to sustain total independence from
society. Despite Thoreau’s opposition to slavery in principle, he knew
no Negroes, had never experienced the slightest social oppression. He
was a radical individualist very well able to support this position in
Concord; he had a share in the family’s pencil business, but was not
confined by it, and he was indeed as free as air—free to walk about all
day long as he pleased, free to build himself a shack on Walden Pond
and there prepare to write a book, free to walk home any night for
supper at the family boarding house. Up until the Mexican War—and
even more urgently, the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 and finally John
Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry in 1859—Thoreau’s only social antago-
nist was the disapproval, mockery, or indifference of his neighbors in
Concord. He never knew what the struggle of modern politics can
mean for people who identify and associate with each other because
they recognize their common condition. Thoreau was a pure idealist,
living on principle—typical of New England in his condescension
to the Irish immigrants, properly indignant about slavery in far-off
Mississippi, but otherwise, as he wrote Walden to prove, a man who
proposed to teach others to be as free of society as himself.
“Civil Disobedience” is stirring, especially today, because of the
urgency of its personal morality. As is usual with Thoreau, he seems to
be putting his whole soul into the protest against injustice committed
by the state. He affirms the absolute right of the individual to obey his

own conscience in defiance of an unknown law. But despite his usual

personal heat, he tends to moralize the subject wholly and to make it
not really serious. He makes a totally ridiculous object of the State,
he turns its demands on him into a pure aff ront, and is telling it to
stop being so pretentious and please to disappear. This is certainly
refreshing. But anyone who thinks it is a guide to his own political
action these days will have to defend the total literary anarchism that
is behind it. And it is no use, in this particular, identifying Gandhi
with it, for Gandhi, as a young leader of the oppressed Indians in
South Africa, was looking for some political strategy by which to
resist a totally oppressive racist regime. There were no laws to protect
the Indians. Thoreau’s essay is a noble, ringing reiteration of the
highest religious individualism as a self-evident social principle. The
absolute freedom of the individual like himself is his highest good,
and the State is not so much the oppressor of this individual as his
rival. How dare this Power get in my way? For Thoreau the problem
is simply one of putting the highest possible value on the individual
rather than on the state. This is urgent because we are all individuals
first, and because it is sometimes necessary to obey oneself rather
than the State. But for the greatest part, Thoreau is not aware that the
individual’s problem may be how to resist his state when he is already
so much bound up with it. He can hardly just turn his back on it.
The significantly political passages in the essay have to do with
what Thoreau calls slavery in Massachusetts. He of all people could
not grant that property is the greatest passion and the root of most
social conflicts and wars. But he insisted “that if one thousand, if one
hundred, if ten men whom I could name—if ten honest men only—ay,
if one Honest man, in this State of Massachusetts, ceasing to hold slaves,
were actually to withdraw from this co-partnership, and be locked
up in the county jail therefor, it would be the abolition of slavery in
America.” With his marvellous instinct for justice, for pure Christi-
anity, for the deep-rooted rights of the individual soul, he said “Under
a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just
man is also a prison.” But morally invigorating as this is, it would
perhaps not have helped the fugitive slave, and the Mexican prisoner
on parole, and the Indian come to plead the wrongs of his race when,
as Thoreau said, they came to the prison and found the best spirits
of Massachusetts there. Thoreau estimated the power of individual
example beyond any other device in politics, but he did not explain

how the usefulness of example could communicate itself to people

who were in fact slaves, and not free.
By 1850 the fury of the coming war could already be felt in Massa-
chusetts. The Fugitive Slave Law was made part of the compromise
of 1850, and now Thoreau really exploded. “There is not one slave in
Nebraska; there are perhaps a million slaves in Massachusetts.” With
all his uncompromising idealism he attacked every possible expedi-
ency connected with politics, and wrote: “They who have been bred in
the school of politics fail now and always to face the facts. They put
off the day of settlement indefinitely, and meanwhile, the debt accu-
mulates.” The “idea of turning a man into a sausage” is not worse than
to obey the Fugitive Slave Law. Rhythmically, he pounded away at the
State, the Press, the Church, all institutions leagued, as he felt, by this
infamous conspiracy to send runaway slaves back to their masters. He
mimicked the attitude of the timorous, law-obeying citizen: “Do what
you will, O Government! with my wife and children . . . I will obey
your commands to the letter . . . I will peaceably pursue my chosen
calling on this fair earth, until perchance, one day, when I have put
on mourning for them dead, I shall have persuaded you to relent.”
Each sentence is, as usual, an absolute in itself; each is a distillation
of Thoreau’s deepest feelings. Yet it is impossible to imagine the most
passionately anti-Vietnam writer saying today that, in the face of such
evil, “I need not say what match I would touch, what system endeavor
to blow up . . .” We have all lived too much under the shadow of the
Bomb to be persuaded by the violence of language.
Thoreau’s greatest affirmation in politics (something different
from a great political utterance) is, I think, A Plea For Captain John
Brown, delivered in the Concord Town Hall on the evening of
October 30, 1859. Emerson’s son Edward, who heard Thoreau deliver
this, said that he read his speech as if it burned him. There is nothing
quite so strong elsewhere in Thoreau’s work; all the dammed-up
violence of the man’s solitary life has come out in sympathy with
Brown’s violence. It is clear that Brown’s attack on Harpers Ferry
roused in Thoreau a powerful sense of identification. Apocalypse
had come. John Brown’s favorite maxim was: “without the shedding
of blood there is no remission of sins.” Brown’s raid was exactly the
kind of mad, wild, desperate, and headlong attack on the authority
of the United States, on the support it gave to the slave system, that
Thoreau’s ecstatic individualism sympathized with. It was too violent

an act for Thoreau to commit himself; he had long since given up

the use of firearms, and was more or less of a vegetarian. But Brown
represented in the most convulsively personal way the hatred of
injustice that was Thoreau’s most significant political passion—and
this was literally a hatred, more so than he could acknowledge to
himself, a hatred of anyone as well as anything that marred the
perfect design of his all-too-severe moral principles.
All his life, Thoreau had been saying that there are two realms.
One is of grace, which is a gift and so belongs only to the gifted; the
other is of mediocrity. One is of freedom, which is the absolute value
because only the gifted can follow it into the infinite where its beauty
is made fully manifest; the other of acquiescence and conformism,
another word for which is stupidity. One is of God, whom His elect,
the most gifted, know as no one else can ever know Him; the other is
of the tyranny exacted by the mediocre in society. John Brown, whom
all the leading historians, judges, lawyers, and respectable people solidly
denounced as mad; John Brown, who indeed had so much madness
in his background, nevertheless represented to Thoreau the gifted
man’s, the ideal Puritan’s, outraged inability to compromise between
these two realms. Nothing is worse than evil except the toleration of
it, thought John Brown, and so he tried to strike at evil itself. This
directness proved his moral genius to Thoreau. Then, as the State of
Virginia and the Government of the United States rallied all its forces
to crush this man and to hang him, it turned out, to Thoreau’s horror,
that this exceptional man was not understood. The State, which would
do nothing to respect the slave’s human rights, and had in deference to
Southern opinion acknowledged its duty to send back every runaway
slave, would indeed obliterate John Brown with an energy that it had
never showed in defense of helpless human beings.
It was this that roused Thoreau to the burning exaltation that fills
A Plea For Captain John Brown. He had found his hero in the man of
action who proclaimed that his action was only the force of the highest
principles. Thoreau’s “plea” indeed pleads principle as the irresistible
force. The pure, vehement personalism that had been Thoreau’s life,
in words, now sees itself turning into deeds. The pure love of Christ,
striking against obstinately uncomprehending, resisting human heads,
turns into pure wrath. God has only certain appointed souls to speak
and fight for Him, and that is the secret of New England. “We aspire
to be something more than stupid and timid chattels, pretending to

read history and our Bibles, but desecrating every house and every
day we breathe in . . . At least a million of the free inhabitants of the
United States would have rejoiced if he had succeeded . . . Though we
wear no crape, the thought of that man’s position and probable fate
is spoiling many a man’s day here at the North for other thinking. If
anyone who has seen him here can pursue successfully any other train
of thought, I do not know what he is made of. If there is any such who
gets his usual allowance of sleep, I will warrant him to fatten easily
under any circumstances which do not touch his body or his purse.”
But for himself, Thoreau added, “I put a piece of paper and a pencil
under my pillow, and when I could not sleep I wrote in the dark.”
He wrote in the dark. Writing was what he had lived for, lived by,
lived in. And now, when his great friend was being hanged in Charles-
town prison, he could only speak for. The word was light, the word
was the Church, and now the word was the deed. This was Thoreau’s
only contribution to the struggle that was not for John Brown’s body
but for righteousness. He called the compromisers “mere figureheads
upon a hulk, with livers in the place of hearts.” He said of the orga-
nized Church that it always “excommunicates Christ while it exists.”
He called the government this most hypocritical and diabolical govern-
ment, and mimicked its saying to protesters like himself: “What do
you assault me for? Am I not an honest man? Cease agitation on this
subject, or I will make a slave of you, too, or else hang you.” He said, “I
am here to plead this cause with you. I plead not for his life, but for his
character—his immortal life; and so it becomes your cause wholly, and
is not his in the least. Some eighteen hundred years ago Christ was
crucified; this morning, perchance, Captain Brown was hung. These
are the two ends of a chain which is not without its links.”
There was nothing Thoreau could do except to say these things.
Brown, who was quite a sayer himself, had said to the court: “Had I
so interfered in behalf of the rich; the powerful, the intelligent, the
so-called great . . . it would have been all right . . . I am yet too young
to understand that God is any respecter of persons. I believe that to
have interfered as I have done—as I have always freely admitted I have
done—in defense of His despised poor, was not wrong but right.”
Yet we in our day cannot forget that Brown was punished for
a direct assault on the Government, for seeking to stir up an actual
insurrection. By contrast, our martyrs, in the age of the Big State,
the Totalitarian State, the All-Demanding State, have been inno-

cent children like Anne Frank, who died in concentration camps

simply because they were Jews; isolated German soldiers like Franz
Jägerstätter, beheaded because they would not kill; theologians like
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, executed because they openly opposed killing;
the Polish priest Maximilian Kolbe, who took another man’s place
in one of the “starvation cells” at Auschwitz and died after weeks of
agony. If we have any moral heroes and imminent martyrs today, it is
not men of violence, no matter how holy the cause seems to them, but
Russian writers and poets who are locked up for years in Arctic camps
for sending their manuscripts out of the country; American scientists
who refuse to aid in the destruction of Vietnam and its people; young
students who believe in peace, live by peace, and act for peace. Thoreau
said that “the cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life
which is required to be exchanged for it,” and the cost of nonviolence
itself is sometimes so great in the face of the powerful twentieth-
century state that Thoreau, who identified power only with individual
spiritual power, does not help us in the face of the state power which
we both need for our welfare and dread for its power over lives.
Thoreau did not anticipate the modern state. He distrusted it
even more absolutely than did Jesus in the days when Rome was the
greatest power on earth. Jesus counseled—Render unto Caesar the
things that are Caesar’s. Not only would Thoreau not compromise
with the State; he would not recognize it. Near his end, when the
Civil War broke out, he advised an abolitionist friend to “ignore Fort
Sumter, and old Abe, and all that; for that is just the most fatal, and
indeed, the only fatal weapon you can direct against evil, ever . . .”
In short—“Be ye perfect, even as your Father in Heaven is perfect.”
That was all the power Thoreau knew and believed in, outside of the
writer’s power that he lived by. He would not have believed it possible
that the United States would be reading and applauding Thoreau
without any sense of irony. The greatest irony is that this American
government has become just as self-righteous as Thoreau thought the
individual should be.

Crime and Punishment
(Fyodor Dostoevsky)
,.
“Crime and Punishment Draws the Line”
by Claudia Verhoeven, George Mason University
In Crime and Punishment, Rodion Romanovich Raskolnikov, a college

dropout living in Saint Petersburg, Russia, commits a brutal double
murder, but finds he cannot bear the burden of the ensuing guilt.
Exhausted and half-mad, he turns himself in to the authorities, who
then sentence him to seven years in Siberia. It took Dostoevsky a little
less than two years to write what is considered the first of his major
works, and it was published in a literary journal called the Russian
Messenger, in monthly installments, over the course of 1866.
Eighteen sixty-six was not just any year. That spring, the Russian
revolutionary movement suddenly exploded into violence when
Dmitry Vladimirovich Karakozov—also a college dropout—attempted
to assassinate Tsar Alexander II. This historical context is crucial when
interpreting Crime and Punishment, especially because the assassin
uncannily resembled Raskolnikov. Karakozov and Raskolnikov shared
age, background, psychological profile, beliefs, and ideas. In one
important respect, though, they seemed to differ: Karakozov’s crime
was public and political, while Raskolnikov’s was private and philo-
sophical. Precisely because they are so similar, this difference sticks
out all the more suspiciously. Karakozov’s political violence makes us
think twice about the nature of Raskolnikov’s crime, and ultimately
allows us to see that Dostoevsky deliberately depoliticized the motive
of his famous protagonist.
117

118 Fyodor Dostoevsky
On a first reading, it can seem that there are no politics in Crime

and Punishment at all. This is because Dostoevsky expressly wrote it as
an act of resistance against civil government. Quite literally, the novel
is an artistic expression of the political idea that Dostoevsky’s contem-
poraries should not challenge their station in life, and that Russia
should remain an autocracy, governed by divine right. How does Crime
and Punishment make this political argument, and make it so success-
fully, all the while not appearing to make it at all? What Dostoevsky
did—through a series of strategies that will be discussed below—was
to take the most revolutionary ideas of his time, but present them
in such a distorted way that they end up appearing not political, but
grotesque. Below the surface the novel actually teems with politics.
Dostoevsky had not always been a political conservative. In his
midtwenties—during the repressive reign of Nicholas I—he had held
progressive views and associated with radicals, so much so, in fact, that
he was sent to Siberia for a ten-year spell. Whether his only crime
had been to read out loud to a group of literary enthusiasts Belinsky’s
famous letter to Gogol (in which the former admonishes the latter
for political conservatism and religious obscurantism) or, rather, to
participate in a conspiracy against the autocracy is still not known.
What is known, however, is that in Siberia Dostoevsky underwent a
religious conversion and was ever after a changed man.
He returned from exile on the eve of the so-called era of Great
Reforms. A war had been lost, the old tsar had died, and the new
tsar, Alexander II, had begun to implement a series of reforms—of
the press, universities, courts, local government, military, and, most
importantly, serfdom—to modernize the empire. Lamentably, the
“Tsar-Reformer” refused to relinquish his own absolute right to rule
(thereby inadvertently radicalizing the revolutionary movement),
but what resulted, nevertheless, were “the sixties,” one of the most
interesting and innovative periods in Russian history. Critical reason,
enlightenment, and techno-scientific progress were celebrated; new
media brought a communications revolution; literature and criticism
had a golden age; class distinctions were trampled underfoot; gender
relations questioned; fashions outrageous; etc. It was a decade so
remarkable, in short, that it may rightfully be compared to its extraor-
dinary counterpart in the twentieth century.
Dostoevsky, however, was rather an odd man out in this atmo-
sphere. He was older now, and he was a religious man in the midst

Crime and Punishment 119
of a popular culture that embraced nihilism. Nihilism was a concept

that functioned as shorthand for all sorts of cultural disobedience
ever since the term had been popularized in Turgenev’s Fathers and
Sons (1862). Somewhat more specifically, it may be said to refer to a
combustible mixture of democratic and, for the most part, anti-reli-
gious political ideologies (e.g., socialism). The heroes of the young
generation were the literary critics Chernyshevsky, Dobroliubov, and
Pisarev (all ridiculed—directly or indirectly—in Crime and Punish-
ment), and they were radicals. Dostoevsky was not.
Sensing in the spirit of the sixties a threat to the order of things,
Dostoevsky waged war against its incarnations in his literary works.
His favorite method was to imitate and then parody the enemy: He
would create characters that embraced the ideas of the sixties, and
who then, ostensibly as a result of their sixties attitude, would find
themselves entangled in tragicomic situations. Dostoevsky played this
game of devil’s advocate so well, in fact, that it often seems as if these
dire situations follow logically from the ideas of the sixties. Indeed, it
has often been said that Dostoevsky was uniquely capable of thinking
these ideas through to their inevitable conclusion. Really, however,
what Dostoevsky did was place his characters inside an invisible grid
of religious truth and then measure their ideas by its standards, so that
the end is not a logical, but a foregone conclusion.
This is precisely the trick Dostoevsky plays with Raskolnikov
in Crime and Punishment. The intention is already evident in an
early proposal he sent to Mikhail Katkov, publisher of the Russian
Messenger, to secure publication for Crime and Punishment:
The action is contemporary, this year. A young man, expelled

from the university, petit-bourgeois by social origin, and living
in extreme poverty, after yielding to some strange, “unfinished”
ideas floating in the air, has decided . . . . (Complete Letters 174)
He first presents an exemplar of a well-known social type of the sixties

(young, educated, alienated, and poor, meaning a member of the petit
bourgeois intelligentsia) who is affected by the Zeitgeist (“ideas floating
in the air”). Then, as a direct result of this Zeitgeist, comes the plot:
He has resolved to murder an old woman. . . . He decides to

murder her and rob her in order to make his mother, who

lives in the provinces, happy; to deliver his sister, who lives as

a hired companion for certain landowners, from the lascivious
attentions of the head of the landowner household—attentions
that threaten her with ruin; and to finish the university, go
abroad, and then for his whole life long to be honest, firm,
unswerving in fulfilling his “humanitarian duty to humanity,”
whereby, of course, “the crime will be expiated,” if in fact crime
is the term for that action against a deaf, stupid, malicious, and
sick old woman who does not know why she is alive herself and
who perhaps would have died on her own in a month. (174)
Raskolnikov, in short, rationalizes murder through utilitarianism: Since

so much social use will come of this killing, the end justifies the means
(note the references to sixties dogma Dostoevsky finds especially ridicu-
lous: “humanitarian duty to humanity,” etc.). Dostoevsky goes on to
explain that the young man gets away with it, but then, suddenly,
God’s justice, earthly law, comes into its own, and he finishes by
being compelled to denounce himself. . . . The law of justice and
human nature have come into their own. (175)
God’s justice, earthly law, and the law of justice and human nature: While
hardly an argument, these sentences are the novel’s Archimedean
point. Raskolnikov’s fate unfolds against the background of these
“truths”: However he struggles, he is always already on the way to
Golgotha—because there is no resurrection without the cross. The
distinctly Christian narrative of punishment and redemption that
animates the novel is summed up succinctly by Dostoevsky in the
third of his notebooks for Crime and Punishment:
THE IDEA OF THE NOVEL

1.
THE ORTHODOX POINT OF VIEW,
WHAT ORTHODOXY IS
There is no happiness in comfort. Happiness is bought with
suffering.
Man is not born for happiness. Man earns his happiness,
and always by suffering. (Notebooks 188)

This is really the crux of the novel, and the crux of Dostoevsky’s argu-
ment with his ideological opponents, who held that improvements
in material conditions (comfort) might lead to an overall increase in
human happiness, and that it was worth fighting for this. Not so for
Dostoevsky, for whom man never lives by bread alone.
The fact that Dostoevsky uses his novels to score points for his
political agenda has long ceased to offend or trouble anyone. There is
a long-standing line of argument in Dostoevsky criticism that holds
that, in the end, Dostoevsky the artist always won over Dostoevsky
the ideologist. This idea goes back to the work of the great and enor-
mously influential literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin, who argued that
whatever convictions Dostoevsky himself might have held, the ideas
of his characters were always given a fair hearing: Dostoevsky creates
“free people capable of standing alongside their creator, capable of not
agreeing with him and even of rebelling against him.” (Bakhtin 6)
This is true in Crime and Punishment. After Raskolnikov has already
confessed and been exiled, for example, Dostoevsky still permits that
he “did not repent of his crime” (544). And even after his conversion
(“something seemed to pierce his heart,” etc.), Raskolnikov remains
hesitant about religion: “Can [Sonya’s Orthodox] convictions not be
my convictions now?” (548; 464). But it is also true—and this applies
especially to Crime and Punishment—that, nevertheless, Dostoevsky’s
authorial position remains dominant.
Dostoevsky is not tolerant of everything, and he has a number of
effective techniques for demonstrating his distaste for progressive ideas
and their revolutionary potential. One tactic is to ridicule and belittle,
such as when he names a filthy tavern in the slums of Saint Petersburg
“The Crystal Palace,” after Victorian England’s most accomplished
architectural feat and the bourgeois century’s premier symbol of progress.
Or when Luzhin is praised for being enlightened (when in fact he is not)
because he would not mind (when in fact he would) “if in the very first
month of marriage Dunechka [his fiancé, Raskolnikov’s sister] should
decide to take a lover” (365). Or, finally, when utilitarianism is put down
by having the novel’s representative man of the sixties, Lebeziatnikov,
claim that cleaning cesspits is an activity that is “much higher than the
activities of some Raphael or Pushkin, because it’s more useful” (371).
A second tactic is the frontal attack. As an example, take the
narrator’s description of Lebeziatnikov.

He was one of that numerous and diverse legion of vulgarians,

feeble miscreants, half-taught petty tyrants who make a point of
instantly latching on to the most fashionable current idea, only to
vulgarize it at once, to make an instant caricature of everything
they themselves serve, sometimes quite sincerely. (365)
It is important to note that this description is the narrator’s (rather

than one of the novel’s characters), for this ostensibly lends it more
objectivity. Auxiliary support, however, comes from having the book’s
most reasonable character, Razumikhin (his name derives from
‘razum,’ reason), exclaim apropos of the ideas discussed by Lebeziat-
nikov, Luzhin, etc.:
[All] this gratifying chatter, this endless stream of commonplaces,

and all the same, always the same, has become so sickening
after three years [presumably meaning since the publication of
Chernyshevksy’s influential 1863 novel What Is to Be Done?]
that, by God, I blush not only to say such things, but to hear
them said in my presence. (149)
Razumikhin is not above making money off this “chatter,” because he

works as a translator for a bookseller who has “hooked onto the trend”
and publishes books that peddle the cult of science. “[And] how they
sell!” he exclaims. “The titles alone are priceless!” (112). To help him
make money, Razumikhin farms out to Raskolnikov a translation of
a German text called Is Woman a Human Being?, describing it as “the
stupidest sort of charlatanism” (112).
Finally, Crime and Punishment pushes the idea that scientific
knowledge (whether natural or social) is suspect. Dr. Zosimov’s
interest in psychology (“he’s gone crazy over mental illnesses”), for
example, is cause for laughter throughout the novel, and the courts—
and mind, these are the reformed courts—are entirely blind to the truth
of Raskolnikov’s crime (191).
But Dostoevsky’s masterstroke is the one he pulls off when he
transforms Raskolnikov’s violence into something grotesque, some-
thing so misshapen that it becomes difficult to characterize. As initially
presented (both in the proposal sent to Katkov and in the early chap-
ters of the book), it is difficult to see how Raskolnikov’s crime is not
political: He will kill and rob an economically exploitative witch of a

woman, then redistribute her money and do good for humanity (it is a
crime, in fact, quite on the level with Karakozov’s plan to kill the tsar
in order to redistribute his power among the people). The only law that
could conceivably counter Raskolnikov’s logic is the Divine law: “Thou
shalt not kill.” But even this, it seems, is too weak here, for no one—no
character, no reader—ever shed a tear for the murdered moneylender.
To provoke abhorrence for Raskolnikov’s crime, Dostoevsky had to
introduce a second and even a third victim: Lizaveta—and her unborn
child. The moneylender herself won’t do, and so it is exactly right, what
is said about her: “What does the life of this stupid, consumptive, and
wicked old crone mean in the general balance?” (65).
The fact that Russia needed someone to do it some good, more-
over, is clear from Crime and Punishment’s sketches of reform-era
Petersburg:
It was terribly hot out, and moreover close, crowded; lime,

scaffolding, bricks, dust everywhere, and that special summer
stench known so well to every Petersburger who cannot
afford to rent a summer house . . . The intolerable stench
from the taverns, especially numerous in that part of the city,
and the drunkards he kept running into even though it was a
weekday, completed the loathsome and melancholy coloring
of the picture. (4)
This environment produces few upstanding citizens. Take the novel’s

major characters. Raskolnikov is a murderer. Svidrigailov is a murderer,
a debaucher, and probably a rapist. Raskolnikov’s love interest, Sonya,
is a prostitute. Raskolnikov’s sister, Dunya, by agreeing to enter a
loveless marriage for financial gain, no less so (albeit a more socially
acceptable sort). Raskolnikov’s mother, meanwhile, thinks it no sin to
sell her daughter for the sake of her son. Sonya’s father, Marmeladov,
does think it sinful to sell Sonya, but he does it anyway, because he is a
drunkard. Dunya’s fiancé, Luzhin, is a petty despot, a miser, and a liar.
Raskolnikov’s doctor, Zosimov, is “a philanderer . . . and a dirty one”
(208). Even the “kind” and “virtuous” Razumikhin had “some little
turns laid to his account . . . not really dishonest, but all the same!”
(344; 211–212). About the investigator Porfiry Petrovich “there is
nothing to like,” he himself admits, and of course the moneylender
is an evil parasite. Finally there is Lizaveta: tragically pregnant at the

time she was killed, yes, but beyond that, in fact, “constantly preg-
nant . . .” (64). The minor characters are not much better, and as for
the general background: Every time Raskolnikov ventures onto the
streets, the only people he encounters are alcoholics, prostitutes, tricks,
tramps, and suicides. Sinners, every last one of them—yet who would
cast the first stone?
In this respect, it is highly significant that Raskolnikov finally
decides that he will kill the moneylender immediately upon reading
the letter from his mother that informs him that she will permit his
sister to sell herself for his sake. Whatever other reasons Raskolnikov
may have had, he is first of all plainly a man in revolt against the order
of things.
Of course, later in the novel, Raskolnikov suddenly says: “I did
want to help my mother, but that’s not quite right either . . .” (413).
And this is why: Dostoevsky rethought Raskolnikov’s motive while
writing Crime and Punishment. As his notebooks have been preserved,
it is possible to track the novel’s compositional history, and of the fact
that Dostoevsky made over Raskolnikov’s motive, the third one bears
precise evidence:
[Raskolnikov’s] idea: assume power over this society. so as to do

good for it Despotism is his characteristic trait. (Notebooks 188)
It is as if Dostoevsky first took the professed “so as to do good for it”

at face value—he still spotlighted it in the proposal sent to Katkov
and in the early part of the book—but then dug himself a tunnel into
his subject’s psyche and hunted its twisted curves for the true motive;
evidently, only upon reemergence from below did he know the real
reason Raskolnikov committed his crime. Retracing this excavation,
the latter parts of Crime and Punishment slowly strip Raskolnikov’s
utilitarian logic of its humanitarian veneer until it stands revealed,
stark naked, as what has come to be known as the Napoleonic Idea.
The Napoleonic Idea has humanity divided into ordinary and
extraordinary people: The first follow the law, the latter break and
remake it—they have “the right to crime,” including, in the most
extreme cases, the right to kill (261). The extraordinary criminals are,
first of all, “the lawgivers and founders of mankind” (mentioned are
Lycurgus, Solon, Muhammad, and, naturally, Napoleon): “all of them
to a man were criminals,” Raskolnikov says, “from the fact alone that

in giving a new law they thereby violated the old one” (260). But
the category also includes genius innovators like Newton, and “even
those who are a tiny bit off the beaten track, that is, who are a tiny
bit capable of saying something new” (260). So when Raskolnikov
confesses to Sonya, “You see, I wanted to become a Napoleon, that’s
why I killed,” he has this in mind: to raise himself above the rest, to
become an extraordinary man (415). “Freedom and power, but above
all, power!” Dostoevsky has him say (330).
Raskolnikov’s motive is thus transformed into will to power and
might makes right. This not only robs him of any moral high ground
he might have had, but also makes him ridiculous—and he knows
it. With the new motive, there appears an insurmountable dispro-
portion between the content and the form of his crime: “Napoleon,
pyramids, Waterloo—and a scrawny, vile registrar’s widow, a little old
crone, a moneylender with a red trunk under her bed [ . . . ] would
Napoleon, say, be found crawling under some little old crone’s bed!”
(274). Repeatedly, Raskolnikov grasps that his real problem is one of
aesthetics: “Eh, an aesthetic louse is what I am, and nothing more”
(274). So Porfiry Petrovich in fact gets it right when he says, “there
are bookish dreams here”: Raskolnikov is a spiritual brother of Don
Quixote, whose imagination was similarly out of proportion with his
circumstances, but who had the good fortune to have read himself
crazy with tales of chivalry rather than with the nihilistic theories
of the 1860s, and whose goodness saved him from the grotesque
results that Dostoevsky prepared for his proud antihero (456). Thus
Raskolnikov is tut-tutted for his idea. “A so-so theory,” Svidrigailov
calls it, and Porfiry Petrovich says, “He came up with a theory, and
now he’s ashamed because it didn’t work, because it came out too
unoriginally!” (491; 459).
But why is it not enough to expose Raskolnikov’s crime as being
rooted in despotism? Why must it also be grotesque? The Napole-
onic Idea contains at its core a radical democratic thrust and, indeed,
a theory of civil disobedience, and this is Dostoevsky’s real target.
Obscured by the way the division between ordinary and extraor-
dinary people is naturalized in the novel (people are thus divided,
says Raskolnikov, “according to the law of nature,” making it seem
like the extraordinary are a quasi-Nietzschean or proto-Nazi “race”
of supermen), it is easy to overlook a crucial statement Raskolnikov
makes about the latter: “For the most part they call, in quite diverse

declarations, for the destruction of the present in the name of the

better” (261). Most generally, that is, extraordinary people are revo-
lutionaries, and so it is for revolutionaries that Raskolnikov’s theory
conquers the right to crime. Which is to say: the right to rebel against
the order of things for the sake of higher justice.
Raskolnikov’s Napoleonic Idea thus supports and in fact approxi-
mates the political radicalism of the sixties, which likewise blurs the
distinction between crime and civil disobedience. The socialist views
of crime are summed up in the novel, as “protest against the abnor-
mality of the social set-up.” So, once society is restructured, crime will
disappear (256). This is anathema to Dostoevsky, and so he has Razu-
mikhin—again, ostensibly as the novel’s voice of reason, but really as
the author’s mouthpiece—deliver a diatribe against socialism, whose
designs for a better society are deemed an offense to “nature,” “the
living process of life,” “the living soul,” and “life’s mystery” (256–7).
Once more, the same strategy as in Dostoevsky’s letter to Katkov,
where similar terms purport to prove that nihilism replaces life with
logic and is, to put it bluntly, against God.
One can place God against “Nihilism,” or modernity’s political
culture, but—and Dostoevsky knew this well enough—God is a point
of view, not an argument. There is only one possible proxy for this
argument, and that is art, and of that Dostoevsky had plenty. In the
same way he once noted that The Brothers Karamazov as a whole was
“an answer” to the devastating logic of Ivan Karamazov’s Legend of the
Grand Inquisitor, so all of Crime and Punishment was conceived as a
counterpoint to the nihilism of the sixties as embodied in Raskolnikov
(Polnoe sobranie sochinenii 27:48). It is testimony to Dostoevsky’s bril-
liance as an artist that the persuasive powers of Crime and Punishment
continue to convince readers that Raskolnikov’s double murder is the
logical conclusion of nihilism, that the Napoleonic Idea is grotesque,
and that socialism goes against the grain of human nature.
Nevertheless, it is also true that in spite of Dostoevsky’s reli-
giously motivated intentions, Crime and Punishment does not suspend
disbelief, and God remains dead for the modern mind. Raskolnikov
earned a place in the pantheon of literary creations not as an exem-
plary repentant and Orthodox convert, but as one of the great modern
rebels. And beneath Raskolnikov’s Napoleonic ego, there is enough
compassion for the world to remind readers that the residents of the

modern age have not only the right, but also the responsibility to rebel
against injustice.
WORKS CITED
Bakhtin, Mikhail. The Problem of Dostoevsky’s Poetics. trans. Caryl Emerson.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984.
Dostoevsky, Fyodor. Crime and Punishment. trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa
Volokhonsky. New York: Vintage Classics, 1992.
. Complete Letters, vol. 2: 1860–1867. trans. David A. Lowe. Ann Arbor:
Ardis, 1989.
. The Notebooks for Crime and Punishment. ed. and trans. Edward
Wasiolek. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967.
. Polnoe sobranie sochinenii v tridtsati tomakh. Vols. 7 and 27. Leningrad:
Nauka, 1973 and 1984.

THE CRUCIBLE
(ARTHUR MILLER)
,.
“Civil Disobedience in
Arthur Miller’s The Crucible”
by Joshua E. Polster, Emerson College
Arthur Miller’s 1953 production of The Crucible was a creation of the

Cold War, the period that reignited the Red Scare and the actions
of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), which
was established in 1938 to investigate subversive Communists and
Fascists, and later helped initiate the Hollywood Blacklist. Miller—
who went before HUAC and was convicted of contempt of Congress
for refusing to reveal names of alleged Communist writers—wrote
that one can “tell what the political situation in a country is” when The
Crucible is performed and “is suddenly a hit” (Timebends 348). It there-
fore was no surprise to Miller when his play successfully returned to
Broadway just after the introduction of the USA Patriot Act (2001).
Arthur Miller’s The Crucible provided and continues to provide an
essential space for disobeying government ideology and exposing and
disrupting corrupt ideologies. The relationships of Arthur Miller, Elia
Kazan, and Molly Kazan against the strategies of governing power
created a countrywide dispute that fractured the United States at a
personal and national level on the issues of civil liberties and national
security, a dispute that continues today.
From the Salem witchcraft trials to the HUAC hearings to
the military tribunals implemented by the USA Patriot Act, there
have always been efforts to compromise civil liberties in the name
129

130 Arthur Miller
of national security. The tension between civil liberties and national

security has not been resolved. It was not solved in 1798 with the
Alien and Sedition Acts; in the Civil War when Abraham Lincoln
suspended habeas corpus; or in the Second World War when Franklin
Roosevelt sent Japanese Americans to internment camps. Still today
the ideological war between civil liberties and national security has
not been reconciled, and the consequence is a national anxiety that
is performed on our public, private, and artistic stages. The Crucible
has been and continues to be a powerful participant in this cultural
anxiety, an act of civil disobedience that challenges the discourse of
the dominant power structures in society.
In the mid-twentieth century, there was a strong peak in anti-
Communist hysteria. The Communist Party had taken control in
China; Communist North Korea had invaded South Korea, bringing
the United States into the Korean War; and the Soviet Union had tested
its first atomic bomb. Civil defense preparations for a Soviet atomic
bomb strike were going on throughout the U.S. The HUAC testimo-
nies of self-confessed spies Louis Budenz and Elizabeth Bentley and
the conviction of the Rosenbergs perpetuated the fear of an extensive
espionage network operating in the United States. President Truman
issued Executive Order 9835, a loyalty and security program within
the federal government that initiated a published blacklist of alleged
subversives. FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, who had made the uncom-
promising connection between affiliations to the Communist Party
and Soviet espionage, kept thousands of files on people believed to be
members of the Communist Party. In this political climate, the Repub-
lican Party was gaining strength against the Democratic administration
that had been in place since Franklin Roosevelt. Republicans declared
the Communist takeover of China and infiltration within the United
States a failure of the Democratic administration. In the Senate, Joseph
McCarthy was made chair of the Committee on Government Opera-
tions, where he investigated Communism in the government. In the
House, John Parnell Thomas chaired HUAC, whose members included
a young Richard Nixon. HUAC investigated Communism in U.S.
society, in particular the entertainment industry for its celebrity appeal
and mass public influence.
It was in this cultural context when, in April of 1952, there was a
conversation that would go down in theatre history. Elia Kazan phoned
Arthur Miller and asked if Miller could visit Kazan at his country

The Crucible 131
home. Miller immediately suspected that his old friend, who had
inspired him as an actor with the Group Theatre and as the director
of his plays All My Sons (1947) and Death of a Salesman (1949), was
in trouble with HUAC. As he drove to Kazan’s house on a gray rainy
New England morning, Miller recalled Kazan’s brief membership in
the Communist Party in the 1930s—a membership that was not and
never had been illegal in the United States—and feared that Kazan
had decided to cooperate with the Committee. Miller grew angry, not
at Kazan—whom he considered a brother—but at HUAC, which he
saw as “a band of political operators with as much moral conviction as
[New York mobster] Tony Anastasia” (Timebends 332).
When Miller arrived at Kazan’s house, the rain briefly stopped, so
he and Kazan took a walk in the woods, not far from where several
girls had danced and spoken of witchcraft centuries earlier. Kazan
spoke of how he was subpoenaed by the Committee and had refused
to cooperate, but then changed his mind and returned to testify about
his Party membership and to name seven former members of the
Group Theatre. Kazan explained to Miller his need to confess to the
Committee, so that he, at the height of his creative powers, could
continue to make films:
[I’d] told Art I’d prepared myself for a period of no movie work
or money, that I was prepared to face this if it was worthwhile.
But that I didn’t feel altogether good about such a decision.
That I’d say (to myself ) what the hell am I giving all this up for?
To defend a secrecy I didn’t think right and to defend people
who’d already been named or soon would be by someone else? I
said I’d hated Communists for many years and didn’t feel right
about giving up my career to defend them. (A Life 460)
Kazan, at the time, was one of the most successful and highly paid
directors on Broadway and in Hollywood. Kazan had no desire to be
among those on the Hollywood Blacklist—the “unfriendly witnesses”
of HUAC and those listed in the anti-Communist pamphlet Red
Channels (1950), which accused affiliates of the entertainment industry,
such as Miller, of being members of subversive and Communist
organizations. Kazan had good reason to fear being blacklisted. The
president of Twentieth Century Fox, Spyros Skouras, had told Kazan
the company would let him go unless he satisfied the Committee. To

132 Arthur Miller
confess was to survive, and Kazan had always told Miller that he had
come from a family of survivors.
As Miller listened to Kazan on that April day, he grew cool
thinking of how he too could be “up for sacrifice” if Kazan knew that
he had attended meetings of Communist writers years ago and, at
one such meeting, delivered a speech (Timebends 334). In response to
Kazan, Miller felt “a bitterness with the country that [he] had never
even imagined before, a hatred of its stupidity and its throwing away of
its freedom” (Timebends 334). If Kazan had invited Miller to his home
that day for validation for his cooperation with HUAC, he did not get
it. The playwright could only say that he thought this dark time would
pass and that it had to pass or it would destroy the country.
It began to rain again, so Miller returned to his car. Before he could
leave, he was approached by Kazan’s wife, Molly, who previously served
as an editor of New Theater magazine and play reader for the Group
Theatre. She bluntly asked Miller if he realized that Communists
controlled the United Electrical Workers union. Molly then pointed
to the road ahead and told the playwright that he no longer under-
stood the country—“everybody who lived on that road approved of
the Committee and what had been done” (Timebends 335). Molly may
have been partially acting out of interest for her husband—to save his
name and career—but she was also a firm supporter of HUAC. Molly
believed, as did many, that Communism was a real and present threat
to the nation, and cooperating with the Committee was a necessary
responsibility of each citizen, even at the expense of civil liberties.
Miller, feeling the gap widen between him and Molly, responded
that he could not agree with the actions of the Committee. He
believed in the right of one’s own convictions, even of unpopular
beliefs such as Communism. Standing in the rain, Molly then asked
where he was going. Miller said that he was going to do some research
in the town of Salem. She instantly understood Miller’s intention. Her
eyes flashed open with apprehension and anger. “You’re not going to
equate witches with this!” (Timebends 335). Miller said he was not sure
and, with a grim wave, drove away.
Miller did write of witches. The Crucible premiered at the Martin
Beck Theatre in New York, less than one year after his meeting with
Kazan. It tells the story of Salem in 1692, when the town was seized
by a fear of witchcraft. The fear of witchcraft quickly grew to hysteria
and paralyzed the judicial faculties of the townspeople and those in

The Crucible 133
authority. Rumors of witchcraft turned into suspicions, which then

turned—in the minds of the townspeople—into facts. Neighbor
accused neighbor of allegiance to the devil; witchcraft trials were
established to verify the charges, and those who refused to confess,
atone for their sins, and name other conspirators were executed
by public hanging. Only a few town members, such as protagonist
John Proctor, stood up against the growing hysteria but then failed
to convince the accusers and authorities. Eventually, even the most
respected members of the community—like John Proctor and his
wife, Elizabeth—were indicted. Proctor was given the chance to save
his life by confessing to witchery and naming names, but, in an act
of civil disobedience, he chose death over betraying his integrity and
the townspeople. The Crucible disparages the informer and advocates
taking a stand to preserve civil liberties against tyranny.
The Crucible demonstrates how ideology is used as a means to
attain and confirm power in society. In a Marxist view, ideology and
power, in general, are created, rehearsed, and sustained in society by
repressive structures (such as judicial courts, prisons, police forces,
armies) and ideological structures (political parties, press, schools,
media, churches, families, art). Salem is presented as a society inun-
dated with the images, myths, and ideas of those in power that use
repressive and ideological structures within the courtroom, political
parties, churches, and families to suppress divergent thought and
action. This, in turn, brings the townspeople to be dominated by
consent, where they govern themselves and thus maintain the status
quo. Reverend Hale, for example, carries “half a dozen heavy books,”
books that are “weighted with authority” (33–34).
Here is all the invisible world, caught, defined, and calculated.

In these books the Devil stands stripped of all his brute
disguises. Here are all your familiar spirits—your incubi and
succubi; your witches that go by land, by air, and by sea; your
wizards of the night and of the day. Have no fear now—we
shall find him out if he has come among us, and I mean to
crush him utterly if he has show his face! (36)
These books contain the rules that instruct Salem’s perceptions,

thoughts, and ethics. Instead of being skeptical of Hale and his books,
the townspeople consent to his authority. Parris, for instance, says to

134 Arthur Miller
Hale, “It is agreed, sir—it is agreed—we will abide by your judgment”

(35). Salem, Miller reminded his readers in the play notes, was “an
autocracy by consent, for they [the townspeople] were united from top
to bottom by a commonly held ideology whose perpetuation was the
reason and justification for all their sufferings” (4).
The Crucible unveils the ideological discourses of power and
demonstrates their use of force in society. Reverend Hale, for instance,
threatens, “We shall find him [the Devil] out if he has come among
us, and I mean to crush him utterly if he has shown his face” (36).
The Crucible also demonstrates how these discourses of power try to
reinforce their perspective on what is happening in society and allow
no alternative perspectives. Reverend Hale, for example, says, “Now let
me instruct you. We cannot look to superstition in this. The Devil is
precise; the marks of his presence are definite as stone” (35).
Miller used The Crucible as a political weapon, a means to scrutinize
ideology and transform society by arousing the spectators’ capacity to
make decisions and take actions against oppressive powers. The audi-
ence of The Crucible, therefore, is not intended to be passive, but to be
an instrument of social disruption and change. There were, however,
audience members, such as Molly Kazan, who were not pleased with
Miller’s comparison of those who believed in witches in Salem to those
who believed in Communist spies in the United States. Her instant
reaction against the Salem analogy, according to Miller, was that “there
are Communists, but there never were any witches” (Timebends 339).
In response to The Crucible, Molly Kazan retaliated with her play
The Egghead (1957). It clearly presents the side of those who believed
in a dangerous Communist espionage network that thrived under “soft
liberalism.” The play, also set in a small town of New England, centers
on Professor Parson, a militant “egghead” liberal (most likely based
on Miller), who sanctimoniously defends a former student against
the FBI charge of Communism. Throughout the play, the professor
thunderously chastises FBI agents, shouts at and humiliates his
family, disobeys the college president, and puts his classroom at risk
by allowing the former student to present a lecture. The final act shows
the professor duped—the former student is revealed as a dangerous
propagandizing Communist set to undermine the country. In his
article “Broadway in Review,” John Gassner described The Egghead as
a “dramatic investigation of the failure of naïve liberalism in a world
menaced by contemporary Communism” (311).

The Crucible 135
Elia Kazan also struck back with his film On the Waterfront (1954),
which presents the side of the informer, who is seen as both scapegoat
and hero for protecting people’s safety. It concerns ex-fighter Terry
Malloy who works for Johnny Friendly on the gang-ridden New York
waterfront. “Malloy,” observes theatre scholar Brenda Murphy, “defies
the ‘Deaf & Dumb’ code of the longshoremen to testify against the
corrupt union-boss Johnny Friendly for having killed Joey Doyle, who
had been about to testify, and Terry’s brother Charley, who had refused
to turn Terry over to Friendly’s thugs. Terry is ostracized by the men
until he leads them to see that it is Johnny who is the betrayer” (212).
At the end of the film, Malloy righteously exclaims, “I’m glad what I
done—you hear me?—glad what I done! . . . I was rattin’ on myself
all them years and didn’t know it” (Schulberg 132).
Elia Kazan also took out a full-page advertisement in the New
York Times—written, in fact, by Molly—urging other liberals to
“speak out,” insisting, “secrecy serves the Communists” (“A Statement”
7). This fracture between Miller and the Kazans represents the frac-
ture within the country.
Beyond the Kazans, Miller saw alienation among friends and
strangers as they turned on each other to save their professional
careers from the Communist blacklists. “People were being torn apart,
their loyalty to one another crushed . . . common human decency was
going down the drain” (Arthur Miller and Company 81). To Miller, the
similarities between Salem in 1692 and the United States in 1953
were obvious; this did not escape the attention of HUAC when Miller
was called before them:
Mr. Arens: Are you cognizant of the fact that your play
The Crucible, with respect to witch hunts in 1692, was the
case history of a series of articles in the Communist press
drawing parallels to the investigation of Communists and other
subversives by Congressional Committees?
Mr. Miller: The comparison is inevitable, sir.
HUAC Hearings, 21 June 1956 (Murphy 133)
It is true that Miller wrote about what was in the air, but he had
intended The Crucible to have a much broader significance, and not
only refer to McCarthyism. The hegemonic barrage of McCar-
thyism headlines—from both the Left, who praised or critiqued

136 Arthur Miller
the play’s assumed portrayal of the HUAC hearings, and the Right,
who viciously attacked the play in order to maintain its position of
power—dominated the readings of The Crucible. According to Miller,
this “deflected the sight of the real and inner theme, which . . . was
the handing over of conscience to another, be it woman, the state, or
a terror, and the realization that with conscience goes the person, the
soul immortal, and the name” (Martin 153).
Miller saw how “a political, objective, knowledgeable campaign
from the far Right was . . . creating not only a terror, but a new subjec-
tive reality, a veritable mystique which was gradually assuming even
a holy resonance” (Martin 153). Miller wanted to reveal through The
Crucible that the world was deeply coded, structured, and manipulated
by aggressive dominating powers that enforce their particular view-
points as natural in order to create and enforce their dominance at
the expense of civil liberties. These are the aspects of The Crucible that
make the play an immutable classic, give it a life beyond its cultural
context, and allow it to speak to numerous countries and periods
about the dangers of tyranny and the need to perform civil disobedi-
ence. Miller said, “When [The Crucible] gets produced in some foreign
country, especially in Latin America . . . it’s either that a dictator is
about to arise and take over, or he has just been over-thrown. I’m glad
something of mine is useful as a kind of a weapon like that. It speaks
for people against tyranny” (Martine 14). Its relevance continued in
the United States after the terrorist attacks of September 11, when
civil liberties were considered, once again, to be compromised for the
benefit of national security.
Forty-five days after the September 11 attacks, the USA Patriot
Act (2001) was passed with little debate. The Patriot Act expanded
the authority of U.S. law enforcement agencies to fight terrorism
in the United States and abroad. In The USA Patriot Act: Preserving
Life and Liberty (Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing
Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism), the U.S.
Department of Justice emphasizes the “key part” of the Patriot Act in
protecting national security:
Since its passage following the September 11, 2001 attacks, the
Patriot Act has played a key part—and often the leading role—in
a number of successful operations to protect innocent Americans
from the deadly plans of terrorists dedicated to destroying

The Crucible 137
America and our way of life. While the results have been
important, in passing the Patriot Act, Congress provided for
only modest, incremental changes in the law. Congress simply
took existing legal principles and retrofitted them to preserve
the lives and liberty of the American people from the challenges
posed by a global terrorist network. (http://www.aclu.org)
However, according to the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU),

civil liberties were substantially compromised for the benefit of
national security, as was the case during the McCarthy era.
There are significant flaws in the Patriot Act, flaws that threaten
your fundamental freedoms by giving the government the
power to access your medical records, tax records, information
about the books you buy or borrow without probable cause,
and the power to break into your home and conduct secret
searches without telling you for weeks, months, or indefinitely.
(http://www.aclu.org)
The ACLU recorded many acts of injustice initiated by the Patriot

Act, including the interrogation of immigrants based solely on reli-
gion or ethnicity; the holding of thousands—including American
citizens—in secretive federal custody without charges or access to
lawyers; the barring of the press and public from secret immigration
court hearings; the government monitoring of conversations between
federal detainees and their lawyers; the spying of the FBI on orga-
nizations and individuals without evidence of wrongdoing; and the
creation of military commissions that can convict non-citizen terrorist
suspects based on hearsay and secret evidence by only two-thirds vote
(http://www.aclu.org).
The most recent Broadway production of The Crucible went on
just after the introduction of the USA Patriot Act (2001). Director
Richard Eyre connected the Salem witch trials and the HUAC hear-
ings “in which all dissent [was] construed as opposition” to the post
9/11 atmosphere of the United States (http://www.aclu.org). In Eyre’s
view, the culture that enforced the actions of HUAC and created The
Crucible resonated with the culture that created the Patriot Act. In his
article in The Guardian, “Why the Big Apple Was Ripe for Miller’s
Return,” he wrote:

138 Arthur Miller
After the introduction of the USA Patriot Act in November

(which relaxed many of the rules that protect people suspected
of crime from unfair investigation and prosecution) and the
introduction of military tribunals, John Ashcroft, the attorney
general, said that civil-rights activists who question or oppose
the legislation are giving aid and comfort to the terrorists.
(http://www.aclu.org)
To Eyre, Ashcroft closely resembled the character of Danforth, the

deputy governor in The Crucible who proclaims that, “a person is
either with this court or he must be counted against it, there be no
road between” (90). Danforth’s proclamation is also strikingly similar
to President George W. Bush’s warning to French president Jacques
Chirac: “You’re either with us or against us in the fight against terror”
(http://archives.cnn.com/2001/US/11/06/gen.attack.on.terror/).
President Bush’s “axis of evil” (his term for governments accused of
sponsoring terrorism) reinforces the binary opposition between the
forces of “Good” and the forces of “Evil.” This also strongly resonates
with Danforth’s perspective of the time:
This is a sharp time, a precise time [ . . . when one can] live no

longer in the dusky afternoon when evil mixed itself with good
and befuddled the world. Now, by God’s grace, the shining sun
is up, and them that fear not light will surely praise it. (90)
This type of conceptualization helped empower the Patriot Act,

which today continues to restrict civil liberties in the name of national
security.
Eyre saw the Patriot Act as a political campaign from the far
Right, a campaign that was creating mob fear and provocation
similar to that found in Salem during the witch trials and across the
U.S. during the Red Scare. In his article in The Guardian, Eyre illus-
trated a dangerous consequence of the Patriot Act. During a recent
production of Kiss Me Kate, a man telephoned a booking agent for
tickets. He asked the agent about the size of the theatre and the
location of his seats before giving his credit card information, which
included his Arab surname. When the man arrived at the theatre,
he was met by four FBI agents and arrested as a suspected terrorist
(Eyre 1).

The Crucible 139
Productions of The Crucible continue to be used as spaces for

civil disobedience to resist repressive strategies of those in power.
To many, The Crucible speaks as clearly now as it did over fifty years
ago about the tense relationship between civil liberties and national
security. The United States continues to be divided at a national
and personal level. The Library Journal, for instance, reports that the
nation’s public librarians are sharply divided over how to protect their
patrons’ privacy. “Those responding [to a survey] split almost evenly
on whether they had complied with requests for voluntary coopera-
tion with law enforcement” asking librarians to require identification
from patrons that use the Internet, to monitor their online research,
and to report suspected terrorist activity (http://www.libraryjournal.
com/article/CA271369.html).
As for Arthur Miller and the Kazans, nothing was ever the same.
Miller never bridged his relationship with Molly Kazan, who died
in 1963; and he never regained his close friendship with Elia Kazan.
Kazan wrote, “I would never really feel toward him what a friend
should feel. Nor, I imagine, he toward me.” For many years, the two
men only spoke to each other through their work—Miller with The
Crucible and A View from the Bridge, another play that disparaged the
informer, and Kazan with On the Waterfront. Before both men died,
Kazan in 2003 and Miller in 2005, they released their autobiogra-
phies one year apart—each still fighting, as the country continues
today, in the ideological battle over how best to govern the country in
dangerous times.

American Civil Liberties Union. The USA Patriot Act and Government Actions
that Threaten Our Civil Liberties. New York: American Civil Liberties
Union, 11 Feb. 2003 http://www.aclu.org.
CNN. “You’re Either With Us Or Against Us In The Fight Against Terror.”
6 Nov. 2001. 15 Jan. 2008 http://archives.cnn.com/2001/US/11/06/gen.
attack.on.terror/.
Eyre, Richard. “Why the Big Apple was Ripe for Miller’s Return.” The
Guardian. 16 March 2002. 15 Jan. 2008 http://www.guardian.co.uk/
saturday_review/story/ 0,,668040,00.html.
Gassner, John. “Broadway in Review.” Educational Theatre Journal. 9.4 (1957):
311–320.

140 Arthur Miller
Kazan, Elia. A Life. New York: Da Capo Press, 1988.

Kazan, Elia. “A Statement.” New York Times. 12 April 1952: 7.
“New Survey: Librarians Divided Over Privacy Issues.” Library Journal. 21 Jan.
2003. 15 Jan. 2008 http://www.libraryjournal.com/article/CA271369.
html.
Martin, Robert. Ed. The Theater Essays of Arthur Miller. New York: Da Capo
Press, 1978.
Martine, James. Ed. The Crucible: Politics, Property, and Pretense. New York:
Twayne Publishers, 1993.
Miller, Arthur. The Crucible. New York: Bantam Books, 1963.
Miller, Arthur. Timebends. New York: Grove Press, 1987.
Murphy, Brenda. Congressional Theatre. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1999.
Schulberg, Budd. On the Waterfront. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois
United States. Department of Justice. The USA PATRIOT Act: Preserving Life
and Liberty (Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate
Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism). Washington: GPO, 15
Jan. 2008 http://www.lifeandliberty.gov/highlights.htm.

FAHRENHEIT 451
(RAY BRADBURY)
,.
“‘And the Leaves of the Tree Were for the
Healing of the Nations’: Reading and Civil
Disobedience in Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451”
by Alina Gerall and Blake Hobby,
University of North Carolina at Asheville
Ray Bradbury opens Fahrenheit 451 with an epigraph by Juan Ramón

Jiménez: “If they give you ruled paper, write the other way.” This short
command to perform an act of disobedience mirrors the defiant action
Guy Montag, Fahrenheit 451’s protagonist, and a group of rebels take
as they seek to preserve human culture and, in doing so, defy the law
of the land. Montag and company rebel against a totalitarian govern-
ment by doing something most of us take for granted, something we
tend to view as a passive activity that provides intellectual growth and
a respite from our day-to-day lives. They read. As we turn the pages of
Bradbury’s dystopic novel, we occupy a close space with Montag, who
comes to see the inadequacies of the civil order, ignores the totali-
tarian state’s prohibitions, and encourages others to become literate.
By the end of this story about literacy, censorship, and the power of
the word in resisting civil authority, we and Guy Montag see books as
mirrors for self-understanding, repositories of culture and myth, and
ultimately tools with which to build a new society.
In Fahrenheit 451, a totalitarian state suppresses critical thought
by banning and burning books. The novel follows Guy Montag, a
fireman—a book burner—who, rather than putting out fires, sets
141

142 Ray Bradbury
them, incinerating what the state has prohibited for “the good of
humanity.” After meeting Clarisse McClellan, however, Montag
begins to question what he has done; as he prepares to torch more
books, Montag begins to read:
Books bombarded his shoulders, his arms, his upturned face. A

book lit, almost obediently, like a white pigeon, in his hands,
wings fluttering. In the dim wavering light, a page hung open
and it was like a snowy feather, the words delicately painted
thereon. In all the rush and fervor, Montag had only an instant
to read the line, but it blazed in his mind for the next minute as
if stamped there with fiery steel. Montag had time to read one
of the lines and it said, “Time has fallen asleep in the afternoon
sunshine.” He dropped the book. Immediately, another fell into
his arms. (37)
Significantly, the line Montag reads comes from Alexander Smith’s

Dreamthorp: Essays Written in the Country (1863). In Dreamthorp,
Scottish poet Alexander Smith describes a mythical world through
which he articulates his ideas about the role poetry and the prose
essays can play in edifying human life. Ultimately, he turns to happi-
ness in general, the good life, and the need human beings have to
understand themselves, the very things Montag weighs throughout
Bradbury’s novel:
There is no happiness in the world in which love does not enter;

and love is but the discovery of ourselves in others, and the
delight in the recognition. Apart from others no man can make
his happiness; just as, apart from a mirror of one kind or another,
no man can become acquainted with his own lineaments.
(http://www.gutenberg.org/files/18135/18135–8.txt)
Here Smith outlines the ways in which others can fulfill a human life,
and the way a “mirror of one kind or another” helps human beings
understand themselves. For Smith, Bradbury, and for Guy Montag,
self-understanding and the social order depend upon learning through
reading and studying books. In Fahrenheit 451, not only do Granger,
Montag, and company remember as much literature as they can to
preserve it, but also, in working to preserve the past and create a better

Fahrenheit 451 143
future, they resist civil authority and seek an end to civil strife, each
breaking the law and performing acts of civil disobedience.
While many contradictory definitions for the term exist, espe-
cially in contemporary political theory and law studies, where
thinkers often argue over what civil disobedience is and is not, the
term is generally understood in literary studies as it was practiced and
written about by two key figures, Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
and Mahatma Gandhi (1869–1948), two pacifists who practiced
nonviolent protest as a means of objecting to laws that violated foun-
dational human rights. Both Gandhi and Thoreau believed in the
possibility of changing the governmental machine through nonvio-
lent means. In Civil Disobedience, Henry David Thoreau proclaims,
“The mass of men serve the state thus, not as men mainly, but as
machines . . . In most cases there is no free exercise whatever of the
judgment or of the moral sense . . .” (229). For Thoreau, serving the
state in this fashion means strengthening the government’s tyran-
nical hold and failing to develop the capacity for judging, deciding
and choosing associated with the cultivation of the moral sense. Thus,
he challenges citizens to do everything possible to end governmental
intervention in private lives. For Thoreau, freedom can only exist
when individual autonomy is honored: “There will never be a really
free and enlightened State, until the State comes to recognize the
individual as a higher and independent power, from which all its own
power and authority are derived, and treats him accordingly” (246).
Following Thoreau, Mahatma Gandhi coined the term satyagraha to
describe his philosophy of nonviolent civil resistance, a philosophy
he used to mobilize Indian people and the world to see the injustice
of British colonialism. Yet acts of civil disobedience can be seen as
early as in Aristophanes’ play, Lysistrata, where women upset the
social order by withholding sex, ultimately gaining power through a
nonviolent act. Thus, while Thoreau articulates what most Americans
have come to understand as nonviolent protest, this concept can
be traced from the literary tradition of antiquity to contemporary
political philosophy to the civil rights era and the ideals of Martin
Luther King, Jr. As with others seeking to change not only ideas but
also actions, what is at stake for Bradbury is the denial of free speech
and the eradication of cultural memory, the things that necessitate
civil disobedience in Fahrenheit 451. Free speech and freedom from
censorship are both essential human rights that, according to Brad-

144 Ray Bradbury
bury, are necessary for creating a humane society. In Fahrenheit 451,

reading is a subversive act capable of undermining the social order;
those who fight the totalitarian government seek an end to oppres-
sion and mass ignorance. Rather than bear arms, they bear books.
One of those books, significantly, is by Thoreau (76, 153). As a work
much like Thoreau’s Civil Disobedience, Fahrenheit 451 challenges the
institutions that define how a human life might flourish and demon-
strates literature’s ability to cultivate human autonomy. Bradbury
divides his novel into three sections that mark the development of the
main character’s sense of identity and capacity for individual thought.
The three sections of Bradbury’s narrative track the progression of
Montag’s civil disobedience, from questioning his own ignorance to
taking action against oppression.
The first section of the story, “The Hearth and the Salamander,”
describes the steps Montag takes as he first realizes not only the
confines of his own life, but also the role he has played in confining
others. At the onset of the novel, he is satisfied with his life. The
opening chapter describes the “pleasure” he derives from watching
“things eaten, to see things blacken and changed.” Montag senses the
power he wields and is proud of his position in society. He is a man
to be respected, a defender of the peace. This is important because
it illustrates the seduction of complacency; Montag is rewarded for
his unexamined obedience. However, it takes only a few encounters
for Montag’s world to unhinge. During his initial conversation with
Clarisse, Montag takes his first steps away from an imprisoning world
where free speech is denied and free thought, exemplified in the act
of reading, amounts to civil disobedience. He begins to question the
world around him. His faith in the system fails, and he is forced to
confront his own discontent.
The section title refers to two connotative images of fire. A hearth
is the floor of a fireplace, one that signifies home life. There, before the
fire’s flames, families gather for warmth and traditionally have regaled
one another, especially before the advent of electricity, with stories. It
is an ideal space for experiencing not only the sort of community that
storytelling creates, but also it provides needed light for reading. With
this familiar image, Bradbury frames the novel. The second image, the
salamander, is often associated with fire and resisting fire. Montag
wears a salamander patch on the shoulder of his uniform, a symbol of
his job as a fireman, one who incinerates books. As a fireman, Montag

Fahrenheit 451 145
holds a position of power and prestige; he is both respected and feared

by those who see him in uniform. The salamander however, does not
affect Clarisse, a liberated seventeen-year-old woman who is Montag’s
neighbor. As she speaks to Montag, she comments: “So many people
are. Afraid of firemen, I mean. But you’re just a man, after all” (7).
Here, and throughout the book, Bradbury questions what constitutes
humanity. For Clarisse, being human means having weaknesses, faults
that lead others to disrespect autonomy, the desired attribute that
Clarisse embodies. After Clarisse makes this matter-of-fact observa-
tion, Montag begins to move outside of himself and comes to under-
stand how he has neither considered how other people might see
him nor questioned the actions that make him complicit in denying
fundamental human rights. As in Alexander Smith’s Dreamthorp, the
issue at hand is the good life: the way a human life may flourish and
the way a just society may cultivate human autonomy. With such
concerns in mind, Montag begins questioning the very civil order
he has enforced. In making this turn from policing to defying the
state, Montag breaks the law, and, in telling others about what he has
read and in encouraging them to use the written word as a means of
passive resistance, he commits acts of civil disobedience.
The second section of the novel, “The Sieve and the Sand,”
chronicles Montag’s attempts to subvert the system of oppression
from within. The section title refers to a childhood trick played on
Montag that leaves him desperately trying to fill a sieve with sand. In
the context of the second section, the sieve and sand serve as a meta-
phor for the mind’s limits. As beings with finite understanding, all
truth, knowledge, and happiness are but sand hastily shoveled into the
permeable sieve of intellect. The futility of the task is overwhelming.
As Montag faces the depth of his ignorance, he begins to question
whether there is any point in thinking on his own at all: Submitting
to prescribed boundaries might be much easier, and safer, than partici-
pating in the arduous life of the inquiring mind. Montag has arrived
at the core issue; Bradbury points to the trend in his own time to rely
more and more heavily upon convenience. A child of the Depression
and a skeptical adult of the fifties, Bradbury thought an unchallenged
imagination made for a more controllable population. And people
were all too often taken in by the conveniences of gadgetry and the
simple hum of the television. But, as Bradbury explicitly and implic-
itly suggests throughout the narrative, it is in the struggle to discern

146 Ray Bradbury
meaning that the human mind finds purpose. With every thousand
ideas that pour through the sieve, a hundred may stick. The task of
the individual is to challenge the limits of the mind. Faber, the man
Montag seeks out to be his teacher, explains that this level of depth
need not come from books alone: “It’s not books you need, it’s some
of the things that once were in books.” While existing forms of media
like television and radio could be used to stoke the mind, the society
no longer demands or even allows for it. Reading is an exercise that
illustrates what has truly been lost: independent thought. In the world
of Fahrenheit 451 the individual is the enemy.
Montag’s wife Mildred seems to think so, clinging to her “family”
of soap opera characters on television and rejecting the attempts
Montag makes to include her in his rebellion. There is security in her
superficial existence when compared to the peril of reading books, a
point Mildred emphasizes when she observes to Montag: “if Captain
Beatty knew about those books . . . he might come and burn the
house and the ‘family.’ That’s awful!” (73). Mildred’s security comes
with a price though, expressed in her repeated suicide attempts. By
acquiescing to the will of the larger society, she must repress her indi-
vidual mind to the extent that the only act of disobedience left to her
is self-destruction. The fact that she does not seem to recall her actions
further serves to illustrate the dysfunction of her conformity. Mildred
is never able to make a break with her addiction to mind-numbing
media, and through her Bradbury shows us how dangerously easy, and
common, it is for an oppressive social order to get its people to submit.
But he also shows us the cost of that submission. Mildred is ultimately
inconsequential. We do not truly get to know her or her motivations
because there is nothing left to know. The ultimate conflict will occur
between Montag and his boss, Captain Beatty, who represents the
social order itself; Mildred is merely one of its drones.
Beatty is a book burner, but he is also very literate. He is able
to quote literature and has a grasp of history. As a manager of the
system, he seems to hold himself to a different standard; and it is
difficult to discern whether he even believes in the rhetoric he spouts.
Beatty is our way into the philosophy behind the totalitarian structure
of their society. He provides the history of the firehouse, how books
came to be banned and “the word intellectual . . . became the swear
word it deserved to be.” Beatty tells Montag that the trouble with
books started when special interest or minority groups began to find

Fahrenheit 451 147
certain passages or works offensive and sought to remove them. He

describes a world of growing populations and with them, increasing
numbers of minority groups living in ever-closer proximity to each
other: “The bigger your market, Montag, the less you handle contro-
versy, remember that!” Here Beatty raises the challenge of living in
a diverse culture. He suggests that the differences between these
splintered groups are petty; nonetheless they are significantly disrup-
tive to the harmony of the mass population. He highlights the fact
that people’s demand for uncontroversial easy entertainment made
literature obsolete well before it was prohibited. The result, Beatty
claims, is a peaceful and happy culture. The trouble is that what Beatty
calls “peace” and “happiness” is a form of obedience and complacency
we find in Homer’s Land of the Lotus Eaters. By de-emphasizing
authorship and ideas, and instead supporting the proliferation of mass
media, the establishment has chosen to numb people to their differ-
ences rather than teaching people to work with them. By committing
his first act of disobedience, Montag has already broken with the state,
and he resolves not to submit to Beatty’s authority.
In the third and final section of the novel, “Burning Bright,”
Montag emerges as a rebellious figure poised to challenge confor-
mity. Montag’s reticence to abandon, and perhaps destroy, all that
he has known is at odds with his desire to combat social ills. This
ethical impasse is mirrored by the fractured nature of a simultaneous
conversation Montag has with Beatty and Faber. Standing in front
of his own house, Montag discusses with Beatty the duties of a
fireman, while also trying to covertly speak with Faber by way of a
radio concealed in his ear. Each figure represents a path—obedience
or rebellion—and Montag must ultimately choose which to follow.
Beatty eventually discovers the earpiece, forcing his hand. He turns
his flamethrower on Beatty and destroys his link to the social order.
Beatty’s murder, by far the most public and violent act of Montag’s
rebellion thus far, makes him an outcast and a fugitive.
When Montag sees that the task of awakening others is greater
than one man can take on, he flees to the wilderness. Outside of the
city limits, Montag meets a wandering band of homeless academics
led by Granger, who introduces Montag to a new form of rebel-
lion. Rather than agitating from within the system, as Montag has
attempted, these academics defy the government by preserving the
textual remnants of a creative culture that honors autonomy. Granger

148 Ray Bradbury
explains: “All we want to do is keep the knowledge we think we will

need intact and safe” (152). Because the academics remain passive,
“the cities don’t bother [them]” (154), and the academics are free to
continue with their endless task of memorization and preservation.
The text-preservation project of the academics, though imperfect,
will ultimately enable future generations to rebuild a new and better
society from the pages of past efforts.
The final section title returns the reader to the image of fire, but
in a sense of illumination, burning bright, as if to read by and see
more clearly, and also to cleanse. We see from a distance the death of
an entire community rife with censorship and ignorance. The society
and all of Montag’s connections to it simply evaporate in a mushroom
cloud; what remains is the potential of a new society from within the
ranks of the homeless academics, a society of people with inquiring
minds that learn from the past. At this juncture, where Montag and
the reader are able to reflect on past societies and those to come,
Granger compares humanity to the phoenix, the mythical bird who
builds a pyre, bursts into flame, and is reborn every hundred years.
Granger has hope not just for this incarnation of society, but also for
all future human beings:
We know the damn silly thing we just did. We know all the
damn silly things we’ve done for a thousand years and as long
as we know that and always have it around where we can see it,
someday we’ll stop making goddamn funeral pyres and jumping
in the middle of them. We pick up a few more people that
remember every generation. (163)
While Fahrenheit 451 begins as a dystopic novel about a totalitarian

government that bans reading, the novel ends with Montag relishing
the book he has put to memory. As Granger discusses how these
memorized books are, at that very moment, in the safekeeping of
small, isolated communities to be “written again,” the only specific
texts he mentions by name are Thoreau’s Walden and the essays of
noted philosopher and outspoken pacifist Bertrand Russell (152).
Here Bradbury seems to suggest the centrality civil disobedience and
self-reliance have in our efforts as a species to become more civilized.
Though Granger is pragmatic to the point of pessimism—“we’ll set
it up in type until another Dark Age, when we might have to do the

Fahrenheit 451 149
whole damn thing over again”—both Bradbury and his characters

are assured of their own civil disobedience and its ability to redeem
society (152). In the final lines of the novel, Montag thinks of the
words he will leave until noon: “the leaves of the tree were for the
healing of the nations” (172).
Guy Montag disobeys the civil order by reading. He refuses to
uphold the rule of law, stops starting fires and burning books, and
memorizes works of literature. Doing so, he works to preserve human
culture. As Bradbury’s band of social pariahs journey to the city, where
it is conceivable they will influence others, they form a community
predicated upon civil disobedience, a community invested in teaching
others and future generations about the power of the word. Fighting
for justice, decrying tyrannical institutions and, perhaps most impor-
tantly, forming an autonomous self through the act of reading, Guy
Montag lives according to the word, seeking to commit the book of
Ecclesiastes to memory. As Bradbury’s work comes to a close, Montag
prepares to memorize a specific Bible passage about the tree of life,
whose leaves “were for the healing of the nations.” For Montag and
for all who have stepped away from the world, read a book, returned
to their station in life changed, and then desired to affect the social
world, reading is personal and communal, private and public. It offers
a means of sustaining the self and of opening out to the world that
always stands just beyond the page. As a book about books that chal-
lenges readers to see the value of human creativity and the moral
agency found in the power of the word, Fahrenheit 451 is by nature
polemical. But, like Thoreau’s Civil Disobedience, Bradbury’s novel
cultivates the mind while encouraging the autonomous self, a neces-
sary work of fiction.
WORKS CITED
Bradbury, Ray. Fahrenheit 451. New York: Random House, 1953.
. Bradbury Classic Stories 1: From Golden Apples of the Sun and R Is
for Rocket. New York: Spectra, 1990.
Rawls, John. A Theory of Justice. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1971.
Thoreau, Henry David. “Civil Disobedience.” Walden, Civil Disobedience, and
Other Writings. New York: Norton, 2008.

THE POETRY OF LANGSTON HUGHES
,.
“Langston Hughes: Rhetoric and Protest”
by Margaret A. Reid, in
The Langston Hughes Review (1984)
Introduction
In her discussion of Langston Hughes’s poetic style, Margaret
Reid explains how the poet crafted his works to “depict the
social evils of America, to prick the conscience of Americans,
and to exhort Black Americans to protest.” Christening him
a “forerunner of the militant poets of the Sixties,” Reid exam-
ines how Hughes utilizes irony, ambiguity, unconventional
poetic structure, as well as the “Negro folk idiom” to satiri-
cally protest the social conditions of Blacks in Harlem (which
she calls Hughes’s “synecdoche of America”) and the Jim
Crow South. Hughes’s innovative deviation from accepted
poetic convention “adds to the poignancy of the theme of
despair” in his works. Thus, Hughes depicts the injustices of
racism and evokes the despair of its victims, calling for acts
of civil disobedience.
f
Reid, Margaret A. “Langston Hughes: Rhetoric and Protest.” The Langston

Hughes Review 3.1 (1984 Spring): 13–20.
151

152 Langston Hughes
Given the kinds of social, economic, political and physical abuse that
Blacks suffered from slavery through the 1920’s, it is inevitable that
the Black poet as the voice of the masses would react in protest. There
were those who heard the clarion call for protest. There were those
who found a voice in spite of the fact that often the publication of
their literary efforts was dependent upon White patronage. The poets
often had to write their poetry in such a way that it would be under-
stood by Blacks but not always understood by Whites. They made
much use of irony and ambiguity. Some of these Harlem Renaissance
poets couched their protest in Standard White English using conven-
tional imagery, but many also used the folk idiom to protest the social
issues of the period. Their themes as well as their poetic styles gave the
poems their universal appeal.
As the poets experimented with their verse forms and poetic
language, there evolved unconventional forms and language. These
unconventional techniques which emerged during the Twenties were
not as radical as those of the Sixties, but there were those poetic tech-
niques which deviated from the traditional mode. Such techniques
sometimes included a break from the standard poetic forms such as
the ballad, sonnet, ode, and other styles. For these poetic innovators,
rhyme, rhythm, and meter were not always the prime prerequisites
that they were for the traditionalist. In contrast to metrical verse, free
verse was used quite frequently during the Harlem Renaissance.
Another trend was the linguistic style. As the Black poet chose to
write about the harsh realities of Black life, he began to use the idiom
of his people. Although the unconventional techniques were not the
norm of the period and were employed by few of the poets, one can
definitely see a trend slowly developing that was to reach its height in
the Sixties.
The most avant-garde of these poetic innovators during the
Harlem Renaissance was Langston Hughes. When he published his
Weary Blues in 1926, the literati saw a new trend developing in Black
poetic forms. Hughes had used the Black idiom, Black themes, and
the blues and spiritual forms from the folk art tradition. Although
Hughes used the folk forms in a more sophisticated fashion than
James Weldon Johnson or Paul Laurence Dunbar, Hughes was
criticized for using these folk sources. The Black intelligentsia did not
want its “uncultured,” “unsophisticated” and “illiterate” side exposed.
In contrast, Whites were fascinated by this primitivism and exoticism,

and at night hundreds of Whites went to Harlem to view it firsthand.

Hughes alludes to this exoticism in his “Negro Dancers” and “Cat and
the Saxophone 2 A.M.” Nevertheless, writing about such realities in
the language of the folks who experienced these realities made Hughes
the poetic innovator that he came to be. As Hughes and others after
him were to discover, the rhymed abstractions of the classical poetic
tradition were not always suited to the portrayal of the concrete hard-
ships borne by the oppressed Negro. The conventional, often stilted,
literary, language often lacked emotional power. To find the exact
word—le mot juste—the poet resorted to the rich folk idiom.
Hughes borrowed his language from the Negro folk idiom, his
poetic form from the spiritual and blues tradition, and his themes
from the life and experiences from the common Negro. Using this
blues form, Hughes, wrote of the social tragedies in ways that would
allow the Negro to see himself and laugh to keep from crying. That
is what the blues songs were about. Concealed in Hughes’ portraits
of the Negro experience was a protest that was sometimes subtle and
often satiric: Hughes’ free-flowing lyrics gave the Negro something
to smile about in spite of his adversities. Furthermore, these poetic
portraits gave back images that Waring Cuney’s dishwater did not
give back.
Although Hughes wrote about the fun-loving Harlemites, he was
still protesting their social conditions. (Harlem served as a synecdoche
for America.) Very often Hughes did not hide his protest; it was
glaringly obvious. One such poem is “The South” published in his
anthology The Weary Blues in 1926.
The unconventional poetic style of Langston Hughes adds to the
poignancy of the theme of despair. His style seems to suggest the chaos
which causes the hopelessness of the Negro. Though Hughes uses an
unconventional poetic structure, he relies heavily on conventions such
as antithesis, irony, hyperbole, personification, and syntax to make his
satiric comment about the South. His poem “The South” is written
in an un-rhyming, free-verse style with varying line lengths ranging
from dimeter to tetrameter. Such free verse style can be suggestive
of the chaos that the South stands for, but Hughes’ language is very
controlled. The free verse style also suggests that the poets wished
their people to be free from the bonds of servitude. Every metaphor
works to make a haunting accusation about the South’s mistreatment
of Negroes. Each metaphor helps to tell the history of Southern

154 Langston Hughes
brutality. “The South” with its myriad personifications is likened to “a

beast,” “an idiot” and is
Beautiful, like a woman

Seductive as a dark-eyed whore,
Passionate, cruel,
Honey-lipped, syphilitic—
That is the South.1
One of the ironies of the poem is that though the persona focuses
on the ugly deeds of the cruel South, Hughes also describes the scenic
beauty of the South, for the South is also symbolic of
Cotton and the moon

Warmth, earth, warmth,
The sky, the sun, the stars,
The magnolia-scented South.
This positive image of the South set in opposition to the negative

image makes the South just that much more objectionable. These four
lines of positiveness are incidental since the dominating themes of the
remaining twenty-four lines depict the cruelty of the South. In spite
of these four lines, the opening lines with the contrasting images set
the tone for the poem:
The lazy, laughing South

With blood on its mouth.
The sunny-faced South, . . .
Finally, the poem progresses to its paradoxical climax. Regardless

of how the South has mistreated the Negro, the persona expresses an
unrequited love for her:
And I, who am black, would love her

but she spits in my face,
And I, who am black,
Would give her many rare gifts
But now she turns her back upon me.

The persona then sings lamentingly the swan song that was so
typical of Southerners during the great Migration of the Twenties.
The poem closes with this irony:
So now I seek the North—

The cold-faced North,
For she, they say,
Is a kinder mistress,
And in her house my children
May escape the spell of the South.
The “cold-faced North” was more than wintry cold. She was coldly
indifferent to the plight of the Negro who still had to contend with
racial discrimination, regardless of how covert it may have been. So
with this closing ironical statement, Hughes satirizes the North as
well as the South.
The two contrasting themes, hope and despair, and the contrasting
styles, conventional and unconventional, indicate the shifting mood
in Black poetry during the Harlem Renaissance, especially at the
beginning. Most Negroes were tired of waiting. They had been
waiting for three hundred years, and even the Emancipation Proc-
lamation had not brought them what they had hoped for. Conse-
quently, the time for being humble had passed; now some began
to protest with indignation. One of the factors which caused great
anguish and which provoked the poet to raise his voice in thunderous
wrath was lynching.
Hughes, who was the most prolific writer of the Harlem Renais-
sance, was considered—along with Claude McKay—the most rebel-
lious poet of the period. Thus, it is Hughes’ poem “Silhouette” which
protests lynching. The poet relies on ambiguity, contrast, paradox, and
irony to make his satiric attack on lynching—a prevalent theme in
Black literature. He gives the poem its ironic impact by having the
persona say
Southern gentle lady

Do not swoon.
They’ve just hung a black man
In the dark of the moon.2

156 Langston Hughes
The underlying implication of this poem is that the Black man was off-sp
probably hanged because of an alleged rape of a white woman. Ironi- lack o
cally, Hughes poeticized that the hanging is “how Dixie protects / Its H
white womanhood.” And it is possible that the victim is innocent as person
were the nine Black boys in the infamous Scottsboro case of 1931. with h
There are three questions that arise from the use of “swoon” which as it r
means “to faint” or “to feel strong, especially with rapturous emotion.” poem
First, is the “Southern gentle lady” fainting at the sight of this ghastly, more
mutilated body of a Black man hanging from a tree? Second, is she with a
swooning at the loss of her illicit lover? Or, is the sight of the Black
man’s manhood causing her to swoon? This “lady” may have been the
town’s whore who made false accusations against her illicit lover when
the two of them were caught. If she is not a lady, then the poet admon-
ishes her to become one in his closing lines:
A
Southern gentle, lady,
impac
Be good!
one. M
Be good!
Hugh
Hugh
If “good” is to be translated to mean either “respectable,” “morally
man!”
sound,” “virtuous,” or “well-behaved,” then the poem closes with the
lining
same sarcasm with which it began. Such ambiguity in “lady” and
along
“good” increases the irony.
fragm
As a matter of fact, the title is ironic in that the Black man has
the ba
allegedly committed a crime against a white woman. This contrast
prono
is the basis of “silhouette” which is defined as “any dark shape or
throug
figure seen against a light background.” This black/white contrast is
In
advanced more by the line “In the dark of the moon.” This line also
provides a paradoxical element since there is no light; yet by “the
dark of the moon / the world [is] to see / How Dixie protects / Its
white womanhood.” The dark moon symbol also portends the evil and
sinister things that lurk in the night—lynchers.
Hughes has presented a very complex situation in a thirteen-line
poem. Those thirteen lines signify all of the bad luck or ill-feelings that
existed in the South.
Illicit sex and/or miscegenation between the races was one of the The co
moral blemishes which was bitterly frowned upon during the Twen- the pi
ties. However, the real tragedy of such a liaison was that the mulatto is rem

an was off-spring not only suffered taunts and abuse but, even worse, felt the
Ironi- lack of a real identity—being neither Black nor White.
ts / Its Hughes satirizes the mulatto theme in “Mulatto.” Irony, metonymy,
ent as personification, oxymoron, repetition, paradox, and syntax—along
31. with his unconventional poetic style—give the poem its satiric thrust
which as it reiterates the mulatto theme. (Claude McKay wrote a similar
otion.” poem by the same title in 1925.) The acerbity of Hughes’ poem is
hastly, more overwhelming than McKay’s “Mulatto.” McKay’s poem opens
is she with a statement of humility:
Black
en the Because I am the white man’s son—his own,
when Bearing his bastard birth-mark on my face,
dmon- I will dispute his title to the throne,
Forever fight him for my rightful place.3
A subordinate clause as an opening line diminishes the forceful

impact that an opening should have when the theme is such a forceful
one. McKay’s poem does build in intensity as the poem progresses, but
Hughes does not delay any action. In stark contrast to McKay’s opening,
Hughes opens with an emphatic declaration: “I am your son, white
morally
man!” Note how the poet punctuates his pronouncement with under-
th the
lining as well as the exclamation point. These two rhetorical strategies
y” and
along with the repetition of key images, short simple sentences—often
fragmented—stress the tension and bitterness in this dialogue between
an has
the bastard son and his white father. Just as forceful as the mulatto’s
ontrast
pronouncements are the denials of the father which are interspersed
ape or
throughout the poem.
rast is
In very straightforward language, the father retorts:
ne also
y “the You are my son!
s / Its Like hell!
vil and Naw, You ain’t my brother.
Niggers ain’t my brother.
n-line Not ever.
gs that Niggers ain’t my brother.4
of the The contradictions of these accusations and denials are heightened by

Twen- the picturesque setting that the poet describes. (The romantic setting
mulatto is reminiscent of the scene in “The South.”)

158 Langston Hughes
Georgia dusk
The moon over the turpentine woods.

The Southern night
Full of stars,
Great big yellow stars.
Silver moonlight everywhere.
The bright stars scatter everywhere.
Pine wood scent in the evening air.
Despite the romantic setting the occasion is not a romantic one.

The epithets “nigger wenches,” “nigger night,” “Bastard boy,” “nigger
joy,” negate the otherwise romantic setting. As a matter of fact, the
phrase “turpentine wood” is not very romantic either. Turpentine
wood makes excellent fire wood—excellent for the funeral pyre of a
lynching victim.
The two oxymora “juicy bodies” and “sweet birth” further promote
the contrast in this caustic attack on one of America’s moral blemishes.
Though these two images are not placed near each other in the poem,
the images are interrelated and, therefore, reflect off each other, such as
“juicy” and “sweet” and “birth” and “bodies.” Then note the poignancy
of yet another contrast in the second line:
Dusk dark bodies

Give sweet birth
To little yellow bastard boys.
Every image and every rhetorical strategy that Hughes uses attest
to the cruelty of the South. The contemptuous disregard that the
White South has for Black women is summed up in the two rhetorical
questions of the poem: “What’s a body but a toy?” and “What’s the
body of your mother?” Perhaps the poet makes a prediction that such
uncivilized cruelty may cause the barbaric civilization to crumble when
he states:
Georgia dusk
And the turpentine woods.
One of the pillars of the temple fell.

Of course, it is also obvious that the last line refers to one of the
town’s officials who committed this dastardly deed. So Hughes has
made a double satiric play with just one line. His constant repetition
of “star” to illumine the romantic setting may also have a satiric allu-
sion to the “star” that presided over an unusual birth two thousand
years ago.
In “Mulatto” Hughes garnered those rhetorical and poetic
devices necessary for creating the intensity of his protest. The
unusual way that he separates his lines just might be symbolic of the
separation of the races. So with all these techniques, the bitterness of
the protest is brought full circle as the poem closes with the opening
line: “I am your son, white man!” But there is some added venom: “A
little yellow / Bastard boy.”
As it was previously mentioned, Langston Hughes was to be the
forerunner of the militant poets of the Sixties who poeticized their
protests about the moral blemishes that scarred America’s sense of
justice. As with the poetry of the Harlem Renaissance, the poetry of
the Revolutionary Sixties used as its objective correlative these social
and moral blemishes. One such blemish that was not considered in
poetry during the Harlem Renaissance is drug addiction. Drug addic-
tion in the earlier part of the century was a little-known problem, and
then it was most prevalent among musicians. But seemingly after each
war or military conflict that America enters, drug addiction becomes
rampant, with its widespread use becoming a national problem after
the Vietnam conflict. Langston Hughes alludes to this fact in his
poem “Junior Addict.” Note the references to war:
Quick, sunrise, come—

Before the mushroom bomb
Pollutes his stinking air
With better death
Than is his living here,
With viler drugs
Than bring today’s release
In poison from the fallout
Of our peace.5
Langston Hughes, who began writing poetry in his teens, had

his first volume of poetry published in 1926 and continued to write

160 Langston Hughes
poetry that reflected the times until his death in 1967. His volume,
The Panther and the Lash, which was published posthumously contains
poems that are reflections of the Sixties. In his last poetry, Harlem is
still the synecdoche for America.
As it was very typical of the poetic style of the Sixties, plain
and direct language replaced metaphorical language. Although
Hughes was a poetic innovator among the traditional group, for
the most part his linguistic style does use the metaphor—“sunrise;”
but his main strategy lies in his syntax and punctuation. Written
in free verse as is most of Hughes’ poetry, “Junior Addict” tells a
sad story:
The little boy

who sticks a needle in his arm
and seeks an out in other worldly dreams,
who seeks an out in eyes that droop
and ears that close to Harlem screams . . . .
There is no indirection in this poem. The poet paints a dismal

picture of a young addict’s world of despair. The word “despair” has a
two-fold purpose in that the despair of the social situation has prob-
ably caused the youth to turn to “the drug / of his despair” which then
intensifies the addict’s desperation. The addict
cannot know, of course,

(and has no way to understand)
a sunrise that he cannot see
beginning in some other land—
“Sunrise” is the metaphor of hope in this poem. But there is little

hope for a better future “to one who will not live.” Yet the persona
pleads frantically in the coda:
Quick, sunrise, come!

Sunrise, out of Africa,
Quick, come!
Sunrise, please come!
Come! Come!

In spite of the desperation of the situation, the poem ends on

the optimistic note that there is still hope. But this hope is to come
out of Africa, the ancestral homeland which is not yet tainted by this
scourge of western civilization—drug addiction.
The urgency felt in the coda with the use of the word “Quick”
is aided by the use of the exclamation points and the rapidity of
the five staccato lines. These five lines range from monometer to
trimeter with a spondaic beat. Also, the poem found this urgency
to be achieved better with the one and two syllabic words. “Africa”
is the only three-syllable word in the five lines. But with the initial
vowel being a slack syllable, “Africa” is not a full-fledged three-
syllable word.
The sentence structure at the beginning of the poem suggests
the mood of the poem. The urgency that is climaxed in the end by
the use of the short exclamatory sentences is also sensed in the long
complex sentences of the first and second verses. Additionally, the two
very long complex sentences are indicative of the complexities of an
addict’s life such as the causes and the effects of his addiction. One
such complexity is mentioned in this poetic soliloquy:
“It’s easier to get dope

than it is to get a job.”
Yes, easier to get dope

than to get a job—
daytime or nighttime job,
teen-age, pre-draft
pre-lifetime job.
The poem is void of esoteric images. With direct and simple

language, the poem makes a social commentary on drugs, war, and
unemployment. Hughes, who always used the folk idiom of his
people, has written a poem which reflects the concerns of his people.
Thus, it was with Langston Hughes who throughout his prolific
literary career felt the urgent necessity to depict the social evils of
America, to prick the conscience of Americans, and to exhort Black
Americans to protest. Allen Prowle adequately summarizes Hughes’
protest poetry when he affirms that “protest is the dominant theme

162 Langston Hughes
of his poetry—a protest expressed in varying degrees of intensity, but

which is always at the root of his creativity.”6
NOTES
1. Langston Hughes, The Weary Blues (New York: Alfred A. Knopf,
Inc., 1926), p. 54.
2. M. Graham, Anthology of Revolutionary Poetry (New York:
Active Press, 1929), pp. 208–9.
3. Wayne Cooper, The Passion of Claude McKay: Selected Poetry and
Prose, 1912–48 (New York: Schocken Books, 1973), p. 126.
4. Langston Hughes, Fine Clothes to the Jew (New York: Alfred A.
Knopf, 1927), pp. 71–72.
5. Langston Hughes, The Panther and the Lash (New York: Alfred
Knopf, 1967), pp. 12–13.
6. Allen D. Prowle, “Langston Hughes,” in The Black American
Writer: Poetry and Drama, Vol. II, edited by C. W. E. Bigsby
(Baltimore: Penguin Books, Inc., 1971), p. 78.

ty, but
Invisible Man
Knopf, (Ralph Ellison)
,.
y and “Where Is the Civil in the
. Invisible Man’s Disobedience?”
ed A. by Brian E. Butler, University of
North Carolina at Asheville
lfred
n
by
There are no instances of civil disobedience in Invisible Man. This
omission, far from being an oversight, actually follows from Ellison’s
understanding of the relative position of law in Invisible Man’s society.
Ultimately, the lack of civil disobedience in Invisible Man follows the
lack of recognition and the legal invisibility of African Americans in
the United States of the 1930s.
John Rawls, in A Theory of Justice, defines civil disobedience as
“a public, nonviolent, conscientious yet political act contrary to law
usually done with the aim of bringing about a change in the law or
policies of the government” (Rawls 364). He goes on to state that
civil disobedience is a political act not only in the sense that

it is addressed to the majority that holds political power,
but also because it is an act guided and justified by political
principles, that is, by the principles of justice which regulate the
constitution and social institutions generally. (365)
For Rawls, it is important to note that in the case of civil disobedi-

ence, “The law is broken, but fidelity to law is expressed by the public
and nonviolent nature of the act, by the willingness to accept the legal
163

164 Ralph Ellison
consequences of one’s conduct” (366). It is illuminating to examine

how this conception of civil disobedience relates to Invisible Man.
Often the perceived disobedience of the unnamed narrator of
Invisible Man, hereafter referred to as the Invisible Man, is uninten-
tional. For example, at the university his dismissal comes about not
because of any conscious insubordination to Bledsoe, but because
of his all-too-slavish wish to please the school’s white trustee, Mr.
Norton. Another example is that the Invisible Man makes speeches
trying to raise interest in the Brotherhood only to be told he is not
staying close enough to the party line.
One of the central acts of the Invisible Man’s disobedience is
not seen by anyone; the narrator and his grandfather do not consider
this act as disobedience at all. In fact, why this clandestine act (to be
described below) is disobedience at all is never clarified, though it is a
very central type of disobedience repeated throughout the novel. The
supreme disobedient act? Full agreement. In the first scene of Chapter
1, the Invisible Man is present at his grandfather’s deathbed when his
grandfather tells his father that,
. . . our life is a war and I have been a traitor all my born days, a
spy in the enemy’s country ever since I give up my gun back in
the Reconstruction. Live with your head in the lion’s mouth. I
want you to overcome ’em with yeses, undermine ’em with grins,
agree ’em to death and destruction, let ’em swoller you till they
vomit or bust wide open. (16)
Here, acting out full agreement when really disagreeing is seen as a

subversive act.
But there are some notable events where the narrator engages in
conscious and conspicuous disobedience. For starters, there is the evic-
tion speech in Chapter 13. This event begins as the Invisible Man is
walking along with his head down to avoid some fumes from a small
fire. He notices a pile of what looks like discarded junk in the street.
Counteracting this impression is the fact that surrounding the junk is
a crowd intensely watching white men carrying furniture, more junk,
out of a building. The junk, we realize, contains the contents of an
old black couple’s apartment; the complete physical contents of their
long lives are being removed from the building and unceremoniously
dumped on the street. They are being evicted. The crowd, while hostile,

Invisible Man 165
at first seems content to grumble amongst themselves, both about the

eviction, but also about the shamefulness of the old couple’s poverty.
As the old woman being evicted tries to wrest her bible from one of
the men, she moans, “These white folks, Lord. These white folks,”
and while her husband tries to calm her, she continues, “It’s all the
white folks, not just one. They all against us” (263). With this, the
crowd gets more vocal and angry. When the old woman tries to go
back into the apartment to pray she is disallowed because, as is stated,
“You were legally evicted.” But the old couple tries to enter neverthe-
less and is pushed backward.The crowd appears ready to attack. This
moves the Invisible Man to action. He runs to the front of the crowd
and yells, “Black men! Brothers! Black Brothers! That’s not the way.
We’re law-abiding. We’re a law-abiding people and a slow-to-anger
people.” He continues, “We’re angry, but let us be wise.” Members
of the crowd, though, are angry and want action. Our narrator then
starts describing the contents of the junk and the life of the old couple
to the crowd, emphasizing their history and years of work. Someone
shouts angrily that the couple has been dispossessed. The Invisible
Man replies, ironically, that they could not be dispossessed because
the “Great Constitutional Dream Book” that the old couple lived by
is “all cataracted like a cross-eyed carpenter and it doesn’t saw straight”
(273). More directly, they cannot be dispossessed because they never
were allowed to have, to really rightfully possess, anything in the first
place. The Invisible Man then looks toward the leader of the group of
white men performing the eviction. He states,
. . . but remember that we’re a wise, law abiding group of

people. And remember it when you look up there in the
doorway at that law standing there with his forty-five. Look at
him, standing with his blue steel pistol and his blue serge suit,
or one forty-five, you see ten for every one of us, ten guns and
ten warm suits and ten fat bellies and ten million laws. Laws,
that’s what we call them down South. Laws! (271–272)
About this time the crowd grows angry and inpatient, attacking
the white men despite, and possibly because of, the Invisible Man’s
oration. In the ensuing scuffle the Invisible Man once again finds his
voice and convinces the people to bring the contents of the apart-
ment back inside. During this activity the police arrive. After briefly

166 Ralph Ellison
taunting the police by claiming that the group was only cleaning the
streets of litter, and laughing to himself, the Invisible Man is over-
whelmed by the scene and makes a rooftop escape, leaving the others
to face the impending arrival of the riot police.
Another moment of implied disobedience is during Clifton’s
funeral. The funeral arises out of an act of disobedience. Ultimately
it turns into an event premised upon injustice and aimed at recogni-
tion. A favorite community leader in the Brotherhood, the semisecret
organization that recruits the Invisible Man after he shows leadership
in the eviction speech, Clifton disappears from the organization and
then resurfaces selling dancing Sambo dolls on the street. Clifton is
next seen being harassed by a police officer. While the police officer
marches Clifton along, Clifton turns violently and punches him.
Though it is a strong blow that knocks the officer to the ground, the
police officer manages to shoot Clifton and he dies in the street. As
a witness to this scene, the Invisible Man seizes on this as an oppor-
tunity to “put his [Clifton’s] integrity together again” and attract
members to the Brotherhood (441). Clifton’s funeral becomes a huge
spectacle with a drum corps, a thirty-piece band and a large group of
attendees. The Invisible Man’s speech, while not technically against the
law (especially the law as a set of written texts), centers on the nature
of the relationship between blacks and the police (the real “law”).
“Listen to me standing up on this so-called mountain!” I

shouted. “Let me tell it as it truly was! His name was Tod
Clifton and he was full of illusions. He thought he was a man
when he was only Tod Clifton. He was shot for the simple
mistake of judgment and he bled and his blood dried and
shortly the crowd trampled out the stains. It was a normal
mistake of which many are guilty: He thought he was a man
and that men were not meant to be pushed around. But it was
hot downtown and he forgot his history, he forgot the time
and the place. He lost his hold on reality. There was a cop
and a waiting audience but he was Tod Clifton and cops are
everywhere. The cop? What about him? He was a cop. A good
citizen. But this cop had an itching finger and an eager ear for
the word that rhymed with ‘trigger,’ and when Clifton fell he
had found it. The Police Special spoke its lines and the rhyme
was completed . . .” (450)

Invisible Man 167
The Invisible Man tells the crowd to teach the police to think, “when
they call you nigger to make a rhyme with trigger it makes the gun
backfire” (451). He then concludes, “I do not know if all cops are
poets, but I know that all cops carry guns with triggers. And I know
too how we are labeled. So in the name of Brother Clifton beware of
the triggers” (451).
One of the most powerful images of disobedience is a short inci-
dent within the very intricate and surreal riot described in Chapter
25. Here, our narrator is following a group of men he met for the
first time during a race riot in Harlem ostensibly caused by outrage
over Clifton’s death. Instead of joining the random looting and
pillaging going on all around him, the Invisible Man becomes part
of a group that appears to have a specific aim and a well-thought-
out plan with which to carry it out. Dupre, the leader of the group,
directs them to a hardware store where they fill buckets with oil.
With full buckets in hand the group walks in deliberate fashion to a
“huge” tenement building where, we learn, two of the men the Invis-
ible Man is with, Dupre and Scofield, live. Dupre intends to burn it
down, but is very methodical in bringing about his plan. He states,
“look here y’all . . . I wants all the women and chillun and the old
and the sick folks brought out” (536). After making sure no one is
left in the building Dupre continues with a just as careful plan as to
how the arson will be carried out. The Invisible Man’s response to
the successful fulfillment of Dupre’s aim is exaltation, at least in part
because “They did it themselves . . . planned it, organized it, applied
the flame” (540).
And, most dramatically, there is “the bump.” While placed in the
prologue, the accidental bump incident is, according to the narrator’s
story, last of all the disobedient acts to happen of those investigated in
this paper. In this incident, the Invisible Man is walking on a deserted
street when he accidentally bumps into a tall blond and blue-eyed
man. The man in response calls our narrator “an insulting name” (4).
Because of this, the Invisible Man seizes his coat lapels and demands
he apologize. Instead of apologizing, the blond man curses him. The
Invisible Man head butts the man’s chin, which results in blood and
the tearing of flesh and then, following this, repeatedly kicks him
while yelling, “Apologize! Apologize!” The man refuses to do so,
and instead continues to utter insults “though his lips were frothy
with blood” (4). Finally, the narrator tells us: “I got out my knife and

168 Ralph Ellison
prepared to slit his throat . . . when it occurred to me that the man

had not seen me, actually; that he, as far as he knew, was in the midst
of a walking nightmare!” (4). With this realization, the Invisible Man
decides not to kill, and drops the man down onto the street. His narra-
tion continues:
He lay there, moaning on the asphalt; a man almost killed by a

phantom. It unnerved me. I was both disgusted and ashamed.
I was like a drunken man myself, wavering about on weakened
legs. Then I was amused: Something in this man’s thick head
had sprung out and beaten him within an inch of his life. I
began to laugh at this crazy discovery. Would he have awakened
at the point of death? Would Death himself have freed him
for wakeful living? But I didn’t linger. I ran away into the dark,
laughing so hard I feared I might rupture myself. (4)
None of these incidents qualify, at least if we accept Rawls’s defi-

nition, as civil disobedience. For example, in the eviction speech there
is no address to the majority. The Invisible Man addresses only the
people in his neighborhood. Further, the only reference to law is that
the people he addresses are “law-abiding.” There is no belief in law as a
source to look to for help or protection. Here the law only commands.
In fact, the “Great Constitutional Dream Book” is described as cross-
eyed and “all cataracted.” If the Constitution cannot see, the law is not
available and fidelity to law, another key factor in Rawls’s definition,
has no place in the event. Further, the idea that the eviction was not
seen as a dispossession at all undercuts any literal argument against
unjust dispossession.
Clifton’s funeral, on the other hand, starts with an act of disobedi-
ence that ends in Clifton’s death due to a police officer’s nigger/trigger
complex. Here, the Invisible Man’s speech clarifies where law fits
in all this. The narrator explains that Clifton had made the mistake
of judgment in thinking that he was a man because “he forgot his
history, he forgot the time and place.” To be black in the eyes of the
law is to be seen by the “good citizen,” in the form of the cop, as not
human. Here there is no appeal to change any law as Rawls would
require. Further, there is once again no appeal to the majority’s sense
of justice. Finally, and most tragically, there is no opportunity for
Clifton to show a “willingness to accept the legal consequences” of his

Invisible Man 169
demand to be treated as a man because the consequences are a little

too drastic—immediate death.
These issues are equally clear in the tenement episode and the
bumping incident. The tenement torching is clearly a conscious, if
not conscientious, act contrary to law. The act, like all of the others
investigated here, is not justified or motivated by political principles
but rather by moral indignation. Finally, arson is somewhat violent
(therefore not satisfying the nonviolent test) and the act, done as it is
during a riot, shows no conscious willingness by the group to accept
the legal consequences attached to breaking such a law. In fact, it
seems that it is only under the cover of general chaos that such an act
could be carried out without resistance. Of course, the bumping act
is clearly eliminated from Rawls’ civil disobedience definition because
of its extreme violence. While an act of moral outrage, the fact that in
the newspaper it is reported as a mugging shows not only that there
is no willingness to note the wrongfulness of the blond man’s verbal
attack, but also that the Invisible Man’s protest is not seen as protest at
all. This is very significant. His type is not really allowed a civil space
within which to protest.
Upon finishing the narration of the bump episode, the Invisible
Man imagines the reader’s reaction:
I can hear you say, “What a horrible, irresponsible bastard!”

And you’re right. I leap to agree with you. I am one of the most
irresponsible beings that ever lived. Irresponsibility is part of
my invisibility; any way you face it, it is a denial. But to whom
can I be responsible, and why should I be, when you refuse to
see me? And wait until I reveal how truly irresponsible I am.
Responsibility rests upon recognition, and recognition is a form
of agreement. (13–14)
The Invisible Man, and those like him, are not allowed a civil space
within which they can be seen as legitimately protesting the injustice
of law. The possibility of legitimacy in the face of the law is refused.
Rawls explains, “civil disobedience . . . arises only within a more or
less just democratic state for those who recognize and accept the
legitimacy of the constitution” (Rawls 363). But here the Constitution
is corrupt. When the Constitution is cross-eyed and all cataracted it
should not be trusted.

170 Ralph Ellison
This thought is played out nicely by Martha Nussbaum in “Invis-

ibility and Recognition: Sophocles’ Philoctetes and Ellison’s Invisible
Man.” Nussbaum claims that, “Like the Philoctetes, Ralph Ellison’s
novel concerns a refusal of acknowledgment, a humanity that has
been effaced” (259). Invisible Man, according to her, aims to undo the
refusal of recognition. The lack of recognition is seen to be “a moral
and social defect, but also, more deeply, as a defect of imagination, of
the inner eyes with which we look out, through our physical eyes, on
the world” (260). Therefore the need is to create the ability, the means,
for a broader ability to [re]imagine the place of blacks in American
society. Nussbaum thinks that Ellison had to construct commonality
between seemingly opposite views of the world. To construct this
“idea of common humanity” Ellison has to utilize a very diverse set
of strategies:
We can understand ultimately (again, a controversial

presupposition of Ellison’s art), but only if we are hectored
and confused, shocked and astonished, approached with a
bewildering combination of mythic violence, sardonic humor,
bizarre narrative, and expressive symbolism. Only such nonrealist
devices are adequate to the recording of the inner complexity of
a daily life in racially divided America. (Nussbaum 264–265)
This explains why there is so little appeal to law in Invisible Man:

Ellison appeals to persuasion instead of force, not only because he
thinks that this type of appeal is more effective, but really because
there is no avenue of appeal to the protection of law; therefore legal
force is no solution.
Through Ellison’s narrative craft, and the various strategies shown
in Invisible Man, the reader can join with the narrator in working
out the implications of this invisibility, of this lack of recognition. As
Danielle Allen puts it, Ellison recognizes and embraces the fact that
democracy rests upon sacrifice, especially the sacrifice of minorities
who are not fully represented in any particular law but must still be
faithful to the law. This works and is just when the sacrifices necessary
for civil society are spread around equally, but:
When sacrifices are not voluntary but demanded, those who

give something up for the common good have been treated

Invisible Man 171
as scapegoats and are not sacrificers. And when a sacrifice is

accepted without the honor due to the benefactor and without
eventually being reciprocated, those who gain from their fellow
citizens’ losses also abuse them. (Allen 859)
In other words, because blacks are involuntary scapegoats, and because

the society they live within will not see their sacrifice as sacrifice,
the law represents abuse in its most direct and clear manifestation.
Because of this, civil disobedience is impossible.
Allen concludes from this that, “citizens of the post-Reconstruc-
tion American South, habituated to poor standards of citizenly inter-
action, understood something that Fine and political theorists often
had not: The political-juridical world comes to exist out of the social
world, which sets limits on and also facilitates the operations of the
political world” (Allen 886). In other words, in opposition to Watts’s
claim that, “should the United States ever advance to the point at
which black jazz musicians and writers are given just recognition for
their accomplishments, it will be the result of some type of political
agitation,” it is more nearly the opposite in the areas of the arts as well
as civil rights (Watts 117). As Steven Tracy states:
. . . at the time of his publication of Invisible Man, many whites

were frequently not ready to acknowledge the contributions of
African Americans, with Brown v. Board of Education, lunch
counter sit-ins, bus strikes, and civil rights marches not yet
materialized. It seems more likely, then, that Ellison was merely
awakening to and illuminating for his audience the artistic and
intellectual contributions that had been there in front of their
faces all along. (Tracy 111)
But, as Ellison shows us, seeing another’s face right in front of ours,
even when it is threatening us with death, is sometimes beyond
our ability. One is confronted with an urgent problem—how to get
someone who is cross-eyed and cataracted by bias and privilege to
see the invisible, the unrecognized, as worthy of honor and respect.
As Ellison asserts, “it is futile to argue our humanity with those
who willfully refuse to recognize it, when art can reveal on its own
terms more truth while providing pleasure, insight and, for Negro
readers at least, affirmation and a sense of direction” (Essays 740).

172 Ralph Ellison
That recognition is the result of an artistic and creative construction.

Before there can be political agitation, one must be seen as a member
of the polis, as at least potentially a citizen. In this sense, the Invisible
Man had to disobey in his way because civil disobedience was not an
option. Further, of course, Invisible Man can be read as a revelation
of sacrifice, of humanity, an aesthetic recreation of the social world so
that acts of civil disobedience in a Rawlsian sense can happen. If there
is a realm of the civil in Invisible Man, it is not in the manner of civil
disobedience but in its appeal to the larger (latent) civility in society.
It is not the top-down or bottom-looking-up appeal to authority, but
a face-to-face appeal to democratic values. Ellison, as effectively as
anyone, used the literary imagination to “smuggle the black man into
society’s machinery in some form” (Trading Twelves 223). The Invisible
Man must be smuggled into American society so as to be seen.

Allen, Danielle. “Law’s Necessary Forcefulness: Ralph Ellison v. Hannah
Arendt on the Battle of Little Rock.” Oklahoma City University Law
Review 26 (2001): 857–95.
Bates, Daisy. The Long Shadow of Little Rock. Fayetteville: University of
Arkansas Press, 2007.
Benston, Kimberly W. Speaking for You: The Vision of Ralph Ellison. Washington:
Howard University Press, 1987.
Bloom, Harold, ed. Ralph Ellison. New York: Chelsea House, 2003.
Brophy, Alfred L. “Foreword: Ralph Ellison and the Law.” Oklahoma City
University Law Review 26 (2001): 823–837.
Callahan, John F., ed. Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man: A Casebook. Oxford: Oxford
Cashman, Sean Dennis. African-Americans and the Quest for Civil Rights: 1900–
1990. New York: New York University Press, 1991.
Ellison, Ralph. The Collected Essays of Ralph Ellison. New York: The Modern
Library, 2003.
. Flying Home and Other Stories. New York: Random House, 1996.
. Invisible Man. New York: Random House, 1992.
. Juneteenth. New York: Random House, 1999.
, with Albert Murray. Trading Twelves: The Selected Letters of Ralph
Ellison and Albert Murray. Edited by Albert Murray and John F.
Callahan. New York: The Modern Library, 2000.

Invisible Man 173
Glaude, Eddie S. In a Shade of Blue: Pragmatism and the Politics of Black

America. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2007.
Jackson, Lawrence. Ralph Ellison: Emergence of Genius. New York: John Wiley
and Sons, 2002.
Magee, Michael. Emancipating Pragmatism: Emerson, Jazz, and Experimental
Writing. Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press, 2004.
May, Larry, ed. Recasting America: Culture and Politics in the Age of Cold War.
Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1989.
Meacham, John. Voices in Our Blood: America’s Best on the Civil Rights
Movement. New York: Random House, 2001.
Morel, Lucas E., ed. Ralph Ellison and the Raft of Hope: A Political Companion
to Invisible Man. Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 2004.
Murray, Albert. The Omni-Americans: New Perspectives on Black Experience and
American Culture. New York: Outerbridge and Dienstfrey, 1970.
Nussbaum, Martha C. “Invisibility and Recognition: Sophocles’ Philoctetes and
Ellison’s Invisible Man.” Philosophy and Literature 23.2 (1999): 257–283.
Polsgrove, Carol. Divided Minds: Intellectuals and the Civil Rights Movement.
New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 2001.
Posnock, Ross, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Ralph Ellison. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2005.
Rampersad, Arnold. Ralph Ellison: A Biography. New York: Vintage Books,
2008.
Rawls, John. A Theory of Justice. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971.
Stephens, Gregory. On Racial Frontiers: The New Culture of Frederick Douglass,
Ralph Ellison, and Bob Marley. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1999.
Sundquist, Eric J. Cultural Contexts for Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man. New
York: Bedford Books, 1995.
Tracy, Steven C. “A Delicate Ear, a Retentive Memory, and the Power to Weld
the Fragments.” A Historical Guide to Ralph Ellison. Edited Steven C.
Tracy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. 85–114.
, ed. A Historical Guide to Ralph Ellison. Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2004.
Watts, Jerry Gafio. Heroism and the Black Intellectual: Ralph Ellison, Politics, and
Afro-American Intellectual Life. Chapel Hill: The University of North
Carolina Press, 1994.

JULIUS CAESAR
(WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE)
,.
“Julius Caesar”
by Stopford A. Brooke, in
Ten More Plays of Shakespeare (1913)
Introduction
In his analysis of Julius Caesar Stopford Brooke focuses on
the political elements of the play, examining the revolutionary
nature of the civil disobedience that leads to Caesar’s down-
fall. For Brooke, the revolution in the play is unsuccessful.
Even though Caesar is slain and his despotic reign ended,
the play “puts, indirectly, into artistic form the two reasons
why revolutions which are in the right do not always succeed
against forms of government which are in the wrong: that
is, why a struggle for freedom fails against a tyranny, or, if it
should succeed for a time, as in the French Revolution, why it
finally falls again under the power of a despotism.”
f
The play of Julius Caesar is the form into which Shakespeare cast the
materials he had collected out of Plutarch’s Lives of Caesar, Antony,
and Brutus. The subject was a common one. Polonius says in Hamlet:
Brooke, Stopford A. “Julius Caesar.” Ten More Plays of Shakespeare. London:

Constable and Co., 1913. 58–90.
175

176 William Shakespeare
In the university “I did enact Julius Caesar: I was killed in the Capitol:
Brutus killed me.” Every one knows how much life Plutarch gave to
his characters, but the life which Shakespeare gave them was more full,
various, and feeling than Plutarch’s power could paint. A multitude of
stories interesting as history, a host of philosophic remarks interesting
as Plutarch’s, illuminate but sometimes overwhelm the presentation of
these three men by Plutarch. In Shakespeare’s play, the men themselves
are the first interest; and only those events and passions are chosen out
of the history, which develop the characters, urge on the action of the
play, or enliven the scenes into a vivid reality. The political philosophy,
of which there is a fair sprinkling in the play, does not seem to proceed
from Shakespeare, but from the very nature of each of the characters
he has separately individualised. Even when Brutus, Cassius, Casca lay
down identical theories, the expression of them is different on the lips
and in the mind of each. In all that Plutarch writes of his men we are
in touch with Plutarch, but in this play we do not touch Shakespeare,
but Brutus, Cassius, Antony, Casca, Cicero, or Caesar. And in this
contrast is contained the eternal distinction between the man of talent
and the man of genius, between the describer and the creator, between
the intellectual man and the poet.
Then, again, a creative genius, having collected his materials, feels
his mastery over them, and uses them as he pleases. He is going to
make a greater matter than that which actually happened; something
that will endure when the historical events have become dreams.
Therefore Shakespeare makes what changes he will in the history of
Plutarch. He makes Caesar’s triumph occur on the same date as the
Lupercalia. It really took place six months previously. He brings the
murder of Caesar, the funeral speeches, and the arrival of Octavius in
Rome, into the circle of one day instead of many. He combines into
one the two battles of Philippi, quietly setting aside the interval of
twenty days between them. This is the imagination dealing as it pleases
with facts. It is possible historians may dislike it, but what talk we of
historians when there is such a man as Shakespeare.
Nor does he less show his sense of mastery over his materials when
he takes from Plutarch, whenever he thinks them good enough for
his purposes, the very words that Plutarch uses or invents. It is true
they were in the noble English of North’s translation—contemporary
English with which Shakespeare was in sympathy—but all the more
one would think that he would avoid transcribing whole sentences,

Julius Caesar 177
almost word for word, out of North’s prose into blank verse. Not at
all. Genius takes all it wants, and is confident of its right to do this.
“I have power to adopt what is good,” Genius would say if he were
questioned, “because it is better where I place it than it was in its
original surroundings.”
The play appeared in 1601. Weever’s Mirror of Martyrs, printed
in 1601, refers to Antony’s speech in this play, for which there is
no original in Plutarch. Hence we know that Julius Caesar preceded
Weever’s book, and probably was written in 1600. It was acted at the
beginning of 1601.
The subject-matter of the play was of great interest at this time.
Perhaps in 1562, certainly before 1579, and again in 1588, there
were plays on the fate of Caesar. In 1589 a play with the title Julius
Caesar was known, and was acted by Shakespeare’s company in 1594.
Then, after Shakespeare’s play, that is, after 1601, a number of plays
represented various portions and views of the same subject. Indeed,
the matter has always engaged the thoughts of men, their passion
and their genius. It is a political interest;—the natural war which has
existed since the beginning of the world between the idea of Liberty
and the force of Autocracy; and this play, where the two powers clash,
where they are impersonated in Caesar and Brutus, has been, on many
a stage, the means of giving expression to the anger and pity of those
who, among a people degraded by the gratuities and coaxing of Impe-
rialism, lived and died for the rugged liberties they could not win.
That interest has been seen and felt in this play. What has not
been seen and felt in it—at least not to my knowledge—is that it
puts, indirectly, into artistic form the two reasons why revolutions
which are in the right do not always succeed against forms of govern-
ment which are in the wrong: that is, why a struggle for freedom fails
against a tyranny, or, if it should succeed for a time, as in the French
Revolution, why it finally falls again under the power of a despotism.
The first of these reasons is—that the single idea which belongs to
all the revolutionists is not kept apart, in each of them, from personal
motives. Each man adds to it his own interest or his own passion; and
these several interests or passions divide the men from one another.
Then unity is lost, and with the loss of unity, force is dispersed. Of
all the conspirators, only Brutus had a single aim uninjured by any
personal motive. Shakespeare makes that plain. His Cassius, Casca,
Cinna, and the rest, had each his own axe to grind, or his own

personal envy of Caesar. Not one of them is ever able to conceive the
impersonal, the unselfish attitude of Brutus. Brutus—and this is the
deep tragedy of the play—far apart from the rest in his own ideal
world, thinks, stands, lives, and dies alone. His is a position which has
been repeated again and again in the history of revolutions. It was,
to give one example from our own time, the position of Délécluze in
the story of the Commune. The other conspirators have little bond of
union except the desire to slay Caesar; no uniting ideal aim in which
their individual selfishnesses are absorbed. Where that is the case, as
often it has been in the story of the struggle of Ireland, and, as yet, of
the working classes in England and abroad, failure is certain.1 Even if,
for the moment, they act together, as in the slaughter of Caesar, they
fall asunder, each to his own interest, when the act is accomplished;
and their want of union for one collective, ideal aim ruins their cause.
The only thing which binds the conspirators together after the death
of Caesar is that they are all proscribed, and have to fight for their
lives. It is astonishing how clearly this comes out in Julius Caesar. It
dominates the play till the death of Caesar. It is not neglected after-
wards. Even the great and vital friendship between Brutus and Cassius
is imperilled by the personal aims of Cassius. On the eve of the battle
which will decide their fate, these two friends all but split asunder.
Again, a still more important reason why revolutions against
Imperialism fail, is that their leaders have no settled form of govern-
ment ready to replace that which they have overthrown; and no men,
trained in official work, to use as means for carrying on a government.
The consequence is, that after the outburst everything is at sixes and
sevens; the various parties devour one another; and in the confusion
the mere mob of the violent, unthinking, drifting people get the upper
hand. Anarchy, then, makes every kind of human life and effort, and all
property, uncertain; and then the steady body of the whole State, sick of
disturbance, illegality, change, uncertainty, welcomes despotism again,
because it governs. This was the career of the French Revolution.
Shakespeare makes the lesson clear in this play. The pure political
idealist, like Brutus, is absolutely at sea the moment he has destroyed
the government of Caesar. And Cassius, Casca, Cinna, like Brutus,
have nothing ready with which to replace it. They are all left, in
ridiculous failure and confusion, face to face with the mob whom
the embryo imperialism of Caesar has weakened and degraded by
amusements and gratuities. Nothing can be better put than this is

Julius Caesar 179
by Shakespeare in the blind, futile, inconsequent, disintegrated talk

of the conspirators after they have slain Caesar. Brutus, their noblest
comrade, is at this crisis the most amazingly foolish of them all. He
loses his head. He shouts like an Anarchist. He thinks all Rome is on
his side. He is absolutely ignorant of the people he has only conceived
in his study. He thinks Rome will govern itself. He takes no measures
to set any government on foot. He believes in Antony! He acts like a
man in a dream. He makes a speech to the people, hands them over to
Antony’s seductive tongue, and walks home, as if he had done nothing
and had nothing more to do, to talk the matter over with Portia. The
inevitable follows; and he flies for his life with Cassius through the
gates of the city he has, by his action, handed over to a more organised
despotism than Caesar ever exercised.
Imperialism has won, Republicanism has failed, and Shakespeare,
in the quiet apartness of the Creator, marks out, through the dramatic
action and speech of his characters, what are the main points of the
event. He records things as they are, and in the quarrel seems to take
no side. This is the proper position of a great dramatist. Yet, as in
Coriolanus, where Shakespeare’s sympathy seems, on the whole, to be
on the side of the tribunes, so here, and more probably here than in
any other play, the personal sympathy of Shakespeare seems to emerge
on the side of Republicanism. He has, as always, his “good-humoured
contempt of the mob.” But there is a heightening of his phrasing,
an intensity of the soul he puts into his words when he speaks of
Brutus or makes him speak, which draws me into the imagination
that his sympathy was with the thoughts of Brutus, the republican.
There is not enough on which to base any definite conclusion, but
there is enough on which to base a suggestion. And this sugges-
tion of his personal sympathy with the Republicanism of Brutus is
perhaps buttressed by the strange and half-contemptuous sketch he
makes of Caesar, the great imperialist. It is unlike any other image
I know of Caesar. He is represented as subject to superstitions, as
wavering to and fro, as led by the nose by his enemies, as vain even
to insolence, as having lost his intellectual powers in self-sufficiency,
as one who thinks himself separated altogether from his fellow-men.
His speeches are almost the speeches of a fool. Shakespeare seems to
have gone out of his way to make this representation, this dénigrante
representation; and it is very curious when we contrast it with the
lofty, dignified, and beautiful representation he makes of the man who

embodies Republicanism. I do not say that Shakespeare was a repub-

lican; that would be absurd. Nobody knows what he was; and he was
not likely to openly sympathise with Republicanism, even of the kind
then conceived, under the rule of Elizabeth. But he was likely to be
opposed to despotism, to maintain the freedom which England had
already won. And it is worth saying that when this play was written in
1601, Elizabeth had tried to enforce the Tudor despotism, to impose
her own will on Parliament; and was successfully met and defeated by
Parliament quietly insisting on its ancient liberties. She yielded with
a good grace; but no Londoner, and least of all one of Shakespeare’s
vast intelligence, could be unaware of this struggle. A great conten-
tion of this kind steals into the thoughts and imagination of men, and
consciously or unconsciously influences their work, even though the
work have nothing to do with the struggle itself. I think it possible,
then, that the representation of the contrasted political ideas of Brutus
and Caesar, which Shakespeare (to the advantage of Brutus) makes
so plain, was indirectly coloured by the struggle between Elizabeth
and the Parliament—between the despotic will of the Queen and the
ancient liberties of England.
But all this is scarcely an argument, much less an assertion. The
common thing to say is that Shakespeare, on debatable matters, such
as politics and religion, took no side himself. And one proof of this
impersonal attitude is, that even if he sympathised with the political
ideas of Brutus, he as plainly did not sympathise with his weakness in
action, with his inability to govern or to manage men. His representa-
tion of Brutus both before and after the death of Caesar, is of a man
totally unfit to handle events or to direct a State. Shakespeare may
have thought it right to oppose despotism, but even despotism was
better than anarchy. Brutus was a better man than Caesar or Octavius.
But Brutus could not govern, Octavius could.
The play is a political play, and of a kind different from that of any
other in his works, even from that of Coriolanus. It is concerned with
affairs of State throughout, and when the ordinary passions of human
life enter into it, they come as episodes. The domestic and personal life
of Coriolanus is more important for that play than the affairs of the
State. But in Julius Caesar, on the contrary, the relation between Portia
and Brutus, the friendship between Brutus and Cassius, are extra-
neous; do not affect the dramatic conduct of the drama, or the catas-
trophe. They are relieving interludes of great charm, and made more

Julius Caesar 181
charming still not only by the invention of Lucius, who in his happy
youth has nothing to do with the storm of events around him, but also
by the gentle and gracious relations between the boy and his master
Brutus. But none of these things interfere with the main action—with
the contest between Caesarism and the old Republicanism of Rome,
between a worn-out Past and a living Present. Brutus is defeated;
Caesar conquers; and the play is rightly named Julius Caesar.
Some have said it ought to be named by Brutus’s name, and that
he is the true hero of the drama. But great as Brutus is in the drama,
and apparent master of its action, Caesar is in reality the cause of
all the action and its centre. His spirit dominates the whole. But in
the first part it is not the Caesar of the play who dominates, it is the
Caesar who has been; the life, the doings, the spirit of the Man who
in the past has bestrid “the world like a Colossus.” What Shakespeare
has made of the existing Caesar is what a man becomes who having
been great, thinks his will divine, even the master of Fate; and falling
into that temper which the Greeks called Insolence, becomes the
fool of Vanity and the scorn of the gods who leave him to relentless
Destiny. Shakespeare’s picture of Caesar resembles the picture drawn
by the Greek tragedians of the chiefs who, isolating themselves from
their fellow-men, equalised themselves to the gods in their self-
opinion, and placed themselves—as the gods did not—above eternal
Law. But his present folly does not lessen Caesar’s past greatness; and
Shakespeare takes pains to show how great he was, and how great
he still is in the minds of men. The play opens with his triumph over
Pompey. Brutus loves him, while he hates his idea of Empire. Cassius,
Casca, while they cry him down, exalt his image in our eyes. When
they slay him, they are like men who have murdered a world. Even the
starry powers, in Shakespeare’s imagination, emphasise his greatness.
The whole heaven, when Caesar comes to die, is racked with storm;
lions roam the streets, the dead rise from their graves. And when he
is dead, all his vanity and folly are forgotten instantly. Rome rises to
drive out his assassins. His spirit broods over the rest of the play in
executive power. It is Caesar who wins the battle of Philippi, who
plants the sword in the heart of Cassius and of Brutus. The theory of
government, because of which he died, defeats the theory Brutus held;
the new world he initiated disperses to all the winds the old world
that Brutus, in vain, tried to reanimate. Caesar is lord of the play;
Brutus is in the second place.

Being thus a Drama concerned with Statesmen and State affairs,

there is but little in it of human passion at its height. The note of the
play is low in sound. There is the passion for liberty in Brutus, but it
is the passion of the student, not of the man of action. The same high
passion is supposed to be in the other conspirators, but it is really the
mean passion of envy which influences them. There is neither loftiness
of motive nor depth of wrath for freedom in anything they say or do.
Then, with regard to Brutus, his Stoic nature forbids in him deep
emotion; and his personal love for Caesar prevents him from feeling
any intensity of indignation against Caesar. His love for Caesar
depresses into a still sadness his eagerness for liberty. Moreover, he is
not angry with anything Caesar has as yet done. He slays Caesar lest
he should do wrong to liberty in the future. This doubt as to whether
Caesar will become a tyrant or not (the slaughter of Caesar being
only to prevent a possibility) would naturally take all passion out of
his thought and act. Scepticism—save vaguely with regard to itself—is
naturally unimpassioned, except in a young man like Hamlet. Brutus
was a mature man and a Stoic. Sad and earnest then, in quiet Stoicism,
without any passion, his mind works, and his hand strikes. His sense of
what he thinks himself compelled to do depresses rather than excites
him. Therefore, with regard to the passion for liberty, the dramatic
note is low and still.
Then, again, the human relations of this play do not reach the high
levels of the great emotions. They are chiefly the relations of friend to
friend. Antony is Caesar’s friend, but his friendship is mixed with his
political selfishness. His various speeches over Caesar’s body rise now
and then into a semblance of passion, but they are calculated. He sees
himself rising into power on Caesar’s death. He is as cool as an iceberg
when he talks with Octavius and Lepidus.
Again, the friendship of Brutus and Cassius is a true friendship
but not an equal one. An unequal friendship does not stir into move-
ment the deeper waters of feeling. The stronger nature of Brutus has
another world in which to live where Cassius cannot come. One feels
this apartness again and again in the famous dialogue between them.
Even in the reconciliation there is that condescension on the part of
Brutus which is incompatible with an impassioned friendship.
[ ...]
Though the image of Caesar dominates the play, and Caesarism
conquers in it, yet its main subject is the working out of the fate of

Julius Caesar 183
Brutus as the last hero of Roman liberty; and the fall of Republicanism
in his death is the true catastrophe of the Drama. The representation
of this might have been made more impassioned. But, even in this,
passion was excluded, because Brutus, being a Stoic, his law of life
excluded passion. Shakespeare was forced then to keep his representa-
tion of Brutus quiet. And nowhere is his careful work as an artist more
remarkable, more close to his conception of a Stoic student pushed
into the storm of great affairs, than in his slow, restrained, temperate
development of the character of Brutus. Again and again we expect
a high outburst of poetry. The events seem to call for it from Brutus.
But Shakespeare does not choose him to rise above the level of his
Stoicism; he does not even permit the tide of his own emotion, as he
writes, to erase the stern lines of the character he has conceived. Twice
only (after Caesar’s slaughter, and during the battle), Brutus is swept
out of his self-restraint.
Nevertheless the position of Brutus, though it is marked by this
self-quietude, is a noble subject for dramatic poetry. It is the struggle
of the hero who belongs to a past world against the victorious pull
of the present world. And since Brutus is high-hearted, and his idea
morally right, and the world he fought with ignoble and unmoral, his
overthrow does not lower him in our eyes. He is conquered by circum-
stance, but his soul is unconquered. He becomes more fit for lofty
tragic poetry when, as the play moves on, he stands alone in his noble-
ness, apart not only from his enemies, but in the purity of his motives
from his friends. And the tragic in him is lifted into splendour of
subject when we see clearly that which he did not see till he came
to die: that the death of Caesar—the means, that is, which he took
in order to bring back to Rome the freedom that he loved—was the
very event which riveted on Rome the Imperialism which he hated.
Few situations are more poetic. The ghost of Old Rome stands on the
threshold of Imperial Rome, and fades before its worldly splendour.
But as the phantom fades away, we follow it with praise and honour.
It will rise into life again when Imperial Rome shall have fallen into
the helpless ruin it deserved. The spirit of Brutus can never die.
In the very first scene (in Shakespeare’s preparing fashion), two
main elements of the drama are represented. There is, first, the mindless
mob, spoilt by the bread and games successive leaders have given to it;
which has no care for liberty or any policy, only for entertainment. The
second is the division of Rome into violent parties. We see the partisans

of Pompey and Caesar, hot with anger; then, in another class, all those
who, like the tribunes, hold some office, and are enraged with Caesar
who threatens to take all offices into himself. These two elements become
as it were two leit-motifs, which occur again and again throughout the
play. We hear in the first Scene the growl of the popular storm which
threatens Caesar. In the next we are in the thick of it. Caesar enters
in triumph. A short dialogue, quick and crisp, sketches the pride, the
superstition, the insolentia of Caesar—the temper of one whom the
gods have doomed; the flattery which has brought him to this point of
foolishness; the pride which could not conceive that misfortune or death
could touch him. When the Soothsayer bids him beware, he cries—
He is a dreamer; let us leave him: pass.
The pageant then passes on, and Cassius and Brutus are left alone.
We hear that Brutus has been brooding of late, apart from his friends,
in silence. No one knows, not even Cassius, what turn his thoughts
have taken on the politics of Rome. Has he even discovered himself
what he thinks? There are thoughts in us which we need to hear
shaped by another person or by some event before we are conscious
that we have had them for a long time; and Brutus is in this condition
when Cassius probes him about Caesar—
Brutus: Into what dangers would you lead me, Cassius,

That you would have me seek into myself
For that which is not in me?
Then the event finishes what Cassius had begun. A shout at a distance
forces out of Brutus the dominant and concealed thoughts within him,
and crystallises them into expression—
What means this shouting? I do fear, the people

Choose Caesar for their King.
On that Cassius works to win Brutus to his side against Caesar; and
at every point of the dialogue the character of Cassius is dramati-
cally divided from the character of Brutus. Brutus only cares for the

Julius Caesar 185
public weal, for his republican ideal. Cassius is consumed with envy
of Caesar; and the bitter hatred of envy appears in the stories he tells
of Caesar’s physical weakness—anything to degrade the image of the
man he hates—as if Caesar’s not being able to swim well, or his trem-
bling in a fever, proved that he was not a better man than Cassius or
Brutus. This has no effect on Brutus, who is incapable of envy. Brutus
scarcely hears him. He is listening for a renewal of the shouts. Then
Cassius, seeing that the chord of jealousy and envy does not answer
to his touch, changes his attack, and changes its motive three times
in the course of his speech until at last he strikes the note which is
answered in the soul of Brutus. First, it is discontent with Fate that
he touches—“Why should we be underlings and he half a god ?” That
note does not touch Brutus. Then he tries ambition—“Why, Brutus,
should you not be as great as Caesar ?” That also does not affect him
either. At last he sounds the note of the ancient liberty of Rome—
There was a Brutus once that would have brook’d

The eternal devil to keep his state in Rome
As easily as a king.
That echoes in the soul of Brutus; and to develop it further into act,
Caesar enters in all his pomp. Shakespeare’s pictorial imagination
strikes out, as it were in flashes, the outward appearance and the
characteristics of the passers-by—
Look you, Cassius,

The angry spot doth glow on Caesar’s brow,
And all the rest look like a chidden train:
Calpurnia’s cheek is pale, and Cicero
Looks with such ferret and such fiery eyes
As we have seen him in the Capitol,
Being cross’d in conference by some senators.
It might be made a picture of. Then Caesar (in the one speech he
makes which is worthy of his intelligence), sketches Cassius so vividly
that he is immortalised; and then Antony with one slight touch—full
of flying power—

Yond Cassius has a lean and hungry look;

He thinks too much; such men are dangerous.
. . . . . . .
He is a great observer, and he looks
Quite through the deeds of men; he loves no plays,
As thou dost, Antony; he hears no music:
Seldom he smiles, and smiles in such a sort
As if he mock’d himself, and scorn’d his spirit
That could be moved to smile at anything.
Such men as he be never at heart’s ease,
Whiles they behold a greater than themselves,
And therefore are they very dangerous.
Here and here alone Caesar speaks up to the level of his former self.
When he has passed by, Casca takes up the presentation, and we see, as
if we were on the spot, the scene when the crown is offered to Caesar,
and the mob, and the women, and Casca’s own bitter envy. Then in
a single phrase Cicero is painted; the cultivated literary man who is
isolated from the common herd in dainty pride of culture.
Cassius: Did Cicero say anything?

Casca: Ay, he spoke Greek.
Every blunt word of Casca lays bare his embittered and jealous heart,
and we can almost see the “quick metal” in his face. Even more vividly
is the heart of Brutus disclosed to us in this masterly dialogue. The
desperate thought which has been born in him—that Caesar must be
silenced—grows steadily while he listens to Cassius and questions Casca.
He is thinking of what Caesar has done, and of that alone. He questions,
questions, that he may be sure that Caesar is trying for the crown, that
he may set his mind at rest. Though he says little, it is enough to enable
us to follow his soul in doubt. Must I slay Caesar whom I love? Is there
no way out of it? I must have time to think. To-morrow, Cassius, come
to me, or I will come to you. His mind runs round the circumference of
his thought, but never quite enters the circle; hesitating, this way and
that dividing his dread, his impulse, and his duty. And so, in this slow
progress of his thought to its shaping, we leave him for a time. He leaves
Cassius alone, who comments on his character: “Noble, yet so simple
that he may be wrought into my conspiracy.”

Julius Caesar 187
The night falls then, and the third Scene opens amid a great
tempest, full of terror and portents. The meaning of it in the play is
put afterwards on Calpurnia’s lips:
The heavens themselves blaze forth the death of Princes.
We have seen how often Shakespeare used the common belief that
Nature mixed herself up with those great human events which,
striking at chief men, struck at humanity. Nay, more, he made Nature
reflect the passions of men when they reached intensity. He writes
as if he believed that a spiritual power in Nature was in touch with
the deep things in man and in his history. We remember the storm
which accompanies the murder of Duncan; the fury of the elements
which reflects and heightens the agony of Lear. And here, to develop
this thought of his, and at the same time to dramatise it, here pres-
ents at length what each of his characters thinks of the storm. And
it affects them all in a different way. This suppression of his own idea,
and this out-creation of it in other lives than his own, other thoughts
than his own, is most masterly in this scene, and most effective on
the stage.
Casca, the envious scoffer, who respects nothing, is like many of
his tribe, smitten by the storm into superstitious terror. With his sword
drawn, breathless and staring, thinking the world is ending, he meets
Cicero; and the little sketch of Cicero is delightful. He is perfectly
unmoved by the terror of the night; as quiet as if all the stars were
shining in a peaceful sky—only astonished by the state of mind in
which Casca presents himself. Hear how placid are his sentences—
Good even, Casca: brought you Caesar home?

Why are you breathless? and why stare you so?
And to Casca’s relation of the awful sights—a lion met near the
Capitol, a man with a burning hand, men all on fire walking the
streets, the owl shrieking at noonday, and the skies dropping fire—he
replies in a philosophic strain as if he were in his study; and then asks
about the news of the day, as if he were at his club—
Indeed, it is a strange-disposed time:

But men may construe things after their fashion,

Clean from the purpose of the things themselves.

Comes Caesar to the Capitol to-morrow?
This is the educated, cultivated man to whom, absorbed in literary and

political interests, the wild games of Nature (who to his mind pursues
her natural course even in storm) are of no importance. Just so might
Burke or Darwin have looked on the elemental war.
Neither does Cassius care a straw for the raging of the tempest,
but not for Cicero’s reason. The fury of hate in his heart is greater than
the fury of the storm. The lightning and the elemental roar express
his soul, and he walked in them with joy. He sees in the dreadful
prodigies of the night the warning of Caesar’s end—Heaven itself
is speaking its wrath with Caesar. Then, as the tyrannic hate within
him seeks fresh forms of expression, he says no longer that the storm
is the message of divine wrath. It is itself the image of Caesar. It is he
who is the dreadful night of Rome; it is he that thunders, lightens,
opens graves, and roars like the lion, in the Capitol. He is our fear
and destruction.
Finally the hate and envy of Cassius break out into that impas-
sioned speech by which he bursts open the heartof Casca, and claims
him as a brother in his envy—and in his conspiracy.
And why should Caesar be a tyrant then?

Poor man! I know he would not be a wolf
But that he sees the Romans are but sheep:
He were no lion, were not Romans hinds.
Those that with haste will make a mighty fire
Begin it with weak straws: what trash is Rome,
What rubbish and what offal, when it serves
For the base matter to illuminate
So vile a thing as Caesar! But, O grief!
Where hast thou led me? I perhaps speak this
Before a willing bondman; then I know
My answer must be made. But I am arm’d,
And dangers are to me indifferent.
He ends by saying to Casca that “three parts of Brutus is ours

already,”

Julius Caesar 189
and the man entire

Upon the next encounter yields him ours.
This phrase, while it marks the slowness in the growth of Brutus’s

resolution, which Shakespeare has so carefully wrought out, intro-
duces us to the next scene in which Brutus at last makes up his
mind. The storm still goes on—“the exhalations whizzing in the
air” give light enough to read by—but the rain has ceased. Brutus
is walking in his orchard, and the dawn is near at hand. He too has
cared nothing for the storm. His soul is stormier, with its dreadful
purpose, than are the heavens. Shakespeare lays bare this soul, rest-
lessly ranging over motives, possibilities, casuistries, and settling
finally into the resolve to slay for the general good the man he
loves; not because Caesar has done anything as yet against liberty,
but because he may—and, “lest he may, I will prevent him.” What
Caesar is, he says, if given greater power,
Would run to these and these extremities:

And therefore think him as a serpent’s egg
Which, hatch’d, would as his kind grow mischievous,
And kill him in the shell.
’Tis a mean argument; and only a philosopher would use it and think
it good. Once, during the soliloquy, the unphilosophic side of Brutus
contradicts it—
To speak truth of Caesar,

I have not known when his affections sway’d
More than his reason.
Then he gets back to his mere philosophy, changing and shifting.

Some say that in this soliloquy Brutus is unlike his previous char-
acter. But Shakespeare is representing a mind travelling over a host of
arguments for and against the deed it considers. The disordered spirit
of Brutus is tossed to and fro; even now he cannot come to certainty.
It needs to settle him down into full resolve, that Rome should call
on him for help. And the sealed papers flung in at his window, crying
to him to “awake, and strike and redress, in the name of his great

ancestor who drove out the Tarquin,” finally secure his resolution.
Then he looks back on the long struggle, and in his loneliness paints
the tempest of thought through which he has passed—marvellous
words they are—half of the philosopher, half of the man who has
loved Caesar, and not one line of a man of the world.
Since Cassius first did whet me against Caesar

I have not slept.
Between the acting of a dreadful thing
And the first motion, all the interim is
Like a phantasma or a hideous dream:
The Genius and the mortal instruments
Are then in council, and the state of man,
Like to a little kingdom, suffers then
The nature of an insurrection.
Now, when at last the mind of Brutus is free from doubt, the
conspirators arrive. They are in the garden, the storm is dying away;
and the presentation to the eye of the whole scene is rendered more
vivid by the little dialogue (while Brutus and Cassius talk apart) of
Casca and Cinna about the part of the heaven where the sun arises.
They talk of “where the east is” while they wait to arrange how the
foremost man of all the world is to die. This is Shakespeare’s way,
as it is the way of human life, of mingling the common with the
uncommon, the great with the small, the deeds which shake the world
with a brawl at an inn in Eastcheap.
Then Brutus, developing still more the high-mindedness of his
character, will have no oath taken. No need for that if they are Romans
who know they have an unselfish cause to maintain; every drop of
whose blood is guilty if they break their promise. This is far too lofty
a strain for the conspirators, whom other motives drive. They do not
even answer him. Such words as
The even virtue of our enterprise
must have struck cold on the passions of envious Casca and jealous
Cassius. The loneliness of Brutus comes home to us.
Then emerges also his folly as a politician. It is the retired student,
engaged only in ideas, who speaks when it is proposed to slay Antony

Julius Caesar 191
as well as Caesar. Our course, he says, would be too bloody then.

Would we could kill Caesar’s spirit, and not Caesar. Mark Antony is
nothing without Caesar.
This is too childish-foolish for this world. Brutus has no eye for
men, or for affairs. He never even thinks of Octavius. He has not
measured the latent power of Antony, nor does he measure him justly
after the murder. He hands the whole of Rome over to him when
he lets him speak over Caesar’s body. His position as a politician
is ridiculous; his position as a noble thinker is honourable. Caesar
dead, Antony was not only Antony, but Caesar as well; and Caesar
is nowhere more alive than when he sways the hearts of the Roman
people in the speech of Antony. The only way the conspiracy could
have succeeded was, once Caesar was slain, by the slaughter of those
that loved Caesar. Napoleon understood that; so did Antony and
Octavius. The tender-heartedness and the personal morality of Brutus
were, in the circumstances, fatal to his cause. All this is the careful
drawing of Shakespeare, who did not work (as I have often said) with
the careless indifference which some think an attribute of genius.
Yet when we turn from the futile politician, and the philosopher
ignorant of the world, to the man, with what charm does his tender-
heartedness arrive! The conspirators depart; Brutus is left alone. He
calls his attendant, Lucius. The boy is fast asleep. And Brutus, looking
at him, loves his youth, and will not disturb him—
Boy! Lucius! Fast asleep! It is no matter;

Enjoy the honey-heayy dew of slumber:
Thou hast no figures nor no fantasies,
Which busy care draws in the brains of men;
Therefore thou sleep’st so sound.
And this interlude of the tenderness which lay beneath the stoicism of
Brutus is continued by the scene with Portia which instantly follows,
and on which I have already commented.
The morning comes, and we are placed in Caesar’s house. The
storm has not quite passed away, and the doomed man enters, to be
met by his wife who urges him to stay from the Capitol. There is
that which is terrible in the insolent pride Caesar shows throughout
this scene. There is that which is pitiable in the weakness with which
he yields to his wife, and then, when his pride is appealed to, to the

conspirators. This kind of pride is the very top of weakness. All the
evil omens are in vain. His pompous and inflated speeches, intoler-
able when he is speaking in the third person, seem to challenge the
gods, and to despise all men but himself. Shakespeare, like a Greek
dramatist, meant them to contain his fate and the cause of it. They
partly explain the hatred and envy of Cassius and the rest; and it is
a fine piece of art which thus modifies our horror of his murder by
our natural dislike to this tone of haughty defiance. And in the death
scene this is continued. His insolence becomes so great that it seems
to claim the dagger. He says he will spurn “like a cur” the man who
would alter his will. “Hence!” he cries, as the conspirators press their
suit upon him—“Hence! Wilt thou lift up Olympus?” Again Decius
claims his friend’s return from exile. Caesar answers,
Doth not Brutus bootless kneel?
This motives the last blow, and brings us up to it without too great a
shock.
Then follows the confusion of the conspirators, who do not know
what to do; the dispersal of the people, and the conspirators left alone
with their dead master. It is a wonderful scene; at first they do nothing
but shout—
Liberty! Freedom!—Tyranny is dead!

Run hence, proclaim, cry it about the streets.
It is almost like the shout of Caliban—as foolish at least as his. Brutus

bids the Senators not to be aff righted. Casca tells Brutus to speak to
the people. “Where’s Antony, where’s Publius?” cry others. This is all
these foolish persons think of doing after their momentous act. No
prevision, nothing arranged, no measures for government,—and the
whole world upturned!
Then they begin to talk, half-philosophic talk about life and death,
and how their deed will be acted over on a future stage, as if they
thought they were playing a tragedy, and had done nothing in reality.
And Brutus, shaken to the centre of his stoicism, falls into melodrama
quite outside his character; bids them bathe their arms in Caesar’s blood,
wash them up to the elbows, smear their swords, and, waving their red
weapons in the marketplace, cry “Peace, freedom, and liberty.”

Julius Caesar 193
At first all this seems, in the bloody circumstance, unnatural. But,

in reality, nothing can be better done than Shakespeare has here done.
The inner agitation of the conspirators shows itself in these absurdi-
ties. They begin to feel that they have shaken the world. They have let
loose forces they cannot manage, and terror and confusion seize on
their heart and brain. They dare not give voice to the overwhelming
dread. And they take refuge in this surface-talk, in these inane
boastings; even Brutus is shocked into melodrama. It is like Hamlet
bursting into fantastic phrase after he has seen the ghost. It is almost
a comfort when Antony—who is contending for his life, who knows
what will follow on this deed, who sees the overthrow of Brutus and
his own success, if only he can for a few hours secure his life from the
conspirators’ daggers—comes upon the scene. He is politic enough.
He persuades Brutus that he will act with him. Cassius suspects him;
but Brutus imputes his own single-eyed love of liberty to Antony,
and consents, like an idiot, to Antony’s speaking at Caesar’s funeral.
Antony is nobly managed. Were he only the hypocrite, we should
despise him. Shakespeare does not leave it so. Even though his life is
on the card, he cannot help breaking out into pity and praise when he
sees his master dead, but he manages to pass this off as an offering to
friendship, while he agrees in principle with what has been done. In
him, and in Brutus, craft and simplicity stand face to face, and both
men are true to the character Shakespeare has made for them. As a
politician Antony is wise and Brutus a fool. As a man Brutus is noble
and Antony ignoble—and yet not quite ignoble. His personal love
and wrath for his friend, arising continually through his deceiving
speeches, redeem him in our eyes. At last, he is left alone with the
dead, and the long repressed rage bursts forth in that impassioned
address to the pierced body of Caesar, wherein, in the last words, we
see beforehand what is coming, when
Caesar’s spirit ranging for revenge,

With Atè by his side come hot from hell,
Shall in these confines with a monarch’s voice
Cry “Havoc,” and let slip the dogs of war.
One catastrophe has been—the death of Caesar; but out of death

Casear rises again, an avenging spirit. Another catastrophe, the death
of Brutus, is at hand. It is the true catastrophe of the play—the

overthrow of the Republican, the triumph of the Imperial, form of

government. Caesar, in Antony, does this, and Caesar’s true revenge is
the victory of his idea.
The second scene closes the third Act. It is the scene of the
speeches in the Forum. The speech of Brutus is entirely in character,
doctrinaire, sententious; convinced, even to a touch of vanity, of his
rightness; so convinced that he does not doubt the people being of
his opinion (imputing his own thoughts to every man in the crowd);
so convinced that he begs them, for his sake, to hear Antony. In every
phrase Shakespeare writes down the folly of the man, his unimagi-
nable unfitness to lead, to convince, or to understand a mob of citizens
whom an imperialistic policy had debauched with gifts. Nevertheless,
they cheer Brutus when he has done! Then Shakespeare, with one
imaginative touch, makes it clear that they have completely misunder-
stood the action and the speech of Brutus.
all. Live, Brutus! live, live!

 cit. Bring him with triumph home unto his house.
 cit. Give him a statue with his ancestors.
 cit. Let him be Caesar.
Listen to that; the people wish to make him that which he hopes he
has destroyed. He has slain Caesar that there may be no more Caesars.
“Let him be Caesar,” is the answer of the mob. Alone, alone, Brutus
goes away, the fool of fancy, self-deceived.
Then Antony begins the speech that every schoolboy knows. It is
charged with contempt of the mob. He plays on them as a musician
on an instrument. The subtle changes of his speech, from praise of
the conspirators—harmonising himself with the impression Brutus
has made on the crowd—to praise of Caesar, dropping the first as he
feels his listeners coming into sympathy with the second; his personal
grief for Caesar breaking forth into tears that win him the sympathy
of the people, and finally impassionate them into love of Caesar; his
careful, reiterated appeal to their curiosity by his reserve with regard to
Caesar’s will till he has lashed them into insatiable eagerness; his final
appeal to their hatred of ingratitude, the vice the people have always
hated most; his exhibition of the dead body to their eyes: “Look, look
and pity”—are one and all most masterly, and, as we read, it is finally
the mighty intelligence of Shakespeare that impresses us more than

Julius Caesar 195
even the mighty events of the history. The last appeal, with its fasci-
nating touch of narrative—with its linking of each separate wound to
the name of a conspirator—is full of a splendid knowledge of the way
to excite a people:—
If you have tears, prepare to shed them now.
Then comes that astonishing scene, in which Antony lashes the

excitement of the mob into fury, in which we seem to see and hear
the tumult growing, swelling, raging, till the Forum roars; till all Rome
is so filled with madness of wrath that the mob slays Cinna the poet
because he bears the name of Cinna the conspirator;—and Antony,
left alone, while the mob rush forth to burn and slay, caps it all with
triumphant cynicism—
Now, let it work. Mischief, thou art afoot,

Take thou what course thou wilt.
The rest, the fourth and fifth Acts of the play, are concerned with
the fall of Brutus and the conspirators. The interest lessens slowly but
steadily, till it dies away almost altogether in the fifth Act. It is only
the interest of a death-bed; of the last and convulsive effort of Roman
Republicanism, wounded to the death by the slaying of Caesar, to
live again.
[ ...]
NOTE
1. There have been many men like Brutus whose aims were pure
of self in the struggle of Ireland and in that of the working
class, but there have been only too many who played the part of
Cassius, Casca, and the rest.

“LETTER FROM BIRMINGHAM JAIL”
(MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR.)
,.
“The American Dream Unfulfilled:
Martin Luther King, Jr. and the
‘Letter from Birmingham Jail’”
by James A. Colaiaco, in Phylon (1984)
Introduction
In his essay on Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “Letter from Birmingham
Jail,” James Colaiaco provides “an exposition of [King’s]
philosophy of nonviolent direct action, especially civil disobe-
dience. The idea of civil disobedience raised for King a
fundamental philosophical issue: Are there any limits to the
obedience which a citizen owes to the State? Put another
way: Is a citizen under an absolute obligation to obey a law
that he believes to be unjust?” With these questions, Colaiaco
honors the fallen civil rights leader, whose acts brought about
change and whose words so eloquently justified the nonvio-
lent civil disobedience for which he is known.
f
Behold, here cometh the dreamer.

Let us slay him
Colaiaco, James A. “The American Dream Unfulfilled: Martin Luther King, Jr.
and the ‘Letter from Birmingham Jail.’” Phylon 45.1 (1984): 1–18.
197

198 Martin Luther King, Jr.
And we shall see what will become of his dreams.

Genesis 37: 10–20
The spring of 1963 witnessed the publication of one of the most

significant documents in the history of the American civil rights
movement: Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “Letter From Birmingham Jail.”1
Few works of prose equal the letter in eloquence or moral force. It
has been compared with Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, Emile Zola’s
letter in defense of Dreyfus, and John F. Kennedy’s Inaugural Address.
Among King’s writings, only his “I Have A Dream” speech, delivered
in the nation’s capital on August 28, 1963, has received more acclaim.
Like many great political documents, the “Letter From Birmingham
Jail” was composed during a time of crisis. Throughout April and May,
1963, national attention was focused on Birmingham, Alabama as
King and his followers led a series of demonstrations that resulted in
the overthrow of the city’s segregation ordinances.2 King’s campaign
of nonviolent direct action was a far-reaching success. The events in
Birmingham proved to be a turning point in the battle for civil rights,
after which the forces of segregation in the South began to crumble.
Birmingham aroused the nation’s conscience by exposing the evils of
racism. While the demonstrators remained committed to nonviolence,
millions of Americans were shocked by scenes on television and in the
press of city police, led by commissioner Eugene “Bull” Conner, sub-
jecting blacks to night sticks, high-pressure fire hoses, and fierce attack
dogs. In the midst of the campaign, King was arrested for violating a
state court injunction forbidding demonstrations. It was the thirteenth
time that he had been jailed for defending civil rights. Placed in soli-
tary confinement, King feared that the campaign would be defeated.
But only briefly. Summoning up great courage, he secretly wrote his
famous letter, a compelling statement of his philosophy of nonviolent
direct action, and an eloquent presentation of his dream of justice and
equality for black Americans.
Not only is the “Letter From Birmingham Jail” the best exposition of
King’s method and goals, but it also exerted great influence in winning
broad support for the civil rights movement. As King asserted in an
interview with Alex Haley in 1965: “The letter helped to focus greater
international attention upon what was happening in Birmingham.”3
And it was this worldwide attention that furthered the civil rights
cause. King continued: “And I am sure that without Birmingham, the

“Letter from Birmingham Jail” 199
march on Washington wouldn’t have been called—which in my mind

was one of the most creative steps the negro struggle has taken. . . . It
was also the image of Birmingham which, to a great extent, helped to
bring the Civil Rights Bill into being in 1963.”4 Because the letter is
such a powerful expression of King’s views, and because it articulates
the aspirations of blacks in the 1960’s better than any other docu-
ment, it is fitting that today, more than twenty years later, we recall the
circumstances of its composition, and analyze its contents.
The “Letter From Birmingham Jail” was written in response to
“An Appeal for Law and Order and Common Sense,” published by
eight white Alabama clergymen in the Birmingham News, charging
that the recent direct actions in the city had been “unwise and
untimely.”5 Referring to “some of our Negro citizens, directed and led
in part by outsiders,” the clergymen urged blacks to withdraw their
support from the demonstrations. As the leading “outsider,” the state-
ment was clearly directed at Martin Luther King, Jr.
When King saw the published statement, his first inclination may
have been not to respond. He said that if he were to answer every
criticism of his work and ideas, his secretaries would be overburdened
by the correspondence, and he would have “no time for constructive
work.”6 But because the criticism came from fellow clergymen—of
the Protestant, Catholic and Jewish faiths—King realized that even
sincere people of good will might misunderstand him and the civil
rights movement. Moreover, with widespread attention aroused by
the events in Birmingham, he saw the value in presenting his case
to the entire nation. Sensing that the future of the American civil
rights movement largely depended upon the success of the cause in
Birmingham, King decided to respond immediately, in the form of
an open letter. There could be no thought of waiting until after the
turmoil of the day had subsided, when he could return to the comfort-
able confines of his study. The letter—a synthesis of ideas he had
been developing for several years in speeches and articles—was begun
in the margins of the newspaper in which the statement appeared,
continued on scraps of paper, and concluded on a pad furnished by his
attorneys. The completed letter, approximately 7000 words in length,
was then smuggled out of jail. Polished for publication, the “Letter
From Birmingham Jail” was first issued as a pamphlet in 1963. It soon
appeared in several national periodicals, and it is estimated that nearly
a million copies were circulated in churches throughout the land.

As King prepared to begin his letter, dated April 16, 1963, he was
mindful of the slow and often frustrating progress of the American
civil rights movement. In 1954, the United States Supreme Court
issued its historic decision in Brown v. Board of Education. Yet, nine
years later, the Southern states continued to defy the law forbidding
segregation in the public schools. In 1955, King had been thrust
suddenly into national prominence as the young Baptist pastor who
organized a successful massive boycott of the segregated Montgomery,
Alabama bus system. Two years later, in 1957, he was elected president
of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), a newly
founded organization dedicated to bringing justice and equality to
black people. In 1960, thousands of students participated in sit-ins
to protest segregated public facilities throughout the South. The
following year, courageous freedom riders, mobilized by the Congress
of Racial Equality (CORE), risked their lives to integrate bus stations
in Mississippi and Alabama. In 1962, King and the SCLC suffered a
temporary setback as poor planning contributed to the failure of the
campaign to desegregate Albany, Georgia. The same year saw James
Meredith become the first black student to enroll in the University of
Mississippi. In 1963, as the nation prepared to celebrate the centenary
of President Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation proclamation, King was
sadly aware that black Americans were still deprived of fundamental
human rights. As long as the Southern states continued to oppose the
full integration of blacks into society, as long as blacks throughout
the nation were denied justice and equality, the dream embodied in
America’s Declaration of Independence and the Constitution would
remain unfulfilled.
The recent events in Birmingham also undoubtedly were fixed in
King’s mind as he contemplated how to respond to his critics. The
direct-action campaign had been conceived in January 1963, when
King pledged in a speech that he and his followers would not cease in
their efforts until “Pharaoh lets God’s people go.”7 That same month,
George Wallace, having received the largest popular vote in Alabama
gubernatorial history, made an inauguration vow of “segregation
now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.”8 The Birmingham
campaign (called “Project C”—the “C” stood for confrontation) was
formally launched on April 3 with the issuance by King and his aides
of the “Birmingham Manifesto,” a review of the deplorable circum-
stances that made the upcoming direct action necessary.9 After a few

days of sit-ins, on April 6, a group of demonstrators was taken away

peacefully by police after they had marched on City Hall. Eugene
“Bull” Conner then secured an injunction directing the demonstrators
to discontinue their activities. For the first time, King would violate a
court order. In consultation with his staff, he decided that he would
be one of the first to set the example of civil disobedience.10 On Good
Friday, April 12, nearly a thousand blacks lined the streets as King
and the Reverend Ralph Abernathy led a small group of protesters
towards downtown Birmingham. After marching eight blocks, they
were arrested and escorted to jail as a crowd of supporters sang “We
Shall Overcome.” In solitary confinement, King would now devote
himself to composing his “Letter From Birmingham Jail.”
From the outset, King realized that his letter had to address several
important questions: As an Atlanta resident, what right did he have
to organize a direct-action campaign in Birmingham? What does
nonviolent civil disobedience entail? Does civil disobedience stem
from a coherent philosophy? Is it moral for blacks to disobey laws?
Does civil disobedience breed anarchy? Why should black Americans
not continue to wait patiently for civil rights? Is King an extremist? If
he could answer these questions effectively, King would defuse much
of the criticism of himself and his methods, and increase support for
the civil rights movement throughout the United States.
King begins his letter by meeting the charge that he is an intruder.
He reminds his readers that he is president of the Southern Christian
Leadership Conference, which has affiliates throughout the South.
He informs them that several months earlier, the Alabama Christian
Movement for Human Rights, an affiliate of the SCLC headed by
the Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth, had invited him to Birmingham to
participate in nonviolent efforts to secure equal rights for blacks. Thus
King is in Birmingham by affiliation and by invitation.
Yet there is a more fundamental reason for King’s presence in
Birmingham in the spring of 1963. He feels a moral obligation
to oppose the city’s segregation practices. “More basically, I am in
Birmingham because injustice is here.”11 Employing metaphors of
particular significance to fellow clergymen, King compares himself
with the Old and New Testament prophets who left their villages to
carry the word of God to the world. He points to the example of St.
Paul, who left Tarsus to carry the gospel of Jesus Christ to the Greco-
Roman world. The comparison with St. Paul is even more apt than

King suggests. King’s letter, written in a jail cell, calls to mind that
Paul composed some of his great epistles to his disciples while he was
imprisoned in Rome. King professes that he too must carry a gospel
beyond his home town—the gospel of freedom. Convinced of “the
interrelatedness of all communities and states,” he proclaims: “I cannot
sit idly by in Atlanta and not be concerned about what happens in
Birmingham.” King clinches his argument: “Injustice anywhere is a
threat to justice everywhere.”12
Having refuted the charge that he is an intruding agitator, King
transcends the immediate criticisms of his recent activities and
launches into the most important part of his letter: an exposition of
his philosophy of nonviolent direct action, especially civil disobedi-
ence. The idea of civil disobedience raised for King a fundamental
philosophical issue: Are there any limits to the obedience which a
citizen owes to the State? Put another way: Is a citizen under an abso-
lute obligation to obey a law that he believes to be unjust? Such ques-
tions have long concerned man, and continue to preoccupy us today in
the 1980s. The justification for civil disobedience is usually either the
doctrine of a higher law or some theory of natural or human rights.
The ancient Greek dramatist Sophocles immortalized Antigone, a
young heroine who is sentenced to death after defying a law of her
king that conflicted with higher divine law. Since the ancient Greeks,
several philosophers, from Aquinas to John Locke, have recognized
the right of the individual to disobey laws that are contrary to the
eternal law of God. The American Founding Fathers brought forth
a new nation on the basis of the natural right of civil disobedience.
The nineteenth-century Abolitionists defied the fugitive slave laws on
the grounds that they opposed the law of God. Henry David Thoreau
practiced civil disobedience and wrote a classic essay on the subject.
Mahatma Gandhi achieved worldwide fame for his nonviolent resis-
tance to unjust laws, first in South Africa, then in his native India.
Since the Second World War, the question of civil disobedience has
become increasingly important in the United States. The civil rights
movement, resistance to the Vietnam War, and, most recently, a series
of anti-nuclear protests have emphasized the right of individuals to
disobey laws that conflict with moral principles. The most outstanding
example in the Western world of the effectiveness of mass civil disobe-
dience is the American civil rights movement under its greatest leader,
Martin Luther King, Jr.

King realized the importance of setting forth clearly and cogently

his philosophy of non-violent direct action and civil disobedience. His
critics must be made aware that the recent protests were not spon-
taneous acts of frustration, but the product of careful planning and
a coherent set of principles. He states that there are four basic steps
to a nonviolent campaign: (1) the collection of facts, to determine
whether injustices exist; (2) negotiation; (3) self-purification; and (4)
direct action, including boycotts, sit-ins, marches, and civil disobedi-
ence. Since publicity focuses mostly on the final step, King saw that it
was necessary to show that direct action is the last resort, undertaken
only after sufficient fact-gathering and attempts at negotiation have
occurred, and only after the protesters have been dedicated to nonvio-
lence. As King asserts, the demonstrations in Birmingham began only
after the first three steps had been taken.
The first step, the collection of facts, is obviously important. No
nonviolent protest movement can gain the support of public opinion,
or claim that it represents the cause of justice, unless it has gathered
clear evidence of injustice. As King observes, the record of racial
injustice in Birmingham was blatant and well-known. Birmingham
was probably the most segregated city in the United States. Blacks
had been treated unjustly in the courts, and their homes and churches
frequently had been bombed with impunity. In September 1962,
after a successful boycott of Birmingham’s downtown stores, civil
rights activists, led by the Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth, began nego-
tiations with members of the economic community. After promises
were made by the merchants that they would remove their offensive
Jim Crow signs and cooperate in efforts to integrate the city’s eating
facilities, the civil rights leaders agreed to halt all demonstrations. But
the blacks soon faced the grim reality that they had been the victims
of false promises. The majority of the signs remained; the segrega-
tionist policies continued.13
King explains that negotiations proving fruitless, the blacks had
no alternative but to begin a campaign of nonviolent direct action.
But before protests could begin, a process of “self-purification” was
necessary to prepare the demonstrators for the trials ahead. Purifica-
tion was essential to the success of a nonviolent campaign. Unless
protesters were purged of all feelings of bitterness towards their
oppressors, unless they were prepared to love their enemies, unless
they were willing to suffer both verbal and physical abuse without

retaliating, their movement would degenerate into violence. As King

reveals: “We repeatedly asked ourselves: ‘Are you able to accept blows
without retaliating?’ ‘Are you able to endure the ordeal of jail?’”14 King
was convinced that no matter how extreme the provocation, violence
is immoral. Moreover, he maintained that the end never justifies the
means. As he declared near the conclusion of his letter: “Over the
past few years I have consistently preached that nonviolence demands
that the means we use must be as pure as the ends we seek. I have
tried to make clear that it is wrong to use immoral means to attain
moral ends.”15 King believed that it is impossible to achieve a moral
end by immoral means without harming the soul and making oneself
unworthy of the end.
As King wrote about nonviolence, he no doubt recalled the
numerous instances in which civil rights activists had maintained
their courage and discipline and responded to their oppressors with
love. The wave of student sit-ins that swept the South in 1960 demon-
strated to the nation that racist oppression could be resisted nonvio-
lently. One year later, freedom riders set a moral example when they
willingly endured the suffering of savage beatings while attempting
to integrate peacefully bus stations in Anniston, Birmingham, and
Montgomery, Alabama. Inspired by examples such as these, prospec-
tive demonstrators for the Birmingham campaign in 1963 had to
pass stringent tests before being permitted to join King’s ranks. After
being carefully selected, volunteers were prepared by attending nonvi-
olent workshops in which they listened to sermons on nonviolence
and participated in socio-dramas that simulated the challenges they
would have to face. Moreover, volunteers had to sign a “commitment
card,” pledging adherence to the Ten Commandments of the nonvio-
lent movement. The first required that volunteers “meditate daily on
the teachings and life of Jesus;” the fifth, that they “walk and talk in
the manner of love, for God is love;” the eighth, that they “refrain
from the violence of fist, tongue, or heart.”16 Only after instilling such
discipline could King be confident that his direct-action campaign
would adhere to nonviolence.
King’s philosophy of nonviolence was a synthesis of the teach-
ings of Jesus Christ and Mahatma Gandhi. While Jesus provided
the motivating ideal of love, Gandhi provided the method of mass
nonviolent direct action. King first became interested in Gandhi when,
as a young student at Crozer Theological Seminary, he travelled to

Philadelphia to attend a lecture on the Indian leader by Mordecai

W. Johnson, then president of Howard University, who had recently
returned from a trip to India. At this time, King was engaged in a
quest for a method to eliminate social evil. He was deeply impressed
by Gandhi’s famous Salt March to the Sea, and by his nonviolent
methods—boycotts, strikes, marches, and mass civil disobedience.17
He was also struck by Gandhi’s concept of Satyagraha, or Soul Force,
as an instrument for overcoming evil. Although committed to the love
ethic of Jesus, King was for a time unsure of how such love could be
employed to solve social problems. He was aware that some people
interpreted Christianity to mean passive nonresistance to evil. Yet
if this were the correct view of Christ’s teaching, a solution to the
problem of racial injustice was hopeless. Moreover, King believed that
to accept passively an unjust system is to cooperate with the evil of
that system. His study of Gandhi convinced him that Christianity
did not mean nonresistance to evil, but nonviolent resistance to evil.
The Christian can resist evil vigorously, but with nonviolence and
love rather than violence and hate. Nevertheless, not until the Mont-
gomery bus boycott of 1955–56 did King perceive the applicability
of Gandhi’s method of mass nonviolent resistance to the American
civil rights cause. Henceforth, he would embrace nonviolence not as
a mere tactic, but as a philosophy of life. King’s devotion to Gandhi
was deepened by a trip to India with his wife Coretta in 1959 as the
special guests of Prime Minister Nehru. King had an opportunity to
study with some of Gandhi’s disciples and to pay tribute to the late
Indian leader. Arriving in New Delhi, he told a throng of reporters
that he came not as a tourist, but as a pilgrim.
King was aware that the tactic of nonviolent direct action involves
an inherent paradox. Although he believed that violence is immoral,
his nonviolent methods were most successful when they provoked
violence from oppressors. King and his followers always hoped to
achieve their goals without becoming the victims of violence. But
because the racist community was usually unyielding, civil rights
activists found that when they used soul force, they were often met
by physical force. Segregationists charged that the protesters should
be blamed because they provoked the violence. Until the protesters
began their activities, the segregationists lamented, peace reigned in
the community. They contended that the protesters deserved to be
beaten and arrested because their actions precipitated violence and

destroyed law and order. But this argument rests on the dangerous
assumption that the lack of conflict in a community is evidence of the
presence of justice.
[ ...]
King understood that to say that one ought to obey just laws and
disobey unjust laws merely begs the question of how one distinguishes
between the two. For an answer, he is compelled to seek an authority
that transcends the State. Since civil disobedients cannot look to the
State to tell them whether its laws are just or not, King relies upon the
rich Western tradition of natural law. The philosophy of natural law
has a twenty-five hundred year history. It refers to moral principles,
found innately in the human conscience, that originate in God and
exist independently of the State. Since the State is sovereign, all its
laws are “legal.” Yet, throughout history, civil disobedients have recog-
nized that civil law is not always just, and that human beings must
be able to appeal to a higher law—divine or natural law—whenever
a command of the State conflicts with their moral principles. Natural
law is, therefore, King’s guide. “A just law is a man-made code that
squares with the moral law or the law of God. An unjust law is a code
that is out of harmony with the moral law.”18 King finds support in one
of the greatest Christian philosophers: “To put it in the terms of St.
Thomas Aquinas: An unjust law is a human law that is not rooted in
eternal law and natural law.”19 King reminds those who tend to regard
civil law as sacrosanct that the early Christians disobeyed laws that
were contrary to their conscience; moreover, the Boston Tea Party was
“a massive act of civil disobedience.” On the other hand, the actions of
Adolf Hitler were perfectly “legal” though morally reprehensible.20
[ ...]
King was careful not to offend his fellow clergymen unduly. To stir
their slumbering consciences was sufficient. Indeed, he hoped to stir the
consciences of millions of professed Christians throughout the nation.
He expresses heartfelt thanks to those who acted independently of
organized religion and joined “the struggle for freedom.” Maintaining
a conciliatory tone, King also insists that although he wept over the
laxity of the church, his disappointment stems from deep love: “Yes, I
love the church. How could I do otherwise? I am in the rather unique
position of being the son, the grandson and the great-grandson of
preachers. Yes, I see the church as the body of Christ. But oh! How
we have blemished and scarred that body through social neglect and

through fear of being nonconformists.”21 The gospel of individual

salvation must be supplemented by a social gospel. King reminds his
readers that the early Christians were champions for the cause of
humanity and justice. He warns that unless the church returns to its
original sacrificial spirit, “it will lose its authenticity, forfeit the loyalty
of millions, and be dismissed as an irrelevant social club with no
meaning for the twentieth century.”22
As King nears the conclusion of his letter, he injects a note of
optimism into his message. Not only is the letter an exposition of
his philosophy, but it is intended also to inspire his supporters to
continue their efforts in the civil rights cause. He therefore expresses
confidence that ultimately they will be victorious:
I have no despair about the future. I have no fear about the

outcome of our struggle in Birmingham, even if our motives are
at present misunderstood. We will reach the goal of freedom in
Birmingham and all over the nation, because the goal of America
is freedom. Abused and scorned though we may be, our destiny
is tied up with America’s destiny. Before the pilgrims landed at
Plymouth, we were here. Before the pen of Jefferson etched the
majestic words of the Declaration of Independence across the
pages of history, we were here. For more than two centuries our
forefathers labored in this country without wages; they made
cotton king; they built the homes of their masters while suffering
gross injustice and shameful humiliation—and yet out of a
bottomless vitality they continued to thrive and develop. If the
inexpressible cruelties of slavery could not stop us, the opposition
we now face will surely fail. We will win our freedom because
the sacred heritage of our nation and the eternal will of God are
embodied in our echoing demands.23
By connecting the victory of the civil rights cause to the destiny of

America, King is appealing to the conscience of the nation by under-
scoring what Gunnar Myrdal described in 1944 as the “American
Dilemma”—the conflict between our devotion to the American creed
of democracy and our actual practice. Indeed, a nation that took pride
in its heritage of freedom, and yet denied fundamental human rights
to a race that had played so great a role in its history, was certainly
confronted by a dilemma. A nation that took pride in itself as a haven

for the homeless and the oppressed, and yet allowed so many of its
citizens to languish in miserable poverty, has much for which to be
ashamed. King no doubt was struck by the irony in the fact that while
America was defending the cause of freedom throughout the world,
she was denying it to twenty million citizens at home.
Before closing, King pays a final tribute to all those who have
sacrificed for the cause of justice. Anticipating his “I Have A Dream”
speech of a few months later, King—stressing again a major theme of
his letter—links the success of the civil rights movement to the fulfill-
ment of the American dream:
One day the South will recognize its real heroes. They will be
the James Merediths, with the noble sense of purpose that
enables them to face jeering and hostile mobs, and with the
agonizing loneliness that characterizes the life of the pioneer.
They will be old, oppressed, battered Negro women, symbolized
in a seventy-two-year-old woman in Montgomery, Alabama,
who rose up with a sense of dignity and with her people
decided not to ride segregated buses, and who responded
with ungrammatical profundity to one who inquired about
her weariness: “My feets is tired, but my soul is at rest.” They
will be the young high school and college students, the young
ministers of the gospel and a host of their elders, courageously
and nonviolently sitting in at lunch counters and willingly
going to jail for conscience sake. One day the South will know
that when these disinherited children of God sat down at
lunch counters, they were in reality standing up for what is best
in the American dream and for the most sacred values in our
Judaeo-Christian heritage, thereby bringing our nation back
to those great wells of democracy which were dug deep by the
founding fathers in their formulation of the Constitution and
Declaration of Independence.24
When Martin Luther King, Jr. put down his pen in April 1963, he
had composed the manifesto of the American civil rights movement.
The “Letter From Birmingham Jail” is the most eloquent and effective
statement of King’s philosophy, methods and goals. He had presented his
dream of justice and equality for the black Americans. He had expounded

his philosophy of nonviolent direct action. He had demonstrated that

the decision of blacks to disobey unjust segregation laws is founded
upon natural law. He had shown that civil disobedience does not
create anarchy because the civil disobedients, in an effort to awaken
the conscience of the community, are willing to accept the penalty of
imprisonment for disobeying those laws that they believe are unjust.
He had explained that blacks cannot and will not continue to wait for
the granting of their fundamental human rights. He had answered the
charge of extremism by showing that his actions were consistent with a
great heritage of men who have been willing to sacrifice their lives for
liberty and justice. In an appeal to the nation, King had proclaimed that
the achievement of civil rights for blacks was necessary for the nation to
fulfill the promise embodied in the American dream.
Martin Luther King, Jr.’s method of nonviolent direct action
was ultimately victorious in Birmingham. But not without weeks
of further struggle. On April 20, 1963, King and Ralph Abernathy
were released on bond after eight days in jail. Tried and convicted of
criminal contempt a few days later, they appealed and remained free
on bond pending the final disposition of their case. Throughout the
first week of May, the protests continued and were met by increasing
police brutality. On May 2, the nation was stunned when almost a
thousand children were arrested as they marched peacefully towards
downtown Birmingham to the strains of “We Shall Overcome.” The
protesters stepped up their pace. Eventually, nearly three thousand
were imprisoned as they proceeded to flood the city’s business district.
Finally, on May 7, a truce was called by Birmingham’s business leaders.
The direct action had crippled the city’s economy and marshaled the
public opinion of the nation behind the protesters. King’s method had
been vindicated; nonviolent direct action had led to negotiation. On
May 10, an accord was reached that met essentially all of the blacks’
demands. The city’s eating facilities would be desegregated; and blacks
would be hired by business and industry. Though the white establish-
ment would later fail to fulfill its promises completely, the profound
effect of the Birmingham demonstrations on the national conscience
and on subsequent federal legislation cannot be denied. On the night
following the accord, King flew home to Atlanta. He wanted to be
with his family; he also planned to preach at his family’s Ebenezer
Baptist Church.

Yet King’s visit home would be unexpectedly brief. On the night

of his arrival in Atlanta, the accord was endangered as discontented
whites bombed King’s Birmingham headquarters and the home of his
brother. Civil rights leaders feared that they had again been victims
of false promises. To King’s distress, many young blacks, no longer
able to contain their frustration, resorted to rioting. Rushing back
to Birmingham, his presence in the streets helped to curtail further
violence. Tensions ultimately subsided after President John F. Kennedy
publicly praised the justness of the cause of Birmingham’s blacks, and
declared that the federal government would guarantee the accord. The
next few weeks saw more victories for King and the civil rights move-
ment. On May 20, 1963, the United States Supreme Court finally
ruled that Alabama’s segregation laws were unconstitutional. Then,
on June 11, President Kennedy announced to the nation that he was
requesting Congress to enact a comprehensive Civil Rights Bill. In a
nationally televised address, the President—in words echoing those
of King—proclaimed: “Now the time has come for this nation to
fulfill its promise. The events in Birmingham and elsewhere have so
increased the cries for equality that no city or state or legislative body
can prudently choose to ignore them.”25
King died without his dream becoming a reality. When he was cut
down by an assassin’s bullet in Memphis on April 4, 1968, America had
only begun to fulfill its promise. Since his death, blacks have taken impor-
tant strides towards freedom and equality, but much remains to be done.
Martin Luther King, Jr. has left an enduring legacy. King’s genius
lay in his extraordinary vision. His was a vision of an America true to
the sacred ideals of liberty, justice, and equality embodied in the Decla-
ration of Independence and the Constitution. His was a vision of an
America that fulfilled the promise of these ideals for all people, black
and white alike. In the last years of his life, as King became involved in
the campaign to combat poverty, he was a symbol for all the poor and
downtrodden of the nation. As he ventured into the peace movement
with public statements condemning the war in Vietnam, he became a
leader in the cause of international justice and brotherhood. Yet King’s
greatest contribution was that he provided charismatic leadership to
a civil rights movement that ranks in the annals of history as one of
humanity’s supreme accomplishments.
The night before he died, Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered a
speech that concluded with the following prophetic words:

We’ve got some difficult days ahead. But it doesn’t matter with
me now. Because I’ve been to the mountain-top. And I don’t
mind. Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity
has its place. But I’m not concerned about that now. I just want
to do God’s will. And He’s allowed me to go to the mountain.
And I’ve looked over. And I’ve seen the promised land. I may
not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we,
as a people will get to the promised land. And I’m happy tonight.
I’m not worried about anything. I’m not fearing any man. Mine
eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.26
The dreamer is dead. It is for us, the living, to determine what will
become of his dream.
NOTES
l. Quotations from the “Letter From Birmingham Jail” are taken
from the book, Why We Can’t Wait by Martin Luther King, Jr.
Copyright? 1963, 1964 by Martin Luther King, Jr. Reprinted
with permission of Harper and Row, Publishers, Inc.
2. For the narrative of the events in Birmingham, see the
following: King, Why We Can’t Wait; David L. Lewis, King: A
Biography (2nd ed., Urbana, 1978); and Stephen B. Oates, Let
The Trumpet Sound: The Life of Martin Luther King, Jr. (New
York, 1982).
3. The Playboy Interview, edited by G. Barry Golson, (Wideview
Books, 1981), pp. 118–19.
4. Ibid., pp. 118–19.
5. King, Why We Can’t Wait, p. 77.
6. Ibid.
7. Oates, Let The Trumpet Sound, p. 213.
8. Ibid., p. 222.
9. Ibid., p. 216
11. Ibid., p. 78.
12. Ibid., pp. 78–79.
13. Ibid., pp. 45–47.
14. Ibid., p. 80.
15. Ibid., p. 98.

16. Ibid., p. 61.

17. For the influence of Gandhi on King, see King, Stride Toward
Freedom: The Montgomery Story (New York, 1958), pp. 84–5;
96–8; 103; 217–18.
19. Ibid.
20. Ibid., p. 87.
21. Ibid., p. 95.
22. Ibid., p. 96.
23. Ibid., pp. 97–8.
24. Ibid., p. 99.
25. Lewis, op. cit., p. 209.
26. Flip Schulke, Martin Luther King, Jr.: A Documentary . . .
Montgomery To Memphis (New York, 1976), Speeches and
Sermons, “I’ve Been To The Mountaintop,” p. 224.

THE SPEECHES OF MALCOLM X
,.
“Rhetorical Resistance and the Conscience
of the World: Civil Disobedience in the
Speeches of Malcolm X”
by John Becker, independent scholar
A captivating orator and leader of the Black Nationalist movement,

Malcolm X was one of the most famous and infamous figures in
the struggle for civil rights in America during the 1960s. Speaking
from the margins of the civil rights movement, either as the official
spokesperson for Elijah Muhammad and his church, the Nation of
Islam, or as the head of his own secular political organization, the
Organization for Afro-American Unity, Malcolm stirred audiences
with his controversial statements about race and political activism.
Launching vitriolic critiques of the U.S. government and the civil
rights movement led by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm
was uncompromising in his scathing judgment of institutions and
ways of thinking that, in his opinion, held African Americans in
bondage—psychologically, economically, and physically. Opposed to
any sort of premature appeasement and wary of any course of action
that would allow the oppressors of blacks to dictate how they should
conduct their struggle for equal rights and political representation,
Malcolm appealed to the angriest and most disenfranchised victims
of racial injustice. His life, as recorded by Alex Haley in The Autobi-
ography of Malcolm X (1965), was plagued by prejudice and marked
by radical change. From street hustler to devout Muslim, from
213

214 Malcolm X
incarceration to international media fame, from staunch separatist to

human rights advocate, Malcolm was a truly protean figure, capable
of transforming himself according to the dictates of his conscience
regardless of what had come before.
In many ways, his legacy of public addresses shares this protean
quality. While many of Malcolm’s statements reinforce his public
image as an advocate of violent, revolutionary upheaval and racial
separatism—an image that has been appropriated by militant groups
like the Black Panthers and the predominantly socialist commentators
and editors who have reprinted his speeches—many of his statements
make this image problematic. The mainstream media’s representations
of Malcolm during his lifetime, starting with Mike Wallace’s televi-
sion special, The Hate That Hate Produced (1959), have undoubtedly
helped disseminate a similarly simplistic and reductive portrait. But
such caricatures do not reflect the variety of positions Malcolm held
during the course of his political career, nor do they seriously consider
the form of resistance Malcolm chose to employ. One of Malcolm’s
many commentators, Michael Eric Dyson, provides insight into this
method as he recounts the formative influence of Malcolm X and
Martin Luther King on his intellectual life:
King’s death and Malcolm’s life forced me to grapple with the

best remedy for resisting racism.
As a result, I turned more frequently to a means of
communication and combat that King and Malcolm had
favored and that had been nurtured in me by my experience in
the black church: rhetorical resistance. In African-American
cultures, acts of rhetorical resistance are often more than mere
words. They encompass a complex set of symbolic expressions
and oral interactions with the “real” world. These expressions
and interactions are usually supported by substantive black
cultural traditions—from religious worship to social protest—
that fuse speech and performance. (15–16)
Thus, for Dyson, Malcolm’s rhetorical strategies not only prescribe

specific courses of action, but also demonstrate the type of resistance
Malcolm advocated. In his speeches, Malcolm often spoke about
violent acts. Because of this, many have assumed Malcolm condoned
violence. To further complicate the issue, his speeches advocate civil

disobedience under specific conditions and also critique civil disobedi-

ence and passive resistance as methods of political reform. In the end,
Malcolm offers a “broader interpretation” of the civil rights movement
and the means of resistance at its disposal (“The Ballot” 31).
At first glance, Malcolm X seems to oppose the strategies of civil
disobedience used by Martin Luther King and his supporters. On
many occasions, Malcolm specifically denigrated and belittled the
“nonviolent direct action” of leaders like King, whom he describes
in his “Message to the Grass Roots” as submissive and complicit
“Uncle Toms”:
Just as the slavemaster [of the past] used Tom, the house Negro,
to keep the field Negroes in check, the same old slavemaster
today has Negroes who are nothing but modern Uncle Toms,
twentieth-century Uncle Toms, to keep you and me in check,
to keep us under control, keep us passive and peaceful and
nonviolent. (“Message” 12)
Such inflammatory statements typify Malcolm, especially during his

tenure as spokesman for the Nation of Islam, a religious organiza-
tion that advocated racial separatism and demonized whites. For
Malcolm, civil rights leaders like King were “not a part of the Negro
revolution” because they were teaching oppressed blacks to refrain
from defending themselves (“Message” 13). Such a strategy might
ultimately have been the only way for a black minority of twenty-two
million citizens to resist and change the unjust policies of a white
majority. But Malcolm refuses to rule out more drastic measures. In
this same speech, Malcolm cites Mao’s revolution in China, the Mau
Mau uprising in Kenya, as well as the Algerian struggle for indepen-
dence as proof that revolution is necessarily violent (8–9). He then
prescribes revolutionary action for oppressed blacks: “And you, sitting
around here like a knot on the wall, saying, ‘I’m going to love these
folks no matter how much they hate me.’ No, you need a revolution”
(9). At other times, Malcolm seems to condone violence solely as a
means self-defense, extolling the moral code of the Koran: “Our reli-
gion teaches us to be intelligent. Be peaceful, be courteous, obey the
law, respect everyone; but if someone puts his hand on you, send him
to the cemetery” (12). These contradictions beg the question: What
qualifies as revolutionary action?

216 Malcolm X
Malcolm marshals acts of civil disobedience in the same speech to

illustrate what he calls “the black revolution”:
[President Kennedy] said he was going to put out a civil-rights

bill. And when he mentioned the civil-rights bill and the
Southern crackers started talking about how they were going to
boycott or filibuster it, then the Negroes started talking—about
what? That they were going to march on Washington, march on
the Senate, march on the White House, march on the Congress,
and tie it up, bring it to a halt, not let the government proceed.
They even said they were going out to the airport and lay down
on the runway and not let any planes land. I’m telling you what
they said. That was revolution. That was revolution. That was the
black revolution. (“Message” 14)
These acts, applauded by Malcolm for their revolutionary character, differ

in magnitude but not in kind from the nonviolent protests led by Martin
Luther King, Jr. and other civil rights leaders. The distinction between the
revolution he champions and the strategies of civil disobedience employed
by King is difficult to discern. In his speech “The Black Revolution,” deliv-
ered six months after “Message to the Grass Roots,” Malcolm concludes
that though the history of revolutions is animated by violence and blood-
shed, America is in the unique position of being “the first country on this
earth that can actually have a bloodless revolution” (“Black Revolution”
56). Such a revolution can only be accomplished, according to Malcolm,
if “ . . . the black man [is] given full use of the ballot in every one of the
fifty states” (57). This “bloodless revolution” of the ballot “would wipe out
the Southern segregationism that now controls America’s foreign policy,
as well as America’s domestic policy” (57).
In another speech from this period, “At the Audubon,” Malcolm
prescribes a strategy for participation in the democratic process that
might effectively empower African Americans. By not registering
with any particular party, Malcolm claims that politicians will try to
placate blacks and treat them as a politically relevant voting bloc:
“Register” means being in a position to take political action

any time, any place and in any manner that would be beneficial
to you and me; being in a position to take advantage of our
position. Then we’ll be in a position to be respected and

recognized. But as soon as you get registered, and you want

to be a Democrat or a Republican, you are aligning. And
once you are aligning, you have no bargaining power—none
whatsoever. . . . [By] being registered as independents, it means
we can do whatever is necessary, wherever it’s necessary, and
whenever the time comes. (“Audubon” 133)
Such a strategy is but one example of what Malcolm, in his landmark

speech “The Ballot or the Bullet,” calls a “politically mature” under-
standing of how voting can be used to enact revolutionary change
(30). This call for shrewd civic participation seems to preclude violent
revolutionary action, though Malcolm always maintains that the
failure of such strategies justifies using the “bullet.”
Thus, Malcolm endorses at various times the full spectrum of
responses available to oppressed blacks, from the concerted use of
political power, to nonviolent protest and civil disobedience, and,
finally, to acts of violence—both defensive and, as his consistent use
of examples of armed uprising implies, revolutionary.
This stance, captured by Malcolm’s oft-repeated phrase “by any
means necessary,” seems to exclude him from what the majority of
political philosophers and legal commentators consider to be an advo-
cate of legitimate civil disobedience. Scholars such as Hugo Adam
Bedau, John Rawls, and many others claim that “justifiable” civil
disobedience is nonviolent by definition (Bedau 51). Rawls’s influen-
tial definition of civil disobedience is as follows: “a public, nonviolent,
conscientious yet political act contrary to law usually done with the
aim of bringing about a change in the law or policies of the govern-
ment” (Rawls 104). But such a definition, as well as the theories Rawls
extrapolates from it, “[presupposes] that the majority has a sense of
justice.” Rawls anticipates such an objection:
[ . . . One] might reply that moral sentiments are not a

significant political force. What moves men are various
interests, the desires for power, prestige, wealth, and the like.
Although they are clever at producing moral arguments to
support their claims, between one situation and another their
opinions do not fit into a coherent conception of justice. . . .
Unquestionably there is much truth in this contention, and in
some societies it is more true than in others.” (Rawls 117).

218 Malcolm X
Rawls ends up answering this objection by limiting his discussion to

civil disobedience in societies where the “sense of justice” prevails over
these baser motivations. In an ideal, or, as Rawls phrases it, a “nearly-
just” State, acts of civil disobedience are attempts at persuasion that
allow the disenfranchised to force a confrontation between a society’s
policies and its “sense of justice.” But Malcolm did not consider the
United States one of these “nearly-just” societies:
Don’t change the white man’s mind—you can’t change his mind,
and that whole thing about appealing to the moral conscience
of America—America’s conscience is bankrupt. She lost all
conscience a long time ago. . . . If [Uncle Sam] had a conscience,
he’d straighten this thing out with no more pressure being put
upon him. (“Ballot” 40)
If such a society refuses to respond favorably to methods of persuasion,

Malcolm argues that the only recourse of the oppressed is coercion:
They don’t know what morals are. They don’t try and eliminate
an evil because it’s evil, or because it’s illegal, or because
it’s immoral; they eliminate it only when it threatens their
existence. (“Ballot” 40)
In fact, some have argued that civil disobedience always involves

varying degrees of coercion. Nonviolent mass protest seems to draw
some of its persuasive power from its potential to turn violent.
Additionally, armed revolt might be imminent if the demands of
such a protest are not met. The political philosopher John Morreall
notes how even the most benign examples of civil disobedience
involve coercion:
When a group of students (presumably justifiably) takes over

an administration building in attempts to get certain policies
changed which were not changed through rational appeals to
the administration, they are usually attempting to get as large
an audience as possible to listen to the rationality of their
proposals. But this is not all they are doing, for they could get
just as large an audience through completely legal means. They
are also trying to apply pressure upon the administration, they

are adding the force of coercion to the reasonableness of their

demands. (Morreall 137)
Howard Zinn, in Disobedience and Democracy, similarly rejects the

claim that legitimate civil disobedience must be exclusively nonvio-
lent. Zinn’s thoughts on the subject are insightful:
I would define civil disobedience more broadly, as “the

deliberate violation of law for a vital social purpose.” . . . [This]
would leave open the question of the means of disobedience,
but with two thoughts in mind: 1. That one of the moral
principles guiding the advocate of civil disobedience is his
belief that a nonviolent world is one of his ends, and that
nonviolence is more desirable than violence as a means; 2. That
in the inevitable tension accompanying the transition from a
violent world to a nonviolent one, the choice of means will
almost never be pure, and will involve such complexities that
the simple distinction between violence and nonviolence does
not suffice as a guide. (Zinn 40)
Insisting on the underlying “pragmatism” of even the most principled

application of civil disobedience, Zinn quotes from the writings of
its most nonviolent practitioner, Mohandas Gandhi. These state-
ments are reminiscent of Malcolm’s pronouncements throughout his
political career:
Gandhi himself wrote at certain times (1919 and 1921) in

Young India: “No rules can tell us how this disobedience may be
done and by whom, when and where, nor can they tell us which
laws foster untruth. It is only experience that can guide us. . . .”
And: “I do believe that where there is only a choice between
cowardice and violence I would advise violence.” (Zinn 42)
The first statement is very similar to Malcolm’s assertion that the

“rules” of protest established by the leadership of the civil rights
movement, designed to appease a government unable or unwilling to
protect the rights of blacks, should not be heeded. For Malcolm, “the
black revolution,” if circumscribed and contained by white America,
would be ineffectual.

220 Malcolm X
The second quote of Gandhi’s that Zinn uses to further his argu-
ment against the exclusively nonviolent nature of civil disobedience
is also reflected in Malcolm’s rhetoric, which saw little substantive
change resulting from the nonviolent resistance of King and others.
Such a strategy fostered the Civil Rights Act in 1964, but racist
discrimination and segregationist violence continued. Malcolm,
like Gandhi, when confronted with an “either/or” choice between
ineffectual pacifism and violent action, favored the latter. But, as
Zinn notes, such comments betray a “pragmatic” attitude toward
social change, one where “ . . . circumstances and results determine
tactics” (Zinn 42). This pragmatic stance, where results and context
have precedence over abstract principles, lies at the heart of what
Malcolm saw as lacking in the civil rights movement. Malcolm
describes this stance in a letter he wrote while completing his
pilgrimage to Mecca:
You may be shocked by these words coming from me. But on

this pilgrimage, what I have seen, and experienced, has forced
me to re-arrange much of my thought-patterns previously held,
and to toss aside some of my previous conclusions. This was not
too difficult for me. Despite my firm convictions, I have been
always a man who tries to face facts, and to accept the reality
of life as new experience and new knowledge unfolds it. I have
always kept an open mind, which is necessary to the flexibility
that must go hand in hand with every form of intelligent search
for truth. (“Letters” 60)
Certainly, the variety of positions Malcolm takes in his speeches

reflects the intellectual adaptability and willingness to change he so
eloquently professes above.
In his late speech, “Not Just an American Problem, But a World
Problem,” Malcolm assumes the posture of an educator, one who gives
his audience the tools to make autonomous moral and political judg-
ments. Such a stance seems less myopic, less concerned with advancing
a particular agenda than with cultivating independent thought and
an awareness of the world beyond America’s borders. Malcolm saw
racism in a global context; this context, he hoped, would be beneficial
to the civil rights struggle and its participants.

So I have to give you the background, in order for you to

understand some of the current problems that are developing
here on this earth. And in no time can you understand the
problems between Black and white people here in Rochester
or Black and white people in Mississippi or Black and white
people in California, unless you understand the basic problem
that exists between Black and white people not confined to
the local level, but confined to the international, global level
on this earth today. When you look at it in that context, you’ll
understand it. But if you only try and look at it in the local
context, you’ll never understand it. You have to see the trend that
is taking place on this earth. And my purpose for coming here
tonight is to try and give you as up-to-date an understanding
of it as is possible. (“Not Just an American” 147)
Separatism rhetoric in Malcolm’s speeches declines after his break

with Elijah Muhammad, and is replaced in this speech by the
pursuit of true “brotherhood.” Malcolm’s frames the argument in
terms that appeal to a higher moral conscience, a secular conscience
based on a global awareness of injustice and the common plight of
the oppressed:
[ . . . We] realize that we have to fight against the evils of

a society that has failed to produce brotherhood for every
member of that society. This in no way means that we’re
antiwhite, antiblue, antigreen, or antiyellow. We’re antiwrong.
We’re antidiscrimination. We’re antisegregation. We’re against
anybody who wants to practice some form of segregation or
discrimination against us because we don’t happen to be a color
that’s acceptable to you. We believe in fighting that. (“Not Just
an American” 149)
Malcolm X was intimately involved in many political spheres—Nation

of Islam separatism, Black Nationalism, and civil rights activism—as
both advocate and critic. At times he leveled rhetorical attacks at the
nonviolent strategy of civil disobedience pursued by King and Gandhi
before him. What was the substance of these critiques? That African
Americans would never have a political voice and be free from

222 Malcolm X
racial oppression as long as blacks answered segregationist violence

with professions of Christian brotherly love and nonviolent protest.
Blaming the federal government for the injustices of the Jim Crow
South and the ghettoized North, Malcolm argues that the only way to
get Washington to change is to bring the plight of African Americans
before the United Nations. The struggle for civil rights, as Malcolm
shrewdly notes in his later speeches, necessarily confines the struggle
of African Americans to the domestic sphere. By simply restating
the grievance, christening it a struggle for “human rights,” Malcolm
and the civil rights movement leadership could legitimately bring the
issue before a governing body with a “higher authority,” a body that
might substitute for the moral conscience of America that King and
others were having such difficulty appealing to. This appeal was both
disobedient and civil: disobedient to the federal government, which
tried to stop Malcolm from making an appearance at the Organiza-
tion for African Unity; but civil since such an appeal was within the
framework of international law that the United States had agreed to,
at least in theory.
Though Malcolm preaches the importance of self-defense, calling
for black men to form rifle clubs to stem endemic racial violence, he
explicitly justifies such action in terms of the second amendment of
the Constitution and the pursuit of civil rights. For Malcolm, the
leadership of the civil rights movement was too prone to influence by
the white liberal establishment, too quick to appease the white world
to make any meaningful difference before the “powder keg” of race
relations in the United States exploded (“Black Revolution” 48). These
concerns proved to be valid: After the deaths of Malcolm and King,
riots broke out across the country as blacks despaired over the tragic
loss of their most dedicated advocates and the continuing climate
of racial oppression and disenfranchisement. This explosion of civil
disorder validated much of what Malcolm had to say.
What happens if you appeal to the conscience of your nation,
its inner sense of justice and need for consistency before the law,
and your efforts fail? This is the question that plagued Malcolm, the
question he spent his political career trying to answer. At times he
embraced the rhetoric of revolution and separatism; at other times
he called for acts of mass protest and civil disobedience. Ultimately,
the conscience Malcolm appealed to is not just the conscience of a
nation, but of the world.


Arendt, Hannah. “Civil Disobedience.” Crises of the Republic. New York:
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1972. 49–102.
Bedau, Hugo Adam, ed. Civil Disobedience in Focus. London: Routledge, 1991.
Bedau, Hugo Adam. “Civil Disobedience and Personal Responsibility.” Bedau
49–67.
Cone, James H. Martin & Malcolm & America: A Dream or a Nightmare.
Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1991.
Dyson, Michael Eric. Making Malcolm: The Myth and Meaning of Malcolm X.
New York: Oxford University Press, 1995.
Malcolm X, with Alex Haley. The Autobiography of Malcolm X. New York:
Grove Press, 1965.
Malcolm X. “At the Audubon.” New York, 13 December 1964. Malcolm X
Speaks 88–104.
. “The Ballot or the Bullet.” Cleveland, 3 April 1964. Malcolm X Speaks
23–44.
. “The Black Revolution.” New York, 8 April 1964. Malcolm X Speaks
45–57.
. By Any Means Necessary. 1970. Edited by George Breitman. New York:
Pathfinder Press, 1992.
. February 1965: The Final Speeches. Edited by Steve Clark. New York:
Pathfinder Press, 1992.
. “Letters from Abroad.” Jedda, Saudi Arabia, 20 April 1964. Malcolm
X Speaks 58–60.
. Malcolm X Speaks: Selected Speeches and Statements. 1965. Edited by
George Breitman. New York: Pathfinder Press, 1989.
. “Message to the Grass Roots.” Detroit, 10 November 1963. Malcolm
X Speaks 3–17.
. “Not Just an American Problem, But a World Problem.” Rochester, 16
February 1965. February 1965: The Final Speeches 143–70.
. Speeches at Harvard. Edited by and introduction by Archie Epps. New
York: Paragon House, 1991.
Morreall, John. “The Justifiability of Violent Civil Disobedience.” Bedau
130–43.
Rawls, John. “Definition and Justification of Civil Disobedience.” Bedau 103–21.
Terrill, Robert E. Malcolm X: Inventing Radical Judgment. East Lansing, MI:
Michigan State University Press, 2004.
Zinn, Howard. Disobedience and Democracy. New York: Vintage, 1968.

NATIVE SON
(RICHARD WRIGHT)
,.
“Richard Wright and Albert Camus:
The Literature of Revolt”
by Steven J. Rubin, in
International Fiction Review (1981)
Introduction
Steven J. Rubin focuses on personal revolt in Richard Wright’s
Native Son and Albert Camus’ The Stranger, justifying the
acts of civil disobedience that the two novels’ protagonists
perform. Ultimately, he finds that: “Although the motivating
forces behind their actions differ, both protagonists conform
to a similar pattern: alienation, a sense of frustration with
conventional order and values, an accidental murder, a real-
ization of the meaning of that murder in terms of their role
in society, a separation (physical and emotional) from their
world, and a final coming to terms with their individual fates.”
Thus, he concludes that both Bigger Thomas, the central
character in Native Son, and Meursault, the central character
in The Stranger, find peace within themselves by realizing
that their “actions, although self-destructive, [are] the only
Rubin, Steven J. “Richard Wright and Albert Camus: The Literature of Revolt.”
International Fiction Review 8.1 (Winter 1981): 12–6.
225

226 Richard Wright
possible responses to the series of injustices and irrationali-

ties within [their] existence.”
f
The early fiction of Richard Wright, comprised of short stories written

in the thirties and culminating in Native Son (1940), is primarily an
expression of personal outrage and frustration. Although Wright’s
literary heritage has been traced to the American Naturalists,1 recent
readings of his works suggest that Wright was not as confined by
that tradition as has generally been believed.2 Working within the
framework of social protest, Wright probed other more metaphysical
issues, which were later to become of even greater importance to him.
In dramatizing the plight of each of his heroes, from Big Boy in “Big
Boy Leaves Home,” to Bigger Thomas in Native Son, Wright explored
the motivating forces behind their actions. As their personal dramas
unfolded, he developed such themes as the possibility of freedom,
man’s isolation and alienation, the inherent irrationality of modern
American society, and the nature and form of personal rebellion
within that society.
Native Son is, as Edward Margolies in The Art of Richard Wright
points out, as much a psychological novel with clear existential implica-
tions, as it is sociological.3 Bigger Thomas is not only a Black man strug-
gling against an oppressive white society, but also Wright’s archetypal
rebel, desperately seeking recognition and meaning within a world that
has offered him none. Alienated from the mainstream of society and
betrayed by his own environment, Bigger, like Wright’s earlier heroes,
searches for an effective means of vanquishing his personal sense of
worthlessness. Ironically, like the protagonists of Uncle Tom’s Children,
Bigger’s revolt is simultaneously victorious and self-destructive.
The literature of revolt is born from the recognition on the part of
many modern writers that meaning and purpose are not an integral
part of the universe in which man finds himself. Native Son, written at
a time when Wright was preoccupied with social issues, also represents
an examination of the nature of personal rebellion, a theme which
dominated much of the thinking of such modern European writers as
André Malraux, Jean-Paul Sartre, and especially Albert Camus.
In its most universal form, rebellion, according to Camus, involves
a protest against the condition in which man finds himself [. . . . ]

Native Son 227
Finding the world to be unjust, the rebel protests against being a part
of the universe and attempts to reorder his world according to his
own version of justice. The act of revolting, even when it involves a
level of injustice to match that which is prevalent in society, results in
apocalyptical moments of freedom and power. The result, according
to Camus, is not only a new respect for one’s self, but also a new sense
of order and unity in the universe. This acceptance of a self-imposed
order is what ultimately moves both Camus’s Meursault (L’Etranger),
and Wright’s Bigger Thomas toward a peaceful reconciliation with
their fates.
In Wright’s first volume of short stories, Uncle Tom’s Children
(1938), physical rebellion becomes the dominant theme and the
means by which his characters achieve freedom and identity. Wright’s
early heroes seek fulfillment of their personality and a purpose to their
otherwise meaningless existence through violent action. In similar
fashion, Bigger Thomas, confused and alone, can find no conventional
way to bridge the gap between his aspirations and the reality of his
condition. In “How Bigger Was Born,” Wright explained the need for
rebellion: “In Native Son I tried to show that man, bereft of a culture
and unanchored by property, can travel but one path if he reacts posi-
tively, but unthinkingly to the prizes and goals of civilization; and that
path is emotionally blind rebellion.”4
As the novel opens, Bigger is seen as a man conditioned by hatred
and a sense of racial exclusion: “I just can’t get used to it,” Bigger said.
“I swear to God I can’t, I know I oughtn’t think about it, but I can’t
help it. Everytime I think about it I feel like somebody’s poking a red-
hot iron down my throat. God-dammit, look! We live here and they
live there. We black and they white. They got things and we ain’t. They
do things and we can’t. It’s just like living in jail. Half the time I feel
like I’m on the outside of the world peeping in through a knot-hole in
the fence.”5 Throughout Book I, “Fear,” Bigger is portrayed as a man
in conflict, not only with white society, but also with his surroundings,
his family, his peers, and ultimately with himself. Bigger is not able
to escape the sordidness of his condition through religion, as does his
mother, or through alcohol, as does his mistress Bessie. For him there
are no external evasions, and as his anxiety and frustration mount
Bigger begins to feel a sense of impending disaster: “Bigger felt an
urgent need to hide his growing and deepening feeling of hysteria;

228 Richard Wright
he had to get rid of it or else he would succumb to it . . . his self-trust

was gone. Confidence could only come again now through action so
violent that it would make him forget” (Native Son, pp.30–1).
Bigger takes a job as a chauffeur for the Daltons, a wealthy white
philanthropic family who support the NAACP but are neverthe-
less one of the city’s biggest slum landlords. Through a strange series
of circumstances Bigger, in a moment of fear and panic, kills their
daughter Mary. The murder, although ostensibly a mistake, is an
accident only in the narrowest sense, for Bigger has long dreamed of
such an act. The full meaning of his crime does not become clear to
him until after the murder, but he had long had a foreboding of such
violence: “I feel like something awful’s going to happen to me. . . .
Naw, it ain’t like something going to happen to me. It’s . . . It’s like
I was going to do something I can’t help” (Native Son, p. 24). Bigger
fantasizes about destruction, of dropping bombs on the white world,
and in one rare moment of insight even admits to the possibility of
murder as an antidote to his extreme anguish and despair: “He knew
that the moment he allowed what his life meant to enter fully into his
consciousness, he would either kill himself or someone else” (Native
Son, p. 14).
Bigger’s killing of Mary becomes the one meaningful act of his
life, giving him a new sense of freedom and identity and a capacity
for action on a grand scale. Up to this time Bigger has cowered in
fear before the white world. Now, as he plots his next move, the many
options that are opened give him a new sense of power and possibility:
“He lay again on the bed, his mind whirling with images born of a
multitude of impulses. He could run away; he could remain; he could
even go down and confess what he had done. The mere thought that
these avenues of action were open to him made him feel free, that his
life was his, that he held his future in his hands” (Native Son, p. 179).
Out of apparent fear of betrayal, Bigger brutally slays his mistress
Bessie. These two acts place him irrevocably outside the social order of
all men, both white and black. Unlike his killing of Mary, the murder
of Bessie is neither accidental nor truly necessary for his protection. It
is simply proof of his new ability to act. Although Bigger is afraid he
will be overwhelmed by a feeling of guilt, this second murder, like the
first, gives him a sense of liberation and an even greater control over
his destiny: “In all of his life these two murders were the most mean-
ingful things that had ever happened to him. He was living, truly and

Native Son 229
deeply. . . . Never had he had the chance to live out the consequences
of his actions; never had his will been so free as in this night and day
of fear and murder and flight” (Native Son, p. 225).
Bigger is finally discovered to be the murderer and is captured
after a search of the entire Black section of Chicago. Max, a white
Communist Party lawyer, becomes his attorney and presents an
impassioned plea, linking Bigger’s deviant actions to his environment
and the transgressions of a prejudiced society. Privately, however,
Max, whose thinking does not go beyond sociological explanations, is
somewhat bewildered as to Bigger’s true motivation. Bigger tries to
explain that his action has made him understand himself as a man:
“What I killed for I am! . . . What I killed for must’ve been good! . . .
When a man kills, it’s for something. . . . I didn’t know I was really
alive in this world until I felt things hard enough to kill for ’em”
(Native Son, pp. 391–2).
[ . . . ] In Camus’ novel L’Etranger, 1942 (The Stranger 1946),
Meursault’s metaphysical rebellion originates because he finds himself
adrift and isolated in a meaningless society. Bigger, like Meursault, is
alone in a world which has lost all metaphysical and moral founda-
tion. Without God and without absolutes, he lacks an a priori basis for
moral and ethical choice. As Wright explained: “All Bigger Thomases,
white and black, felt tense, afraid, nervous, hysterical, and restless. . . .
These personalities were mainly consequent upon men and women
living in a world whose fundamental assumptions could no longer be
taken for granted; . . . a world in which God no longer existed as a
daily focal point in men’s lives; a world in which men could no longer
retain their faith in an ultimate hereafter.” 6
[ ...]
In the final pages of Native Son, Bigger Thomas, condemned to
death, [attempts] to understand the relationship between man and the
absurdity of his environment. Rejecting the solace of religion, he is
determined to die alone, as he has lived. In talking with Max, however,
he realizes that other men have lived and felt as he has. He is finally
able to send a belated gesture of fraternity to Jan, whose help Bigger
has rejected throughout. As Max is leaving his cell for the last time,
Bigger calls out to him: “Tell . . . Tell Mister . . . Tell Jan hello.”
As his death approaches, Bigger, like Meursault, is free of fear of
life and death. He has finally made peace with himself by realizing
that his actions, although self-destructive, were the only possible

230 Richard Wright
responses to the series of injustices and irrationalities within his exis-

tence. As his execution nears, Bigger has no remorse; instead he is seen
with “a faint, wry bitter smile” (Native Son, p. 392).
[ . . . There] is a basic difference in the pattern of revolt and its
motivation between Wright’s Bigger Thomas and Camus’ Meursault.
Meursault’s actions are the result of his comprehending the chaotic
nature of the universe. Bigger acts out of hatred, fear, and an innate
longing to be free. Uneducated and inarticulate, he reacts unthink-
ingly to the underlying contradictions of an American society which
proclaims the inherent worth of the individual and yet everywhere
denies that worth to the Black man. Unlike Meursault, Bigger is not
aware of the metaphysical implications of his protest. It is only after
his action that he begins to experience a new knowledge of himself, his
existence, and the nature of his surroundings. Directed immediately
against the white majority, his rebellion eventually assumes a universal
dimension and ultimately is, like that of Meursault and Ellison’s invis-
ible hero, a protest against the entire scheme of things.
Native Son is as much a study of an alienated and lonely indi-
vidual struggling to understand his existence, as it is an examina-
tion of racial prejudice and its effects. Bigger is forced into an alien
existence because of the irrational and unjust nature of the society in
which he lives. For Bigger, the opposite poles of aspiration and satis-
faction can only be briefly united through violence. Murder becomes,
paradoxically, the one creative act of his life: “He had murdered and
had created a new life for himself ” (Native Son, p. 101). Like Cross
Damon, Wright’s Dostoevskian hero in The Outsider (1953), Bigger is
able to kill without remorse, for good and evil have become meaning-
less to him. Killing has become part of Bigger’s definition of himself;
and although Wright does not attempt to justify or condone murder,
he does strive to explain the necessity of Bigger’s actions.
Although The Outsider has many obvious parallels to the work of
Sartre, Camus, and the post–World War II European writers, there is
little to indicate that Wright was influenced by the French existentialists
during the writing of Native Son. His vision of an absurd world emanated
more from firsthand experience in America than from literary sources.
Wright clearly perceived the inconsistencies of the American system
and tried to show, through Bigger Thomas, a man struggling within that
system. Living in a society that had placed him next to obscurity, Bigger
turns to violence as the only meaningful action open to him.

Native Son 231
“What peculiar personality formation results,” Wright later asked,

“when millions of people are forced to live lives of outward submis-
siveness while trying to keep intact in their hearts a sense of worth
of their own humanity.”7 The answer, in part, is given by Wright in
Native Son. Written in 1940, the novel gives an early indication of
Wright’s existential vision and the themes that were to preoccupy his
thinking in the years to come.
NOTES
1. Wright’s literary relation to the American Naturalists was first
articulated by Alfred Kazin, On Native Grounds (New York:
Reynal and Hitchcock, 1942), p. 372; and later by Robert Bone,
The Negro Novel in America (New Haven: Yale University Press),
pp. 142–43.
2. Among the most interesting of Wright studies dealing with this
issue are Richard E. Baldwin, “The Creative Vision of Native
Son,” Massachusetts Review 14 (Spring 1973), 378–90; and
John R. May, Toward a New Earth (Notre Dame: Notre Dame
University Press, 1972), pp. 164–72.
3. Edward Margolies, The Art of Richard Wright (Carbondale:
Southern Illinois University Press, 1969), p. 106.
4. Richard Wright, “How Bigger Was Born,” Saturday Review, 1
June 1940, p. 4.
5. Richard Wright, Native Son (New York: Harper and Row,
1940), pp. 22–23. All further references to this work appear in
the text.
6. Richard Wright, “How Bigger Was Born,” pp. 17–18.
7. Richard Wright, Introduction, Black Metropolis. Edited by
Horace R. Clayton and St. Claire Drake (New York: Harcourt
and Brace, 1945).

THE PRINCE
(NICCOLÒ MACHIAVELLI)
,.
“Civil Disobedience in The Prince”
by Raymond Angelo Belliotti,
State University of New York at Fredonia
An act of civil disobedience is an intentional, public violation of an

ordinance that is clearly the law of the nation in which it takes place.
Acts of civil disobedience flow from reasons of moral conscience and
they usually are aimed at a change in the law or a related policy.
Acts of civil disobedience must be distinguished from common-
place lawlessness or inadvertent violations. Gunmen who rob banks
and rapists who assault victims are not civilly disobedient. They are
merely criminals. They are not motivated by higher social purposes;
they do not hope to alter the laws prohibiting theft and rape; their
actions are neither public demonstrations nor designed to rally mass
support for their cause. Likewise, those who violate the law because of
neglect, indifference, or ignorance are not civilly disobedient. Motor-
ists who pass through a stop sign because they are paying insufficient
attention to their task, hikers who mistakenly drop lit cigarettes in a
forest, and foreigners who violate a law because they are unaware of
the prohibition are not civilly disobedient.
Civil disobedience has a unique purpose: to inspire a social outcry
to change existing law or policy by publicly demonstrating the alleged
immorality of existing arrangements. Acts of civil disobedience aspire
to win converts to their cause by stirring the moral sensibilities of the
public. Classic cases of civil disobedience abound. In the nineteenth
233

234 Niccolò Machiavelli
century, Henry David Thoreau refused to pay taxes in order to protest

the Mexican-American War and the institution of slavery. In 1955,
Rosa Parks refused to comply with the legal requirement that African
Americans could occupy only the rear seats of public buses. During
the first half of the twentieth century Mahatma Gandhi orchestrated
numerous acts of civil resistance in leading India’s struggle for inde-
pendence from the British Empire. In the 1980s Nelson Mandela
and Archbishop Desmond Tutu organized civilly disobedient acts as
a way of protesting apartheid in South Africa. In all these cases, the
participants were legally punished for their actions.
Acts of civil disobedience violate the law. Accordingly, the moral
appropriateness of civilly disobedient action is problematic. The critical
question surrounding civil disobedience is clear: When, if ever, may
individual citizens justifiably substitute their understanding of right
and wrong for the judgment of the state? After all, if citizens system-
atically refuse to comply with laws simply because they disagree with
the appropriateness of those laws, public order would dissolve. Scores
of laws are controversial, yet the state demands general compliance
in order to nurture the common good and secure stability. A nation
where civil disobedience is rampant is unlikely to remain unified. Still,
certain organized acts of civil disobedience have earned widespread
approval for inspiring healthy change that would not otherwise have
been forthcoming. Where might we draw the line between justified
civil disobedience and self-indulgent lawlessness?
At least five questions provide a framework for understanding
justified civil disobedience. The first is the question of means: Will
the civilly disobedient acts be nonviolent or will they involve violence?
Usually, advocates of civil disobedience require nonviolence for both
moral and strategic reasons. When people break the law nonviolently
they implicitly affirm their general consent to the legal system and the
social order. When they break the law violently they call into question
their own motives. Moreover, nonviolent resistance is more likely to
inspire others to rally to the cause. By displaying their own rectitude,
civilly disobedient activists underscore their moral message and maxi-
mize their chances of winning public support for their cause.
The second question is the scope of the intended change in existing
arrangements: Do the activists aim at reform or do they target an over-
throw of the basic structures of government? Aiming at reform—the
change of a certain law or a few policies—is less threatening to the

The Prince 235
general order and more likely to attract supporters than calling for
revolution. At least, this is the case in a reasonably just state.
The third question is one of political context: Will the civilly
disobedient acts occur in a democracy or republic that is reasonably
just, or in a totalitarian state that is fundamentally unjust? If the activ-
ists operate in a democracy or republic, their message is more likely to
be heard, their cause is more likely to gather support, and the govern-
mental response is likely to be less harsh than in a totalitarian state.
In a totalitarian state, one of the critical aspects of successful disobe-
dience—public awareness of the event—is likely to be frustrated.
Authoritarians rarely permit widespread publicity for dissenters.
The fourth question is one of past benefits: Has the state granted
and have the activists accepted substantial benefits from the state in
the past? Where the protestors have benefited greatly from the state
in the past, their present opposition may be judged as ingratitude.
This was an argument advanced by Socrates in Plato’s dialogue The
Crito (Plato 51d-54e). Where protestors have been systematically
oppressed—Mandela and Tutu under apartheid, Parks under segre-
gation laws, Gandhi under imperial rule—their case for justified civil
disobedience is stronger.
The fifth question is one of future compliance: Should the protes-
tors accept punishment as the lawful consequence of their disobedi-
ence, or should they refuse to accept punishment? The usual answer
is that accepting punishment is morally and strategically wise. By
accepting punishment for their lawlessness, the protestors affirm their
general commitment to the rule of law and allegiance to their nation.
Moreover, they are more likely to win public support for their cause by
taking full responsibility for their actions and accepting punishment.
The radical answer is that the protestors have no strong moral reason
to accept punishment and doing so contradicts their central purpose:
If they are convinced their actions are morally justified, why should
they accept punishment for doing what is morally right? If they accept
punishment, are they not compromising their moral message?
When is civil disobedience justified? The answer to this question is a
matter of ongoing debate, but the following summarizes one plausible
position. The first step is to address the issue of citizens substituting
their own judgments for those of the state. In a reasonably just state,
such as a democracy or republic, protestors are not substituting their
sense of right and wrong for the judgment of the state. Instead, they

are holding the state accountable for straying from its own standards.
The state holds itself out—in public records, founding documents,
and constitutional aspirations—as subscribing to certain fundamental
values and basic political commitments. Where the state’s laws trans-
gress those stated values and commitments, the state has failed its
own purposes. Citizens who hold the state accountable, through acts
of civil disobedience intended to highlight the discrepancy, are merely
demanding that the state live up to its expressed goals.
The second step is to restrict the justified range of civil disobedi-
ence. Protestors should organize civilly disobedient acts only against
offensive laws and policies that cause serious injustice. Such laws and
policies transgress the fundamental values and political commitments
that define the state. They cause serious injury to a significant number
of citizens.
The third step requires civil disobedience to be aimed at reform
and to be conducted nonviolently. Lawless acts aimed at revolution
are less civil disobedience and more civil insurrection. Although
revolutionary activity is often justified, it goes far beyond civil
disobedience. Remaining nonviolent, as noted above, underscores
the moral message and maximizes prospects of earning public
sympathy for the cause.
The fourth step insists that protestors accept punishment for their
civilly disobedient actions. To be justified, civilly disobedient acts
must fulfill both moral and strategic requirements. Punishment is the
standard legal response to violating the law, and nonviolent protestors
further their cause, both morally and strategically, by complying.
The fifth step recognizes that civil disobedience is, for practical
purposes, a last resort. Other methods of affecting change should be
tried prior to launching civilly disobedient deeds. The civilly disobe-
dient acts must also have a reasonable expectation of achieving their
results. Having the moral high ground is not enough to enact change.
The strategic or prudential dimension—Are prospects for success
reasonable? What ways of acting will maximize those prospects? How
can public support best be won?—remains crucial.
Finally, the amount of harm caused by the civilly disobedient acts
must be outweighed by the amount of good caused by the expected
changes in the disagreeable laws or policies. That the activists must
minimize the amount of harm they cause by their deeds should go
without saying.

The Prince 237
dards. Two notions inform the advice Niccolò Machiavelli offers polit-
ments, ical rulers in The Prince, written around 1513. Virtù has been, more
mental or less accurately, translated as efficiency, skill, strength, excellence,
trans- discipline, manliness, ability, virtue, effectiveness, will power, vigor,
led its and a host of related attributes. For Machiavelli, virtù connotes an
h acts excellence relevant to a person’s function. Human beings inhabit a
merely world of scarce resources and keen competition that rests uncom-
fortably with our bottomless ambitions and passions. Worse, we are
obedi- susceptible to the whims of Fortuna, which often conspire against
gainst our best-devised strategies. Only people embodying virtù are able to
ws and cope with Fortuna, confront adversity with renewed purpose, imagine
ments and pursue grand deeds, and maintain their resolve and passion in a
umber relentlessly competitive world.
Specifically, Machiavelli refers to military virtù, political virtù,
eform civic virtù, moral virtù, and artistic virtù. The qualities of excellence
lution defining each type will differ. The greatest men—those able to found,
hough preserve, reform, and expand healthy political units—must exude
d civil military and political virtù. Such leaders must effectively size up the
scores prevailing situation; reflect on the available choices, priorities, and
public probable consequences; and act decisively and successfully. Citizens in
a healthy political unit must exhibit civic and moral virtù if the unit
r their is to continue to flourish.
t acts In The Prince, Machiavelli sometimes writes as if Fortuna is a
is the personified, natural force that consciously and whimsically plays with
testors the circumstances of human beings. At other times, he writes as if
g. Fortuna is only the set of circumstances within which human beings
actical must operate and choose alternatives (Ch. 25). Wise human beings
uld be can take proactive and reactive measures to soften Fortuna’s fury. The
isobe- message to individual rulers is even crisper. Do not depend on past
g their favorable Fortuna. Your fortunes will change. No person will enjoy
hange. positive Fortuna forever. Sometimes caution wins the day. Sometimes
uccess boldness succeeds. The character of the times determines proper
? How action. For Machiavelli, the highest ends of governments are expan-
sion and glory; the highest end for human beings is enduring glory, a
nt acts form of immortality.
pected A host of slogans capture the gist of Machiavelli’s advice to princes.
must He tells princes to “free yourself from the imperatives of conventional
uld go morality.” Because of the unbridgeable gap between how people live
and how they ought to live, princes who insist on acting on moral ideals

will destroy themselves. Princes who refuse to cast aside conventional

morality at critical times will fail because so many people act immor-
ally. Princes must learn how to be not good, understand when to use
that knowledge and when not to use it, in accord with necessity (Ch.
15, 18). In general, a prince should follow conventional morality where
he can, but recognize that necessity often requires violating morality to
advance the purposes of the state and prince (Ch. 15, 18, 19).
People are mystified by appearances. They judge the actions of
everyone, especially those of princes, by their results. If a prince
succeeds in founding, preserving, reforming, or expanding the power
of the state—and thereby enhancing the well-being of its citi-
zens—his methods will be evaluated favorably (Ch. 18). Machiavelli
is not championing the evaluative notion that “good ends justify any
means.” Instead, he is describing the way the majority of people will be
blinded by results when judging the ways those ends were attained. He
suggests that if their self-interest were promoted by the results, people
would brush away the wrongness of the means.
A prince’s default position is following the scruples of conven-
tional morality. But necessità—the basic human inclination toward
self-interest; the scarcity of natural resources; the actual behavior of
the vast majority of people; the competitive nature of international
affairs; and the whims of Fortuna—will often require violating the
demands of conventional morality as the only way to attain political
ends: founding, preserving, reforming, or expanding the state. A
healthy state is required if the prince is to achieve glory and the people
are to enjoy security and order, and develop civic virtù.
For a prince to merely hold his subjects in fear is not enough.
According to Machiavelli he must “cultivate the loyalty of the masses.”
A prince must transform what citizens first take as external rule into
an internally accepted regime. The cornerstones of the program include
showing the people how their self-interest is tightly bound with the
well-being of the prince; recruiting a strong army and instituting
sound laws; neutralizing the ambition of the nobles; implementing
disciplined education; cultivating appropriate habits and customs;
enlarging the prince’s reputation; and demonstrating that the system
works through grand military triumphs and a clear system of internal
rewards and punishments.
According to Machiavelli, people are strongly inclined toward evil;
they are turned to the good only by necessity; they judge mainly by

The Prince 239
appearances; they evaluate actions only by results; they seek merely to

avoid being oppressed; they will desert the prince if he is defeated or
captured; and, thus, they lack grand spirits. Still, their well-being and
collective loyalty is pivotal to the prince’s successful reign and to his
reward of enduring glory.
A successful prince must also “establish strong armies and sound
laws.” He should recruit, train, and lead his own troops. A prince’s
reputation for strength must be based on his actual military capa-
bilities. The prince’s troops can include his subjects or citizens or
dependents. To lose with his own men is preferable to winning with
soldiers belonging to someone else or those who are hired guns (Ch.
13). As always, the prince should be self-sustaining and rely as little
as possible upon outsiders (Ch. 10). Only if strong arms and sound
laws are in place can a state cultivate civic virtù and begin to compete
effectively in international affairs.
If natural resources are scarce, the ambition of glory-seekers is
expansive, and world affairs consist of a series of competitions, then
the prince must draw a tight circle around his area of concern—his
state and citizens—and advance their interests to the detriment of
those outside that circle. For Machiavelli, this is the nature of the
world and of human beings. Care for the well-being of citizens or
the common good does not extend beyond the state’s borders. A
prince should “operate within the world as it is.” Glory is conferred in
response to grand political and military achievements. These triumphs
involve winners and losers. One sure way of losing is to operate from
principles and values which lack currency in the world as it is and as
it functions.
Like a proficient poker player, the prince tries to conceal the real
strength of his holdings. Sometimes he wants to give the impression
his position is stronger than it is in order to forestall internal opposi-
tion or external attack. At other times, he may feign vulnerability in
order to invite aggression which he can easily quell. The deception in
all cases is designed to amplify his overall standing. But no one, poker
player or politician, can succeed through bluffs only. A firm basis of
strength, not merely its illusion, is required. For princes, a strong mili-
tary, a well-ordered polity, and avoiding the hatred of the people are
prerequisites for continued success.
The ends of the state are the personal glory of the prince and the
enhanced well-being of the citizens (Ch. 26). Machiavelli is clear in

The Prince that these ends require territorial expansion (Ch. 3, 7). The neutra
prince must “understand the critical ends of the state.” The state must and d
expand because, in Machiavelli’s uncompromising worldview, the only The q
other choice is enslavement. True, the prince burns with ambition and 18, 19
aspires to enduring glory. That glory can be attained only by invigo- M
rating the state and enlarging the common good. tempt
The prince’s deepest aspiration springs, true enough, from self- prince
interest. But he comes to understand that what is in his self-interest by unr
cannot be gained selfishly. If selfishness is ignoring the interests of equall
others when one should not, then the prince must shun it in order to neutra
satisfy his self-interest in enduring glory. From the standpoint of the party
people, the glory of the prince is a means to the common good. None forme
of this assumes that the prince has purely selfless motives or even that Th
his heart aches for the plight of his people. Accordingly, the well-being of The
of citizens is part of the definition of personal glory, rather than merely stands
a means of attaining it. his na
The prince must remember that “it is better to be feared than to and ot
be loved, but avoid being hated.” For the prince, being both feared efforts
and loved by the people is the best situation. But accomplishing both intern
at once is uncommon. If the prince cannot join these two emotions poten
in his people, it is better to be feared than to be loved. This is the his ow
case because of Machiavelli’s conception of human nature: People lute p
are generally ungrateful, cowardly, selfish, deceptive, greedy, and the m
inconstant. As long as the prince serves their interests, they pledge from
loyalty and offer extravagant promises. Love is an emotion that binds the m
people through obligation. People, who are basically wicked and self- Such
interested, will shun that duty when convenient. Fear has a greater identi
hold because it includes dread of punishment. Fear, then, is completely circum
reliable and predictable (Ch. 17, 18). public
At all costs, a prince must avoid being hated (Ch. 17, 19). The prince
people will hate a prince only if the ruler confiscates their property or that it
their women. When the prince has to kill, he should be able to articu- Mach
late persuasive reasons and to make a clear case. Above all, he must not frustr
seize the property of citizens: “Men forget more quickly the death of civil d
a father than the loss of a father’s estate” (Ch. 17). If
The prince should take the lion and the fox as role models. or oth
The lion frightens wolves and the fox recognizes traps. Rulers who is civi
act only as lions do not fully understand the requirements of their arms,
office. The lion, as a metaphor for military might, can be tricked and avelli

The Prince 241
neutralized by clever adversaries. The fox, as a metaphor for cunning

and deception, cannot always defend itself from forceful enemies.
The qualities of both beasts are needed by a successful prince (Ch.
18, 19).
Machiavelli disdains half-hearted measures, the kind we are
tempted to apply when we are unsure of our position and options. The
prince must be decisive and avoid neutrality. A prince gains respect
by unreservedly allying himself with one party in a conflict and being
equally opposed to the other party in the conflict. If a prince remains
neutral, the victor in the dispute will injure him and the defeated
party will revel in that injury. The prince will be conquered by the
former and receive no aid from the latter (Ch. 21).
The theory and practice of civil disobedience postdate the writing
of The Prince by over three centuries. Machiavelli, however, under-
stands keenly the danger that social unrest poses for the prince and
his nation-state. A divided country—one where civil disobedience
and other social revolts are widely practiced—undermines the prince’s
efforts in international affairs and minimizes his prospects for rallying
internal support for his policies. Thus, he advises the ruler to quell
potential civil disobedience of every sort by fashioning the state and
his own conduct appropriately. The prince is a monarch holding abso-
lute power. According to Machiavelli, he will win the allegiance of
the masses as long as he is militarily and politically effective, refrains
from trifling with the women and property of his subjects, advances
the material interests of the nation, and thereby avoids being hated.
Such a monarch earns loyalty from his subjects by getting them to
identify their collective self-interest with his interests. Under such
circumstances, groups of citizens are highly unlikely to mount a
public protest over this or that law. Given the absolute power of the
prince, if a demonstration of this sort were initiated the likelihood
that it would gain widespread public airing is miniscule. Accordingly,
Machiavelli designs the political context of The Prince in order to
frustrate the central purposes, methods, and prospects for successful
civil disobedience.
If a prince is politically and militarily ineffective, if he is hated,
or otherwise loses the allegiance of his subjects, the most likely result
is civil insurrection or revolution. Citizens may well rise up, take up
arms, and attack an incompetent or cruel monarch. Elsewhere Machi-
avelli celebrates Lucius Junius Brutus (ca. 545 bc–ca. 509 bc), who led

the people of early Rome in a revolution that drove an unscrupulous

monarch, Tarquin the Proud, out of Rome and installed a republic (The
Discourses Book 1, Ch. 16; Book 3, Ch. 3). Machiavelli judged that
deposed princes of this stripe received precisely what they earned by
their ineptitude.
Accordingly, the political context of The Prince is an inhospitable
setting for civil disobedience. The government is a monarchy, not a
democracy or republic; public demonstrations would be quickly extin-
guished and would not receive widespread discussion; and citizens
would be unlikely to target specific laws for reform. For Machiavelli,
the central purposes of the nation—the personal glory of the prince
and the enhanced well-being of the citizens—deserve nothing less.

Bedau, Hugo. Civil Disobedience in Focus. New York: Routledge, 1991.
Belliotti, Raymond Angelo. Niccolò Machiavelli: The Laughing Lion and the
Strutting Fox. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2008.
Fortas, Abe. Concerning Dissent and Civil Disobedience. New York: Signet
Broadside, 1968.
Machiavelli, Niccolò. The Prince. Machiavelli: Selected Political Writings. Edited
and translated by David Wootton. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing
Company, 1994. 5–80.
. The Discourses. Machiavelli: Selected Political Writings. Edited and
translated by David Wootton. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company,
1994. 81–217.
Plato, The Crito. Plato: Collected Dialogues. Translated by Hugh Tredennick.
Edited by Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns. Princeton: Princeton
Price, Russell. “The Senses of Virtù in Machiavelli.” European Studies Review 3
(1973): 315–45.
Zinn, Howard. Disobedience and Democracy. Cambridge, MA: South End Press,
2002.

THE SCARLET LETTER
(NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE)
,.
“Civil Disobedience and Realpolitik in
Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter”
by Robert C. Evans,
Auburn University at Montgomery
In the rich and thought-provoking article “The Scarlet Letter of the

Law: Hawthorne and Criminal Justice,” Laura Hanft Korobkin raises
many points relevant to any consideration of civil disobedience in
Hawthorne’s greatest novel. Korobkin not only discusses The Scarlet
Letter in relation to the actual methods and procedures of the justice
system in Puritan New England, but she also relates the book to polit-
ical controversies that were raging when the novel was first written,
published, and read. In particular, she shows how Hawthorne’s text
may have resonated for readers concerned with the problems created
by the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, which “placed all citizens”—even
those living in the North—“under affirmative legal obligations not
only to permit but also to assist in the capture and return of fugi-
tive slaves” (428). Korobkin suggests that The Scarlet Letter raises two
questions that would have seemed highly relevant to Hawthorne’s
contemporaries as they wrestled with their own and others’ reactions
to the Fugitive Slave Law:
First, what obligations do individuals have to obey laws

regulating private behavior, laws that directly conflict with the
individuals’ deeply held principles, and which they have had
243

244 Nathaniel Hawthorne
no hand in making? And second, must submission to such a

law be viewed as integrity-destroying cowardice, or can it be
understood as courageous and even beneficial to the individual?
These questions sounded with particular resonance in 1850,
when the legitimacy of public law and criminal process was a
matter of intense national debate. (428)
No summary of Korobkin’s subtle article can do justice to her

painstaking and thorough discussion; suffice it to say that she suggests
that Hester Prynne may have struck many of Hawthorne’s first readers
as a model illustrating the virtues of outward obedience to civil laws.
By accepting the punishment Puritan authorities inflict on her, and by
continuing to live as an obedient member of the community, Hester
helps preserve that community even while she inwardly dissents from
some of its values. Rather than openly rebelling and thus provoking
discord and division, she is willing to remain in the community, live
a useful and public-spirited life, set an inspiring example, and look
forward to a day when the community will peacefully evolve, in ways
that correspond more with her own ideals. Korobkin admits that to
some of Hawthorne’s contemporaries, “Hester’s outward submission to
the strictures of Puritan law might well appear a shameful knuckling
under, the kind of failure of will that buys safety at the price of personal
integrity. Yet Hawthorne” (Korobkin continues) ultimately “convinces
us that Hester’s behavioral acquiescence is both truly heroic and intel-
lectually liberating. With Hester as a model, the novel suggests, readers
may find the courage not to rebel but to forego rebellion” (429).
Hester, from Korobkin’s perspective, thus emerges as a more
compliant, more conservative, less radical, and less revolutionary
character than she is sometimes perceived to be. Hester may
think radical thoughts, but she fails to act in radical ways. Indeed,
Hawthorne even “implies that it is precisely because she need not
think about practical action that her mental explorations can be so
far-reaching” (434).
Hester’s philosophical and historical conclusions can be radical,

even revolutionary, precisely because they are not muddied by
the messy and corrupting process of attempting change in the
real world. It is significant too that outward obedience is all that
the Puritan rule of law requires; its justice system punishes only

The Scarlet Letter 245
acts, not thoughts. Because community stability depends on

each member’s self-restraint, Hester’s conformity to behavioral
expectations helps hold the community together even when
her thoughts may be at their bitterest. (435)
Certainly much evidence within the novel supports Korobkin’s

interpretation of Hester’s character and behavior. This is especially
true of her conduct in Chapter III of the book, in which she refuses
to name her partner in sin but never protests the fundamental justice
of her sentence. To lodge any such public protest, of course, might
only have led to even harsher punishment, and so Hester mainly (and
wisely) keeps her silence. Her only speech consists, ironically, of a
refusal to speak (Hawthorne 49–50), and she even seems willing not
only to suffer her own punishment but also to shoulder the punish-
ment that should apply to the unknown father of her child: “would
that I might endure his agony, as well as mine” (49). She is forthright
in refusing to confess her lover’s name (“Never!’ . . . I will not speak!”
(49–50) ), but she never objects to the punishment imposed on her or
to the laws that dictate that punishment.
By refusing to speak, Hester engages in a kind of passive resis-
tance and civil disobedience (especially since her refusal is enacted
in front of the entire community), but she stops short of engaging in
any kind of active protest or any exceptionally provocative defiance
of authority. She never challenges her judges, and she never rebukes
the people of the town. Indeed, her disobedience is “civil” in nearly
every sense of the word: It is polite; it is dignified; it is free from open
anger or obvious rancor; and it seems to concede the right of the civil
authorities to ordain the punishment they have chosen to impose.
Her silence wins the (obviously self-interested) admiration of her
secret lover, Arthur Dimmesdale (“Wondrous strength and generosity
of a woman’s heart! She will not speak!” [50]), although Hawthorne
leaves it unclear whether Dimmesdale expresses his admiration loudly
enough for anyone else to hear.
Hester’s behavior in Chapter III thus seems to exhibit precisely
the kind of “behavioral acquiescence” emphasized by Korobkin (429).
Hester’s only action is a refusal to act; her only words amount to a
determination to stay silent. She stands on the scaffold for more than
four hours, enduring the stares and scorn of the outraged commu-
nity and the open condemnation (in an hour-long sermon) of the

censuring clergy. When the authorities briefly urge her to act in a

way she considers a violation of her personal conscience, she refuses,
and those authorities are (somewhat surprisingly) willing to accept
her refusal. She is punished only for the sin of adultery; no further or
greater punishment is exacted as a result of her conduct on the scaf-
fold. Hester thus manages to disobey in a way that fails to provoke
any heightened outrage or any vindictive response. She makes her
point quickly but firmly, and “the elder clergyman,” recognizing “the
impracticable state of the poor culprit’s mind,” soon launches into his
already-prepared sermon (Hawthorne 50). It is as if the clergyman
had anticipated Hester’s defiance, is essentially untroubled by it (he
almost seems to feel a kind of pity for her), and so moves on to the
next stage of the preordained ritual. No one suggests that Hester
should be physically threatened, whipped for disobedience, or tortured
into confessing her lover’s name. Hester has thus managed to defy
authority in a way that fails to outrage the authorities assembled; she
has managed to assert her independence from the community in a
way that fails to provoke communal vengeance. She has engaged, in
other words, in a successful act of civil disobedience: She has managed
to show—before the whole assembled population—that it is possible,
even for a relatively powerless woman, to stand her ground without
pushing her defiance too far.
Far more disturbing, however—and also far more difficult to
explain in the terms Korobkin has suggested—is Hester’s behavior
in a later episode of the novel. In Chapter VIII of The Scarlet Letter
(titled “The Elf-Child and the Minister”), Hester and her infant
daughter, Pearl, are present at the home of Governor Bellingham,
where Hester has come to deliver a pair of embroidered gloves the
governor has ordered. In the first half of the chapter, Hawthorne goes
out of his way to emphasize the governor’s wealth, pride, and love of
material comforts (Hawthorne 73–74). In a nice bit of subtle irony,
the narrator notes that despite this sort of materialism, men such as
Bellingham were nevertheless always “prepared to sacrifice goods and
life at the behest of duty” (73), although such phrasing leaves intrigu-
ingly unclear exactly whose life and goods they were willing to sacrifice.
Similar irony attaches to a description of Arthur Dimmesdale, who
also happens to be present (along with a prominent clergyman named
Mr. Wilson, as well as Roger Chillingworth) at the governor’s home
during Hester’s visit. The narrator notes that Dimmesdale’s “health

had severely suffered, of late, by his too unreserved self-sacrifice to

the labors and duties of the pastoral relation,” although the phrase
“self-sacrifice” only helps remind us how little, in fact, he has actually
sacrificed in the several years since Hester first stood upon the public
scaffold and willingly bore sole blame for their mutual sin.
In any case, the governor, upon seeing Pearl, informs Hester that
he and other men of authority have recently been discussing whether
the infant should be removed from “ the guidance ” of Hester, whom
he smugly calls “ one who hath stumbled and fallen ” (Hawthorne 75),
as if he himself were free from sin. Hester at first answers “calmly,
although growing more pale,” but the more she speaks, the more
significantly pointed her words become. Touching her scarlet letter,
she says that “ this badge hath taught me, it daily teaches me,—it
is teaching me at this moment, [italics added]—lessons whereof my
child may be the wiser and better, albeit they can profit nothing to
myself ” (75). Hesters phrasing is not only eloquent and rhetorically
effective, but it is also (by the time she reaches the crucial phrase “at
this moment”) fairly sharp and even somewhat sarcastic. The words
“at this moment” imply that Hester is presently enduring a lesson in
patience, endurance, self-control, and humility—the kind of humility
utterly lacking, it goes without saying, in the governor himself. Never-
theless, the governor persists, insisting that Pearl be examined (by Mr.
Wilson) to determine “ whether she hath had such Christian nurture
as befits a child of her age ” (75). Although the narrator notes that
Pearl is indeed well versed in the tenets of the Christian religion, the
girl refuses to cooperate with Wilsons questioning, a fact that only
further frustrates the governor. With unintended irony, he exclaims
(within a few feet of Dimmesdale, and certainly well within Dimmes-
dales hearing), “ Here is a child of three years old, and she cannot tell
who made her! ” (76). Dimmesdale, of course, who has had a signifi-
cant role in making the child, remains characteristically silent.
Perhaps partly for this reason, Hester becomes increasingly
outspoken and rebellious. When the governor indicates that Pearl
may be taken from her custody, Hester grabs the girl and draws her
“forcibly into her arms, confronting the old Puritan magistrate with
almost a fierce expression” (76). The narrator notes, in language that
has remarkably explicit political overtones, that Hester “felt that
she possessed indefeasible rights against the world, and was ready
to defend them to the death” (76). At first, though, Hester does not

openly state her rebellious feelings. Instead, she begins by appealing to

a higher authority: “‘God gave me the child!’ cried she.” Nevertheless,
in the next sentence she becomes more openly confrontational: “He
gave her, in requital of all things else, which ye had taken from me”
(76; italics added). Hester’s “ye” may refer to Bellingham in particular,
to the assembled men in general, or to Puritan society more broadly,
but in any of these senses it is far more defiant in tone than anything
she has said before. She doesn’t mention any sense of guilt for her own
sin, and, rather than describing Pearl as a kind of punishment from
God, she speaks (at least at first) of the child as a form of “requital” for
everything else that had been “taken from” the mother.
Hester presents herself, in other words, as a victim—a view she
had not earlier expressed in public. She next calls Pearl her “happi-
ness,” but then, perhaps realizing that this assertion will prove rhetori-
cally ineffective, she immediately adds that Pearl is also her “ torture,
none the less! ” (Hawthorne 76). The same kind of careful balance
is repeated in the next two sentences: “ Pearl keeps me here in life!
Pearl punishes me too! ” (76). She even claims that Pearl, in effect, is a
living embodiment of “ the scarlet letter, only capable of being loved,
and so endowed with a million-fold power of retribution for my sin ”
(76). Only now, indeed, does Hester explicitly mention her own “ sin ”
and thus seem to grant the justice of the judgment that has been
imposed upon her. No sooner does she do so, however, than she openly
expresses her most defiant statement yet: “Ye shall not take her! I will
die first! ” (76). One way to read that final sentence is as a threat to
commit suicide; another way to read it is as a promise of her willing-
ness to die in the process of violently opposing any attempt to take
her child. In any case, her words are shockingly frank and are far more
openly rebellious than anything she said (or did not say) earlier on the
scaffold. The fact that she speaks as a loving mother, of course, wins
her some sympathy, even from at least one of the Puritans himself.
Mr. Wilson—described with nice equivocation as the “not unkind old
minister”—tries to calm her by addressing her as a “ poor woman ” and
by assuring her that “ the child shall be well cared for ” (76).
Hester, however, refuses to be placated. “‘God gave her into my
keeping,’” she repeats, “raising her voice almost to a shriek. ‘I will not
give her up!’” (76). And now, in a truly remarkable turn of events,
Hester moves from brazenly outspoken civil disobedience to some-
thing different altogether: She now begins to engage in what might

be called a form of hard-hitting, hard-ball realpolitik, demonstrating a

kind of desperate cunning and skill that make her far more dangerous,
uncontrolled, and unpredictable than perhaps at any other point in
the novel. Turning to Dimmesdale, whom she has thus far ignored,
she suddenly demands (in wonderfully effective and heavily accented
monosyllables), “Speak thou for me!” (76). She then explicitly reminds
him (in words that ironically echo words addressed by Mr. Wilson
to Dimmesdale in the first scaffold scene [48–49]), “Thou wast my
pastor, and hadst charge of my soul, and knowest me better than these
men can” (76). In this sentence, as indeed throughout her address to
Dimmesdale, Hester’s words are double-edged. He did indeed have
charge of her soul, but, as they both know, he also had access to her
body. He has indeed “known” her in a different way than the other men
present. He has “known” her sexually, but he also knows her strength
of character, and so her statement to him is both a bit of implied flat-
tery and also a subtle threat. When Hester once again states that she
“will not lose the child,” her words are once more double-edged: She
will not lose Pearl, but she now seems willing to lose Dimmesdale
and destroy his career by revealing him as Pearl’s father. She once
more demands, “Speak for me!” (76), but implied in these words is
also a demand that he speak for Pearl, and also that he speak now if
he hopes to save his own reputation. Here and throughout her speech,
Hester’s words are richly ambiguous. They are full of desperation, but
they are also brimming with implied threats.
Hester speaks publicly, and all the assembled men hear her, but
only Dimmesdale (and perhaps also Chillingworth) is in a position to
catch the many ironies embedded in her language and to appreciate the
fuller and deeper implications of the threats she is making. Thus, when
Hester tells Dimmesdale that “thou hast sympathies which these men
lack” (Hawthorne 76), she simultaneously appeals to his compassion,
plays on his vanity, alludes to his sterling public reputation, reminds
him of his past and present love for her and the girl, and implicitly
threatens to reveal the precise nature of those “sympathies” if he should
fail to comply with her demands. Likewise, when Hester tells Dimmes-
dale that “thou knowest what is in my heart, and what are a mother’s
rights, and how much the stronger they are, when that mother has but
her child and the scarlet letter” (76), the complicated connotations of
her words are exceptionally rich and pointed. Dimmesdale does indeed
know what is in her heart, because he has had fuller access to her than

any other man present except (possibly) Chillingworth. Dimmesdale

must also realize that Hester now feels that her “rights” as a “mother”
are far stronger than are his as a father or as a secret lover, and that
she will not hesitate to expose him if he fails to assist her. It is, after
all, largely thanks to Dimmesdale—and to his silence and weakness
over the years—that Hester has only “her child and the scarlet letter”
(76). Up to now, she has been unusually patient, loving, forgiving, and
self-sacrificing in her dealings with Dimmesdale, but the whole secret
burden of this speech is that those days may be about to end abruptly
unless he helps her. Without ever threatening him explicitly (i.e., in
ways that the governor or Mr. Wilson can comprehend), she neverthe-
less draws a very firm line in the sand—a line Dimmesdale can see even
if it is invisible to the two men in authority.
Hester knows that her feelings of utter powerlessness have now,
paradoxically, put her in a position of extreme power over Dimmes-
dale, and thus there is a tone not only of desperation but also of
supreme confidence when she tells him, “Look to it! I will not lose
the child! Look to it!” (77). The narrator instantly comments that
“this wild and singular appeal . . . indicated that Hester Prynne’s situ-
ation had provoked her to little less than madness” (77), but with the
exception of the governor and Wilson, every other witness to the
scene—including Hester, Dimmesdale, Chillingworth, the narrator,
and Hawthorne’s readers—knows that if Hester is crazy, she is crazy
like a fox. She knows precisely what she is doing, and so (significantly)
does Dimmesdale. Hester is playing a complicated game of chess with
her secret lover, and he has just been checkmated. She presents herself
as a victim (and genuinely feels herself to be one), but she is far from
conceding defeat. No wonder Dimmesdale looks “pale” and “nervous”!
No wonder he places his hand over his heart and seems to be “thrown
into agitation” (77). In one sense, of course, he is genuinely agitated
spiritually; his conscience is (and has long been) troubled. Signifi-
cantly, however, Dimmesdale does not really make a positive step to
act on Hester’s behalf until he is threatened—until his secret (which
is already known to God) is about to be revealed to men. Only then
does Dimmesdale step forward. “There is truth in what she says,” he
solemnly announces, but he knows (and we and Chillingworth know)
how much more truth there is in her words than the governor and
Wilson are capable of realizing. “God gave her the child,” Dimmes-
dale continues (thereby continuing once more to deflect his own

responsibility). “This child of its father’s guilt and its mother’s shame
hath come from the hand of God” (he proclaims) “to work in many
ways upon her heart, who pleads so earnestly, and with such bitterness
of spirit, the right to keep her” (77).
As these words should make obvious, Dimmesdale’s phrasing
is in many ways as double-edged and as full of hidden meanings as
Hester’s has already been. Thus, by referring to a “father’s guilt,” he
not only lets Hester know that he does feel guilty; he also lets her
know that she has been successful in arousing—and playing on—
that guilt in the present episode. Similarly, by referring to Hester’s
“bitterness of spirit,” he not only alludes to her general anger; he
also signals that he understands why she may feel bitter at him in
particular. The presence of Pearl does indeed “work in many ways
upon [Hester’s] heart,” but the child’s presence (combined with the
mother’s hidden threats) have also worked on Dimmesdale’s. Thus,
when Dimmesdale describes the effect Pearl has on Hester, he also
implicitly describes the effect that both Pearl and Hester have upon
himself: Every sight of them is, for him, “a retribution . . . ; a torture,
to be felt at many an unthought of moment; a pang, a sting, an ever-
recurring agony, in the midst of a troubled joy!” (77). Hester, indeed,
has just proven how subtly she can manipulate Dimmesdale (when
she feels she needs to) in order to achieve her own ends. She has
just demonstrated how, by appealing to his conscience but also by
implicitly threatening to expose him, she can make him speak and
act as she desires.
Dimmesdale’s arguments win the day, which is another way of
saying that Hester (not to put too fine a point on it) blackmails
Dimmesdale into winning a victory for her. Yes, she appeals to his
conscience, but she also appeals (more pertinently) to his sense of
self-interest and to his desire for self-protection. It is a stunning
example of power politics within the pages of The Scarlet Letter, and
it goes far beyond a simple example (as in the first scaffold scene)
of civil disobedience. Roger Chillingworth, for one, cannot help but
admire Hester’s skill. After hearing Dimmesdale’s plea, Chillingworth
smilingly responds: “You speak, my friend, with a strange earnestness”
(78). Chillingworth and Hester, of course, both know why Dimmes-
dale speaks so earnestly, even if Dimmesdale is as yet unaware of
Chillingworth’s real identity and of Chillingworth’s precise knowl-
edge. Chillingworth, though, knows exactly what has just happened,

and perhaps, as a kind of Satanic figure, he even admires the spark of

rebellion that has just flamed up in Hester.
Hester, too, seems to realize how important a victory she has
just won. Later, as she is leaving the governor’s home, she exchanges
words with the governor’s sister, Mistress Hibbins (“the same who, a
few years later, was executed as a witch” [78–79]). Mistress Hibbins
expresses her regret that Hester will not accompany her into the forest
to meet “the Black Man” (i.e., Satan) (79).
“Make my excuse to him, so please you!” answered Hester, with

a triumphant smile. “I must tarry at home, and keep watch over
my little Pearl. Had they taken her from me, I would willingly
have gone with thee into the forest, and signed my name in the
Black Man’s book, too, and that with my own blood!” (79)
Possibly, of course, Hester is merely being sarcastic in responding to a

woman she probably distrusts and who (she may feel) has just tried to
insult her. In another sense, however, her threat does not seem merely
sardonic or empty. Hester has just proven her willingness not only to
defy the deputies of God but also, indeed, to manipulate and blackmail
one of them. She has just proven her willingness—and her ability—to
play hardball. No longer merely civilly disobedient, Hester has shown
herself to be a potential and dangerous rebel. Feeling threatened in her
“indefeasible rights” as a mother (76), she first appeals to her Heavenly
Father but then ends by claiming (perhaps only jokingly) that if she
had lost her child, she would have been willing to become a follower
of Satan. Fortunately, thanks to the success of her subtle exercise in
realpolitik, no one (especially not Dimmesdale) is forced to witness just
how far Hester might really have been willing to go if she had been
pushed beyond her limits of endurance.
WORKS CITED
Hawthorne, Nathaniel. The Scarlet Letter. Person, 3–166.
Korobkin, Laura Hanft. “The Scarlet Letter of the Law: Hawthorne and
Criminal Justice.” Person, 426–51.
Person, Leland, ed. The Scarlet Letter and Other Writings, by Nathaniel
Hawthorne. New York: Norton, 2005.

THE TRIAL
(FRANZ KAFKA)
,.
“Franz Kafka’s The Trial and Civil Disobedience”
by Michael D. Sollars, Texas Southern University
The theme of civil disobedience—a protagonist struggling against a

powerful, even menacing social body or tradition—has many notable
antecedents in the long history of literature. Most historical examples
of civil disobedience in literature present a predatory social body that
is identifiable and definite, and capable of being faced and possibly
defeated. The civil disobedience in more modern literature, on the
other hand, often catapults the reader into a disorienting and inde-
cipherable new world. Franz Kafka’s novel The Trial (1925) is one of
modernism’s most poignant portrayals of the lone individual’s defiance
against a powerful, pervasive, yet indeterminate social consciousness.
Published posthumously in 1925, only one year after the author’s
death at the age of forty-one from tuberculosis, The Trial presents a
blurred reality of the absurd and existentialism. This situation of a
character thrust into a disorienting and frightening landscape—one
sharply marked by the absurd—is so prevalent in Kafka’s novels (other
examples include The Metamorphosis (1915) and The Castle [1926]),
that “Kafkaesque” is the literary term coined to describe such plots.
And it is in The Trial that Kafka most poignantly reveals the individ-
ual’s challenge against an encroaching and sinister social body.
Kafka’s story of his protagonist Joseph K.’s plight against the
Courts begins very much like Gregor Samsa’s nightmare story in The
Metamorphosis. In this, Kafka’s earlier work, the young Gregor awakens
one morning in his familiar bedroom to find himself transformed into
253

254 Franz Kafka
a giant beetle. He spends the rest of his short life as the outsider, alien-
ated from his family and society. Joseph K., beginning his thirtieth
year, wakes one morning to find his familiar, stable world suddenly
transformed into one that he finds confusing and threatening. What
was once familiar becomes strange. K. is not greeted by the smiling
face of his landlady who daily serves his breakfast. Instead he faces
two coarse Court warders who have intruded into his lodgings to
arrest him for reasons that are never disclosed. The reader, like Kafka,
is equally off balance because K. is never taken away to be jailed by
the two court officials; for the most part, his arrest only amounts to
a quasi-official notice that he has fallen under the watchful eye and
jurisdiction of the Law and the Courts, two social edifices against
which K. must now spend all of his time and energy battling. K. never
actually learns of any charges, general or specific, against him.
The initial catalyst—his arrest—begins Joseph K.’s defiance of the
Law and the Courts, although his resistance ultimately proves to be
insubstantial and ineffective. His first reaction to the arresting warders
is disbelief, as he thinks that his co-workers are playing a game on
him, for it is his birthday. He then turns his indignation toward the
two clown-like thugs, insulting their lack of intelligence by assuming
his own intellectual superiority over them. But Joseph K. has only
now awakened to this strange world, and as such he fails to consider
his own ignorance of the Courts. His hubris compels him to believe
that he will quickly outsmart these policemen. But what K. believes
to be his intellectual mastery pales in the face of the straightforward
logic voiced by one of the crude warders named Fritz, who says to his
colleague: “See, Willem, he admits that he does not know the Law
and yet he claims he’s innocent” (6–7). Nina Pelikan Straus points out
in her article “Grand Theory on Trial: Kafka, Derrida and the Will
to Power” that language in The Trial “inflicts an emotional and intel-
lectual trauma upon Joseph K.—call it a nihilistic apprehension of the
world and the self—from which he does not recover” (380).
As Joseph K. begins to accept the gravity of his situation, he then
turns defiant toward the “wretched hirelings,” his arresters. He says,
“Plain stupidity is the only thing that can give them such assurance.
A few words with a man on my own level of intelligence would make
everything far clearer than hours of talk with these two” (7). But K.’s
defiance at this point only seems to make it more clear to him that he
has indeed become ensnared in the trap of the Courts. This he soon

The Trial 255
learns from the Inspector, an official over the two warders, who has set
up a makeshift interrogation office in one of lodging rooms next to K.’s
small sleeping room. K. denies to the Inspector that he has committed
any offense. He then seeks to take the offense in his predicament: “ . . .
the real question is, who accuses me? What authority. . . . Are you offi-
cers of the law? . . . I demand a clear answer to these questions, and I
feel sure that after an explanation we shall be able to part from each
other on the best of terms” (11). K.’s expectation is twofold: He wants
to confront the real authority lurking behind these front men, and he
naively thinks that mere human discourse between intelligent beings
will bring a mutually agreeable outcome to the situation.
Joseph K. has awakened to find not himself transformed, but
the reality around him totally redefined. Only the day before he had
remained comfortable in his existence, ignorant of the Court’s unseen
forces secretly marshalling against him. Now K. quickly learns that
everyone around him—his landlady, the bank manager, and even
strangers—are very familiar with his case. In K.’s world of the absurd,
traditional meanings no longer suffice to answer the new reality before
him, an enigmatic Court and Law that he must confront. K. possesses
an idea of the Law and justice and his idea—the abstract prin-
ciple—does not coincide with his new reality. The world that Joseph K.
believes exists in the novel’s opening pages is not the world he has actu-
ally awakened to find: “What authority could they represent? K. lived
in a country with a legal constitution, there was universal peace, all
the laws were in force; who dared seize him in his own dwelling?”(4).
Kafka’s words are shockingly prescient, as the indiscriminate arrests
and executions of untold numbers by Germany during World War II
would soon commence. Kafka did not live to see his sisters and others
once close to him put to death in concentration camps.
Once K. is defeated in his attempts to bring quick remedy to his
arrest through simple logical negotiations, his only recourse is defi-
ance against the Law, Courts, and the Court’s representatives. Kafka
presents K. as an individual who becomes more and more isolated
from society. Arnold Heidsieck writes, “When at first Joseph K.
discovers the court offices in the attic they appear as something in
limbo beyond the everyday world, something shadowy, homeless, not
really existing” (16).
K. is not alone as an accused by the Law and Courts, as Kafka
describes the the throng of defendants who inhabit the Courts. One

256 Franz Kafka
defendant that K. meets is an old man who has been coming to the
Court about his case for many years. K. asks the old man what he is
waiting for at the Court. The defendant offers no answer, as though
he does not know. Kafka suggests that the defendant has visited the
Courts for longer than he can recall. As John P. McGowan notes in
“The Trial: Terminable/Interminable,” “ . . . the individual is merely
one element in a network . . . Once pulled into this system, the indi-
vidual has no choice but to play his role, to act out the part assigned to
him, thus insuring the maintenance of the equilibrium in the whole”
(3). The futility of one’s action, and yet the futility of inaction, epito-
mizes the absurd condition for K.’s defiance against the Courts. K. is
cautioned time and again that he must attend to his case with all his
time and energies, warnings that K. refuses to follow. His intention is
not to become one of the many who have succumbed to a plaintive
and penitential existence.
Joseph K. finds himself alone, essentially trapped and lost, and
what aid and advice he receives is of questionable merit. For instance,
K. is befriended by the Manufacturer, a client at the bank where K.
works as the Chief Clerk. The money borrower shares his knowledge
about the Courts with K., warning him not to leave a stone unturned
in his defense. He also encourages K. to seek assistance from Titorelli,
a Court portrait painter.
K. finds the Court painter Titorelli in the artist’s poor lodgings.
The shabbily dressed Titorelli, living in a small room owned by the
Courts, has inherited his post as a painter of judges from his father,
an earlier Court painter. K. learns that the Courts rely only on tradi-
tion and memory, what was done before, in every manner, even to the
point of keeping no written records. The judges even demand that they
be painted like the judges of old, and thus no portrait looks like the
subject. Surprisingly, it is the artist rather than the lawyer Huld who
offers K. the most information about the Courts. Titorelli explains that
there are three possible outcomes to K.’s case. There are three forms of
acquittal possible, and that it is up to K. to choose his outcome: defi-
nite acquittal, ostensible acquittal, or indefinite postponement.
Titorelli explains that once a judge grants an acquittal for K. to
please Titorelli and the judge’s other friends, then K. will be a free
man. K., incredulous, says: “So then I am free.” Titorelli qualifies
this outcome, though, by explaining that K. will only be “ostensibly
free, or more exactly, provisionally free” (158). He goes on to explain

The Trial 257
that the low-level judges he knows lack the authority to grant a final
acquittal, and that power belongs only to the highest Court, which is
inaccessible. But then Titorelli clarifies even further that even once
an acquittal has been given, the defendant can expect that one day
in the future the courts will again take up his case for prosecution.
This continues ad infinitum, with no complete release or expulsion.
Titorelli’s explanations give K. a headache and dash his hopes.
K. is encouraged to seek an advocate for his defense, one who
knows the Courts well, and on the surface this seems a logical course
of action. His uncle, Albert K., who visits K. from his countryside
home, introduces K. to the elderly and bedridden Dr. Huld, a well-
respected lawyer and a friend of many powerful judges. His influ-
ence has him attached to the Court in the Palace of Justice. K. seems
only marginally interested Huld’s words, even ignoring his grave
warnings. K. then finds it surprising to see the Chief Clerk of the
Court in Huld’s bedchamber so late at night. As the men begin to
discuss K.’s case, K., rather than develop strength for his case with
the Chief Clerk, suddenly leaves the room and goes off to make
love to Leni, Huld’s young maid and nurse whom he has only met
minutes before.
To turn his case over to Huld, K. would be following the domi-
nant and prevalent attitude and recourse. But K. soon judges that
Huld, who feels that K. will benefit from long delays in his case, is
not an effective advocate. Huld tells K. very little about his case and
the progress being made. K. never learns of the actual charges against
him from Huld. This is certainly one of Kafka’s points of irony, in
that Huld is a powerful and influential advocate, but yet his abilities
are limited. K. later goes to see Huld in order to dismiss him as his
attorney, deciding instead to take the matters in his own hands in
order to push for a speedier resolution of his case.
Kafka’s Courts in The Trial are symbolic of the absurd concerning
guilt, justice, and punishment. Any specific crimes K. has committed
and charges against K. remain obscured. The reader also quickly real-
izes that it matters not whether a defendant is guilty or innocent, as
the Courts are said to be resistant to all forms of proof and innocence.
These are presented as ambiguous and menacing edifices to which
everyone is tied and subject. These offices of inquiry are housed in
the attics of most houses, in essence, blanketing the social body. These
spaces are dark, stuffy, and filled with foul air. They are packed with

258 Franz Kafka
defendants and those who work for the Courts. K. finds the Court to
be a labyrinthian network of corrupt, power-driven officials (45). This
is the social body, to which all fall subject, that K. intends to defy.
K.’s only encounter with the Courts is the Court of Inquiry, as he
never is able to confront the actual final Court of Judgment. These
Courts are never described and may or may not exist, and therefore any
possible final judgment by this entity remains problematic. Titorelli
the Painter, one familiar with the Courts, remarks to K. that he knows
of no one who has been given unconditional acquittal—absolution
and freedom by the Courts.
The Court of Inquiry finally summons Joseph K. to appear before
it on a Sunday morning. K., who is uncertain as to the time and loca-
tion of his case, becomes lost en route but eventually arrives in the
offices of the Court by accident. It may also be that all K.’s choices
and routes lead to the Court. This Court, like all Courts, is housed in
the attic space of an old, dilapidated, and crowded building. Subter-
ranean passageways lead from one Court to another. Kafka describes
it as looking like a large, dark, and stuffy political meeting hall with
one group seated on one side and another group on the other side.
K. is admonished by the Examining Magistrate for being more than
an hour late. To this K. retorts: “Whether I am late or not, I am here
now” (39). K. hears loud applause from one side of the room, and this
fills him with bravado. He now feels certain that he can win over the
crowd, just as he earlier believed that he could outwit the Investigator.
K. then attempts to seize control of the Court deliberations. He chal-
lenges the Court’s authority by asserting that the proceedings can only
be termed a “trial” if he, K., so asserts and allows it to be.
Then K. attempts a more demonstrative rebuke of the Examining
Magistrate of the Court when the judge identifies K. as a house
painter. K. recoils at this reference, asserting and clarifying at the same
time that he is the chief clerk in a large bank. He snatches an old book
or ledger from the hands of the official, bellowing: “Herr Examining
Magistrate, I really don’t fear this ledger of yours though it is a closed
book to me . . .” (41). K.’s defiance takes on not a private but public
defiance: “ . . . what has happened to me . . . is representative of a
misguided policy which is being directed against many other people
as well. It is for these that I take up my stand here, not for myself ”
(41). But questions remain regarding K.’s outburst. Is he sincere in
his declaration to fight for humanity, or is K. merely grandstanding,

The Trial 259
seizing the moment to embarrass the Examining Magistrate and

thereby gain himself popularity in the Court?
As K. soon learns, he has not taken the proceedings seriously
enough. Even his hope of release from the Court due to his mistaken
identity fails. Kafka’s portrayal of the Court’s confusion concerning
K.’s identity further underlines the corruptness of the proceedings.
Actual identity matters little. Of course, the confusion over K.’s
identity suggests to the reader the possibility that K. is innocent, at
least in this particular instance. The momentum rushes to K.’s side
and then we recognize that, despite his courage or bravado, he will no
doubt fall to the machinations of the Court. Ultimately, K. discovers
that the vast majority of the old men in the Court are Court offi-
cials, not onlookers or other defendants. Only one group is made
up of defendants. Although his bravado is dimmed, his courage or
resilience seems undiminished: “You scoundrels, I’ll spare you future
interrogations” (48).
Who is Joseph K.? His identity seems intentionally left obscure by
Kafka. The author does not complete K.’s surname, only calling him
K., and this, of course, begs the question as to K.’s full signification.
We can only speculate that the K is intended for the author’s own
surname. The letter K also gives the protagonist an everyman identity.
The reader is offered only a modicum of background information
concerning K. He is a thirty-year-old man and works as a chief clerk
at a large banking institution. He takes his work seriously. He rooms
in a boarding house owned by Frau Grubach. He has an uncle named
Albert K. He enjoys the presence of women. At one point the Chief
Magistrate identifies K. as a house painter. In a discourse based on
logic, this signification would indicate that the court has the wrong
defendant in front of it. In Kafka’s world of the absurd, the correct or
incorrect identity of the accused makes no difference. This point rein-
forces the everyman motif. K. is also seen during the first half of the
novel as self-absorbed. He prides himself on his superior intellect and
looks down on the Court workers and officials. His attitude changes
later in the novel when K. attempts to help the two warders (the same
two who had earlier arrived to arrest him) keep from being whipped.
This is one of the rare occasions when K. is not solipsistic.
But is K. guilty and, if so, of what? Throughout the novel K. denies
any guilt to criminal action. And this is why he remains puzzled by
the Court’s determination to snare him. K.’s puzzlement as to his guilt

260 Franz Kafka
propels his defiance of the Courts. The protagonist’s rebellion remains

directed and intent until later in the novel. K. is defeated. Perhaps he
succumbs, refuses to fight on. Kafka is not clear on this point. Perhaps
Kafka is suggesting some metaphysical guilt, a Christian guilt that
surrounds humankind’s Fall in the Garden of Eden. Kafka offers only
fragmented, often disjointed, descriptions and images, mere sugges-
tions, in The Trial. As a modernist work the form of the absurd, The
Trial does not perform the traditional duty of explaining motives and
actions or showing causal relations between events. Joseph K. never
becomes acutely reflective about his life. He asserts his innocence, but
makes no attempt to explore his past for the reader. Only toward the
end of the novel, after K. is to be led off to his death, does he unchar-
acteristically contemplate his life:
I always wanted to snatch at the world with twenty hands, and

not for a very laudable motive, either. That was wrong, and am I
to show now that not even a year’s trial has taught me anything?
. . . Are people to say of me after I am gone that at the beginning
of my case I wanted to finish it, and at the end of it I wanted to
begin it again? I don’t want that to be said. (225–26)
In the end, K.’s defiance gains him a certain dignity, apart from the
barbaric forces set against him.
The final scene in the novel reveals that K. chooses to end his life
with individual dignity. On K.’s thirty-first birthday, one year from the
start of the novel, two men dressed in black suits and hats escort K.
from his lodgings. He goes with them willingly. At this point he seems
to have accepted his fate or sentence. His earlier struggles have ended.
Kafka writes, “ . . . the important thing was that he suddenly realized
the futility of resistance. There would be nothing heroic in it were he
to resist . . .” (225). In the face of overwhelming odds, he struggles to
understand that “the only thing for me to go on doing is to keep my
intelligence calm and analytical to the end” (225). He proceeds with
his two executioners across dark, empty streets. At times K., rather
than being led by the two men, leads them. At one moment, the three
are confronted by a policeman, but K. leads his group away safely. Then
K. takes up running, again leading the other two, until they come to
a desolate stone quarry, a site emblematic of religious sacrifice. There
K. is murdered “like a dog.” Straus adds that “Joseph K.’s arrest and

The Trial 261
death served as a warning against the arbitrariness of certain dicta as

practiced by imperial regimes, such as the Hapsburg and the Nazi . . .
readers might discover that empires need no nation states to exert
their traumatic powers and can be built in universities” (383).
To further understand the unique dilemma Joseph K. faces in his
resistance to the social body, other literary antecedents may prove
helpful. Reaching back first to Sophocles’ tragedy Antigone, the young
heroine Antigone is seen facing her own challenge in her defiance of
the overreaching power of the State. Antigone’s world and her reasons
for her decision to defy King Creon are based on reason and logical
considerations that connect her moral act with what she sees as divine
purpose. She acts against the king because she recognizes that the law
of the gods must take precedence over the law of man. More than two
millennia later, the American Romantic writer Henry David Thoreau
defied the government’s position on slavery and war by not paying
his poll taxes, and he was briefly jailed. As in Antigone’s situation,
Thoreau faced a definitive and exact foe: a government whose acts
are unacceptable to the conscious-thinking individual. Both Anti-
gone and Thoreau encountered a world in which reality’s landscape
can be surveyed in cause-and-effect terms and meaning. Antigone
knows that her defiance of the State will result in her death, and
she freely chooses this death. Joseph K., on the other hand, finds no
“other” world apart from the individual self that can be understood or
confronted directly. He cannot learn of the charges against him, how
the Court functions, how and in what way he must answer the Court.
The charges against Antigone are clearly stated. This “other” hidden
world or set of laws remains inaccessible and threatening to Joseph K.
He faces the world of the absurd, unlike Antigone and Thoreau, who
react to a comprehensible, albeit detrimental, reality.
In the mid-twentieth century, the French writer and philosopher
Albert Camus wrote what has become the defining statement of
human life characterized as the absurd and existential—“The Myth
of Sisyphus.” In this essay, Camus recreates in modern language the
tragic story of Sisyphus from Greek mythology. Sisyphus is punished
by the gods for his defiance, and must push a huge boulder up the
long slope of a mountain. Once he nears the summit, the boulder
tumbles back down to the foot of the mountain where Sisyphus must
again take up his eternal work, his punishment. Sisyphus’s existence
can be seen as absurd: Clearly he is the hamster turning his wheel,

262 Franz Kafka
all the time hoping he can escape his cage. Sisyphus’s punishment
is capricious, his meaningless toil has no end, and there exists no
reason or balance between human acts, applied justice, and resulting
punishment.
It is in Camus’ world of Sisyphus that Joseph K. certainly finds
himself trapped. The unsuspecting young man is plunged into the
machinations of the Law, which for Sisyphus is the capricious Greek
gods. For K. the motives, decisions, and actions of the Law are never
declared directly or revealed by revelation. Joseph K. can only conjec-
ture why he has been caught up in the Law’s labyrinth. Straus summa-
rizes this dilemma in “Grand Theory on Trial: Kafka, Derrida and the
Will to Power,” explaining that: “The Trial is not about the impos-
sibility of justice, but about what it is like for humans when justice
morphs into an endless series of interpretations of the law controlled
by a powerful but inaccessible interpreter” (382).
WORKS CITED
Carter, Steven. “Kafka’s The Trial.” Explicator 61.1 (Fall 2002).
Heidsieck, Arnold. “Logic and Ontology in Kafka’s Fiction.” The German
Review 61.1 (Winter 1986): 11–17.
Kafka, Franz. The Trial. New York: Knopf, 1964.
Kittler, Wolf. “Burian Without Resurrection on Kafka’s Legend ‘Before the
Law.’” MLN 121.3 (2006): 647–647.
McGowan, John P. “The Trial: Terminable/Interminable.” Twentieth Century
Literature. 26.1 (Spring 1980): 14.
Straus, Nina Pelikan. “Grand Theory on Trial: Kafka, Derrida and the Will to
Power.” Philosophy and Literature. 31.2 (2007): 378–393.
Yalom, Marilyn K. “Albert Camus and the Myth of The Trial.” Modern
Language Quarterly. 25.4 (Dec. 1964): 434.

, Acknowledgments .
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263

264 Acknowledgments
Stern, Milton R. “Billy Budd.” The Fine Hammered Steel of Herman Melville.
Urbana, IL: U of Illinois P, 1957. 206–39. Copyright by The Board of
Trustees of the University of Illinois. Reprinted by permission.

le.
of
, Index .
A Hegel’s interpretation of, 36,

ACLU (American Civil Liberties 46n15
Union), 137 interpretation of difficult, 35
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn law as of divine origin, 37–38,
(Twain), 21–29 47n21
characters and civil disobedience, literary antecedent of Kafka’s
21–22 Trial, 261
controversy on final chapters, 22, Odysseus and, 33
23–24, 27, 28 Oedipus Tyrannus and, 36–37,
Huck’ and civil disobedience, 46n18
21–22, 23–24, 29 sacred rites of dead and, 32
ironies in, 26–27, 29 similarity to other works by
Jim and civil disobedience, 23–24 Sophocles, 35–36
Jim as only person of conscience, Sophoclean rulers, 39–45
29 struggle between Antigone and
moral dilemmas posed by, 22, 29 Creon in, 32, 35, 39, 40, 48n26
Pap Finn and Huck, 23, 29 Teirsias’ intervention after
racial prejudice in, 23, 28 Antigone’s death, 44–45
Tom’s selfish scheme and, 25–26 totalitarianism of Creon, 43–44
Antigone (Sophocles), 31–48 unwritten laws, 34, 36–38, 45n6
introduction, 31–32 unwritten laws sacred to
Athenian law on burial traitor, 32 Sophocles, 38
burial of body religious duty, Zeus and, 36
32–33 Aristophanes, 49–58][
Creon’s decree and, 39, 42–43 Acharnians (play), 50
Creon’s decree not written law, 37 Amphiaraus (lost play), 52
divine order prevails in, 36 assessment of, 55–57
as an early text on civil Babylonians (play), 51
disobedience, 31–32 Banqueters of Heracles (lost play),
examples of “truth” of, 41–42 50
final words of play, 40–41 Birds (play), 52–53
265

266 Index
birth of, 50 Melville’s end of “individualism,” Bern

Callistratus and, 50 70–71 91
civil disobedience and, 49 Melville’s failure to mention cens
Clouds (play), 51–52 Thoreau, 61–62 deat
Cocalus (lost play), 54 Mumford on, 60–61 deb
contemporaries maligned by, 56–57 as revelation of Melville’s mind, 72 an
as critic of Euripides, 56–57 as story of withdrawal, 61 exile
death of, 54–55 Thoreau and: jail, 70 95
doctrine of unclear, 55–56 Thoreau and: loner, 66–68 Ford
Ecclesiazusae (play), 54 Thoreau and: scrivener, 64–66 94
education of, 56 Thoreau and: self-imprisonment, hap
Eolosicon (lost play), 54 66–69 Hel
Frogs (play), 53–54 Thoreau as model for, 59, 61 hum
Knights (play), 51 Thoreau’s influence on Gandhi, Hux
Laborers (lost play), 52 62–63, 111 indu
Lysistrata (play), 53 Beauchamp, Gorman, 1–20 Hu
Merchant Vessels (lost play), 52 Becker, John, 213–223 John
number of plays by, 55 Bellotti, Raymond Angelo, 233–242 Lem
Peace (play), 52 Billy Budd (Melville), 73–87 Mu
Peloponnesian War and, 54 introduction, 73–74 Sava
Philonides and, 50 Claggart in, 78–79 sui
Plutus (play), 54 “Conflict of Convictions” (poem), Sha
Thesmophoriazusae (play), 53 86 Tho
Wasps (play), 52 digressions in, 84–85, 87n uniq
Art of Richard Wright, The lessons lost in, 83–84 Brooke
(Margolies), 226 Machiavellian prudence and, 76 Brown
Ashcroft, John, 138 Melville’s intent in, 86–87 Brown
Autobiography of Malcolm X (Halley), Nelson’s Victory and, 75–76 Bush, G
213 Nelson-Vere-captain and Ahab- Butler,
captain, 77–78
plot of, 73–74
B self-sacrifice and, 74–75, 78 C
Bakhtin, Mikhail, 121 Vere’s death, 82–83, 86–87 Camus
“Bartleby, the Scrivener” (Melville), Vere’s sacrifice and, 76–82 under
59–72 Black Nationalist movement, 213 Castle,
Bartleby ceases to eat and dies, 70 Bloom, Harold, xv civil di
“On Civil Disobedience” summary, Bonhoffer, Dietrich, 115 “Civil
62–63 Bradbury, Ray, 141–149 101–11
little critical attention to, 59–60 Brave New World (Huxley), 89–99. Scriv
Melville’s Concord poet friends, See also Huxley, Aldous Henr
62 art in World State, 93 intr

Index 267
ism,” Bernard’s individuality and, 89, conception of by Thoreau, 109–

91, 92 110, 143–144
censors of, 94, 98 Gandhi and, 62–63, 111
death of Linda and, 95–96 irony of modern state, 115
debate between Savage and Mond John Brown and, 112–115
ind, 72 and, 96 Kafka’s Trial and, 261
exile of Bernard and Helmholtz, Mexican War and, 110
95–96 moral heroes of “today,” 114–115
Fordism replacement for religion, personal morality of, 110–111
66 94–95 political passages of, 111–112
ment, happiness and, 96 urgency of, 110
Helmholtz in, 89, 92, 93 Civil Rights act of 1964, 220
human engineering and, 90–91 Civilization and Its Discontents
dhi, Huxley’s “third alternative” and, 97 (Freud), 1, 2
industrial capitalism feared by Colaiaco, James A., 197–212
Huxley, 89 “Conflict of Convictions” (poem)
John the Savage in, 89, 93–96 (Melville), 86
–242 Lemina in, 91 Conner, Eugene “Bull,” 198, 201
Mustapha Mond and, 90 CORE (Congress of Racial
Savage’s self-flagellation and Equality), 200
suicide, 98 Crime and Punishment (Dostoevsky),
oem), Shakespeare as influence, 94, 97 117–127
Thoreau and, 96 compositional history of, 124
uniqueness essential to life, 98 counterpoint to nihilism of sixties,
Brooke, Stopford A., 175–195 126
, 76 Brown, John, 112–115 culture of 1866 parodied in, 119
Brown v. Board of Education, 200 Dostoevsky’s change in Siberia, 118
Bush, George W., 138 historical context of, 117
hab- Butler, Brian, 163–173 Lebezianikov and, 121–122
motive transformed in, 125
Napoleonic Idea and, 124–126
C plot of, 117
Camus, Albert, 261–262. See also politics below surface in, 118
under Native Son punishment and redemption crux
13 Castle, The (Kafka), 253–254 of, 120–121
civil disobedience, defined, 233–234 Raskolnikov as modern rebel, 120,
“Civil Disobedience” (Thoreau), 122–123, 126–127
101–115. See also “Bartleby, the Razumikhin and, 122
–99. Scrivener” (Melville); Thoreau, reprehensibility of characters in,
Henry David 123–124
introduction, 101 utilitarianism put down in, 121

268 Index
Croiset, Alfred and Maurice, 49–58 E “Grand

Crucible, The (Miller), 129–140 Egghead, The (M. Kazan), 134 Derri
civil liberties vs national security, Ehrenberg, Victor, 31–48 (Strau
129–130 Ellison, Ralph Waldo, 163–173
Cold War and, 129 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 104, 105
Communist blacklists and, 129– Evans, Robert C., 21–29, 243–252 H
130, 135 Eyre, Richard, 137–138 Haley,
Egghead and, 134 Hate Th
HUAC and, 129, 130–131, 135, 214
137–138 F Hawth
ideology as means to power and, 133 Fahrenheit 451 (Bradbury), 141–149 Heaven
Miller and Kazans, 130–132, Beatty and, 146–147 Hobby
134–135, 139 book about books, 149 HUAC
Patriot Act and, 129, 136–137 Clarisse and, 145 Activ
plot of, 132–133 Dreamthorp and, 142, 145 131, 1
political climate of mid-twentieth dystopic novel, 141, 148 Hughe
century and, 130 Granger and, 147–148 Lang
return of in 2001, 137–138 Guy Montag as protagonist, 141– Huxley
Reverend Hale and, 133–134 142, 144, 146, 149 World
September 11 attacks and, 136 humanity questioned by, 145 Dev
theme of according to Miller, 136 Mildred and, 146 Hea
On the Waterfront and, 135 opening epigraph of, 141 indu
plot of, 141–143 89
section 1 of, 144–145 Islan
D section 2 of, 145–147 “Ou
Darkness at Noon (Koestler), 4 section 3 of, 147–148 92
Devils of Loudun (Huxley), 95 Thoreau and, 143–144, 148, 149 “Per
Disobedience and Democracy (Zinn), Ford, Henry, 90 M
219 Frank, Anne, 115 “Ple
Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 117–127 Freeman, John, 60 “Sci
artist superseded ideologist, 121 Freud, Sigmund, 1, 2, 4–6, 16n2,
Crime and Punishment written in 2 18n12
years, 117 Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, 243–244 I
exile in Siberia, 118 Invisib
religious conversion experienced, app
118 G 17
techniques used to parody culture, Gandhi, Mohandas (Mahatma) blac
119 acts of civil disobedience by, 234 17
Dreamthorp (Smith), 142, 145 Malcolm X and, 204–205, 219– bum
Dyson, Michael Eric, 214 220, 221 civil
dystopian novel, defined, 1, 4, 15, 16, Thoreau’s influence on, 62–63, 111 exi
18n12 Gerall, Alina, 141–149 civil

Index 269
“Grand Theory on Trial: Kafka, Clifton’s funeral and, 166–167, 168

Derrida, and the Will to Power” eviction speech in Ch. 13, 164–
(Straus), 254 166
3 face-to-face appeal to democratic
05 values in, 172
252 H full agreement as disobedient act,
Haley, Alex, 213 164
Hate That Hate Produced (TV special), lack of civil disobedience in, 163
214 little appeal to law in, ’170
Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 243–252 refusal of acknowledgment, ’170
1–149 Heaven and Hell (Huxley), 95 sacrifice of minorities and, ’170–
Hobby, Blake, 141–149 171
HUAC (House Un-American Island (Huxley), 97
Activities Committee), 129, 130–
131, 135, 137
Hughes, Langston. See Poetry of J
Langston Hughes, The Jägerstätter, Franz, 115
, 141– Huxley, Aldous. See also Brave New Julius Caesar (Shakespeare), 175–195
World introduction, 175
5 Devils of Loudun, 95 Antony’s speech, 194–195
Heaven and Hell, 98 Brutus as unfit to govern, 179
industrial capitalism feared by, Brutus’ folly as politician, 190–191
89 Brutus’ Republicanism favored in,
Island, 97 179
“Outlook for American Culture,” Brutus’ stoicism and nobility in,
92 183
149 “Personality and Discontinuity of Caesar as hero of, 181
Mind,” 94 Caesar as weak in, 179
“Pleasures,” 92–93 Caesar’s insolence and, 192
“Science and Civilization,” 97 conspirators arrive as storm dies,
2, 190
Coriolanus compared to, 180
3–244 I death scene of, 192–193
Invisible Man (Ellison), 163–173 deviations from history in, 176–
appeal to latent chivalry in society, 177
172 fall of Brutus and conspirators in
) blacks as involuntary scapegoats, acts 4 and 5, 195
234 171 forum speeches in act 3, 194
19– bump incident and, 167–168, 169 human relations lack passion in,
civil rights marches not yet 182
63, 111 existing, 171 Plutarch’s Lives as source of,
civil space not allowed for, 169 175–177

270 Index
political climate of Shakespeare’s four steps to nonviolent campaign, My Lif

era, 180 203–204 “Myth
publication of, 177 influence of, 198–199 261
scene 1 of, 183–184 King’s activism, 200
scene 2 of, 184–186 King’s arrest, 201
scene 3 and reactions to storm, King’s assassination, 210 N
187–188 King’s “mountain-top” speech, Nation
scene 4 with Brutus, 189–190 210–211 Native
storm as symbol of events, 187 King’s violation of court order, 201 intr
why revolutions fail illustrated in, love of church professed in, Bigg
175, 177–179 206–207 22
“Junior Addict” (Hughes), 159–160 manifesto of civil rights Bigg
movement, 208–209 sen
optimism of, 207 Bigg
K paradox of nonviolence, 205–206 Be
Kafka, Franz, 253–262 questions addressed in, 201 Bigg
Kazan, Elia, 129, 130–132, 135, 139 refuting of charge he is intruder, Cam
Kazan, Molly, 129, 133–134, 139 201–202 Bi
Kazin, Alfred, 101–115 response to white clergymen’s them
King, Martin Luther, Jr., 214–215, criticisms of protests, 199 Wri
221. See also “Letter from Ten Commandments of 22
Birmingham Jail” nonviolence, 204 Wri
Koestler, Arthur, 5, 18n13 victory after struggle, 209 exp
Kolbe, Maximilian, 115 1984 (
Korobkin, Laura Hanft, 243–245 Sigm
M intr
Machiavelli, Niccoló, 233–242 Ada
L Malcolm X. See Speeches of Malcolm Big
“Letter from Birmingham Jail” X, The brai
(King), 197–212 Mandela, Nelson, 234 12
introduction, 197 Margolies, Edward, 226 cont
American dream as theme of, 208 Melville, Herman, 59–72, 73–87 as d
“Birmingham Manifesto” as Meredith, James, 200 Julia
forerunner of, 200 “Message to the Grass Roots” O’B
bombing of King’s headquarters, (Malcolm X), 215 Oce
210 Metamorphosis, The (Kafka), 253–254 Roo
Christianity’s influence, 204–205 Miller, Arthur, 129–140 sexu
crisis leading up to, 198 Morreall, John, on coercion in civil tota
distribution of, 199 disobedience, 218–219 utop
eloquence of, 198 Muhammad, Elijah, 213, 221 Win
explanation of mass civil “Mulatto” (Hughes), 157–159 an
disobedience, 202–203 Mumford, Lewis, 60 Zam

Index 271
mpaign, My Life and Work (Ford), 90 O

“Myth of Sisyphus, The” (Camus), Oliver, Egbert S., 59–72
261 “On Civil Disobedience,” 59. See
also “Civil Disobedience”; Thoreau,
Henry David
N On the Waterfront (film), 135
h, Nation of Islam, 221 “Outlook for American Culture”
Native Son (Wright), 225–231 (Huxley), 92
er, 201 introduction, 225–226 Outsider, The (Wright), 230
Bigger Thomas’s alienation and,
226, 227–228, 230
Bigger’s capture and death P
sentence, 229–230 Parks, Rosa, 234
Bigger’s killing of Mary and “Personality and Discontinuity of
–206 Bessie, 228–229 Mind” (Huxley), 94
Bigger’s lack of remorse in, 230 Piazza Tales (Melville), 60
uder, Camus’s Meursault compared to Pierre (Melville), 59
Bigger, 225–226, 227, 229–230 Plato, 2
n’s themes of, 226–227, 231 Plays of Aristophanes, The. See
Wright and American Naturalists, Aristophanes
226, 231n1 Plea for Captain John Brown
Wright influenced by own (Thoreau), 112–114
experience, 230–231 “Pleasures” (Huxley), 92–93
1984 (Orwell), 1–20. See also Freud, Poetry of Langston Hughes, The,
Sigmund; utopia; We (Zamiatin) 101, 151–162
introduction, 1 introduction, 151
Adam’s Fall and, 1, 4, 14–15 analysis of “Junior Addict,”
alcolm Big Brother (1984), 10–12 159–160
brainwashing of Winston and, analysis of “Mulatto,” 157–159
12–13 analysis of “Silhouette,” 155–157
control techniques and, 15, 19n24 analysis of “Sunrise,” 160–161
87 as dystopian novel, 1, 3–4 analysis of “The South,” 153–155
Julia and, 11–12, 13 despair as theme, 153
O’Brien and, 11, 12 Harlem as synecdoche for
Oceana and, 10, 19n21 America, 151, 153
3–254 Room 101 and betrayal of Julia, 13 Negro folk idiom used in, 152–
sexual puritanism and, 11 153
civil totalitarianism threat and, 15–16 protest as dominant theme of,
utopia and, 2 161–162
Winston’s hatred of Big Brother protest of black poets, 152
and, 12 Whites impressed with, 152–153
Zamiatin’s influence on, 10, 19n20 Pollerd, Jake, 89–99

272 Index
Polster, Joshua, 129–140 “Resistance to Civil Government” Sopho

Prince, The (Machiavelli), 233–242 (Thoreau). See “Civil Disobedience” “South
advice of, 237–238 Rubin, Steven J., 225–231 Speech
being feared better than being 223
loved or hated, 240 “At
civil disobedience defined, 233– S back
234 “Scarlet Letter of the Law: 21
civil disobedience unlikely under, Hawthorne and Criminal Justice “ “Ba
242 (Korobkin), 243–244 “Bla
concealment of real holdings and, Scarlet Letter, The (Hawthorne), civil
239 243–252 21
conventional morality often Arthur Dimmesdale and, 245 coer
violated, 238 Chillilngworth s Satanic figure, Gan
decisiveness and, 241 251–252 22
evil natural tendency of people, Dimmesdale speaks up for Hester, infla
238–239 249–250 Mal
fear not enough to hold subjects, Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 and, 22
238 243–244 Mal
Fortuna and, 237 Hester defies efforts to take Pearl M
justifications for civil disobedience, from her, 248–249 Mal
234–236 Hester urges Dimmesdale to speak 22
lion and fox as role models, for her, 249–250 “Me
240–241 Hester’s “blackmail” produces “No
practice of civil disobedience victory, 251–252 Bu
postdates, 241 Hester’s confrontational behavior, 22
results key to judgment of, 238 247–248 self-
revolution likely result of Hester’s defiance on scaffold and, Stern,
ineptitude of, 241–242 245–246 Strange
seizure of property and, 240 Hester’s silence as passive Straus,
self-interest of prince but not resistance in, 245 “Sunri
selfishness, 240 Pearl examined for religious
state and citizens come first, 239 training, 246–247
strength of military essential to, “Science and Civilization” (Huxley), T
239 97 Taylor,
territorial expansion essential, SCLC (Southern Christian Theory
239–240 Leadership Conference), 200 Thorea
Shorter Novels of Herman Melville also “B
(Weaver, ed), 60 Disob
R “Silhouette” (Hughes), 155–157 arre
Rawls, John, 163–164, 169, 217–218 Skinner, B. F., 2, 17n4 biog
Reid, Margaret A., 151–162 Smith, Alexander, 142 Civ
Republic (Plato), 2 Sollars, Michael D., 253–262 cont

Index 273
nt” Sophocles, 31–48 “faults of style” and, 106

ience” “South, The” (Hughes), 153–154 God and, 104–105
Speeches of Malcolm X, The, 213– journals of, 102, 104
223 Nature and, 103, 105
“At the Audubon,” 216–217 opposition to slavery of, 110, 112
background of Malcolm X, Plea for Captain John Brown,
213–214 112–114
tice “ “Ballot or the Bullet,” 217–218 Walden and, 107–109
“Black Revolution,” 216 writing his life, 101, 102, 106–107,
, civil disobedience advocated in, 114, 115
214–215 youthfulness of, 106, 108
5 coercion advocated in, 218–219 totalitarianism, threat of, 15–16
ure, Gandhi and, 204–205, 219–220, Trial, The (Kafka), 253–262
221 Antigone and, 261
Hester, inflammatory statements in, 215 Camus’ Sisyphus and, 261–262
Malcolm on Mecca pilgrimage, Castle plot, 253–254
and, 220 Courts and throng of defendants,
Malcolm’s break with 255–256
Pearl Muhammad, 221 Courts symbolize absurd charges,
Malcolm’s political spheres, 257–258
o speak 221–222 Huld and Chief Clerk meet with
“Message to the Grass Roots,” 215 K, 257
es “Not Just an American Problem, Huld dismissed by K., 257
But a World Problem,” 220–221, Joseph K.’s unexplained arrest,
havior, 222 254, 262
self-defense advocated, 222 K. appears late to Court, 258
d and, Stern, Milton R., 73–87 K. turns defiant, 254–255
Stranger, The (Camus), 225–226 Kafkaesque defined, 253
Straus, Nina Pelikan, 254 K.’s defiance in Court, 258–259
“Sunrise” (Hughes), 160–161 K.’s denial of guilt throughout,
259–260
K.’s first reaction to arrest, 254
xley), T K.’s mistaken identity and, 259
Taylor, Frederick Winslow, 90 K.’s murder in final scene, 260–
Theory of Justice, A (Rawls), 163–164 261
Thoreau, Henry David, 101–115. See K.’s reality redefined, 255
lle also “Bartleby, the Scrivener”; “Civil as modernist work of absurd, 260
Disobedience”; Fahrenheit 451 Thoreau and, 261
7 arrest and jailing of, 109, 234 Titorelli explains three outcomes
biography of, 102–103 for K., 256–257, 258
Civil War and, 115 Tutu, Archbishop Desmond, 234
contempt for state by, 104 Twain, Mark, 21–29

274 Index
U man’s last disobedience and, 10, 13

Uncle Tom’s Children (Wright), 227 MEPHI and, 9
USA Patriot Act, 129, 136–137 Orwell’s debt to, 1, 10, 19n20
utopia, 2–3, 9–10, 15, 16n1, 17n7 plot of, 6–7
sex and, 7
utopia and, 9–10
V Well-Doer and, 1, 7
Verhoeven, Claudia, 117–127 Weary Blues, The (Hughes), 153
Weaver, Raymond, 60
Week on the Concord and Merrimack
W Rivers (Thoreau), 62
Walden (Thoreau), 107–109 Winston Smith (1984), Winston as
Walden Two (Skinner), 2 last Adam, 10
Wallace, George, 200 Wright, Richard, 225–231
We (Zamiatin). See also 1984
(Orwell)
D-503’s fall and, 7–10 Z
as dystopian novel, 1, 4, 13–14 Zamiatin, Eugene, 4
I-330 and, 7–8 Zinn, Howard, 219

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Bloom's Literary Themes

BLT Civil Disobedience-dummy.ind1 1 11/4/09 12:52:24 PM

BLT Civil Disobedience final pasiii iii 10/19/2009 1:14:37 PM

Edited and with an introduction by

BLT Civil Disobedience final pasv v 10/19/2009 1:14:37 PM

Bloom’s Literary Criticism

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Text design by Kerry Casey

This book is printed on acid-free paper.

Series Introduction by Harold Bloom:

Volume Introduction by Harold Bloom xv

1984 (George Orwell) 1

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Mark Twain) 21

The Plays of Aristophanes 49

“Bartleby, the Scrivener” (Herman Melville) 59

BLT Civil Disobedience final pasvii vii 10/19/2009 1:14:38 PM

Billy Budd (Herman Melville) 73

Brave New World (Aldous Huxley) 89

“Civil Disobedience” (Henry David Thoreau) 101

Crime and Punishment (Fyodor Dostoevsky) 117

The Crucible (Arthur Miller) 129

Fahrenheit 451 (Ray Bradbury) 141

The Poetry of Langston Hughes 151

Invisible Man (Ralph Ellison) 163

Julius Caesar (William Shakespeare) 175

BLT Civil Disobedience final pasviii viii 10/19/2009 1:14:38 PM

“Letter from a Birmingham Jail” (Martin Luther King, Jr.) 197

The Speeches of Malcolm X 213

Native Son (Richard Wright) 225

The Prince (Niccolò Machiavelli) 233

The Scarlet Letter (Nathaniel Hawthorne) 243

The Trial (Franz Kafka) 253

BLT Civil Disobedience final pasix ix 10/19/2009 1:14:38 PM

1. Topos and Trope

BLT Civil Disobedience final pasxi xi 10/19/2009 1:14:38 PM

another. But the themes of great literature, though immensely

2. Contest as Both Theme and Trope

BLT Civil Disobedience final pasxii xii 10/19/2009 1:14:38 PM

BLT Civil Disobedience final pasxiii xiii 10/19/2009 1:14:39 PM

As a term, “civil disobedience” for most of us evokes the activists

BLT Civil Disobedience-dummy.ind15 15 11/4/09 12:52:24 PM

Beauchamp, Gorman. “Of Man’s Last Disobedience: Zamiatin’s We and Orwell’s

BLT Civil Disobedience-dummy.ind1 1 11/4/09 12:52:24 PM

Utopia can be deﬁned as civilization-only-more-so: that is, as a system-

BLT Civil Disobedience final pas2 2 10/19/2009 1:14:39 PM

Isolation, stratiﬁcation, ﬁxation, regimentation, standardization,

Such a realization underlies the emergence of a distinctly twentieth-

BLT Civil Disobedience final pas3 3 10/19/2009 1:14:40 PM

In two dystopian novels in particular—Eugene Zamiatin’s We

BLT Civil Disobedience final pas4 4 10/19/2009 1:14:40 PM

liberty against the will of the group.”12 His “urge to freedom” is

Sexual impulsions are unfavorable to the formation of groups. . . .

BLT Civil Disobedience final pas5 5 10/19/2009 1:14:40 PM

“the dreadful father,” a secularized god demanding total allegiance

That legend referred to us of today, did it not? Yes. Only think

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The god who oversees this paradise regained is the Well-Doer, a

Naturally, having conquered hunger . . . , the United State

On these occasions, one “received a certiﬁcate permitting the use of

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