Under the Lions Paw by Hamlin Garland - Literature review Example

In an engaging and thrilling manner, Garland tells the story of ordinary people, captured in the midst of an exploitative economic system. “Under the Lion’s Paw” is a story about the social and economic inequalities prevalent in the 1880s and 1890s, and the pursuit of happiness and freedom, embodied in the American dream. “Under the Lion’s Paw” is a work, which belongs to realism in American literature, because of its naturalistic depiction of people and landscapes.

With almost cinematographic precision the opening paragraph takes the reader in the reality of the farmer’s everyday life: IT was the last of autumn and the first day of winter coming together. All-day long the ploughmen on their prairie farms had moved to and fro in their wide level fields through the falling snow, which melted as it fell, wetting them to the skin all day, notwithstanding the frequent squalls of snow, the dripping, desolate clouds, and the muck of the furrows, black and tenacious as tar (Garland 1).

What captures the attention is the literary uniqueness of the characters. Although they are created in order to convey the author’s ideas about the organization of society, the characters in “Under the Lion’s Paw” also possess captivating dimensionality, which is revealed through their actions, feelings and struggles: The little woman's eyes filled with tears which fell down upon the sleeping baby in her arms. The world was not so desolate and cold and hopeless, after all (Garland 3).

Garland also conveys broader notions of the organization of society and the distribution of resources through his characters. He expresses his moral views of good and evil. The social contract between these characters is what constitutes Garland’s universe and the human values on which it is based. One of the leading characters in the story is Timothy Haskins. He is the embodiment of the average, hard-working man, who is ready to sacrifice everything in the name of his ideal, which is his family.

Haskins is Garland’s vision of the hard-working, honest man, who has internalized the constraints of the system, which in most of the cases works against him:Many a night he worked till his anxious wife came out at ten o'clock to call him into rest and lunch […] No slave in the Roman galleys could have toiled so frightfully and lived, for this man thought himself a free man, and that he was working for his wife and babes (Garland 10).Timothy Haskins represents the individual aspect of a social struggle, against land speculation and unfair taxation in the 1880s and 1890s.

In this sense, the story sends the author’s message for social reform as the only road to democratization. The antidote of this vision of social and economic equality is Jim Butler. He is the collective image of those, who have gained economic supremacy through illegal means, and greed has transformed their capacity to create into the capacity to dominate. It is difficult to say whether Butler is morally corrupt or just taking advantage of the system. Jim Butler was one of those men called in the West "land poor” […]But a change came over him at the end of the second year when he sold a lot of land for four times what he paid for it.

From that time forward he believed in land speculation as to the surest way of getting rich (Garland 5).