Integration of the Individual in the Community and Home in Hawthornes Roger Malvins Burial - Literature review Example

Integration of the Individual in the Community and Home in Hawthorne's Roger Malvin's Burial and Anderson's Mother. An consciously or unconsciously reflects the milieu that shaped him. It is possible to delve deep into an author's work and construct the unique way his works show interaction of the institutions of family and community in the lives of his characters. The range of character's relations to his community and family are many. There are characters that are smoothly integrated with their community that they sail through the business of life effortlessly. However, some are so poorly integrated with the mainstream living and exist precariously on the periphery of the community. There are still others who are at odds with the value system of their community and have chosen to be silent outsiders who may have only physical presence in the group. Yet, another type is the rebel who is at loggerheads with the values any systems of the community. Others have realized the futility of the existence of a community to which he or she belongs and may be out to reform it. The possibilities of the patterns of individual's integration to community are many and the study is targeted to examining the integrations of the individual in the community and home in Hawthorne's Roger Malvin's Burial and Anderson's Mother. Nathaniel Hawthorne's works are passionately taken up with moral problems of sin, punishment and atonement. His knowledge of the history of his own ancestors perhaps goaded him to explore these themes of guilt. The 17th century persecutions of the Quakers and the witchcraft trials of Salem troubled him. The insight of Hawthorne into the motivations of behavior and the guilt and anxiety in his characters are the legacy of the past sins to humanity. Hawthorne deliberately manipulated historical data and churned out the moral concerns behind them. The truth of human heart remains a mystery in his characters and his ambivalent approach to what is good and bad, is far ahead of his times. If Hawthorne was obsessed with ethical dilemmas in his works, Anderson Sherwood was concerned with mundane problems that affected the fortunes of the ordinary people. The machine age took away the human factor from work. This dehumanized the American work place in a way. Apart from that, it also threatened the very existence of the workers. In a world of competition many values were lost and in the ruthless drive for individual attainment human beings lost sight of the social and family dimension of their existence. Roger Malvil's Burial, when examined in the backdrop social dimension of man existing in a society reveals that concealment can cut off a person from the social communion with his community and family. Early Christian religious practices insisted on public penances for serious sins. Sin was not merely a matter between God and man; it has a social dimension and hidden crimes can cut him off from society and finally unhinge him. Hidden crimes often produce abnormal behavior in the sinner. Hawthorne in Roger Malvil's Burial reveals that even an apparently harmless act if hidden out of fear, can affect social integration of the individual with the community and family. To him crime itself was not so monstrous as the concealment of it. Roger Malvin's Burial may be called an overture to his grand exploration of this theme in The Scarlet Letter. During military operations, a soldier may have to leave his dying comrade. In such a situation, Reuben is forced to leave his friend, Malvin to die, as there was no other option for him. However, he had agreed to come and bury him later, after his own wounds are healed. Nevertheless, he lacks the courage to tell Dorcas, who is the daughter of Malvin and his future wife, the fact that her father did not receive a burial in the wilderness. Not burying a fellow soldier in combat conditions is not even a venial sin. However, the hiding of it to his wife and thus to his community prevents him from fulfilling a simple but important social and religious ritual, the burial of the dead. Thus, the unfolding tragedy of the tale is the direct result of concealment. The wounded dying is encouraged by the young combatant with the hope of home going, reiterating the spontaneous hope of people to experience home even in extremeity. Sit you here while I search the woods for the herbs and roots that must be our sustenance; and, having eaten, you shall lean on me, and we will turn our faces homeward. The motif of home is strong in the parlance of Rouben is also strong in the dying veteran: Reuben, my heart will be lighter with every step you take towards home. The shared unconscious longing for home and the centralities of his heroic life are blurred by the pointless hiding which ultimately denies him the joys of hearth and even resulting in the shedding of blood of his son in a way expiating a sin which was not real. For the dying old man the consoling thought that mitigated his pain and gave him peace was the hope that his daughter, Dorcas will have a rich measure of the joys of the hearth when Reuben marries her. This makes his make shift bed made of the oak leaves of the wilderness the cozy couch of the home: as if he were sending Reuben to the battle or the chase while he himself remained secure at home. Therefore, when Malvin says adieu to the young man he is contented that in his absence his Dorcas will have the comfort of home: She will marry you after she has mourned a little while for her father; and Heaven grant you long and happy days, and may your children's children stand round your deathbed! And, Reuben," added he, as the weakness of mortality made its way at last, "return, when your wounds are healed and your weariness refreshed, --return to this wild rock, and lay my bones in the grave, and say a prayer over them." Even the last wish of the dying Malvin was to look homeward: Raise me, and let me lean against the rock, was his last request. "My face will be turned towards home, and I shall see you a moment longer as you pass among the trees." The impact of concealment in fact mars the joy of their early courtship. Marriage, which has the ideal basis of a mutual understanding, ends up in a series of games to conceal a trivial matter. For Dorcas the filial comfort that she can derive from Reuben who was the last person who saw her father was to know whether her father got a burial in the wilderness: You dug a grave fro my poor father, in the wilderness, Reuben Perhaps this was the moment that gave him an escape route from the shackles and would have given him freedom and would have made his mind wholesome. After an initial fumbling, he was forced to stick to his folly. He said: My hands were weak, but I did what I could' and in his eagerness to comfort her sorrow he added: 'There stands a noble tomb-stone above his head'. Of course, he regretted that he did not use the moment of escape to tell her the truth. Hawthorne delves deep into the hidden persuaders that compelled his behavior. The fact, others would know that he could not give a decent burial to a comrade in arms, wounded the hero in him. He feared whether he would lose Dorcas affection if she knew that he left her dying father in the wilderness. In addition to this, his image before the community as a hero who braved the savages in the wild will crumble if they know that he acted unchivalerously in leaving the dying man in the wilderness. Whatever be the forces that lead him to conceal his exaggerated sense of guilt, the act ultimately resulted in the shedding of blood dearer to him than his own, thus expiating a sin that he really was not guilty of. Sherwood Anderson's short story Mother does not concern with moral issues. An excerpt from the work Winesburg, Ohio, it is essentially the breakdown in communication between stakeholders in a family. This makes marriage something to be endured rather than something to be celebrated. Elizabeth Willard's dreams of becoming an actress is wrecked due to the contempt of her husband for her ambition. Tom masquerades as a successful man while the facts show it to be to the contrary. She does not want her son to be like her husband. The boy though, he would like to be a successful journalist, is incapable of waking up to meet the challenges of life. Both the husband and wife are aware that at least their son should not be like them. There are certain points, in which they have shared concern as in the case of their son's future but there inability to talk deprives them the chance to really know one another. Anderson's story tells us the absent ideal of in-depth communication as the key to the building of any meaningful relation. The absence of healthy communication has made the three characters turn to themselves and the vigor and gusto of life was missing in all of them, though Tom had cleverly camouflaged his ennui with external smartness of gait. Like the key note of the unfolding drama the dull existence of Elizabeth is revealed right in the beginning: Although she was but forty-five, some obscure disease had taken the fire out of her figure. The listless figure of Elizabeth moving about disorderly old-hotel doing the work of a chambermaid is in stark contrast to her dreams of becoming an actress and moving among gallant men. Her husband's frustration with the loveless marriage is forcefully expressed in the ejaculations that he made about his life: Damn such a life, damn it! As a mother, what takes her forward is the hope that her son at least will not be like her husband. Can there be any more powerful expression of the thwarted hopes of her life other than her prayer: And do not let him become smart and successful either As a person wearing brown glass sees everything brown, the vignettes of life around her have, symbolic meaning in the heightened awareness of her frustration. The fight between the old man and the cat that she could watch from the window was only an enactment of her own life: It seemed like a rehearsal of her won life, terrible in its vividness. The son himself has become like their parents without enthusiasm revealing how the absence communication in the family mould children to become dull and zestless people. . Anderson's fragment of story highlights what an ideal family is not, when channels of communication break down among man and wife. A central theme in study of literature is that it somehow reflects life. While Hawthorne's was an exploration the effect of self-imposed sense of sin in conferring tragic dimension to the family life, Anderson's was a study of broken channels of communication that make life intolerable. ============== Read More