Scapegoats And Scapegoating - Book Report/Review Example

Scapegoats and Scapegoating. 'Twas right, said they, such birds to slay, That bring the fog and mist.(Coleridge, Rime of the Ancient Mariner) The transfer of inequities upon the innocent is as old as humanity itself. In biblical times, a goat was sent into the desert to symbolically atone for the sins of the Israelites (Leviticus, 16:8-17; New International Version) in an ancient ritual. In contemporary usage, an innocent person is assigned the blame when actual targets are excessively threatening and thought to have the potential for retaliation (Clark, 1997). In both the historical tradition and the modern definition, individuals purge themselves by transferring their iniquities to a victimized scapegoat. Narration and depiction of a scapegoat is found throughout literature that partially or fully build up as a tragedy The three stories that we examine here are Ursula Le Gunin's "The Ones who walk away from Omelas," "The Lottery" by Shirley Jackson, and "The Blue Hotel" by Stephen Crane. LeGuin's story "The Ones who walk away from Omelas" presents a picture of a utopian city, governed by an underlying understanding that despite the moral repulsion of heaping torture upon one individual, it is a necessity for the mental well being of the many, in order that the utopian condition of the city might be preserved. The story "encapsulates the full beauty and horror of a society in which the good of the many occurs at the expense of the suffering of a small minority. "The abused child in the basement" from that story became a kind of shorthand for the disadvantaged in our discussions of social equity as it applies to all citizens." (Adams, and Pugh 65) In a similar manner, Jackson's "The Lottery" is based upon the theme of one individual becoming a scapegoat to support a group mechanism for the sacrifice of one to preserve the happiness of many. Crane's "The Blue Hotel" shows a self-selecting scapegoat who by rubbing in his difference creates a collusive communal reaction leading to his death. LeGuin's story suggests an idyllic existence in a culture of a prosperous and sophisticated people, much given to carnivals, parades, and festivals of all kinds where their leaders are wise and free of corruption. A picture of a crime-free society where there are no wants or distress of any kind. The shocking contrast comes when the existence of a single child locked in filthy, miserable conditions within a broom closet is revealed to the reader. "In a basement under one of the beautiful public buildings of Omelas, or perhaps in the cellar of one of its spacious private homes, there is a room. It has one locked door, and no window. A little light seeps in dustily between cracks in the boards, secondhand from a cobwebbed window somewhere across the cellar. . . . The floor is dirt, a little damp to the touch, as cellar dirt usually is. The room is about three paces long and two wide: a mere broom closet or disused tool room. In the room a child is sitting. It might be a boy or a girl. It looks about six, but actually is nearly ten. It is feebleminded. Perhaps it was born defective, or perhaps it has become imbecile through fear, malnutrition, and neglect. . . . The door is always locked, and nobody ever comes, except that sometimes--the child has no understanding of time or interval--sometimes the door rattles terribly and opens, and a person, or several people, are there. One of them may come in and kick the child to make it stand up. The others never come close, but peer in at it with frightened, disgusted eyes. The food bowl and water jug are hastily filled, the door is locked, the eyes disappear. The people at the door never say anything, but the child, who has not always lived in the tool room, and can remember sunlight and its mother's voice, sometimes speaks. "I will be good," it says. "Please let me out. I will be good!" They never answer." (Le Guin, 281) The existence of the child is known to the citizens of the town - it sometimes begs for release and promises to be good, because it is suffering so much from being naked, covered with sores and left to sit in its own excrement. Most of the citizens decide that "to throw away the happiness of thousands for the chance for the happiness of one: that would be to let guilt within the walls indeed." (LeGuin 282). They rationalize the child's suffering by arguing that after so long, the child would not even appreciate freedom - "it would probably be wretched without walls about it to protect it, and darkness for its eyes and its own excrement to sit in." (LeGuin 283). In "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas," Ursula Le Guin proposes as an essential condition of utopia that it be counterbalanced by a hidden tragic flaw (Collings 4) Ursula Le Guin's story keeps to the traditional concept of scapegoating, a theory where the natural and supernatural is confused, and the different individual sacrificed for common good. When faced with modern thoughts of liberalism and scientific thought the traditional concept of scapegoating changed. "Now the process of victimization is investigated not just as part of a ritual process but from the point of view of the victim, and thus there grows the beginnings of the idea that some victims are self-selecting." (Douglas 50) This concept of self-selection as a scapegoat is elaborated in Stephen Crane's "The Blue Hotel." In the story of "The Blue Hotel," the Swede is an outsider who has come from the east and is not used to the ways of the West. Six men are involved in the story. Pat Scully, the Irish hotelkeeper, his son Johnny, a cowboy, an easterner, a gambler and the Swede. While the Swede is a guest at Scully's hotel, the Irishman is duty bound to treat him with courtesy and ensure his safety as a guest of the hotel. Nevertheless, it becomes obvious as the story progresses that the Swede is aware of his alienness and it makes him afraid. He announces his conviction that he is going to be killed before he can leave the house. When Scully comes in on his tragic attitude, he is flat: "These men are going to kill me." Scully rounds on his son and the two guests, but of course they can make nothing of it. They say he's crazy. The Swede bursts out, "Yes, of course, I'm crazy-yes." While playing cards the Swede accuses Scully's son Johnny of cheating. A fight ensues in which the Swede beats up Johnny mercilessly with the cowboy howling, "Kill him, Johnnie! Kill him! Kill him! Kill him!" The gambler knifes the Swede and kills him when the Swede starts boasting about his feat of beating Johnny. Although for a while, it appears that the underlying rejection of the others will not prevail and the Swede himself starts to believe this and loses his fear, the story progresses on to a bitter end. The actual twist to the story is brought when "months later, on a ranch near the Dakota line, the Easterner brings news to the cowboy. The gambler got three years, a light sentence. "It's funny, ain't it If he hadn't said Johnnie was cheatin' he'd be alive this minute," says the cowboy; "I believe he was crazy." "The Swede might not have been killed if everything had been square," the Easterner muses, and when the cowboy retorts full of contempt that the Swede invited it all he gets angry. "You're a fool!" the Easterner cries viciously. "Johnnie was cheating! . . . I saw him. And I refused to stand up and be a man . . . We are all in it! This poor gambler isn't even a noun. He is kind of an adverb. Every sin is the result of a collaboration. We, five of us, have collaborated in the murder of this Swede . . . ." Injured, rebellious, the cowboy cries out blindly against "this fog of mysterious theory" and the story ends." (Berryman 211) Though a reader might conclude prior to this section that men should recognize the necessity of mutual involvement, he is not likely to see, as the Easterner sees, that "we are all in it," that the responsibility for the Swede's death is a social responsibility extending even beyond the group immediately involved in the circumstances leading up to the event. "Up to the final section Crane's attitude toward s the Swede leads us to believe that the responsibility for his death rests with the Swede alone; we are then shown the other side of the coin when the complicity of the others is revealed, especially that of Johnnie and the Easterner." (Gibson 111) Jackson's most famous story opens on a beautiful June 27 as villagers gather for an annual lottery that is held concurrently in other towns. Playful children arrive on the square before their busy parents, and the boys make a large pile of the "smoothest and roundest" stones, whose grim purpose is revealed only at the story's conclusion. Other foreshadowings are equally unobtrusive. The townspeople keep their distance from the lottery equipment and hesitate when Mr. Summers asks them to steady the black box so he can mix up the slips of paper inside. The degree of ceremony is puzzling: families line up together, lists of kinship networks have been prepared, and every able-bodied person (Hall 312) must attend. People seem reluctant to get the winning ticket, and there are rumors that other villages are going to stop holding the lottery; but Old Man Warner counters with a proverb: "Lottery in June, corn be heavy soon." When Bill Hutchinson draws the slip with a black spot, his wife shatters the morning calm, shouting that Mr. Summers rushed Bill's selection. Tessie herself receives the marked paper after the five Hutchinsons draw to determine which family member will win the final round. As the desperate woman screams, "It isn't fair," the town advances against her, armed with stones from the boys' stockpile. (Hall 313). In this story Shirley Jackson takes the ancient ritual of the ceremonial scapegoat and set it into a realistic backdrop of American life. The clear message is that the instincts and urges that brought the ritual into being still persist within our society looking for innocent scapegoats. One may understand the deeper significance below-the-surface story. Shirley Jackson has raised the lesser theme of scapegoating to one encompassing a comprehensive, compassionate, and fearful understanding of man trapped in the web spun from his own need to explain and control the incomprehensible universe around him, a need no longer answered by the web of old traditions. (Bloom 37) The story of the Lottery and Omelas differ from the Blue Hotel in that the scapegoat chosen in these stories are not outsiders, while the Swede is an outsider to the group. Where the scapegoats in the Lottery, and Omelas exhibit the traditional concept of a mechanism of group survival working upon Scapegoating, the scapegoat in the Blue Hotel is self selected and generates scapegoating as a social reaction. In the Lottery, Tessie is classed as a rebel and there is a subtle allusion to her rebellious nature in her name (Oehlslager, 1988). A similar perception exists about the Swede in the "Blue Hotel" which mandates his destruction, and in the same way the child in Omelas must be made to suffer otherwise the happiness of the town will be in jeopardy. So, each time the person who is marked as an easy target by virtue of differences that sets him or her apart from the main group is the scapegoat. The Lottery stands out from the other two stories in that the Scapegoating is by rigid ritualistic community choice for sacrificing one of their own for common good. Scapegoating is an ubiquitous occurrence in groups of all sizes, and the idea that people can transfer their guilt or inequities to some other being is based upon a confusion between the tangible and the intangible world, a confusion that is as old as humanity itself. Huckleberry Finn coins the eternal human nature of external blame attribution best when he says: "That's just the way; a person does a low-down thing, and then he don't want to take no consequences of it. Thinks as long as he can hide it, it ain't no disgrace." (Twain 1975:207) WORKS CITED Adams, Elsie B., and Darrell L. Pugh. "The Humanities and Professional Studies: Adding People to Policy." College Teaching 42.2 (1994): 63-65. Bell, Derrick. Faces at the Bottom of the Well: The Permanence of Racism. New York: Basic Books, 1992. Berryman, John. Stephen Crane. New York: William Sloane, 1950 Bloom, Harold, ed. American Women Fiction Writers, 1900-1960. Vol. 2. Philadelphia: Chelsea House Publishers, 2000. Clark, Arthur J. "Scapegoating: Dynamics and Interventions in Group Counseling." Journal of Counseling and Development 80.3 (2002): 271+ Crane, Stephen. "The Blue Hotel" Collings, Michael R., ed. Reflections on the Fantastic: Selected Essays from the Fourth International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts. New York: Greenwood Press, 1986. Douglas, Tom. Scapegoats: Transferring Blame. New York: Routledge, 1995 Gibson, Donald B. The Fiction of Stephen Crane. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1968 Hall, Joan Wylie. "Shirley Jackson (1916-1965)." The Columbia Companion to the Twentieth-Century American Short Story. Ed. Blanche H. Gelfant and Lawrence Graver. New York: Columbia University Press, 2000 Jackson, Shirley. "The Lottery" Le Guin, Ursula K., 1975. "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas." The Wind's Twelve Quarters. New York: Harper, pp 275-84. Oehlslager, Felix, 1988. "The stoning of Mistress Hutchinson: meaning of context in the Lottery" Essays in Literature Twain, M. (1953) The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Puffin Books, Penguin Books: Harmondsworth, p. 207. Read More