Isolation
during my ISC elective english course, i took up a research project referencing a novel and a play
research question: can i prove that each of the unassuming secondary characters of these two texts can be linked under the theme of ‘isolation’?
texts:
to kill a mocking bird
death of a salesman
unassuming secondary characters:
dill, mayella ewell
happy loman
from the convenience of a narrative pinhole, it’s easy to bask in a hero’s glory, than recount the people who brought them there. the people who end up having less glory, the people who stay the same as they were when the story began.
but what happens to them? if, on their own, do these characters matter? is all they are created for simply just foils to a more important, more relevant ‘main’ character?
this got me interested in the deceptive nature of what ‘secondary’ truly means to characters in a story.
yet, because plot holes carry greater weight than character holes, my curiosity was often left unattended.
i then rescaled all three texts from start to finish, collected all the possible evidence that i could muster, and presented a case study. a whiteboard with quotes, instances and connections, neatly rounding the corners of thumb pins in red thread.
i surprised myself too, but the case was solved. or at least, the connections closed.
a hint?
the lesser attention you attract, the more you are capable of saying.
to kill a mockingbird, is a story of a young girl in the 1930s, having a ‘regular’ childhood in parallel to her father’s battle in a court case. the girl, jean louse finch (scout, familiarly) befriends a boy named dill during her time in the novel. dill stays within the chapters of the novel that have to do with scout and her childhood. mayella, has to do with court side of scouts story. as the victim of the case her father is opposing.
both dill and mayella are very lonely.
death of a salesman is a play about willy loman, in relentless pursuit of a self-deluded ideal of the ‘american dream’. willy has two sons, bill and happy loman. the play is a montage of memories, dreams and confrontations that willy experiences as he essentially begins to lose his mind. happy, unlike his name – is the saddest character of them all. the only heir to willy’s pipe dream, who learns nothing from willy’s failures, and eventual death.
Dill
charles baker harris, formally, or ‘dill’ is a simple boy with a vivid imagination. he is the most enthusiastic of his friends, scout, and her brother jem – to seek the truth about their mysterious neighbour, boo radley.
his fascination with boo though, reveals a silent companionship. a sense of belonging to a man who seems as lonely as he is.
“Why do you reckon Boo Radley’s never run off?”
Dill sighed a long sigh and turned away from me.
“Maybe he doesn’t have anywhere to run off to. . . .”
[146]
what dill offers to scout (as the secondary to main character), is a face to call her ‘child world’. this is important because, as she stands privy to the court case her father atticus is defending, she enters the ‘adult world.’ her only respite and chance to remember her age, is dill.
dill’s absence then coincides with the continued intrusion of the adult world upon scout’s childhood. and towards the latter half of the novel, is almost gone.
his final reappearance is during an integral juncture of the novel – which is when he offers scout an opportunity to flee for a short time back into the blithe of her ‘child’ world.
yet, dill has a story too. a runaway child of a dynamic childhood – and a place of stability in scout’s home.
“He was worn out, dirty beyond belief, and home.”
[143]
the author whispers to us on the margins of his visits to maycomb, that his vivid imagination and captivating tales, along with a fierce reluctance to talk about his father – can only mean he has a troubled life at home.
“Beautiful things floated around in his dreamy head. He could read two books to my one, but he preferred the magic of his own inventions.”
[156]
Mayella
mayella now, is the ‘adult side’ of scout’s world. a 19-year-old pitiable victim of a so-called rape case. yet, she is no victim of the case, as much as she is one of her upbringing. her father abuses and possibly molests her, and has convinced her to perjure herself in order to conceal the shame that it was a black man whom she leaned on for comfort.
scout observes mayella’s environment, which is of a small tin-roofed cabin situated behind the town’s garbage dump, with a yard full of trash. she notes, though, that buried among this trash, is an oderly corner of the yard lined with well-tended red geraniums rumoured to belong to mayella. a seemingly irrelevant detail, but a telltale sign of how she sets herself apart from the rest of the ewells.
“It came to me that Mayella Ewell must have been the loneliest person in the world. She was even lonelier than Boo Radley, who had not been out of the house in twenty-five years. When Atticus asked her if she had any friends, she seemed not to know what he meant, then she thought he was making fun of her.”
[194]
scout reconciles mayella’s lonely nature to that of the ‘mixed folks’. set apart from the whites because “she lived among pigs” and from the blacks, because she was white to begin with. this suspended state of isolation encourages mayella to, for one, feel desperate enough to lean on a black man for comfort, and two, betray that man to obey her father’s wishes.
it is almost ironic then, that this compassion mayella sows in her geraniums, and sought from tom, was something that she hadn’t ever seen in her dismal and secluded life.
as atticus quotes,
“And so, a quiet, respectable, humble Negro who had the unmitigated temerity to ‘feel sorry’ for a white woman…”
was faced with punishment because a white woman
“…must destroy the evidence of her offence. What was the evidence of her offence? Tom Robinson, a human being.”
[207]
Happy
happy loman is a seasoned womaniser who encourages his fragile self-image by lying about his success. he emulates his father in his outdated belief that success comes from being ‘well-liked’ rather than hard work. however, it amounts to little under the shadow of his brother biff, who is idolised by his father.
so in respite, happy reinforces his sense of accomplishment by bragging about his sexual exploits – even though he already possesses all the hallmarks of material wealth.
“It’s what I always wanted. My own apartment, a car, and plenty of women. And still goddamnit, I’m lonely.”
[12]
this awareness does nothing, as his desire to be validated by his father will always find reasoning. so, he instead mimics his father with no compass of his own, treating women the same poor way his father treats his wife, linda.
at the end of the play, once willy has died, happy refuses himself the one thing that could make him happy by remaining bound in the comfort of someone else’s shadow. biff invites happy to come out west with him, as they had conspired at the beginning of the play, a prospect that seemed to excite happy. yet he puts down the offer, saying, “I’m staying right in this city, and I’m gonna beat this racket!” and that he will win willy’s dream for him. a helpless attempt to gain approval from a man who will not be able to validate him anyway.
Dill & Mayella
now that we have established that both characters are lonely, what sets them apart is how they use deception to cope with it.
dill, on one hand, embeds himself in stories of what could be instead of what is. but no matter how much he tries to escape the realities of his home life, he is strongly connected to his emotional sense of being (his empathy toward boo + his reaction to the court case).
mayella, on the other hand, turns toward spite and self-interest rather than empathy. even though she does exhibit nurturing and compassionate traits through the account of her well-kept geraniums, the mayella seen during the trial is hateful and cruel – a clear contradiction to this image. and perhaps a sad reality that not all loneliness converts to empathy.
Mayella & Happy
what makes mayella and happy similar, is the root of their isolated upringings as well as the manner in which they cope with it.
while mayella has an abusive father, happy has a neglectful one. both characters are unable to detach themselves from their paternal shadow and seek sexual intimacy as a sense of release.
mayella and happy are, hence, static characters with incomplete arcs. there is no resolution for them as they are not the ‘main’ characters of the story. mayella will continue to live a guilt-ridden life under the abuse and abandonment of her father, and happy will live out his remaining years trying to fulfil willy’s dream.
Happy & Dill
as far as crucial father figures come into play, both happy and dill have had inconsistent attention from their fathers. happy being overshadowed by his brother biff, and dill never having a static paternal head to look up to. as a result, both characters lose their grasp with reality and live in a self-deluded state of being.
dill with his elaborate made-up stories, and happy, blindly following a hollow ideal of willy’s version of the ‘american dream.’