約翰・齊福作品中的逃避與接受

全文

(1)i. 國⽴臺灣師範⼤學英語學系碩⼠論⽂ Master’s Thesis Department of English National Taiwan Normal University. 約翰・⿑福作品中的逃避與接受 Escapism and Acceptance in the Writings of John Cheever. 指導教授：狄亞倫 Advisor: Dr. Aaron Deveson 研究⽣：陳瑛祥. 中華民國 107 年 7 月. July 2018.

(2) 摘要. 本論文探討約翰．齊福作品中的逃避與接受。這些作品包含：〈哈特利〉 (1949), 〈一甕黃金〉(1950), 〈海邊房屋〉(1961), 〈泳者〉 (1964), 《約翰．齊福的日記》 (1993), 和《好似天堂》(1982)。其中的四則短篇故事是關於「逃避」的主題。在此四則短篇故事中，本論文探討故事中的角色由不滿的心態與缺乏自信所引發的逃避，以及其後續所引發的龐大壓力。《約翰．齊福的日記》與《好似天堂》中則探討了逃避與接受的主題。《約翰．齊福的日記》呈現了一個人的潛力可以救贖自己，而《好似天堂》呈現了一個人的潛力可以貢獻社會、造福人群。本篇論文主要引用了拉爾夫·沃爾多·愛默生的《依靠自我》(1841)、狄奧多·阿多諾的〈自由時間〉 (1944)，與亨利·大衛·梭羅的《湖濱散記》 (1854) 來分析約翰．齊福的作品。齊福的作品裡所呈現逃避的後果主要符合阿多諾的〈自由時間〉。齊福對於逃避的原因、解決方法，以及個人的潛能符合愛默生的〈依靠自我〉。解決逃避的部份方式和一種與人分享心靈解脫的精神則符合梭羅的〈湖濱散記〉。. 關鍵詞：逃避、接受、自立、不滿、自由時間、原始智慧、漂泊. i.

(3) Abstract This thesis discusses the escapism and acceptance in John Cheever’s writings through analysis of four short stories, “The Hartleys” (1949), “The Pot of Gold” (1950), “The Seaside Houses” (1961), and “The Simmer” (1964), The Journals of John Cheever (1993), and “Oh What a Paradise It Seems” (1982). The four short stories focus primarily on the theme of escapism. Among the short stories, I discuss the discontented mindset and lack of self-trust that lead to escapism which brings tremendous pressure on the characters in these stories. The journals and “Oh What a Paradise It Seems” contain both the aforementioned escapism theme and add acceptance. While Cheever’s journals represent the potential an individual has to redeem him/herself, “Oh What a Paradise It Seems” represents the potential to contribute to society. This thesis mainly uses Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Self-Reliance (1841), Theodor Adorno’s “Free time” (1944), and David Henry Thoreau’s essays in his Walden (1854) to analyze Cheever’s writings. Cheever’s presentation of the consequences of escapism are mainly in line with Adorno’s “Free Time.” Cheever’s view of the reasons for escapism, the solution to it, and the potential of each individual conform to Emerson’s Self-Reliance. The other part of the solution to escapism, and a willingness to share personal spiritual findings, are in line with Thoreau’s Walden.. Keywords: escapism, acceptance, self-reliance, discontent, free time, primary wisdom, driftingness. ii.

(4) Acknowledgements Writing this thesis was a unique experience in my life. Just like what the title of my thesis—escapism and acceptance—and Cheever’s writings reveal, my entire experience of composing this thesis was just like them: first escapism, then a seemingly endless and curvy journey, and finally acceptance. Without my supervisor Dr. Aaron Deveson’s patience, expertise, and encouragement, I doubt if I could ever make it to enjoy casually sitting in front of my laptop and typing this acknowledgement. The process of writing this thesis was far from smooth, filled with all sorts of adversities, including a change of title. I escaped for a long time from the fact that I had inaccurately evaluated my ability to cope with a former thesis title, with which I wanted to prove myself. But then of course I could not, so there began a near-horror of keeping fitting myself into a position that I just did not belong. During the process, Elsa Lin, Marshal Lin, Alice Lin, and Clara Lai noticed my condition and offered timely suggestions for a possible way out and warm encouragements. I am truly lucky to have them as not only classmates but friends. When I finally faced the music, Dr. Deveson helped coin the new title “Escapism and Acceptance” for me after attentively listening to my ideas. I could not tell how marvelous his coinage was. This title has helped me gain so many understandings and whole-new insights when I analyzed Cheever’s writings with this title in mind. Given that I loved this new title, I still would not have survived the last couple of months before the oral defense without my parents’ full support. The necessary alterations in my thesis were far more than I had anticipated, I therefore doubted my ability to complete my thesis and have been through depression countless times. My parents always had all sorts of amazing ways to soothe me, making me hopeful again. It is impossible for me to tell how iii.

(5) much I am thankful for them. They have tolerated my whimsical temper, and restored me with unconditional love. My oral defense committee, Dr. Hui-Hua Wang and Dr. Wei-Ching Lai, have also helped me a lot on my thesis. They warmly offered numerous inspiring suggestions that I had never thought about before. I was impressed by Dr. Wei-Ching Lai’s peculiar quickness of wit and Dr. Hui-Hua Wang’s words of wisdom when she learned my winding writing process. I admire their rich knowledge and scope. There are many more who have willingly helped me during my dire situation. I sincerely thank these people for their kindness. The process of writing this thesis was at once greatly filled with tears, despair, and miracles and gratitude. I have gone through probably the darkest years of my life, but I also got to witness the light, possibility, and purity in so many people.. iv.

(6) Table of Contents Introduction. 1. I. General Background. 1. II. Motivations. 4. III. Literature Review. 5. IV. Methodology. 8. V. Outline of Chapters. 12. Chapter 1. The Short Stories of John Cheever. 15. I. “The Pot of Gold”. 19. II. “The Hartleys”. 21. III. “The Seaside Houses”. 24. A. Obtaining Domestic Goods to Escape Work. 25. B. A Complete Representation from Aspiration to Boredom. 28. 1. Aspiration. 29. 2. Alienation and Boredom. 30. IV. “The Swimmer”. 30. Chapter 2. The Journals of John Cheever. 33. I. Escaping from one Social Status into Another One. 36. II. Escaping from an Unsatisfactory Lifestyle through Buying Houses and Domestic Products. 37. III. Escaping from a Wife Not Loving Enough. 40. IV. Escaping Numerous Lovers. 42. V. The Acceptance. 44. Chapter 3. “Oh What a Paradise It Seems”. 49. I. Perception: The Starting Point of Spiritual Freedom. 51. II. The Process of Attaining Spiritual Freedom. 52. A. Love of Self. 53. B. Observation and Experience. 54. 1. Observing the Problems of the Masses. 54. 2. Detecting the Potential in the Masses. 63. 3. The Evolution of Sears’s Level of Understanding and Attitude toward the Masses. 64 v.

(7) C. Acceptance and Opening up to “Primary Wisdom” 1. The Final Push. 65. 2. Discovering the Correct Way to Understand People. 66. 3. Discovering the Means for Liberation that People Need. 68. III. Sharing the way to Spiritual Freedom to Others. 68. Conclusion. 73. Works Cited. 77. vi. 65.

(8) Introduction. I. General Background John Cheever wrote for The New Yorker and published 121 stories there. His career took off when he began to win major awards in the USA starting in 1956 when he won the O. Henry Award for “The Country Husband” that year. He was elected to the National Institute of Arts and Letters in 1957, and in the following year earned a National Book Award for his novel The Wapshot Chronicle. Different writers affected his writing style in different periods. His early works during the 1930s were influenced by F. Scott Fitzgerald. Hemmingway was also one of the writers who influenced Cheever’s early writings during 1930s to 1950s before he reached “the height of his own fame” (Bailey 40). Cheever was honored as “the Chekhov of the exurbs’ and ‘Ovid in Ossining’” (May 533), and the feature Chekhov and Cheever shared was “the banality of incident suggesting—but lightly—an underlying sadness” (qtd. in Bailey 111). Known for his short stories about life in the American suburbs, Cheever once stressed in an entry of his journals that, as “an American writer” (The Journals of John Cheever 185), he would rather “describe four hundred people under the lights reaching for a foul ball” than to “the misgivings of a woman taken in adultery as she looks out of a window at the rain” (Ibid.). Cheever recorded this when he was at a baseball court when he related to this experience to what an American writer should do—to depict a large group of people’s lives rather than to picture an individual’s incident. Among the writers who wrote about the suburbs, “only Cheever was able to make an archetypal place out of it, a terrain [readers] can 1.

(9) recognize within ourselves, wherever [the readers] are or have been” (Updike, John. Odd Jobs: Essays and Criticism 118). James E. O’Hara, author of John Cheever: A Study of the Short Fiction (1989), states that in terms of his writing technique, Cheever “transcend[ed] a realistic style he had perfected” and turned it into a “more imaginative—and occasionally fantastic—narrative technique” (xi) that is of “lyrical accents capable of expressing poetic sentiment” (56). The stories and journals I have chosen to analyze in this thesis come from two eras of American culture. Most of the historians and sociologists who study these eras are pessimistic of the American culture in those times. In his writings, Cheever reflects the historians’ and sociologists’ findings, which are embodied by the theme of escapism. However, he ultimately exhibits a possibility to secure a calmness and contentedness through acceptance, and spread this spiritual status to others. The first of these eras is from the late forties to early sixties. The other era is the seventies in America. Morris Dickstein describes the 1950s of America, in his chapter on “Fiction and Society, 1940-1970,” in The Cambridge History of American Literature, as “at once a period of complacency, of getting and spending, and an age of anxiety, a time for doubt and selfquestioning” (Dickstein 170-1). From the sociological aspect, “[s]ome social scientists and historians, often formal radicals, began emphasizing consensus rather than conflict, status anxieties rather than class divisions, and portrayed America as a country that had largely solved its most pressing problems” (170). By the “problems,” Dickstein means problems the US faced in and shortly after World War II, like “returning soldiers,” and “anti-Semitism” (170). From the literary aspect, “novelists and filmmakers, on the other hand, were drawn to stories that reflected the darker side of American life” (Dickstein 170). Unlike the 2.

(10) sociologists and historians who believed that America had had most “problems” solved, literary works at that time were created to “[reflect] pervasive anxieties about the Cold War, nuclear war, and the blight of timidity that spread in this atmosphere of fear” (170). “Much of the fiction of the fifties, including popular novels such as Sloan Wilson’s The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit and Cameron Hawley’s Executive Suite, belongs to the vein of critical selfexamination” that contrasted with the sociologists and historians’ confidence in America (171). As the air of the seventies presented in Cheever’s novella, “Oh What a Paradise It Seems,” is permeated with a sense of “driftingness” (to use Cheever’s term in the novella), a sense of a similar kind pervaded the 70s in America. Literarily, it is a sense of “exhaustion,” reflecting the feeling of not being sure of what to write in a novel, as “experimental writer and critic Raymond Federman summed up the ideology of exhaustion” (Steiner 430): “Writing about fiction today, one could begin with the usual clichés—that the novel is dead; . . . fiction has become useless and irrelevant because life has become much more interesting . . . . [A]ll the possibilities of fiction have been used up, exhausted, abused” (ibid.). Sociologically, Daniel Bell, an influential sociologist in the 1970s, “concluded that American society had experienced its own irrevocable turn, or shift, from the ‘industrial’ to the ‘post- industrial’ mode. For the most part, Bell uses the term ‘post-industrial’ to describe changes in the economy, the labour market (or ‘occupational system’) and the arena of technological development” (Kaufman 3). Bell means to express that “[s]ocial structures . . . were ruthlessly rational and efficient, while culture, sadly, was fixated on the self rather than on the community at large” (ibid.). Perhaps being aware of this “fixat[ion] on the self rather than on the community at large” (ibid.), Cheever starts to explore the theme of helping others 3.

(11) in his “Oh What a Paradise It Seems” (1982).. II. Motivations Reading Cheever’s journals, there was a time at which I could not read any further because his journals are mostly full of grief until he reaches old age. That was the time when I started to find a dramatic change in his journals. Cheever starts to calmly accept almost everything that he used to feel discontented with or bewildered about. I felt strongly about and was happy for this change. Because of noticing this change in Cheever’s journals, I also find that escapism and acceptance are what Cheever had been persistently discussing. Cheever uses decades of writings to discuss escapism and acceptance. He finally shows that, no matter what happens, people have the inborn potential to redeem themselves and help others. Emerson records a fable in his Self-Reliance about a drunkard on a street who is taken to a duke’s house and treated with “all obsequious ceremony” (28). Emerson emphasizes an individual’s potential with this fable. The potential is noble and precious, but it needs to be revealed. Cheever shows in his writings that revealing the potential takes a seemingly bland method: acceptance. The prototype of acceptance can be noticed in “The Pot of Gold” (1949). Ralph has always been trying to make money like others do in this story. Although he often suffers losses, he still yearns for being rich until his wife Laura says by chance: "It did look like the treasure" (70). Ralph suddenly realizes that the most precious treasure—Laura—that he has been seeking for so long has always been around him. Cheever continues to explore the theme of escapism and acceptance in his writings. 4.

(12) Another story that touched me was "The Swimmer," whose protagonist Neddy runs away from the facts that he was fired and has been divorced for a long time. When he learns that he cannot escape them anymore, he finally bursts into tears. His being surrounded by fear and despair made me cry. In his journals, Cheever often records the similar feeling of how he cannot afford to recall his adversities or sense of guilt. He cries over this many times: “[I]t seems that I have wept too many tears, gin tears, whiskey tears, tears of plain salt, but too many” (57). But compared with Cheever’s later entries, Cheever ultimately exhibits the inestimable potential of an individual. I found that he is still able to face and master his life after experiencing a lot of “driftingness,” confusion and pain. This is the main reason that motivates me to write this thesis.. III.. Literature Review. Over the years, Cheever’s critics have shown multiple facets of his works, in a way proving the fun and depth Cheever’s writings provide. This section first starts with the four selected short stories’ criticism. In discussing the function of “family” in Cheever’s short stories, Burton Kendle sees Laura, Ralph’s wife in “The Pot of Gold,” as a variant from Cheever’s more typical representation of wives as “Venuslike” (227). As for when Kendle discusses “The Hartleys,” he relates Anne’s death with “[t]he dead or threatened children who populate Cheever’s stories” that symbolize the decadence of the adults’ world (Kendle 225). Morris Freedman argues for the positive side of Cheever’s works using “The Pot of Gold” as an example, which “must be read as demonstrations not of what Cheever believes life must inevitably be, but of what it should not be, of what we should fight against it becoming” (26). 5.

(13) Robert A. Morace analyzes “The Hartleys” from the perspective of literary form. Along with “The Enormous Radio,” Morace argues that these two stories “antedate . . . [Cheever’s] interest in opera” (514), an element Cheever frequently experiments with his lyrical style in his later works like The Wapshot Chronicle, according to Morace. “The Seaside Houses” is seen as a depiction of “the mystery of Original Sin” by critic George Hunt (136). To illustrate his point, Hunt points out the repeated scenes in this story like Mr. Ogden’s renting seaside houses each year, his different marriages with the same question that haunts him, and an inherited “ominous moral baggage” left by the seaside house owner (Hunt 136). As for “The Simmer,” one of Cheever’s most analyzed works, different critics have different views of this work. Critic James E. O’Hara observes Cheever’s use of his Chekhovian characters who, when faced with an adversity, choose “to lose touch with the truth rather than to suffer under its crushing weight” (70). In “The Swimmer,” though, O’Hara notices Cheever’s alternation in that he adds the element of “extended fantasy” to tell his readers the “psychological costs” of escapism (O’Hara 70). Keith Wilhite argues that the role of Neddy reflects Cheever’s ambiguous attitude toward the suburbs. Neddy’s “confront[ing] the divide between conceptual and physical spaces as a voyeur at his own window” is (215), according to Wilhite, like Cheever’s placing himself “somewhere between criticism and defense of suburbia” (Wilhite 216). There is even one critic, Robert M. Slabey, who likens “The Swimmer” with Washington Irving’s “Rip Van Winkle” in that both stories represent “the gulf between the fantasies Americans live by and the actualities they live in” (182). Slabey offers more examples of how both stories are alike like the protagonists’ characteristics (“avatar of the amiable good fellow” (Slabey 182)), their escaping from “cares and responsibilities” (183), or the habit of drinking. Slabey concludes that Cheever’s “The 6.

(14) Swimmer” is more pessimistic and “mythic” (185) than Irving’s “Rip Van Winkle” is. In the latest criticism on Cheever, his journals are mainly read in order to supply information about his personal daily life. Critic Geoff Dyer traces Cheever’s sources of inspiration in his journals “that will eventually be transformed in the fiction” (194). Among the critics who discuss Cheever’s journals, Colm Tóibín takes a harsher point of view for Cheever’s journals which, according to Tóibín, are “usually self-pitying and humorless” (278). Using one of Cheever’s journal entries as an example, Tony Hilfer slightly points out Cheever’s preference, “[a]t his worst” (Hilfer 168), to “play the role of huffily conventional American Protestant male but [Cheever] partly understood his own pretence” (Hilfer 168). Although there is an exception to this approach appearing in the work of Anna Jackson, in her work Diary Poetics: Form and Style in Writers' Diaries, 1915-1962 (2010), she analyzes the “form”—not the “content”—of Cheever’s diaries, treating his journals as works containing literariness. Very few critics dealt with the “literariness” and “content (instead of “form”)” of Cheever’s journals. However, this thesis argues that, although Cheever’s journals are an abundant source to provide clues for Cheever’s readers to trace his personal lives, sources of inspirations and the like, his journals actually show a continuous discussion of the themes of escapism and acceptance, which link his earlier and later stories/novella. There is one critic, Geoff Dyer, who does connect Cheever’s journals with a “larger torment” (195), which suggests a sense of struggle under a heteronormativity of Cheever’s time. This thesis will take Cheever’s journals and stories as reflections of parts and parcels of his personal life and his literary creation in order to represent Cheever’s mingling of experiences from his daily life and his ideals of life. Cheever mainly uses Emerson’s Self-Reliance during his last years 7.

(15) to express his ideals of life. This thesis will show that characters or narrators in Cheever’s four short stories and the journals before his very last years lack self-reliance which makes them conform with other fellow people and face kinds of pains in work, family, and even leisure time. Overtime, Cheever has been trying to explore what the lack is, so that it frees himself and people from the pains. With regard to “Oh What a Paradise It Seems,” most critics view this work as being pessimistic. R. G. Collins describes it as “both elegiac and evasive” (5), in which the “grizzled guerrilla” struggles in a world where he feels left behind (5). O’Hara sees this novella as a link between morality and nature: “it is Cheever’s most direct indictment of the kind of moral corruption that has defaced so much of America’s natural beauty” (58). Morace sees it as a challenged search in spirituality—a “spiritual ungainliness” (143)—which is also part of what Chapter Three will discuss in detail. However, none of the criticism of this novella represents the spirit of helping others. This theme will be expounded in Chapter Three.. IV.. Methodology. To analyze the theme of escapism and acceptance in Cheever’s writings, this thesis uses Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Self-Reliance, Theodor Adorno’s “Free Time,” and Henry David Thoreau’s Walden. These works represent an individual’s potential, the consequences of escapism, and the methods needed to achieve self-reliance, respectively, in Cheever’s writings selected in this thesis. In addition to this section (“Methodology”), this thesis will also introduce the above theories in the introduction of each chapter again in a way that suits each chapter’s needs. Emerson’s Self-Reliance is about the nobility and importance of one’s potential. Self8.

(16) reliance comes from “perceptions” (31)—“involuntary perceptions” which contrast with “voluntary acts” (ibid.). In this sense, Emerson’s “perceptions” are abilities to perceive things as they are: Man is timid and apologetic. He is no longer upright. He dares not say “I think,” “I am,” but quotes some saint or sage. He is ashamed before the blade of grass or the blowing rose. These roses under my window make no reference to former roses or to better ones; they are for what they are[.] (Emerson 33) These perceptions come from, and lead one back to an inner divinity “at once the essence of genius, the essence of virtue, the essence of life” (Emerson 30). The thoughts generated by the inner divinity all conform to “justice” (31) and “truth” (ibid.). So, Emerson said that when such “involuntary perceptions” rise, people can just follow them, and try their best to do it. We can naturally generate an immense “self-trust” (30). This is because a person who follows his/her perception is self-reliant and “lives with God[.] His[/her] voice shall be as sweet as the murmur of the brook and the rustle of the corn” (35). Emerson advocates: “Accept the place the divine Providence has found for you” (11). Cheever shows that acceptance will not only bring an end to the consequences of escapism, but will also reveal one’s potential. Cheever shows in his “Oh What a Paradise It Seems” that if one accepts his/her “place”, one even has the ability to reform society. This person would become one of those who are, according to Emerson, “redeemers and benefactors, pious aspirants to be noble clay, plastic under the Almighty effort, . . . advanc[ing] on Chaos and the Dark” (12). Simply put, the ability or freedom to utilize one’s potential at will comes from acceptance. Cheever’s writings show that acceptance comes from a (at times curvy) process of facing and understanding oneself and his/her surroundings. This process is in line 9.

(17) with Henry David Thoreau’s Walden. Cheever mainly represents the state of being “redeemers and benefactors” (Emerson 12) in the novella “Oh What a Paradise It Seems.” Sears, the protagonist of the novella, embodies Cheever’s ideal state of a self-reliant person. When Sears finally reaches the ideal state near the end of the novella, his feeling of an endless surge of love in his mind represents the “internal ocean” (Emerson 38)—the revealed divinity—which does not drain away. Adorno’s “Free Time” theory shows the consequences of escapism in two of Cheever’s short stories. Some of the characters in the short stories indulge in recreational activities to escape the pressure of work. Some others do so to escape the pain of divorce and unemployment. But Cheever shows that doing so may lead to the consequences warned of by Adorno. People will fall into a repeated cycle from aspiration to boredom. In Adorno’s opinion, there shouldn’t be a distinction between “work” and “free time”—it’s a false concept. Dividing these two, calling the latter “hobbies” even, is encouraging people to take “free time” as a time to think of nothing and prepare oneself to work more. The division suits “a behavioural norm of the bourgeois character” (189), which strictly tells apart “work” and “leisure/free time”: While at work, “one should pay attention . . . and not be distracted or lark about” (ibid.), the laws of wage labor are “internalized;” while at free time, the free time should “not resemble work in any way whatsoever, in order . . . that one can work all the more effectively” (ibid.). In Cheever’s short stories, the characters often seek to play to resolve the stress they receive from work or adversities in life. If looked at from Adorno’s notion of “free time,” this escapism is destined to be only a temporary solution because the free time/hobbies that the characters indulge themselves in are “nothing more than a shadowy continuation of labour” 10.

(18) (194), with an intention to fit in the spirit of the Protestant work ethic in that “time free of work should be utilized for the recreation of expended labour power, then work-less time, precisely because it is a mere appendage of work, is severed from the latter with puritanical zeal” (164). However, this thesis argues that Cheever is more interested in pondering on the spiritual causes (and their solution) instead of social structural causes. This thesis will analyze Cheever’s four short stories in Chapter One with a retrospective point of view which considers Cheever’s transcendentalist ideas in his journals and “Oh What a Paradise It Seems.” This thesis uses Henry David Thoreau’s Walden to explain that reaching the stage of acceptance takes a persistent patience (sometimes courage) to go through “a thousand simple tests” (Thoreau 11). When acceptance takes place, self-reliance quickly (if not at once) follows afterwards. This process can be seen in Cheever’s journals and “Oh What a Paradise It Seems.” Thoreau seems to suggest that even a drifting life has its significance. This can be seen in the following statement: “We might try our lives by a thousand simple tests” (11). Moreover, Thoreau shows an embrace to the failures during “tests”: “man's capacities have never been measured; nor are we to judge of what he can do by any precedents, so little has been tried. Whatever have been thy failures hitherto, ‘be not afflicted, my child, for who shall assign to thee what thou hast left undone?’” (11). Thoreau tirelessly dedicates his time to testing the depth or temperature of Walden Pond, observing any phenomena by the pond which may enlighten him, or experimenting with what he could find in a minimalist life. Tiffany K. Wayne, author of Encyclopedia of Transcendentalism, states that in general, Thoreau’s living by Walden is “an experiment in Transcendentalist self-reliance” (303). What Cheever and Sears experience before reaching 11.

(19) acceptance is in line with the experiential spirit Thoreau thoroughly shows and records in his Walden.. V. Outline of Chapters This thesis encompasses three chapters, they are first, short stories of my selection, second, journals, and third, a novella—“Oh What a Paradise It Seems.” Chapter One discusses escapism with four of John Cheever’s short stories. They are: “The Pot of Gold,” “The Hartleys,” “The Seaside Houses,” and “The Simmer.” The characters in each story escape from different kinds of worries or stresses. As previously mentioned in “Methodology,” Chapter One analyzes the reasons and consequences for their escapism with a retrospective point of view. Therefore, this chapter mainly uses Emerson’s Self-Reliance, a theory that Cheever’s later writings (including his journals and “Oh What a Paradise It Seems”) strongly conform to, to analyze the stories in this chapter. Two of the stories in this chapter use Adorno’s “Free Time” theory in addition to Self-Reliance in order to present the kind of consequence of escapism that is in line with the “Free Time” theory. Chapter Two analyzes The Journals of John Cheever published posthumously by Cheever’s son, Benjamin Cheever. Cheever’s journals first contain the theme of escapism, which takes up a large proportion of the journals. Starting from the last years of Cheever’s life though, Cheever presents a sharp change from escapism to acceptance. This chapter argues that Cheever goes through the process of observing and recording what he does—a process similar to Thoreau’s while living by Walden Pond—before he finally reaches the stage of acceptance, in which he starts to express thoughts that are in line with Emerson’s Self-Reliance. Chapter Three analyzes how Sears’s journey in “Oh What a Paradise It Seems” shows a 12.

(20) coordination to Emerson’s Self-Reliance and Thoreau’s Walden. Sear’s journey conforms to Emerson’s Self-Reliance in that Sears follows, testifies, and realizes what he “involuntary perce[ives]” (Emerson 31)—to protect the Beasley’s Pond. What Sears experiences during the process and his decision to share how he reaches his spiritual freedom conform to Emerson’s Self-Reliance and Thoreau’s Walden.. 13.

(21) 14.

(22) Chapter One The Short Stories of John Cheever Mr. Ogden, the protagonist of Cheever’s short story “The Seaside Houses,” describes how he feels about taking a summer vacation from his work in New York City: The journey to the sea has its ceremonious excitements, it has gone on for so many years now, and there is the sense that we are, as in our dreams we have always known ourselves to be, migrants and wanderers—travelers, at least, with a traveler’s acuteness of feeling. (579) How Cheever represents the sense of escapism, driftingness, and (at times) the feeling of boredom that Mr. Ogden feels exemplifies the other main characters’ mindsets in the four short stories in this chapter. The four short stories are: “The Pot of Gold,” “The Hartleys,” “The Seaside Houses,” and “The Swimmer.” Cheever makes assumptions in his four short stories: If Americans continue to live such luxurious lifestyles and are unemployed when an economic crisis occurs, they will find it difficult to face and accept such adversity. This kind of American bourgeois’ aspiration can be dated back to the 1850s, when public discourse and media advertisements in America all encouraged the American middle class to spend a vacation for a several days if not a month away from work. This may be one of the reasons why the middle class in the United States gradually entered a luxurious lifestyle. Concerned about the problems of overwork, American medical experts and businesses in the nineteenth century called for, and enforced a “paid vacation” for the American middle class (and later for the working class as well) (Aron 47): 15.

(23) In the years after the Civil War one characteristic of a middle-class “style of living” increasingly came to include the possibility of a summer vacation. . . . [W]hite-collar employees in private or government offices found themselves the beneficiaries of a designated period of paid vacation. During the postbellum decades many businesses, sensitive perhaps to both medical and popular warnings about the dangers of overwork, were making at least one week’s paid vacation standard practice for “brain workers.” . . . White-collar workers in federal government offices were routinely allowed a full month’s paid vacation each year. (Aron 47) Given the privilege of enjoying vacationing on a yearly basis, and due to the “expanding network of railroads” and the advertisement boards along the railways promoting the American middle class’s wish to spend a vacation, “vacationing became,” Aron argues, a “critically important marker of middle-class status” (Aron 5). Cheever uses these four stories to show the consequences of escape. One of the kinds of consequences especially conforms to Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Self-Reliance theory—in fact, this theory explains the common origin of the “consequences” in all four short stories—, which will be expounded in later sections. The other kind of consequence is embodied by Theodor W. Adorno’s “Free Time” theory. The “consequence” that the characters in “The Seaside Houses” and “The Swimmer” experience fits this theory. Adorno argues that what ties Americans firmly to the bourgeois society is their belief that there should be a contrast between work and free time. This must be discussed from Adorno’s discussion on the meaning of free time: The question concerning free time, what people do with it and what 16.

(24) opportunities could eventually evolve from it, must not be posed as an abstract generalisation. Incidentally the expression ‘free time’ or ‘spare time’ originated only recently – its precursor, the term ‘leisure’ (Muβe) denoted the privilege of an unconstrained, comfortable life-style, hence something qualitatively different and far more auspicious – and it indicates a specific difference, that of time which is neither free nor spare, which is occupied by work, and which moreover one could designate as heteronomous. Free time is shackled to its opposite. (187) People naturally look forward to this “auspicious” free time (ibid.). But actually, the “free time” is deliberately designed to be contrary to work. In this way, people will work “all the more effectively” after they enjoy their free time (190). Adorno warns that this way of life will eventually make people feel bored. But we shall see from Cheever’s journals that, throughout his life, he cared more about how to find a way out rather than to explore social structural causes. We will see Cheever's constant internal and self-questioning process, even in his short stories. Cheever’s enquiry conforms to Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Self-Reliance. This chapter will not fully describe the works of Emerson’s or even Henry David Thoreau’s—which is alluded in Cheever’s journals and “Oh What a Paradise It Seems”— because Cheever has not fully revealed the essence of the above-mentioned works in these four short stories. This chapter will only give an introduction to Emerson’s notion of “selfreliance.” Emerson states: [T]he resolution of all into the ever-blessed ONE. Self-existence is the 17.

(25) attribute of the Supreme Cause, and it constitutes the measure of good by the degree in which it enters into all lower forms. . . . Nature suffers nothing to remain in her kingdoms which cannot help itself. . . . [T]he vital resources of every animal and vegetable . . . are demonstrations of the self-sufficing, and therefore self-relying soul. (38) Emerson argues that everyone has the “self-relying soul” (ibid.). The “self-relying soul” means self-reliance, and is something shared not only by everyone, but also the “Supreme Cause”, which is sometimes referred to as “primary wisdom” (30), or “Intuition” (ibid.). Emerson continues to elaborate the notion of self-reliance: Thus all concentrates: let us not rove; let us sit at home with the cause. Let us stun and astonish the intruding rabble of men and books and institutions, by a simple declaration of the divine fact. Bid the invaders take the shoes from off their feet, for God is here within. Let our simplicity judge them, and our docility to our own law demonstrate the poverty of nature and fortune beside our native riches. . . . [One’s] genius [is] admonished to stay at home, to put itself in communication with the internal ocean, but it goes abroad to beg a cup of water of the urns of other men. We must go alone.” (38) Judging from this passage, it can be inferred that people’s minds—or inner divinity—are already rich/wealthy; and this inner divinity has all the resources people need. Emerson emphasizes that this precious and important inner divinity must be revealed through a process of quietness and loneliness. Cheever also goes through this kind of process in his journals. He constantly explores his mind, whose conclusion seems to conform with Emerson’s discovery. 18.

(26) The evasive behavior of people in “The Seaside Houses” and “The Swimmer” is often motivated by boredom because it fits the free time theory described by Adorno. In addition, these roles are ultimately in danger of bankruptcy. When they face bankruptcy, it is already difficult for them to lead a simpler, more affordable lives. Moreover, Cheever continues to explore this phenomenon in his journals and “Oh What a Paradise It Seems”. We can tell that during his last years, Cheever emphasizes the importance of accepting a plain life. He expresses that people should accept themselves, their surroundings, and everything which has happened to them in these writings. Finally, the four stories in this chapter present that the characters' methods of escape are not a long-term solution. This thesis argues that Cheever uses his journals and his last work “Oh What a Paradise It Seems” to express that the reason why those methods are not a long-term solution is because people do not face and accept themselves.. I. “The Pot of Gold” Set during the 30s and 40s in New York City, this story shows the bourgeoisie’s working lives in general. Their working lives are mainly represented by the bourgeois’ attitude towards earning money: “the protagonist [Ralph Whittemore] of ‘The Pot of Gold,’ who spends years seeking the literal gold, with its promise of the good life, . . . obsesses the imagination of many middle class characters” (Kendle 227). The wives—Laura Whittemore and Alice Holinshed—either work temporarily during WWII or focus on caring for the child in this story, but they still represent the middle class’s competitive spirit in this chapter. No matter the bourgeois is at work or at social gatherings like parties or simply a walk in parks, an atmosphere that contrasts the bourgeois’ seemingly “natural, amiable, and fair” 19.

(27) characteristic permeates through the bourgeois characters (141): Laura Whittemore senses a subtle yet tense and restless atmosphere in the working life of the American bourgeois: The hunt, the search for money that had seemed to her natural, amiable, and fair when they first committed themselves to it, now seemed like a hazardous and piratical voyage. She had thought, earlier in the evening, of the missing. She thought now of the missing again. Adversity and failure accounted for more than half of them, as if beneath the amenities in the pretty room a keen race were in progress, in which the loser’s forfeits were extreme. (Cheever 141) However, no matter how “hazardous” (ibid.) Laura senses toward the middle class’s expectation to earn wealth “with its promise of good life” (Kendle 227), most of them are represented by Cheever to continue their positive attitude towards investments until a long time later at some point they realize the rare chance of being wealthy. Alice Holinshed represents one of them. She complains with bitterness to Laura how she used to persist in believing her husband Larry would “[make] a killing” one day (140) as she insists to wear her best dress and carefully brushes her purse each day. But Alice ends up being like many people in this story who couldn't continue to attend parties, all after a long time since being forced to face the truth. Alice cannot accept herself, so she cannot face the fact that she does not fit the middle class. So she needs to deliberately dress herself up to gain recognition from others. This reflects that she is not self-reliant. Finally, Cheever depicts Ralph’s epiphany when Laura is “no longer young, and more wan, thinner than she might have been” (142). Perhaps as one of the lucky few among the middles class who fail to earn wealth, Ralph finally realizes that for him the pursuit of money 20.

(28) is almost meaningless upon hearing Laura say “It did look like the treasure . . .” (ibid.). Many characters—especially those who shy away from parties out of “divorce, drink, nervous disorders, and adversity” (Cheever 139)—have believed in this statement and kept pushing themselves forward. Ralph also finds that "the shine of the gold" he has been pursuing for ten years or so "seem[s] to him to be all around [Laura’s] arms" (ibid.) Ralph is the only important character who is able to face the truth and himself in the four short stories. He thus ends the pain and suffering caused by desire—or in Emerson’s word, “want” (39). In this story, Cheever represents the solution with a whim of epiphany. It is not elaborated how Ralph finally decides to get out of the repetition of investments that other bourgeois characters carry on in this story. Cheever himself was not satisfied with “The Pot of Gold”’s “sentimental resolution” despite earning the “O. Henry Award Prize Stories and Best American Short Stories” (Bailey 164). This thesis argues that Cheever still persists on experimenting the solution to be out of the control of the middle class society in his journals and finds out that acceptance is the key. He then elaborates his understanding of spiritual freedom from his daily life to forge “Oh What a Paradise It Seems,” his last work, which is about helping others obtain spiritual freedom. Further discussion of these will be expounded in Chapter Two and Three.. II. “The Hartleys” “The Hartleys” describes a skiing vacation gone wrong. It all starts with Mr. and Mrs. Hartley and their daughter Anne’s going to Pemaquoddy Inn for a vacation in the snow. While the tempo appears casual and the atmosphere light, as in the beginnings of many of Cheever’s short stories in this thesis, the comfort and relaxed feeling at the beginning of the 21.

(29) story is sharply contrasted with its tragic ending: Anne’s death. The Hartleys belong to the upper middle-class who used to be wealthy and lead a tasteful life. However, after Mr. Hartley loses his job, the Hartleys are unable to face the truth. They try their best to maintain their dignity, vanity, and to escape from the painful fact. During their stay in the hotel, we can see that the couple have various behaviors in order to strive for the approval of others. We can tell that the Hartleys care a lot about how other people think of them by the fact that they frequently exhibit their knowledge of luxurious goods to people around them. So, the connotations of the “marker[s]” (Aron 5)—ones that show someone as privileged, respectable middle class, and “distinguish [the person] from members of the working class” must have been of vital importance to the Hartleys (ibid.). They want to do whatever they can to fit those “marker[s]” (ibid.). First of all, the motivation of their vacation is an act of gaining approval because the ability to vacation is a basis upon which others would use to measure whether you belong to the middle class. Vacationing, according to Aron, is an important “marker” of being a member of the middle class (Aron 5). Next, the ability to show one’s “genteel style” is another clue for people to judge whether a person is among the middle class since the 19th century. Bushman argues in The Refinement of America: Persons, Houses, Cities (1993) that “[b]y the middle of the nineteenth century, vernacular gentility had become the possession of the American middle class. . . . All who aspired to simple respectability had to embody the marks of the genteel style in their persons and their houses” (xiii). Mr. Hartley utilizes jokes or knowledge of luxury goods to win everyone's love and hint at his own taste. But he is described to have “intense and polite manners” (74). This clearly shows that he cares a lot about what other people think of him. This is also true for Mrs. Hartley, who likes to suggest 22.

(30) the properties her parents and grandparents have. In addition, Cheever suggests that Mrs. Hartley “seem[s] anxious to be friendly and she plunged, like a lonely woman, into every conversation” (75). She is often shown absent-minded, and the guests in the inn “[get] the feeling that this characteristic [is] the result of some misfortune that [has] shaken her selfpossession” (75). We can see that this couple regards their social status as important. The reason why this occurs is due to their lack of confidence, that is, “self-reliance”. Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string. Accept the place the divine providence has found for you, the society of your contemporaries, the connexion of events. . . . And we are now men, and must accept in the highest mind the same transcendent destiny; and not minors and invalids in a protected corner, not cowards fleeing before a revolution, but guides, redeemers, and benefactors, obeying the Almighty effort, and advancing on Chaos and the Dark. (Emerson 11-2) Emerson asserts that there is no other person who can become one’s master but oneself. Everyone or anything else cannot determine his/her joys and sorrows. Obviously, the Hartleys cannot be their own masters because of lack of “[t]rust” (11) or confidence in themselves. Lacking self-reliance is lacking confidence. People who lack confidence cannot face themselves and face the truth. The Hartleys have been trying all they could to prove themselves. But doing so, judging from Emerson’s theory, means a lack of self-reliance and ability to resist effects from people around them or incidents that strike them. Also, judging from Cheever’s narration, Cheever suggests their failure to do so, too. For example, the snow 23.

(31) storm that gradually encloses the inn shows that the Hartleys’ situation does not grow any better. The challenge raised by Mrs. Hartley in the quarrel directly reveals the answer: “What good has it ever done?” (77). Their situation is getting more and more difficult. Cheever shows that if people evade themselves and escape the truth, they will gradually move toward a dead end.. III. “The Seaside Houses” This story was published in an era when, after the World War II, “American economic leadership had grown into supremacy without precedent in modern history” (Freeman 50). America did not meet major economic failure until the late 1960s. The U.S. Department of State records this economic failure due to the Vietnam War, and President Johnson’s aim to build a “Great Society”: Military spending also increased as American's presence in Vietnam grew. What had started as a small military action under Kennedy mushroomed into a major military initiative during Johnson's presidency. Ironically, spending on both wars -- the war on poverty and the fighting war in Vietnam -- contributed to prosperity in the short term. But by the end of the 1960s, the government's failure to raise taxes to pay for these efforts led to accelerating inflation, which eroded this prosperity. (U.S. Department of State) The four short stories in this chapter were published before “the end of the 1960s” (ibid.), therefore, John Cheever seems to have foreseen the problem earlier in these stories: Cheever had anticipated some Americans who couldn’t control their material desires and meet their humble endings. 24.

(32) In “The Hartleys,” Cheever presents the bourgeoisie’s escaping from loss of dignity due to unemployment by spending a winter vacation in a ski resort, revisiting old friends or restaurants. In “The Seaside Houses,” Cheever especially focuses on the escape using household or recreational facilities: dwelling in different seaside houses each summer vacation, or endlessly obtaining domestic furniture, collections, and recreational gear to escape work-related stress. By depicting the American bourgeois life from the perspective of spending money on household items, believing this can give one’s family happiness or divert one’s attention from work-related stress, Cheever represents a cycle caused by their escape. The following passage shall explain this cycle. Adorno's free time theory shows the stages that people experience during free time. This chapter organizes into three stages: expectation, alienation, and boredom. Adorno argues that the reason why people who experience boredom in their free time is that they “have been refused freedom” (194). However, this chapter argues that Cheever uses the four short stories, his journals, and “Oh What a Paradise It Seems” to present that these are the stages that people who escape themselves will experience. That is to say, Cheever exhibits in his writings that if one accepts himself and his surroundings, he will still have the hope to regain his spiritual freedom. In “The Seaside Houses” and “The Swimmer,” Cheever shows that having fun does not directly give people a sense of fulfillment, so, these people will feel bored as Adorno observes.. A.. Obtaining Domestic Goods to Escape Work. Compared with the other three, this story uses a considerable amount of household items like books, furniture, or personal collections to represent the domestic, leisurely life of the 25.

(33) bourgeoisie, through which they believe they can escape work-related problems and themselves. Cheever uses dreams in this story to suggest moments when people are more frank about themselves. The Ogdens do not understand why the ghosts drift, and why they feel like “migrants and wanders” in their dreams (579). This shows that the Ogdens do not understand themselves. Emerson’s statement in the following reflects Ogden’s mood: Traveling is a fool’s paradise. …. At home I dream that at Naples, at Rome, I can be intoxicated with beauty, and lose my sadness. I pack my trunk, embrace my friends, embark on the sea, and at last wake up in Naples, and there beside me is the stern Fact, the sad self, unrelenting, identical, that I fled from. I seek the Vatican, and the palaces. I affect to be intoxicated with sights and suggestions, but I am not intoxicated. My giant goes with me wherever I go. (Emerson 50) This paragraph can fully explain the problems encountered by the protagonist. Although Emerson uses “sadness” as an example, what Emerson mainly wants to express is that escape is temporary. In this story, although “sadness” is not what Neddy escapes, what Neddy feels while escaping coincides with the core idea that Emerson wants to express. We can see that Mr. Ogden establishes meaning at work through renting different kinds of houses each summer vacation, and believes he can acquire happiness by renting recreational gear. This is again a kind of material desire – this means that Mr. Ogden sees work as something that needs to be escaped. Mr. Ogden escapes his stress from work in New York City by renting different seaside houses or related recreational gear each summer vacation. He suggests that the hardships at work in the New York City “all make sense” when 26.

(34) he gets to walk through bushes beside one of the seaside villas or see an owl fly from another house with an antique style (580). In addition, Mr. Ogden’s following statement reflects again the protagonist's emphasis on the enjoyment of luxurious goods: “Someone was enormously happy here, and we rent their happiness as we rent their beach and their catboat” (579). Mr. Greenwood’s belief in escaping work with domestic facilities is very much like Mr. Ogden’s. Mr. Greenwood escapes his work in New York City mainly by expanding household furniture in his house by the sea. Mrs. Whiteside, his neighbor, says that his house used to be “his pride and joy” before he loses his job (584), for which Mr. Ogden feel sorry. He, like Mr. Ogden, rests the wish to escape from working life upon retreating to rural houses with staircases and arched windows—household refinements—thinking that these can be exchanged for something, like “happiness” (579) or “pride” (584), contrasting from “raffish and noisy” city (580). They have connected these fascinating feelings or experiences to household luxury items. The mindset held by Mr. Greenwood and Mr. Ogden conforms to the one observed by Adorno: “The difference between work and free time has been branded as a norm in the minds of people” (189). In this story, the content of Mr. Ogden’s and Greenwood’s “free time” is embodied by household refinements—or “genteel goods” (Bushman xix)—the sense of domesticity of which are bound to be opposite from “work.” In The Refinement of America, Bushman states that by “the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth” century in America (xiii), some “industrialist, artisans, merchants, and shopkeepers, whose livings came to depend on the enlarging market for genteel goods” utilized American bourgeoisies’ awe towards gentility to promote and spread gentility (Bushman xix). Consequently, Bushman suggests that American bourgeois consumers are 27.

(35) gradually taught “to consume as well as to work, even when working and saving, not leisure and consumption marked the sure road to success” (xviii). Considering Adorno’s observations of American bourgeois society and Bushman’s historical research on the spread of genteel goods among American bourgeoisie, this chapter argues that Cheever represents that the American bourgeoisie is trapped by a cycle of working and spending money on domestic luxury goods during free time in “The Seaside Houses” because they cannot accept their “place” (Emerson 11), “society” (ibid.), or “connexion of events” (ibid.). This story shows that people have been spending their energy, time and money on pursuing outwardly, rather than inwardly. For example, Mr. Ogden fascinates vacationing in decorous houses filled with luxury goods each year. However, because they are not selfreliant, their methods quickly bore them. All in all, we can observe that although they have (or have had) financial resources to build up the value of life, they all end in failure. Mr. Greenwood fails to achieve happiness for his daughter, and Mr. Ogden fails to establish meaning for his daily life. Mr. Ogden’s daily life is ironically full of boredom "for the last six years" (Cheever 587). Cheever emphasizes that only when one accepts himself and his surroundings will one stop drifting around. Cheever also expresses in “Oh What a Paradise It Seems” that, if people’s purpose of work is to help other people, then their work will not be exhausting. Therefore, they will not long for enjoyments like possessing luxurious goods. Working hours and the time off work ("free time”) would naturally become one.. B.. A Complete Representation from Aspiration to Boredom. In addition to a different angle to represent Adorno’s sense of the cycle of free time and 28.

(36) “unfree” time, this story exhibits a complete process of what a person in a bourgeois society would experience in his/her free time: first, a (generally) cheerful aspiration to escape from work to a rural tourist site, then, a gradual feeling of alienation, and finally, the boredom. Mr. Ogden works in New York City, who spends every summer vacation renting different kinds of seaside houses to stay. While he appears happy exploring all kinds of rented houses and enjoying their facilities, Cheever finally reveals that he has been “bored for the last six years” (587). Mr. Ogden’s experience from excited cheerfulness to utter boredom conforms to Adorno’s “Free Time” theory. 1.. Aspiration. At first, Mr. Ogden seems quite pleased with being able to spend “a month that promises to have no worries of any kind” by renting a new style of house each year away from work (579): Fishing in the spring woods, you step on a clump of wild mint and the fragrance released is like the essence of that day. Walking on the Palatine, bored with antiquities and life in general, you see an owl fly out of the ruins of the palace of Septimius Severus and suddenly that day, that raffish and noisy city all make sense. (580) The reason why bourgeois characters like Mr. Ogden aspires to spend a vacation from work is because, according to Adorno, that the bourgeois society has made them into believing one “must have” a hobby, like, to go for a trip. It would be “better still” that the hobby can be “in accordance with what the ‘leisure industry’ can supply” (190). In this way, the bourgeois’ “need for freedom” is secretly mingled with commercial interests, then “forced upon them once again” (ibid.). Therefore, even the recreational time when one goes far away 29.

(37) from their workplace and enjoy some ruralized vacations is, according to Adorno, “functionalized” (190). 2.. Alienation and Boredom. However, this kind of recreational activity often reveals a sense of emptiness. The “vacuous” essence of the bourgeois’ free time (Adorno 191) makes Mr. Ogden feel like not only “migrants and wanderers” (579), but also gradually like “ghosts.” Mr. Ogden is unable to find the meaning and value of such a drifting life, so he begins to suffer from alienation, and quickly, boredom. Adorno quotes from Schopenhauer in “Free Time”: “People either suffer from the unfulfilled desires of their blind will, or become bored as soon as these desires are satisfied” (191). Adorno intends to express that the Americans are caught in the sufferings of “desires of their blind will” or sufferings of boredom (ibid.). According to Adorno's thesis, people like Mr. Ogden “have been refused freedom” (Adorno 194). But like what this chapter has discussed earlier, he makes it clear in his later writings that the key to avoiding a wandering life like Mr. Ogden’s is to face and accept the present moment.. IV. “The Swimmer” Neddy Merrill is a suburban bourgeois who happens to come up with a brilliant idea of going back to his home one afternoon: he shall swim all the way back home. On his swimming journey, he swims across various swimming pool parties of his suburban neighbors and experiences many kinds of greetings from passionate welcome to cross rejection. Neddy repeatedly asks for alcoholic drinks. When he is almost home, Neddy bursts 30.

(38) into crying. When Neddy arrives home and, still escaping from his dim facts, this story halts with: “He shouted, pounded on the door, tried to force it with his shoulder, and then, looking in at the windows, saw that the place was empty” (737, emphasis added). Cheever has clearly stated at the beginning of this story that his journey contains “a suggestion of escape” (726). Moreover, Neddy’s journey consists of almost entirely of free time recreational activities. When Neddy finally breaks down and cries bitterly, the whole process of this story fits James E. O’Hara’s analysis of this story: that Neddy has “chosen to lose touch with the truth rather than to suffer under its crushing weight” in his John Cheever: A Study of the Short Fiction (1989) (70). Cheever uses the word “empty” to reveal the emptiness and “driftingness” in Neddy’s mind. Cheever presents a repeated process of Neddy’s escaping the fact, temporarily, that he has “suffered some loss of social esteem”, and of his remembering or facing the facts. This story also conforms to Adorno’s theory of free time, but Neddy’s process from aspiration to boredom becomes shorter and shorter. Alcohol or parties only bring him a very short-lived happiness. In Emerson’s terms, this is because Neddy is not at the present moment: There is simply the rose; it is perfect in every moment of its existence. . . . But man postpones or remembers; he does not live in the present, but with reverted eye laments the past[.] . . . He cannot be happy and strong until he, too, lives with nature in the present, above time.” (33-4). Neddy focuses on escaping his past, so he attends parties and drinks alcohol. As a result, the happiness of his recreational activities is short-lived. For fluency of discussion, this chapter refers to Adorno’s theory as “free-time procedure”—from aspiration to boredom—in this story. The “free-time procedure” in this 31.

(39) story is embodied by attending pool parties and binge drinking. Just like what happens in “The Seaside Houses," too, drinking is an action that appears when one has been escaping his/her troubles long enough. In other words, the person in question must have been in agony to need to anesthetize his/her agonized mind with alcohol. This also shows that Neddy has no way to confront himself and he has to paralyze his consciousness and block out (escape) any possibilities to recall his loss of home, family, and job. The narrator suggests Neddy’s deliberate escape: “Was he losing his memory, had his gift for concealing painful facts let him forget that he had sold his house, that his children were in trouble, and that his friend had been ill?” (734). Neddy has shied away from examining himself the entire story. This causes Neddy to sink deeper and deeper into the “free-time procedure.” Cheever’s presentation of repeating the accelerated free-time cycle many times— especially with its gradual speeding up—shows that escape does not solve work-related stress. In other words, Cheever makes it clear that escape cannot lead a person's heart to the path of freedom. Escape brings along a nearly endless nightmare of repetition of aspiration, alienation, and boredom. This repetition is caused by American capitalistic society which, starting from as early as the nineteenth century, provided its middle class citizens with ability to enjoy paid vacations, educated them to admire gentility (and thus spend their savings on related domestic products), and finally, as Adorno observes, trapped the middle class Americans in the vacuous cycle of aspiration and boredom.. 32.

(40) Chapter Two The Journals of John Cheever The critic, Geoff Dyer, comments on The Journals of John Cheever: Cheever was all too familiar with the gin-sodden, mid-twentieth-century residue of this sentiment: “you drink too much at cocktails you talk too much you make a pass at somebody's wife and you end with doing something foolish and obscene and wish in the morning you were dead.” . . . His milieu may seem circumscribed—martinis, swimming pools, lawns—but it has the infinite brevity of that Kierkegaardian dash.1 The comfortable specificity and familiarity of the setting—the way rows are routinely and silently choreographed around the morning’s toast and eggs—is part of a larger torment. (195) Dyer suggests that the “larger torment” reflects the bourgeois everyday life, and, much later in his essay, sexuality: “Cheever’s slow discovery and eventual acceptance of his sexual identity conforms to the larger story of homosexuality in the twentieth century” (197). This chapter argues that Cheever shows an escapist spirit (sometimes presented as longing as the other side of the same coin) during his often bewildered discovery and ponderings on his bisexuality and bourgeois life, and finally presents acceptance on both, conforming to a transcendentalist spirit. Cheever’s discussion about these two themes have to do with a Cold War bourgeois capitalist heteronormative background. During the Cold War, American 1. Dyer quoted Kierkegaard’s diary in a previous passage: “I have just returned from a party of which I was the life and soul; wit poured from my lips, everyone laughed and admired me – but I went away – and the dash should be as long as the earth's orbit ——————————— and wanted to shoot myself” (qtd. in Dyer 195). . 33.

(41) “[g]overnment officials and business leaders presented backyard barbecues, washing machines, and Coca-Cola as proof of the superiority of mass production capitalism to SovietStyle communism,” Freeman argues (114). This suburban lifestyle was also, according to Jimmy Kimmel, “a central fact of postwar America and the new arena for proving one’s manhood” (155). As Communist Russia did not have the suburbs that featured such bourgeois recreational lifestyle, Kimmel states that “[n]o wonder Senator Joseph McCarthy so easily linked homosexuality and communism—both represented gender failure” during the Cold War (155). It is this politically related heteronormative background that becomes the source of most of Cheever’s stress and pain in his journals. Plus, Kimmel states that there is a common concept among the American middle class: “[b]eing a breadwinner and family provider remained the centerpiece of middle-class masculinity” (161). These two concepts among the mid-twentieth century America are what cause Cheever’s stress, as he often struggles to raise his family and over his bisexuality. However, Cheever also has a hunch at the beginning of his journals—what if the stress and pain he feels are actually “an unlocked cell” (8)? He is of course unsure—if not pessimistic—of this hunch when he writes this. Earlier in the same year (1952), Cheever writes in another entry: “I am like a prisoner who is trying to escape from jail by the wrong route. For all one knows, that door may stand open, although I continue to dig a tunnel with a teaspoon” (5). But Cheever later testifies this hunch using his entire life. He records the whole process in his journals. As Chapter One has briefly stated, acceptance is the key. Cheever starts to accept many things in his last years. Before his acceptance, his experiential spirit and ponderings conform to what Henry David Thoreau, an American transcendentalist writer, does in his Walden (1854). Thoreau spent two years living beside Walden Pond, who 34.

(42) recorded every person, thing, social phenomenon, and place he came across. “He continued to collect and revise these observations during the next seven years and published them in the book, Walden, in 1854” (DCR Massachusetts, Walden Pond State Reservation). Cheever records in an entry of his journals in 1978 what he thinks of the function of literature that it bears the “responsibility of continuing [the] dialogue—vital to the life of the planet—that we and our kind carry on with one another, with our landscapes, with our oceans, and with our gods2” (348). Cheever’s using literature—in Chapter Two, his journals—to observe and understand his relationships with people, places, and spiritual subjects shows a similarity with Henry David Thoreau’s Walden. In the very last years of the journals, Cheever arrives at what this chapter calls the stage of “acceptance.” In this stage, Cheever constantly shows the importance of the power of an individual against society. Cheever shows that an individual does not have to suffer under society. There is still hope to achieve “self-reliance.” The reason why Cheever used to be unable to achieve self-reliance is just like what Emerson says in his Self-Reliance: “Discontent is the want of self-reliance” (46). “Discontent” is what Cheever has been obsessed with throughout most of his journals before his stage of acceptance. Emerson is against what he calls “dead Bible-society” (19). This “dead Bible-society” (ibid.) hates “self-reliance” and “requests . . . conformity” (14). “Discontent,” a typical attribute of this society, is “infirmity of will” (46). Therefore, Emerson encourages people to stop being discontented, and “[a]ccept the place the divine providence has found for [them], the society of [their] contemporaries, the connexion of events” (11). Cheever’s last stage is. 2. By “with our oceans, with our gods” (Cheever 348), this statement makes one think of Emerson’s “communication with the internal ocean” (Self-Reliance 38) and his emphasis on an inner divinity that everyone has.. 35.

(43) really like Emerson’s and Thoreau’s thinking. Cheever accepts his image, social status, sexuality, wife, and lover.. I.. Escaping from one Social Status into Another One As a person who is, according to critic R. G. Collins, from “one of shabby gentility”. who is a descendant of Ezekial Cheever but suffers from his father’s “subsequent loss of his money in 1929” (Collins 6), Cheever once wished to “insinuate” himself by joining the middle class as a “spy” so that he could observe and make an “attack” on them (ibid.). Later, he expresses his regret by saying that he has taken his “disguises too seriously” (ibid.): “Last night, folding the bath towel so the monogram would be in the right place . . ., I wondered what I was doing here. This concern for outward order—the flowers, the shining cigarette box—is not only symptomatic of our consciousness of the cruel social disorders with which we are surrounded but also enables us to delay our realization of these social disorders, to overlook the fact that our bread is poisoned. I was born into no true class, and it was my decision, early in life, to insinuate myself into the middle class, like a spy, so that I would have an advantageous position of attack, but I seem . . . to have taken my disguises too seriously” (16) Being able to attack the middle class may be one of his reasons for joining this class. This entry shows that being able to use money freely—to enjoy a “privilege of an unconstrained, comfortable life-style” (Adorno 187)3—is another important reason for joining the middle. 3. Adorno states that this is what people are after when “they are seeking to escape in their hours without work” (188, emphasis added).. 36.