“A democracy is nothing more than mob rule, where fifty-one percent of the people may take away the rights of the other forty-nine.” -Thomas Jefferson
In 1852, Harriet Beecher Stowe took a stand against the important and timely issue of slavery in her influential novel Uncle Tom's Cabin. Her work is said to have energized abolitionist movements in the North. Joel Johnson (2008) notes that rather than attacking those directly involved in the slave trade, "Stowe focused her efforts on converting to abolitionism the unwilling and unwitting accomplices of slavery: namely, those who disliked the institution but did little to undermine it (e.g., the Shelbys), and those who falsely considered themselves innocent of the matter (e.g., most northerners)." In doing so, and in differentiating between the various ways people respond to grim injustice, Johnson (2008) argues that Stowe's story did even more than inspire an anti-slavery movement and Civil War mentality; it provided "insights into both the variety of reactions to injustices, and the variety of tactics necessary to end those injustices" that seemed to be universal and could thus be broadly applied.
Fiction has also been used to address such dangers as concentrated political and economic power and the ever-growing destructive and oppressive capabilities of technology. Almost 100 years after Stowe took on slavery, Aldous Huxley warned against another form of oppression. In his 1932 novel, Brave New World, Huxley combined his penchant for satirical writing with his interest in science to construct a future dystopian world whose inhabitants are robbed of their individuality by a tyrannical, technologically-savvy regime. Stories of this nature are often related to existing social concerns. For instance, George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, which tells similar cautionary tale of bureaucracy, conditioning, and technology, was written in 1949 when, by virtue of World War II and the Cold War, such issues were high on the international consciousness. In 1939, at the tail end of the Great Depression, a disenchanted John Steinbeck wrote Grapes of Wrath to expose the misery and hopelessness associated with the economic hardship of many Americans.
Other works, such as Ursula K. Le Guin's The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas (1973) and Lois Lowry's The Giver (1993), inspire the intellectually and emotionally deep thinking crucial to a beneficent body of self-governing, majority-ruled citizens, challenging the very nature of seemingly simple concepts like normalcy and morality. Le Guin paints a literary picture of a perfect society, where happiness abounds, bellies are filled, and pain does not exist--except, unfortunately, for the pain of the single child-scapegoat, who endures all the suffering, loneliness, and terror of the entire community. Le Guin (n.d.) describes a small, dingy cellar, in which a small, piteous child sits: "It could be a boy or a girl. It looks about six, but actually is nearly ten. It is feeble-minded. Perhaps it was born defective, or perhaps it has become imbecile through fear, malnutrition, and neglect. It picks its nose and occasionally fumbles vaguely with its toes or genitals, as it sits hunched in the corner farthest from the bucket and the two mops. It is afraid of the mops. It finds them horrible. It shuts its eyes, but it knows the mops are still standing there; and the door is locked; and nobody will come." The citizens know of this child. They are told of its existence as they come of age. Though they may not understand why, they know that "that their happiness, the beauty of their city, the tenderness of their friendships, the health of their children, the wisdom of their scholars, the skill of their makers, even the abundance of their harvest and the kindly weathers of their skies, depend wholly on this child’s abominable misery." Some even come to see "the wretched one" for themselves. Those who visit the child are overcome with shock and disgust, and often go home to cry bitter tears of rage. But, understanding that the wondrousness of Omelas would wither away if the child were helped, most recover fairly quickly from any charitable urges. "Now do you believe in them?" Le Guin asks, "Are they not more credible? But there is one more thing to tell, and this is quite incredible." Some people, she explains, do more than brood and cry:
"These people go out into the street, and walk down the street alone. They keep walking, and walk straight out of the city of Omelas, through the beautiful gates. They keep walking across the farmlands of Omelas. Each one goes alone, youth or girl, man or woman. Night falls; the traveler must pass down village streets, between the houses with yellow-lit windows, and on out into the darkness of the fields. Each alone, they go west or north, towards the mountains. They go on. They leave Omelas, they walk ahead into the darkness, and they do not come back. The place they go towards is a place even less imaginable to most of us than the city of happiness. I cannot describe it at all. It is possible that it does not exist. But they seem to know where they are going, the ones who walk away from Omelas."Lowry's tale, The Giver, crafts a similar situation. According to Lowry's website (n.d.), The Giver is set in a "seemingly ideal world: a world without conflict, poverty, unemployment, divorce, injustice, or inequality... [where] family values are paramount, teenage rebellion is unheard of, and even good manners are a way of life." It is a world in which emotions, relationships, end even the weather are controlled, pain and color are eliminated, and individuality suppressed. Lowry tells the story of a boy named Jonas who is entrusted with the unusual and little-known task of receiving from "The Giver" the often disturbing memories of the outside world, one characterized by war, color, lust, changing weather, and suffering rather than perfection and Sameness. In the end, Jonas flees the society in an attempt to save a less-than-perfect baby boy who is scheduled to be "released" (or euthanized) when he proves unable to sleep soundly through the night. Though written for a young audience, the story boldly "questions every value we have taken for granted and reexamines our most deeply held beliefs" (Lowry, n.d.).
References
Lois Lowry. (2011). Books: The Giver. Retrieved from http://www.loislowry.com/giver.htmlJohnson, J. A. (2008). Modes of Moral Reasoning in Uncle Tom's Cabin. Conference Papers -- American Political Science Association, 1-28. Retrieved from EBSCOhost.
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