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Chapter 3
Themes
and Colors
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in American Pastoral, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Heroes, Legends, and Myth-Making
Family, Responsibility, and Duty
The Irrationality of Suffering
The Unknowability of Others
American Ideals
Summary
Analysis
A small, pale young woman who claims to be several years older than Merry but looks like a young girl comes to the Swede’s factory four months after Merry goes missing. The young woman, Rita Cohen, claims to be a student at the Wharton School of Business writing her thesis on the leather industry in Newark. She has come to the Swede for research. He didn’t know at the time that she was “Merry’s mentor in the world revolution” or that she’d somehow gotten around the FBI agents monitoring the building. In retrospect, the Swede guesses that she held off on alerting him to her connection to Merry until after the tour to “size up the Swede first,” or perhaps she was just messing with him.
As subsequent scenes will make clearer, Rita Cohen isn’t exactly a real figure in the Swede’s real life—rather, her character functions as a storytelling device through which Nathan Zuckerman can examine the Swede’s feelings of guilt and confusion as he tries to make sense of Merry’s act of terrorism. Thus, Zuckerman creates Rita, “Merry’s mentor in the world revolution,” to figuratively show the Swede’s struggle to accept Merry’s responsibility for her crime. In the Swede’s eyes, Merry is still his blameless daughter—and, therefore, someone else must be to blame for forcing Merry to do the horrible thing she did.
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Rita is charming and seems genuinely fascinated as the Swede shows her how gloves are made. The Swede is impressed as she asks questions about every last detail. She reminds the Swede of Merry, before she became a sullen teenager—Merry used to be so excited by her father’s business. At some point in the tour, the Swede starts calling Rita “honey.” The Swede eagerly guides Rita through the process. He feels happy for the first time in a long time, with this young woman who “kn[o]w[s] the value of hard work and paying attention” by his side, and he measures Rita’s hand and asks his “Master” cutter, an old man named Harry, to cut leather for a pair of gloves to be made in Rita’s size. He praises Harry’s skill, noting that the man has been with Newark Maid for 41 years.
Rita feigns interest in the Swede’s work to ingratiate herself with him and to be cruel. It’s clear from the Swede’s calling Rita “honey” that he immediately sees in Rita a younger Merry, back when she was still his sweet little girl who loved seeing her daddy at work. Later, when Rita comes clean with the Swede about her real intentions for this visit, one may surmise that the revelation may prompt the Swede to reevaluate Merry’s own interest in the Swede and his work—was any of that ever real?
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The Swede explains that he learned how to cut gloves from Harry. He says he “learned this business in the old-fashioned way. From the ground up.” When he was just starting out, the Swede says to Rita, his father (Lou) made him sweep the floors, then learn to cut from Harry. Harry would say that if anyone thought he was a skilled cutter, then they should have seen his father.
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The Swede enthusiastically tells a story about Harry’s father making a perfect-fitting pair of gloves for a giant man who performed with the circus—he got the man’s size right just by eyeballing his hands. When the Swede explains that they ran a story about it in the Newark News, Harry corrects him: “The Star-Eagle.” Harry tells Rita his father couldn’t speak a word of English, and Rita replies that it just proves that “you don’t have to know English […] to cut a perfect pair of gloves for a man nine feet tall.” The Swede laughs, but Harry does not. Rita continues to ask questions about the tradition of leather cutting and glove making, praising the Swede and his business. Only after the forewoman, Vicky, presents Rita with the gloves and then shuts the door does Rita turn to the Swede and whisper, “She wants her Audrey Hepburn scrapbook.”
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The next morning, the Swede meets Rita at the Newark airport parking lot and hands her the scrapbook. He pleads with Rita to tell him anything about Merry, but Rita refuses. She insists that Merry hates the Swede and Dawn and never wants to speak with them again. Antagonistically, Rita asks how much the Swede pays his workers in his factory in Ponce, Puerto Rico. She calls him an exploitative “shitty little capitalist” who exploits minorities. Inwardly, the Swede scoffs at the “loathsome kid with a head full of fantasies about ‘the working class.’” He’s tried to keep these thoughts to himself, feeling that staying in Rita’s good graces is the only way to have even a small chance to see Merry, but his anger finally overtakes him. He accuses Rita of never having had a job herself and of knowing nothing about how the world works.
Rita shifts her focus to Dawn, accusing her of trying “to make [Merry] into a debutante.” When the Swede argues that Merry worked on Dawn’s farm from the time she was a young girl, Rita calls this totally “fake.” Dawn’s cattle business was just a wealthy woman pretending to farm. Rita accuses the Swede and Dawn of fixing Merry’s hair, buying her nice clothes, and giving Merry dance lessons and tennis lessons not out of love, but for the sake of appearances. Rita suggests that Merry’s obsession with Audrey Hepburn was only ever an attempt to gain Dawn’s approval. Merry, Rita suggests, felt stifled and unhappy with a mother who refused to acknowledge the “dark” aspects of the world. She lists other humiliations Merry suffered under Dawn, like a “Now You Are a Woman” party Dawn supposedly threw to announce Merry’s first period. The Swede insists the party never happened.
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The Swede demands to know where Merry is. When he emphasizes that Merry has been “accused of murder,” Rita counters that many, many Vietnamese have been killed in the war. She insists that Merry is safe, “loved,” and “fighting for what she believes in.” She reminds the Swede that Merry isn’t his “possession” any longer. In his head, the Swede reasons that this can’t be true: Merry must be under the control of this horrid Rita Cohen and her stupid, superficial ideas. He hadn’t known it was possible for someone to be so horrible, but he reminds himself that Rita is his only chance at seeing Merry again and tries to make nice with her.
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The Swede recalls the immediate aftermath of the bombing. Apparently, Merry had gone around school the day before telling her peers, “Quaint Old Rimrock is in for a big surprise.” This is the evidence against her, for in fact no one saw Merry anywhere near the post office the morning of the attack.
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In retrospect, the Swede thinks, he should have told the FBI about Rita Cohen. But Dawn, in her desperation to see Merry again, insists they try to handle things themselves and go along with whatever Rita asks of them. She thinks they can find Merry and keep her hidden themselves, until the war ends and everything blows over. Dawn, in her heart, believes Merry has “been tricked” by political radicals and that if they do things right, things will be okay.
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Out of love for Dawn, the Swede arranges to meet Rita Cohen at a room in the New York Hilton. Per her instructions, he arrives with $5,000 in cash. Dawn believes Merry herself will be in the hotel room. But when the Swede arrives, it’s only Rita Cohen there. Now, she’s dressed in a garish, thrifted floral dress. Her childlike face is plastered in horrible makeup. She alternatively antagonizes and tries to seduce the Swede, hiking her dress up to reveal her genitals. “Let’s f-f-f-fuck, D-d-d-dad,” she begs, reclining on the bed. Despite the “repugnance” he feels for her, he feels an instinctual “lust.” Rita tells the Swede he has to have sex with her if he wants her to lead him to Merry.
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Themes
When the Swede asks to know what Rita’s behavior now has to do with what happened to Merry, she continues to antagonize him, attacking his refusal to look at her exposed body. Mocking the Swede’s earlier demonstration of how to size ladies’ gloves, Rita gestures toward her exposed genitals and asks him to guess the size of her vagina. At some point, the Swede guesses, Rita must have stuck her fingers inside herself, because when she pushes her hand toward him he detects a “fecund smell” on it. Rita places her fingers inside her mouth. “It tastes like your d-d-d-daughter,” she shrieks. With this, the Swede gets up and runs from the room. He immediately calls the FBI, but by the time they arrive at the room, Rita is nowhere in sight.
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Five years pass, but Rita doesn’t return to the Newark Maid factory. Bombs continue to go off throughout the country, in cities and on college campuses. A bomb even explodes in the women’s restroom of the Pentagon. The Swede is convinced that Rita is behind at least one of these attacks and that it’s only a matter of time before the authorities apprehend her. Some attacks are orchestrated by an offshoot of the Students for a Democratic Society called the Weathermen. The Swede imagines that Rita has forced Merry to be involved in these attacks, too. The Swede thinks back to when Merry was becoming more interested in the sciences. Her stutter seemed to lessen when she was focused on a project, so he and Dawn had happily encouraged it. It seemed “totally innocent” then, and realistically no parent would have connected this interest to a bomb.
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When an anonymous caller warns of a planned attack on a midtown building in Manhattan, police manage to evacuate janitors and other workers, saving lives. The Swede imagines that this bomber and Merry are the same—she knows now to call first so that innocent people don’t die. Merry “has learned something,” at least, and so there’s reason to continue waiting and hoping that she’ll someday return to her family.
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The Swede reads about the parents of two young women who are also missing and wanted for questioning about a recent explosion. The mother of a missing girl who used their family home to make bombs pleads for her daughter to return home and not “add more sorrow to this tragedy.” When Merry went missing, the Swede himself said “We love you and want to help.” One mother of a missing girl later reports that they know their daughter is safe. Meanwhile the Swede and Dawn have no such knowledge of Merry, who, unlike “these privileged townhouse bombers” is “innocent.”
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The Swede thinks back to 1962 or 1963, back before the war was really underway, when the news showed footage of a Vietnamese monk setting himself on fire in protest. The monk doesn’t shout out or even flinch as his body erupts in flames. He shows no sign of pain at all. In contrast, the Swede, Dawn, and Merry are horrified at the televised self-immolation. The only words 11-year-old Merry can say are, “these gentle p-p-p-people…” Later, she is so terrified that she asks to get into bed with her parents. As she pesters them with endless, agonized questions about why the violent act happened and why no one seems to care, they can think of no satisfactory answers. They tell her it’s a good thing that she has such a “well-developed conscience,” while so many people in the world do not.
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Later, the Swede reads from the papers and tries to explain why the monk set himself on fire. It was about the South Vietnamese president, General Diem, and his corrupt government. The Swede tries to speak of complex political conflict, but for Merry the issue becomes about “the extremes to which gentle people have to resort” to bring about change. Just when she gets over that first immolation, another monk sets himself on fire, then a third and fourth. Merry watches them all, and her parents don’t know how to stop her. The Swede becomes disturbed when it seems as though Merry’s horror has morphed into curiosity.
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The Swede tries to distract Merry from the mounting horrors, taking his family to Yankee games and on a vacation to Puerto Rico. In the end, Merry’s anxiety only stops once the immolations stop. When Diem is assassinated months later (by the USA, who had earlier backed his authority, it was later reported), Merry doesn’t seem to notice—and the Swede doesn’t tell her. She doesn’t talk about the monks’ martyrdom again, and for this reason it seemed that the monks’ actions couldn’t have anything to do with Merry’s own act of violence—and yet the Swede can think of no other explanation.
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Five years after Swede’s last encounter with Rita Cohen, a young Black philosophy professor named Angela Davis—a Communist, anti-war professor at UCLA—is tried for kidnapping, murder, and conspiracy. She is accused of supplying arms used to free three Black San Quentin convicts, a scheme that resulted in a judge’s death. Davis goes into hiding for two months after the government presses charges against her. She’s later reprehended in New York and sent to California for trial. Her supporters claim she is being framed. The Swede watches news coverage of Davis’s case obsessively. He feels that Angela Davis is the key to Merry’s return.
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The Swede remembers going through Merry’s room years ago on a day when she was in New York. He found a copy of The Communist Manifesto in her desk and wondered where she’d gotten it. He realized that she wasn’t just involved with people who were against the war, but with people who wanted to dismantle capitalism and the U.S. government. Now, he thinks he might have seen something written by Angela Davis there, too, but he can’t know for sure—the FBI confiscated everything when they searched her room. He suddenly has a vivid memory of trying to read the Davis book at Merry’s desk, finding it impenetrable and feeling amazed that Merry could understand it.
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Literary Devices
Now, as though by magic, Angela Davis begins to appear before the Swede in his kitchen. He takes it as a sign. As Angela Davis speaks, he dutifully listens to everything she says, imagining it is the key to seeing Merry again. On the TV, Davis says that everything he has heard about Communism is a lie—that he has to go to Cuba to really understand it. She says that imperialism is a weapon wealthy white people use to pay Black workers less for their labor. She praises Merry as “a soldier of freedom.”
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Literary Devices
The Swede tells Angela Davis about how Vicky, the Black forelady with two college-graduate sons, was the only one to stay with him in the factory during the 1967 riots. During the riots, the Swede chooses to stay in the building against government orders, thinking he might protect it against vandals. Vicky makes signs that read, “Most of this factory’s employees are NEGROES” and places them in the windows. The windows are later shot out by white guys—likely Newark cops, Vicky suspects.
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When Vicky goes down to the armed National Guardsmen with hot coffee, she urges them not to shoot at so-called “snipers.” She bangs on the door of a tank stationed outside the factory and pleads with the men not to do too much damage to the neighborhood—this is people’s home, she reminds them. Later, the governor is criticized for sending in the Guard, but the Swede is secretly grateful (this last part, he doesn’t tell Angela Davis). The Swede realizes then that Vicky cares as much about the factory as he does. He vows to keep the business in Newark to not abandon his Black employees. He will never admit that his real reason for not joining the other businesses that left en masse was that it would finally confirm to Merry that everything she thought about him was true, after all.
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Following the riots, the quality of work at Newark Maid diminishes markedly, in large part due to employees’ indifference. Lou Levov repeatedly begs the Swede to hurry up and move the business elsewhere before subsequent riots destroy the factory for good. He is furious that his business—which he built from the ground up, all on his own—is on the verge of collapse now that “they” are taking the city and reducing it to “ruins.”
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Lou hired “schvartzes” (Black people) despite his colleagues’ warnings, and he “treated them like human beings.” He even threw a graduation party for Vicky’s twins. And now he’s being made the fool. When his friends say “they ought to take the schvartzes and line ‘em up and shoot ‘em,” it’s Lou who reminds them that this is “what Hitler did to the Jews.” And even then, Lou’s friends insist he’s wrong. In response, the Swede suggests that sometimes you have to argue for something out of “conscience.” Lou retorts that his Black employees should have a conscience, then, and remain loyal to Newark Maid. Despite Lou’s many complaints, the Swede could not move the factory out of Newark. He cannot risk Merry finding out if he ever wanted to see her again.
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In the present, continuing his imagined address to Angela Davis, the Swede tells her he attends meetings across the city despite the danger. He works for the liberation of Black people. He lies and tells her he believes Merry is in fact “a solider of freedom,” and that he is proud of what she has done. In secret, he wishes and prays for Angela Davis’s acquittal. When she is acquitted, he feels overjoyed, though he does not send Davis his letter. Instead, he sits alone at his kitchen table and continues to wrack his brain for answers about why “he still cannot do anything that he should do or believe anything that he should believe or even know any longer what it is he does believe.” What could he have done differently? Should he have had sex with Rita Cohen, like she asked? “Is that what any father would have done?”
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For a year following Merry’s disappearance, the Swede can’t go into town without seeing where the general store once stood. He and Dawn hear gossip about them around town (“What can you expect? They have no business being out here to begin with.”) The local Community Club bulletin board posts numerous articles that have been written about Merry. One is an interview with Edgar Bartley, a boy who took Merry on a date some years before the bombing. Bartley said Merry had been a nice girl who must have just snapped. In the aftermath of the bombing, he says, he’s no longer so trusting of anyone. Another article written about Merry following the bombing writes of her “stubborn streak,” which enrages the Swede for its “smugness.”
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When a new general store, McPherson’s, replaces Hamlin’s, the Swede vows to start shopping there alongside all the other villagers. The owners are new to town and care little of the past, but Dawn refuses to shop at the store. The Swede makes a point to go there on Saturdays and talk nonsense about the weather with Beth McPherson, just as he used to do with Mary Hamlin back when it was Hamlin’s general store. And so, this is what has become of the Swede’s “outer life.” But there’s an “inner life,” too, and it’s full of “horrible imaginings, fantasy conversations, unanswerable questions.” He feels constant “remorse,” too, for that kiss when Merry was 11. Could that kiss be what prompted Merry’s savage act of violence? In the face of his inner agony, though, the Swede goes on living, “with all the shame of masquerading as the ideal man.”
