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Chapter 8
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
One of the girls the Levovs hired to help at the dinner tells the Swede he has a phone call. The Swede takes the call in Dawn’s downstairs study. It’s Rita Cohen. “They” have been following him, Rita tells him. Angrily, she asks the Swede why he refused to lie to Merry and say that he had sex with Rita in the hotel room. As Rita talks, the Swede look at the model home that Bill Orcutt earlier placed in the office. He sees the bed in the model bedroom, “awaiting its two occupants.” The Swede considers that if Merry lied about knowing Rita, then she might also have been lying about Sheila hiding her—and then, he and Sheila can still run away to Ponce when Dawn and Orcutt move in together. If Lou Levov drops dead as a result of all that, “they’d just have to bury him.”
Rita Cohen’s reemergence here ups the tension as the narrative approaches its climax in the final chapter—the surreal quality of her character exacerbates the Swede’s already frenzied, agitated state after seeing what has become of Merry and learning about Dawn’s affair. His sudden impulse to run away with Sheila—someone he now despises, knowing that she hid the fugitive Merry and didn’t tell him about it—shows how at the height of his confused anguish, he has abandoned all logic and reason. His glib pronouncement that if Lou drops dead out of shame and disappointment at this, “they’d just have to bury him,” reinforces the Swede’s new rejection of the morals and conventions that have thus far informed all his actions.
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Themes
The Swede wonders if Merry is lying, and perhaps no Rita Cohen exists at all. But then he grounds himself. Of course Rita exists. Someone must have brainwashed her, “someone corrupt and cynical and distorted”— Merry can’t have done all the horrible things she has done on her own. Rita mocks the Swede for thinking he ought to bring Merry back “to all [the] dopey pleasures” of his middle-class existence and rip her away from her present life of “holiness.” The Swede’s thoughts of anger and confusion race until his mind suddenly stills. He thinks, if only briefly, that “his capacity for suffering no longer exists.”
Yet again, the Swede demonstrates his refusal to confront and accept the disintegration of his idyllic American pastoral when he refuses to acknowledge Merry’s guilt. Merry’s crime and all the suffering it brought into his formerly idyllic life has tested the Swede’s faith in institutions, in social norms, and in America in general. With his passing thought that “his capacity for suffering no longer exists,” the Swede—like the biblical Job—suggests that perhaps he’s finally ready to give up on moral uprightness.
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Themes
The Swede hangs up the phone and the thought strikes him that Rita is back, and something awful must be on the verge of happening. Tonight, things will come crashing down. Suddenly he hears a knock at the door—it’s Sheila. The Swede grabs Sheila and pushes her against the door. “You took her in!” he hisses. An angry confrontation ensues. Sheila insists that nothing she did changed things for Merry. She already blew up the building. And Sheila didn’t know about the bombing when Merry first arrived at her door—she only heard about it on the news later that day. And Merry was already in her house by then—what was Sheila to do?
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Themes
The Swede insists Sheila should have called him. “You lock her in the house and keep her there.” Sheila insists that Merry was in a horrible state, “yelling about the war and her family.” She talked about the Swede with such hatred that Sheila wondered if something “very wrong had happened to that girl.” In retrospect, Sheila admits, “I think maybe that’s what I was trying to figure out when we were together.” The affair settled Sheila’s doubts, though, assuring her that the Swede was in fact “kind and compassionate,” just as she’d thought before Merry bombed the post office.
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Themes
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Sheila holds tight to her conviction that there’s nothing she could have done, even after the Swede tells Sheila that Merry went on to kill three other people, and that Sheila could have prevented those deaths by telling him. Their argument unsettled, the Swede rejoins the others on the candlelit terrace. Dessert—a strawberry-rhubarb pie from McPherson’s—has been served. Now that the conversation has moved on from Deep Throat, the Umanoffs and Bill Orcutt are once more chatting amiably together. Sylvia is chatting with Dawn and the Salzmans. The Swede lies and tells Dawn he was taking a business call. Lou and Jessie aren’t outside. Sylvia explains that they “went somewhere together.”
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Themes
Literary Devices
Bill Orcutt tells the Swede that Lou has taken Jessie into the kitchen to eat a slice of fresh pie the right way, standing in the kitchen with a glass of milk. The Swede looks at Orcutt and remembers when he dumped Orcutt in a pick-up football game years ago. Orcutt had been more aggressive than the Swede thought acceptable for a simple pick-up game, and so he momentarily showed his athletic prowess to catch a long pass from Bucky Robinson, push Orcutt down, and “prance” off to score. That, the Swede remembers thinking, would teach Orcutt to look down on him. Now, the Swede realizes Orcutt has always been no good. He comments on seeing Orcutt’s model home in Dawn’s office, noting “I think you’re going to be very happy in it,” not realizing his error.
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Themes
Just then, the Swede realizes that he should have forced Merry to come home—he needs to go back to the dilapidated old boarding house and get her. If he finds Rita is there with Merry, he’ll kill her. He can drive and get Merry now, but what about Lou? The man would die if he were to see Merry in her present state.
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Themes
The Swede returns to Dawn and holds her hand, and he realizes then that he cannot imagine life without her, just as he imagines she must want to return to him. “But she can’t because it’s all too awful.” She birthed a murderer, and she can’t live with that. The Swede realizes he should have listened to his father when he said not to marry Dawn. It was the one time he disobeyed his father, but it was the one time that mattered. And the marriage had proven Lou correct: in raising Merry as neither a Catholic nor a Jew, she became “first a stutterer, then a killer, then a Jain.”
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Themes
The Swede members how he secretly brought Dawn to the factory to meet with Lou, to try to resolve their differences. He pleaded with Dawn not to mention to Lou about any of “the stuff”—the crosses, the Virgin Mary sculptures—her family has at home. They’re “sore subjects” with Lou. The Swede wasn’t defending his father’s views, but he wanted the meeting between Lou and Dawn to go as smoothly as it possibly could. Dawn, irritated, didn’t want to lie. The Swede felt stuck.
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The Swede next recalls Lou’s discovery of Merry’s baptismal certificate—Dawn had done it in secret, with her mother, and she only told the Swede after she returned home that evening. Lou found out when Merry was six years old. Lou would go on to blame this, the Christmas tree, and her grandma Dwyer’s influence for all the trouble that Merry got into after. Grandma Dwyer would take Merry to church with her whenever she got the chance, and Lou resented it despite the Swede’s insistence that Merry didn’t take any of the religion seriously.
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Themes
The scene returns to the meeting between Dawn and Lou at the factory that the Swede arranged before he and Dawn married. Lou grills Dawn about her Catholicism and her family’s Catholicism. Dawn insists she isn’t particularly religious, though her mother (Grandma Dwyer) attends church every Sunday. Dawn insists she doesn’t find anything too wrong with it. She describes the image of baby Jesus in the manger as a “pleasant and comforting” scene that is important for its depiction of “humility.” She doesn’t see what’s so wrong or bad about it.
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Themes
Lou asks what Dawn’s parents say about Jewish people. Dawn at first just says that when she was a little girl, she didn’t like the thought of her Jewish school friend not going to heaven. Then she admits that her mother has said “the usual things you hear” about Jewish people: that they are “pushy” and “materialistic.” Her father sometimes says “Jew” in a derogatory fashion but insists it’s not out of genuine hatred.
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The subject of children arises, and Dawn admits she’d like for her child to be baptized. She explains that it’s about washing away original sin so a child can get into heaven. Lou says he can compromise and allow the baptism, but he draws the line at First Communion—he won’t have his grandchild “eat Jesus.” When Lou brings up the subject of a Bar Mitzvah, Dawn starts to become overwhelmed and wants to end the conversation. Lou tells her he admires her for “fighting this fight,” and he insists they continue—“later never works,” he insists. “We work it out now or never.” Dawn refuses a Bar Mitzvah, Lou says they don’t have an agreement, and Dawn replies that in that case, she and the Swede just won’t have any children. Lou, frustrated, suggests everyone just go their separate ways. He ends the conversation abruptly.
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Eventually, though, Lou caved. Dawn and the Swede were married, and Merry was born and secretly baptized. Until Dawn’s father died in 1959, both sides of the family got together each year for Thanksgiving in Old Rimrock. Dawn’s father and Lou even got along well, reminiscing to each other about the way life used to be. It was harder for Mrs. Dwyer and Sylvia Levov to find common ground. Mrs. Dwyer would prattle on about church and Sylvia would sit and smile in silence, too polite to do otherwise. They would get along well enough, seeing one another only once a year to gather around the table to eat “one colossal turkey.”
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Themes
Back in the present, Dawn happily recalls a trip to Europe she, the Swede, and Merry took when Merry was a little girl. They walked the streets of Paris with baguettes sticking out of their pockets, knowing they looked like typical American tourists, “a couple of rubes from New Jersey,” but they hadn’t cared. She laughs as she remembers throwing all their luggage out of the moving train after the staff had forgotten to wake them when the train arrived at the platform that morning.
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Themes
Dawn carries on about the Levovs’ European vacation. Sheila listens intently, and the Swede thinks she must be pretending: she can’t not be rattled by their recent confrontation in the study. Shelly Salzman, meanwhile, seems genuinely to be listening, “under Dawn’s spell,” transfixed by her charm. It strikes the Swede that Dawn has gone on “as though nothing had happened.” She looks radiant, and the Swede feels a renewed tenderness toward her and her robust, simple straightforwardness.
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Sheila, meanwhile, looks dull and “severely withheld” compared to Dawn. The Swede cannot grasp how he once found her more attractive than Dawn and contemplates the “broken, helpless” creature he was in the aftermath of Merry’s crime and disappearance. Perhaps the attraction of Sheila was simply that she was someone else, and he needed a distraction from all he had lost. He wanted to pretend to be someone else. But that was what made it so wrong: it was Dawn alone he wanted to be with, and Dawn who had inspired him to accomplish his greatest feat: “The feat of standing up to his father.” And she had done that by “looking as spectacular as she looked and yet talking like everyone else.”
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The Swede wonders whether it is for deep reasons or arbitrary, irrational reasons that people long for a lifelong mate. Sheila, ever inquisitive, would know. Meanwhile, Dawn continues to talk about Europe. Sheila asks about the farms in Zug, and her interest in “figuring it all out” suddenly enrages the Swede. He considers how exhausting he finds “deep thinkers,” who have never built anything themselves or known how things are built, yet still believe they know all.
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As the others chat, the Swede imagines the possible ramifications of telling Sheila, and Jerry on the phone earlier, about Merry’s three other murders. He becomes certain that Sheila will go home and tell Shelly—her even-keeled, ethical husband—who will know that the only thing to do is to call the police and report it. And it will be because, in Shelly’s mind, “she was a little bitch who deserved it.” The Swede imagines calling Shelly later that night and pleading with him to not say anything, to give the Swede a chance to bring Merry home and protect her.
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But then the Swede realizes that the police probably already know, because Jerry has likely already called them. Jerry has turned on his own brother and turned him in to the authorities for hiding a fugitive. And the Swede, by calling Jerry in a moment of vulnerability, has “planted his own bomb.”
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Just then, the Swede hears Lou shout, “No!” from the kitchen, and he is certain that Merry has come home on her own and confessed to all four killings to her grandfather—and Lou, unable to accept this confession from the ragged, foul-smelling creature who pretends to be his granddaughter, has dropped dead on the spot.
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The others run into the kitchen to find Lou standing beside the table with blood on his face. His face is blank as he tries not to weep. It’s the first time he appears to understand that he lacks the power to “prevent anything” he doesn’t want to happen. Jessie Orcutt sits at the table, a half-empty plate and a glass of milk in front of her. One of the hired girls explains that Lou had been feeding Jessie pie and trying to explain to her that she needed to stop drinking. He praised her with each bite of pie she swallowed, and he laughed in delight when suddenly she cried out, “I feed Jessie,” and took the fork from him. Then she stabbed him with the fork, aiming for his eye.
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Bill Orcutt picks up Jessie, who looks completely unaware “that she ha[]s overstepped a boundary fundamental to civilized life.” Jessie missed Lou’s eye by less than an inch. Marcia remarks on Jessie’s good aim for being so drunk. And then Marcia starts to laugh, delighting in the unraveling of the Levovs’ civilized, conventional life. It is clear that “the breach had been pounded in their fortification, even out here in secure Old Rimrock,” and that things will never be the same again.
