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Allegory
Definition of Allusion
In literature, an allusion is an unexplained reference to someone or something outside of the text. Writers commonly allude to other literary works, famous individuals, historical events, or philosophical ideas... read full definition
In literature, an allusion is an unexplained reference to someone or something outside of the text. Writers commonly allude to other literary works, famous individuals... read full definition
In literature, an allusion is an unexplained reference to someone or something outside of the text. Writers commonly allude to... read full definition
Chapter 7: Politics
Explanation and Analysis—Patient Continues Fantasy:
Chapter 7, titled "Politics," contains the following political allusion:
I can’t remember if it was E. Howard Hunt or G. Gordon Liddy who said, during the Watergate hearings, that he’d nightly held his hand in a candle flame till his palm burned to assure himself he could stand up to torture. Whoever it was, we knew about it already: the Bay of Pigs, the seared skin, the bare-handed killers who’d do anything. We’d seen the previews, Wade, Georgina, and I, along with an audience of nurses whose reviews ran something like this: “Patient lacked affect after accident”, “Patient continues fantasy that father is CIA operative with dangerous friends.”
Kaysen often utilizes political, historical and pop culture allusions throughout the book. These allusions simultaneously emphasize the distance between the women in the ward and the outside world and remind the reader that, fundamentally, life inside the ward is not so different from life anywhere else.
E. Howard Hunt was a writer and intelligence officer central to the Bay of Pigs Invasion, and G. Gordon Liddy was an FBI agent implicated in the Watergate scandal. The quote Kaysen refers to is commonly attributed to Liddy. Both men mentioned were high-ranking, powerful operatives (seen by society as wholly different from people like Susanna and Georgina), and yet Liddy and Georgina both engaged in the exact same activity of burning themselves on purpose. For powerful men like Liddy, this behavior is likely to be seen as a sign of toughness, while in adolescent girls like Georgina, it is seen as "craziness." This allusion, like many others throughout the text, asks how identities like gender and class shape society's perspective on "crazy" behavior.
Related Themes:
Chapter 26: The Shadow of the Real
Explanation and Analysis—Tunnels:
Susanna has an obsession with the tunnels that run underneath McLean. She describes them with the following imagery, which also contains an allusion, in Chapter 26:
First their wonderful smell: They smelled of laundry, clean and hot and slightly electrified, like warmed wiring. Then their temperature: eighty at a minimum, and this when it was thirty-three outside, probably twenty-five with windchill (though in the innocent sixties, windchill, like digital time, hadn’t yet been discovered). Their quavery yellow light, their long yellow-tiled walls and barrel-vaulted ceilings, their forks and twists and roads not taken, whose yellow openings beckoned like shiny open mouths.
For Susanna, the tunnels are a sign of hope for the future. She says so to Melvin, her therapist, when he argues they represent the womb. The intensity of this imagery shows how much space they take up in her brain. Aspects of the tunnels, such as their "wonderful smell," their "yellow light," and their "vaulted ceilings," conjure a type of paradise or nirvana. "Forks and twists and roads not taken" in the tunnels represent the vastness of life's possibilities on the outside of McLean, as does the image of "beckoning shiny open mouths."
These lines also contain allusions to "The Road Not Taken," a 1915 poem by acclaimed poet Robert Frost dealing with how one confronts life's wide array of choices. The poem's famous first two lines are: "Two roads diverged in a yellow wood / And sorry I could not travel both." These lines are recalled by Kaysen's images of "roads not taken" and "yellow light." For Susanna, the tunnels' vastness and dense network of paths represent the very concept of choice—something she longs to have access to but often lacks within the confines of the hospital.
Related Themes:
