Corruption, Purity, and Accommodation Theme Analysis

Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption represents the world as a corrupt place, where people can become entirely corrupt, protect their purity but remain ineffectual, or accommodate some corruption to achieve good ends without becoming entirely corrupt themselves. The novella’s ending suggests the third path, accommodation, is best. In the novella, corruption is everywhere. One protagonist, a banker named Andy Dufresne, is wrongfully imprisoned for murder on circumstantial evidence—in part because the district attorney who prosecutes Andy’s case wants to run for higher office and thinks a high-profile conviction will improve his election chances. In his trial, Andy testifies honestly—retaining his moral purity but condemning himself to prison, since the jury doesn’t find his true story believable. Once in prison, Andy encounters corruption everywhere. Guards sell drugs and take bribes, while wardens run illicit businesses, embezzle money, and use the threat of prisoners’ free labor to extort local businessmen who don’t want to be underbid on contracts. Andy wants to secure protection from prison rapists and avoid getting a cellmate who might discover the hole he’s digging in the prison wall—so he uses his banking expertise to help guards and wardens do their taxes and launder the money they’ve earned illicitly. When the novella’s narrator, Andy’s friend Red, expresses discomfort with Andy laundering the guards’ drug-dealing money, Andy argues that “grown-ups” can make morally gray decisions for good reasons instead of descending into ineffectual moralizing or total corruption. He compares his money-laundering to Red’s contraband business, where Red secures various prohibited items for other prisoners but refuses to deal in guns, drugs, or contract killings. Since Andy’s decision to launder money puts an end to the rapes he’s been suffering, and the contraband pin-up poster Red procures for Andy aids Andy in his escape from unjust imprisonment, the novella seems to suggest that the “grown-up” approach to accommodating corruption that Andy takes in prison may be a more effective approach than either the prison staff’s total corruption or Andy’s own moral purity during his trial.