Sweet Dreams, Darling

After tromping through all the muck of the American Dream, it is just possible to find the lotuses that grow there. There are gentler, happier stories that end with love and respect for the people who share them. Willa Cather is one such person. Her stories of life on the prairie remind me of listening to Garrison Keillor talk about his "hometown" of Lake Wobegon. The people in these stories are not so distorted or extraordinary. That is what makes them so wonderful.

People like the Rosickys do not achieve glorious wealth or fame. They do not win awards. They aren't even necessarily terribly smart. What they do seem to have are meaningful lives. They live well. I read a story about them and it calms my heart, and I want to hug them. I end up hugging the book instead. So what do I see that they have so readily applied? "It was as if Rosicky had a special gift for loving people, something that was like an ear for music or an eye for colour" (1141). He would have gotten along swimmingly with Zora; they could have gone to listen to jazz together, or perhaps they could have chased a rainbow winged wonder. They both have their priorities straight- love comes first. Not a romantic or dazzling love, but a steady, plodding love for all humanity.

The American Dream of wealth, fame, fortune, and family? These are certainly helpful, but the real American Dream should be love. And we have a long ways to go.

Dream in the Spotlight

Perhaps I am staying too focused on the part of the American Dream that deals with our momentary happiness. Maybe all the dreams of money and comfort and rags-to-riches have more to do with fame than anything else. It is a universal dream to live forever, and Americans like to forget about mortality. The scent of the flowers we stop to sniff seem to be more an amnesiac than any intrinsic pleasure.

Harry (from "The Snows of Kilimanjaro" by Ernest Hemingway) found this out too late. "He knew at least twenty good stories from out there and he had never written one. Why?" (1861). He got too caught up in life. He forgot about death. This is another hole in the American Dream; nobody lives forever. How can we ever get done all we wanted to? How many humans in the history of the world have died ready? Maybe the American Dream is no more than a flower, or a rich marriage, that leads us by the nose into a settled lifestyle. Thus distracted, we do not do what needs to be done with the world. We are too busy to stop abusing the environment, or to solve poverty, or to write our life stories. The Dream causes a lack of motivation and vision.

Somebody get this flower away from my face.

Dreams Made of Wood May Burn

"Detestable race, continue to expunge yourself, die out.
Breed faster, crowd, encroach, sing hymns, build bombing airplanes;"
(1611).

Is this what the American Dream has led us to? With so many people focused on gaining so much life and goodness for themselves, why are we still so bent on destruction? The American Dream orders us to consume, invent, and climb at all costs. Edna St. Vincent Millay is right to criticize this in her poem (above). We think we are so clever, with our nuclear power and such, until a power plant blows up in our faces and if we aren't lucky enough to be killed by the blast we end up dying sick, slow deaths of radiation poising.

Speaking of detestable... take a gander at Abner in William Faulkner's "Barn Burning." Doesn't this prove the point? This man's big dream is either to be equal or more to everybody else or to see everything burn. There is a jealousy brewing in people who do not think they have the American Dream, but who can see people who seem to have it. It is hard not be jealous of rich people... of kids who get sent to college on their parents' money... who get allowances and packages from home... who have boyfriends... who have natural talent and wit and a functioning social drive. Yet, I am not burning down Vorhees or VanVleck (if I wait long enough and the popcorn in the microwave would do that for me). Is Abner a crazy caricature of jealousy, is he so distorted so as to be unreal? I would say so. I would hope so, for my sake. I live in a flammable building.

Red Orange Yellow Blue Dream Purple

Lowell's Imagist poetry is beautiful for its wildness and for its attention to the little details. Looking at her poem "The Captured Goddess," we see the seeking of another dreamer. The Goddess is so beautiful with her wings of every hue, more colorful than Joseph's coat! The Dream is full of rainbow feathers and flashing wings! How can America resist chasing after it?

Yet, is this the same American Dream we have seen in the other stories? The Dream in those stories was as this Goddess is at the end.
"Her fluted wings were fastened to her sides with cords...
They bargained in silver and gold,
In copper, in wheat...
The Goddess wept"
(1145).

How did we let this happen? Are we responsible? The American Dream holds such promise for happiness, for a full life... until people grab a hold of it and tie it down to the real world, and assign it monetary value. I want to cry with the Goddess and free the Dream, but I cannot control the other people. Like the narrator I am forced to turn my back on everyone and flee, lonely and colorless.

Again, note that the Dream is all about colors. Whether it be the colors of our country's racial constitution or the colors jazz lets us feel dancing in our souls... the Dream is not the same without her rainbow feathers.

A Dream Worth Keeping

A vein of gold runs through the American consciousness. Examples: Hurston's Missie May and Joe fall into the trap of a gilded six-bit. Fitzgerald's Dexter Green seeks whatever glitters. O'Neill's Tyrone sells out his talent for money. Amy Lowell's poem "The Captured Goddess" even sees someone following "The spotted gold of tiger-lily petals" (1145). These all speak to the power of gold and money.

And yet...
there are also American voices such as Robert Frost.
"Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay"
(1191).

Maybe the American Dream suffers too much from the human tendency to forget the mutability and mortality of everything. Yet, we still expect the world to remain the place it was in our childhood. We chase after the same happiness, the same colors of dawn, and the same flashes of gold that we have come to expect. When the plain, bright light of day hits us, when fall puts an end to winter's dream, the American Dream crumples along with our expectations. We need to take a page out of the reed's handbook and learn how to bend. Maybe we need to take a time out from the money chase to contemplate a snowy wood somewhere.

I Have a Dream...

Some groups of Americans have different sorts of American Dreams. During the Harlem Renaissance, African-Americans showed their desires and thought-motifs in an explosion of art, music, and literature. They have so much to teach me about pursuing the American dream...

Zora Neale Hurston, for example, demonstrates how to be an active (instead of a passive) seeker. She really embodies the Harlem theme of black pride. "I dance wildly inside myself; I yell within, I whoop... He is so pale with his whiteness then and I am so colored" (1517-8). It takes a certain spirit to pursue the American Dream, and that spirit has to do with being satisfied not exactly with what you have, but with who you are. Perhaps one of the biggest difficulties is that the American Dream draws our gaze outwards with all its glitter, but Zora shows that glitter to be pale in comparison to inner color (be that color purple or red or whatever).

Langston Hughes presents a view of life which "ain't been no crystal stair" (1893). His poems are laced with protest: at a life of inequality, hardship, and racism. "I'll sit at the table... I, too, am America" (1894). His poetry strives to become more, to acquire more, to be seen as a somebody. He wants to join the majority of America in sitting at the table, and of chasing the mirage in the desert.

So who displays a more successful Dream -- Zora or Hughes?

I Dream of Eugeney

If money and comfort did not do it for Dexter Green, what if he had had a wife and children? Is family the true American Dream?

*O'Neill enters stage right. His dark eyes peer out from under noble eyebrows with a sense of melancholy. With hair slicked back and a professional dark suit, he exudes an air of gloomy knowledge. A bottle of whiskey can be seen in his pocket.*

Mary and Tyrone were also Dream seekers. They thought that their love and marriage would happily carry them through into their old age. I would argue that love is the current key to the American Dream, although it is arguable whether this key is just as illusory as wealth and beauty were for Dexter. Mary even echoes Dexter: "What is it I'm looking for? I know it's something I lost" (1415). Staring "dreamily" into nowhere, she goes on to talk about wanting to become a nun in "the winter of her senior year," and how she got distracted by falling in love and getting married. If her winter dream had come true, would she have been happy? Are personal dreams like hers of more substance than the general (but more enticing) American Dream? Had Mary stayed on her own path, perhaps she wouldn't have been enticed into the desert by the American mirage.

Winter Dreams of Spring and Then Wakes Up.

F. Scott Fitzgerald-- now there is a guy who could write about the American Dream. Perhaps "Winter Dreams" and American Dreams are synonymous. Winter dreams are of the coming summer just as American dreams are of a future happy. Let's explore this idea further...
*drum roll*

Dexter Green is such an obvious specimen of a Dream seeker. He is a rags-to-riches man who starts as a caddy and eventually makes his fortune. He's got good looks, a work ethic, and either luck or good business sense. He even has a hot love affair. We can also check materialism off on his list: "He wanted not association with glittering things and glittering people - he wanted the glittering things themselves" (1645).

However, not all that glitters is gold. Dexter's good looks and youthful vigor will fade. His money and comfort turn out to be no substitution for true happiness. What he really wants, a permanent relationship with the fabulous Judy Jones, he cannot have. He cannot even hold onto the idea of her fabulousness. At the end of the story, "the dream was gone... even the grief he could have borne was left behind in the country of illusion, of youth, of the richness of life, where his winter dreams had flourished" (1658). So, dreams flourish in illusion? Does this mean that the American Dream is an impossibility because it is not based in reality? This must be true for Dexter, who has it all -- otherwise why is he so sad? Even if he had Judy, I do not think the story would have ended any happier because he says, "No disillusion as to the world in which she had grown up could cure his illusion as to her desirability" (1652). Her desirability is just a mirage. The Dream merely serves to draw us along, appearing to us like the water of happiness in a world gone crazy, and we can do nothing but stumble after it, soaking our clothes with sweat. Perhaps this is why Dexter made so much money in the laundry business.

Is the oasis real?

Dream Unraveler: A Monoblog

The American Dream (note the capital letters here) is something that every American cannot help hearing about, yet it is also something that is so general that a good definition is slippery. So, of course, I turned to what is perhaps the most beloved resource of all online resources: Wikipedia.org. In this case, the reputability of this communal online encyclopedia can be mostly ignored, because who would be a better judge of the peoples’ dream than the people themselves? This is what those people had to say: “The American Dream is the faith held by many in the United States of America that through hard work, courage, and determination one can achieve a better life for oneself, usually through financial prosperity... many pursued the 'perfect family' as a part or consequence of the American Dream." In other words, the American Dream consists of self-earned wealth, comfort, and familial happiness. Now-a-days, people are wary of admitting to seeking such shallow-sounding goals. Yet, is there anything wrong with this Dream? How could it go wrong?

More to come later...