ASSIGNMENT 7:
Hamlin Garland, "Under the Lion's Paw"

This story first appeared in Harper's Weekly (now simply Harper's, a monthly magazine) in 1889, and was later collected in a volume of his short stories, titled Main-Travelled Roads (1891). Garland is regarded now as an important contributor to realist fiction in America. His own definition of realist aesthetics--"veritism" was his term, after the truth-telling impulses he thought should always guide the writer--was important in its calls for the "truths" of American social reality. Typically categorized among other "regionalist" writers of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, Garland is significant among them for his socio-political commitments.

In a series of essays published in 1894, Garland called upon fellow Midwestern and Western writers to "deal with conditions peculiar to our own land and climate." In particular, he drew from memories-gathered during his years in the Dakota territory--of "houses, bare as boxes, dropped on the treeless plains, the barbed-wire fences running at tight angles, and the towns mere assemblages of flimsy wooden sheds with painted-pine battlement, [that] produced the effect of an almost helpless and sterile poverty." Searching for the origins of that poverty, Garland pointed frequently to banking and mercantile interests controlled by wealthy easterners, absentee-landlords controlling the fates of desperate farmers, many of whom were recent immigrants and former peasants from eastern European countries. Garland shared the concern of many Americans over the ways that, as he put it "free land was disappearing at railroad speed."

Thus, several years before historian Frederick Jackson Turner would declare, in 1893, that census data showed the frontier had closed, and with it the free land that served as a "safety valve" for disgruntled, oppressed, but self-reliant Americans. Turner argued that the loss of frontier would signal a profound change in American institutions, and in the American imagination. Frontier, Turner argued, was that alien space, the locale of the Other, against which Americans had for centuries imagined themselves into being. As you study "Under the Lion's Paw" note where the emigrant farmer, Haskins, has come from, and why he left there to return eastward. Note, as well, the tightly controlled system of land-ownership that Haskins must confront. He is the kind of American that Turner was concerned about.

The 1890s was a time of financial depression, widespread labor disputes and strikes, as well as a crisis over the gold standard which would peak in 1896, when William Jennings Bryan delivered his famous speech before the Democratic convention. Bryan called for a change in monetary policy, and specifically the abandonment of the gold standard so that Western states, rich in newly minted silver, would be able to pay off long-standing debts and match eastern states in economic power. The period was also a time of great disturbances in American agriculture. Declining grain prices on world markets, coupled with climbing interest rates, forced many mid-western farmers into bankruptcy, a condition that would be replicated one century later when farm foreclosures, and "Farm Aid" benefit concerts, were very much in the forefront among other national issues.

Garland's symbol for these crises is the imperial lion. Symbol of Roman imperial power at the end of Henry James's novel, Daisy Miller, when Daisy and Giovanelli ironically refer to the Christian martyrs sacrificed to the lions in the Coliseum, the lion appears at the close of Garland's tale also. There, the narrator refers to Haskins's fate, the future of a hard-working man, a man who--in the view of Franklin, Crevecoeur, Jefferson, Emerson, and Whitman--should by rights reap all the benefits of his self-reliant labor, in Nature; but a man who, instead, must yield to the relentless profit motives of banking and mercantile interests. As such, it's useful to read Garland's tale as a bitter commentary on the loss of the agrarian ideal in modern America. This loss parallels, and seems in Garland's view to stem directly from the loss of frontier, and its free lands.

Garland's is an important kind of fiction: realism with an edge. It looks forward to Crane's bleak view of modern prairie life in "The Blue Hotel," and forward, as well to the uses of realism in social critique by writers such as Upton Sinclair and Sinclair Lewis, both of whom also write about Midwestern locales, and who are the twentieth century heirs of Garland's writing.

Reading Assignment

1. Hamlin Garland, "Under the Lion's Paw" (pp. 645-655).

Writing Assignment

1. What is the exact time of year, perhaps even the day on the Christian calendar, that serves as the temporal setting for the opening scene in Garland's story? How does he use that temporal setting, both for purposes of dramatic tension, and to establish a context for Judeo-Christian values of charity and mercy? Discuss the significance of these details.
2. Where has Haskins come from? What has driven him to uproot his family and return back eastward?
3. What values are represented, in turn, by Stephen Council and by Jim Butler? How do the two characters contrast with each other? What does Garland seem intent on demonstrating to us by means of that contrast?
4. If you know the writings of Franklin, Crevecoeur, and Emerson from ENG 251, comment on the specific ways that Haskins embodies a traditionally American, agrarian ethic. If you haven't read these earlier writers, use specific detail from the story to summarize the main values that Haskins represents.
5. In several paragraphs, write about Garland's control of dramatic tension in the story. What values, in Haskins for example, are spotlighted by those uses of dramatic tension.
6. What forms does "Wealth" take in Garland's story, and where do these different forms of wealth originate? Of which does Garland clearly approve and of which does he disapprove? Discuss in about 250 words.

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