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Chapter 7
Themes
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
The Swede tries to go through the motions at dinner, which includes—in addition to the Levovs, the Swede’s parents, and the Orcutts—Marcia and Barry Umanoff and Sheila and Shelly Salzman. It’s only been a few hours since the Swede learned that the Salzmans hid Merry after the bombing, and he’s furious. Barry Umanoff was the Swede’s best friend in high school, and he and Marcia come for dinner whenever Lou and Sylvia Levov come up from Florida. Barry is now a law professor at Columbia.
With his earlier, deeply troubling reunion with Merry to anguish over, the Swede’s recent discovery of Dawn’s affair hardly registers. This chapter’s opening also circles back to another of the book’s main concerns: secrecy and the fundamental unknowability of other people. Remarkably, most of the Levovs’ dinner guests are hiding (or think they’re hiding) secrets from the others: Dawn and Orcutt are hiding their affair, Sylvia Levov is hiding Lou’s stolen letter, the Salzmans are hiding the fact that they harbored Merry from the authorities, and the Swede is hiding his recent discovery of Merry.
Themes
The Swede remembers turning to Barry for legal advice following Merry’s crime. Barry took him to see Schevitz, the Manhattan litigator, who told the Swede that if Merry were apprehended and found guilty, she would probably receive 7-10 years at worst. If she was tried as a juvenile, it could be as few as 2-3 years. And since there’s very little to prove her involvement in the crime, it’s possible she could get off with no sentence at all. Over the next several years, the Swede clung to the lawyer’s words for hope when he otherwise had none.
This passage emphasizes the pragmatic, rational approach the Swede initially took to dealing with Merry’s crime, focusing his energy on minimizing the subsequent harm that would come to Merry in the form of legal consequences. At this point, though devastated by what has happened, he is still somewhat confident that he can problem solve his way out of the mess if only he works hard enough.
Themes
Marcia Umanoff, meanwhile, is a literature professor in New York. She’s “a difficult person” with nonconformist ideals who always makes her thoughts unmistakably clear. She doesn’t put any care into her appearance and wears huge glasses. The Swede has never understood Barry and Marcia’s relationship, given how kind, gentle, and soft spoken Barry is. It would make sense, the Swede thinks now, for Merry to come from someone like Marcia—but not from Dawn. Dawn can’t stand Marcia because she knows Marcia can’t stand her for being a former Miss New Jersey. She thinks Dawn’s cow operation is the silly performance of a privileged, wealthy woman. Worst of all, Marcia feels great sympathy for the North Vietnamese, and she doesn’t dampen her feelings even in the company of the Swede and Dawn, and “the misery that had befallen [them].”
There are compelling reasons for the Swede to be annoyed by Marcia’s self-satisfied, gloating style of liberalism. However, it would be imprudent to ignore the sexist undertones of his condemnation of Marcia—the Swede’s disdain for Marcia’s rejection of conventional femininity (her appearance isn’t polished, she is loud and unfeeling as opposed to demure and nurturing, and so on) seems to exacerbate his disdain for her performative liberalism. The narration describes Marcia as “a difficult person,” but one wonders whether the Swede might overlook some of her so-called “difficult[y]” if she were a man.
Themes
Dawn, for her part, suspects Marcia of being responsible for harboring Merry after the bombing. She cites Marcia’s connections with anti-war priests Marcia knows who “pour[] blood on draft records.” These priests “are not great forward-thinking liberals,” Dawn says—otherwise they wouldn’t have become priests. And Marcia doesn’t like the priests because they’re good men—“she loves them because they’re doing something that […] taints the Church.” The Swede, of course, now knows that it wasn’t Marcia Umanoff who hid Merry: it was Sheila Salzman, Merry’s former speech therapist, whom Merry adored—and who for four months became the Swede’s one and only mistress.
Undertones of sexism aside, there are plenty of more compelling reasons why Dawn and the Swede feel disdain for Marcia. As Dawn points out here, one of Marcia’s most reprehensible features is that her stated values don’t correspond with any genuine beliefs or morals: she simply relishes the chaos of watching formerly powerful institutions and authority figures deteriorate in response to the fraught sociopolitical climate of the day. The shocking reveal of the Swede’s brief affair with Sheila Salzman further nuances the Swede’s character, with his lapse in fidelity contradicting his admirers’ glorifying visions of him as the ever upright man, citizen, and father.
Themes
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At dinner, everyone discusses the Watergate scandal and Deep Throat, the X-rated movie that has become a mainstream sensation. Shelly Salzman criticizes the hypocrisy of the president and vice-president, who were voted in for their so-called moral piety, for “mak[ing] a hit out of” a smutty film. Lou grumbles about the movie and goes off on a long tangent about how Black people have destroyed Newark and unions have destroyed the glove industry. Sylvia tries to get Lou back on track. Bill Orcutt chimes in and says that things have become so degraded and “grotesque” in America that now “what they call ‘repressed’ is a source of shame to people—as not to be repressed used to be.” Lou agrees and then goes into another diatribe about the death of “the ladies’ fashion glove,” which came about with the assassination of Kennedy and the birth of the miniskirt.
Deep Throat was the name the journalists who uncovered the Watergate scandal used to refer to an unnamed source who gave them leads on the Nixon administration’s corruption. The name was in part an allusion to Deep Throat, a landmark pornographic film whose 1972 release garnered widespread notoriety. The name suggests a parallel between the degradation of formerly trusted people and institutions (namely the U.S. President) and the supposed moral decay of the U.S. as a whole. Lou Levov takes things a step further and aligns these parallel shows of decline with the death of “the ladies’ fashion glove,” President Kennedy’s 1963 assassination, and the invention of the miniskirt (code for the death of women’s modesty and the onset of the sexual revolution).
Themes
Lou continues his rant, eventually voicing the point he was apparently trying to make from the start: that it’s a disgrace for the Swede to have taken Dawn to see Deep Throat (everyone at dinner but the Orcutts, Sylvia, and Lou have seen it). His son and daughter-in-law are “intelligent, educated people,” after all. Marcia laughs and adds that intelligence “doesn’t annihilate human nature.” She shocks the Lou further when she suggests that there’s no need to explain any of the smut to children—kids these days don’t bother to ask their parents about such things. “They just go.”
Lou and Marcia represent opposing views on the relationship between society and human nature. Lou thinks society and societal conventions play a critical, imperative role in suppressing human nature for the good of humanity. Marcia argues that suppressing human nature is actually harmful in that it denies people their humanity. Her offhanded remark to Lou about kids these days going to see smutty films behind their parents’ backs speaks to a parent’s limited capacity to control and protect their children.
Themes
Lou turns to Dr. Shelly Salzman, a kindly family physician, for help. Shelly pauses and mildly replies that whether he approves or not has nothing to do with what others do. The Swede thinks back to when Dawn first started talking about getting a face-lift. He went to Shelly for advice on the doctor Dawn had read about in Vogue. The Swede was involved in his affair with Sheila at the time and almost came clean with Shelly then and there, overcome with the sudden desire to beg for the man’s forgiveness. But doing that would mean betraying Sheila, and he didn’t know if he had the right to do that. So instead, he kept quiet.
The Swede’s flashback to his inner turmoil over whether to come clean to Shelly about the affair further points to the fundamental unknowability of other people. The Swede in this moment doesn’t consider that he might not be the only person in the room with a secret. In fact, Shelly is hiding the role he and Sheila played in hiding Merry. And the reason for the Swede’s visit to Shelly—Dawn’s face-lift—raises the possibility that Dawn has already begun her secret affair with Orcutt (and is getting the procedure to entice her new lover).
Themes
Back at dinner, the Swede is seated between his mother and Sheila Salzman. Sheila, like Barry Umanoff, is a regular fixture at family events. The Swede’s parents adore her, thinking her a “lovely” and “dignified woman.” With her fair hair, they jokingly insist she can’t be Jewish. This has always annoyed Dawn, particularly when Merry came to idolize Sheila when Sheila was her speech therapist. Looking at Sheila in the present, the Swede is overcome with anger that Sheila had harbored Merry and not told him. When she was his lover—a move Sheila herself had initiated—he thought she was candid. Now, he see that she is “cold.”
The Levovs’ exaggerated praise for Sheila shows that even decades later, they still harbor some feelings of regret or resentment over the Swede’s act of defiance in marrying a Gentile woman rather than a Jewish woman. The Swede’s anger at Sheila is warranted—Merry was an underage teenager when she committed her crime, after all, and so Sheila had a moral (if not a legal) imperative to alert Dawn and the Swede when Merry came to her. Still, the Swede’s characterization of Sheila as “cold” and calculating seems a little unfair given his own failure thus far to tell Dawn about his recent discovery of Merry.
Themes
Meanwhile, Lou continues to condemn Deep Throat as a symptom of the country’s moral degrade. If the kids today are watching such things, then their parents should lock them up in their rooms and throw away the key. Whatever happened to “decency?” Lou is shocked into silence when Marcia bluntly suggests that “decency” is boring. After a pause, Bill Orcutt replies, “And what is wrong with decency?” The Swede can hardly look at Orcutt’s smug face as Marcia, Orcutt, and Lou spar over decency and transgression. Marcia explains, self-satisfied, that without transgression there would be no knowledge: it’s even in the book of Genesis. Lou retorts that the real moral of Genesis is to do as God says, or else you suffer the consequences. When Marcia clarifies, smugly, “and all the terrible things will vanish,” it takes Lou a moment to realize she is mocking him.
If Marcia is merely condemning “decency” for the sake of stirring up chaos, then Orcutt is doing the same thing when he argues in favor of decency—clearly, given his ongoing affair with Dawn, he isn’t genuinely concerned about decency and moral goodness. Critically, Marcia here references humankind’s expulsion from the idyllic Garden of Eden following Adam and Eve’s choice to disobey God and eat from the tree of knowledge, as conveyed in Genesis. As American Pastoral’s subheadings (Part 1 is “Paradise Remembered,” Part 2 is “The Fall” and Part 3 is “Paradise Lost”) suggest, the Swede’s story is a contemporary reimagining of the Fall of Man, with Merry’s crime expelling the Swede from his own paradise as he is forced to confront the ugly, brutal reality of the world. The issues that Lou and Marcia fight over here reflect some of the broader concerns of the novel—whether it is foolish to live in denial about life’s ugly truths, whether the pursuit of knowledge and truth is always the most noble path one can take, and so on.
Themes
The Swede listens to the ongoing fight and wants to tell Marcia to just cut it out already—arguing with Lou will just invigorate him. Dealing with Lou is an ordeal for everyone. The Swede, for his part, learned long ago to be strategic about “subduing his own personality” to maintain peace with his father. The Swede’s brother Jerry, meanwhile, “just told their father to fuck off.” Sylvia calmly endures Lou’s tirades. When Lou suggests that Linda Lovelace, the porn star of Deep Throat, ought to have a “real job,” Marcia tries to poll the women at the table to make her point, asking if they’d rather be a porn star or a cocktail waitress. Neither Sheila nor Dawn play along. “Up yours, Marcia,” Dawn replies sweetly.
The Swede and Jerry’s opposite approach to dealing with Lou illustrates a practical application of Marcia and Lou’s debate about the respective merits of obedience and transgression. The Swede “subdue[s] his own personality” to appease his father, recognizing that there’s not likely anything he can do to change his incorrigible father’s mind, so he might as well keep the peace. Jerry, meanwhile, transgresses, going against his father to express to his own thoughts and beliefs—a strategy that seems to do little more than exacerbate conflict within the family. Jerry’s penchant for stirring up chaos echoes in the question Marcia here poses to the female guests, which seems more designed to provoke and unsettle her audience than to make a point about the legitimacy of sex work.
Themes
In this moment, the Swede processes the fact that Dawn has a lover. He realizes that the face-lift—which the Swede had paid for and comforted Dawn through—was for Bill Orcutt all along. The new house is for Dawn and Orcutt. In the brief period when the Swede was seeing Sheila, when he was still in shock over Merry’s disappearance, it was Sheila who talked him back to his senses. He and Sheila could not run away together—he could not abandon his wife in a moment of such great suffering. But now, Dawn is planning to do just that, starting over with her new face, her new house, and her new husband.
Dawn’s affair with Orcutt bothers the Swede not necessarily because he feels betrayed, but rather because it forces him to the tenuous, unsustainable, and uncertain nature of everything he’s clung to to find meaning, stability, and direction in life. He has believed that working hard and doing the right thing—as when he listened to Sheila’s advice and did the responsible thing, abandoning his own emotional breakdown to return to and care for his wife—will amount to something meaningful and rewarding in the end. The arbitrary collapse of his marriage and, in effect, his American Dream, proves that sometimes, things just don’t work out.
Themes
