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Chapter 5
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Miss Lonelyhearts, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Religion and Morality in Modern Society
The Illusion of the American Dream
The Limitations of Love
Isolation and Madness
Summary
Analysis
At 3:30 p.m. the next day, Miss Lonelyhearts wakes to a call from Shrike asking if he’s planning on coming to work. Miss Lonelyhearts gets ready to come in, but by the time he’s had his second cup of coffee, the workday is over. Even so, he knows that Shrike would never fire him—he tried to get fired once by suggesting in his column that readers consider suicide, and even that didn’t work. While walking around outside, Miss Lonelyhearts realizes that one thing he hasn’t tried in an attempt to make himself feel better is sex. He decides to call Shrike’s wife, Mary. The two have previously kissed—Miss Lonelyhearts found that physical affection with Mary made him feel better about himself, while Mary enjoyed it because she hates her husband.
While Miss Lonelyhearts not worrying about being fired is comical at first, the situation becomes absurd when considering that Shrike didn’t care about Miss Lonelyhearts suggesting suicide as an option to their readers—and doesn’t seem to care about Miss Lonelyhearts’s sexual relationship with his wife. Moreover, Miss Lonelyhearts’s pursuit of sexual relationships outside of his relationship with Betty suggests that he’s drifting further from genuinely practicing Christianity, as pursuing someone else’s wife would be considered a sin. In fact, the revelation that Miss Lonelyhearts and Mary have already kissed suggests that Miss Lonelyhearts never truly cared about living a moral, Christian life.
Themes
Over the phone, Mary invites Miss Lonelyhearts to her home, insisting that she’s done with Shrike. When Miss Lonelyhearts arrives, Shrike greets him with a drink and congratulates his employee on doing “field work.” Shrike later explains, though, that although people like Miss Lonelyhearts and Mary think they’re the only ones who suffer, Shrike suffers in his own way, too, which draws him to women like Miss Farkis. Shrike’s façade breaks as he calls his wife a “selfish bitch” for not wanting to sleep with him and complains that she’s accused him of rape.
Although this interaction is still marked with absurdity as Shrike congratulates Miss Lonelyhearts for pursuing his wife, this rare moment of Shrike dropping his nonsensical façade is memorable as Shrike reveals that, like Miss Lonelyhearts, he’s suffering. While this revelation doesn’t redeem or excuse Shrike for the abusive acts he commits, it does render Shrike’s performative cruelty and violence more complex by suggesting that he acts in nonsensical and sometimes violent manners as a result of his pain.
Themes
Mary and Miss Lonelyhearts head to a place called El Gaucho since Mary wants to dance. At El Gaucho, Miss Lonelyhearts asks Mary to sleep with him, but she begins to tell him her life story, explaining how her mother died of breast cancer when she was young. Miss Lonelyhearts asks Mary to sleep with him again, but she continues talking about her childhood. They eventually leave in a cab, and Miss Lonelyhearts continues to beg. At the Shrike household, Mary refuses Miss Lonelyhearts and talks instead about her difficult childhood. Miss Lonelyhearts ignores her refusal—he kisses and begins to undress her. Mary breaks away and enters her home, and once she’s gone inside, Shrike comes to the door to look outside, wearing no pants.
Miss Lonelyhearts’s attempt to assault Mary bears some resemblance to his experience tormenting the old man with Gates. While he engages in an activity that he hopes will make him feel better (in this case, trying to have sex with Mary), he finds that he can’t escape other people’s suffering as Mary confides in him about her childhood, much like the letter-writers confiding in Miss Lonelyhearts about their personal struggles. There seems to be something about Miss Lonelyhearts that encourages people to ask him to help them bear their burdens, and in this way, Miss Lonelyhearts bears some resemblance to a Christ figure. However, he continually acts in immoral ways that prevent him from fulfilling his potential as a Christ figure.
Themes
