History and the Past Theme Analysis

Norma Jean and Leroy have not had an easy marriage. They wed when Norma Jean was 18 and pregnant, and their son Randy died months after he was born. Rather than grieving together, they retreated into themselves; Leroy went out on the road as a trucker while Norma Jean stayed home alone. But now Leroy realizes that he and Norma Jean have grown apart and he’s determined to revive their marriage. Instead of working through their years of estrangement, though, he wants to start fresh, returning to how things were before everything went wrong. Of course, Leroy can never erase the history between them—and as the story progresses, “Shiloh” suggests that one cannot move towards the future by trying to recreate an idyllic past.

To fix his struggling marriage, Leroy tries to return to the past. He wants to “start afresh” and “become reacquainted” with Norma Jean, which implies his desire to re-create their idyllic courtship period before their son was born. He even suggests that they “start all over again […] right back at the beginning,” as though they could simply ignore everything that has happened since they were eighteen and pick back up before they lost their son. To encourage this return to their teenaged years, Leroy buys Norma Jean an electric organ, since she loved to play the piano in high school. In addition, he treats all her new interests with skepticism. Clearly, he wants her to remain who she was when they met and doesn’t want to acknowledge how much she has changed.

The biggest indication of Leroy’s desire to return to the past is his obsession with building Norma Jean a log cabin. This is an attempt to fulfill a promise he’s been making since they got married: to build her a home. But the fact that he wants to build a log cabin—an antiquated building that would be out-of-place in their town—emphasizes how silly he’s being. 15 years have passed since he promised Norma Jean a home, and fulfilling his promise now is meaningless; he can’t rewind the clock to when they were newlyweds. Just as a log cabin is a relic of the past with no place in the present, the early period of their marriage is just a memory—Norma Jean doesn’t want the cabin now, she wants to move on to something new.

Norma Jean rejects Leroy’s attempt to return to the past, presumably because his vision of the past is false: there’s too much history that he refuses to acknowledge. The most obvious example of this is Leroy’s silence about losing their child. He and Norma Jean “never speak about their memories of Randy,” and Leroy never brings him up—even when he thinks it might ease the awkwardness between them. In fact, the one time that Norma Jean references losing Randy, Leroy initially pretends not to know what she is talking about. This moment estranges Norma Jean, plunging her into silence and making her feel like they have nothing in common—not even the past. In addition, Leroy tries to ignore the fact that he was out on the road for the past 15 years. Instead of trying to heal the distance this created, he tries to push aside his feeling that something is wrong in their marriage. It’s revealing when he jokes that their new dust ruffle from Mabel will allow them to “hide things under the bed.” This calls attention to his method of coping with difficulty: pushing aside anything uncomfortable and pretending that it doesn’t exist.

Leroy’s false vision of the past comes crashing down around him on his and Norma Jean’s trip to Shiloh, a trip that embodies Leroy’s doomed attempt to save his marriage by returning to the past. By going on a date to a historic site, they’re traveling figuratively to the past—and, on top of that, Leroy is thinking of this trip as a “second honeymoon,” emphasizing his desire to pretend that he and Norma Jean are newlyweds again. Shiloh, however, is a place that glorifies a false vision of the past. The site of a bloody battle, Shiloh has since been beautified and turned into a tourist attraction, obscuring the tragedy that occurred there. Furthermore, the tourists are remembering the wrong narrative; people go there to celebrate the Confederacy (even Norma Jean and Leroy buy a Confederate flag as a souvenir in the gift shop), but Shiloh was the site of a devastating Confederate defeat. Just as Leroy wants to imagine a version of his past without the loss of his son and the grief and estrangement that followed, the historic site promotes a sanitized version of the past that bears no resemblance to the reality of what happened.

At a picnic on the grounds of Shiloh, Norma Jean tells Leroy that she’s leaving him. She explains that she’s been feeling “eighteen again” ever since he returned home, and that she refuses to “face that all over again.” She means that being 18 was traumatic for her the first time around and it’s not something she wants to revisit. This shows how misguided Leroy has been in trying to save his marriage by re-creating their past; he remembers their early years as idyllic because he’s repressed the loss of their son, but Norma Jean is more honest with herself about what happened between them. For her, returning to the past would rekindle a grief that she cannot continue to face.