The American Dream in Thomas Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence and J.D. Salinger’s Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut.
Thomas Jefferson and the Founding Fathers of the United States of America were not merely engaged in a project of national liberation. Though their revolution began in precarious rebellion against the tyranny of arbitrary rule, its radical contingency oriented itself squarely on the reconstitution of the political realm and the foundation of a new form of freedom, within whose natality lay the beginnings of an indestructible Dream. Yet a dream of any sort derives its power from the illusion of perfection. Belief in that dream, and attempts at its actualisation, thus demand a certain degree of innocence. By cross-reading the Declaration of Independence with J.D. Salinger’s ‘Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut,’ I argue that any attempt to actualise the American Dream, and the democratic potential latent in its promise of a society wherein ‘all men are created equal,’ necessitates an overriding sense of innocence, which itself depends on a dialectical suppression and rationalisation of experience to preserve the Dream’s illusive veneer of perfection.
The American Revolution was the crowning achievement of nearly a century of early modern political theory. Enlightenment philosophers like Hobbes and Locke were the first to argue that there exists no emancipatory force for mankind so strong as the promise of its own capacity for reason. Unbound by the forces of nature, God, or any other ‘absolute,’ man was free, through the exercise of reason, to construct systems of being that enabled his transcendence into limitless possibility (Arendt 149). In the Declaration of Independence, the Revolution’s foundational document, Jefferson christened this triumph of reason in a lasting political act.
‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness’ (US 1776).
A cursory examination of this passage would question the Declaration’s Enlightenment posture, evidenced by Jefferson’s appeal to a natural ‘Creator’ and to ‘self-evident’ truths (US 1776). What is significant, however, is that this claim follows the possessive ‘We hold.’ To declare such truths as ‘Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness’ as self-evident is already to make a powerful epistemological claim, but to declare that ‘We hold’ them specifically to be self-evident means that these rights are self-evident not because they are derived from some natural authority but because ‘We,’ the Founding Fathers, ‘speak’ them into existence and declare them lasting truths (US 1776). The force of this claim lies in its implication that the world is merely what mankind creates for itself. In the face of intolerable conditions, man can use reason to create a better future.
Reason manifests itself in the Declaration as the beginning of a fundamentally creative act: that it is ‘the Right of the People to alter or to abolish’ any ‘Form of Government’ destructive to its ends (US 1776). To unilaterally declare that ‘these United Colonies are, and of Right ought to be FREE AND INDEPENDENT STATES [sic.],’ backed by no authority but the word of man and its power to speak truth into existence, is to commit a decisive act of self-definition (US 1776).
Thus, the birth of ‘the Dream,’ as it unfolds in Jefferson’s Declaration, does not just refer to the birth of a society politically separate from Great Britain. It also refers to the birth of a radically modern ideal: a society wherein ‘all men are created equal,’ emancipated of their natural or assumed chains to any predetermined absolute (US 1776). From this radical equality proceeds a shared experience of freedom empowered by the force of collective action. In other words, the We hold subjectconstitutes that man’s power to imagine such dreams and declare them ‘self-evident’ truth is derived from his fundamental humanity and made binding by a form of action in concert, which involves a ‘pledge to each other [of] our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor’ (US 1776).
In the aftermath of the War of Independence, the Founding Fathers were faced with the burden of consolidating their Revolution into a political foundation. Understanding that ‘there is nothing more futile than rebellion and liberation unless they are followed by the constitution of the newly won freedom,’ the success of the fledgling Republic necessitated a suspension of the Revolution’s innocence (Arendt 136). This ‘reconstituting’ of the revolution into political reality meant preserving the Dream it founded by limiting the revolutionary principles of liberty and equality through the institution of a central government (145).
It was in this act of foundation, the constitution of their newfound, universal experience of freedom, that the Founding Fathers simultaneously sanctioned the most abhorrent form of violence ever imagined on the very men that their self-evident truth professed as equal. They did so through the codification of instruments of oppression, such as slavery, upon whose labour and resources the new Republic depended. Through the instrument of marginalisation, the contradictions inherent to a society that simultaneously professed the equality of all men within a carefully constructed bubble that was maintained by the physical and cultural bondage of human beings were conveniently externalised by changing what, and who counted as ‘universal.’
In Salinger’s ‘Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut,’ the suppression of universal freedom to preserve a particular conception of the American Dream extends beyond the political and becomes far more nuanced. Contrary to Jefferson’s universalism, Eloise, the story’s protagonist, experiences the American Dream as one that is fundamentally conditional. Her licence to enjoy the fruits of this dream is contingent on a set of preconditions that suppress her liberty and her creative capacity to act. The most significant of these preconditions is gender, which surfaces while Eloise is reminiscing with her former roommate, Mary Jane, about their bygone university days.
‘They had an even stronger bond between them; neither of them had graduated. Eloise had left college in the middle of her sophomore year … Mary Jane had left … to marry an aviation cadet stationed in Jacksonville, Florida’ (Salinger 28-29).
The fact that both Eloise and Mary Jane were so affected by their experience with these men that they left college and discarded their ambitions is indicative of how the female experience of the American Dream is squandered by the precise distinction that ‘all men’ – and presumably only men – are ‘created equal’ (US 1776, emphasis mine). Unlike their male counterparts who possess the power to ‘create’ their own realities because they are emancipated from their predetermined absolutes, women in this era are robbed of both ambition and liberty.
Whereas it was the tyranny of arbitrary rule that first inclined the Founding Fathers to rebellion, it is the tyranny of the domestic sphere that confines Eloise and Mary Jane, even at that early age, into a predestined fate in which their self-worth is defined insofar as they resemble the ‘ideal,’ all-American woman. Aspiring to this standard, whatever it may entail in practice, becomes a matter of life-altering proportions for Eloise, and striving towards this ideal becomes a debilitating, if largely unconscious, ordeal.
This is echoed by the importance both women place on fashion and physical appearance, which conflates the women’s self-image with their attractiveness to the male gaze. Eloise experiences this both positively and negatively. In both cases, however, her affective experience is assessed according to a distinctly male subject position.
When Eloise recounts a memory of riding the train into New York with her ex-partner Walt, she recalls that she had ‘Joyce Morrow’s cardigan on underneath’ (Salinger 43). This seemingly inconsequential detail, remembered amidst a wave of fondness, indicates that Eloise has developed a special association between ‘that darling blue cardigan’ and the sense of care and happiness she experienced with Walt. In effect, a relationship arises between a measure of the self and the approval of the male subject (43). Conversely, when Eloise recalls ‘that brown-and-yellow dress [she] bought in Boise’ and how ‘Miriam Ball told [her] nobody wore those kind of dresses in New York,’ her humiliation is inexplicably linked to her choice of clothing, which is itself a proxy for a male-defined measure of desirability (56).
Eloise requires the authority of the male gaze because it is her licence to partake in the fruits of the American Dream, barring her ability to attain those fruits through acts of her own volition. The Dream, in this case, is materially embodied by the story’s setting in suburban Connecticut, a traditionally upper-class suburb of the New York City metropolitan area. Indeed, Eloise enjoys all the material comforts of the post-war American dream, complete with an idyllic suburban mansion, a car, a servant, and a child. Yet this paradisal setting is contrasted with Eloise’s pervasive use of narcotics and her generally resentful temperament, prone to sudden bouts of sarcasm and anger (Salinger 35). Eloise’s material comforts become construed as a prison because her enjoyment of these privileges depends on the surrender of her liberty to a tyrannical domestic sphere, stripping her of the capability to shape her own life. Thus, her experience of the American Dream is inexplicably one of boredom. It is an experience that she must ‘purchase’ through the sale of the innocent, authentic self for material success.
Since Eloise is denied the opportunity to actualise her American Dream, she is overcome by a deep resentment that manifests in a variety of different ways. Her servant, Grace, becomes Eloise’s first target.
‘“She’s sitting on her big, black butt reading ‘The Robe.’ I dropped the ice trays taking them out. She actually looked up annoyed”’ (Salinger 32).
Grace’s background African-American presence serves two main purposes. Firstly, she becomes the displaced object of Eloise’s resentment, who uses pejorative language like ‘big, black butt’ and a sarcastic tone to establish a hierarchy of roles. Since she is unable to position herself at the top of that hierarchy, she chooses to consolidate her position by acting with cruelty.
Secondly, characterising Grace as a servant positions her as a subject whose labour maintains Eloise’s house, a literal stand-in for the American Dream. Despite this, Grace’s African-American presence is effectively made external to Eloise’s experience. In their first encounter, Grace is physically sitting outside of the house, while in the second encounter, Eloise sends Grace and her husband outside despite the harsh weather conditions.
Through this careless act, she actively suppresses the freedom of another subject and bolsters her experience of the dream by essentially creating a subject who is excluded from it. Yet, because she is complicit in the maintenance of this Dream, which she develops by conforming to a female ideal and by facilitating the marginalisation of a subject deemed lesser, Eloise utterly renounces her innocence and is forced to reckon with the guilt of suppressing not only her own experience of freedom but that of others around her.
The figure of the ‘modern man’ in Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence, who creates above and beyond himself through the exercise of his emancipated reason is, in Salinger’s work, embodied by Eloise’s child, Ramona. Ramona is the epitome of childhood innocence, and her repeated engagements with imaginary friends reflect a suspension of reality. From Ramona’s perspective, reality is as malleable as the ideal she possesses in her mind. Like the ‘We hold’ subject in the Declaration, she creates a world, through the act of speech, that exists solely because she willed it into existence. This childhood innocence comes into direct conflict with Eloise’s experience of resentment, of which, for reasons previously discussed, she is simultaneously the victim and the perpetrator. Consequently, she consolidates this resentment by suppressing Ramona’s innocence. At first, this suppressive act takes the form of rationalisation, evidenced by her immediate dismissal of Ramona’s imaginary friend to Mary Jane.
‘“You just think so. I get it all day long …
“Where’d he get that name, though?
“Jimmy Jimmereeno? God knows.
“Probably from some little boy in the neighborhood.”
Eloise, yawning, shook her head. There are no little boys in the neighborhood. No children at all”’ (Salinger 39).
Later in the story, this rationalisation turns into anger.
‘Eloise raised her voice to a shriek. “You get in the center of that bed. Go on.”
Ramona, extremely frightened, just looked up at Eloise.
“All right.” Eloise grabbed Ramona’s ankles and half lifted and half pulled her over to the middle of the bed. Ramona neither struggled nor cried; she let herself be moved without actually submitting to it’ (Salinger 55).
Eloise’s anger soon gives way to a deep sadness. ‘She was crying and had been crying,’ weeping at the realisation that, like herself, her daughter will enter a world that will force her to trade her innocence for success (Salinger 55). She then longs and grieves for a time when she too shared in this innocence, weeping ceaselessly for ‘Poor Uncle Wiggily’ and pleading, to the remains of her former self, that she might still be remembered as a ‘nice girl’ (56).
For the Founding Fathers, the American Dream was conceived in innocence and represented the triumph of man’s reason over the absolutes that restricted his liberty. Yet, the constitution of this Dream into an actionable political foundation paradoxically suppressed its principles and sanctioned abhorrent forms of violence. For Salinger, the maintenance of the American Dream depends on rationalisation, conformity, and the loss of childhood innocence to actualise a particular conception of the Dream at any expense necessary. The Dream’s promise of equality and freedom thus demands a dialectical balance between its distinctly modern idealism and the decidedly imperfect realities of human existence.
Works Cited
Arendt, Hannah. On Revolution. Penguin, 2009.
Salinger, J.D. Nine Stories. 11th ed., Little, Brown and Company, 1953.
U.S. Congress. “United States Code: The Declaration of Independence.” United States Library of Congress, U.S. Code, 1982, http://www.loc.gov/item/uscode1982-001000007/.
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