37 pages • 1 hour read
Annie DillardAn American Childhood
Nonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | Adult | Published in 1987A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
Transcendentalism
Throughout her autobiography, Dillard deliberately uses elements in her writing drawn from the Romantic period in American literature, and particularly from the Transcendentalist Club writers from Concord, Massachusetts, which included Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, among many others. Dillard comments:
Ralph Waldo Emerson, for example excited me enormously. Emerson was my first crack at Platonism, Platonism as it had come bumping and skidding down the centuries and across the ocean to Concord, Massachusetts …I wrote a paper on Emerson’s notion of the soul—the oversoul, which, if I could banish from my mind the thought of galoshes (one big galosh, in which we have our being), was grand stuff. (236)
Dillard’s most significant borrowing occurs when she uses the metaphor of flowing water, carrying her along with it, to indicate the passage of time. Dillard finds union between the natural world and the written word: “I flung myself into poetry as into Niagara Falls” (234). This sentiment demonstrates Dillard’s version of finding truth in books and nature, unified into one metaphor.
Additional images that depict Dillard’s psyche as immersed in nature occur frequently during her studies of the natural world. The Prologue of the narrative states that Dillard’s last memories will be of the land upon which she grew up. Following in the footsteps of other American Transcendentalists, Dillard finds divinity in the rivers, rocks, and forests of the natural world.
Books
For Dillard, books symbolize knowledge, wisdom, and learning about the world outside her own sphere in Pittsburgh. She remains frustrated by the fact that there is no way to know beforehand whether a book is good or useful “except to throw yourself at them headlong, one by one” (83). Having discovered the vast and interesting amount of information that can be contained in a well-written and interesting book, she determines:
What I sought in books was imagination. It was depth, depth of thought and feeling; some sort of extreme of subject matter; some nearness to death; some call to courage. I myself was getting wild; I wanted wildness, originality, genius, rapture, hope. I wanted strength, not tea parties. What I sought in books was a world whose surfaces, whose people and events and days lived, actually matched the exaltation of the interior life. There you could live. (183)
Dillard’s life manifesto takes shape and form in this passage, when she is about 13 years old. She is unable to reconcile the superficialities of the life that she is supposed to live, consisting of dancing school followed by debutante dances and marrying one of “our” boys (87), with the life of the mind and the exciting adventures she wants to pursue. Life becomes intolerable to her. She yearns for a life of self-determined meaning, engaged with the world and improving it.
At one point in her early teens, Dillard reaches a point where the incongruities of her life become too obvious to ignore: “I was now believing books more than I believed what I saw and heard. I was reading books about the actual, historical, moral world—in which somehow I felt I was not living” (183). For young Dillard, books contain facts and can be trusted, while people have an agenda, which must be understood before their information can be validated.
The Polyphemus Moth/Insects
Dillard uses the story of the Polyphemus moth as a central metaphor representing her own growing awareness. Her class watches as the cocoon within the mason jar opens, revealing a huge moth, as big as a small mouse with a potential wingspan of six inches, but whose wings cannot unfurl because of the small, confining jar. Fascinating, obscene, and deformed, the moth’s wings harden within the confines of the jar, not fully opened. The class takes the jar outside to let the moth go, and it struggles to walk down the school’s asphalt driveway on its six tiny legs.
Soon to graduate, Dillard remembers this moth as she remembers her time at the Ellis School, a comparison that equates her school experience with the impossibility of the moth’s normal growth inside the mason jar. The moth, like Dillard, could not grow to its full potential when limited to a small, confined world: “I thought, unfairly, of the Polyphemus moth crawling down the school’s driveway. Now we’d go, too” (243). On some level Dillard knows that this analogy does not fit her (no one is confining her in a small life that will deform her); however, neither is she free.
Dillard also collects insects, though they terrify her. She even learns the difficult process of how to patiently pry open a dead butterfly’s wings. Her killing jar method, however, fails to kill a huge beetle, and she finds it after several months inside its cigar box, writhing and trying to walk, with its body pinned to the box. Later in the narrative, a rebellious Dillard uses this beetle as a metaphor for her own life, saying, “All spring long I crawled on my pin” (238). Unable to escape her senior year at the Ellis School, Dillard hopes to merely endure until she can leave.
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By Annie Dillard
