Slouching Towards Bethlehem

Nonfiction | Essay Collection | Adult | Published in 1968

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Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Part 1, Essay 1

Part 1, Essays 2-3

Part 1, Essays 4-7

Part 1, Essay 8

Part 2, Essays 9-11

Part 2, Essays 12-13

Part 3, Essays 14-15

Part 3, Essays 16-20

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Themes

The Decay of America’s Moral Fabric

Throughout these essays, Didion asserts that there’s been a disconnect between generations that is leading to a moral decline best typified by the rise of the counterculture movement, which Didion sees as a naïve group of young people with generally well-meaning political stances undone by their lack of seriousness or rigor of thought. The counterculture viewed nonparticipation in society as a radical act, and Didion presents it instead as the act of a generation that is lost in their search for purpose and a meaningful life.

Didion offers up several explanations for this shift, all of which culminate in the idea that somehow the responsibility to educate people about “the rules of the game” has been abdicated, either because of a dereliction/absence on the part of the previous generation or on that generation’s own unspoken disillusion with American life (123). The title essay of the collection paints the counterculture as a grim, lost generation, while Didion’s portrait of Joan Baez presents something that’s more akin to optimistic naivete. In either case, Didion is careful to not condemn particular individuals, seeing instead that something has gone wrong in the systems of belief.

Her essay “On Morality” clarifies what she sees as the problem: a rise of moral absolutism that allows for a self-righteous belief that a person’s individual moral stance is the correct one. She advocates a return to a particularized thinking of morality that she sees in anecdotes she hears while spending time in the desert, rooted in the survival stakes of communities and individuals. In other words, she sees moral absolutism as a cause of, rather than as a cure for, society’s ills.

The Effects of Hollywood and the Media

Didion has a curious relationship with Hollywood during the writing of this book. She and her husband John Gregory Dunne had begun working as script doctors and writers and were connected through a relative to the film industry. Didion took an outsider’s perspective on the industry while still having a ground’s-eye view of it. Through this, she developed an understanding (and a suspicion) of Hollywood’s influence on American culture, and several of the essays in this collection present versions of what she calls “the golden dream” of the movies.

In “Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream,” she sees the way that real life has begun to bend to the dictates of Hollywood narrative. The details of Lucille Miller’s case are more fit for Hitchcockian thriller than mundane suburban life, and Didion points out the ways that Miller, Atherton, and others speak and behave as though they are in a movie. For Didion, the case is indicative of an ongoing misapprehension in American culture, that the narratives they’re presented with should match their day-to-day reality.

She is also concerned with the flattening effect of the lingering studio system. In “I Can’t Get That Monster Out of My Mind,” she shows the way that the old model of Hollywood filmmaking stifled creativity to such a degree that it still has power over writers and directors even without those systems still in place. Didion thinks that creative people in Hollywood are using their idea of what Hollywood is as an excuse to avoid thornier subject matter, and she sees a dearth of originality in the storytelling of the era.

However, Didion isn’t entirely immune to the effects of Hollywood, particularly in “John Wayne: A Love Song,” where she admits that her fascination with John Wayne has colored her expectations of masculinity and the romantic ideal of the American West. In being confronted with the real man, she sees the way that the power of the dream has to be actively constructed and maintained, and the scenes of the actors and crew hanging out suggest that they long to live the fantasy they’re creating in their Western. Even though she has seen the real person, Didion is still swayed by the star power of Wayne, in part because she sees the same longing for the “golden dream” in his behavior.

The Author’s Relationship to Herself

The essays in Slouching Toward Bethlehem comprise Didion’s writing during a period of life and career transition. She moved to Los Angeles with her husband and adopted a daughter as she began writing these essays, and she had spent the previous years of her early and mid-twenties living in New York working directly in publishing. In many ways, the essays in this book mark Didion’s transition into adulthood in both her career and life, and as such the essays, particularly the ones that aren’t journalistic in intent, often focus on Didion reckoning with past versions of herself. For “On Keeping a Notebook” and “On Self-Respect,” that means confronting the writing she’s been doing her whole life, often moving into comparative modes that show her sense of having grown and changed and her anxiety about how those less-mature versions of herself might have an influence on her still. In other essays, like “On Going Home,” “Notes From a Native Daughter,” and “Goodbye to All That,” she reckons with the fleeting nature of her youth and wonders what of it has lasting meaning and what may have been illusory.

There is a sense throughout that what Didion is trying to do in these essays is establish herself on the page. Didion brings a cool, collected authorial persona to the essays of “Life Styles in the Golden Land” and is able to take an analytical approach to outside subjects. On the other hand, the essays in “Personals” and “Seven Places of the Mind” reveal someone who is actively asserting that persona in defiance of her younger self and her experience as someone with anxiety and who is prone to debilitating migraines. There’s a complexity to Didion’s self-assurance. In “On Self-Respect” she lays out a clear philosophy that allows her the freedom of either being passionate or indifferent, yet her essays often contain subtle asides that indicate a struggle that she rarely brings to the foreground (except when she’s writing about who she used to be, not who she presently is).

What the reader is left with is a woman who has worked her way into the persona that suits her best through distinct effort and is willing to show her work. Didion was a young woman who embraced ambivalence, a woman who drove a bright yellow Corvette and still maintained a suspicion about people who seek attention, who was able to live inside of her subjects and remain an observer. She became one of the voices of a generation through her sharp observation and her iconoclasm, and Slouching Toward Bethlehem sets the tone for the career that follows.