The Universality of Loneliness

What should young people do with their lives today? Many things, obviously. But the most daring thing is to create stable communities in which the terrible disease of loneliness can be cured. --Kurt Vonnegut

Loneliness is terrible because it makes you feel as though you have nothing to look forward to and no one to provide stability in a capricious and cruel world. Aristotle said, “Man is by nature a social animal; an individual who is unsocial naturally and not accidentally is either beneath our notice or more than human.” Loneliness, in Aristotle’s definition is an unnatural state, but it is the common condition of many characters in literature, both American and British. J.D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye, Charlotte Perkins Gilmore’s The Yellow Wallpaper, Edgar Allen Poe’s The House of Usher, Harper Lee’s To Kill A Mockingbird and Tennessee Williams A Streetcar Named Desire, as well as in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre and Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations, to name a few, are all novels that deal with highly sensitive characters who are lonely for one reason or another.

 In some of the novels, location contributes to loneliness. The characters live in places that are physically isolated, like the House of Usher, the Yorkshire moors of Bronte’s novel or an island as in Robinson Crusoe. Sometimes the characters choose to be alone even though they have the ability to be a part of society. Roderick Usher and Miss Havisham never leave their homes to interact with the rest of the world. Usher is sensitive to light and sound which makes it difficult to interact with the outside environment. He also stutters and can’t express himself fluidly. The House of Usher relies on supernatural elements as a part of the narrative. Usher believes that the house is alive and he is its prisoner.  Usher doesn’t care about his personal appearance and over the years, the house too has fallen into disrepair. Miss Havisham continues to wear her wedding dress. She, like Usher, always stays indoors. She looks older and frailer because of lack of exposure to the sun. Her house stays frozen in time since she stopped all the clocks at the moment when she receives the letter from her prospective bridegroom cancelling the wedding.

 Jane’s husband in the Yellow Wallpaper and Boo Radley’s father and brothers in Mockingbird attempt to control their unacceptable behavior by keeping them confined at home. Eventually, Radley himself makes the choice to stay at home and keep away from society to escape its toxic environment. In other cases, the choice is not in the character’s hands. Like Boo Radley, Holden Caulfield is disgusted by the hypocrisy and duplicity of the world.  He is also grieving the death of his brother Allie. Holden, Blanche DuBois and Jane Eyre are sent away to impersonal institutions such as boarding schools or asylums by their families. Frankenstein is also rejected by his father/creator so he wanders the world looking for love and companionship. These individuals are extremely sensitive, which makes it difficult for their families to understand and relate to them.

The depictions of Blanche DuBois, Carrie Meeber (Sister Carrie by Theodore Dreiser), Jane Eyre  and Jane in the Yellow Wallpaper all share the common characteristic of women who are victims of their passionate natures.  As a young child, Jane Eyre gets locked in “the red room” for standing up for herself against her cousin. After she meets Mr. Rochester and is preparing to marry him, she learns that his first wife, who also has a passionate personality, ironically has been locked in the attic at Thornfield. In the Yellow Wallpaper, Jane is confined to the nursery of the home where she and her husband are spending their vacation.

Carrie Meeber is a young woman who has a series of failed relationships, much as Blanche does at an older age in Streetcar. Miss Havisham is a jilted bride and Bertha Rochester is a discarded wife. Jane in The Yellow Wallpaper is a mother with postpartum depression and Blanche DuBois is an aging widow who has lost her home.  No matter what stage of life the women are in, none of them are happy.

Creativity seems to go hand in hand with loneliness in many of the novels. Roderick Usher paints, plays music and composes poetry.  The female protagonist of the Yellow Wallpaper keeps a journal. In Catcher in the Rye, Holden Caulfield is a writer, whose favorite class is English. Gaston LeRoux’s Phantom is a singer, musician and architect. The creative impulse is admired but often involves mental processes that are beyond ordinary understanding.

Men are frequently seen as the instruments of women’s mental instability. Blanche’s sexuality and Jane’s literary aspirations make them both dangerous to the patriarchy. Blanche’s promiscuous past begins as an escape from her feelings of guilt at her husband’s suicide and the death of other family members leading to the loss of her family home. Blanche’s descent into madness is accelerated when her sister Stella’s husband Stanley Kowalski rapes her. In the Yellow Wallpaper, the suppression of Jane’s creative endeavors by a paternalistic husband reflect a Victorian culture that did not encourage women to pursue aspirations outside the domestic sphere, causing her to have a mental breakdown. Jane Eyre has a temporary breakdown when she discovers on their wedding day that Mr. Rochester is already married. Mr. Rochester ascribes his wife’s behavior to a family predilection for insanity, but her unhappiness at being forced into an unwanted marriage and trying to accommodate to a foreign culture might also be contributing factors. Miss Havisham in Great Expectations is not just rejected by her fiance, but he and her half brother cheat her of her fortune, a trauma from which she never recovers.

A change in financial status plays a role in the loneliness of some of the characters. Blanche DuBois comes from a rich Southern family but her position in society goes down when she has to sell the family home to cover funeral expenses. Miss Havisham was also wealthy but the destruction of her dreams makes her bitter. Carrie Meeber, in Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie is a young girl from a poor family in a small town who moves to Chicago and strikes it big. Both Blanche and Carrie search for connection through their romantic relationships but neither is able to. Carrie ends up in her rocking chair, rich but unhappy, just like Miss Havisham who failed to find satisfaction in a loving relationship.

Physical appearance as an isolating factor is also a common theme. Boo Radley and Frankenstein are perceived as monsters as are Gaston LeRoux’s Phantom of the Opera and Victor Hugo’s Hunchback of Notre Dame because they do not conform to societal standards of physical appearance. At the end of Shelley’s novel, the creature’s creator, Victor Frankenstein, is dead. Having neither family nor friends to depend on, the creature jumps out of the window of a ship on which he and Dr. Frankenstein are travelling and floats away on an iceberg, separating himself from the world that has rejected him.

Charlotte Bronte’s  Jane Eyre  has neither looks, money or family connections and has also been betrayed by her lover. That would appear to doom her to a lonely and unfulfilled life. However, she is a product of the author’s dissatisfaction with the restrictions of Victorian society. Jane doesn’t avoid the outside world but embraces it with all its foibles and tries to make things better. She is a friend to the consumptive Helen at the boarding school at Lowood, and stays with her until she dies. She later becomes a governess to Mr. Rochester’s ward, Adele. She helps the little girl, who has been abandoned by both her parents and, being French, is a foreigner to the English, to adjust to her life. Even after being mistreated as a child, Jane returns to her aunt’s home and helps to take care of her in her final days. She also stays with and helps Diana and Mary with their work after she runs away from Thornfield. Her discovery of Mr. Rochester’s suffering brings her back to help him. Although her life is incomplete in many ways, she is a source of strength and support for those around her. Though Jane also suffers periods of loneliness, of all of the characters mentioned, she ultimately achieves everything that she hopes for. She finds relatives who care for her, gains financial independence, becomes a wife in a loving marriage of equals, and starts her own family when she becomes a mother.

Jane Eyre was written over 150 years ago, but her example reinforces the wisdom of Vonnegut’s words. Perhaps that is the real solution to ending the tragedies of the mass shootings that have traumatized the nation. We should all work together to create an environment that nurtures and support its members and looks out for those who are in danger of slipping through the cracks because they feel alone, unloved and unwanted. Give these troubled and confused young men the assurance that that their lives are important and that they have something of value to contribute to society and we may actually succeed in replacing violent behavior rooted in loneliness and isolation with a community reflects the Aristotelian ideal.