Replication and Transformation Theme Analysis

At this time in history Jacob Riis, a tireless newspaper reporter and reformer, wrote about the need of housing for the poor. They lived too many to a room. There was no sanitation. The streets reeked of shit. Children died of mild colds or slight rashes. Children died on beds made from two kitchen chairs pushed together. They died on floors. Many people believed that filth and starvation and disease were what the immigrant got for his moral degeneracy. But Riis believed in airshafts. Air shafts, light and air, would bring health. He went around climbing dark stairs and knocking on doors and taking flash photos of indigent families in their dwellings. […] After he left, the family, not daring to move, remained in the position in which they had been photographed. They waited for life to change. They waited for their transformation.

So the young black woman and her child were installed in a room on the top floor. Mother made numbers of phone calls. She cancelled her service league meeting. She walked back and forth in the parlor. She was very agitated. She felt keenly her husband’s absence and condemned herself for so readily endorsing his travels. There was no way to communicate with him any of the problems and concerns of her life. She would not hear from him till the following summer. She stared at the ceiling as if to see through it. the Negro girl and her baby had carried into the house a sense of misfortune, chaos, and now this feeling resided here like some sort of contamination. She was frightened.

Some of these men saw the way Evelyn’s face on the front of a newspaper sold out the edition. They realized that there was a process of magnification by which news events established certain individuals in the public consciousness as larger than life. These were the individuals who represented one desirable human characteristic to the exclusion of others. The businessmen wondered if they could create such individuals not from accidents of news events but from the deliberate manufactures of their own medium. If they could, more people would pay money for the picture shows. Thus did Evelyn provide the inspiration for the concept of the move star system and the model for every sex goddess from Theda Bara to Marilyn Monroe.

But he would sit in the parlor and tell the boy stories from Ovid. They were stories of people who became animals or trees or statues. They were stories of transformation. Women turned into sunflowers, spiders, bats, birds; men turned into snakes, pigs, stones and even thin air. The boy did not know he was hearing Ovid, and it would not have mattered if he had known. Grandfather’s stories proposed to him that the forms of life were volatile and that everything in the world could as easily be something else. The old man’s narrative would often drift from English to Latin without his being aware of it, as if he were reading to one of his classes of forty years before, so that it appeared nothing was immune to the principle of volatility, not even language.

It was apparent to them both that this time he’d stayed away too long. Downstairs Birgit put a record on the Victrola, wound the rank and sat in the parlor smoking a cigarette and listening […] She was doing what she could to lose her place. She was no longer efficient or respectful. Mother marked this change to the arrival of the colored girl. Father related it to the degrees of turn in the moral planet. He saw it everywhere, this new season, and it bewildered him. At his office he was told that the seamstresses in the flag department had joined a New York union. He put on clothes from his closet that ballooned from him as shapeless as the furs he had worn for a year.

Tateh shook his head. This country will not let me breathe. In this mood he slowly came to the decision not to go back to Lawrence, Massachusetts. His belongings, his rags, he would leave to the landlord. What do you have with you, he said to his daughter. She showed him the contents of her small satchel—things she had taken for her trip away from home. Her underthings, her comb and brush, a hair clasp, garters, stockings, and the books he had made for her of the trolley car and the skater. From this moment, perhaps, Tateh began to conceive of his life as separate from the fate of the working class. He stood and she stood and took his hand and together they looked for the exit. The I.W.W. has won, he said. But what has it won? A few more pennies in wages. Will it now own the mills? No.

[Morgan] heard from a native guide of the wisdom given to the great Osiris that there is a sacred tribe of heroes, a colony from the gods who are regularly born in every age to assist mankind. The idea stunned him. The more he thought about it the more palpably he felt it. It was upon his return to America that he began to think about Henry Ford. He had no illusions that Ford was a gentleman. He recognized him for a shrewd provincial, as uneducated as a piece of wood. But he thought he saw in Ford’s use of men a reincarnation of pharaohism. Not only that: he had studied photographs of the automobile manufacturer and had seen an extraordinary resemblance to Seti I, the father of the great Ramses and the best-preserved mummy to have been unearthed from the necropolis of Thebes in the Valley of the Kings.

Has it occurred to you that your assembly line is not merely a stroke of industrial genius but a projection of organic truth? After all, interchangeability of parts is a rule of nature. Individuals participate in their species and in their genus. All mammals reproduce in the same way and share the same designs of self-nourishment, with digestive and circulatory systems that are recognizably the same, and they enjoy the same senses […] shared design is what allows taxonomists to classify mammals as mammals. And within a species—man, for example—the rules of nature operate so that our individual differences occur on the basis of our similarity. So that individuation may be compared to a pyramid in that it is only achieved by the placement of the top stone.

There is no question then that Younger Brother was fortunate to conceive a loyalty to the colored man. Standing at the pond he heard the lapping of the water against the front fenders of the Model T. He noted that the hood was unlatched, and lifting and folding it back, saw that the wires had been torn from the engine. The sun was now setting and it threw a reflection of blue sky on the dark water of the pond. There ran through him a small current of rage, perhaps one-hundredth, he knew, of what Coalhouse Walker must have felt, and it was salutary.

Always she had intuited a different future for them, as if the life they led was a kind of preparation, when the manufacturer of flags and fireworks and his wife would life themselves from their respectable existence and discover a life of genius. She didn’t know of what it would consist, she never had. But she now no longer waited for it. […] she was coming to the realization that whereas once, in his courtship, Father might have embodied he infinite possibilities of loving, he had aged and gone dull, made stupid, perhaps, by his travels and his work, so that more and more he only demonstrated his limits, that he had reached them, and that he would never move beyond them.

It is a great honor for me to meet you, sir, [Coalhouse] said. I have always stood in admiration for you. He looked at the marble floor. It is true I am a musician and a man of years. But I would hope this might suggest to you the solemn calculation of my mind. And that therefore, possibly, we might both be servants of our color who insist on the truth of our manhood and the respect it demands. Washington was so stunned by this suggestion that he began to lose consciousness. Coalhouse led him from the hall into the West Rom and sat him down in one of the red plush chairs. Regaining his composure Washington […] gazed at the marble mantle of the fireplace as big as a man. He lanced upward at the polychrome ceiling that had originally come from the palace of Cardinal Gigli in Lucca.