The Tobacco Street
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The Tobacco Road , English original title Tobacco Road , is a novel by the American writer Erskine Caldwell published in1932 by Charles Scribner's Sons . It is grotesquely tragic about the life of a completely impoverished tenant family in the US state of Georgia during the worst phase of the Great Depression , the severe economic crisis at the beginning of the 1930s. The poverty of the family is so great that their life is dominated only by the fulfillment of the most basic needs: the satisfaction of their hunger and their sexual desire. In a review eighty years after the novel was first published, the critic Nathaniel Rich wrote that the novel still had the quality of a freak show: as moderate comedy and utterly failing as tragedy, it brutally confronts the reader with losers in American society, who no longer have any dignity. This distinguishes this novel from the novels of John Steinbeck , Carson McCuller or Eudora Welty , which also depict failures, but still give these failures an inner dignity.
Tobacco Street , whose literary value was controversial at the time of its publication, is now counted among the most important novels of the 20th century. The Modern Library included the novel in its list of the 100 most important American novels of the 20th century. In 2009 the British newspaper The Guardian counted the novel among the 1000 novels that everyone must have read, and Joachim Kaiser also lists the novel among the 1000 most important works in literary history .
Tobacco Road was staged on Broadway by Jack Kirkland in 1933 and staged 3,182 times over a period of eight years. It was the most successful show on Broadway to date. In other cities, however, there was an attempt to ban performances of the stage version on the basis of the profanity presented. John Ford made the 1941 film of the same name based on the novel. However, he emphasized the humorous traits of the plot and also changed the course of the plot considerably.
action
Framework for action
Tobacco Road is set in rural Georgia, a few miles outside the city of Augusta . It depicts the life of the Lesters, an impoverished white tenant family who can neither cope with industrialization nor with migration to the cities. The main character of the plot is Jeeter Lester, an uneducated and immoral man whose actions are only excused by his love for his land and his belief in its fertility. The piece of land on which Jeeter and his family now live was once a small part of the plantation that belonged to his grandfather. The division of inheritance and mismanagement led to their property being lost. Until seven years ago, the Lesters built at least a small part of this land as sharecropper . With the beginning of the mechanization of agriculture, however, the cultivation of small areas is no longer economical. That is why the owner of the land sold all his draft animals and machines seven years ago and, like many others, moved to the city. He still tolerates his former tenants in the country. Tenants like the Lesters don't even have the money to buy cottonseed and fertilizer to do some farming. Jeeter has his whole life on this piece brought to the tobacco road and although the standard of living dropped his family steadily and they are now on the verge of starvation, to Jeeter refuses to leave the country and move to the city where work in a cotton mill it and that would offer his livelihood. He insists that such a form of life is impossible for him.
Jeeter dreams of working his land again. However, it remains a dream. There is no other farmer from whom he can borrow a mule or who can borrow money for seeds and manure. However, since his feasible plans also remain unrealized, it remains to be seen whether he could successfully harvest a crop even if he had mule, seeds and fertilizer at his disposal. Instead, he persistently tries to sell black oak as firewood, which is unsuitable for it. Only his preoccupation with his, in his opinion imminent death, moves him as intensely as his desire to cultivate his land again. Jeeter had to witness how rats ate parts of his father's corpse when he was laid out in the corn barn. Jeeter makes his relatives promise several times a day that they will not lay his body there. Although no rats have lived in the maize shed, which has remained unused for years, Jeeter is convinced that they return regularly to check whether the barn is filled with food again. His wife Ada, heavily scarred by Pellagra , is similarly fixated on her own death. Her greatest wish is to be buried in a fashionable dress rather than her torn cotton robe.
Course of action
The first episode shows Lov Bensey, a relative by marriage of the Lesters, passing the Lester house on his way home. He walked a seven and a half mile to buy a sack of turnips for 50 cents, which is half his daily wage. Normally, Lov Bensey would avoid the Lester home when shopping for groceries. However, Lov Bensey had married Jeeter's daughter Pearl a year earlier, who was only 12 years old at the time of the marriage. Since the beginning of the marriage she has refused to allow herself to be touched by Lov Bensey, sleeps on the floor at night to avoid the marriage bed and leaves the house when Jeeter comes home. Lov asks Jeeter to intervene in his favor and goes so far as to ask his father-in-law to help him tie Pearl to the bed. In addition to Jeeter, Ada and Grandma Lester, Jeeter's mother and 18-year-old Ellie May, the last daughter of Ada and Jeeter still living in the house, who was grotesquely disfigured by a cleft lip and palate , are also present. While Jeeter is still trying to negotiate Lov's sack of turnips as the price for his work on Pearl, Ellie May begins to seduce Lov, while the other family members, in desperation, steal Lov's sack of turnips in order to have food. Disgusted by the family, Lov returns to his house.
At this point in the action, Sister Bessie Rice, a lay preacher, joins. Like Ellie May, her face is disfigured. She lacks nasal bones, so her nostrils lie flat on her face - the sight of her is compared several times in the novel with that of a pig's snout. Sister Bessie, 39, gives a short sermon, then prays for forgiveness for the sins of those present, then suggests that she marry Jeeter's son, the 16-year-old dude. Dude put up with Sister Bessie's advances during the prayers, even though he feels repulsed by her disfigured face. Fascinated by the prospect of an automobile that Bessie might want to buy, he doesn't contradict her marriage plans. Bessie Rice returns home to pray and find out if it is God's will for her to marry Dude.
When Bessie Rice returns to the Lester home the next day, she declares that God has given his consent to the marriage. Bessie and Dude go out to buy a car that they can use to travel around the county and preach. The car dealer takes advantage of Bessie's naivete and while amused at her deformed face, he cheats her of the money she has saved by selling her a wreckage. As a next step, Bessie and Dude obtain a marriage license. The official rebukes Bessie for wanting to marry a man 23 years her junior. Just as he could not prevent the marriage of the only 12-year-old Pearl the year before, he also has no legitimate reason to refuse the marriage permit. For Dude, marriage primarily means the right to use the car. To consummate the marriage, Bessie almost has to force him to do so. As they consummate the marriage, Ada, Grandma Lester, and Ellie May watch through the open door. Jeeter leaned a ladder up against the house to witness the execution of the marriage.
Over the course of the next two days, the newly acquired car is increasingly damaged. Dude initially has an accident with a wagon. The driver of the wagon, a black man, is killed without Dude or Bessie caring. A little later, Dude hits a tree stump and damages the front of the car. The seats in the car are torn by Jeeter's bundle of black oak, which he tries in vain to sell in Augusta. The car's engine is damaged when they drive without enough oil. In Augusta, Jeeter, Dude and Bessie are finally forced to sell the spare tire for three dollars in order to have enough money for gasoline, food and an overnight stay in a questionable hotel. At the hotel, Bessie willingly agrees to prostitute herself. A few days later, Bessie Jeeter refuses another ride in the car. This leads to a violent argument between Ada and Jeeter and Bessie and Dude. When Bessie and Dude leave Jeeter's farm with their car, they run over Grandma Lester without realizing it. Neither her daughter-in-law Ada, nor her son Jeeter or her granddaughter Ella Ma take care of the dying woman lying in the dust of the road, as her family has long seen her only as an annoying eater. When Lov comes to the farm to tell him that Pearl has run away, they finally bury the woman who has since died of her injuries in the country. Pearl, who was once sold by her father to Jeeter for bridal money in the form of gasoline and a few blankets, has fled to Augusta to escape her marriage to Lov and the desperate country life.
Jeeter is burning down his weed-covered fields, still hoping to find someone to give him credit so he can start working his fields. As Jeeter and Ada sleep, sparks from the fire light the shingles of their dilapidated house. Both burn. The novel ends with Dude talking about work for the first time. Like his father, he dreams of cultivating the land - the terrible cycle in which rednecks , the poor southern farmers are trapped, begins again with him.
History of origin and classification in US literary history
Erskine Caldwell was confronted with poverty in the US state of Georgia as a young man. His father, Ira Sylvester Caldwell, was a Presbyterian pastor who was interested in social issues and often took his son with him when visiting the poorest parishioners around the city of Wrens, Jefferson County . Erskine Caldwell's concern for their poor living conditions was as genuine as his indignation at the causes that led to their desperate living conditions. Caldwell therefore understood his novels and short stories as a form of social protest. At the same time, however, he refused to romanticize the poverty he had experienced or to give his characters an inherent dignity.
Tobacco Road is one of the novels in the wake of 1929 beginning worldwide economic crisis and the Depression Great emerged. These crises exacerbated social tensions within American society. In literary terms, the 1930s went down in American literary history as the “red decade”. Sizes of classic modernism presented their aesthetic experiments sit behind, and wrote "proletarian" novels, such as Dos Passos ( USA , 1930-36) and Hemingway ( Have and Have Not , 1937). For many, the model in program and presentation was the socialist realism of the Soviet Union, but the American counterpart is characterized by a tendency towards tragedy. The protagonists of John Steinbeck's novels ( Von Mäusen und Menschen , 1937; Frucht des Zorns , 1939 or James T. Farrell's Studs Lonigan , 1932–35) fail because of the harshness of capitalism. Many of the publications produced in the course of the Federal Writers' Project dealt with the living conditions of the poorest sections of the population. This government project was launched in 1935 to provide unemployed intellectuals, including writers, historians and photographers, with a livelihood. Their work was meant to be of service to the nation, and so many of the Federal Writers were busy documenting the everyday life and social history of the United States. The works created in this context include Let Us Now Praise Famous Men , a semi-documentary work by James Agee , to which Walker Evans contributed the photographs. Originally commissioned by Life Magazine to write a report, the two men spent six weeks in Alabama and documented the lives of three white families who, like the Lester family, lived as sharecroppers from growing cotton. Every detail of their joyless, hard life was documented by them with the greatest care: their little furniture, their ragged clothes, their skinny chickens, the cheap calendars and newspaper advertisements with which their fireplace wall was decorated. In the summer of 1936 and in the spring of 1937, Caldwell and his second wife, the photographer Margaret Bourke-White , similarly documented the living conditions of the rural population in the southern states. Their joint work was published in 1937 under the title You have Seen Their Faces .
Like Steinbeck's novels, many of the documents produced in the Federal Writers' Project express a belief in the impoverished rural population as guardians of the “true” American virtues; times may be tough, the message says, but thanks to the perseverance, ingenuity, and honesty of the American people, things will change for the better. Caldwell's novel stands outside of this tradition in its portrayal of the Lester family, brutalized by their living conditions. Many southerners found the novel to be exaggerated, even pornographic. Northerners, on the other hand, interpreted the novel as evidence of an economic system typical of the southern states, which had failed and urgently needed reform. Caldwell himself later stated that he did not want the novel to depict a life situation that was representative of the southern states.
Others
Maxwell Perkins , one of the most important editors in American literary history, was the author of Scribner's Erskine Caldwell and was instrumental in getting the novel published by that publisher. F. Scott Fitzgerald , also one of the Perkins supervised authors, had brought Perkins' attention to Caldwell.
Film adaptations
In 1941 the film adaptation Tobacco Street , directed by John Ford , was published.
- Tobacco Road in the Internet Movie Database (English)
expenditure
- Tobacco Road. Scribner, New York 1932. (first edition).
- The Tobacco Street. The only authorized translation from English by Gertrud Müller. Scherz, Bern 1948.
Web links
- Review of the novel on The Daily Beast, April 30, 2012
- Review of Caldwell's novels Tobacco Road and God's Little Acre on Georgia Encyclopedia
Single receipts
- ↑ American Dreams: Book Review by Nathaniel Rich , accessed January 24, 2014.
- ↑ Modern Library - 100 best novels , accessed February 1, 2014.
- ↑ 1000 Novels Everyone Must Read: The Definitive List , accessed February 1, 2014.
- ^ Review of Tobacco Road and God's little Acre on Georgia Encyclopedia , accessed January 24, 2014.
- ↑ Summary of the film Tobacco Road , accessed January 22, 2014.
- ↑ Georgia Encyclopedia on Caldwell's novels Tobacco Road and God's little Acre , accessed February 1, 2014.
- ↑ Georgia Encyclopedia on Caldwell's novels Tobacco Road and God's little Acre , accessed February 1, 2014.
- ^ Peter Conn: Literature in America - An Illustrated History. Cambridge University Press, London 1989, ISBN 0-521-30373-7 , p. 405 and p. 406.
- ↑ Caldwell's biography on Georgia Encyclopedia , accessed February 1, 2014.
- ↑ Georgia Encyclopedia on Caldwell's novels Tobacco Road and God's little Acre , accessed February 1, 2014.
- ↑ Caldwell's biography on Georgia Encyclopedia , accessed February 1, 2014.