364
PARTISAN REVIEW
their marriage. The man "asks my mother to marry him," and she "begins to
cry," and says, "It's all I've wanted from the first moment I saw you." For
Yeats, ''This is the anniversary / Of my mother's wedding night, / Or of the
night wherein I was begotten." This son's mother, too, had "Looked at [the
father] and married him." Yeats's speaker expresses uncertainty about which
evening he sees, and the uncertainty mutes the slight difference between the
scenes.
Also, the scenes' similar thematic function emerges when Schwartz's
observing son "stood up ... and shouted: 'Don't do it! It's not too late to
change your minds, both of you.'" This compares to Yeats's observer shout–
ing, "Don't let him touch you!" Schwartz's son pleads with his parents to
avoid the "remorse, hatred, scandal" bound to arise from their decision to
marry. Though Schwartz's scandal remains undefined, the phrase fits the–
matically with the Yeatsian character's tale of how his father had
"squandered everything she had ... To pay what he had lost at cards / Or
spent on horses, drink and women."
Even more strikingly parallel is the element of self-hatred in each son's
begging of the parent to leave him unconceived.
In
addition to the remorse,
hatred, and scandal, Schwartz's character says, "Nothing good will come of it,
only ... two children whose characters are monstrous," and Yeats's lines are
as follows: "And if he touch he must beget / And you must bear his
murderer." Schwartz was one of two sons, as may be the case for his
narrator in this highly autobiographical tale. Correspondingly, we find that
Yeats's play also deals with two undeserving male results of the marriage - a
son and grandson, rather than with two sons.
In both works, the emotional atmosphere arises in a dreamlike setting.
Schwartz's story retells a dream, but for most of it, the reader must deduce
the dream quality from the story's features. Occurring in the title, the word
"dream" suggests this possibility, and the narrative's dream-like characteris–
tics allow the reader
to
guess the story's dream status long before the tale
ends. However, the narrator does not specifically name the experience a
dream until the story's last paragraph when he says, "I woke up into the
bleak winter morning of my twenty-first birthday." There are dream-like
qualities in
Pwgatory
as well. Viewing the parents' ongoing Purgatory, the
son explains that the dead reenact their transgressions until the consequences
of their transgressions are no more. The son says, "For when the conse–
quence is at an end / The dream must end." Yeats centers his plot on the
son's desire to free his mother fi-om her dream, and when he fails, he claims,
"Hel- mind cannot hold up that dream."
The Old Man hints at the dream's literary context when he says,
"'Then the bride-sleep fell upon Adam': / Where did I read those words?"
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